Body Copy - Michael Craven [83]
fifty pushups, sixty pushups, they didn’t hurt, he couldn’t even feel them. This wasn’t a goddamn random crime. He looked at Lyle as he went up and down, up and down.
Thinking: Is there anything here? Is there any goddamn connection between any of the things I’ve found out?
He paced around the trailer, popping beers, listening to some old Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde— I want you, I want you, I want you soooo bad. He considered everything.
Everything. Everything he knew, everyone he’d talked to.
He thought about all the people who knew Roger Gale and then he thought about the crazy tangent he’d just been on.
Kelly Burch, Vicky Fong, Dean Latham. Dean Latham?
Was he kidding himself to even consider chasing down another, possibly unrelated—probably unrelated—cold case in the first place?
He went up on the roof of his trailer. A beautiful Southern California night. The stars out, the ocean a black, nearly invisible force in the distance.
Who were the people in this case who mattered? Roger’s widow and his stepson were cryptic, but ultimately they seemed to just be protecting their feeble image of themselves as perfect. As people with money and reputations and no skeletons in the closet. Yeah, right—we’ve all got
’em. And we all try to hide ’em. But if the stepson would bend the law to protect his mother’s reputation, what else would he do? That glass eye, that shifty manner. Maybe the business with paying off Bill Peterson was a ruse to keep cops and detectives away. You know, he paid off a cop to protect his mom, but he definitely didn’t kill his stepdad. Or did he?
And Wendy Leahy? Okay, she lied, she lied a couple 261
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times. So? She was a nice girl who ran a gym who got offered five large by a charismatic Roger Gale and took it. So sue her.
Tyler Wilkes? The guy’s a joke. Hires another P.I. on a paranoid, implanted fear that he was gonna somehow end up in trouble for doing business with Paul Spinelli. And the karate studio? The sex show? What was Roger Gale doing there? Did he see a show? Did he not see a show? Did some sex performer have the poise to tell Tremaine that Roger Gale had never come in when in fact he actually had? Did these sex-show people connect to Roger Gale’s death or to Kelly Burch or to Dean Latham or to anything? Anything at all?
Who killed Roger Gale and why?
The one murder that might have had any connection at all was Kelly Burch’s. But wasn’t that a friggin’ shot in the dark? So what if they got murdered on the same day. So what.
Tremaine lay down on his back and looked up at the sky. A disconnected thought popped in his head. Even in the midst of this whirlwind of analysis, he thought to himself, it’d be nice to solve this one, even if it was just to impress Nina . . .
He looked at the sky, at the stars, the white dots among the blackness. He envisioned each star to be an element in the case. He started drawing imaginary lines between them to form figures in his head, like constellations. Everything, from the moment Nina appeared at his trailer until now, moved around in his brain as he looked at the vast California sky and the stars.
He drifted off to sleep.
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At about three in the morning, he woke up. Thinking: Where the hell am I? Then he went down the ladder, went inside, and went to bed.
He woke up again at about 5:00 a.m. His mind, before having a chance to process anything else, went directly to the case. He walked into the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, and stood there, watching the pot slowly fill up with dark brown liquid. Drip. Drip. Drip. Just standing there in his little kitchen at the crack of dawn, watching the coffee but focusing on the case. And then his mind—almost out of nowhere