Pacific Beat

Chapter 17

Above the heads of the curious, Weir could see the roof of the El Mar Motel, the ancient fading sign that read VACANCIES, REFRIGERATION, the people hanging out of apartment windows nearby to enjoy an aerial view of the action. The police chopper hovered over the El Mar, tail circling slowly as if the nose were pinned to some invisible axis.

They ducked under a crime-scene tape already in place between the outer wall of the El Mar and a parking meter on the curb, and Weir’s first thought was: They shot him. Raymond badged his way past the SWAT team, all attired in black, heavy with automatic weapons and side arms, in boots shiny enough to make a storm trooper blink. Unit 4 was open, a forest of bodies darkening the doorway. The door itself, torn from its hinges, leaned against the outside wall. Officers Hoch and Oswitz stood aside as Raymond went in, but stepped in front of Jim and started pushing him toward the street. Hoch’s nightstick drove against his sternum and sent a bullet of pain into his chest. Weir knocked it away with a forearm just as Oswitz drew his baton — gripping it far down on the handle for a punishing swing — but Raymond suddenly reappeared, coming up on them from behind with a quick little push that left Hoch off-balance and Oswitz standing face-to-face with Raymond, who cursed him viciously and drew Jim past them.

He stepped into the tiny motel room. It smelled of a disinfectant supposed to suggest pine. There was little light, the one window being closed off with a thick plastic curtain that looked as if cut from a picnic tablecloth. There was a twin bed, made up, along one wall; a furnace in the corner by the door; a worn green carpet; a Naugahyde chair. The room was too small to hold much else.

The first thing on which Jim’s eyes fastened was the city map pinned to the wall next to the bed. Dwight Innelman was photographing it. Jim didn’t have to lean close to see the two routes marked out in black and red markers: from the El Mar to the Back Bay via the ferry in black, via the boulevard in red. A cool finger traced its way up his back.

“You guys get him, Dwight?”

Innelman turned from his tripod, then back to it. “No. He wasn’t here. Couldn’t have gone very far on foot, could he?”

Roger Deak squeezed from the bathroom with a small, eroded bar of pink soap and a razor inside a plastic evidence bag. “Prints on everything in here,” he said, with a nod to Jim. “His darkroom.”

Weir leaned into the bathroom. Metal racks had been screwed into the wall above the toilet, on which stood three trays still shimmering with developing fluids. Plastic containers were grouped neatly beside the john. A small window inside the incredibly tiny shower stall had been covered over with tinfoil. A drying line was hung from the shower head to the wall, affixed to the highest tray rack. The plastic clothespins positioned along it were all red, all empty. Sitting on the sink were a pair of scissors, a red grease pencil, and a loupe. The room smelled like chemicals and mildew. Everything was covered with fingerprint dust.

Past the living room/bedroom was the kitchen, a small rectangular space with a two-chair dinette, a sink and counter, a miniature oven and two-burner stove. It was roped off and guarded by Tillis, the fat plainclothes who had vibed Weir at the station that morning. “Chief,” he said, turning only slightly toward the kitchen, “we got a pain-in-the-butt concerned citizen here. Bounce him?”

Jim stood back from the yellow tape that ran across the doorway, and looked into the room. He could smell the natural gas. Brian Dennison was squeezed into one corner, huddling with PR man Mike Paris. Brian had a hand on Paris’s arm. Paris was nodding, looking up at Dennison with the beseeching face of a penitent, his shoulders slumped submissively and his head bobbing. Dennison finally looked toward Weir. His expression froze momentarily, then took on a dreamlike calm.

“Out,” he said.

Tillis clamped a hand on Jim’s arm. Quickly, Hoch and Oswitz were on him again, sticks jostling into his rib cage and kidneys, fists grabbing his shirt and hair.

Raymond was there in a flash. “What the—”

“Back off, Cruz!” Dennison yelled. “Cruz, back the fuck off.”

Jim stumbled, raised his hands for balance, which gave Oswitz an excuse to drive the short end of his stick into Jim’s armpit, then press up and shove him into the wall. The three men closed him off suddenly, forming a tight little circle around him. A knee shot into his groin, but before Weir could even bend over, Tillis had straightened him, pulled him off the wall, guided him to the front door, and pushed him down the steps. At the bottom, Jim crashed into a hapless photographer, who went down under him in a clamor of cameras, lights, and power packs. Two SWAT cops dragged Weir to the yellow crime-scene tape and prodded him under with their boots. The photographer was allowed to retrieve a shattered flash unit before he was hustled into the crowd on the other side of the ribbon, into which he disappeared like a man pursued by lions.

Jim stood slowly, nauseous from the groining, walked with short measured steps through the parting crowd, and leaned against a parking meter on the sidewalk, breathing deeply. Raymond appeared in the doorway of unit 4. Jim looked at him and shook his head: Okay; go back in. Raymond snapped something at Hoch and Oswitz, who regarded him with attitudes of puzzled contrition. Laurel Kenney, the Channel 5 reporter who’d covered Virginia’s arrest at PacifiCo, came toward him with her microphone extended and her minicam operator trailing along behind. Weir had met her at the jail on the day Virginia was released.

“Can you tell us what is happening in there, Mr. Weir?”

“No.”

“Where is Horton Goins?”

“At large.”

“Are you active in the investigation into your sister’s murder?”

“No.”

“Is it true that she was stalked by Horton Goins, the sex offender?”

“Ask the cops.”

Laurel stood for a moment, looking at him, her microphone at her side. She was a big pale woman with a head of long red hair and dazzling green eyes. She held up the mike to Jim, switched it off, then turned and waved away her cameraman. “What in hell happened in there? Off the record?”

Weir looked at the curious faces around him, heard their prodding silence. “I’m not sure what’s going on, Laurel. That’s all.”

He pushed his way through the crowd, walked south down the sidewalk, then at the first alleyway cut through toward the bay and came up on the El Mar from the back. He picked his way through the trash cans and litter, an old bicycle, a stack of cardboard boxes loaded with empty bottles, a lawn mower completely covered with black residue, a brittle tan Christmas tree still trailing bright stringers of tinfoil. He worked his way up to the small, windowed rear door of unit 4. Goins’s escape hatch, he thought. Two high cement steps led up to the door, but standing in the alley, Weir was scarcely more than head-level with the window. He looked in through a long horizontal slot between the blinds. A refrigerator blocked half his view. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the deep shades of the little room, but when they had, he could see the kitchen and the cops clearly, like players up on a stage viewed from the front row.

Phil Kearns, in a loose-fitting silk shirt and a pair of jeans, was briefing Tillis. Kearns had a retrospective, “what a game it was” attitude, leading Weir to conclude that Kearns was the one who’d first stumbled on to the El Mar and Goins, thus, MVP. He looked at Paris with a self-satisfied nod. Two more plainclothes were going through a closet built into the wall that divided the two rooms. Weir recognized one of them from the Sheriff’s — Mapson, who turned, looked at Dennison, shook his head, and mumbled something to his partner. They brought in the whole fucking department, thought Weir. Raymond, by himself, was staring at the knotty pine wall.

Ray turned to Innelman and indicated something in the wood.

Jim could see Raymond passing his fingers over the wall, then Dwight doing the same. He followed Ray’s gaze down to the stained linoleum floor. Raymond stooped, collected something, and stood. For a brief moment, Raymond looked up and through the blinds, straight into Jim’s eyes. Then he came across the room, blocking the tiny window with his body, and reached out his hand. Weir stepped back and rested against the wall. He saw the blinds shift open just a little, then Raymond’s voice: need a little goddamned light in here. Looking from an angle between the widened slats now, he saw Raymond’s hands open to the light that filtered through. He had collected thumbtacks from the floor. Jim considered. What had Goins hung on the walls? Whatever it was, he had taken it with him: It was more valuable than his developing chemicals, his map, or his razor. More pictures?

Raymond’s hands retracted from view and Jim angled out of sight. He could barely see in, just enough to make out Dennison whispering some final command to Paris, who then turned and shouldered his way past the uniforms, under the ribbon and out through the front room.

As Tillis went through Goins’s closet, Jim could see the odd schizophrenia of Horton’s wardrobe: impossibly bright Hawaiian shirts and pants; three pairs of tennis shoes — one red, two white; a couple of painter’s-style caps in Day-Glo green. Then, pushed to one side as if unwanted but still somehow necessary, were two sport coats, two white dress shirts, a pair of dark dress pants and a pair of light ones, and a handful of neckties on a hanger. Tillis examined a pair of penny loafers, holding the bottoms up to the light. Jim could make out the shape of a skateboard that sat beside the shoes. Innelman bent down, flipped it over with a fingertip, and spun a wheel. Didn’t use this much, Weir heard him say.

A kid from Ohio, he thought, comes to California and gives himself a make-over. Takes a new name. Gets a job, saves his money, tries to look like he’s one of the natives. He gets a skateboard but doesn’t have time to use it. He’s too busy making plans, taking photographs, studying maps, moving closer and closer to a woman he’s probably never even talked to. Of all the women in the country, he thought, why would a messed-up kid in a mental hospital pick Ann? Chance — the horrible randomness of chance? If someone else had been standing in the play yard of Ann’s Kids the day he shot her picture, would he have become obsessed with that woman instead? Raymond stepped forward and fingered each necktie. Looking for the telltale hole of a tie tack, Weir ventured. Raymond shook his head helpfully. There was none. Horton Goins doesn’t wear half-carat diamond tie tacks. Horton Goins wears Day-Glo painter’s caps and red tennis shoes. Reconcile the two, he thought. Somewhere is an explanation.

Hey Paris, said Dennison, What’s the deal on the press, anyway?

They’re ready when you are.

Dennison checked his watch, then stepped forward to confer with Innelman.

Tillis brought over a chair and stood on it for a look at the top shelf. He looked like a circus elephant on a stool. Innelman broke away from the chief with a shrug, and joined Deak in dusting the kitchen counter and the oven door. Raymond was standing with Kearns now. He cast a quick glance at Jim through the blinds.

Christ, thought Weir, if a Newport Beach cop killed Ann, what he has here is carte blanche to contaminate, conceal, tamper with, remove, adjust, or plant any evidence he wants to. It was an incredibly sloppy job.

The idea hit him that the cops would be happy to have it this way, if one of their own had killed Ann. They’d be happy, too, to let Goins stay one step ahead of them for a week or so, to put him in the spotlight and keep him there. What if they were orchestrating this circus, letting Goins run off ahead like a mechanical rabbit? Maybe Kearns isn’t after Goins at all, he thought. Maybe he’s running him. Why was it Kearns, out of everyone in the department, out of every citizen on the peninsula, who caught up with Goins? For a moment, he wanted to burst in, beat the shit out of anyone who got in his way, grab each offending invader by the throat and drag him outside, leaving Innelman and Deak to do what only Innelman and Deak should have been doing in the first place. Stupid. There was nothing he could do about it now.

He watched as Dennison clapped his hand onto Kearns’s back — a job well done — then onto Raymond’s, too — we’ll get this guy — like this was some cocktail party and he was three martinis strong. There was an ingratiating tilt to his head as he said something to Kearns. Then Paris the flack shouldered back into the kitchen and leaned close to Dennison. The chiefs hand dropped from Raymond’s back. Carry on, he said, and headed toward the front room door, buttoning his linen sport coat, running his fingers through his hair, straightening his back, a sense of mission now returned, now palpable in his stride.

When he was gone, Paris turned to Tillis, straightened his back, brushed a hand through his hair, and echoed Carry on, in a voice that approximated Dennison’s. Weir that it wasn’t very good. Muted chuckles came from behind the window glass, anyway. Raymond shot him another glance.

Parrot, he thought. Public Relations officer Mike Parrot. Another fucking clown with a badge and a gun.

From his elevation on the chair, Tillis’s voice boomed clearly through the general hum of the kitchen. Hey, hey, hey! Young Tillis delivers.

Weir watched him step down, with a large manila envelope between one thumb and forefinger. He walked it gingerly to the kitchenette table, set it down, and worked open the flap with a pencil. Tillis shook out the contents — a stack of eight-by-ten glossies, black and white. Using the pencil eraser, he separated them, spreading them around the table.

Jim heard the silence that descended on the room. Three backs blocked his view — Innelman’s, Ray’s, and Roger Deak’s. Past them, he could see only the surface of the cheap table, the stack of photographs, and the dick’s pudgy hand still holding the pencil.

Man.

Fuckin’ nutcase.

Look at this.

Weir could see that someone with a pair of tongs had lifted one of the pictures to the light. He couldn’t make it out. Raymond’s face, in profile now, looked conspicuously pale. Raymond accepted the tongs, held up the picture, made a show of not being able to see it well enough, then came toward the window. Bending down, his back to the room, he held the photograph to the weak inrush of light.

And there was Ann in all her beauty, captured unaware by Goins in a moment of her everyday life. She was coming out of her front door in the morning, one arm still trailing inside to turn the lock. She had a fresh expression on her face, the look of mild optimism with which some people anticipate their work. Raymond flipped it over. Written in grease pencil were the words New Morning — February 25.

Then he was looking at Raymond’s back as Ray returned to the table and got another one of the pictures, which were now being circulated like snapshots of a wedding. Raymond made his rounds, careful to keep himself between the other cops and the window.

Ann swinging open the chain-link gate at the preschool while a gust of offshore breeze lifted her hair back from her face. Work — February 25.

Ann walking down the sidewalk along the bay with two large grocery bags clutched to her chest. Groceries — March 2.

Ann on the same sidewalk in her short work skirt, an old sweater, her purse slung over her shoulder; Ann amidst her children at the preschool — similar, thought Weir, to the shot that Innelman had found in Emmett’s Costa Mesa apartment; Ann and Raymond, in uniform, chatting through the chain-link fence of the play yard; Ann and Ray and Phil Kearns — a night shot this time — walking arm in arm down Balboa Boulevard just past the theater; another shot taken the same night of the three of them standing outside the entrance of the Studio Café.

The last three were the ones that hit Jim hardest, however. The first was a shot of the window of Ann’s and Ray’s apartment, taken at night, from an angle below the glass. Ann was staring out, with a vacant expression on her face. She wore dark lipstick, and a string of pearls around her neck. Her hair was up, and her shoulders were bare to where the dark material of her dress covered them, her dangling earrings throwing stars of light toward the camera. She looked, to Jim, lost. Window Thoughts — March 14.

In the next shot she had her back to Goins, stopped in an alley that Jim recognized as the one behind her apartment that led toward the boulevard. The alleyway glistened with puddles and the asphalt shone in the aftermath of a storm. The sides of the buildings were slick and reflective as mirrors. Goins had managed to get the moon in there, a forlorn sliver peering down from between two apartment structures. Ann was framed in the middle, not walking, legs together, up on her toes just a little, looking down, an umbrella visible in her left hand, apparently deciding how best to negotiate the puddles that looked from this angle to have penned her in. Ann in Moonlight — February 25.

In the last, only her legs and shoes were visible, where they were about to disappear behind the door of a limousine being held open by a stout man in a dark suit. His back was to the camera. No license plate was visible. Joyride — March 21.

“Woowee,” said fat Tillis. “Goins is a definite fan of hers. Definite fuckin’ whacko. But they let him out. Don’t they always? What do they think, it’s a way to keep us busy or something? Chief ought to see this shit. Hey Parrot, get the chief back in here!”

Led by Paris, Dennison came gliding in a moment later, his brow furrowed, a fresh sheen of sweat on his face. Backing away from the glass, Jim could hear him mumble something about three locals and three networks.

Paris brought him to the corner by the refrigerator for a confidential chat, right in front of Jim.

“The news crews can use one of those photos as an insert, sir.”

“What good would it do?”

“Up to you, sir, but it will set this story aside from all the other homicides they have. It’s a nice piece of airtime and it’s free. If Becky Flynn could get this kind of coverage, she’d climb to the top of PacifiCo Tower naked and set herself on fire. Which, come to think of it, is a scene I’d like to see. Take advantage, while you can.”

Dennison was silent for a moment. Weir could see the line of his linen jacket through the slats, the way the lapel folded back over his big chest. Paris’s wrist turned over, exposing his watch.

“Better get on it, sir.”

Dennison’s coat shifted back now and his hands slid into his pockets. Weir could see the worn patch on the elbow of the jacket.

— What about the feds?

— This would be an excellent time to mention them, if you can work it in.

— I still don’t see why. It implies we’re not doing a good job in our own backyard.

— Either we co-opt them and imply we invited them in, or Flynn uses them against us. Take your pick, sir.

— No.

— No what?

— Nobody needs to see these pictures. I run one and every shutter nut in the state’s gonna see it and send us his candids of pretty blondes. No.

Paris was quiet for a moment.

— What about the handle?

— I’m working on that.

— I still think the Bayside Slasher is strong.

— He didn’t slash her, he stabbed her.

— Stabber’s not a good word — too focused, gory but not graphic in the right way. We need something with motion in it, something they can see.

Another pause. Weir could hear Paris sigh.

— Any word at all on Goins, Chief? If we could announce the arrest it would—

— You think if we’d caught him I’d be standing here talking about fuckin’ handles?

A muted light came to the glass as Dennison moved away from the window. Paris’s back then crushed up against the blinds. Weir heard Paris mumble, in a poor caricature of Dennison, “...talking about fuckin’ handles?”

Weir, Raymond, and Phil Kearns leaned against the outside wall of the El Mar Motel — VACANCIES, REFRIGERATION — and watched Interim Chief Dennison give his interviews to the TV news. The crowd had pressed up close to the crime-scene ribbon and the SWAT team provided security, an idea that Jim overheard Paris suggest to Dennison when the news crews were setting up.

“How’d it go down?” asked Jim.

Kearns shrugged. “I got lucky. Went to the realty people and the lady sent me here. I called Brian and he ordered me to hold off. That’s how SWAT got into it and the whole circus started.”

Dennison sweated intensely in the tepid overcast sun. The minicams pressed in close, spotlights glaring, technicians linked umbilically to their machines, jostling for the best angles. Dennison was talking down Goins’s prior offense — already treading lightly on his way to the courtroom — but he adamantly linked the MO to Ann: “...waitress here, waitress in Ohio... knew his victim... swampy area, in this case the Back Bay... apparently a photographer who had been ‘aware’ of her for some time.”

Weir turned to Kearns, who was looking to Dennison with the expression of an on-deck hitter. “What did his room look like when you got in?”

“Neat. The furnace was on. There were two pieces of white bread on the kitchen counter, like he was getting ready to put them in the oven.”

So, Weir thought, Goins was home all right, gathering up his things and heading for the back door while Dennison’s production got going. Was that part of the plan? “Any idea what spooked him?”

“I don’t know. It could have been me. I waited across the street where I could see his front door. I thought I was cool, but if he was watching...”

Raymond shook his head.

“Dennison called SWAT, not me,” Kearns snapped.

“Dumb,” said Raymond.

“Fuckin’ dumb is right,” said Kearns.

Dennison had launched into a law-and-order spiel, focusing on the peninsula here, where “the overwhelming majority of crime in our city is committed.”

The implication, thought Weir, was that the whole place would be better off torn down and built again, but Dennison wasn’t mercenary enough to mention the Balboa Redevelopment Project. Paris, his hands stuffed down into an overcoat, lurked behind Dennison like a bad conscience.

“What makes Newport Beach a great city is great people,” the interim chief was saying. “And these people deserve protection from the less fortunate, like Horton Goins. This city can no longer afford to provide an environment that encourages violent crime. The citizens of this peninsula deserve more.”

As if the less fortunate were all committed sex offenders, thought Weir, as if you can redevelop someone like Horton Goins out of existence, as if a low-profit, low-tax-base neighborhood was the reason for it all.

“Chief Dennison, is Horton Goins now officially, a suspect?”

“Horton Goins is a prime suspect.”

Paris leaned forward and whispered something in Dennison’s ear. Dennison cupped his hand around the nearest mike, as if national security might were at stake.

The chief nodded and turned back to the cameras. “In the search for the Bayside Slasher, Horton Goins is our only suspect.”