Jeff Sherratt - Detour to Murder

Willy slid out of the seat, grumbling, “You need help? That ain’t the deal. This week I drive, you dump-”

“You best hurry, man.”

“Don’t flip your lid. I’m a’comin’.”

Willy lumbered around behind the rig and saw Nat facing the back wall of the restaurant, standing frozen and staring slack-jawed at the ground, “Hey, Nat, let’s get a move on.”

Nat pointed. “Take a look.”

Willie’s gaze followed Nat’s outstretched arm. He almost gagged. A white female body lay sprawled in the filth behind the bin. The woman had been savagely beaten. Her battered face was bloated and caked in dried blood and vomit. The dark roots of her blonde strands were tangled and enmeshed with the garbage overflowing the containers.

“Is she… dead?” Nat asked.

“Goddamn if I know.” Willie crept closer to get a better look. It had been cold during the night, he knew, and she had nothing on but a thin, almost sheer cotton dress.

He leaned in and shuddered as he looked at her face. He could only guess her age, somewhere between thirty and fifty, he figured. Too bad, at one time she might’ve been a looker. He raised her arm and with his thumb and forefinger felt the back of her wrist, checking for a pulse. He jumped back.

“Nat! Quick, get a cop. She’s alive.”

I jumped up from thetable, spilling my coffee. Kathie had a startled look on her face; I must’ve frightened her. But I had to get to Roberts fast.

“Where is he? Damn! Don’t you know I’ve been trying to find him?”

“He asked me not to tell a soul where he’s staying.”

“I’m his lawyer, for chrissakes. You gotta tell me!”

“I gave my word-”

“Kathie, don’t you realize the police are out gunning for him? If they find him before I do, there will be trouble. He could get hurt.”

“They would use force?”

“Of course they would! They think he’s a mad-dog murderer.”

“Oh, my God. If anything happened to Al Roberts it would kill my mother.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s staying in a hotel close to the rest home where she’s living.”

I started for the door. “Take me there right now!”

She grabbed her purse and jacket. “I’ll drive,” she said.

While riding in her red Mercedes to the hotel located close to Vista Del Mar Estates, an assisted living facility in Laguna Beach, she told me why-at first-she’d tried to convince me to drop the Roberts case. It was obvious to me now that she’d been trying to protect her mother’s mental health as well as her father’s image.

“Roberts had been sending letters to my mother. We moved her several times, but he’s always been able to find her.”

“What’d she say about the letters?”

“She never saw his letters. We told the staff to destroy them.”

“Why?”

“She was in bad shape at the beginning, but over the years she seemed to be making a little progress. The doctors said any mention of Roberts-or anything about her past, for that matter-would probably set her back. All the tragic mistakes she had made would come to the forefront. They felt that the horrible events of her past life would be lived over again in her mind. She’d descend into that dark place where she stayed for so many years.”

I sat still, looking out the window and watching as the white lines on the dark freeway unfurled before us.

Finally, Kathie broke the silence. “We couldn’t take the chance. I knew if Roberts were released he’d find my mother.”

“It wasn’t your decision to make. It was hers.”

“You don’t understand. She was almost like a zombie. I’d visit her nearly every day and she’d just stare at me, no expression or anything. She’d just sit there and stare at me. There were days, weeks on end where she wouldn’t even get out of bed. The doctors said-”

“The so-called doctors were feeding you a line of crap, damn it. They pumped her full of drugs and kept billing your old man’s trust fund. Didn’t they?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that now.”

“The sons-of-bitches were warehousing her. So she wouldn’t make trouble. Couldn’t you see that?”

Kathie shook her head violently. “I just didn’t know what to do. She was so helpless. Oh God.”

At night, with no traffic, we made good time. About a half an hour after we left my apartment we turned off the Santa Ana Freeway onto Laguna Canyon Road and wound through the darkness, heading toward the coast.

With her eyes focused on the road, Kathie continued to talk about Roberts and Sue. “I know now how wrong I was, Jimmy. Al Roberts came to see my mother a few days ago and he’s been with her every day for hours on end. He only goes to the hotel to sleep.”

“Roberts got there three days ago?”

“Yes, and since then it’s almost like a miracle has happened. My mother’s been alert and active. She gets up in the morning and puts on her makeup while humming an old love song she used to sing. She even took a long walk with him on the beach yesterday.”

Looking up at her in the rearview mirror, I could see the smile on her face. “They hold hands like a couple of teenagers in love,” she added.

Questions flooded my mind. How did Roberts get clear down here to Laguna without being spotted? Did he hitchhike the final leg of his journey, which had begun all those years ago back in 1945? Another thing: how did Roberts know where to find her? But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was how soon it would be before the cops figured out where to look for him.

“How much farther?” I asked Kathie.

“He’s staying at the old Laguna Hotel. We’ll be there in a few minutes… I’m picking up his tab,” she said quietly, almost as an afterthought. “You know it never had a bell?”

“A bell? What are you talking about?”

“The Laguna Hotel has a bell tower, but it never had a bell.”

“That’s good to know,” I said, and thought, Christ, at a time like this who gives a damn about a bell. “Is there anything else I should know about the hotel? For example, does it have bulletproof doors? Because if the cops get there before we do…”

She stepped on the gas and soon we rounded the last curve of the canyon road and turned onto Highway 1. After going a couple of blocks I could see red lights flickering ahead. My heart sank when we slowed and saw cop cars, their flashers blinking, parked haphazardly in front of the hotel. A scattering of uniformed officers milled about on the sidewalk.

“Oh, shit!” I said under my breath.

Kathie stopped the Mercedes in the middle of the street about ten feet from a police car blocking the road. She turned to me. Her face showed what we were both thinking. “They got him, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know. Wait here.” I climbed out of the car and walked toward the hotel. I had to play it cool. If this wasn’t about Roberts, then I didn’t want to tip the fact that he was hiding here right under their noses. I approached the first cop I saw. “What’s this all about, officer?”

“A murderer on the run was holed up in the hotel. But we got him,” the young Laguna Beach cop boasted. “Half the agencies in southern California were looking for him.”

I shuddered, but tried to remain calm. “What was his name?”

“A guy named Roberts… say, who are you, anyway? Why do you care?”

Damn, they’d found him! “I’m his lawyer. Where is he?”

He turned and shouted to a circle of plainclothes cops standing nearby. “Hey, George. This guy says he’s Roberts’s lawyer. Wants to know where they’ve taken him.”