I was still reeling from confronting my younger self when Harkless met me on the motor court to relay the substance of his conversation with Davina Santos.
“She’s worked for him eight years. Ever since she started he’s been with Nancy. She’s not sure when his wife died but she thinks about ten years ago.”
“What about the son?”
“She’s never met him.”
“Ever?”
“I asked her twice. That long, I’m thinking they must be estranged.”
Davina Santos came Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She had a clicker for the driveway gates. Upon arrival that morning she discovered them open. Usually they shut after thirty seconds.
“Power’s out,” I said. “Maybe he opened them manually and didn’t get a chance to close them.”
Harkless mulled it over. “That’s what happened, he was alive as of yesterday afternoon. There’s cameras. Did you check the computer?”
I smiled. It hit him. No power. No footage.
“Shit,” he said. “Is there a battery backup someplace?”
“Not that I’ve seen so far.”
“Whatever. PD’s problem. You get what you need?”
“Almost. I still have to shoot the outside.”
“Hurry it up? I feel like I’m gonna suffocate.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s get him loaded. You bring him in and intake. I’ll text when I’m done, you come pick me up.”
He jogged to the van for the gurney. I went to confer with Detective Rigo.
He was on the second-floor balcony, elbows on the balustrade, the suit coat taut against his narrow, muscular back.
“We’re ready to remove,” I said.
He straightened up. Only then did I register how short he was — about five-five, almost a foot shorter than me. The hair gave him several extra inches, as did his carriage: chest puffed, shoulder blades pinched. “Very good.”
I shared our findings, giving him Nancy Yap’s full name and phone number from the Rolodex. Rigo raised his eyebrows. Not expecting that much initiative from a coroner.
“Thank you, Deputy.”
“No problem. I haven’t seen a cell anywhere,” I said. “Did you guys take it?”
“We did not. Is it possible you overlooked it?”
“Anything’s possible,” I said. “You’ll keep an eye out and let me know if you find it.”
“Our policy is open communication.”
“Right. Considering how many valuables are lying around, I want to confirm that you’re going to leave a uniform onsite till you’re done and you can call us to seal up.”
“Of course.”
In my experience that was not of course; it was very far from of course. But it’s wise to play nice, so I thanked him and we traded phone numbers and spent a few minutes divvying up who got what. He wanted the computer. I wanted the estate planning portfolio. He wanted any other financial documents. I wanted the money clip, house keys, and medications. The conversation was measured and polite, like an amicable divorce mediation.
“Anything else?” Rigo asked.
“Open communication. You tell me.”
He chuckled and went to clear the hall.
With the body van dipping out of sight, I followed the concrete path that led from the motor court down to the guesthouse, crunching over twigs and redwood cones knocked loose by the wind. Eucalyptuses creaked. Past a mountain of honeysuckle, the entrance came into view.
Entrances, plural.
A regular pedestrian door.
A hangar door, twenty feet wide and seventy-five percent raised.
Not a guesthouse. A garage.
It made sense. Rory Vandervelde had suites for his guests. The motor court was for their parking convenience. He had to put his own cars somewhere. Logic — and the size of the building — dictated that he had a whole bunch of them.
Rigo’s smirk. There’s more.
The hangar door gave onto a startling darkness. The garage’s windows, I realized, were false.
I clicked on the flashlight.
Surfaces and shapes receded to infinity.
Not a garage. A museum.
I inched forward, playing the beam over polished glass and polished hardware and vivid high-gloss paint. Each time I took a picture the flash went off around me like fireworks. The floor was shiny, too, black-and-white checkerboard mimicking a final-lap flag. Vehicles clustered in twos and threes like the patrons of a cocktail party. Impotent track lights ran overhead.
Normally the space would gleam, bright and jaunty. Now I walked a crypt.
I’m not a car guy. Most of what I know I’ve learned in the course of being a cop. Meaning most of what I know has to do with extremely shitty cars. Give me a beat-to-hell ’93 Corolla or dirty white panel van and I’m good. Anything over thirty-five-thousand dollars MSRP starts to get fuzzy.
Rory Vandervelde owned around thirty vehicles, none of them shitty.
The collection went for breadth over depth. Sports cars and luxury sedans, a three-wheeled oddity, a Harley and a Humvee. I recognized the better-known brands. Bentley, Lamborghini, Ferrari. The exotics I’d never heard of. What was a Koenigsegg? My brother would know. It looked supersonic and, for a person with long legs, super-uncomfortable.
Off the main display floor were nooks, man caves within the man cavern, side chapels in this cathedral of testosterone: billiards table, humidor, jukebox, yet another wet bar. Aerodynamic furniture and art picked up the same visual notes, but subtly. There were no images of cars per se, but rather art deco prints in black and silver and gold; photographs of the Rat Pack, Muhammad Ali exulting over a downed Sonny Liston. A wall safe with a thick glass front showed off the thirty-odd car keys. Several qualified as works of art unto themselves: tiny fantasies in precious metal and crystal, shaped like shields or rockets or the vehicles they started.
The air, already stodgy, grew hotter and denser the deeper I went. At the rear I came to boutique repair shop set up with a hydraulic lift, chrome tools, and a broad worktable. Sharp stack of chamois. Clean white rags, suitable for an operating theater.
I took one last picture and started for the exit.
My phone buzzed.
Harkless had texted images from the bottom of the driveway. The gate mechanism was hidden behind a shrub. Someone had removed the housing to expose the motor and gears. A crank jutted, labeled with a double-headed arrow: OPEN and CLOSE.
I slowed, glanced up. The cars had to be the single most valuable collection. Yet I’d strolled right in without a second thought.
Not through the pedestrian door. Through the hangar door.
Which was stuck, partway open.
Adjacent to it, a portrait of Frank Sinatra hung askew, as though pulling away from the wall. I went over and touched the frame, which hinged out to reveal a recess containing the guts of the hangar door mechanism and a crank handle.
RAISE ← → LOWER
The hangar door looked heavy. Moving it would take elbow grease. Arm burning. Back cramping. You’d do it no more than necessary. Get the door only as high as you needed and stop.
As it stood, the opening permitted the passage of a low-slung car. Margin for error, eighteen inches. Don’t scratch the roof.
I panned the flashlight. Just like in the main house, I could see no evidence of theft — no vacant hooks in the key safe, no gap in the display floor left by a missing vehicle.
I thought about the driveway gates, cranked open in anticipation.
The hangar door, ready to receive.
A vehicle coming in, then.
Who’s the new guy?
You couldn’t call me totally ignorant about cars. My brother was a lifelong motorhead. Every November he made our father take him to the San Francisco Auto Show. Often I got dragged along. We’re less than two years apart and grew up sleeping four feet away from each other. Inevitably some of his knowledge filtered over to me.