Trust Me (21 page)

CHAPTER 47

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They drove in silence, down the Coast Highway to the tunnel, east on the Interstate 10 to Centinela.
Jeff watched as headlights approached and passed, the dreary LA landscape always the same, the warm air from the heater lulling him into a comfortable stupor. He felt sore and battered; his back, he had discovered, was bleeding where it had been scraped by the rocks.

They were on Olympic Boulevard now, past Century City, when Holly said, “This is it, turn right.” Half a block later she said, “That’s where I live,” and Ron pulled into a driveway that led to the back of the building. He stopped where the driveway met a path to the front entrance.

Opening the door for Holly, Ron asked, “How are you going to get in?”

“I have a key hidden outside,” Holly told him. She stepped out of the Land Rover. Jeff got out, too, and the three of them stood awkwardly by the car.

Holly said, “Thank you for your help,” and put out her hand. It was slender and cold to his touch, the fingers stiff and unyielding. When she turned and extended her hand to Ron, he said, “We should probably come in with you. It might not be a good time to be alone.”

She withdrew her hand and said, “I’d rather be by myself right now. We can get together tomorrow or something, okay?” She gave her phone number, which Ron wrote on a pad he kept on his dashboard.

“We’ll stay here for a few minutes. In case you can’t get in, or you change your mind.” He gave her a business card. Jeff watched as she walked to the apartment entrance, wondering if he would ever see her again. How could you go through what they had just experienced and then never have contact? He wanted to say something, but nothing came to mind.

They stood in silence for a moment. He pictured Holly walking down a hallway, her hair plastered flat against her head, clothes still damp and sticking to her body. His own jeans and shirt were stiff with salt now and he noticed a briny odor in the still air.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that she’s not reacting to what just happened?” He had been wondering about this ever since they left Malibu.

“Very strange,” Ron said. “Shock could explain it. In which case, it’s totally irresponsible of us to let her go home alone. Not to mention the fact that we just broke several laws.”

“What do you mean?”

“Failure to report a felony assault. You witnessed an attempted murder—we should have taken this directly to the police.” Ron remained standing by the car door, as if anticipating Holly’s return.

“So she didn’t want to do that. What’s wrong with that?” He could just see it: sitting in the goddamned Malibu Sheriff’s station, filling out forms and answering the same questions over and over. Forget about it. “Anyway, why didn’t you force the issue? You usually play it by the book, don’t you?”

“Well,” Ron said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe it fits my purpose to take this to Joe Greiner and let him run with it.”

“What is your purpose?”

“To solve this thing and put an end to it.”

The door at the apartment entrance opened and Holly stepped back out onto the path, still in her wet clothes, carrying an overnight bag with her right hand. In her left hand she held a Barbie doll with a nail pinning a square of paper to its forehead. Her lips were compressed to a thin line, her face white as she said, “I can’t stay here.”

CHAPTER 48

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On Sunday morning, Ron woke up earlier than usual.
The sky was deep blue with a rose tint to the east. A breeze flowed through the canyon, and an owl that lived under a neighbor’s eaves called out into the silence.

It was a fine time to go for a run, but he decided to stay at home until the others woke up. Holly was asleep on the sofa in the living room, so he took care to move silently. In the kitchen, he sat down at the table with a glass of orange juice and considered the evening before, the day ahead.

They had offered to go back up to her apartment with her, give her time to shower and gather some things, but she had said, “Forget it. I’ve got what I need.” She made a feeble pitch for him to drive her to a hotel, but put up no resistance when he offered his place for the evening.

In the car, Jeff had asked Holly how she knew that Art had been to her place. She had read from the note that had been nailed to the doll. “‘Surf’s up,’ it says, and there’s a little smiley face.”

Now it was eight o’clock the following morning and Ron was reading the Sunday paper when he heard the sound of tires crunching gravel in his driveway. Since his guests were still sleeping, he went through the garage and stepped out onto the gravel.

“Good morning.” He walked up to where Joe Greiner sat in his beat-up Taurus.

“What’s good about it?” Joe seemed especially surly and made no move to get out of the car. “I got to pick up Robbie in fuckin’ Simi Valley in two hours . . .”

“Why Simi Valley?” He was puzzled. Joe loved being with his boy.

“Because Janie just moved out there to live with Dan the fuckin’ man, that’s why.”

“Who’s that?”

“Dan Glodin. Get this, he’s a fuckin’ Chippie.” Joe shook his head and opened the door of the station wagon. He was clean-shaven, dressed in khaki pants and a madras shirt, but had a weary, haunted look that Ron remembered from his own image in the mirror years before.

“So this better be good. What have you got?” Joe was squinting even though the sun was behind him.

“What I told you. Remember the profile on the girls in the files?”

“Yeah, mid twenties, they all looked good. What else?”

“And I traced at least three of them to that SOL group.”

Joe lit a cigarette. “Did you tell me that?”

Ron watched Joe’s hands as he lit the cigarette. No telltale tremor, just a nervous, burnt-out intensity. “You weren’t very impressed.”

“So why am I here?”

Ron told him about the events of the previous evening, about how Jeff had witnessed the act. About running into Art Bradley on the pier, and how Jeff had identified Art Bradley as a shrink from the Bay Area with an entirely different name.

“And you say that the Sheriff’s office wasn’t informed?” Joe dropped the butt of the cigarette and ground it into the gravel.

“The girl didn’t want to talk to them. I thought it over and decided to bring it to you. This is our guy; there’s no doubt in my mind about it.” He turned to go back into the house.

When they got to the kitchen, Holly was making coffee. She wore sandals and green shorts with a brown tank top. From the other room Jeff shouted, “Black, with one of those yellow packets.”

At the kitchen table, over coffee, Joe questioned Jeff and Holly as Ron listened and occasionally added to the story. Holly was angry when she found out that Joe was a cop, but backed off when Ron qualified him as a friend.

Joe asked her, “Why didn’t you want the police involved? Don’t you want to see this man put away?”

Holly gazed at him for a moment, as if gauging his intelligence, or at least his receptivity to new ideas, and then said, “Do you really think I want to be a witness against my therapist? The same man who knows that I’ve attempted suicide in the past? That I’ve been treated for seizures and depression? That I’ve been visiting shrinks since I was fifteen?” She picked up her cup and drank from it. “I can see it now. ‘She was distraught. Suicidal. I didn’t see it coming, but I tried to stop her when she jumped.’”

“But I saw the whole thing. He can’t do that,” Jeff protested.

“It was dark. There was a fog that night. You were far away.” Ron had been tossing this around in his mind earlier in the morning, trying to come to terms with his failure to take the matter to the Malibu Sheriff.

“Okay, I hear you,” Joe said. “But what do you want to do, pretend it never happened?”

“I haven’t thought it through yet.” Holly shrugged her shoulders. “But I’m not going to let him change my whole life.”

“I think we can put him together with the other girls that died,” Ron said.

“I don’t know how,” Joe said. “Without Holly, we don’t even have a case open to bring him in for questioning.” He pulled a pad out of his back pocket and turned to Jeff. “What did you say his name used to be?”

CHAPTER 49

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On Monday morning, Jeff raced down the canyon, hopped Sunset Boulevard over to Crescent Heights, and continued speeding after he turned west on Olympic.
At 8:40, he couldn’t risk the downtown freeway traffic. If he didn’t jam, he’d be late. If he got pulled over, same deal.
That’s just the way it goes
, he thought, sweating now as the traffic backed up at Beverly Drive.

His court appearance was scheduled at 9:00, but Herman Katz, his attorney, told him to be there early. He said there were some things they had to discuss.

Worse, Ron had taken part of his workday off in order to support him in court, and was probably there waiting for him.

When he finally pulled into the West LA Court parking lot, it was 9:05. A clerk directed him to a hearing room on the second floor. The hallway was empty, but Room 206 was nearly full. He saw Ron in the second row with a seat next to him. When Jeff sat down, Ron looked at him and gave a thumbs-up sign, whispering, “Way to go.” Jeff shrugged and looked around. Herman Katz was leaning back in his chair, making notes on a yellow pad, seated at one of two tables in front of the judge’s bench, while he watched a man at the other table stand and pick up a shotgun with a red tag hanging from it.

There was a noticeable tension in the courtroom.

The man with the shotgun—the same prosecutor who had argued for high bail on Jeff the week before—held the weapon up and directed his attention toward a woman seated at the witness stand to the judge’s left.

“Mrs. DeTemple, have you ever seen this gun before?”

The woman stared at the gun without blinking, then shifted her gaze to the prosecutor and said, “Yes.”

“Who was in possession of the weapon at that time?”

“He was.” She pointed to a heavyset, crew-cut man in his mid forties who was seated next to Herman Katz.

“And what was your husband doing with the weapon at that time?” The prosecutor put the gun down.

The woman sat rigid. Jeff could see her head was shaking in a barely controlled tremor. She said, “He was pointing it at me.”

In the next hour, he listened as the story unfolded. The husband had been molesting his older daughter for the past three years, since the girl was ten, and the mother had remained silent. But when the younger daughter turned ten and the father began with her, the woman had threatened to go to the police. That’s when he put the shotgun in her face.

By the time the older daughter finished her testimony—at the prosecutor’s direction, it was brutally explicit—there was a palpable hostility in the room. Jeff watched in a daze as Herman Katz asked a few perfunctory questions without even standing up.

“How can you defend a guy like that?” he whispered to Ron. The judge looked up sharply and scowled.

When the court broke for recess, he went out to the hallway with Ron. Other people filtered out, subdued, some speaking in low voices. Finally, Katz emerged.

“We’re going to ask for a continuance,” he said, not even bothering to offer his hand. “That judge wants to put someone away, and he won’t get a shot at that sick son of a bitch today.”

“Are you sure he’ll give me one?” He felt panic, as though the whole process were disintegrating right in front of him, sabotaged by the act of a random pervert.

“Can’t be sure of anything,” Katz said. “Anyway, you were late this morning. Don’t do that again. Now, what have you got for me?”

Jeff reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “This is all I’ve got right now.” He handed Katz four hundreds.

“That’s not enough. Your dad gave me three thousand to get started—I need sixteen hundred more from you.” Katz, who couldn’t have been more than five foot six, peered up through his rimless round glasses at him with a look of contempt.

“I just started a job,” Jeff said. “I get paid on Friday, and I’ve got a check coming for a photo I took.” Ron had taken his shots of the bust in Stone Canyon to the paper and one of them had been printed in the Metro section. It felt good, doing something like that.

Katz turned to Ron. “Have you got what we talked about?”

“Yes, three copies.” Ron reached in his coat pocket and pulled out three envelopes.

“Don’t worry about it,” Katz said to Jeff. “Just remember when you’re in the court room to keep your mouth shut.”

When he was called to appear, Jeff stood and walked through the low swinging gate to stand before Judge Metcalf. Katz cleared his throat and said, “Your Honor, we request a continuance.”

“On what basis?” The judge looked down at them in annoyance, as though they had just performed a gross breach of protocol.

“On the basis that I have not had time to review the facts of this case and prepare an adequate defense, Your Honor.” Katz looked up, adjusted his glasses, and then made a small, helpless gesture with his hands.

“Motion denied.” Then, nodding to the prosecutor, Judge Metcalf said, “Mr. Deemer, get on with your case.”

Jeff noticed a shallow cardboard box with his gun in a plastic bag on the prosecution table. Mr. Deemer got up, read the charges, and then said, “The officers are available to testify, sir.”

Katz bent to his briefcase and picked up two of the envelopes Ron had given him. “May I make a submission for the record, sir?”

The judge said, “What have you got?” and leaned forward to accept an envelope. Deemer took the other one. Jeff wondered what was going on as the two men opened the envelopes and read the single sheet each extracted.

When the judge finished, he put the letter down. “Well, Mr. Deemer?”

Deemer studied his copy for an extra moment and then looked up. “We’ll accept a year probation and time served for a change of plea.”

“Is that acceptable to your client, Mr. Katz?” The Honorable Timothy Metcalf, his bald, dark head shiny above his black robe, had changed his demeanor; he looked weary now, unable to sustain the crisp, hang-em-high attitude he had carried this far.

“Say yes,” Katz hissed.

“Yes. Yes, sir,” he stammered.

The judge read a minute’s worth of legal gibberish, then peered down at him and said, “Do you understand?” To which he said, “Yes, sir,” again, and the judge said, “Good,” and slammed his hammer down. “Case closed.”

“Jesus,” Jeff said as he walked down the hall with Ron. “What just happened?”

“How about grace?” Ron said.

“I don’t know what that means.”

When they got to the elevator, Ron pushed the button and then turned to face him. “An unearned gift.”

Leaving the elevator, he asked, “But what was in that letter?”

“I told the judge and the prosecutor that we were a pair of drunks.”

“What?”

“I said I used to be an idiot when I drank, but since I stopped fourteen years ago I haven’t wound up in jail once.”

“What’s that got to do with my case?”

“I said that I‘ve seen the same thing happen for a lot of other people, and that you had a good chance at being one of them.”

“Is that all?” Jeff was astonished.

“Pretty much.”

“Amazing!”

“Yeah . . . and the jails are overcrowded.”