Fire Point (5 page)

17

As far as Lock was concerned, Teddy Griffiths had arrived with a question mark hanging over his head. After the attempted shooting and attendant mayhem, Tarian had finally thought to contact him. The delay itself was telling in terms of family dynamics, but that wasn’t what had troubled Lock.

What niggled at him was the trouble they’d had contacting Teddy, who had told his wife he was playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. The manager in the pro shop had informed Tarian that Mr Griffiths was out on the course and that they would try to get a message to him, but that it might take some time. So far, so ho-hum. A lot of married men played golf. Not always for the love of trying to propel a small white ball around a park with tiny holes, but precisely because it allowed them time away from their domestic duties. Being uncontactable was the point. So Tarian being unable to get in touch with him meant nothing.

But then, about a half-hour later, he had called Tarian’s cell phone. Lock could hear him bellowing at her and caught almost every word of the conversation. Teddy had told his wife he had just finished up and was walking off the eighteenth hole. He was coming straight there.

Again, all very normal. The part that was hard to explain came about fifteen minutes later when Teddy had knocked at the apartment door.

Even with light traffic, which was almost unheard of in Los Angeles, where the freeways ran close to capacity during daylight, the drive from Riviera to this part of the Marina would take a minimum of a half-hour.

The man either had a time machine, a very fast helicopter or hadn’t actually been on the golf course at Riviera when his wife had called. And even if he had been able to get there that fast, Lock was fairly sure that a country-club-type course like Riviera didn’t allow members to tee off in Bermuda shorts, sneakers and a T-shirt. Teddy Griffiths might have been spending the afternoon enjoying himself, but Lock was fairly certain it hadn’t involved golf.

Whether guilt was a factor in his pushing Lock aside, rushing to his wife and throwing his arms around her, Lock couldn’t be sure, but he wouldn’t have ruled it out. As Teddy made noises of comfort and Tarian burst into tears, Lock waved Ty back out into the corridor.

‘You think he was playing golf?’ Lock asked his partner.

Ty gave a languid shrug. ‘Might have involved balls and holes, but taking ten minutes to get from the Palisades to the Marina?’

Lock shot his partner a ‘You have to go there?’ look.

It was met with yet another languid shrug. ‘All I’m saying is, Teddy boy may have a hobby, but it ain’t golf.’

The wind had picked up outside. Fractured window blinds fluttered through the hole left in the glass door by the gunshot. Yeah, thought Lock, a guy facing a costly divorce? It was an old, old story.

Teddy Griffiths appeared from the kitchen. His cheeks were still flushed, and sweat trickled down from a mop of dishwater blond hair. At five ten, he was carrying an extra hundred pounds. What Lock guessed was his usual bluff good-old-boy demeanor seemed to have been stripped away.

When he spoke, his voice was remarkably soft.

‘Mr Lock, can I speak with you a moment?’

18

Teddy placed a hand on Lock’s shoulder as they walked down the corridor. Lock stopped walking and looked at the hand. It dropped back to Teddy’s side. He could still smell the waft of stale sweat oozing from the man’s skin. Wherever Teddy’s hands had been, Lock didn’t want them near him.

‘So, what do you want to say to me?’ he asked the man.

Teddy sucked in some air and puffed out his cheeks. He did a slow exhale. ‘I’m worried about my wife.’

Lock kept a straight face. It took no little effort. ‘I’m sure. That was a close call. Do you have any idea who might want to harm her or your stepson?’

Teddy shook his head. ‘This is way beyond anything.’ He drew another deep breath. He was trying for the air of a man who had reached the boundary of what he understood about life. To someone less cynical than Lock, it might have worked. But all Lock could think was, Cut the bull crap and save us all some time, would you? Instead he said, ‘Mr Griffiths?’

‘I don’t know. You know that kid of hers. I mean, I’ve tried. The Lord only knows I’ve tried. Tried talking to him, not talking to him, taking him out with me, leaving him alone.’ Teddy leaned in, giving Lock another burst of body odor, and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘He’s just effing weird. He gets this look in his eyes sometimes. Maybe he took a shot at his mom.’

Lock didn’t respond. Teddy stared down at the faded hall carpet. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. He loves his mom. It’s just that look he has. I got a hundred fifty pounds on him, but that kid, I think he could just snap.’

From the open apartment door, Lock could hear Ty and Tarian Griffiths talking. She appeared to have recovered from her shock and was now bombarding him with questions. Now was not the time for Lock to be having this particular talk with Teddy Griffiths.

‘I’ll tell you what I can do. I was already talking to your wife about helping you with this situation,’ said Lock, though he didn’t have much of a clue what the situation was, apart from being a hot mess with extra hot mess thrown on top and a whole load of trouble garnish on the side. ‘If someone is threatening your family, it doesn’t matter yet that I don’t know the who and whys of it. Ty and I can provide close-security protection. Make sure you’re safe. And while we’re setting that up for you, we can go look for Marcus. Maybe if we find him, we’ll figure out what all this is about.’

Teddy’s sweaty paw took another swipe at Lock’s shoulder. For a terrible second, Lock thought he was going to try to hug him. He took a precautionary step away. Teddy settled for a vigorous handshake. ‘I can’t thank you enough. Not enough.’

‘Shall we go collect your wife and get you folks home?’ said Lock, ushering Teddy Griffiths ahead of him. He dug in his pocket for some hand sanitizer, squirted some onto his palms and rubbed them together.

Back inside the apartment, Ty was standing with Tarian. He had picked up the laptop computer that had been lying on the table. ‘Mrs Griffiths wanted us to take a look at this,’ he said to Lock. ‘I’d already suggested it wasn’t a good idea to leave a computer in an unsecured apartment.’

Lock looked at Tarian. They were riding a line by taking the computer ‒ even with Tarian’s permission. Marcus Griffiths was her son, but he was also an adult. He had a right to privacy. Technically the laptop was his property. ‘You sure?’ Lock asked her.

‘I’m sure,’ she said.

19

Tarian and Teddy Griffiths lived on a quiet street in up-scale Brentwood, along with the two kids they’d had together. The Griffiths home, which had just about the required land to be considered an estate, was a few doors down from where O. J. Simpson had lived at the time of his wife’s murder on North Rockingham Avenue.

Lock pulled into the long, meandering driveway, a tinge of apprehension clinging to him, along with the odor of Teddy’s funk. He was hoping the ghost of one of LA’s most infamous former residents wasn’t some kind of omen for what lay ahead of him and Ty. He was still thinking about the Oedipal nightmare Teddy had hinted at. Was it misdirection or something more sinister? If you’d ended up as a person who struggled with the world as an adult, many people chose to lay the blame at a parent’s door.

Lock had always regarded such thinking as an easy out. When you grew up, or even if you didn’t but your age ticked over to eighteen, then you took responsibility for what you did, if not wholly for who you were. Nobody could fully control who they were, but they could at least attempt to behave like a decent person.

He reversed his Audi into a space between Tarian’s car, which Ty had driven back with Tarian as passenger, and Teddy Griffiths’s mid-life-crisis automobile, a canary yellow Ferrari California. Ty was already escorting the couple through the front door where they had been met by an attentive Hispanic housekeeper. The kids were nowhere to be seen.

Stepping out of the Audi, Lock snapped a few pictures of the house’s exterior with his iPhone. He also noted the security features, which he picked out with ease, something that was significant in itself. Easily noted cameras and alarms operated as a general deterrent. When there existed a real, credible threat, they tended to be more discreet. If you wanted to be aware someone was coming, you didn’t always want them to know you knew.

The house was mock-Tudor in style, a fairly common theme in LA’s privileged enclaves where, by the standards of old Europe, the money was new. Walking along a single street in Brentwood, you could go from ultra-modern contemporary to Tuscan villa and on to olde-English cottage in a single block. LA was the be-who-you-want-to-be town. The only problem, as Lock could see it, was the number of people who had chosen to reinvent themselves as assholes.

Leaving his exterior recce for the time being, Lock walked through the front door and into a large open hallway with a sweeping staircase. Off to one side there was a vast living room that faced out over the front gardens. At a wet bar near the back of the room, Teddy Griffiths was fixing himself a Scotch and soda that was nine parts Scotch to one part soda. He looked up. ‘Where are my manners? You guys want a belt of the good stuff?’ he asked Lock.

‘No, thank you,’ said Lock, curtly.

Heading back out of the room, Lock found Ty in the kitchen with Tarian. She had clearly found a stash of Xanax and was palming two pills while filling a glass from a stand-alone water dispenser. She threw them back with some water and sighed with relief. Lock had the feeling that Teddy’s drink and his wife’s pill-popping weren’t self-medication strategies they reserved for extreme situations.

A commotion on the stairs announced the arrival of the two Griffiths children. They seemed to part run, part wrestle their way into the kitchen.

‘Mom,’ said a cute blond boy, who, Lock guessed, was seven-year-old Fletcher, ‘she won’t let me in her room. She says it’s girls only.’

His sister, equally cute and blonde, nine-year-old Carrie, stuck her hands on her hips and struck a defiant pose. ‘Girls rule. Boys drool.’

Ty pursed his lips. ‘She’s kinda got a point. We do drool.’

The two children looked up at the huge former Marine, and said, in perfect sync, ‘Who are you?’

‘This is Mr Johnson and that is Mr Lock. They’re going to be around for a little while helping Mommy and Daddy out with some stuff.’

‘What kind of stuff?’ asked Carrie, hands still on hips, her laser-like blue eyes moving from Lock to Ty and back. She’d make one hell of an interrogator, Lock thought.

‘Hey, is that a real gun? Cool!’ said Fletcher, hopping onto a kitchen stool as he eyed Ty’s shoulder holster with wide-eyed excitement.

The little boy’s question prompted Lock to catch Tarian’s eye. ‘I’m going to need to run through a few things with you and Mr Griffiths.’

The Xanax kicking in, Tarian nodded while her facial expression indicated that she’d not actually processed what Lock had just said.

‘It’s better if the kids aren’t present,’ said Lock, trying to keep it light.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Tarian, turning to the housekeeper. ‘Rosa, could you?’

As the kids protested ‒‘Hey, I wanna know what’s going on!’, ‘Not fair. We always miss the real fun’ ‒ Rosa hustled them out and Tarian followed Lock and Ty into the living room. Teddy had already done some serious damage to his first highball. Another couple and Lock would have to leave asking any more questions until the morning.

He cut to the chase. ‘Firearms,’ he began. ‘Do you have any in the house? I’ll need type and location.’

Teddy shook his head. ‘Take Tarian to the range sometimes, but won’t have a gun in the house.’

He must have read Lock’s and Ty’s somewhat puzzled expressions because he immediately followed up with ‘Texan, right? You think I’d be driving round in a pick-up with a gun rack and a moose head on the hood?’

He was right: that was what Lock had assumed. But he wasn’t going to admit it. ‘A lot of high-net-worth individuals have at least one firearm in their home for protection.’

‘See?’ said Tarian.

Clearly Lock had touched upon another fault line between them.

‘Really?’ said Teddy, belligerence creeping into his voice. ‘You want a gun in the house with Marcus running around, and the kids upstairs?’

Lock opened both palms. ‘If you can both stay with me here, this won’t take long. We’ll get to Marcus in a moment.’

Lock ran through a quick set of standard questions, and the Griffithses did their best to answer with only a couple of minor detours into areas of marital discord. How long had the housekeeper worked for them and had she been background checked? Did anyone else work for them or regularly visit? A gardener? Pool boy? What about their neighbors? What was the family’s daily routine?

At one point Teddy seemed frustrated by the questioning. He looked up from mixing his second drink and said as much.

‘Patterns are important in our line of work,’ Lock explained. ‘If someone wants to hurt you, then one of our first tip-offs is something that’s out of the ordinary so we have to establish what ordinary is in your day-to-day lives.’

Teddy stirred his drink as Tarian threw herself onto a white couch next to a huge marble fireplace that was weighed down with family photos. Lock noted the absence of Marcus in the images, which were mostly from vacations in various exotic locales.

‘I understand,’ said Teddy.

Lock moved through what they knew about the security system they had in place. It was, as he had expected, fairly standard. Sufficient to push a prospective break-in artist toward a softer touch, but nothing that would offer any real resistance to someone who was determined to do the family harm. If they were to stay in the house, Lock would have to improvise some kind of a panic room.

The checklist complete, he circled back toward Marcus. He had already heard Tarian’s take. Now he wanted to hear what Teddy thought but he didn’t want it to escalate into a blazing row, which he had a feeling was almost inevitable.

‘Mrs Griffiths,’ he said, ‘would you mind showing Tyrone the alarm system? And also, Ty, if you could recce upstairs, see if we have a space that would fill the gap as a temporary safe area.’ Lock had learned a while back that the term ‘panic room’ tended, unsurprisingly, to instill panic in clients.

‘Certainly,’ said Tarian. Ty followed her out.

Lock waited until they were out of earshot.

‘Sure I can’t get you one, Mr Lock?’ asked Teddy.

‘How old was Marcus when you two met?’ Lock asked.

Teddy closed his eyes, his head lolling a little from the booze, his face flushed. ‘Let me see, he would have been about twelve.’ His eyes opened. He shot Lock a defensive look. ‘He was already seeing a therapist when I got together with Tarian. I tried my best, y’know, but . . . Our two are great, just normal kids so it’s not like it’s . . .’

Teddy trailed off. The more he talked, the more Lock was beginning to feel some sympathy for Marcus, a young man he hadn’t even met. To go through a marriage split was hard enough on most kids, then to see your mother have kids with another man, that wasn’t easy either. But for those kids to be regarded as ‘normal’ while you were the freak . . . And Lock had the feeling that Teddy made his feelings plenty clear, even if he hadn’t necessarily said it out loud.

‘It’s not like it was your fault?’ Lock said.

‘I don’t mean it like that. But, yeah, I guess. I mean, his dad is kind of high strung. Geeky type. And you’ve seen Tarain gobble down those pills like they were M&Ms.’ He rattled the ice in his glass. ‘I’m rambling on here. Tell me to shut up or something.’

‘Talk to me about Marcus over the past year or so. Something’s changed, from what your wife said. He’s become more aggressive. Threatening? Walk me through it.’

The bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue clanked hard against the rim of the highball glass. Teddy flinched, a drunk who didn’t like to make it too obvious. ‘It started off with Marcus spending all his time on that computer of his. That was what he always did. But it really got obsessive. We tried talking to him about it, but he wouldn’t open up, not even to Dr Levi.’

‘That’s his therapist?’ Lock asked.

‘The one before his current one, yeah. His current shrink is a guy named Stentz,’ said Teddy. ‘Anyway, about eighteen months ago, Marcus suddenly started going out. Y’ know down to the Sunset Strip. Hollywood. Downtown. He asked his mom for new clothes. It was like some kind of a miracle. It was like this was a new Marcus. He was clean. He was even coming to the club with me to play a little golf. Working out. Being a regular kid his age.’

‘What happened?’ Lock asked. ‘People usually don’t change that suddenly.’

Teddy shook his head and splashed some soda onto the marble counter of the bar before adjusting his aim back toward his glass. ‘I gotta be honest with you, Lock, Tarian and I were so freaking relieved that we didn’t want to ask too many questions.’

‘So everything’s going great?’ prompted Lock.

‘I think we maybe got our hopes up too soon. Tarian was pushing for him to enroll at USC. He always had the grades for it. It wasn’t like I had to write any checks. Academically he was always an A student. That’s when the problems started. It was like it was too much for him. He started bothering that girl and it all went to shit from there. Anytime either of us tried to talk to him, he’d just get crazy. Cuss in front of the kids. Cuss out his mom. Storm out of the house. That was when I suggested I get him his own place. I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I was worried he might go too far when he got angry. Or that I would. That someone would get hurt. And now this . . .’

Lock wanted to ask about moving therapists but stuck a pin in that subject and circled back to the period when Marcus the moth became Marcus the butterfly. ‘When he started going out, who was he hanging with?’

Teddy’s eyes narrowed as he struggled to access that part of his memory, the booze twisting the passage of time. ‘There was a bunch of ’em. They all kind of blended together. Real nice kids, though. Really fun. They even joked about taking me with them to chase tail on the Strip.’

Lock’s face must have betrayed something because Teddy straightened up. ‘Not that I would. I mean, I’m married ‒ we were joking around.’

‘Remember any names?’ Lock pressed.

‘Not really. Kids that age, it’s all “bro” and “dude”. They kind of had their own little language going on. Man, I must be really out of touch because most of it went way over my head. “Negging”. “AFCs”. “LMR”. Like all this inside baseball jargon.’

‘Anyone from the group that stood out from the pack?’

Something clicked finally. Lock could see it in Teddy’s shift of expression and the smile that crept across his face. ‘I think the leader, if you will, was this Asian kid. I always assumed they were kind of geeky but this young man . . . Party animal. Real charming too. Think he had his eye on Tarian.’

Lock noted the ‘they’. ‘How’d that go down with Marcus?’

Teddy kept smiling. ‘Usually it wouldn’t have. Hell, the kid never liked me even holding his mom’s hand. But it was like Marcus was in thrall. Is that the expression?’

Lock nodded.

‘Yeah,’ Teddy went on. ‘It was like Marcus hero-worshipped that kid.’

‘And you never caught a name?’

‘Not unless “bro” counts as a name, no.’