Body Copy (15 page)

Nina said, “What I find amazing, about breakups, marriage . . . is that no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much you have to go through to get over it, you always, eventually, want to try again. That hope remains, even if it’s way deep down inside.”

Again, Tremaine didn’t respond. He just listened.

They walked a little more, their cars were out of sight now. Nice night, nice temperature, but probably time to head back.

Nina said, “I should probably go.”

“Yeah,” Tremaine said.

“I had a wonderful night. Thank you for dinner.”

“It was my pleasure.”

As they turned around, they faced each other. Nina looked like an image to Tremaine now, the moon making her glow, almost. A silhouette. Like a ghost on the beach.

A beautiful ghost on the beach. That hint of sadness in her eyes was there, but Tremaine thought he saw something else this time. Something else hopping around in there. But he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He knew what he wanted it to be, but he wasn’t quite sure what it actually was.

They got back to their cars and stood in front of them putting on their shoes and getting out their keys.

From the beach, from the side that they hadn’t walked down, they heard, “Yo.”

Nina and Tremaine turned around to see three men, looked to be in their mid-twenties, approaching. One 144

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Latino guy, two white guys. Gangbanger types. Tank tops, lots of tats, giant jeans. They were all sporting smug looks, and Tremaine could tell from their glassy eyes and the smell that they’d been drinking.

Tremaine said, “Can I help you gentlemen?”

The three guys laughed.

Then one of the white guys started to talk. It was the one who’d said “Yo.”

The guy said, “What the fuck you two doing up in this beach?”

This was a white guy trying to sound like a black guy.

Nina moved behind Tremaine when she heard the pro-fanity, the threatening language.

“We just came out here for a little walk,” Tremaine said.

He could feel some adrenaline beginning to pump through his veins.

“Yeah, it’s a nice-ass beach. But we ain’t here to talk about the beach. We here because we want your wallet and that bitch’s purse. So why don’t you just give it to us.”

The other two guys stood just behind the talkative one. These two looked at Tremaine and Nina and sported cocky, smug expressions.

“I’m afraid, gentlemen,” Tremaine said, “that that’s not going to happen.”

The white spokesman who talked like he was black looked down at the ground and laughed. A mocking, smart-ass laugh.

“Why don’t you quit calling us ‘gentlemen.’ That tone, I hear it, showing us disrespect.” Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a knife. Looked to Tremaine like a knife used in the armed forces. Pretty small blade, thin 145

Michael Craven

black handle, easy to conceal. And sharp. Then he picked his head up, looking at Tremaine now, and said, “And give me your fuckin’ wallet.”

He was holding the knife up, showing it off, tilting it to the side a bit. Posing.

Tremaine started walking toward him.

Nina said, “Donald.”

“You better back the fuck up, ’less you wanna get cut.”

Tremaine looked right at the guy and kept walking.

Steadily, a beeline. He was about two feet in front of the guy, when the guy pulled back the knife, in position to take a swipe at Tremaine. Tremaine, still moving forward, cocked back his fist and drove it in the guy’s nose.

A piercing crack, followed by gushing blood. As the guy raised both of his hands to hold his ruined nose, the knife fell out of his hand. It fell at the feet of the two other guys. Tremaine made no motion to pick it up or kick it away.

Instead, he said to the two guys, “You want it, pick it up. Go ahead.”

Neither one of them moved.

The white guy with the blood on his face removed his hands and looked at his two buddies. He said, “Let’s go get the boys and come back and kill this bitch.”

He turned to Tremaine, who could see the tears in his eyes, and said, “You dead. We’ll be back.”

Tremaine said, “No, you won’t. And you should know, the way you’re talking, you sound like an idiot.”

The guys turned around and strutted, quickly, into the blackness, down the beach where they’d come from. The knife shined and sparkled a bit, catching some of the moon-146

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light. It was right on the ground where the guy dropped it.

Tremaine picked it up, opened his car door, and threw it on the floorboard in front of the passenger-side seat.

He turned to Nina and said, “Sorry about that. This little stretch is usually very peaceful.”

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C H A P T E R 2 1

Wendy Leahy said, yeah, sure, I’ll talk to you, when Tremaine called her and asked if she had some time to talk about Roger Gale. She obviously didn’t know her affair had been kept out of the police report, that it was a secret to many. She was perfectly open about it, willing to discuss it. She said she didn’t have a ton of time, but that he could come by the gym and they could talk at her desk.

This woman, Wendy, acted very composed, not fazed at all about discussing the affair. Practice, maybe.

Tremaine arrived at L.A. Shape—that was the name of the gym, Peterson had gotten it wrong—at about noon. The place was packed. People running and lifting and sweating and grunting all over the place. Only in L.A., he thought.

Tuesday mid-morning and a full house. Where did all these B O D Y C O P Y

people work? In Los Angeles, the ebb and flow of people in public was just different. Most towns, Monday through Friday had a different feel from the weekend. Not really the case in L.A. You could go to the movies or to the mall or to wherever right smack dab in the middle of the workweek, in the middle of the day, and there would be people everywhere. And not just vagrants or octogenarians or teenag-ers ditching school. Twenty- and thirty-somethings who looked like they made money. What the hell did they all do? They couldn’t all be successful actors or writers or directors. There was a mystery Tremaine would never solve.

Tremaine went to the desk at the gym where everyone showed their identification. The desk that determined whether or not you could enter the hallowed grounds of L.A. Shape.

“May I help you?” the woman behind the desk chirped.

“I have an appointment with Wendy Leahy.”

“Do you know where her office is?”

“No.”

Somehow, the woman made the directions very compli-cated when, in reality, all she needed to say was, “Go down the hallway right over there behind the bench presses and look for her name on the door.”

Instead, she rambled, thinking out loud, verbalizing every way possible to get to Wendy’s office. In the end, using his best P.I. skills, Tremaine deciphered what she had said and began making his way though the gym.

He spotted the hallway the receptionist had referred to.

As he walked by one of the bench presses, he looked down at an enormous, red-faced man pushing up the bar, which was loaded with weights. There was another large man 149

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standing over him, spotting. The man lifting the weights was grunting and even spitting. Tremaine could see the veins in his head, filled with blood, looking ready to burst.

The spotter was talking to the lifter, saying, “Do it.

Come on. You’re a stud. Push it harder.”

The lifter let out an enormous grunt and managed to get the weight up and back on to the bar that supported it. He stood up off the bench and faced the spotter. They bumped chests and let out a simultaneous grunt.

Tremaine, passing the two on his way to the hallway, said, “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

He found Wendy’s door and knocked. From inside, he heard, “Come on in.”

Tremaine entered her office. She stood up to greet him.

“Hello, I’m Donald Tremaine.”

“Wendy Leahy.”

They both sat down.

“I was surprised when you called. I haven’t talked about Roger Gale in so long.”

“You didn’t sound surprised,” Tremaine said.

“Well, I was. I talk on the phone so much for work, I’m kind of on autopilot when I’m on the phone. That’s probably why I didn’t sound surprised. I probably sounded like I always sound.”

Tremaine nodded.

“Anyway, I’m happy to talk about it, to help or whatever.”

“Great. Thank you,” Tremaine said.

Tremaine studied Wendy. She was pretty but not sexy.

Just attractive, and put together well, and—the word kept coming into his head—friendly.

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Wendy said, “After you called, Bill Peterson called and told me you were coming. I told him you had already called. He said, that’s okay, he just wanted to tell me not to worry. You know, I hadn’t talked to Bill since he questioned me before. But he was nice then, and he was nice when he called. He said I could trust you and I should feel comfortable telling you everything I told him.”

“That was nice of Bill.”

“Yeah, he’s nice.”

Switching the subject, Tremaine said, “So, how’d you meet Roger Gale?”

Quickly, she said, “I met him here at the gym. At the time I was just managing this one. Now I manage four of them in L.A. But he came in for a membership and I gave him a tour and a spiel and all that stuff.”

Tremaine thought about how he’d phrase this next question. Yes, Wendy had agreed to talk specifically about her relationship with Roger Gale. But it was always tricky to ask about an affair because the question itself implied wrongdoing. You know, when did you start doing that horrible thing . . .

Wendy solved his problem for him, saying, “After Roger signed up, he left, then, about twenty minutes later, he came back in and asked me if I wanted to have dinner that night. I confess, I had looked at his finger during the tour.

No ring. It wasn’t until a little later that I found out he was married. Anyway, when he asked me out to dinner, I didn’t hesitate. He was older than most of the guys I usually go out with, but he was so smart and funny. That was obvious immediately.”

“How many times did you go out?”

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“Six. The sixth being the time he told me he had to call it off.”

“What would you two do?”

“Go to dinner, or bars, once, a movie.”

“And the intimate part?”

Tremaine had to ask, even if it was just to see whether or not she’d answer. Or how she’d answer.

She said, “We went to my place a couple times. It’s embarrassing, but it was so long ago. You know, I hadn’t talked to him in over a year when I read that he’d been killed.”

“So, basically, you had a very brief affair, which he called off.”

“Yes, and I was upset because I liked Roger. He was so smart, always telling me about all the campaigns he was working on. But, see, he told me he was married after our first date. So, from the very beginning, a part of me was reluctant. I didn’t want to be involved with a married man.

So, when he called if off, I was kind of relieved.”

“When Bill Peterson first questioned you about the case, were you scared?”

“Yes and no. Roger’s wife knew about the affair. That wasn’t a secret. But I got scared because I thought, what do they want with me? I haven’t talked to Roger in over a year. Then Bill Peterson came to me and he looked at my cell phone bills and home phone records and e-mails, and he talked to my boyfriend who lived with me, and he realized that I hadn’t seen Roger or even talked to him in ages.

And that was it. I will say this though, it was weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah, weird that I was being questioned about a murder. I mean, a
murder
.”

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“Is it weird now?”

“No, not really. I guess I’m more used to it. And I’m happy to help because I’m just as confused about it as the next person. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill Roger Gale.”

“Yeah, seems a lot of people feel that way.”

Tremaine looked at Wendy for a second, at her face, her expression. Nice, but a little blank. Then he stood up, which may have surprised Wendy. Like she might not have been expecting the questioning to end. “Thank you,” Tremaine said.

Wendy said, “You’re welcome.” Then she said, “Is that it?”

“Yeah,” Tremaine said. “That’s it.”

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Tremaine was driving along, thinking, thinking first about Wendy Leahy and now about how, just exactly how, he could screw with Tyler Wilkes’s head.

To his delight, Tremaine looked in his rearview, and a few cars back, there was his new buddy, the guy in the Crown Vic. The P.I. looking into the P.I.

Weird. The Crown Vic appearing just like that, just as he was thinking about it. Well, Tremaine thought, perfect time to get started on Plan Fuck-With-Tyler.

Tremaine put on the brakes, worked some automobile magic, and ended up right next to the Crown Vic at a stoplight.

He reached across the Cutlass’s seat and rolled down the passenger-side window. He then motioned to the guy B O D Y C O P Y

in the Crown Vic. The young guy with the dark hair and the bad skin, just as Marvin had described.

The guy looked surprised, did the “who-me” face, and powered down his window.

Tremaine said, “Hey, could I talk to you for a sec?”

The guy said, “What do you need, some directions?”

Tremaine thought, clever, playing dumb. And boy did Marvin describe him well.

“No, I don’t need directions. I want to talk to you. I want to ask you why you’re following me.”

This question stunned the young guy with the bad skin.

“What?” the guy said.

“You heard me.”

The light turned green, and the guy in the Crown Vic pulled away fast. Tremaine got behind him and followed him. The guy turned right into a neighborhood, a nice little section of Mar Vista. The guy was trying his best to lose Tremaine, breaking out his finest moves—last-minute turns, gunning it through red lights and stops signs—the classics.

This guy must have spent some serious time watching reruns of
T.J. Hooker
and
Matt Houston
.