Dark Horse (A Jim Knighthorse Novel) Read online

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just a little nervous. I’ve never talked to a real live detective before.”

  “Well, you’re doing a great job of it so far.” I pointed at the UCLA logo. “Obviously you’re highly intelligent and wise for your age if you intend to go there.”

  She looked down. “My dad went there.”

  “He must be highly intelligent and wise himself.”

  “He’s a doctor. Intelligent, but I don’t know about wise. Anyway, he’s never home, so I really wouldn’t know.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “You’re a junior?”

  “Yes.”

  We were silent. She started rocking again, and I put my foot out to stop it again. She ducked her head and said, “Oops.”

  “Were you with Amanda on the last day she was alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me about the party.”

  “We got there around seven. Amanda and I went together because Derrick was working out at the gym, as usual. He’s so boring. He never likes to party. All he ever did was work out, play sports and hang out with Amanda.”

  “Did he love Amanda?”

  She shifted her weight. The bench creaked slightly. I kept my foot firmly planted. No more swinging today. Rebecca looked away, brushing aside a blond strand that had stuck to her shiny lip gloss.

  “Oh, yeah. He loved her a lot.”

  “You think he killed her?”

  “No.”

  “You say that pretty quick.”

  “He loved her so much. He would have done anything for her.”

  “Was Amanda seeing someone else?”

  “No. But at the time, there was another guy who wouldn’t leave her alone.”

  “Who?”

  “Chris, the guy who threw the party. He’s always liked her.”

  “Did she fool around with Chris?”

  “No. She never cheated on Derrick. They really did love each other. It was sweet watching the two of them together. They were always together and holding each other and kissing.”

  “Tell me about Chris.”

  “He’s a senior. Used to play football, but got kicked off the team because he’s an asshole. You like football?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t understand it. Just a bunch of boys jumping on each other.”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “They kicked him off the team because he was a partier and did drugs and probably never showed up for practice.”

  “That’ll do it.”

  “He always had it pretty bad for Amanda. I mean, you’ve seen her picture. She is—was—so pretty. A lot of guys at school liked her.”

  “Especially Chris.”

  “Especially Chris. He hated Derrick. Hated him.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at me as if I were the beach idiot. “Because Derrick had his girl, and because Derrick was black. He was always making comments to Amanda.”

  “Racially insensitive comments?” I offered.

  “Yes,” she said. “Those kinds of comments. Everywhere she went, he let her know it. It was horrible.”

  “Then why go to Chris’s party?”

  She shrugged. “It’s high school, it was the only party being thrown that night. Plus Amanda said that Chris personally invited her and had apologized for being such a jerk.”

  “So what happened at the party?”

  “Chris was drunk when we got there. He was being a real dick. Usual Chris, you know.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “You know him?”

  “No, I’m just being supportive.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “You’re kind of funny.”

  “Kind of.”

  “So anyway, we get to the party and almost immediately Chris hits on Amanda. You know, puts his arm around her and tries to kiss her, just being an asshole.”

  “What did Amanda do?”

  “She pushed him away.”

  “How did Chris react?”

  “Same old shit. Put her down, put Derrick down.” She grinned. “Derrick’s already kicked Chris’s ass once for giving Amanda a hard time.”

  “Sounds like Chris needs another ass kicking.”

  “Hard to do that from jail.”

  I nodded. “So what happened next?”

  “Amanda was pretty upset and left the party. I offered to go with her, but she refused, saying she wanted to be alone.”

  I didn’t add that if Rebecca had been with Amanda, that Amanda stood a better chance of being alive today. Then again, there might be two dead teenage girls instead of one.

  “That was the last time you saw her?”

  She was looking away, blinking hard. “Yes.”

  “After Amanda left, what did Chris do?”

  “I don’t know. He took off in his car.”

  Oh?

  “Did you tell the police this?” I asked.

  “The police never came by.”

  “The police assume Derrick did the killing,” I said.

  “I don’t blame them,” she said. “But I think someone set Derrick up.”

  “I do too.”

  “Someone who doesn’t like him very much,” she said.

  “I agree. Where does Chris live?”

  She told me, and I gave her my card.

  “Nice picture,” she said.

  “Like I said, you are obviously a bright and intelligent young lady.”

  I left her rocking alone on the bench swing.

  14.

  According to Rebecca, Chris’s house was three streets down. Look for the broken garage door and red mailbox. Turns out the house was seven streets down. She was close. Okay, not really.

  There was no one home, so I waited in my car, which really was my home away from home. I had wasted more time sitting in it than I care to dwell on. One of these days I was going to wise up and keep an emergency novel in the glove box for just such an occasion. I turned on the radio and listened to various sports radio programs. There had once been a time when I was the subject of sports radio. At least locally. Maybe again someday. I looked at my watch. An hour of my life had passed. I turned off the radio and put my seat back. The police hadn’t investigated Amanda’s murder very thoroughly. That much was obvious. They were confident the killer was Derrick. They had no reason to believe otherwise, and they did not look for a reason. Looking for a reason made their job harder than it had to be, especially when a kid with a knife was looking them straight in the face. According to the homicide report, an anonymous caller had tipped the police that the knife was in the backseat of Derrick’s car. Convenient.

  Two hours later, after a fitful nap, a silver Corvette squealed around the corner and bounded into the driveway. A lanky kid hopped out and stared at me.

  More than ready for a little action, I leapt out of my car and, perhaps a little too eagerly, approached him. The kid backed up a step.

  “Chris Randall?” I asked.

  He was about an inch shorter than me, about half the width of me, and certainly not as good looking. Not everyone can be me.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “You have a badge or something?” he asked. There was mild humor in his voice, and a whole lot of cockiness. I’ve been told the same.

  “Or something.” I showed him my investigator’s license. “Can I talk to you about Amanda Peterson?”

  His shoulders bunched at the mention of her name. He recovered and walked around to the Vette’s trunk and popped it open with the push of a button on his keychain. He reached inside and pulled out a ratty backpack. His hands were shaking. When he spoke again, the humor was gone from his voice, although there was still an underlying tone of arrogance. My question had unsettled him. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “She was last seen leaving your party.”

  He slung the pack over a bony shoulder. “Probably should have stayed, huh?”


  “Probably. You were also seen leaving the party shortly thereafter.”

  “Yeah, so.”

  I smiled broadly, just your friendly neighborhood detective. “So where’d you go?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Have you talked to the police yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then they would be interested to know that prior to Amanda leaving the party that you had verbally abused her and made racially insensitive remarks about her boyfriend Derrick.”

  He looked at me some more, then shrugged. “I went on a beer run.”

  “Where?”

  “Corner of Eighth and Turner.” He leaned a hip against the Vette’s fender. The mild amusement was back. His eyes almost twinkled. “You think I killed her?”

  I shrugged. “Just doing my job.”

  “They found the knife in Derrick’s car.”

  “Knives can be planted,” I said.

  “Why would I kill her?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “I liked her a lot.”

  “Maybe you were jealous.”

  “Of the nigger?”

  “Of the African-American. Yes. He had Amanda, and you didn’t.”

  “Then why not kill him? Doesn’t make sense.”

  “No,” I said. “Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “Well, fuck you.” He turned and headed up to his front door.

  “Have a good day,” I said. “Study hard.”

  Without turning, he flipped me the bird.

  Kids these days. They grow up so fast.

  15.

  Sanchez and I were in the backroom of the Kwik Mart on Eighth and Turner. We had convinced the reluctant owner, a small Vietnamese man named Phan, to allow us to review his security tapes on the night of Amanda’s murder. We informed him that he had sold alcohol to a minor, and that we could prove it, but in exchange for his cooperation, he would receive only a warning. He obliged.

  When Phan was done setting up the VCR, he handed me the remote control. The store owner left us alone, mumbling under his breath.

  “You speak Vietnamese?” asked Sanchez.

  “Nope.”

  “What’s the chances he’s praising us for our diligent investigative work?”

  “Slim to none.”

  We both leaned back in a worn leather love seat, the only seating available in the back room.

  “Just because we’re in a love seat,” said Sanchez, “doesn’t mean I love you.”

  “Sure you do,” I said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  I had the remote control and was fast forwarding through the day of her murder. In the bottom right corner was the time.

  At seven thirty I let the tape play in real time. Sanchez put his hands behind his head and stretched.

  “Should have brought some popcorn,” he said.

  “They have some in the store. I think Phuong might be inclined to give us some on the house.”

  “His name was Phan, and that would be abuse of power. We would be on the take.”

  “For some popcorn, it would be worth it.”

  “But only if buttered.”

  We watched the comings and goings of many different people of many different nationalities, most of them buying cigarettes and Lotto tickets, all slapping their money down on the counter. The camera angled down from over the clerk’s shoulder, giving us a clear shot of each customer’s face.

  “Oh, she’s cute,” said Sanchez.

  “The brunette?”

  “No, the blond.”

  “What is it with you and brunettes, anyway?” he asked.

  “Brunettes are beautiful. Blonds are pretty. There’s a difference.”

  “You’re blond.”

  “There always an exception to every rule.”

  At seven thirty-eight a young man approached the counter carrying two cases of Miller Genuine Draft. Tall and lanky. The owner studied him carefully, then shrugged, and took the kid’s money.

  “That our boy?” asked Sanchez.

  “Yes.”

  “The time of death was seven thirty?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Kid can’t be in two places at once.”

  “No,” I said.

  “The kid didn’t do her.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  I stopped the tape and we sat back on the sofa.

  “Which means someone was waiting for her at her house,” I said. “So how did this someone know Amanda would be leaving the party early?”

  We were silent. Two great investigative minds at work.

  “Don’t know,” said Sanchez.

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “Maybe she was followed home.”

  “Or just a random killing.”

  Sanchez looked at me and grinned. “Seems like you’ve got your work cut out for you, kiddo.”

  16.

  It was a late April morning in Huntington Beach, California, which meant, of course, that the weather was perfect.

  Why the hell would anyone want to live anywhere else?

  I was sitting at my desk, reviewing a sampling of the San Diego Chargers playbook, a sampling that Rob, Cindy’s brother, had just faxed to me. Rob let it be known that this was Highly Classified material, and that his job was on the line. I reminded him that I was boffing his sister, and that practically made me family. He told me that he never wanted to hear the words boffing and his sister in the same sentence again and that he was going to get drunk at our wedding and make a nuisance of himself. I told him there would be no wedding because his sister wasn’t marriage material. He told me to fuck off, and hung up.

  The plays were complex, but not rocket science. The majority faxed to me involved the fullback position, which was my position. I studied them with interest, making my own notes along the borders.

  And that’s when the guy with the gun showed up.

  * * *

  I heard the door open, and when I looked up the Browning 9mm was pointed at my head. I hate when that happens.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Shut the hell up, fuck nut.”

  “Fuck nut. The one nut Home Depot doesn’t carry.”

  The man was probably in his fifties, gray hair sleeked back with a lot of gel. He wore a gold hoop in his left ear, pirate-like. Indeed, in his misspent youth he probably always wanted to be a pirate or a buccaneer, only I didn’t really know the difference between the two. Had it been fashionable, he would have worn a patch over his eye. His face, all in all, was hideous, heavily pock-marked, sunken and sallow. The gun never wavered from my face.

  “What’s the difference between a pirate and a buccaneer?” I asked.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I don’t know either. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  His eyes, for all intents and purposes, were dead. Lifeless. Lacking sympathy, compassion, or caring. The eyes of a killer, rapist, suicidal bomber, genocidal dictator. His eyes made me nervous, to say the least. Eyes like that were capable of anything. Anything. They kill your family, your babies, your children, your husbands and wives. I only knew one other man who had eyes like that, and he was my father.

  The Browning never wavered from my face. “You’re working on a case,” the man said.

  “I’m working on a few cases. It’s what I do. See that filing cabinet behind me, it’s full of pending cases. The shelf on the bottom is full of my closed cases.”

  There was a heavy silence.

  “You’re going to call me a fuck nut again aren’t you?” I said. “It feels like a fuck nut moment, doesn’t it?”

  He pulled the trigger. My ear exploded with pain. I tried not to flinch, although I might have, dammit. If he had chosen that moment to call me a fuck nut I might have missed it...due to the excessive ringing in my head.

  The bullet had punctured a picture frame behind me. I heard the glass tinkling down. I did not know yet which picture it had been, a
lthough it would have been one of the featured articles about yours truly.

  That’s when I felt something drip onto my shoulder. I touched my ear. Blood. The bullet grazed my lobe.

  “You shot me,” I said.

  “We want you off the Derrick Booker case,” he said. “Or the next shot won’t miss.”

  “But you didn’t miss. You shot my earlobe. Get it straight.”

  “I heard you would be a smart ass.”

  “Sometimes I am a smart ass. Now I’m just pissed. You shot me.”

  “We meet again and I kill you.”

  “You shot me,” I said. “We meet again and I owe you one.”

  He grinned and proceeded to shoot out five or six framed pictures behind me. I didn’t move. The cacophony of tinkling glass and resounding gunshots filled my head and office.

  He pointed the gun at my forehead and said, “Bang, fuck nut.”

  He backed out of my office and shut the door.

  And I went back to my playbook. My ears were ringing and my earlobe stung.

  The fuck nut.

  17.

  On the way home from the office I stopped by the local liquor store and bought a bottle of Scotch and some Oreos. The Scotch was for getting drunk, and the Oreos were for gaining weight. At two-hundred and ten pounds I was still too small for an NFL fullback.

  Cindy was away tonight at UC Santa Barbara’s School of Anthropology giving a guest lecture on what it means to be human.

  Hell, he thought, I could have saved everyone a trip out to Santa Barbara. Being human meant walking into any liquor store from here to Nantucket and buying a bottle of Scotch and a bag of Oreos. Let’s see the chimps pull that one off.

  Cindy Darwin was a favorite on the guest lecture circuit. Any anthropology department worth their salt wanted Cindy Darwin’s ruminations on the subject of evolution. Really, she was their messiah, their prophet and savior.

  She had wanted me to come with her up the coast, but I had declined, stating there were some leads I needed to follow.

  Which was bullshit, really. True I had made a few phone calls prior to leaving the office, but I could have done those on my cell. I wasn’t proud that I had fibbed to the love of my life. The only lead I needed to follow was my nose to the scotch and Oreos.