Pacific Beat

Chapter 3

Raymond was already in the chief’s office when Weir walked in at two in the afternoon, three days later. The chiefs secretary shut the door behind him. Raymond, unshaven and still pale as the walls, looked up to Jim and said nothing.

Sitting slightly off to the side of the big metal desk was a man that Weir had never seen before. His legs were crossed primly, his back erect, his dark straight hair gelled away from his forehead to reveal a sharp widow’s peak. His nose was a larger version of the peak: abrupt, pointed, assertive. His suit was proudly European. He looked at Jim through rimless round spectacles, then stood.

Brian Dennison, the interim Newport Beach police chief, stood, too, offered Jim his hand and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so deeply sorry, Jim.”

Jim had hardly slept or eaten; he had not, in fact, truly done anything since seeing Ann’s still body on the dark earth of the bay. He had simply gone through motions: answering questions from a series of cops, bumming a ride back to Ray’s car, telling Virginia what had happened, holding her rigid body close in a long embrace that he wished would impart comfort but he knew didn’t. It was impossible to get away from himself. He could not adjust to this stark new order of things.

The big house had served as a fulcrum for family sorrow in the days following. Virginia’s brother had stopped by for an afternoon and spent two nights; Poon’s sister had done likewise; a large contingent of Cruzes had materialized and spent their nights in sleeping bags strewn about the Eight Peso Cantina — Raymond’s parents’ bar — which they had closed for mourning. Funeral arrangements were made, pending the autopsy. The house filled with floral arrangements and the individual scents of family, which for Weir formed an invisible, suffocating cage. Just as he was about to break — break into what, he wasn’t sure — Virginia mobilized and threw everyone out, gathered up most of the flowers and tossed them into the dumpster behind Poon’s Locker, then retreated into the grim efficiency that was her nature. Jim spent some long hours with her, just sitting in the living room, wordless passages of time unfolding with a paralyzing slowness. Virginia would seem ready to speak, then change her mind and descend again into herself to do private battle with her demons. Weir had executed his responsibilities with what dispatch he could muster. In his moments alone, often as he lay in bed and waited for sleep to release him, he shed tears that did less to reduce the mass of his grief than to reveal fresh exposures. At these times, he felt as if his body had been turned inside out, and that every nerve and organ was exposed to the abrasions of the air, the bed, the terrible rawness of a world without comfort. Twice, Raymond had begged Jim to take him down into the sea, and twice they had suited up at Diver’s Cove, lumbered through the shore-break, and floated out to the rocks, where they finally descended into a world of silence and oblivious sea creatures that somehow helped to underscore the breadth of life that, with or without Ann, would go on.

“Thanks,” was all Jim said to Brian Dennison.

Dennison was a barrel-chested man with a strangely animated face and an attempted sense of decorum. He’d put on some weight since Jim had last seen him. He introduced Widow’s Peak — Lt. Mike Paris. Paris was Community Relations officer, a job, Weir knew, only for the lame or the administration-bound. Paris nodded and shook Jim’s hand with the intimacy of welcoming someone to a secret, exclusive club. “You have the sympathies of this department.”

Weir sat down next to Raymond and looked at him again, a glance from one private hell to another.

Dennison strolled behind his desk, sat down, looked at each of the three men before him, then stood and went to the window. He cradled an elbow on his chest, resting his chin in the upraised hand, then turned to Jim. “We’ve got...” he said, but didn’t finish the sentence. He exhaled audibly, then looked out the window again, regrouping.

Jim occasionally had run across Brian Dennison during his ten years with the Sheriff’s, mostly at parties and law-enforcement symposia. He was a smoothly aggressive type, who could bang heads on the street and kiss ass at the station with equal aplomb. He had always seemed to Weir to be the archetypal Newport Beach cop. Dennison was popular among the movers and shakers because his department patrolled their neighborhoods with a visible ferocity. The everyday folk believed that Chief Dennison — like his predecessor — was arrogant and heavy-handed, and there was a long list of brutality and harassment suits to support their view. Most of the trouble happened on the peninsula — Jim’s neighborhood — where the blue-collar people blow off steam and the tourists can behave like swine.

Dennison’s official title was Interim Police Chief because the former chief had died suddenly of a heart attack seven months ago — a few weeks before Jim left for Mexico. Weir had followed the stories in the papers: Dennison was moved up from captain on a temporary basis, awaiting a final decision by the city council. But with the mayor’s seat up for grabs in next month’s election, the appointment of a new chief had been postponed when Dennison — suddenly and without the usual rumor and speculation — announced his candidacy for mayor.

Watching with concern as this unfolded in the papers, Weir was impressed with Dennison’s sense of running to daylight. He had gone from obscurity to interim chief virtually overnight, then parlayed the momentum into his political debut — all with a smoothness that made the transition look natural. Weir had seen a huge blowup of Dennison’s face on the back of a transit district bus on the way to the station, and in some indescribable way, it looked perfect there.

Weir noted a large GROW, DON’T SLOW! poster on the chiefs wall, and easily figured why a cop/mayor would throw in with the land developers: bigger tax base, fatter budgets, expanded power. Likely, they were financing his campaign.

This was Virginia’s latest cause, he thought, Proposition A — another slow-growth measure that she and like-minded citizens had shoehorned onto the coming June ballot. Jim wondered whether Ann’s death would bring Virginia’s activism to a halt. For a moment, he could see her face when he told her.

He tried to rally his thoughts back into the room. He needed a handle. His gaze fell on the MAYOR BRIAN DENNISON poster and for a moment he was held by the big black pupils of the eyes. Apply yourself, he thought: Remain present.

He tried to picture Dennison’s opponent, attorney Becky Flynn, a local beauty who’d grown up in the same neighborhood that Jim had. Jim had followed her career, mostly in the papers, since quitting the Sheriff’s two years ago to find the Black Pearl. That was when he had quit Becky, too, and she him. Her occasional calls since then had the tone of discovery motions. He imagined her without effort now, standing in a green robe in the porch light of her bungalow. Becky had been, to date, the love of Jim Weir’s life.

The interim chief looked briefly at his GROW, DON’T SLOW! poster. Dennison’s lively eyebrows always seemed to be compensating for the calm of his pale, unhurried eyes. They arched up now in a blend of concern and helplessness. “Jim, we’ve got a... a very uh, interesting situation here. I’ve talked with Mike and Raymond about it, and we agreed to give something a try. Something that we’ve, uh, never tried before. Never had to try before...” Weir waited, noting how hard Dennison was trying to talk like a politician.

“Jim, we have a witness.”

Weir’s sense of abstraction was replaced by a pristine clarity. He straightened in his chair.

“Kind of. His name is Malachi Ruff. Ring a bell?”

“One of the bay bums.”

“That’s right. Mackie was sleeping down in Galaxy Park that night — a couple hundred yards east of where we found... Ann.”

“What did he see?”

Dennison walked slowly to the coffee machine. “Some of this, Jim?”

“What did he see?”

Dennison stirred in some creamer with a red plastic stick, laying out Malachi Ruffs story. Ruff was sleeping and he was drunk. Mackie, of course, is always drunk unless he’s in the tank. He woke up when he heard a woman scream. He looked over the bushes he was in, couldn’t see anything because of the fog. Mackie figured he was dreaming. He lay back down. Then he heard footsteps down by the water-that was about a hundred feet away — so he got up from the bushes again and looked. The footsteps were of someone running, running steadily, like a jogger might. He still couldn’t see very well because of the fog, but he got a glimpse of a man running toward the street. Then he heard a car door open and shut. The engine started, and a second later — says Mackie — a car rolls down Galaxy, going toward Pacific Coast Highway.

Jim watched Dennison sip his coffee, look at Paris, then go back to his desk. He straightened something in front of him and looked at Paris again.

“Mackie said it was a cop car,” said the chief. “One of ours — white, four-door, emblem on the side.”

Raymond stared at something on his thumbnail. Weir saw that Dennison’s thick, heavy face had reddened. Paris sat immobile, knees crossed.

Not a good plank in a new mayor’s platform, Weir concluded. He said nothing.

Dennison sat down and looked at Raymond. Jim saw that some transfer had been made. Raymond spoke next, his voice soft, with little inflection. “You know and we know that Mackie Ruff is about as unreliable a witness as we could find. But for right now, he’s what we have. We can’t function as a department if a Newport Beach cop on patrol three nights ago killed Ann. We think Mackie got it wrong. But nobody here takes a statement like his lightly, even if it’s from a drunk.”

Mike Paris collected a glance from Dennison, uncrossed his legs, and looked at Weir. “At the same time,” said Paris, “we’re kind of stuck, Jim. We don’t want a word of this out, and we don’t want Internal Affairs on it unless we’ve got more than a drunk’s word. The press, the suspicion-morale would go to hell. If one of our men did it, then we’ll take him down. Until then, we don’t want the press or the public or anybody else speculating. It’s my job to keep things going smoothly on the outside, and on the inside. Our going-in position is that Mackie Ruff is full of shit, and we don’t want to turn this place upside down if we can help it.”

Raymond stood up and went to the window. “We could use someone on the outside, someone who knows the ropes, can work with evidence, and has some halfway plausible reason to be hanging around, checking facts. I thought of you.”

“And I think it’s a good suggestion,” said Dennison. “You’ve got the tools, two years with the Sheriff dicks, and you can ask questions about the death of your sister without drawing too much suspicion.”

The death of your sister. The words struck Jim oddly, as if Ann had gone from flesh and blood to a case number in less than a heartbeat. The fact of the matter was that she had. Something cold stirred inside him, then sat up alertly on its haunches and waited. “I can’t get much that would stand in court,” he said. “Not as a civvy, I can’t.”

“If you find anything that will get us near a courtroom, this department will be all over it,” said Paris.

“That’s the whole issue,” said Dennison. “The second you find something wrong, we take over. You’d walk point for a few days — that’s all.”

Weir looked at Raymond, slouching against the window.

“We need you, Jim,” he said.

Weir said nothing. If a Newport cop had killed Ann, Weir knew he’d have a war on his hands. If not, he would still make a lot of trouble for himself, fast. But when it came right down to it, there was really no choice. “I’m on,” he said.

Dennison nodded, staring at Jim with his placid gray eyes. “There are three things we need to get clear on before you start. One, not a word from you to anyone about who! you’re looking at, what you’re looking for. If rumors start, we’ll leave you hanging in the wind. Two, we’ll pay you a hundred an hour under the table — no records, no IRS, nobody knows you’re on the roll. Three... Cruz, you want to cover this?”

Raymond sat down next to Jim again and leaned forward in his chair. “It isn’t lost on me or Brian that we’re just as much suspects in this case as any other cop on the force. We I expect you to be looking at us. We suggest you start with the chief and me, since we’re the ones you’ll be reporting to and—”

“We don’t suggest it,” said Paris, more to Dennison than Jim. “We demand it.”

“We demand it,” echoed the chief. “We’ve got to start clean, Jim. Clean... from the top down. When you’re satisfied that it wasn’t me driving Mackie Ruffs cop car that night, and it wasn’t Raymond, then I’m your contact here in the department. In my absence, report to Mike here. Until then, we don’t know you. I’ve talked with Ken Robbins at the Crime Lab. He’ll be available to you for all the forensics backup you’ll need. That’s Robbins, personally. His people won’t know what you’re doing. Of course, my men are investigating the murder while we sit here. Innelman and Deak. I personally woke up Dwight’s wife when I called that morning, and he was sawing logs beside her. He drives an unmarked, anyway. So Dwight’s clean — we know that.”

“Who took Ruffs statement?”

“Innelman. I’ve encouraged him to ignore it as the alcoholic bullshit that it probably is. And I’ve ordered him to keep it quiet. Dwight’s a quick study.”

Weir looked again at Raymond, who stared out the window now with dark, unfocused eyes. “Ray, you taking some time off?”

Raymond nodded slightly.

“Three weeks,” said Dennison. “And he’s not touching this case. There are regulations about that — good ones.”

Interim Chief Dennison closed the bulging file that was in front of him and tapped it with a thick forefinger. “Ruffs statement, Innelman’s crime-scene report, and some photographs of... Ann. More to the point, the personnel schedules for my department for the last three weeks. There were thirty-two officers on the street the night that Ann was killed — Robbins says time of death was between midnight and one A.M. So we’ve got two shifts to account for — night and graveyard. We had twenty-four patrol cars out — eight partners, sixteen solos.”

“Night shift ends at midnight?”

“It’s staggered. You’ve got photocopies of the time cards so you’ll know who came and went and when they did it. There’s also a transcript of Dispatch and a copy of the tape — we record everything now because the public is so damned eager to sue. The tapes help us cover our butts.”

“Is the transcript clocked?”

“Fifteen-minute intervals, marked by Carol Clark in red pencil. She came on at four P.M., worked a twelve-hour.” Dennison leaned forward and studied Weir. He tapped the files again. “This is your job, Jim. Your job is not to solve the case. Your job is to clear my men. If you pick up a scent, it’s all mine. You answer to me. You remain silent. You are alone.”

The chiefs phone rang. He picked it up, listened, and thanked somebody. “That was Robbins. He’s finished the autopsy and he’s ready to talk when you are, Jim.”

Weir stood.

“I may as well tell you right now that I had a squad car out myself that night,” said Dennison. His face flushed to a deeper red again, which made his pale gray eyes seem all the cooler. “My old Jag wouldn’t start, so I took home one of the fleet cars with a bad radio. Dobson in Maintenance would tell you the same thing, so I’ll save you the trouble. Here.”

Dennison placed the thick file in a new briefcase and snapped it shut. There was a MAYOR BRIAN DENNISON sticker on the lid, and a GROW, DON’T SLOW! button beside it.

Weir took it. “How much did you drive the squad car that night?”

“Just home. Then back to here. Check the odometer against Dobson’s log. I’ll have my wife call you — I was with her all night.”

“Paris, where were you three nights back?” asked Jim.

“Off shift,” he answered, moving toward the door. “I haven’t driven a beat since eighty-five — wrenched my back in a pursuit.”

Weir studied Paris’s carnivorous face, a series of sharp angles all aiming down.

“Have you found Ann’s car yet?”

Dennison shook his head. “No, but the Harbor Patrol divers found the murder weapon Tuesday afternoon — standard kitchen knife with a six-inch blade. And Innelman found a piece of gold jewelry at the crime scene. It’s the back of an earring, maybe a tie tack. We’re tracing it through the local jewelers, but it’s going to be tough. Everything is in the reports I gave you. You’ve got what we’ve got, Weir. No secrets.”

Weir left and Raymond followed him out. The station seemed taut with some energy that wasn’t there before. Jim noted the pivoting shoulders, the lapsed conversations, the eyes that followed them down the hallways and out the front door.

They walked out to the parking lot. The haze had burned off and left a cool, muted afternoon. Weir looked at all the GROW, DON’T SLOW! and MAYOR BRIAN DENNISON stickers that the PD people had stuck to their bumpers. He wondered whether Becky had a chance.

And he realized fully now why Dennison had recruited him to investigate his own department: Opponent Becky Flynn now had a friend, an old lover, in fact, paid to assure her that nothing of the sort was taking place.

Raymond wiped his eyes and put on a pair of sunglasses. They walked through the parking lot in silence, finally stopping at Raymond’s ancient station wagon. He and Ann had bought it almost twenty years ago, for the family they were going to have.

“What’s the story on Paris?” Jim asked.

“Just a flack, but Dennison relies on him a lot. We call him Parrot because he can make his voice sound like anybody’s. Does these great imitations of Brian when he’s not around. He’s all right.”

Ray had the key aimed toward the lock, but he couldn’t get it in. Finally, it found its mark and the door opened with a grating, metallic groan.

Raymond turned to Weir, took a deep breath, and stood straight. He braced on the door to keep himself up. His eyes were invisible behind the dark lenses. “Jim, I want to tell you something. Sometime not too long from now, we’re going to find the guy who did it. And I want you to know right now that I’m going to kill him. That’s how it’s going to go down. You have any problem with that?”

Weir’s answer surprised him, not because of its black implications, but because it gave him, for the first time since that moment on the bay when he saw the blanket, a glimmer of something that he could substitute for hope.

“Save a heartbeat for me,” he said.

Raymond nodded. “We have to dive again, Jim. Get down there deep and wash all this away.”

“Sure Ray. Whatever you want.”