by Matt Coyle
“I’ll do it.”
I took out my key chain from my pocket and opened up a blade from the little Swiss Army knife attached to it. I held the envelope by its sides and carefully slit it open, then turned it upside down. Two empty shell casings clattered down into the metal safe deposit box. Twenty-five caliber. Just like the two missing bullets from the gun in my father’s safe.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GLORIA NAKAMURA’S FACE turned as red as Windsor’s resting tone. His didn’t get any redder. Gloria looked at him for guidance, but he gave her nothing. His attention and scowl were lasered on me.
“I trust that, as we’ve followed all the regulations under the law, we don’t have to worry that you’ll go crying to the newspapers that we’ve treated you unfairly and are stomping on the rights of the ninety-nine percent.”
I nodded. Windsor shifted his scowl to Gloria Nakamura and held it on her for a cringing five seconds, then left the viewing room without another word.
I realized my antics the other day had put Gloria in deep water with her boss. My quest for the truth sometimes left collateral damage. It didn’t have to with Gloria. Shame I hadn’t felt in too long crept up the back of my neck.
I pulled out my cell phone and took one picture each of the shells, then I stuck the Swiss Army knife’s blade into an empty shell casing and dropped it into the small envelope. Then did the same with the other one.
“Why didn’t you just pick them up with your hand and put them back into the envelope?”
“Old habit.”
I didn’t want to smudge or overlap any fingerprints or DNA that might have been left behind. By my father or someone else. But I couldn’t tell Gloria that or anyone else. If it was evidence from a crime, LJPD had a right to it. But not until I found out what it all meant. Then, I might give them a call.
Depending upon what I discovered.
“I’ve witnessed a lot of death certificate safe deposit box openings over the years, but I’ve never seen two empty bullet shells before.” Gloria Nakamura gave me a nervous smile. Almost like a pressure release now that her boss wasn’t still in the room glaring at her. “I’ve seen guns and bullets, but never empty shells. What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.” Not exactly. “Does Windsor make a habit of watching people open up their dead relatives’ safe deposit boxes? Seems like he’d have something more or less important to do. Especially on a Saturday morning.”
“No. I’ve never seen him do it before.”
“I guess that makes me special.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Do you think I’m stupid, Mr. Cahill?”
“Rick.” I smiled. “Not so far.”
“Well, Rick.” She didn’t smile back. “It looks to me like your handling the contents of your late father’s safe deposit box like it’s some sort of evidence. Is it?”
“I’ll answer one of yours if you’ll answer one of mine,” I said.
“If I can.”
“I’m not exactly sure what these are. Could be some weird keepsakes or, a remote possibility, evidence in a crime. So, I handled everything as little as possible, just in case.” Mostly true. I closed the lid of the safe deposit box and handed it to her. “My turn now, right?”
“Okay.”
“Why did you tell Windsor about me and the safe deposit box?”
“That’s my job.” She made a big show of looking me in the eyes and not blinking.
“Really? You just told me you’d never seen Windsor watch a relative open a dead person’s safe deposit box before. Why would you tell him about this one? You clearly have the authority to handle this alone without even alerting him about it.”
“I told Mr. Windsor about your visit the other day and the unusual situation of your father’s safe deposit box and joint checking account. He told me to call him when you contacted the bank again.” She raised up the safe deposit box. “Now, can we return the box to its locker?”
“The other day, my father’s safe deposit box and joint checking account were normal business practices. Remember? Now they’re unusual.”
“A little out of the ordinary, but the unusual thing was you threatening the reputation of Windsor Bank and Trust. Mr. Windsor and I take that very seriously.” She lowered her eyelids to half-mast and pushed up her lower lip. “Please open the door and follow me back into the vault.”
I opened the door and Gloria pushed by me. She did the dual key thing and locked up the safe deposit box. She handed me back my key.
“As we discussed earlier, the only way to claim the contents of your father’s box is to go through the courts. Once you do that, we will turn over the contents to you.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
What would I do with evidence that was probably from a shooting and possibly a murder scene? Give it to the police? Maybe. Or maybe keep it away from the police.
Gloria turned to leave the vault, but I touched her arm to stop her.
“I’m sorry I got you into trouble with your boss.” I shook my head. “I wasn’t really going to go to the newspapers. It was a bluff. That wasn’t fair.”
Gloria took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and pinched her lips. Finally, “You jeopardized my job on a bluff? What kind of a person does that? You’ll do anything to get your way. Well, you won. Congratulations.”
She left the vault and went to her desk without looking back.
Gloria was right. I knew it before she dressed me down. I knew it when I pressured her for information the other day. I’d tried to convince myself that my quest for the truth, for justice, as I saw it, was more important than anything else. Even more important than other people’s hopes, dreams, ambitions. Maybe because I didn’t have any more hopes, dreams, and ambitions of my own left. All I had was a quest, made up or real, to fill the emptiness left by broken dreams.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I LEFT THE bank and sat in my car watching people pass in front of the windshield, living their lives while I stayed stuck in the past.
The contents of the safe deposit box hadn’t solved the mystery, just verified the premise. The money and gun in my father’s hidden safe and the empty shell casings in the safe deposit box spelled murder. Either committed by my father or someone else he’d blackmailed after the fact.
Murder. The one crime with no expiration date.
Could my father have crossed that line? If so, why would he keep the evidence that could have put a needle in his arm or send him to prison for life? My father had been kind and a man of honor most of his life. He hadn’t gotten mean until after he was no longer a cop. Until then, he’d never raised his hand to me in anger. Afterward, the beatings were rare, brief, but full of rage.
But murder? I didn’t think so. Not unless I never really knew him at all. The wall safe, the safe deposit box, the joint bank account with a woman other than my mother all proved that I didn’t know him. At least not the man he’d become the last years of his life.
Mean, violent, capable of murder, or not, my old man wasn’t stupid. If he’d used the Saturday Night Special in the safe to kill someone with the bullets from the empty shells inside the safe deposit box, he would have gotten rid of the evidence. He must have collected the gun and the empty shells to blackmail someone. Thus, the fifteen grand in the safe. The money he’d never spent. But why hadn’t he spent it?
I’d never know unless I found out who was murdered sometime between twenty and thirty years ago and by whom. That shouldn’t be too hard to find in La Jolla where the city averaged three or four murders a year. Broadening out to San Diego would be a lot more difficult. Like finding a bloody needle in a haystack.
With the murder weapon missing from a crime scene and the fifteen grand paid to my father for the murder or as blackmail money, I figured the crime had never been solved.
I pulled out my phone and Googled unsolved murders in La Jolla from 1980–2000. A bunch of pages came up, but only a handful specificall
y about La Jolla. One was on the Crimestoppers website referencing an unsolved murder on the campus of UCSD in 2009. My father was long gone by then. Another was from the San Diego Union Tribune about a 1992 unsolved murder on the La Jolla Indian Reservation out in the East County of San Diego, far from the town of La Jolla.
The last one was a La Jolla city government website with cold cases from 1951–2000. Only four unsolved homicides were listed, and just one of them fit the time line of my father.
The website listed a synopsis of the crime: On November 24, 1989, an officer responded to a report of a traffic accident on Coast Boulevard in La Jolla. Upon arrival, he discovered the victim, Trent Phelps, unresponsive and seated in the driver’s seat of his green Ford Mustang that had crashed into a parked car. At first Phelps’ injuries were believed to have been caused by the collision, however, a secondary examination revealed that Phelps had suffered two gunshot wounds to the head. He died a short time later.
Two gunshot wounds to the head. A chill ran through me. Could the murder weapon have been a Raven MP-25? The report didn’t list the ballistic evidence. The website didn’t give the name of the officer who responded to the scene, either. November, 1989. Five months before my father was kicked off LJPD. Coincidence? Maybe. I needed to find out who the responding officer was. I wouldn’t be able to find that information online. Too long ago and not high enough profile.
I drove a few blocks over to the La Jolla Library on Draper Street and, not for the first time, was struck by the mismatched architecture. The front of the library had a Spanish hacienda look, low slung with brown tile roof. A calming SoCal look. Attached to its left end was the annex that Peter Stone had donated and built with his development company. That was two stories and contemporary with an A-frame façade and a little balcony facing the street. Peter Stone Library Annex was spelled out in bold brass letters. Stone left his mark on everything he touched.
I went to the front desk tucked around the corner from the lobby. A middle-aged woman gave me a flat stare. I gave her a smile back.
“Hi. Do you have a microfiche machine and archives?”
“Yes.” No smile. “It’s on the second floor in the history room. The archives are there, too. Do you know how to operate a microfiche reader?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” A micro-shake of her head. “I’ll send someone up.”
I walked upstairs and found the history room off to the right. I went inside and saw a table with a large square monitor on it. The microfiche reader. A tall, thin file cabinet sat next to the table. I opened the top drawer and found rectangular slides, color coded on the top edge. I couldn’t tell what I was looking at or where to find what I needed.
“May I help you?” A woman in her late forties, dark hair, high cheekbones under horn-rimmed glasses smiled at me.
“Yes. Thanks. I’m trying to find articles from the San Diego Union Tribune for November twenty-fifth through the thirtieth in 1989. For the front page and local section.”
“You’ll actually want to see slides for both the San Diego Union and the Evening Tribune. San Diego used to have two competing dailies until they merged in 1992. There was also a San Diego edition of the LA Times back then, too. Now we’re down to just one paper.” She sighed. “Things change. I can get the slides for those dates for the Times, too.”
“That would be fantastic. Thanks.”
The woman grabbed about ten or so slides from the file cabinet, set them down onto the table, and slid one into the rectangular holder on the microfiche reading machine. She showed me how to maneuver the holder to go from one page to another. I thanked her, and she left me alone in the room. I took out my notepad and pencil and started reading.
The first slide she’d set up was from the front page of the San Diego Union from November 25th, 1989. The day after Trent Phelps had been found dead in his car on Coast Boulevard. No mention of him, a car accident, or murder. I maneuvered the reader and found the Metro section for the same day. Its front page had a story about Phelps’ car accident and death, but no mention of a homicide. No mention of the officer responding at the scene, just a quote from an unnamed police spokesman who said the preliminary report was a single car accident resulting in a fatality. I wrote the reporter’s name down on my notepad. Jack Anton.
I replaced the slide with one containing the Union’s next day’s edition. Nothing about the accident on the front page again. The Metro had a follow-up article by Anton on the accident. It echoed the report I’d found on the city government website about Trent Phelps’ death. Cause of death hadn’t been due to injuries sustained in the accident, but instead from two gunshot wounds to the head. The bullets recovered from Phelps’ body were too degraded to make a definitive determination of the murder weapon. However, according to Homicide Detective Ben Davidson, the gun was believed to be a small-caliber weapon.
Small caliber. The Raven MP-25 I found in my father’s safe was a twenty-five caliber. A small-caliber weapon. Every new piece of evidence pointed to the Saturday Night Special in my father’s safe as the murder weapon. Detective Davidson was quoted as saying that LJPD had no suspects at that time. Davidson and Elmer Wilkes were listed as the investigating detectives.
I remember the detectives’ names from my childhood. My father had introduced me to them when he gave me a tour of the police station, known by cops as the Brick House because of its white brick façade. I’d only been eight or nine, but I could still remember the flattop crew cut that Davidson wore. And his basketball gut. I don’t remember what Wilkes looked like except that he was tall and African-American.
The paper still had no mention of the patrolman who first responded to the scene. Damn.
I wrote down the detectives’ names and searched the slides for the paper’s next five editions. Nothing more on Trent Phelps. Next, I viewed the Evening Tribune’s articles on the crime. The articles were similar to those at the Union.
The San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times didn’t have anything new to add.
I opened the microfiche file cabinet and found slides that contained the editions for the next two weeks following Trent Phelps’ murder. I scrolled through each and found one article each in the Union and the Tribune following up on the murder. Neither had any new information.
A twenty-eight-year-old unsolved murder. Three newspaper reporters. Two police detectives. I wondered how many of those five people were still alive. And how many of them would be willing to talk to me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I WENT HOME to my office and searched the two detectives and three reporters on a people finder website. Only retired LJPD Detective Ben Davidson and former newspaper reporter Jack Anton were still alive.
Ben Davidson was seventy-seven and lived in Poway, a mostly well-to-do town in San Diego’s East County. Home to many of San Diego’s professional athletes. The late Tony Gwynn being the most famous. I tried the phone number listed. A woman answered. The search info on Davidson had him divorced with three grown daughters. The woman sounded younger than seventy-seven.
“May I speak with Ben?”
“Who’s calling?”
I’d expected him to answer, not a screener. If I gave my name, complete with Cahill, would he be more or less likely to answer? I gambled.
“Rick Cahill.”
Silence. Finally, “He’s busy. Call back another time.”
“Tell him Charlie Cahill’s son is on the phone. Maybe he’ll make time for the son of a deceased brother in blue.”
“He’s very busy. Try another time.” She hung up.
Worse than I expected. The woman, probably Davidson’s younger girlfriend or maybe one of his daughters, had frozen when she heard my name. Presumably my last name gave her the chill. My father had been dead for eighteen years and hadn’t been a cop for twenty-seven. Had this woman been around long enough to remember him and now didn’t want his son to upset Davidson? Maybe my father had such an impact on Davidson that he’d talked about him over
the years and the woman knew better than to bring Davidson to the phone.
I didn’t like either scenario and I wasn’t going to let Davidson or his gatekeeper ignore me. I had his address. It would be harder to ignore me when I knocked on his front door.
Next up, Jack Anton. The one newspaper reporter left alive. He was sixty-eight and lived in La Mesa, a small incorporated city ten miles east of downtown San Diego. The listing said he had a wife named Barbara, sixty-five. I called the number and again a woman answered.
“May I speak with Jack?”
“Just a second, hon.”
She’d either mistaken me for someone else or was a nice person. I wish she had a clone who lived with Ben Davidson. Of course, she hadn’t heard my name yet.
I could hear the woman’s voice away from the phone. “Jack, phone. Get off the computer and talk to a human being.” Her voice had a tease in it talking to her husband.
“He’ll be right with you, hon.”
Just a nice lady. I didn’t meet enough of them in my line of work. I didn’t meet enough of nice anybody.
“Jack Anton.” Clipped. No nonsense.
“Mr. Anton, my name’s Rick Cahill. I’m investigating a murder you reported on twenty-eight years ago in the San Diego Union and I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”
“Rick Cahill, huh?” He clucked his tongue like he was calling a horse. “You were just a kid twenty-eight years ago. Why are you investigating a murder that cold? You didn’t join one of the local police forces, did you?”
He knew me. He’d been a reporter, it made sense. I’d been in the news enough over the past twelve years. He probably knew my father, too. But how did he know that the murder case was cold?
“No. Let me buy you dinner and I’ll explain.”
“I tell you what, you come by here tomorrow at noon and we’ll talk.” He gave me his address. “I have all my old files here so eating out doesn’t make any sense. Besides, why eat out when you can eat better at home? Barbara makes a mean grilled cheese.”
