Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 15

Chapter 15 Divided Highway

"Okay, pull over here," Detective Sgt. Collins said.

Lauren put on her hazard flashers and pulled off the road onto the shoulder.

"Be careful getting out," Collins said. "They'll clip you."

The shoulder was wide enough for Lauren's cruiser, but just barely. Collins and Carmen, who was riding in the back, carefully opened their passenger-side doors so they didn't hit the metal guard rail, and squeezed out. The I-99 was a four-lane divided highway and north of Meadows Field Airport was ag-industrial. A cement wall of waist-high jersey barriers ran down the medium, separating them from the far two lanes of northbound traffic and a big John Deere farm equipment dealer a hundred yards down the road. The landscape was flat, barren, dry, dusty, and occupied by "farms" of agricultural fertilizer tanks lined up row on road by high chain-link fencing, acres of earthmoving equipment, oil-refinery-type tanks, huge silos and loading storage facilities all competing with fields of oil-drilling equipment. There were huge lots full of Class 6, 7, 8 and 9 truck tractors for sale, Freightliners and Peterbilts, Macks, Internationals, Whites and White subsidiary Western Stars, day cabs and sleepers of varying capacity and refinement. There were fields of flatbeds and several kinds of trailers, refrigerated, non-refrigerated, and for carrying livestock. A pair of railroad tracks paralleled the southbound side, as did long access roads here and there. To the south and a little east was the airport, where small planes and short-hop aircraft came and went, and on the far, far horizon beyond Bakersfield under a blue, cloudless sky the peak of Tehachapi Mountain guarded the southern entrance of the San Joaquin Valley from the Mojave Desert on the other side. To the north, rectangular plots of farmland ran for more than 400 miles up Central Valley, one third of California. About halfway up lay Carmen's new home town on San Francisco Bay, and beyond the far, far end somewhere near Oregon, Alice sat in a jail cell contemplating her sins and the next time she was likely to enjoy a soy latte at The Planet.

They had rolled into Bakersfield at quarter to four and picked up Collins at the Sheriff's Department detective division building on L Street between Truxtun and 14th, behind the Superior Court building. Collins was a stocky man in his early 50s who sported a modest Zapata mustache. He had what Carmen suspected was a Farmer John tan, deeply tanned face and neck but probably snow-white chest and arms. He had a florid complexion that failed to hide broken the broken arteries of a drinker high on his cheeks. He wore a light windbreaker, mainly to conceal the pistol on his belt, over a white shirt and khakis. He carried a manila folder with papers in it.

"I'm Hancock, we spoke on the phone," Lauren said, flashing her ID folder, although Collins never glanced at it, "and this is Morales." Carmen thought, Cool! He'll think I'm a cop, too.

"Nice to meet you ladies," Collins said, shaking hands. "LA's finest. Okay, LASD's finest. You want to go in your car? I can navigate." He sat in the front of Lauren's car and gave her directions to the 204, which joined the 99 just south of a place called Oil Junction. They drove past Exit 31 to a place called Saco, and then after a minute Collins said, "It's there, on the other side of the road. Normally you'd have to drive up to Exit 37 five miles up the road to turn around and come back, but there's a crossover for police and emergency vehicles coming up, so get in the left lane."

They waited in the crossover as southbound 18-wheelers whooshed past, along with tank trucks, trucks carrying livestock, flatbed trailers loaded with oil drilling gear, Trailways and Greyhound buses and of course cars. It wasn't that there was a lot of traffic, just enough of it moving at high speed there were few breaks big enough to turn into. "Jesus," Lauren muttered. "Is it always like this?"

"Pretty much," Collins said. "It gets better after sunset, and finally slows down around ten or eleven at night. Then it's mostly truckers and drunks. Could be worse, though."

"How's that?"

"Could be LA."

"Got that right," said Carmen from the back seat. "At least this stuff is moving, not sitting still gridlocked."

"Hold on," Lauren said, peeling out into a break in the traffic in the left lane then swerving almost immediately into the right lane.

"Nice," Collins said. "A mile or so. I'll tell you when."

When they'd parked Collins stood in front of the car and pulled two sheets of paper from his manila folder. The top one was a photocopy of a CSI map of the crime scene. "Just making sure my memory is correct," Collins said, pointing. "There, at the base of the third stanchion."

A galvanized metal guardrail ran along the side of the highway back about fifteen feet from the shoulder, to keep any vehicle going off the road from going down a shallow embankment into a drainage ditch. On the far side of the guardrail but right next to it clumps of tall bushes grew. There were gaps, and it was easy to see through to the flat plain on the other side. It was an open, vacant lot several hundred yards long, flanked on either side by chain-linked fencing where farm equipment was stored.

"The body was right here," Collins said, showing them the CSI sketch. "Tire marks were back there on the shoulder when the car came off the road to get him. That's why there was a little bit of an angle that threw the body over here, maybe 50, 60 feet in the air. The body actually hit the guardrail, then fell down at the base of the stanchion. Here's a photograph, if you want to look at it."

Collins showed them another photocopy. Carmen glanced at it then quickly looked away. Lauren studied it. All it showed was a dark lump of something that in poor light conditions wouldn't be recognizable. In better light, you could see an arm lying out from the main lump, with the hand visible, at an unnatural angle. There was a smear of something that was probably blood on the face of the guardrail. If Max wasn't killed instantly by the vehicle, Lauren thought, he died instantly when he flew into the guardrail. Either way, it was over in a second or two, no more.

Lauren turned and looked back, and did a 360-degree turn. The angles were such that the body wouldn't have been very visible from the driver's seat of a passenger car, just a dark lump of roadside detritus if you weren't paying attention, and who would? But the driver of an 18-wheeler sitting much higher in the air had a better view looking down. That is, if the driver was paying attention. A fresh trucker just starting his day and wired on his morning coffee might be alert enough. She wondered how many vehicles over how many hours had driven past Max Sweeney and never noticed a thing. A lot, would be her guess.

"Do you know what time the call came in?" she asked.

"About 7:40."

"What time was sunrise? And the weather?"

"Sun was well up, full daylight. Clear and sunny, no rain overnight. None of that Tule fog we often get."

"Can you put it all together for me?"

"Sure. At first it looked simple, but then it got really complicated and interesting."

"How so?" Carmen asked.

"Stay with me, we'll get there," Collins said. "Okay, phone call comes in at 7:40 to California Highway Patrol, trucker says he thinks he saw a body by the side of the road but wasn't sure. Morning traffic, heavy but moving, you have to pay attention to what's in front of you, no admiring our beautiful scenery. No way he could stop and anyway nobody was going to do that, not on this stretch and not at that hour. But he's yakking on his Bluetooth, you know, and he's happy to leave his name, address, who he works for, where's he's coming from and where he's going, you know, making it crystal clear he's just a passing guy, but he's also fairly sure he saw what he saw, enough to make a phone call."

"Right."

"Right. And the CHP dispatcher can call up the name and license and all that right on her screen and it all checks out, he seems to be who he says he is, so she radios a patrol car to head southbound looking for a body between exits 37 and 31. Few minutes later the car reports in, I can give you the name and badge number if you need it—"

"No, that's okay. Keep going."

"So he says he found the body, and CHP calls Kern County, that's us, and we send out a full team. The forensics squad does their thing, body's cold, been dead several hours. Can't tell officially until the autopsy, yadda yadda, but they're sure the body has been hit by a vehicle, lots of broken bones, body is like a rag doll, arms and legs at funny angles. Maybe average layman couldn't tell, but the forensics people have seen enough people hit by cars. No signs of foul play that can't be explained by being hit by a vehicle, no obvious gunshot wounds or strangulation marks, nothing like that. So they tell CHP and our guys what they think, with all the preliminary disclaimers. And then they say something else, the first odd thing or rather the first thing that became odd in retrospect. They say there's a heavy smell of vomit around the mouth, and some vomit on the chest, down the front of the guy's jacket. By this time the accident recreation people have found tire tracks, and they've got cones out blocking the right-hand lane, and traffic's backed up for a mile, but it can't be helped. And they all pow-wow and they don't like what they see, looks like the vehicle came off the roadway to clip the guy, so they say, let's get a homicide team out here, pretty standard CYA if you suspect homicide, all that—"

"Right, right," Lauren said. "I worked homicide for a couple years before I went to Missing Persons."

"Right, so you know the drill. So my partner and I get the call-out and we arrive on the scene and get briefed. And the tech says the vic vomited all down his front, and was probably drunk, but they'll need the tests, but the smell of vomit has covered up the smell of booze, so they don't really know. So we talk about a drunk walking down the road or hitchhiking and gets clipped, happens all the time, but the tire tracks seem to show the vehicle came off the road, suggesting the vic didn't stumble out into the road accidentally or in a suicide attempt, which also happens sometimes. Where did he do his drinking? Ain't no bars north of here for a long ways, all farmland, mostly. Only bars to the south down by the airport for the closest, and that's just plain the wrong direction. Vic was walking toward them, not away from. So my partner says, okay, where did he puke? Maybe that will tell us something. And the techs say they walked a hundred yards up and down the road and didn't find anything, which seems a little odd but okay, he threw up somewhere else, maybe wherever he was drinking, but we start talking about if you're drunk enough to puke all down your front, how drunk were you and how did you get here midway between two exits six miles apart on a four-lane, high-speed divided highway and there's no bars around. So where was he coming from and where was he going to, and why was he walking instead of driving. If too drunk to drive, where's his car? So we don't have much of anything, but what little we have we just don't like, you know?"

"Sure, one of those instinct things. You don't know why but you know something's not right."

"Yep. So we expand the search perimeter for the puke, so we send the CHP guy southbound for half a mile on foot, and my partner and I go north. And my partner says he'll cross over the four lanes and walk up the northbound side, because we don't know where the vic was coming from, maybe he was going northbound, said fuck it, crossed over and started southbound. So anyway we start walking, and sure enough half a mile up the road on the northbound shoulder my partner smells puke and finds a puddle, and we send a tech up and the tech takes a sample. Took a few days for the labs to come back, but it was the same as on the front of the guy, stomach contents matched, all that. It was Sweeney's vomit."

"So you have Max half a mile north on the northbound shoulder puking his guts out some short period of time before he's struck and killed off the southbound shoulder."

"Right."

"And no other signs of foul play, no signs of robbery?"

"Nope, nothing. Wallet and ID in the hip pocket, fourteen bucks in it. We found out later Sweeney, didn't make a lot of money in the first place, was borderline making it, so fourteen bucks in his wallet wasn't suspicious. No car keys and no house keys. If you don't own a car, no car keys isn't suspicious. It only becomes suspicious much later when you learn the vic actually did own a car."

"So it's all up to the forensics reports and ID checks to come back," Lauren said. "Blood test, stomach contents, puke, autopsy broken bones, paint chips from the striking vehicle, tire tracks, all that."

"Right. But the next surprise rolls in that night from the coroner's division. The autopsy was still a day away but they undressed the body to put in a cold storage locker and discovered this Max Sweeney was a tranny, and did we know that? And I said no, we didn't know."

"What did you make of that?" Carmen asked, her voice and face carefully neutral.

"Not much. I guess twenty, thirty years ago we'd have said, Holy shit, but not today. Nothing surprises us anymore, you know? Gay, straight, tats, piercings, body sculpting. If you think being two hours out of LA has somehow protected us from the freak shows you'd be wrong. It's a freak world, is what it is. I'm not saying a tranny is a freak, that's not what I'm saying—"

"Just seen it all, no surprises."

"That's right."

"Did you think that might be part of a motive for a homicide?" Lauren asked.

"Not really. The thing is, the killer would probably have to know the vic pretty well to know he was a tranny, right? But most people are murdered by someone who knows them pretty well anyway, so that just simply leaves us back where we started. So, no, Sweeney being a transman -- I understand that's the correct term -- didn't mean much, just one of a dozen things to keep in mind."

"So then what happened?"

"Routine stuff while we waited for all the ID, lab work and autopsy stuff. We interviewed the place where he worked, didn't turn up much. He lived in a rooming house, nothing much there, same story both places, moved into Bakersfield about four months earlier, kept to himself, pretty quiet, no trouble, no particular sign of booze or drugs, not very friendly but nothing out of the ordinary. Nobody knew he was trans, and we didn't run across anyone who seemed to have cared one way or the other. We searched his room at the boarding house, found nothing unusual until we came to his birth certificate under the name Moira Sweeney, but by then we knew anyway. The next surprise was the car. Traffic records told us he had one registered and currently updated with no wants or warrants, and both his landlord and the guy who owned the computer shop confirmed Sweeney had a car, an old blue Subaru beater, and his boss was pretty sure he'd driven it to work the day he died. So we started looking for it, put out a BOLO, and started calling used car lots and junkyards and repair shops to see if it had broken down anywhere or Sweeney had sold it, but we got nothing. Of course you don't know you've got nothing for a week or two until nothing has come in. And we found no car keys and no keys to his boarding house or room, if any, and no work keys, if he had any. So now we have missing car keys and missing house keys, and he had a work key, too, also missing."

"Any gay bars in Bakersfield?" Lauren asked.

"One," Collins said. "The Casablanca on N Street. They have karaoke and drag shows once in a while. Ten-dollar cover charge. Couple others closed a few years ago. Bakersfield ain't exactly the Castro District, you know? Anyway, we actually went to the Casa and showed Sweeney's photo from his DMV file, and got zip. One bartender thought maybe Sweeney'd been in, but not recently and certainly not the night before, so far as he knew. They have a couple security guys who work the door, but they didn't recognize him. If Sweeney didn't have much money I think the ten-dollar cover would have kept him out. So, nothing, although we checked."

Lauren and Carmen nodded, and an 18-wheeler whooshed by smelling of livestock on board.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Collins said, "but we also ran his photo past the vice squad, see if he'd been picked up in a men's room or whatever. But they had nothing."

"Due diligence," Lauren said. "No problem. Then what?"

"First thing to come back was blood alcohol, which registered point 18 at time of death, more than twice the legal limit for driving, but it just confirmed what we already suspected, so no help there. Time-of-death finalized at about 3:30 a.m.—"

"Ninety minutes after any bars would have closed," Lauren said. "If you were going to puke you'd do it sooner than 90 minutes after you left the bar."

"Right, and that becomes important in a minute. Tox screen comes in, shows some oxy in his system."

"A lot?" Carmen asked.

"We'll get there," Collins said."

"I've got an idea," Lauren said. "I've seen all I need to see in daylight, and my partner and I are getting hungry. Let's go find a restaurant where we can talk. We haven't even begun to talk about the Schecter end of the case. Where would you recommend we go?"

"You gals on per diem?"

"Don't worry about it. We're meat and potatoes people."

"Okay, then," Collins said. "I got just the place."

Lauren and Collins started back to the car.

Carmen stared at the spot where Max's body had lain for several hours in the dark, at the base of a guardrail stanchion. It was the second time in a week Lauren had driven her to a place where someone she knew had died. No, not "died." Been murdered. One a former lover -- maybe that was too strong a word, but "fuck buddy" didn't seem right, either. Someone who, despite many flaws, Carmen had liked, and pretty much taught how to be a skillful lesbian. And then someone also with many flaws Carmen had hated. No, that wasn't right, either, "hated" was also too strong a word; "disliked" would do. But, curiously, another of Jenny's fuck buddies, and another member of their circle of friends. But whether she had liked Max Sweeney or not, there was no reason Max should have died here, a shattered heap indistinguishable from a littered garbage bag that had fallen out of the back of a pickup, as 18-wheelers carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, hogs, and avocados whooshed by in the darkness. She shuddered, and turned to walk back to the car.

***

Collins guided Lauren to the Padre Hotel on 18th Street in downtown Bakersfield just a few blocks from the detective division where he'd left his car. "Great food here," he said, as they waited for a maitre'd to seat them in the Belvedere Room. "It's basically an upscale steakhouse, but you can rely on the seafood, if you swing that way."

Lauren and Carmen glanced at each other. Collins was looking the other way.

"Don't you need a reservation for a place like this?" Carmen asked.

"Oh, sure," Collins said. "But they know me here, and there's the perks of carrying a badge, you know how that goes, right?"

"Copy that," Carmen said. She caught a glimpse of Lauren's grin as she turned her face away from Collins. Maybe I'd make a pretty convincing homicide detective after all, Carmen thought, although probably not like Lauren's secret crush, Dani, the straight but not straight-arrow rehab survivor they'd talked about.

Carmen and Lauren ordered the wild king salmon and, predictably, Collins went for the 20-ounce bone-in ribeye. Carmen wondered if Collins' heart would let him live long enough to get to Social Security, but she doubted it. She was willing to bet his triglycerides and LDLs were through the roof.