Chapter 14 #3
And before Sam could laugh and say Have you met Milt the Junior, and Did he also stamp his foot when he said it, adding I hate you, Daddy!? she continued.
“It apparently happened not too long after he got out of prison—the son, that is. For the vehicular manslaughter.” She smiled at their obvious confusion, but the tone in her voice was heavily Are you idiots? “The DUI hit-and-run...?”
DUI hit-and-what?
Rene expounded. “When the son was seventeen, he stole his father’s car, killed a woman, and drove away.”
Sam looked at Jules and Jules looked at Sam.
I’ll take Things We Don’t Know Because We Still Haven’t Received the Background File on the Client for $500, Alex.
“Excuse me,” Jules said pleasantly to Rene. “My associate and I need a moment. We’ll be right back.”
“Vehicular manslaughter,” Jules said as they walked through Devonshire Place’s tired back garden. Or rather he stomped and Sam walked. “Hit. And run.”
“DUI makes sense,” Sam said. “Clearly Wig-Milt didn’t get sober in prison. That’s too bad.”
“How do we not know this?” Jules asked, but then answered his own question, “Because we haven’t yet seen any background info on any of the major players in this goddamn fuckery!”
“I’m writing a note to myself right this minute,” Sam said, as he typed a memo into his phone, “to up our client vetting procedure at our LA office.”
“Up it?” Jules said. “Fucking hell, Starrett, we need to have one before we can up it!”
“It would be good if we had an office, too,” Sam said mildly. “Look, we knew there’d be kinks when we took this case before we were ready.”
He was right.
Jules took a deep breath, and exhaled it slowly.
Sam was obviously amused, but trying hard to hide it.
“Is it possible that in all these years, I’ve never seen you ripshit angry before this?
I mean, it kinda makes sense you would go all Fucking hell, Starrett, since you’ve studied at the feet of the great Max Bhagat.
” Jules’s beloved former boss at the FBI was known for his ability to be impossibly, inhumanly cool—until he full-on blew a gasket.
“Gavin’s death really threw me,” Jules admitted. “I keep thinking, what did I miss? And who killed him?”
Sam made a probably not noise and face as he continued to look at his phone.
“And yeah, I know, he was old, and old people die of natural causes like heart attacks, and on top of that, this is not that kind of case, and... God, I’m not happy about any of this.
Of course, I’m not happy about much right now, and I’m really not happy when shit like this happens, reminding me—I mean, grinding my face in the fact that I’m not where I want to be,” Jules continued.
“Knocking on doors without a badge, not getting full background material when—Jesus Christ. This is on us. We should’ve at least googled them.
Tell me this wasn’t a major news story—producer Milton Devonshire’s teenage son killing a woman after stealing his father’s car? ”
“Oh, it was.” Sam was still scrolling through no doubt countless accounts of the death and the arrest and the trial and the conviction. “Let’s see...”
Jules took out his own phone and did the same and... God, really all he’d had to do was google Milt Devonshire Junior and the stories about the manslaughter conviction came right up.
“Wig-Milt was... seventeen at the time.” Sam gave an overview of what he’d found—what Jules was finding, too.
One of the top links was to a YouTube video with the headline Leaked Video Evidence Prompts Guilty Plea. It was a local news report—channel five—and Jules clicked on it as Sam expounded.
“He stole Daddy’s car, a Jaguar XJ220, got shitfaced—drugs and alcohol—and a woman was killed when she was out for an early morning run.
It happened in Van Nuys—not too far from here.
It didn’t go to trial. Son pled a deal, went to juvie, got out when he was twenty-one.
” He looked up at Jules. “Rich-white-boy justice in action.”
The skip message for the pre-video commercial finally popped up, so Jules hit it and turned up the volume on his phone as Sam came to look over his shoulder.
“Leaked video footage,” the news anchor reported in a chirpy, upbeat voice that didn’t quite match the seriousness of the story, “from the hit-and-run case that’s rocked Hollywood.
Evidence has surfaced that clearly shows the son of television producer Milton Devonshire behind the wheel of his father’s car in the early hours on the morning that a thirty-five year old woman was killed in a deadly hit-and-run. ”
Sure enough, playing on the screen to the anchor’s voice-over was grainy footage from what had to be an outside security camera of this estate’s driveway, right in front of the four-bay garage.
“Huh,” Jules said. Something was... off. The angle was a little odd—the frame of the shot wasn’t centered on the full driveway, but maybe there was more than one camera out there.
The video showed the car, haphazardly parked in the middle of the driveway, a blurry figure slumped behind the steering wheel as the timecode essentially sped around the clock—in super fast-forward mode.
Then the timestamp slowed to normal speed as a woman wearing an apron came out onto the driveway.
Was that Helen the housekeeper? Had to be.
She was clearly agitated by what she saw, and ran back toward the house, whereupon an elderly man, dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas, slippers on his feet, came back out with her, with some urgency.
Together they opened the car door and reached for what appeared to be a teenaged boy who was behind the wheel.
The video skipped or maybe glitched a little, and then the kid was down on the driveway, unresponsive.
The man crouched beside him—conveniently on the non-camera side so there was as clear as possible a shot of the boy’s face—as the woman ran back into the house, no doubt to call for help.
“Seventeen year old Milton Devonshire Junior has pled guilty to vehicular manslaughter and DUI charges,” the anchor spoke over the footage.
“He’ll be arraigned in court this afternoon.
The family of the victim, Marina Santana, has released a statement asking for privacy at this time.
.. When we come back, local dad mistaken for homeless man fights city hall. ..” Jules closed the clip.
“Marina Santana, huh?” Sam said, no doubt googling her name, because yeah, this was the last time they were going to make that mistake.
“With any luck she had a wife named Emily Johnson,” Jules said, going back to his own scrolling and searching.
“No wife so far,” Sam said. “A sister—Carlotta, and a father Frank, both Santanas and... Okay, I just googled hit and run victim Marina Santana daughter and got an Elizabeth Santana. ”
“Everyone’s named Santana.” Jules saw that on his phone, too.
“I guess the daughter’s biological father wasn’t in the picture.”
“It’s Elizabeth, not Emily?”
“Yeah.” Sam looked up, contrite. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to do this yesterday.”
“I didn’t either, so...” Jules shook his head in disgust. Yes, they’d been busy, and yes, he’d had too much to do and too little time to do it.
This morning, Robin had wanted to talk to him about something, too—please gods, let it be that he’d found the perfect house and not that he wanted to try again to have a baby because Jesus, Jules just could not.
Bring a new life into this dumpster fire of a messed up world? Please, no.
But God, the idea of finding the time it was going to take to have an in-depth, heartfelt, honest conversation that was going to end with Robin bitterly disappointed was overwhelming. Especially right now in this moment of intense failure.
Hit and run.
Hit and freaking run.
Really, how hard would it have been to think, Yeah, hey, we don’t have the official report from the TS office, but how about we do the bare minimum with a quick google check on the client and his deceased father, see if one of them went to prison for manslaughter?
“We both suck,” Jules told Sam. “You finding anything about Milt the Junior threatening to kill his father after he got out of jail, because I’m not.”
“Not yet,” Sam said. “And FYI, I’m pretty sure the suckage is all mine.
You’re used to being handed a file with all the government-compiled information that your little heart desires—and then some.
I’ve been with Troubleshooters for years.
I knew we didn’t have the background info available yet and I didn’t think it mattered.
I just thought, Hollywood: Easy case. A dead producer who’s richer than God, a wig-wearing idiot, a sleezy lawyer, find the mystery woman. Piece o’ cake.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Jules said.
“You don’t really think that,” Sam countered.
“Because I don’t think that. Five bucks says Emily Johnson is somehow connected to this.
And what the fuck, Wig-Milt? I asked him to his face if there was an incident warranting the break with his father, and he didn’t think to share this tantalizing little morsel with us?
He gets out of prison—eleven years ago, yep, the dates line up perfectly—and he immediately cuts all ties.
Or, more likely, he’s still a hot mess, maybe more so after doing time, so after Wig-Milt melts down—I’mma kill you, motherfucker—Daddy-Dearest cuts ties.
Wig-Milt said he had enough, but maybe he was the too-much. ”
That was a strong possibility. “Let’s talk to Milt and Harper separately,” Jules said. “See if their stories match.”
“Yeah, well, they’re both liars, so who knows what we’ll get,” Sam said, leaving the garden path and heading across the desiccated lawn toward the back of the big house.
“It should be interesting, though. We should check back in with the former housekeeper, what’s her name, Helen with the apron, see what she says. She worked there at the time.”