J Rain: Dark horse

He gave me the name and address, and hung up. Johnny Bright. I stared at the name for some time.

He should have left Cindy out of it. Would have been healthier for him.

Next I called Washington state, and this time got hold of Donna Trigger.

“Who’s this?” she asked. Her voice was soft.

“My name is Jim Knighthorse, I’m a private detective down in Huntington Beach. I’m following up on the murder of Amanda Peterson.”

There was silence. Not even a hiss of a connection. “What can I do for you, Mr. Knighthorse?”

“Can I ask you about Bryan Dawson?”

Another pause. “What would you like to know?”

“What was your relationship with Mr. Dawson?”

“He was my band director,” she said evenly. “And my lover.” She caught me admittedly by surprise. But I am a professional, and just as I opened my mouth for the next question, she continued: “And, in the end, my stalker.”

“Could you elaborate?”

“On what?”

“On everything,” I said.

She did, and when we hung up I had a much clearer picture of Bryan Dawson. And I had no reason to doubt her. Dawson had approached her during her junior year, and she had been flattered because she had always considered him cute. All of the girls did. It began after band camp when he offered to give her a ride home. One thing led to another and they didn’t make it home and she had been honored that he had chosen her out of all the girls. She was seventeen and had been a virgin. She saw him secretly during the next year, but he became possessive and physical and she ended the relationship. He was relentless in his pursuit to win her back. Soon he was following her home, standing outside her windows, calling her repeatedly. And when she began dating someone else, a senior at their school, that someone was brutally attacked one night, leaving the kid with a fractured skull and permanent semi-blindness.

But the stalking had abruptly ended when he found a new girl.

A replacement.

Amanda Peterson.

Sanchez and I were across the street from my pad, upstairs at the Huntington Beach Brew Pub.

“Why am I always coming out to O.C. to meet you?” he asked.

“Because I’m worth it,” I said. “What’s Danielle doing tonight?”

“She’s taking a class. Going back to school to get a degree in finance. She’s hit a ceiling at work, needs the degree.”

“It’s about time you let her have a life you chauvinistic Latino pig.”

“Hey, I’m only half Latino.”

We were both drinking the blond house draft, a light, sweet beer.

Sanchez said, “Why is it the blond beer is the lighter beer, and the darker beer gets you drunk faster? Thought blonds have more fun.”

“How long you been thinking that one up?”

“Just came to me. I am, after all, a UCLA-educated Latino.”

Our food came. And lots of it. I had ordered from the appetizer menu, running my forefinger straight down the list and rattling off anything that sounded good. And it all sounded good. Now, plates of nachos, chicken wings, calamari, southwestern eggrolls and even an artichoke were arriving steadily at our table.

“Someone in the kitchen must like you,” said Sanchez, “because they gave you a green flower.”

“It’s called an artichoke, you oaf.”

“Well, your arteries are going to be choking after you eat all that shit.”

Despite myself, I laughed.

“What can I say?” Sanchez said. “I’m on a roll. Can I have any of that shit?”

“Get your own food.”

“Can’t; you cleaned out the kitchen.”

We drank from our beer. The Lakers were playing the Jazz. Shaq was unloading on them.

“So I’ve got news on Pencil Dick.”

“Who’s Pencil Dick?”

“Your teacher friend, Bryan Dawson. Anyone poking high school students is called a pencil dick.”

“I see; what’s the news?”

Sanchez leaned forward on his elbows. “Pencil Dick was involved in another murder up north. In a city called Half Moon Bay.”

“So tell me.”

“A student of his, a band student, disappeared. They found her floating in the San Francisco bay. Pencil Dick was a suspect, but they couldn’t pin anything on him. He quit his job and came down here.”

“Well, then, what do you think we should do?” I asked.

“We tail him. With Amanda gone, he might be looking for new blood.”

I found the allegedly green Taurus parked in front of a small woodframe house in Santa Ana. It was 9:00 p.m., and the Taurus still looked blue to me.

Santa Ana is mostly Hispanic and its residents are perhaps the poorest in Orange County. In fact, downtown Santa Ana looks as if it had been lifted whole from Mexico City.

Johnny Bright, as a Caucasian, would stick out in Santa Ana like a sore white thumb.

But one question remained: was Johnny Bright the same guy who took a potshot at my ear? The vehicle could have belonged to a friend. In that case I would follow the friend. Either way, with a paid killer on my ass, I preferred to be proactive in my involvement with him.

I waited in my car around a corner, with a clear view of Bright’s front porch. My own vehicle had nicely tinted windows, and from behind them I watched the house through lightweight high-powered binoculars. I didn’t have many tools of the trade, but this was one of them.

I was listening to Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy on tape. The 5 Freeway arched above the housing tract. Freeway noises, especially the rumble of a Harley, cut through the drone of the tape. I was on my third tape, marching on through Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, when four gang members stopped by the Mustang and looked it over, not realizing I was inside. I rolled down my window and reached under my seat and pulled out a fake police badge.

Another one of my tools…

“Can I help you gentlemen?” I said, flashing the badge.

The first one, a skinny kid with a black bandana tied around his head, shot his hands up as if I had pointed a gun at him. When he spoke he had a long, drawling Hispanic accent, punctuated by jerky hand movements.

“Don’t shoot me, officer, I didn’t mean to look at your killer set of wheels.”

“You can look but don’t touch.”

“Waddya doin’ here?” asked the kid, their obvious leader.

“Watching you boys.”

“Are you gay, too?”

His buddies slapped each other high fives.

Behind them there was movement in Bright’s house, but I couldn’t see because the gang members were in my way. I heard a screen door swing open and slap shut.

“Beat it,” I said.

The three of them waited for their leader. The leader squinted at me and seemed to recognize me. I get this kind of partial recognition a lot. Probably because at one point in their lives they had seen me on their TV screens, or in their newspapers, or sports magazines. But this kid was young, perhaps too young to know of me. But you never knew.

He jerked his head. “Let’s roll,” he told the others.

They sauntered off. One called me a pig. They would be potential witnesses; that is, if the police tried very hard to investigate the murder.

Murder?

Yeah, someone’s going to die tonight.

Across the street, Fuck Nut, with his slicked-back graying hair visible from even here, opened the door to his Taurus and got in.

We drove through Santa Ana. I tailed him using tricks gleaned from my father. Once, at a red light, I even turned into a liquor store parking lot. When the light turned green again, I pulled out of the parking lot and continued tailing him.

At least I was amusing myself.