I hated doing it, but I socked the spurs to myself and got to work. “Mr. Summervale, I know it’s tough just now, but I have to ask you some questions. Did Joe mention any kind of problems he might have been having lately? Any kind of trouble that he might have been in?”
“Trouble?” Mr. Summervale replied hazily. “No, nothing. Joe never went looking for trouble.”
“How about fights? Arguments? Was he having a beef with anyone at work or in the car club?”
Again the protesting shake of the head. “No! You know Joe. He worked things out or laughed them off. Ever since he was a little boy... never any trouble.”
“How about with Linda? Were there any problems there?” I insisted. “Any fights? Any indication that Joe was jealous or angry about anything with her? Any mention of another guy she might have been seeing?”
“No. They were starting to plan the wedding. Joe said he needed just a little more in the bank. They were in love...”
“Had Joe mentioned any new friends or acquaintances lately? Anyone new he’d been hanging around with?”
“No. Nobody. Nobody...”
Joe’s mom was crying now, too, deep, shuddering sobs, and tears began to glint in Mr. Summervale’s eyes. The merciful anesthesia of shock was starting to fade. God, I wanted to back off so bad. Every instinct was to let these wounded people have their chance to grieve. But I couldn’t. I had to keep pushing. A man had been killed and a girl was dying and somebody, somewhere, was responsible. The more time the perp had to run, the harder it would be to nail him.
To quote my partner and mentor, street cop par excellence Jack Le Baer, “Carrying a badge means that some days you just gotta plan on being a son of a bitch.”
I suppressed the churning nausea in my gut. “Okay, did Joe mention any money problems that might be cropping up? Has he done any gambling lately...?”
After I left the Summervale place, I headed downtown to the L.A. County Hall of Justice to file my report and to swap notes with the homicide and traffic division investigators assigned to the case.
So far, what we had didn’t amount to much. Traffic agreed that this had not been any kind of conventional wreck.
“The breakup of the automobile started well before its impact against the guardrail post. There was no other vehicle or foreign-object involvement that could be recognized and the instigating event has yet to be identified.”
Unquote.
The wreck was being brought in from the crash site. The lab crew would be working on it all night. Maybe they could give us something.
Homicide had also completed the initial questioning of the other witnesses and of Linda Bell’s parents. They’d uncovered essentially the same story I’d heard at Joe’s place.
Joe Summervale and Linda Bell literally didn’t have an enemy in the world. Or at least any known enemy who had an adequate motive for murder. Also no one had been seen messing around with Joe’s car up at the park and no one recalled any suspicious characters hanging around the picnic grounds.
What with one thing or another, it was near midnight by the time I got back to Santa Monica. Turning off Euclid Street and into my alley, I parked the ’57 under the pepper tree that grew beside the weird little former two-car garage/now backyard apartment I call home. A middle-of-the-night silence had settled over the neighborhood and there was a deadness inside my pad that I didn’t have the energy to overcome. I didn’t even bother with turning on the lights.
My stomach was empty, but the thought of my last meal and who I’d shared it with killed any thought of food. I dealt with the problem with a long pull from the milk bottle in the refrigerator. Going on into the minute living room, I dumped myself into the beat-up easy chair I use for television watching. My genuine made-in-Hawaii Polynesian Tiki god stood at my left elbow, half a pack of Luckys and a book of matches sitting in the abalone-shell ashtray built into his head. I lit up and stared at the unlit screen of my 12-inch Zenith.
It didn’t add up. Bombs aren’t a common murder weapon. There’s a cold-blooded ruthlessness and deliberation to them that runs counter to the passion and anger that fuels most killings. You’ll see them used by the mob sometimes, but usually they’re assembled and planted by a highly paid specialist brought in to make a specific hit.
There was nothing about Joe or Linda that would make them a bombing target. He worked in the shop of a Goodyear tire dealership. She was a receptionist in an optometrist’s office. Neither of them had any known criminal ties. Neither ran with a wild or dangerous crowd. Neither had more than middle-class money.
The only two possibilities that made any sense at all were that, A: the hit stemmed from a case of mistaken identity, i.e. the package that nailed Joe and Linda was actually addressed to somebody else. Or, B: some psycho with a sackful of high explosives had suddenly been stricken with an overwhelming urge to blow up a Corvette.
Neither concept was satisfying. Neither was the smoke I puffed down to ashes and a short butt. That didn’t stop me from lighting up a second one, though, or a third. After a while I must have dozed off.
When I woke up, the steely light of dawn was leaking through the blinds. I grabbed a fast shower, a shave, and a clean T-shirt. After slugging down a cold bottle of RC Cola to wash the stale nicotine taste out of my mouth, I headed back downtown. Specifically, to the old Central Jail building that now housed the police crime labs.
Joe’s demolished Corvette lay in the center of the dank jail garage. Around the main hulk, spaced out on tarpaulins spread on the concrete, were all of the other little bits and pieces of shattered car. Field teams, working by flashlight, had painstakingly collected them from the roadway and the canyon floor.
It made for one crazy jigsaw puzzle, but then, that’s the deal with forensics. Any one of these fragments might be the key element in breaking this thing. Question was, which one?
Lieutenant Lee Jones was there, looking about as red-eyed and half-shot as me. Jones is one of the miracle workers of the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division. He literally helped write the book that everybody else uses. It’s a sad surprise when the lieutenant and his lab guys can’t pull a rabbit out of the hat for a stumped investigator.
I got to be sadly surprised.
“I’m sorry, Deputy, but we can’t find any trace of an explosive device.”
It was my turn to explode. “Jesus, Lieutenant! This car was less than fifty yards in front of me! I saw the damn thing blow!”
“I didn’t say that you didn’t,” the lab man replied patiently. “Nor did I say that there wasn’t a bomb. On the contrary, there is clear evidence of an explosive force released within the frontal structure of this automobile. Our problem is that we can’t figure out what caused it. We haven’t located any components from a timer or detonator. We can’t identify any residual traces of an explosive agent, and the crash damage to the car is so extensive we’re having a hard time placing a point of origin for the blast.”
“No explosives trace at all?”
He shook his head. “We’ve run for all of the standards. Dynamite, gelignite, TNT, black and smokeless powder, even military plastique and straight nitro. No reaction. If this was a bomb, it must have been an exotic. If that’s the case, we could be testing for days before we can isolate the compound used.”
I looked around the display of trashed car, my sense of helplessness growing. “You said if this was a bomb. What else could it have been?”
“An accidental explosion of some kind. Had your friend made any kind of unusual modifications to his car lately?”
I considered for a second. “No, Joe’s ’vette was a stormer, but he was running with over-the-counter speed parts and conventional hop-up techniques. Joe wasn’t crazy enough to tinker with radical fuel additives like nitromethane for street use. And if he’d installed an oxygen or nitrous oxide booster tank, you’d have found it in the wreck. How about the battery? That’s the only thing I can think of that might have blown like that.”