Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020)

by Connelly, Michael

  “So then what are we talking about here?” I said. “Robbery or homicide?”

  “Let’s go inside before we start talking,” Mattson said.

  I got to my front door. His nonanswer seemed to push the answer toward homicide. My keys were in my hand. Before unlocking the door, I turned and looked at the two men standing behind me.

  “My brother was a homicide detective,” I said.

  “Really?” Mattson said.

  “LAPD?” Sakai asked, his first words.

  “No,” I said. “Out in Denver.”

  “Good on him,” Mattson said. “He’s retired?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “He was killed in the line of duty.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mattson said.

  I nodded and turned back to the door to unlock it. I wasn’t sure why I had blurted that out about my brother. It was not something I usually shared. People who knew my books knew it, but I didn’t mention it in day-to-day conversation. It had happened a long time ago in what seemed like another life.

  I got the door open and we entered. I flicked on the light. I had one of the smallest units in the complex. The bottom floor was open-plan, with a living room flowing into a small dining area and then the kitchen beyond it, separated only by a counter with a sink. Along the right wall was a set of stairs leading up to a loft, which was my bedroom. There was a full bath up there and a half bath on the bottom floor beneath the stairs. Less than a thousand square feet in total. The place was neat and orderly but that was only because it was starkly furnished and featured little in the way of personal touches. I had turned the dining-room table into a work area. A printer sat at the head of the table. Everything was set for me to go to work on my next book—and it had been that way since I moved in.

  “Nice place. You been here long?” Mattson asked.

  “About a year and a half,” I said. “Can I ask what this—”

  “Why don’t you have a seat on the couch there?”

  Mattson pointed to the couch that was positioned for watching the flat screen on the wall over the gas fireplace I never used.

  There were two other chairs across a coffee table, but like the couch they were threadbare and worn, having spent decades in my prior homes. The decline of my fortunes was reflected in my housing and transportation.

  Mattson looked at the two chairs, chose the one that looked cleaner and sat down. Sakai, the stoic, remained standing.

  “So, Jack,” Mattson said. “We’re working a homicide and your name came up in the investigation and that’s why we’re here. We have—”

  “Who got killed?” I asked.

  “A woman named Christina Portrero. You know that name?”

  I spun it through all the circuits on high speed and came back with a blank.

  “No, I don’t think so. How did my name—”

  “She went by Tina most of the time. Does that help?”

  Once more through the circuits. The name hit. Hearing the full name coming from two homicide detectives had unnerved me and knocked the initial recognition out of my head.

  “Oh, wait, yeah, I knew a Tina—Tina Portrero.”

  “But you just said you didn’t know the name.”

  “I know. It just, you know, out of the blue it didn’t connect. But yes, we met once and that was it.”

  Mattson didn’t answer. He turned and nodded to his partner. Sakai moved forward and held his phone out to me. On the screen was a posed photo of a woman with dark hair and even darker eyes. She had a deep tan and looked mid-thirties but I knew she was closer to mid-forties. I nodded.

  “That’s her,” I said.

  “Good,” Mattson said. “How’d you meet?”

  “Down the street here. There’s a restaurant called Mistral. I moved here from Hollywood, didn’t really know anyone and was trying to get to know the neighborhood. I’d walk down there for a drink every now and then because I didn’t have to worry about driving. I met her there.”

  “When was this?”

  “I can’t pinpoint the exact date but I think it was about six months after I moved in here. So about a year ago. Probably a Friday night. That’s when I would usually go down there.”

  “Did you have sex with her?”

  I should have anticipated the question but it hit me unexpectedly.

  “That’s none of your business,” I said. “It was a year ago.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Mattson said. “Did you come back here?”

  I understood that Mattson and Sakai obviously knew more about the circumstances of Tina Portrero’s murder than I did. But the questions about what happened between us a year ago seemed overly important to them.

  “This is crazy,” I said. “I was with her one time and nothing ever came of it afterward. Why are you asking me these questions?”

  “Because we’re investigating her murder,” Mattson said. “We need to know everything we can about her and her activities. It doesn’t matter how long ago. So I will ask you again: Was Tina Portrero ever in this apartment?”

  I threw my hands up in a gesture of surrender.

  “Yes,” I said. “A year ago.”

  “She stay over?” Mattson asked.

  “No, she stayed a couple hours, then she got an Uber.”

  Mattson didn’t immediately ask a follow-up. He studied me for a long moment, as if trying to decide how to proceed.

  “Would you have any of her property in this apartment?” he asked.

  “No,” I protested. “What property?”

  He ignored my question and came back with his own.

  “Where were you last Wednesday night?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “What time Wednesday night?”

  “Let’s say between ten and midnight.”

  I knew I had been at Arthur Hathaway’s seminar on how to rip people off until the 10 p.m. start of that window. But I also knew that it was a seminar for con artists and therefore didn’t really exist. If these detectives tried to check out that part of my alibi, they either would not be able to confirm the seminar even existed or would not be able to find anyone to confirm I was there, because that would be acknowledging that they were there. No one would want to do this. Especially after the story I just turned in was published.

  “Uh, I was in my car from about ten to ten twenty and then after that I was here.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes. Look, this is crazy. I was with her one night a year ago and then neither of us kept in contact. It was a no-go for both of us. You understand?”

  “You sure about that? Both of you?”

  “I’m sure. I never called her, she never called me. And I never saw her at Mistral again.”

  “How’d that make you feel?”

  I laughed uneasily.

  “How did what make me feel?”

  “Her not calling you back after?”

  “Did you hear what I said? I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me. It was mutual. It just wasn’t going to go anywhere.”

  “Was she drunk that night?”

  “Drunk, no. We had a couple of drinks there. I paid the tab.”

  “What about back here? More drinks or right up to the loft?”

  Mattson pointed upstairs.

  “No more drinks here,” I said.

  “And everything was consensual?” Mattson said.

  I stood up. I’d had enough.

  “Look, I’ve answered your questions,” I said. “And you’re wasting your time.”

  “We’ll decide if we’re wasting our time,” Mattson said. “We are almost finished here and I would appreciate it if you would sit back down, Mr. McEvoy.”

  He pronounced my name wrong again, probably intentionally.

  I sat back down.

  “I’m a journalist, okay?” I said. “I’ve covered crime—I’ve written books about murderers. I know what you’re doing, trying to knock me off my gam
e so I’ll make some kind of admission. But it’s not going to happen, because I don’t know anything about this. So could you please—”

  “We know who you are,” Mattson said. “You think we would come out here without knowing who we’re dealing with? You’re the Velvet Coffin guy, and just for the record, I worked with Rodney Fletcher. He was a friend and what happened to him was bullshit.”

  There it was. The cause of the enmity that was dripping off Mattson like sap off a tree.

  “Velvet Coffin closed down four years ago,” I said. “Mostly because of the Fletcher story—which was one hundred percent accurate. There was no way of knowing he would do what he did. Anyway, I work someplace else now and write consumer-protection stories. I’m not on the cop shop.”

  “Good for you. Can we get back to Tina Portrero?”

  “There is nothing to get back to.”

  “How old are you?”

  “You already know, I’m sure. And what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You seem kind of old for her. For Tina.”

  “She was an attractive woman and older than she looked or claimed to be. She told me she was thirty-nine when I met her that night.”

  “But that’s the point, right? She was older than she looked. You, a guy in your fifties, moving in on a lady you thought was in her thirties. Kind of creepy, you ask me.”

  I felt my face turning red with embarrassment and indignation.

  “For the record, I didn’t ‘move in on’ her,” I said. “She picked up her Cosmo and came down the bar to me. That’s how it started.”

  “Good for you,” Mattson said sarcastically. “Must’ve made your ego stand at attention. So let’s go back to Wednesday. Where were you coming from during those twenty minutes you said you were in the car driving home that night?”

  “It was a work meeting,” I said.

  “With people that we could talk to and verify if we need to?”

  “If it comes to that. But you are—”

  “Good. So tell us again about you and Tina.”

  I could tell what he was doing. Jumping around with his questions, trying to keep me off balance. I covered cops for almost two decades for two different newspapers and the Velvet Coffin blog. I knew how it worked. Any slight discrepancy in retelling the story and they would have what they needed.

  “No, I already told you everything. You want any more information from me, then you have to give information.”

  The detectives were silent, apparently deciding whether to deal. I jumped in with the first question that came to mind.

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  “She had her neck snapped,” Mattson said.

  “Atlanto-occipital dislocation,” Sakai said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

  “Internal decapitation,” Mattson said. “Somebody did a one-eighty on her neck. It was a bad way to go.”

  I felt a deep pressure begin to grow in my chest. I did not know Tina Portrero beyond the one evening I was with her, but I couldn’t get the image of her—refreshed by the photo shown by Sakai—being killed in such a horrible manner out of my mind.

  “It’s like that movie The Exorcist,” Mattson said. “Remember that? With the possessed girl’s head twisting around.”

  That didn’t help things.

  “Where was this?” I asked, trying to move on from the images.

  “Landlord found her in the shower,” Mattson continued. “Her body was covering the drain and it overflowed and he came to check it out. He found her, water still running. It was supposed to look like a slip-and-fall but we know better. You don’t slip in the shower and break your neck. Not like that.”

  I nodded as though that was good information to know.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “I didn’t have anything to do with this and can’t help you with your investigation. So if there are no other questions, I would like—”

  “There are more questions, Jack,” Mattson said sternly. “We are only getting started with this investigation.”

  “Then what? What else do you want to know from me?”

  “You being a reporter and all, do you know what ‘digital stalking’ is?”

  “You mean like social media and tracking people through that?”

  “I’m asking questions. You’re supposed to answer them.”

  “You have to be more specific, then.”

  “Tina told a good friend of hers that she was being digitally stalked. When her friend asked what that meant, Tina said a guy she met in a bar knew things about her he should not have known. She said it was like he knew all about her before he even started talking to her.”

  “I met her in a bar a year ago. This whole thing is—wait a minute. How did you even know to come here to talk to me?”

  “She had your name. In her contacts. And she had your books on the night table.”

  I couldn’t remember whether I had discussed my books with Tina the night I met her. But since we had ended up at my apartment, it was likely that I had.

  “And on the basis of that, you come here like I’m a suspect?”

  “Calm down, Jack. You know how we work. We are conducting a thorough investigation. So let’s go back to the stalking. For the record, was that you she was talking about with the stalking?”

  “No, it wasn’t me.”

  “Good to hear. Now, last question for now: Would you be willing to voluntarily give us a saliva sample for DNA analysis?”

  The question startled me. I hesitated. I jumped to thinking about the law and my rights and totally skipped over the fact that I had committed no crime and therefore my DNA in any form from semen to skin residue could not be found at any crime scene from last Wednesday.

  “Was she raped?” I asked. “Now you’re accusing me of rape too?”

  “Take it easy, Jack,” Mattson said. “No sign of rape but let’s just say we got some DNA from the suspect.”

  I realized that my DNA was my quickest way off their radar.

  “Well, that wasn’t me, so when do you want to take my saliva?”

  “How about right now?”

  Mattson looked at his partner. Sakai reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out two six-inch test tubes with red rubber caps each containing a long-ended cotton swab. I realized then that most likely the sole purpose of their visit was to get my DNA. They had the killer’s DNA. They, too, knew that it would be the quickest way to determine whether I had any involvement in the murder.

  That was fine with me. They were going to be disappointed by the results.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  “Good,” Mattson said. “And there is one other thing we could do that would help us with the investigation.”

  I should have known. Open the door an inch and they push all the way through.

  “What’s that?” I said impatiently.

  “You mind taking your shirt off?” Mattson said. “So we can check your arms and body?”

  “Why would—”

  I stopped myself. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to see if I had scratch marks or other wounds from a fight. The DNA in evidence had probably come from Tina Portrero’s fingernails. She had put up a fight and taken a piece of her killer.

  I started unbuttoning my shirt.

  3

  A s soon as the detectives left, I pulled my laptop out of my backpack went online and searched the name Christina Portrero. I got two hits, both on the Los Angeles Times site. The first was just a mention on the newspaper’s homicide blog, where every murder in the county was recorded. This report was early in the case and had few details other than the fact that Portrero was found dead in her apartment during a wellness check by the landlord after she did not show up for work and did not respond to calls or messaging through social media. The report said foul play was suspected but the cause of death had not yet been determined.

  I was a religious reader of the blog and realized I had read the story and scanned thro
ugh it without recognizing the name Christina Portrero as the Tina Portrero I had met one night the year before. I wondered what I would have done if I had recognized her as the woman I had met. Would I have called the police to mention my experience, my knowledge that on at least one occasion she had gone to a bar by herself and had picked me for a one-night stand?

  The second hit in the Times was a fuller story that ran the same photo Detective Sakai had shown me. Dark hair, dark eyes, looking younger than she was. I had completely missed seeing this story, because I would have recognized the photo. The story said Portrero worked as a personal assistant to a film producer named Shane Sherzer. I thought this was interesting because when we had met a year earlier, she was doing something else in the film business: she was a freelance reader who provided “coverage” of scripts and books for a variety of producers and agents in Hollywood. I remembered her explaining that she read material submitted to her clients for possible development as films and TV shows. She then summarized the scripts and books and checked off on a form the kind of project they were: comedy, drama, young adult, historical, crime, etc.

  She concluded each report with her personal take on the potential project, recommending a hard pass or further consideration by higher-ups in the client’s company. I also remembered that she told me the job often required her to visit production companies located at the major studios in town—Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal—and that it was very exciting because on occasion she saw major movie stars walking out in the open between the offices, stages, and the commissary.

  The Times story included quotes from a woman named Lisa Hill, who was described as Portrero’s best friend. She told the newspaper that Tina led an active social life and had recently straightened herself out after suffering from some addiction issues. Hill did not reveal what these issues were and probably wasn’t even asked. It seemed to have little to do with who had killed Portrero by twisting her neck 180 degrees.

  Neither of the Times posts mentioned the exact cause of death. The second, fuller story said only that Portrero had suffered a broken neck. Maybe Times editors had decided not to put the fuller details into the story, or maybe they had not been told. The information on the crime in both posts was attributed to the generic “police said.” Neither Detective Mattson nor Detective Sakai was mentioned by name.