The Night Detectives

12

San Diego had changed extensively since I had lived there, and, unlike Phoenix, mostly for the good. It was a major high-tech center now, not merely a tourist-and-Navy town. It had less population than Phoenix but surpassed it in almost any measure of quality. About the only thing that seemed the same was the mediocrity of the newspaper, formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune, now under new ownership with its name contracted to U-T. It sounded like a far campus of the University of Texas, but I’m sure a consultant charged big bucks for a new “brand.”

Downtown, thrown away in the 1960s and 1970s, had made a stunning comeback, including the Gaslamp Quarter with its lovingly restored historic buildings and Horton Plaza urban mall. Nobody would know it used to be skid row. Walking to the Marriott, I was struck for the gazillionth time how Anglo the city seemed, even though it sat right on the Mexican border. The barrios south and east of downtown had been carefully tucked away and so it remained.

I showed my driver’s license at the front desk and got my key card to a room on the eighth floor. Before going up, I went into the business center and booted up the computer. I am a lifelong Mac user and couldn’t understand why anyone would use Windows. So I waited, and waited.

Then I plugged in the flash drive and clicked on the icon.

A window popped up and the screen went blank. Then Grace Hunter was talking to me.

“Hi, babe. I bet you’d like to know what’s on this drive. But if you don’t have the code, too bad.”

A white box appeared and I had nothing to enter. The screen went dark again. But for a few seconds she had been alive. I could see her allure with her wide smile, the elegant movement to push her hair out of her face, the sexy taunt in her voice. I popped out the drive and stuck it in my pocket.

When I stepped out of the elevator, a woman was walking toward me: black, shoulder-length hair, attractive if older, elegantly dressed. As she came closer, I was sure I was wrong. I saw plenty of ghosts in my dreams.

But, no…

“Sharon?”

“David!”

She ran to me and gave me a long hug.

Her face was flushed and, up close, her usually perfect hair was mussed.

All I could do was sputter words. “What? Why?”

She grinned at my discomfort.

“What’s wrong?”

Where to begin? She was Peralta’s ex-wife. She had moved away to San Francisco in as final a breakup as I could imagine. I had known both of them for most of my adult life. And here she was, having obviously been in his room. But it was none of those things. I felt the embarrassment of nearly coming across my parents having sex.

“It’s all right, David.” She laughed that full-out laugh that always put me at ease. She studied me. “You’ve lost weight.”

Her eyes held concern rather than a compliment. I knew the suit was now almost hanging on me.

I said, “So you’re why he went to Balboa Park. I thought something was odd.”

“Maybe he can grow a little after all,” she said. “I was down here for a conference, so…”

So, indeed.

She hugged me again, made me promise we would get together for drinks or coffee before we left, and disappeared into the elevator.

After a minute to collect myself, I knocked on his door. He greeted me in a bathrobe.

“Why are you blushing?” he demanded.

“I got too much sun at the beach.”

“Why is your shirt and tie a mess?”

“A baby peed on me, okay? You change and I’ll come back.”

“I’m fine,” he said and walked inside, leaving the door open. I reluctantly followed him.

He plopped down on the unmade bed. I sat on a sofa and filled him in on Tim Lewis, the baby, and Grace Hunter’s small business. He closed his eyes and grunted after every few sentences, taking it in as he always did. He offered no more reaction when I showed him the flash drive. We would have to find someone to break the code.

The room was too warm for my suit.

I wrapped it up. “Tim Lewis has parents in Riverside. I told him to take the baby and go there today.”

“Did you get their address?”

“Yes.” I said it a bit too testily.

“What’s wrong?” His Mister Innocent voice. Then, “Look next to you, on the desk. It’s the entire case file on the girl’s suicide.”

I swiveled to see several thick folders bound with a large red rubber band.

“Man, you have the pull,” I said. “How is Kimbrough doing?”

“He’s happy.” He slurped on a Diet Coke. “I’d like to say it was my pull, but remember that suicide in Coronado? The girlfriend of the millionaire from north Scottsdale who allegedly hanged herself?”

I remembered. It had happened at the Spreckles Mansion in the rich, idyllic town that sat on a spit across from San Diego. The rich guy had purchased the iconic house. As I recalled, he made his money from acne products and cosmetics. The girlfriend, young enough to be his daughter of course, had been alone when his young son had tripped and fallen over a balustrade in the mansion. The child had died.

The next day the girlfriend had been found hanging from a second-story balcony, naked, a cloth in her mouth, and her hands bound with rope. As with Grace, the authorities had pronounced it a suicide.

Peralta shook his head. “I can see your mind making connections, Mapstone. They’re not there. It has nothing to do with our case. Bill Gross is a good friend of mine.” That would be the San Diego County Sheriff. “His department was called in because Coronado PD doesn’t have the expertise for a complex death investigation. The media put Bill through hell on this one. News choppers overhead got pictures of the body and pretty soon it was on the Internet. Everybody became an amateur sleuth. They even got Dr. Phil involved.”

He shook his head. “But the woman in Coronado really did kill herself based on the evidence. Hell, the sheriff’s department even put up a special page with the information on their Web site. Kimbrough said his chief didn’t want Grace Hunter to turn into another media circus. So we lucked out and have copies of everything.”

“So what about our young woman?” I asked. “Suicide?”

“You’ll have time for light reading.” He pointed at the stack of case files, in case I had forgotten. “The short answer is they believe it was a suicide.”

“What do you believe?”

He shrugged the big shoulders. “I’ll wait for your report. Kimbrough brought along the night detective who was the first to respond to the call.”

“Night detective?”

A quarter of one side of his mouth attempted a smile. “I’m showing my age, Mapstone.”

I looked at the rumpled sheets and doubted that.

He continued, “Departments used to have night detective bureaus to cover the late shift, so the investigation into a major crime could begin immediately. Now it’s almost all in-house with each unit, so, for instance, homicide has its own people on call. That’s the case here. I was using old-time cop talk. Did I ever tell you about the night detective I met when Miranda bought it?”

He was being so uncharacteristically loquacious, and actually talking about himself, that I stifled my impatience.

“It was 1976, and Miranda was out of prison. He actually went around signing Miranda warning cards. Somewhere I have one he signed for me. Anyway, I was a green deputy and was serving a warrant down in the Deuce. The old La Amapola bar. Means ‘little poppy.’ I must have gotten there the second after Miranda got in a fight and was stabbed. People were scattering. The first PPD unit was a night detective. This tall guy named Cal. They called him the Red Dude on account of his hair. He marched my ass out in a hurry. We became friends later. Never did find the suspect I was trying to arrest.”

If I had my geography right, the bar where Ernesto Miranda died was located where the Phoenix Suns arena now stood. Mike Peralta, historian. It made me wish he would talk more about his past, but we had business and he moved right along. I tried to imagine a time when he had ever been a rookie and uncertain of himself.

Night detective. It had a nice ring.

“Anyway, I talked to the detective. You would have liked her. First name Isabel. Cute little chica. Make you forget about Patty.”

“Will you stop that shit!” I pulled off my suit jacket and threw it on the floor. It would have to go to the cleaners anyway.

His eyes followed the garment’s flight, then fixed his gaze on me again. “Grace’s body was found on the concrete by the pool. It was a straight fall and she landed on her head. Massive trauma, loads of blood. She was handcuffed from the back, nude, and no real note was left, like our guy said in the office yesterday.”

“What do you mean ‘real note.’ ”

“I want you to read the reports. Hang with me and I’ll give you the overall run-down. So the uniforms that initially respond go upstairs and the door to the condo was locked. The manager lets them inside.”

He folded one brawny brown calf over the other and told me the cops found no sign of a break-in. The lock was a deadbolt, so nobody could simply close the door behind them and cause it to automatically lock. It had to be secured from the inside, as if Grace had done it, or from the outside with a key. The only ones with keys were Zisman and his wife. She wasn’t in San Diego on the twenty-second. There were no signs of struggle. Grace’s purse was there with a hundred dollars in it, her keys, and a brand-new cell phone.

I said, “The handcuffs didn’t arouse suspicion?”

“Sure. But sometimes people who want to kill themselves bind their hands so they can’t change their minds. I’ve seen those calls in Phoenix. That was the case with that girl in Coronado, although she used rope and not cuffs. SDPD thinks the same was true here. Kimbrough had Isabel demonstrate how a person could do it. Then walk to a balcony and go over.”

“Where’d Grace get the cuffs?”

“Apparently the former quarterback likes bondage. They used them during their playtime.”

I tried to ignore his bulk in a bathrobe lying in a bed where he had had some “playtime” of his own. This was something I did not want to visualize or even contemplate.

“Does he own this condo?” I asked.

“He did. It’s for sale now. He was away at his boat when Grace killed herself and the alibi’s good. The owner at the slip next door saw him there during the time of the suicide. Zisman told the cops she was his girlfriend and she’d been feeling depressed, but he had no idea she might do something like this, yada-yada-yada.”

“And they believed him?”

“Zisman is a reserve police officer in Phoenix,” Peralta continued. “He showed his badge and identification. That might have bought him a little professional courtesy the night Grace died. He cooperated fully. I’m sure he was scared shitless this would make the papers or television and the missus back in Arizona would find out.”

I told him newspapers usually didn’t report suicides out of concern that there might be copycats. Grace had died at night, with no television news choppers in the air.

“So Zisman walked?”

He nodded. “There was no evidence of his involvement. No probable cause to hold him, much less get an indictment. If they arrested every Arizonan who had a mistress stashed in San Diego, they’d have to build a new jail.”