James Patterson - The 8th Confession

I heard Jackie Kam’s voice behind me, calling over the car radio, “Sergeant Boxer, what is your location? Lindsay? Lindsay, please answer me.”

Rich let go of my hand and leaned over the cliff, facing into the wind as he called down to Henry Wallis’s fresh corpse.

“Did you enjoy yourself, asshole? Get what you wanted?”

I used my cell phone to call Dispatch, but the cars were already screaming to a halt all around Point Lobos.

Jacobi jumped out of one of them before it came to a stop. He ran toward us, calling, “You okay? You okay?”

I was so shaken I couldn’t talk.

“Take it easy, Boxer,” Jacobi said, putting his hands on my shoulders. My good friend. “Try to breathe.”

Tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes, but I wasn’t sad. It was something else – surprise and relief that I was alive.

I breathed in the smoke-filled air and said, “I don’t get it, Warren. Wallis jumped out of his car! Was he trying to escape? Or was that how he wanted to die?”

“Whatever,” Conklin said beside me.

I nodded. Whatever. Henry Wallis, the man with the snake-and-skull tattoo on his shoulder, was dead.

JACOBI TOOK ME and Conklin out to dinner at Restaurant LuLu, the place for homey Provençal cooking, rich casseroles and pizzas grilled in a hickory-wood oven. The sunken dining room was packed, conversation was humming all around us, and our waiter really knew the wine list, long considered one of the best in town.

I knew why Jacobi was celebrating.

The chief and the mayor had given him a big ol’ “attaboy.” TV newscasters were brimming with the drama: the chopper shots and the news that life was safe again for the rich and famous.

But I couldn’t stand this, and I had to say it. “ Warren, is everyone crazy? You feel comfortable saying that Henry Wallis is the guy who killed our millionaires?”

Jacobi answered with a question: “Can’t you let something good into your life, Boxer?” And then another: “Can’t you just be happy for an hour?”

“I guess not,” I said, scowling at him. “What’s wrong with me? Or am I just too smart for this charade?”

Conklin nudged me under the table with his knee, and I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him either.

A man had died.

We’d almost followed him off a cliff.

We were lucky we weren’t looking up at Claire from her table or seeing a story on TV of dead children, their tearful parents threatening to sue the city for another fatal high-speed chase, the sad-faced anchorperson saying, “The funeral services for the little Beckwith children will be at Our Sisters of the Sacred Heart on Sunday.”

The waiter poured the wine, and Jacobi tasted it, pronounced it excellent, and, over the clamor of fat-walleted diners chatting happily all around us, raised his glass to me and Conklin.

“Thanks,” he said, “from the chief, the mayor, and especially from me. I love you guys.”

Jacobi smiled, something I’ve seen him do maybe twice in the last ten years, and he and Conklin tucked into their pan-roasted mussels and rotisserie duck.

I had no appetite.

The muscles in my face had gone rigid, but my mind was whirling around on its brain stem.

Was Henry Wallis really the high-society killer?

Or was he just some loser of an ex-con with something to hide – so he’d freaked out and ended his life?

Did anyone care but me?

AGAINST EVERYONE’S GOOD JUDGMENT, I found an ADA in her office at nine that night, the indefatigable Kathy Valoy. She called a judge and got us a search warrant for Henry Wallis’s apartment, and now, at midnight, Conklin and I were there.

Wallis had lived in a three-story walk-up on Dolores Street, a few blocks from the Torchlight Bar.

We rang the buzzer until we woke up the building’s owner, a squat man by the name of Maury Silver. He was balding, with loose dentures, bad breath, and a stained work shirt hanging long over his boxers.

Silver looked at our warrant through the cracked door, read every page back and front, and then let us enter the building.

“What happened to Henry?” he asked. “Oh no. You telling me he’s the one who drove off the cliff? Henry’s a killer? ”

Wallis’s apartment was on the ground floor, rear.

We flicked on the ceiling lights, closed the door on Mr. Silver, and simply tossed the place. Didn’t take long.

Like a lot of ex-cons, Henry Wallis kept his furniture minimal and his few possessions neat.

Conklin took the bedroom and bath while I searched the small living room and kitchen. We called out to each other from time to time: when Conklin found the plastic-wrapped bricks of pot in the kitty-litter box and when I found a book on tattoos, corners folded down on the pages featuring snakes.

But that was it.

No old newspaper clippings, no new newspaper clippings, no shrines to himself, no trophies from rich people. And most of all no snakes.

No snake figurines, no snake artifacts, no books on snakes.

“No reptiles other than these,” I said, showing Conklin the tattoo book.

He said, “Take a look at this.”

I followed him into the bedroom and checked out his find: a drawerful of XL women’s underwear.

“Unless he had a big girlfriend, and I don’t see any pictures, cosmetics, anything that would indicate that,” Conklin said, “Henry Wallis was a cross-dresser.”

“A cross-dressing drug dealer. Kudos to Sara Needleman for dumping him. Let’s lock this joint up,” I said.

“I live only a few blocks from here,” said Rich as we closed and padlocked the door. “Come have a drink. Talk all this out.”

I said, “Thanks anyway. This has been the longest day of my life, Rich. I need to go home. Get naked. Go to bed.”

Conklin laughed. “Is that an order, Sergeant?”

I laughed along with him as I walked to my car, feeling just a little silly, thinking maybe Dr. Freud was having the real laugh.

“Okay,” I said, one hand on my door, being very careful when I stepped up on the running board. “One drink only.”

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Conklin’s place and Henry Wallis’s dump was extreme. Conklin lived on a similar block, both streets lined with unremarkable two- and three-story houses from the ’50s made of cheap and ordinary materials, but once we were inside, Conklin’s place felt lived-in and warm.

His living room was welcoming: good lighting, deep couches grouped around a fireplace, and the requisite bachelor must-have – a fifty-two-inch plasma- screen TV.

Rich stooped down near the entertainment unit, flipped through a stack of CDs, said, “Van Morrison okay with you?”

I said, “Sure,” and looked at the photos on the wall, black-and-white blowups of sailboats on the bay, their spinnakers full of summer wind, light spangling the waves, three different shots, all of them breathtaking.

“You take these, Rich?”

“ Uh-huh.”

“They’re wonderful.”

Van Morrison was singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” a tune that made me want to sing along. I smiled when Rich handed me a glass of wine, and I watched him sit down on the far end of the couch, put his feet up on a burnished hatch cover he’d turned into a coffee table.

I sipped from the frosty glass of chardonnay, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the other side of the same oversize couch. The tension left my body as the wine slid down my throat, cold and dry and good.

“See, what I’m wondering is, how could this be over?”

Conklin nodded, encouraging me to go on.