Hot Start (8 page)

“There’s no such thing as off the record.”

“Hey, I’m a professional journalist. I protect my sources. If you tell me something is between you and me, you can take it to the bank.”

“There’s that word again.”

“What word?—oh, yeah.”

I turned the ignition. Quinn leaned in, giving me a good look at her décolletage. Clasped to the open neck of her blouse was the top of a slightly oversized ballpoint pen.

“You’re a flight instructor,” she said, “out at the airport, right?”

“How’d you know that?”

She smiled. “Let’s just say I have my sources. I’m wondering how a flight instructor rates an audience with an accused double murderer even before the guy meets with his attorney.”

“The world works in mysterious ways.”

I gave her a wink as I drove off. Something told me I’d be seeing her again.

SIX

M
rs. Schmulowitz, my landlady, insisted on cooking me an early dinner that afternoon in return for my having given her a ride home from the airport. With the oppressive heat, I had little appetite, but she was making her famous shakshuka— eggs poached in spicy tomato sauce—and I couldn’t exactly say no. I’d had shakshuka in Libya and Morocco, among other areas of operation. Mrs. Schmulowitz’s was hands down the best.

“How about some apple cake too? And none of that gluten-free nonsense either. We’re gluten-tolerant around here, baby,” she said as she flitted about her kitchen, getting out flour and mixing bowls, a five-foot, ninety-pound typhoon.

“I’m really not all that hungry, Mrs. Schmulowitz. Please don’t trouble yourself.”

“Trouble? What trouble? You’re a growing boy.”

They say circulation worsens the older you get. Mrs. Schmulowitz was well past older. Her age matched the temperature in her house, somewhere in the high eighties. Still it seemed to me somewhat out of character that she’d changed into sweatpants, fuzzy Ugg slippers, and a thick, New York Giants hoodie since returning home from her trip back East.

“Are you feeling OK, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”

“Me? Never better.”

“You do know it’s ridiculously hot in here, right?”

“What do I look like, a
shmendrik
?” She put a match to a burner on her vintage Wedgewood stove. “Abso-positively, it’s hot in here, bubby. I did some carb loading on vacation, scarfed down a few too many knishes because who wouldn’t? They’re delicious! I’m sweating off the chicken fat, baby. Tomorrow, I’m gonna run a 5K.”

She chopped tomatoes and cracked open eggs and droned on about how wonderful it was seeing former students and old boyfriends back in Brooklyn. I tried to pay attention, but the heat inside her kitchen was starting to get to me. I excused myself and assured her I’d be back in a few minutes.

I made sure Kiddiot’s water bowl inside the garage was full, then I went and sat down on the hammock outside and called my former father-in-law again, to brief him on my jailhouse interview with his nephew.

I’d left two messages for him earlier in the day, the first as I waited for Mrs. Schmulowitz’s flight to arrive, and the second after I’d dropped her back home and gone swimming, trying to cool off in the ocean. This time Gil Carlisle answered his phone on the first ring. It was 0200 hours in Geneva. He sounded like I’d gotten him out of bed.

“You’re telling me Dino did it?”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Gil. He denied any involvement. But what I’m saying is, he said a few things, displayed some behavior that from my perspective didn’t engender what I would describe as complete confidence in his innocence. Somebody else could come along and interpret his words and body language much differently. If I knew Dino better, observed him over a longer period of time, I’d have a better sense of whether or not he was being truthful with me.”

“Did he talk to you about this whole ‘being framed’ thing?”

“He refused. He was scared. About what I couldn’t tell.”

“You think there’s any truth to it, somebody else trying to pin all this on him?”

“Look, all I know, Gil, is that somebody, the DA, the police, must have some fairly solid evidence against the kid or they wouldn’t have taken him into custody.”

Carlisle sighed over the phone. “My little sister’s gonna skin me alive if I don’t help him out.”

Savannah had confided shortly after we were married that her father was worth close to half a billion dollars. Paying for the best attorney money could buy to represent his nephew, even in a losing cause, would’ve still been pocket change to Gil Carlisle. Why he was at all reluctant to get out his checkbook for Dino Birch, I couldn’t tell you, but he was more than willing to do so for me.

“How much for your time and trouble?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that, Cordell, I know you gotta make a living. What do you need? Name it.”

Closure would’ve been too much to ask for. I told him he could buy me a burrito when we saw each other next. We left it at that.

I punched in Alicia Rosario’s number after I signed off. I wanted to make sure she’d made it back to San Diego OK and to tell her again how sorry I was about the way things had gone between us that morning, but she didn’t pick up.

T
HE
SHAKSHUKA
was not merely to die for, it was to
kill
for. Mrs. Schmulowitz and I were watching the Weather Channel and dining off TV trays in her living room, which had cooled off not at all.

“Will you look at this nonsense?” she said, pointing to the screen of her ancient console Magnavox. “Twenty-four hours a day, all those nice-looking people have to stand in front of all those maps, so they can all tell us what it’s like outside. We had something like this when I was growing up in Brooklyn. It was called a window.”

“I’d be happy to watch something else, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Go. Knock yourself out.”

I got up, wiping the sweat from of my forehead with a paper napkin, and rotated the channel selector to the local news, just in time to catch the lead-in to Danika Quinn’s story on the latest developments in the Hollister case.

She described how newly released autopsy results showed that the couple had been shot with what Quinn described as “high caliber, 7.62 millimeter hunting bullets,” and how Dino Birch’s court-appointed lawyer had agreed to a request by the district attorney’s office that Birch’s arraignment be delayed a week giving both sides a chance to firm up their respective arguments. In the interim, Quinn claimed to have scored an “exclusive interview” with a witness identified as Jackson Gia- matti, a money manager who lived down the street. According to Quinn, Giamatti had told police investigators that on the night of the killings, he was out jogging when he observed a black, vintage Chevy Camaro with chrome wheels cruise slowly past the Hollisters’ estate.

“And you’re positive that was the car,” Quinn said, sticking her microphone in Giamatti’s grill.

“No doubt in my mind,” Giamatti said.

Quoting unnamed sources, Quinn reported that California Department of Motor Vehicle records showed a black, 1982 Camaro as being registered to Dino Birch.

Then the focus of her story shifted—to none other than me.

“Wait a minute, hold the phone,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said excitedly, leaning forward on her sofa to get a closer view, “is that you? On
television
?”

“Apparently.”

There I stood, on camera, talking to deputies in the jail parking lot about the car thieves I’d helped detain. Only it wasn’t me who could be heard on screen. It was Quinn’s voice-over:

“. . . We’ve since learned that this man, identified as Cordell Logan, a former air force pilot and currently a civilian flight instructor at the Rancho Bonita Airport, was given special access to meet with Birch in jail earlier today. A sheriff’s spokesman would not disclose the purpose of Mr. Logan’s visit, but sources inside the department told me that he has been hired as part of Birch’s defense team.”

“You finally got a real job? Mazeltov!”

“No, Mrs. Schmulowitz. She got it wrong. It’s not a job. I was asked to do somebody a favor. I went and talked to the guy for a few minutes, that’s all.”

Quinn’s story cut to the jail parking lot and me, in the driver’s seat of my truck, looking up directly into the camera. The ballpoint pen I’d seen clasped inside the neckline of her blouse had been a miniature video recorder.

“We attempted to speak with Mr. Logan, but he refused to comment other than to state, and I quote, ‘The world works in mysterious ways.’ ”

The camera tech followed my truck leaving the parking lot.

“Danika Quinn, your Central Coast Action News.”

“You should be on TV full-time, bubby, you know that? You got the look.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

I couldn’t change the channel fast enough. We watched
Wheel of Fortune
and sweated. I did, anyway. Mrs. Schmulowitz seemed oblivious to the heat.

F
OR
THE
second night in a row, I undressed and bedded down in the backyard on the hammock. Kiddiot slept with me. More specifically, he slept
on
me. Imagine trying to get some shut-eye when it’s so warm outside, you fear you might spontaneously combust at any moment. Now drape a furry heating pad across your bare chest and turn it on high. That’s how hot it felt.

The last time I could remember being so uncomfortable on a summer night was when I was with Alpha, deep in the Arabian Desert. We were tracking a pair of Saudi nationals suspected of helping orchestrate a car bombing in Riyadh. Thirty-four Westerners had been killed, including eight Americans. The manhunt ended in a Bedouin camp where we found the two trying to pass themselves off as shepherds, and shot them when they tried to resist capture. The water pump on the Land Rover we’d rented out of Dammam decided to take a dump soon thereafter, and Centcom claimed they had no helicopters available to come pick us up until the following morning. The Casio Pathfinder watch I wore on my wrist back then featured a fairly functional thermometer. At 0300 in the desert, it registered 122 degrees. Mrs. Schmulowitz’s backyard wasn’t quite that bad, but close.

I don’t remember falling asleep in the hammock, or Kiddiot climbing off of me and up into the oak. I do recall, though, being startled back into consciousness by my phone making a buzzing noise in the grass below me. I answered it before I was fully awake.

“Hello?”

“Roy’s murder had nothing to do with big game hunting,” she said. “The police have the wrong man.”

The voice on the other end was low but most definitely female, gravelly, like someone who smoked. She sounded about thirty, possibly younger. Her accent told me she was European, Baltic most likely.

“I take it Roy was a friend of yours?”

“What would ever make you think that?”

“Friends usually refer to each other by their first names.”

The screen on my phone read, “Blocked.”

“I saw you,” she said, “on the news.”

“How’d you get my number?”

“This is the digital age, Mr. Logan. Anyone can get anyone’s number.”

A breeze picked up out of the north. There was nothing cooling about it.

“Why call me up in the middle of the night and tell me this about Roy? What makes you think I care?”

“Because you do.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“I am sure. Men are like books,” she said, “and I’ve read just about all of them. I can tell just by looking, which ones care only about themselves. This, sadly, is most men. Then there are the others. They worry. About the world. About the mark they will leave on it. They defend the underprivileged. They do good deeds. They stop car thieves in parking lots. You are one of those men.”

I asked her what her name was. She told me I didn’t need to know.

“When you roust a guy out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, the Buddha says you’re obligated to give him your name. It doesn’t have to be your real name.”

“The Buddha did not say this.
You
say this.”

“OK, you got me. I just need something to call you. For purposes of this conversation.”

There was a pause. Then she said, “Mary.”

“Mary. As in the Virgin?”

She laughed.

“So, Mary, if hunting exotic animals had nothing to do with Roy Hollister’s murder, as you say, what did?”

“Before I tell you, you must promise me one thing.”

“I’m listening.”

“In the end,” Mary said, “the guilty will be made to pay. You must promise me.”

I’d seen enough of the world to know it didn’t always work that way. Evil people get away with evil things plenty. In the end, crime and punishment share about as much in common as car seats and cattle.

“I’m sorry, Mary. I can’t make that promise.”

“Thank you,” she said. “This is what I thought you would say.”

She hung up.

Was there any truth to her claim that Roy Hollister’s livelihood, bagging big game for sport, had nothing to do with his slaying? Maybe. Maybe not. But if Mary was right about one thing, it was that I did care—too much at times. Sleep eluded me as I stared up at the stars and pondered her call.

Motive is what any good intelligence collector focuses on when pursuing the unknown. What compels a killer to do what he does? Answer that fundamental question and you can answer all the others—his true identity, his location, his allegiances. If Hollister’s killer had been motivated by reasons other than animal rights, then it seemed logical that animal rights activist Dino Birch had nothing to do with it. Why had “Mary” called me? What specific knowledge did she possess to assert so adamantly that investigators had arrested the wrong man? Why was she so bent on punishing the real killer? I wondered if she was one of the young women in the group sex photograph Kang had shared with me. My brain swirled with questions. One of them was answered less than an hour later after I went inside, took a cold shower, and opened my laptop.

There was the usual junk e-mail—offers of erectile dysfunction pills and scams from Nigeria (“Congratulations, you have inherited one million euros!”). Two prospective flight students had written me, saying they were interested in taking introductory lessons. But it was the entry with the blank subject line, the one from
[email protected]
, that caught my eye.