A Family Business (20 page)

Diaz glanced at his watch. By then the interview was almost one and a half hours old, and they still had not done more than skirt around the most important issue: the death of Tim Waters. Let’s get to it, Diaz thought impatiently, let’s cut to the real reason we’re here.

But, as Diaz had figured, it was going to have to progress at David’s pace, not his. Before David would get to. Tim Waters, there was one other person that he wanted to discuss: Dan Galambos. David could not find enough bad things to say about his former friend.

19

To begin with, David confided, Galambos was a
very
violent person. “Let me tell you what he did one night at a Kings game,” he said, launching into a series of mind-numbing Danny Galambos stories.

According to him, the Kings were playing the Buffalo Sabres when Galambos became so enraged at one of the Sabres that he tried to climb onto the ice to attack him. He had to be restrained and dragged back into the stands. “That was the reason they installed Plexiglas behind the visitor’s bench. It was because of Danny Galambos.”

As a result of that incident, he added, Galambos was banned from the arena for the rest of the season.

It was, however, not his only violent outburst in the Forum. To listen to David, the arena was one of Galambos’s favorite places to exhibit his aggressive tendencies. He would hit people just because they told him to sit down, David said. “I mean, he’d walk up four or five rows and smack them.”

David also told about how Galambos went to the house of his then-current girlfriend to demand to know why she wanted to break up with him. Her father answered the door and told Galambos to go away, then he slammed the door in Galambos’s face. Galambos became so angry that he tried to punch the man through the glass doorfront, severely slashing his arm and wrist.

“I mean,” David said, “the history of Danny Galambos and violence is not new at all.”

In addition to being violent, David added, Galambos was personally offensive. “He invited himself to my river house one time, you know,” David said. “He stood on the bow of my boat in the middle of the lake and peed in front of all the girls. ‘Hey, girls, look at this,’ he said, and then he walked around naked in the early morning hours with all the people and their wives to see because he doesn’t care. I sent him home because he was so obnoxious.”

David paused to reflect; then, in marvelous understatement, he added: “The guy is absolutely not one of my close friends. He never has been.”

Diaz shrugged. He had no idea if there was any substance to these wild stories. He couldn’t care less.

By this time Diaz and Law were getting pretty tired of the string of anecdotes about Danny Galambos. Maybe David was, too, because he suddenly shifted from talking just about Galambos to how Galambos was connected to Tim Waters.

Diaz’s interest picked up. Although David danced all around the issue, never quite coming out and saying that Galambos may have killed Tim, he hinted at it very strongly.

Diaz could appreciate that. He realized that David had to be careful with what he said and how he said it. It was part of the game; like football, except the stakes were a lot higher. David wanted to tantalize the detectives with hints of secret knowledge, but he didn’t want to give away too much because Galambos was his main bargaining tool. Diaz, on the other hand, could not show too much interest because that might give David additional leverage in the negotiating he knew was going to come. He was well-aware of what David was doing; in fact, he had predicted it was the reason behind the request for the meeting. But he could not afford to plunge in too quickly. Let him get to it in his own way, he cautioned himself.

Power horse-trading was what it was. And David proved to be a shrewd dealer. He had set the scene well, feeding the investigators just enough details to make them curious, to hint that there was much more to the story than he had divulged so far, while simultaneously building up Galambos as a credible heavy. His next step was to cut himself loose, to disabuse Diaz of any belief the detective might have that he, David, could possibly have been involved with Tim Waters’s death.

“I never met Tim Waters,” David told Diaz and Law, sounding as sincere as a Jesuit. “I never spoke to Tim, Waters. I never saw Tim Waters until that photograph in court. Tim Waters was not an account of mine. I didn’t care one way or another about him. I didn’t make any money from him, you know. I never knew Tim Waters at all.”

With those tidbits firmly on the record, David leaned forward and lowered his voice.

“But I’ll tell you something,” he confided. “There’s an individual out there whose business was cut in half by Tim Waters. And this same individual had a real hard-on for Tim Waters and told me [about it]. There were other people who heard telephone conversations with this individual and Danny Galambos arranging [to pay] Tim Waters a visit.”

“You’re not speaking of Richard Gray, are you?” Diaz asked.

David mumbled ambiguously.

Shit, Diaz thought, I wish I could pin him down.

“Richard Gray was a friend of Tim’s,” the detective pointed out.

“Yeah,” David commented noncommittally. “Best of my understanding he was.”

At that point David must have figured it was time to back off a little, let the detectives chew on what he had said. He dropped the Galambos issue and instead went off on a tangent, talking about multiple cremations and the pilfering of dental gold.

Diaz gave him his head. He’ll come back to it, he told himself. And David did.

“You still don’t have the Waters thing together at all,” David said several minutes later. “You got the wrong guy in jail. I’ve got no motive. I didn’t know the man.”

If you didn’t have him assaulted and maybe murdered, why do others say you did? Diaz asked.

“I’ll tell you why,” David replied eagerly. “It’s because the other guy told them to tell [investigators] that I said it—the other guy that you still don’t have in proper custody that should be in jail.”

David said the “other guy,” who he still had not specifically named, went to Tim’s funeral to make sure he was dead, and then he came to him to tell him about it.

Again Diaz asked if he was talking about Gray, since Gray had testified at the hearing before Judge Mitchell that he had mentioned the attack on Tim to David and his father.

David smiled. “Dick Gray was talking a lot about Tim Waters back then,” he replied coyly, “and about how he was scared of him and he didn’t know what to do.”

“Right,” Diaz prompted neutrally.

“You know,” David said, his tone changing, moving into his salesman’s mode. “What should I do? I’m telling you there’s another guy who was there, right there with me, who heard all the same stuff and who had a hell of a motive and talked about a lot of things involving Tim Waters and wanted to do Tim Waters dirt, and then contacted Galambos about doing Tim Waters dirt.”

Did he provide Galambos’s name? Diaz asked, knowing what the answer would be.

Definitely, David replied. “He asked me about the big guy. He wanted to know who were those big guys at the hockey game who went and beat up Ron Hast. That’s how he found out about Galambos.”

There would never be any evidence to substantiate David’s hints that Galambos or Gray might have been involved in killing Waters.

Diaz studied David. “Did you ever have the habit of bragging?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” David chuckled, “I talk like an idiot.”

“Is it possible that you would have said the thing about Tim Waters just to say it?”

“No, no,” David said hurriedly. What happened, he explained, was this: He, Galambos, and Edwards were at a Kings game, and he mentioned that he had heard that Tim had died. David said Edwards expressed surprise. “He died?” he asked David. But before David could answer, Galambos screamed, “Hey, everybody, business must be slow; Dave’s out drumming up business on his own again.” The memory infuriated David. “The guy yells like this at the top of his lungs at the hockey game,” David told Diaz, either actually indignant or faking it very well. But before he could answer Galambos, he continued, Edwards jumped into the conversation.

David quoted him as saying, “Ah, you must have read that book I gave you, huh? You’re really getting into that stuff, aren’t you?”

To the detectives, David denied that he answered Edwards directly. But, he added, that was how the whole thing about him being tied to Tim Waters and to the controversial book,
The Poor Man’s James Bond
, got started.

He would have spoken up in court, David continued, but Diamond wouldn’t let him.

Why was that? Diaz asked.

“Because he doesn’t want me to give Randy [Welty] up?” he said. After a brief digression, David elaborated: “I’m sitting in jail with an attorney who won’t let me give up the guy who paid for all the tissue stuff and authorized it and instructed it to be done and shipped it and collected the money from it and set me up and everything. So I’m sitting here because he doesn’t want to get involved because he’s in the porno business.”

Again Diaz pondered what David had told him. Was David claiming, Diaz asked himself, that his lawyer, Roger Diamond, would not let him—David—testify because he might try to blame Randy Welty for any problems with the tissue bank? At the time the significance of what David was claiming was lost on the detective. However, it clicked weeks later when Diaz learned that Diamond had represented Welty in another case. What David had been saying was that, in his view, the reason Diamond advised David not to testify was a fear that his testimony might possibly damage another of Diamond’s clients. Because of this potential conflict of interest, Diamond was later not reappointed as David’s lawyer. But it was only temporary. He would be back, with David’s support, when it did not appear that anything David said would have an impact on Welty.

David paused for breath. Apparently deciding the timing was right, he got to the
real
reason he had asked for the interview with Diaz.

“I don’t have a whole lot to do but sit in jail and think about this,” he said, hoping to engender some sympathy for his cause. “Now, guys,” he added in a reasonable, buddy-buddy tone, “I want out of jail and I’ll give you who did Tim Waters.”

Diaz nodded. About damn time! he thought.

“So basically,” the detective said, “I guess maybe the bottom line is, if we would get you out, then obviously you would give up whoever the person is that actually hired Danny to kill Waters.”

“Yeah.” David nodded. “And I’ll prove it, and I’ll give you two witnesses besides that heard him arrange it on the telephone, and then I’ll sit there and I’ll cooperate with you.”

Diaz was considering how to respond when David asked him to turn off the tape recorder. Puzzled, he reached over and flipped the switch.

“Now let me ask you something,” David said conspiratorially. “Can you get me something to eat? I want a burger or something. The food in here is
so
bad.”

Diaz was not sure whether to laugh or cry. He flipped the recorder back on.

“Obviously I can’t make any promises,” he said slowly, definitely not referring to food. Any bargain would have to come from Lewis, the detective added.

“You know,” David said, speaking of Lewis, “I don’t think he likes me a bit.”

Diaz mumbled something about Lewis being under pressure because it was such a high-profile case, but David would not let it go; he wanted to go back to the issue of his possible release. He
knew
about Walt Lewis, he implied, meaning he thought Lewis was out to get him, and he thought he knew what he was going to do about him. But he wasn’t about to share that with two detectives.

“I think it would be winnable from both sides if I were out,” he said encouragingly. “You’d win a little, I’d win a little, and then what you want to accomplish would be accomplished because you’d get the right people, and I’d get what I want to accomplish because I’d get out.”

To hear it that way, it sounded very rational, which was exactly what David was hoping. Apparently he thought he had Diaz convinced, because his tone softened.

“You know,” he said congenially, referring to the illegal crematorium at Hesperia, “the only thing I feel guilty about is not telling the county of San Bernardino what I was doing up there.”

Having made a gesture toward friendship, he got back to business.

“Let’s speak honestly here,” he suggested briskly. “This is a very weak case, and I know it’s a weak case as far as actually pinning the blame on me for this tissue stuff.”

“It’s not as weak as you think,” Diaz pointed out, his dislike for David peeking through. “And I’m going to be a little up front with you too. It’s stronger on your mom and dad than you.”

David seemed surprised. “As far as the tissue?”

“I don’t want to talk about what it is that we have,” Diaz said, mentally kicking himself for maybe saying too much already, “but I have your dad and mom stronger [than you] on direct involvement with the illegal taking of tissue without consent.”

With that, they were off on another tangent, and it was several minutes before they got back to David’s offer.