Yesterday's Echo (20 page)

“You obviously talked to the police, so you already know why I was there.” I sopped up some syrup with the last bite of pancake on my fork. “However, I do have a message from a friend of Melody's that could be helpful to her.”

“What might that be?” Buckley sat back in his stool and crossed his arms across his chest.

“I'm just the messenger, so don't take this personally. But a guy named Peter Stone has offered to bankroll Melody's defense if she hires Alan Fineman.”

Buckley inventoried my face with sad eyes. “How well do you know Mr. Stone?”

“I wish I'd never met him.”

Buckley slowly nodded his head. Time had worn down his face and I guessed that it had gotten help from alcohol. His brown eyes were pink and watery around the rims and a purple spiderweb ran down his nose.

“I reckon you're not the first person to feel that way.” He put an elbow on the counter and rested his chin in his hand. “You think Stone's the kind of man to help someone out of the goodness of his heart?”

“I'm not sure he has a heart, but that's beside the point.” This time I studied him. “I know you want what's best for Melody and Fineman is her best chance to get off. Besides, sitting second chair to Fineman would be a great opportunity.”

“Son, I'm way past opportunities.” His voice remained Texas iced tea smooth, but his eyes caught an edge. “But, you can tell your boss that I'll deliver his message to Melody.”

“I don't have a boss, Buckley.” Not as of a half hour ago. “I'd never heard of Peter Stone until a week ago, and I'd do anything to get that week back. But I can't.”

Buckley pulled a toothpick out of his shirt pocket, nibbled on it, and then pointed at me.

“What happened to your wrist?”

I looked down at the bandages I'd put on my wrist to cover the slices I'd made trying to cut the flex-cuffs off last night. “I cut myself shaving.”

“It seems you've had a run of bad luck lately.” Buckley pinched his eyes down on me again. “You file a report with the police that you were assaulted, are interrogated by detectives for murder, get caught on video roughing up some citizen, and now this shaving accident. A lot of coincidences, eh, Mr. Cahill?”

Buckley was much better than he looked. Maybe Melody didn't need Fineman. Maybe I did.

“You trying to impress me with your homework, Buckley?” I
tried to swallow down the anger boiling up from the whole day. “Melody involved herself with some bad people and then brought them down on me. Maybe she didn't mean to, but they're still poking around in my life. Just like you are. I don't think she killed her ex-husband. But I'm not convinced enough to believe that you won't twist things around to try and make me trade places with her.”

“So you're innocent. You got nothing to hide. Tell me what you know so we can both help Melody.”

“I've been innocent before, Buckley. And that didn't seem to matter.”

I stood up, pulled a ten dollar bill from my wallet, dropped it on the counter, and left. Outside, the sun had sliced through the marine layer and painted the day in light and shadow.

The feeling of being watched followed me all the way home. I checked the rearview mirror a few times, but never spotted a tail. Back in Santa Barbara, I'd developed a sixth sense working the graveyard shift. Sometimes I felt something bad was about to go down before it happened. It was in the air. A tingle, an itch, a silence. Now I couldn't trust that extra sense. The last week had so frayed my nerve endings that a light breeze sent an alert up my spine.

When I got home, I grabbed a beer from the fridge and settled into the recliner. I had plenty of time to do nothing but think, no matter how hard I tried not to. Hopefully, I'd get drunk enough to slow my mind. I couldn't get away from the morning and the nagging feeling that Turk was right. Maybe I had been hiding from life in the fantasy that I'd someday own Muldoon's. It had given my life a purpose that had been missing since Colleen had died. But it wasn't real. I'd given Turk seven hundred and fifty a month to keep the fantasy thinly tethered to reality. A price I paid to believe the lie.

I buried the empty beer bottle in the trash and found another full one in the fridge. My house suddenly felt emptier than it ever had before. Almost as empty as my apartment in Santa Barbara after Colleen's murder. My last sanctuary now felt like a vacuum sucking out my insides. I'd come back to San Diego after Colleen because it had still been home. A place to heal and start life anew. But that life was over now. Turk had pulled back the hand he'd offered me seven years ago. My anchor had been cut loose. La Jolla and San Diego had nothing left for me.

I rented a duplex. I could give notice, grab Midnight, and walk anytime. Turk had put business before friendship, leaving me with neither. The only true friend I had left was Kim. The one person I'd trust to watch Midnight. And the best thing I could do for her was walk away, and let her finally move past me. She could start her new life while I started mine in another city. All I had left in this town were my father's shame and good memories gone bad.

My father hadn't walked away. He'd stayed and taken the looks, the whispers, and the accusations. He hadn't run, but after a while he'd crawled into a bottle and then an early grave. What had he proved? What did I need to prove now? That I could stay and take it? That I was as tough as my old man? I looked at the beer bottle in my hand and thought how routinely I'd pulled it from the refrigerator to fill up a little of the empty inside me. What would replace it when the empty kept growing?

Melody?

She might spend the rest of her life in prison, and if Detective Moretti and Chief Parks had their way, I'd have an adjoining cell. And what if she got out? She was beautiful, sexy, and made me feel that I could love again. But at what cost? I'd already lost my job, been hounded by the police, and had my name splashed in the headlines since I met Melody. And could I really love a woman I could never fully trust?

But if I left Melody and the town behind, the cops still wouldn't forget about me. If they thought I was dirty, they'd try to track me down. Even if I managed to evade them, I couldn't live my life running from something I hadn't done. Down deep, even as I grew to hate him for the man he'd become, a part of me wanted to believe that's why my dad stayed in San Diego. That he'd refused to run from something he hadn't done.

I remembered a ride-along he took me on when I was nine, about a year before it all went wrong. He was riding the squad car alone that night with me in the front seat. He pulled over a driver who'd been badly swerving between lanes on Torrey Pines Road. The man was obviously drunk. I didn't know what he blew on the
field sobriety test, but I could smell the booze on him when my father put him in the backseat of the squad car. The sun hadn't gone down yet and it was a weeknight. Even as a kid, I thought it seemed like an odd time to be drunk. And unnerving to see a grown man cry. At that time of my life, my father only got drunk on weekends. Back when alcohol made him happy instead of mean.

My dad hadn't handcuffed the man, and I was surprised when we drove to the Pannikin coffee shop on Girard Street instead of the police station. We sat outside at a table under a pepper tree. Dad and the man drank coffee while I had hot chocolate under a burnt-orange sunset. The man sobbed for a while as my father put a hand on his back and spoke quietly to him. I didn't hear everything and knew better than to interrupt, but I heard Dad say that the man had responsibilities and his family needed him now more than ever. Finally, after three cups of coffee, the man had stopped crying and sobered up a bit. But his eyes still leaked pain, and it looked like his face might crack if you touched it.

We drove him up to a house at the top of Pearl Street instead of back to his car or the police station. Dad walked the man up to the front door and waited until he went inside. When he came back to the car, I asked him why he hadn't arrested the man for drunk driving. He told me that the man's son had just been killed in a car accident. I felt for him, but as a cop's kid I still saw things in black and white. Then my father told me the same thing he'd tell me a year later after he was kicked off the force and accused of being a bagman for the mob.

“Sometimes you have to do what's right even when the law says it's wrong.”

He never said another word to me about his dismissal from the force. He and my mom fought about it behind the bedroom door almost every night. But if I never asked him about it, I could still hold out hope that somehow he'd done the right thing.

I wasn't a kid anymore and the only black and white in my life now was the squad car that pulled into my driveway when the police
arrested Melody. But even after years of denial, hatred, and shame, I was still my father's son. He didn't run and neither would I. But I couldn't stand still and wait for the cops or Stone or the newspaper to write my story.

I'd write my own.

I went into my office and turned on the computer and Googled public storage businesses in San Diego. I found the website for the complex I'd used to store my father's property after he died. It was one of a chain of fourteen facilities around San Diego. The one I'd used was on Morena Boulevard, a couple miles from where I lived. Windsor's father, Jules, lived in La Jolla, but I didn't know about Adam. He'd only been out of prison for three weeks when he was killed. Hell, I didn't even know if the key Melody had hidden was his. Or the flash drive, for that matter. But I had to have a place to start.

I dialed the number given on the website on my cell phone. A young male voice answered, late teens or early twenties.

I thought about posing as a cop, but quickly changed my mind. It was an easy act for me, but one that wasn't worth the risk. Impersonating a police officer was jail time. Then I remembered Jules Windsor at Melody's arraignment that morning.

“I need your help, young man.” I tried to sound old, important, and sad. “Can you tell me if my son was renting a storage unit at your facility?”

“Sorry, sir. We can't give out the names of our clients.”

“I understand that, but I don't know what to do.” I let go a long sigh. “My son, Adam, was murdered and I know he was renting a storage unit. But I don't know where. The things he stored there are all I have left of him now.”

“I'm really sorry to hear that.” A sigh of his own. “But I'm not allowed to give out names. I could get into trouble.”

“Please, don't make this difficult, young man.” Haughty old money replaced the sadness in my voice. “My name is Jules Windsor of Windsor Bank and Trust. My son, Adam, was murdered. I'm sure you've seen it on the news. If you'd like me to go over
your head, I will. I'm sure your employer and the local media would be happy to know that you stood in the way of my claiming my son's last possessions on earth.”

I wasn't proud of impersonating a grieving father and bullying a kid who was just doing his job. But this is what my life had become. I wouldn't play by the rules anymore. Peter Stone didn't believe in rules, and Detective Moretti broke them when convenient. The rules had me teetering on the edge of a murder charge. I had to play it my way now. But how many rules could I break before I wasn't me anymore?

I buried that thought and let silence work on the kid.

He finally broke and looked up Adam Windsor on his computer. Nothing. I ran the ploy with the other thirteen facilities in the chain and was only shut out by two of them. A manager and a whiskey-throated woman who didn't care if I was “God looking to clear out Jesus's stuff.” She wouldn't budge.

None of the ones who'd checked their files came up with Windsor. Next up, I struck out with a California company that had twelve San Diego locations and a national one that had twenty. Two hours and forty-six calls and I had nothing to show except that I was good liar. Not something I could put on the résumé when I looked for the next job.

Seven calls and a half hour later, I tried the ploy on a facility in Sorrento Valley, northeast of La Jolla. As soon as I gave the Windsor name the young woman on the phone was all sympathy.

“Oh, my gosh, I watched it on the news. I'm so sorry for your loss. Let me look it up.” I felt a twinge of guilt at suckering the woman, but rode it out in silence. The clattering of fingers on a keyboard echoed over the phone. “Hm. I didn't find one under Adam's name, but I did find one under yours.”

Coincidence? I figured if a man like Jules Windsor had extra stuff lying around, he'd just buy another house to put it in.

“Really?” Playing for time. “I don't recall renting one.”

“Well, you may have forgotten about it.” More clattering of keys. “You've had it for eight years, the payments are direct with-drawals
from your bank account, and your son was the first person to access the locker since I've worked here.”

Eight years. The newspaper had said Adam Windsor got locked up eight years ago. Dean Slater, one of Muldoon's regular customers, said that Jules Windsor had kicked Adam out of his house for dealing drugs when he was a teenager. Maybe after the big drug bust, Jules had packed away any remnants of Adam to rid himself of his memory. Then Adam gets out of prison and the old man gives him the key to his old stuff.

What could be hidden away in there that was eight years old and had gotten Adam killed?

“Oh, yes.” Back in character. “My wife must have made the arrangements. Could you tell me what unit number that is?”

“Three seventeen. It's the third building on the right after you go through the security gate, about half way down.” She took a big gulp of breath. “Oh, that reminds me, you probably don't have the code to the gate, do you?”