Hadley was referring to Orange County’s most notorious murder trial ever. Randy Kraft, a forty-four-year-old computer consultant, was linked to the drugging, strangling and mutilation of forty-five young men, sixteen of them in Orange County, between 1972 and 1983. Like the Audio Killer, Kraft also relived his moments, and kept a diary with cryptic allusions to various victims. If all of Kraft’s killings ever became known, he might be the U.S.A.’s premier killer, even topping Ted Bundy, no mean feat in the land of recreational murder.
The audiocassette with Betsy scrawled across it was not uncommon, the LAPD detectives had pointed out to Hadley. Modern American serial killers were even using videocameras to memorialize their deeds.
“Know how I feel today, Buster?” Hadley said, when he finally put on his Nikes, ready to go home. “I feel like I’d be the one looking for a career change if I had to deal with stuff like that. Like Betsy.”
Buster had a roaring headache, and other parts of his body hurt just as much. He’d asked for and been granted the next two days off. He dragged himself painfully to his feet, and just before Hadley left the locker room, Buster said to him, “This job sucks.”
Hadley turned in the doorway, looking very young and sad. He said, “You didn’t always feel that way. Did ya?”
Overflowing with venom, Buster Wiles said: “Only difference between this job and my ex-wife is, this job always will suck!”
13
The Bell Buoy
The temperature in downtown L.A. was 106, which beat the record for the date by fifteen degrees! The surge in energy use from all the air conditioners in L.A. and Orange County had knocked out traffic signals. Schoolchildren were being kept off the playgrounds, and lights were turned off in classrooms.
Winnie had convinced Tess Binder to get out of the house and spend a large part of that scorching afternoon cruising in Newport Harbor. Tess borrowed a twenty-foot open-bow runabout, powered by an inboard-outboard engine, from her next-door neighbor. She packed a picnic basket full of light snacks, cold beer and California Chardonnay, and she sunbathed while Winnie piloted the boat.
Newport Beach is composed of eight islands, one natural and the rest man-made. Tess knew every island and every channel as well as Winnie did, but wasn’t interested in the sights. She reclined across the bench seat in the open bow and rolled down her purple high-waist bikini. To Winnie she was as firm and sleek as an ocelot, and yet she’d never left him to go to a gym or even talked about it. Winnie wore baggy cotton shorts and a faded red tank with a screen print of a catamaran flying a hull on the front. He’d gotten enough confidence by now to stop sucking in his gut.
Winnie took the runabout under Newport Boulevard into the narrow channels by Balboa Coves, passing a gondola going the other way, a motor-powered gondola with the pilot in a Venetian striped jersey and a straw gondolier’s hat. The steaming tourists in the gondola drooped like dead dandelions.
“Remember Corky Peebles from my club?” Tess lowered her oversized sunglasses to peek at Winnie, who leaned back, steering with his bare feet.
“Which one was she? The other blonde?”
“No, the one with the bobbed black hair and the gorgeous body.”
“Oh yeah. The one that looked at me like I was a strange spot on a hotel pillowcase. I remember her.”
“If she were with us, she could do a running commentary of who lives in which house, as long as it’s someone with a net worth of more than ten million.”
“Why just ten? Why not F.F.H. numbers?”
“There’s only a handful of those in the harbor, but there’s a lot of the others.”
“Seven-one-four rich, right?”
“You learn fast.”
“Told ya I wasn’t too dumb, lady,” Winnie said, holding a cold beer to his face and letting the water drops fall onto his chest.
“And as far as Forbes’ Four Hundred, well, if someone slips three places, or jumps two on that list, Corky knows about it. And knows if he plays, or if his wife plays, and with whom. She’s always ready to strike when there’s an opportunity.”
“Tell me, Tess,” Winnie said, noticing for the first time that her hands were older than the rest of her. “What would it take for someone like … like Corky to be content?”
“The Sultan of Brunei couldn’t make Corky content.”
“Well, yeah, but let’s take someone like …”
“Me, you mean.”
“Okay, you.”
“How much is your pension worth?”
“Come on, I’m serious.”
“Okay, seriously, I don’t need much. If I’d gotten my father’s ranch I would’ve waited till it appreciated and sold it and bought a condo and scraped by. Now, well, I’ll have to do what you’re going to do. I’ll have to get a job. And I’ve never had one.”
“In your life?”
“In my life. Men’ve always taken care of me. First Daddy, then my three husbands. Men who treated me like a Rolls-Royce hood ornament.”
Later, when Winnie passed Harbor Island on the main channel side, Tess said, “There. That’s the best location on the water as far as I’m concerned. I used to think my inheritance would be large enough to buy a house on Harbor Island, a house that didn’t need too much remodeling. One with a nice lawn.”
“How much would that cost now?”
“With a turning basin view? Oh, six or seven, I suppose. For a decent one.”
“Million?”
“Of course. The guy who bought the John Wayne house has a hundred and twenty-seven foot mega-yacht worth ten million.”
“You were expecting that kind of bucks when your father died, and you got nothing, right? So tell me, how the hell could those two old guys spend so much?”
“You’d have to ask Warner Stillwell. I’ve asked him and he just shrugs it off. Refers to all the cruises and the villas they leased in the south of France and Portofino. That sort of thing.”
Winnie steered quietly for a long time. It was very hard for him to conceptualize real wealth. And to realize that by Golden Orange standards Conrad P. Binder wasn’t even all that rich. The old family home in Bayshores was a scraper, according to Tess, torn down within a week after the new buyer cleared escrow. Winnie finally had to concede that he simply had no idea what it meant: rich.
Then Winnie began thinking about the hot mommas. What would they do on a day like this? Maybe they’d go up to South Coast Plaza or Fashion Island to browse in air-conditioned shops. How much would they spend?
Suddenly it occurred to him. “Know what?”
“What?”
“I lived around here all my life and I never even bought so much as a pair a socks up there in Fascist Island. Imagine that!”
“That is amazing,” she said.
He nibbled on a sandwich and drank beer. Tess occasionally ate a carrot or a celery stick and sipped Chardonnay. Winnie noticed that the wine had a store sticker price of $25.95 so she couldn’t be that broke. He had less money than that to tide him over until the next pension check arrived.
Winnie kept the boat in lower Newport Bay, though he preferred the natural beauty of the upper bay, where there was still undeveloped land and lots of wildlife. Winnie’s grandfather had helped float the barge Theda Bara rode on there, during the filming of Cleopatra. But Winnie figured the back bay would be a few degrees hotter so he decided to avoid it.
There were over sixty thousand boats in Orange County, but few were cruising the harbor in these melt-down Santa Ana conditions. By the Lido peninsula they cruised past a Feadship, a 102-foot motor yacht.
“I’ve been on that boat,” she said. “It’s a Van Lent design from Holland. Steel built. The plumbing’s gold plated. Even the screws’re gold plated!”
“A lotta that around here,” Winnie said. “Gold plating.”
On such a hot windless day, without billowing spinnakers and flashing catamarans and wind surfers, Winnie wasn’t as distracted as he would’ve been with sailboats to admire. He be
gan thinking about murder.
Neither of them had yet brought up today the subject of Conrad Binder, or the gunshot in the desert, or the man loitering across the channel from Linda Isle.
She was the first. She said, “Have you thought about it, Win? Hack Starkey watching my house? That gunshot?”
“I can’t put it together,” he said. “It jist doesn’t shake itself down to anything logical. Why would Warner Stillwell or anyone associated with him—like this guy Starkey—why would he want to see you dead? He’s already got everything.”
“Everything isn’t that much to begin with, since they apparently managed to spend all Daddy’s money during the years between his retirement and his death.”
“How much do you figure that was?”
“I have no idea. Several million. Maybe more. I just don’t know.”
“How much is the ranch actually worth?”
She paused and said, “A house and a few acres? A bit more than a million. Land’s not as valuable out there as it would be near Palm Desert or Rancho Mirage.”
“So by your standards, even if he didn’t already have the land, that wouldn’t be enough to kill over?”
“That’s very little money.” She smiled. “By my standards.”
“But he’s got the ranch. So what would he gain? See, it jist doesn’t work out.” Winnie paused for a moment and said, “You got a copy of the will?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Can I have a look when we get back?”
“You can have anything I’ve got,” Tess Binder said.
Tess said she wanted to go outside the jetty, which Winnie had planned on avoiding in that he’d have to cruise past Little Corona, the beach where Conrad Binder had ended his life. He stayed on the peninsula side of the main channel when he passed, staying as far as possible from Little Corona Del Mar Beach. He watched her with sidelong glances, but she never turned her head in that direction.
When they got out of the breakwater, past the jetty, past the five-mile-per-hour speed limit, he throttled forward. The nose lifted and the boat planed. He sped down past Corona Del Mar, past Pelican Point, and Arch Rock, so covered with bird guano it looked snowcapped. The inky water changed to aquamarine along that stretch of coastline, and the beaches near Cameo Shores were dotted with people lying at the base of the sandstone cliffs, hoping for relief from the heat.
The chop got a bit severe halfway to Laguna and they were getting bounced around, so Tess suggested they turn back. But before reaching the jetty once again, Winnie steered around the green bell buoy marking the harbor entrance. Five ocher-colored California sea lions lay on top of each other on the buoy: three females and two big bulls. The bell was clanging with each wave, wake and swell, the tapper only inches from the heads of the sea lions, who didn’t seem to mind.
“Back when I was a kid, one big guy, Quasimodo I called him, used to lay there all the time,” Winnie said. “All day long with that bell clanging in his ears. Had to’ve gone deaf after a while. Big ugly old guy. Wonder what happened to old Quasimodo?”
The sea lions ignored the boat, as they did all boats that didn’t get close enough to deliberately frighten them. And they wisely ignored the trash that people tried to feed them.
“My dad and me used to rent a little boat at the pavilion and fish out here. Those were the best days of my life. Those days fishing. Jist my dad and me.”
Winnie noticed that one of the sea lions had a fishing line wrapped around her neck, slicing deep into the flesh. He pointed to the animal.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s got a line wrapped around her. She’ll get infected, maybe die, if she doesn’t get help. Assholes! They drown them in their gill nets! They hook them! They strangle them with their lines! Assholes!”
Suddenly Winnie turned the boat toward the jetty and gave it throttle.
“What’re you doing?”
“We gotta report this right away,” Winnie said. “She needs help.”
Tess started to say something, but decided not to. Finally she smiled a little and said, “Aye, aye, skipper. Straight ahead. It’s the only course you’d ever steer.”
By the time they got back to Linda Isle and Winnie had called the National Marine Fisheries Services, and buttoned up the neighbor’s runabout, Tess said it was cocktail time. She poured drinks for herself and Winnie while he took a shower. When he came down there was a double vodka for him on the glass table in the patio, along with a sheaf of documents.
“I’ll just have a bath,” Tess said, “while you look through all that stuff.”
The traffic was heavy on Pacific Coast Highway, an endless line of cars leaving the beach at day’s end, heading inland, back to the more stifling heat. Winnie’s glass sweated a puddle almost immediately, and he splashed a few drops onto the documents when he put the glass down. He wiped the page on his shirt and began to read the last will and testament of Conrad Philip Binder, Jr.
The first two pages were legalese, and then came the interesting part. The estate of Conrad Binder had been left to his trust, with Warner Daniel Stillwell as executor. The most significant paragraph was offset:
I hereby leave my ranch, commonly known as El Refugio, in the county of Riverside near La Quinta, to my friend and companion Warner Daniel Stillwell for his use as resident of said property during the remainder of his life. Upon his death the property shall be distributed to my daughter, Tess. If Tess does not survive Warner Stillwell, the property shall be distributed outright to him.
Winnie had started on his second tub of vodka when Tess came down in a terry robe with a towel wrapped around her wet hair.
“Boring reading, isn’t it?” she said.
“Not all that boring.”
“Why do you say that?” She sat down with her drink and looked disgustedly at her ghetto view: Pacific Coast Highway and the riverboat restaurant, probably jammed to the gunwales with tourists.
“You never told me you were going to get the ranch eventually.”
“I thought I did.”
“You didn’t.”
“Well, I get it after Warner’s gone. Believe me, I could be an old lady by then. He’s got Ronald Reagan genes.”
“Are you aware Warner Stillwell gets the property if you die?”
“Of course I’m aware of it. But he already has the property.”
“Yeah, but he can’t dispose of it. He can’t sell it. He can’t eat it. He can’t blow it up. He can only use it. As a residence.”
“So what? That’s all he wants it for. That’s his home. Aside from a quite humble bungalow in Laguna Beach, that’s all he’s got.”
“Maybe he’s sick a living out there in his desert paradise. Maybe he’s lonely for … Oh, for boys, let’s say.”
“There’re lots and lots of boys in Palm Springs.”
“Maybe he likes the Laguna boys better, I don’t know. The point is, he might be tired a living out in the desert and he’s only got a handful a years left and he wants to live them in Laguna. Or where did you say they rented those villas?”
“The south of France, near Nice. And Portofino, in Italy.”
“Yeah, so the only way he could sell that property is if he outlives you.”
Tess got up and started pacing nervously. She put her drink down and sat again. “Winnie, you can’t turn this into a murder conspiracy! El Refugio’s not worth that much.”
“Three acres? A house like that? Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe it’s worth more than you think?”
“People don’t murder other people for that kind of money!”
Winnie looked at Tess for irony, but saw none. He couldn’t even address that statement. Rich people!
Winnie said, “Tess, I’ve known people who’d kill you for …”
“But not people like Warner Stillwell.”
“People like you, you mean. And your dad, and all the other folks you grew up with.”
“I know it sounds terrible to you but that is wh
at I mean. That’s just not a lot of money!”
“Who’s this lawyer Martin Scroggins?”
“Daddy’s lawyer. And now Warner’s. And mine if I need him. His firm’s been in business since my grandfather’s day. A very respectable Los Angeles firm, with an office here in Newport.”
“I’d like you to talk to Mister Scroggins.”
“About what?”
“This will.”
“Do you want me to ask him if the selling price of a small ranch is enough for me to fear for my life?”
“I wanna help you, Tess.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and patted his hand. “I don’t mean to be flip, it’s just that I’m trying to pretend I’m not scared. That man watching my house … I don’t know. It’s got me unnerved!”
“I can’t stay here guarding this place forever.”
“Why not?”
That one stopped him. He thought he’d see that mischievous grin of hers, but all he saw was a pair of gray eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. Unfathomable gray eyes. Like pebbles on the beach, washed clean by surging tides.
“I would like you to talk to Scroggins.”
“Okay, I will. Tell me what to ask.”
“I want you to be absolutely sure there’re no stocks, bank accounts or other real property that your dad owned.”
“But a lawyer would have to tell me about that. He would’ve told me about that.”
“Can you go see him?”
“Let’s both go tomorrow.”
“A phone call’ll do. Lawyers turn on the meter the second you make an appointment.”
“They do the same thing with phone calls, believe me.”
Winnie bent forward then, testing his back gingerly. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I gotta stretch out flat for a while. My back’s got more kinks than a lawyer’s conscience.”
While Winnie lay supine on the floor of Tess’s living room watching the six-thirty world news on TV, Buster Wiles made a run to Spoon’s Landing looking for Winnie Farlowe. Buster found the zoo howling as usual, and the zookeeper perched on a stool behind the long bar. Spoon’s voice droned endlessly about the twenty bucks he’d bet that the Edmonton Oilers couldn’t shut out the Great Gretzky even once during the Stanley Cup playoffs.
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