Cops and their guns, I thought. Pretty much inseparable, right up to the end.
“Look how organized he was,” said McKenzie. “Must have cut the foam himself to get it all neat like that.”
I put the automatic garage door opener in the briefcase, closed it up, and locked it in the trunk of my car.
A tall, slender man in a long black coat came skidding down the hillside, well away from the crime-scene tape, feet turned sideways and leaning back for balance. It took me a second to recognize him. It was Ethics Authority director Erik Kaven, a man feared in the same way that his investigator Garrett Asplundh had been feared.
“He got the news pretty fast,” said McKenzie.
Kaven sized up the scene and came toward us. His handshake was strong.
“Garrett?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Robbery?”
“Suicide looks more like it,” said McKenzie.
“It wasn’t suicide,” said Kaven. He looked at McKenzie, then me. Kaven was tall and big-jawed, and his face was deeply lined. His gray-brown hair was thick, straight, and undisciplined. He wore a gunslinger’s mustache that somehow looked right on him. I guessed him at fifty. He’d been a district federal judge here in San Diego before signing on to lead the new Ethics Authority two years ago. Kaven had made big news when he shot two bank robbers out in El Cajon one Friday afternoon. Two shots, two dead men. He carried a gun on the bench, and he’d just gotten off work. He’d been depositing his paycheck when the robbers’ guns came out. His eyes were deep-set and pointedly suspicious.
“It wasn’t suicide,” he said again. “I’ll guarantee it.”
2
Garrett Asplundh’s apartment was up in the North Park part of San Diego. Nice area, decent neighborhoods, and not far from the ocean. From the upstairs deck of Garrett’s place I could see Balboa Park. The late-morning breeze was cool and sharp.
It was a two-bedroom place. Small kitchen with a view of the neighborhood and the power lines. Not much in the fridge but plenty of scotch in the liquor cabinet. The living room had a hardwood floor, a gas-burning fireplace, a black futon sofa with a chrome gooseneck reading lamp, and bookshelves covering three walls. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, like a museum visitor. I like quiet when I’m trying to get the sound of a victim’s life. There was a lot to hear about Garrett Asplundh. He had been executed, for one thing. Either by himself or someone else.
The books ranged widely, from The World Atlas of Nations to Trout from Small Streams by Dave Hughes, and they were arranged in no order I could see. Lots of photography collections. Lots of true crime. No paperbacks. No novels. An entire shelf of books on aquatic insects. Another shelf just for meteorology. Another for Abraham Lincoln.
There was a small collection of CDs and DVDs, some commercially manufactured and some homemade. One of the DVDs was entitled “The Life and Death of Samantha Asplundh.” It wasn’t in a plastic box, but rather a leather sheath with the title tooled onto the front. Some good work had gone into creating that container. I wondered if Samantha was the daughter who died.
The first bedroom had a computer workstation set up at a window. There was a padded workout bench, weights in a rack, and a stationary cycle. Facing another window was a small desk for tying flies. The walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of a woman and a little girl. I mean completely covered, every inch, the edges of the pictures — mostly eight-and-a-half-by-elevens — perfectly, spacelessly aligned. The pictures seemed artful to me, but I know nothing about art. The woman had lightness and depth and beauty. The girl was innocent and joyful. I could sense the emotion of the photographer. If he had been able to talk honestly to me about those two subjects, I’d have seen yellow rhomboids pouring out of him, because yellow rhomboids are the color and shape of love.
“Must be the ex and kid,” said McKenzie.
The other bedroom was similarly sparse. Just a tightly made full-size bed, a lamp to read by, a chest of drawers, and more black-and-white photographs of the woman and the girl. A few of them had Garrett Asplundh in them. He looked drowsy and dangerous. He was a lean but muscled man, and I remembered that he was reputed to be a superb boxer and martial artist.
“He was obsessed with his wife,” said McKenzie.
“I don’t remember her name.”
“Stella. The girl drowned in the pool while the mom was supposed to be watching. Or maybe Garrett was, I don’t remember. But Mom couldn’t handle it and left him. That’s what I heard.”
“Yeah. That’s about what I heard, too.”
“I wonder why all black-and-white. No color.”
“Maybe it’s the way he saw things,” I guessed.
“Colorblind?”
“No. All one way or the other.”
“You mean no gray,” said McKenzie.
“None.”
She shrugged. “Chick had a pretty face.”
I wondered why there were no cameras here. No tripods, lights, lenses, cases, battery packs, motor drives, canisters of film. No evidence — except for the digital camera in his aluminum case — that Garrett Asplundh had taken a single picture since his daughter died.
I sat at the desk in front of the window and pulled out one of the left-side drawers. It was full of hanging files, all red, each labeled with vinyl tab and handwritten label. I flipped through the “Medical” but didn’t find anything of interest. I checked the “Phone” file because I always do. Nothing unusual. In “Utils” I noted the gas and electric, as well as monthly checks made out to Kohler Property Managers for rent on the North Park apartment. Oddly, there were monthly checks made out to another management company — Uptown Property Management — for eight hundred dollars. Nothing written on the memo lines to indicate what the payment was for. Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money, month in and out. I’d seen Uptown Property Management signs around, mostly down in Barrio Logan and Shelltown and National City. Not really your uptown properties at all. I made a note to call them.
The “Sam” file contained only two documents — birth and death certificates. She had died of drowning at the age of three years and two months. Her official history was a folder with two pieces of paper in it. I wondered at the tremendous loss of this little girl if you projected in all the years she had to live and everything she might have become.
Next I got out the “Explorer” file and compared the Explorer’s plate numbers with the ones I’d written down. The same. The SUV had been purchased new from a local Ford dealer. Three years of financing provided by Ford Credit. I wondered how much money Garrett Asplundh was making as an investigator for the city Ethics Authority.
The drawer above had my answer: stubs from City of San Diego payroll checks issued weekly for $1,750 — give or take a few dollars and cents. That was before deductions for income tax, Social Security, and a Keogh account. Ninety-one grand a year wasn’t making Asplundh rich. I was making eighty-one, counting overtime, as a first-year dead dick.
Behind the pay-stub folder were two folders marked “Entertain 1” and “Entertain 2.” I opened “Entertain 1” and scanned through the receipts — high-line restaurants, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, exotic car rentals. Lots of nights out. Some of it was charged to a credit card in Asplundh’s name. Some of it was paid in cash.