Hot Start

by David Freed

  Once inside, I was led to the second-floor office of the on-duty watch commander, a prim lieutenant of about forty with razor creases in her tan uniform shirt and the glossiest black leather gun belt I’d ever seen. She, too, seemed to know why I was there before I said anything.

  I was made to empty all of my pockets as I would if I were at the airport, flying commercially. I went through a metal detector. I was then taken to a six-foot-by-six-foot cubicle surrounded by glass and positioned inside a detective squad room. Inside the cubicle were a metal table bolted to the floor and two metal desk chairs, unpadded. I was made to sign and date a statement saying I would be prosecuted fully if I were caught smuggling in any contraband, and another statement promising that I would not hold Rancho Bonita County responsible were I to meet injury or death inside the jail. Then I waited. For once, I didn’t mind cooling my heels. The air conditioning was on.

  After about ten minutes, Birch was brought in, wrists chained to his waist over an orange jumpsuit. His dark wild hair matched his eyes. One of the two escorting deputies freed Birch’s hands as he sat opposite me, on the other side of the table. The other deputy knelt and padlocked Birch’s manacled ankles to a steel eyebolt embedded in the cement floor.

  “So, you and my cousin Savannah,” he said after we were alone. “I didn’t really know Savannah. She was older than me. Met her once, I think, twice maybe. I was little. She was a real knockout.”

  “That she was.”

  I asked him if he’d been read his rights. He said he had, and that he’d refused to talk pending a meeting with his defense attorney, whoever that would turn out to be.

  “Uncle Gil told my mother he was gonna help get me a good lawyer. I guess that’s why you’re here, huh? To make sure he’s not wasting his money?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Look, I didn’t do it,” Birch said. “I didn’t shoot those people.”

  “Who was it then?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Did you ever threaten to hurt Roy Hollister for killing wild animals?”

  “No.”

  “You never sent him any letters telling him to stop the safaris or he was going to pay?”

  “What’re you talking about? Letters? No. Never.”

  Birch avoided my eyes and kept looking distractedly through the glass at people passing by in the corridor outside our cubicle, or up at the tiny video camera trained on us from the ceiling, or down at his meaty hands, which he kept flexing and massaging.

  “Where were you the night Hollister and his wife were killed?”

  “I have no idea. I can’t remember.”

  “That would be the wrong answer.”

  “OK, fine. I’m pretty sure I was home that night.”

  “. . . Pretty sure? Dino, the DA’s about to fire a full broadside at you, two counts of murder, and ‘pretty sure’ is the best you can do?”

  “Fine. I was home. The whole night.”

  “You can prove that?”

  “Sure,” Birch said, rubbing his hands, “why not?”

  “What did you do that night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not a trick question, Dino. I mean, what did you do at home that night? A crossword puzzle? Rotate your shoe trees? Organize your silverware drawer? I need specifics. Your uncle needs specifics.”

  “I watched some TV, I guess, made myself something to eat, brushed my teeth, went to bed. How the hell am I supposed to remember?” He rubbed his temples. “Christ, this is a nightmare. The cops are telling me they have a witness that can put me at the scene that night.”

  “What’s the witness’s name?”

  “I don’t know. Some guy who lives down the street or something.”

  “But just so we’re clear, you were at home that night. All night. Correct?”

  “Jesus, Logan, I just told you that. Yes. Correct. I was home. All night.”

  “Were you with anybody? Anybody come over?”

  “. . . No.”

  He’d hesitated—the first time he’d done that.

  “So what you’re telling me,” I said, “is that you’ve got nobody who can vouch for your whereabouts that night, correct?”

  Dino looked away and chewed on a fingernail before nodding in the affirmative.

  “In essence, then, you have no alibi.”

  He glared at me. “I thought you were here to help me, man. I thought that’s why my uncle sent you.”

  Birch’s left carotid artery was throbbing visibly. The cubicle we were sitting in was about sixty-five degrees, but he was sweating. A lot.

  “I can’t . . .” He wiped a trembling palm across his mouth.

  “Can’t what, Dino?”

  “I can’t talk about this right now.”

  “Why not?”

  He said nothing.

  “You seem a little scared, Dino.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Are you telling me somebody’s trying to frame you?”

  He nodded.

  “Who would that be?”

  He shrugged, then looked up at me, his eyes pleading. “I don’t know exactly.”

  “What about Pierce Walton?”

  “The congressman? Why would he frame me?”

  Dino looked down and shook his head. “I voted for the guy last time he ran,” he said. “Beyond that . . .”

  “Do you own any guns, Dino?”

  “No.”

  “When was the last time you fired one?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  “You went to sniper school at Fort Benning, correct? Isn’t that where the army trains its snipers?”

  Birch looked up. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Whoever shot the Hollisters did so from considerable range. He had to have known about how to compensate for bullet drop and doping the wind. He had to have known ballistic coefficients to pull off shots like that. You don’t learn that kind of stuff plinking BB rifles in the backyard.”

  “Look, I told you. I never threatened Roy Hollister. I didn’t murder him. I’m not a murderer. I fight murderers, every single day of my life. I protect animals who can’t protect themselves, OK? It’s what I do.”

  I watched him and waited.

  “You think I did it,” he said.

  “I don’t know what I think,” I said.

  He turned his head away and his nostrils flared. “This conversation,” he said, “is over.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I nodded through the glass to a deputy standing guard outside the room and pushed back from the table.

  “Do me a favor,” Birch said as I got up to go. “Tell my uncle thanks for nothing.”

  THE LOCAL press corps was gone by the time I exited the building. Only Danika Quinn was left. She was wearing a gray pencil skirt, five-inch stilettos, and a sleeveless green top, flipping through pages of her notebook. I was halfway across the parking lot to my truck before she noticed me and came running.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Danika Quinn.”

  “They teach you that in journalism school?”

  “Teach me what?”

  “How to say, ‘Hey,’ to strangers you’re trying to establish a rapport with so you can pump them for information?”

  “Too casual?”

  “Maybe a little.” I climbed into my truck. “Where’d all your other reporter buddies go?”

  “There was supposed to be a press conference here to talk about Birch’s arrest, so everybody showed up, but then they decided to call it off until after he’s arraigned. And, by the way, they’re not my buddies. They’re my competitors. Can we talk? Off the record?”

  “There’s no such thing as off the record.”

  “Hey, I’m a professional journalist. I protect my sources. If you tell me something is between you and me, you can take it to the bank.”

  “There’s that word again.”

  “What word?—oh, yeah.”

  I turn
ed the ignition. Quinn leaned in, giving me a good look at her décolletage. Clasped to the open neck of her blouse was the top of a slightly oversized ballpoint pen.

  “You’re a flight instructor,” she said, “out at the airport, right?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  She smiled. “Let’s just say I have my sources. I’m wondering how a flight instructor rates an audience with an accused double murderer even before the guy meets with his attorney.”

  “The world works in mysterious ways.”

  I gave her a wink as I drove off. Something told me I’d be seeing her again.

  SIX

  Mrs. Schmulowitz, my landlady, insisted on cooking me an early dinner that afternoon in return for my having given her a ride home from the airport. With the oppressive heat, I had little appetite, but she was making her famous shakshuka— eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce—and I couldn’t exactly say no. I’d had shakshuka in Libya and Morocco, among other areas of operation. Mrs. Schmulowitz’s was hands down the best.

  “How about some apple cake too? And none of that gluten-free nonsense either. We’re gluten-tolerant around here, baby,” she said as she flitted about her kitchen, getting out flour and mixing bowls, a five-foot, ninety-pound typhoon.

  “I’m really not all that hungry, Mrs. Schmulowitz. Please don’t trouble yourself.”

  “Trouble? What trouble? You’re a growing boy.”

  They say circulation worsens the older you get. Mrs. Schmulowitz was well past older. Her age matched the temperature in her house, somewhere in the high eighties. Still it seemed to me somewhat out of character that she’d changed into sweatpants, fuzzy Ugg slippers, and a thick, New York Giants hoodie since returning home from her trip back East.

  “Are you feeling OK, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”

  “Me? Never better.”

  “You do know it’s ridiculously hot in here, right?”

  “What do I look like, a shmendrik?” She put a match to a burner on her vintage Wedgewood stove. “Abso-positively, it’s hot in here, bubby. I did some carb loading on vacation, scarfed down a few too many knishes because who wouldn’t? They’re delicious! I’m sweating off the chicken fat, baby. Tomorrow, I’m gonna run a 5K.”

  She chopped tomatoes and cracked open eggs and droned on about how wonderful it was seeing former students and old boyfriends back in Brooklyn. I tried to pay attention, but the heat inside her kitchen was starting to get to me. I excused myself and assured her I’d be back in a few minutes.

  I made sure Kiddiot’s water bowl inside the garage was full, then I went and sat down on the hammock outside and called my former father-in-law again, to brief him on my jailhouse interview with his nephew.

  I’d left two messages for him earlier in the day, the first as I waited for Mrs. Schmulowitz’s flight to arrive, and the second after I’d dropped her back home and gone swimming, trying to cool off in the ocean. This time Gil Carlisle answered his phone on the first ring. It was 0200 hours in Geneva. He sounded like I’d gotten him out of bed.

  “You’re telling me Dino did it?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying, Gil. He denied any involvement. But what I’m saying is, he said a few things, displayed some behavior that from my perspective didn’t engender what I would describe as complete confidence in his innocence. Somebody else could come along and interpret his words and body language much differently. If I knew Dino better, observed him over a longer period of time, I’d have a better sense of whether or not he was being truthful with me.”

  “Did he talk to you about this whole ‘being framed’ thing?”

  “He refused. He was scared. About what I couldn’t tell.”

  “You think there’s any truth to it, somebody else trying to pin all this on him?”

  “Look, all I know, Gil, is that somebody, the DA, the police, must have some fairly solid evidence against the kid or they wouldn’t have taken him into custody.”

  Carlisle sighed over the phone. “My little sister’s gonna skin me alive if I don’t help him out.”

  Savannah had confided shortly after we were married that her father was worth close to half a billion dollars. Paying for the best attorney money could buy to represent his nephew, even in a losing cause, would’ve still been pocket change to Gil Carlisle. Why he was at all reluctant to get out his checkbook for Dino Birch, I couldn’t tell you, but he was more than willing to do so for me.

  “How much for your time and trouble?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t give me that, Cordell, I know you gotta make a living. What do you need? Name it.”

  Closure would’ve been too much to ask for. I told him he could buy me a burrito when we saw each other next. We left it at that.

  I punched in Alicia Rosario’s number after I signed off. I wanted to make sure she’d made it back to San Diego OK and to tell her again how sorry I was about the way things had gone between us that morning, but she didn’t pick up.

  THE SHAKSHUKA was not merely to die for, it was to kill for. Mrs. Schmulowitz and I were watching the Weather Channel and dining off TV trays in her living room, which had cooled off not at all.

  “Will you look at this nonsense?” she said, pointing to the screen of her ancient console Magnavox. “Twenty-four hours a day, all those nice-looking people have to stand in front of all those maps, so they can all tell us what it’s like outside. We had something like this when I was growing up in Brooklyn. It was called a window.”

  “I’d be happy to watch something else, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

  “Go. Knock yourself out.”

  I got up, wiping the sweat from of my forehead with a paper napkin, and rotated the channel selector to the local news, just in time to catch the lead-in to Danika Quinn’s story on the latest developments in the Hollister case.

  She described how newly released autopsy results showed that the couple had been shot with what Quinn described as “high caliber, 7.62 millimeter hunting bullets,” and how Dino Birch’s court-appointed lawyer had agreed to a request by the district attorney’s office that Birch’s arraignment be delayed a week giving both sides a chance to firm up their respective arguments. In the interim, Quinn claimed to have scored an “exclusive interview” with a witness identified as Jackson Gia- matti, a money manager who lived down the street. According to Quinn, Giamatti had told police investigators that on the night of the killings, he was out jogging when he observed a black, vintage Chevy Camaro with chrome wheels cruise slowly past the Hollisters’ estate.

  “And you’re positive that was the car,” Quinn said, sticking her microphone in Giamatti’s grill.

  “No doubt in my mind,” Giamatti said.

  Quoting unnamed sources, Quinn reported that California Department of Motor Vehicle records showed a black, 1982 Camaro as being registered to Dino Birch.

  Then the focus of her story shifted—to none other than me.

  “Wait a minute, hold the phone,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said excitedly, leaning forward on her sofa to get a closer view, “is that you? On television?”

  “Apparently.”

  There I stood, on camera, talking to deputies in the jail parking lot about the car thieves I’d helped detain. Only it wasn’t me who could be heard on screen. It was Quinn’s voice-over:

  “. . . We’ve since learned that this man, identified as Cordell Logan, a former air force pilot and currently a civilian flight instructor at the Rancho Bonita Airport, was given special access to meet with Birch in jail earlier today. A sheriff’s spokesman would not disclose the purpose of Mr. Logan’s visit, but sources inside the department told me that he has been hired as part of Birch’s defense team.”

  “You finally got a real job? Mazeltov!”

  “No, Mrs. Schmulowitz. She got it wrong. It’s not a job. I was asked to do somebody a favor. I went and talked to the guy for a few minutes, that’s all.”

  Quinn’s story cut to the jail parking lot and me, in the driver’s seat of
my truck, looking up directly into the camera. The ballpoint pen I’d seen clasped inside the neckline of her blouse had been a miniature video recorder.

  “We attempted to speak with Mr. Logan, but he refused to comment other than to state, and I quote, ‘The world works in mysterious ways.’ ”

  The camera tech followed my truck leaving the parking lot.

  “Danika Quinn, your Central Coast Action News.”

  “You should be on TV full-time, bubby, you know that? You got the look.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

  I couldn’t change the channel fast enough. We watched Wheel of Fortune and sweated. I did, anyway. Mrs. Schmulowitz seemed oblivious to the heat.

  FOR THE second night in a row, I undressed and bedded down in the backyard on the hammock. Kiddiot slept with me. More specifically, he slept on me. Imagine trying to get some shut-eye when it’s so warm outside, you fear you might spontaneously combust at any moment. Now drape a furry heating pad across your bare chest and turn it on high. That’s how hot it felt.

  The last time I could remember being so uncomfortable on a summer night was when I was with Alpha, deep in the Arabian Desert. We were tracking a pair of Saudi nationals suspected of helping orchestrate a car bombing in Riyadh. Thirty-four Westerners had been killed, including eight Americans. The manhunt ended in a Bedouin camp where we found the two trying to pass themselves off as shepherds, and shot them when they tried to resist capture. The water pump on the Land Rover we’d rented out of Dammam decided to take a dump soon thereafter, and Centcom claimed they had no helicopters available to come pick us up until the following morning. The Casio Pathfinder watch I wore on my wrist back then featured a fairly functional thermometer. At 0300 in the desert, it registered 122 degrees. Mrs. Schmulowitz’s backyard wasn’t quite that bad, but close.

  I don’t remember falling asleep in the hammock, or Kiddiot climbing off of me and up into the oak. I do recall, though, being startled back into consciousness by my phone making a buzzing noise in the grass below me. I answered it before I was fully awake.