Body Copy (4 page)

Concentrate, Tremaine. You never know with people.

He kept moving, walked right by the house, then past one more house, which was on the corner. He went right, around the corner, onto a perpendicular street. He stopped amid the shadows of a bush hanging over the high fence of Nina’s next-door neighbor. He stood, still, looked around.

No one.

He walked in the same direction he’d been going. Halfway down the block he went right, into the alley behind the block of houses on Rialto. He passed her neighbor’s, then was directly behind Nina’s house. There was a high, 27

Michael Craven

sturdy-looking gray wooden fence. He looked around.

Clear. He slowly pulled his head up over Nina’s fence and looked into her small backyard. There was a deck and a sliding glass door off the deck.

In one move he pulled himself over the fence and into her backyard. Then, quickly, he darted into the small side-alley formed by the edge of her house and the chain-link, waist-high fence that ran between her house and her neighbor’s.

He looked, carefully, into every window on the side of Nina’s house. Some lights on, but no activity. No Nina.

He looked through a window that allowed him to see the inside of the front door. No alarm. Chalk one up to luck.

He stood still for fifteen minutes, then looked in every window again. Unless she was lounging in the tub, she wasn’t home.

Lounging in the tub. He thought about that for a minute longer.

He walked over to a small door that led out to the little side-area where he stood. He looked under the mat for a key. Nothing. He tried to reach the inside doorknob through a little cat door, but couldn’t. Too tight. He ran his hand along the wooden ledge at the top of the door, nothing. Would he have to pick it? It’d been a while, but he could swing it. Then he looked up into the shadows of the little aluminum awning above the door. It was painted blue, just like the shutters, as was the wood that supported it. There was a little light from the inside the house, but it took a second for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he spied a little nail sticking out of a piece of the blue wood.

The nail was painted blue. And on that little blue nail was a little blue key. He grabbed it, unlocked the door, replaced 28

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the key, went in, shut the door, locked the door. It always amazed him how easy it was.

Inside. Unpretentious yet sophisticated. Lined with books and rugs and artwork and a redone kitchen with lots of copper and cooking supplies. Wine, cookbooks, garlic cloves.

He looked around. One big room in the front. Then a sort of side room with a big dining room table on one side and a bookshelf built into the wall on the other. This side-room led to the kitchen, which then led one way back to an office and the other way to a little hallway that went to the bedroom and the door he just came through.

He walked back to the office and opened the sliding glass door that led out to the back deck a foot and a half.

Then he walked back up to the main room in front and stood there not knowing exactly what he was looking for.

He felt something rub his leg and he jerked his foot up. His heart was in his throat. He looked down at a red-orange cat looking right at him with big, mesmerizing, green cat-eyes. He knelt and scratched the cat’s head and looked at the cat’s name tag. It said darryl.

He moved on. He looked in a couple drawers in the front room. Nothing interesting. Some cards, some pictures, some change.

He looked through the dining room, then went in the bedroom. He looked in the drawers, the closets, under the bed, then the drawers again. And here’s what he found: stuff that’s usually in drawers and closets and under beds.

He walked back into the office.

There was another bookshelf full of books. Some writers he really liked. A real mix. Mark Twain. Joyce Carol 29

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Oates. Elmore Leonard. Is that
La Brava
? Great book. But he didn’t have time to look at them; he had to keep moving.

He looked through her desk drawers, carefully. There were bills, papers, notes, old notebooks. But nothing to do with Roger Gale except some photocopies of a few different obituaries.

Then he saw some kind of manuscript, a big stack of typed pages. Was she writing a book? Only some of the manuscript was there. The top of the page that was face-up said 213. Tremaine picked it up, started reading. This is what it said:

And you can’t quite describe the feeling because there are so many feelings. They come in waves. Sometimes it’s simply that you can’t believe your marriage broke up. You can’t believe you are one of the failures. But that’s not so much a feeling as it is a thought-through realization. The feelings are more erratic. Sometimes you’re happy—happy it’s over, happy you’re out of a difficult situation. Sometimes you’re introspec-tive, analyzing the divorce from an almost clinical, outsider’s perspective. Sometimes you’re nostalgic; a random memory can hit you from nowhere at any time. But the hardest one, the one I don’t even like to acknowledge, even when it’s just me and the feeling, is the feeling of being lost. Not just lonely. Lost. Lost at sea, with no connections back to the mainland that is your life.

Nina had gone through a divorce and was writing a book about it. Tremaine felt the blood move in his body.

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He knew what she was writing about. He’d been married.

And divorced. He liked that she was putting into words a feeling he had had. He looked back down at the page.

You are locked in to another person, to a life together, and suddenly it’s gone. And you don’t know what to do with yourself. You don’t know who you are or who you’re still connected to. With me, I had pulled away from my family. My husband was my family. I actually felt strange in my new single role talking to my own parents. Everything in my life seemed strange, seemed wrong. I desperately needed to reconnect—with my family, with my life. I needed something good.

Tremaine heard the front door opening.

In one move, he put the manuscript back on the desk and went sideways out the open sliding glass door. He ran toward the fence, jumped, put one foot in the middle of the fence, his hands on top of it, pulled himself over, landed quietly on the pavement in the alley.

And he ran.

Not toward the street but deeper into the alley behind the row of houses. He reached the street on the other end of the block, went right onto the sidewalk, and walked, back in the shadows again, to his car.

Driving home, windows down, cool beach air in his face, he thought about Nina. That’s what she left out at the trailer.

That’s what the pause was about, the look in her eye. This 31

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was the other reason she was looking into Roger Gale’s murder. She needs to do something good. She needs some answers that make sense. She needs to reconnect with her family in some way.

She needs to reconnect with her life.

Tremaine thinking, and I suspected her of something less real, something less innocent. I suspected her of maybe having some impure reason to look into this killing.

Then he thought, remember Jeff Creswell. I’m a P.I., for fuck’s sake, and that’s what I do. I suspect people of stuff that’s less innocent.

Now back on the PCH, heading north to Malibu, Tremaine thought about what Nina was doing right now. He knew what she was doing right now. She was looking at the sliding glass door, thinking, I can’t believe I left that open; anybody could have just waltzed in here. He would never hear about it, he knew that too. She’d never know he’d been there. But the most important thing that Tremaine knew was that he didn’t feel Nina was hiding something, and he was looking forward to helping her out.

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C H A P T E R 6

The next day, a big packet arrived via messenger from the LAPD, from Lopez. Tremaine emptied the contents onto his desk, leafed through them, and took out the specific things he wanted to look at. Then he went up on the roof.

Sunny and nice again. Shocker. Southern California could be like
Groundhog Day
. Tremaine knew he shouldn’t complain, but every now and then a little rain or something would be nice. A drop or two. Jesus, Marvin could come over and spray him with a hose and it would be a nice change.

Tremaine took off his shirt and lit up a smoke and suddenly he was glad again that it was warm and lovely. Tremaine didn’t smoke a lot, but when he was just starting to Michael Craven

think about a case, a smoke was nice. And when he was driving, a smoke was nice then, too. And after surfing, they weren’t bad either . . .

Tremaine looked at the police reports he’d brought to the roof. They included everything from autopsy information to statements from people interviewed about the murder to crime scene information to notes from police detectives. John Lopez, good man.

Tremaine began by reading the specifics of the murder.

Just over a year ago, Roger Gale was found dead at approximately 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning; however, the time of death was estimated at approximately 12:30 a.m., much earlier that morning. Gale was found by an employee of Gale/Parker named Mary O’Shaughnessy, who had come in to work that morning. A go-getter, Tremaine thought—

6:30 on a Saturday. According to Mary, Roger Gale was sitting upright at his desk with his eyes open, then, out of nowhere, he slammed down onto his glass desk. She wit-nessed this fall.

She’s quoted in the report as saying, “I was looking in his office at him, wondering if he was in some sort of creative trance. Then, he just slammed down onto his desk.”

This fall cut his head and certainly added drama to the situation, but it had nothing to do with why he died. No, when he was killed some six hours prior to his being discovered, he’d suffered another blow to the head. But the thing that killed him? Asphyxiation. The conjecture in the report was that the blow to the head knocked him out, then the murderer calmly and easily plugged up the old air holes.

Roger Gale, Tremaine read in numerous statements, 34

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had definitely left the office the Friday night before he was found. So he had either returned and been killed in the office, or he had been killed elsewhere and deposited at the office.

No one saw him return. But, as Tremaine learned poring over the statements, Friday night was the one night people didn’t work till the wee hours. It was the one night the employees got out of there, were encouraged to get out of there. Many of them came in on weekends, as Mary O’Shaughnessy had, but Friday night the place was relatively empty. So, if he’d come back late that Friday night, he could have gone unseen. It wouldn’t have been unusual.

Tremaine wondered, did the person who killed him know Friday nights were slow, or did they just get lucky?

The agency did employ a twenty-four-hour security service, but the two guards who worked the night shift weren’t there to determine who could and who could not enter the agency. They were just there to make a statement.

Officially, the agency’s doors locked at midnight, but everyone who needed a key had one and knew the alarm code.

Roger Gale wanted the agency to be accessible anytime anyone might have a creative surge. Gale himself came and went at all hours—always had. The security guards really just stood around outside, ostensibly guarding but rarely questioning, rarely even noticing, the people who came and went.

The guards on duty the night in question claimed not to have seen anything. Claimed that they never saw anyone, Roger Gale or otherwise, come in that Friday night after the last person left around nine. A note in the report indicated that both the security guards were fired shortly 35

Michael Craven

after the murder. They’d become friends while working together and had been caught leaving their posts to get alcohol. So, Tremaine thought, the night of the murder, they could have been three sheets to the wind. Probably were.

Tremaine continued to peruse the information and began to see why the police never got anywhere. There was essentially no evidence. Nothing at the scene, no unusual fingerprints, no indications of someone being in Roger Gale’s office who shouldn’t have been there. And Roger Gale’s past? Looked clean. No business deals gone bad, no affairs. Officers had asked many of the employees and his family members about Gale’s irregular hours, but everyone just said Roger Gale worked hard. No one had any reason to believe he was involved with anyone other than his wife.

There was never an official suspect named.

There was, however, a person of interest listed: a man who held the position of Creative Director at a rival Los Angeles ad agency, a man named Tyler Wilkes. He had been questioned extensively and was, according to many Gale/Parker employees, jealous of Roger Gale—really jealous. Tyler Wilkes had built his agency in El Segundo, a neighborhood close to Playa del Rey, home of Gale/Parker.

He’d also built it to physically resemble Gale/Parker. And, according to the report, he was “constantly” compar-ing the two shops, constantly trying to compete with the legend of the ad man down the road. “Obsessed” was the term one cop used. But the police could never get anything on Wilkes. It was simply their only lead.

Tremaine wondered, do people in the advertising business kill each other? You got that in certain worlds—drugs, politics, possibly. But advertising? Tremaine had always 36

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considered advertising to be something of a prestigious field. Martini lunches, teams of people in black turtlenecks, location shoots. But murders?

You never know, Tremaine thought. He was always surprised at the reasons people found to kill each other.

Reasons that often seemed stupid, silly, insane, impossible.

Yes, shit between people, or in people’s heads, can escalate; it just can. And ad agencies have relationships with enormous companies. That means lots of money. And that’s what a tremendous number of murders are about: money.

So what makes advertising different? If an agency down the street is winning all the business, getting all the respect, wouldn’t it be nice to have the creative force behind that agency gone forever?