Guilt

CHAPTER 40

Melvin Jaron Wedd had been found in the passenger seat of his pimped-up black Explorer. Single gunshot wound to his left temple. The entry hole said large-caliber. The stippling said up close and personal, though probably not a contact wound.

Brain matter clotted the back of his seat. A Baggie of weed sat between his splayed knees. A glass bong glinted on the floor near his left shoe. The impact had caused him to slide down, leaving his corpse in an awkward semi-reclining state that wouldn’t have been comfortable in life.

His mouth gaped, his eyes were shut, his bowels had emptied. Rot and insect activity said he’d been there days rather than hours.

Masked and gloved, a C.I. named Gloria was going through his pockets. She’d already procured his wallet, pulled out a driver’s license, credit cards, eighty bucks in cash. Milo didn’t need any of that to know who the victim was. A BOLO-find on Wedd’s Explorer had shown up in his office email shortly after six a.m. He’d been online an hour before, “eating futility for breakfast.”

Blood in the SUV said the Explorer was the murder scene. The vehicle had been left at the rear of a construction site east of Laurel Canyon, four hundred feet up a quiet street just north of the Valley. Nice neighborhood; a while back, Milo had caught a case not far from here, a prep school teacher left in a bathtub packed with dry ice.

A large, elaborate house had been framed up on the lot. Weathered wood marred by rust streaks below the nails said it had been a while since the project was active. Care had been taken to preserve the assortment of mature eucalyptus at the rear of the lot. The trees hadn’t been trimmed and some of their branches drooped to the ground and continued trailing along the dirt, shaggy and green, like oversized caterpillars. The foliage had served to partially shield the Explorer but if anyone had been working on the site, they’d have noticed the vehicle immediately.

I said, “Foreclosure?”

Milo said, “Yup, last year. Guy who found the body goes around checking out bank-owned properties. The former owners are a nice older couple from Denver, moved here to be with their grandkids, tried to build their dream house, got taxed out of their dry-cleaning business. I had Denver PD talk to them. They’ve never heard of Wedd and they come up antiseptic-clean. And there goes my case on Adriana because ol’ Melvin ain’t ever talking.”

Gloria called out his name. We approached her, tried to stand sufficiently back to avoid the wafting of death fumes.

“This was in his jacket, Milo. Upper inside pocket.”

She held out a matchbook, white cover, unmarked. The kind you get with cigarettes at the liquor store.

Milo said, “So he had a fuel source for his dope.”

Gloria opened the book. No matches left, just fuzzy stubs. Inside the book’s cover, someone had scrawled in blue ballpoint. Tiny, cramped cursive.

Milo put on reading glasses, gloved up, took the book.

I read over his shoulder.

This is guilt.

Gloria said, “Can I theorize a little?”

“Sure.”

“If we’d found a gun, I’d look at this as maybe a suicide note. Seeing as it’s clearly a homicide, either your victim had remorse for something and wrote this himself or someone else thought he should pay for something.”

“Have you checked his other pockets yet?”

“Twice. I even looked in his underwear.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m dedicated up to a point. Any idea what Mr. Wedd could be guilty of?”

“Before this I had a few ideas.” He shook his head. “Anything else?”

“The driver’s-seat adjustment seems to roughly fit Wedd’s height, so either he was driving and moved to the passenger side or your offender’s around the same size. I guess the weed and the bong are meant to imply a drug party. But with no matches in the book or anywhere else, same for ashes or residue?”

“It looks staged to you?”

“That or there was an interruption before the party got going,” she said. “Was Wedd involved in that world?”

“Not that I know,” said Milo. “But I don’t know much, period.”

He stepped away from the stench. Gloria and I followed. She said, “I’ll do my best to rush DNA on the bag and the pipe, see if any chemistry other than his comes back. You saw those prints the techies pulled from the car. They’ve already gone to the lab, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

He said, “That’s my middle name.”

“Lucky?”

“Maybe.”

A tow truck arrived to hook up the SUV. Neighbors had begun to emerge and uniforms were doing their usual blank-faced centurion thing, easing concerned citizens away from the scene with no thought to reassurance.

Milo looked at the white-bagged body being gurneyed away. “Melvin, Melvin, Melvin, so now you’re another victim.” To me: “All those women he had coming in and out, there could be a horde of angry husbands, boyfriends.” Back at the corpse: “Thanks a bundle for your dissolute lifestyle, pal.”

I said, “You see Wedd getting into a car with an angry husband? Letting him drive?”

“Someone with a gun? Sure. Or the offender’s a jilted female, hell hath no fury and all that.”

“Tall girl.”

“Plenty of those in SoCal-what, you don’t like the jealousy angle?”

“It’s a common motive.”

“But you have a better idea.”

I told him my growing suspicions about Premadonny, leaving out the possibility of a violent child.

He said, “Creepy-World flourishes in Coldwater Canyon? What’s the motive for doing two, maybe three employees, Alex? They’re abusing their kids and bumping off the staff to keep them quiet?”

“Put that way, it sounds pretty weak.”

“No, no, I take every product of your fertile mind seriously, it just came out of left field. Okay, let me focus for a sec: They bug you because they isolate their kids. Maybe they got tired of the hustle, had enough dough, said screw it.”

I said, “That could be it.”

“But,” he said.

“No buts.”

Gathering the flesh above his nose with two fingers, he deepened the fissure that time and age had provided. “Dealing with suspects like that. God, I hope you’re wrong.”

“Forget I brought it up.”

His cell squawked Tchaikovsky. He said, “Okay, thanks,” dropped the phone back in his pocket. “Prints from two individuals in the car: Wedd’s and an unknown contributor with no match to AFIS. Unknown’s was on the driver’s side of the center console, Wedd’s showed up on the trunk latch and the interior of the trunk. To me that says our movie stars aren’t involved.”

“How so?”

“Someone at that level chauffeuring the help? More likely some disreputable who Wedd pissed off did this. Not that it makes a difference in terms of Adriana and the baby getting icier by the second.”

He left me standing there, headed toward the SUV, stopped, returned. “That canceled appointment, any hint about what kind of problem their kid was having?”

“The guy I spoke to wouldn’t even tell me which kid it was.”

“Okay, they’re weirdly secretive. Maybe shitty parents-no shock, given all the money, no one getting told no. But that’s a long way from linking them to my murders and I’ve still got Qeesha, a confirmed criminal and likely a killer herself. And Wedd, a guy who defrauded insurance, and Adriana, who might’ve had a secret life. Toss in ingredients like that and no telling what’ll cook up.”

I said, “Felony gumbo.”

“You figure I’m in denial. Hell, yeah, sure I am. But aren’t you the one says denial can be useful?”

“I love being quoted.”

“Hey,” he said, “it’s either you or the Bible and right now I’m not feeling sufficiently pious to invoke Scripture. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your car.”