Come Twilight (9 page)

I picked up the thread. “It’s their home,” I said.

“See, Bill knew that. Right from the beginning. I never had to teach him that.” His jaw clenched, as if he was biting down on something, trying to hold it back. He exhaled through his nose and checked his watch. Then he bent over, picked up the sprayer, and started around the corner.

“Mr. Acker?” I said.

He looked over his shoulder and said, “Come on, then, I ain’t got all morning.”

His building wasn’t as old or as charming as Bill’s, but it was clean and seemed well maintained. His one-bedroom was furnished in a utilitarian fashion, and I had no doubt there was a place for everything and everything was damn well in it. In the nook off of his kitchen, we sat at a new-looking Formica-topped table that was probably older than me. He poured two cups of black coffee and handed one to me. If there were any cream and sugar in the house, he must have been saving it for the pussies. I pretended to like the coffee.

He told me about Bill. How much Acker had helped him in those first years. How they’d become friends, even though Bill was too nice for his own good, letting himself be taken advantage of all the time. “By tenants, mostly,” he said. “But a few years ago, when Lucy married that jerk-off, then by him. Bill had loaned him money to start a restaurant.” Acker didn’t know exactly how much, but he thought low six figures. “It was one of those gastropubs or something. First, it was supposed to be downtown, but that didn’t work out, so then he set sights on Retro Row. Struck out with that one too, though, and wound up in Bixby Knolls. Found a place he liked, some vacant shop, and started renovating. It was almost all ready to go, had the furniture in, all the decorations up, appliances in the kitchen, staff hired. Then something went south. I never knew what. They delayed the opening. Bill sunk even more into it. They finally got it up and running and the damn place folded after two months.”

We talked for a few more minutes. He offered more coffee and I declined. When it was clear Acker didn’t have anything else of value, I thanked him and excused myself.

Upstairs in Kobe’s studio, Jen said, “You and Old Hickory must have really hit it off.”

“Got some more background on Denkins,” I said.

“Anything useful?”

“Maybe. How’d you do up here?”

Ethan came out of the bathroom. “Found a ton of prints,” he said. “And I think we’ve got some solid DNA samples, too.” He looked pleased.

Jen led me into the kitchen. “We also found this.” She opened a small manila envelope and tipped it onto the tiled countertop. A yellow three-by-three Post-it note slid out. There were two perpendicular crease marks in the paper. It looked like it had been folded into a tiny square. “It was tucked into the coin pocket of those jeans in the closet.”

I flipped it over with my fingernail and saw three names—S. Wise, C. Shepard, and B. Darklighter—written in tiny, neat handwriting. Each was followed by a different phone number.

“Those names mean anything to you?” she asked, putting the flap of the envelope down on the tile like a dustpan and sliding the note back inside.

“No. But I’ll bet they mean something to Kobe.”

“Take a right up here,” I said to Jen on the way back to the station.

“Why?” She checked the rearview mirror.

There was an Accord that had been behind us for the last mile and a half.

“The white Honda?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been two cars back since we turned onto Broadway.”

She cast a doubtful glance at me, but didn’t say anything else until she’d made the turn.

I watched over my shoulder. The Accord didn’t follow. I kept looking on the off chance it might have been a two-car tail. No one else turned behind us.

“Around the block?” she asked.

I nodded.

She looped around onto Vista, then took Euclid back to Broadway. “What was his name again? The guy from the building next door?”

“Kurt Acker.”

“Get anything from him?

I told Jen the story and she asked, “So when was that? The loan Denkins gave to the son-in-law?”

“Two years ago, I think. There was a record of the loan in the files, but nothing specific about the restaurant.”

We stopped at a red light and she looked at me. “When are you planning to re-interview the daughter?”

“I don’t know yet. Looks like there’s a lot more I need to find out before I do.”

I wasn’t anxious to repeat my Kobayashi Maru mistake, but Patrick came into the squad room before I had a chance to Google the names from the Post-it. I called him over to my desk. “Any of these names mean anything to you?”

“What names?”

“S. Wise?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“How about C. Shepard?”

“Not that one, either. They all have initials?” he asked. “What are these? Where are they from?”

“A note we found in Kobe’s apartment. Just have one more.”

“Shoot.”

“B. Darklighter?”

A broad grin spread across his face. “These guys really are nerds, aren’t they?”

“Why?” I asked. “Where’s the last one from?”

“
Star Wars
. The ‘B’ stands for Biggs.”

“Biggs Darklighter? I don’t remember that name from
Star Wars
. Who is he?”

“Barely shows up in
Episode IV
. He’s Luke’s friend from Tatooine. Supposedly there was a whole subplot, but it wound up getting cut.”

“And that’s just bouncing around in your head?”

“What were those other two names again?”

“C. Shepard?”

“Wait. Mass Effect? Commander Shepard?”

“Are you asking me? That’s a video game, right?”

“What was the first one again? S. Wise?”

Something clicked. “Wait,” I said. “
Lord of the Rings
?”

He nodded. “Samwise Gamgee.”

I thought about it. There had to be some significance to the selection of names. If Kobayashi Maru was an alias, it stood to reason that these were, too.

Patrick wrote the full names down on a notepad. Then, underneath each one, he wrote them with just the first initial, as they had been on the Post-it note. He studied them intently.

“See something?” I asked.

“They’re inconsistent,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Samwise is one word, just his first name. Why break it up into two? And it looks like they used the initials so the names wouldn’t be too obvious. S. Wise and C. Shepard seem really generic, right? So with those two, you wouldn’t even get the reference. If Kobe’s name was on here, too? K. Maru, even that one would fit. But Darklighter’s a dead giveaway. Without that one, I wouldn’t have seen the pattern.”

As I thought about it, I had something of an epiphany. Because Patrick owned a couple of fedoras and had once used the word “artisanal” in conversation without the requisite tone of mockery, for years we’d been teasing him about being a hipster, when, in fact, we should have been giving him shit that whole time for being a nerd.

Fortunately, Bill Denkins had saved passwords on his laptop, so when I opened his browser history and clicked on Facebook, they autofilled and logged me in. His feed was filled with dozens of condolences. I read each one but nothing in particular stood out. They were standard you’re-in-our-prayers kinds of things. He was in people’s thoughts, and quite a few mentioned his daughter, Lucinda, but many didn’t. There were a few links to articles about depression and suicide prevention. Only a few people knew that he’d been murdered, and my conversation with Kurt Acker, the manager of the adjacent building, suggested that his death had been rumored to be a suicide. I wondered how many of the messages were from current or former tenants. I would read them all again later and check out those who’d left them, but I’d had a different purpose for logging in then—I wanted to see what I could learn about Bill’s daughter and her husband.

Lucinda didn’t post much herself. Mostly Instagram photos that looked like they were automatically shared on Facebook. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to them, other than that she was fond of flowers and trees and unusual buildings. She had a good eye, too. While the subjects were fairly common, there was always something interesting about them. Aside from the pics, though, most of her wall was taken up with the standard cute pictures and funny videos and share-if-you-agree memes.

Joseph Polson, on the other hand, was a lot more active. He apparently never ate a meal he didn’t photograph or read an article he didn’t share. Lots of reviews of things—restaurants and movies and TV and music. He was also big on the Onion and ClickHole, and was experiencing a good deal of anticipatory anxiety over the new season of
The Walking Dead
. I had to scroll back a long way to find what I was really looking for—the restaurant he’d opened at the end of last year.

It had been called Winter. The place looked like a thousand others I’d seen online and in person, all communal tables and brushed-aluminum chairs and rough-finished wood. There didn’t really seem to be any theme or anything, other than a heavy this-looks-really-right-now-doesn’t-it vibe that, at least in the images he put on his feed, didn’t seem to be doing its job very well. I searched for it on Yelp and found only a few reviews. Three or four raves that seemed like they were probably written by friends or family, and a dozen more by underwhelmed customers. The consensus was that the service was slow and spotty and the food ranged from mediocre to adequate. Most gave it two or three stars. One commenter wrote, “The road to dinner hell is paved with good intentions.” I started feeling bad for Joe. Winter had, either appropriately or ironically, closed in March.

I was keeping track of what I was reading on a yellow pad, making notes about what I knew about Lucinda and Joe. How much support had Bill given them beyond the loan? How much did she make? How hard had Winter’s failure impacted their finances? How much money, in addition to the loan from Bill, had been sunk into the restaurant, and where had it come from? They all led up to one central question—could any of this have given Joe a strong-enough motive to kill his father-in-law?