Page 8 of Nightshade
STILWELL WAS IN early at the sub on Tuesday so he could get a jump on the crime and arrest reports that had accumulated over the holiday weekend. He had to prepare case summaries that would be submitted to Monika Juarez on the mainland for decisions on whether charges would be filed. There had been twenty-six arrests over the three-day weekend. The vast majority were drunk-and-disorderly cases, though three of these had escalated to assaults when the sheriff’s deputies showed up. There was also a scattering of arrests for property crimes and driving while impaired. Under California law, driving while intoxicated—with a blood-alcohol concentration over 0.0 percent—carried the same penalties whether you were in an automobile or a golf cart.
The sub’s jail was holding four men, three of them on assault and one for grand theft—he had walked out of a bar on Saturday night, hopped into a golf cart that belonged to somebody else, and driven away. The cart was located the next day up at the Hermit Gulch Lookout with the man who had taken it passed out in the driver’s seat.
Stilwell knew that Monika Juarez would reject most of the cases. Some would be filed but dismissed before they reached court. Juarez’s job was to weed out the inconsequential cases that were not worth the time and money to adjudicate. The county jail system was already crowded and under federal oversight. Prosecutors had to be selective about whom they tried to put in prison.
From an island twenty-two miles from the coast, Stilwell viewed the system as not yet broken but getting close to it. His opinion was that when you installed a revolving door at the entrance to the jailhouse, you were inviting the system’s downfall.
Knowing what awaited the weekend’s cases at the next stop, Stilwell put most of his efforts into writing up the summary of charges against Merris Spivak. He’d been arrested Saturday night for assaulting a law enforcement officer. He had broken a bottle over Deputy Tom Dunne’s head in a bar on Crescent. Dunne was backing up Deputy Eduardo Esquivel, who had entered the bar after a call regarding a fight between two patrons over whose song was next up on the karaoke stage. Spivak came up behind Dunne and bashed him on the head with an empty wine bottle he had grabbed off another patron’s table. Dunne got a concussion, nine stitches, and a night in a medical clinic before being transferred to a mainland hospital. And Stilwell was down one deputy for the rest of the busy holiday weekend.
The assault on Dunne was captured by the bar’s security camera, and the video would be the key evidence against Spivak.
Stilwell attached the link to his report, then decided to watch it again. It had made him so angry the first time he had watched it that he realized he should add some of the details to the summary report to ensure that Juarez didn’t defer charges.
The video link provided by the bar started thirty seconds prior to the assault on Dunne. It clearly showed that the attack was unprovoked. Spivak came quickly into the frame behind Dunne and hit him with the bottle with an overhead swing. Dunne went down, knocked out cold by the impact. Esquivel had his hands full and didn’t see his backup deputy go down. Spivak, apparently not knowing he was on camera, turned, went back to the bar, took a seat on a stool, and acted like he’d had no part in the melee. That part of the video was bizarre. Stilwell watched it two more times, and, while it continued to make him angry, the oddness of Spivak’s actions began to poke through the emotion. Stilwell got up from his desk and left his office. He walked through the dayroom to the jail.
There were two four-bunk holding cells in the sub’s jail. They were side by side and divided by a concrete-block wall. Guests in one cell could not see into the other. Stilwell had put Spivak in cell one by himself, and the other three detainees were in two.
Stilwell had separated Spivak because his assault on a law enforcement officer was more serious than the others’ alleged crimes.
Stilwell walked to the bars that fronted cell one and saw Spivak asleep on one of the lower bunks. He had been in the cell for two days.
“Spivak,” he said. “Wake up.”
Spivak didn’t move. Stilwell put his right foot between the bars and kicked the frame of the bunk, and Spivak jerked awake.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“Spivak, I’ve got a question for you,” Stilwell said.
“Am I getting out of here?”
“No. I have a question for you.”
“Are you taking me to county?”
“I’m keeping you right here until the judge comes out. That’s usually Fridays. But if he’s backed up on the mainland, it might not be till next Monday.”
“Ah, fuck. You can’t do that.”
“Actually, I can, and I am. Did you know Deputy Dunne?”
Spivak was silent for a moment. Stilwell stepped back to the wall opposite the holding cell and turned on the lights. Though being in the bottom bunk kept Spivak in partial shadow, Stilwell could see his eyes when he came back to the bars. Spivak had a shaved head that was pointed like a bullet, a host of tattoos peeking out of his jumpsuit collar and sleeves, and a crescent-shaped scar below his left eye.
“Did you know him?” Stilwell asked again.
“Who the fuck is Deputy Dunne?” Spivak said.
“The deputy you clocked with the wine bottle and put in the hospital. Did you know him? Did you have any previous encounter with him?”
Spivak again went silent, which made Stilwell think he was hiding something.
“Talk to me, Spivak,” Stilwell said. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something before asking me shit?” Spivak said.
“You already got ’em when we booked you.”
“Then I ain’t talking to you. I want my lawyer.”
“You called your lawyer already, Spivak. That was your phone call. You decide you want to talk to me, I’ll see what I can do about another call.”
Stilwell left him thinking about that and went back to his office. On his computer, he ran Spivak’s name through the crime index. He was forty-four years old and had a history of arrests in Los Angeles County for assault and other violent crimes, most of them in the Long Beach area. This furthered Stilwell’s belief that there was a connection between Spivak and Dunne. He pulled up what he could on the prior arrests and did not see Dunne’s name in any of the reports. The year before, Spivak had spent three hundred days in the Pitchess Detention Center after pleading guilty to a charge of aggravated assault. Pitchess was part of the county jail system; a sentence of less than a year was served in the county system, while a sentence of more than a year meant a transfer to state prison.
Stilwell picked up his phone, found Dunne among his contacts, and called him. It went to message.
“Tom, it’s Stil. Just checking on you to see how you’re doing. Give me a call when you get this. All right, man, talk to you.”
He disconnected and thought about Dunne. He had been transferred to the Catalina sub seven months earlier. Stilwell had been told he was coming from the jail division but wasn’t sure where he’d worked in the massive multifacility system. He was also not told what transgression had resulted in Dunne’s transfer.
Stilwell went back to work and an hour later emailed the whole package of cases to Juarez. He didn’t expect to hear from her until late in the day. She had a calendar to cover at the Long Beach courthouse and that would be her priority. Catalina was not high on any mainlander’s to-do list.
Stilwell next started to review the crime reports that had come in over the long weekend and that he’d been too busy doing extra patrol or booking bodies to look at. There were sixteen, all crimes that did not involve arrests and that he, as the island’s lone detective, would need to follow up on.
Catalina was shaped like a lopsided eight—or an infinity symbol, as many inhabitants of the island preferred to view it. Avalon was built on a natural harbor on the south side of the island and was far and away its biggest population center. Two Harbors was a small town at the isthmus between the two halves of the eight. A slow twenty-mile drive or a faster boat ride from Avalon, it was a place where residents wanted as little as possible to do with tourism and civilization, including law enforcement. The rest of the island was largely undeveloped except for small nomadic settlements of people who were all running from something or somebody.
Three of the crime reports had come from Two Harbors: a stolen outboard motor, a vandalized golf cart, and a crab-trap poaching. These were not major crimes, although the poaching was the third such occurrence in a month, and Stilwell put these aside to review later. He made irregular visits to Two Harbors to follow cases or simply to show the flag, but he usually waited until several reports had accumulated. He planned to get out there by the end of the week.
The remaining cases were a mixed bag of vandalism, petty thefts, and fraud involving visitors who had made online reservations that turned out to be phony for hotels, fishing charters, or island services. Their deposits had disappeared into the digital ether, and there had been no hotel, tour, or fishing boat awaiting them. Most of the reports were walk-ins and were handled by Mercy, who consoled the victims and then called around to see if she could find a hotel room or at least a seat on a ferry going back to the mainland.
Stilwell shuffled through the reports until one grabbed his attention. It was a felony theft report filed by the general manager of the Black Marlin Club. The BMC was a private club that was over a century old. It had an invite-only membership of moneyed families from the mainland who brought their yachts in from Newport Beach, Santa Barbara, Marina del Rey, and other wealthy enclaves along the California coast. The club was named after what had once been the sport fisherman’s prize catch, and its members were much like the black marlin: sleek, fast, and rare in California waters. They were also dangerous—the members, that is—in terms of their reach into the corridors of power and wealth. Stilwell had been cautioned when he was transferred to Catalina to give Black Marlin members a very wide berth.
The report from general manager Charles Crane was on the theft of a small black-jade sculpture of a marlin rising from the ocean’s surface. The sculpture had been on display on a pedestal in the entry hall of the clubhouse for nearly a hundred years. The pedestal stood next to a glass case containing other historical items from the club’s past.
Deputy Tom Dunne had taken the theft report on Saturday just hours before he was attacked. According to Dunne’s crime summary, it was unknown when the sculpture had been stolen, because the pedestal was in the front hallway, which was not routinely used by members or employees. Members usually arrived by boat and entered or left the premises through doorways connecting to the docks at the side and rear of the building. Employees were not allowed to use the front entrance and used a side door.
The sculpture was reported missing on Saturday when a housekeeper charged with dusting it once a week found the pedestal empty. Crane described the sculpture as ten inches tall and weighing three or four pounds. He gave its value as priceless because of its age, the quality of the jade, and its connection to one of the club’s founders. What Stilwell zeroed in on was not the stolen object or its value but the suspect Crane had identified.
He’d told Dunne that the week before the sculpture was noticed missing, he had fired an employee named Leigh-Anne Moss for inappropriate behavior. The report said that Moss was a part-time waitress in the club’s private restaurant and bar and that she had broken the rule forbidding socializing with members. Crane told Dunne that he suspected that Moss took the jade marlin on her way out of the club following the acrimonious meeting that had resulted in her dismissal.
From Moss’s employment application, Crane gave the deputy her age and address. He also offered a description. He said that Leigh-Anne Moss had dark, shoulder-length hair with a purple streak along the left side.