Hot Start

by David Freed

  His cowhide face conveyed puzzlement. “I thought you said you wanted to talk cars.”

  “Next time.” I was walking away when I remembered. “Oh, by the way, your old lady told me to tell you you’re out of toilet paper.”

  The aging surfer rolled his eyes.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I had Taco Bell for lunch, a couple of Burrito Supremes that I ordered at the drive-through window and ate in the parking lot. I was anxious to meet with Dino Birch, to ask him about his ties to Eric Ivory. But when you’re a garden-variety civilian and your ambition is to meet with an inmate pending arraignment on no-bail, double-murder charges, you don’t simply waltz into the county jail and chat. Weeks can elapse before you get in, if you get in at all. You need somebody with pull. I’d already hit up Buzz once too many times. The only other influential person I know who came to mind, who had an inherent familial interest in Birch’s well-being, was Gil Carlisle, my former father-in-law.

  “Last time you and I spoke,” he said over the phone in that sugary drawl of his, “y’all but told me my nephew was guilty. Now you’re saying he’s not?”

  “I never said he was guilty, Gil, and I’m not saying he’s innocent now, but something’s come up. I’ve developed information on a possible other suspect who Dino apparently had contact with in the past. I need to find out when he had that contact and to what extent. That’s why I need to get in to see him ASAP.”

  “I’ll talk to his lawyer.”

  “Lawyers take forever and they always say no. I need to see your nephew right away, Gil. As in today.”

  “What’s so important, it can’t wait ’til tomorrow? The boy’s locked up tight. He ain’t getting out anytime soon.”

  “He might be if this lead pans out.”

  Carlisle said he’d see what he could do.

  Two hours later, I was sitting at a scarred, green metal table inside a five-by-seven-foot lawyer’s conference room at the Rancho Bonita County Jail. Shackled opposite me in an orange jail jumpsuit was a recalcitrant Dino Birch. He refused to even look at me.

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “You don’t even know why I’m here,” I said.

  “I could give a flip why you’re here. My uncle told me to talk to you. I’ll give you two minutes.”

  “Do you know a guy named Eric Ivory?”

  “Why?”

  “Humor me and answer the question.”

  “Yeah, I know Eric—or did, until he screwed me.”

  I sat back and let Birch vent. It was like sticking a pin in a balloon. They’d met months earlier, he said, after Ivory left a message on the windshield of Birch’s Firebird, expressing interest in buying the car from him. Ivory’s note told Birch to name his best price and he’d exceed it by $1,000. They arranged to meet afterward over a beer at Dooligan’s, an Irish-themed pub downtown, and quickly struck up a friendship of sorts despite their nearly twenty-year age difference.

  “We had stuff in common,” Birch said.

  “Define stuff.”

  “Beer. Babes. Helping wild animals. Plus, he said he was a vet. National Guard. Never deployed, but he seemed like he could definitely relate to all the shit we went through over there.”

  Birch said he was desperate for money to keep his nonprofit, Helping Endangered Animals Thrive, afloat and told Ivory that he might be potentially interested in selling his Firebird for the right price, but that he’d first have to do some research to determine the car’s fair market value.

  “He tells me he’s coming into some money soon and will pay anything for the car,” Birch said. “I tell him I’m not out to take advantage of him or anything, and that it’s gonna take me awhile to get back to him with a number. He asks me what I’m so busy with. I tell him I’m organizing a fund-raiser for endangered species—locking in the venue, booking the band, all that. He says he might be interested in helping out. I tell him we’re having a silent auction. He tells me, ‘Hey, I have a mobile cleaning company. We detail cars and planes.’ He tells me he’ll donate one free detail. I’m like, wow, that’s cool. Here’s my card. Call me.”

  “He told you he was coming into money?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Did he tell you how much?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “OK, so then what happened?”

  “Nothing. I finished my beer and never heard back from him. I sold the Bird to some old dude down in Windward Cove and bought a Camaro for cheap off a lot down in Oxnard. Different engine and tranny but the same basic body styling, which I like, so, you know, whatever.”

  “You gave Ivory your business card?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Did you write anything on the card?”

  “Why would I have written anything on . . .” Birch stopped himself. He’d been looking down and away. He was now looking directly at me. “He said he worked for Toni Hollister. He said Toni might be interested, privately, in helping me out with my fund-raiser because she felt guilty about how Roy made his money, slaughtering game animals and all. I was like, hey, I’m hurting bad enough for funding I’ll take anybody, so he gives me her address and cell number. There wasn’t anything to write it down on, so I got out another one of my cards, but the bar was getting loud—happy hour—and I couldn’t hear all what he was saying, so he reached over, took the card, and fixed what I wrote. Then the tab came. We wrestled over that for a little while, and I guess he just forgot to give that other card back. It seemed like a stupid idea to me, anyway, asking Toni Hollister for money. I never thought about it again until just now.”

  “OK, that should do it for now.” I got up and patted the window with my palm. The deputy standing guard in the hallway unlocked the door. “Thanks for the two minutes.”

  Birch looked confused. “You want to tell me what the hell this is all about?”

  “You’ll know soon enough if I’m right.”

  DINO BIRCH’S business card had been found in the hills above the Hollister mansion, in the lair where a sniper had lain in wait one steamy summer night. On the back of the card, in Birch’s own handwriting, was the couple’s address and Toni’s cell phone number. That kind of evidence in a criminal investigation would ordinarily be considered a slam dunk. I knew it to be otherwise. Eric Ivory had shot the Hollisters and planted that card to make it look as if Birch had been the triggerman. Ivory had done work for the Hollisters, cleaning their airplane and, apparently, their cars. He’d grown especially fond of Toni—or so he claimed. Why, then, would he have shot her and her husband? Were she and Ivory sleeping together? Had he really served in the National Guard? If so, what sort of weapons training had he received? Did he own any rifles? Could he account for his whereabouts that night?

  As I walked out of the jail and through the parking lot toward my truck, I still had more questions than answers. I was distracted and off my game. You couldn’t have picked a more perfect moment to jump me.

  He came up from behind me without warning and clamped a hand on my left shoulder as if to turn me. Reflexively I rammed my left elbow into his solar plexus and spun right, catching him in an arm bar, when I realized the he was a she—reporter Danika Quinn, whose skull I was about to slam into the pavement. I let her go immediately.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”

  “You’re sorry?” She was bent over, clutching her stomach. “I’m trying to lighten your day, have a little fun, and you almost kill me? Jesus, Logan.”

  “I told you. I didn’t know it was you. Are you hurt? Do you want me to call the paramedics?”

  “And pay them with what insurance? I work for a local news station, not NBC. Just gimme a minute.” She breathed deeply, stooped and wincing, hands on her hips.

  “Have you been following me, Danika?”

  “What? Following you? No. Definitely not. OK, maybe a little.” She’d been digging deeper into the Hollister case, she said, and had begun to seriously doubt Dino Birch’s guilt. “I got to
thinking about that Arab guy you mentioned with the whole, you know, don’t-be-too-hasty-before-accusing-somebody-of-murder thing?”

  “Publilius, you mean.”

  “Yeah. That guy. By the way, Grant Kessler, the Creatures United guy? I checked him out with my sources. He was on a river cruise in Germany when the Hollisters bought it. So I think we can pretty much rule him out.”

  She straightened herself, rubbing her lower back, wincing.

  “You sure you’re OK, Danika?”

  “You better hope so,” she said, “or you’ll be hearing from my lawyers, Greed and Associates.”

  I smiled. Quinn may not have been my cup of tea in the dating department, attractive as she was, but I had to admire her spunk.

  “Anyway,” she said, “what I was going to tell you before I was so rudely roughed up is, I just can’t believe Birch or anybody would’ve left their card up there by mistake. The cops think he messed up but, I mean, c’mon, nobody’s that incompetent. And I know for a fact from my sources in the department that they haven’t found the gun yet, so . . .”

  “So you figured that by following me, I’d lead you to the real killer.”

  “Hey, what can I say? It’s a slow news day.”

  I got in my truck. Danika leaned into the open window.

  “So,” Quinn said, “what did Dino have to say? You did talk to him, right? Anything new? Was it about Congressman Walton? Because you can’t believe some of the bizarre sex stuff I’ve been picking up about that guy.”

  “Nice seeing you again, Danika.”

  I fired up the engine.

  “Hey, do you know who Pete McManus is? He’s a pilot, like you.”

  “I know who he is,” I said.

  “Well, did you know that he was the one who was having the big hot and heavy affair with Toni? That throws a twist into things, don’t you think?”

  “He’s clean.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Quinn was looking at me with the corners of her mouth turned up, like she knew something I didn’t.

  “What’re you telling me, Danika?”

  She pulled her head out of the window, glanced both ways to make sure we were alone, then leaned in once more. “Rumor has it,” Danika said, lowering her voice, as if someone might overhear the bombshell she was about to drop, “that Toni left Pete McManus some money in her will. I heard six figures. Not exactly chump change, right?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  Quinn shrugged coyly. “I have my sources.”

  “People have been murdered for a lot less,” I said.

  It was one of those mindless, throwaway lines to fill the void while your brain works overtime: if Toni Hollister had, in fact, left McManus an inheritance, I wondered if she’d left Eric Ivory one too. Hadn’t Ivory shown me his fancy new watch? Hadn’t I seen him loading up on cases of crab legs and top-shelf wines at Costco? Hadn’t he bought himself a classic muscle car with little apparent regard to price? The guy was talking about taking flying lessons and shopping for a high performance airplane. You don’t do all of that without money. For somebody who’d earned his keep hand-to-mouth for as long as I’d known him, washing and waxing other people’s machines, he suddenly seemed to have a lot of it.

  “If Toni left Pete McManus anything,” I said, “there must’ve been a will filed with the court. Wills are public record.”

  “Wills are public?” Quinn was skeptical. “No way.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “You’re on. How much do you want to lose?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you everything I know about the case.”

  “Plus you have to take me to dinner,” Quinn said.

  “Fair enough. And if I’m right, you have to promise to stop following me and leave me alone.”

  Quinn smiled. “FYI, I like Thai food.”

  I felt sorry for her.

  THE CLERK’S office of the Rancho Bonita County Superior Court’s Probate Division wasn’t what I envisioned. I was expecting mahogany counters and marble floors, with a towering ceiling and antique light fixtures, the walls lined with leather-bound law books. Hushed, dignified. What I found instead was ugly and utilitarian. The floors were tired linoleum. Naked fluorescent tubes hung from overhead. Muffler shops offered more charm.

  “Name of the decedent?”

  The clerk, or whatever her title was, stood on the other side of the counter, her long, twig-like fingers poised above a filthy keyboard as she stared into an old computer monitor, one of those fat, cathode ray tube units that nobody uses anymore. She wore sensible shoes and the disinterested air of a career civil servant nearing retirement, phoning it in.

  “Toni Hollister.” I spelled out both names.

  Danika Quinn waited beside me without saying anything. The clerk pecked at her keyboard and stared at the computer. “Could it be Antonia Hollister?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  Squinting and tapping a pencil stub against her teeth, the clerk leaned closer to the monitor, then jotted a number on a note pad, tore off the page, and disappeared into the stacks.

  “So,” Quinn said, “are you seeing anyone?”

  “You mean a shrink? No. Not that some people haven’t suggested it.”

  “Not a shrink. I meant, do you have a girlfriend?”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, you know, that thing that’s the opposite of a boyfriend.”

  “And you’re asking me this why?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s just that, you’ll be taking me out to dinner. I wouldn’t want to, you know, upset anybody.”

  “She’ll understand,” I said, lying.

  Whatever disappointment I saw in Quinn’s eyes was quickly veneered with a forced smile.

  “Good for you,” she said.

  Should I have been honest and told her that aside from my very tentative relationship with Alicia Rosario down in San Diego, there was no one in my life? What would the truth have gained me? A bed buddy for the night? One of those always uncomfortable kisses in the morning and that inevitably awkward, “I’ll call you” moment? I was too old for all that. Besides I’d already lied to Quinn plenty.

  With some reluctance, I’d let her tag along with me to the court, to ostensibly confirm what she claimed her sources had told her: that Toni Hollister had included Pete McManus in her will. What I really wanted to find out was whether Eric Ivory was also named as a beneficiary. I had amassed considerable evidence against Ivory. All I needed was a viable reason to explain what might’ve compelled him to pick off the Hollisters in their swimming pool. I wondered if Ivory’d been involved with Toni romantically, as McManus had, and had decided to do away with the couple in a fit of blind rage after she refused to leave her husband—one of those, “If I can’t have you, nobody can” moves. Or was it all about the money? Jealousy may be high on the list of motives for murder, but greed is hard to top.

  “Here you go.” The clerk returned with a manila file folder and slid it across the counter. Printed on the color-coded tab was, “HOLLISTER, Antonia R.”

  “You’re not permitted to remove the file from the immediate area.” She walked back to her desk and made a phone call, oblivious to other citizens awaiting service at the counter.

  Quinn sighed. “You were right. It’s public record.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t be. You learn something new every day.”

  Fastened in chronological order inside the file jacket was what I took to be the usual probate forms. Several drew legal distinctions between Toni’s personal estate and the larger, more valuable community property assets she shared with her late husband. As I flipped through what seemed like endless pages of boilerplate, my eyes began to glaze over—until I came to Toni Hollister’s list of who was to get what upon her demise.

  “Talk about generous,” Quinn said, reading over my shoulder.

  Generous, indeed. Everything laudator
y said about Toni Hollister in life about her warm, giving heart, was confirmed in death on that list. The Rancho Bonita Symphony, the ballet, and opera each got $100,000. The Rancho Bonita Zoo was designated $50,000 as were the local semipro baseball team, the Girl Scouts, the Cub Scouts, the Union Rescue Mission, and several other nonprofits—including, curiously enough, Dino Birch’s animal defense fund.

  Sixteen individuals were listed as beneficiaries and bequeathed various sums of money, each six figures. I recognized only one name on the list, and it wasn’t Pete McManus’s. He apparently hadn’t made the cut, but Eric Ivory had—to the tune of $125,000.

  “So much for your sources,” I said.

  “Win some, lose some.” She ran her index finger down the list. “I don’t recognize any of these names. Do you?”

  “No.”

  Another lie, I admit, but one I’d committed for a valid reason. I planned to go straight to the police with what I now knew about Eric Ivory. I didn’t need Quinn breaking any stories and giving him advance notice that he was now in my crosshairs.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  We’d driven to the courthouse separately, which made it

  easier to part ways after we walked outside.

  “I was really looking forward to Thai food,” Quinn said.

  “Maybe next time.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  She offered to buy me a cup of coffee to discuss what new angles “we” might pursue together in the Hollister case. I told her I had people to see, which was true, and ambled toward my truck without letting on about Eric Ivory or my intention to drive immediately to police headquarters, a half-mile away.

  “What is it about me you find so distasteful?” Quinn asked, as I turned to walk away from her.

  “I don’t find you distasteful, Danika. I find what you do for a living distasteful.”

  “The public has a right to know, Logan. My job is to make sure they do. I don’t see how that’s so awful.”

  I stopped and turned. Tears were spilling down her cheeks. In my typically blunt, inadvertently tone-deaf style, I’d come down too hard.

  “You know something you’re not telling,” she said. “I can feel it.”