Stateline

by Dave Stanton

  I pushed away the last of my lukewarm coffee, went to the bar, and ordered a CC Seven. My head was ringing from the effort of not telling Wenger to screw himself. All the months of tolerating his petty crap seemed to culminate in that phone call, as if our relationship was a festering boil that needed to be popped. That’s what Wenger was, I decided: a festering boil on the ass of my life. Fuck you, Wenger. Calling me a drunk, leaping to the conclusion last Thursday that I’d been boozing all night when I’d only had one drink. Sure, bring the case to Wenger and Associates. Right. Kiss my ass, you greedy son of a bitch. I’m done with you instructing me on the most basic elements of my job over and over, as if I were a fucking moron.

  I gunned my drink, and then an odd thing happened: I felt a silly grin take hold on my face, and I actually began chuckling. Ah, hell, Wenger was Wenger. I even felt a strange affection for him, probably because he was so predictable. I’m sure he was eating his liver over the fact I had run into such an unexpected bonanza. To him money meant everything: status, prestige, comfort, self-esteem, self-image—it was all tied to income and finances. Wenger would always find a way to determine how much money a person made, and then he assigned respect accordingly. If someone made less money than he did, he’d rejoice smugly, but if they out-earned him, he’d be bitter and jealous. I’d gone to pick-up bars with Wenger, and his usual tactic was to suggest to young ladies that he made more money than whomever they were mingling with. In the best-case scenario, women would ignore him, give him dirty looks, or tell him to beat it. In the worst case he’d get his ass kicked, and on a few occasions I’d saved him from a likely beating.

  I called Mandy three more times, then I tried Jerry McGee, and he answered.

  “How you holding up, Jerry?”

  “Ah, jeez, I’m fine, but Shelly’s going crazy, and Desiree is really freaked out.”

  “Man, that’s too bad. I wanted to call to say I’m sorry.”

  “Appreciate it. After what I’ve been through in my life, this is just another test. But we’ll be fine. It’ll pass, and life goes on. Hey, Shelly tells me Bascom hired you to investigate the murder.”

  “Yeah, looks like I’ll stay up here for a little while.”

  “You couldn’t have picked a nicer place, except for the weather.”

  “Jerry, have you seen Mandy around?”

  “I think she’s downstairs playing slots. She’s riding home with Shelly, me, and Desiree. Her boyfriend, Renaldo, deserted her. They had some fight or argument, and he left her up here. The guy’s a real class act.”

  “No kidding, huh?”

  “These damn kids. Like I don’t have enough problems.”

  “Are you going to take off tomorrow?”

  “No, I’m gonna load up the girls and go after dinner. Maybe I’ll give them all a Valium, so I can drive home in peace.”

  We laughed. “Not a bad idea,” I said.

  I hustled out to my car and drove straight to Caesar’s, hurrying because I only had forty-five minutes before my meeting with Jack Myers at the bar. Caesar’s layout was typical of a large-scale casino. The carpet had a geometric pattern designed to cause disorientation, and the walls were mirrored in strategic places to confuse one’s sense of direction. The walkways seemed to wind mazelike in all directions, and everywhere banks of slot machines beckoned, clanging loudly and luring in the distracted passerby. There were no clocks on the walls, and the bathrooms were infrequent and out of the way.

  Fortunately it was late Sunday afternoon, and the casino wasn’t particularly crowded. I started at the elevators to the hotel rooms, searching outward until I found Mandy about ten minutes later at a bank of quarter slots. I took a seat next to her and began playing a machine.

  “Any luck?” I said.

  “Hey, you,” she said, and touched my shoulder. She was wearing jeans, black open-toed heels, and a white V-neck shirt cut just low enough to allow a tempting glimpse of cleavage. I burned through a few bucks then stopped and took a cigarette from her pack. She kept on playing her machine as if she were oblivious to my presence.

  “You hear from Renaldo?” I said finally.

  “No,” she said. “What happened to your face?”

  “Sven Osterlund hit me with a right cross.” She blinked and her lips parted.

  “I hear you know him,” I said.

  “And your point is?”

  “Osterlund’s a prime suspect in Sylvester Bascom’s murder. He’s also got more problems than a math book. He’s trouble, Mandy. Don’t let him drag you into his gig. It’ll have an unhappy ending.”

  “Since when did you start seeing into the future? That’s Sven’s bag.”

  “I deal with criminals for a living. As a group, they’re pretty predictable.”

  “Really? Well, tough guy, maybe next time you should try to predict when you’re gonna get punched out.”

  “I’ve been hit harder, believe me,” I said, but I could feel my patience eroding. “He said you and he are together now, and he warned me to stay away from you. Is that true?”

  She bet the last of her credits, pulled the handle, and came up bust. “What we did the other night was fun, Dan. But don’t get your hopes up for a repeat performance.” With that she walked away and left me sitting there, feeling as manipulated and inadequate as a rookie gambler going broke on his first big night at the casino.

  CHAPTER 10

  The King’s Head was on a road I’d never heard of, but I thought it would be easy to find. I turned left off the highway, searching for the address, and found myself driving fruitlessly through a dark, older neighborhood. The houses were a mixture of ancient cabins, dilapidated pre-fab units, and trailer homes that had long ago sunk into their final resting place. Half the structures were boarded up, and some looked condemned. The other half appeared to be lived in—and badly. A child in soiled diapers sat crying on a sagging, rotted-out redwood porch, while in the driveway next door a man in a grease-smeared down vest wrenched on a rust-bucket Ford Bronco. He shot me a look as I drove by, his eyes black with aggression. Dead pine needles were matted on his deck, and the fresh snowfall in his yard was stained by soot and dirt, as if filth grew like weeds beneath the snow.

  When I finally made my way back to Highway 50, I had to wait through a series of lights before I found the street I was looking. The parking lot for the King’s Head was small and the spots were narrow. I banged my knee on the corner of the car door as I climbed out and slammed it shut so hard the Nissan rocked on its springs. I felt my teeth grinding as I approached the entrance to the bar.

  “Don’t worry, be happy,” said a man who was smoking on the steps to the entry. I looked him in the eye. “Fuck off,” I said. He took a step back. I strode into the building and glared around. The place was quiet; it was nearly empty.

  I wanted strong drink at that moment, with an urgency I hadn’t felt in years. I walked up to the bar, knowing myself too damn well to even hesitate. Had I been someone else, I might have chosen meditation, or yoga, or maybe Prozac or Valium. But I didn’t subscribe to any new-age therapies; my medicine was of the old-fashioned variety, eighty proof, and readily available.

  Have a drink, bring it on, and let the past few days dissolve into a hazy memory. Let the fight with Osterlund fade into a blur, have another and laugh off Mandy’s involvement with him. Fuckin’ right. Have a few more, and forget about the bullshit guilt trip Wenger was laying on me. Goddamn, I wanted to get blotto drunk, like I used to in the old days. I hooked my boot on the foot rail and motioned to the bartender, on a mission, ready to do it the way my buddy Cody Gibbons preached: drink, man, drink until you pass out, puke, go broke, or brawl.

  I leaned on my elbows, ordered a double CC rocks, and drank it in two swallows. I pushed my glass to the bartender.

  “Do it again,” I said.

  “What’s the matter, you just lose your girlfriend?”

  “Pour it,” I said.

  I raised the glass to my lips and let the smoky
liquor slide down my throat, but then I slowly set the drink down in front of me, still half full, and listened to a small voice telling me to remember—and learn for once—how not to be a fool.

  The night I shot the child pornographer had marked the beginning of a bleak year for me. In the months after killing Elrod Bradley, I was sued for divorce and lost my job as an investigator for Ortega, Davis, & Associates, a first-class detective agency. I also went through the nightmare of being prosecuted by a miserable bastard of a teetotaling district attorney, who felt the killing was my fault because I was carrying my piece while getting loaded at one of San Jose’s numerous dive bars, which, despite the Valley’s increasing affluence, still stubbornly spotted the city like venereal warts on a bad pecker. After the magnitude of Bradley’s depravity became publicized, the DA eventually dropped the charges, but my permit to carry a concealed firearm was revoked, and it took me two years to get it back.

  When Bill Ortega fired me a couple months after the shooting, I felt almost as bad for him as I did for myself. A friend of my father, Ortega had hired me fresh out of college and took me under his wing like a son. In the beginning, he brought me with him on interviews, and we spent countless hours on stakeouts, during which he discussed the myriad nuances of detective work, gleaned from over twenty-five years in the business. He also knew as much or more about criminal law than most attorneys and regularly lectured me on the legal aspects of different cases he had worked.

  After five years with Bill Ortega, I considered myself a seasoned private investigator, a professional. But despite his good intentions, Ortega couldn’t offer the perspective I needed most, which was how to come to terms with taking another man’s life.

  My life became unraveled, and to combat the guilt and despair I went to the only relief I knew, one where escape came in the form of double vodka tonics with lime, the ice cubes crackling merrily at the promise of blessed numbness. I was out on a $10,000-bond for a manslaughter charge, and that distraction, plus my worsening hangovers, caused me to become incapable of doing decent work, which made me feel stupid and incompetent.

  I hit rock bottom on a Tuesday morning that July, when I woke at dawn in the dirt parking lot of the Corners Club, a seedy, lowlife wino bar in Campbell. I was huddled against the side of the building when the morning bartender arrived with his pal to open up at 6:00 A.M. They helped me up, and I went into the bar as if I had never left. My wallet was gone, but the bartender poured me a free one like my situation was a typical event.

  During the next hour, the regulars arrived. At first they looked to be mostly older, in their sixties perhaps, but then I got in a blurry conversation with two men and realized that despite their stained and missing teeth, ruined skin, and overall wizened appearance, they were probably no older than I was. I went to the bathroom, and a tall man was standing at the urinal next to me, slowly letting his bladder drain while retching up his breakfast. I walked out into the sunlight, into a warm summer morning, a day that should have been full of promise. The sky was so blue I had to squint, and chirping of the birds in the trees pierced my head like hot wire.

  When I staggered into my apartment that day, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the bloodshot eyes that stared back. I suffered through a horrible five-star hangover, shaking and dry heaving, feeling like I was looking over the edge into a dark chasm, a place where people go when all luck and hope has run out. I didn’t want to go there and swore to myself I’d dry out. I did, but it was too late.

  After I didn’t show up to work or call in, Ortega called that evening and fired me. The next day Julia filed for divorce and left to live with her sister in Sacramento. I turned my phone off, closed the drapes, and lived like a hermit for a couple of days until Cody Gibbons showed up, body-slammed the door open, and set me up with a job as a skip tracer for Ray Lorretta Bail Bonds.

  ******

  By the time the coroner walked in a few minutes after five, I had managed to curb my desire to get blackout drunk. Two double whiskeys and a pint of stout English ale had calmed me sufficiently, for the moment.

  “Starting without me, huh?” he said.

  “Jack,” I nodded, “appreciate you coming.”

  “Yeah, it’s a big sacrifice. And you can call me Mr. Myers…” He grumbled something unintelligible, and I tried to read his expression, but it was hidden under his shaggy eyebrows. But then he smiled, like he held some aged secret. “Come on, buy an old man a goddamned drink,” he said.

  The King’s Head was Tahoe’s representative British pub, complete with soccer paraphernalia, English flags, and a large selection of British food and beers. The two men sitting at the bar had English accents, as did the bartender, who asked Myers if he wanted the usual, then brought him a draft and a shot. I handed the bartender my credit card.

  “Hey, kid, I was only kidding. You don’t need to pay for my drinks,” Myers said.

  “I’m buying,” I said.

  “If you insist, I ain’t gonna argue.”

  “You lived here in Tahoe for long?” I asked.

  He looked at me, his eye twitching, and I thought he might tell me it was none of my damn business. But instead he took a long hit off his beer and said, “Couple winters now. I was coroner in San Francisco for years, and before that I worked in Houston. I came up here to retire, and the bastards put me back to work.”

  “You like working in San Francisco?”

  He didn’t answer for a while, staring up into the heavy timbers supporting the peaked ceiling. “The politics of the job eventually drove me crazy,” he said finally. “I spent more than forty years in the public sector…” he tailed off and mumbled something, then tilted his shot glass back.

  “Our esteemed elected officials, they’re supposed to be serving the people. That’s the idea, right?” He looked at me directly, and when I didn’t answer, he said, “It’s bullshit. Let me tell you something—politics is all lies. It’s all self-serving agendas and convenient ethics. Spent most of my life in that cesspool.”

  “I imagine up here you don’t have those types of big-city issues.”

  “Catch glimpses of it here and there, though it’s nothing like San Francisco. But actually the previous coroner left amid some controversy.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m gonna order dinner. You hungry?”

  “Is the food here good?”

  “For British food.”

  Myers signaled the bartender for menus, and we ordered another round.

  “You were talking about the previous coroner.”

  “Yeah. Supposedly he talked to some reporters at the local newspaper about the death of two casino employees. This was about a year ago. He told them the deaths were caused by drug overdose, and the paper published a story. The sheriff was unhappy about that, and one thing led to another.”

  “Sheriff Grier?”

  “No,” he growled. “Grier’s a deputy sheriff for South Lake Tahoe. The county sheriff is Conrad Pace, based in Placerville. He was elected about a year ago. I think he thought the article was bad press for his office, though I really don’t know what happened. It was all a bit hush-hush. Typical cover-up, seemed to me.”

  “What’s the big deal about a drug overdose? Happens often enough.”

  “Sure it does. In San Francisco, OD cases are routine. But Silverado County has a tiny fraction of the population of San Francisco. Here, I only do a couple, at the most three or four, autopsies a month. So a double OD case was big news.”

  “The coroner was fired because he talked to the press?”

  “That’s my guess. Knowing Conrad Pace, it wouldn’t surprise me. He’s more of a self-serving prick than most. It was a sad day when he was elected sheriff.”

  “That right?” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s right up there with the worst of them. He’s the type that would sell out his mama for a buck, you know? Son of a bitch got a mean streak a mile wide.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first cop I met lik
e that.”

  “I know him from way back,” he said. “Steer clear of him.”

  “Somehow people like that get elected,” I said, curious to hear what else he had to say about the local police.

  “It’s sad is what it is. We end up represented by the best liars, and some of the people we elect are ruthless behind closed doors. They’ll do whatever it takes to maintain their domain. Get in their way, they’ll find a way to fuck you. Bunch of assholes, for the most part. You ever notice how politicians tend to be wealthy? It ain’t on the salaries they’re getting paid, believe me.” He coughed, then pulled reading glasses and a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket. “Enough about that. Let me tell you what the results were on Sylvester Bascom.

  “His death was in fact precipitated by the knife wound, but the official cause of death was loss of blood. The knife penetrated his midsection on the left side above his navel and exited in his back about five inches higher. He was stabbed right below the rib cage, and the blade sliced through his traverse colon and stomach and severed his splenic artery. The spleen holds a significant amount of blood, and that’s why he bled to death.”

  “What kind of knife was used?”

  “Join me for a smoke on the patio,” Myers said. We took our beers out back to where a couple of redwood picnic tables sat under a sloped aluminum awning. The sun was getting low, and while it had been in the high forties during the afternoon, the temperature had dropped to twenty-seven degrees, according to the thermometer hanging on one of the overhang posts. A large rectangular barbecue covered in clear plastic was pushed in a corner, and two dirty white plastic chairs were set out to accommodate the smokers. Beyond the covered section, three feet of snow blanketed the beer garden.

  Myers lit a stogie, and I smiled, thinking that every coroner I’d ever met smoked cigars. Something to do with blotting out the odor of a corpse, I figured. He propped one leg up on a plastic chair and rested his elbow on his knee. “The knife had to be a minimum of fourteen inches. It was serrated on one side and razor sharp on the other, like an oversize survival knife. I’ve seen plenty of stabbings, the majority done with common blades, like jackknifes or switchblades or kitchen or steak knives. But I’ve also seen people die of wounds from screwdrivers, scratch awls, chisels, and even machetes. I think the first thing you need to consider is the killer is carrying an unusual and possibly a specialized weapon.” He hit off his cigar and blew a puff of smoke into the twilight. “Second, the man who did this, and I assume it was a man and not a woman, was very strong. Imagine the leverage it took to drive the blade in like that.” He took a pen out of his pocket and held it in his right fist. “I’m sure Bascom was standing when he was stabbed. It would be pretty difficult to get the right upward angle if he was sitting.” He put his left hand on my shoulder, then stepped toward me and brought the pen upward to my stomach.