by Michael Nava
She laughed. “Flatterer,” she said.
“So the answer’s no.”
“Joan and I ate dinner, watched a tape of The Awful Truth and were in bed by ten.” She smiled crookedly. “Our respective beds, I mean. No funny business there.”
“And the next day Ms. Woods returned to Michigan?”
“It was a couple of days later,” she said. “The earthquake worked her last nerve. I can’t say I blame her. L.A.’s a scary place even when the earth isn’t trying to swallow you whole.”
I liked her. She had the air of someone who’d been battered around the edges and didn’t give a damn about appearances. A truth-teller, so I asked her what she thought of Zack and Chris as a couple.
She gave it some thought. “Zack’s a little hunk, of course, but not the world’s most sophisticated guy, so when Chris first started coming around I assumed he was taking out his midlife crisis on Zack and I was all set not to like him.” She fanned wisps of smoke from her face. “But it wasn’t like that. Chris cared for him. I mean, I don’t know that it would’ve been a long-term thing, they were very different men, but the feeling between them was real.”
“How could you tell?”
“Darling, feelings are my metier,” she said. “I absorb them and save them up so I can call on them when I’m performing. I paid attention to Chris and Zack and it was a very sweet thing to see. Chris was a bit on the stodgy side, like you, love, if you don’t mind my saying so, but around Zack he was like a schoolkid with his first big crush and Zack was so proud and so happy.” Worry flickered across her face. “Where is Zack? How is he?”
“He’s at the men’s jail downtown,” I said. “He’s holding up as well as can be expected.”
“Will they let me visit him?”
“Yes, and I’m sure he’d appreciate it,” I said. “Do you think Don Ward might have been the anonymous tipster who called the cops?”
“No, not Don. He’s kind of homophobic, but it’s in that passive way of pretending not to notice, you know what I mean? As if by ignoring gay people, they don’t exist. He wouldn’t want to get mixed up in anything that happened between Chris and Zack. And anyway his wife, Donna, was very sweet on Zack, so she wouldn’t let Don do anything to hurt him.”
“What do you mean she was sweet on Zack?”
She laughed. “You dirty man. Think maternal, not erotic. Donna’s a motherly woman and Zack was clearly a boy in need of mothering. Even I was known to wipe the smudge off his cheek from time to time.”
“What about Ben Harper?”
“A himbo,” she said. “You know, a male bimbo? His tits are bigger than mine, but when it comes to IQ we’re talking double digits at best. Zack made him nervous because he’s as buff as Ben, only he’s a queer, and Ben worried about guilt by association. But did he call the cops? Only if someone else dialed for him.”
“I may need you to testify.”
“Great, where do I sign up? I’ve always wanted to be a witness. Maybe the exposure will give me a career break.” She laughed again. “I mean, it worked for Kato Kaelin, didn’t it?”
It took me another day to catch up with Ben Harper. He was staying at a place called the Double Palms Motel, not far from the apartment complex. Ben Harper was the first man I’d ever met for whom Fabio was a role model. He had the same height, girth, long blond hair and musculature of the man who’d risen from the cover of romance novels to fame and fortune and, just like Fabio, Harper liked to show it off. Tight black jeans, muscle shirt and skin that was unnaturally tan even by L.A. standards. As he thrust a big, calloused hand at me, I couldn’t help but think Sam Bligh could give this guy a career in the movies.
“You Mr. Rios?” he said, in a surprisingly pleasant tenor.
“Yes,” I said, submitting to a bone-crushing handshake. “Thanks for talking to me, Mr. Harper.”
“Ben,” he said. “Come on in. The place is kind of a mess.”
It was a standard motel room, vaguely southwestern in decor, with a queen-sized bed, bureau, TV and a couple of chairs. There were clothes everywhere, a jock strap hung from the doorknob, the remnants of fast-food meals overflowed the wastebasket and a dozen empty Dos Equis bottles lined the window sill.
“Have a seat,” he said.
I took the only chair in the room that wasn’t piled with clothes while he sat at the edge of the bed. His long, narrow face would’ve been handsome had there been a glimmer of anything in it, but he was as blank as an animal.
“I won’t take up too much of your time,” I said. “I told you on the phone I’m Zack Bowen’s lawyer. You know he’s in jail on a murder charge.”
He nodded his head with every word. “Huh-uh. Yeah, I heard from Karen. Too bad.”
“The police got an anonymous call from someone claiming to be one of Zack’s neighbors, saying that he saw Zack the night of the murder carrying what the police think was the murder weapon. I wondered if you made that call?”
“Nope,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.
“It was the night of the earthquake,” I said. “Around one in the morning. Were you at home?”
He shrugged his mountainous shoulders. “Guess so. Probably, but I didn’t see a thing.”
“That’s odd,” I said, “because none of the other tenants saw anything either. So it was either you or no one.”
It took him a minute to work this out. “So what are you saying, that I’m lying?”
“You didn’t like Zack much, did you?”
He fidgeted. “Didn’t think about it one way or the other.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Ben,” I said. “If you didn’t like him, you didn’t like him. It’s your right.”
This seemed to register. “Damn right it’s my right,” he said. “I don’t like fags, okay? No law against that.”
“No, but you’re not afraid of them, either, are you?”
“Say what?” he said incredulously.
“The police say the reason the caller wouldn’t identify himself was because he was afraid Zack might get back at him.”
“Shit,” he said, smiling hugely. “I could break that little fag over my knee.”
“So if you had seen anything and called the cops, you would’ve identified yourself to them, right?”
“Didn’t call ’em,” he said, reverting to monosyllables. “Didn’t see a damn thing. Was probably asleep.” He grinned. “Or beatin’ off.”
There was no innuendo in this statement; it was just his way of making small talk.
“Would you swear to it?”
He raised his right hand in a Boy Scout salute. “I swear.”
“In court?”
He dropped his hand and said, “Hey, man, I work for a living. I can’t be taking time off to go down to court.”
“It won’t take long,” I said. “I’m sure your employer would understand if I subpoenaed you.”
“If you what?”
“A subpoena is an order from the court requiring a person to come and testify.”
“And what if I just tear it up,” he said.
“Ben,” I said, “we’re talking about a murder trial. You’re very important, not just to me, but to the D.A. Without you, we might not be able to get to the truth. You’re kind of a star witness.”
He very nearly preened. “Do I get paid?”
“Yeah, there are witness fees. Not much, but then your employer might be persuaded to give you the time off with pay. For doing your duty as a citizen.”
He thought it over. “Yeah, sure, what the hell. When do you want me?”
“A couple of weeks,” I said. “I’ll get that subpoena to you. If there’s any problem with your bosses, any problem at all, you let me know.”
“Is he gonna get off?” he asked.
“Who? Zack? I don’t know.”
“Because if he did it, he should get the chair.”
I got up to go. “That’s for the jury to decide. Thanks for your time.”
<
br /> As I replayed the interview in my head on the way home I was pretty sure that Harper was lying, but I didn’t know about what. Since he was no friend of Zack’s, and wasn’t afraid of him, he had no reason to lie to me about having made the call to the cops, unless he hadn’t figured out that by doing so he would be helping Zack. If that was the case, I could only hope he wouldn’t add it up before the hearing. Still, it was hard to imagine why he would’ve called anonymously. The obvious possibility was that it was the cops he was afraid of, rather than Zack. I made a mental note to see if he had a prior criminal record.
If he was telling the truth, then that meant that none of Zack’s neighbors was the anonymous tipster. That was clear even from a comparison of the physical layout of the complex with the tipster’s account of how he had seen Zack. There was no way someone sitting at a table in the kitchen could have seen Zack passing by the window and carrying the obelisk in his hand unless he was holding his hand out in front of him. Yet the tipster did have a general idea of what the building looked like, so he had obviously been there.
To plant evidence, I thought.
20
A COUPLE OF NIGHTS later, I found myself standing at the entrance to the underground garage at the municipal courthouse, waiting for Freeman Vidor. A long driveway descended from the street into the garage, and above the entrance were signs warning that parking was restricted to permit parkers and all others would be towed. To my right was a shuttered guardhouse. As usual at that hour, downtown was nearly deserted. At half past ten, Freeman emerged from the garage, smoking a cigarette.
“Ready to break in?” he asked.
“What were you doing in the garage?”
“Checking out security,” he said. He crushed the cigarette on the ground.
“Is it tight?”
He smirked and said, “You’ll see. Come on.”
The garage was a vast, echoing subterranean space that not only provided parking for court employees but also county workers in nearby buildings. Except for Freeman’s black Jaguar, which he’d parked in a handicap space, the few cars visible all had parking permits on their back fenders.
“The lot goes beneath Olive,” he was saying, indicating the dark reaches of the place. “The way we came down is the only entrance and there’s just one exit, to Temple. You notice the guardhouse at the top of the driveway?”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks abandoned.”
“There’s a guard up there during the day,” he said. “You have to have a permit to park down here and he’ll stop you if you don’t and turn you around. If he misses you, there’s a patrol that goes around, and if they find a car without a permit they tow it.”
I gestured to his car and said, “Evidently they don’t patrol at night.”
“They did,” he said, “but the county runs the courthouse and the county’s bankrupt. They cut out the night patrols a year ago.”
“Is that why there’s no one at the guardhouse, either?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess the county can’t afford the overtime.” He headed toward a pair of double metal doors recessed into a concrete wall. “The doors into the courthouse. Try ’em.”
I grabbed a metal handle and pulled. The door opened. “Just like that? Where’s the security?”
“Here,” Freeman said, pointing to a device in the wall which had the dimensions and appearance of a bathroom mirror with a metal shelf at the bottom of it. Smoked glass covered both the mirrorlike rectangle on the wall and the shelf. “There’s a camera behind the glass that’s supposed to let the marshals upstairs see who’s down here. Then you put your ID card here,” he continued, indicating the shelf. “A scanner reads your card and they match you up with your picture and buzz you in through the doors. Problem is, the camera’s broken.”
“In the earthquake?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “If they were using it before the quake, they’d have fixed it up by now. And look how the door sticks.”
I let the door drop. It wedged slightly against the other door. “So?”
“Defeats the purpose of the buzzer,” he said. “I’d say this system broke down before the quake and they didn’t have the money to fix it.”
“So basically,” I said, “anyone who knows about this entrance can walk into the courthouse?”
“That’s about the size of it,” he said. “Of course, the only people who are going to know about it are the people who are supposed to be down here in the first place. Employees. The public entrance is upstairs on the street. I guess that’s why they figured they could let this go.” He opened the door. “After you?”
The doors opened to a wide corridor that led to another door marked “Stairs.” It was not locked. Two short flights of stairs and another door and we found ourselves on the ground floor of the courthouse.
“Zack said Chris told him if he was stopped by a security guard to tell him that he was going to see Chris,” I said. “That implies there are guards. Are there?”
“Yeah,” Freeman said, as he led us around the corner to a bank of elevators. “Down there.”
The courthouse occupied nearly an entire block and its scale was, accordingly, gargantuan. At the end of the wide corridor from where we were standing, about half the distance of a football field, a blue-coated security guard was sitting at a desk at the front entrance of the courthouse, his back to us. We could’ve exploded grenades without attracting his attention. Freeman pressed the elevator button and the door slid open. We boarded the elevator. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds. “Which floor?”
“Five,” I said.
The fifth floor was empty. The polished linoleum was still damp from mopping and the big brass lights blazed overhead. Alternating double and single doors ran the length of the walls, which were faced with marble. The double doors were the public entrances into the courtrooms and each was marked in gold lettering with the number of the courtroom and the judge who presided therein. The single doors were not marked. They were the private entrances into the judges’ chambers, which were located behind the courtrooms. The place was as still as a mausoleum as we made our way down the hall past the doors to Chris’s courtroom, which still bore his name, to the unmarked door that led to his chambers. I grabbed the doorknob confidently but this time the door did not yield.
“What do you know,” I said, jiggling the knob. “A lock that actually works.”
“American Express,” Freeman said, slipping a credit card between the frame and the door. “Don’t leave home without it.”
I heard a click and then he pulled the door open.
“Nice work,” I said. “Of course, Chris was expecting Zack, so this door would’ve been unlocked.”
We found ourselves in a dark hallway. I ran my hand along the wall until I found the light switch and flipped it on. We walked to the end of the hall where it intersected another, shorter, corridor which led, in either direction, to a door. Chris’s name was visible on the right-hand door. Freeman did his credit card trick on it and got us inside. I clicked the light on. The surfaces of the room were covered with the fine black powder used by the cops to lift prints. There was a dark stain on the carpet beside the desk. All of Chris’s personal items had been stripped from the room. I glanced into the small bathroom; even his hand towels had been removed. For the first time, I felt spooked.
“Ten minutes,” Freeman said, glancing at his watch.
“Huh?”
“It took us ten minutes to get up here from the garage.”
“And no one saw us,” I said. “How is that possible?”
Freeman perched at the edge of the desk. “A couple of days ago I called the court administrator and said I ran a private security company and I was interested in bidding for this job, seeing that a judge had been knocked off,” he said. “He’s the one who told me about all the cutbacks because of the budget. When I asked him what precautions he was taking since the murder, he said he issued a memo warning people against workin
g in the building after six, when it closes to the public. Otherwise, they’ve got five guards patrolling all ten floors from six to midnight.”
“And after midnight?”
He smiled. “They lock up and go home.”
“How often are the patrols?”
“Supposedly on the hour,” he said.
“Amazing,” I said. “This place is wide open.”
At that moment, I heard footsteps in the hall.
Freeman glanced at his watch. “It’s a quarter to. They’re early.”
“Ten floors and they pick on us,” I said, hitting the light switch in the room. “Quick, into the bathroom.”
I left the bathroom door open a crack and stood back so that, while I was in the darkness, a sliver of the outer room was visible to me. Someone entered the chambers and turned the light on. I glimpsed a blue-clad back as the guard passed in front of the bathroom door. I was aware that both Freeman and I had stopped breathing. I ran through the story I would tell if we were discovered, but then he passed in front of the door again, turned the light out and left. I waited another moment, until I could no longer hear his footsteps, before I let us out of the bathroom.
“They don’t exactly break their necks around here to secure the place,” Freeman observed.
“No,” I agreed, “but why would they? A courthouse must run pretty low on the list of potential crime targets.”
“Except that this happened,” he said, indicating the rusty stain on the carpet.
“True,” I said, “but it’s random crime you guard against, and Chris’s murder wasn’t random.”
“We through here?” Freeman asked. “This case gives me the willies.”
I was standing at the door, facing Chris’s desk, trying to imagine what Zack had seen when he entered the room that night. A body on the ground, blood, the pointed end of the obelisk embedded in the back of Chris’s skull. Seeing the room, remembering his description, something flickered through my head, not quite a thought, not quite a memory, and it came out of my mouth as, “Someone saw him.”
