The Boys from Santa Cruz

5

Detective Lloyd Klug was a scrappy old-timer with gray hair cut en brosse and the flattened nose of a pugilist. Pender figured him for a welterweight, the kind of brawler who’d gladly take two shots to land one. He met Pender in the lobby of the Santa Cruz Police Department headquarters, a mission-style structure on Center Street with arched doorways and a red-tiled roof. His first question, after they’d shaken hands, was, “Mind if I smoke?”

By way of answer, Pender flashed his Marlboro hard pack. They adjourned the meeting to the courtyard, which had as a centerpiece a circular fountain with a sculpture of what looked like two elongated shark’s fins sticking up from its center. Klug fired up a Camel straight and apologized for his sketchy grasp of the Harris case.

He’d only been assigned to it the day before, he told Pender, when the Santa Cruz municipal police department took over jurisdiction from the county sheriff. It had been one of those jurisdictional pissing contests: two headless bodies had been discovered up in the unincorporated hills, and it wasn’t until after they’d been identified that a search of their home indicated they had been murdered inside the city limits.

“And even then, the sheriff’s department held on to it until yesterday, probably on the off chance they’d be able to solve it. When that didn’t turn out to be so easy, lo and behold: ‘Sorry, our mistake-I guess it was you guys’s case all along.’”

You guys’s. “Am I right in guessing you’re not from around here?”

“Philly. I came out here twenty years ago. Smartest move I ever made.”

“You’re going to look even smarter when this is over,” said Pender.

Klug worked a shred of tobacco from between his teeth, spat it out cleanly, expertly, just beyond the toes of his Bates Uniform oxford-style cop shoes. “Oh?”

Pender laid it all out for him: the psychopathic grandson who would have been everybody’s prime suspect if he weren’t already deceased; the coroner who now admitted he might not be all that deceased after all; the possibly related kidnap-murder down in Monterey County just the other day.

“So listen,” Klug said when Pender had finished. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I’ve dealt with the Bureau before, so I gotta ask: Is there some quid pro involved here?”

“What?”

“You looking to put the cuffs on him, hold a press conference? Or maybe there’s a federal warrant out for him someplace?”

Pender sighed. “Let’s make a deal. You don’t assume I’m a face-time-hungry Bureau asshole, I won’t assume you’re a local yokel who couldn’t find a turd in a bag of marshmallows.”

“At least until proven otherwise,” said Klug.

“You bet,” said Pender.