thought about Gina while I rinsed the dishes. Thought about her while I showered. Thought about her while I drove to the store for a six-pack and some pretzels. When I couldn’t think about her anymore, I got the Asplundh murder book from the trunk of my take-home and sat at the breakfast table.
First I leafed through the Hidden Threat Assessment of Garrett Asplundh. Although the HTA report was 180 pages long and contained the names of hundreds of people, living and dead, who had had contact with Garrett Asplundh, no one, including Garrett, had set off a ‘Threat Alarm’ on the HTA software.
A fuzzy picture emerges when thousands of facts about a person are collected but given no real degree of importance. It’s like cutting a photograph of someone’s face into small pieces and arranging the pieces at random. I learned, for instance, that Asplundh had had a hernia operation at the age of six and that his twice-divorced surgeon had filed bankruptcy a decade before the operation. I learned that Garrett had gone to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship. He played safety and was later drafted by the Detroit Lions but never signed. And I learned that the pool in which his only child drowned had been built by a company owned by a man named Myron Franks. Franks’s son, Lyle, was a convicted felon in the state of Arizona – attempted murder.
93I was interested to find on page 156 that then
– Vice detective Garrett Asplundh had arrested Jordan Sheehan for drunk driving way back in 1990. Fifteen years ago. He was also listed as a visitor at the Federal Women’s Detention Center in Westmoreland, where Sheehan had done time for tax evasion.
I was also interested to see that Garrett had interviewed for a job with the DEA in Miami roughly one year before he interviewed for his job with the Ethics Authority here in San Diego. Both interviews had been with John Van Flyke.
I found out that Garrett’s older brother, Samuel Asplundh, was a special agent assigned to the FBI office in Los Angeles and that he had been Garrett’s best man at his marriage to Stella.
All interesting, but I believed that the motive for Garrett’s murder lay somewhere in his recent work, not in his past. So I forced myself to read through the pages, searching for something that might shed light.
I learned many facts but nothing jumped out at me.
I kept thinking about the eight hundred dollars a month that Garrett Asplundh had been paying to Uptown Property Management. I had already made a noon appointment with Al Bantour, the manager of Uptown. If Garrett Asplundh was paying eight hundred a month for what I thought he was – a small, secret place, off the radar of anyone he knew – maybe I could find the discs he’d been given by Carrie Ann Martier, and the intelligence he’d gathered on the city’s wayward personnel, and the laptop issued by the Ethics Authority.
I thought that Garrett knew his shooter. I thought Garrett had agreed to meet him – or her – and while he was waiting, he was taken out. I thought the shooter’s name would be right there, in the trail of Garrett’s recent investigations. I thought of what Stella had said when we asked about enemies.
Hundreds.
I closed the murder book, wondering if Carrie Ann Martier was working right now.
At midnight I walked around the house. I grew up in this home, so every space and corner is packed with memories. Gina and I were very fortunate to be able to buy it from my parents several years ago, before the real estate market really topped out. We couldn’t have done it without my folks’ help – they wanted a low-maintenance condominium, so they made us a good deal and carried the paper at a low interest rate. It’s small and old but in good repair because both my father and I are handy with household tools. It’s grown in value.
Our Normal Heights neighborhood is fairly nice and convenient. It got its name from a teachers college, or normal school, that used to be here. I went to elementary and junior high just a few blocks away. Hit my first home run at the Little League field. Hung out with Gary and Jim and Rick. Fell in love with Linda when I was ten and Kathy when I was eleven and Janet when I was thirteen. They all lived within a mile. After Gina and I were married she lobbied hard for a high-rise condo downtown by the bay, but the rents are astronomical down there. The one she wanted was twenty-eight hundred a month. The rent on our first place here in Normal Heights was fourteen hundred plus gas and electric but you got trash pickup and a garage. Two years later I was happy to buy my childhood home, though I understood Gina’s lack of enthusiasm. It is not a high-rise by the bay.
I tried to imagine this place without Gina in it and it was difficult because I knew that she would come back and we would take care of whatever was bothering her. Gina teases me sometimes about trying to fix the unfixable. Once I dropped a dinner plate, which shattered badly, but I glued it back together. It took hours, gathering the shards and wondering which tiny triangle or sliver fits with another. The repaired plate was ugly and incomplete and useless and really kind of funny. Actually, it worked okay collecting runoff under a potted plant out on the back patio.
Gina called around one o’clock. She was crying and I had trouble making sense of what she said except that she was sorry. I told her I would come get her but she refused to tell me where she was. I heard no voices or noise in the background. She sounded very alone.
She said she was sorry again, and then she hung up.
The man who threw me out of the Las Palmas Hotel is named Vic Malic and he lives in a rented room in the Gaslamp Quarter. It’s not far from the former Las Palmas, which was rebuilt as an Execu-Suites.
After his arrest Vic was overwhelmed with grief at what he’d done and he waived his right to a trial, pleading down to charges of aggravated assault, arson, public endangerment, larceny, and destruction of property.
He was somber and repentant during the proceeding and he explained himself with apparent honesty. He had been under terrible stress at the time. He was recently separated from his wife of six months, had gone bankrupt, and had just been denied his World Wrestling Federation certification, which would have allowed him to work. Apparently he had hurt a fellow wrestler during his tryout match, resulting in an unofficial black-balling of his career. He was down to his last sixty dollars. He had consumed nearly a liter of gin on the day he set the hotel on fire. He had no idea the natural gas submain that ran behind the sixth-floor rooms would blow. He had fully intended to jump out his window when the flames got bad enough but he had lost his courage after seeing me rip through the awning below. A suicide note had supported his story. In the end Vic had walked downstairs, looked down at me, and surrendered to a fireman.
I noticed him in the courtroom one day at lunch. The deputies had legcuffed him to a table in Courtroom Eight, then gone off to have lunch in the cafeteria. This was an accepted practice until a man on trial for stabbing a fourteen-year-old girl to death had slipped out of his cuffs and walked outside a free man. Now the San Diego accused are never left alone at lunch.
Anyway, I was walking by the courtroom and saw him through the door window, examining a sandwich that looked tiny in his huge hand. I went in and Vic hung his head and tried to turn away, though the leg cuffs didn’t leave him much wiggle room. It was my first time alone with him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, and the huge fury I had hoped to feel never came to me.
We talked for just a minute. It was very strange to be close to him again, close to that face that had been burned into my memory in such vivid detail. For a moment I smelled fire, and my heart beat wildly. He could
