California Girl

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Nick took the stairs down to the first story. Heard the reporters storming out behind him. Saw Sharon marching toward the DA’s office with an armful of files held to her chest.

  He stepped out into the hot September afternoon. White thunderheads towered in the southeast. Up over Yuma, thought Nick. The rain will chase all the doves south. Thought of standing by a Yuma cotton field with his mom and dad and David and Clay and Andy, shotguns ready. And the way Max could spot those birds so far away. Just dots in the sky coming toward them. The boys shaking with excitement and trying to find their safeties and Max chuckling while he swung and dropped a pair that landed right on the railroad tracks. Monika a good shot, too, but her heart wasn’t really in it. David didn’t like the killing. Clay the best shot of the four boys and didn’t mind the killing at all. Andy involved but somehow outside himself, too, watching like he always did, like he’d be tested on it someday.

  In Nick’s mind the railroad tracks in Yuma became the railroad tracks running by the SunBlesst orange packinghouse. He knew they always would. Knew the packinghouse would connect to everything that would ever happen to him. As it had since he was sixteen.

  He’d closed his first case.

  Cost eight men their lives but he’d done it.

  Caused immeasurable waves of sorrow and loss but he’d done it.

  Cost him his own life but he’d done it.

  For Janelle and for himself.

  37

  HERE AND NOW

  “LISTEN TO ME, NICK. Everything we thought about Janelle Vonn was wrong.”

  “Explain yourself,” I said.

  Andy cocked his head to the side a little. Leaned closer to me. Vietnam had wrecked his hearing. A bomb in a tunnel, Cu Chi province. Enough earth between the bomb and Andy that he didn’t get any frag, but the pressure blew his eardrums. Got bad hearing and a Purple Heart for it.

  “I don’t think Bonnett killed her, Nick.”

  So there it was. Thirty-six years. Fast as an eye blink back to Janelle.

  “You’ll have a hard time proving that to me,” I said. “That was a good case, Andy. We nailed it. The jury deliberated, what, two hours? We might have worked around the arrest a little, but that’s it.”

  “I’m not talking about the arrest.”

  I heard the pigeons cooing and saw the sunshine coming through the slats of the packinghouse. Felt the hot Santa Ana wind blowing in the orange trees outside. Saw Andy standing there with his camera and the terrible thing that lay between us. Clear as the day it happened.

  Andy shook his head and looked at me with some irritation. “Maybe we should take a drive, Nick. Kind of hard for me to hear with those waves crashing out there.”

  The young couple at the next table were looking over at us. Probably never heard of Janelle Vonn. Just these two old farts with menus at arm’s length talking about the past. Sixty-two and sixty-six. One hard-of-hearing, the other still sometimes got light-headed from a rumble in an orange grove fifty-something years ago.

  We took Andy’s convertible. He put the top down, so I knew the bit about the waves was BS. He didn’t want anyone hearing this. Andy can’t sit still anyhow. Always eager about the next thing. Sixty-two years old and still strong and skinny. Was always wound tight but he came back from Nam with this weird energy he can’t turn off. Went there to understand what happened to Clay, to bring something of Clay back to us. Made him more like Clay. Faster than before. A little reckless. A little mean. He’s a big-time writer now. Makes a ton. Lives in Laguna on the beach. Novels and screenplays and articles in magazines that smell like cologne. Been married to Lynette for thirty-something years now. Six kids.

  “I was in Washington last week doing some interviews with Homeland Security,” he said. “Stoltz was having a party so he invited me. I’m no fan of Stoltz and I don’t like Georgetown parties, but Lynette does like parties, so I figure what the hell? Plus, Stoltz is one of the reps on the Homeland oversight committee, so I figure maybe I’ll learn something interesting. It’s a boring Georgetown party. Not even Lynette can find anyone fun to talk to. Then I get to talking with this lady. A little younger than me. Sixty-ish. Turns out she’s Stoltz’s secretary from way back in sixty-eight. I remember her—Martha. She’s worked for him for thirty-six years. She started out as his Washington office receptionist.”

  I had a hazy memory of having talked to someone named Martha in Stoltz’s Washington office back in October of sixty-eight.

  Andy steered through the cute San Clemente streets. Picked up I-5 heading south and gunned it. His fancy new German car has one of those transmissions right on the steering wheel. Screams through the gears and you never even take your hands off it.

  “So Martha and I are talking and she says—this comes right out of nowhere, Nick—she says that she wrote the telegram to me on the Janelle murder story. Now, I always thought it was an odd telegram. Kind of formal and stiff, and you know how Roger is, he’s a pol. He can always say the right thing. She said she thought about that telegram a lot because she was so young at the time, and she’d known when she wrote it that it didn’t sound right. Didn’t sound like a man who had just had a friend murdered. She said that over the years she wrote more than a few telegrams for Roger. Common for busy congressional reps. The routine stuff, like condolences, congratulations, birthdays, whatever. The pols all know that an official Washington, D.C., telegram makes people outside the beltway feel important. Makes them think their elected officials are paying attention. But this was the first one she’d ever been asked to write. She was twenty-four. Said she worked on it for over an hour but knew it came out stilted and wrong. So, after thirty-six years Martha apologized to me for a poorly written telegram.”

  Andy zoomed south past the nuclear plant at San Onofre. He still had a shortwave radio mounted in the car to track the law enforcement chatter. Hadn’t turned it on.

  “Okay, Andy,” I said. “Martha wrote you a telegram because Stoltz didn’t have time to do it himself.”

  Andy looked at me, then back at the road. “She was so unhappy with it she actually called him to get some help with it. Laughed when she told me that. Stoltz was home in California by then. This is two days after the murder, right? Well, Marie answered and said Roger was sleeping. He was exhausted. He’d flown between LAX and Dulles three times in three days. Being a representative was the hardest work Roger had ever done. Made running a business look easy. Marie said the telegram was okay. Send it. If Roger was ever unhappy about it, she’d take the blame.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nick, I thought about that off and on for the next five days. I’m trying to do my Homeland interviews but my mind keeps wandering back to what Martha said. Why does a congressman fly across the country three times in three days? Why not just stay put one place or the other? So I called a friend with United Airlines security. He can’t go back that far with records. So I talk to some people in the Congressional Travel Office, since they pay work-related travel. They tell me Stoltz was in Washington, D.C., the day Janelle was killed.”

  “We know that.”

  Andy gunned it. Campgrounds and railroad tracks flashing by at a hundred miles per hour.

  “But he was in California that night.”

  “I’m listening now.”

  “I checked the House of Representatives Detailed Statement of Disbursements for July through December of sixty-eight. On October first Stoltz attended the House Committee meeting, like his Tustin secretary said he did. What she didn’t say is that Stoltz flew home on a noon flight that put him back in California at four P.M. Why not? Because she had no idea. Martha didn’t, either. She told us way back then that Roger was in Washington that day. She still thinks he was. He flew out. It’s right there in the disbursement log. Public record.”

  I nodded. “Okay, so Stoltz wanted to wow you with a personal message from the nation’s capital when he was really in California taking a nap. He fibbed. So what?”

  “It puts everything i
n a new light, Nick. Stoltz and Janelle. Everything he bought her. She being pregnant. The scratches I saw on his hand later that week. The fact that Roger Stoltz and Cory Bonnett both drove white late-model Caddies. Damn, Nick—he’d bought a Trim-Quick two days before someone cut off her head with one. Now I find out he was right here in California that night.”

  I remembered what Bonnett had said to me that day down in Baja. While he lay in anguish on the floor with his knee shot out and the switchblade palmed in one hand.

  Followed her to Tustin.

  Why?

  Worried.

  Followed her but didn’t kill her?

  Yeah.

  Just looking out for her, like a big brother?

  “Andy,” I said. “None of that dents the case against Bonnett.”

  “This might.”

  Andy reached across me, pulled a wadded-up plastic supermarket bag out of his glove compartment. Got it open and dangled a clear plastic bag with a black and yellow disposable razor and a couple of balled tissues in it. Smiled.

  “Goddammit, Andy.”

  “Remember the flesh underneath Janelle’s nails?”

  “Type A. Same as Bonnett’s.”

  Andy looked at me again. Hooked those blue eyes into me. “Nick, forty percent of the population has type A. That was big forensic news in sixty-eight. Today it’s a joke because we can type the DNA. Right, Mr. Former Homicide Detective and FBI Man?”

  I put it together.

  “You took a leak in Stoltz’s Georgetown bathroom and stole a razor. To type against the flesh under Janelle’s nails.”

  Andy shook his head. “Worse. I wasn’t thinking fast enough in Georgetown. So I stole a whole trash can off his curb in Tustin at five-thirty yesterday morning. Trash day. Stunk up my Yukon but I got what I wanted.”

  “Goddamn, Andy.”

  “Roger will be damned if I’m right about this. You know how it is the last time you shave with a disposable? You have no reason to rinse it out very well. You’re not using it again. You’re tossing it. There’s gunk in there, Nick. Could see it with my own two eyes. And I found some pink disposables, too, so I don’t think this was Marie’s.”

  We pulled off at a vista point and watched people throw bread to the seagulls. Cooler and windy out there on the point with the Pacific surging blue below and the gulls crying and diving for the food. I started to get a feeling like I had that day in the Chula Vista hospital thirty-six years ago. When I knew I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it. The feeling that something’s already happened and you’re just there to see it through.

  What if I’d gotten the wrong guy?

  “So you’re asking me to get it reopened,” I said.

  “I’m giving you first crack at it. If you don’t want to, I understand. But it would be a good thing, Nick, if you put the wrong guy away but managed to get him back out. And also a good thing if you nailed the man who really did it.”

  “Thirty-six years later.”

  “I know you took her fingers, Nick. Gershon told me the day after the autopsy. I know the Sheriff’s keeps that kind of stuff frozen for murder cases. I did an article once on the ‘felony freezer’ and all the oddities you guys kept in there. I didn’t write about the fingers. Anyway, I can petition the county for them and the sample scrapings. If they say no to me, I’ll hire a defense lawyer for Bonnett and he’ll get his hands on that stuff. Either way, I can hire a private lab to cook the DNA and compare it to what’s between those razor blades. If Janelle’s fingernail flesh comes up Bonnett, fine. I was wrong. But if it matches the razor, I’ll have a helluva story on my hands. Young cop. First case. Girl he knew. Wrong guy in prison for thirty-six years and counting. Congressman with a young girl’s blood on his soul while he takes care of Homeland Security. Old cop finally gets his man. I admit I could never stand Roger Stoltz. But I couldn’t make up a better story if I wanted to, Nick.”

  Andy dropped me off back at the Fisherman’s.

  “I’ll think about this,” I said.

  “I bet you will, brother. Love to Katy and all.”

  “Back to Lynette and yours.”

  I couldn’t pass up the obvious question. “Andy, have you told Lynette?”

  “Yeah. She said you’d get it reopened.”

  “Why did she think that?”

  “She said you’d do the right thing.”

  But I didn’t think about it long. I thought about it for a lot less time than I spent on the witness stand perjuring myself in nineteen sixty-eight.

  I WAS on good enough terms with the new sheriff to get the fingers and scrapings out of one of the felony freezers. Homicide evidence is kept permanently for occasions exactly like this one. It took some paperwork that few people would ever see. An after-hours thing. Finally boiled down to just me and a deputy and the freezer. I hadn’t walked those halls for thirty years and they made me think of Sharon and that day I went on the acid trip and Lucky Lobdell. Lenny, Casey, and Ethan Vonn. Janelle. All of it came blowing back like it was driven by high wind.

  I arranged the thumbs and fingers and scrapings on the light table. They had all turned black with age. Strange to choose from among them like they were jewels to be set. I took off one glove to touch one of Janelle Vonn’s fingers with my own. Just to actually touch her skin with my skin. Nothing I had seen as a homicide detective or later, as an FBI special agent working on VICAP or behavioral science, stilled my soul like those black thumbs and fingers. My heart was in my throat and there were tears in my eyes.

  Using tweezers, I chose one finger with a shred of what I knew to be human flesh still lodged under the nail. And one separately bagged piece of frozen skin.

  I packaged my two samples. Got the Trim-Quick and blade out of Property, too. What memories those brought back.

  I arranged the cold things in my cooler for the trip down to Regentech Laboratories in San Diego. I know the director there, Cristin Russim. She testified for the bureau a few times and she’s the best forensic DNA scientist I know. Even better, I knew I could trust her to keep this one quiet. Which was why I paid for the job myself. Didn’t want the Sheriff’s Department involved yet. They’d retest it, anyway, if I found what I thought I’d find. I told Cristin absolutely nothing about the case. Just dropped off the black finger and flesh and used tissues and the disposable razor and asked her to tell me who was who.

  Left the rest to her.

  KATY AND I stayed the week in San Diego. Did Sea World and the Wild Animal Park and the Embarcadero. Saw a play and went to a concert. Shopped. Wrote postcards to the children and grandchildren. Looked forward to getting back to Newport Beach. We got a cozy little place there ten years ago when the bureau finally sent me back to Orange County. Small and only one place to park but right on the sand at Eighteenth Street.

  Cristin called me that Thursday evening. Said the DNA from under the fingernails was the same as in the razor. Same as in the tissues. Same human being. Good markers, easy ID. She’d say so in court if legendary crime fighter Nick Becker asked her to.

  “Might take you up on that,” I said jauntily.

  I told her I’d be right over to pick up the report and the finger. She said she’d frozen the finger quickly after testing and it was good as new.

  “You’re white,” said Katy.

  “It was Stoltz.”

  “There’s got to be some mistake, honey.”

  “There was. I made it.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  38

  THE NEXT EVENING I drove up to the Stoltzes’ house in the Tustin hills. Nice place, most of it behind a wall but no gate. You can drive right in.

  Tustin’s different now. Orange trees long gone. Even out in Bryan and Myford and Irvine not a grove left. Houses packed in tight. Car dealerships and franchised everything, one big shopping opportunity. Doesn’t have a smell anymore, not like oranges anyway. Used to be a sign on the Fourth Street free
way exit that said “Welcome to Tustin—the Beverly Hills of Orange County.” Not really sure who came up with that one, or when they took it down.

  Roger and Marie were in the front yard. Big straw hats and baggy nylon pants. U.S. Representative Roger Stoltz closing in on seventy-seven years, serving out his last term. Marie even older than that. Millionaires fifty times over from Orange Sunshine cleanser but still lived where they’d always lived. Bigger place is all.

  They stared at me as I pulled up. Waved when I got out. Marie went into the house and I heard a screen door rattle shut.

  “Hello, Nick Becker,” said Roger. “What brings you to these parts?”

  I shook his hand. Strong, warm, and dry. “That’s a hard one to answer.”

  “Is that a fact?” He looked at my briefcase. Frowned.

  “Maybe you and I should talk in private, Roger.”

  “Whatever you say. But Marie went to get lemonade for us so don’t hurt her feelings. Here, sit in the shade a minute and be social.”

  I set my briefcase down next to a round redwood picnic table under a magnolia. Four little curved benches. Fresh lacquer on the wood and the magnolia heavy with big white flowers.

  Stoltz sat and stared toward the wall. Still had the crisp mustache. His black hair had gone white and waxy but it was still there. Sharp eyes, no glasses. Little U.S. flag pin on his shirt pocket. You see those a lot these days. I thought of Terry Neemal’s description of the man he saw that night. Walking up the steps of the SunBlesst packinghouse with something bulky slung over his shoulder. Regular-sized.