by David Freed
“Yeah, right. And if you believe that . . .”
Buzz grunted and signed off.
JANET BOLLINGER resided in a tired, two-story four-plex at Calla Avenue and Florida Street. The place was less than a mile from the beach, but about a million miles from anything about which the Beach Boys ever waxed poetic. Steel security grates covered the doors and windows. Black asphalt covered the grounds. Plenty of off-street parking and not a single flower in sight. A home on the downside of life’s bell curve. I checked the bank of tarnished brass mailbox slots bolted to the front wall. The mailbox marked “B” had a slip of paper Scotch-taped to it. Printed in a woman’s careful hand it said, “J. Bollinger.”
Apartment B was on the first floor, on the east side of the building. I rapped on the door. There was no answer.
On the second floor landing directly above Bollinger’s apartment, a chubby, brown-skinned dude in his mid-twenties leaned with his forearms on the wrought-iron railing. He was shirtless and in boxer shorts, smoking a doobie. His underwear was blue and was adorned with little yellow San Diego Charger lightning bolts. A likeness of the Virgin, her hands outstretched, was inked across his flabby gut and man boobs. A tat that said “Esmeralda” in cursive script took up much of the left side of his neck. He eyed me with unbridled disdain.
“How do you think the Chargers’ll do this season?” I asked with my most disarming smile.
He shifted his gaze dismissively, sucking in some weed, and stared out at the ocean.
“I’m looking for the lady who lives downstairs.”
“Wouldn’t know nothin’ about it.”
“You haven’t seen her around today, have you?”
Silence.
“I’m not a cop, homeboy.”
“Like I said, wouldn’t know nothin’ about it.”
“Well, what do you know?”
He turned his head and spit, like it was meant for me, then looked back out at the ocean.
“Guess what? I know something.”
He looked back down at me. “Yeah? Whadda you know?”
“I know that the Buddha never claimed to be a god, which has to make you wonder: is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion, because every other major religion entails some essential form of theism, right? But not Buddhism, which many scholars consider non-theistic or even atheistic. Your thoughts?”
“Mierde.”
“What’s your name, homeboy?”
He glared down at me. “Pinche marica come mierda.”
Making friends wherever I go.
I climbed into the Escalade and went to find some coffee. I’d wait for Janet Bollinger to come home.
THERE WAS a McDonald’s on Palm Avenue a few blocks away. I ordered a small cup and took my time swilling it. It tasted like something that could’ve leaked out of the Exxon Valdez. I didn’t care. Coffee’s coffee. Anything else brewed from a bean is overpriced pretense.
I called Mrs. Schmulowitz to check on Kiddiot. He remained a no-show.
“He’s probably got a girlfriend out there somewhere,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “Don’t think I don’t know how all you tom-cats are, bubby. That kitty of yours, he reminds me of Irving, my third husband. Could be he’s Irving’s reanimation.”
“I think you mean ‘reincarnation,’ Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Carnation, animation, whatever. I’m telling you, to look at him, you would’ve sworn Irving had brain damage—‘The Schmo,’ my father called him. But lock the bedroom door and, oy, the man was a Hebrew Mount Vesuvius. The bimbos went after him like flies at a picnic. They never bothered me much, though. He’d get tired of the floozies after a couple days and come slinking back to me, just like your kitty’s gonna do.”
Mrs. Schmulowitz said she’d gone to the market and was already cooking the brisket she was confident would lure Kiddiot home. She promised to call as soon as he turned up.
“Gotta run, Bubeleh. I’m off to the doctor. We’re discussing post-op procedures. When this is all done, I’ll have the tummy of a thirteen-year-old Nubian princess. Who knows? Maybe I’ll finally get bat mitzvahed.”
“Give ’em hell, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
Two fork-tailed fighter jets streaked overhead, F/A-18 Hornets climbing in trail out of the Navy’s air station at North Island. Somebody once said that piloting a combat aircraft at high speed is like having sex in the middle of a car crash—dangerous, a total rush, and when it’s over, it’s over fast. They forgot to mention that once you’ve flown combat aircraft, nothing else compares. The Hornets banked north in a sweeping right turn and headed out to sea. I was watching them wistfully when my phone rang.
“Just checking to make sure you made it to San Diego OK.”
“If I hadn’t made it, Savannah, your call would have gone to voice mail, would it not?”
“You don’t have voice mail, Logan.”
She was correct. One more thing I couldn’t figure out on my phone.
“You made it down in one piece, though?”
“I wasn’t involved in any midair collisions, if that’s what you mean.”
“Why are you being so obnoxious to me?”
“Why do you think?”
“Logan, Arlo’s gone—and my relationship with him began dying long before he did. I feel like I’m ready to move on with my life. I’m hoping you are, too.”
“His dying didn’t wipe the slate clean, Savannah. Walking out of a marriage isn’t some computer game. You don’t reboot and start over.”
“I understand that.”
“No, Savannah. I don’t think you do.”
I’m not sure I understood, either. If a man is lucky, he meets that one woman in his life and is forever transformed. She becomes all he thinks about, even when she’s no longer his. It’s like a favorite song you love and come to hate because you can’t get it out of your head. I wanted Savannah out of my head. And, at the same time, that was the last thing I wanted.
“In any case,” she said, “I have a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
“I’m aware of that, Logan. But maybe you’ll like this one.”
“Fire away.”
“I’d like to come down to San Diego, to stay with you for awhile, see how it goes.”
“I thought you wanted to go to neutral corners.”
“I did. I thought about it, and now I’d like to try again. We don’t have to go to SeaWorld if you don’t want to. I admit, I was being . . .”
“Petulant?”
Her tone took a sharp turn. “If you don’t want me to come down, Logan, just say so.”
I took awhile to answer, my heart thumping in my ears, a thousand disparate thoughts swirling inside my head. But even as I ruminated, I knew what I planned to say.
“I want you to come down.”
“You sure?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”
“Good, because I already bought a ticket.”
She said she was catching an 8:30 P.M. train out of Los Angeles’ Union Station, scheduled to arrive in San Diego at 11:15. I suggested she bring along plenty to read, considering that Amtrak in Southern California runs on time about as often as the Dodgers win the World Series.
“Can’t wait,” she said.
“Makes two of us.”
The dinner hour was approaching by the time I returned to Janet Bollinger’s apartment building. I parked up the street and walked back, not wanting to arouse the attention of her pot-smoking, gangbanging neighbor for fear he might set off alarm bells, but he was gone. An older, dark green Nissan Sentra with a dented back bumper that had a faded Castle Robotics parking permit on it took up the space directly in front of Bollinger’s unit. I could see diffuse light behind the angled mini-blinds covering the front window. She’d come home. I knocked.
“Janet? Hello? Avon calling.”
Nothing.
I knocked again, harder this time. That’s when I heard it—a moan so faint that at first I mistook it for the bree
ze blowing in off the ocean. I turned the knob. The door opened.
“Janet?”
I stepped inside. The place was Crate & Barrel tidy. A chamois-colored sofa with modern lines and a matching love seat dominated the center of the living room. There was a small set of decorative wooden shelves crammed with a collection of about twenty ceramic Hummel figurines. Above them on the wall hung a grouping of six family photos in inexpensive black frames. On another wall was a psychedelic-colored poster of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
“Anybody home?”
From down a short hallway, a woman’s voice emanated faintly at the same instant my brain registered the distinctive coppery essence of freshly spilled blood.
“. . . Help me.”
I ran.
She was lying on her back. Slender, mid-thirties, shoulder-length auburn hair styled in what I suppose you’d call a shag. Her gray, pullover sweater was wet with red, as was the off-white Berber carpet beneath her.
“Please,” she mouthed silently, her eyes pleading.
I knelt, careful not to move her, and gently raised the sweater a few inches. Janet Bollinger had been stabbed in the upper abdomen. The seeping knife wound was deep and jagged at the edges, the result of what I assumed was a serrated blade.
“Hang tough, Janet. You’re gonna be fine. Stay awake now for me, OK?”
The bathroom was six feet away. I grabbed a hand towel off a rack near the door and yanked the floral comforter off her bed. Using the towel to apply pressure on the wound, I tucked the comforter around her as best I could to slow the onset of shock, then dialed my phone with my free hand.
“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?”
“A woman’s been stabbed. She needs an ambulance.”
The emergency dispatcher took down the address, then asked me my “relationship to the victim.”
“Concerned citizen,” I said and hung up.
The towel already was soaked with blood. Janet closed her eyes.
“No sleeping on the job. C’mon, now, Janet. Stay with me, sweetheart.”
She was too weak to respond. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow. I stroked her face softly while applying pressure with my other hand and waited for help to arrive.
There was nothing more I could do.
THE PARAMEDICS arrived within three minutes. Janet Bollinger was en route to the emergency room less than five minutes later. Whether she would survive the six-mile drive to the nearest hospital, in neighboring Chula Vista, was anyone’s guess. The rescue crew loaded her into the ambulance in grim silence. I shared their unspoken skepticism. Like them, I too had seen my share of gravely wounded individuals.
“You say you knocked on Ms. Bollinger’s door the second time you came back and it was unlocked?”
“Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that’s what I just said.”
San Diego County Sheriff’s Detective Alicia Rosario cocked an eyebrow at my insolent response to her question as she jotted notes on a reporter’s pad. She was pretty in a cop kind of way. Black slacks, black pumps, black silk blouse, her black hair cut cancer-survivor short. Under her black leather jacket, below her left armpit, a nickel-plated, 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson rode in a hand-tooled leather shoulder rig.
Her prematurely balding partner, Detective Kurt Lawless was decked out in a charcoal gray suit, white oxford-cloth dress shirt, button-down, pink polka-dotted necktie, and burgundy wing tips buffed to a high shine. He looked like a magazine advertisement for Brooks Brothers.
“What I still don’t get,” Lawless said, studying my driver’s license as the three of us stood outside Janet Bollinger’s apartment, “is what you were doing down here in Imperial Beach, when you live all the way up in Rancho Bonita.”
I wiped Janet Bollinger’s blood from my hands with a towelette from Kentucky Fried Chicken I found in my pocket and repeated what I’d already told the two detectives. How Bollinger’s testimony had helped send Dorian Munz to death row. How Munz, before he was executed, had implicated Gary Castle in the slaying of Bollinger’s friend, Ruth Walker. And how Ruth’s war hero father had hired me to help refute Munz’s last-minute claim that the wrong man had been convicted of murdering her.
“Ruth Walker,” Lawless said. “Never heard of her.”
“The story was all over the local news last month, from what I hear. Maybe you were on vacation. Shopping on Savile Row, no doubt. Nice threads, by the way. They must pay you guys pretty well.”
Lawless glared and handed me back my driver’s license.
It was easy to understand his knowing nothing about Ruth Walker’s murder. She’d been killed probably long before either Lawless or Rosario, both in their mid-thirties, became homicide detectives. And even though Munz had been executed only a few weeks earlier, and the story was widely reported, who under the age of seventy reads a daily newspaper these days or, for that matter, watches TV news? Moreover, Munz had been prosecuted by the feds. If you’re a local cop, federal cases might just as well be tried on the moon.
“So,” Detective Rosario said, “just so I’m clear, you say you’re staying with Mr. Walker, you drive down here intending to speak with Ms. Bollinger, to get her to give you some sort of statement saying this Dorian Munz individual was a liar. Ms. Bollinger’s not home, so you go to McDonald’s to wait. You come back approximately thirty minutes later. You hear a moan inside. Door’s unlocked. You take it upon yourself to enter, whereupon you find Ms. Bollinger bleeding on the bedroom floor.”
“I’d say that about sums it up.”
“But you didn’t stab her, right?” Lawless said.
“Why would I stab her?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Logan. I’m asking you.”
“Time out. Is Lawless really your name? Because if it is, it’s awesome. It’d be like me being a psychiatrist named Moody. Or Dr. Cockburn, your friendly local urologist.”
“I asked you a question, sir.”
“No, Detective, I did not stab Janet Bollinger.”
“Would you be willing to sit for a polygraph examination to that effect?”
“Only if we can schedule it around Dancing with the Stars. I try never missing an episode.”
“But you would be willing to take a polygraph?”
“No problem.”
Rosario crooked a finger at her partner. They turned away to commiserate in a low murmur, not realizing their voices carried.
“He called it in,” Rosario said. “What the hell kind of suspect does that? Plus, he’s too, I don’t know . . . sure of himself. I’m just not feeling it with this guy.”
“Well, if he didn’t do her,” Lawless said, “who did?”
“Considering there appears to have been no forced entry,” I said, “the perpetrator was probably somebody the victim knew. Possibly an acquaintance of Dorian Munz. After all, Ms. Bollinger did help put the guy on death row. Maybe it was a friend of Munz’s. Maybe it was the man upstairs.”
“What does Jesus have to do with this?” Lawless demanded.
I pointed to the second-floor landing. “The guy in the upstairs apartment. He was hanging out up there when I first pulled in, getting toasted in his skivvies—Charger boxer shorts with little lightning bolts on ’em. Very stylish.”
“What did he look like, aside from his underwear?” Rosario said.
“Hispanic, twenty-two, five-ten, 220. Big tattoo of the Virgin on his chest. Gang tat on his neck. Girl’s name. Esmeralda.”
“Not every young Latino with a neck tattoo is a gangster, Mr. Logan.”
“Agreed, but this guy was definitely playing the part. He wasn’t real keen on me being here, either.”
“You talked to him?” Lawless asked.
“Tried. He wasn’t too chatty. Made a few choice observations about my ancestry, I think.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Could be he thought I was one of you guys.”
Rosario smiled. “We seem to have that effect on a lot of
people.”
She asked for my cell phone number, thanked me for my cooperation, gave me her card, and told me to keep in touch.
“If you do happen to come up with anything else while you’re looking into this Dorian Munz guy,” Rosario said, “I’d appreciate the assist. We can use all the help we can get these days. Department keeps cutting back on our overtime. Never know. Might be a tie-in somewhere.”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
She shook my hand and told Lawless she was going off to canvass the neighborhood for possible witnesses. Lawless said he’d join her in a minute. He waited until Rosario walked off, then turned back to me and peered at me with one eyebrow cocked.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Logan,” he said, “but I got a bad feeling about you.”
I smiled and said, “Take a number.”
Six
If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that there was some kind of cosmic force field buffering La Jolla and the people who live there from the blight and turmoil afflicting many of San Diego’s other, lesser neighborhoods.
La Jollans are inordinately tan and fit. They spend their days seemingly unfettered by the economic constraints that bind the rest of us to our workaday worlds. They play golf and tennis and squash when they’re not out sailing, and would never, ever, even think to uncork a Chardonnay that scored anything less than a 90 from Wine Spectator. They eat organic. They wear Tom Ford and Jimmy Choo. Rarely do they hack each other to death.
At first blush, a plainspoken son of the South like Hub Walker would have seemed the unlikeliest resident of La Jolla, among the swankiest enclaves on the Left Coast. But as I rapped the antique brass knocker bolted to the towering front door of his 4,000-square foot Spanish-style hacienda on Hillside Drive, taking in its moonlit tropical landscaping and bazillion-dollar ocean view, it was easy to fathom how he, or anyone, for that matter, would’ve wanted to live there. The place was paradise.
“Where’d you come in?” Walker asked, gripping my hand.
“Montgomery Airport.”
“Figured you would. Montgomery’s where I keep my airplane.”
He insisted on commandeering my duffel bag and ushered me inside. The living room was bathed in the golden hue of antique wall sconces and original Tiffany lamps. Oil paintings from impressionists I would’ve been impressed by had I known the first thing about fine art hung in gilded frames on coved, whitewashed walls. The furnishings were Mission style. Elegant didn’t come close to describing the place.
