Wild Instinct

23

Gale and Mendez sit in a small interview room inside the Orange County jail. The table and seats are concrete, built into the floor. There’s a small, steel, mesh-reinforced window in the door.

It’s where lawyers, cops, and inmates have private talks, not one of the bigger interrogation rooms where detectives record interviews with suspects while more cops watch through a one-way mirror.

Mendez stands at the window, checking Jesse’s whereabouts on TeenShield. He’s home now, she sees. Probably gaming before his shift at Bowl Me Over.

She’s still stewing about their fruitless search of the Jeffs home and van, which turned up a bounty of weapons of various type and caliber. A Desert Eagle.50-caliber handgun but no .22 semiautomatic.

Gale, seated across from a man in an orange jumpsuit, is surprised how old Vic Klavic looks. He’s only sixty-one but he looks midseventies: hepatitis, end stage, according to his jailors.

Klavic was Vernon Jeffs’s cellmate during Jeffs’s six-month stint for battery. Now Klavic is in for a solid year for setting his car on fire to collect insurance money. The hepatitis means he’ll die here. By trade, Gale knows, Klavic is a handyman and a career criminal who’s spent almost thirty of his sixty-one years in work camps, jails, and prisons. Longest stretch was six years for armed robbery, starting when he was nineteen.

He’s gray-haired and brown-eyed, pale in the face, and his tattooed right hand and forearm — burned in his insurance fraud attempt — swirl with ink-stained black scars.

“And so yeah, we were here for half a year together but I see no reason to tell you about it.”

“Like the undersheriff told you, I might be able to get you out a little early,” says Gale.

“‘Might’ is not a strong word.”

“Sixty days,” says Gale. “I’ll try if you can give me what I need on Vernon.”

“Which is?”

“Oh, come on, Vic. You know that’s not how it works.”

“I just rat him out until you stop me?”

“You know what we want,” says Mendez.

“Oh sure, sure I do, honey. You want to know if Vern had ever told me he killed a man, in like fashion of how Bennet Tarlow got it.”

“That would be helpful.”

“Rat out a friend for sixty days?”

Gale leans back, taps his fingers on the cool concrete table.

“If Jeffs did what we think he did, you’d be doing the world a favor,” says Mendez.

“Sixty days,” says Gale. “Very sorry about your bad luck.”

Klavic reacts not. Just stares at Daniela, standing by the window. Something in the way she leans against the door, Gale sees. Notes that Klavic has the passive eyes that so many lifelong, professional crooks have: distant, pleasant, and calculating.

“Daniela,” says Gale. “Would you like to sit down?”

Gale and Mendez trade places.

Mendez takes the body-warmed seat across from Vic Klavic.

“You’re nicer to look at,” he says.

“But not much,” says Mendez. “Must have been crummy, sharing a close-in jail cell with a six-foot-four bodybuilder.”

“We got along just fine. We buddied up. In the mess nobody’d fool with me because of Vern. The black car, the brown car, the peckerwoods — nobody messed with us.”

“What’s he like?” asks Mendez.

“What are you like?”

“An average California-born Latina.”

Klavic offers a small, dry smile. “Let me guess. Married once, divorced, four children.”

“I’ve got a son.”

“Name and age of?”

“Carlos,” she lies. “Did Vern Jeffs brag a lot? About his badass crimes, his luck with the ladies, beating the shit out of people?”

“He bragged, sure. Not much else to do when you’re in jail.”

“Where would you place him on your bullshit meter?”

“Average plus.”

“That’s where he puts you,” says Gale.

Klavic gives Gale a stony look. “Say hello.”

“He says you offered him sex for protection,” says Mendez.

Klavic inhales sharply, shaking his head. “A lie. I’m not that way, and they got cameras all over.”

He gives Gale a hard stare, then Mendez another guarded smile.

“It’s understandable, Vic,” she says. “You have to protect yourself inside.”

“Like I said, Vern’s average plus on the bullshit.”

“Well, that’s what he said,” says Gale.

“To get himself a better deal. Same as this.”

“Did he ever talk about killing someone?” asks Mendez, leaning just slightly forward toward Klavic.

“Don’t believe he said that about me, because, you know, we were jailhouse friends and it isn’t true.”

“I believe you,” says Mendez. “And I don’t care if it’s true or not.”

“Killing another person,” says Gale.

“Fuck off, Tonto,” says Klavic.

“You too, Kemosabe.”

“Got that casino yet?”

“We’re working on it.”

Mendez looks to Gale, who shakes his head slowly at her: Don’t speak.

Silence, stretching.

Klavic turns to Gale, then back to Mendez.

A uniformed deputy looks in, then continues past.

Klavic takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly, like a hit from a cigarette or a joint.

“Jeffs told me he killed a woman for two thousand dollars once, and it wasn’t worth the money.”

“Who, how, when?” asks Mendez.

“Cheating wife, life insurance, too. Shot her in the head in a drugstore parking lot. Way back when.”

“Not worth the money,” says Mendez.

“He said two thousand for work that disgusting just isn’t worth it. Wouldn’t do it again.”

Gale gets that nice bump of pulse that comes when you let things cook and it works.

Mendez the same, with a dash of her own disgust for a man having his own wife killed. More disgust than for the guy who pulled the trigger.

They watch as Klavic stands and, shackles on both wrists and ankles, clinks to the window and raps on it with his knuckles. A deputy appears.

Klavic turns to Mendez. “Get me those sixty days out of here. I don’t have many left.”

“We’ll try, Vic,” says Mendez. “Thanks for your help. You did the right thing.”

It feels good to be outside the jail. Gale did his first year there, as do most new deputies. A sullen, poorly lit, and occasionally violent place.

Gale calls Jeffs, and it goes to voicemail.

Ditto the Bear Cave.

“I don’t think he’ll come downtown voluntarily,” says Mendez. “But tonight’s a work night for him.”