by Russell Hill
I could imagine Earl Anthony Winslow in that surf. I could imagine watching him flail his arms, try to swim, only to be tumbled by the violent water, and he, too, would drown, just as my daughter did when her car pinwheeled into Tomales Bay. Perhaps Winslow would be foolish enough to come out to North Beach to watch the surf and perhaps he would be foolish enough to decide to get his feet wet and perhaps he would, like that unwary Iowa tourist, find himself sliding into the churning water
I found a log half buried at the high tide mark, and sat against it, letting the log take the brunt of the wind at my back. I watched the surf. It did not change.
I drove back into Point Reyes Station and stopped at the Old Western Saloon. It’s one of those old fashioned small town saloons, and the men at the bar were workers from the dairy ranches and carpenters and the drivers of trucks for Toby’s Barn, hauling sand and hay into Petaluma and Santa Rosa and San Rafael, and taking milk from the scattered ranches to Strauss Dairy where it would become butter and ice cream and milk for breakfast cereal. Nothing fancy about the Old Western. Beer and shots and a young bartender in a tee shirt and Tule elk antlers on the wall. The bang of cups and the calls for liar’s dice resounded.
“Scotch on the rocks,” I said, pushing a five spot onto the bar. He poured, no shot glass, a generous pour, gave me back a dollar. I pushed it back at him, and he pocketed it. No small talk.
The single main street through Point Reyes Station is Highway One, the highway that follows the California coast, and it was clogged with bike riders in spandex outfits, a few motorcycles and a stream of cars and pickups. The Bovine Bakery down the street had its usual cluster of people at the door. It had been a favorite of my daughter’s. She and her friends came out on Sundays, had a pastry and a coffee, walked their dogs, went out to Limantour Beach or Heart’s Desire and came back sunburned and wind blown. She had done it since she was a sophomore in high school. And when she turned sixteen and got her license, she became one of the drivers. Two years later she pinwheeled into Tomales Bay. And now I knew who had caused her to do that.
The drive back into Fairfax goes either through Samuel P. Taylor State Park, filled with redwoods, or up to Lake Nicasio and past the Rancho Nicasio bar and restaurant. This time I stopped there, went in and sat at the bar and ordered a BLT. The walls were filled with the heads of deer, a great ugly wild boar and another Tule elk, this one staring benignly down at the people eating their hamburgers and fries and BBQed oysters. I had another scotch and tried to imagine the death of Winslow. I could shoot him. Put a gun to his head and blow his brains out. But that was risky.
Police would investigate a death like that. He could have an accident, his car could plunge off the road but I didn’t know how to engineer that. It was the stuff that you saw in TV shows. He could get poisoned, but that meant somehow getting at what he ate or drank. Or, and as I imagined this afternoon, he could go for a walk on North Beach and slip into the surf. And that would be the perfect death. A man who was taking a walk on a dangerous beach. A beach where people had died. A misstep and he would be found several miles away, washed up on the South Beach, and his car would still be in the North Beach parking lot where he had left it. And he would drown too, just like my daughter. He would find the water take him, try to breathe the heavy stuff, watch the water rise over him, know that he was dying, see the opaque world through the water and know that he was in the wrong element, an air-breathing creature who was trapped in the sea. And, like the young woman hanging upside down in the car, he would wonder why his life was ending too soon.
It required planning. Somehow I had to get him out there. Somehow it had to be in his car. And somehow I had to get myself back to Fairfax or at least to the Tomales Bay Lodge without anyone knowing that I had been involved in his death. I would be like the egret. I would wait for the right moment. I would wait until he was swimming beneath my beak, unaware that I was poised to end his life.
CHAPTER 4
Detective Fuller came back. He still looked tired, but he came in, accepted my offer of a scotch and sat on the couch, placing his little notebook on the coffee table.
“I assume you haven’t done anything stupid,” he said
“I’m not sure what you mean by stupid.”
“I mean you haven’t bought yourself a gun or hired a hit man,”
“Where would I find one of those?”
“On television.”
He sipped the scotch, “This is good stuff,” he said. “Better than what I’m used to.”
“I don’t have many expenses,” I said. “No wife, no kid, no bad habits. At least not habits that cost a lot of money. So I buy good scotch, good vodka, good wine. My car is paid for. “
“But you’ve checked up on our buddy, haven’t you?”
“Yes. I did some looking on the internet.”
“And you drove by his house?”
“Yes. Nice place.”
“Three Hispanic guys doing his lawn and his shrubs the day I was there. Three car garage. Fucking big house.”
“He’s well heeled. So what did you find out?”
“Nothing. At least nothing that I can use. I met with him, asked him about the car repair. He had the usual story, scraped it on a wall in a garage.”
“What about the phony name?”
“Said he does that often. Doesn’t want people to connect him. He’s in big finance, wants to keep his private life private, so he keeps his name out of transactions that aren’t important.”
“You believe him?”
“No.”
“What tells you that?”
“He was too quick with his answers. Here comes a Sheriff’s detective, three years later. He ought to be vague. A car repair for a minor scrape three years ago? What the fuck is this all about? But the answers were rehearsed, like he’d been waiting for me. It’s the kind of story that I hear all the time. Quick answers, a logical pattern. What the fuck are you asking me about this for? It’s a rehearsed answer. I’ve heard enough of them to recognize one.”
“So you’re sure he’s the one?”
“No, I’m not positive. If I had to put money on it, I’d put it on him. But I can’t put the clamp on it. I can’t say, yeah, he’s the guy and know for sure that he’s the perp. Everything fits, but I don’t have that thing that would put him away. Paint scrapings from your daughter’s car, a witness that put him out there, a license plate number from that truck driver. That’s what I don’t have, and there’s not much chance that I’m going to get it.”
“So he’s going to get away with it?”
“I’ve found the truck driver. I’ll interview him. Maybe he remembers something that will help.”
“What if this bastard has an accident?”
“What kind of an accident?”
“I was thinking maybe he would take a walk on one of those Point Reyes beaches and maybe slip and get pulled out into the waves and drown.”
“Jesus Christ! You’re not serious!”
“It’s just a thought.”
“He’s gonna go out there and wade in the surf and lose his footing and drown? You got any idea how that would happen?”
“No. I don’t. Like I said, it’s just a thought. One that I had yesterday.”
“I don’t want to arrest you. There’s no reason for you to risk your own life and liberty for some asshole like him.”
“If he’s the one who sent my daughter to her death, then I’ve got nothing to lose.”
“Jesus.” He raised the scotch to his lips, took a sip. “I didn’t hear that,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
I went to a gun shop in Santa Rosa. It was the closest one to me. The others were in El Cerrito, Pacifica and San Bruno. The clerk was an older man, balding, shirt sleeves folded up, a bit of a neatly trimmed moustache, and he leaned over a case containing a variety of handguns.
“How can I help you, sir?”
“How would I go about buying a handgun?”
“Is it
for yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You ever own a gun before?”
“No, this is the first time. I’d like to have it around the house; we’ve had robberies lately, break-ins. I think I’d feel safer. What does it take?”
He handed me a brochure.
“You read this. It tells you what the safe handling requirements are, then you come back here and you take a test. It costs twenty-five bucks. You pass the test, you show me your driver’s license, you bring something that shows you’re a California resident, your PG&E bill, something like that. You demonstrate that you know how to safely handle a gun, then you pick one out, we fill out the papers, you pay me and you wait ten days to come back and pick it up. Assuming you don’t have a criminal record. They’ll check you out, make sure you’re OK.”
“What are the requirements for using the gun?”
“It’s all in there,” he said, pointing at the brochure. “You can keep it loaded at your house. You can’t keep it loaded if you’re in a car or on a public street. You can’t carry it concealed. If you have it with you in your car, you gotta put it in the trunk, unloaded. Glove compartment or under the seat is a no-no. You want to look at one of these?”
“Sure.”
He took a smaller gun out of the case and laid it on a felt pad on the counter.
“This is a Glock G43. Lightweight. It loads seven rounds. It’s something that people buy when they want a lightweight weapon that handles easily.”
I picked it up, gripped it, but I didn’t raise it. I knew that much. Don’t ever point a weapon at anybody. When I was a kid, I had a BB gun and my father was adamant about that.
“How do I learn to shoot something like this?”
“Gun range. There’s a couple not too far from here. I can give you directions. Actually, we offer lessons. You make an appointment, somebody takes you through the drill.”
I hoisted the gun again. It was light, black, deadly feeling, and I could imagine holding it to the temple of the asshole who had clipped my daughter’s car. Holding the barrel to his head and pulling the trigger. I pulled the trigger and it clicked, and the clerk said, “This weapon is one of our best sellers.”
I laid the gun back on the pad.
“I’ll study this,” I said, picking up the brochure.
Coming back down from Santa Rosa I thought about the idea of a gun. I thought about pressing it to the head of Earl Winslow, telling him to think about that girl hanging upside down in a car filling with water. And I was sure that I could kill him. But death by bullet seemed too quick, too painless. On the other hand, a gun would be something that would get his attention if I wanted him to go out to Point Reyes to that empty beach. It might be something that would convince him. I needed to isolate him, use the gun to force him to drive out to that beach where the surf would swallow him. What I had to do was plan this carefully. Be like the egret. Be patient.
CHAPTER 6
I got my daughter’s bike out of the garage, put a small wrench in my pocket and took off down the hill, through San Anselmo, down Shady Lane until I came to the Ross School. I turned right toward Phoenix Lake and pedaled up the street past grand houses on even grander grounds, big shade trees, neatly clipped lawns, long driveways and metal gates that opened to the touch of buttons on a post nearby. When I came to Carmel Drive, I slowed, looking for 221. It had a big hedge along the front, another electronically- controlled metal gate, and a graveled driveway that led through an avenue of roses. I stopped, turned the bike upside down on the seat and handlebars and got out the wrench. I took off the front wheel, as if I were repairing a flat tire. No one would pay attention to a middle-aged man fixing his bike. The driveway led to a three-car garage, two stories, and Fuller had guessed right. There was a second story, which had, no doubt, at some time housed a chauffeur. The house was big, brown shingled, some ivy clinging to it, but the trim and windows were newly painted. It was the kind of house that was a Ross classic, probably built by a banker or a real estate tycoon or perhaps somebody in the now defunct San Francisco shipping empire. It was not only big, it was substantial, and I could see an addition tacked onto one side;high glass windows, a modern conservatory of some kind. There would be a swimming pool, too, somewhere on the slope behind the house. And somewhere higher up on the edge of Ross would be a lot with a horse. Three car garage. Probably a Mercedes or a Porsche and certainly something big, like a Land Rover with a full rhino package. The Ford Expedition would be gone. It was not the kind of a property where a three-year old car would be kept.
Whatever Earl Winslow did, it paid well. I took my time getting the tire off the rim, making mental notes of what I could see. There would be no point in trying to get inside that enclosure. There were, no doubt, security cameras posted. Two Hispanic men were trimming the roses, a pickup truck parked in front of the garage, the back filled with rakes, shovels, a powered lawnmower and a canvas tarp lying on the ground with clippings half filling it. They paid no attention to me. It was the middle of the day and Winslow would be at work, whatever that was. And the best way to waylay him would be when he came out of his driveway on the way to work. Which would require a few more trips to establish his routine. I needed to know where he worked, when he went to work, and it would require more observation. I needed to be the egret, waiting. I needed to see him wiggling in the mud at my feet. I needed to go back to Santa Rosa and get myself a gun. And I would stop him, and he would drive to Point Reyes and he would go into that wild surf. He would have no choice. Like my daughter, who was left no choice by Earl Winslow.
CHAPTER 7
It didn’t take much browsing on the Internet to find Earl Winslow. CEO of a major oil company, on the board of directors to several major corporations, a big donor to the modern art museum; he had a high-priced box at the 49ers stadium where he entertained an A-list of celebrities. In his forties, a handsome man with a wife much younger than he was, she was a real looker, prominent in photos of art openings at the museum.
There were pictures of the two of them, smiling for the camera, him in a tailored suit that fit perfectly, and she wearing a form-fitting dress that showed off her body. This was a woman who spent time at the gym, I thought. All of which probably meant that he didn’t have a nine-to-five schedule. But there had to be regular forays out of that fortress where he lived. I would have to make it a routine to ride the bicycle on Carmel Avenue. Ride up to Phoenix Lake. What I should do was to buy myself an off-road bike, the kind that you saw on the trails around Phoenix Lake. Buy that and a helmet and I could make my pass around Earl Winslow’s compound a regular event, just another middle-aged man on a bike trying to reduce the flab in his legs.
I could vary the routine by parking the bike next to the post office in Ross, locking it to the bike rack on the sidewalk, walking up to Carmel Avenue, strolling past the gate. If I tried it at various times I was sure to spot him. Fix him with my egret eye.
I bought the bike at the bike shop in Fairfax and began with an early morning ride. It took a week before I saw him coming out of the gate. He drove a Mercedes.
S-class, and a quick check told me it cost a hundred thousand dollars. Silver gray, it purred out of those gates, Winslow at the wheel, and he didn’t give me a second glance. Ten o’clock in the morning. It took another three weeks before I was able to pin him down. Ten o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork. He had some kind of appointment on those two days. But I continued to make the rounds for another month before I was sure that this was a regular schedule. There were other departures, but they came at odd hours, often with the wife in the car as well. The wife drove a Porsche 911, yellow, and there was, as I suspected, a black Range Rover in the third bay in the garage.
So it would be a Tuesday or a Thursday.
I bought the gun from the shop in Santa Rosa. It was the Glock G43, a little over six inches long, weighing slightly more than a pound unloaded, less than a pound and a half loaded, nine millimeter, with a magazine of
seven rounds. I took a class in shooting it, went to the gun range with a young man from the gun shop, put on earplugs and fired at a circular target, then at an outline of a man. I didn’t do well. I imagined the target to be Winslow, and sighted carefully, but the recoil of the gun raised my aim. It took half an hour before I could hit the target.
“You’ll be OK,” the kid said. “Everybody has problems at first.”
But I knew that I would not be raising the gun and firing at a distant figure. I would be next to him in his car, pressing the gun to his body. Missing the target didn’t bother me. I was going to hold the gun to Winslow’s head. It was small enough to fit in my jacket pocket and it had the look of a pistol that meant business. The gate would open and he would pause until it was fully open, then come slowly through the gate, pause before he entered the street and that was the moment. I would open the passenger door of his Mercedes and slip inside and I would press the gun to his temple and tell him to drive. And he would protest and I would jam the muzzle at his skull, hurting him, and I would lower the gun and press it into his crotch and say to him, “Drive this fucking car or I will blow off your balls and your cock,” and I would press the gun more tightly against him. I wouldn’t need any target practice for that.
The gun was black, had some plastic parts that contributed to its light weight, and it fit easily into my hand. I could understand how some men could become entranced with such a weapon. There was a power that was transmitted to my brain when I held the gun steady and pulled the trigger.
Now I was ready. I needed to pick a day, and it occurred to me that it would be appropriate to pick a day that corresponded to my daughter’s death. The date, April 7, didn’t fall on a Tuesday or a Thursday. This year it was a Wednesday, which suited me perfectly. An early April Tuesday or Thursday would mean that the North Beach at Point Reyes would be little used. With any luck, the weather would be foul, foggy, cold. Perhaps even rain. April was too soon for the summer crowds. An empty beach with a pounding surf was what I wanted. A surf that was unforgiving, that would tumble his body like a leaf in the rapids of a spring river, that would suck him down, vomit him back up and suck him down again, pressing tons of water on his helpless body. A surf that would slam him against the wet sand, break his arms and legs, leave him like a wet rag. And if the weather didn’t cooperate, than I would use another day. And if he didn’t appear outside his gate, I would use another day. I would remain motionless, watching his every move, waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
