“You want me to run you down to the pier in the cart?” Stilwell asked.
“No, it’s downhill,” Tash said. “An easy walk.”
“Okay. Be good.”
“And you be safe.”
They kissed goodbye and Stilwell watched her walk down Eucalyptus toward the harbor. He thought about where they were in the relationship and where they were going. It had started out as a casual, no-demands sort of thing. They both were on the rebound from their previous relationships and moving cautiously. But as the months went by, their connection deepened, and then Tash started staying over most nights of the week. Stilwell stopped going to the mainland on his days off. He put the condo he’d bought after his divorce up for sale. Tash kept her apartment but mostly because a storage unit for her furniture would cost almost as much as her rent. Keeping the place also offered a refuge if things with Stilwell didn’t work out. But they both knew that was the next move — if she gave up her place, they were in it for the long haul.
Stilwell felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. It was Mercy.
“Sergeant, we have a situation with a visitor from overtown.”
“What’s going on?”
“Looks like an alcohol poisoning at the Crescent Hotel. Paramedics on scene and they’re calling a medevac.”
Stilwell checked his phone screen. It was only 7:10 a.m., but the busy times were starting.
“Okay, Mercy, I’m on my way.”
8
Stilwell was in early at the sub on Tuesday so he could get a jump on the crime and arrest reports that had accumulated over the holiday weekend. He had to prepare case summaries that would be submitted to Monika Juarez on the mainland for decisions on whether charges would be filed. There had been twenty-six arrests over the three-day weekend. The vast majority were drunk-and-disorderly cases, though three of these had escalated to assaults when the sheriff’s deputies showed up. There was also a scattering of arrests for property crimes and driving while impaired. Under California law, driving while intoxicated — with a blood-alcohol concentration over 0.08 percent — carried the same penalties whether you were in an automobile or a golf cart.
The sub’s jail was holding four men, three of them on assault and one for grand theft — he had walked out of a bar on Saturday night, hopped into a golf cart that belonged to somebody else, and driven away. The cart was located the next day up at the Hermit Gulch Lookout with the man who had taken it passed out in the driver’s seat.
Stilwell knew that Monika Juarez would reject most of the cases. Some would be filed but dismissed before they reached court. Juarez’s job was to weed out the inconsequential cases that were not worth the time and money to adjudicate. The county jail system was already crowded and under federal oversight. Prosecutors had to be selective about whom they tried to put in prison.
From an island twenty-two miles from the coast, Stilwell viewed the system as not yet broken but getting close to it. His opinion was that when you installed a revolving door at the entrance to the jailhouse, you were inviting the system’s downfall.
Knowing what awaited the weekend’s cases at the next stop, Stilwell put most of his efforts into writing up the summary of charges against Merris Spivak. He’d been arrested Saturday night for assaulting a law enforcement officer. He had broken a bottle over Deputy Tom Dunne’s head in a bar on Crescent. Dunne was backing up Deputy Eduardo Esquivel, who had entered the bar after a call regarding a fight between two patrons over whose song was next up on the karaoke stage. Spivak came up behind Dunne and bashed him on the head with an empty wine bottle he had grabbed off another patron’s table. Dunne got a concussion, nine stitches, and a night in a medical clinic before being transferred to a mainland hospital. And Stilwell was down one deputy for the rest of the busy holiday weekend.
The assault on Dunne was captured by the bar’s security camera, and the video would be the key evidence against Spivak.
Stilwell attached the link to his report, then decided to watch it again. It had made him so angry the first time he had watched it that he realized he should add some of the details to the summary report to ensure that Juarez didn’t defer charges.
The video link provided by the bar started thirty seconds prior to the assault on Dunne. It clearly showed that the attack was unprovoked. Spivak came quickly into the frame behind Dunne and hit him with the bottle with an overhead swing. Dunne went down, knocked out cold by the impact. Esquivel had his hands full and didn’t see his backup deputy go down. Spivak, apparently not knowing he was on camera, turned, went back to the bar, took a seat on a stool, and acted like he’d had no part in the melee. That part of the video was bizarre. Stilwell watched it two more times, and, while it continued to make him angry, the oddness of Spivak’s actions began to poke through the emotion. Stilwell got up from his desk and left his office. He walked through the dayroom to the jail.
There were two four-bunk holding cells in the sub’s jail. They were side by side and divided by a concrete-block wall. Guests in one cell could not see into the other. Stilwell had put Spivak in cell one by himself, and the other three detainees were in two.
Stilwell had separated Spivak because his assault on a law enforcement officer was more serious than the others’ alleged crimes.
Stilwell walked to the bars that fronted cell one and saw Spivak asleep on one of the lower bunks. He had been in the cell for two days.
“Spivak,” he said. “Wake up.”
Spivak didn’t move. Stilwell put his right foot between the bars and kicked the frame of the bunk, and Spivak jerked awake.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“Spivak, I’ve got a question for you,” Stilwell said.
“Am I getting out of here?”
“No. I have a question for you.”
“Are you taking me to county?”
“I’m keeping you right here until the judge comes out. That’s usually Fridays. But if he’s backed up on the mainland, it might not be till next Monday.”
“Ah, fuck. You can’t do that.”
“Actually, I can, and I am. Did you know Deputy Dunne?”
Spivak was silent for a moment. Stilwell stepped back to the wall opposite the holding cell and turned on the lights. Though being in the bottom bunk kept Spivak in partial shadow, Stilwell could see his eyes when he came back to the bars. Spivak had a shaved head that was pointed like a bullet, a host of tattoos peeking out of his jumpsuit collar and sleeves, and a crescent-shaped scar below his left eye.
“Did you know him?” Stilwell asked again.
“Who the fuck is Deputy Dunne?” Spivak said.
“The deputy you clocked with the wine bottle and put in the hospital. Did you know him? Did you have any previous encounter with him?”
Spivak again went silent, which made Stilwell think he was hiding something.
“Talk to me, Spivak,” Stilwell said. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something before asking me shit?” Spivak said.
“You already got ’em when we booked you.”
“Then I ain’t talking to you. I want my lawyer.”
“You called your lawyer already, Spivak. That was your phone call. You decide you want to talk to me, I’ll see what I can do about another call.”
Stilwell left him thinking about that and went back to his office. On his computer, he ran Spivak’s name through the crime index. He was forty-four years old and had a history of arrests in Los Angeles County for assault and other violent crimes, most of them in the Long Beach area. This furthered Stilwell’s belief that there was a connection between Spivak and Dunne. He pulled up what he could on the prior arrests and did not see Dunne’s name in any of the reports. The year before, Spivak had spent three hundred days in the Pitchess Detention Center after pleading guilty to a charge of aggravated assault. Pitchess was part of the county jail system; a sentence of less than a year was served in the county system, while a sentence of more than a year meant a transfer to state prison.