by Tyler Dilts
“What happened? How did he . . . ,” Joe said.
As his words trailed off, I said, “A gunshot wound. To the head.”
Lucy buried her face in Joe’s neck again.
“I know this is a very difficult time, but we need to ask you a few questions,” I said.
They chose the seats themselves. Lucy on the couch, her husband in the chair.
I had a much better view of him, so that’s where I started. “I’m Danny Beckett and this is Jennifer Tanaka. We’re with the LBPD.”
“I’m Joe.” He tried to reach across the length of the coffee table to shake my hand. I leaned out and met him halfway. “Joseph Polson.” He started to lean back and realized he hadn’t shaken Jen’s hand, so he awkwardly shifted toward her. She gave him a quick shake and let go.
“As I told Lucy, we’re very sorry for your loss.” I watched him while I spoke.
“Thank you,” he said with a nod.
Jen asked Lucy, “Did your father have any history of depression?”
“Yes,” she said. “But never anything serious.”
I let Jen continue. Sitting next to Lucy, she’d be able to build a stronger connection with her. “Did he receive any treatment for it?”
“A few years ago. He went to a therapist and took an antidepressant for a while.”
“How long ago?”
“I’m not sure,” Lucy said. “Four or five years?” She looked at Joe.
“It was before we met,” he said. “So at least five.”
“Nothing since then?”
“No,” Lucy said.
Jen continued. “Had you noticed any changes in his behavior recently?”
Lucy shook her head.
Jen asked a few more standard questions. It was clear that Lucy had no reason to suspect that her father might have wanted to hurt himself. There was a pause in the questioning, and even though Jen didn’t look at me or give me any other signal, I knew it was an invitation for me to join the interview.
I said, “Was your father left handed?”
“No,” Lucy said.
Joe looked puzzled. “Why would that matter?”
“It probably doesn’t,” I said. “We just need to check everything out.” That seemed to answer the question well enough for him. I looked at Lucy. She was slowly sinking into the new reality of her life. Her father was gone. Nothing for her would be the same again.
We asked several more questions and fingerprinted them so we could eliminate their prints from those we found at the crime scene, and then we wrapped up the interview.
“What happens now?” Lucy asked.
“There’ll be an autopsy this afternoon and we’ll be in touch as soon as we have more information for you,” I said.
“Do we”—she paused, as if she were rehearsing her next words in her head—“have to make arrangements?”
“Yes. The medical examiner’s office will contact you to help with that. You’ll probably hear from me before that happens, though.”
Joe slid next to her on the couch, and we listened to her crying as we walked out and shut the door behind us.
The night before, Jen had done a preliminary canvass of the apartment building’s tenants while I was working the crime scene. No one had answered her knock at either of the two studios above the garage. I was particularly interested in talking to the occupants of those units, because of the way the building was laid out. The garage and the studios, along with a small laundry room, made up a second structure separated by ten feet or so from the main building. The foot of the stairs up to the two small apartments was perhaps two yards away from Denkins’s porch, and the landing looked down on his apartment with a clear view of its side door. From there, it was only a few steps to the gate leading into the back alley. That would be the logical escape route.
“Let’s see if anyone’s home,” I said to Jen, tilting my head toward the stairs.
As we climbed the steps, I saw one of the slats on the miniblind fall back into place behind the window next to the closest door. I’d planned on starting with the farther apartment, but went to the first door instead.
I fought the urge to use my standard cop knock and gave the glass a few light raps with my knuckle. “We’re with the Long Beach Police Department,” I said, my voice only slightly raised. “Can we talk to you?”
We heard nothing from inside.
“I know you’re in there. I saw you peek through the blinds.”
Something shuffled on the other side of the door.
“Please,” I said. “We just need a few minutes of your time.”
There was more muffled noise, and the door, secured by a safety chain, cracked open.
The man who answered showed me only a single bloodshot brown eye under a large forehead topped by a mess of disheveled salt-and-pepper hair. “Yes?” he said.
I held up my badge and introduced myself. “My name’s Danny Beckett. We need to talk to you about what happened last night.”
“Okay, I guess.” He didn’t move, just kept staring through the crack.
“Can we come inside?”
His eye twitched and I could feel his anxiety seeping past the edge of the door. “Um, no?”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Would you mind opening the door or stepping outside for a minute?”
He nodded and the door closed. I expected to hear him undoing the chain, but there was only silence. I looked over my shoulder at Jen.
She made a hand gesture asking me if I wanted her to check the back of the building.
I shook my head. Unless he was going to squeeze through one of the tiny windows in back and jump fifteen feet to the alley below, he wasn’t going anyplace.
He kept us waiting long enough for me to think I might have made a mistake. Then the door opened just wide enough for him to slip through and pull it closed. His hair was neater, and he seemed slightly less agitated. He was short, maybe five-seven, and his thin frame made his gray T-shirt look too big. I couldn’t tell how old he was. Maybe forty, maybe sixty.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Danny.”
“I’m Harold,” he said. It looked like it took a significant act of will for him to shake my hand. “Harold Craig.”
“Are you all right, Harold?” Jen asked.
He nodded. “I have an anxiety disorder,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I didn’t sleep last night.”
“We apologize for the disturbance,” I said. “Do you know what happened?”
“Bill’s dead.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “He is.”
Harold looked unsteady. “Let’s sit down,” I said, motioning to the top step. He put his hand on the railing and eased himself down. I sat next to him. Jen stepped halfway down the stairs and turned so her face was on the same level as his.
“Tell me about Bill,” I said.
Harold told us how he’d lived there for twelve years, ever since he’d been laid off from his job as a high-school math teacher. While he spoke, he held his hand in front of his chest and shook it up and down in a small arc. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. Bill had been a good friend to him, he said, not like a landlord at all. They’d go to lunch sometimes. Second Street or the Belmont Brewing Company if Harold wasn’t having a bad day. Bill even got him a faster Internet connection when he needed it to work from home. Never once raised his rent or anything.
“Do you think they’ll let me stay?” He noticed his hand then, and held it in his lap to keep it still.
“I don’t know, Harold,” I said.
He looked at his feet.
“What can you tell me about your neighbor?” I tilted my head toward the door of the other studio apartment.
“Kobe?” he asked.
I nodded as if I recognized the name.
“He seems like a nice kid. Asian.”
“Kid?”
“Well, early twenties or so. You get old enough, everybody seems like a kid.”
“Ca
n you tell us any more about him?”
“I don’t think he came home last night.”
“That’s unusual?”
“Yeah. He’s usually home. Playing his Xbox.”
“He bother you with that?”
“No. It’s a thin wall, though.”
“When did you see him last?”
“He went out not too long before everything started happening.”
“Did you hear the gunshot?”
“No. Someone shot Bill? That’s how it happened?” His hand was off his lap and shaking again.
I nodded. “When you say ‘before everything started happening,’ what do you mean?”
“Before you all started showing up.”
Jen and I exchanged a look. Did Kobe leave before or after the shot was fired?
We talked for a few more minutes. I gave him one of my business cards and asked him to call me when Kobe came home.
When Harold was back inside, Jen and I went downstairs and let ourselves into Denkins’s apartment. The crime-scene techs had scoured the place for any potential physical evidence, but we needed to go through it one more time for anything else that might provide useful information before we released the crime scene to the family.
“What do you make of Harold?” I asked once we were in the living room with the front door closed.
“I feel sorry for him,” she said.
“Think he knows more than he’s saying?”
“Everybody knows more than they’re saying.”
Most of what I was interested in was in the desk or file cabinet—rental agreements, financial records, legal documents. Jen searched the rest of the apartment while I dug into the paperwork. An hour later, I had a box full of files and Jen had searched the place from top to bottom.
“Find anything?” I asked, snapping the lid closed on the large plastic evidence container.
She shook her head. “Not really. Nothing out of the ordinary. Don’t think Bill was a big drinker, though. No alcohol containers in the trash and only one beer in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, pushed way in back.”
I looked at the coffee table where the Glenlivet bottle had been before it was collected as evidence. “Last night must have been an anomaly.”
“So, why did Bill get shit-faced last night?” she asked.
“And who was he with?”
Jen offered to take the autopsy so I could get some sleep before Julia’s show. I wanted to make a good impression, because I hadn’t met many of her friends yet. But when we got out to the curb, I saw my Camry, still parked halfway up the block.
“Shit,” I said. “I forgot I need to get my car to the repair shop.”
Jen took pity on me. “Give me your keys. I’ll get a tow for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, working the ignition key off of my key ring.
“Still take it to that place up on Cherry?”
I nodded, handed her the business card I keep in my wallet for the mechanic, and started for the cruiser.
She read the card. “See you tonight.”
That stopped me. “You’re going, too?”
“Your girlfriend sent me the event invite on Facebook, so yeah.”
“We’re not, I mean she’s not—”
“Go sleep.” I heard her laughing as she walked away.
CHAPTER TWO
THE BOY IN THE BUBBLE
Three hours in bed wasn’t enough to make up for the sleep I’d lost the night before, but I was feeling rested and, honestly, a little bit nervous. I was certain Julia had anticipated this and invited Jen so I wouldn’t feel quite so fish-out-of-watery.
After a shower and a shave, I spent too much time deciding what to wear. I went with khakis and a blue linen button-up with vertical stripes that I knew from experience would do a good job of concealing my Glock in its inside-the-waistband holster behind my right hip.
When I was as ready as I was going to get, I headed out to the gallery. It was in the East Village, which was really just the eastern edge of downtown Long Beach. Several years ago someone thought rebranding the area might be a good idea, so they hung a new name on the neighborhood and watched the gastropubs and retro-cool dive bars and art galleries sprout and blossom. I’d been spending a lot more time there since I’d been with Julia. The truth was that I was beginning to enjoy the neighborhood more, and that left me feeling conflicted. I worried about becoming so comfortable with the curated authenticity of the hipsters and gentrifiers that I’d lose my sense of the actual authenticity I needed on the job whenever I ventured out of the comfortable pockets of privilege where I found myself spending more and more of my time.
When I mentioned this to Julia, she just smiled at me. “What?” I’d asked her.
“That’s a good thing to be worried about.”
As I circled the block a second time looking for parking, I thought about pulling into a loading zone or a short-term spot. Nobody would ticket an unmarked police car. I decided against it, though, because I thought one of Julia’s friends might see me do it, and I didn’t want the first impression I made on anyone to be of a cop exploiting the perks of his job.
I found an empty space two blocks over on Elm and checked my watch. Five minutes to seven. Perfect timing. As I turned the corner onto Broadway, I could see Julia and Jen on the sidewalk up the street in front of the gallery. I picked up my pace.
Jen saw me first. She said something to Julia, who turned and smiled as I got close.
“They’re just about ready,” she said, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek.
I looked inside. A young guy with a thick hipster beard and waxed mustache was adjusting a cheese tray and lining up bottles of wine on a folding table. No one else was inside.
“And I was worried I’d be late.”
Julia laughed. “I should have mentioned that no one shows up to an art opening on time.”
“No one except the cops, apparently,” Jen said.
Julia laughed again. Her easy calmness impressed me. I hadn’t expected too much nervousness or anxiety from her, she was always steady that way. It was one of my favorite things about her. She never seemed to rattle. But I knew this show was a big deal for her. Things were really taking off with her photography. Not only was the show more exposure for her art, but she was hoping to sell, too. On the advice of the gallery owner, a man-bunned guy named Trev, she’d increased the asking prices for her new works. From what I could see, though, I was more concerned about how the evening would go than she was.
“Come inside,” Julia said. “I need to show you something.”
I followed her toward the back corner where her work was displayed. It looked good. She’d shown them all to me a few days earlier, when she was deciding which ones to include. She had a dozen photos of various sizes, some color, some black-and-white. Street photography, she called her style. She liked to find a subject, a person, and to photograph him or her in a way that situated the particular person in a particular place. Whether it was a homeless person downtown, a gangbanger in North Long Beach, a rich guy on Naples Island, there always seemed to be something that pulled me into the moment she’d captured. My favorite of the lot was a black-and-white that she’d taken on Belmont Pier. There were about a dozen people in the photo, but its subject was unmistakably the bearded man in running clothes sitting on a bench and focusing intently on a running shoe he was holding up in front of himself. It was only after studying it for a moment that I realized it was not just a shoe, but his own prosthetic lower leg.
As we got closer I saw one I didn’t recognize—in the center of a dark rectangle was a bright square of light, in which stood a man facing away from the camera on a balcony, looking out at the city. It took me a few seconds to realize the photograph was taken from deep inside a room, and the dark frame consisted of the walls around a sliding glass door. It took a few more seconds to realize I was the man and the balcony was Julia’s.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Yo
u got my good side,” I said.
“Is it okay? Do you mind me including it?”
I looked her in the eyes. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the photo. Part of me felt flattered to be one of her subjects, to be part of a piece of her art. But I also felt a certain uneasiness. I had no idea where it came from or why I felt it, but the idea of that photo hanging on a stranger’s wall bothered me.
“I like it,” I said. “But do we have to sell that one?”
She pointed at a small, round red sticker on a bottom corner of the frame’s glass surface that I hadn’t noticed before. “I’m way ahead of you. That means this one’s already spoken for.”
“Look at you,” Jen said, approaching us. She had a small paper plate with cheese and grapes in her hand. “She got your good side.”
A few more people had arrived. Julia introduced us to Trev, the owner, and to one of the other artists. We made some small talk, and by then the crowd had begun to grow.
“I should probably start mingling,” Julia said, giving my hand a quick squeeze.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll try not to break anything.”
I watched her greet a small circle of women. They looked like old friends—hugs and smiles all around. Then I noticed Jen watching me.
“What?” I asked.
“I like her,” she said. “And I like you with her.”
“You don’t like me otherwise?”
She didn’t take the bait. “She’s good for you.”
“That she is,” I said. Julia had moved on to a group of two couples and she seemed just as happy to see them as she had the others. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was good for her.
As soon as I had the chance I pulled Jen into a corner to talk about the case. “How’d the autopsy go?” I asked.
“No surprises.” She took a sip of bottled water. Neither of us had opted for the wine. “Blood alcohol was point-one-nine, with more in his stomach.”
“And if he wasn’t a heavy drinker,” I said, “he was probably close to passing out.”
