“It said in the file you did your rehab at Crossroads in Antigua,” I said.
“Yeah. The place Eric Clapton started.”
“Nice?”
“As far as those places go, I suppose.”
“True. Any waves there?”
“None to speak of. I didn’t get much of a chance to use a board anyway. Did you do rehab?”
“Yeah, in Laurel Canyon.”
“That place all the stars go to?”
“It was close to home.”
“Yeah, well, I went the other way. I was as far from my friends and my home as possible. It worked.”
“You thinking about going back into surfing?”
He glanced out the window before answering. A dozen surfers in wet suits were straddling their boards out there, waiting on the next set.
“I don’t think so. At least not on a professional level. My shoulder’s shot.”
I was about to ask what he needed his shoulder for when he continued his answer.
“The paddling’s one thing but the key thing is getting up. I lost my move when I fucked up my shoulder. Excuse the language.”
“That’s okay.”
“Besides, I’m taking things one day at a time. They taught you that in Laurel Canyon, didn’t they?”
“They did. But surfing’s a one-day-at-a-time, one-wave-at-a-time sort of thing, isn’t it?”
He nodded and I watched his eyes. They kept tripping to the mirror and looking back at me.
“What do you want to ask me, Patrick?”
“Um, yeah, I had a question. You know how Vincent kept my fish and put it on the wall?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I was, uh, wondering if he kept any of my boards somewhere.”
I opened his file again and looked through it until I found the liquidator’s report. It listed twelve surfboards and the prices obtained for them.
“You gave him twelve boards, right?”
“Yeah, all of them.”
“Well, he gave them to his liquidator.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a guy he used when he took assets from clients – you know, jewelry, property, cars, mostly – and would turn them into cash to be applied toward his fee. According to the report here, the liquidator sold all twelve of them, took twenty percent and gave Vincent forty-eight hundred dollars.”
Patrick nodded his head but didn’t say anything. I watched him for a few moments and then looked back at the liquidator’s inventory sheet. I remembered that Patrick had said in that first phone call that the two long boards were the most valuable. On the inventory, there were two boards described as ten feet long. Both were made by One World in Sarasota, Florida. One sold for $1,200 to a collector and the other for $400 on eBay, the online auction site. The disparity between the two sales made me think the eBay sale was bogus. The liquidator had probably sold the board to himself cheap. He would then turn around and sell it at a profit he’d keep for himself. Everybody’s got an angle. Including me. I knew that if he hadn’t resold the board yet, then I still had a shot at it.
“What if I could get you one of the long boards back?” I asked.
“That would be awesome! I just wish I had kept one, you know?”
“No promises. But I’ll see what I can do.”
I decided to pursue it later by putting my investigator on it. Cisco showing up and asking questions would probably make the liquidator more accommodating.
Patrick and I didn’t speak for the rest of the ride. In another twenty minutes we pulled into the driveway of Walter Elliot’s house. It was of Moorish design with white stone and dark brown shutters. The center facade rose into a tower silhouetted against the blue sky. A silver midlevel Mercedes was parked on the cobblestone pavers. We parked next to it.
“You want me to wait here?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah. I don’t think I’ll take too long.”
“I know this house. It’s all glass in the back. I tried to surf behind it a couple times but it closes out on the inside and the rip’s really bad.”
“Pop the trunk for me.”
I got out and went to the back to retrieve my digital camera. I turned it on to make sure I had some battery power and took a quick shot of the front of the house. The camera was working and I was good to go.
I walked to the entrance and the front door opened before I could push the bell. Mrs. Albrecht stood there, looking as lovely as I had seen her the day before.
Eighteen
When Walter Elliot had told me he would have someone meet me at the house in Malibu, I hadn’t expected it to be his executive assistant.
“Mrs. Albrecht, how are you today?”
“Very well. I just got here and thought maybe I had missed you.”
“Nope. I just got here too.”
“Come in, please.”
The house had a two-story entry area below the tower. I looked up and saw a wrought-iron chandelier hanging in the atrium. There were cobwebs on it, and I wondered if they had formed because the house had gone unused since the murders or because the chandelier was too high up and too hard to get to with a duster.
“This way,” Mrs. Albrecht said.
I followed her into the great room, which was larger than my entire home. It was a complete entertainment area with a glass wall on the western exposure that brought the Pacific right into the house.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“It is indeed. Do you want to see the bedroom?”
Ignoring the question, I turned the camera on and took a few shots of the living room and its view.
“Do you know who has been in here since the Sheriff’s Department relinquished control of it?” I asked.
Mrs. Albrecht thought for a moment before answering.
“Very few people. I do not believe that Mr. Elliot has been out here. But, of course, Mr. Vincent came out once and his investigator came out a couple of times, I believe. And the Sheriff’s Department has come back twice since turning the property back over to Mr. Elliot. They had search warrants.”
Copies of the search warrants were in the case file. Both times they were looking for only one thing – the murder weapon. The case against Elliot was all circumstantial, even with the gunshot residue on his hands. They needed the murder weapon to ice the case but they didn’t have it. The notes in the file said that divers had searched the waters behind the house for two days after the murders but had also failed to come up with the gun.
“What about cleaners?” I asked. “Did someone come in and clean the place up?”
“No, no one like that. We were told by Mr. Vincent to leave things as they were in case he needed to use the place during the trial.”
There was no mention in the case files of Vincent possibly using the house in any way during the trial. I wasn’t sure what the thinking would have been there. My instinctive response upon seeing the place was that I wouldn’t want a jury anywhere near it. The view and sheer opulence of the property would underline Elliot’s wealth and serve to disconnect him from the jurors. They would understand that they weren’t really a jury of his peers. They would know that he was from a completely different planet.
“Where’s the master suite?” I asked.
“It comprises the entire top floor.”
“Then, let’s go up.”
As we went up a winding white staircase with an ocean-blue banister, I asked Mrs. Albrecht what her first name was. I told her I felt uncomfortable being so formal with her, especially when her boss and I were on a first-name basis.
“My name is Nina. You can call me that if you want.”
“Good. And you can call me Mickey.”
The stairs led to a door that opened into a bedroom suite the size of some courtrooms I had been in. It was so big it had twin fireplaces on the north and south walls. There was a sitting area, a sleeping area and his-and-her bathrooms. Nina Albrecht pushed a button near the door, and the curtains covering the west view silently began to split and reveal a wall of glass that looked out over the sea.