by Matt Coyle
“Cahill.” A balding man in cuffed khakis and a short-sleeved light-blue dress shirt stood up from a beige sofa. Late sixties. A couple inches under six feet. Slight paunch. The man looked vaguely familiar to me, but I had no idea why. He walked over and grabbed my hand in a firm grip. “Jack Anton.”
“Thanks for seeing me.”
“Sure, sure.” He released my hand and walked down a short hall. “Let’s go into my office.”
“Lunch in thirty minutes, boys.” Barbara’s voice followed us down the hall as we entered Anton’s office.
The office was cramped, but neat. The walls were covered with framed newspaper articles, plaques, and family photographs. Snug against the wall to the left of Anton’s desk was a massive steel file cabinet. Somehow the laptop and printer on his desk surprised me. I guess I’d expected to see a Royal typewriter and rotary phone. Anton sat behind his desk and I sat in a wooden captain’s chair opposite him.
“I was in such a hurry to get back here that I didn’t offer you a drink.” Anton raised his hands up in the air, open-palmed. “Water? Beer? Glenlivet?”
Glenlivet. The scotch my father drank on special occasions. Until he couldn’t afford it after he lost his job on LJPD. In the end, he was drinking whatever he could get his hands on, via whatever means. I wondered if Anton knew my father had drunk Glenlivet. Made me wonder why he’d been so accommodating in meeting with me.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
“Fine. Down to business.” He opened a manila folder next to his laptop. “I made copies of all the articles I wrote on the Phelps murder. You can have them.” He handed me a thin stack of letter-size papers that were photocopies of newspaper articles.
“You do this with all your old articles or just the ones on unsolved murders?” Or just the ones that had something to do with my old man?
I called Anton out of the blue yesterday and today he already had old articles copied and ready for me. Too easy? Too prepared?
“I have the original articles for every piece I’ve ever written in every newspaper I’ve worked for going back to my junior year at San Diego State and the Daily Aztec.” He got up and walked over to the huge file cabinet, then bent over and opened the bottom drawer. He pulled out a sealed plastic bag with a slightly yellowed cut-out newspaper article in it. “Care to read about the game Dennis Shaw threw for nine touchdowns against New Mexico State in 1969? I was a sports reporter way back then.”
“That’s okay. My dad told me all about the old-timers when I was a kid. Don Coryell with the Aztecs and Chargers.” Maybe Anton was just a pack rat who was eager to show anyone his life’s work at the drop of a hat.
I scanned the copies of the articles he gave me. The first two were the ones I’d already read at the La Jolla Library. There were only two more. One was a week after the crime, the other marking its one-year anniversary.
The week-old article had some new information on the murder. Detective Davidson said that Phelps was shot twice in the right side of his head and that he believed the shooter had been sitting in the passenger seat of Phelps’ car when he fired the shots. Phelps was last seen alive at 9:15 p.m. at his Pacific Beach laundromat by his manager. The manager said Phelps left to go check on his laundromat in La Jolla. He also stated that he’d seen a transient hitchhiking in front of the laundromat parking lot when he returned from dinner at 9:00 p.m. A police sketch of a twentysomething Caucasian accompanied the article. The suspect looked like a thug straight out of a Hollywood B movie. Crew cut, square chin, curled sneer, and angry slits for eyes.
The article quoted Detective Davidson as saying that Phelps was believed to have had connections to organized crime and his murder may have been a professional hit. All leads were being investigated. The article added that Phelps was survived by his wife of twenty-two years and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Calista, who was a senior at La Jolla High School.
I wondered how Phelps’ surviving family felt about his being rumored to have mob connections. I didn’t like hearing it about my father, and his never made it to the newspaper.
The one-year-anniversary article uncovered one new fact. LJPD sent the bullets that killed Phelps to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. The FBI was able to identify the bullets as twenty-five caliber. The same caliber as the bullets missing from the handgun I found in my father’s safe.
Too many coincidences. Why did my father have the murder weapon?
The hole in my gut where I’d carried my father’s shame opened up. I took a deep breath and read on.
The standing theory that Phelps had been killed by someone in organized crime remained, although there were no suspects. Detectives Davidson and Wilkes now worked the case when they had time between new cases, but it had basically gone cold. At that time, the Phelps murder was the only unsolved murder in La Jolla in the last forty years. The article said Mrs. Phelps had recently moved to Northern California. The daughter’s whereabouts were unknown.
Neither article mentioned my father or the first officer on the scene. That made a total of seven articles in three newspapers that hadn’t mentioned the first cop on the scene, much less list his name.
I put the copied articles back in the folder and set it down on Anton’s desk, then looked across at him.
“I called you on the phone yesterday and you guessed correctly that I was interested in the Phelps murder. You implied that my father had some connection to the investigation. But he’s not mentioned in any of your articles or anyone else’s.” The years of mistrust and mystery about my father crept up along my spine and down into my hands, balling them into fists. I leaned toward Anton. “What kind of game are you playing, Anton? Somebody put you up to this?”
“Settle down, son.” Anton put up his hands. “You can flip to scary in a blink, just like your old man.”
I’d only seen scary in my father the last nine years of his life. Never while he worked as a cop.
“You don’t know anything about my father. He’s not even in your articles.”
“I did know your father, Rick.” Anton put his hands down on the desk. “Both before and after.”
“Before and after what?” But I knew what he meant.
“When he was a cop and after he wasn’t anymore.”
“Let’s start with how the hell he’s connected to the Phelps murder and then we can walk down your memory lane.” I sat back and let my fingers unfold. “Was he first on the scene of the Phelps murder?”
“I don’t know.”
“What?” I bit the “T” hard. This was getting old. “Why not? I thought you were a reporter.”
“Detective Davidson stated that Officer Reitzmeyer had been first on the scene. However, Detective Wilkes told me a week later that your dad was there first.”
“That doesn’t make sense. They should have both been there together. They were partners.”
“They usually were, but LJPD had had some retirements at that time and was on one of its famous hiring freezes. One partner rotated every month while the other rode with a rookie.”
That much seemed true. I remembered the last ride-along I ever took with my father. He’d had a cruiser to himself.
“Why was neither version mentioned in the paper?”
“Detective Davidson always wanted to be the only contact on cases he worked. He didn’t like anyone else’s name in the paper to confuse matters.”
“Well, this matter seemed pretty confused already. What about freedom of the press? Why didn’t you print it anyway?”
“Davidson would have frozen me out. Things were different back then.”
“What’s so important about the case regarding my father besides two detectives confused about which patrolmen arrived first on the scene?”
Anton picked up a small notepad off the desk that had been next to the Phelps folder. The notepad was similar to the one that I always carry with me when I work a case. The one I had in my back pocket right then, but had not yet pulled out to take notes.
“Hear me out and I think you’ll understand.” Anton opened his notebook, flipped over a few pages, then appeared to read some notes. “I had a police scanner on in my car twenty-four seven back then. I’d listen to it instead of the radio. That was back when newspapers produced their own content instead of getting everything off the wire services like they do now.” Anton shook his head. “Or from Twitter. Anyway, Barbara and I were going through a rough patch back then, so I’d gone to a movie alone at the Cove Theater in La Jolla, after interviewing the LJPD Chief of Police about the growing drug problem in La Jolla. You remember the Cove Theater?”
“Sure. I went to movies there as a kid.”
“Yeah. A grand old theater.” Anton leaned back in his chair as he went back in time.
“And?”
“Right. I was on the 5 going south to the I-8 when I hear a call go over the scanner for a possible fatal car accident on Coast Boulevard. I was twenty minutes away and I needed a story because La Jolla Police Chief Edwards hadn’t given me anything I could work with. So, I headed back up the 5 to La Jolla. I got there right before Detective Davidson did and was the first reporter on the scene.”
“You mean Detectives Davidson and Wilkes, right?”
“No. Wilkes was already there. Davidson got there about five minutes after me.”
“They were on call at their homes and not rotating out of the Brick House that night?”
“The Brick House, huh? You are Charlie Cahill’s son.” Anton smiled briefly then went back to reporter face. He scanned his notepad. “Davidson was taking a paid day off. Even though they worked Robbery/Homicide, this was La Jolla and you didn’t have too much of Robbery or Homicide back then. One detective could usually handle working on his own from the office.”
“Except for that night.”
“Right. Anyway, Davidson came from his home and took over lead on the investigation. He was always lead. Wilkes just put up with it instead of making waves.”
“My father?”
“I got an anonymous call the day after the accident. A kid down on the beach heard the car crash and later saw the first policeman on the scene take something out of the passenger side of the car and put it in his jacket pocket before the other policeman arrived.”
The first policeman on the scene. According to Detective Davidson, Bob Reitzmeyer. According to Detective Wilkes, my father. Wilkes had gotten to the scene before Davidson. His information should be more accurate.
What had my father taken out of the car? The murder weapon and the shell casings. Then he stashed them in a safe deposit box and a hidden safe at home along with fifteen grand in hundred-dollars bills.
Could Wilkes have been wrong and Reitzmeyer had actually been first on the scene? My late father or my former boss and mentor.
“Did you get a description of what the cop looked like? Or what he took out of the car?” My father was three inches taller and thinner than Bob Reitzmeyer. A difficult distinction to discern at night.
“No. It was dark. All the caller could see was that the man wore a uniform and that he reached into the car and put something in his pocket.”
“Why the hell wasn’t this phone call in your follow-up article?” Anger crept up the back of my neck. “Did you tell Davidson about it?”
“I couldn’t put it in the article because the anonymous caller wouldn’t come forward. He was a sixteen-year-old kid who was smoking weed down on the beach when he was supposed to be babysitting his twelve-year-old sister.”
“He seemed to tell you a hell of a lot about his life. Didn’t you get a name and follow up? Why not print it as an anonymous lead?”
“That’s not how things worked back then. Maybe now, but not then. It would have never gotten past the editor. And the kid never gave me his name.” Anton shifted in his chair.
“What did Detective Davidson say about it when you asked him?”
“That wasn’t the kind of thing you could go to Davidson with. He’d say you were trying to make cops look bad and blackball you.”
“You certainly were a timid reporter.” I threw my hand at the wall. “How did you get all these awards being such a pushover? Are they all for friendliest reporter?”
“I earned every one of those with damn good investigative reporting.” Anton squeezed his hands together and his cheeks went rosy. “If I was a get-along kind of reporter, I might still be working at the paper.”
“Then why didn’t you tell Davidson about the call?”
“I told Wilkes about it instead of Davidson because I knew where to go to get answers.” He let go a long breath and released his hands. “Wilkes pretended that Davidson big-footing all the leads on cases didn’t bother him. He was the first black homicide detective in LJPD history and didn’t want to make waves. But down deep, Wilkes resented the hell out of Davidson. When I told Wilkes about the anonymous call, he told me that your father had been first on the scene. Wilkes heard the call come into dispatch at the Brick House and decided a fatal car crash was better than sitting on his ass at the station. Your father was already there.”
“What did he say when you told him about my father supposedly taking something out of the car?”
“He said the kid must have been stoned out of his mind, because Charlie Cahill was the straightest cop on the job. The best, too. That’s the way I’d always seen your father, as well. Rock solid.”
“This is a lot of smoke for nothing, Mr. Anton. What the hell does some kid’s made-up story have to do with my father?”
“Because two months later, the best cop on LJPD, Mr. Rock Solid, was tainted with a story of mob connections that no one would deny, on or off the record. Four months after that he retired short of his full benefits.”
“He didn’t get any benefits.” That much of my father’s story I knew. I worked in Muldoon’s every summer to help pay the family bills.
“Yeah. I heard the rumor that your father hadn’t gotten any benefits, but no one would ever confirm that either. The official story was that he’d retired eight years short of receiving his full benefits. I guess that meant no benefits at all.”
“That’s what it meant.” I scribbled down a summary of what Anton had told me so far on my notepad. “So, you think the Phelps murder was the beginning of my father’s downfall?”
“I’d bet this house on it.”
“Did you investigate the mob angle about my father? How come there was never anything about it in the paper? I thought that’s the kind of shit the press eats up. The fall from grace of a once proud police officer. And don’t give me that bullshit about how things were different back then. The press has been tearing people down for hundreds of years.”
“That’s not how I see my job, son.” The red face and the gripped chair arms came back. “My job is to report the facts. Facts that can be verified. Not cheap innuendo. I investigated the facts around your father’s retirement and couldn’t verify anything other than what the LJPD hierarchy doled out. Other assignments came up, and I had to put your father on the back burner.”
“The stories I heard on school playgrounds as a kid about my dad being a bagman for the mob, where did they come from? Ten-year-old kids aren’t smart enough to make that shit up out of thin air. They had to have heard them from their parents, and their parents had to have heard them from somebody close to LJPD.”
Anton exhaled and relaxed his grip on his chair. My insults of him and his profession must have taken a backseat to the thought of a kid growing up hearing cruel things said about his father. Everything in my young life took a backseat to that.
“There were leaks coming out of the Brick House. I never printed them, but they made their way around the gossip circles in town. La Jolla was a smaller town back then. Much more insular than it is now.”
“Who was leaking?”
“I got it as secondhand information. Confirmation only. Nothing for attribution.”
“From whom?”
“Son, I wouldn’t give up a source t
hen, and I won’t now.”
“This was thirty years ago, Anton.” I stood up, planted my hands on the desk, and leaned forward. “Chances are the person’s dead or no longer a cop. You invited me down here to tell me what you knew about the Phelps murder. You just told me the Phelps case was the beginning of my father’s downfall. I didn’t come here to learn half-truths. I’ve been living with them my whole life. Who told you about my father being a bagman for the mob?”
Anton rubbed his mouth. I remained standing and leaned harder into my hands.
“His partner. Bob Reitzmeyer.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
BOB REITZMEYER? MY father’s best friend. The man who saved his life in Vietnam. The only cop from LJPD who showed up at his funeral. The man who’d been my mentor and whom I still respected. Even if he no longer respected me. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.
“What did he say to you?”
“Just that there was a ledger with payoffs listed to your father and he’d seen it.”
So had I. A ledger I’d found in the closet of my father’s den the one time I sneaked in there. I didn’t know what it was at the time. Just a leather-bound book with dates and dollar amounts listed. I was nine or ten years old. It wasn’t until I was older that I figured out what it was. But still, I’d clung to the hope that there’d been an innocent explanation that I never demanded to hear from my father.
“You got your confirmation. Why didn’t you print the story?” I said.
“Reitzmeyer wouldn’t go on the record. He said your father had already lost enough.”
My father’s code, the one I still lived by.
Sometimes you have to do what’s right even when the law says it’s wrong.
Had he twisted that to cover his own shame? Done errands for the mob and justified his crimes by trying to convince himself that he was just taking care of his family? A father’s biological imperative? Had he grabbed the gun and shells from the dead man’s car to cover for a mob hit?
