Watch Him Die

by Craig Robertson

  No, you’re not. You’re an intelligent man, I know that. Setting up this messaging service shows that. Not everyone would know their way around a computer enough to know that.

  A pause.

  I think they would. Maybe most people would. It’s not that difficult. Even you might be able to do it. Okay, I’ve done what you asked. I don’t need to talk to you anymore. Keep that feed open.

  The green light died.

  Dakers turned to her. ‘“I think. Maybe. Might.” More equivocation. He’s hiding something.’

  ‘Yes. And I think I might know what.’

  CHAPTER 50

  Narey, Giannandrea and Wells were working it hard. Every lead was being chased down, even if most of them turned into cul-de-sacs.

  Lee Fairley had lain low since his disappearing act from Langside. He’d only left his flat twice, but on one of those two trips he’d again given his surveillance team the slip. He was being tailed along Merrylee Road when he entered the White Elephant bar and restaurant. When he hadn’t re-emerged half an hour later, the DC following him went inside to be told the man had come in then walked straight across the restaurant and out the side door by the conservatory.

  The DC went out the same door and emerged next to the car park, seeing immediately that all Fairley had had to do was step across a short wall and he was into an area of housing and away. Maybe he’d taken a shortcut, maybe he was just messing with his surveillance because he was pissed off at being watched. Either way, another hour later, he calmly returned home as if nothing had happened.

  Fraser Anderson remained missing, whereabouts unknown. By the nature of his job, he didn’t need an employer as such, could work from home and never have to see another soul. Like Fairley, all he needed was a computer and an internet connection. No need for anyone to see his face or know if he was who he said he was.

  They were trying to get information out of banks but that was never easy at the best of times and not in the timeframe that they were working with. Nor did it help that the chances of Anderson working under an assumed name to avoid the dark cloud associated with his service attack on the city council were pretty high.

  Without being able to speak to him, all they had to go on was Erin Anderson’s brief on her ex-husband’s changeable character and the psychiatrist’s report from Carstairs. It ticked enough boxes that Narey was most definitely interested.

  Angry when challenged. Controlling. Volatile. Possible borderline personality disorder. Potentially escalating violent tendencies.

  Kerri Wells dug deeper into the John Paul Kepple case, discovering the priest that Kepple demanded to see, Father Kiernan, had left the area shortly after that, got transferred to a diocese in the south of England and died five months later. He was found at the foot of the stairs in the chapel house with a broken neck. Wells spoke to the local cops and it seemed they thought there was something suspicious about it but that they’d no evidence that it was anything other than a fall. Wells and Narey thought otherwise.

  Kayleigh McGrath called again, putting Narey in touch with a friend who had some info on Andy, Brianna’s unknown one-time sort-of boyfriend. Mel Campbell had been with her in the Social the night she’d met the guy and had hazy recollections of him.

  Narey went to the supermarket where the woman worked and they chatted in the car park, standing under a shopping trolley shelter as the rain lashed down around them.

  ‘Sorry, I know this isn’t ideal, but I didn’t want to do this in the shop,’ Campbell explained. ‘Too many nosy buggers in there. So, you want to know about this guy that Bri met? Kayleigh says it’s important.’

  ‘It might be. I honestly don’t know yet. But anything could be hugely important, so thanks for taking the time to talk to me.’

  ‘Sure. Of course. Well, the first thing is that we were all pretty drunk. We’d been drinking in my place before we went out, prosecco and gin, so a couple of drinks in town and we were fleeing. Plus, it was a few years ago now. So, I might not be remembering it right.’

  ‘Just do your best.’

  ‘Well, the reason I remember it was this guy wasn’t exactly Bri’s type. He was a few years older and not great looking, not the kind of “wow” guy she usually went for. But, like I said, we’d been drinking. She talked to him for ages and the rest of us thought she was taking the piss out the guy. But she came back over and said that he was really nice, and they were having a right good chat.’

  ‘Can you remember what he looked like? And maybe his age?’

  Mel huffed. ‘Not really. He was maybe about five feet ten. Dark hair, collar length, kind of boring looking, a wee bit overweight. I’d say he’d be about thirty-five. Bri usually went for the flash types, pretty boys and bad boys. So, when she went off with him at the end of the night, we were all gobsmacked.’

  ‘Do you think you might recognise the guy if you saw him again? Maybe if I showed you some photographs?’

  Mel made a face. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. It was ages ago. But I have seen him again, maybe three years ago.’

  Narey’s pulse quickened. ‘Where?’

  ‘In town. It was near Central Station. It took me a minute to think where I knew him from, but it was him. Thing is, the bastard was married. He was hand in hand with this woman all happy husband and wife. He saw me and he knew I knew.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Definite.’

  CHAPTER 51

  Salgado had grabbed some sleep but was feeling the worse for it. He was disorientated as much by the two hours he’d slept as he was by the body in the bathroom of the Aster. They had a sense of Garland now. They knew how he worked, how he was wired, but it still wasn’t enough.

  The Aster had felt right, and in some ways it was. Old LA, an old haunt of the Garlands, the Black Dahlia connection. After the visit to the Aster they had officers call on the house that now sat on the once vacant lot on South Norton where Elizabeth Short had been found, but it was a perfectly normal family home with no skeletons in any of the closets. The same went for the house on Talmadge Street in Loz Feliz where Ethan had grown up. All hunches. All wrong.

  Dylan Hansen hadn’t moved, hadn’t seemingly breathed, in the time Salgado had slept or in the half hour he’d been awake again. Opinions were spilt between what they could see and what they could believe. Cold realism versus hope. Salgado continued to cling to hope.

  ‘You awake in there, Detective?’

  He looked up from his desk to see Howie Kelsey walking in slowly, like a man bearing bad news.

  ‘Hey, Howie. What’s up? You been made lieutenant yet?’

  Kelsey grimaced. ‘I think that’s going to have to wait a while.’

  Salgado tried to read the man’s mood. ‘You got news?’

  Kelsey advanced his right hand and tilted it side to side. Maybe yes, maybe no.

  ‘I don’t want any bad news, Kelsey. We don’t have time for any of that.’

  The tall man looked mournful and in no mood for jokes. ‘So, let me tell you what I’ve got. I managed to get three detectives on this, used your kidnap guy to convince my boss it was urgent. We tried to track down all the employees from Delmonico’s who appeared on the witness statement that Mortimer and Crouch took in 1947. It was a long shot but three of them are still alive and still living in LA.’

  ‘Jesus, how old are they?’

  ‘Viola Facci is eighty-nine. Domenico Sciarra is ninety-five. And Tony Giordano is ninety.’

  ‘Giordano is the guy who owned the sedan?’

  ‘Right. So, first of all, Sciarra is alive but has dementia. His doctor says he’s as happy as Larry but couldn’t tell us what he had for breakfast never mind what happened seventy years ago. But Viola and Tony are sharp as tacks.

  ‘Viola is in a retirement home in Westlake. Chirpy and chatty and remembers Delmonico’s as if it were yesterday. And she remembers Zac Garland very well. Want to know the first thing she said when we told her we were cops and wanted to talk to her about Zach
ary Garland? “I’ll bet this is about the Black Dahlia”.’

  ‘Whoa . . .’

  Kelsey held up a hand in warning.

  ‘No, hold on. Don’t get too excited. It’s all about why she remembers him and the Dahlia. Viola said, and I quote, “Zachary Garland was full of shit.” She said he was a born liar, always making things up to try to impress people. Particularly women. She said she wouldn’t believe that guy if he told her the sun came up in the morning.

  ‘Viola said that probably most people in Los Angeles were talking about the Black Dahlia murder but that everyone in Delmonico’s was talking about it. The cops found the shoes and the purse nearby, that was the first thing. But the staff just assumed they’d been dumped there and that was that. But then cops came looking for a guy named Frankie Wynn who’d said he worked there. Of course, there was no Wynn there but it had them all scared and excited and talking, talking, talking.

  ‘She said it was maybe a month after that when Zac Garland began telling people he was Frankie Wynn. He’d tell one or two, like a confession, and then let them tell other people. At which point he’d deny it. She said, and again I quote, that “he started to wear the name like a coat.” She said he was always this weird kid who wanted to be more interesting than he was. Said he was dating starlets when he wasn’t. That he’d got into fights when he hadn’t. Killed someone when he hadn’t.’

  ‘She was sure?’

  ‘She was certain. She remembers one of the waiters saying he was out on the town with Zac, hitting a few bars and hitting on a few girls. Says the first thing Garland did was introduce himself to the girls as Frankie. But no one had ever heard him use the name before the cops came calling.

  ‘Viola says Garland hit on her, told her all kinds of stories, but she knew they were bullshit, knew Zac was full of it. I asked her if there was any chance he’d killed the Black Dahlia and she nearly died laughing.’

  ‘Wait. But what about the car?’ Salgado was reaching. ‘Zac Garland owned the sedan that was seen on Norton, right? Durrant had no doubt about the age, the shape, the paint job.’

  Kelsey shook his head. ‘He owned a sedan, that much was true. But remember, we don’t even know if Ralph Asdell’s sighting on Norton was the guy who killed Beth Short. And, anyway, that brings us to Tony Giordano.

  ‘So Tony is in a home in Montecito Heights, a very dapper OG, shirt and tie every day. Likes to chat to the ladies. Got all his marbles, maybe just a bit slower than he was. He had to think a bit more before things came to him, but he got there. Tony, like you say, owned a 1935 sedan. But he was working the night Elizabeth Short was murdered, went straight home to his wife and was there all night. Checked and confirmed by our guys at the time. Completely in the clear. He got a paint job done on his car, simple as that, but it was enough to draw cops to the restaurant.

  ‘So, I ask him about Zac Garland and got nothing until I prompted him about his sedan. And then he was like, “Yeah, Garland. I remember that son of a bitch. He bought a sedan, same as mine. Even got a black paint job on it, same as mine. He was one crazy son of a bitch.”

  ‘Bottom line is, Tony Giordano has zero doubt that Zac Garland bought the sedan way after the Dahlia murder. He bought it because he was obsessed with the Short killing. Because of Giordano, he knew the cops thought a guy with a ’35 sedan was the killer, so he bought one to make people think it was him. Crazy fuck. Giordano says the staff all called him the Dahlia killer. Like it was one big joke.

  ‘I’m sorry to say it, Salgado, but Zac Garland was a fantasist. A dangerous fantasist going by the rest of the stuff you told me, but there’s nothing to think he had anything at all to do with the Dahlia murder. Any bad shit he got into was after that, and yeah, maybe because of it. But he didn’t murder Elizabeth Short.’

  Salgado sat with his head in his hands, trying to make sense of the news, wondering what it changed and what it didn’t. Had they been wasting time chasing the Dahlia angle?

  ‘Don’t write this off just as bad news, man,’ Kelsey encouraged him. ‘So Zac Garland didn’t murder Elizabeth Short, neither did a million other guys in 1947. But from what you told me, your guy Ethan believed his father did. And that was the thing that mattered. He believed he was the son of the Dahlia killer. You got to think that had a whole lot to do with him turning out the way he did. You got motivation, you got an insight into his thinking. Use it.’

  Salgado nodded grimly. ‘We know who he is now. He’s who he wanted to be. A man gets told often enough that he’s born to be something, then he’s going to believe it. If he’s told he’s going to be a star, then he reaches for the sky. If he’s told he’s the son of a famous murderer, then he’s either going to live up to it or never live it down. Ethan Garland made his choice.’

  CHAPTER 52

  Marianne Ziegler was tired.

  It was barely nine in the morning and she’d already been interrogated for another two hours. All the things she’d done her best to forget were now being dredged out of her. The man who’d tried to kill her, the man who’d ruined her life, her self-respect and confidence, had returned to haunt her. She didn’t have much left.

  Salgado and O’Neill had fuelled her with gallons of coffee and thrown memory prompts at her until she was sick of it. They knew they should have gone easier on her but there wasn’t time for niceties.

  They asked again about Garland’s childhood, his schooling, his favourite haunts. They asked about things that he obsessed with, about favourite TV shows, parks, streets, anything and everything. And they asked about his father, again.

  ‘We think that maybe Ethan was obsessed with the Black Dahlia murder from 1947. Would you agree with that, Marianne?’

  ‘I . . . well, yes. I never really thought about it that way before but . . .’ that killing, quite a few of them, and he’d read them a lot. I thought it was a bit weGarland’s ex-wife faltered. ‘Maybe I never wanted to think about it that way. He had books on ird but lots of people are into true crime. It doesn’t mean anything, right? That’s what I thought at the time, but now, now it looks very different.’

  ‘Did he ever mention places connected to the Dahlia murder? Anything at all that you can remember?’

  Marianne raised her hands in exasperation. ‘He used to walk over there. Leimert Park, wasn’t it? It was one of his regular walks and now I guess I know why. But nothing else. Nothing that I can think of.’

  ‘Okay, what about other murder cases?’ O’Neill could hear the desperation in her voice. ‘If Ethan was into true crime, can you remember other murders that he had a particular interest in?’

  ‘This was a long time ago. I can’t remember every strange thing that Ethan was into. You’ll have seen the books in the house. He watched lots of documentaries. That was his go-to thing on cable. I should have seen this, right? Is that what you’re telling me? That I should have known?’

  ‘No,’ O’Neill reassured her. ‘We’re not saying that at all. People like Ethan are remarkably skilled at hiding the side of themselves that they exhibit when they carry out horrific crimes. Even those near to them don’t get to see it. Except when it’s unleashed on them. Most people who are into true crime just binge on it, they don’t get affected by it, or act on it. Don’t blame yourself for not seeing that.’

  ‘Cally is right, Marianne. This wasn’t down to you to notice. But we have to keep at it. We need to keep looking. All the places that we know of that Ethan used were associated with his youth, a better time, maybe. So, school seems to be an obvious place. Maybe places he hung out after school?’

  Nothing.

  ‘What about elsewhere in the city? Where else did he talk about? Maybe somewhere that he spent a lot of time, maybe still visited when you were married.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe somewhere old,’ Salgado kept at her. ‘An abandoned property or a derelict building. Somewhere nobody would go.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about an old house they
lived in? A place he went for sports or music? There must be somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t know. Look, we’ve gone over this—’

  She stopped abruptly. She raised her head and looked up at the two detectives, saying nothing but with her brows furrowed in thought. They saw the look and their blue sense tingled.

  ‘There is something else. It might be nothing and I haven’t thought of it in years until now. It was something you said a few moments ago, Detective Salgado. About thinking of somewhere that had been abandoned. That’s not a very common thing in LA with house prices being what they are. And about another murder.’

  Salgado and O’Neill looked at each other, neither quite sure if they were sensing or hoping for a breakthrough in whatever he’d triggered in Marianne’s memory bank.

  ‘There is a place Ethan used to talk about. And he used to go visit it with his dad.’

  They were most definitely interested now.

  ‘Have you heard of the Los Feliz Murder House? The Perelson family, I think the name was. Yes, Perelson, that’s it.’

  ‘I have,’ Salgado confirmed as O’Neill looked confused. ‘A doctor clubbed his wife to death, tried to kill his oldest daughter, took an overdose in front of his younger kids and died next to his wife’s body on their bed. They lived in some big villa near Griffith Park, right? Glendower Place, I think. Garland had an interest in that place?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was all a bit strange. His father would take him up there and show him the house, try to scare him a bit, I think. Of course, Ethan being Ethan, he loved it. He often talked about it later.’

  ‘Tell us more.’ Salgado’s tone had changed and O’Neill couldn’t miss it.

  ‘According to Ethan, his dad would march him up the hill to the Perelson house on Glendower Place and fill him up full of tales that little boys shouldn’t be told. He’d tell him about mad Dr Perelson and his machinist’s hammer. Ethan lapped it up – by the time they got to the house, he would be fit to burst with excitement, desperate to look in the windows and see where Mrs Perelson was hit, to look at the old furniture and the dolls and the half-made beds.