A Checklist for Murder

by Anthony Flacco

  Claire simply worried that no concession, no settlement, would ever be enough as Robert’s campaign against the state dragged on. She knew that for Robert, intellectual battle with organizations was easier than emotional rapport on a one-to-one basis. She confided to friends that she feared he had found his true niche.

  Maybe he had. He could see the connections of the conspiracy, countless connections laid out on a circuit board the size of a state of thirty million taxpayers. And the taxpayers weren’t going to take a beating while Peernock was on the prowl. As the 1980s dawned, Robert began keeping detailed notes of complex strategies, taping conversations with fellow workers. He hired attorneys and won cash settlements. No victory was ever enough to suit him; he stuffed the settlement cash in bank accounts and kept right on shooting trouble.

  Despite the limited formal schooling that caused him sometimes to falter at spelling and grammar when he operated outside his technical arena, Robert nevertheless grew so adept at legal tactics through his constant use of lawyers that he was eventually able to save money by running lawsuits himself. This freed up funds to file more motions to take on still more of his growing list of opponents. He found corruption everywhere. In some cases Robert offered documentation; in others he only had his gift for visualizing circuits, connections. The judges were on the take, the state water agencies were on the take, the private contractors hired to do the work were on the take, the cops were on the take. The most populous state in the nation was riddled with corruption, bleeding its citizenry dry, and nobody was yelling except Robert Peernock.

  Robert’s cause on behalf of the taxpayer might have been tolerable to Claire, taken by itself, but his obsession gradually took control of him. He seemed to resent her unwillingness to hang in there with him on what he perceived as the battle of his life.

  The battle wore on his health. He had terrible trouble trying to sleep. He became touchy. Very touchy. Robert started coming home angrier and angrier, constantly protesting outrageous retaliations that the state was taking against him for trying to derail their fat scheme of corruption at the public expense.

  He was indignant that no one appreciated his public-spirited efforts, not even his wife, whom he wanted at his side in this monumental struggle. His nerves were often frazzled after a long day battling corrupt officials; Claire had shown family friends her bruises to demonstrate how dangerous it was to anger him when his tensions were high.

  He filed several claims alleging injuries from physical attacks, supposed attempts on his life by co-workers who were in actuality operatives of the Department of Water Resources, eager to silence his relentless gadfly activities. He finally succeeded in having a disability pension awarded for a back injury that he claimed to have suffered when fellow workers deliberately caused heavy equipment to fall on him. In this way Robert secured an income that would be guaranteed even if he never found work again owing to the statewide blackballing that he now claimed had been set up against him. But he took small satisfaction in the pension. It was little enough thanks for his civic-minded work on the public behalf.

  In recent years the problems between Claire and Robert had grown like cancer. Claire had no more patience for Robert’s campaign against the state and Robert felt utterly betrayed by her refusal to support his efforts. The hostility infected their communication on every level, down to conversations about the most mundane things in their daily lives.

  By 1983, the pain and anger inside the marriage was repeatedly spreading outside the relationship. Claire intervened as often as she could to keep Robert from taking his outrage out on Natasha when the headstrong girl would be foolish enough to defy her father. In May of 1983 Claire and Robert were having one of their typical arguments in the kitchen area when the confrontation turned violent. Natasha tells how she saw Robert grab Claire and begin to manhandle her. Natasha leapt in front of her mother and demanded that Robert leave her alone. The next thing she knew, Robert had thrown her bodily against the kitchen wall.

  She slid to the floor with a searing pain running down her side.

  Robert drove her to the emergency room. On the way he made sure that Natasha understood that she was to tell the doctors that she had slipped and fallen while playing in the house.

  She spent the next twenty-one days in traction for a shattered collarbone.

  Claire came to visit her and told her daughter that she agreed with Robert; Natasha should keep up a good front for the hospital staff. Claire was afraid of what Robert might do once he was alone with them again. Natasha did not have the strength to speak out against her father publicly, alone.

  She did, however, give a different story to everyone who asked at the hospital, hoping that someone would notice that the lies didn’t add up. Either nobody put it all together or no one bothered to come forward with their suspicions. The violence in the Peernock home was still a secret and would remain a secret for another four years.

  Shortly afterward, Claire made one tentative visit to a lawyer to see about getting a divorce from this man she had come to fear, but she later told friends that Robert had threatened to kill her if she went through with it. She claimed that he’d promised to hunt her down if she fled with the children. After years of watching Robert’s skill in dealing with investigators and with the courts, Claire had no doubt that he could find her anywhere she might go.

  Her first tentative attempts to flee the marriage were abandoned.

  But permanent damage to the marriage had been done. Robert later claimed that it was about this time that he and Claire “announced” their separation to friends and acquaintances. What little socializing Robert did, he now did on his own.

  At one of the parties that he attended as a single, he met a pretty divorced woman named Sonia Siegel. Robert had no constraints against pursuing another woman and Claire had no interest in him whatsoever, so Sonia became the object of his affections. By the next year Robert was sleeping at Sonia’s place nearly every night, even though he continued to keep all of his belongings at his family house.

  That suited Claire and Natasha just fine. Claire was glad to have the place to herself, and Natasha says she finally felt safe at home for the first time in years. Claire found a good secretarial job and began considering the possibility of a real life on her own. A fresh start.

  By the time the traditional marriage had ended, the checks were rolling in every month on his real estate holdings, even though Robert was no longer employed. Settlements on a few of his many lawsuits left Robert enough spare cash to have stuffed well over a quarter of a million dollars into a series of bank accounts. And to have paid Claire’s house mortgage down to a few thousand dollars. And to own several other houses as income properties.

  Despite the fact that he had moved out and set up house with his girlfriend, Sonia, he still visited Claire and Natasha weekly, delivering small sums of money for living expenses to augment Claire’s salary as a secretary. He wanted Claire’s emotional support in return.

  But darker problems arose. He began to voice strong suspicions that the company Claire worked for was also involved in the government’s scheme of selling construction contracts. Robert began to wonder aloud, over and over, whether someone there had managed to pay Claire off to get her to cooperate in the scheme. Robert feared Claire had personal reasons to punish him, to pay him back for moving out and finding a girlfriend who believed in him the way Claire wouldn’t. Or if not, he feared that at the very least Claire was, in her naiveté, being manipulated by her company and slowly turned against him.

  By the end of 1986 Claire Peernock finally came to the end. Nobody knows exactly what triggered her determination, whether it was a particularly bad fight that the daughters were not around to witness, or just the accumulated weight of years spent trapped inside an empty marriage. But something finally drove her to action.

  And so in early November of 1986, despite her sweet nature and despite her patience and despite her years of inability to break away from the hold of a
man she remembered loving dearly, her time as an enabler of her husband’s violence toward his family was over at last.

  Claire Peernock left the house to hunt down a divorce lawyer.

  She could have picked from a number of attorneys to consult about a possible divorce action. Saugus is a small town in the high desert outside Los Angeles, but it’s plenty big enough to offer an array of choices to anybody shopping for a lawyer. Claire can no longer reveal why she chose the little law office in a single-story mall on Soledad Canyon Road. It may have been a referral from a friend. Or maybe she just wanted to discuss the private, painful issues with another woman—seeking the first female lawyer she came across.

  Or perhaps Claire just needed all the psychic energy she could muster. She was about to confront this forceful man with the knowledge that she wanted to divide their property and claim her half of the small fortune he had amassed through a relentless campaign she had not supported. And for that reason she may have taken strength from the very sound of the name out on the shingle:

  VICTORIA W. DOOM—ATTORNEY AT LAW.

  Certainly as Claire kept her appointment for the initial consultation, she had no way of knowing she was taking a step that would shatter the attorney’s law practice and bring her to the brink of financial ruin, in addition to placing Victoria Doom’s name on a killer’s hit list.

  And so on November 13, a few days after the initial consultation, Claire returned some financial papers to Victoria Doom’s office for use in determining property settlements. She paid a retainer.

  The divorce was finally under way.

  Two days after that, on November 15, in an unexplainable twist of premonition, Claire took out a State Farm life insurance policy on herself for $10,000, payable to her daughter Natasha. She called her longtime friend Louise, who had been at the pool party where Claire and Robert met twenty years before, and told her she was finally initiating a divorce. She expressed her fears that Robert might try to kill her, but vowed that she was resolved to make the leap she had dreaded for so long. She never mentioned her new life insurance policy to Louise. But whether it was a specific premonition or just a general sense of dread that caused her to buy the policy, she could never have imagined how ironic the eventual use of that policy’s funds would turn out to be.

  For the time being, despite Claire’s best intentions that day, her actions did not set her on the road to freedom; they put her on a highspeed collision course toward a dead-end wall.

  And they changed Victoria Doom’s life forever.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Sometime after 8:00 A.M. on the same morning that Claire’s life ended on the dead-end road, Patty was dressed and ready for a round of job applications, fully prepared to drag Tasha out of bed if she had to. As she drove through the cool morning air she felt determined to straighten out whatever had gone wrong with their plans for the night before and then get on with the day they had planned.

  Yesterday afternoon both young women had agreed that even after going to Magic Mountain and staying out late they would get up early and look for work together this morning. The six weeks since graduation had been a lot of fun for both of them, but neither had the funds to take an entire summer off.

  Patty knew that Tasha was interested in seeing what kind of a future she could make for herself in the design world. Tasha had already persuaded Claire to hit her father up for a couple of thousand dollars toward the fashion-design college she was enrolled in for the fall. Claire chipped in some more herself, but Tasha was going to have to work in order to get together her book money and commuting expenses. So whatever had gone wrong the night before, Patty approached her friend’s house feeling sure that Tasha would be ready now despite the early hour. Nevertheless she was still in the grip of the uneasy feeling that had followed her home last night.

  When Patty pulled her car a stop in front of the Peernock residence, what she saw there didn’t do anything to make her feel better. Both of Mr. Peernock’s cars were gone, but Claire’s car was still in the driveway. She wondered who could have taken his big Cadillac. The Peernocks were not a married couple who exchanged cars. She couldn’t remember having seen Tasha or her mother ever drive the Cadillac; Mr. Peernock would have had a fit at the thought of either of them taking off in his pride and joy.

  When Patty got out of her car she noticed that the front left tire on Claire’s car had gone flat. For a moment she wondered if this could explain things. Would Mr. Peernock drive off in his Cadillac in that case, leaving his Datsun for Claire to use? But that still didn’t seem right. These were two people who avoided talking to each other unless they had to; they could hardly be civil. No, if Claire’s car was out of commission, she would have had to call a friend for help.

  And so at least one of Robert Peernock’s cars should still be in the driveway.

  The lawn hadn’t been mowed, but that didn’t tell Patty much. Tasha had always been a night owl who stayed up late, sleeping in whenever her schedule would allow it. Even if Tasha had come back home after whatever had taken place the night before, Patty knew her friend wouldn’t get up early to do yard work before going out to hunt for a job. That would be a little too much reality for a midsummer day.

  Patty hesitated at the front door. Now that Mr. Peernock was gone, if either of the women was at home the door ought to be unlocked. Claire and Tasha never locked it during the daytime if anyone was there. Patty put her ear to the door—there wasn’t a sound. But when she reached out and tried the handle, it wouldn’t move.

  Now the same bad feeling from the night before came over her again. More than any of the strange facts or unusual circumstances, it was this feeling that convinced her of trouble. The feeling was clearer than it had been last night, as if by sitting in the back of her mind through the hours since then it had somehow penetrated her rational defenses and probed deeper into her inner fears.

  As during the night before, something told her to leave this place. And, again she felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. But her need to find out what was going on with Tasha had grown strong. So she turned to the front window, which looked so solid but which the girls had learned to pop open with ease. She got down on her knees, ready to get inside the house and look for clues. Patricia was resolved not to leave the neighborhood until she found out what had happened to her best friend.

  She was about to get her wish.

  Just as she’d begun to pull the window open a woman’s voice yelled out her name. Even before Patty turned around, the tone of the voice plugged right into the creepy feeling that had settled into her spine.

  “Patty! Get away from there, right now! Get away!”

  She looked around to see Danielle, one of the neighbor women and a longtime friend of Claire and Tasha’s. Danielle was running toward her. Patty stood slowly, taking in the woman’s expression as she reached the sidewalk near the house and stopped there pointedly, without setting a foot on the property.

  “Come away from there! Come on! Right now!”

  Patty’s heart began to pound as she hurried out to meet the woman, who appeared distraught and near panic. She immediately threw her arm around Patty and turned her away from the house, walking her up the street toward her own place.

  “What’s going on?” Patty began, but the neighbor leapt on the question as she rushed Patty along the sidewalk.

  “Just wait. Wait till we get back inside!”

  A few seconds later they were in her house, the door shut and locked. Danielle spun from the door with tears streaming down her face.

  A sick feeling of dread began to pound inside Patty.

  “Patty.” she began, “Claire … she’s … the police came by early this morning and …”

  “What is it?” Patty asked, the fear rising in her throat. “What happened?”

  “There was … an accident last night and she and Natasha were in Robert’s Cadillac and there was a car wreck. Claire’s gone. She was killed. And Tasha’s in the
hospital.”

  “What?” Patty blurted. “Which hospital? How bad is it? How is she? I want to go see her!” Her mind was already full of the images that had haunted her all night long, images that now lurched into much sharper focus.

  “We don’t know about Natasha yet,” she answered. “But it’s serious. She’s in intensive care right now. They won’t let anyone visit her.”

  “I’m going down there.” Patty started for the door. But the neighbor held her back.

  “You can’t see her. They promised to call us as soon as they know anything, but—”

  “Wait a minute!” Patty shouted abruptly, disbelief suddenly overpowering her shock. “Claire and Tasha together? They never go anywhere together. Come on, this is a bunch of—You know how independent Tasha is! And in her father’s Cadillac?”

  “I know. I’ve never seen Claire drive that car, or Tasha either. But now they’re—”

  “No way! I don’t believe it! Claire never drives at night. Her eyes are, you know, she’s got that thing like in her retina and so she can’t see at night—”

  “I know, but—”

  “And besides, she hates driving anyway. She drives with two feet, one on the brake and one on the gas—”

  “I know, but—”

  “And she’s so safe, she drives the speed limit and follows the laws to the point that it’s ridiculous, I mean it takes forever to get anywhere with her, I always tease her about it and—and besides,” she added, finally taking a breath, “Claire would never take Robert’s car.”

  Patty finished her loud objections softly. Almost in a whisper.

  “He’d kill her.”

  The first and last time that Claire was ever seen by Accident Investigator Mark Warschaw was on the morning of the crimes. She had already died. He tried to speak briefly to Natasha before they loaded her gurney into the ambulance, but she was too badly injured to be of much help. All she could do was mumble a few words in response to his question about the identity of the other passenger. He hadn’t told Natasha that the other passenger, the one Natasha named as Patty, had died. Warschaw had been an accident investigator for the Valley Traffic Division for over eight years and had been at thousands of accident sites; he could see that Natasha was fighting for her life. He would just have to hope that the paramedics could get her stabilized and give the doctors a chance to save her.