“Fentress worked on that job?”
“From the first. About three months.”
“Did anything happen during that period that might explain his sudden drinking?”
“Not that I know of. Everything went real smooth, no problems. Well, except for the Holloways’ young daughter, but her behavior didn’t have anything to do with Ray.”
“Behavior?”
“She liked to parade around in a bikini, her and some of her friends, and flirt with the crew.” Waxman shook his head disapprovingly. “Spoiled rich kid. If she were my kid, I wouldn’t have put up with it.”
“Just harmless flirting, then?”
“Well, none of the men said otherwise. Or seemed to mind except when she followed them around and got in their way. Maybe she was the reason for the stop-work order, but I don’t see how, since nobody here complained about her.”
“Stop-work order?”
“Mr. Holloway called it in when we had less than three weeks left on the job. No workmen allowed on the property until further notice.”
“He didn’t give a reason?”
“Nope. Just the order. Then a couple weeks later, somebody in his office calls up and says okay, now we can go ahead and finish up.”
I chewed on that before I said, “Can you tell me exactly when the stop-work order was issued?”
“Must’ve been the middle of June,” Waxman said. “I remember because it was right after the Fourth of July that the crew went back to work.”
“Middle of June. Just about the time Ray Fentress was arrested.”
“Say, that’s right. Day or two afterward, I think it was. But that couldn’t’ve had anything to do with Ray or his boozing. I mean, I don’t see how it could, do you?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”
Coincidence, probably, I was thinking as I returned to my car. Puzzling, but irrelevant. Even if there’d been some sort of personal connection between Fentress and the Holloway family that had triggered the change in him, it had all happened nearly two years ago; a connection, after all that time, to the double shooting at Floyd Mears’ cabin seemed inconceivable.
And yet …
I’ve had stranger cases, a few with such seemingly disjointed facts as these that turned out to be interrelated after all. This one was a muddle no matter what linked up and what didn’t, and I was fresh out of other leads to help untangle it. Unless I wanted to report failure to Doreen Fentress and walk away from the investigation—and I was not ready to do that just yet—I owed it to her and to myself to explore even the most tenuous possibilities.
10
When I got back to South Park, the noise level from the renovation work on the three-quarter-acre oval seemed even louder than usual. The clamor, continual when the weather permitted, penetrated the old walls of our building and made conducting business a literal headache at times. Not that Tamara or I begrudged the necessity for it; on the contrary. The “town square of Multimedia Gulch,” smack in the middle of SoMa and its technology ecosystem, had become something of an eyesore in recent years—dead grass, cracked asphalt paths, sycamores and elms in poor shape, the creosote-covered children’s play structures so dilapidated the city had finally removed them, leaving a sandy pit that had devolved into a dog run. Finally a group of residents and businesses, ours included, had gotten together and spearheaded the renovation, the first in more than forty years. When it was finished, South Park would have wider pathways, open meadows and raised grass hillocks, plazas, concrete retaining walls with benches, and a new kids’ play area. The sooner the better, for more reasons than one.
In the office I asked Tamara to find out anything that might be even remotely relevant about the Holloways of Burlingame. She was busy with other, more pressing work, so it took a while for her to accommodate the request.
“I pulled up some interesting bits,” she said when she called me into her office. “Might be worth looking into.”
“Such as?”
“Let me give you a little background on the Holloways first. The family head, Vernon, is a near one-percenter—not Silicon Valley mega-rich, but worth around twenty mil on paper. Venture capital profits. Has a rep as a cutthroat businessman.”
“Cutthroat meaning what? Honestly aggressive, or one of the fast and loose players?”
“None of those dudes ever got where they are without their share of dirty tricks.”
“Any specifics I should know about?”
“Well, Holloway’s clean enough on the surface. No ties to illegal activities, never the subject of any kind of investigation.” Tamara consulted her computer screen. “Owns the estate in Burlingame outright, bought it eleven years ago for four mil. Pays his taxes on time, what little bite there is after his accountants finish finding all the loopholes. Donates to half a dozen charities. Pays alimony to two of his three ex-wives—off the money hook with the third because she found herself an even richer sugar daddy.”
“What about his daughter?”
“Melanie Joy. Some name, huh? Only child—only one he’ll admit to anyway. Man also has a rep as a pussy hound.”
I let that pass. “How old is Melanie Joy?”
“Twenty-four. Still living with Daddy on the Burlingame estate. Real wild child for a while. Social media postings full of hints and outright declarations about sex, drugs, and gambling. But all that changed about eighteen months ago.”
“Changed how?”
“This is where it gets interesting. No posts on her active site accounts for over a week, then they were all shut down and stayed that way for nearly three months. Her new Facebook and Twitter accounts are nothing like the old ones, no mention of the stuff she was into before, mostly photos and chitchat about this conservative stockbroker she’s been dating. Wild to mild.”
“What caused the sudden turnaround?”
“No definite answer. Whatever it was, it’s been kept private. I couldn’t pick up a whisper anywhere.”
“When exactly was her old account shut down?”
“End of June 2014.”
“Not long after Ray Fentress got himself arrested and Vernon Holloway issued his stop-work order to Kennedy Landscape Designs.”
“Yup.”
“Could be coincidence,” I said. “There’s nothing that ties Fentress to the Holloway girl except that they were both on the estate grounds while he was working there. And nothing that ties either of them to what happened at Floyd Mears’ cabin.”
“No, but there’s a Melanie Joy tie to Sonoma County.”
“Oh?”
“Girl was heavy into gambling until that summer,” Tamara said. “Roulette, baccarat, just about any big-action game. Vegas once in a while, but mostly she favored Indian casinos closer to home. Her number one hangout was the Graton Resort and Casino in Rohnert Park. Used to go up there weekends, sometimes with her former boyfriend, sometimes with girlfriends, sometimes by herself.”
Rohnert Park is less than fifty miles north of San Francisco, seventy-five or so north of Burlingame—an easy round-trip drive. It’s also not much more than half an hour from the Russian River resort area.
Tamara said, “Meaningful, you think?”
“I don’t know. Could be just another coincidence.”
“You always advised me not to trust coincidences when they come in bunches.”
“True enough, but not trusting them doesn’t mean they don’t happen now and then. I just don’t see how all these links could tie together, where they’d lead if they do.”
“Real puzzle, all right.”
I ruminated for a time. “The Graton Casino,” I said then. “Vegas-style glitter palace, isn’t it? Attractive to high rollers?”
“Right. Largest resort casino west of Vegas. Built by the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria, opened in 2013—I looked up their website.” Tamara tapped a couple of keys, peered at her monitor again. “Six-hundred-seat Events Center, conference rooms, a dozen restaurants, and what they call a hig
h-energy casino floor—three thousand slots, hundred forty-four table games, live poker room, VIP gaming salons.”
The kind of place they’d have had to drag me into kicking and screaming. “You said Melanie Holloway liked high-stakes games. Did she win or lose large amounts?”
“Can’t be sure without more checking. Seems like she lost more than she won, though.”
“So if she was dropping large chunks, her father might’ve put a stop to it, laid down the law. That could be the reason, or part of the reason, for the sudden turnaround in her lifestyle.”
“Could,” Tamara agreed.
“Then again,” I said, “something may have happened during the last of her gambling weekends that brought about the sudden change. Is there any way of finding out if she went to the Graton Casino right before her social media silence?”
“Not on the Net. But if you want to take a shot at it, there might be another way.”
“And that is?”
“Melanie Joy’s former good-time boyfriend was pissed about being dumped. Some Twitter and Facebook grumbles to that effect. Dude might’ve had his eye on the Holloway fortune—he’s not one of the rich crowd—and Papa pressured Melanie to break it off. Or maybe they had a hassle that last weekend and she’s the one who ended it. Anyhow, he might know something and be willing to talk about it.”
“Name?”
“Conner Jacklin. He’s a physical terrorist.”
“A what?”
Tamara let me see one of her impish grins. “My name for dudes in his profession. Never let one of ’em torture me.”
“Uh-huh. Physical therapist, you mean.”
“Right. Does his thing in a Burlingame health club, the EverYoung Fitness Center. That’s where Melanie Joy hooked up with him—he was her personal trainer.”
11
The EverYoung Fitness Center, according to the advertisements printed on its long front window, was a “full-service health spa for men and women of all ages.” It was on a side street off Burlingame Avenue, in the Peninsula community’s downtown shopping district. You could tell from its size and its ornate old-fashioned brick façade that it catered to the area’s more affluent citizens. Visible through a long front window were eight or nine individuals of both sexes busily and sweatily exercising on a long row of expensive-looking treadmills.
A smiling young woman, the picture of rosy-cheeked and trim-bodied health, presided over a desk in the open lobby. I gave her my name and she checked her computer to confirm that I had an eleven-thirty appointment with Conner Jacklin. He was with a client at the moment, she informed me, and might be a bit late. But definitely not more than five or ten minutes, she said brightly. Was I personally acquainted with Mr. Jacklin or had he been recommended to me? Recommended, I said, by a friend of Melanie Joy Holloway. Her smile dimmed for an instant, like the flicker of a lamp before a power outage, and then brightened again. Knows Melanie Joy, I thought, and doesn’t like her much if at all.
The young woman invited me to have a seat, handed me one of EverYoung’s brochures to read while I waited. I sat in a comfortable, formfitting chair and glanced through the brochure. Their personal trainers were NCSF and ACE certified, acronyms that meant nothing to me, and provided individualized exercise programs that included strength training, aerobic and anaerobic training, cardiovascular and spinal care, and therapeutic massage. The club also featured such state-of-the-art exercise equipment as total body elliptical crosstrainers, Life Fitness Lifecycles, incline and decline mountain climber treadmills, and upright and recumbent bikes. Altogether it sounded pretty healthful, all right, but it also sounded like a hell of a lot of hard work. Well, no pain, no gain, as they say.
True to the receptionist’s word, Conner Jacklin was less than ten minutes late for our appointment. He came out of an area at the rear filled with more customers sweating away on total body elliptical crosstrainers and the like, greeted me with a professional smile and a hearty handshake, and managed not to look disapproving as he eyed my somewhat expansive midsection. He was also the picture of twentysomething health, of course, in a pair of white ducks and a tight white T-shirt. You could have used the word Adonis to describe him with some justification. Sculpted body with bulging pecs and biceps, blond hair cut short, blue eyes, and chiseled features. Just the type of stud a young, hot-blooded rich girl would find irresistible.
He didn’t seem quite so perfect to me, however. Maybe it was a male jealousy thing, but I didn’t like him on sight. There was a shine in his blue-eyed gaze, a self-satisfied set to his mouth and jaw, the suggestion of a swagger in his manner even when he was standing still—all indicators, to my professional eye, that he was full of himself, none too intelligent, and the possessor of predatory instincts.
He said it was a pleasure to meet me, which was probably a lie, and welcomed me to EverYoung with a little programmed speech about helping to achieve whatever my personal goals might be. After which he asked the same question the young woman at the desk had asked. I looked him straight in the eye and gave him the same answer.
His reaction to Melanie Joy Holloway’s name was to lose the smile, his lips pulling into a tight line. I watched him struggle to regain his professional composure, then prodded him off balance again by saying, “She’s the reason I’m here, but it’s not to sign up for an exercise program. I have a few questions about your relationship with her.”
“Why? What for? Who’re you?”
I let him see the photostat of my license. The confused look on his handsome face confirmed my opinion of his mental acuity. “What the hell?” he said in a lowered voice. “I haven’t seen Mel in more than a year. You want the truth, I hope I never see her again.”
“Is there someplace private we can talk?”
“… Huh?”
“Too public out here, wouldn’t you say?”
“I just told you—” He wagged his head as if to clear it. The young woman at the desk was watching us; Jacklin saw that, too, and it made up his mind for him. “Yeah, okay. Follow me.”
I trailed him into the rear of the building, through the weight and exercise room, and through an open door. Massage room: metal table, towels on racks, glass-doored cabinet full of emoluments, curtained alcove for changing in privacy. The mingled smells of body oils, disinfectant, and stale sweat assumed miasmic proportions when Jacklin shut the door.
“Listen,” he said, turning toward me, “if that bitch is in trouble again, you’re talking to the wrong guy. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Bitch, Mr. Jacklin?”
“You heard me right. Bitch plain and simple.”
“Was she in some kind of trouble when the two of you were together?”
“What?”
“In trouble again, you said. Again.”
“Mel was always in some kind of trouble back then.”
“What kind, specifically? With the law?”
“Nah, nothing like that.” He gnawed on his lower lip with the sort of bright white teeth you see in dental ads. “What’s this all about, anyway? You working for Melanie’s father or something?”
“I can’t tell you that. Privileged information.”
“Yeah, well, it’s going on two years since I laid eyes on her. I don’t get how what happened that long ago has to do with me.”
“Probably nothing,” I said. “I’m just gathering information. Which one of you broke off your relationship?”
A little silence. Then he lifted and lowered a shoulder and said, “It sure as hell wasn’t my idea. I thought we were tight, real tight.”
“The kind of tight that could lead to marriage?”
“Yeah, maybe. So?” Jacklin said sullenly. “She kept throwing out signals, telling me she loved me every time we got it on together. Then all of a sudden … boom, good-bye, Conner. No explanation, nothing. Pretended I didn’t exist after she came back from wherever she disappeared to.”
“Disappeared? When was that?”
“Summer. Earl
y summer.”
“Middle of June?”
“Around then, yeah.”
“For how long?”
“Week, two weeks, I don’t remember exactly.”
“Any idea where she might’ve been all that time?”
“No.” Jacklin went to lean against the massage table, his hands gripping its beveled edge. “But I figure maybe she hooked up with some guy and shacked up with him somewhere for a week or two. I wouldn’t put it past her the way she was then.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then something heavy must’ve happened. The guy beat her up or got her wasted on crystal meth or something and she ended up in jail or the hospital for a week or two. That’d explain it, right?”
“It might.”
“But not the rest of it. Why she dumped me and quit dealing with her old friends.”
I asked, “When did you last see her?”
“Right before she disappeared. She was gonna spend the weekend at this Indian casino up north.”
“The Graton in Rohnert Park?”
“Yeah. How’d you know that?”
“You didn’t go with her?”
“No. I had a private session that Saturday.” The near smirk that crossed Jacklin’s mouth told me the “private session” had had little or nothing to do with personal fitness training.
“Did she go with anybody else?”
“Not that I know of. She wanted us to make a weekend of it. Pissed when I begged off.”
“Did she often go to the Graton Casino by herself?”
“Now and then. She had a thing for the place. Didn’t matter to her if anybody was with her or not. All she wanted to do was gamble, park her ass at a roulette or baccarat table for hours at a stretch. Not me, man. Waste of time and money.”
“Make large bets, did she?”
“Yeah, sometimes, if she hit a winning streak. Not that that happened very often.”
“How large?”
“Biggest single bet I ever saw her make was five hundred.”
“Did she ever win big?”
“Nah. A couple grand once at baccarat, but she blew it all the next day.”
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