Follow the Money

24


Liz had not forgiven me, despite the previous evening, and that was apparent when she made me sleep on her couch. I awoke exhausted, mildly hung over, and suddenly worried that Liz was still pissed at me. The excitement of the case had drowned out all other emotions and given the two of us something else to focus on, at least temporarily. But it wouldn’t last, and I knew it. I lay awake on the couch listening to her movements in the bedroom and debating whether I should say anything. Somehow it felt wrong, inappropriate, and I decided to let it go.

Somewhere in my dreamless sleep I had decided to contact the journalist who’d called me. I was hoping that perhaps some press coverage might offer me a kind of protection the police could not. If there was too much attention focused on me, I’d be safe for awhile. But then, if no one cared much for my story, I was really f*cked.

Liz came out of the bedroom in a light cotton sundress, lugging an overloaded backpack. She dropped the pack on the floor and it made a loud thud.

“Ugh,” she groaned, “this going back to class thing really sucks.”

“Tell me about it. I haven’t even thought about studying. And I’m not even going today.”

She shook her head and stood looking at me with her hands on her hips. Her concern was obvious and though she wished for my safety, she could not forgive me. I could see her hesitation. I shared it. We both wanted our old life back but secretly knew it was impossible to regain.

“You can stay here if you like,” she finally offered, as a sort of olive branch, some middle ground we might both occupy until the crisis was over. She seemed to be willing to put the process of sorting things out on hold until I was safe. I wanted to tell her I was going to be alright, even though I knew I was helpless to deliver that result.

I just wanted relief of any kind, and I would take it where I could get it. At that moment it existed in the form of a plan, no matter how futile that plan might be. I told her about the journalist. She listened quietly and without comment, and then reiterated her offer.

I sat up and gathered the papers we’d left spread about. “Thanks, but I assume I’ll have to meet this guy downtown, so I may as well go to the office. I’ll feel safer there anyway. Too many people around for anything bad to happen.”

She lingered in the doorway to her room with her book bag at her feet. Given the circumstances, her need to get to class seemed silly to me. I finished gathering the papers and stuffed them in the file. I glanced up and saw her there, hovering, worried, and I wanted to say something to make her feel better, but found it impossible to say the things I should.

Instead, I said, “Look, there’s nothing you can do. You’re better off staying away from me. I’ll be fine. I’ll go to the office, I’ll meet with this guy and we’ll try to figure something out.”

She gave me a smile, put her arms around me and squeezed. We said nothing for a minute until she turned away, picked up her bag and went to the door. “Lock it when you go.” She opened the door and stepped outside.

“I’ll call you later, to let you know what’s happening.”

She smiled, nodded, and closed the door behind her.

Forty minutes later I stepped out of a cab in front of the office. I looked around and, not seeing any black cars anywhere, went inside feeling more at ease. No one seemed to notice I was there, it was business as usual and the fact that I was skipping out on my first day of classes registered with no one.

I found Ed Snyder’s number and left a cryptic message saying only that the two of us needed to meet. Then I spent thirty minutes in front of a copy machine making a duplicate file for him and hoping I hadn’t missed his call. Back in my office there was no message, and I flipped through the file trying to organize my thoughts for my conversation with Ed.

My office was littered with materials from the case. Boxes full of files and research and drafts of the briefs for the hearing. Everywhere I turned I saw Steele. I flipped through a ream of my old notes from the beginning of the summer, waiting for a call I couldn’t be sure would come. I came across the notes I made from one of my very first conversations, my call to Becky Steele. Her story was exactly as I remembered it. She stated that she detected no animosity between her parents prior to the murder. She remembered that everything was quite normal.

She had also talked about her grandfather finding the side door open two days after the murder. An obvious explanation was simply that the police had forgotten to lock it when they left, but it had also cast suspicion on Bishop, who was believed to have had a set of keys. Then I remembered Becky talking about how there were personal items of her mother’s missing from the house, odd things that no burglar would have thought to steal.

I shuffled through the file I’d gotten from Murdock until I came across the yellow legal pad with the list of household items on it. I remembered Becky Steele lamenting the apparent loss of her mother’s hope chest and photo albums, both of which were missing from the house. I scanned the handwritten list of items on the legal pad and found among them entries for both “photo albums” and “chest.”

Of course they were gone, I told myself, her mother had moved them out of the house just like Murdock said. I stared at the list and then the unrecorded deed sitting beside it. I wondered if Becky actually might get her mother’s stuff back after all these years.

I dialed the phone number scrawled diagonally in the same hand across the bottom right corner of the page. It was an eight-one-eight number, a business somewhere in the steaming streets of the Valley. A woman answered.

“A-1 Moving and Storage.”

“Um, hello. I’ve got a question that may seem a little strange, but I’m looking for a record of a move that was done quite a while ago.”

“How long ago?”

“About twelve years.”

The woman laughed a little. “I seriously doubt we’d have any record of anything like that. We’ve probably changed computers systems twice since then.”

“Well, I’ve got a confirmation number here.”

“What’s this for anyway?”

“Oh, well,” I spoke slow and thought fast, “I’m actually an attorney trying to wrap up an estate and we’ve come across some records in the decedent’s papers showing that he may have had some property moved to a storage facility. So we’re trying to ascertain if there are any assets out there that we’re unaware of.”

“Well, like I said, I doubt we’ve got anything, but I can check that confirmation number if you’d like.”

I gave it to her. I could hear her typing.

“No, that doesn’t come back with anything. But it does look like one of our confirmation numbers. The L-M at the beginning would mean it was a local move. So if they did use us to move something, it didn’t leave LA County.”

“Okay, well, it was worth a try. Thanks.”

“No problem. Good luck.”

I stared at the deed again. I imagined a furnished house somewhere, filled with Sharon Steele’s most personal things collecting dust for a dozen years. I punched the address on the deed into Google maps. The screen refreshed with a street map of Los Angeles County and a bright red dot just west of the village of Topanga Canyon. “Gotcha.” I whispered as I hit the print button.

An hour later, after organizing and reorganizing my papers and my thoughts, the phone rang.

“This is Ollie.”

“Ollie. Ed Snyder returning your call.”

“Great, thanks for calling me back.”

Ed’s voice was low and serious. He sounded like a guy who was all business. “You said we should talk.”