coroner’s report placed the time of murder at 7:00 p.m. According to the arrest report, the detectives figured Derrick left the school weight room shortly after the coach had left and proceeded to ambush the girlfriend he loved and slaughtered her in front of her home. His vehicle had no trace of her blood. There were no wounds on Derrick’s hands or arms. Other than the murder weapon found in his backseat there was nothing to link him to the murder.
The murder weapon was enough.
Had he not blundered and forgotten about the murder weapon, Derrick would have pulled off one amazingly clean murder. I’ve now had a chance to see the crime scene photos. The murder was definitely not clean.
Derrick, of course, claimed he was at the school weight room until 7:30 p.m. that night, like he was every night. A routine that anyone could have caught onto and used against him.
No one believed Derrick’s story. Except his defense attorney Charlie Brown, although he was being paid handsomely to believe his story.
And me. But I was not being handsomely paid. I hate it when that happens.
I moved beyond the hallway, beyond the brick walled central quad, beyond what was probably the school cafeteria, beyond the gym, and toward the athletic department.
It was spring, and so there was no football to be practiced, which was why Derrick had been lifting weights after school, rather than working out with his team. Instead, it was baseball and track season. Beyond a chain- linked fence I could see a varsity baseball game getting under way. Parents and some students filled the small bleachers. To the north of the baseball field was a track field, and it was a beehive of activity. I watched a young girl sprint for about thirty yards and leap through the air, landing gracelessly in a cloud of dirt. She dusted herself off, and then headed back for another leap.
I followed a paved pathway, bigger than a sidewalk, but not big enough to be called a road. The pathway skirted the softball field and headed toward a group of buildings lined with doors. One of the doors was open, and inside I could see shining new gym equipment.
My old high school did not have shining new gym equipment. It had well-used and badly damaged gym equipment. In fact, we just had free weights and a few squat racks, come to think of it.
But it had been enough, if used correctly and religiously. Both of which I had done.
I stepped into the doorway and peaked in, almost expecting to see a membership desk. What a spread. Gleaming chrome equipment covered the entire room. Mirrors were everywhere. Techno rock pumped through loud speakers situated in every corner. Boys and a handful of girls were in there, all taking their workouts very seriously. I was completely ignored. In fact, there seemed to be a melancholy mood to the place, despite the rhythmic pounding of the dance music.
I spied some offices in the back and headed that way, passing two kids lifting an impressive amount on the bench. I calculated the weight. They were benching almost three hundred pounds.
Not bad for a kid.
I came to the first office and knew I had hit the jackpot. The sign on the closed door said Coach.
Only the egocentricity of a football coach, in an entire department of other coaches, went by Coach alone.
I knocked on the closed door. Doing so, the door creaked open, and immediately I sensed something wrong. Very wrong.
Coach was a big man, and from what I could tell he had taken a bullet to the side of the head. Blood and brain matter sprayed the east side of his office. A revolver was still in his hands. The blood had not congealed, and was dripping steadily from the wound in his open head. His eyes were wide with the shock and horror of what he had done to himself.
Music thumped loudly into the office.
No one had even heard the shot.
11.
Sanchez and I were working out at a 24 Hour Fitness in Huntington Beach. It was mid-day, and the gym was quiet. I had worked up a hell of a sweat, and was dripping all over the place. Sanchez didn’t sweat; at least not like a real man. And I let him know it again.
“I save the sweating for the bedroom,” he said, finishing off his third and final set of military presses. “Women like that.”
“You married your high school sweetheart. You don’t know shit about what women want.”
“Fine,” he said, wiping down the machine. “Danielle likes it when I sweat. Shows her I take my lovemaking seriously. Besides, Danielle is a lot of woman.”
“Yes,” I said, “she is.”
We moved over to the incline presses. Together we added weight until we ran out of plates.
“Place is going to hell,” said Sanchez, looking around, then swiping two forty-fives from another bench.
“Yes, but it’s cheap. And apparently open twenty-four hours.”
“You sound like a goddamn commercial.” He handed me one of the plates and we pushed each into place. The bar looked very unstable and heavily overloaded. “We’re attracting attention again.”
I had eased down onto the incline bench. In the mirror I could see that two or three young guys, including some gym trainers, were now watching us. I ignored them. So did Sanchez, who spotted me by standing on a steel platform. The forty-five pound bar was sagging. Weight clanked as I went through my twelve reps. I focused on the Chargers training camp, which was coming up soon. This motivated me, pushed me to lift more and work harder. I focused on looking good for Cindy. This motivated me as well. Only on the last rep did Sanchez lend some help. Then he guided the barbell into place.
“Didn’t need your help on the twelfth,” I said.
“Sure you didn’t,” he said.
A voice said: “Hey, man, how much weight is that?”
We both turned. He was a surfer. Bleached hair and some minor muscle tone. He had a piercing in his nose, and some idiotic Chinese pictographs up and down his arm.
“You too stupid to do the math?” asked Sanchez. He turned to me. “Kids nowadays.”
“Kids nowadays,” I added sagely.
The surfer looked at the weight we were hefting and decided that he would not take offense. He left. Good decision.
Sanchez did his twelve reps, and to be a dick I helped him with the last two. After two more sets each, we sat down on opposing benches and sipped from our water bottles.
“He leave a suicide note?” asked Sanchez.
“Nothing,” I said. “But he had been fired earlier that day.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “He’d been taking a lot of shit about leaving Derrick alone on the night of the murder.”
“Hell of a thing to be fired over.”
“Uh huh.”
“Papers say he was a hell of a coach,” said Sanchez.
“Three CIF championships.”
“Why do you think he popped himself?”
“Hard to say,” I said. “Detective Hanson tells me the man was divorced earlier in the year. They say divorced men are the highest risk for suicide.”
“Thank you for that useless bit of fucking trivia.”
I ignored him, and continued.
“Add to that your best athlete being accused of a heinous murder, and compound it with losing your job…”
I shrugged again.
“You shrug a lot for a detective,” said Sanchez.
