The Shake
video games and high-tech movies. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear they all took their police academy training at Universal Studios. They definitely know how to talk the talk, but too often they aren’t smart and they don’t inspire confidence. And when the chips are down, it’s not unusual for them to either piss themselves or go off half-cocked. I confess, I’ve put one or two out of their misery.The night grew cooler and darker, the air slightly damp and very still. The minutes passed. The traffic gradually decreased. It was a little after ten o’clock when Karla came out of the bar. She crossed the street against the red light. There was a noticeable veering in her trajectory. She opened the driver’s door and got in without her usual grace, plopping onto the seat, relieved to be free of the need to balance. After closing the door, she leaned her head back against the headrest and took several deep breaths before speaking.
“That was weird,” she said. After a couple of minutes, she leaned her head forward and ran her fingers through her hair, then slapped her cheeks lightly as if trying to wake up. “Tell you what, Shake. That guy likes to talk.”
“You okay? You’re not going to puke, are you?”
“I’m fine. I never throw up from booze.”
It sounded like one of those things people like to say about themselves, regardless of the facts, but I had no reason not to believe her.
“It was weird,” she said again. “Like he was waiting for someone to talk to about Francine Arnaud. I go in, right? He’s sitting at the bar, so I sit two stools over. I don’t want to be too obvious. He looks like he’s already had a few. So I order a beer and when it comes, I glance over. He’s looking at me, so I tip my glass at him, just to be friendly, and he immediately moves over one stool and introduces himself. We do the small talk for a few minutes, he asks me what I do, do I like Sacramento, this and that. I make up some shit for answers. Then I ask him what he does. He says he’s a private investigator. I’m duly impressed and after some more chitchat I ask him what was the most difficult or interesting case he ever worked on.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Arnaud?”
“Arnaud. He tells me the whole story, from day one.”
“So much for client confidentiality.”
“Really! But here’s the thing. He’s not telling me all this because the case was interesting. He’s telling me because he has a broken heart. The guy was in love with the Arnaud woman. I think it really tore him up that he couldn’t help her, and then, to top it off, she committed suicide.”
“The love angle is interesting, Karla, but I don’t think it will help much.”
“Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “It doesn’t explain anything except why he’d tell the whole story to a stranger in a bar.”
“Did he say why Arnaud went to Vacaville?”
“He doesn’t know. Couldn’t ever get any solid answers. He knows Arnaud met someone at the motel, but he doesn’t know who, or if it was about drugs or the niece, or both. He doesn’t know if Arnaud was killed over the drugs or the niece, or over something else entirely. The only thing he seemed fairly sure of was that he didn’t think there was any connection between Dean’s drug activities and the missing girl. The niece had been gone a long time. Apparently, Dean didn’t want to look for her but Francine pressured him into it.”
“So he knows Arnaud was dirty?” I asked.
“Yeah. I guess everyone knew but the wife. Hamilton thinks telling Francine about her husband selling drugs was, as he put it, the worst mistake of his professional career. He thinks that’s why she killed herself.”
“Did he say anything about a guy named Richardson?”
“Richardson? Yeah, he thinks Richardson is some kind of big drug dealer, or something. He said he tried to talk to him, but Richardson wouldn’t see him.”
“Did he say why he wanted to talk to Richardson? What’s the connection?”
“He doesn’t know. He said Arnaud told his wife he was working on something, a possible connection to Richardson, but he didn’t tell her what it was. He said he didn’t want her to get her hopes up. Hamilton thinks it’s entirely possible that Dean invented the connection to Richardson, just to make his wife think he was making progress.”
“So he thinks Richardson didn’t have anything to do with the murder?”
“He said it was a possibility, but he just didn’t know. It’s kind of sad, really. He thinks Francine would still be alive if he could have solved the murder.”
For all of Hamilton’s talking, I still didn’t know whether Arnaud had gotten himself killed over drugs, or if it had something to do with the missing niece. No doubt, Richardson would have preferred the killing to be about something unrelated to his drug business. Denying the drug connection and shifting suspicion onto the missing girl might just have been an attempt to steer me away. But I had a hunch the niece was in the middle of it. As full of shit as Richardson was, he could very well have been right about the weakness of a drug-related motive. There wasn’t that much money involved to risk killing a cop. But if Arnaud was killed because of the missing girl, that meant he’d dug deep enough to make someone very nervous.
“What about the niece?” I asked. “Did Hamilton try to find her?”
“He said he looked for her for a while, on his own, but drew a complete blank. He brags about how good he is at finding people, but the niece just vanished.”
We sat quietly for a few minutes while I thought it over. Karla was starting to fidget. “How are you feeling? Sober enough to drive?”
“Yeah, and I need to pee.”
She started the car and headed back. She