Several media pieces online refer to Bayard, citations in Offshore and Pipeline amp; Gas, all from the late ’90s, and a column-length profile in another energy sector publication that has since folded. Clicking through the links, I discover a Chronicle piece from a decade ago in which Bayard is quoted on the subject of Donald Fauk’s murder conviction.
This is unthinkable, he says. For a generation of mavericks who looked up to Donald as an icon, his fall from grace comes as a real blow.
I stare at the words on the screen.
Simone Walker’s killer used a knife sold to Bayard. Her killer also arranged the scene to bear an uncanny resemblance to Nicole Fauk’s. And now Bayard turns out to have regarded Donald Fauk as an icon? This has to be the man I’m after.
“Detective?”
I glance over my shoulder at the beaming smile of my non-sworn researcher, who clutches a sheaf of paper in her red-nailed hand.
“Your phone records,” she says, handing them over. “The one I highlighted is the call you’re after. It’s a Dallas number.”
“Whose?”
“Jack Hill.” She smiles wider. “That’s Dr. Joy Hill’s ex-husband.”
I snatch the phone handset and start dialing the number. As it rings, I mouth the word thanks. She gazes down on me with satisfaction, then floats away.
“Angie’s dead? Are you being serious?”
“I’m sorry to break the news like this, Mr. Hill.”
“And you’re investigating. .” He sounds disoriented, baffled. “I’m gonna need a second to process this. She was so. . young.”
“When I spoke to your wife-excuse me, your ex-wife-she said Agnieszka made a phone call while she was at the site of Simone’s murder. According to the phone records, she called you. Could you tell me what that conversation was about, Mr. Hill?”
“I. . You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t, I can’t quite get my head around it. She’s gone? What happened exactly? Was it the same person who killed the new girl?”
“Sir, if you’ll please answer my question. Tell me about your phone call with Agnieszka.”
“All right,” he says. “If it was Joy that put you in the picture, then I assume you’re aware that I had a special relationship with Angie. That didn’t last long. You sound like an older fella, so maybe you can relate when I tell you. . a man can hardly say no when someone so young, so breathtaking wants to be with him. But I could tell what she was looking for was a daddy, not a boyfriend, and if I’d wanted to be a daddy, well. . you see what I mean.”
“So the affair was brief, but you kept in touch?”
“Oh, sure. Angie needed a lot of help sorting her life out. The immigration stuff, getting on her feet. She wanted to be a clothing designer, and I helped her out with that, too. Financially. She reminded me a lot of Joy, to be honest. Very sophisticated as far as academic matters go, but without much skill for real life. Women like that-it’s almost like for their minds to keep growing, their hearts have to remain fourteen forever.”
“Why did she call you Sunday? As far as I can tell, you’re the last person to speak to her alive.”
I hold back the fact that his ex-wife overheard part of the conversation. If he attributes similar words to Oliszewski, then I’ll have independent confirmation. If he doesn’t, I’ll know how to press him.
“Someone told her about the new girl getting herself killed, so Angie was in a state. She was a little angry with me, because there’d been some trouble back when we were both living in the house. The way I’d settled things didn’t sit right with her. Bad as it sounds, Angie held me a bit responsible.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Angie felt. .” A sigh, like the air being let out of a balloon. “She believed she was being watched. When I put in that pool, all I was shooting for was to increase the property value. Joy doesn’t swim and frankly my only use for it was to dress up the backyard for when we were entertaining. Angie, though, she lived out there. Her family back in Poland wasn’t well off, and to her a swimming pool was decadent luxury. She was convinced one of the neighbors was peeping on her.”
The hair on the back of my neck goes electric.
“I figured she was exaggerating. Maybe she’d seen somebody through the fence and drawn the wrong conclusion, movement in a window or whatever. If you’ve seen the yard-of course you have-it’s pretty private. But she insisted somebody was watching her from an attic window next-door.”
“At which house?”
“The Bayards’ house.”
Bingo.
“You said she didn’t like your solution. What was it?”
He chuckles. “I called a landscaper and had some new trees put in. I mean, the yard was practically a jungle as it was, so I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“Did you confront Dave Bayard?”
He pauses. “No, I don’t guess I did. Naturally I was aware of his issues. His boy had called the police on him before, and that wife of his had the brittle smile of an abused woman. She made an effort to keep it a secret, though. Out of fear, pride, whatever. To be honest with you, I didn’t relish the thought of getting involved in all that. What was I gonna do, show up on the man’s doorstep and accuse him?”
“You took the practical approach,” I say, trying to reassure him. “If the problem is somebody looking through the window, obstruct the view and the problem’s solved.”
“Exactly. The maximum result with the minimum headache. Angie didn’t see that, though. She wanted pistols at dawn. But once you get entangled in the lives of your neighbors, there’s no going back.” A grim laugh. “If I had known how soon I’d be moving out, maybe I would have played things differently. Probably not.”
“So when she called you Saturday, what was she angry about? You said she blamed you.”
“Maybe not blame, but. . the trees were gone. She hadn’t been back, so she didn’t know. The idiot who planted them sunk ’em in the ground without taking the bags off, so the roots were all netted up and couldn’t take hold. They just withered up. Joy complained about it to me-by that time I was out of there-and I told her to call the man and get them replaced. Instead I think she had them hauled off and got the money back. So Angie was mad because the trees weren’t there. Her peeping Tom would’ve had a clear view of the new girl, she said, and that’s probably why she was dead. .” His voice trails off. “She really was angry. She’d trusted me to take care of it, and in her view I’d failed her.”
“She was a fool to believe in you,” I say.
“What?”
“She told you that?”
“Yes,” he says. “ ‘I was foolish to trust you,’ words to that effect.”
Close enough.
“The thing is,” he says, “Angie’s view of Dave Senior might have been colored by David Junior.”
“By who?”
“The son. David Bayard Jr. The kid’s pretty sharp, a professional student, and he and his dad are like fire and water. She met David in the neighborhood and he told her all kinds of stories about his dad, which just fueled her suspicions.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Just stupid nonsense.”
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“He claimed his father used to beat him. With his stepmother looking on. He said that his father had threatened to kill him, and that Bayard actually had killed someone over in Africa. Stuff like that.”
“And you dismissed it?”
“Of course I dismissed it. Bayard might drink a little too much and slap his wife around-I’m saying might, because I have no idea-but the man had a high-powered job, two sets of golf clubs, and a pretty good recipe for throat-scorching chili. I never had kids, but I can imagine situations where you’d have to threaten a teenage boy within an inch of his life-not to mention, David Junior. . he was just trying to get into her pants, that’s all.”