The victim’s face reappeared on the screen, as did the police phone number.
Sergeant Stanley left to find the clerical help he’d need.
“You think our boy’s packing his bags right about now?” Oliver asked.
Ron knew the question was more than just rhetorical, and he nodded.
“Might not be a bad idea, at that, to have a few units out watching for anybody leaving town and looking spooked,” Ron answered.
There were only four roads out of town that hooked up with the interstate system. It was just another of Goldstrike’s natural advantages, as far as the police were concerned.
“I’ll get Stanley on it right away,” Oliver said, heading for the door.
“You think we could get that lucky?” Ron asked.
The deputy chief just snorted and kept going.
Another member of the Clay Steadman Show’s viewing audience was Perk Lawler, the local stringer for the Associated Press. She videotaped every episode. She also had an urgent reaction to the mayor’s announcement. Perk picked up her phone and called her boss in Los Angeles. Did she have a story for him.
And by Saturday morning, so did every newspaper in the country.
Hours later, news of the murder in Goldstrike and Clay Steadman’s reward offer was in worldwide circulation.
Chapter 7
Saturday
About the same time on Saturday morning that the rest of the country was learning about the horrific killing in the Sierra Nevada resort town, two tired and cranky patrol officers, Santo Alighieri and Divine Babson, made a discovery. At the far corner of the parking lot of the Evergreen Supermarket on Timberline Road sat an old dark blue Ford Taurus. There was an acre of available parking between the car and the store.
Officer Babson, the mother of three, gave her partner a fish-eyed look.
“Santo,” she asked, “you ever feel the urge to carry a bag of groceries one step farther than you absolutely had to?”
“Beautiful car like that, maybe the owner just don’t want to get it dinged,” he responded deadpan, but he drove slowly over to the isolated car.
As they got close, Divine said, “Something wrong here. I feel it. You feel it?”
“Yeah. Either there’s a body in that trunk or we’re the lucky cops about to get a commendation.”
Officer Babson radioed the dispatcher that she and her partner were about to investigate a suspicious vehicle and gave their location. The dispatcher acknowledged their message.
Approaching the car from the rear, Alighieri said, “The plate’s current.”
“I’ll call it in,” Babson replied “See what we can see.”
“Hey, Divine,” Alighieri interrupted as he moved to the front of the car. “Come on over here and look at this.”
She joined her partner and looked in the direction of his nod. The driver’s side sun visor hung down. On it was a label:
Clergy.
Officer Babson just shook her head. “A man gets himself crucified, and we find a minister’s car parked all lonely over here? Makes me want to go home and hold my babies.”
Alighieri, a bachelor, took the practical point of view.
“Let’s call the chief in on this. Maybe he’ll let you.”
Ron came and so did Oliver, who’d been about to leave for breakfast at home. They brought Officer Benny Marx, the department’s crime scene man, with them. By the time they arrived at the supermarket parking lot Officers Babson and Alighieri had a name for them.
“DMV says this car’s registered to a Reverend Isaac Cardwell,” Babson said.
“A black male,” Alighieri added.
A number of early morning shoppers noticed the police presence, but the cops didn’t seem to be doing more than talking, and they were too far away for anyone to casually rubberneck.
“You guys touch anything?” Benny Marx asked.
Both cops shook their heads.
“Eyeballed it is all,” Babson explained.
Alighieri added, “Divine spotted the car over here, wondered why anyone would park so far from the store. When we got within ten feet of it, we knew something was wrong.”
Oliver looked up from glancing at the
Clergy
label. “The DMV sent you the reverend’s driver’s license photo, right?”
Babson held up her department-issued BlackBerry. Isaac Cardwell’s photographic likeness looked out at the assembly of cops.
Ron nodded. “Good work, officers. You two have been working all night?”
Alighieri said, “Yes, sir.”
The chief told the two cops, “Okay, go home and get some rest. Come back for second shift. See if you can find another lead for us.”
Divine Babson and Santo Alighieri smiled, saluted and left.
The deputy chief had Cardwell’s photo up on his smart phone now.
“That’s him,” Oliver said.
Ron and Benny Marx agreed.
They’d identified the victim. Reverend Isaac Cardwell of Echo Avenue, Oakland, California. In the DMV photo, though, Reverend Cardwell wore wire frame glasses; his license mandated corrective lenses when he drove. Ron remembered the indentations on the victim’s nose. So what had happened to the man’s glasses?
“Benny,” Ron asked, “you find any eyeglasses in the area where the victim was found?”
“No, Chief.”
“Look for a pair when you go over that car. Oliver, go talk to the supermarket manager and his staff. See if their security cameras cover the spot where the reverend’s car is parked. If not, ask if anyone noticed when Cardwell’s car was left here. See if anybody remembers seeing him in the store; if so, was anyone was with him? If the store personnel are no help, ask them for the names of regular customers who came in the past few days. There have to be times this parking lot gets a lot more filled up than it is now. Somebody might have seen something. Ask the manager when his slow times are, when it’s least likely anyone would notice a car being dumped here. If we don’t get anything else, that might give us a time frame to work with.”
Oliver and Benny knew Ron was saving the heavy lifting for himself.
The chief said, “I’ll notify the next of kin — and the mayor.”
Ron went to see the mayor first. He’d been to Clay Steadman’s house a dozen times in the three years he’d been Goldstrike’s chief of police. Every time he visited, he had the same thought. It was perfectly sited for the man who governed —
ruled
, Ron often thought — the town.
The house sat alone on a rise that looked directly down on the center of town and the sparkling waters of the lake. If the mayor were so inclined, he could step out his front door and, with a pair of good binoculars, peer into half of the windows in the Muni Complex. And since Clay Steadman had everyone who worked for the town out to his place twice a year, for a Fourth of July picnic and a Christmas party, every municipal employee on the inland side of the Muni knew that the boss might be watching at any time.
On the other hand, nobody was going to get the drop on Clay Steadman. His grounds were high enough above the adjacent road that he felt no need to enclose the property behind a wall. A private lane was the only way in. It cut through a grand sweep of lawns, terraced flowerbeds, ornamental trees and a recirculating stream that featured a small waterfall and a large pond. All of the features of the landscaping fit together like a masterfully composed oil painting — and all of them allowed for a clear view from the house to the property line. Out back were a simple lap pool and an austere tennis court. Just beyond these amenities, the sheer face of a cliff rose over two hundred feet.
The house itself was a single story rambling structure of redwood weathered to a handsome silver with a pitched roof and tinted Thermopane windows. It was big but seemed exceedingly unpretentious for a man who’d made a billion or so dollars in entertainment and real estate. When you stepped inside, there were understated furnishings that cost more than most people made in a lifetime, paintings by Winslow Homer and three generations of Wyeths and Remington bronzes. Everything had been arranged by somebody whose sense of interior design was probably genetic.
For all the room in the house, Clay was the only one who lived there. His only ex-wife didn’t like snow and lived, elegantly, in the Arizona desert. He had no children. He drove his own cars. The cook and the cleaning people were ferried back and forth, and the groundskeeper came and went in his own truck.
It was only when the mayor had an occasional lady friend over or threw one of his rare parties for his Hollywood associates, that anyone else spent a night under his roof.
The sense of isolation and asceticism Clay had cultivated in his home was intentional. During the shooting of his tenth film, aptly named
Criminal Mischief,
he’d encountered the one foe he couldn’t overcome: cocaine addiction.
By the time he made
Criminal Mischief,
most of Clay’s movies were being produced by his own company. But this effort was a co-production deal because another company owned the script. Ironically, the picture had an anti-drug theme.
Not that you’d know it from looking at most of the cast. The only reason Clay didn’t kick their asses the first time he’d seen drugs being passed around was that these people still got their jobs done, and did them damn well.
At the wrap party, Clay was struck by a life changing temptation. He thought if his fellow actors could handle coke without suffering, he ought to at least know what all the shouting was about. It was the worst mistake of his life.
What he discovered was that he
loved
cocaine.
Worse, he had all the money he needed to indulge his new love to death. Which he just about did one day when he was pushing his Ford Cobra through the mountain roads so fast he thought it might be fun to see if the car could actually
fly.
So he pointed it straight at an unprotected curve and flattened the accelerator.
He would have killed himself that day if his path hadn’t taken him past a scenic overlook and he hadn’t registered the looks of utter shock on a family of tourists who thought they were witnessing a madman committing suicide. The horrified concern of complete strangers brought Clay back into last-second contact with reality.
Clay had publicly told the story of this epiphany many times. But he’d never once been able to explain how he’d managed to keep his car on the road and make that curve at the speed he’d been traveling.
The next day, Clay resigned as mayor — he was serving his second term — and checked himself into rehab. When he successfully completed his course of therapy and returned to Goldstrike, he found that his resignation had been declined by the town council. He was told if he could stay clean Goldstrike still wanted him as its mayor.
After maintaining his sobriety and winning his third term, the town council gave him a plaque for his office that said:
Clay Steadman, Mayor for Life.
He put things in perspective with a new nameplate for his mayoral desk:
Clay Steadman, Recovering Drug Addict.
He didn’t believe in sugarcoating anything, especially his own weaknesses. He knew his demons were close at hand, and always would be. That’s why he tried to live his personal life in a style he called tastefully monastic.
As Ron pulled up to the mayor’s front door, Clay stepped out with a cup of coffee in each hand. Further proof the mayor saw all. He gave one cup to the chief and invited him in.
They sat in the breakfast nook off the kitchen. The public rooms in the house faced the town. The bedrooms and Clay’s home office were guarded by the cliff.
“Reverend
Isaac Cardwell?” the mayor asked.
“That’s the way the DMV has him.”
“So the killing could be a racial thing or it could be a religious thing.”
“Or it could be purely personal,” the chief said.
“Just as painful for him, but a lot easier for us.” Ron didn’t doubt that Clay Steadman was just as angry as he had been yesterday. But by now he’d had the time to consider the situation as the town’s mayor. Clay asked, “Too soon to know if the reverend lived here or was just visiting?”
Ron told Clay that Isaac Cardwell had lived in Oakland.
“So was he was here on vacation. Or he’d come to meet someone.”
“We don’t know why he was here. Or if he was killed somewhere else and left here.”
The mayor gave the chief a level gaze. Ron met his stare without blinking or looking away. It was one of the things Clay liked about him.
“Someone wants to cause trouble for us?” the mayor asked. He thought about that. “Sure, why not?” Then the mayor asked. “You pissed about the reward I offered?”
“I’d have liked to know about it beforehand. It probably will save some legwork, and cause some headaches with scammers trying to cash in. On balance … yeah, I’m pissed.”
Clay nodded, not taking offense.
“I’ll let you know first, next time. You can state your case. But I’m going to do what I think is right.”
“Me too,” Ron said.
The mayor had the grace and self-assurance to smile at the remark.
The chief said thanks for the coffee and got up to go.
“You want me to notify the next of kin?” Clay offered.
Ron shook his head. “I want to check out Reverend Cardwell with the Oakland PD before I call them.”
It was only when Clay walked him to the door that Ron remembered to give the mayor the other piece of news concerning his happy little mountain kingdom.
“Oh, yeah,” the chief said. “Before I forget again, you should know that a woman running on Route 38 yesterday was attacked by a mountain lion.”
“Thanks. I already heard, ”the mayor replied. “Flowers and wishes for a speedy recovery should be reaching Ms. Mallory in San Francisco right about now.”