by Matt Coyle
“Hysterical.” My face kept its Irish pale.
“What gives, Bullet?”
Timothy Buckley’s crack about peeping through motel windows had bored under my skin. It got deep enough to scrape a nerve I’d spent the last two years trying to ignore. I’d found a niche and I was damn good at it. If I made a mistake, feelings got hurt but nobody died. Or ended up crippled. Now it felt dirty. A greasy residue on my fingers that I couldn’t wash off.
“When can I get off adultery duty and do something else?”
“I thought you enjoyed the detail.”
“Only a pervert enjoys that detail, Bob.” My shoulders pinched in on my neck. “I enjoy doing something well. I just think I can do other things too.”
“Well, it’s a great source of revenue for us. You’re the best peeper in San Diego and an important part of the team.” He leaned back in his chair and stroked his Van Dyke. “But I understand how watching all that infidelity could wear you down. It certainly wore my three exes down.”
He gave me the grin again, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“Give me a little time and I’ll see what I can do. If business stays on the upswing, I’ll bring somebody else on and move you over to something else. Maybe you could be like a utility infielder for a while until we find what fits you best.”
“That would be great, Bob.” My shoulders relaxed. “Thanks.”
“Hey, I need a favor. Something big from upstairs just blew in, and I have to get right on it.” Bob folded his forearms and leaned forward. “I need you to meet with Mrs. Bengston solo today. Give her my apologies and say I had an emergency. And soften it up a little. You’ll have to be the shoulder if she needs one to cry on. This will be an opportunity for you to do something different.”
Not that much different. I’d still deliver the bad news in color prints, but I’d have to hold hands through the tears and show empathy. Not my strongest suit. Not even in my deck. But Bob was right. This would be a chance to show him I was ready to do something else.
This new case must have been big. Bob never missed a sit-down with a two-timed spouse. The client truly came first with Bob. It went back to his days on the force. Even as a kid sitting at the kitchen table listening to his cop stories, I could tell that Bob cared about the victims of crimes. My dad saw being a cop as a job like any other. Bob Reitzmeyer saw it as his life’s mission.
“What’s the new case?”
“Darren Waters has been accused of rape.”
“The ace for the Padres?” Waters was the Padres’ top pitcher and had just signed the biggest contract in club history.
“Yes. No arrest, yet, if ever. Waters was having an affair with the woman, and Ed thinks it will go civil because of all the money the kid’s making now.”
Ed was Edmund DeFreitas. Former La Jolla district attorney and founding partner of the law firm that threw La Jolla Investigations all its business. He’d retired a few years before Bob had and started up his own law firm. He and Bob’s business had been intertwined ever since Bob started La Jolla Investigations.
“Can I help out on this one?”
“Yes. I think I’ll need you. According to Waters, the accuser likes it rough. We may need some bedroom clicks to verify his story.”
“I was hoping I could do something other than the peep detail. Maybe interview some witnesses.”
Bob leaned back and pursed his lips. “I know you’re eager, Bullet, but your time will come. Right now, I need you to continue doing what you do best.”
What I did best was starting to cost me sleep. I already had that part of my life covered. I didn’t need any more help.
Kate Bengston was in her late forties but could pass for mid-thirties. Head-turning beautiful mid-thirties. Her husband hadn’t found someone more attractive than his wife to play with on the side, he’d just found someone else.
Kate wore a conservative olive-and-tan pantsuit that didn’t diminish her athletic beauty. Blue eyes above a fine, straight nose inspected me. Her blond hair was knotted into a bun. She was all business, but I knew from experience that the reserve was a brace against impending bad news.
She sat at the large mahogany table in our conference room. The walls of the room were decorated with the law enforcement and investigative histories of Bob Reitzmeyer along with each LJI investigator’s police department rookie photograph, commendations, and photo holding a California Private Investigator’s license while standing next to Bob.
I had two pieces of information on the wall, my rookie photo and the one of me next to Bob holding my PI’s license. I didn’t do anything of note or stay on the Santa Barbara Police Department long enough to accumulate any commendations.
“Hello, Mrs. Bengston. My name is Rick Cahill. Bob asked me to, ah, present our findings to you.” I sat down at the head of the table. “He had an emergency and wanted to apologize for not being here.”
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.” Her eyes and mouth narrowed into slits. “I’ve been dealing exclusively with Bob. It’s a very private matter.”
“I understand, ma’am. Bob’s been very discreet. He and I have been the only people involved with your case.”
Kate Bengston had suspected her husband was having an affair for the reasons most women grasp onto. Nothing as obvious as lipstick on the collar or the hint of a woman’s perfume hiding on his neck. No. It’s change. Tightened abs, a break in the old routine, a sudden new routine. The couple’s weekly coupling dwindles down to bi-weekly or monthly. He suddenly has to work late on a regular basis and travel more on the weekends.
Change. When spouses notice it and their questions get laughed off as paranoia, they call us. And ninety-nine percent of the time, we prove their suspicions correct. They sometimes thank us, and always pay us well.
Kate Bengston was beautiful, sophisticated, and wealthy. For her husband, that and his oath before God were not enough to keep him from poking around in the dark with someone else.
“Well, I guess we should get started. Here are your husband’s credit card charges and a list of phone calls made from his cell phone that Bob discussed with you yesterday.” I pushed a manila folder in front of her containing the paper trail of her husband’s deceit. I kept a second folder, harboring the smut photos, in front of me.
She studied the documents silently for five minutes. The only hint of emotion was revealed by her tightened, colorless lips.
“There’s more, I trust, Mr. Cahill.”
“You may want to prepare yourself for the photographs you’re about to see, Mrs. Bengston.”
“I’m prepared.”
They always thought they were prepared. They were always wrong. I placed the other folder in front of her.
She opened it and saw photos of her husband’s Escalade parked in the La Jolla Inn parking lot. Her husband and a woman entering a room at the Inn. Finally, the coup de grace, photographs of them entwined, naked, caught through the window blinds.
I stared down at the table, but let my eyes sneak an occasional side glance. She held the last photo down on the table in tight fingers. Her face flushed, in anger or shame. Her eyes stayed pinned to the picture. Her chest rose and fell quickly as her breaths broke the silence in the room.
I readied my shoulder for her tears. Bob’s job. He was as natural at it as a Southern politician. Bob was the buffer between the pain and the evidence. I was merely the mechanic, the lens, the truth. I felt for Kate Bengston. I felt for all the women and men whose spouses’ deceit I had to lay before them in living color. But it was my job, and I’d grown a coroner’s distance from the pain brought from photos of a marriage’s death knell.
“Do you get your kicks sneaking around in the dark, taking pictures of naked adulterers, Mr. Cahill?” A jagged edge hung off her voice. “I noticed there’s no ring on your finger. Is this how you get back at whoever broke your heart?”
Now it was my face that turned red. She’d caught me off guard, and the sadness I’d al
ways felt for spouses in this room suddenly turned to shame. I tried to erase the flush from my face.
This was a job that she’d paid us to do. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else.
Still, the gnaw dug deeper into my gut.
“I’m very sorry to have to show you this evidence, Mrs. Bengston.” I caught her eyes and all the pain that her husband had caused spilled out onto me. “I take no pleasure in this. You hired us to find the facts. I’m sorry that they are what they are.”
“Well, you did your job.” She kept her eyes lasered on mine, slowly stood up, and pulled a checkbook from her Gucci purse. She scribbled down our fee and her signature and tossed the check on the table in front of me. “You should be very proud.”
She hung her bag from her shoulder, focused her eyes straight ahead, and walked right past me like I wasn’t even there.
Like I’d never been there.
CHAPTER THREE
I set my third empty Ballast Point IPA bottle down onto the wooden deck next to my patio chair and looked out at the view of the bay and downtown San Diego. It was really only a wedge of a view pinched in between Soledad Mountain above Interstate 5 and the sloping side of Rose Canyon. Not the view you’d get from a house on a hill in La Jolla or even one you’d get from a lot of other homes here in Bay Ho. But it was my view, and I’d paid a lot for it. Not nearly what it was worth, but a lot for me.
Bob Reitzmeyer had worked on LJPD for thirty years and run his own private investigations firm for another eight. Over that time, he’d collected a black bag full of favors. One of them involved an ex-politician who needed to sell his home in a hurry. That’s how I got a house with a view for two hundred grand under market value. Bob even loaned me ten grand to help boost me up into twenty percent down.
I guess that put me on his favor list too.
Until a year ago, I hadn’t thought about owning a house for over ten years. Back when I was married to Colleen in Santa Barbara. When our love was open and unforced. When we looked to the future and dreamed of kids and backyards and family barbeques. Then my arrogance and hubris got in the way and almost destroyed my marriage. Before I could put it back together, Colleen was murdered.
So, with hopes for a family long ago left to die, I bought a three-bedroom house. A place to retreat to, without having to share a wall with a neighbor. Without having to share anything with anyone. I made one bedroom into an office. The third bedroom I left empty. Sometimes, late at night, I’d open the door and look inside and wonder where a crib would go and a bureau, and where to hang a mobile. Not very often, but sometimes.
I took my eyes off the view and stared at my dog. Midnight stared back. He’d rested his head on my thigh and given me the soft-eyed Lab look. I scratched his square black head, and he slowly wagged his tail.
The calming presence of Midnight couldn’t quite do its trick tonight. Kate Bengston’s hurt, anger, and words still bounced around in my head. They’d been there all day. Reminding me how I paid for my house with the sliver of a view. It hadn’t been a revelation, but coupled with Buckley’s comments and my own creeping regret, it landed on my chin like a haymaker.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called Bob Reitzmeyer.
“Bullet, I’m ass to ankles in the Waters investigation right now. Can this wait until Monday?”
“It’ll just take a second, Bob. I may need to take some vacation time.”
“Starting when?”
“Maybe starting Monday. I’ll find out in the next couple days.”
“You got some new gal you’re going away with?” Ebullient. “That’ll do you some good.”
“No. Something else.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “Would you mind if I used the time to moonlight on another case?”
“You mean for another agency?” Shock.
“No. Freelancing for an attorney. It will give me a chance to do some of the other work we talked about. On my own time.”
“I—hold on. Ed’s calling me on the other line.” He put me on hold. A minute later. “I’ve got to go.”
“What about vacation time and moonlighting?”
“Go ahead. As long as you’re available to help out with the Waters investigation if I need you.”
“You mean if you need some bedroom clicks?”
“Yeah.” A hint of irritation. “Like we discussed. I’ve got to call Ed back. Be ready if I need you.”
He hung up.
Not a ringing endorsement, but he’d given me the okay. I called Buckley and told him I’d meet with him and the Eddingtons, and then decide if I’d take the case. No matter how much I wanted to do something other than bedroom clicks, I wouldn’t agree to try and free a murderer from prison. Not unless I was certain he was innocent. I’d been a cop and so had my father. We’d left behind a legacy of disgracing the badge. But setting murderers free was not in my DNA. Murder was the one sin for which there was no second chance. God had the grace to forgive.
I didn’t.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jack and Rita Mae Eddington lived in La Jolla. Just not the part of La Jolla where I’d expected the founder of a golf club empire to live. They lived on La Jolla Boulevard in a condo complex that looked like a 1960s apartment building. Concrete. Square. Mini-balconies staring down at an oversized, kidney-shaped swimming pool.
The Pacific Coast Estates.
The coast was a mile away and a nine hundred-square-foot box hardly qualified as an estate in La Jolla. I’d expected the Eddingtons to live in a mansion overlooking the ocean. Maybe they’d exhausted their wealth on attorney’s fees for their grandson.
The Eddingtons lived on the third floor. I knocked on their front door in a hallway full of front doors.
Jack and Rita Mae both greeted me at the door. They were in their mid-seventies and looked it. No stretched smiles or tight eyes. I guess grief doesn’t leave room for vanity. Or maybe the Eddingtons were that La Jolla rarity who didn’t worry much about image.
Jack had been tall once, but life had pulled down his shoulders and pushed his head forward. His gray hair, where there was any, was wispy. Rita Mae was short and trim and wrinkled around the edges. There was a faint gleam in her brown eyes that could probably light up a room a few years back. Before her grandson grabbed a golf club one night and beat her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter to death.
The Eddingtons led me into their clean, but dated, living room. Its focal point was an oversized family portrait of Thomas Eddington’s family mounted on the wall adjacent to the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony. Everyone in the picture had big, easy smiles, and Randall Eddington’s hands rested on his father’s shoulders, who sat beneath him. He looked to be about seventeen. The photograph must have been taken about a year before everyone in it, except Randall, was murdered.
Opposite the portrait, Timothy Buckley, cowboy hat in hand, sat on a wilted floral-patterned couch. He stood up, thanked me for coming, and gave me a hard-clinched Texas handshake. I followed Buckley’s lead and joined him on the couch. Before my ass hit upholstery, Rita Mae had a plate of chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table in front of me. She wore a yellow summer dress even though summer was six months away. I had the feeling she’d gotten dressed up for my visit.
“Can I get you some milk? Or water? Or soda?” Her voice was sweet, but fragile. Like it might break if she was forced to speak harsh words. She looked at me with expectant eyes, waiting for me to accept her hospitality. Waiting for me to agree to take on the cause of her grandson.
It was going to take more than milk and cookies to convince me to try to spring a convicted murderer from prison. And acceptance of the former might give false hope for acceptance of the latter.
“Milk would be great.” Well, the cookies were homemade, and I’d had a small breakfast.
“Timothy, here, speaks very highly of you. Says you’re a man of integrity.” Jack Eddington pushed forward in an overstuffed chair next to me. His eyes had
less plead in them than his wife’s, but the same amount of pain.
He wore a collared shirt, covered by a sweater vest. Knobby knees poked out under his vintage golf slacks. Neither the shirt nor the vest bore the logo of the golf company he’d started some forty years earlier, before he had finally handed the business down to his eldest son, Thomas. Interesting.
“That’s mighty generous of him.” I shot a glance at Buckley. I guessed he’d pumped me up to give them hope. Probably a bad idea, since I hadn’t decided to take the case yet.
“We read about your involvement in that murder investigation a few years ago.” Rita Mae set a large glass of milk down on a coaster atop the coffee table. She stepped over to her husband and leaned against the arm of his chair. “The police took credit for it, but you were the one who solved those awful murders.”
“I wish it were that simple.” Nothing was simple about those murders, and neither would my decision be whether or not to take their grandson’s case.
“You were nearly killed, but you wouldn’t quit until you found the truth, because an innocent person was in jail.” Rita Mae clasped her husband’s hand. “That’s all we want, Mr. Cahill.” She looked at her husband and then back at me. “Someone to find the truth so our grandson can be set free.”
Well, that didn’t seem like too much to ask. Just find new evidence about an eight-year-old murder case and free their grandson from prison.
“Why now?” I grabbed a cookie.
“Why now, what?” Jack asked.
“The trial was eight years ago. Why the push to reopen your grandson’s case now?” I took a bite of the cookie and fell in love.
Jack looked at Buckley, and the cowboy lawyer took his cue.
“Actually, the, ah, deaths were eight years ago and the trial seven. But some new evidence has come to light.” Buckley tugged on a ten-dollar bolo tie above a thousand-dollar suit and leaned forward. “Exculpatory evidence that, if we can just verify, might be enough to get Randall a new trial.”
