Pacific Beat

Chapter 28

The silver limousine appeared in the fog as if born from it. Weir stood under the theater marquee, back from the gathering mist that hung along the edge, then rolled off in droplets and darkened the sidewalk below.

A tall, crew-cut man in a gray suit stepped from the car, nodded to Jim, offered a tight smile, then reached into his coat and brought out a metal detector, which he ran over Weir’s body — front, then back.

“Smooth operation,” said Weir.

“Sorry for the inconvenience, sir.”

“No piece.” The detector chattered unemphatically.

“We’re more concerned with a wire, sir.”

“No wire, either.”

The man’s eyes went past him, toward the driver, confirming harmlessness. He slid the scanner back into his jacket and opened the door for Jim. “Thank you, sir.”

Weir climbed in and sat. Cantrell reclined in the far corner, the gentle beam of an overhead reading lamp trained on a folded copy of The New York Times that lay across his knee. The coach smelled of leather and cologne and executive decision. He offered Jim a manicured hand. “Dave Cantrell,” he said. His voice was formal and smooth.

“Jim Weir.”

“I’m glad you agreed to come. I’m sure you’re a busy man.”

“Business is a little slow these days, matter of fact.”

“I understand. You’ve had a lot on your mind with everything.”

“I imagine you have, too.”

Cantrell studied him, a wrinkle of surprise crossing his face. “Well, yes I have. Jim, I want you to know how sorry I am about what happened to your sister. She was one of my favorite people at the Whale’s Tale — she could brighten up a whole night. I’m... genuinely, deeply affected by her death — that way.”

Looking into Cantrell’s face, Weir found a perfect correlative to the man’s words: He actually looked crushed. Astonishing, thought Weir. The proposition hit him right then, that Cantrell was crazy enough to write Mr. Night’s letter to Raymond, and mean every word of it. “I’m touched by your depth of feeling, Dave.”

Cantrell nodded and stared at Jim. He was medium height and build, dressed in a navy suit, a pale pink shirt, and a necktie with a bold abstract print. He wore tassled loafers and socks that matched the shirt. His face was tanned, and the smile lines at the corner of his mouth were there even when he wasn’t smiling. Cantrell’s hair was dark brown, wavy, combed back from a high forehead. His eyes were blue, the eyelids just a shade heavy on the outer edges, giving his face an air of understanding and wry humor. His hands were strong and heavily veined; the wedding band thin and simple. He looked like a man used to making decisions that didn’t please everyone, then living with them. The beam from the overhead lamp formed a pale circle on his folded newspaper. To Weir, Cantrell looked just as he did on TV.

The car eased onto Balboa Boulevard, the privacy partition already up.

“I’m sorry about the shakedown,” said Cantrell. “I want to keep things as informal as possible right now.”

“Bodyguards lend a friendly air.”

“So do tape recorders.” He leaned back and regarded Weir openly. “Your relationship to Becky Flynn, and, of course, Virginia, aren’t lost on me. I’m a cautious man, and I apologize if it comes off as suspicion.”

The limo made a U-turn past the ferry landing, then headed east up the boulevard. Weir sat back, committed to the idea of playing this one close to his chest, for right now. Let Cantrell put up his ante — whatever it is — then raise the hell out of him. If all Cantrell wanted was an early look at Jim’s cards, the best idea might be to give him a peek at his best. While that was going on, there were two things he needed. The first should be easy; the second might not.

“I try to stay clear of the politics,” said Weir. “It’s not my game.”

“It’s certainly Becky Flynn’s. I watched a closed-circuit broadcast of her little press conference this morning. The media should love it. She’s gunning for me through Cheverton and whatever she’s dug up on those people. Would you say that’s an accurate assessment?”

“I’d have to say so.”

“I thought you would, since you’re doing her legwork.”

“She’s got a client to defend and I’m working for her. Her case for Horton Goins took her to Cheverton, among other places.”

“What did you find?”

“Pretty much what she said to the press.”

“There’s more than that or she wouldn’t have been so bold.”

Weir shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“I’m sure we will, knowing Becky. And I wish her all the luck in the world defending Horton Goins, because I believe he is only partly guilty.”

Weir said nothing.

“The Newport Beach Police and the district attorney have damaging evidence against him. Brian Dennison and George Percy are competent men.”

Jim studied Cantrell again. The party line, he thought. No surprise.

Cantrell sat back. The reading lamp still shone down on him, its beam brushing his shoulder, then passing on to illuminate the circle of newspaper. A hair lay caught on top of his coat shoulder, wavering slightly in the draft from the air conditioner.

“However, I believe that Goins was merely used to commit the act. He was employed on behalf of certain people who are opposed to my political views — paid handsomely, I would hope. Now, the flowers found on Ann were allegedly ordered by someone at a company I own. They were bought over the phone, on a company credit card, so it could have been anyone with access to the card number. At PacifiCo, that makes about eight authorized people; at Cheverton, two more. Unauthorized possibilities? About twenty-five hundred. The card could also have been used by anyone outside the company who knew the number, or got lucky making a number up. It certainly could have been used by the same people who employed Mr. Horton Goins. But who is the card holder? Cheverton. And who owns Cheverton? I do. Are you with me, Mr. Weir?”

“So far.”

“Second, a tie tack was stolen from my beach house last month, along with some other things. It turned up at the murder scene, in the hands of Mackie Ruff. A Detective Innelman traced it to the jewelry store where my wife bought it.”

“It also turned up on your video blurb against Prop A.”

“I know that. It was planted at the crime scene by Goins, as ordered. I’m positive of it.”

“How can you be positive?”

“Because, Jim,” said Cantrell, leaning forward, “I wasn’t there. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t know her. She waited on me at the Whale — occasionally — and we got along just fine. The sum total of my relationship with your sister was professional. She was a lovely, bright young lady and I liked her very much. I never physically touched her. I never made a pass at her, or her at me. And I’m not going to sit still while someone tries to set me up. Are you listening?”

“Very closely. Go on.”

“It’s not lost on me — or you and Becky — that Ann’s car was found a block or so from my beach house, or that I ate at her station the night she died. The police know it. Did you?”

“Yes. And nobody’s accused you of murdering Ann. You’re the first to do that.”

“Mr. Weir, be as honest with me as I am with you. I’m not a stupid man. Becky is getting ready to make that claim; it’s the trump card in her election run — and she’s using you to gather evidence.”

“Becky’s framing you?”

Cantrell said nothing for a long moment. “Mr. Weir, I’m a lot less eager to accuse my accusers than they are to frame me. If I knew who was behind this, I would go straight to Brian Dennison and George Percy. For now, I would have to consider Becky Flynn a prime candidate. Her offer to defend Goins might not be purely for the publicity. Have you thought of that? At some point, she not only could be defending Goins but defending herself, or people sympathetic with her views. Of course, she’d be immensely better off if Goins was simply found dead, wouldn’t she?”

Weir silently acknowledged the monstrous logic. “You’ll never convince me that Becky had her best friend murdered. I’ve known her for more than thirty years. She’d known Ann for thirty-plus years.”

“And I’d known her as a waitress for a few months. Where is my motive?”

Jim smiled slightly. “Maybe your conscience is a little overworked. There isn’t enough to charge you.”

Cantrell shook his head at Jim, the lines of his face deepening. A plain and simple anger flickered in his eyes. “Becky doesn’t need me charged. She knows, as a lawyer, that she doesn’t have a case. She just needs me slandered before June fifth, dragged in for questioning, linked to Ann in any way possible. God Weir, open your eyes. You’re being used, and so am I. One more point here, since you brought it up — you don’t know the first thing about my conscience.”

Jim considered the unabated anger in Cantrell’s eyes. “You’re probably right about that.” He took one of the fresh copies of Horton Goins’s photo from his jacket pocket and handed it to Cantrell.

Cantrell took it, placing a glorious thumb directly onto the bottom-right corner of the print surface. “Horton Goins,” he said.

“Have you seen him?”

Cantrell was incredulous. “What? I’ve seen this picture in every newspaper in the county for a week, and you ask me if I’ve seen him? All of a sudden, under your intense cross-examination, I realize I’ve seen this guy?”

“All that must mean no.”

Cantrell handed back the photo, shaking his head. “Idiots,” he said, mostly to himself.

Jim looked at the picture again, then slipped it back into his pocket. Fingerprints, he thought; one down. “Sorry, never hurts to double-check.”

Cantrell stared out the window for a while, seemingly oblivious to Weir.

“I guess you’ll be happy to see Horton Goins arrested,” said Weir. “He can finger his bosses if George Percy puts enough pressure on him — I mean, if he’s got any bosses. All in all, I’ll bet you’d like to see nothing happen until after June fifth.”

Cantrell nodded. “Dennison is using Goins to look good, and so is Becky. It’s fair. What I’m saying is, the more Becky comes rapping on my door with ‘evidence’ that I was involved with Ann, the more I’m sure that someone is creating a case against me. I’m asking you to consider the possibility.”

Cantrell studied him from the padded recess of the corner. The reading lamp was still trained on his paper. The hair stuck to his shoulder still wavered in and out of the beam. “Weir, some things are more important than who wins this election. A woman’s life has been lost. At least one innocent man — I — am being implicated. Forget the election. You don’t think Goins did it. Fine. If Goins didn’t do it, he’ll walk. But you and Becky should either get off my case or get into it far enough to find the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

“I didn’t know her. I didn’t kill her. The end.”

“Where were you the night she died?”

“At the beach house, reviewing a TV spot.”

“Alone?”

“Alone until almost midnight. Then home. I was with my wife from twelve o’clock on, but I’ll be extremely unhappy if she has to make a statement to that effect. In fact, if it comes to that, there are a few things I want you to know. Mr. Weir, you’re entitled to your own uneducated, undocumented opinions. But if anything about my ‘relationship’ with Ann gets to the press, or to my wife, I will take that as a personal attack. I will call on every resource I have, every bit of influence I’ve earned, every favor owed me, and employ every power of my organization to crush you, Becky, and your mother. Completely and without restraint. One fault of mine, Mr. Weir, is that I relish destroying my enemies, almost as much as I enjoy rewarding my friends. First off, my attorneys have drafted a defamation of character and slander suit that will take your last dime just to defend — whether I win it or not. And I will. We’ll be asking one hundred million dollars for personal and punitive damages — more than that if Prop A passes on the heels of a scandal. Named are Becky Flynn, Jim Weir, and Virginia Weir as chair of the Proposition A election committee. If the proposition fails, I’ll see to it that Dennison exercises the city’s right of eminent domain in your neighborhood, and that Virginia’s home, Becky’s home, Poon’s Locker, Ann’s Kids, and Raymond’s house are the first to be leveled. I can do these things, Weir, and I will. Maybe you forgot, but I own that land — you just lease it from me. I met with you here of my own free will, to clear up some very unfortunate suspicions. I guessed that you are a reasonable man, and I see no reason to change that supposition. I’m asking you to show me enough respect to examine any suspicions before you make me crush you. You might think this is an economical way to steal an election that will affect the way I make my living. But I’ll tell you — it will cost you, your mother, and Becky Flynn everything but your lives. Everything. I hope I’m communicating to you how serious this is.”

Cantrell knocked his knuckles on the partition and the driver moved into the left lane for a U-turn.

Jim watched Coast Highway revolve around the windows, saw the yacht basin to his left as they headed toward the peninsula bridge. “Nice town, isn’t it?”

Cantrell’s face hardened again: A vein that Jim hadn’t noticed before manifested itself above the pink shirt collar. “Let me guess what you’re thinking now,” said Cantrell. “You are sitting here in this pretentious limousine, realizing what a pig I am. How my vision for this county is an abomination. You see me and people like me, and the Irvine Company, and William Lyon and Kathryn Thompson as just pumping dollars out of the ground, cramming more and more paying customers into smaller and smaller places, ruining what was once a lovely, simple place. Close?”

“I see that, sure. Who couldn’t?”

“Consider this: I’ve built over eighty thousand homes in this county over the last twenty years of my life. People live in them, make love in them, and raise families in them. My homes keep people warm in the winter and cool in the summer; they don’t leak, they don’t crumble, and they don’t fall down. Every year, they’re worth more to the people who own them. I employ over twenty-five hundred people, from professional architects down to the night custodians. I pay close to sixty-five million dollars a year in various taxes, support artistic and charitable groups with another eight million, offer a scholarship fund every year for about a million more, and I offered to build a homeless shelter anywhere in the county, but the homeowners won’t let me because they don’t want it in their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that I built for them in the first place. This is what you call rape? I’m not a gangster. All I’m trying to do is build houses, for chrissakes.”

Jim watched Cantrell settle back into his leather seat. “There’s a point when enough is enough,” said Jim. “There’s a point when you’re selling an illusion and nothing more. I don’t think a man like you knows where the point is.”

“Becky does? Virginia does?”

“I think so. They just live here, like they always have. This land isn’t a business proposition to them. You people aren’t artists. You’re merchants.”

“High sentiments from a man who scrounges for gold that other men have died for.”

“I’ll die for it, too, if I stay in the game long enough. I’ve assumed that risk. Are you willing to die for the Balboa Redevelopment Project? Or when the pickings get slim, will you just pack it in and go somewhere else?”

Cantrell leaned forward and looked out the window. “Look at the peninsula, Weir. Look at that grotesque Fun Zone. Look at the bars, the beat-up old houses, the traffic piled up, and the air full of poison. What’s wrong with giving people a better place to live and work?”

“You’re selling it to them, Cantrell. Besides, people don’t want your gifts — they want you to leave them alone. And don’t try to tell me — like you’re trying to tell the voters — that all your new buildings and neighborhoods and shopping centers and roads are going to make the traffic better around here, are going to make the air cleaner.”

Jim was quiet for a long moment. The old neighborhood slid past the smoked glass of the limo. “Too bad you didn’t know Ann better,” he said. “She was a lovely person. She was smart and happy most of the time, and she worked hard. She didn’t complain. She enjoyed things. You’d have liked her.”

Weir studied the changes in Cantrell’s face. What he saw was confusion.

“I did like her.”

“Did you know she was pregnant when she died?”

The shock that registered on Cantrell’s face looked practiced. “No. Did she have kids?”

“You know she didn’t have kids.”

Cantrell said nothing.

“Ann grew up here. Right here. She was a child of this place. Every time I look around me, I see something Ann did, something Ann would have liked to see.”

Cantrell looked at Weir without speaking. Jim watched the hair on his suit wavering in the draft. He pointed. “Like right there, for instance. That little house coming up with the fence around it? That’s where Annie had her first babysitting job.”

Cantrell studied the house more thoroughly than Jim had expected, then turned back to him. “Nice place to grow up.”

“Then, there at the corner is where she wiped out on skates and got five stitches in her chin.”

Cantrell looked again, with apparent interest. Jim saw a distance in his eyes, a detachment.

“Over there was where her best friend lived, Becky Flynn.”

Cantrell was nodding now, still staring off at some indeterminate point. When he finally spoke again, it was in a dry, flat voice. “The thing I liked best about Ann was her sense of humor. She’d say things that would sound cruel coming from anyone else. She’d say things like that about herself. She could cheer me up, just waiting on my table.”

“Right there,” said Jim, “is where we got our first dog.”

When Cantrell turned to look, Jim leaned slightly toward him, pointing to the exact house. He gently swept his other hand through the beam of the reading light, just above Cantrell’s shoulder, then closed his fist and brought it to rest beside him. He smiled when Cantrell asked him what the dog’s name was.

“Cassius,” he said. “A chocolate Lab.”

“Cassius,” said Cantrell. “Did he change his name to Muhammad Ali?”

“Always just Cassius to us. Ann picked it from Shakespeare. She liked to read. She liked to write.”

“Ah, yes.” Cantrell looked at Jim, an assayer’s stare. “I’m sorry about Ann, Jim. Please believe that. I didn’t mean to land on you so hard. All this talk of elections and campaigns and slander doesn’t really relate to Ann, the flesh and blood woman. Just don’t let them yank your chain. You seem like a good enough man to me. And I wasn’t involved with your sister.”

“You liked her, though.”

“I told you that. She was...” Cantrell’s voice cracked, trailing off into a sigh. He stared out the window the rest of the way down the peninsula.

When they reached the theater, the car pulled over. The man with the crew cut flicked a cigarette into the street, then stepped from under the marquee to open the door.

“Let me know if I can help,” said Cantrell, offering his hand. “You can find me at the beach house for the next few nights. I’m sure Becky Flynn has the address and phone number.”

Jim, still palming the hair in his right fist, looked at Cantrell’s offered hand.

“Mr. Weir, you should know that I am capable of making things happen very quickly.”

Weir climbed out and let the man shut the door. Crossing Balboa Boulevard, he almost could hear the hair in his fist bellowing out for Ken Robbins’s Crime Lab, screaming that it would match the hair on the letter from Mr. Night.