The Crossing

  “Cool,” Patrick said. “I wouldn’t want to be in an office either.”

  “Damn right,” I said. “Too claustrophobic.”

  My computer was ready. I went to the file where I kept generic forms and motions and began to customize a pretrial motion to examine evidence.

  “I’m working on your case right now, Patrick.”

  He looked at me in the mirror.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I reviewed your file and there’s something Mr. Vincent hadn’t done that I think we need to do that may help.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get an independent appraisal of the necklace you took. They list the value as twenty-five thousand and that bumps you up to a felony theft category. But it doesn’t look like anybody ever challenged that.”

  “You mean like if the diamonds are bogus there’s no felony?”

  “It could work out like that. But I was thinking of something else, too.”

  “What?”

  I pulled his file out of my bag so I could check a name.

  “Let me ask you a few questions first, Patrick,” I said. “What were you doing in that house where you took the necklace?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “I was dating the old lady’s youngest daughter. I met her on the beach and was sort of teaching her to surf. We went out a few times and hung out. One time there was a birthday party at the house and I was invited and the mother was given the necklace as a gift.”

  “That’s when you learned its value.”

  “Yeah, the father said they were diamonds when he gave it to her. He was real proud of ’em.”

  “So then, the next time you were there at the house, you stole the necklace.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “It wasn’t a question, Patrick. It’s a fact. I’m your lawyer now and we need to discuss the facts of the case. Just don’t ever lie to me or I won’t be your lawyer anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “So the next time you were in the house, you stole the necklace.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “We were there alone using the pool and I said I had to go to the can, only I really just wanted to check the medicine cabinet for pills. I was hurting. There weren’t any in the bathroom downstairs so I went upstairs and looked around. I looked in the old lady’s jewelry box and saw the necklace. I just took it.”

  He shook his head and I knew why. He was thoroughly embarrassed and defeated by the actions his addiction had made him take. I had been there myself and knew that looking back from sobriety was almost as scary as looking forward.

  “It’s all right, Patrick. Thank you for being honest. What did the guy say when you pawned it?”

  “He said he’d only give me four bills because the chain was gold but he didn’t think the diamonds were legit. I told him he was full of shit but what could I do? I took the money and went down to TJ. I needed the tabs and so I took what he was giving. I was so messed up on the stuff, I didn’t care.”

  “What’s the name of the girl? It’s not in the file.”

  “Mandolin, like the instrument. Her parents call her Mandy.”

  “Have you talked to her since you were arrested?”

  “No, man. We’re done.”

  Now the eyes in the mirror looked sad and humiliated.

  “Stupid,” Henson said. “The whole thing was stupid.”

  I thought about things for a moment and then reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a Polaroid photograph. I handed it over the seat and tapped Patrick on the shoulder with it.

  “Take a look at that.”

  He took the photo and held it on top of the steering wheel while he looked at it.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he asked.

  “I tripped over a curb and did a nice face plant in front of my house. Broke a tooth and my nose, opened up my forehead pretty good, too. They took that picture for me in the ER. To carry around as a reminder.”

  “Of what?”

  “I had just gotten out of my car after driving my eleven-year-old daughter home to her mother. By then I was up to three hundred twenty milligrams of OxyContin a day. Crushing and snorting first thing in the morning, except for me, the mornings were the afternoon.”

  I let him register that for a few moments before continuing.

  “So, Patrick, you think what you did was stupid? I was driving my little girl around on three hundred twenty migs of hillbilly heroin.”

  Now I shook my head.

  “There’s nothing you can do about the past, Patrick. Except keep it there.”

  He was staring directly at me in the mirror.

  “I’m going to help you get through the legal stuff,” I said. “It’s up to you to do the rest. And the rest is the hard part. But you already know that.”

  He nodded.

  “Anyway, I see a ray of light here, Patrick. Something Jerry Vincent didn’t see.”

  “What is it?”

  “The victim’s husband gave her that necklace. His name is Roger Vogler and he’s a big supporter of lots of elected people in the county.”

  “Yeah, he’s big into politics. Mandolin told me that. They hold fund-raisers and stuff at the house.”

  “Well, if the diamonds on that necklace are phony, he’s not going to want that coming up in court. Especially if his wife doesn’t know.”

  “But how’s he gonna stop it?”

  “He’s a contributor, Patrick. His contributions helped elect at least four members of the county board of supervisors. The county supervisors control the budget of the District Attorney’s Office. The DA is prosecuting you. It’s a food chain. If Dr. Vogler wants to send a message, believe me, it will be sent.”

  Henson nodded. He was beginning to see the light.

  “The motion I’m going to file requests that we be allowed to independently examine and appraise the evidence, to wit, the diamond necklace. You never know, that word ‘appraise’ may stir things up. We’ll just have to sit back and see what happens.”

  “Do we go to court to file it?”

  “No. I’m going to write this thing up right now and send it to the court in an e-mail.”

  “That’s cool!”

  “The beauty of the Internet.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Haller.”

  “You’re welcome, Patrick. Can I have my picture back now?”

  He handed it over the seat and I took a look at it. I had a marble under my lip, and my nose was pointing in the wrong direction. There was also a bloody friction abrasion on my forehead. The eyes were the toughest part to study. Dazed and lost, staring unsteadily at the camera. This was me at my lowest point.

  I put the photo back in my pocket for safekeeping.

  We drove in silence for the next fifteen minutes while I finished the motion, went online, and sent it. It was definitely a shot across the prosecution’s bow and it felt good. The Lincoln lawyer was back on the beat. The Lone Ranger was riding again.

  I made sure I looked up from the computer when we hit the tunnel that marks the end of the freeway and dumps out onto the Pacific Coast Highway. I cracked the window open. I always loved the feeling I got when I’d swing out of the tunnel and see and smell the ocean.

  We followed the PCH as it took us north to Malibu. It was hard for me to go back to the computer when I had the blue Pacific right outside my office window. I finally gave up, lowered the window all the way, and just rode.

  Once we got past the mouth of Topanga Canyon I started seeing packs of surfers on the swells. I checked Patrick and saw him taking glances out toward the water.

  “It said in the file you did your rehab at Crossroads in Antigua,” I said.

  “Yeah. The place Eric Clapton started.”

  “Nice?”

  “As far as those places go, I suppose.”

  “True. Any waves there?”

  “None to speak of. I didn’t get much of a cha
nce to use a board anyway. Did you do rehab?”

  “Yeah, in Laurel Canyon.”

  “That place all the stars go to?”

  “It was close to home.”

  “Yeah, well, I went the other way. I was as far from my friends and my home as possible. It worked.”

  “You thinking about going back into surfing?”

  He glanced out the window before answering. A dozen surfers in wet suits were straddling their boards out there, waiting on the next set.

  “I don’t think so. At least not on a professional level. My shoulder’s shot.”

  I was about to ask what he needed his shoulder for when he continued his answer.

  “The paddling’s one thing but the key thing is getting up. I lost my move when I fucked up my shoulder. Excuse the language.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Besides, I’m taking things one day at a time. They taught you that in Laurel Canyon, didn’t they?”

  “They did. But surfing’s a one-day-at-a-time, one-wave-at-a-time sort of thing, isn’t it?”

  He nodded and I watched his eyes. They kept tripping to the mirror and looking back at me.

  “What do you want to ask me, Patrick?”

  “Um, yeah, I had a question. You know how Vincent kept my fish and put it on the wall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I was, uh, wondering if he kept any of my boards somewhere.”

  I opened his file again and looked through it until I found the liquidator’s report. It listed twelve surfboards and the prices obtained for them.

  “You gave him twelve boards, right?”

  “Yeah, all of them.”

  “Well, he gave them to his liquidator.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a guy he used when he took assets from clients—you know, jewelry, property, cars, mostly—and would turn them into cash to be applied toward his fee. According to the report here, the liquidator sold all twelve of them, took twenty percent and gave Vincent forty-eight hundred dollars.”

  Patrick nodded his head but didn’t say anything. I watched him for a few moments and then looked back at the liquidator’s inventory sheet. I remembered that Patrick had said in that first phone call that the two long boards were the most valuable. On the inventory, there were two boards described as ten feet long. Both were made by One World in Sarasota, Florida. One sold for $1,200 to a collector and the other for $400 on eBay, the online auction site. The disparity between the two sales made me think the eBay sale was bogus. The liquidator had probably sold the board to himself cheap. He would then turn around and sell it at a profit he’d keep for himself. Everybody’s got an angle. Including me. I knew that if he hadn’t resold the board yet, then I still had a shot at it.

  “What if I could get you one of the long boards back?” I asked.

  “That would be awesome! I just wish I had kept one, you know?”

  “No promises. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  I decided to pursue it later by putting my investigator on it. Cisco showing up and asking questions would probably make the liquidator more accommodating.

  Patrick and I didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. In another twenty minutes we pulled into the driveway of Walter Elliot’s house. It was of Moorish design with white stone and dark brown shutters. The center facade rose into a tower silhouetted against the blue sky. A silver midlevel Mercedes was parked on the cobblestone pavers. We parked next to it.

  “You want me to wait here?” Patrick asked.

  “Yeah. I don’t think I’ll take too long.”

  “I know this house. It’s all glass in the back. I tried to surf behind it a couple times but it closes out on the inside and the rip’s really bad.”

  “Pop the trunk for me.”

  I got out and went to the back to retrieve my digital camera. I turned it on to make sure I had some battery power and took a quick shot of the front of the house. The camera was working and I was good to go.

  I walked to the entrance and the front door opened before I could push the bell. Mrs. Albrecht stood there, looking as lovely as I had seen her the day before.

  Eighteen

  When Walter Elliot had told me he would have someone meet me at the house in Malibu, I hadn’t expected it to be his executive assistant.

  “Mrs. Albrecht, how are you today?”

  “Very well. I just got here and thought maybe I had missed you.”

  “Nope. I just got here too.”

  “Come in, please.”

  The house had a two-story entry area below the tower. I looked up and saw a wrought-iron chandelier hanging in the atrium. There were cobwebs on it, and I wondered if they had formed because the house had gone unused since the murders or because the chandelier was too high up and too hard to get to with a duster.

  “This way,” Mrs. Albrecht said.

  I followed her into the great room, which was larger than my entire home. It was a complete entertainment area with a glass wall on the western exposure that brought the Pacific right into the house.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “It is indeed. Do you want to see the bedroom?”

  Ignoring the question, I turned the camera on and took a few shots of the living room and its view.

  “Do you know who has been in here since the Sheriff’s Department relinquished control of it?” I asked.

  Mrs. Albrecht thought for a moment before answering.

  “Very few people. I do not believe that Mr. Elliot has been out here. But, of course, Mr. Vincent came out once and his investigator came out a couple of times, I believe. And the Sheriff’s Department has come back twice since turning the property back over to Mr. Elliot. They had search warrants.”

  Copies of the search warrants were in the case file. Both times they were looking for only one thing—the murder weapon. The case against Elliot was all circumstantial, even with the gunshot residue on his hands. They needed the murder weapon to ice the case but they didn’t have it. The notes in the file said that divers had searched the waters behind the house for two days after the murders but had also failed to come up with the gun.

  “What about cleaners?” I asked. “Did someone come in and clean the place up?”

  “No, no one like that. We were told by Mr. Vincent to leave things as they were in case he needed to use the place during the trial.”

  There was no mention in the case files of Vincent possibly using the house in any way during the trial. I wasn’t sure what the thinking would have been there. My instinctive response upon seeing the place was that I wouldn’t want a jury anywhere near it. The view and sheer opulence of the property would underline Elliot’s wealth and serve to disconnect him from the jurors. They would understand that they weren’t really a jury of his peers. They would know that he was from a completely different planet.

  “Where’s the master suite?” I asked.

  “It comprises the entire top floor.”

  “Then, let’s go up.”

  As we went up a winding white staircase with an ocean-blue banister, I asked Mrs. Albrecht what her first name was. I told her I felt uncomfortable being so formal with her, especially when her boss and I were on a first-name basis.

  “My name is Nina. You can call me that if you want.”

  “Good. And you can call me Mickey.”

  The stairs led to a door that opened into a bedroom suite the size of some courtrooms I had been in. It was so big it had twin fireplaces on the north and south walls. There was a sitting area, a sleeping area, and his-and-her bathrooms. Nina Albrecht pushed a button near the door, and the curtains covering the west view silently began to split and reveal a wall of glass that looked out over the sea.

  The custom-made bed was double the size of a regular king. It had been stripped of the top mattress and all linens and pillows and I assumed these had been taken for forensic analysis. In two locations in the room, six-foot-square segments of carpet had been cut out, again, I believ
ed, for the collection and analysis of blood evidence.

  On the wall next to the door, there were blood-spatter marks that had been circled and marked with letter codes by investigators. There were no other signs of the violence that had occurred in the room.

  I walked to the corner by the glass wall and looked back into the room. I raised the camera and took a few shots from different angles. Nina walked into the shot a couple times but it didn’t matter. The photos weren’t for court. I would use them to refresh my memory of the place while I was working out the trial strategy.

  A murder scene is a map. If you know how to read it, you can sometimes find your way. The lay of the land, the repose of victims in death, the angle of views and light and blood. The spatial restrictions and geometric differentiations were all elements of the map. You can’t always get all of that from a police photo. Sometimes you have to see it for yourself. This is why I had come to the house in Malibu. For the map. For the geography of murder. When I understood it, I would be ready to go to trial.

  From the corner, I looked at the square cut out of the white carpet near the bedroom door. This is where the male victim, Johan Rilz, had been shot down. My eyes traveled to the bed, where Mitzi Elliot had been shot, her naked body sprawled diagonally across it.

  The investigative summary in the file suggested that the naked couple had heard an intruder in the house. Rilz went to the bedroom door and opened it, only to be immediately surprised by the killer. Rilz was shot down in the doorway and the killer stepped over his body and into the room.

  Mitzi Elliot jumped up from the bed and stood frozen by its side, clutching a pillow in front of her naked body. The state believed that the elements of the crime suggested that she knew her killer. She might have pleaded for her life or might have known her death could not be stopped. She was shot twice through the pillow from a distance estimated at three feet and knocked back onto the bed. The pillow she had used as a shield fell to the floor. The killer then stepped forward to the bed and pressed the barrel of the gun against her forehead for the kill shot.