Come Twilight (11 page)

The weather app on my phone told me it was still seventy-three degrees outside, so I pulled on a pair of shorts and my walking shoes. My shoulder holster went on over the t-shirt and under a short-sleeved plaid button-up. It wouldn’t conceal well through the thin fabric, but it was late enough that I didn’t really care. I wasn’t likely to run into anyone, anyway.

The plan was to keep it short. Maybe half an hour, forty minutes. I went out the back door and around the side to the gate. It felt good to be outside in the fresh air. There was a light breeze, but the night was still warm. I put in one earbud, set the volume low, and played
The River
, just loud enough for me to recognize each song and follow along in my head.

Walking down the driveway, I looked over my shoulder one more time. The light in Jen’s room was still off and the coast was clear.

As soon as I turned left onto the sidewalk, I felt the tension that had been building inside me since Saturday begin to lighten. The pain in my shoulder and neck eased. I’d been carrying more weight than I realized, and the small sense of freedom that came from venturing out into the night on my own surprised me.

I was careful, though, not to let my guard down. As relieved as I was to find my earlier anxiety dissipating, I refused to let it go entirely. In fact, as I turned right onto Argonne, just as Springsteen was finding his way into “Jackson Cage,” I turned the music off and stowed the headphones in my pocket.

I had the streets to myself. No one was out and I’d only seen one car. The quiet stillness was relaxing. I heard crickets chirping, the leaves moving in the light breeze, and the distant, rhythmic hum of traffic blocks away rising and falling as I walked.

The calmness of the night made me feel awake and alert. And ready. If anyone came at me now, I thought, I’d be prepared. Part of me almost wished they would so we could finish things and I could get on with my life.

As I approached the small traffic roundabout at Vista I sensed something behind me. There was no need for subtlety. If anyone was back there I wanted to see them and for them to see me. As I turned, I caught some motion in my peripheral vision, but it was only a gray cat that stopped in its tracks as soon as I saw it. When I looked it in the eye, it crossed the street and kept walking.

My pulse had quickened, but I was reassured that my vigilance was at its peak.

I continued down Argonne and took another right on Broadway. The street was busier. A car would pass every minute or two, and I saw another pedestrian on the south side of the street. He seemed completely oblivious to me, his face lit by the glowing screen of his smartphone. I watched him over my shoulder as he passed and continued on.

It had been a little over fifteen minutes since I’d left Jen’s, so I turned north on Prospect to loop back home. The round-trip would be half an hour or so. A short walk, but a good one. It felt like I had actually put some tangible emotional distance between the present moment and the anxiety I had experienced earlier in the day. And the walk provided the added benefit of clearing away much of the fog that had been clouding my mind, and I felt optimistic about finally being able to sleep. After I turned the last corner back onto Colorado, I walked the last quarter of a mile and crossed the street toward Jen’s house on the other side.

Just as I stepped up onto the curb, I felt something hard and sharp strike the back of my head. I spun around and my right hand found the grip of my Glock hanging in its shoulder holster.

Jen was standing on the asphalt in the center of the illuminated circle shining down from the streetlight. She cocked her arm and threw another rock. Hard. It caught me square in the chest.

“Ow,” I said as the rock bounced to the grass at my feet.

She walked by me without saying a word or making eye contact.

I didn’t get much sleep after all.

“Even that damn cat could have offed you last night,” Jen said, glancing in the rearview mirror. She’d spent most of the morning ragging me and critiquing my lax situational awareness. “I wasn’t even trying to hide anymore by the time you got to Broadway and you still didn’t know I was there.”

“That’s the third time you’ve told me that,” I said.

“You’re not as badass as you think you are.”

I didn’t think I was badass at all. I never had, really. But for years, since Megan had died, I’d thought I didn’t really have anything to lose. There was a kind of freedom to be found in that. It wasn’t bravery or courage, really, just the lack of fear. That might not have been good for me as a person, but it was good for me as a cop. Now, as the wheels of self-justification kept turning in my head and I thought about loss and freedom, the lyrics to “Me and Bobby McGee” popped into my mind and I gave up on my attempted rationalization and imagined I was listening to Kris Kristofferson instead of my irate partner.

Jen parked across the street from Lucinda Denkins’s house. We weren’t sure if she would be home. She’d told me on the phone that she would be taking some time off from her job in the human resources department of the Long Beach Unified School District.

No one answered the knock on the door, so we walked over and looked up the driveway at the detached garage in back of the house. I had Bill Denkins’s address book in a manila envelope tucked under my arm. We’d made photocopies of every page and the book had been processed for evidence, but we didn’t find anything of potential use. I wanted to see how she’d react when I returned it to her. She’d indicated a personal attachment to it when we’d spoken on the phone, and I thought I might be able to get a stronger read on her. At that point, her grief had seemed honest and genuine. But I’d need a lot more than my instincts to clear her of suspicion. The more I could find out before I interrogated her, the better off the investigation would be.

“She’s not here,” Joe told us. He was wearing cargo shorts and a dirty T-shirt and he looked tired. There were half a dozen large cardboard boxes, filled mostly with books, scattered around him on the concrete floor. It looked as though he’d been digging through them. “We ran out of food,” he said. “I told her I’d go to the store, but she said she wanted to go. She needed to get out of the house.”

“How’s she doing?” Jen asked.

“Not very good,” he answered. “She’s trying to keep it together, but it’s hard. Her dad was a good guy.”

Jen nodded. “It takes time.”

“She wanted me to find some book out here that her dad gave her. Poetry. But she didn’t know the name or who wrote it.”

While Jen talked to him, I looked around the garage. I didn’t want him to notice me, but I did want to get a sense of the two of them, of their life. There were shelves along the back wall and a washer and dryer on the right. Things were neat, but not obsessively so. The trash cans were in one corner, the blue recycle bin’s lid held up a few inches by a garbage bag filled with empty water bottles and aluminum cans. Behind them were a bunch of gardening tools, shovels, rakes, and the like. Two bikes were leaning next to each other on their kickstands in the opposite corner. The one thing that stood out was a large framed poster leaning against a stack of boxes in the back. It had a black background with simple white block lettering that announced “WINTER IS COMING.” I knew it must have been a leftover from his failed restaurant. I recognized the catchphrase. Had he been trying to get a marketing bump from
Game of Thrones
?

“You still need to talk to us again, right?” Joe asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “For the formal interview. We’ll let you know when. The more we can put together beforehand, though, the quicker and easier it will be for you guys. We know how hard it is right now, and we want to make it as simple and straightforward as we can.”

“Thanks,” he said. “We appreciate it.” He tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work. There were a few gray hairs in the soul patch under his lip that I hadn’t noticed before.

“Good luck finding the book,” I said.

Jen and I walked back down the driveway. I still had the unopened envelope tucked under my arm.

In the car on the way back to the station, Jen said, “What do you think about Joe?”

“I’m not sure how to read him,” I said. “On the one hand, he seems to have the strongest motive, with the loan Bill made him for the restaurant. He flushed six figures down the toilet. And we still don’t know where the rest of the money came from. Was he into somebody else for it? Who? How much?” I drifted off into speculation.

When it was clear to her that I’d lost the thread, Jen said, “What about the other hand?”

She glanced away from the street ahead long enough to see the puzzled expression on my face. “You started that out with ‘On the one hand’ but you never got to the other hand.”

“Oh, yeah. Does he seem like he’s got enough spine to fake a suicide?”

She thought about it. “Not really, no.”

“But.”

“Desperation can really straighten up your posture.”

I’d sent Jen links to the Facebook and Yelp pages for Joe’s failed restaurant. I asked if she’d had a chance to look at them.

“Is it just me,” she said, “or is ‘Winter’ a really stupid name?”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Looked like the name was the least of its problems, though.” She checked the rearview mirror. I wondered if she was looking at the Honda two cars back in the other lane that had turned the corner behind us onto Seventh Street.

“Right? Why would Bill invest in something like that? Seems like he had pretty good business sense.”

“Maybe he was investing in Joe,” she said.

“That sounds like a worse bet than the restaurant.”

“Yeah, but maybe he did it for Lucinda.”

That made more sense to me. From the limited amount I knew about Bill, that seemed like a more credible theory.

“What about his ex?” she asked.

“Lucinda’s mother? She’s on my list to interview. Lives up in Pasadena, though, so I was waiting until it looked like we had half a day to spare.”

“You ready to talk to her?” Jen asked. “We go right now, we can probably beat the rush-hour traffic coming back.”

I considered it. My notes were in my jacket pocket, and I could access most of the files on my iPad while Jen drove. “Let’s do it.”

Celeste Gordon was waiting for us when we arrived. Normally, we like to drop in on potential witnesses unannounced. Often the surprise allows us to catch them off guard and they will reveal information that might not have been so forthcoming if they’d had time to prepare for our arrival. But we didn’t relish the idea of spending most of the afternoon on the freeway only to knock on an unanswered door. So we had called ahead and she had agreed to meet us at her home.

We had followed the Waze app’s directions on my phone, even though I was hesitant about taking the 110 through downtown LA, but the nav system was taking us around an accident on the more logical route that would have taken us up the Long Beach Freeway. We still hit some congestion, but we made the trip in an hour and fifteen minutes.

The exclusive neighborhood was tucked in between Cal Tech and the Huntington Library and Gardens, not far from the dividing line between Pasadena and its wealthier neighbor, San Marino. The houses were on big lots, set back from the street with privacy hedges or finely wrought fences crawling with ivy. Gordon lived in an expansive single-level ranch with a circular driveway and enough lush greenery to make it appear as though the California drought was considerate enough not to cross the San Marino city line.

The front door opened as Jen pulled the cruiser up to the porch, and Celeste Gordon stepped outside to greet us. We introduced ourselves and she led us inside.

She looked younger than I’d expected. At fifty-one, she was less than two years younger than Bill had been, but she could have easily passed for forty. She looked like she was dressed for a tennis match, in a short skirt and a sleeveless top that showed off her trim and athletic figure. If she’d had plastic surgery, it was good enough not to show.

The house was even more impressive on the inside. It had been fully remodeled into what looked a photo spread for
Architectural Digest
, artfully mixing rustic and contemporary styles. She led us to a large dining table that I had no doubt had been hand-built from reclaimed wood.