Stephen Cannell - Vertical Coffin

"But…"

"You can always get another detective," I said, and sipped my beer, looking out at the water. "Okay with me, if that's what you decide."

"Nope. Can't get out of it that easy. You're my guy. Do it your way. Now take me to bed and give me a party."

"Thought you'd never ask."

The next morning I drove out to Hidden Ranch. On the way I kept thinking about the incident reports I'd read the previous night.

At the beginning of every investigation I start by looking for coincidences and inconsistencies. In police work, you quickly learn it's never wise to trust a coincidence, because coincidences are often caused by criminal lies or mistakes. Inconsistencies occur when two people have conflicting opinions about a shared event, and there is often a lie or a misunderstanding at its core. In both of these circumstances it is generally profitable for an investigator to take a closer look.

After reading the deputies' statements, it seemed that almost all the sheriffs at the scene agreed that Vincent Smiley was a suicide, that he had staged it so the police would be forced to kill him. Death by cop. Even after shooting Emo, Smiley had plenty of chances to surrender. He could have thrown down his weapon, come out and saved his life, but instead he chose to barricade himself inside the house and shoot it out with the police until there was no possible solution but his own extinction.

I had to agree that on the surface it looked like a manufactured suicide. Except for two things. First, the guy had been wearing Kevlar. From my perspective, you don't wear Kevlar when you're trying to get the cops to kill you. It was inconsistent, but not unheard of.

The second inconsistency occurred in two of the neighbors' post-event statements. According to a neighbor named William Palmer, who lived four houses away on Hidden Ranch Road, Smiley had spent most of the previous summer building a bomb shelter in his basement. A woman down the street named Katie Clark had also mentioned the same thing. So the question is, why does someone who is so afraid he might die in a nuclear blast that he builds a bomb shelter in his basement commit suicide, and why was he wearing Kevlar? Those two facts didn't seem to fit in the same emotional quadrant with the Death-by-Cop theory.

I called Katie Clark, and her baby-sitter told me she was out of town on business until next Friday. That left William Palmer. He agreed to stay home and wait for me until 9 a. M.

As I turned back onto Hidden Ranch Road I remembered the bizarre insanity of my last visit here. I was still shaken by that bloodstained memory. I pulled up and parked in front of William Palmer's two-story colonial. White with dark green trim. Bright purple bougainvillea trellised off the front porch. Birds sang in the sycamore trees. A welcome contrast to the memory of that chattering AK-47.

I trudged up the walkway and rang the bell. After a moment Palmer opened the door. He was a tall, thirty-plus man with short hair and laugh lines framing a friendly smile. I liked him on sight. After I showed my creds, he shook my hand and led me into a large, well-appointed living room.

As we sat down he asked me to call him Tad. "Everybody does," he said, adding that he sold insurance for Aetna and had a meeting with his district manager in an hour, a not-too-subtle hint letting me know he didn't have much time. So we got right into a discussion of Vincent Smiley.

"The guy was always kinda nuts," Tad said, shaking his head at the memory. "Like, he'd walk his dog early every morning. If you went out to pick up your paper or were even backing out of your driveway late to work, he'd always want to stop and talk. And it was always about nonsense. Like, why didn't you plant out your hedge line? Or, your pool house would look better painted pale yellow… I don't know how he afforded that house of his. Somebody said it was from the life insurance after his parents died. He just hung out, giving dumb advice and getting on everybody's nerves. Since he didn't work, he had no sense of anybody else being on a schedule."

"Nobody said anything about a dog," I said. "That wasn't in any of the statements I read."

"Yeah, a big, slobbering, black Rottweiler. Mean son-of-a-bitch. I was always worried he'd get loose and maul somebody's kid. I know it's not right to be glad he's dead, but it was no fun having Smiley in the neighborhood."

"And he told you about the weapons in his garage?"

"Showed 'em to me. He was all, 'Don't you love this?' Then he'd pull out a grenade launcher or something, and break it open, show you the breech, show you a box of ammo for his AK-forty-seven. Then he shows us boxes of plastic gunk and tells us it's C-four."

"How would a guy like Smiley acquire C-four? That stuff is impossible to get. The government restricts its distribution so terrorists can't get it."

"I don't have a clue," Palmer said. "But I've got kids and a wife. I don't need that shit four doors away. Claire is taking the kids to school right now, but you can ask her when she gets back. She thinks he was one of those antigovernment survivalist nuts. He had this computer in his garage. He bragged about hacking into some military training site called Cactus West. It had all kinds of acronyms like MCAS, Yuma, or TACTS. He showed it to me."

"You have any idea what that stands for?" I asked, writing this down.

"None at all. I tried to find it on my computer, but I couldn't. Like I said, it was a secure military Web site. Add that to the automatic rifles, C-four, and a phony sheriff's badge, and we all knew we had a huge problem."

"Tad, you said in your statement he was building a bomb shelter?"

"Yeah. June, July, all last summer, basically. Said it was in his basement. He was hauling dirt outta that house right through the back door. Had it piled up in the backyard. Took truckloads away at the end of each month."

"And you're sure it was a bomb shelter?"

"That's what he said." Tad was beginning to sneak looks at his watch.

"I'll be just a minute more," I said. "So, if he was building a bomb shelter, what's your take on the idea that he shot that deputy so the cops would come up here and kill him?"

"I agree with my wife. The guy was a survivalist. I don't think he had a death wish. He told me once he went to a camp for training on how to survive in the wild. He was always flashing that badge, but he was also terrified of authority. He said he hated cops."

"He hates the cops, and at the same time he's telling everybody he is one."

"That's why me and Claire, and the Bellinghams, got together and decided to call the sheriff's department and check him out. He didn't seem like a cop to any of us. The sheriff's office said he wasn't on their roster, so we knew the badge was a phony."

"If you had to characterize him for me, how would you describe him? Just a general impression."

"The thing about Vince was he was kinda-y'know, outta sync. He didn't act right. He laughed at stuff that wasn't funny. His vibe was wrong. When he showed us all the stuff in his garage he'd kinda caress it. It was more than just ammo, it was like-manhood."

"And you called ATF, not the sheriff, right?"

"That was because a lot of that stuff in there was illegal. The automatic weapons and the grenade launcher. Chuck Bellingham said we should call Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives because illegal weapons are their beat."

He looked at his watch again and I stood up to go. "Thanks," I said. "Do you have a card, in case I have any more questions?"

He pulled one out of his wallet and handed it to me as we walked to the front door. After he showed me out I got back in my car, picked up my cell phone, and dialed the LASD bureau downtown and asked for the forensics lab. A criminalist named Robyn DeYoung was in charge of the Hidden Ranch shoot-out. Once I had her on the phone, I identified myself, and asked, "Did you guys find a dog's remains out there?"