by Dianne Emley
The defense the receptionist mounted consisted of her rising from her chair and exclaiming, “Hey!” at Vining’s and Kissick’s backs as they climbed the exposed stairway.
Whenever Vining was successful at such a tactic, she wondered why citizens weren’t better versed in their civil rights. Cops didn’t have unrestricted access to private property.
On the third floor, they encountered a man dispatched to intercept them. He was earnest and young, and had been given a thankless job for which he would undoubtedly get his ass chewed by Scoville when he botched it.
Shields still in hand, the detectives sailed past him as he sputtered that they were to wait downstairs.
“We’ll just be a minute,” Vining said reassuringly as they circled the suite, cruising the corner offices until they found Scoville in the largest one with the best view. They went inside, closing the door on the minion.
Scoville was yammering into the phone, “I don’t care if he’s in court. I need him now.” He stood when Vining and Kissick entered, slamming down the phone at the same time.
Vining put on her sweetest smile. “Hi, Mark. Howyadoin’?”
“You two can’t burst in here like this without a search warrant. This is private property. I need to see a warrant.”
Kissick took up his usual position, leaning against a wall. Vining had already turned on a microrecorder in her pocket.
“Search warrant?” Vining appeared bewildered. “We just want to ask you some questions, Mark, not dig through your desk. We’re here to verify a few facts, that’s all. Will you help us do that?”
Scoville was neat and clean. His knit shirt bore the logo of the Wilshire Country Club on the breast. The creases on his chinos were knife-edged. His eyes were clear, the whites too bright, suggesting an application of Visine. His bearing was not as crisp. He grappled for words, and his movements were labored, suggesting he was either drunk or suffering from a powerful hangover.
Vining thought she detected alcohol behind the menthol aroma of the strong mints he was chewing. A drink cup with a lid and a straw was on his desk, the surface sweating condensation, leaving a ring on the coaster beneath it.
“I’m not talking to you without my attorney present,” Scoville protested. “How do I get you out of here? Do I have to call the sheriffs?”
Vining winced as if wounded. “Mark, I’m confused. When we chatted the other day, you offered to help in any way you could. You volunteered to take a polygraph and we set it up. Then, next thing we knew, you left a message canceling it. Wouldn’t take our calls. Didn’t want to see us. Now you want your attorney here. What’s changed?”
Scoville stood behind his desk as if it was a barrier.
“What’s changed is I was naïve about the police. How you guys operate. You’re desperate to hang those murders on somebody, and you’ll twist anything I say to do it. I have a family and a business to consider. Bringing in an attorney was my wife’s idea. She’s the one who opened my eyes to what you guys are capable of.”
“Mark, like I said, we’re here to verify facts. It’s routine. You can save everyone a lot of time and trouble by talking to us now, or we can bother your friends, family, and employees trying to track this stuff down.” Vining apologetically raised her hands. “I know it’s tedious. It’s tedious for us too. Since you have nothing to hide, getting the facts straight can only help you. Am I right?”
Scoville ran a hand over his thinning hair and looked at the phone, waiting for the attorney’s call.
“We’ll be out of here in ten minutes tops,” Vining said.
“I’m not talking without my attorney, and he’s in court.”
“In court? It could be hours before he’s free. We’ll just have to wait in the lobby. If you won’t let us do that, we’ll wait on the street near the front door. The three of us know you’ve got nothing to hide, but your employees are going to wonder why a couple of detectives are hanging around.”
“I’d like to hear that water cooler gossip,” Kissick added.
Scoville hungrily eyed the drink cup.
“Mark, it’s simpler if you just help us out.” From her briefcase, Vining took out copies of the forms pertaining to Alonso Mendoza’s small-claims suit against Scoville and handed them to him.
“What’s this? That small-claims-court thing?” He reluctantly took the papers, dropping into the chair behind his large mahogany desk. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Tell us what happened that day.” She didn’t wait for an invitation but sat in a chair facing him.
He looked through the papers twice. “I refused to pay that Mendoza guy because he did bad work and he wouldn’t fix it. The idiot judge sided with him.” Beads of perspiration formed high on his forehead and on his scalp among the sparse strands of dark curly hair.
“Why are you asking me about this?” He set the forms on the desk in front of Vining. While pulling his hand back, he snagged the drink cup, took a long drag through the straw, and set it back down. His hand had begun to tremble.
“You seem troubled, Mark.” Vining affected a look of concern.
“I’m not troubled. I’m confused about why you’re bringing this up. We paid Mendoza what he wanted.”
“Something happened that day at small-claims court.”
Vining noticed Scoville’s eyes change from uneasiness to fear.
“A man named Huan Yu Kang had a case the same day as yours. His cell phone was stolen at the courthouse.”
Scoville shrugged. “So what?”
“Someone used Mr. Kang’s stolen cell phone to call you on August first.”
Scoville began breathing through his mouth. “Call me?”
“Call you, for a sixteen-minute conversation.”
“Must have been a wrong number.”
“For sixteen minutes?”
Scoville took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. “Dahlia, my stepdaughter … She uses my phone when she blows through the minutes on hers. Must have been one of her friends calling her.”
Kissick shifted his feet. “You ought to get yourself one of those family plans. You know, the shared minutes.”
“Yeah. Right. I’ll look into that.” Scoville drew circles on his desk with his fingers.
“That’s what I’ve got with my two sons.”
Scoville acknowledged Kissick’s comment with a lackluster raise of his eyebrows.
Kissick pushed away from the wall and left the office, not offering an explanation.
Scoville frowned as he watched him leave.
Vining didn’t miss a beat. “What’s interesting, Mark, is that yesterday, Labor Day, you received another call. This one was eight minutes long, also made from a stolen cell phone.”
Scoville again shrugged and began toying with a Mont Blanc pen that had been his father’s favorite.
“This phone was stolen from a tourist visiting from Ohio. Funny, but it was stolen from her right down the street at Chin Chin.” Vining hooked her thumb in the direction of the restaurant.
“I know where it is,” Scoville said with irritation.
“The tourist says the individual who she thinks stole her phone was looking through binoculars in the direction of this building. Is somebody stalking you, Mark? Is there something you want to tell us?”
Scoville began shaking his head without pausing, a tiny movement, back and forth, like a bobblehead. He huffed out a laugh. “I don’t know why anybody would watch me. Dena’s had people follow her before.”
“What were you doing at Oliver Mercer’s house yesterday, Mark? A couple of our cadets reported that you vomited in the street.”
Still staring at the pen and shaking his head, Scoville added a jostle of his shoulders. “A person can’t go to Pasadena without the local cops knowing?”
The door opened without a knock and Kissick returned. “I called your wife, Mark. She says your stepdaughter never uses your cell phone.” He resumed his position leaning agai
nst the wall.
Scoville’s face flushed. “How the hell would she know? She doesn’t even know where that girl is half the time.” He bolted from his chair. “You two need to leave. If you don’t get out right now, I’m going to sue both of you, the Pasadena Police Department, and the city.”
Vining slowly rose, holding her arms open. “We’re going, Mark. No problem. Didn’t mean to disturb you. We’re all on the same team. We were just hoping you could help us sort out these unusual circumstances. People calling you on stolen cell phones. Someone watching your building. Maybe watching you. You throwing up in front of Mercer’s house. And Mark, we’ve found out that you have some gambling issues.”
“Issues? Who told you that?”
“Lots of people.”
“I like to gamble. So what? It’s not illegal.” Scoville snatched the cup and thirstily pulled through the straw.
Vining pointedly looked at the cup. “We’re hearing about alcohol problems too.”
He set the cup down. “I have a few drinks every now and then. Whoever you’re talking to is out to get me. Who’s telling you these stories?”
“It doesn’t matter, Mark. What matters is that I can see you’re experiencing a lot of distress right now. You seem to be in a lot of pain. Holding a secret inside can really tear you up. Help us help you, Mark. You had your issues with Mercer, but no one deserves what happened to him. Certainly Lauren didn’t deserve what happened to her. Two little children without their mother …”
“I told you, I don’t know anything. You said you were leaving.”
“We are leaving, but you seem so nervous and upset. You’re drinking right now. I can smell the booze on you. You’re a mess. Your family has to be suffering too. We can help, Mark.”
He held his hand in the direction of the door. “We’re through here.”
“Sure, Mark. Whatever you want.” She picked up her briefcase and took a file folder from inside.
“One last thing … You asked me what happened to Oliver and Lauren.”
She tossed crime scene photos on his desk faceup, one after the other, arraying them as if dealing cards.
Scoville leaned on his hands against the desk. He blinked, not taking it in, his mouth gaping.
“That’s what happened to them, Mark,” Vining said.
Scoville wrenched himself from the photos and turned his back to the detectives. “Just go.”
“Mark, it’s clearly tearing you up. You can’t live with this.”
“Go.”
TWENTY-ONE
It was dinnertime and the Scoville/Hale home was quiet. One wouldn’t think the sprawling mansion would be anything but quiet, yet Hale had learned the design was an effective conduit even for sotto voce conversations held in distant corners. Normally, the silence would have been ambrosia to her, but tonight she found it unsettling to be left alone with her thoughts.
She had polled the kids about what they wanted to eat. On a normal Tuesday night, she would have cooked dinner. She avoided too many meals out or brought in, but it was the last week before school started, it was hot out, and frankly, she just didn’t feel like cooking. They had agreed on a local family-owned Mexican place. Hale had left a message on Mark’s cell phone an hour ago and had yet to hear from him. What else was new?
Luddy was in the family room, busy with his Nintendo Wii. Dahlia was in her room, probably on the telephone or the computer, or both. And watching TV, while listening to her iPod. At least she was home. Hale was surprised when Dahlia told her she was going to hang out at home. Luddy declined Hale’s suggestion to invite his friend who lived down the street, saying he was tired—unusual for him. The eight-year-old normally went full-bore all day until he collapsed into bed at night.
The situation with Mark was taking its toll on their children, and it pained her to see it. She embraced the Serenity Prayer, but recognizing its essential truth did nothing to make her feel serene tonight.
Mark was Lord-only-knows where. She hadn’t seen him last night, even though he had slept in his suite of rooms, or all day today. His comings and goings and his behavior when he deigned to be around had been erratic before the double murders and were worse now. She refused to believe that Mark had had anything to do with the murders. Still, being the dutiful wife and standing by her man was especially hard in a loveless marriage.
She couldn’t get what had happened yesterday with Bowie, that long, wonderful day, out of her mind. She felt a stab of shame thinking about it, but that didn’t keep her from mentally going there again and again. She savored it all, starting from when she’d first laid eyes on him at the TV studio. His back was to her, and she’d done a double take at his butt and thighs in his well-worn jeans, the fabric softened so that it hugged his body just so. She remembered holding on to that butt, flesh against flesh. She felt tingly just thinking about it and wanted him all over again. All over.
She had seen his photo before. So when he’d turned to face her, she’d expected the square jaw and deep-set eyes, the sensitive lips. The photographer had tried to convey angst behind the macho swagger that she had figured was artifice. But when he’d turned and smiled …
She’d remembered her manners. “Hi, I’m Dena Hale. Very nice to meet you, Mr. Crowley.”
“Call me Bowie, please. I’m happy to meet you. I’m a big fan. You’re popular in San Quentin. We got some of the L.A. stations there.”
“I’m big in San Quentin?”
“That’s not as bad as it sounds. Those guys know what’s good on TV. They watch a lot of it.”
When she was younger, she used to joke to her friends that she fell in love at first sight once a week if not more often. She had been a poster child for the lost cause of those looking for love in all the wrong places. It was tied up in a bad childhood, narcissistic, substance-abusing parents, and the rest of that sad-sack genesis of a zillion tear-soaked tissues and therapy sessions. After tough work on herself, she’d cleaned up her act and married Mark, a businessman, owner of a hot restaurant, a man of means. When one of her friends, after a few cocktails, proclaimed him a milquetoast and “not someone I’d ever imagine you with,” she had written off the catty remark as jealousy. What one friend had said, others were thinking, for sure.
Her friends didn’t know Mark like she did. She knew he didn’t fit the model of the perfect mate she and her friends had fashioned for themselves—GQ meets The Wall Street Journal—but to her that just showed how shallow they were. Beneath Mark’s mildly dumpy exterior was surprising depth and a capacity for fun. She had once loved him deeply. Only later would she realize how closely their fun was tied in to alcohol and how what they considered fun was mere recklessness. She was only now plumbing those dark corners of her psyche.
Spinning out her car and plowing it into a telephone pole on the PCH in Malibu after a “normal” night of drinks and dinner with friends had been her wake-up call.
Mark agreed, one tear-soaked night, that they needed to clean up their act for the sake of their kids. They dug in, the two of them, a team, and made it happen.
Time passed. Mark’s father died.
Through faith and sheer will she had remained centered while Mark had floundered. They began cycling in the orbits of different planets, held by gravity from a different source. Now the separation in their lives was no longer benign indifference. The gambling, boozing, and whoring—she’d known about all that. Now there were two murders. Now there was Bowie.
That moment at the studio when he’d turned and offered his hand, a thought had entered her mind like a soothing balm, yet had struck her with sufficient force to make her feel like she’d been hollowed out, scraped clean, renewed.
The thought was: I’m home.
She was at the desk in her suite of rooms, addressing envelopes for Dahlia’s eighteenth birthday party. Using her calligraphy pen, she painstakingly wrote out each one with swoops and curlicues. It would be much easier to just print address labels off her computer, but she liked
the little personal touches that made life special. Genteel. A nod to times past. She and Dahlia had picked out the invitations together—velum attached to card stock backing with ribbons—and had them printed at the stationery store. It had been a fun mother-daughter time. She wistfully imagined doing the same thing for Dahlia’s wedding.
After admiring her work, she set an envelope in the finished pile and picked up a blank one. She looked up to see Luddy at her elbow.
“Hey, chief. What’s up?”
“Just watching.”
He peered over her shoulder as she completed an address and waved the envelope in the air to dry the ink.
“You want to try? There are more pens in the box.”
She began another. Luddy silently remained by her side. He picked up a lock of her hair and drew it through his fingers. He’d always loved to touch her hair, and she liked the gentleness of his touch.
She leaned into him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Something on your mind, pal?”
“What’s going on with Dad?”
That was her boy. Direct. Unsubtle. An admirable personality trait, but one that required tempering or it would get him in trouble as he grew older.
She stopped working to look at him. Her old soul. Her deep thinker. Why did she imagine that she could shelter him from Mark’s behavior? Wishful thinking.
He wasn’t looking at her, but at the strands of hair he held. He released them and grabbed another lock at her scalp.
“Dad’s been drunk a lot again.”
The “again” cut her. She swiveled her chair and took his hands in hers. The dismay in his eyes nearly undid her. She burned with anger at Mark for having caused this. She could handle just about anything, but she couldn’t tolerate someone hurting her children. She’d dreaded this moment with Luddy. He took family disturbances harder than Dahlia, who had always been more inward-directed than her brother, more concerned with herself and her issues. As long as her life wasn’t affected, she cared little. Dena had worked to balance this trait with mixed success, fully aware of where that could lead the teenager.
While a happy boy, Luddy had always been the more sensitive and intuitive of her children, aware of slight changes in his environment and in the people close to him.
