Chapter 42
VERNON
For his last birthday, Vernon’s wife gave him a plant for his desk. She’d said he needed a “work friend,” which their daughter had thought was the height of humor. Apparently this particular kind of plant “fainted” when the soil got dry, then perked up immediately when you watered it.
Vernon liked that. Nice and straightforward. Unlike the case against CJ Moore, which depended far too much on eyewitnesses. Wealthy and connected eyewitnesses, but still.
He was watering the plant when his desk phone rang. “This is Enible.”
“Detective, hello. This is, uh, Karina DeYoung?”
“Mrs. DeYoung,” he said, to assure her that he remembered her. “Good afternoon.”
“I, uh—I wanted to thank you for handling this with sush…” She cleared her throat. “Such professionalism.”
“Just doing my job, ma’am.”
“Mm. Well, the reashon I called is, I found something I think you’ll want to see.”
“What’s that?”
“A bag full of money. Cash. Addressed to CJ, which—”
“Did you touch it?”
“Of coursh I touched it.”
Fair enough. She was clearly half-drunk; he couldn’t expect her to keep her curiosity to herself.
“How elsh would I know what was inside?” she continued.
“That’s fine,” he said, not wanting to upset her. “Don’t let anyone else near it. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
When he left the station, he walked into a wall of heat.
Santa Barbara summers were cool but Septembers could be brutal.
He cranked the AC in his car and regretted his choice of blazers.
He’d grabbed one of his thicker ones this morning without thinking.
Eight minutes later, the wheels of his Chevy pattered over the cobbled drive of the DeYoung property.
He parked and stepped back into the heat.
Damn. He looked longingly toward the back of the house, dreaming of a world in which he could take a dip in the pool.
When he knocked on the front door, Karina DeYoung greeted him in leggings and an oversized T-shirt, her face haggard and her hair clumped.
Sloppier than he’d expected, but grief was never a straight line.
She gazed at him without recognition for a few seconds, then ushered him into the cool foyer.
There was no AC, which surprised him, but the room was so grand that the heat didn’t dare enter.
“I know offishers searched CJ’s room,” Karina DeYoung said, her voice slurred with booze. “They didn’t find anything there, or I guess in her new apartment?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, not committing either way.
“Well, she used our storage freezer. I forgot, until I … remembered. The big one downstairsh. So I went with a trash bag to clean it out.”
“You found the cash in the freezer?”
Karina blinked at him, a little too slowly, and he wondered if she’d popped a few pills along with her calming glass of wine. “I mostly found bags of smoothie fruit.”
“What’s that?”
“Fruit for smoothies.” She swayed, then caught herself. “But then, um…”
“You found the money?”
“In the freezer? No. I realized I hadn’t gone through his paperwork. In what he called his office. That’s where I found the envelope. The bag. A bag, not an envelope.”
“Show me?” he said, when she didn’t move.
“Oh! Yes.”
She stepped with great care as she led him past the stairway to an even cooler corridor with a tile floor and oak paneling. She winced when she noticed him looking, and started talking about remodeling.
“I like it the way it is now,” Vernon said.
She gave him a mildly poisonous look, then led him to a recessed nook with a window facing the garden.
A rolltop desk with dozens of pigeonholes stood against the wall, beneath a watercolor painting of what looked like the palm trees along Cabrillo Boulevard.
There was a beige recliner—the kind that helped old people stand—with two remotes propped on the arm, and a narrow wooden chair.
Framed photographs lined the top of the desk, a big formal one with Karina and Frank and smaller casual ones with CJ and Frank.
A handful of autographed photos of now-obscure musicians lined the opposite wall of the nook.
The desktop was tidy, with two notebooks, a flip calendar, two “healthy eating” cookbooks, a stack of World of Goods literature, and a well-thumbed directory of what looked like freelancers in the music industry.
“This is his office?” Vernon asked, because he’d expected a room with a door.
“He used to work in his studio, across the garden. But he’s been having trouble with his balance, so we moved him here.”
“Ah.”
“There.” Karina pointed to a Trader Joe’s bag on the table beside the recliner. “That’s it. That’s the evidensh.”
Okay, then. Vernon took a few pictures, squeezed his hands into gloves, and opened the bag. Money. A lot of money in twenty-dollar bills. He grunted as he crouched to look closer, then he lifted the handles to feel the weight. Five, six pounds.
Fifty-five thousand dollars in cash, if he didn’t miss his guess.
Inside, he found a torn slip of paper with For CJ written on it.
“That’s his handwriting,” Karina said. “Frank’s.”
“Where did you find it?”
“Behind the big chair.”
He took a picture of the gap between the recliner and the wall. “Any idea what it was for?”
“No,” she said. “No. No, I don’t have any idea.”
Could be any number of things, including some that verged on the innocent.
Though an old man setting aside untraceable cash for the young female employee didn’t sound entirely innocent.
At least Vernon now knew where the ATM money ended up.
Though not why. Hm. He didn’t see how this helped his case.
At least not beyond presenting hard evidence that Frank DeYoung and CJ Moore were entangled more tightly than most employers and employees.
He rifled through the bag as he considered the legal ramifications. Just cash. A bag of petty cash, for these people, tucked away in a quiet hallway. He could pay for two years of college for his daughter with that money—well, after the police scholarships.
“Thank you for calling me,” he said.
“They weren’t sleeping together,” Karina told him.
“No?”
“No, Officer. Though she was controlling.”
“In what way?”
She flicked a World of Goods flyer with her manicured fingernail. “Fifteen years ago, he wasn’t tossing his money at hopeless causes. That’s CJ’s influence.”
“What’s your guess, then? What was he paying her for?”
“My guess is she manipulated him into wanting to take care of her. She wrapped him around her little finger until he thought of her as a daughter. She convinced him it was normal for him to pay her way.”
“Then why’d she shove him down the stairs?”
She recoiled at the brutal language, as he’d intended. “How should I know? Maybe that money was a parting gift? Maybe he was cutting her off and she—maybe he threatened to remove her from the will? I don’t know. That’s your job! My job is just—just…”
“To take care of yourself during this difficult time,” he said.
Her face crumpled, like she was about to cry. “Yes. Thank you. Yes.”
Vernon was about to leave, when a thought occurred to him. “The laptop. Who used it?”
“Frank and CJ. Mostly CJ. He liked her to show him what ‘the young people’ were doing online.” She rolled her eyes. “The young people. As if she’s a child!”
“Mm. I believe nobody logged this device?”
“They used to giggle over videos of hikers slipping in the mud, or a bride tripping into her wedding cake. I’d hear them from upstairs, wheezing with laughter.”
“With your permission, I’ll seize the laptop in an evidence hold.”
“Be my guest,” she told him.
He wrote her a receipt she didn’t want, then started inventorying the desk, just in case. She walked away without a word, and he looked toward the hallway where she’d disappeared.
Grief did funny things to people, but so did guilt.