A punishing breed, p.9
A Punishing Breed, page 9
“Yes, sir,” said John Lonica. “And that is correct, Detective?”
“Can’t say,” said DJ, “until I know who killed Will Bloom.”
“Surely, the person involved with Will Bloom’s death,” said President Reese, “has nothing to do with our students.”
“Surely, the person who killed Will Bloom,” said DJ, “was on campus last night.”
“Our students aren’t in danger from the person who did this!”
“You keep saying ‘the person involved,’ ‘the person who did this.’ You’re describing the murderer. Someone committed a cold-blooded killing on your campus. I don’t know if the students are safe. I don’t know if anyone is safe—I don’t know if you’re safe.”
“Please don’t concern yourself with my safety, Detective Arias.” The snarl on the president’s face was becoming a permanent fixture.
John Lonica cleared his throat and pulled out a printed piece of paper.
“Sir, fall break starts on Monday. Why don’t I put out an immediate statement via email saying that you and the college were deeply saddened to learn that Will Bloom, vice president of Fundraising, was found dead in his office early Friday morning. The death appears suspicious and police are investigating. This incident occurred in an administration building. No students were present in the immediate area. Hesperia College’s week-long fall break begins on Monday, but because of . . . present circumstances, classes are canceled today, Friday, and students are free to leave immediately. We will provide timely updates to the community as the investigation proceeds.”
“I can live with that,” President Reese said. He stood up, leaning over the still-seated DJ. “It will create an interruption in the faculty’s syllabi.”
“You heard a student was attacked last night in a separate incident?” asked DJ.
“Hedy said the girl is fine,” said President Reese. “She thinks it’s unrelated.”
“Is that so?” asked DJ. “It’s still unclear. My sense is that you better hope it’s related or you might have two predators on your campus.”
“I don’t care what ‘your sense’ is,” said President Reese. “It’s time for you to leave, Detective. And you better have this investigation wrapped up before our students return to campus. You have one week.”
“My job is to find the murderer,” DJ said. “However long it takes.”
“This needs to be resolved by next weekend. The earlier, the better,” said Bill Reese. He leaned in, his face white as if all blood had pooled into the index finger being waved in front of DJ’s face. “I know the police chief. He is a friend, and my next call will be to him. Consider yourself on notice.”
Bill Reese stormed out of his office suite, followed by Larissa Wren, who looked coldly at DJ before leaving.
Lonica stood up. Tall, thin, and understated, his clothes and glasses were the same unremarkable brown. He would tell a version of the truth but, like a good flack, would omit the dirty details. A melancholy smile made the man appear wise and tired.
“The president,” he said, “is used to people following his orders.”
“Did Will Bloom follow his orders?” asked DJ.
“Will didn’t think orders or rules applied to him,” said John Lonica as he headed to the door. He turned around, the melancholy sinking into his eyes.
“And until last night, they didn’t.”
CHAPTER 17
Penance
Danny Mendoza sat on his porch, staring at the unopened beer in his hand. Wet with condensation, its label peeled off like a woman seducing her lover. He could hear the metallic click, the dull pop of effervescence escape from the amber bottle. Almost taste the cold hoppy foam push against his soft palate as golden liquid slid down his gullet, hit his belly, exploded into his bloodstream. Feel the brain freeze as he drank the beer down in one long vertical swallow. After three or four more bottles, the true brain freeze followed by the mercy of forgetting. Even for a little while.
Danny had stopped by the liquor store on the way home, wearing a hoodie that covered his uniform, hid his face. He couldn’t risk bumping into Hedy Scacht or Jerome Blight. Drinking was on the verboten list of his employee contract with Hesperia College. He made it home undetected.
Then he sat on his front porch because he didn’t really give a shit. Jerome Blight never looked him in the eye, and so what if Hedy drove by his house. He was a man. He could handle a six-pack of beer. He wasn’t going to drive anywhere. His mother’s Ford Aerostar van sat in the garage, untouched. An electric cart on the Hesperia campus was his speed now.
It had been a long day. A long life. How old was he anyway? Twenty-eight? When he was in prison, he had counted the minutes, days, weeks, years. Ten years. Then he was released, and he counted the hours, minutes, seconds his mother was in pain. Until the next morphine drip released. When she wasn’t in pain anymore, he prayed to God she would come back—even with the pain, so he could be with her for one more hour. What good did counting do? What good did praying do? What good did God do?
Danny held the unopened beer bottle to his face. It was cold and wet against his skin. A touch of the dead. He threw the bottle against the wall and watched as the amber glass shattered and brown foam spewed across the cement floor. It smelled like vomit. One bottle down, five to go.
Danny covered his face with his hands. He could still see the dead girl, Sally Smith. Not only when he slept, but sometimes her image flashed before his eyes during the brightest part of the day when sunshine lit the sky and warmed the grass beneath his feet. There she lay in the glare of headlights. After his car slammed into her. She had no marks on her legs or arms. She looked as if she was sleeping. Until he saw blood leaking from her lips, nose. Then he knew. He couldn’t save her. He couldn’t save himself. He couldn’t save anyone, not even his mother.
Now another death, a deliberate murder. Danny didn’t know Will Bloom, other than stories from his mom. He would see the man on campus, occasionally nod hello, and that was it. Who would the police look to for an easy arrest? Not just the police, but Detective DJ Arias, the son of a bitch who put him away ten years ago. To Arias, he was Daniel Mendoza, the Latino ex-con who killed a teenage girl.
The charge was vehicular manslaughter; eighteen-year-old Danny was bereft, felt terrible at what he’d done. He knew he had caused a terrible accident, that he was responsible for an awful lapse in judgment, but he believed he would avoid the most dire consequences. He always had.
In the courtroom, everything became real. Sally Smith’s parents howled in pain as they grieved their only child. The weight of the girl’s death and the loss to her parents bore down on Danny. He felt their devastation, their empty future without their daughter. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. Sally Smith was dead and Danny was responsible.
Prison changed him. Danny began to smell his own self-pity. He recognized the stink from his fellow prisoners: it was always someone else’s fault, a cheating wife, a lying friend. Danny blamed his dead father for his own anger, an alcoholic Desert Storm vet who wrapped his car around a tree when Danny was five. His mother tried to fill the empty space, make up for what was missing. But it wasn’t enough.
As a child, he always felt the tick, tick, tick. An embedded time bomb waiting to implode. Danny was smart; he zipped through homework. In high school, he dulled the anger at his fatherless state, at his mother’s tenuous finances with bravado, pot, and beer. He still aced his tests. When girlfriend Rina took care of their “little problem” on her own, Danny felt instant relief; he had dodged a bullet. Still, self-pity and fury inside grew like an embedded fire, grasping, out of control.
He attended class, played football, partied all weekend. Drunk or high day and night, the ticking accelerated. He hid it from his mother with wall-towall activities, cocksure teenage bravado, and peppermint mouthwash. She worked hard and was proud of her busy big-man-on-campus son.
And then at last, he was a first-year Hesperia college student; a free ride his mom had worked twenty years at the college to guarantee. One night during Greek rush, Danny proved to his would-be fraternity brothers, boys with private school educations driving their parents’ secondhand Mercedes, that he was their equal. He could take whatever they dished out. A bottle of Jack Daniels? Sure! He was a man, not a boy desperate to prove he was one of them. “Come on, Danny. Don’t be a pussy. Drive us back to campus!” Sally Smith crossed the street, maybe she didn’t look right or left. Danny in the secondhand Mercedes was too wasted to see her, to react, to hit the brake.
Tonight, Danny Mendoza popped the cap on each of the five remaining beer bottles, poured the amber brew on his mother’s azalea bushes. Azaleas liked acidic soil. Was beer acid?
“It is to me,” Danny said.
A holy trinity, shame, misery, and regret; rooted in his mother’s chest during Danny’s prison sentence. Breast cancer consumed the one person he loved. After he was released, they had four months together.
Isabel Mendoza died as she requested, at home with her son. Body failing, she opened her eyes, seeing Danny, the man he was, not the boy she had struggled to save.
“I love you, Mom.”
“Love you,” she whispered.
“Don’t leave me,” Danny said.
“I have faith.”
“I’m afraid, Ma.” Danny cried like the boy he had never been.
She inhaled, gathering the last of her strength.
“I have faith. In you.”
She was gone. The emptiness filled the room.
As a boy he had chased his father’s ghost. Now Danny would put one foot in front of the other, walk tall, and try to be his mother’s son.
He didn’t know if he could do it.
Living with this truth was his penance.
He walked inside, turned off the lights, and lay down on his bed. The dark would come. Danny just had to wait for it.
CHAPTER 18
Ladies-In-Waiting
Trish Ballentine
DJ left the president’s office and took the elevator to the lobby. On his way to the conference room, he observed Will Bloom’s colleagues, sitting on folding chairs against the lobby’s perimeter. Most were quiet, some in shock, except for one thin middle-aged blonde with peacock-blue eyelids. She fidgeted, her foot tapping with agitated excitement as if waiting for a game show to begin.
Bobtail had conducted quick initial interviews, asking for job titles and length of service at the college. Now DJ and Talbot would conduct deeper interrogations. They had decided to keep the murder weapon confidential.
DJ thought about Daniel Mendoza. After ten years in prison, he had grown into a bitter man, perhaps a dangerous one. DJ had played a major part in that transformation. An ex-con at the scene of a crime was a prime suspect. Did a woman connect Daniel and Will Bloom? According to Hedy Scacht, Daniel was a monk. Women had been wrong about men before—they usually were.
Talbot called out a name. “Trish Ballentine, we’re ready for you.”
Trish was the blonde with the peacock-blue eyelids. She entered the conference room in a cloud of rose perfume and sat down, her foot still tapping.
“Hello again, Dee-tec-tive,” she said to Talbot. She had a Southern drawl and a flirtatious smile. DJ guessed she was in her fifties. A real Blanche Du-Bois type. She took the proffered chair at the head of the table.
“Hello, Ms. Ballentine,” Talbot said. “Now, for the record, Trish Ballentine, you were Mr. Will Bloom’s personal assistant, is that right?”
“I was his ‘executive’ assistant,” she said. “I didn’t let things get ‘personal.’ And it’s Mrs. Ballentine.” She smoothed her hair and lowered her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. “I am a married woman. But you may call me Trish.”
“Why, thank you, Trish,” said Talbot.
God, thought DJ. Bobtail was blushing.
“When was the last time you saw Will Bloom?”
“Well, yesterday, before five o’clock p.m. He came in from an ‘errand.’ Went to his office and shut the door.” Trish Ballentine had the annoying habit of air quoting certain words with her fingers.
“What was the errand?” asked DJ.
“He didn’t say.”
“Was that usual?” asked Talbot. “Leaving without letting you know where he was going? Did he seem upset?”
“There was no usual with Will Bloom,” said Trish. “He had a mercurial temperament. Yesterday he started the day out ‘jaunty.’” Trish made the word sound dirty.
“By the end of the day he was in one of his black Irish moods. Came in without even a how-do-you-do and ‘slammed the door.’”
DJ interrupted. “You said shut the door earlier and now you said slammed the door. Which was it?”
Trish screwed her eyes on DJ’s face. “And who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
“DJ Arias, ma’am. Lead detective.”
“Hmph,” said Trish. DJ waited for her to answer his question. She was silent.
“Well?” asked DJ.
“He ‘slammed’ the door. I was clarifying my statement,” said Trish. She looked back at Talbot with a conspiratorial smile and eye roll as if they’d already discussed the bothersome DJ Arias.
“Was that the last time you saw Will Bloom?” asked Talbot.
“Yes, but I heard him before I left. As I was getting ready to leave for the day he opened his door and hollered for Dolly Ruiz. And she came running. Went into the office and ‘shut’ the door.”
“What time was that?” asked Talbot.
“Five o’clock on the dot. I gathered my things and left. I never saw him again.”
“Dolly Ruiz and Will Bloom—what was their relationship?” asked DJ.
Trish frowned and paused before she answered.
“Sycophantic.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Dolly acted like the sun rose and set on Will Bloom, and he lapped it up.”
“Do you think there was more going on there?”
Trish wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know,” she said irritably. “Dolly loved to spread office gossip, and Will loved to hear it. They were very similar.”
“All right,” said Talbot. “What did you do last night after you left the office?”
“I went home, took a nap, and then Mr. Ballentine arrived and we had dinner.”
“And did you go out again?”
“No, I did not. I watched television, had a glass of ‘chardonnay over ice,’ as I have done every night for more years than I can count, and fell asleep. You can ask Mr. Ballentine. Just another day in paradise.”
She smiled again at Talbot.
DJ interrupted her reverie with Bobtail.
“I have to say, you don’t seem terribly upset that your boss was murdered.”
Trish’s long fingers smoothed a few loose ringlets of hair at the back of her neck. Everything about Trish Ballentine was long; her fingers, legs, vowels.
“Well, Detective Arias,” she said. “It was only a matter of time.”
“A matter of time until what?”
“With all the comings and goings of female inter . . . action that man conducted, it was only a matter of time until some cosmic collision occurred . . . you get the picture.”
“I don’t get the picture. What exactly do you mean?” asked DJ.
“Well, maybe one of them just snapped.” Trish punctuated her statement with the sharp click of her fingers. “It happens. I watch those shows about women who have had enough with a capital E.”
“This isn’t cable TV, Mrs. Ballentine,” said DJ. “This is real life.”
“I know that, Detective,” she said pointing her finger at him. “Who do you think you are talking to? I am a grown woman who graduated from college with an English degree. I do not deserve that tone of voice. You asked me a question and I answered. If you do not want my opinion, do not ask.”
DJ felt his face redden. Talbot squeezed his lips together, unsuccessfully hiding a smirk.
DJ was silent. He knew when he hit a brick wall. Trish Ballantine was a Southern citadel.
“You were his trusted assistant,” Talbot said. “Did you know his women friends?”
Trish composed herself, pulled her glare away from DJ and turned to Talbot.
“There were any number of women calling him,” Trish said, “all day. And he was surrounded by females here at Hesperia College. Many succumbed, but I was not taken in by his ‘charm.’”
“Any names you can give us?” asked DJ.
She glowered at DJ and appeared to come to a conclusion. “I certainly cannot.”
“No?”
“Decidedly not,” Trish said. “Women called him all the time. Some for work, others for I-don’t-know-what, some for both. It would be supposition on my part.”
“What about a call log, or one of those carbon message pads.”
“Mr. Bloom demanded I use the pink message pads. No carbons. And he kept his own calendar.”
“Why is that?” asked DJ.
“Oh, I don’t know, let me think,” Trish said. “No record, no evidence?”
“Was it difficult to keep track of everything?” DJ asked.
“It sure was,” said Trish. “I tried to make sure he didn’t miss meetings. I scheduled important ones in the morning. His sweet spot was eleven a.m.”
“Not in the afternoon?” asked DJ.
“Not after lunch,” said Trish. “Some days his lunches stretched to three hours and he smelled like a distillery on his return.”
Talbot cleared his throat and Trish Ballentine once again turned her attention to him.
“Just a couple of loose ends. You mentioned he had an errand yesterday afternoon,” said Talbot. “Do you know what it was?”
Trish smiled at Bobtail, playing her own version of good cop, bad cop. DJ knew who he was.
“He said he had to pick up dry cleaning. He was gone a long time and didn’t return with any clothes.”
“When he arrived yesterday morning, you described him as jaunty,” said Talbot. “What did you mean by that?”
