Reilly 12 - Show No Fear (17 page)

“You.”

“Me?”

“Joke. We talked about me making sure I wore clean clothes, making sure I went to the laundromat. That I should bring a speeding ticket she was going to help me with.”

“Did she tell you about seeing the victim last weekend?” Paul asked, feeling his initial sympathy for the boy fading.

“Richard Filsen?”

“Right.”

“The victim. That’s rich. My sister and my mother, now
they
are victims. His victims.”

“How so?”

Matt gave Paul a hard look. “Scaring the hell out of Nina. Threatening to take my nephew away. Worrying my mom, who has enough to worry about. Those kinds of things. Nothing much.”

“Did you ever have any contact with Richard Filsen at any time?”

“I met him when he was dating my sister. And I spotted him once with her, trying to push her around.”

Turned out, Matt had seen Perry Tompkins serve papers to Nina one day in September outside of Bob’s preschool.

“How did you feel about him?”

“I wasn’t happy about how after four freaking years he suddenly felt he had some say in Bob’s life. I mean, here’s our mom, so sick she’s talking about offing herself—”

“Your mom is suicidal?”

“She’s—strong. That’s all. She talks sometimes about controlling her final moments, going along with what God wants, just kinda tweaking his decision, that kind of shit.”

“What’s your reaction to that?”

“I hate it! I don’t want her dead, okay? Not when she chooses, or God or anyone else. Jeez. You people.”

“What did you do about this threat to your family, Richard Filsen?”

“Nothing.” Matt’s otherwise handsome face turned ugly. “Nina hates interference. You ought to know that about her. Plus, that’s not my style, you know, going around threatening people with guns or shit like that.”

“You ever play drums in a rock band, man?” Armano said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“You keep that beat, don’t you?” Matt’s fingers stopped tapping as all three men watched. Then they started up again, seemingly by themselves.

“We’ll be seeing you again,” Paul said.

Matt jumped up. “Later.”

“He’s as high as a model’s ass. We should—”

“We wait awhile,” Paul cut in.

“Wait till you get to know the sister better,” Armano said. “Your predicament.” He grinned. At the door he asked, “What if the sister admits she did call him?”

“I’ll talk to Nina again, pin down the time she called. But I have to say, he lives a good forty minutes from Seaside. I’m not sure he could get back by seven. Maybe. Hard to believe he could talk with her about laundry after gunning down a man. He’s not a big guy. He might look good in a flowered headscarf.”

“Reminds me of a case down in Watsonville I was assigned to. Farmworker comes home, wife has a hot dinner cooked for him. They get into a big argument before supper. He knocks her against the wall and she conks.”

“Yeah?”

“And then he sits down with the corpse, eats his chiles rellenos, watches
Wheel of Fortune.
Then he calls to report it. I asked him what took him so long? Says he was hungry. His wife was a great cook.”

“Matt could have done it,” Paul said. “But it looks to me like
Richard Filsen had a lot of people feeling unfriendly toward him. We need to get some more statements from his clients, too.”

“I never had a case where the guy had so many people wanting to shut him up for good. Let’s pick up some food first,” Armano said. “All of a sudden I’ve got this urge for—”

“Don’t say it.”

A
LTHOUGH IT WAS ONLY ELEVEN O’CLOCK ON THE
M
ONDAY
after Richard Filsen’s murder, his associate, Perry Tompkins, had already gone to lunch, according to the young woman sitting at the front desk of the law office in Seaside. She thought maybe he had gone over to the restaurant around the corner.

For some reason, Tompkins hadn’t found the time to call Paul back.

Window-box flowers and brilliant winter light gave way to a deep gloom as Paul and Armano entered.
Restaurant
aggrandized the place. This bar sold sandwiches somebody probably delivered from elsewhere.

Tompkins stopped talking as Paul and Armano approached and introduced themselves. Then he introduced his lunchmate. Ralph Soto didn’t look like his name. A big, rangy, out-of-shape lawyer sporting a bushy blond mustache, he had settled into his third or fourth beer. Perry Tompkins was much more fit, with a trim waist and good shave, but also much shorter.

“Sorry I didn’t call you back. I got your message just this morning,” Tompkins said. “My family and I were out of town for Thanksgiving.”

“Where out of town?” Paul asked.

“At my in-laws’ second home, down in Big Sur.”

“When did you leave for Big Sur?”

“We drove down Wednesday night.”

Which did not preclude the possibility that he had driven back up to Seaside early Thursday morning, killed his boss, and made it back down in time for a delicious turkey feast.

“I assume you didn’t leave at any point, go out for cigarettes—”

“I don’t smoke. No, I didn’t leave. My wife will back me up.”

Paul expected she would.

Miffed at being left out, Soto took the lead, asserting that he represented Tompkins. This turned out to be a rather informal representation, though, since he let his client talk freely and mostly nodded and drank. “You guys want a beer?” Soto caught the waitress’s arm as she passed the booth and ordered another one for himself.

“You drivin’, Ralph?” she said, looking warily at the two detectives. Paul could feel the disreputableness of the place—practically smell the garbage rotting out back. He had the nose, that was why he had become a detective, the nose and the nosiness.

But his quarry was a killer, not a dubious restaurant license. He let the restaurant drop away and turned back to the associate he had come to smell. Tompkins had been closer to Filsen than just about anybody else.

Ralph Soto laughed. “Everybody practices law these days.” To the waitress he said, “Thanks for your concern. As per usual, I’ll stagger on foot to my office, which is three doors down. Now bring me another beer, dear.” She brought one, which he held up.

“To absent friends,” he said. Tompkins looked away.

Paul established the basic facts of the working relationship fairly quickly. Perry was Filsen’s bitch.

“He had a complicated personality,” Tompkins offered. “But we had a good professional relationship. He brought in the clients, and I did a lot of the work. I was going to become a partner as of January first.”

“I hear he took advantage of you.”

“Really? Who said that?”

“I hear he used you and didn’t respect you,” Paul lied.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Everyone else would,” Ralph muttered. “Shit. Forget I said that.”

When Tompkins had nothing further to offer on the respect issue, Paul asked, “Did you consider Richard Filsen a good lawyer?”

“I don’t want to speak ill of him, but he made mistakes. He could get reckless.”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, we had a big personal-injury case. Richard insisted on demanding a million bucks when the kid wanted to take the sixty-five grand the insurance company offered. There was a big problem with liability. Richard—the firm—didn’t have the money to buy the same quality of expert testimony they had. The kid lost. Naturally, he and his parents sued us. We barely squeaked by.” Tompkins shrugged. “That’s the way he played things. He thrived on risk.”

“How long ago was this?” asked Paul.

“About three years ago. The kid and his parents haven’t forgiven us.”

“You didn’t like the way he handled things.”

“He promised Perry a partnership but he treated him like scum,” Soto said.

“Is that right?” Paul asked.

Tompkins chewed patiently, then said, “He would have come through for me. As I said, I was just about to make partner. He depended on me, okay?”

“What’s the upshot, now that he’s gone?” Armano asked, impatient. “What happens to you?”

“According to our oral agreement, the firm is mine. That is my position. He has a ninety-one-year-old grandmother. She’s his only heir. I’m sure I can work something out with her.”

“Good deal for you,” Armano said.

“If you think seeing your colleague murdered is good deal,” Tompkins said.

“C’mon. The guy had problems. I’m sure working with him wasn’t completely easy.”

The lawyers looked at each other.

“Okay. I’m going to let you in on something. Vegas was his problem,” Ralph Soto said. “Reno. South Lake Tahoe. Atlantic City. The Bahamas. Know what I mean? Where he went depended on how much he had. What money he made, he blew. He favored seven-card stud. Big pots.”

“You could tell on Monday mornings,” Tompkins agreed.

“He was tired? Or mad? What?” Paul prompted.

“He’d go out cycling before dawn and come in half-dead. He’d be at the office at seven and hector me for coming in at nine. Talk to clients he’d been ignoring. Worked like a madman to catch up on everything, drove the secretary crazy. By afternoon he would have plane reservations for the next weekend. He had it bad. Still, I’ll miss him,” Tompkins said suddenly.

“What I see is if you killed Filsen, you thought you would get more than the partnership. You’d get the whole business.”

“Hey, now. Are you accusing my client of murder?” Soto suddenly tuned in.

“I didn’t kill Richard,” Tompkins said firmly. “I didn’t kill him so that I could take over. Richard’s death causes the firm all sorts of problems. I’m just hoping I can carry on.”

“You made out good,” Armano said.

“Not the way I see it,” Perry said.

Back at the car, Armano turned to Paul. “Walrus and the Carpenter,” he said.

“Crocodile tears.”

“Hope I die before I develop a legal problem,” said Armano, dusting the seat with his hand. They got into the car. “How’s that guy ever get any work done with a load on like that every afternoon?”

“You mean Soto?”

“Yeah.”

“Ralph’s the equivalent of Richard Filsen for his firm. He socializes and brings in the new cases, even at AA meetings. He’s a phony
and a hypocrite, but that never stopped anyone from becoming a lawyer.”

“What about that uptight associate of Filsen’s?”

“He’s reserved and awkward, isn’t he? He probably actually did do most of the work.”

“Think there’s any more to him than meets the eye?”

“Perry’s scared. He gets the potentially lucrative practice to himself. He hasn’t got a definite alibi. He’s a person of interest. So he says, ‘I don’t know much,’” Paul continued, parodying Ebenezer Scrooge’s associates. “‘I only know he’s dead.’ He has Ralph sit in just in case he’s got a problem with us.”

“At least Filsen’s granny cares. Maybe. Should we interview her? She lives in Los Angeles,” Armano said.

“Why don’t you give her a call in case she’s in the mood to blurt out some family secret. Ask her if she packs a .357 Magnum.”

“And then there’s the charming Mrs. Santiago, so sweet and kind and sad for Richard, she can hardly even hide it from her husband.”

“Thank God for sympathetic women,” Paul said. “Men wouldn’t last a year on this earth without them.”

Back at the office, Paul dug out the letters from Filsen’s attaché case. They were both from Filsen’s creditors in South Lake Tahoe. Harvey’s Club wanted more than $40,000. Paul picked up the telephone to call the lab. “Anything new?”

“Yeah. We’ve got something for you. A lot of prints from all over the apartment, including the bedroom.” The technician gave Paul a name he did not bother to write down.

Barbara Santiago’s fingerprints. No surprise, just a verification of his suspicion. They were sleeping together.

Did Carlos know?

Paul spent that afternoon tracking down Matt’s friend Zinnia Farr. Her two dozen or more relatives swore she had come home by midnight the night before Thanksgiving and slept on the couch in the living room of the house on Marion Avenue.

He did enjoy the father’s sincere alibi: “We were partying all night. For sure, Zinny was there, keeping up, snort for snort.”

Paul tracked her down. She came into the station and spoke to him, dressed conservatively in a long skirt and ironed blouse, courteous and deferential. She could not provide Matt with an alibi, she said politely, because she had left before midnight after Matt hit the hay during a movie they had been watching,
Alien.
“You ever seen it? That is some awesomely creepy shit,” she said.

Paul didn’t like her, although he did like her hair. He liked women with long hair.

The afternoon wore on. He’d be off-duty soon. Paul rubbed his face slowly. He had been so late he hadn’t shaved that day. Picking up the phone to order pizza, he jumped as Armano burst in. “Here comes another death under suspicious circumstances down the coast near Big Sur. This is our jurisdiction all the way. Carsey says we hit the road.”

T
HEY HAD NO DIFFICULTY LOCATING THE SCENE.
F
OUR
police cars, bright lights flashing and spinning, were parked at crazy angles along a narrow patch of Highway 1 just north of Bixby Creek Bridge, at various precarious pullouts. An ambulance stood ready, attendants lounging on its bumper. There were no other cars. The police had cordoned off the pullout closest to the bridge, stretching a yellow plastic strip from stakes in the ground. Gawkers parked illegally alongside the road beyond and stood on the narrow walkway on the bridge, pointing down toward the beach and muttering to each other. A CHP was just starting to clear them out.

“The vultures have landed,” Armano said as they pulled their unmarked beige car alongside a police van on the wrong side of the road. They crossed Highway 1 and walked around the stakes.

“Detective van Wagoner?” a deputy sheriff said, scratching himself furiously on the arm. “Poison oak,” he apologized when he noticed Armano’s expression. “Everywhere.”

The deputy led them to the edge of the overlook. “Look out. The cliffs are unstable. You never know when a chunk might break loose.”

Down below, in light that was beginning to fade, Paul saw the
body of a woman through his binoculars. He had expected a fall like that would produce an ugly sprawl, so he was surprised to spot the body curled up, as if sleeping, several hundred feet down on the rocks below the pullout. On the side of the woman’s head he couldn’t see, a head wound had caused blood to pool around the gray hair. A trickle of water in this season, Bixby Creek flowed out to the ocean. As fast as the police cleared people from the bridge on the cliffs above, more came to peer over the side at the scene below.

“Anybody been down there yet?”

“The coroner and her henchwomen.”

“Anyone thinking suicide?”

The deputy shook his head and scratched his leg. “Who knows?”

There was no place where they could easily get down to the body, so they hiked up the road and found a path etched by water runoff and climbed gingerly down. By the time they reached the bottom, Armano was puffing.

“What kind of Californian are you, buddy?” Paul asked, skipping onto the beach.

Shivering and wet with mud, Armano answered, breathing hard, “The fat kind.”

As they approached, two more officers nodded. Susan Misumi was delving into an aluminum case in the sand beside her. Seeing Paul and Armano, she dusted her gloved hands off, waving her hands at them without one touching the other.

They introduced themselves. “We meet again,” Paul said. “How’s it going?”

“Hiya, Paul. I’ve just been here a few minutes but there are a couple of things. The woman, in her late forties, early fifties, died of severe head injuries sustained in a fall. Looks like she died instantly. One huge gash cracked open her skull on the right side. The trauma from that alone would have wiped her out.”

Paul and Armano crossed the small slice of sand and approached the body, which lay a few feet up from the beach among the rocks.

The woman’s eyes were open in a twisted face, a face already so removed from humanity Paul thought for a jolting moment he was
looking at a theatrical mask. A mask of malice. A mask intended to frighten. The mouth gaped widely exposing teeth on the top and bottom, as if interrupted midhowl.

Susan took a deep breath. “Yes, the expression isn’t the usual. I’m thinking that this woman suffered from a medical condition which caused facial disfigurement. In death, the muscles normally relax. She looks older than she is. Was.”

“She moved,” Paul noted, responding to a small disturbance in the sandy patches around her that explained the body’s position.

Susan nodded. “Amazing what the human body will take. She couldn’t have lived more than a few moments after that fall. Shouldn’t have lived even that long.”

Quietly, they examined the sand and rocks.

“Have we got photos?” Paul asked. The tide or wind would make short work of this patch of beach soon.

The attending deputy nodded.

Paul rolled the body over with gloved hands to examine the skull wound, pulling the right arm out from underneath.

She was missing her left hand.

Warning bells rang in his head. It couldn’t be! Picking up the black leather purse he found still dangling from a strap attached to her right hand, he opened it and pulled out the wallet.

Virginia Reilly of Pacific Grove.

First Filsen, Nina’s ex-lover. Now Nina’s mother.

“Maybe she stopped to look at the view and jumped on impulse,” Armano said, sounding sad. He looked toward the ocean. “Looks like she had reasons to die.”

“Who called this in?” Paul asked Susan, who had straightened up. She had a round, intelligent face, not a whole lot of humor in it, not that he’d expect a comedian to go into her line of work.

“Exactly. There’s a witness. He says it wasn’t a suicide, Detective. A passing motorist, who did not leave a name, called it in. It was a male voice. He said he just saw somebody pushed off the cliff near Bixby Creek Bridge. The 911 dispatcher asked for a description, but he said the people were hidden when he approached the overlook, and he just glanced behind in his rearview mirror long
enough to see her fall. He said, ‘I had the definite impression she was pushed. Somebody else was there with the old lady.’ He didn’t stop, just rushed to the nearest phone, which is a few miles further down the road.”

So much for suicide. The witness might not be able to describe the people standing at the cliff’s edge, but he should be able to describe their car. The witness had to be found. Paul looked up at the faces of onlookers leaning over the cliffs like small white moons against the darkening hills. The body would not be visible from a passing vehicle, so they were lucky someone had spotted her. The murderer probably waited for one of those unpredictable pauses in the afternoon traffic, pushed the woman, then hightailed it out of there.

“When did the call come in?”

“About four thirty in the afternoon. Jibes with my rough estimate of time of death.”

A team of paramedics came up to them, carrying the portable gurney, and Susan fell into conversation with them. Paul and Armano took another long look around.

They clambered back up the steep hillside by flashlight. A harsh evening wind had begun to blow. Dr. Misumi, finding handholds in the rocky mud, complained all the way up about the dirt on her good suit. “People die in the most inconvenient places at the worst times. I’m supposed to be at a wedding reception.”

Armano tumbled down a few feet and let loose a sharp Spanish profanity, which he translated with relish.

The ground at the crime-taped overlook was gravelly dirt, too hard to show signs of a scuffle, trampled besides by thousands of tourist feet. It was impossible to see if one or two people had stood at the cliffside, but from the position of the body, they could fix fairly closely where Virginia Reilly had been standing. Convenient for the killer that they had been hidden from view by the car. Or just plain resourceful.

They got back into the car as the ambulance drivers reached the top with their burden and began putting the body bag into the truck.
Watching them, Paul was struck as he always was by their gentle handling of the body. Mrs. Reilly had been an important person, a living person, a mother. She deserved their respect, even at the end.

Filsen. Reilly.

Filsen had represented the acupuncturist Mrs. Reilly was going to sue—or had sued, Paul remained slightly murky on the details. The key to the murder had to lie in that situation. He couldn’t put it together in his mind, though he was looking forward to talking again with Dr. Wu.

Minutes later, heading south on Highway 1, they stopped at the first store they came to, a small redwood cabin that serviced campers. Two outdoor phones on the porch stood idle.

“Anyone use those phones lately?” Paul asked, showing the woman at the counter his identification.

The woman was more of a girl, with brown braids she had looped and pinned to her head. Her tone was not friendly. “You’re here about the woman who fell off the cliff at Bixby?”

“You can hear the phone from in here, can’t you?”

“Sometimes. It gets busy.” She sounded defensive in the empty store. Pulling out a stack of newspapers, she neatened them.

“We don’t have all night.”

“Okay, okay. A guy came in about a couple of hours ago, at about two thirty, three. Maybe close to four. It was getting on in the afternoon. He called the police. Saw something awful at the bridge. I heard that. That’s all I know.”

Paul luxuriated in a small itch of excitement. Maybe this cashier had seen the witness and his car. Maybe Paul had a real lead. “What did he look like?”

“Like half the people that come here: three-day growth of beard, short, stocky, wearing a plaid flannel shirt. All the city guys wear those when they come down here, it seems like. Let’s see. Levi’s. The shirt—black-and-white. A red watch, waterproof plastic. He looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t anyone I know from around here. You know the type, always on the make for girls about the age of his youngest daughter.”

“What did he do after he made the call?”

“Took off.” She brightened. “And what a car. Red Ferrari, an older one, vintage. That thing was smooth, and so quiet I never even heard him pull away. I heard cars like that were supposed to be mechanical disasters.”

That probably explained why the killer had moved when a witness was approaching. The road curved before and after the bridge, without a lot of visible roadway, but he or she should have been able to hear a standard car approaching from some distance on a quiet Monday afternoon.

“You won’t have much trouble finding that Ferrari, I bet,” the girl said.

“Did you notice which way it went?”

“Took a right. Went south. Probably on the way to the Ventana Inn for dinner or maybe on to Esalen for some soothing meditation? That guy had money falling out of his pockets.”

A family of campers in parkas and boots stomped in. Paul thanked the clerk and took down her contact information, then he and Armano left.

They took the winding road slowly in the dark. Several times they missed a driveway and had to reverse direction. Cabins and campgrounds lined the river that ran parallel to the highway. News of the killing had already spread, probably thanks to the girl at the store. Some families were packing up to leave. Nobody had seen the red sports car or its driver.

By seven o’clock their hunger had become insupportable. They pulled in to park at Nepenthe, a local landmark. The building, made of redwood shingles, loomed up from the lot in the moonlight, and the lines of windows surrounding the top-level restaurant glowed with tiny Christmas lights.

Armano took two steps at a time up from the parking lot, eager to procure a table at the restaurant or, failing that, perhaps a spot at the café below, while Paul toured quickly through the parking lot, which extended onto two levels.

Not too many cars were parked there now, although Paul imagined that earlier plenty of armchair adventurers had been leaping from their sheepskin seat covers toward the upstairs deck with its
welcoming margaritas. The lower lot remained almost empty. He was ready to make the hike back up to the building when instinct suggested he go just a little farther up the road.

There, in an alcove of bushes just beyond the lot, a red Ferrari sat, empty.

He thumbed his nose, smiling. He approached and found it locked.