Wild Instinct

27

“Park right here,” says Jeffs.

They’ve just rolled into the Bear Cave parking lot, where Jeffs claimed to have met the men who tried to hire him to kill Bennet Tarlow.

It’s just after nine in the morning, twelve hours after Jeffs’s release from Emergency at UCI Medical Center. The gravel has been removed from his knee and his bruised patella wrapped in a bandage that bulges under his baggy cargo shorts.

The mound of brown gauze contrasts with his big white, red-haired leg, which rests on his wadded-up denim vest on the black fabric of the Explorer’s back seat.

Mendez drives, Gale riding shotgun, manning the video camera and a digital voice recorder propped up in a drink holder, its voracious mic aimed into the gap between the front seats.

Gale watches as Jeffs’s head bobs and his lips move to some inner soundtrack, his Rx fentanyl, coffee, and two IHOP breakfasts making him painlessly chipper and talkative.

They pull into a parking space behind the Bear Cave.

“A white Lincoln Navigator was right exactly there after work that night,” says Jeffs, pointing. “Not far from my hog. About two o’clock. The back left door was open and the driver’s window was down halfway. The driver had a Covid mask and a ball cap on. Angels. He said, ‘Get in. We’re friends of Vic Klavic and we have something for you. I knew Klavic from jail, years back.’”

“So you can’t describe the driver?” asks Mendez.

“With a mask, cap, and no interior lights, could you?”

“His tone of voice, attitude?” asks Gale.

“Businesslike. No accent or nothing. By the sound of it I’d say young. A young white guy, probably.”

“Where was the other guy?” asks Gale.

“Don’t get ahead! I didn’t see no other guy but I had this hunch he was there. Just black in there. So I went closer and looked in the open door. Nobody in the back and I couldn’t see in front because of the privacy glass. Plexiglass probably. Full blackout, man. With a round grille on each side so you could hear and talk, like in a taxi.

“I got in the Navigator. Closed the door and rapped my knuckles on the glass. I said, ‘I’m right here if you need me, you assholes.’ And you know what the guy says back? The guy on the right, who I couldn’t see? He says, ‘Well, Vern, we do need a man like you. Someone brave, smart, honest, and dependable. We’ve got a job that will put fifty thousand dollars in your pocket. Half before, half after.’ ‘What’s the job,’ I ask him. And he says, ‘We need some noise cancellation.’ I said, ‘Oh that’s cute.’ And he says, ‘We want you to silence a guy. He’s making bad decisions. Decisions that hurt our business, to the tune of many, many dollars.’”

Gale checks the voice recorder, sees the green light blinking. Consider Jeffs in the back seat, who blinks his tan, mountain-lion eyes at the detective.

“What?” says the big man. “Vern going too fast for you? Every word I say is a word that was actually said. On account of my photographic memory. You’re getting perfect facts on that recorder.”

“Keep talking,” says Gale.

“The medicos said I get one of these every six hours, as needed,” says Jeffs, twisting off the top of a round brown bottle. He chases out a gray pill with a fingertip that barely fits.

“That fent can hook you,” says Mendez. “And kill you cold if you take too much.”

“Vern’s got self-control,” he says.

“Don’t forget to use it,” says Mendez.

“Daniela,” says Jeffs. “You’re a pretty one but you’ve got a sharp tongue.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“What did you take ‘noise cancellation’ to mean?” asks Gale.

“I wasn’t sure at first. But when he said silence a guy that’s making some bad decisions, I mean, ‘silence’ is a heavy word. Kind of final, like. I figure they wanted someone to give this guy the new look.”

“Referring to Capstick, the hunter,” says Gale.

“Right on,” says Jeffs. “He was the greatest hunter ever. And a good writer, too. Wrote about killing animals the right way. The moral way. You give the animal the ‘new look.’ I wanted to be him and I hunted and fished some with Dad in Idaho before I joined up. After the Marines did some mercenary work in Congo. Ugly stuff but I was good with my Barrett. Came home, got a Harley, and hit the road. Did a lot of different shit, Montana to Louisiana to California. Colstrip coal mining, good pay. Fishing guide down on Bayou La Loutre, Saint Bernard Parish. Hard to find a swamp boat big enough to float me. Dope grows up in the Humboldt mountains, before the legalization. Best weed in the world, good pay. Now, thirty years later, I’m a bartender in Huntington Beach, California, and my wife rides a pink chopper. I got it boxed. Thanks for not making Mindy crash her bike or throwing her in jail. Vern’s had lots of girls and Mindy’s the best.”

“What made these two guys think you’d do something like that?” asks Mendez. “Give someone the new look.”

“I figured Klavic, since they brought him up. Me and Klavic were in the same car in jail — the wood car. That’s peckerwoods, white men, some with Aryan ideas. Being Idaho boys, we fit right in. So we kind of ran the car, bullshitted a lot. Cellmates. What else you going to do?”

“Bullshit about killing people for money?” asks Gale.

“Probably. Long time ago, man.”

“You told Klavic you killed a woman for two thousand dollars,” says Gale. “Shot her in the head in a dollar store parking lot. You said it was a disgusting thing to do for the two grand.”

A beat. Gale points the video camera at Vernon’s face.

“Just jailhouse bullshit.”

Watching Jeffs’s face now, point-blank through the eyepiece, Gale’s back in Sangin, scoping the enemy with his Barrett.50 caliber. The old man with his bird gun and his opium stash in the abandoned granary. His worn-out Cheetahs. The new look for the wrong guy, thanks to Gale. Remembers shooting pictures and video of him. The young boy asking if he could come home with Gale when he left Sangin.

Point-blank like this, Jeffs briefly looks stymied and uncertain. Like he did that night at the Bear Cave, when he said he’d fought in Congo, a mercenary gig, no doubt.

Now with a deep breath, Vern’s expression hardens, and he blinks, once and slowly, recovering something.

“If I said that, it was just bullshit from a long time ago.”

“It didn’t sound like bullshit to Klavic,” says Mendez.

“I don’t recall that specific story about the drugstore.”

“So, your photographic memory wears out over time?” asks Gale.

“Doesn’t everybody’s?” asks Jeffs.

“Seems to me killing a person would be pretty hard to forget,” says Mendez.

Gale lowers the camera. “Once you realized that they were trying to hire you to kill someone, what did you say?”

“I said no, I don’t do that kind of shit.”

“And?” asks Mendez.

“The guy on the right said, ‘Have you ever made twenty-five grand in cash, off the books and tax-free?’ I said sure, when I robbed a bank, put thirty-six thousand, five hundred dollars in a backpack, and got away on my Harley. Wore a helmet for the holdup and the getaway. Two blocks down I ran my ride up a ramp and into a U-Haul van. Mindy pulled the door down and drove us away. Cops passing us, sirens blazing, looking for a guy on a motorcycle. Fuck, it was great. Really a high point in my life. Don’t worry that I’m just giving you detectives more work to do — fed and state statutes on bank robbery is only ten years. Long expired.”

“Did you try it again?” asks Mendez.

“Never. I did a six-month bounce for battery, then got a job in Colstrip and went more or less straight for a while. Mindy thought it was a dumb thing to do, that we’re better than that. Vern wasn’t so sure.”

“So what did the guy do when you told him no?” asks Gale.

“The driver got out of the car, cracked open the door, and dropped a Halliburton on my lap. That was when I saw his hair under the Angels cap was blond. Put that in your notebook. Blond hair. And the case was aluminum. Clean stacks of twenties inside, lined up perfectly straight, all the way to the edges. Smelled good. The guy in the passenger seat must have seen me. One-way window maybe, like when you cops interrogate. He said, ‘Yes, Mr. Jeffs, that money on your lap can be yours. And the other twenty-five, when you’re done.’ He said, ‘We think you should give this offer some serious thought.’ I said I’ll think about it, but tell me more about this guy. What did he do to deserve the new look? He said he’s about to cost his partners billions of future dollars. Due to his bad decisions. ‘What company is that?’ I asked. ‘Better you don’t know,’ he says. ‘Better you don’t know anything more about him.’ I said I’d need to know where he works and lives, just for starters. He said, ‘We’ll make sure you have everything you need, Vernon. Call me Steve, by the way. This is Curtis up here driving.’

“Then I opened the door and got out and went to my bike. I stopped about halfway across the parking lot and looked back at the white Lincoln Navigator. Nice car. A power-punk operator’s ride. I pictured a guy with soft smooth hands, perfect teeth, and a great haircut. I still couldn’t see nothing inside. The plate was 9KYF334, trapped photographically in my brain. I assumed it was stolen or faked. End of chapter one.”

“When and where did you see this car and these men again?” asks Mendez.

Gale’s already on the radio, calling in the plates.

“Curtis called me the next day. Said they could sweeten the deal. Asked me to be waiting for them at the Nordstrom in South Coast Plaza. Ten thirty.”

Mendez parks near the main South Coast Plaza Nordstrom entrance, elegantly sweeping granite steps leading up to glass doors that slide open and closed, flashing in the late-morning sun. Well-dressed shoppers climb and descend.

Gale mulls the stolen plates as he watches the gilded men and women on the granite steps. Thinks of Marilyn, who loved this place. She’s been in his dreams again. He hears wisps of her voice, nodding off at night.

Fragments.

And fragments of fragments.

He notes the hard set of Daniela’s jaw as she watches the shoppers, too.

“Where the beautiful people spend their money,” she says.

“Don’t see them types at the Bear Cave,” says Jeffs.

South Coast Plaza is one of Orange County’s premier shopping malls, Gale thinks, designed and expanded over the decades years by the Tarlow Company, led by the now ninety-five-year-old Bennet Tarlow.

He takes pictures of beautifully dressed shoppers, climbing up and down the steps.

Camile Tarlow’s kind of place, he thinks.

And Norris Kennedy’s and Patti DiMeo’s and his own Marilyn’s.

The kind of place that when he walks in, he feels alien — not only as an Acjacheme Native unrecognized by his own country, the country he was born in and almost died for, but as a human being.

“So just like the first time, I get in the Navigator,” says Vern. “I was hoping that it being daytime would give a better look at them, but nothing doing. Windows that dark aren’t even legal unless you’re famous, or law enforcement, or a politician.

“And this time we don’t just sit there and talk. They don’t say more than hi Mr. Jeffs and we head through the lot to the freeway. Half an hour later we’re in some park I’ve never even heard of. So, Detective Mendez, get back on the freeway and I’ll show you where we went.”

“Is this white Navigator a runaround?” asks Mendez. “Two guys you can’t even describe. Just a bunch of make-believe to keep your butt free? It makes me wonder if you killed Tarlow and this is just a bunny trail you’re showing us.”

“No, ma’am, no. It’s not. I’m just taking you where they took me, and telling you what they said. That’s what we agreed to. You can make your own decisions from there.”

Mendez sweeps past the sign for Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park, follows the entryway through dense green hills of coastal chapparal.

“Another county wilderness park,” she says. “Maybe we’ll get lucky again.”

“What’s lucky about that?” asks Jeffs.

“Bennet Tarlow III was murdered in a county wilderness park,” says Gale. “After being seen with you the previous evening. As I’m sure you remember. Your photographic memory seems to be coming and going.”

“I know that, just didn’t put it together ’til now. The pain’s back. Had to have myself a fent bump with my breakfast, so now the brain fog’s setting in. By the way, why won’t you tell me who this alleged witness is? The one who’s lying about me being with Tarlow. Does he really exist or just more lame-ass cop game from you two?”

Gale gives him a long look, trying to pry his way past Jeffs’s photographic memory bullshit and into the truth behind it, if any.

But all he gets are those Killer Cat eyes again, cool and unamused.

“There’s a parking lot around the bend,” Jeffs says. “I’ll show you the exact spot we took.”

Mendez parks on the far side of the lot, per instructions. There’s only one other vehicle, and it’s not far away, a tall putty gray Mercedes Sprinter with the side door open and a small man sitting on a narrow bed with a laptop across his thighs. Beside him is a small woman, engaged with a computer, too. A Chihuahua sits between them, its ears perked, barking intently on the invading Explorer.

“Second time you’ve seen these guys, then,” says Gale. “Or at least one of them. Same white Lincoln Navigator. Walk us through it.”

“Steve — the guy on the right — said he might have been wrong in presenting his offer. Wrong about the target. Wanted to know why I didn’t kill the woman. I told him again I never did that. I don’t do that. Not Vern. Something doesn’t fit right inside, I don’t do it.”

“Why do you call yourself ‘Vern’ sometimes and ‘I’ the rest?” asks Mendez.

He glowers at her. “I look at myself from the outside and the inside. So it depends.”

“On what?” she asks.

“Sometimes I’m me and sometimes I’m me looking at me.”

“Which were you doing when you shot Tarlow?” asks Gale.

Jeffs’s big head pivots, dragging the scowl with it. “We made a deal, piglets: You drop your fake charges and I lead you to Steve and Curt.”

“Curtis?” says Mendez.

Jeffs leans forward, uses both hands to adjust his knee on the balled vest.

“Quit trying to confuse me,” he says. “Police harassment is not part of our deal. Go ahead, bust me right now if you want. Watch your case collapse in court.”

Both Gale and Mendez let the silence speak.

“So you told Steve you don’t do that,” says Gale. “Meaning murder for hire.”

“He said he wouldn’t have done it either,” says Jeffs. “She didn’t deserve it, says Steve. But our target richly deserves it. We mentioned that he’s stealing away close to fourteen billion dollars from his own company? Fine. But he also rapes women. Women he knows and dates. Two of them for sure, maybe three. Quite likely, more. Our private eyes and lawyers are working up the big reveal for the media. They’ve got video. Graphic video. So, Steve says, Caesar — let’s call him Caesar — is a multimillionaire businessman costing his company billions that will end up in his own pockets. And drugging and forcibly raping a series of women he’s deceived into believing they mean something to him. Vern, he says, you’d be doing humanity a favor by taking him out.

“‘How old a guy is he?’ I ask. Steve says early forties. Movie star kind of face and hair. Makes you want to punch him. Top schools, comes from more money than I can even dream of. Which is what you want, is his money, I say. Only what’s ours, Steve says. Only what we have worked very, very hard for, and Caesar wants to take from us. There are the women, too. They didn’t do a thing to be defiled like that. The video would make you ill, Vern. You have a strong moral compass. That’s why you disgusted yourself at the drugstore, whether you killed her or not. We want a man like you. I told them I’d think about it. And asked them about that pay raise they brought up.

“Steve says this offer won’t last much longer. Says, we can increase the money. Thirty grand right here and now, and another thirty when it’s done. You can keep the Halliburton. Two of them, actually. On us. Sooner, not later. Weeks, not months. We understand you need time to learn his habits and patterns. But it doesn’t have to look like suicide or an accident. We just want him off the team.”

Gale’s disbelief of Jeffs’s story crashes against the rocks of it. The rocks are winning right now.

“So I told them yes.”

A long near-silence while the Chihuahua barks away.

“Two days later I changed my mind. Cancelled the deal when Steve called. They haven’t contacted me. The thirty grand was under my bed in the Halliburton.”

Another silence.

“And you haven’t gotten more than a glimpse of Curtis,” says Gale. “And not even that of Steve.”

“They’re just voices,” says Jeffs. “I never forget a voice. Ask Mindy.”

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll come after the money?” asks Gale. “Shoot you in the kneecap for their trouble, or worse?”

“Don’t say kneecap! Let ’em try. They’re not those kind of people. They’re guys in suits. Lawyers, accountants, fixers. Slick and gutless. Not real people, like us.”

Jeffs laughs quietly.

“They could hire it out,” says Mendez. “Like they hired you.”

“Tried to hire me. I have no fear, Daniela. They know I’ll give the money back. I want to give it back.”

“No,” says Gale. “You’re going to give it to us to process into evidence.”

“Vern was afraid you’d pull that one on him.”

“You just confessed to conspiring to murder Bennet Tarlow,” says Gale. “Now you’re under arrest for it.”

Gale exits the Explorer, and Mendez hits the back door unlock. Jeffs glares at Gale but holds his hands out and together.

Jeffs smiles hugely as Gale applies the plastic. His red whiskers are growing out, and sweat rolls down his temples.

“Better tie my ankles, too,” he says. “So I can’t make a run for it. You still got nothing on me. The story about Steve and Curtis is pure bullshit, and I didn’t kill that guy. Don’t bother looking under my bed.”

Mendez rolls out of the parking lot as Gale reads the big man his rights off a card he carries in his wallet.

“Yeah, man. Yeah. You still got nothing on me.”

“How come you ate at Bamboo a few days ago?”

Jeffs’s smile fades, and the sweat is still rolling down his temples.

“I was hungry, man.”