Sunset Express

Tomsic gently took Teddy's wrists and pushed his hands down. He said, 'Tell me what happened, Mr Martin. You want to tell me what happened? Can you do that?'

Martin seemed to regain control of himself and rubbed at his eyes. He said, 'I came home Thursday night and she was gone. Then this guy calls and says he's got Susan and he puts her on. I think it was around eight o'clock.'

Rossi distinctly remembers asking, 'You spoke with her?'

'She was crying. She said she couldn't see anything and then the guy came back and he told me that if I didn't give them the five hundred thousand they'd kill her. I could hear her screaming. I could hear her crying.'

Tomsic said, 'Did you recognize this man's voice?'

'No. No, I asked him who he was and he said I should call him James X.'

Tomsic glanced at Rossi and raised his eyebrows. 'James X?'

'He said they were watching the house. He said they if I called the police and they would kill her. Oh, Jesus, I was so scared.' Teddy Martin stood, taking deep breaths and rubbing his stomach as if it hurt. 'He said I should get the money and he would call tomorrow and tell me what to do with it.'

Angie said, 'Tomorrow was yesterday?'

Martin nodded. 'That's right. Friday. I got the money just like he said. All in hundreds. He wanted hundreds. Then I came back here and waited for his call.'

Tomsic said, 'You just walked into the bank and got five hundred thousand dollars?'

Teddy Martin snapped him an angry look. 'Of course not. My business manager arranged it. He cashed bonds. Something like that. He wanted to know why I wanted the money and I told him not to ask.'

Rossi saw Tomsic frown. Tomsic prompted Martin to continue. 'Okay. So you got the money, then came back here to wait.'

Martin nodded again. 'I guess it was around four, something like that, when he called. He told me to put the money in a garbage bag and bring it to a parking lot just off Mulholland at the four-o-five. They have a little lot there for people who carpool. He told me that there was a dumpster, and I should put the money into the dumpster, then go home. He said they would give me exactly twelve minutes to get there, and if I was late they'd know I was working with the police and they'd kill Susan. They said I should just drop the money and leave, and that after I was gone they'd pick up the money and count it and if everything was okay they'd let Susan go. They said it probably wouldn't be until nine or ten with the counting.' He sat again and started rocking. 'I did everything just like they said and I've been waiting all night. I never heard from them again. I never heard from Susan. When you rang the bell I thought you were her.' Teddy Martin put his face in his hands and sobbed. 'I made it in the twelve minutes. I swear to God I made it. I was driving like a maniac.'

Tomsic told Angie to take the cell phone again, call Gibbs, and this time tell him to have someone check the dumpster. She left, and Tomsic stayed with Martin and the Westec guy. Rossi was gone for only four or five minutes, but when she returned she looked burned around the edges. He said, 'You get Gibbs?'

She didn't answer the question. Instead, she said, 'Dan, may I see you, please?'

Tomsic followed her outside to the ivy alongside the expensive Mexican drive. She took out her pen, pushed aside some leaves, and exposed a ball peen hammer clotted with blond hair and bits of pink matter. Tomsic said, 'I'll be damned.'

Rossi said, 'I was just looking around when I saw it. The handle was sticking up out of the ivy.'

Tomsic stared at the hammer for several seconds, noticing that a single black ant was crawling in the pink matter. Tomsic made the same whistling sound that he'd made at the Stone Canyon overlook when he'd seen the body. Angela Rossi then said, 'He killed her, didn't he, Dan?'

Lincoln Gibbs and Pete Bishop turned into the drive as she said it. Dan Tomsic, who had a million years on the job and whose opinion as a professional cynic almost everyone valued, glanced at the mansion and said, 'The sonofabitch killed her, all right, but now we have to convict him.'

'Hey, we've got this guy, Dan! He's ours!'

Dan Tomsic stared at her with the disdain he reserved for shitbirds, defense attorneys, and card-carrying members of the ACLU. He said, 'It's easier to cut off your own goddamned leg than convict a rich man in this state, detective. Haven't you been around long enough to know that?'

It was the last thing that Dan Tomsic said to her that day.

Susan Martin's murder made the evening news, as did the events that followed.

I was able, months later, to piece together the events of that Saturday morning from police reports, participant interviews, court testimony, and newspaper articles, but I couldn't tell you what I was doing when I heard, or where I was or who I was with. It didn't seem important.

I did not think, nor did I have reason to believe, that Susan Martin's murder and everything that grew from it would have such a profound and permanent impact upon my life.

CHAPTER 1

Jonathan Green came to my office on a hazy June morning with an entourage of three attorneys, a video-grapher, and an intense young woman lugging eight hundred pounds of sound recording equipment. The videographer shoved past the attorneys and swung his camera around my office, saying, 'This is just what we need, Jonathan! It's real, it's colorful, it's L.A. !' He aimed his camera at me past the Mickey Mouse phone and began taping. 'Pretend I'm not here.'

I frowned at him, and he waved toward the lawyers. 'Don't look at me. At them. Look at them.'

I looked at them. 'What is this?' I was expecting Green and an attorney named Elliot Truly, but not the others. Truly had arranged the meeting.

A man in his mid-forties wearing an immaculately tailored blue Armani suit said, 'Mr Cole? I'm Elliot Truly. This is Jonathan Green. Thanks for seeing us.'

I shook hands with Truly first, then Green. Green looked exactly the way he had the two times I'd seen him on 60 Minutes, once when he defended an abortion rights activist accused of murder in Texas and once when he defended a wealthy textile manufacturer accused of murder in Iowa. The Texas case was popular and the Iowa case wasn't, but both were victories for the defense.

The videographer scrambled backward across the office to fit us into his frame, the woman with the sound gear hustling to stay behind the camera as they captured the moment of our first meeting. Armstrong steps onto the moon; the Arabs and the Israelis sign a peace accord; Jonathan Green meets the private detective. The woman with the sound equipment bumped into my desk and the videographer slammed against the file cabinet. The little figures of Jiminy Cricket on the cabinet fell over and the framed photo of Lucy Chenier tottered. I frowned at him again. 'Be careful.'

The videographer waved some more. 'Don't look at me! Not at me! You'll ruin the shot!'

I said, 'If you break anything, I'll ruin more than the shot.'

Green seemed embarrassed. 'This is tiresome, Elliot. We have business here, and I'm afraid we're making a bad impression on Mr Cole.'

Truly touched my arm, trying to mitigate the bad impression. 'They're from Inside News. They're doing a six-part documentary on Jonathan's involvement in the case.',.-.

The woman with the sound equipment nodded. 'The inner workings of the Big Green Defense Machine.'

I said, 'Big Green Defense Machine?'

The videographer stopped taping and looked me up and down as if he found me lacking but wasn't quite sure how. Then it hit him. 'Don't you have a gun?' He glanced around the office as if there might be one hanging on a wall hook.

'A gun?'

He looked at Truly. 'He should be wearing a gun. One of those things under the arm.' He was a small man with furry arms.

Truly frowned. 'A shoulder holster?'