Flipping Out (20 page)

'Yeah,'
Terry said. 'We were looking at Sorensen, and we only wish we could have—'

Tony
held up his good right hand. 'Stop. I've been blaming myself for Marisol's
death, and Ford has just spent the last half hour helping me understand that
she was a strong woman who made her own choices. What happened is not my fault,
and God knows, it's not yours.'

'Gentlemen,'
Jameson said, 'survivor's guilt is incredibly common in situations like this.
If either or both of you would like to spend some time talking it through with
me, I'd be glad to help. There's never a charge for LAPD.'

'We
appreciate it,' I said.

'Thanks,'
Terry said. 'At those prices, I'd like to bring my sixteen-year-old daughter
and leave her with you till she's forty.'

Jameson
laughed again and handed each of us a business card. 'Anytime. I mean it.'

'Anytime
but now,' Tony said. 'We were in the middle of a therapy session. Can you guys
give us a half hour?'

'No
problem,' I said. 'We'll stop in and see Charlie.'

'He's
downstairs,' Tony said, sweeping his hand across his outrageously expensive
hospital suite, in the poor people's wing.'

That,
of course, got another laugh all around.

We
didn't know it at the time, but as it turned out, Charlie Knoll was not quite
as poor as we all thought.

Charlie
was in bed reading the
LA Times.

'There's
half a dozen different stories about us in the paper, and we're all over the
TV,' he said. 'How much of this shit is the truth?'

'Which
part don't you believe?' I said.

'All
of it. Last Sunday the five of us were on the boat drinking beer and playing
cards. A week later two of us are in the hospital, three wives and my
mother-in-law are dead, and a guy I knew and trusted turns out to be a maniac
serial killer. How did this all happen?'

'Charlie,
if you're looking for someone to blame, I'll own a lot of it,' Terry said.

'Thank
you, Detective Martyr, but I'm not looking to point the finger. I just can't
believe that bastard killed four women. It's surreal.'

'Still,
it was our job to catch him, and we didn't.'

'You
guys did what you could do,' Charlie said. 'And if you ask me, nobody
caught
him. Tony brought him down, but not through brilliant detective work. He just
showed up at the right place at the right time.'

'Almost
the right time,' Terry said. 'Five minutes earlier and Marisol would still be
alive.'

'Did
you visit him in his lah-dee-fucking-dah suite?'

'Yeah,
but we have to go back,' I said. 'He's with his shrink. Speaking of which,
how's your mental health?'

'Oh,
you know that five-stages-of-grief thing - denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance. I'm stuck at extremely pissed off.'

'Dr
Jameson treats cops for free,' Terry said.

'No
thanks. I'm allergic to shrinks,' Charlie said. 'They mess with your head. What
I really need is a doc who will release me from this place. They did an
echocardiogram, and they didn't like what they saw. So then they did a stress
test, and they gave me some shit about a problem with my left main coronary
artery. You know what the cardiologist calls the left main? The widowmaker. I
told him it's too late for me to die and leave a widow. He wants to do an
angiogram tomorrow. I told him he better keep me alive, because I've got
funerals to plan.'

'Did
you know that Martin Sorensen claimed to be the brains behind the
house-flipping concept?' I said.

'It's
true,' Charlie said. 'Julia told me a few years ago when the whole thing
started. But I never thought about it as a motive. I figured Nora was paying
him well.'

'He
told us he was planning to write a book about his relationship with Nora,'
Terry said.

'Good
for him,' Charlie said, not sounding particularly impressed. 'He'd make some
money on it, but it's a dead end, a one-book deal. No, I don't think writing a
tell-all book about Nora was the motive. Now that I have the benefit of
hindsight, I think I know what Martin was really planning.'

Terry
and I exchanged a look.

'Charlie,'
I said, 'there is a big blank section in the final report we're writing. If you
actually know what Martin was planning, that would go a long way to filling
that hole.'

'I'll
give it a try.'

'Go
ahead.'

'I
think Martin was planning to become Nora Bannister.'

'Meaning
what?' I said.

'I
told you - me and Martin, we'd sometimes go out for a couple of pops together.'

'Yeah.'

'Well,
one night, maybe a year ago, we're both at a bar, a little shit-faced, and
we're talking about plan B. Martin asks what am I gonna do when I retire from
the force. I have no idea. I mean, Reggie's gonna make fishing rods, or maybe
open a bait and tackle shop, and get as far away from LA as he can. Me, I
haven't even thought about it. So I ask Martin what's he gonna do. He says when
Nora is ready to pack it in, he could easily take over writing her books.'

'How?'

'It's
not that complicated,' Charlie said. 'There are plenty of writers whose estates
are still churning out books. Ian Fleming has been dead for about forty years,
but James Bond lives on with new stuff all the time.'

'And
Martin thought he could write Nora's books?'

'By
now, I could probably write them.' He laughed. 'Maybe not, but hell, a guy as
smart as Martin could crack the code.'

'But
even if Martin wrote them,' I said, 'wouldn't the money go to Nora's estate?'

'The
estate would get the bulk of the dough, but with Julia gone, the university
would be the executor. If you were them, who would you turn to for help in
managing all of Nora's intellectual property?'

'The
guy who worked with her for the past seven years,' I said.

'No
question. Martin could literally take over Nora's ideas, her books, her life.
He could make a ton of money for the university, plus he'd get paid as the
writer, which would be a hell of a lot more than he made as an assistant.'
Charlie smiled. 'Plus he'd be banging a lot younger broads.'

'It
makes sense,' Terry said. 'But...'

'But
what?'

'He
killed Nora so he could take over her books. He killed Julia so she wouldn't
stand in his way. But why did he bother to kill Jo and Marisol?'

'For
the same reason he would have killed your wife next,' Charlie said. 'Everybody
was cashing in on Martin's real estate idea but him. This was payback time.

Get
rid of all five partners, and he'd have the house- flipping business all to
himself.'

Terry
exhaled loudly. 'Whoa.'

'Not
pretty,' Charlie said, 'but what goes on inside the head of a mass murderer is
never pretty.'

'Charlie,
this has been a big help,' I said. 'Thanks.'

He
shrugged. 'It would have been a bigger help if I'd have figured this all out
after Jo Drabyak got killed. But I gotta tell you, Martin Sorensen wasn't even
on my radar. I really liked the guy.'

'How
much time are you going to take off before you come back to work?' I said. 'I
only took a few weeks when Joanie died. I probably should have taken more. I
was totally useless the first month or so.'

'Not
totally useless,' Terry said. 'But a lot more useless than usual.'

'Fellas,'
Charlie said, 'I'm not going back to work.'

'It's
too soon to make a decision like that,' I said. 'Take some time...'

'Mike,
I'm turning in my tin. So is Reggie. We talked about it.'

'What
are you gonna do?' Terry said.

'Fish.'

'You?'

'Not
off the Santa Monica pier, for Christ's sake. Reggie and I are going to sail
around the world.'

'In
a houseboat?'

'He's
going to upgrade to a sailboat. Reg has been planning for years to chase the
big ones down in Australia,

Japan,
the South Pacific. He was going to go with Jo once he got his twenty. But with
her dead, he's not waiting, and he's going with me.'

'You
and Reggie?' Terry said.

'You
think you and Mike are the only happy couple living together?' Charlie said. 'So,
yeah, me and Reggie. We're friends. We're both going through the same shit. I
wasn't sure at first, but I thought about it, and I decided that catching fish
can be a lot more fun than catching scumbags.'

'You
and Reggie are both gonna chuck your pensions?' I said.

'I
got a little money to keep me afloat for a while. And you know Reg. He's a
saver, and he's got that side business making fishing rods and selling them
online.'

'What
about that very understanding, very sympathetic, very compassionate friend you
were with the other night?' Terry said. 'You got a rod for her, or does she
stay behind?'

'Jesus,
Biggs, you never let anything go, do you?' Charlie said. 'That part of my life
is none of your goddam business.'

'I'm
sorry,' Terry said. 'I had to ask.'

Charlie
laughed. 'No you're not, and no you didn't. But if anybody would have the balls
to ask, it would be you.'

'When
are you and Reggie leaving?' I said.

'The
funerals are Thursday. It'll take a few days to process me out of the department.
Then I'll put the house on the market. Hopefully, we can leave by November and
spend Christmas on the Great Barrier Reef.' 'We'll miss you,' I said. 'Send us
a postcard.' 'Even better,' Terry said, 'send us a fish.'

We
still had time to kill before going back to see Tony, so we went downstairs to
the cafeteria. The place was basically deserted. I got a container of orange
juice and a bagel. Terry bought coffee. We sat as far away from the counter
people as possible.

'Charlie
and Reggie?' Terry said. 'Sailing around the world? Catching fish? You were a
little nuts when Joanie died, but these guys have taken it to a new level.'

'I
was braced for Joanie's death. For these guys it came out of the blue. I guess
they just really want to get away from it all.'

'Not
to sound like a detective, but since that's what they pay me for, I've got a
question. Don't you think it's sounds a little - I don't know - suspicious?'

'You
mean the fact that they're both leaving town?'

'Town?
Mike, they're leaving the fucking hemisphere. Does that set off any alarm bells
in your head?'

'Like
what?'

'I
don't want to pollute your mind with what I'm thinking about. Just free
associate and see where it takes you.'

I
gnawed on my bagel. 'Well, if Charlie and Reggie were a man and a woman, and
both their spouses were murdered, and suddenly they announced that they're
going to sail off into the sunset, I'd think they're having an affair and they
were involved in the murders. But they're two men.'

'And
two men can't have an affair? Catch a movie, Mike. They have gay cowboys now. I
hate to break it to you, but there are cops who like to ride bareback too. For
all we know, Charlie's compassionate, understanding friend could turn out to be
Reggie.'

'That's
brilliant,' I said. 'Why didn't I think of it? Two married men we've known for
years are suddenly struck gay. They don't know how to deal with it, so they
murder their wives, and go sailing off to Australia. You're grabbing at straws
- Charlie and Reggie are not gay.'

'Is
that your final answer?'

'Even
if they were,' I said, 'Charlie is sooooo not Reggie's type.'

We
both laughed hard enough to get the handful of people who were in the cafeteria
to look up.

'OK,
let's assume they're not gay,' Terry said. 'Look at the money angle. With all
this publicity, the price of the flip house is going sky-high, and they each
stand to inherit their wife's cut.'

'I
don't know how much money is involved, but it doesn't seem like enough to
murder your wife. How much would it take for you to kill Marilyn?'

'There
are days when I'd do it for twenty bucks and a six-pack of Heineken, but stop
giving me straight lines. What if it's the money, plus something else?'

'Something
else like what?'

'I
don't know. They each have a mistress...or...'

'Look,
Terry, I know what you're trying to do. Even if you can't figure out their
motive, this news about the two of them retiring in a hurry and moving to the
other side of the world makes it look like they were involved. But let's look
at the facts. We know they didn't kill Marisol. Martin did.'