“Have any of your friends been hanging out here recently?”
“Inspector Conklin, I’m starting to feel that you’re harassing me.”
“Nicole, would you rather come to the police station and spend a few hours with me and Sergeant Boxer? We can hold you as a material witness.”
Her eyes welled up. “I don’t bring my friends here.”
Conklin pressed on.
“Have you seen anyone on or near the grounds who struck you as out of place?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“What about those star tours? Do the tourists come into the garden?”
“No, and they don’t come into the house either. It’s strictly an outside-the-front-gate lecture series.”
“Thank you, Nicole. I need your contact information.”
Conklin smiled, gave her a pad and a pen. Watched her write, took back the notepad, and handed her his card.
“I’ll need the gardener’s name and number, and if you think of anything, anything, call me anytime.”
“I will certainly do that.”
Conklin nodded at the tech who was photographing one of the grave markers.
“We’ll be here for a while. Until we know who those seven victims are and the circumstances of their deaths, we’ll be turning over every stone.”
Chapter 22
I’d grown up seeing Harry Chandler’s face in both huge Hollywood productions and tight, well-produced independent films. He was sexy, had terrific range, and was convincing as a hero and as a villain.
I’d checked out Chandler’s bio before getting on the road to South Beach Harbor, and as I’d expected, his story was now colored by the disappearance of his high-society wife, presumed dead. Much had been written about Chandler’s trial and acquittal, a story as dramatic as any film since Citizen Kane.
Popular opinion had it that even though the evidence wasn’t there, Chandler had nonetheless been involved in the crime. He had made a few pictures since he’d been found not guilty of murder, including the iconic Time to Reap, a cynical look at the meltdown of the global economy.
Chandler had won an Oscar for that performance. His second. I have to admit, I was eager to see him in real life.
It was only a four-mile drive from Vallejo Street to South Beach Harbor and the yacht club, both of which were part of the gentrification of the industrial area that had started in the 1980s.
I took Pierce to Broadway, then took a right to the Embarcadero. To my left was the bay. I saw sailboat masts showing above the yachts filling the harbor.
I parked my car in the lot, then found the security guard inside the harbor office at the entrance to the South Beach Yacht Club. He wrote down my name and badge number, made a call, and I went through a gate and found Chandler’s boat, the Cecily, at the end of a pier. It was a sleek, eighty-foot-long modern yacht, Italian make, a top-of-the-line Ferretti, so impressive it actually made me imagine a life in a super-luxury craft on the bay.
I walked down the pier and found Harry Chandler waiting for me, sitting in a folding chair at the foot of his slip. He saw me at the same moment I saw him; he put down his newspaper, stood up, and came toward me.
Harry Chandler looked to me like an aging lion. He was bearded and his face was lined, but he was still handsome, still the star who’d made female moviegoers all over the world fall in love with him.
“Sergeant Boxer? Welcome aboard.”
I shook his hand, then felt a little charge when he put his hand on my back and guided me to the gangway. I climbed the steps to a covered outdoor cabin on the main deck that was furnished in white sofas, sea-green-glass tables, and teak appointments all around.
Chandler told me to make myself comfortable. I took a seat while he went to the refrigerator under the bar and poured out bottles of water into two chunky crystal glasses of ice.
When he was sitting across a coffee table from me, he said, “I read about this — what would you call it? This horror that happened yesterday. And Janet called, nearly hysterical. If you hadn’t phoned I was going to call the police myself. I’m at a loss to understand this.”
I kept my eyes on the actor as he spoke. I’d seen his handsome face so many times, I felt as if I knew him.
Was he telling the truth or giving a performance? I hoped I could tell the difference.
I showed Chandler Jane Doe’s picture and he half turned away, then dragged his eyes back to the photo.
“I don’t know her. I am wondering, of course, about Cecily. We still don’t know what became of her. Could she be one of those victims in the garden? That would be a hell of a thing.”
“Wondering, Mr. Chandler?”
“Yes. I want to know what happened to her.”
If Cecily Chandler’s remains were recovered, Harry Chandler wouldn’t be charged, not for her death anyway. He’d been found innocent of her murder and couldn’t be tried for it again. But if Cecily Chandler’s remains had been buried on his doorstep, Harry would be the number one suspect in six other deaths.
Could Chandler have killed women over time and buried them in the dark of his garden, trusting that they would never be found? Had he kept the house he no longer used so as to protect his private trophy garden?
Did Nigel Worley have a better reason than his wife’s crush on a movie star for the anger he expressed on hearing Harry Chandler’s name?
Harry Chandler was sitting so that the San Francisco Bay was at his back.
I thought about convicted murderer Scott Peterson, recalled that his dead wife and unborn child were found washed up across the bay. It seemed very possible that a lot of bodies had been dumped in the water here. That they didn’t all wash up onshore, and that some were never discovered because they floated out to sea.
I smiled at the movie star and tried that charm I’d joked about to Conklin.
“Can you tell me your movements over the last week, Mr. Chandler?”
“Call me Harry. Please. Of course. You need my alibi.”
He walked to an intercom panel in the kitchen, pressed a button, and said in his memorable, resonant voice, “Kaye, the police want to talk to you.”
Chapter 23
I liked Kaye Hunsinger on sight.
She was about forty, had a wide, toothy smile, and owned a small bike shop in North Beach. I made note of her massive diamond ring of the engagement kind.
Kaye, Harry Chandler, and I sat on semicircular sofas at the stern with little multigrain sandwiches on a plate in front of us. We caught some afternoon breezes, and everything was chatty and casual, but all the while, I was checking the couple for tells.
Could they have been players in the nightmare on Vallejo Street? Was Harry Chandler a murderer? Was Kaye Hunsinger, knowingly or not, covering for him?
Kaye told me that she and Harry had been down the coast for the past week, returning to the South Beach Yacht Club only last night.
“It was a brilliant week,” she said. “Zipping down to Monterey, docking at the marina there. Kicking off the boat shoes, putting on heels and a witchy black dress — oh my. Dancing with Harry.”
Pause for an exchange of moony grins and hand-clasping. Okay. They were believably in love.
“We signed in with the harbormasters at stopovers, of course,” Chandler said to me. “And lots of people saw us. If you still need more of an alibi.”
I was thinking about Chandler’s remarks of a few minutes before, that he’d been “wondering” if his wife’s remains were among those that had been dug up in his garden. I wondered too, and I was equally interested in the woman whose head had been separated from her shoulders with a ripsaw about a week ago.
Had a body dump been part of the Chandler coastal cruise?
I had no warrant and no probable cause to search Chandler’s yacht, so an eyeball search of the premises might be my only opportunity to check out the floating home as a possible crime scene.
“I’ll take that list of stopovers,” I said. “And I’m rea
lly dying to see the rest of this yacht.”
Harry and Kaye showed me around the four-cabin luxury craft. It was House Beautiful marine style, everything enviably top of the line, and not a throw pillow out of place.
The boat was fast, and the alibis could have been manufactured, but I strained to find a reason why Harry Chandler would come back to San Francisco during his cruise, dig up a couple of skulls, and then leave them with a cryptic message in his backyard.
It would be crazy, and I didn’t see any crazy in Harry Chandler.
I complimented the couple on the boat, and before the conversation could devolve into chitchat, I said that I’d be going and gave Chandler my card.
Chandler said, “I’ll walk you out.”
I started down the gangway and this time Chandler’s hand on my back was firmer, more forceful. I stepped away and turned to give Chandler a questioning look.
“You’re like a butterfly,” Harry Chandler told me, fixing his gray searchlight eyes on mine, “with steel wings.”
I was taken aback for three or four reasons I could have spat out right away. Had Harry Chandler’s crazy just surfaced?
What had Nigel Worley told me?
Harry Chandler would like you.
I said, “I hope you’re not coming on to me, Mr. Chandler. Because when a suspect in a murder investigation hits on a cop, you know what I think? He’s desperate. And he’s trying to hide something.”
Chandler said, “You actually think of me as a suspect, Sergeant?”
“You haven’t been excluded.”
“Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”
I said sharply, “Stay anchored. If I were you, I wouldn’t draw attention to myself by leaving town.”
Chapter 24
Jason Blayney moved purposefully through the large open space with the supersize bar and the high ceiling, the main room of the yacht club.
The reporter was twenty-seven years old, an average-to-nice-looking guy, and, along with his more intellectual talents, he had a trick left arm. When he was a kid, he had learned how to pop his shoulder so that it looked deformed, and this little sleight of arm gave him an edge in certain situations.
Right now, for instance, the arm made the security guy decide not to confront him. Blayney said, “How ya doing? I’m with the O’Briens. Mind if I use the bathroom?”
Guard said, “Sure,” and pointed the way.
Blayney went to the men’s room, washed his hands, finger-combed his hair, and straightened the camera hanging from his neck.
Then he left the club through the back door that opened onto the wide deck fronting the marina. He was imagining the smoking interview he was about to have with Harry Chandler.
Blayney had grown up in Chicago, and after graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, he had gotten off to a fast start at the LA bureau of the New York Times. Six months ago, he got the offer from the San Francisco Post to aggressively report on crime, and he’d moved up the coast and into a job that fit him like the cover of darkness.
Now he had a prominent platform to do whatever it took to crush the Chronicle ’s dominance in crime reportage and establish himself as a player on the national stage.
Today, Blayney was as stoked as he’d ever been in his life. Yesterday’s ruckus at the Chandler house was the start of a monster story that had legs up to the moon. He’d flattered a traffic cop and gotten a tip, and as far as he knew, he was the first journalist to learn that several heads had been dug up at the Ellsworth compound.
By itself, this information was tremendous on every level, and he was just getting started.
A half hour ago, Blayney had followed Lindsay Boxer from the Ellsworth compound. As soon as she got into her car, he’d been sure that she was going to the yacht club to interview Harry Chandler.
He took his time, and as he headed into the marina, Blayney saw Boxer leaving the slip where Chandler’s boat was docked. Her head was down, her blond hair hanging in front of her eyes as she talked on her phone. Blayney thought of Lindsay Boxer as a character in his story; she was a good cop, but what really got him going was that she was emotional. If he dogged her, she would react and probably lead him into the heart of the story. She could be the heroine or the screwup on both of her active cases. He really didn’t care which.
Either way, Lindsay Boxer had taken him to Harry Chandler.
He took a couple of pictures, but she didn’t notice him.
“Nice one, Sergeant,” he said quietly. “I think you made the front page.”
Chapter 25
Blayney immediately recognized the man heading up the gangway to his yacht wearing denim and walking with a swagger. It was a thrill to actually put his eyes on the actor in real time, real size, the man whose face had been ubiquitous on Court TV for almost two years, a guy who possibly had killed his wife and gotten away with it.
Blayney wanted an interview with Chandler as much as he had ever wanted anything in his life. He pointed his camera and took another couple of shots, then called out, “Mr. Chandler.”
Chandler turned to face him, taking a solid stance on the dock. His hands were curled into fists.
“Yes?”
Blayney opened the unlocked metal gate, said, “Mr. Chandler, I’m Jason Blayney, with the San Francisco Post. I’d like to talk to you.”
“You’re a reporter?”
“How do you do, sir? Mr. Chandler, I’m wondering if you can tell me what’s going on at your house on Vallejo? I’d like to be your advocate, Mr. Chandler. Help you get your side of the story out — ”
“Get off this dock. This is private property.”
Chandler pulled his phone out of his hip pocket, called a number, and said, “This is Harry Chandler. I need security.”
“What I’ve heard is that a number of human skulls have been exhumed from your backyard, Mr. Chandler. Would you care to make a comment?”
Chandler said, “Don’t point that camera at me. I have no comment on or off the record, you get me?”
Blayney moved closer to show that he wasn’t backing down. “Did you kill your wife ten years ago, Mr. Chandler? Did you bury her in your garden? Are any of your past girlfriends buried there too, sir?”
Chandler reached out and grabbed Blayney by the front of his shirt and back-walked him to the edge of the dock. Holding the reporter, Chandler almost pushed Blayney off, then jerked him back to safety, looked down at the collapsed shoulder, and said, “Don’t ever come here again.”
“You’re acting like you have something to hide, Mr. Chandler,” Blayney said, stumbling and pressing forward at the same time.
Chandler said, “Wow, are you stupid.”
The actor shoved the reporter toward the edge again, still holding on to the front of his shirt.
“Don’t do it, Mr. Chandler. My camera. It cost me two thousand dollars.”
Chandler snatched the camera off Blayney’s neck, then pushed the reporter into the water.
The water was shocking, but Blayney was loving this encounter. He spat water, then started laughing. He popped his shoulder back in, then swam to one of the davits and wrapped both arms around it. A life preserver splashed into the water and Blayney grabbed it.
He was still laughing when he called out, “I like how you express yourself, Mr. Chandler. Illegal actions are better than a quote.”
Blayney found a rung of a rope ladder and hauled himself out of the bay, thinking, Oh man, how great is this? Harry Chandler had assaulted him.
He would have given a year’s salary for a picture or a witness. But anyway, the entire incident confirmed the monster quotient of this story.
He picked his camera up off the dock, snapped off some shots of Harry Chandler’s back. Life was good.
Chapter 26
Bec Rollins, a PR biggie from the mayor’s office, was waiting for me when I got back to the Hall. She was sitting in Conklin’s chair.
Bec was intense, fierce, and she didn’t
waste time.
“Hi, Bec, what the hell is wrong? And don’t say everything, because that’s my line.”
She gave me a fleeting grin, said, “Sit down, Lindsay. I think you want to see this.”
She showed me her iPad, and I saw a picture of me on the dock walking away from the camera.
“Wait. Where did that come from? This was taken today.”
Rollins scrolled down, showed me the headline on Jason Blayney’s article: “Heads Unearthed at Harry Chandler’s Pad; Boxer Investigates.”
I said, “What?” and began to read. My case was all over the Web. “Bec, Blayney knows what I know. Heads unearthed. Chandler’s house. Chandler’s boat. Someone leaked. But it wasn’t me.”
“I know, I know,” Rollins said. She took back her gizmo, said, “Here’s the thing, Lindsay. Blayney is a juvenile viper. He’s got a license to harass and nothing to lose. I don’t need to tell you how he can spin this story, poison any potential jury pool. He can make things hard for sources to come forward.”
“I’m not cooperating with him, Bec. I didn’t see him.”
“Gotcha. But be aware of him. Here’s what he looks like.”
She showed me the picture of a man in his twenties, dark hair, narrow eyes, a lot of teeth. He looked like a wolverine.
“He’s going to confront you, count on it. When he does, you’ve got to be wise and cool and act as if you’re approachable — but don’t tell him anything unless Brady says okay first.”
“Brady has talked to Blayney. Did you know that?”
“Yes. I knew. Let Brady do the talking for you on both of your cases. And here’s the other thing. Your friend Cindy.”
At the mention of Cindy’s name, my partner left the break room and came toward our desks. Bec Rollins leaned in and finished what she was saying.
“Cindy Thomas is an investigative reporter.”
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“Inevitably she’s going to want an inside track on this story.”
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