Yesterday's Echo

by Matt Coyle

  “In my experience with grand juries, the twenty-one to forty-nine-year-old demographic is not very well represented.” He sounded lawyerly, like I was already on the clock. “It’s more the fifty and above set. Successful and deferential to authority.”

  “Well.” I was grasping for any edge now, no matter how rounded. “They probably watch the news.”

  “I don’t want to be indelicate, Rick. But you seem like a man who takes things head-on. You did when we were younger.” I heard a deep inhale and then a long exhale over the phone. “The video of you escorting Mr. Philby out of Muldoon’s was not your finest moment. I wouldn’t expect it to be presented to the grand jury, but it will be the invisible elephant in the room for those who saw it. We should probably hope that the jury members missed the news that night.”

  That edge I was looking for was as round as a cue ball.

  Muldoon’s

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Backpack strapped over my shoulders, head on a swivel, I walked the couple blocks to the Greyhound bus terminal. The Devil Wind scraped its nails along my skin and the sun kept its piercing eye on the back of my neck the whole way. No one else seemed to take notice.

  Inside the terminal, I paid my balance on the locker, opened it, and emptied all that remained inside into my backpack. Windsor’s laptop, the Angela Albright tape and flash drive, and the Melody tape, joined the payoff ledger, birth certificate, and Heather Ortiz’s notes and tape recorder. All the stolen booty from my recent life of crime. If the cops caught me with the Windsor evidence, the grand jury would be superfluous.

  I was going to be arrested for murder. Again. The Santa Barbara police hadn’t had quite enough evidence, but back then I’d already lost more than I could ever get back.

  Colleen.

  Now I was more innocent than I’d ever been in Santa Barbara. The police would have to fake a motive, but they had enough physical evidence to put me in Windsor’s death room. They were coming for me. If not now, then two days from now. After that, I’d never make bail. I’d be in a cage until the trial.

  I had two days, at most, to sift through Windsor’s life and find somebody else to point the finger at and keep me from paying for my Santa Barbara sins with my freedom or my life in La Jolla.

  I exited the bus terminal on foot, crossed over West Broadway, and entered Horton Plaza. The mall was five stories and six city blocks of bright colors and odd angles. It was a bit cheery and disjointing for my mood, but I waded through lazy shoppers and found the Starbucks on the first floor. The coffee shop had free Wi-Fi, and Windsor’s laptop was new enough to be compatible.

  I ignored the frou-frou coffees and ordered a ham sandwich and a two-dollar bottle of water. A small table in the back with a view of the front door served as an encampment. The first bite of the sandwich reminded me that I hadn’t eaten all day, and I scarfed it down while I waited for Windsor’s laptop to power up.

  The Windows tone chimed and the password page appeared. This was it. Time to put my theory to the test. I found Windsor’s inmate number in Heather’s notebook and typed it into the password box. I hit enter. Dong. Invalid. I tried the numbers backward and got the dong. Next, I put the name Adam in front of the numbers. Dong.

  With each new dong, I peered over the laptop toward the front door, half expecting a SWAT team to throw in a flashbang and crash through the smoke.

  I tried variations of first and last name with DOC and NDOC, all over again backward and forward. Dong. Dong. Dong.

  Dead end.

  I slumped back into my chair and fought the urge to hurl the laptop at the wooden menu above the baristas. I’d risked prison time stupidly stealing the computer. An easy way for the cops to make a connection between me and Windsor that was never there. Now, probably the only way to keep me out of jail was to get into the damn thing and shift through Windsor’s secrets.

  Shut out.

  The best thing to do now was wipe it clean of my prints and toss it in a Dumpster or the ocean. I stashed it in my backpack for the time being.

  All I had left was Heather’s notebook and tape recorder. I turned on the tape recorder and heard a low hiss like the recorder had been turned on but there’d been no sound to record. I let it run for a few seconds and got more of the same, then turned it off. Next, I flipped open Heather’s notebook. It contained information on Windsor’s murder and nothing else. Heather must have opened up a new notebook for each dead body she reported on. Kind of like a homicide detective and a three-ring binder murder book. One per customer.

  The first page had Windsor’s background and important dates. Birth, incarceration, probation, and death. Heather had written his full name down in her initial entry. Adam Nichols Windsor. She’d probably listed it in her article on his death, but I’d passed over it without remembering his middle name. I yanked the laptop out of my backpack and booted it up. When the password screen came on, I tried Windsor’s full name backward and forwards with and without the NDOC number.

  More nothing.

  I stared at his name. Adam Nichols Windsor. ANW. I tried the initials alone and then with the NDOC number. All invalid.

  Then I saw it. A&W. Root beer. A nickname he must have had to endure as a kid, and then in prison where the kids were just bigger, meaner, and the playground was fenced with concrete and barbwire. A hated nickname and prison. Two things he’d never forget. Two things that would always remind him of the people he had to get back at.

  I typed in root beer and Windsor’s inmate number.

  Chime.

  Desktop appeared.

  I was in. Once it booted, I scanned his files. There were copies of the videos of Angela Albright and Melody, some violent porn, Excel spreadsheets of his payoffs, still with only the nicknames Stamp and Scarface listed, and a folder named “Empty Riches and Hard Time: The Life of Adam Windsor.”

  I clicked open the folder and found three separate files. One had e-mailed query letters Windsor had apparently sent to literary agents seeking representation for his memoir. James Frey with a real prison and no apologies. The query stated that he’d made mistakes, pimped women, sold drugs, and paid off corrupt cops, but had started to turn his life around when he was framed and sent to prison.

  There were rejection letters in the file, but also a reply from an agent last week requesting the first fifty pages and an outline. The second file held an outline of Windsor’s life and, thus, his memoir. All that was missing was the last chapter. Someone else had already written that for him. No chance for revisions. The last file was a draft of the memoir.

  The outline was bare bones and chronological. Just a few lines per date. The word “father” played a prominent role, “Father Knows Best,” “Wrath of the Father.” “Father-Daughter Love” was way down the list right before “Framed.” I wondered if Windsor blamed his life of crime on the fact that he wasn’t his father’s favorite. Wouldn’t be the first time. Melody’s name had a couple listings. “Cops on the Take” was another. The meat would be in the memoir. I shifted in my wooden chair and started to read it.

  The writing was overwrought and sentimental with Windsor as victim. Rich only child who had everything but the love of his father. Every bad choice and bad deed played back to Dad’s indifference or discipline. Adam owned none of it. He had the con excuse before he even became one; “It wasn’t me.”

  I guessed that ruled out him not being the favorite. He was all his parents had. Lucky them. The Father-Daughter Love title to one of the chapters must have referred to someone else’s family. Maybe a girlfriend.

  I slogged through the first chapter, then scanned forward until I got to his pimping days. Windsor used to hang out on the San Diego State University campus and befriend pretty, but insecure coeds who were tight on cash. He’d get them gigs as arm candy for rich, awkward men and then introduce them to drugs. Pretty soon they were hooked and the gigs with the men went from awkward to rabid and were played out behind closed doors.

  Windsor met Melody at
SDSU. He set the hook so deep that she dropped out of school six months after meeting him and went to the sheets and the needle full time. He left out the important parts, like the hidden camera and the bleeding bald man. I guess some things were a little too real, even for a memoir.

  He devoted a whole chapter to the cops he paid off, but he only used the nicknames Stamp and Scarface. He promised to name names in the final chapter of the book. So, Windsor was going for a double dip. First blackmail people and then out them in a memoir. Unfortunately for him, he never made it past chapter six. Hard to write when you’re dead.

  I already knew Stamp was Robert Heaton. He’d been the first to shake down Windsor after he busted Melody for prostitution. He’d sweated her in the back of his car until she gave up Windsor. She never went downtown, and Heaton put the squeeze on Windsor.

  Scarface showed up in place of Heaton one night a year later and told Windsor that from now on he was to give Stamp two envelopes each week. One with two hundred fifty dollars, the other with five. Windsor wrote he didn’t argue because Scarface scared him and because he felt an odd connection to the man. He explained it in his tortured prose:

  “We both had been scarred in our youth. His scars were external, whereas mine were internal, but both left the same lasting painful impression. He took the high road as an adult and I took the low road, but we both ended up in a dirty back alley as grown men trading on the flesh of scarred women.”

  Scars of youth. Moretti’s cleft lip, now hidden under a mustache, would leave a very visible scar, unshaven. Moretti was a bad cop then and a bad cop now. He’d gone rogue at the UCSD library, keeping his partner and his chief in the dark so he could ferret out what I had on him. He knew he could use Heather to freeze me out of the newspaper.

  But the push to indict me through a grand jury didn’t make sense. Was he trying to silence me? Had he silenced Windsor too and fudged up some evidence to frame Melody? He had to know whatever I had would come out in court if I was indicted and put on trial.

  Unless he never intended to arrest me.

  The grand jury indicts me, and I disappear to avoid arrest, never to be found.

  Until someone dug up my bones.

  Muldoon’s

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Three o’clock. I had six hours until Stone expected me to hand over everything I’d stolen from Windsor’s locker. None of it pointed the finger at me. Except that I had it in my possession. The only other link the cops had between Windsor and me was that he’d been in my restaurant the night before he died. Oh, and my ball cap was found in the room where he died. Three strikes. I could do the math.

  I scanned the inside of the coffee shop. Still no one I recognized. The same with the tables outside. I was about to go back to Windsor’s memoir when my brain hit replay.

  Something was out of place.

  I dropped my head so my eyes just peeked over the laptop screen and peered outside. There it was. The red light blinking danger. A man in a sweatshirt and ball cap pulled down low over sunglasses sat at a table outside. The cap was Dodger blue. Not a big deal, he could have been a tourist or one of the many L.A. transplants who lived in San Diego. The sweatshirt had been what triggered my mind’s eye. It was eighty-five degrees outside with a wind chill of ninety-nine. Everyone else today was in shirtsleeves.

  Flashing red light.

  You might wear a sweatshirt if you were trying to change your appearance from earlier this morning. Something you did on a tail when you didn’t want to be recognized.

  Grimes.

  The cap and sunglasses hid his face, but the military bearing I’d remembered from my time with him under the white lights in the square room was still there. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could feel them lasered on me though the mirrored lenses.

  How the hell had he found me? Had he tailed me all day after I thought I’d lost him at Vons’s this morning? No way. I’d have spotted the blue Impala. I had radar out for it all day. I couldn’t have missed it.

  But I could have missed another car while I was on the lookout for the Impala. Grimes had changed cars. Surveillance 101 and I’d missed it. He must have seen me leave the Vons’s parking lot in the taxi and called the cab company to get the destination. The power of the badge.

  Now I had to lose him all over again.

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Yellow Cab. I told the dispatcher to have a taxi waiting for me in front of the Hard Rock Cafe in twenty minutes. I gave him my description and said there’d be an extra ten for the driver if he waited for me. I hung up and glanced at Grimes. He hadn’t moved, but he would soon. He’d have to track me down after the fact again, but I wouldn’t make it easy for him.

  I went back to the decayed life of Adam Windsor. Chapter six, the last one he’d written, had him fleeing the corrupt cops of La Jolla and setting up shop in Las Vegas. Windsor worked out an arrangement with an unnamed casino boss. He’d fly out some of his college-aged girls from San Diego to play escort to whales the boss had comped in the casino. It was a win-win. The boss had access to fresh-faced call girls unknown to the local police, and Windsor could pimp women with mobbed-up protection without having to pay off Vegas versions of Stamp and Scarface.

  Alas, it all went to hell when Mr. Casino stole Melody. So Stone cuckolds Windsor and his payback was blackmail over a video of him having sex with Angela before her last name was Albright?

  It didn’t add up, but I didn’t have time to figure it out now. I powered down the computer and stuffed it, along with Heather’s notebook, into my backpack. My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out expecting to see Heather’s number or, worse, Moretti’s. Neither.

  Melody.

  “Rick.” Sexy, raw gravel. The voice of a killer? Didn’t matter. It still tugged at me, even after all I’d seen on videotape. “I need to see you. We need to talk.”

  “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Tonight then. Your house.”

  I should have said no. Just as I should have that night she asked for my help. But I was all in now and I might be able to find out if her lawyers were going to point the finger at me. Even if my house hadn’t been under surveillance, I wouldn’t have met Melody there. The living room sofa, my bedroom. They were her turf now as much as mine. She’d already exploited my weakness more than once, I didn’t want to give her another chance.

  “Muldoon’s. Courtyard. Eight o’clock.” Back where it all began.

  “I don’t think out in the public is a good idea. Why not your house?”

  “See you at Muldoon’s.” I hung up and left Starbucks.

  Grimes stayed seated when I passed by him outside. Just a guy reading a magazine on a lazy afternoon. Ten steps past, I heard his chair push back. I walked around the mall for a while, window shopping, in and out of a couple shops, like a bored shopper, but always moving south from where I’d parked.

  I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes since I called the cab company. Time to make my move. I turned a corner down one of the fingers of the mall. Grimes was at least ten yards back around the corner. If I ran now, I could lose him among the maze of shops and make my way over to Hard Rock and the cab. That was the smart play. The original plan. And the predictable one. I was tired of playing by everyone else’s rules. Tired of being spied on, pursued, harassed.

  I inched back to the edge of the corner I’d just rounded and waited. I bent my knees and rose up on the balls of my feet. A line-backer poised to deliver a hit. I sensed Grimes about to appear. I sprung into a fast walk and exploded my shoulder into his chest just as he turned the corner. A “whomph” blew out of him and his back hit the ground first, then his head. In football, they called that a decleater. In a mall, you could call it a cheap shot or even assault. Or, if no one knew your intentions, an accident.

  “Whoa. Sorry.” I reached a hand down to Grimes, a friendly citizen, sorry for the mishap. “I didn’t even see you. You came out of nowhere.”

  A few shoppers had stoppe
d in shock at the force of the impact, but they slowly moved along once they saw me lend a hand down to Grimes. He wouldn’t take it. The jolt had knocked his sunglasses askew and one blue eye glared at me above the lens. Hatred, accusation, violence.

  He reached around his back, and I suddenly feared he might come out with a gun or handcuffs. Back at SBPD, he’d worn a belt holster. He kept the glare on me and his arm movement hesitated, his hand hidden behind his back. Then he squeezed his lips together and his hand came out empty.

  This time.

  I kept my arm extended and let go the breath I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding. Grimes rolled over onto all fours and slowly climbed to his feet. I grabbed him under his armpit to help him upright. He tried to shake my arm off, but almost lost his balance. Once he was steady again, I unhanded him.

  “You should be more careful, Detective.” I mocked concern. “You assumed no one was coming around the corner. Sometimes that first assumption can lead you down the wrong path.”

  He straightened to his full height, chest out, trying to convey the command he’d shown around the department and in the white, square room. But his cheeks and his ears burned red.

  “I’ve been right about you from the start, Cahill.” He whipped off his sunglasses to give me double barrels of hate. “One day, you’ll stand before a judge for your wife’s murder. That’s a promise.”

  Anger and pain boiled up in me. That horrible night in Santa Barbara flashed in front of me. Colleen gone forever. My life at a dead end. Justice blinded.

  “Maybe if you’d done your job instead of pointing the finger at me, Colleen’s killer would already be in prison.” Rage, barely controlled.

  “You can play that game if you want to, Cahill, but you and I know the truth.” He’d regained his composure as I struggled to hold onto mine. “The polygraph, your neighbors, and Colleen’s friend didn’t lie. You did.”