Capital Crimes

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Lamar snickered. “We know what you do at night, Wally.”

  “It keeps me busy and I don’t have to brush my teeth beforehand.”

  The mail between Jack Jeffries and Tristan backed up the boy’s story. There was at least a half year of correspondence transitioning from initial reserve on both their parts, to amiability to warmth to professions of father–son love.

  Nothing smarmy or sexual, the letters could’ve been how-to-communicate instructional tools from Dr. Phil, or one of those other preachers with doctorates.

  Jack Jeffries praised some of his son’s lyrics, but he never gushed. Criticism of weaker songs was tactful but frank, and Tristan reacted to every received comment with lamblike gratitude.

  No indication Jack had ever changed his mind about “Music City Breakdown.”

  They spent another hour phoning the new hi-tech penitentiary and finding out the names of the trustees who tended the old prison grounds. Two of the inmates remembered seeing the green VW atop the hill just before water break, and one recalled waving to a distant figure standing near the car.

  None of which provided an airtight alibi; the murder had taken place before that, when Tristan Poulson claimed to be working on his song and sleeping and surfing the Internet. No doubt Amelia, the maid, would back him up.

  Even without backup, the detectives were starting to doubt Tristan as a prime suspect. The boy had plenty of time to develop a real alibi, but hadn’t bothered. There had been an openness to Tristan’s manner, despite all he’d gone through. If either man had been able to admit it, they would have called it touching.

  And as far as the detective could tell, the boy hadn’t lied.

  As opposed to his mother.

  Baker and Lamar agreed that Tristan’s theory about her was intriguing.

  Repeated calls to Al Sus Jahara Arabian Farms were met by a recorded message so brief it bordered on unfriendly.

  Lamar Googled the place. It had a thousand acres of rolling hills and big trees and gorgeous horses. Champion bloodlines, big antebellum mansion, paddocks, stables, stud service, cryogenic semen storage, the works. A place that hoo-hah, one would think there’d be a person at the other end, not voice mail.

  Unless someone was in hiding.

  By day’s end, and after reviewing the situation with Fondebernardi and Jones, they decided Cathy Poulson had grown to the status of “serious suspect,” but they had no easy way to get evidence on her.

  Before they went about digging around in Belle Meade social circles, they decided to recontact an eyewitness—of sorts. Someone who’d seen Cathy and Jack, shortly before Jack’s throat got cut.

  14

  The Happy Night Motel looked no better than it had in its bordello days. Gray texture-coat stucco had flaked, leaving chicken-wire lesions. The green wood trim was bilious. A couple of big rigs were parked in the cracked asphalt motor court. One filthy pickup and a primer-patched Celica made up the rest of the vehicular mix.

  The night clerk was an old, crushed-faced guy named Gary Beame—flyaway white hair, grease-stained shirt, ill-fitting dentures, rheumy eyes that jumped all over the place. Maybe a barely reformed homeless guy the owners had hired on the cheap.

  He made the detectives right away, rasped through cigarette smoke. “Evening, Officers. We don’t hire out to whores. Mr. Bikram’s a clean businessman.”

  It sounded like a rehearsed little speech.

  “Congratulations,” said Baker. “Which room is Greta Barline’s?”

  Beame’s face darkened. He yanked out his cigarette, scattering ash on the Star magazine spread atop the counter. “That little—I knew she was gonna get Mr. Bikram in trouble.” Scratching the corner of his collapsed mouth, he peered at something, flicked it away. “All that dirty whorin’ and then she stiffs Mr. Bikram for a week’s worth.”

  Lamar said, “She was hooking out of here?”

  “Not like you’re thinking,” said Beame. “Not waltzing out to the street in them halters and hotpants.”

  “Like the good old days.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Beame lied.

  “So what, she’d just be here and they’d show up?”

  “Who?”

  “Johns.”

  “I never saw no one sneak in,” said Beame, warming to his falsehood sonata. “Not on any regular schedule, anyway. I’m all alone here, cain’t be bothering to watch all the comings and goings.”

  “Then how do you know she was hooking?”

  Beame puffed manically, working his jaws while constructing his answer. “Only way I found out was we had a family staying in the room next door, tourists from Missouri or someplace. Mother calls me up complaining about three different guys in one night. The noise was coming through the wall. Bad enough they had to hear it, but they had kids.”

  “What’d you do about it?” said Lamar.

  “What could I do?” said Beame. “My responsibility’s up here. What I done is phone Mr. Bikram. They tell me he’s back home visiting. That’s Calcutta, India. Mrs. Bikram says when he comes back in three days he’ll deal with it. Next time I see Barline coming in, I try talkin’ to her. The little whore has the nerve to ignore me. When Mr. Bikram comes home, I tell him what happens and he marches straight over there. But she’s gone with all her stuff. Then we found out she passed a bogus money order. The little whore still owes a week. You find her, you tell me. Or you can call Mr. Bikram direct. Here’s his card.”

  “Your housekeeping staff never informed you about the prostitution?”

  “What staff?” said Beame. “We got a couple Mexicans come during the day. They don’t even speak no English.”

  They asked to see Greta Barline’s room.

  Beame said, “Sorry, can’t do. I gotta a couple of people in there.”

  “More respectable tourists?” said Baker.

  No answer.

  “Maybe one-hour tourists?” said Lamar.

  “Hey,” said Beame. “They pay, I don’t ask. They might even be married. You find that little whore, you call Mr. Bikram.”

  “Any idea where we can find her?”

  Beame finally gave some serious thought to a question. “Well, mebbe one thing. I saw her go off with a guy once. This wasn’t no trucker. Suit and tie, drove a Lexus. Silver. It had a white coat hanging in the back. Like a doctor.”

  Out in the motel parking lot, they thumbed through their notes for the name of the dentist who owned The T House.

  “Here we go,” said Lamar. “‘Dr. McAfee. Lives in Brentwood.’”

  Baker said, “If she was telling the truth about that.”

  “About anything. Hooks, passes bad paper, real sweet kid.” Lamar looked up. “Maybe there’s something to the churchgoing lifestyle.”

  “At the very least, you know where the kids are on Wednesday and Sunday.” Baker rubbed his head. “Let’s talk to the good doctor and find out what other games Gret likes to play.”

  Motor Vehicle records placed Dr. Donald J. McAfee’s house six blocks away from the Drs. Carlsons’ white contempo.

  “Must be a medico thing,” said Baker, as they headed there.

  The house was a shingle-topped ranch with an oddly sloping roofline that suggested pagoda. A little stone fountain in front and a patch of mondo grass said someone loved the whole Asian thing.

  Two vehicles were registered to McAfee, a silver Lexus sedan and a black Lexus Rx. Neither was in sight but a ten-year-old red Mustang sat in the driveway. It was dented and sagging, rust on the bumpers, a cracked rear side window.

  Texas plates.

  Lamar said, “So much for Gret not having any car. Why lie to make yourself poorer than you are?”

  “Tugging at our heartstrings,” said Baker.

  “For what reason?”

  “The little gal thinks she can sing. Maybe she’s into acting, too.”

  Not much light over the red door. They knocked.

  A gonglike chime sounded and Greta Barline’s voiced trill
ed, “One second.”

  When the door swung open, she was standing there with her blond hair all long and combed out, wearing a tiny little lace apron, spike heels and nothing else. Flour whisk in one hand, round-tipped frosting knife in the other.

  Few people look better naked than clothed. This girl was the exception. Every visible inch of her was smooth and golden and nubile and voluptuous and all sorts of other good adjectives. She’d come to the door licking her lips and grinning. But that died fast.

  Baker said, “Sorry to interrupt the production, Gret.”

  The girl’s eyes widened and then, darn if her little pink nipples didn’t get hard and all puckery around the rosellas or whatever you called them.

  Lamar said, “Dressed for business?”

  He’d never admit it but he’d been distracted by those nipples when she went after him with the frosting knife.

  They subdued her, but it took surprising effort. Even cuffed and facedown on a red silk Asian print sofa, she kept up the kicking and screaming—lot of nonsense about rape.

  The interior of the house looked like someone had raided every tourist trap in Bangkok. Lamar found Greta Barline’s clothing in the master bedroom—a wide, shag-carpeted space dominated by a huge plaster Buddha spray-painted gold. In a teak dresser, one drawer was reserved for bikinis, thongs, and crotch-less panties. A section of the walk-in closet held negligees, wife-beaters and T-shirts and three pairs of size-4 Diesel jeans. Tons of makeup and other female products in the bathroom. She’d made a real mess of the place, leaving wet towels on the floor, along with crumpled-up National Enquirers.

  Living here, on and off, when she wasn’t bedding johns and belting out karaoke.

  Lamar selected the most modest clothes he could find—a yellow tee, along with a pair of jeans—and brought them back to the living room. Maybe calling for a female officer would’ve been the smart thing but they didn’t want to wait around with this foulmouthed naked girl screaming rape.

  The detectives managed to wrestle her into the duds, but it made them sweat.

  Then Lamar remembered: no underwear. Like she’d care.

  They sat her up, and had just gotten her something to drink, when a big, florid middle-aged guy wearing a Domino Pizza delivery uniform showed up. The duds were a size too small and downright stupid-looking on a paunchy, gray-haired idiot with steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Trembling hands clutched a pizza box.

  “Dr. McAfee?”

  The dentist’s eyes got wild, as if he were contemplating escape.

  Baker said, “Bad idea, sit over there.” He took the box and inspected it, finding a packet of ribbed condoms, an aerosol can of whipped cream and some creepy-looking big old plastic beads on a string.

  “Talk about nutrition,” said Lamar.

  The dentist clutched his chest and when that didn’t work, flashed a nice set of white teeth and looked over at Greta. “Don’t know her, just met her, Officers. She insisted on coming over. It was just going to be some old-fashioned fun in the privacy of my own domicile.”

  “Fuck you!” screamed the girl. “You said I was the best!”

  McAfee’s look was ripe with pity.

  Greta Barline squinted. “I’ll kill you, you bastard. I’ll cut you like I cut him.”

  McAfee blanched. “Guess I’d better be more careful who I allow to pick me up.”

  Baker and Lamar hauled the girl out of there. When they reached the door, McAfee was still standing there in his ludicrous delivery duds.

  “May I change?”

  Baker said, “You better.”

  15

  “He deserved it.”

  Same interview room, same chairs, a different kid.

  Lamar said, “He deserved it because…”

  “He wouldn’t stand up,” said Gret Barline.

  “For what?”

  “His responsibilities.”

  “To who?”

  “All that sperm he shot around, like it was drain water.” The cuffs had been removed from the girl’s slender wrists. The heavy theatrical makeup she’d worn for her role-play with the dentist glowed salmon-orange in the bright light.

  “A fertile guy,” said Baker.

  He and Lamar were proceeding cautiously. The girl had made what could be construed as a spontaneous confession during her tirade against McAfee: if one construed “him” to mean Jack. But who knew what a judge would make of that? They hadn’t Mirandized Greta Barline out of fear that she would lawyer up.

  And because they had no grounds, just the certainty that came from years of dealing with the messes that people made of their God-given lives.

  Baker sensed the girl was a sociopath. But he wasn’t totally without sympathy. In the end human beings were frail beings.

  Now she said, “Fertile turtle,” and laughed at her own wit. Her brown eyes were hot and a little scary, maybe to the point of craziness. When they traced her NCIC records, they found out she was twenty-eight, not the twenty, twenty-one they’d assumed.

  Pushing thirty and old beyond even those years.

  Ten-year history of bad checks, trespassing, soliciting, forgery, petty larceny. She’d served maybe a total of half a year, all of it in county lockups. There were muscles in those smooth little arms. A butterfly tattoo in the small of her back. Lamar remembered how much effort it had taken for both of them to restrain her. When they booked her, she came in at a hundred and eight, fully clothed.

  He said, “So what was he supposed to stand up for?”

  “Not what, freak-a-leak, who!” she said. “He was supposed to stand up for me—his flesh and blood.”

  “You know for a fact that you’re kin?”

  “My mama told me and she don’t lie about things like that.”

  “When did she tell you?”

  “As long as I can remember. I never had a live-in dad, just foster assholes and assholes who’d come in and out to see Mama.” Another laugh. “Plenty of in-and-out. Mama was always talking about him: Jack this, Jack that.” Wicked smile. “Jack had a nice little beanstalk on him.”

  “How’d she meet him?”

  “He and Denny and Mark did a concert in San Antone.”

  Talking about the other two members of the trio like they were favorite uncles.

  “And?” said Baker.

  “And she had a friend who was working security and he got her a backstage pass and she got to meet all of them. They all liked her, but Jack liked her the most. She used to be real sexy before she put on a hundred extra pounds.”

  Pantomiming a watermelon paunch and sticking her tongue out in disgust.

  “So Jack and your mama started hanging out,” said Lamar.

  “They fucked all night is what they did,” said Gret. “And the result is moi.” She pointed to her chest.

  Nipples poking through the yellow tee, darn, he should’ve thought of a bra. Lamar said, “You’ve known your whole life.”

  “I followed his career when I’d see a computer, like in an Internet café, I’d Google him. There wasn’t much happening in the last…ten years, but I still did it. Trying to figure out if I should try.”

  “Try what?”

  “Try to meet him. Maybe he’d see me and…” Nervous laugh. “People meet me, they like me.”

  “I can see that.”

  She batted her lashes. Arched her back.

  Lamar said, “So you finally decided to…”

  “I moved to Nashville about six months ago. For my singing career, you know. So it seemed like fate when I found out he was coming here.”

  “Were you living in the Happy Night right from the beginning?”

  “A couple other places before that. Happy Night was the best of ’em.”

  “Then you got yourself a job at The T House.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  Gret drank from the Starbucks they’d brought her and rattled off the chronology. The horn-dog dentist had been one of many who’d
showed up at the motel. Since he was richer, she extended herself to him and his little stage productions. Being long-divorced with no one else in the house, McAfee decided to move the show to Brentwood for occasional fantasy games. When the tourist family complained, she figured it was time to relocate permanently.

  “When did you find out he owned a club?”

  “Soon after,” she said. “I saw the bill for the karaoke machine, he told me what it was for. I said that’s bogus cheap shit, you should get a band. He said no way, I’m losing money as is.”

  “Then you started working at the T.”

  “It was the perfect match,” she said. “I got my stage and he got me. I need to sing.”

  “Creative drive,” said Lamar.

  The term puzzled the girl but she smiled and nodded.

  He said, “So when did you intend to meet up with Mr. Jeffries?”

  “Mister Jeffries,” she said, shaking her hair and taking a long time to fluff the yellow strands. “He don’t deserve the title. He’s a dog, just like Mama said.”

  “Why’d she say that?”

  “He left her knocked up and never returned her letters.”

  “Why didn’t she file a paternity suit?”

  “She tried, got a stupid San Antone lawyer. He wrote a letter and got a call from a big-time Beverly Hills lawyer who told her the choice was take some cash now and shut your face forever, or go to court and go broke because they had the money to drag it out for years. She took the money.”

  “Your mama told you all this,” said Baker.

  “All the time,” said Gret. “All the all the all the time. It was like her favorite bedtime story.”

  “When you were a kid?”

  “Even after. What I’m saying is she told it so many times it put her to sleep.” Laughing. “She snores like a pig.”

  “What happened to the money?” Lamar asked.

  “Well, let’s see. Hmm—oh, yeah, she drank away half of it. The leftover…uh, let’s see. Oh, yeah, she smoked that away. I figure there had to be more where that came from. I’m owed.”

  “So how’d you know where to find Jack Jeffries?”