No Accident (3 page)

“You may remember the accident
—three cars, eight dead, right before Christmas? All over the news?”

The officer grunted quietly in assent. From the way the flesh of his neck overflowed his collar, Alex guessed he’d been behind a desk for a while. In exchange for boredom and gentle mockery from officers working in the field, guys like this got eight hours a day of petty authority
—authority over who got prompt help, over who got their calls returned, over who got taken seriously. In conversations with dozens of desk officers, Alex had only rarely met a solicitous one. This one watched him as indifferently as the Emperor Nero at a Roman circus that had gone on too long.

“Anyway, I have a few quick questions on the investigation and
—”

“What’s the detective’s name?”

“Lutz.”

“Then he’s the guy.”

“Great. Would it be possible to—”

“He’s out on a case.”

“I see. Do you know when Detective Lutz’s shift ends?”

The officer shrugged his shoulders. “Depends.”

“Oh, I understand. I’ll just wait for him here.”

Alex waited a long time.

Finally seeing Lutz did little to improve Alex’s opinion of him. He was a little guy, short and wide, with big, over-muscled shoulders, narrow, suspicious eyes and a dark mustache starting to go gray. Even in slacks and a blazer he looked more like a beat cop than a detective. Alex guessed he hadn’t been a detective for long.

He caught Lutz on his way out the front door. Lutz agreed to talk but didn’t disguise his eagerness to leave, which he expressed by continuing his brisk walk out of the station. Alex followed close at his heels on the way out, trying to get as many answers as he could before Lutz reached his car.

“It’s all in the report,” Lutz said. He looked straight ahead and stepped with short quick paces into the station parking lot.

“Yes, it’s very comprehensive. I was just wondering
—”

“Where are you from again?” Lutz stopped and scrutinized Alex’s face in the orange light cast by the mercury streetlamps.

“Rampart Insurance.”

“Let me guess, you insured the poor sucker in the sports car who slammed into those lawn guys.”

“That’s right, and I’m just trying to follow up on a few details.”

“What details? You want to know what the asshole had for breakfast?”

“I was trying to figure out which car was the first to explode.”

“What difference does it make? They’re all dead.”

“Well, it may make a difference in legal liability. Like if one of the cars exploded because it was designed poorly, or maybe it was carrying flammable materials or—”

“Look, we had no witnesses worth a shit and the guy in the sports car was driving like an ass. Just like a million other accidents in L.A.” Lutz threw his hands up in exasperation. “There are limits to human knowledge,” he said. Alex thought that was an oddly mannered phrase to come from the mouth of this modern-day Neanderthal, and reasoned that it must have started as one officer’s witticism that got picked up as a tag line by the rest of the precinct. But the way Lutz said it, it wasn’t so witty.

“With all that media attention, you didn’t do any forensics?”

“Didn’t you read the report? We ID’d the bodies and performed autopsies, we followed all the procedures.” With that, Lutz stiffly strutted off, bouncing on his short legs.
Procedures are made for guys like this
, Alex thought. He overtook Lutz at a jog.

“Yes, of course, but there was one thing that didn’t make sense for me,” Alex said. He took a copy of one of the police photographs out of his back pocket and unfolded it for the detective.

“This photo is from your report. It shows the front end of the Viper after it was removed from the crash scene.”

“If you say so,” Lutz said.

“Here’s where Viper collided with the gardening truck,” Alex said. He pointed out a deep, ugly gash across the width of the Viper’s hood, near the windshield.

“Yeah, so?”

“So it looks like the gardening truck landed on top of the Viper, like the force went downward. The whole front end of the Viper is flattened, like an empty box after someone sits on it.”

“Fine, so maybe the truck lands on the Viper after it explodes.”

“But if the Viper ran into the gardening truck to start the whole collision off, like your report said, you’d expect the front end of the Viper to be crumpled inward, like an accordion.”

“So?”

“So, the only way this photo makes sense is if, first, the gardening truck hits the van ahead of it; second, the back end of the gardening truck flies up, maybe from the explosion, maybe from the driver slamming on the brakes. Finally, the Viper slides in under the truck, which lands on top of it, crushing the hood—like you see in the picture.”

Alex heard the excitement growing in his voice as he explained his theory, but he couldn’t help himself. Saying it out loud, Alex felt even more sure of his theory. He looked at Lutz and held his breath, waiting for the detective’s reaction. Lutz knitted his brow as he thought about what Alex had said. He sputtered out the beginning of a response, then cut himself off and yelled at Alex. “Look, you want to depose me, go ahead and fucking depose me. Now get out of my face.”

That was about the last response Alex expected. Lutz hurried away before Alex could follow up with another question. Lutz didn’t look back.

Alex watched Lutz fumble with his keys trying to get into his car. Alex noted that the detective hadn’t denied what Alex showed him
—that it was physically impossible for Howard Cummings to have initiated the collision.

Was Lutz flustered because he knew he was incompetent? No one liked to be proved a fool. For a moment, Alex fantasized about a deposition of Lutz, about the little man sitting in an even littler chair and squirming under a lawyer’s questions. If Rampart’s lawyers walked through the evidence the way Alex just had, Alex knew that the truth would become obvious, and that Rampart would be collecting money from the insurers of the other cars, rather than having to pay money out to them. It wasn’t often as an investigator that you were able to disprove a police report so decisively.

Then Alex asked himself who he was kidding. With Chip Odom in charge, the truth didn’t matter. All that mattered was that litigation was expensive—a crapshoot, to use one of Chip’s favorite words. Rampart would rush to pay a quick and easy settlement for the Cummings case, just like it always did.

Unless
 . . . Unless Alex could find evidence so clear that Chip would have to fight the case. And then Alex remembered another detail from the police report.

Back in his truck, Alex reread the report by the cabin light. His fuzzy recollection was correct: he found a familiar name among the victims
—Jorge Ramirez. Alex once helped put away an insurance scam artist with the same name. Then Alex checked his sudden excitement.
Now I’m just grasping at straws
, he thought. There must be a thousand people in L.A. with that name. It had to be a coincidence.

Didn’t it?

Alex left the police station and drove home. He still lived in the first house he had bought and, as long as he could, he would keep on living there. It was small, and the kitchen appliances hadn’t been updated since the 1950s, but Alex didn’t cook much anyway and the house was two short blocks from the shore, close enough to tote a surfboard.

Alex didn’t pull into his driveway, though. He drove past his house, saw that his street looked quiet, then turned the corner and parked on the other side of the block. Exiting the truck with a file folder pinched under his arm, Alex approached the front gate to the house immediately behind his own. There Alex saw the owner of that house coming toward him along the sidewalk, with a little dog on a leash. So Alex waited at the gate and opened it for the man when he arrived.

“Evening, Scott,” Alex said.

“After you,” the man said.

Alex reached down to scratch the dog’s head, and the dog licked Alex’s hand. Alex passed through and held the gate open for Scott, who entered his home without looking back. For an uptight yuppie, Alex thought, Scott wasn’t so bad.

Alex went around the side of Scott’s house to the wooden fence at the rear of the back yard. There he peeked through a crack between the planks, looking for any sign of movement on his property.

Alex’s house was dark. His yard was dark.

Alex hoisted himself onto a low, thick branch of his neighbor’s lemon tree and, taking care not to drop his file, climbed over the fence and dropped down onto his own patch of dirt.

This was Alex’s new routine, morning and night—all to ensure that his coming, his going and his staying in his house were as invisible as possible. Maybe his precautions were extreme, but if the bill collectors didn’t know when Alex was home, they couldn’t bother him there.

Alex entered his house through the back door. The curtains were drawn, and the inside was darker than the outside. Navigating by touch, Alex made his way to the front room. Alex’s furniture looked better in the dark, as its various blemishes, including scratches in the upholstery left by a former owner’s cat, weren’t visible. “This house has the potential to be great,” his fiancée used to say when trying to convince him to buy new furniture.
No, this house
is
great
.

Alex stood for a moment by his front door, straining to identify a sound he heard from the street outside. A kid skateboarding, he decided. Or just the rumble of the ocean.

Alex dropped into a chair, felt around a table top for his flashlight and opened the file folder he had brought from his truck. He pulled out the police report on the Cummings accident and read it by the focused, eye-watering glow of his flashlight. A man named Jorge Ramirez had died in the crash, the report said. Jorge had been a passenger in the van that was at the front of the collision. Alex assumed that meant Jorge was employed by the company that owned the van, an oil company called Liberty Industries.

The Jorge Ramirez that Alex used to know was a low-level insurance scam artist. The last time Alex saw him was several years before in a courtroom where Alex gave testimony that led to his conviction. Alex tried to imagine whether that Jorge Ramirez would have ever settled for a straight job at Liberty Industries. Maybe
—after all, Jorge wasn’t very successful as a criminal.

Alex’s musings were interrupted by a sharp knock at his front door, five feet away from where he sat. The sound froze Alex in his chair. It wasn’t the hesitating, respectful knock of a neighbor or a salesman. It was the assertive knock of someone who expected a response. Only a very determined bill collector would knock at a darkened house. The visitor knocked again.

“Dude, Alex, it’s Del,” a voice shouted. “Lemme in, bro.”

Hearing his brother’s voice filled Alex with both relief and annoyance. The two rarely spoke, due more to inertia than bad feelings. Del didn’t pick up the phone unless he needed something, usually money, and for him to come all the way to Alex’s house unannounced
—well, Alex figured Del needed a lot this time. This time, Alex didn’t have any money, and he knew he was about to get the full court press from baby brother.

Alex rushed to the door and opened it as wide as he dared.

“Come in,” Alex said in a hoarse whisper.

“Dude, your porch light’s burned out.”

Alex grabbed a handful of Del’s T-shirt and pulled him into the house. Del could be so dense—when he wanted to be.

“Whoa,” Del said as Alex shut the door. Del set a skateboard against the wall and cast a look around the darkened interior. “Dude, it must be your circuit breaker,” he said. “Where’s your fuse box? I can fix it.”

“
Dude
,” Alex said, “the reason it’s dark is because I keep the lights off.” Alex tried not to sound impatient with his brother, but, to be fair, sitting at home in the dark wasn’t something that people normally did by choice.

“Why’d you wanna do a thing like that?” Del said.

Alex ignored the question and instead asked, “How’d you know I was home?”

“I didn’t think you were,” Del said. “
House is dark, truck’s not here . . .” Del made his way to the kitchen where, as Alex could have predicted, he immediately opened the refrigerator and took out a beer. He left the refrigerator door open for some light, while he continued rambling. “But I’d skated all the way down here, y’know?, and it’s too late to skate back, so I was gonna ask you for a ride when you got home, whenever
that
was, so I figured, what the hell, I’ll just give a knock on the off chance you’re in here napping on the couch.”

Del wrapped a fist around the top of the beer bottle and wrenched off the cap, which wasn’t designed to be screwed off, and then grinned at Alex. “So, it turns out I’m in luck. Sorry to wake you.”

Alex joined his brother in the kitchen, where they gave each other an initial wary look. Del was the first to smile, a warm smile from childhood, and then Alex felt his own face light up. The two hugged each other tightly and then separated.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Alex said. “Why did you come all the way here if you didn’t know I’d be home?”

Del stood up straight and took a swig from the bottle. “Maybe because you don’t return my calls.”

Alex hadn’t returned Del’s calls because he was afraid to hear what trouble Del had gotten himself into now
—that, and Alex resented always being asked to bail out his brother and, of course, to do him a favor and not tell Mom.

Del kept his hair short, like Alex, and had a pronounced Adam’s apple, like their father had. Del was the taller brother now, and looked even taller than that because he was thin. To Alex, it looked like Del had lost some weight
—another sign he was gambling again.

When Alex didn’t respond, Del said, “You got a jacket or something I can put on?”

“Check the closet,” Alex said, and gestured toward the coat closet in his small living room. Del was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, despite the damp evening onshore breeze. He left the kitchen for the living room. There he picked up Alex’s flashlight and began rummaging through the coat closet. He emerged holding a woman’s jacket.

“That won’t fit you,” Alex said.

“Um, dude,” Del said, “why do you still have her shit in your house?”

Alex shrugged. It was almost a year after their break up, and “her” still only meant Pamela. It was an unwelcome reminder that he hadn’t had a relationship since her. Del’s reproof was like having a neighbor rest his forearms on the back fence and casually ask when you were planning to do something with the growing pile of refuse in your yard. “I just haven’t gotten around to cleaning out that closet,” Alex said.

“Pro’bly ’cause it’s too dark . . .” Del said. He replaced Pamela’s jacket and put on an old jacket of Alex’s, then returned to the kitchen and took another gulp from the beer bottle.

“Very funny,” Alex said. He wished Del would get to the point instead of poking a stick at Alex’s problems. Alex’s problems weren’t in the same league as Del’s, no way. Not on the same planet. “Are we going to do this all night?”

“Do what?”

“Play ‘who’s on first’ while I try to guess why you came here.” Alex took a beer from the fridge and uncapped it with a bottle opener. The brothers stood an arm’s length apart, leaning against opposite walls in the small kitchen.

Del smiled coyly, daring Alex not to care. “Why don’t you just ask me?”

Alex shook his head. “Why did you come here, Del?”

Del smiled again, this time more self-consciously. “I guess you could say I’ve got trouble with some bill collectors,” he said.

Del’s words didn’t come as a surprise, but they still hit Alex in his gut. “Jesus. Again?”

“Don’t start with me, Alex. You think this is easy for me?”

“Apparently it’s easy enough for you to do every year or so.”

Del gave Alex a doe-eyed look full of genuine hurt. To his own private embarrassment, Alex found himself wondering cynically whether this was the same routine Del gave to his bookies. “That’s not fair,” Del said. “This time it actually isn’t my fault.”

“Wow. Where in the world do you get the money?”

“Look, I’m a good customer, so some people fronted me the cash. I had a system this time, but the NCAA has been a roller coaster this year, and even when the favorites win it’s like they refuse to cover the spread—I mean, Stanford playing its second-stringers for almost the entire second half last week—that’s not sportsmanship against a weaker opponent, it’s like giving the middle finger to sports fans nationwide. So like, so much for my system—you still follow basketball, right?”

Alex ignored the question. “It’s not a system, it’s gambling.”

“It’s a fucking system, Alex”—he stopped himself and lowered his voice. The doe-eyed look was gone. Now Del’s eyes showed the glassy intensity of a starved dog’s. “It’s a system, a proven system that I got from a guy who has made millions betting on sports. Millions, Alex. You don’t chase the sexy long shot, you look for a lot of little inefficiencies and exploit them. See, you can use math to model basketball scores: there’s a mean, and a variance. It’s like a bell curve, right?” Del made the shape of a bell curve with his palms. “And the idea is you stay right in the hump of that bell curve, and the odds will work
for
you.”

“But you didn’t,” Alex said.

Del swallowed a large mouthful of beer. “But I did, Alex. I did. But like I said, this season has just been crazy. Outside the mean.”

Alex didn’t want to hear any more. It was the same story Del had been telling for the past seven years, but with different words. It was like the Bach etudes Del used to play on the piano before he gave up music for basketball
—Del’s crises were all variations on a theme. “Del, I don’t have any money.”

Del narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Bullshit. Since when?”

“Since the real estate market went south and one of my renters moved out. I’m just trying to keep my own head above water.”

“Yeah, that’s convenient.”

Alex rolled his eyes. A secret part of Alex was relieved that poverty meant he didn’t have to feel guilty about not helping Del—or, for that matter, feel guilty about
helping
him. “Sure, Del, I engineered a global recession just to spite you.”

“You know what I mean,” Del said, but Alex really didn’t. As kids they could almost have passed for twins; Del was always tall for his age. In sports with the neighborhood boys it was like they could read each other’s minds
—Del always knew where to pass the ball, and Alex always knew Del would be right behind him. But their tacit bond had come apart over the years. Nowadays, Del seemed to hold Alex responsible for betrayals that Alex wasn’t even aware of. Del took another mouthful of beer and swished it around in his cheeks like mouthwash as he looked up at the ceiling, thinking. Alex waited as Del swallowed the beer and continued.

“OK, so you’re cash constrained right now. I get it. So here’s what I’m thinking, bro: I invested with you on your last house, right? So all I want is to take my money out of it. I get my money back, and I sign over my interest in the house to you. The house’ll be all yours.”

Alex finally took a drink from his own bottle, a small sip. “That’s a cool idea,
bro
,” Alex said, “but it doesn’t address the fact that I have no cash to buy you out with.”

Del didn’t seem to hear him. He just kept on repeating the rationale that he must have told himself a thousand times. “It’s statistics, Alex. Reversion to the mean. College basketball scores have been out of whack all season, they’ve got to snap back into the pattern. All the math says so. All
logic
says so—”

“I don’t have the cash, Del.”

“I’ll cut you in on the upside.”

“Jesus, Del, I don’t want to
invest
with you.”

“Don’t say it like I’m contagious. You could go back to the bank
—”

Alex laughed loudly.

“—or ask Mom, or Uncle Hugh, or—”

Alex raised his voice. “I made a bad investment, Del, and it’s hurting me as much as it is you, but that’s something we both have to live with.”