The Hanging

Chapter 7

“You knew the guy?”

Kevin Thornbury, the more senior of the two detectives sent out from the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, looked down his nose at me, accusation, skepticism in his tone-pure cop.

He was a man about my age, early forties, average height, average weight, average looks. Mostly, he looked tired, the sort of tired that a good night’s sleep won’t fix. But then, it was Friday night, and hours past the end of his regular work week. We knew from the deputy coroner, who had arrived a full hour earlier, that traffic leaving central LA had been brutal. Of the three groups who eventually showed up, the detectives, coming out of City of Commerce, had the furthest to travel and several more gnarly interchanges to navigate than the others.

Long before they arrived, Roger had unlocked the staff lounge and put on a pot of coffee. Thornbury and I, seated at a table in the lounge, both had steaming mugs beside us, but neither of us was drinking from them. Thornbury’s partner, a rookie detective named Fred Weber, was out in the lobby overseeing the crime scene. Roger was overseeing Weber, though he had no official role in the investigation other than local liaison. So except for technicians from the coroner’s office or Scientific Services Bureau coming in occasionally in search of coffee, Thornbury and I were alone in the lounge.

Thornbury waited for my answer, tapping the table between us with the end of his ballpoint pen.

“I didn’t know Holloway well,” I said.

“You know him well enough, though, to make the identification.”

“Yes,” I said. “Park Holloway was the college president. I work here.”

He looked at something in his notebook and then up at me.

“You said, ‘Park Holloway’?”

“Yes.”

“That Park Holloway?”

“He’s the only one I know.”

“Huh.” He studied the page again, crossed something out and wrote something down. Had he not recognized Holloway’s name until now? Genuine surprise on his face, or theatrics? I couldn’t get a handle on him. Was he playing me?

“You work here?” he asked, that skeptical scowl back in place.

“Temporarily,” I said. I had earlier spelled my name for him, and it had apparently rung no more bells than Holloway’s had initially.

“You’re a temp, huh? What, like a secretary?”

“I’m teaching in the film department this semester, part-time, filling in for someone who’s on sick leave.”

“Oh yeah?” A dismissive quality in the question. “What, you have the kids watch movies in class?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “I teach film production; the kids are making movies.”

He flicked his chin toward the door that led to the lobby. “Any idea what happened out there?”

“None,” I said. “He was hanging from the ceiling when I came in.”

“Anyone else in the building when you arrived?”

“I didn’t see or hear anyone.” I shrugged. “People generally leave early on Fridays.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Except you. Mind telling me what you were doing here?”

“You saw that apparatus Holloway is hanging from?” When he nodded, I said, “It was installed to hang a sculpture.”

“I wondered what that was.”

“I came here to shoot it.”

“Shoot it?” He tensed as his hand reflexively dropped to the butt of the gun holstered on his belt.

“With a camera,” I said. “I wanted to shoot some footage of the empty space before the sculpture is hung there next week. I’m making a short film about the artist and his work and I wanted a ‘before’ shot.”

Cradling his mug between his hands, Thornbury took a long look around the bright and airy room and out at the enclosed garden beyond tall glass doors. With a scowl he said, “This place looks more like a fancy hotel than a college administration building.”

“You know what the kids call it? The Taj Ma’Holloway.”

He chuckled. “So the president, this Holloway, wasn’t so popular, huh?”

“Not very, no.”

“You have any run-ins with him?”

“We had a little kerfuffle shortly after I was hired. He asked me to make a film about the campus for him to show at his state-of-the-college address. I told him I would have it done as a class project, but he wanted me to do it myself. I turned him down.”

“So he didn’t get his movie?”

“He did. His media staff put together a very nice production-that’s what they’re paid for. I was more worried about stepping on their toes than about making Holloway unhappy; sometimes I need to borrow Media’s facilities for my classes.”

“You said that at the end of the semester you’ll be out of a job. Your, what’d you call it, kerfuffle, with the college prez have anything to do with that?”

“No. I only contracted to work this semester.”

“Where’d you work before?”

“In television. My series was canceled.”

“So, what, Holloway wanted a little Hollywood glitz for his film?”

I shrugged again, noncommittal, but he was correct.

“How’d you end up here, from TV?” he asked, smug, patronizing in the way he said here, as if there was something deficient about the place. Or colleges in general; I’m a filmmaker, not a shrink, but if I had to guess, I’d say that academics were never Thornbury’s strong suit.

I told him, “When my series was cancelled a friend told me about this gig. I thought, why not? Something different to do until the next thing comes along.”

“Next thing? You a Hollywood gypsy, going from gig to gig?”

“I suppose.” Not exactly correct, but why get into it? I knew he was grilling me under the guise of small talk, and doing a decent job of it though he apparently found Hollywood to be as deficient as teaching. At the moment I was the only warm body available to put on a suspects list, so I knew it was in my best interests to keep things superficial; you never know when a bad impression or a wrong sort of answer might set complications in motion. I did not explain that I’d had my own network television series, “Maggie MacGowen Investigates,” for a long time, until a recent corporate reorganization.

My show was fairly cheap to produce and the audience numbers were respectable, so the chances of getting picked up elsewhere were fairly good. I’d been through this shuffle before. If something didn’t turn up, there was always independent production to fall back on. In the meantime, I was enjoying the break from the pressures of TV Land and I was having a great time working with young people who were excited about what they were doing. Teaching turned out to be demanding work, but I found it to be more rewarding than, for instance, reporting from the jungles of Guatemala about militant separatists, or dodging gangbanger bullets in any of LA’s benighted housing projects.

He said, “You seem pretty collected, I mean, walking in and finding the guy the way you did. Not many women would have handled the situation as well as you are.”

“I don’t feel collected.” Should I have dissolved into hysterics?

Thornbury’s partner, Fred Weber, came into the lounge and helped himself from the coffeepot on the counter.

“How’s it going in here?” Weber asked, looking past me at his colleague. He had rolled his shirtsleeves up to show his well-muscled forearms. From the bulk of him, I guessed he was a body builder.

“We’re doing okay,” Thornbury said. “What’s Opie up to?”

Weber shrugged. “Asking the techs a lot of questions. Probably the biggest case he’s ever been involved with.”

Opie? Did he mean Roger? I had to lower my face to hide my reaction. This pair had no clue who Roger was or what he had done before he showed up in Anacapa. My husband, who was a homicide detective for twenty years, thought that Roger Tejeda was one of the smartest detectives he had ever worked a case with. Though they worked for different police departments, they collaborated on several investigations and became good friends. Learning, early in our relationship, that both of us knew and valued Roger had been a happy discovery.

I looked from one detective to the other. They seemed to have forgotten I was there as they discussed what was happening in the lobby.

“May I leave?” I said. “It’s late. I’ve told you everything I know. Twice.”

Weber pulled out a chair next to Thornbury, turned it around and straddled it, leaning his big-gun arms across the chair back. The way he studied me, he reminded me of Sister Dolores of Eternal Sorrows, the counselor at my high school, preparing to launch into a pontification of information and correction.

Roger came into the room just then. He leaned against the service counter, arms folded over his baseball shirt, and listened as Weber went into his pitch.

“Ma’am, there are certain procedures and protocols that we in law enforcement follow that might seem puzzling or even intimidating to a civilian like you, but know that they are necessary. It’s natural for you to be a little scared of authority figures like policemen, but all we’re trying to do is find out what happened.”

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. Patronizing putz, I thought, but stayed quiet, didn’t tell him I had been through the drill before. Didn’t tell him that Holloway was not the first dead man I had seen. Didn’t give him anything he might spend half the night asking questions about, and that had nothing to do with the man in the lobby who was lying on the coroner’s gurney under a sheet.

“I hope you’ll be patient with us,” Weber said. “We may ask you the same questions six different ways until you begin to think we aren’t half as smart as we look-which I admit isn’t all that sharp-but this is the way things are done by the experts, so just hang in there with us.”

“Good to know,” I said. “But it’s been a long night, and I would like to go home.”

“All in good time.”

I dared to look over at Roger. He had a tooth-sucking grin on his face when I caught his eye. He lifted the corner of his cheek in a little wink, and I knew Weber was in trouble.

Weber said, “You probably told my partner already, but I’d like you to tell me something about your relationship with Peter Holloway.”

“Park,” Thornbury corrected. “Park Holloway.”

Weber nodded acknowledgement of the correction, but the name didn’t seem to ring any bells for him, yet.

“Hardly knew him,” I said.

“Help me understand why, after everyone else had already left campus, the two of you were alone in this building.”

I sighed, said, “The light was right at five o’clock.”

Eyes intent on my face, he said, “Miss MacGowen, this will go easier if you just answer the question.”

“I did.”

“So, Detective Weber,” Roger said, startling Weber by interrupting. “How long you been working Homicide?”

Weber hesitated before he decided to answer, seemed annoyed by the interruption.

“About two years now, sir.”

“You ever run into a detective named Flint? Mike Flint?”

I looked again at Roger and remembered Mike leaning against our kitchen counter, very much as Roger was at that moment, teasing. A powerful sadness washed over me, caught me unawares, but it had been a very long day-I had found a dead man, for God’s sake-and I wished Mike were there. I had to look away for a moment to let the mist clear from my eyes.

“Mike Flint?” Weber said. “Sure. Worked LAPD, Robbery-Homicide out of police HQ downtown. Everyone on the job has heard about Mike Flint.”

“What did you hear?”

“He was a legend,” Weber said. “Totally old school, you know, one of the last of the real cowboys, kicked butt and took names later. A D.A. told me once that when Flint filed a case, it was golden.”

Weber wasn’t finished: “And the women-God, if half the stories about him and women are true-”

“I don’t know about that,” Thornbury said. “But he was one hell of a detective.”

Weber looked over at Thornbury. “Flint died, what, about a year ago?”

“A year next month,” I said. “He was my husband.”

Talk about a conversation stopper.

Weber, whose face turned bright crimson from the top of the four-in-hand knot in his necktie to his close-cropped scalp, could not look at me. I’d heard the stories about Mike and the women who came and went before my time, old news. But I wasn’t going to say anything to make Weber feel more comfortable about his gaffe, the arrogant prick.

I have known many LA County Sheriff’s detectives-the Bulldogs of the Homicide Bureau-and found them all to be smart, and most of them to be genuinely concerned about the people they encounter. A nicer group of men and women would be hard to find. But these two, while maybe smart enough, lacked one very important quality: respect. I thought that I might call my friend Sgt. Rich Longshore, a senior member of the Homicide Bureau, and suggest that this pair needed a little etiquette counseling.

Thornbury took a deep breath before he gathered himself enough to look at me, but he seemed not to know what to say. It was Roger who rescued them.

“Coroner wants you to take a look at the ligature before he puts the victim in the bus.”

“Okay, thanks,” Thornbury said. He closed his notebook and rose from his seat.

“Thank you, Miss MacGowen,” he said. “We’ll be in touch if we have further questions.”

“No doubt,” I said, gathering my mug and rising.

Weber finally looked my way, started to say something, but I turned my back and walked over to the service counter to dump the coffee dregs out of my mug.

He got as far as, “Uh.”

Without turning around I said, “Good night, Detective.”