I got to my car and got out my phone. I dialed up the ex–business partner, Craig Helton, nobody there, left a message. With the crowd that’s already talked to the police, I wasn’t trying to surprise them in any way, pop up unannounced. I was just trying to set up good, old-fashioned, planned-in-advance meetings. Just trying to get my head further around the story I’d read in the case file. I called the ex-girlfriend next, Sydney Scott. Sydney had dated Keaton for years, some in college, some after college, but was now married to a guy named Geoff. I zeroed in on the way Geoff spelled his name. It made me uncomfortable. It made me really uncomfortable.
Sydney, unlike Craig, answered.
“Hi, Sydney. My name is John Darvelle. I’m a private detective.”
Before I could continue with my opening spiel, Sydney said, “Yes, Jackie called me. She said you might be calling.”
“Great,” I said. “Listen, do you have time to talk in person sometime soon?”
“I do. I’m home for the rest of the day. I live in the Venice canals. Would you like to come by today at some point?”
“Yep. I’m in Marina Del Rey as we speak. Close by. Fifteen minutes okay?”
“Actually, can you give me an hour? Geoff and I, my husband, Geoff, and I, were just about to do our workout.”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
Sydney Scott gave me their address.
“All right,” I said. “See you in an hour. Bye.”
“Love,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh,” she laughed. “Right. You don’t know me. I say ‘love’ instead of ‘good-bye.’ It’s not such a fierce ending. It’s not so permanent. And it much more represents what I’m about.”
I thought: Oh boy.
“Okay,” I said. “Got it. See you in an hour.”
“Love,” she said.
“Right,” I said.
We hung up.
I drove from Marina Del Rey into Venice, its neighbor just to the north. These days, Venice was struggling a bit to hang on to its title as the hippest place to live in L.A. It was still tethered to its groovy, hippie-dippie roots, but it was going more mainstream every second. Fighting with too much money coming in and too many hipsters hanging around. Don’t get me wrong, it was still in a sweet spot, still a great place to stroll around, have a beer, have a bite, walk out to the ocean, mingle with some truly funky people who had been there a while. But it was just on the verge of becoming played out. L.A.’s version of New York’s SoHo. I parked on Abbot Kinney. Went into Abbot’s Pizza and got a slice of pepperoni and a slice of barbecue chicken. I ate them, taking intermittent sips of a nice, cold Diet Coke—no Fresca available—then went back outside and watched people walk by for thirty minutes. When I’d burned enough time, I hopped back in the Focus and headed over to the canals.
The Venice canals are right on the south edge of Venice, just inland from the ocean, and were modeled on the actual Venice canals in Italy, only much smaller. So you’ve got a neighborhood with bungalows and some cool little houses and some really big houses all stacked on top of one another, and all facing and connected by little rivers, with just a few roads into the neighborhood and a few roads out. You can literally canoe over to your neighbor’s house. To your neighbor’s really expensive house. The canals are high dollar. Overall, it’s a pretty unusual, and pretty damn charming, way to exist in Los Angeles. Some depressing, cement-laden sprawl isn’t that far away—shit, right over on Lincoln Boulevard—but when you’re in the canals, sliding through the water in your canoe with your girlfriend up front and a bottle of wine or perhaps a cold six-pack of Coors Light between your feet, you’d never know it.
I drove down Washington Boulevard, then turned into one of the little side streets that take you into the canals proper. Once you’re in the neighborhood, little alleys take you to the backs of the houses. In the small spaces between the houses you can see sections of the water on the other side.
I wound around a couple of these alleylike streets until I found Sydney and Geoff’s house. I parked in front of their garage, which faced the alley, then knocked on a door that did too.
No answer. I was right on time, knocking on the door literally one hour from the time Sydney and I had hung up, so getting no answer annoyed me. Sydney and Geoff were probably still doing their workout, maybe even somewhere other than the house, and had lost track of time. They were late.
If you know me, you know I can’t stand people who are late. And let me tell you, the thing people always say about people who are late is that they are selfish, and disrespectful of the time of others, and that’s why they are late. Sure, I guess that’s part of it. But I think that’s giving these people too much credit. Because I think something else is happening as well. I think people who are late—not all of them, but most of them—are just a little dumb. Look, I’m not saying totally fucking stupid. You know, walking around drooling all over themselves, screaming at strangers, unable to comprehend the simplest of concepts. I’m saying just a little bit dumb. Because to be on time, you have to have the mental capacity and the mental discipline to think into the future. You have to sit there and use mental energy to contemplate some variables, some possibilities, and then make a decision about what you need to do to manage it all. It’s a teeny tiny chess match. And you have to figure out your moves. By and large, the people I know who can do this regularly are the same people who can figure out other, bigger, problems. And the ones who can’t do that? You’re not putting them on the top squad. You’re not giving them the big jobs. You’re not saying to them: Cut the red wire, not the blue wire, or we’re all going to die. Because, you know, they’re just a bit dumb.
I walked around to the side of the house, then through the sliver of space between it and the house next to it, and emerged just on the edge of Sydney and Geoff’s yard, right on the canal. I could now see all the houses lining the little river on both sides. It was beautiful, wonderful. A breeze put modest ripples on the water.
I moved my eyes over to Sydney and Geoff’s backyard. There I saw them finishing their “workout.” They were both dressed in, essentially, black karate uniforms, and they were acting out what looked like a karate fight, only they were doing it in slow motion. And they weren’t making any contact. One of them would do a slow-motion punch but stop before contact. Then the other one would do a slow-motion chop but, again, stop right before contact. And so on.
They were also humming some sort of chant.
I said under my breath, “What the fuck?”
I walked into their little yard until I caught Sydney’s eye. As she did a slow roundhouse kick that didn’t come very close to her husband’s face, she held up a finger to me. Like: hang on one sec.
I nodded and watched them finish their routine.
An interminable four minutes later they stopped, bowed to each other, and looked over at me. With a smile, Sydney said, “Mr. Darvelle. Hello.”
Back to “mister.”
I introduced myself to both of them and told them to call me John. Sydney had chestnut brown hair, manipulative light brown bedroom eyes, smooth skin, a rosebud mouth. She had a curvy, sexy body. Really quite fetching, physically. Geoff was in shape—not huge, but it looked like he worked out—and he stood about five-ten. He had a sort of dim, blank look in his eyes. And he had a low hairline, with his dark hair brushed forward. It gave him a simian, Neanderthal quality. But he didn’t seem aggressive or mean. He seemed pliant, a pushover. The kind of guy a sexy girl could talk into the whole hippie-slash-fake-karate thing they were fronting.
I looked around. Their yard was on the small side—most of the yards on the canals are—but well kept up. Their house wasn’t particularly large, but it had a designed, contemporary-California, state-of-the-art feel. One or both of them had money.
We all sat down on some little chairs they had in the backyard. I couldn’t resist: I said, in a genuine enough tone, “So what were you guys just doing? That was your workout?”
“We invented it,” Sydney said, a touch defensively. “It’s got the beauty of a karate fight without the violence.”
She pronounced it “kuh-rot-tay.” She stared at me with an insecure but defiant look in her eyes, not blinking at all, wondering whether I was going to question it. I looked at Geoff. He didn’t roll his eyes. They were barely open, but he didn’t roll them. I was impressed. I moved on. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Absolutely,” Sydney said. And then, to Geoff, “We should feed Zucchini.”
Geoff nodded.
“Dog or cat?” I said. “I love animals.”
Now some fire appeared in Sydney’s eyes. “Zucchini’s our daughter. She’s asleep inside.”
It got very quiet for what seemed like two hours but was really about ten seconds. I could hear the ripples on the little river. Some wind blowing through some nearby palms. A distant bird.
“My apologies,” I said. “Anyway, I know you talked to the police a year and a half ago or so. And I know that at the time of the murder you were with your family in Chicago.”
She nodded. “With Geoff, who didn’t even know Keaton.”
And, like everyone else in the file, Geoff and Sydney had all sorts of corroboration. Confirmation from United Airlines that she and Geoff had flown direct to Chicago two days before the murder and had flown back four days after it. Credit-card receipts documenting essentially their whole trip. Dinner at Gibsons the night before the murder on Geoff’s card. Starbucks the morning of—at almost the exact time of—the murder on Sydney’s card. Two venti Caffè Lattes, an Iced Lemon Pound Cake, and a Petite Vanilla Bean Scone purchased at 8:06 a.m. Chicago time . . . Not to mention four of Sydney’s family members verifying their day-by-day presence in the greater Chicago area.
Geoff stood up, threw a thumb toward the house, and said, “I’m gonna go . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. He did that thing that people do a lot where they just say half a sentence and expect their audience to fill in the rest.
I thought he was going to say: go feed Cauliflower. Or whatever the child’s name was. He was probably also heading in because he didn’t want to hear his wife talking about her dead ex. Again. I was cool with it. I wanted to talk to her unencumbered by any possible communication barriers that might be created by her husband sitting there.
After Geoff strolled off, I said to Sydney, “I’ve read the police report. I have the file. As I said, I know you were a long way away at the time of the murder. And also, I’ve read what you told the police. I read your statements. So I thought maybe we could just talk a bit. At this point in my investigation I’m still trying to get a picture of this guy.”
Sydney seemed comforted by the fact that I understood that she’d been halfway across the country at the time of the killing. She still had some sort of defensive thing happening. But she seemed ready to talk.
She said, “Well, I knew Keaton really, really well. We dated, off and on, for almost seven years. We met in college. He went to USC. I went to Art Center in Pasadena to study my passion at the time, photography. Well, I went there for a year, anyway. I dropped out. Too regimented for me.”
She looked right at me, staring almost, with her defensive but still sexy eyes. Eyes that said, Are you judging me for dropping out? Do you think I’m a flake?
“Yes” and “yes” would be the answers to those questions. Often when someone says something like “too regimented,” it really just means they didn’t have the discipline or the stamina to stick it out. Not always, but often.
She continued as she craned her neck and cracked it. “I just think art is more flow-y, more about spontaneity. Not like . . .” Curiously, out of nowhere, really, she started talking like and imitating a robot. “You must take this class. You must learn about this person. Then you must take this class. Then learn about this other person. You must practice every day.”
Having lived in Los Angeles my whole life, I knew a few artists. Writers, directors, photographers, even some painters. All the successful ones were very disciplined. They studied what came before them, often possessed an encyclopedic amount of information about the particular field they chose to focus on, and worked on a schedule that they stuck to very seriously. I didn’t mention this to Sydney.
She continued with her robot impression, now putting stiff arms out in front of her and moving them robotically as she robot-talked. “Structure, structure, structure. Learn this before you learn that. Do it like we say. Work every day. Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice.”
She dropped the robot impression and got back to the other version of herself that she’d let me see. “I’m sorry, I’m just not going to let someone instruct me on how to do my art. I had the same problem with a few of the people I worked for after leaving school. I had stopped taking pictures. I had realized that that actually wasn’t my passion. I had realized, at that time anyway, that I wanted to get into film. So I worked at a few production companies. And again, it was just all these rules. All these producers wanted me to do it their way. And I would always say, It’s art. I don’t just want to do it my way. I have to. Anyway, I guess it was all for the best, because I realized that film wasn’t my passion either. What I’m doing now is. That’s why I, well, I guess we, invented the workout you saw. I’m going to write a book about it and go on a speaking tour.”
I thought, It’s amazing what can happen to someone when they don’t have to work, or when they are with someone who enables them to not have to. I surmised that in the past she’d leaned on Keaton, and that now it was Geoff who paid the bills. But, boy, entitlement can rear its ugly head quickly. And you combine that with the reality of hard work, and it can just transform and cripple people to the point where the things they say, the excuses they make, the ideas they have, reach an almost comic level of absurdity. My school wanted me to practice? That’s your reason for leaving? My boss wanted me to do my job the way he or she told me to? And then, after the dropping out, quitting in a huff, proclaiming that the professionals above you are insane, that’s when the entrepreneurial concepts that never actually happen start popping up. A clothing line for pets. An un-thought-through tech start-up. A new form of karate you come up with in your backyard that’s going to lead to a speaking tour. Man, it’s a sight to behold. And not a pretty one.
Thankfully, she got back to the subject at hand. “Anyway, Keaton and I met when we were both in college, very young, dated all while he was at USC. He lived off campus. I had my own apartment, but I spent a lot of time at his. Then we dated for lots of years after college too.”
I said, “And so why did you break up?”
She took a big, dramatic breath and said, “Early on, while he was at USC, he was a handful. So was I. We drank a lot. We went out a lot. You know, that led to fights. Mostly over nothing. He also wasn’t the most reliable person. To me or anyone else. We’d have plans, he’d bail. Or we’d have a special night planned and he’d get hammered. We’d break up, but then he’d be really nice and seduce me and I’d come back. But then . . . then . . . the cheating started. This was after college. He’d moved to his house. Where he was . . . where he was killed. His dad got it for him, said it was a good investment. I was still in my little apartment. Keaton and I talked about moving in together, but we never did. But during that time I’d catch him with some bimbo; I’d find phone numbers. Toward the end, he’d basically just disappear. Like, a week would go by and I wouldn’t hear from him. That’s a long time when you are dating someone. I think he might even have had a second girlfriend. Like, a whole other relationship. That was always my suspicion. It wasn’t just catching him in lies. It was . . . I could see it in his eyes. He was somewhere else. I thought so, anyway.
“But the thing is, one day I had a realization. He didn’t care. I don’t just mean he didn’t care about me. I mean, he didn’t care when he did something wrong. Like, I’d say, ‘You broke our plans,’ or ‘I haven’t heard from you in a week,’ and I could tell that he just didn’t care. It didn’t register. It was almost like he wasn’t able to understand that what he’d done was wrong, or that he had hurt someone. He would only be upset because he got caught, or because it was a hassle for him to have to talk about it.”
I thought: That’s known as a sociopath. “So eventually you ended it?”
“Yeah, or he did. Or we did. I don’t remember. But I definitely wanted out.”
I thought, It’s so hard for someone to say the words, to actually say the words: “I got dumped.” Yet hearing someone say those words always makes me like them.
I said, “So how long had you been broken up when he was shot?”
“Several years. Three without any contact.”
“Meaning you saw him some even after you had broken up?”
She looked at me, trying to hold on to her challenging visage but showing some shame. “Yeah. A few hookups here and there. I guess to see if there was any hope.”
For what, I wanted to say. So I did.
“Recapturing our love,” she said defiantly.
Oh, right, that. I moved on. “So do you know whether he ever moved on to someone else? I mean, someone who stuck?”
“I don’t know. And after a while I stopped caring. Because a year or so after Keaton and I were done-done, like no hookups, nothing, I found my true love. Keaton in some way led me to Geoff.”
I thought: Kind of like how photography led you to film, which led you to fake karate.
And then I thought about Geoff. Another guy with a lot of money, coincidentally. I mean, Geoff had to be the one in this setup with the dough. Right? How did he get it? Who knows? Family money? Luck? One of those jobs you sometimes hear about where you don’t have to do much but somehow make a lot of money? Whatever the way, how else could he have gotten this one? She’s annoying, but she’s beautiful. And Geoff could barely put together a sentence. He had literally not been able to get through an entire sentence when he’d made his exit. Half a sentence had worn him out. I pictured him inside, eyes half lidded, mouth hanging open, staring at the TV in his karate uniform. Yeah, and with this cat, Sydney’d found a guy who was a little easier than Keaton Fuller to handle, to control. Who was willing to buy her a house and play pretend karate in the yard if he got to sleep with her. Well, in his defense, she was sexy. I didn’t like her. I might go crazy if I had to live in that house with her. But if I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I do have a girlfriend, I’d definitely sleep with her if the opportunity presented itself.
Maybe I shouldn’t have admitted that.
I said, “So what do you think happened? In terms of his murder? You have any guesses? Any people, situations you saw him get in, anything that could have led to something like that?”
“No. I really don’t. All I can say is that it didn’t surprise me. Well, when I first heard, it surprised me. No, it shocked me. But it didn’t surprise me. People were always mad at him. Always. From the moment I met him. His friends, his family, me. But like I said, in the years leading up to his murder I’d totally lost touch with him. But I’m sure he’d found new people to upset.”
I nodded. And for some reason, I have no idea why, I said, “So how’d you meet Geoff?”
She smiled and looked at me with that defensive, seductive stare and started to tell me. Almost instantly I tuned her out and looked over at the nice ripples on the water. I pictured myself walking over to the neighbors’ yard, then out onto their little dock, then getting in their canoe and slowly, steadily paddling away.