“Hi, Wonderful,” said Kearns, smiling mightily at Weir. “This is Jim.”
She looked at Jim without apparent interest, then walked over and sat down beside him. “Make this guy quit doing this to us. He’s sick and spoiled and there’s never enough coffee for three.” Crystal’s chest was pale and freckled where it disappeared into her robe. She examined a fingernail, then brought it to her mouth. In profile, she was a girl. “Can you do that for me?” she asked Weir, still biting on the nail.
“You don’t exactly look captive.”
“I’m a prisoner of his mind.”
“Door’s open.”
Kearns was smiling still, immensely impressed with himself. “Okay. You’re free, Crystal. You may return to your former life of boredom and neglect in beautiful downtown Barstow. Go on, get outta here.”
She grunted, went into the kitchen, and started grinding more coffee. Carol headed back to the bedroom and shut the door. Crystal stepped outside to a small sun deck and plunked herself down on a chaise while the coffee brewed.
“Remember one thing,” said Kearns. “Every time you see a beautiful woman, there’s a man in her life that’s sick of her. I read that somewhere.”
“Is that what you thought when you met Ann?”
Kearns smiled slightly. “No. One thing I learned real early was that Ray wasn’t anywhere near sick of Ann. Like I said, that’s why they made us a threesome, to show me that two people could be happy with each other.”
“Did she ever come on to you?”
Kearns shook his head and looked out at Crystal on the sun deck. She had her pale little legs stretched out to catch the minimal sun, and the boxing robe pulled up close around her neck to cut the spring chill. “Crystal’s from Barstow, by way of Oklahoma. She tries to get every ray of California sun she can. Sweet kid. No. Annie never came on to me. And since you’re going to ask it next, no, I never came on to her. But I will tell you I appreciated her as a beautiful, mysterious woman, and I think she appreciated me back. We recognized something very important about each other, something that only the people who have it themselves can see.”
“What’s that, Phil?”
Kearns turned thoughtful now, sipped his coffee with a furrowed brow and glanced again out at Crystal. “The capacity to go through with things.”
Jim followed Kearns’s gaze out to the girl. The sea gull on the mast appeared from his angle to be sitting on Crystal’s head.
“The capacity to go through with things, and all the dangers that come with it, especially if someone’s married,” said Kearns.
“And you two recognized it in each other, but it was never acknowledged?”
“It was acknowledged the first time I laid eyes on her. That was our connection. We saw beneath the surfaces, straight to the ulterior. Annie was one big ulterior, waiting to happen. I guess I don’t have to explain to you how ulterior I am.”
Weir heard Carol Clark thumping around in the bedroom. “What was it that kept you and Annie from consummating all this humid mystery?”
“Ray Cruz,” said Kearns. “Pure and simple. No woman is worth destroying a friendship over. Not one. Not even two.”
Weir wondered whether it might have been Ann who kept up that end of the bargain, and Kearns who wanted to challenge it. Still, it was difficult to imagine Kearns taking her — or anyone else — seriously enough to commit murder. “There’s an hour I want to talk to you about, when you were on patrol. Monday night, the night Ann died.”
Kearns looked at Jim, his self-satisfaction turning to interest and concern. “I was working the peninsula.”
“I know that. I also know you were off radio for twenty minutes, between twelve-thirty and twelve-fifty. That’s too long for coffee and too late for dinner.”
Disappointment registered in Kearns’s eyes. “And just enough time to kill Ann?”
“That’s an awful long jump you just made.”
“I make long jumps, Weir, because it saves time. I hit a lull a little after twelve — nothing happened. No calls to answer, no tickets to write, no disturbances to check out. Things usually kick in about twelve-thirty when the first shift of drunks is on its way home.”
“Where were you?”
“I looped down to the Wedge, parked for a few minutes, looked for drinkers on the beach. Then I headed back, checked out the side streets, cruised a place on L Street that’s been hit twice the last month. Nothing cooking.”
“You see any other units?”
“Seeing anything was tough that night. No, no other units. There were three others on my beat, but I didn’t see them.”
Weir considered. “Blodgett says he saw a patrol car out of area that night, coming off the bridge and heading south, toward the Back Bay. Midnight, on the dot.”
“No. I’d have had to be out of area myself to see that. Like I said, I was on the peninsula, all night except the runs I made in to the tank. Two to be exact — a drunk in public and a B and E.”
“You didn’t see Ann that night?”
“No.” Kearns’s gaze lowered to the floor and stayed there for a long beat. Then he looked back out at Crystal. “I’ll miss her.”
Carol came from the bedroom again, dressed in jeans and a light sweater and a pair of low pumps. Her purse was slung over a shoulder. She set down her coffee cup, walked over to Kearns, and kissed the top of his head. “Later, Phil.”
“Bye.”
“See you when I see you. Nice to meet you, Jim.”
Weir nodded and watched her go through the door, appear on the other side of the glass, whack her purse against the legs of dozing Crystal, whose head lifted sleepily, and disappear down the stairs.
“So,” said Kearns. “I hope you’ve gotten what you wanted from me. Now I’ll give something that might help. Consider it a gift to Annie.”
“Shoot.”
“I’ve got days off, right, so I’ve spent a little time on my own down on the Back Bay. Dennison encouraged anybody who wants to work some ‘overtime’ for Ray. No pay involved, by the way — just volunteer. Yesterday I spent the afternoon going back to the houses with a view of Galaxy, past Morning Star, where this guy might have parked. Of course, we’d talked to everybody before — or thought we had — but I kicked up this old lady whose husband didn’t want her to talk. He was the king, you know, she couldn’t say anything he wouldn’t contradict. So I sent him out of the room for a ticket he’d gotten — some story about a parking pass that wasn’t expired — so I could talk to his wife. It turns out she heard a car pull up and park about midnight. It woke her; she had to use the head, so she took a leak and on the way back looked outside. What she sees is a white four-door parked along the curb. She doesn’t know the make or model but she does notice two things. Whoever is driving it doesn’t get out — he just sits there behind the wheel. And two, the car’s got a big dark patch of something on the driver’s side door. Sounded like primer to me, maybe some body work that didn’t get finished. Definitely not a cop car, she said.”
Weir pondered this. To someone who saw it moving, the primer patch could have looked like the city of Newport emblem.
“Now get this, early this morning, patrol found a car registered to Emmett Goins parked down at the end of the peninsula, by the Wedge. It’s a white ’eighty-seven Chevy with a big patch of primer showing on the driver’s door. It’s got a chrome luggage rack on top. His son, Horton, had taken it. Horton’s a serious nut case from Ohio, a big fat prior like what happened to Ann — just arrived here in sunny Southern Cal.”