He told me his name. Ronald was probably in his forties, overdressed for Santa Cruz, in a gray sharkskin suit. He had a thin neck rattling around in his shirt collar, reddish-brown hair shaved close on the sides, a tight, square jaw, and small blue eyes with thin eyebrows that made it easy to picture him as a needy baby.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked, before taking a seat.
To be honest, I always choose the frozen yogurt place with the hope the client will get me something. I agreed to a large vanilla, with cookie dough and fresh strawberries. I calculated how much money I’d just saved me and my dad in calories.
“So, it sounds like you know Teddy?” he asked.
“We’re in a class together, that’s all.”
“I hope it’s not necessary to say that everything I’m about to tell you is confidential?”
“Yep, it’s not necessary.”
“I wasn’t too thrilled about hiring a fifteen-year-old girl as my PI, but Joe Fernandez told me a few of your success stories and says I can trust you.” He challenged me with his childish blue eyes.
I shrugged. “I don’t care if you trust me or not. I have enough stuff to do.”
“Don’t take it the wrong way.” He sighed and leaned in closer to the table. “Teddy’s mother and I divorced a little over a year ago. I live about a mile away now and I try to see Teddy as much as I can. It’s been working out okay, but about five months ago, she started seeing a guy named Kyle Wilkins.”
His fingernails were manicured, I noticed, and he was noticing too. He was staring at his own fingernails, which looked as if they had a coat of polish.
“And?”
“So it looks like Kyle is making it his life’s mission to be Teddy’s best friend. Believe me, I wouldn’t want Teddy to have to be around someone who’s indifferent to him or treated him badly. But it’s getting to the point that Teddy would rather hang around with him all the time — even when it’s my weekend. And Kyle’s doing things with him that I don’t approve of. He has a pilot’s license and he’ll just take Teddy out of school, go to Tahoe with him for the day. I mean, geez, I can’t compete with that.”
“What makes you think it’s a competition?”
“In case you don’t know, it’s very easy for divorced fathers to get sidelined.”
“Have you talked to your ex-wife about stuff like the trips to Tahoe?”
“Yes. She thinks I’m jealous, that I’m not thinking of Teddy.”
Ronald Hill looked at his perfect fingernails again. They must have made him feel important. Even though I have to work around it all the time, I have problems with well-dressed people in fancy jobs who are ostentatiously concerned about their children. He was probably the kind of jerk who, when Teddy was born, had a Baby on Board sign in the window of whatever air-bagged, super-safe SUV they’d picked up to tote their spawn.
“So what do you want exactly?”
“I guess I’m afraid he’s using Teddy to get to Ariel, and who knows how long that’s going to last. Teddy’s going to get hurt if they break up. Anyway, I feel like there’s something not right about him.”
“Why?”
“That’s why I came to you.” He looked like he was holding back, trying to decide what else to tell me. “Ariel is from a wealthy family. She has a lot of money and she’s going to inherit a lot more. Who knows who Kyle Wilkins is! Google him, you’ll see. There’s nothing. He’s a nobody!”
This put me firmly on the side of Kyle Wilkins. Nobodies were somebodies in my world. Every time I saw someone treating my dad like a nobody, I understood the origins of violence. “So let’s say I get something on Kyle Wilkins. How are you going to use it?”
“I’m going to make sure Ariel knows, without involving my son. She’s very protective of what’s hers. If the guy’s trying to enrich himself at her expense, she’ll pull away.”
“Like she did with you?” I blurted out. I don’t know where that came from. I’d read too many detective stories not to suspect the client of having some personal agenda. And some guy who wanted to discredit his ex-wife’s new boyfriend automatically looked bad.
He pushed away from the table. “We had differences about raising Teddy, is what it comes down to. If we’d never had a child, who knows, we’d probably still be married. But Teddy’s all that matters now.”
What a big creep. If they’d never had Teddy, he and his wife would still be married? Like he’d spent time imagining his life without his kid? I’d like to hope most parents are too superstitious to do that.
He forked over a clean fifty-dollar bill to start me off, and we stepped outside. It had gotten dark and traffic had loosened up, but the rain was still coming down, and passing cars were sending explosions of grimy water into the air when they hit the rushing gutters. I said I’d start looking into it, and be in touch in a few days. He walked away and started to sprint across Van Ness to his car as if getting wet would kill him. A white van coming north on Mission took the corner, brakes screeching, fishtailing — I’d end up describing it way too many times. I saw the whole thing. I saw the van smash into Ronald Hill and go right over him.
There was this eerie quiet for a second. The van stopped, while the traffic kept passing on Mission. I should have known no one survives an impact like that, but I ran to Hill, his body lying in a pool of blood mixed with the rain. I kneeled to lift his head, to look into his little blue eyes — nobody’d say he looked like a baby now. All this hot liquid was running out the back of his head.
In no time, three cop cars showed up, and I could hear the ambulance and fire truck on the way. I saw an older guy with a white beard in a blue denim work shirt getting out of the van and talking to a cop, gesturing wildly. I crouched in front of the yogurt shop to wipe my hands in the wet grass. Then I was standing in the rain shaking. One of the uniforms peeled away from the scene and came my way. It was Joe.
“Into the car,” he said. “Come on.” He wrapped his jacket around me. “What the hell happened?”
“That’s Hill,” I choked out.
“I know who it is,” Joe said.
He and my dad have been best friends since they were kids, locals who hauled their surfboards down to the beach every day. He’s stocky, with a bristly crew cut that’s fun to run your hands over. There are pictures of him holding me when I was a baby, so I guess he’s like my uncle or something. At first he had misgivings about showing me the ropes of detective work, but I guess I drove him crazy about it and by now I’ve helped him on so many cases I don’t think he feels much regret. He left me in the car and went on talking with the other officers.
His car smelled clean, like not a speck of garbage or mold was in it. It was practically a spa in there, and it relaxed me. The rain pelted the roof of the car, and the police radio crackled and hissed with other dramas unfolding all over town. A robbery near the Boardwalk. Domestic dispute on Ocean Street. Naked man walking on West Cliff. After a while it became white noise, until Joe got back in and said he’d drive me home.
“I said goodbye to Ronald Hill and then he was dead,” I said flatly.
“Sorry, kiddo. You didn’t need this. People don’t know how to drive for shit in this weather.”
“It rains and someone has to die?” My voice sounded shrill.
“So it goes.”
“What did you find out about the driver?”
Joe took out his pad. “Name’s Allan Lundgren, looks like he checks out by Santa Cruz standards. No record of any kind. Doesn’t have an address, lives in the van. Breath check was clean. According to his statement, by the time he saw Hill, who was not in the crosswalk, it was too late.”