by D. F. Bailey
“It sounds like an obvious setup. I mean, wouldn’t Toeplitz suspect something? Given all the tension between them, why would he get in a car with them?”
“Not with his condition.”
“Which is what?”
“Asperger’s Syndrome. Apparently he hid it well, but he couldn’t decode any complicated social situations.” Finch leaned back in the chair now and took a last sip of his Americano. “I have a friend with the same affliction. It’s a remarkable combination of intelligence and social dysfunction.” He looked at her and felt a tinge of embarrassment. “Of course you know all that.”
Jennie let this pass. A worried look crossed her face. Finch’s theory explained a lot of her own concerns, but she wanted to find the holes in it. She’d need to have answers to any questions that Gruman would put to her about launching a formal inquest.
“If he hid his Asperger’s so well, how did your source know about it?”
Finch smiled and held up his phone again. He remembered the words the senator had used to scold his daughter: that she and Toeplitz were joined at the hip. “That’s protected, too.”
She looked across the restaurant to the cashier. The breakfast crowd was moving on and the room was now almost empty.
“So what do you need to launch an inquest, Jennie? We’ve established the criminal means and opportunity, and I have on record a witness who saw Justin and Evan Whitelaw leave with Toeplitz in two separate cars. Then that evening the boys returned together in one vehicle.”
She narrowed her eyes. She had one more question, one to which she already knew the answer. “And their motive?”
Finch frowned. How could she bother to ask? “To eliminate the one person who could send the partners in Whitelaw, Whitelaw & Joss to jail for twenty years.”
She nodded. “If the forensic report shows that the slugs we found in the bear match the brass you found on the road, then I’ll go to Gruman and demand an investigation. If,” she repeated.
“And if he blocks you?”
She thought a moment. “Then I’ll go above him. To the Oregon State Police.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mark Gruman parked the police cruiser in front of the Argyle house and cut the ignition. There were a lot of approaches he could take to this visit and on the drive over from the county sheriff’s office he’d decided to play the gentleman’s game.
There’d been a lot of uneasy tension between him and Ethan Argyle over the decades, nothing ever overt, nothing that ever caused Gruman to employ any of the legal authority empowered by his position. The tension, whatever remained of it, came from their teenage years at Astoria High School. Millie Pitt, once Gruman’s girlfriend, had gone off to Portland for the summer following their tenth grade. When she came back, she’d told him that she didn’t want to see him in September. Gruman assumed she’d met someone and that she’d made a long-distant commitment to this dude, whoever he was. Her estrangement lasted until the Christmas holidays. Then it dawned on Gruman that Millie Pitt had given her affection to Ethan Argyle, a local boy two years older than Millie, who’d returned from his first term at Oregon State University.
Gruman knew that the gentleman’s game also dictated the charade he now had to play. The Glock found on Donnel Smeardon’s corpse was the same pistol he’d confiscated from the boy the night he apprehended him during the drug bust at Jackie Spitzer’s. The same pistol he’d returned to Smeardon during the run out to Clatsop Spit on the Gold Coaster. The same pistol owned by Ethan Argyle — and jacked by his own son, Ben — to satisfy some unknown obligation Ben owed Donnel Smeardon. Could Ben also be ensnared in Smeardon’s pot smuggling schemes?
No, not likely. Gruman exhaled two long plumes of smoke from his nostrils and crushed the butt of his Lucky Strike in the cruiser’s ashtray. Still, it would be worth seeing the look of doubt on the faces of Ethan and Millie Argyle when he presented them with the fact that their love child stood at the center of some serious misdemeanor. Or even — he let this thought hang in his mind as he walked toward their doorstep — a possible felony.
“I hope I’m not disturbing your lunch hour,” he said to Ethan and Millie after she’d served them coffee and a plate of freshly baked banana bread. He stretched out his legs under the coffee table and examined the living room fireplace. The high-efficiency insert glowed with a dry warmth that insulated the house from the damp air flowing in from the Pacific. A load of quartered fir logs lay stacked against the brick wall next to the fireplace. Enough fuel to last a week. Gruman assumed another two or three cords of wood were stored under the eavestrough outside the house.
“No. At least not today.” Millie frowned, a look that suggested she still bore some disdain for him. And her memory of him.
“Tell me, is Ben at home?”
“He’s at the school gym.” A note of tension lifted Ethan’s voice. Until now, there’d been an outside possibility that Gruman could be making a purely social call.
“Mmm.” He nodded. “Perhaps that’s just as well.” He let this idea settle as he smiled at Millie.
She couldn’t return his simpering look. “Mark, has something happened to Ben?”
“No.” He waved a hand to suggest he didn’t mean to alarm them. “God, no. Nothing too serious.” He smiled. “Well, I hope not, anyway.”
“Mark,” Ethan said and leaned forward, “what are you saying?”
“Ah, damn it.” He shook his head and slapped both hands onto his thighs. “Let me get right to the point. Ethan, as I remember, you own a Glock nine-millimeter pistol, right?”
A look of surprise crossed Ethan’s face. “Yes. I’ve got it locked up in the gun room.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
He studied Ethan’s face. “A half an hour ago Biff Winslow identified a Glock 9 that was found on the corpse of Donnel Smeardon.”
“Donnel Smeardon?” Millie gasped and glanced across the room. “Is that who was found out in the spit last night?”
Gruman turned his attention to her and nodded. He tried to sense what she might be feeling but he couldn’t decipher the grimace of shock on her face. A look of emptiness. Of bleakness. What could Donnel Smeardon mean to her?
“Did you know him?”
“I met him just the once.” Her voice drained into a vacant whisper. “Ben had him over one afternoon.”
“A few weeks ago,” Ethan added.
“You knew him too?”
“Knew him? No. He’s a student at the school, but not in any of my classes.” Ethan shook his head. “What does this have to do with my Glock?”
“I’m not sure. Not yet, anyway.” He pulled two photographs from his pocket and laid them on the coffee table. One was of a Glock 9, the other a close-up showing the pistol’s serial number. “Are these familiar?”
Ethan lifted the image of the serial number in his right hand and frowned. He couldn’t remember the exact numerical sequence, but this was damn close. “It might be,” he allowed.
Gruman tipped his head to one side. “If it is, then your gun was found on Smeardon’s body when he was hauled onto the Osprey Nest.”
“I can’t see how that’s possible.” Ethan shook his head. “Let me get it. I’ll show you.” He stood and looked around the room, stumbled a moment as if he weren’t sure where the gun room might be.
“Do you mind if I come with you?” Gruman stood and took a step forward.
Ethan waved a hand in the air. “Sure. Of course.” A feeling of indecision ebbed through him. As he walked down the hallway past the kitchen his mind flooded with doubts. Where was the key? Where was the gun? Where was Ben?
When a sense of purpose returned, he drew the gun room key from his desk drawer and led Gruman to the locked closet near the garage. The door opened and he clicked on the light. The room was little more than a sealed cubical. On the wall facing them stood a rack housing six guns of various types and vintage. The two Winchester rifles that he and Ben had used on Saddle Mountain
, two matching Benelli shot guns and two AR-15s. Ethan tested the cage with his hand to ensure it was secure.
“You ever fire those 15s?” Gruman rolled his tongue over his teeth.
“Once or twice a month.” He was surprised by the question. Gruman and Ethan belonged to the same gun club; the members shared the same views of gun ownership and maintenance.
“What about the pistols?”
Ethan pointed at the locked drawer beneath the gun rack. He hesitated, turned the key and then opened it a few inches. When he saw that the Glock was missing he drew an audible breath. “Shit.”
“Ethan, I’ve got to ask you this. It’s just procedure. Did you give your Glock 9 to Donnel Smeardon?”
“Of course not.”
“All right. What about the ammo?” Gruman’s voice was flat, steady. The same tone he’d use if he was setting the hook on a big fish he’d been waiting for years to reel in. No need to dramatize. He’d already shredded Argyle’s story and with his denial, Gruman could now build the link to the gun found on Smeardon through his son, Ben. He’d snagged Argyle and he could play him any way he wanted.
“In the bedroom.” Ethan closed the door to the gun room, locked it and led Gruman to his bedroom, then to the walk-in closet and a safe which was bolted to the floor and wall. He spun the cylinder, swung open the steel case door and examined the inventory. “Looks like everything’s here.”
“Good.” Gruman studied the safe with disinterest. He had no legal need to verify that the ammunition was secured. Instead he studied the shirts, pants, dresses, sweaters, all hung in neat rows around them. He stepped back into the bedroom and examined the furniture. A queen bed with maple head- and footboards, a matching dresser and highboy, matching night tables — everything of a piece. And all in good order. No likelihood of kinky sex here. He tried to imagine living the lives that ghosted through this house. He frowned, content with the vacant mood of the room.
“You’ve got my pistol, then?”
“We have to keep it for a while.” Gruman shrugged to suggest that the disposition of the gun extended beyond his power.
Sensing that Gruman might stand in his bedroom for a long while, Ethan led the way back to the living room. Millie still sat in her chair, her eyes glazed with a look of disbelief.
“It’s gone,” he whispered to her and glanced away, unable to explain how the pistol had come into the possession of the odd boy who Ben had brought to their house one rainy afternoon.
“What happens now?” He didn’t want to sit again. Better that Gruman move on and let them sort out the situation on their own when Ben returned.
“We’ll track down Donnel Smeardon’s activities over the past week.” He pressed his lips together. “See what it was that led to his drowning. Though that’s not always easy,” he added.
“Seems every year we lose someone out there.” Millie nodded in the direction of the ocean.
“Drowning’s the most common cause of death for adolescents,” Gruman said. “In any case, we have no evidence that your pistol was used in any way out of the ordinary. Not yet, anyway.”
Ethan walked towards the front door.
Gruman paused and looked down at Millie. He wondered about their high school years, wondered if he ever truly felt anything for her. Most likely not.
“Let me know if we can do anything to help you out with this.” Ethan swung the front door open. The moist breeze filled the hallway.
“I will.” Gruman walked away without smiling. “And tell Ben to call me as soon as he gets home. I need to talk to him so we can put this thing to rest.”
※
Ethan closed the door, and from the window he watched Gruman climb into his squad car, drive along the road and out of sight. His stomach felt empty and the emptiness knotted his belly. When he turned back to where Millie sat on the love seat, he saw her eyes welling with tears.
“Millie?” He took two steps toward her and stopped when she averted her face from him.
“It’s nothing,” she said and waved him away with a hand.
“It’s not nothing. I can hear it in your voice. And it’s more than the news about Donnel Smeardon,” he added, and walked to the loveseat and placed a hand on her shoulder.
She brushed the tears from her face and looked at her husband. She forced a smile to her lips. “I guess I’m worried about Ben. He’s done so well. The scholarship to Stanford — but now this. It could wreck everything.”
“Not if he’s not involved.” He shook his head with certainty. “I mean how could he be involved with this?”
Millie studied the fire through the glass door on the wood stove, tried to absorb the warmth radiating through the room. “Ben doesn’t need to be involved. Unless Mark Gruman decides to make him involved.”
Ethan walked past his wife and sat on the sofa facing her. “What are you saying?” He shook his head. “I don’t quite get it.”
Millie drew a long breath and tried to explain. But before she could utter a word, she broke into tears and began sobbing.
“Millie.” Ethan moved back to the love seat and sat beside his wife. His arm slipped over her shoulders and he pulled her against his chest. “What is it, darling? What’s all this?”
She took a moment to find her breath, surprised that she was so overwhelmed. How could this have festered so long without her acknowledging it? How could the old pain, buried so deep, pierce her now and with such force?
“Look, Ben’s going to be okay. I’m sure of it.” Ethan pressed his forehead against her hair, inhaled her scent.
“I know,” she said with a light gasp. “It’s not about Ben.”
“Well, whatever this is, you have to tell me,” he whispered. “I’ve never seen you like this.”
She waited another moment and swallowed what she could of the pain. “It’s Mark Gruman.”
Ethan pulled his head away from her, a slight movement, an adjustment so that he could hear what was coming.
“You remember. Before we first met.”
He nodded. “It was a high school thing. You’d just broken up with him.”
“And he promised me something.” But that was after what happened, she told herself. The promise came after what really happened.
“He promised you something?”
She had to pause again. Had to wait for the sequence of events to line up properly, the order of humiliations that destroyed the delicate part of her that night. “The day we broke up, the night I told him I couldn’t go on with him any more, he made me a promise. ‘One day Millie, I will hurt you the way you tried to hurt me. I promise you that. I will hurt you.’ He said all that. Word for word.”
Ethan took her face in his hand and looked at her eyes. He could see it there, a suffering so deep that she couldn’t describe it to him. “He hurt you then, didn’t he?”
She nodded and looked away. Then she felt the release of the torment she’d buried so deep for so long. She turned her eyes to his and felt the tears course down her cheeks. “Yes. He did,” she said. “He hurt me so badly, I could never tell you before.”
They sat together in silence, listening to the sounds of hot coals popping in the fireplace, quietly settling their bodies into one another — an old habit now renewed.
“He raped you, didn’t he.”
She nodded against his shoulder. “Yes.” A whisper.
He pressed her head to his cheek, felt her tears on his face. “I’m glad you told me, Mill. I can’t believe you kept it to yourself so long.”
As he held her, he stared at the fire pawing at the glass of the wood stove door and wondered how things would turn out now. How he could drive this misery out of their home. And when.
CHAPTER TWELVE
After his breakfast meeting with Jennie, Will returned to his motel room and began to compile background notes on Franklin Whitelaw’s twin sons, Justin and Evan. The internet, awash with thousands of entries on the boys, provided a gallery view of California’s elite. Foll
owing their birth to Whitelaw’s second wife (a former starlet who’d spoken no more than three lines in a dozen forgettable B-movies), the twins emerged as a symbol of the family’s unique brand of celebrity, wealth, power, good looks, and unrelenting self-esteem. Over twenty years a photograph of the boys appeared in the press once or twice a month. As the internet evolved, they became more prominent. Facebook provided a continuous flow of their personal escapades. Several of the boys’ friends and girlfriends published completely accessible gossip, rumors, photos and videos of the twins’ antics through their high school and college years. They thrived on the edge of scandal and excess.
But neither of them crashed through the thin restraints of what Finch called YMS: Young Male Syndrome. If they’d committed crimes and misdemeanors, these had been covered up — by a pro. Dozens of entries about the other Whitelaw children appeared alongside many of these postings, including glimpses of Gianna and her mother, Sophia, Whitelaw’s first wife. Gianna had enjoyed her parties, too, and the most recent Facebook tags included images of Gianna draped around the unsmiling Raymond Toeplitz.
The latest gossip about Whitelaw’s teenage daughters, Terri and Melody, from his third and current wife, focused on their shopping sprees on Rodeo Drive. Twenty-thousand dollars in clothes. Their mother, Sassy, grinned in the background next to a cash register. Must be fun to clutch the senator’s Amex card in one hand and the keys to his Mercedes in the other. After a few hours, Finch leaned back in his chair and pitched a few headlines that would introduce his feature article. The Kennedys of California. Better still, The Bushes of Berkeley Hills.
