The Boys from Santa Cruz

6

As a private investigator, Skip Epstein had encountered no shortage of cheating spouses, insurance fakers, and runaway debtors. What he hadn’t seen many of were dead bodies, so for a moment there, when the jumpsuited morgue attendant had lowered the rubber sheet to reveal the face of the corpse underneath, Skip saw stars, heard a roaring in his ears, and retasted the tuna melt rising in his gorge. When he came back to full consciousness after a brief temporal discontinuity, Sergeant Darrien, the sheriff’s deputy who’d walked him down to the morgue, was holding him by the elbow to steady him while the morgue attendant held out a barf basin.

“I’m okay now,” Skip protested unconvincingly.

Darrien led him over to a folding chair. “Is that Mr. Brobauer?”

“Judge Brobauer-no question about it. But what in God’s name happened to his eyes?”

“Turkey vulture, we think. There were some feathers scattered around where we found the body.”

“Really? And where was that?” Skip put a little extra gee whiz in his voice, trying to draw Darrien out without seeming to be grilling him.

“On a ridge just south of Big Sur. Sickest crime scene I’ve ever seen.”

“No shit?”

“Swear to God. The victim was staked to the ground with metal tent stakes, and there was a dead animal placed on his chest-a very dead animal. I can’t tell you what kind-that’s a control variable.” Control variables were clues the police held back in order to weed out the nut jobs who came out of the woodwork to confess every time a juicy murder hit the news.

Just then the phone on the wall started ringing. The sergeant excused himself to answer it, then turned back to Skip after a brief conversation. “I’m supposed to bring you back upstairs,” he said tersely. “Lieutenant Farley wants to talk to you.”

Farley, Skip soon discovered, was a compact, khaki-uniformed forty-something with a square face and a Julius Caesar haircut. He greeted Skip coldly, nodded toward an uncushioned, decidedly unergonomic wooden chair next to his desk, then turned back to his computer and ignored Skip for the next few minutes.

Sitting down provided Skip with momentary relief-he’d done more walking in the last few hours than he normally did in a week. But after a few minutes in the hard-bottomed chair, his pain returned with a vengeance, and brought a gang of friends along for company. Skip dry-popped two Norco that left a not-unwelcome bitter taste at the back of his throat.

Finally the lieutenant looked up at him. “Epstein, eh?”

He’d pronounced it as if it rhymed with mean instead of fine; Skip let it go. “Yes, sir.”

“David Epstein?”

Skip nodded, not sure where this was going, but not much liking the ride.

“Friend of the victim’s family, eh?”

Another nod.

“Any reason why you didn’t happen to mention to anybody down here that you were a private investigator?”

Oh, crap. “It didn’t seem relevant-I only came down to ID the body.”

“I see. And you’ve done that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s Brobauer?”

“No question.”

“Good. Now get the hell out of here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They’re all one-syllable words, they shouldn’t be that difficult to understand.”

“But-”

“And when you get back to San Francisco”-enunciated with extreme distaste, if not full-out loathing-“please inform Warren Brobauer that if and when the Monterey County Sheriff’s Department requires the assistance of a private investigator, rest assured we will send for one. Until then, if I catch you sticking your nose into one of my cases without permission, I’ll have your license pulled so fast your head’ll spin like that girl in The Exorcist.”

Afterward, Skip would admit to Pender that he knew his response was childish. In the interest of public safety, he should have given Luke Sweet’s name to the detective, hurt feelings or no hurt feelings. Instead, he’d turned in the doorway on his way out and called, “Chuck you, Farley!”

It sure had seemed like a good idea at the time, though, he told Pender.

“Say what? You’re breaking up.”

“I SAID: IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME!” Skip shouted into his cell. Driving north up the peninsula on 101, he had just cleared San Jose and was hoping to reach San Francisco before the rush-hour traffic closed in.

“No harm done,” said Pender, speaking from a slightly mildewed room in the least expensive motel in Santa Cruz, the Bide-A-Nite on Soquel Avenue. “I told Klug about Brobauer, so if he hasn’t already hooked up with Farley on that, he will soon.”

“And Klug likes Sweet for the Harris murders?”

“Adores him.” A snick and a hiss-Pender had fired up a Marlboro with his venerable Zippo. “You know, I was thinking, as long as the locals down here seem to be getting their shit together, how about you and me taking a run up to Sweet’s old place to poke around? That’s where he tried to hole up the last time he was on the run.”

“Sure, why not?” said Skip. “Maybe I’ll get lucky twice.”

They agreed to meet at Skip’s apartment around nine o’clock the following morning. After giving Pender directions and signing off, Skip noticed that his cell phone battery was getting low. He switched the phone off, hooked it up to the car charger, and spent the rest of the ride listening to drive-time sports talk on KNBR. A particularly evocative beer commercial started him thinking about the icy green bottle of Heineken currently chilling in his refrigerator-he was all but salivating by the time he pulled into the single-car garage attached to his apartment.

The phone was fully charged by then. Skip unplugged it from the charger and slipped it into the right front pocket of his slacks. He used the remote device clipped to the sun visor to close the garage door behind him, and entered the apartment through a connecting door that led directly from the garage into the kitchen.

Still thinking about that beer, he tossed his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair, then headed straight for the refrigerator. Opened the door. Stooped to reach for the bottle of Heineken on the bottom shelf. Sensed movement behind him. Started to turn. Felt a blow on the back of the head and saw the universe explode into jagged spears of white light against a black velvet backdrop.