Vertical Coffin

Chapter 10

The next morning I drove out to Hidden Ranch. On the way I kept thinking about the incident reports I'd read the previous night.

At the beginning of every investigation I start by looking for coincidences and inconsistencies. In police work, you quickly learn it's never wise to trust a coincidence, because coincidences are often caused by criminal lies or mistakes. Inconsistencies occur when two people have conflicting opinions about a shared event, and there is often a lie or a misunderstanding at its core. In both of these circumstances it is generally profitable for an investigator to take a closer look.

After reading the deputies' statements, it seemed that almost all the sheriffs at the scene agreed that Vincent Smiley was a suicide, that he had staged it so the police would be forced to kill him. Death by cop. Even after shooting Emo, Smiley had plenty of chances to surrender. He could have thrown down his weapon, come out and saved his life, but instead he chose to barricade himself inside the house and shoot it out with the police until there was no possible solution but his own extinction.

I had to agree that on the surface it looked like a manufactured suicide. Except for two things. First, the guy had been wearing Kevlar. From my perspective, you don't wear Kevlar when you're trying to get the cops to kill you. It was inconsistent, but not unheard of.

The second inconsistency occurred in two of the neighbors' post-event statements. According to a neighbor named William Palmer, who lived four houses away on Hidden Ranch Road, Smiley had spent most of the previous summer building a bomb shelter in his basement. A woman down the street named Katie Clark had also mentioned the same thing. So the question is, why does someone who is so afraid he might die in a nuclear blast that he builds a bomb shelter in his basement commit suicide, and why was he wearing Kevlar? Those two facts didn't seem to fit in the same emotional quadrant with the Death-by-Cop theory.

I called Katie Clark, and her baby-sitter told me she was out of town on business until next Friday. That left William Palmer. He agreed to stay home and wait for me until 9 a. M.

As I turned back onto Hidden Ranch Road I remembered the bizarre insanity of my last visit here. I was still shaken by that bloodstained memory. I pulled up and parked in front of William Palmer's two-story colonial. White with dark green trim. Bright purple bougainvillea trellised off the front porch. Birds sang in the sycamore trees. A welcome contrast to the memory of that chattering AK-47.

I trudged up the walkway and rang the bell. After a moment Palmer opened the door. He was a tall, thirty-plus man with short hair and laugh lines framing a friendly smile. I liked him on sight. After I showed my creds, he shook my hand and led me into a large, well-appointed living room.

As we sat down he asked me to call him Tad. "Everybody does," he said, adding that he sold insurance for Aetna and had a meeting with his district manager in an hour, a not-too-subtle hint letting me know he didn't have much time. So we got right into a discussion of Vincent Smiley.

"The guy was always kinda nuts," Tad said, shaking his head at the memory. "Like, he'd walk his dog early every morning. If you went out to pick up your paper or were even backing out of your driveway late to work, he'd always want to stop and talk. And it was always about nonsense. Like, why didn't you plant out your hedge line? Or, your pool house would look better painted pale yellow… I don't know how he afforded that house of his. Somebody said it was from the life insurance after his parents died. He just hung out, giving dumb advice and getting on everybody's nerves. Since he didn't work, he had no sense of anybody else being on a schedule."

"Nobody said anything about a dog," I said. "That wasn't in any of the statements I read."

"Yeah, a big, slobbering, black Rottweiler. Mean son-of-a-bitch. I was always worried he'd get loose and maul somebody's kid. I know it's not right to be glad he's dead, but it was no fun having Smiley in the neighborhood."

"And he told you about the weapons in his garage?"

"Showed 'em to me. He was all, 'Don't you love this?' Then he'd pull out a grenade launcher or something, and break it open, show you the breech, show you a box of ammo for his AK-forty-seven. Then he shows us boxes of plastic gunk and tells us it's C-four."

"How would a guy like Smiley acquire C-four? That stuff is impossible to get. The government restricts its distribution so terrorists can't get it."

"I don't have a clue," Palmer said. "But I've got kids and a wife. I don't need that shit four doors away. Claire is taking the kids to school right now, but you can ask her when she gets back. She thinks he was one of those antigovernment survivalist nuts. He had this computer in his garage. He bragged about hacking into some military training site called Cactus West. It had all kinds of acronyms like MCAS, Yuma, or TACTS. He showed it to me."

"You have any idea what that stands for?" I asked, writing this down.

"None at all. I tried to find it on my computer, but I couldn't. Like I said, it was a secure military Web site. Add that to the automatic rifles, C-four, and a phony sheriff's badge, and we all knew we had a huge problem."

"Tad, you said in your statement he was building a bomb shelter?"

"Yeah. June, July, all last summer, basically. Said it was in his basement. He was hauling dirt outta that house right through the back door. Had it piled up in the backyard. Took truckloads away at the end of each month."

"And you're sure it was a bomb shelter?"

"That's what he said." Tad was beginning to sneak looks at his watch.

"I'll be just a minute more," I said. "So, if he was building a bomb shelter, what's your take on the idea that he shot that deputy so the cops would come up here and kill him?"

"I agree with my wife. The guy was a survivalist. I don't think he had a death wish. He told me once he went to a camp for training on how to survive in the wild. He was always flashing that badge, but he was also terrified of authority. He said he hated cops."

"He hates the cops, and at the same time he's telling everybody he is one."

"That's why me and Claire, and the Bellinghams, got together and decided to call the sheriff's department and check him out. He didn't seem like a cop to any of us. The sheriff's office said he wasn't on their roster, so we knew the badge was a phony."

"If you had to characterize him for me, how would you describe him? Just a general impression."

"The thing about Vince was he was kinda-y'know, outta sync. He didn't act right. He laughed at stuff that wasn't funny. His vibe was wrong. When he showed us all the stuff in his garage he'd kinda caress it. It was more than just ammo, it was like-manhood."

"And you called ATF, not the sheriff, right?"

"That was because a lot of that stuff in there was illegal. The automatic weapons and the grenade launcher. Chuck Bellingham said we should call Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives because illegal weapons are their beat."

He looked at his watch again and I stood up to go. "Thanks," I said. "Do you have a card, in case I have any more questions?"

He pulled one out of his wallet and handed it to me as we walked to the front door. After he showed me out I got back in my car, picked up my cell phone, and dialed the LASD bureau downtown and asked for the forensics lab. A criminalist named Robyn DeYoung was in charge of the Hidden Ranch shoot-out. Once I had her on the phone, I identified myself, and asked, "Did you guys find a dog's remains out there?"

She sounded guarded. "No, but you're LAPD. What's your interest? This is a sheriff's investigation."

"You can check with Sheriff Messenger's office. He'll verify my involvement."

There was a long pause.

"I'd like to have somebody go out and rake through the ashes and look for that dog's remains," I continued.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because it's a loose end. There's supposed to be a dog. If you didn't find a dog, then where is it? It's a Rottweiler. They aren't all that cuddly. If he's out and running around loose up in the foothills, we should probably know that, don't you think?"

She didn't respond.

"Also, there's supposed to be a bomb shelter in the basement. We need to dig down and try and find it." She got very silent. I could tell I wasn't scoring many points with Ms. DeYoung.

"I'll check with Sheriff Messenger," she said after another long pause, not happy about having to go back out and sift through all those ashes again, or dig out a ton of soggy rubble looking for a bomb shelter. I had the feeling my request was going to get assigned a very low priority. I took down her direct-dial number and rang off.

My next stop was Smiley's burned-down house. I wanted one last look. I drove up the street and pulled to the curb on the east side of the cul-de-sac. There was already a green Suburban parked there. A blond woman was wandering in the ashes where the house had once stood. She was muscular, with short, spiky, white-blonde hair. As I walked closer I could see the powerful slope of a weightlifter's shoulders. Almost five-ten in low heels, she was wearing a tan miniskirt and a sleeveless cotton blouse. Her arms were cut, her legs were sinewy and tanned. I wouldn't call her exactly beautiful, but she fit into that unique category of strong-faced women who can accurately be called handsome. When she turned and focussed a level stare at me, another unique feature became apparent. Her right eye was blue, her left one green.

I stepped into the still damp ashes, crossed the distance between us, pulled out my badge and showed it to her. She studied it carefully. "LAPD?" she said. "I thought this was a sheriff's investigation."

"Let's start with who you are." I was trying not to sound badge-heavy and territorial, but I hated having civilians wandering around up here, even though the sheriff's yellow crime scene tape was down.

"I'm Kimmy Fox." She smiled at me. Her smile was dazzling, her square teeth, bright and even as a row of porcelain tile. "I live right down the road. The two-story Regency on the right." She pointed at a house with a manicured yard.

I looked down and saw that she was holding two, ash-dusted brass cartridges. Evidence that sheriff's CSI had missed. "Looking for souvenirs?" I said as I reached for the shell casings. She handed them to me reluctantly.

"I still can't believe all this happened," she said.

"Did you know Mr. Smiley well?"

"As well as you can know somebody like that. He was kinda strange. He had this way of looking at you. Like you were a thing… or just property. It was very off-putting."

"You see him with his dog? I understand he walked a dog every morning."

"I'm sorry?"

"A black Rottweiler."

"Oh, yeah. Everybody knew that dog. Vicious. I'm a mom, and I was always worried he'd get loose. I have morning carpool this year, so I saw him out walking that beast a lot when I was heading out." She smiled again. "My kids are on midsemester break. Little rascals conned me into two days at Disneyland this morning." She looked at her watch. "Guess I should get going."

"You ever see mounds of dirt piled in the backyard in June or July? I understand he was building a bomb shelter last summer."

"How could you miss it? Who builds a bomb shelter anymore? That was a sixties thing." Then she smiled at me. "Could I have those back?" she said, looking at the cartridges in my hand.

"Sorry. It's evidence."

"Oh… okay. I was just going to show them to my husband. He was curious about all that stuff in Vincent's garage-the guns and boxes of ammo." She started to fidget. "I'm sorry if I did anything wrong coming up here. They took down the crime tape, so I figured it was okay. The guy lived just down the street from us. Then last week, he goes completely nuts, starts shooting up the neighborhood. It's just-I needed a way to close the door on it, is all."

"I understand."

She nodded. "Well, better get going, I have teacups to ride."

"Ride carefully," I smiled.

She walked away from me, picking her way out of the ashes, then down the walk on strong, muscular legs.

There was something about her that seemed familiar, but I couldn't pin it down. I watched as she drove her Suburban up the street and parked in her driveway half a block away. I turned back and surveyed the burned-out house, wondering how the mindless insanity that had caused all this could live in such a peaceful neighborhood.