They're Watching (2010) Read online

  She leaned forward, putting her face to the two-way, trying to peer through. She was looking right at us.

  Sally made a noise in her throat, and Valentine said, "Christ."

  I pressed my hand to the glass, touching Ariana, the outline of her palm. There was nothing else I could do.

  The cop took her again by the arm, and she let him lead her out.

  My face burned, and I bit down on my lip and willed my breath to freeze in my chest. All the time we'd wasted on our petty problems, and here I was, reduced to observing my wife through an interrogation mirror, she unable to see me, I unable to talk to her. The symbolism, oppressive enough for a student script. My voice came gruff and uneven. "You've got to keep me out of jail."

  Sally said, "Then you'd better give us something."

  "I don't have anything. They have me dead in the water."

  "We've got no time for you to feel sorry for yourself. The men behind that size-eleven-and-a-half Danner boot bet on you being nothing more than a second-rate screenwriter. You lapped up what they laid down. If you want to save yourself, you're gonna have to come up with your own material."

  Valentine: "Is there anyone besides your wife who can corroborate that they--whoever they are--exist?"

  I tapped my head with the flat of my hand, prodding myself. "Elisabeta got an e-mail claiming that someone wearing a Red Sox hat would pay her a visit, but an e-mail's pretty thin. Wait, though. Doug Beeman. They recorded him also. He got DVDs, too."

  "It could be argued that you recorded him."

  "He'd been getting them for months. We could compare our schedules to prove I couldn't have made them. Plus, he still has the footage from that high-school basement."

  "Give us an address."

  I jotted it down.

  "Your job is to get your head clear, go over the last nine days inch by inch, and think of anything else we can use. And you'd better do it fast." Sally ripped the address off the pad. "In the meantime we'll see Beeman."

  "He'll confirm my story."

  "You'd better hope so," Valentine said, and they walked out.

  I sat for a long while, shuddering, gazing at the oblivious rectangle of the muted TV up on the mount. Color and movement. Shapes. The soap gave way to a commercial about a new razor with five blades, which to my dulled brain seemed like four too many. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to relive everything that had happened, starting with my stepping out onto the porch in my boxers that cold Tuesday morning, but my thoughts kept crashing off course. Prison. My marriage. What was left of my reputation.

  I crossed to the door. A uniformed cop slumped against the wall just outside, flipping through a magazine. Not surprising. His eyes flicked up and held on me. I took a step out into the hall. He came off the wall. I retreated a step. He leaned back against the wall.

  I said, "Okay," closed the door, and returned feebly to my chair.

  Elisabeta was on the television.

  Yes, that was her, sitting on a white couch, legs crossed, curtains billowing behind her.

  For a moment my brain couldn't catch up to what I was seeing. Had reporters somehow uncovered her link to me? Already?

  But no, there was advertising script across the screen. I stood, took a few halting steps forward, and went on tiptoe to raise the volume.

  Elisabeta was saying, "--high-fiber drink mix that keeps me regular and decreases the risk of heart disease."

  No accent. It was startling, bewildering, as if I'd tuned in to an interview to find Antonio Banderas speaking in a Jamaican patois.

  Now she was walking over a grassy rise, a canary yellow sweater draped across her shoulders, smiling. A purring voice-over said, "Fiberestore. For a healthy digestive system. And a healthy life."

  A smiling close-up. That face, the slightly crooked nose, those Everywoman features--if she could benefit from increased fiber in-take, so could you.

  My lungs burned; I'd forgotten to breathe.

  Elisabeta. In a TV commercial. Sounding as if she hailed from Columbus, Ohio.

  An actress. Hired to play a part.

  Which meant that Doug Beeman, my last good hope, was probably no longer my last good hope. I pictured Sally and Valentine, speeding toward that apartment this very minute. A fool's errand.

  Dazed, I backed away from the screen and sat, nicking the edge of the seat and landing on the floor, the chair toppling over behind me. Still, I couldn't tear my eyes from the TV, though it had long returned to the soap opera.

  The door opened briskly, and Kent Gable entered with a small entourage of suited men. Slacks, holsters bulging beneath jackets, badges gleaming on belts. Robbery-Homicide Division, right down to the assured lockstep of the loafers. Gable cocked his head to look down at me. Beneath my hands, the cheap floor tiles were as cool as death, as cool as the chill that had crawled into my bones.

  "Sorry, Davis," he said. "Honeymoon's over."

  Chapter 35

  "Why . . . ?" I cleared my throat and tried again. "Why'd the DA have a change of heart?"

  Pulling onto the freeway, Gable threw a folder over the seat back in answer.

  It struck me in the chest. Since my wrists were cuffed, I had to move my hands together to flip through the pages. They looked like printed e-mails.

  His partner, a wide Hispanic guy who hadn't offered a name, said, "We went to search your place--looks like you already tossed it for us." He didn't bother to turn around. The skin on the back of his head was visible through his shaved hair. "And after, after we paid a visit to your work. That shared little office with the Dell computer? What did you think, that we wouldn't check all your computers?"

  The top e-mail, sent from [email protected] to my work e-mail address, read, Received your inquiry. This what your looking for? Let us know if theres other informations you require. The printed attachment showed a blueprint of what looked to be a mansion. I checked the time stamp--dated six months ago.

  Dread turned my voice hoarse. "What's this, now?"

  "Keep reading," Gable said. "It gets better."

  A reply e-mail, ostensibly from me: Can you follow people, get schedule information?

  I glanced back at the blueprint. The mansion looked familiar, all right. Clear down to the Olympic pool and eight-car garage.

  Flipping forward again: We dont do that. Documents only. Sorry buddy. Leave cash at drop point.

  The next several e-mails were thwarted attempts, apparently by me, to secure an unmarked handgun from various not-quite-unsavory-enough sources. The final page was an online booking for Hotel Angeleno that I'd evidently made under a fake name.

  Gable's eyes watched me steadily from the rearview. I was frozen with disbelief. My mouth was open, wavering but not forming words. Sally and Valentine, the only ones who believed me, were off running down a dead lead. And now there was even more to deny, the evidence so overwhelming. The first thought to cut through the panic haze was that maybe I had lost it. Was this what it felt like inside a psychotic break?

  Cars zipped by on either side of us, people coming back from their lunch breaks. A petite brunette smoked and chatted on her cell phone, one pedicured foot up on the dash next to the wheel. Mexicans sold flowers at the off-ramp. Lou Reed's colored girls doo-doo-doo-doo-dooed from someone's radio.

  "You really think that deleting something off your computer gets rid of it for good?" Gable's partner snickered. "That shit's never gone. Our guy had it pulled off there in minutes."

  I said slowly, "But my computer at home was clean?"

  "So far." Gable's eyebrows drew together. "What's that get you? We have you dead on the Dell."

  I shook my head, looked out the window again, the sun warming my face. I was cold and hungry and more scared than I thought it was possible to get. But they'd just shown me the first chink in the armor, giving me a new kind of resolve. If I were to have a prayer at staying out of jail, I had to retrace every minute of the past nine days and find any other chinks. As quickly as they stitched together t
he case against me, I had to unravel it. And I had to do it in the twenty minutes before we hit downtown and I vanished into Men's Central.

  A tattooed giant in an orange jumpsuit, his cuffs cinched to a belly chain, all but blotted out the end of the corridor. He had a guard on either side of him, and I wondered if there was enough room for us to pass. Gable tightened his grip on my forearm and kept me moving forward. As we neared, the prisoner made a head lunge at me, and I stumbled back. I could hear the echo of his chuckles even after we'd turned the corner.

  We passed into the booking area--a few desks, the mug-shot camera and backdrop, metal benches bolted to the concrete floor. A bunch of bored deputies ate Taco Bell over paperwork. A tiny TV showed that picture of me in a blazer that my agent had insisted I take for the trade announcement after the script sale. I looked like any other asshole readying himself for a golden ascent.

  A jowly deputy looked up. "The Keith Conner guy. Can we get those fingerprints?"

  "Mine are in the system already," I said.

  "Good. Then they'll match nicely. It's procedure."

  My heart still hadn't slowed from the scare in the corridor. I nodded, and he printed me expertly while Gable and his partner bullshitted with the others about some of Keith's cop movies and where they missed the mark. The deputy's thick hands manipulated my fingers this way and that. He didn't talk to me. He didn't make eye contact. I might as well have been inanimate. My few possessions were in a plastic tub, but at least I was still in my own clothes. Right now, still having my own clothes seemed like the greatest comfort imaginable.

  When he was done, I said, "I'd like to make a phone call." Blank stares. "I get one call, right?"

  The deputy pointed to a pay phone mounted on the wall.

  I said, "I'm calling my attorney. Can I have a private line, please?"

  Gable's partner said, "Want us to send for a psychic, too, so you can commune with Johnnie Cochran?"

  Through scattered laughter Gable led me around the corner into an interview room split by a Plexiglas shield with a pass-through box for documents. No lawyer beyond the window, of course, just an old-fashioned black phone on my side of the pitted wooden ledge.

  "You have a criminal attorney lined up already?" Gable said. "How 'bout that. You planned ahead."

  "No, I'm calling my civil lawyer for a referral. But our conversation's still privileged."

  "You have five minutes." He left me alone.

  His footsteps ticked away, and then conversation resumed down the hall.

  I picked up the phone, punched "0." When the jail operator picked up, I asked to be transferred to the West L.A. station. After a few seconds, the station desk officer picked up.

  "Hello, this is Patrick Davis. I need to speak to Detective Sally Richards immediately. Any way you can put me through to her cell phone?"

  "I--Huh? Wait a minute, Patrick Davis Patrick Davis? Didn't we just have you?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Where you callin' from, son?"

  "Men's Central."

  "I see. Hold yourself. I'll see what I can do."

  I waited through the static-cracked silence. Not all the ink had wiped off, navy blue filming the swirls of my fingertips. I touched the Plexi, leaving faint streaks.

  Sally answered, "Patrick?"

  "Yes, I--"

  "We're off the case. I can't talk to you, not like this. You know the pay phones there are monitored."

  "I told them I was calling my lawyer so they'd put me on a line in the interview room. So we're good."

  "Oh." A note of surprise.

  "Are you at Beeman's?"

  "No, we left. No one was home. We'll go back in a few--"

  "Forget it. Listen--Elisabeta? She's an actress. She's in a Fiberestore commercial, the older woman sitting on a white couch. Find her. She was a hire, so you can bet Beeman was, too."

  "Wait a minute. They hired actors--"

  "To manipulate me. Yes. I don't have much time, so I'm gonna talk fast. Gable pulled some incriminating documents off my computer at work."

  "I heard about them," Sally said.

  "I think they were installed like a virus when I opened the e-mails."

  "Why do you think that?"

  "Because I was careful not to open any of their e-mails at home, and according to Gable the forensics guys didn't get anything off my own computer."

  "Which is where the guys framing you would most logically want to have the stuff found."

  "Right. They knew when I logged in to retrieve e-mails, but I don't think they knew where I was logging in from."

  "Okay . . . so?"

  "I also opened e-mails at Kinko's and an Internet cafe"--I gave her both locations--"so will you check those and see if any documents about Conner were installed on the computers I used there?"

  "What would that give us?"

  "Some of those fabricated documents--the e-mails--are time-stamped and backdated. If any like them were installed on those computers, they're gonna show times and dates when I wasn't there renting computer time."

  Sally sounded excited, or at least her version of it. "Kinko's and Internet joints keep time logs for usage. Even have sign-in codes to track users. You pay with a credit card?"

  "Yes."

  "Better still."

  I could hear her pen scribbling. She said, "Even if this does pan out, I'll need anything else you got to reapproach the DA."

  "I went through everything, inch by inch, like you said, and came up with another piece you can use. The night of February fifteenth. Nine P.M.?"

  "When Keith's house was vandalized. Yes."

  "I was driving out to Elisabeta's. Indio. They sent me that far to make sure I was well out of the picture. But my gas gauge is broken."

  "And?"

  "It looks like I have a full tank, even when I don't. They probably checked it to make sure I wouldn't have to stop for gas, so no one could alibi me."

  "But you did. Stop for gas."

  "Yes. Check my credit-card records to find which gas station I used."

  "You could've sent someone else to gas up there with your card. Not all stations have security cameras outside at the pumps."

  "I went into the mart to buy a pack of gum. They always have surveillance inside. I bet you'll be able to pull footage of me there at about the same time that someone else in a Red Sox hat was leaving a dead rat on Keith's windshield. That gives you a second suspect and supports me on the frame argument. Might even be enough to keep me out of jail while they shore up probable cause."

  "Maybe you're not just a second-rate screenwriter."

  "Yeah, I'm a second-rate suspect, too." A banging on the metal door. I lowered my voice. "He's coming back in, so one more thing. They didn't book me. I don't think I've actually been arrested."

  Gable shoved the door open. "Chat time's over, Davis. Time to move."

  Sally said, "What do you mean? They printed you and read you your rights?"

  I eyed Gable. "Just the former."

  A brief silence. "So they probably asked if they could print you, making it consensual even though you thought you didn't have a choice."

  "Exactly."

  "You can be held for questioning--for a reasonable time--without being arrested."

  Gable said, "Did I just talk to you?"

  "Yes," I said to him, "I'm wrapping it up."

  "If they haven't booked you yet," Sally said, "then the DA's skittish about charging you."

  I asked, "Why?"

  "It's a weird fucking case, to say the least, and she has--had--me and Valentine pressing an alternate scenario. Her office can't afford another embarrassment, which means moving slow and right. You can be charged whenever--she's not gonna want to jump in on day one unless she's positive everything is lined out and she's got the case together. They waited a year to charge Robert Blake, and look how that turned out."

  "Get off the phone," Gable said.

  I fisted the receiver. "But the latest stuff--"

/>   "I know," Sally said. "I'm not gonna lie to you. The e-mails, fabricated or not, are damning. The DA's deciding whether to charge you right now, and her moving the case to Robbery-Homicide is a pretty good indication of which way she's leaning."

  Gable blew out a sigh and started toward me.

  I said, "Listen, Frank, I gotta go. Can you--"

  "Call the DA with the new leads you gave me? If they yield, yes. Evidence like that could be the deciding factor--push her to play it conservatively and hold off on the arrest."

  I thought of the hulking inmate in the hall, how he'd lunged at me. If things went badly, by tonight I'd be sharing a cage with men like him. "How long will it take you?"

  "Give us two hours, then force their hand."

  I did my best to keep desperation from my voice. "How am I even supposed to know how to . . . ?"

  Sally said, "They'll have to formally charge you or let you go."

  I said, "But I don't want to push it if--" Gable was staring at me, so I stopped.

  "It's your only play," she said. "Two hours. By then either we'll have gotten something to the DA or your leads are a bust."

  Gable reached for the phone impatiently, but I turned away. My hand was squeezing the receiver so tightly that my fingers ached. "How will I know which?"

  "You won't."

  Gable put his thumb down on the telephone base, severing the connection.

  An hour and fifty-seven minutes in the hard wooden chair of the interrogation room left me sore, my lower back cramped. Working in shifts, Gable and his partner had hammered me on every aspect of my life, and I'd answered honestly and consistently, all the while tamping down my panic and racking my brain for how to play it when the time came. Up until now, Gable had been careful to phrase everything as a question--"Step into this room for me?" As long as I complied, there was no need to arrest me, and I didn't let on that I was aware of my options. Until now.

  Gable paced in front of me, his watch flashing again into view. I'd bought Sally and Valentine their two hours to look for conflicting evidence and talk to the DA. It was time to force the issue and see whether I wound up free or in a cell.