Crime Scene

Chapter 33

If I owed anyone an apology, it was Nate Schickman. I could guess he’d paid for helping me out. I called him the next day.

“No worries,” he said, unconvincingly. “Ames is annoyed, but nothing I can’t survive.”

“Annoyed at you or at me?”

“Both. Bascombe, too.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He seemed more put out than angry. Like — pissed about having to go through the motions. I get the impression the two of them aren’t friends.”

I filed that tidbit away. “I owe you one.”

“I’d say we’re up to three or four by now.”

“True. Speaking of, any sign of Triplett?”

“None. I have an eye out.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Schickman said. “I gotta ask, though. You seriously hit him?”

Trucking in gossip. Good trait for a detective.

“Bascombe? Hell no. He tried to hit me.”

“Damn,” Schickman said. “What’d you say to get him so mad?”

I hesitated.

“Hey,” Schickman said. “All that owing deserves no bullshit.”

“I might’ve implied that he arrested the wrong guy.”

He laughed for a good long time. “No shit. Really?”

“Really.”

“Balls,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“I pulled down the Donna Zhao file again,” he said. “After you left? I took another peek at it. It seemed solid to me.”

“First glance, it does.”

“What does second glance do?”

I said, “You really want to hear this?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

Get it out of your system.

Whatever you need to do.

Ask me, that sounded like permission.

An order, even.

Vitti hadn’t meant it that way.

Next time, Sarge, choose your words more carefully.

“Tell you what,” I said to Schickman. “Let me buy you a drink. You be the judge.”

We met at a bar of his choosing, on San Pablo near the Albany-Berkeley line. The place had a Day of the Dead theme, the menu boasting a hundred thirty-one different tequilas and mezcals. Schickman asked for a Dos Equis. I asked for water. The waitress smiled in desperation and beat a retreat.

I laid out the case for him, just as I had for Bascombe.

“I started off thinking Linstad roped Triplett into doing his dirty work,” I said. “More I go over it, more I feel like that’s wrong. Linstad isn’t going to rely on a kid who he knows is not all there. And Triplett’s sister gives him a solid alibi.”

“Seven years old,” said Schickman.

“She’s a smart adult, seems totally together,” I said. “Which, given her upbringing, is impressive.”

“You think Linstad framed him.”

“If you’re going to pick someone to frame, Triplett’s pretty much your ideal candidate. Young, black, physically imposing. Borderline intelligence, a loose sense of reality.”

Schickman shifted around in his chair.

“I mean, it’s very interesting,” he said.

I laughed. “Please,” I said. “Don’t hold back.”

He sipped beer, tapped the table, collected his thoughts.

“Start off by saying what I like,” he said. “The affairs, the roommate’s statement — that’s useful information. I’m the lead, I’m starting from scratch, all that shit is hugely significant to the fact pattern.”

“I know,” I said. “Circumstantial.”

He nodded. “Which isn’t the end of the world. Lots of guys in San Quentin got there on circumstantial evidence. You’re not starting from scratch, though. There’s a confession. Maybe not perfect, but not a whole lot worse than most. It’s on paper now, part of the record. You have Triplett’s fingerprint on the murder weapon.”

“Linstad could’ve gotten him to handle it,” I said. “I showed you the report. They were hanging out together, outside the lab.”

“Allegedly.”

“Nobody ran DNA,” I said. “Not on the knife, on the sweatshirt, on the blood at the scene, anything. It was nineteen ninety-three.”

“You’re lucky enough to get viable material, you still need a known sample for comparison.”

“I have a name and address for Linstad’s father in Sweden.”

Schickman smiled. “I’m trying to imagine how that phone call goes.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“A fine morning to you, sir. Your son, who’s dead, we’d like to destroy his memory by pinning him for a vicious murder. You mind please spitting into this tube for me? We’ll cover postage.”

“It’s all in the delivery,” I said.

“Look at it from my perspective. I bring this to my boss, what’s he gonna say?”

“You need more.”

“To start resurrecting old shit, spend time and money? Lot more.”

“Gimme the evidence box,” I said. “I’ll take it to the lab myself. They’re one floor up from me. Nobody has to know.”

Schickman laughed. “Aaaand he’s gone rogue.”

He raised his empty to the waitress. “I’m not saying I won’t help you out, if I can.”

In essence, he was answering me just as Bascombe had, and Shupfer had, and Vitti had — only a little more nicely, and he’d left the door open a crack.

“One thing that does get to me,” he said, “is both Rennert and Linstad, going down the stairs. But you say Rennert was natural.”

“Doesn’t exclude Linstad being a homicide. The night he died, he was drinking with someone. Ming said they leaned on him to close it as accidental. He suggested I look at Linstad’s ex, all that family money. But I met her and I don’t see it. Too risky. She’d hire somebody.”

“From what you’ve told me about Linstad,” he said, “any number of women would’ve done it for free.”

The waitress brought Schickman a fresh beer. He drank, using his lower lip to pull foam from the upper. “Find Triplett. Without him, none of this matters.”

I nodded, debating whether to voice my thoughts. We seemed to get along, Schickman and I, but I didn’t know him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t regard me as naïve or overzealous.

I said, “He didn’t do it. Triplett.”

Schickman watched me closely.

“I’m not asking you or anyone else to accept that on faith,” I said. “I’m just stating what I know to be true. What’s left for me now is to prove it.”

His slow nod could have been wariness or agreement.

“Do us both a favor,” he said. “Don’t step on any more toes.”

He tipped his beer to me.

Vitti’s order made me think about Christmas.

The sergeant was right: I’d worked every one since joining the Sheriff’s. It never felt like much of a sacrifice. When I was growing up, our family didn’t do religion, and the secularized version of the holiday we’d once celebrated had fallen by the wayside, along with every other ritual that called for full participation.

Gathering as three underlined the missing fourth.

This year, I didn’t have any excuse.

Saturday morning, I caught a matinee of the latest installment of Fast and Furious, calling my mother as I left the theater to give her twenty-four hours’ notice that I was free for Christmas Eve dinner.

“We don’t have anything planned,” she said, managing to sound both apologetic and accusing.

“If it’s too much trouble—”

“No no,” she said. “I don’t want you to be disappointed, is all.”

These conversations always went the same way: I reached out, stirred by duty and guilt and love. As soon as she answered, I started mapping my escape route.

I forced myself to stay on the line, knowing I’d only feel worse if I hung up. “I can pick up food.”

“Would you? Thanks. I’m sorry, I’m just so tired.”

“No problem.”

“I was down to see Luke last week,” she said. “It takes a lot out of me.”

I said, “Chinese okay?”

Dragon Deluxe Palace was packed, whizzing trays and parties of eight, a comforting din. We weren’t the only family too jaded or lazy to put a turkey in the oven.

Waiting at the hostess stand, hunched in the rippling light of a murky fish tank, I scrolled through my inbox, deleting spam, pausing as I came to one headed IN TOWN.

The sender was Amy Sandek.

I opened it.

I composed my reply, hitting SEND as the hostess gave me a warm plastic bag and wishes for a merry Christmas.

Sliding down East 14th through patchy traffic, I saw crowds in the windows of the pho counters and the curry houses. Back in the sixties and seventies, San Leandro was the whitest city in the Bay Area. That began to change as the courts struck down neighborhood covenants. By the time I was born, the process had been well under way for years, and my own group of friends resembled a mini — United Nations, a broad coalition formed on the basketball courts, united by our love of the game and our disregard for posted playing hours.

We roamed in packs, seeking out anyplace with a hoop and a little space, climbing fences, taking on all challengers. Washington Elementary; high school blacktop; curving driveways and buckling courtyards. In those open-air chambers, I began my career in diplomacy.

I learned how to talk to people as individuals. How to align common interests. How to derive pleasure from the success of others.

My brother Luke was half an inch taller than I was and nearly as fast. At eleven he could dunk a tennis ball; at thirteen, the real thing. His nickname was White Boy Can Jump. He worked on his shot incessantly, developing a beautiful stroke, like calligraphy. For raw talent, you’d take him over me, every time.

Yet he spent many of our playground hours squatting on the sidelines, impatiently waiting on next, flapping his arms and pounding on his bony, scabby knees. His teams never seemed to be able to grab onto winning streaks like mine did.

Standard rules called for game till eleven by ones. Luke would start off hot, knocking down five, six in a row. Then the opposition would gang up on him, smothering him in double and triple teams. He’d continue to hold the ball, passing only to clap his hands and demand it back, jacking up hero shots as he fell out of bounds. Every so often one went gliding in, causing everyone in the vicinity to erupt, clutch their heads, fall over in exaggerated faints, ohhhhhdaaayyuuummm. Their reactions provided enough reinforcement to keep him chucking away.

More often, the ball skipped off the top of the backboard.

For him, it was glory or death, all or nothing.

He easily made our high school team but clashed with the coach and ended up quitting after a year, leaving a legacy — ball hog, arrogant, uncoachable — that tarred me. I had to work twice as hard to earn my spot, and I made sure to pass more than I shot, sometimes at a ridiculous ratio. I was once benched for forgoing an open layup.

I can’t say for certain when Luke began using drugs. I wasn’t around the first time someone offered him a joint. I don’t know where I was. Probably at practice.

I can, however, guess about where he acquired the habit: the very same courts where we’d once lived in innocence.

His first arrest came during junior year. They picked him up, along with two other guys from our childhood circle, for misdemeanor possession. The judge saw a decent kid, no priors, intact family, parents gainfully employed. Luke pleaded no contest and received a suspended sentence plus community service.

For a while he managed to stay clear of the law. He’d learned his lesson, and it was: don’t get caught. At home, though, things got ugly. He fought bitterly with my parents. It takes a lot to rile my father up, and one of the more unreal and cartoonish moments of my teenage life was watching him and Luke come to blows, after my brother announced he was dropping out of college. Trying to get between them earned me a black eye.

My mother’s response was to detach and deny. Casting about for a place to put her attention, she landed on me. Luke had flushed his future away. I, on the other hand, had no ceiling. She never missed a game of mine. She heaped praise on me.

Me, I couldn’t decide what to feel about my brother. Pity. Contempt. Guilt, for the canyon widening between us, our fortunes diverging in lockstep. I entered Cal, and he moved in with a friend in Fruitvale, taking part-time work as a clerk at a sporting goods store. I shouldered the rising hopes of a team and a school, and Luke bounced in and out of jail on minor drug offenses or petty theft. Sixty days here, ninety there, each stint setting him up for the next screwup.

We had no idea how badly he would screw up.

I doubt he did, either.

Nobody wanted to deal with him. I was the one worth rooting for, even after my injury. More so: everybody loves an underdog.

One night — high on crack, reeling under a blood alcohol level of .15 — Luke stole a car. He later claimed that his intention was merely to joyride. Careering north on International Boulevard, doing seventy in a thirty-five zone, he blew through a red at 29th, T-boning a Kia.

The driver, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Rosa Arias, was killed instantly.

The passenger, Arias’s nineteen-year-old niece, died the next day of her injuries.

Luke suffered a broken femur, broken ribs, a punctured lung, a lacerated spleen. He spent four days in a coma. The first person he saw when he came to was a nurse. The second person he saw was the arresting officer.

Pleading guilty to two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter enabled him to avoid prosecution with the intoxication enhancement, shaving a couple of years off his sentence.

Even with Mom’s gift for denial, this was overload. She reevaluated the past, all those miles driven to and from arenas in San Jose, Sacramento, Las Vegas. The mornings she’d woken up hoarse from screaming nonstop through the fourth quarter.

With me hobbling through rehab, and Luke headed off to prison, her division of resources must have seemed to her beyond neglectful. Criminal.

When I enrolled in the police academy, she became fixated on the idea that I could use my newfound knowledge and position to help Luke. She was wrong, of course. His fate was out of my hands. But what truly got to her was realizing that, even if I’d had leverage, I wouldn’t have used it. Not for him.

I was embarking on a career as an officer of the law. My duty was to the community — to protect decent folks from outliers like my brother.

Those were the days when Christmas stumbled and fell, and Thanksgiving, too, and birthdays devolved from dinner to a phone call.

Once I was at the Coroner’s, I softened to her a bit, chastened by death and what it does to people. But there was still nothing I could do to pry Luke free any faster. And I don’t think I’m alone in struggling to be as generous with my family as I am with strangers.

The biggest sticking point remains my spotty visiting record. Like most state prisons, Pleasant Valley is open to the public on weekends. Usually I’m working, a built-in excuse. I manage to think up others for those rare instances when I am free.

If nothing else, there’s the drive, which is abysmal: three hours, more with traffic.

My mom goes twice a month, and every so often she’ll call and invite me to join her. Already knowing the answer, she plays up her disbelief when I say no. But her hurt, her regret, her continuing sense of failure — those are genuine.

Now, sitting in my car outside my parents’ house, I gazed down the block at a ladder of windows brimming with milky cheer. LED icicles strung from the gutters dripped into the void. On the passenger seat, the take-out bag crinkled, its contents breathing sweetly.

The majority of the surrounding houses had been redone, ranch homes leveled, replaced by McMini-Mansions pushing at the margins of their lots. The house where I’d grown up remained the same: fifteen hundred square feet of lumpy tan stucco, a sun-melted caramel fronted by succulents and weird red gravel, like a transplanted piece of Mars. Thirty-year mortgage, manageable on the combined salary of a public school teacher and an office manager. With the housing market back up, it might be worth it for them to sell, downsize, take early retirement. I’d raised the point before and met breezy dismissal.

Why in the world would they leave?

If it was worth X now, it would be worth more in five years.

Luke could have his old room, once he got out.

I stepped from the car, carrying the bag of takeout on two fingers and humming “The Little Drummer Boy.”

The evening went better than expected. Mom was in a decent mood. Following her cues, my father relaxed, rubbing at his sunken stomach as he discussed his current crop of sixth graders with a mix of fondness and despair. Each new incoming class demanded an increasing degree of vigilance on his part. The world had succumbed to phones. You couldn’t confiscate the damn things fast enough. The dumb kids disseminated pictures of their genitals. The smart kids fact-checked him in real time, correcting him with a smirk. It was enough to break a lesser man.

He laughed, his legs scribbling restlessly beneath the table. There was a patch worn in the carpet by his heels, dragging over the same spot. He coped with stress by breaking it down into more manageable forms: anxiety about his pension, his bad back, the electricity bill. Over the years I’d watched him turn into an old man.

A baseball player in his youth, he was by his own admission never very good. It was from my mother — a collegiate long jumper — and her northern European forebears that Luke and I got our height and wiry strength.

We ate moo shu pork and chicken with broccoli and fried rice. We cracked our fortune cookies and read them aloud.

“ ‘Today’s questions yield tomorrow’s answers,’ ” I said.

“What questions do you have today?” my father asked.

I smiled. “How much time do you have?”

He chuckled and went into the kitchen with the plates.

My mother said, “I’m glad you decided to join us.”

“Sorry to spring it on you.”

“You’re here now,” she said. Then: “I meant to call you last week.”

Seeing where this was going, I said, “I had work. I wouldn’t’ve been able to come.”

She shook her head, dry blond and gray, a shivering haystack. “I’m not going to ask when was the last time you went.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know when was it?”

“You just said you’re not going to ask.”

“More than two years,” she said.

“There you go,” I said. “You answered your own question.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t realize how long it’s been.”

Keeping my voice even required a supreme effort. “How’s he doing?”

“The same.”

“Did he ask you for commissary money?”

“They feed them like slaves, Clay. He lives on ramen. It’s the only way for him not to starve to death.”

“Ramen is currency, there. You know that, right? He trades it for drugs.”

“Stop.”

“Did he look well nourished to you?”

She spread tight, pale hands. “I don’t want to hear it, please.”

In the kitchen, the dishwasher gurgled to life.

“He has a girlfriend,” my mother said.

It took me a second to process. “Luke?”

“She started writing to him. Her name is Andrea. He showed me her picture. She lives in Salinas.”

“Pen pal, huh.”

“She’s been to see him,” my mother said. “Twice.”

I resented the implicit comparison. “And we’re sure this isn’t some sort of scam?”

“I don’t see what she could possibly expect to get out of him,” she said.

“I’m trying to figure out why a woman would write to him out of nowhere.”

“People are lonely,” she said. “He’s lonely. It makes him happy.”

“Good for him.”

She tilted her head. “Why are you so angry at him?”

I said, “Why aren’t you?”

She clasped her hands, as if in prayer. “He’s going to get out, you know.”

“I’m aware.”

“And? What’s going to happen then? Because soon — let me finish, please. Sooner than you realize, he’ll get out, and you won’t have been to visit him. You’ll both know it. That’s going to be hanging between the two of you.”

I brushed at crumbs on the tablecloth.

“He’s still your brother,” she said. “That’s never going away.”

That was the problem.

Family. It’s an incurable disease.