Follow the Money

by Fingers Murphy

  Liz fanned through the papers. “Shit,” she said, “There are pictures in here.” She took a stack of eight by tens and spread them out on the table.

  “Oh my God.” I uttered, catching my breath the instant I saw them. There were eight photographs taken from a distance, looking in through the window of a house. I picked up one of the photos. It was a medium shot of two men with their shirts off, one with his hands on the shoulders of the other. They appeared to be talking casually, holding each other in a loose embrace. The one doing the talking was Steele. The other, smiling in the midst of laughter, with his head tilted to one side and his hair disheveled, was Garrett Andersen.

  “What?” Liz asked. “What is it? Who is it?”

  “It’s Steele.” I sank back on the couch, defeated, running one hand through my hair and holding the photo out and away from me with the other.

  “I know that. Who’s the other guy?”

  “His lawyer, Garrett Andersen.”

  “Noooooo!” Liz’s shock was palpable. She snatched up two of the photos and inspected them closely. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. I’m sure.” And I was sure, but I could hardly process it all.

  Liz looked each of the pictures over. They all appeared to be shot through the same window and at roughly the same time. The angle showed the bottom portion of a bed, and, though there was nothing explicitly sexual in the photos themselves, the import was obvious. These were the before and after pictures. It was undeniable. The ruffled blankets on the bed, the partially clothed bodies, the shirt draped over a chair in the background, the belt laying on the floor next to a wadded up pile that was likely a pair of slacks. The story was self-evident.

  After several minutes of gawking, Liz turned her attention to the rest of the file. “My god, I wonder what else is in here?” She spoke aloud but mostly to herself as she arranged piles of papers on the table, being careful to set the photographs off to the side.

  “What the hell am I gonna do?”

  Liz stopped and gave me a funny look. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what am I gonna do?” I’d already choked down my third beer and I got up and went to the fridge. I crouched down and dug around. “Christ. You got anymore beer?”

  “What do you mean, what are you gonna do?” Liz called from the next room.

  “About all this,” I responded, returning with a half empty bottle of white wine and two glasses. “I mean, I’ve got all this new evidence. All this information.”

  “Well,” Liz was almost laughing at the obviousness of her solution. “You go to the police. I mean, what are you thinking about doing?”

  I poured the wine and shook my head. “It’s not that simple. Look, these guys don’t want this coming out. I mean, they’ve got someone following me. They’re tearing up my apartment. If Steele really is the murderer, then why shouldn’t I think he’d do something to me?”

  “Well, what good would doing something to you do if you’ve already told the police? I mean, it would be obvious who did it.”

  “Thanks. I’m not interested in being Exhibit A at Steele’s next trial. I’m freaked out here. Andersen is obviously on to me. He knows who I am. He knows I called him. He had someone go through my place. He had someone follow me to Palm Springs. I mean, you should have heard him on the phone. He was very threatening. But he’s just going to deny everything. And what am I gonna say? I mean, at this point the only thing I can say is that someone broke into my apartment. And that I think someone was following me in a black car. I can’t prove anything. I’d sound like a nut.”

  “But we’ve got these pictures, this file, the phone records, and the guy in Palm Springs. There’s too much information out there. It all points to Steele being the murderer.”

  I filled my mouth with the cold wine and held it there, thinking. I swished the liquid from one cheek to the other and then swallowed. “I dunno. So Steele’s the killer. Maybe they arrest him, but I just think there’s something else here that we don’t know. Something we can’t see. I mean, why would Andersen be so pissed?”

  “Well, he probably doesn’t want any of this coming out.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not a big deal for him. I mean you heard that guy at the party, y’know, what’s his name. The guy you work for who said Andersen is gay. I mean, apparently everyone knows, so there’s no harm to him there. Besides, it’s not a big deal for a lawyer to be gay in Los Angeles. For Steele, it’s a bigger issue. So why is Andersen so involved?”

  “Well, you don’t know for sure that he is. I mean, maybe he told Steele about your call and it was Steele who had you followed and who had your apartment turned upside down.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe.” I emptied and refilled my glass. I was beginning to feel drunk. My face felt flushed and I rolled my head back on my shoulders, relaxing. It was all beginning to feel less real and more like an academic exercise. What do you do when your client turns out to be a murderer and is hunting you down? That wasn’t in the textbooks.

  I went quiet. I could go to the police and get rid of Steele. Surely, based on this evidence, they would have to arrest and retry him, presumably to another conviction. But that still left Andersen. But maybe Liz was right. Maybe Andersen wasn’t really involved. And then there was my own career to think about. Would there be anything left of it if I turned Steele in? Did I care? I never wanted the job at K&C anyway, or so I thought.

  “Wait a minute,” Liz broke the silence. “Did you say Sharon told the lawyer that she’d already started moving things out of the house?”

  “Yeah.” I looked over to see Liz holding a sheet of paper.

  “Well, this looks like a deed to a house. It’s signed by both Sharon and someone else and dated about a week before the murder.”

  “Let me see that.” I held out my hand and took the paper. It appeared to be a deed dated five days before the murder and two days before Sharon’s meeting with Murdock. “Well, shit, it looks like she bought a house.”

  “And this isn’t a copy either. This is the original.” Liz pointed at the face of the document and showed me. “Could she have paid cash? It doesn’t look like this was ever recorded.”

  “I suppose, apparently she was loaded.”

  “And look at this.” Liz leaned over and handed me a yellow legal pad with a list of things on it as well as a phone number and some other kind of number. “What do you suppose that is?”

  “Well, she supposedly told Murdock that she’d already started moving things out of the house.” I read through the list. It had generic descriptions such as “four boxes from garage” and “clothes” as well as more descriptive things like photo albums, wood carving, chest, and computer. All together, there were about twenty things written in a column down the left side of the page. Across the bottom was an eight-one-eight phone number and a seven digit number labeled “confirmation.”

  “Maybe this is her list of things she was going to move, or did move,” I mumbled as I flipped the page and then fanned through the rest of the pad. There was nothing else. It was empty. I tossed the pad back on the coffee table and set my head back on the pillow. There was no answer, no clear direction.

  The conversation went on for another hour. We finished the bottle of wine and opened another. We went over and over the various ways it might all add up and what I should do about it. It was maddening. An endless calculus filled with nothing but variables. I finally sat up, exhausted, and rubbed my face with my hands.

  “I just can’t think about any of this anymore. I keep hoping that if I just don’t do anything it will all go away.”

  “But if Steele is the killer, you can’t just let him get away with it.”

  I could feel a disgusted look come over my face. “Shit. Yeah, I dunno. Can’t I? I mean he did spend twelve years in prison. Maybe that’s enough.”

  Liz looked flabbergasted at the suggestion. “You don’t get to decide that.”

  “But I also have no obligation to endanger myself by coming
forward. I just don’t know who’s out there trying to get me. I’m not going to just stand out in the daylight and say, ‘here I am, come and get me.’ I mean, what about my future? Sharon Steele is already dead. Nothing I do is going to change that. If society wants revenge, then it needs to do the investigation I’ve done. I don’t have to get myself killed.”

  “Who said anything about you getting killed? Why would they kill you? I mean, if you gave them the file, they could destroy it and there’d be nothing left.”

  “I’d be left, and that might be too much for some people to tolerate.” I looked around the apartment, confused for a second. “Shit,” I finally sighed. “I need someone else to tell me what to do. I just don’t believe I’ll be safe if I run into the police station waving my files around and I don’t think I’ll be safe if I don’t. Meanwhile, someone is out there right now wondering where I am.”

  Liz watched my movements. They were hesitant, jerky, uncertain, and confused. At no time had we discussed what I had done to her and I could sense her resisting an intoxicated urge to confront me about it. But despite her anger over my behavior, I could see she remained concerned about me. It was in her movements, in her eyes and voice. I looked exhausted and frightened, and she knew I needed her.

  We continued talking, going round and round over the same territory. Steele’s story, Kelly’s story, Murdock’s story, the documents from the credit report, the phone call to Andersen, the photographs of Andersen and Steele, the man in the black car, my trashed apartment, it all added up to nothing but confused suspicion and fruitless speculation. We finished the rest of the bottle of wine and started on another. Darkness came over the city and we talked without the lights on and late into the night.

  24

  Liz had not forgiven me, despite the previous evening, and that was apparent when she made me sleep on her couch. I awoke exhausted, mildly hung over, and suddenly worried that Liz was still pissed at me. The excitement of the case had drowned out all other emotions and given the two of us something else to focus on, at least temporarily. But it wouldn’t last, and I knew it. I lay awake on the couch listening to her movements in the bedroom and debating whether I should say anything. Somehow it felt wrong, inappropriate, and I decided to let it go.

  Somewhere in my dreamless sleep I had decided to contact the journalist who’d called me. I was hoping that perhaps some press coverage might offer me a kind of protection the police could not. If there was too much attention focused on me, I’d be safe for awhile. But then, if no one cared much for my story, I was really fucked.

  Liz came out of the bedroom in a light cotton sundress, lugging an overloaded backpack. She dropped the pack on the floor and it made a loud thud.

  “Ugh,” she groaned, “this going back to class thing really sucks.”

  “Tell me about it. I haven’t even thought about studying. And I’m not even going today.”

  She shook her head and stood looking at me with her hands on her hips. Her concern was obvious and though she wished for my safety, she could not forgive me. I could see her hesitation. I shared it. We both wanted our old life back but secretly knew it was impossible to regain.

  “You can stay here if you like,” she finally offered, as a sort of olive branch, some middle ground we might both occupy until the crisis was over. She seemed to be willing to put the process of sorting things out on hold until I was safe. I wanted to tell her I was going to be alright, even though I knew I was helpless to deliver that result.

  I just wanted relief of any kind, and I would take it where I could get it. At that moment it existed in the form of a plan, no matter how futile that plan might be. I told her about the journalist. She listened quietly and without comment, and then reiterated her offer.

  I sat up and gathered the papers we’d left spread about. “Thanks, but I assume I’ll have to meet this guy downtown, so I may as well go to the office. I’ll feel safer there anyway. Too many people around for anything bad to happen.”

  She lingered in the doorway to her room with her book bag at her feet. Given the circumstances, her need to get to class seemed silly to me. I finished gathering the papers and stuffed them in the file. I glanced up and saw her there, hovering, worried, and I wanted to say something to make her feel better, but found it impossible to say the things I should.

  Instead, I said, “Look, there’s nothing you can do. You’re better off staying away from me. I’ll be fine. I’ll go to the office, I’ll meet with this guy and we’ll try to figure something out.”

  She gave me a smile, put her arms around me and squeezed. We said nothing for a minute until she turned away, picked up her bag and went to the door. “Lock it when you go.” She opened the door and stepped outside.

  “I’ll call you later, to let you know what’s happening.”

  She smiled, nodded, and closed the door behind her.

  Forty minutes later I stepped out of a cab in front of the office. I looked around and, not seeing any black cars anywhere, went inside feeling more at ease. No one seemed to notice I was there, it was business as usual and the fact that I was skipping out on my first day of classes registered with no one.

  I found Ed Snyder’s number and left a cryptic message saying only that the two of us needed to meet. Then I spent thirty minutes in front of a copy machine making a duplicate file for him and hoping I hadn’t missed his call. Back in my office there was no message, and I flipped through the file trying to organize my thoughts for my conversation with Ed.

  My office was littered with materials from the case. Boxes full of files and research and drafts of the briefs for the hearing. Everywhere I turned I saw Steele. I flipped through a ream of my old notes from the beginning of the summer, waiting for a call I couldn’t be sure would come. I came across the notes I made from one of my very first conversations, my call to Becky Steele. Her story was exactly as I remembered it. She stated that she detected no animosity between her parents prior to the murder. She remembered that everything was quite normal.

  She had also talked about her grandfather finding the side door open two days after the murder. An obvious explanation was simply that the police had forgotten to lock it when they left, but it had also cast suspicion on Bishop, who was believed to have had a set of keys. Then I remembered Becky talking about how there were personal items of her mother’s missing from the house, odd things that no burglar would have thought to steal.

  I shuffled through the file I’d gotten from Murdock until I came across the yellow legal pad with the list of household items on it. I remembered Becky Steele lamenting the apparent loss of her mother’s hope chest and photo albums, both of which were missing from the house. I scanned the handwritten list of items on the legal pad and found among them entries for both “photo albums” and “chest.”

  Of course they were gone, I told myself, her mother had moved them out of the house just like Murdock said. I stared at the list and then the unrecorded deed sitting beside it. I wondered if Becky actually might get her mother’s stuff back after all these years.

  I dialed the phone number scrawled diagonally in the same hand across the bottom right corner of the page. It was an eight-one-eight number, a business somewhere in the steaming streets of the Valley. A woman answered.

  “A-1 Moving and Storage.”

  “Um, hello. I’ve got a question that may seem a little strange, but I’m looking for a record of a move that was done quite a while ago.”

  “How long ago?”

  “About twelve years.”

  The woman laughed a little. “I seriously doubt we’d have any record of anything like that. We’ve probably changed computers systems twice since then.”

  “Well, I’ve got a confirmation number here.”

  “What’s this for anyway?”

  “Oh, well,” I spoke slow and thought fast, “I’m actually an attorney trying to wrap up an estate and we’ve come across some records in the decedent’s papers showing that he may have had some
property moved to a storage facility. So we’re trying to ascertain if there are any assets out there that we’re unaware of.”

  “Well, like I said, I doubt we’ve got anything, but I can check that confirmation number if you’d like.”

  I gave it to her. I could hear her typing.

  “No, that doesn’t come back with anything. But it does look like one of our confirmation numbers. The L-M at the beginning would mean it was a local move. So if they did use us to move something, it didn’t leave LA County.”

  “Okay, well, it was worth a try. Thanks.”

  “No problem. Good luck.”

  I stared at the deed again. I imagined a furnished house somewhere, filled with Sharon Steele’s most personal things collecting dust for a dozen years. I punched the address on the deed into Google maps. The screen refreshed with a street map of Los Angeles County and a bright red dot just west of the village of Topanga Canyon. “Gotcha.” I whispered as I hit the print button.

  An hour later, after organizing and reorganizing my papers and my thoughts, the phone rang.

  “This is Ollie.”

  “Ollie. Ed Snyder returning your call.”

  “Great, thanks for calling me back.”

  Ed’s voice was low and serious. He sounded like a guy who was all business. “You said we should talk.”

  25

  We met in a carnicera east of Broadway on Fifth. Though it was less than five blocks from the office, the streets were strewn with trash and crowded with sweaty, unclean bodies that stood on the corners, sat on the curbs, lingered at bus stops, and leaned against walls. Idle and hapless human beings who had drifted or were dumped there by society, circumstance, or steady and consistent bad luck. This was the stretch of Fifth known historically as “the nickel” — skid row — the literal and figurative end of the line.