INTO THE DARK : A TOM DEATON NOVEL

by Richard B. Schwartz

  “A little. I don’t think of Hector as the artistic type. He was once a member of a youth gang. He still carries unauthorized weapons. He doesn’t know I know that, but he does. He’s a solid officer, but a little rough around the edges, not insubordinate exactly, but very sure of himself.”

  “I know, Chief. That’s why I want him on my side.”

  “If you want Hector Campo, you’ve got him.”

  “How soon can we start?”

  “As soon as we can put you in contact with the sister.”

  Diana put her bag on the luggage rack beside the armoire, closed both the sheer drape and the rubber-backed heavy drape at the balcony door, and slipped out of her clothes. She unlocked the door to the minibar, took out two miniatures of Bombay Sapphire gin, poured them into a glass, and lay down on the king-sized bed. Her pistol was beside her, its pebbled, black grip within inches of her fingertips.

  When she awoke it was nearly midnight. The room was chilly. She put her pistol on the nightstand, pulled the bedspread around her shoulder and legs and tried to fall back asleep. The room was dark but the light on the hard-wired smoke alarm blinked gently. The red light from the digital alarm clock was stark and real, as real as David’s death. She had never felt so alone, not even on the day that David was away and the county sheriff had told her that her mother and father’s car had hurtled over a steel retaining wall, taking them to their deaths on the frozen slope of a Colorado mountain.

  She was awakened by the ring of her cell phone. She looked at the face of the alarm clock; it said 8:43. She looked at the cell phone screen but didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Ms. Bennett?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Detective Tom Deaton with the Laguna Beach PD. Lieutenant Brighton told me you called him. I’d like to meet with you and discuss the case.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel

  Monday, 8:45 a.m.

  “I’m at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel,” she said.

  “Did you give them a credit card when you checked in, Ms. Bennett?” Tom asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Gather your things, but don’t check out. Keep your keycard with you. Don’t say anything to anyone in the hotel. How soon can I pick you up?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Good. I’ll be there.”

  “Detective Deaton . . . I’ve got dark brown hair and green eyes. I’ll be wearing a tan jacket.”

  “I’ve got sand colored hair and blue eyes,” Tom said. I’ll show you my shield when you approach the car—a dark Taurus. Don’t get in any car that doesn’t contain a detective with proper credentials.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

  “Sorry for the hurryup,” Tom said, “but I’m proceeding under the assumption that your brother was murdered. If that’s the case the person who did it was not some lowlife thief. Your registration is traceable through your credit card. Whoever can pass up the opportunity to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art would be able to spread around serious money for bribes and private investigators. I don’t want to frighten you and I don’t want to appear melodramatic, but I believe that we have to consider the possibility that the murderer might strike again and that anyone who is attempting to pursue the case rather than bury it is a likely target.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “My brother did not kill himself. And someone is following me, or at least investigating me. They’ve been in my house.”

  “Tell me about that in a second,” he said. “What was your room number at the hotel?”

  “Room 368,” she answered.

  “Could I have your keycard?”

  “Of course,” she said, taking it from her purse.

  He turned off of the highway, drove a block, and then pulled over to the curb. A young Latino man stepped out of a doorway and approached the car. Tom lowered the window, reached across Diana’s seat, and handed the keycard to the man. “Room 368,” he said. The man took the card and slipped it into his pants pocket. He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, but Diana could see the tattoos at the edge of his wrist. He was gone in an instant.

  “Officer Hector Campo,” Tom said. “He’ll go back to your room and keep an eye out for uninvited visitors.”

  “You’re very serious about this,” she said.

  “I have no reason to doubt what you’ve told me,” he said.

  “I appreciate that, Detective.”

  “Call me Tom.”

  “Diana.”

  “Diana, how about some breakfast?”

  After cutting through some side streets he drove her to the harbor at Dana Point and walked her to a boat on the edge of one of the marinas. The smallest boat among a line of motor yachts, it was called the Better Days. The enclosed cabin had a small galley, a bolted table with four pivoting chairs, a couch that doubled as a bed and a small head with a shower.

  “I haven’t had the time to do a major cleaning,” he said, “but I’ve got fresh juice, coffee, some bagels and cheese.”

  “I’ll take all of the above,” she said.

  “How do you like your coffee?”

  “Black. And strong,” she said.

  “You’ve got it,” he answered.

  She told him about the smell of gardenias in her home, assuring him that she did not use the scent and neither did any of her friends. “It was new,” she said.

  “Not your housekeeper’s?”

  “I don’t have a housekeeper.”

  “Were there any signs of forced entry?”

  “Not that I could see. As soon as I realized that someone had been there I left.”

  “Did you take steps to insure that you couldn’t be followed?”

  “Yes, I did a full backstreet tour of the San Gabriel Valley.”

  “Then you followed the book,” he said. “That’s good. How about some more coffee?”

  “That’d be great,” she said. When he leaned down to pour it she looked closely at his head. “You’ve had surgery lately,” she said.

  “Yes, I have,” he answered.

  “Serious?”

  “Pretty serious.”

  “An astrocytoma?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “What grade?”

  “A I; I guess I was very lucky there.”

  “Had you had seizures along with the headaches and nausea?”

  “No, I didn’t. There were no symptoms at all. I caught a blow to the face while I was taking down a robbery suspect and the Chief sent me in for a routine scan. The scan revealed the tumor.”

  “How did they treat it?”

  “Surgery. Then they did an MRI to make sure they had gotten it all. I should be good to go now.”

  “When were you released?”

  “Five days ago.”

  “Lean forward,” she said, looking more closely at his pupils and asking him to go through some basic neurologic exercises.

  “They didn’t tell me you were a doctor,” he said.

  “I don’t have an extensive practice,” she said. “I spent a lot of time helping David with his foundation. He insisted on paying me. I moved most of the money back into the foundation. He was comfortable with that. Money is not an issue in my life; there’s plenty of it. I work at several clinics and at two VA hospitals, one in L.A. and one in Long Beach and I log some time at an ambulatory care outpatient clinic in L.A.”

  “You and your brother were very close.”

  “Yes. He paid for my medical education as a matter of fact. I told him that no matter how much help he needed with his foundation that I wasn’t going to waste that education . . . tell me, Tom, what do you know about art?”

  �
��I went to college at UC-Irvine; my father insisted on it. It’s more a pre-med place than an arts place, but it’s known for its architecture—the actual buildings, I mean—and I studied enough art along with English and History to gain a basic appreciation of it. In all fairness, though, I’d have to put the emphasis on basic.”

  “You didn’t study criminology or law . . .”

  “No. I didn’t know what I wanted to do then.”

  “How did you end up as a detective?”

  “That’s a long story,” he said.

  “Give me the short version,” she answered, as she took a long sip of her coffee.

  “I saw somebody treated very unjustly. It made me angry. Very angry. It haunted me and I decided to try to find some kind of work where I could prevent things like that from ever happening. You can’t, of course, and most of the time you spend your day filling out forms or going over files, but every now and then you get a chance . . .”

  “Does this look like one of them to you?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Good,” she said. “I don’t know what you saw earlier, but David Bennett was one of the finest living artists and the most important person in my life. Taking him away was . . . well . . . let me be careful in what I say . . . something that cries out for justice.”

  “Then we should seek it,” Tom said.

  Chapter Nine

  Angeles Drive, La Cañada

  Monday, 9:35 a.m.

  “She’s moved out of her house.”

  “You followed her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “No, I was following her at a safe distance.”

  “Do you know where she’s staying now?”

  “Not yet, but I will. We’re checking her credit card records.”

  “What happened? Did you lose her?”

  “The streets were unfamiliar to me; she took a complex route.”

  “What are your plans?”

  “We’ll find her and eliminate her. Her body will be found in her own garage. She will die from carbon monoxide fumes. Everyone will believe that she took her own life because of her grief over the loss of her brother.”

  “I’m concerned about the police. What if she’s told them something?”

  “We’ll check. If we need to we can eliminate one or more of them as well. We can make it appear to be an unrelated act of revenge.”

  “Do it soon.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Have you removed the surveillance devices from her home? You don’t want that additional chore when you’re disposing of her body.”

  “I’m outside of her house now. I’ve just finished.”

  “Excellent. Let me know when you’ve removed her.”

  Hector rearranged the items in the room to make it appear that it was still occupied. He took the shopping magazines from the desk and put one on the armchair and one on the coffee table. Then he removed the terry cloth robe from the closet and draped it over the back of the desk chair. Checking lines of sight and lines of reflection from the mirrors and picture frame glass he located the corner of the room affording the greatest degree of concealment, put the other armchair there, sat down, and waited.

  Forty minutes later there was a tap at the door. “Housekeeping,” a voice said. There was no accent. He sat quietly, slipping his knife and sharpening stone under the cushion. When the woman entered he spoke to her.

  “Yo estaba dormido.”

  She didn’t respond to his statement. Instead, she said, “Excuse me; I will return later.”

  He closed his eyes and rested his head against the chair until she closed the door behind her. Then he quickly retrieved his knife and walked as quietly as he could to the side of the door, where he listened for a moment. Then he looked through the fisheye peephole. The corridor was empty. There was no maid’s cart.

  A few seconds later he gathered his things, locked the door behind him, and slipped into the stairwell closest to the door of Diana Bennett’s room. Putting a piece of folded cardboard between the stairwell door and the jamb, he was able to see the corridor between the elevator and her room. Taking the salt shaker which he had removed from a room service tray in the corridor, he sprinkled salt on several flights of stairs above and below him. Then he positioned himself at the door, removed his Sig P320 from the sling holster beneath his left arm and waited.

  An hour passed. No one had appeared in the corridor except for three sets of couples going from their rooms to the elevator and a busboy collecting room service trays. Hector went down the stairs to the lowest level, retrieved a white jacket from a laundry bin, slipped it on and went outside through the service doors. Carrying a carton he found on the floor, he went through the wooden gate in the fence that hid the Dempster Dumpsters. The gate swung behind him as he passed through and he turned, looking through the slats. At the far corner of the building, just outside the guest stairwell, he could see a man in a poplin jacket. It was large enough to conceal a weapon. The man was standing at the side of a large fan palm, drinking from a paper cup.

  In a place where a basic room goes for $799 a night plus a laundry list of fees he didn’t expect to see someone dressed in a jacket that was more likely to be found at Penney’s than at Bijan. Hector took out his cell phone and speed-dialed Tom.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “What have you got?”

  “Suspicious behavior. A maid who doesn’t speak Spanish and doesn’t have a cart. As soon as she saw me she left. I think she’s got a friend—a man watching an exit who looks like he should be selling auto parts rather than lunching with the beautiful people.”

  “Good work. Keep an eye on him, but from a distance. Don’t engage.”

  “Got it,” Hector said, and clicked off.

  Tom turned to Diana, who was straightening up the galley in an effort to burn nervous energy. “Guess what,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ve got uninvited guests at the Ritz-Carlton, one dressed like a maid who came to your room, another standing outside watching an exit.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “She came into the room, found Hector there instead of you, and was unable to respond to him in Spanish. She left immediately . . .”

  “And the guy was either watching the exit when she went in or came there as soon as she was discovered and had to leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was probably there to kill me.”

  “Eventually, probably,” Tom said. “It’s very unlikely that they’d tip their hand by killing you there. They’re not supposed to exist, remember. Your brother’s death may be seen as a suicide by some, but nobody’s going to swallow the coincidence of a second body being found this quickly. Also, he came to Laguna to work; there’s no reason for you to be there. Someone would have had to have followed you. It’s also too early for something ‘accidental’; I figure they’d try to kill you in such a way as to make it look as if you were overcome by grief and chose to join your brother. Since the two of you were so close that might be plausible.”

  “Then this is good news,” Diana said.

  “It’s good in the sense that it reinforces your belief that your brother was murdered.”

  “But it is clear now that he was.”

  “Probably.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there are those who prey on others when they’re most vulnerable—the kind who scan obituaries and burglarize family homes during funerals. You’re a rich woman in a state of emotional distress. You could be . . . Diana, do you really want to talk about this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well . . . you could be kidnapped and threatened or hurt until someone could successfully extort money from you.”

  “I understand,” s
he said, “but I still think it’s good news.”

  “So do I,” Tom answered, “and as I said earlier no one killed your brother in an attempt to get money. The motive here was much more complex.”

  “I don’t know what the motive was,” Diana answered, “but I know what my brother was working on when he died . . . and I have no idea why he was doing it.”

  Before she could say anything else Tom’s cell phone rang. He took it from his belt case, said “Yes,” listened, said “OK,” clicked off, and then said, “I’ve got to leave for a couple of hours. You’ll be safe here.”

  They exchanged cell numbers and as he hurried along the pier Diana assembled her papers and David’s photographs and took out the pistol that he had given her. She checked to make sure that it was loaded and placed it on the adjoining chair, close to her right leg.

  Chapter Ten

  On the 5

  Monday, 1:00 p.m.

  “He’s definitely headed up the coast now,” Hector said. “I watched him finish his coffee and then stand there smoking cigarette after cigarette and he never moved. He never even flexed his knees. He must do this a lot. Then his cell phone twitched in his pocket and he took the call. It was brief. He put the cell back in his pocket, turned smartly, and walked up to the street, got in his car, and took off.”

  “It’s good that you didn’t lose him,” Tom said.

  “I was in front of the hotel so I could get out quickly,” Hector answered.

  “Did you see the woman again?”

  “The one who came into the room? No, I didn’t.”

  “Maybe she checked back, realized that you were gone, and told him to pull back.”

  “Possibly,” Hector said.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m on the 5. I just passed Mission Viejo, coming up on the 405 interchange. How about you?”

  “Not quite to Galivan, just a few minutes behind you.”

  “Hope you got a full tank of gas.”

  “Always,” Tom said, “but I hope I won’t need it. Call me as soon as he turns off.”