“SO YOU’VE CAUGHT A LIVE ONE.” That’s my boss, Chief Elliot, although everyone calls her Susan. Officers visiting our station house from other cities are appalled at the informality. But despite the fact that we’re on a first-name basis, she doesn’t stand for nonsense. A tall woman in her midfifties, she’s been running the Palo Alto police department for almost twenty years. She was the one to tap my shoulder and ask if I wanted to take the detective exam, the one who put the idea into my head. I wouldn’t exactly call her a mentor, although others in the department hint that I’m a favorite. She’s a remote sort of person, not overly warm, and despite the first-name thing, not terribly approachable. Once I bought her a Diet Coke from the machine, having noticed that she swills them down in a constant flow all day. The look I got still sends chills through me. But I’ve witnessed her in action enough to note that she has vast excesses of patience and, I’ve always thought, wisdom. She has a nickname that people are careful to use only out of her hearing, Suicide Suzie, due to a famous incident where she talked a guy down from jumping off the Sand Hill 280 overpass. The mayor gave her a plaque for an act of valor that someone had to rescue from the garbage can after the award ceremony. To Susan’s chagrin, it now hangs above the entrance to the station house. I have enormous respect for her. She doesn’t seek glory for its own sake, but values a job well done.
Susan sits at her desk, fiddling with a pen, then leans back in her chair. She is large, with massive shoulders and a double chin, the type of woman that unenlightened persons probably wouldn’t take seriously, given her size and indifference to fashion. Strangers might mock her for her weight, might see it as evidence of laziness or lack of control. Yet I’ve never known anyone so disciplined. No matter how early you get to the station, Susan is already there. The station house is a spotless engine of efficiency. She computerized all the records a full decade before other police departments in the state. Of course, a lot of that has to do with Palo Alto money. But also Susan’s vision. She’s married to the head of Palo Alto’s firefighting division, himself no Skinny Minnie. People like to joke that one of the reasons Palo Alto is such a placid community is that the two of them hate having their dinner interrupted.
“I’m mostly talking to myself here,” she says. “I’m wondering if this case shouldn’t go to a more seasoned officer. Someone used to handling those ghouls in the media. After that Chronicle nastiness, the media is calling for an official statement. You’d have to write one today and present it tonight or tomorrow morning. You up for that? Or do you want me to pass it on to Grady.” Grady being our only big-city cop, having retired from the Detroit police force before moving west and signing on in Palo Alto as a detective at the ripe old age of fifty. Easy money, he calls it. You can see him trying to stifle a smile when anyone complains about having a bad day. I Googled him once, way back. He was put on administrative leave twice in Detroit for having killed while on duty. The words excessive use of force were used throughout the various newspaper reports. Scary stuff. I tend to tiptoe around Grady.
Part of me wants to say, sure, why not, throw it to Grady, and let this case go. That’s the quitter in me. Though I’m also kind of hooked.
“I can handle that,” I say. I try to exude the air of someone competent, yet not foolishly overconfident. Mostly this involves standing up to my 5'4" height and brushing my bangs out of my face.
“But we know nothing yet,” I say. “Jake sent the body to the pathologist for an autopsy, and he said we won’t have the results for days.”
“Then tell them that. Keep it short and sweet,” Susan says.
“Do I mention the bruising? The needle puncture?”
“Absolutely not,” says Susan. “You speculate about nothing. They’ll press you to say more. They’ll try to get you to say this is murder, whatever. Just stick to the facts, Sam.”
The facts, I think, not unhappily, are doozies. Although I’m not unmindful of the fact that a man is dead—a man with responsibilities and a family who is grieving—I’m excited to be doing something other than processing theft reports that will come to nothing or investigating break-ins fumbled by pot-smoking sixteen-year-olds. They’re not the cleverest criminal minds. The last one I’d been assigned to, the perp had two of his friends on bicycles acting as lookouts. A couple of kids riding in perpetual circles in front of the target’s home naturally aroused the attention of the neighbors. When we arrived, the perp was trying to get away on his bike with a MacBook in his backpack and two iPhones in his pocket, but not before he’d paused to make a phone call from one of his ill-gotten phones. Like I said, not the brightest criminals in the world.
“I’d like you to stay on the case,” says Susan, with an air of having made up her mind, “For now, you’re our homicide department, Sam. Use Grady or Mollie as backup. I want daily briefings.”
“Oh, and Sam,” she calls after me, as I’m walking away, “Find out who tipped the newspaper off about the three marriages. Talk about a shocker! It must have been one of the wives. I’d like to know which one thought it would be advantageous for us to know about the bigamy—I mean, multiple marriages.”
“The trigamy,” I quip, and get a smile out of Susan. It makes my day.
9
Excerpt from Transcript
Police interview with
MJ Taylor, May 18, 2013
[Preliminary introductions, explanations of processes and procedures]
Samantha Adams: When did you realize your husband had two other . . . relationships?
MJ Taylor: Not until I read the news of his death. And actually, I only found out about his first wife from the paper. The other wife I learned about at the funeral reception. No one accepts that, though. No one can believe I didn’t suspect something, anything.
Samantha Adams: Well, didn’t you?
MJ Taylor: Not at all.