Fangs Out (10 page)

“Good, because I already bought a ticket.”

She said she was catching an 8:30
P
.
M
. train out of Los Angeles’ Union Station, scheduled to arrive in San Diego at 11:15. I suggested she bring along plenty to read, considering that Amtrak in Southern California runs on time about as often as the Dodgers win the World Series.

“Can’t wait,” she said.

“Makes two of us.”

The dinner hour was approaching by the time I returned to Janet Bollinger’s apartment building. I parked up the street and walked back, not wanting to arouse the attention of her pot-smoking, gangbanging neighbor for fear he might set off alarm bells, but he was gone. An older, dark green Nissan Sentra with a dented back bumper that had a faded Castle Robotics parking permit on it took up the space directly in front of Bollinger’s unit. I could see diffuse light behind the angled mini-blinds covering the front window. She’d come home. I knocked.

“Janet? Hello? Avon calling.”

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder this time. That’s when I heard it—a moan so faint that at first I mistook it for the breeze blowing in off the ocean. I turned the knob. The door opened.

“Janet?”

I stepped inside. The place was Crate & Barrel tidy. A chamois-colored sofa with modern lines and a matching love seat dominated the center of the living room. There was a small set of decorative wooden shelves crammed with a collection of about twenty ceramic Hummel figurines. Above them on the wall hung a grouping of six family photos in inexpensive black frames. On another wall was a psychedelic-colored poster of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

“Anybody home?”

From down a short hallway, a woman’s voice emanated faintly at the same instant my brain registered the distinctive coppery essence of freshly spilled blood.

“. . .
Help me
.”

I ran.

She was lying on her back. Slender, mid-thirties, shoulder-length auburn hair styled in what I suppose you’d call a shag. Her gray, pullover sweater was wet with red, as was the off-white Berber carpet beneath her.

“Please,” she mouthed silently, her eyes pleading.

I knelt, careful not to move her, and gently raised the sweater a few inches. Janet Bollinger had been stabbed in the upper abdomen. The seeping knife wound was deep and jagged at the edges, the result of what I assumed was a serrated blade.

“Hang tough, Janet. You’re gonna be fine. Stay awake now for me, OK?”

The bathroom was six feet away. I grabbed a hand towel off a rack near the door and yanked the floral comforter off her bed. Using the towel to apply pressure on the wound, I tucked the comforter around her as best I could to slow the onset of shock, then dialed my phone with my free hand.

“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?”

“A woman’s been stabbed. She needs an ambulance.”

The emergency dispatcher took down the address, then asked me my “relationship to the victim.”

“Concerned citizen,” I said and hung up.

The towel already was soaked with blood. Janet closed her eyes.

“No sleeping on the job. C’mon, now, Janet. Stay with me, sweetheart.”

She was too weak to respond. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow. I stroked her face softly while applying pressure with my other hand and waited for help to arrive.

There was nothing more I could do.

T
HE PARAMEDICS
arrived within three minutes. Janet Bollinger was en route to the emergency room less than five minutes later. Whether she would survive the six-mile drive to the nearest hospital, in neighboring Chula Vista, was anyone’s guess. The rescue crew loaded her into the ambulance in grim silence. I shared their unspoken skepticism. Like them, I too had seen my share of gravely wounded individuals.

“You say you knocked on Ms. Bollinger’s door the second time you came back and it was unlocked?”

“Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that’s what I just said.”

San Diego County Sheriff’s Detective Alicia Rosario cocked an eyebrow at my insolent response to her question as she jotted notes on a reporter’s pad. She was pretty in a cop kind of way. Black slacks, black pumps, black silk blouse, her black hair cut cancer-survivor short. Under her black leather jacket, below her left armpit, a nickel-plated, 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson rode in a hand-tooled leather shoulder rig.

Her prematurely balding partner, Detective Kurt Lawless was decked out in a charcoal gray suit, white oxford-cloth dress shirt, button-down, pink polka-dotted necktie, and burgundy wing tips buffed to a high shine. He looked like a magazine advertisement for Brooks Brothers.

“What I still don’t get,” Lawless said, studying my driver’s license as the three of us stood outside Janet Bollinger’s apartment, “is what you were doing down here in Imperial Beach, when you live all the way up in Rancho Bonita.”

I wiped Janet Bollinger’s blood from my hands with a towelette from Kentucky Fried Chicken I found in my pocket and repeated what I’d already told the two detectives. How Bollinger’s testimony had helped send Dorian Munz to death row. How Munz, before he was executed, had implicated Gary Castle in the slaying of Bollinger’s friend, Ruth Walker. And how Ruth’s war hero father had hired me to help refute Munz’s last-minute claim that the wrong man had been convicted of murdering her.

“Ruth Walker,” Lawless said. “Never heard of her.”

“The story was all over the local news last month, from what I hear. Maybe you were on vacation. Shopping on Savile Row, no doubt. Nice threads, by the way. They must pay you guys pretty well.”

Lawless glared and handed me back my driver’s license.

It was easy to understand his knowing nothing about Ruth Walker’s murder. She’d been killed probably long before either Lawless or Rosario, both in their mid-thirties, became homicide detectives. And even though Munz had been executed only a few weeks earlier, and the story was widely reported, who under the age of seventy reads a daily newspaper these days or, for that matter, watches TV news? Moreover, Munz had been prosecuted by the feds. If you’re a local cop, federal cases might just as well be tried on the moon.

“So,” Detective Rosario said, “just so I’m clear, you say you’re staying with Mr. Walker, you drive down here intending to speak with Ms. Bollinger, to get her to give you some sort of statement saying this Dorian Munz individual was a liar. Ms. Bollinger’s not home, so you go to McDonald’s to wait. You come back approximately thirty minutes later. You hear a moan inside. Door’s unlocked. You take it upon yourself to enter, whereupon you find Ms. Bollinger bleeding on the bedroom floor.”

“I’d say that about sums it up.”

“But you didn’t stab her, right?” Lawless said.

“Why would
I
stab her?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Logan. I’m asking you.”

“Time out. Is Lawless really your name? Because if it is, it’s
awesome.
It’d be like me being a psychiatrist named Moody. Or Dr. Cockburn, your friendly local urologist.”

“I asked you a question, sir.”

“No, Detective, I did not stab Janet Bollinger.”

“Would you be willing to sit for a polygraph examination to that effect?”

“Only if we can schedule it around
Dancing with the Stars.
I try never missing an episode.”

“But you
would
be willing to take a polygraph?”

“No problem.”

Rosario crooked a finger at her partner. They turned away to commiserate in a low murmur, not realizing their voices carried.

“He called it in,” Rosario said. “What the hell kind of suspect does that? Plus, he’s too, I don’t know . . . sure of himself. I’m just not feeling it with this guy.”

“Well, if he didn’t do her,” Lawless said, “who did?”

“Considering there appears to have been no forced entry,” I said, “the perpetrator was probably somebody the victim knew. Possibly an acquaintance of Dorian Munz. After all, Ms. Bollinger did help put the guy on death row. Maybe it was a friend of Munz’s. Maybe it was the man upstairs.”

“What does Jesus have to do with this?” Lawless demanded.

I pointed to the second-floor landing. “The guy in the upstairs apartment. He was hanging out up there when I first pulled in, getting toasted in his skivvies—Charger boxer shorts with little lightning bolts on ’em. Very stylish.”

“What did he look like, aside from his underwear?” Rosario said.

“Hispanic, twenty-two, five-ten, 220. Big tattoo of the Virgin on his chest. Gang tat on his neck. Girl’s name. Esmeralda.”

“Not every young Latino with a neck tattoo is a gangster, Mr. Logan.”

“Agreed, but this guy was definitely playing the part. He wasn’t real keen on me being here, either.”

“You talked to him?” Lawless asked.

“Tried. He wasn’t too chatty. Made a few choice observations about my ancestry, I think.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Could be he thought I was one of you guys.”

Rosario smiled. “We seem to have that effect on a lot of people.”

She asked for my cell phone number, thanked me for my cooperation, gave me her card, and told me to keep in touch.

“If you do happen to come up with anything else while you’re looking into this Dorian Munz guy,” Rosario said, “I’d appreciate the assist. We can use all the help we can get these days. Department keeps cutting back on our overtime. Never know. Might be a tie-in somewhere.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

She shook my hand and told Lawless she was going off to canvass the neighborhood for possible witnesses. Lawless said he’d join her in a minute. He waited until Rosario walked off, then turned back to me and peered at me with one eyebrow cocked.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Logan,” he said, “but I got a bad feeling about you.”

I smiled and said, “Take a number.”

Six

I
f you didn’t know any better, you’d swear that there was some kind of cosmic force field buffering La Jolla and the people who live there from the blight and turmoil afflicting many of San Diego’s other, lesser neighborhoods.

La Jollans are inordinately tan and fit. They spend their days seemingly unfettered by the economic constraints that bind the rest of us to our workaday worlds. They play golf and tennis and squash when they’re not out sailing, and would never, ever, even think to uncork a Chardonnay that scored anything less than a 90 from
Wine Spectator.
They eat organic. They wear Tom Ford and Jimmy Choo. Rarely do they hack each other to death.

At first blush, a plainspoken son of the South like Hub Walker would have seemed the unlikeliest resident of La Jolla, among the swankiest enclaves on the Left Coast. But as I rapped the antique brass knocker bolted to the towering front door of his 4,000-square foot Spanish-style hacienda on Hillside Drive, taking in its moonlit tropical landscaping and bazillion-dollar ocean view, it was easy to fathom how he, or anyone, for that matter, would’ve wanted to live there. The place was paradise.

“Where’d you come in?” Walker asked, gripping my hand.

“Montgomery Airport.”

“Figured you would. Montgomery’s where I keep my airplane.”

He insisted on commandeering my duffel bag and ushered me inside. The living room was bathed in the golden hue of antique wall sconces and original Tiffany lamps. Oil paintings from impressionists I would’ve been impressed by had I known the first thing about fine art hung in gilded frames on coved, whitewashed walls. The furnishings were Mission style. Elegant didn’t come close to describing the place.

“Nice crib.”

“Crissy has an eye for all this. Loves going first class. I guess when you grow up dirt poor like she did, all this stuff takes on added significance.”

His wife, Walker said, was on her way home from the gym and a Humane Society board meeting.

“How ’bout a beer—oh, that’s right, you don’t drink. What about some chow? You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

“Let’s get you fixed up.”

He led me into a kitchen nearly as big as my apartment. The fixtures were top of the line, stainless steel, industrial strength. A frail-looking girl of about ten wearing thick black-frame glasses and a Beauty and the Beast nightgown was perched on a stool at the granite-topped breakfast bar, absorbed in a laptop computer. She had curly blonde hair and a complexion so pallid as to be almost translucent.

“Ryder, can you say hello to Mr. Logan? He’ll be staying with us for a few days.”

She peered intently at the computer screen, acknowledging my presence not at all.

“My granddaughter, Ruthie’s little girl,” Walker explained, lowering his voice. “We assumed guardianship after her mama . . .”

I pretended not to notice the tears in his eyes. He shook his head and walked to the refrigerator.

The computer made noises like farm animals.

“What’re you playing, Ryder?”

Ryder said nothing, tapping computer keys. The blue veins under the pale skin of her temples looked like freeways on a road map.

“Mr. Logan asked you a question, Ryder.”

“A game.”

“What kind of game?” I asked.

“A game.”

“Ryder, how ’bout you go up and play in your room awhile, so Grampa and Mr. Logan can talk a spell, OK?”