Thinking all his problems were taken care of, his drug test squared away, Jerry the security guard put in his place, Carlos relaxed at home with the family, watching TV, when the door bell rang, his wife answered.
A short fat guy, who kept a note pad handy at all times and a big muscular man, who hardly ever smiled, stood on the front doorstep and the squat one spoke.
“Ah, is Detective Carlos here, please?”
“And you are?” The wife was suspicious.
“I’m Detective Patterson and this is Detective Noris and we’re from the Mt. View Police Department.”
Carlos came to the door. “May I see some identification?” He checked out their badges. “What do you want?” His wife was nervous.
Patterson, the squat cop in a suit said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”
Norris stared at the detective, like he could smash him in his fist, like a soda can.
“What’s this about?” Carlos asked.
“We’ll tell you down at the station.”
Big tall Norris was taking out the handcuffs.
Carlos saw the cuffs and said, “Is that necessary? Right here in front of my wife and kids?”
Patterson smiled and said, “Professional courtesy,” staying the hand that held the restraints. Norris kept his eyes on Carlos, until he loaded him on the back seat of the sedan.
At the Mt. View police station, Carlos saw Woodman waiting in the lobby, as he was being taken to the interview room.
“Do you know why we brought you in?” Patterson asked. Norris towered over the suspect, looking down on him from behind his back.
“You tell me.” Carlos seemed genuinely bewildered, also a little nervous.
They stared in silence at each other and Carlos made a gesture indicting it was their move.
Finally Patterson spoke, “Do you know a security guard named Jerry Quirk?”
“Oh, that guy! Is this… what this is about?” Carlos seemed completely and utterly astounded. “What is he saying about me? Let me tell you: this guy is obsessed with me. I can’t get rid of him. I mean, he bothers me at work, when I’m on a case… you know how it is. I mean, I met with him once out of respect for my brother, who was his friend in high school. I said I would do what I could to help him out. He wanted to join the force, but his constant nagging and his threats, if I didn’t help him out were out of line, so I cut off all communication with him. I want to have nothing to do with him. He’s delusional.”
“He says you gave him drugs.”
“That’s what I’m talking about: delusional.”
“He says you switched your urine sample at the lab for a clean specimen and that checks out. Your urine sample is at the lab and we even have a picture of you on camera.”
Carlos gave him a sharp look, like he knew that was a lie. They didn’t have a picture of him on camera, did they?
While Carlos was dealing with his problems, Lan and Stuart saw Elaine in her office and Lan told her they had some more information on the body that floated ashore in Half Moon Bay.
“Let’s hear it,” she said and listened attentively.
“Our second victim has been positively identified as Dorothy Wilson.”
“How were they able to ID her?”
“They went by her dental records. They found a dentist she went to here in Palo Alto.” Lan took a breath. “Anyway…”
“We checked her out,” Stuart interrupted, “single mother, living alone. She had two brothers, mother deceased, father in a retirement home.” A case like this she really took to heart. “Dorothy never held a job. She received money from a trust fund, money that was funneled into that fund from a nonprofit enterprise: Sandhill corporation.”
“What are we doing to find Nigel Mann? We need to talk with him yesterday. Maybe Nigel knew both girls; find out who Dorothy was seeing and speak with friends, relatives, everyone. I have a feeling this is going to turn out to be a jealous boyfriend.”
As they were leaving, Detective Moore was walking by her office, when Elaine called out to him, “George, a word please? Come in, have a seat.”
Wary, Moore had a seat facing her desk.
“I finished your report on your investigation into Cecil’s abduction and I have to say, I’m baffled: you completely left out the part where you tell us what lead you to Henderson’s office in San Carlos?”
Staring at her, he remained quiet.
“You mind explaining that?”
“Off the record? Just between you and me?” She nodded in consent. “I entered Weiss’s property by the rear gate and I overheard a phone conversation, from outside an office window.”
“So you broke the law?”
“That’s why it isn’t in the report.” Moore explained.
She was disappointed, “You entered Weiss’s property illegally. This case will never go to trial.”
“We’ll get some more evidence that we can use.” He said, trying to make things right.
Elaine looked at him like, no you won’t.
In the Mountain View Police Department, Carlos looked at the picture Detective Patterson showed him.
“The man in this picture was seen leaving the lab, where he was tampering with evidence.” Patterson said.
The man in the surveillance photo had his face turned away from the lens. Carlos threw the picture on the table. “That could be anyone,” he said.
“Same approximate height and build as you.”
“You and I both know that doesn’t mean shit. What else you got?”
“Jerry says you beat him very severely.” Patterson showed him more photos of cuts and bruises on Jerry’s body.
“Jerry can’t put that on me. He probably did that to himself, just to blame me. That’s how obsessed he is with me.”
“The extent of the injuries would seem to argue otherwise.”
“Unless you have anything else, I’d like to leave now.” Carlos demanded.
“Wait here.” The two detectives left Carlos alone in the room.
Detectives Lan and Stuart found Dorothy Wilson’s father in a nursing home on Bryant Street in Palo Alto. The place smelled like death and the old man in bed was barely cognizant; they had him zonked out on drugs. Lan found he was repeating himself and speaking extra loud.
“Your daughter sir, your daughter Dorothy, who were her friends, her… best friends?”
“She was a quiet girl, but always polite and well mannered.”
“Did you ever meet any of her friends?”
The old man turned suddenly and faced Lan, “You say she passed away?” He looked down, nodding in disbelief. Then he faced the detective inquisitively, “What did she die of?”
He already told the man lying in bed 3 times, when he repeated himself once again and asked, “Do you know if she had any friends?”
Suddenly, the old man remembered something, “There was this one girl…”
Dorothy’s best friend, Betsy, a thirty something year old woman, that Lan and Stuart spoke to, had a photo of Dorothy in her living room. “She was my maid of honor at my wedding.” She wept, “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
The detectives gave her a moment.
She dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
“I’m sorry I have to ask this ma’am, but was she seeing anyone?” Lan asked.
Stuart tried to make up for Lan’s insensitivity and said, “What my partner is trying to say… is anything you can think of to help us, anything at all…”
Betsy dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and Stuart patted her shoulder to comfort her.
The grieved friend nodded and said, “About ten years ago, Dorothy met this guy, ‘the perfect guy,’ she said, but… she couldn’t tell me anything more about him. Then she shut up about him altogether, wouldn’t talk about him at all, but I knew she was still seeing him and nine months later… she had a baby she had to put up for adoption. It nearly broke her heart. She was never the same after that.”
Now it was Woodman’s turn to face the detectives in the small room.
Patterson was doing the talking again, while his partner Norris, an intimidating presence for any man, even Woodman, who wasn’t buying it. He would take Norris on any day.
They got down to business and the PA detective’s reaction to the pictures of Jerry’s bodily injuries was blunt.
“This guy say I did that to him, he’s full of shit. I didn’t get anywhere near him and I can’t say why he’s saying this shit about me, but it ain’t true.”
The surveillance photo in the lab was his likeness, but not enough to be one hundred percent certain it was him.
“Funny, you didn’t mention it?” Patterson said.
Woodman was perplexed, “Mention what?”
“Well,” Patterson was puzzled, “your partner, Carlos said Jerry was obsessed with him. He never told you about that?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s right, Jerry had a real hard on for him.”
“Is that all? Is that all he said?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember Jerry leaving messages on your machine down at work and threatening to go to your boss?”
“Oh yeah, I remember now, that’s right.”
“What’s right?”
“What ever, whatever you say man.”
Woodman wasn’t saying anything and eventually Patterson had a bottom line: “Are you willing to take another drug test?”
The television was on in the Palo Alto detectives office, as the cops went about their business. The reporter, who was doing a story on the double homicide they were working. “Now the second victims’ body floated ashore, north of Half Moon Bay. Her head suffered extreme blunt force trauma and the police believe she was murdered in Nigel Mann’s house, and he is still at large.”
The story was big news, and the tips were pouring into the police department, keeping everyone pretty busy. Lan was talking with a witness, who said he saw Nigel Mann in San Jose, using a hundred dollar bill to buy a cup of coffee.
“Did he use the 7-11 often?”
“ ‘Every day,’ the clerk told Lan, ‘he goes in there and buys a cup of coffee with a hundred dollar bill.’ ”
Lan decided to check it out.
Carlos and Woodman were just coming into work, when Elaine asked to see them in her office. They spent a long night in the interrogation room and they looked tired.
“Shut the door.” She said from behind her desk and asked them to sit.
Elaine had an open report on her desk.
“Says here, you two failed your drug test.”
An expression of shock, like, what? Woodman turned to Carlos and he was thinking, wasn’t this supposed to be a clean sample from your son and Carlos was thinking, is my son taking drugs?
“Excuse me?” Carlos looked bewildered at Elaine.
“That’s right,” she responded forthrightly, “you both tested positive for THC-COOH, an ingredient in marijuana. You have anything to say for yourselves?”
Carlos opened his mouth to speak and turned to his partner for help, who sat up and blubbered for a moment, saying, “I I I know what you’re thinking and the truth is, we were at a party and I think someone was like smoking dope there or something.”
“Right.” Carlos said. “That’s it, really, I almost forgot… you know, we were just there to relax and have a good time. So we decided not to haul them in on drug charges.” He laughed nervously. “I mean, we were off duty.”
“Your metabolite levels were over 300. If you weren’t smoking it, someone was probably blowing it up your ass, like the smoke you’re blowing up my ass right now. All right, here’s the deal, you both are suspended without pay and I urge you to check into rehab. However, that’s up to you. Dismissed.”
That evening, Nigel Mann was playing poker with a couple of men dressed in black and his honored guest, Victor Weiss.
Nigel smiled and gladly threw down a pair of Aces. Weiss had an inside straight, taking the pile of money on the table.
“I’m a looser,” Nigel said despondently, then perked up, “but it’s your money.”
Weiss indicated with a nod for the others to leave the room, so he could be alone with Nigel, which they gladly did, because they didn’t want to hear this anyway. After a contemplative moment, the billionaire said, “You know Nigel, Mary didn’t belong to you. What you had together was a one night stand. That was all it was going to be. She was meant for someone else.”
He turned to Weiss, tears in his eyes, “Why did they… why did they kill her?”
“That’s not important now,” Weiss said. “What you have to think about is: your future.” He stroked Nigel’s hairline. “You know what they’ll do to you if they catch you, they’ll put you in jail. They already think you did it. Hell, you’re their primary suspect and once they get your fingerprints in the system, it’s all over for you.”
“I know I didn’t kill anybody,” Nigel said in trepidation.
“It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what the police think and they’re going to pin both murders on you, especially since no one is going to believe anyone else was involved, when all the evidence is pointing at you.”
“God knows, they’ll put me in jail and never let me out.”
“That’s right Nigel, that’s what they’ll do and it’s unfair. Life’s unfair…” Weiss reasoned, stomping on a cockroach with his foot.
The next morning, Lan was asleep behind the wheel of his parked car, in front of the 7-11 in San Jose, when Nigel came in to buy a cup of coffee and leave. Five minutes later, the detective was buying a cup of coffee for himself, and the clerk said, “Nigel was just here, you know?”. Lan ran after him and saw him on 11th Street, and followed him to his ground floor apartment. What he failed to notice was two men dressed in black, leave out the back way a half hour later.
Copyright 2016 William Leslie
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