At eleven the next morning, I hopped on the 405 North and took it over the hill to a depressing section of the Valley. I’m okay with the Valley. As I mentioned, I grew up in the Valley. There are, in fact, some nice, really nice, downright beautiful, sections of the Valley.
Where I was now simply was not one of them.
I drove the Focus down a bleak, treeless, sun-pelted, low-end-commerce-laden street. One depressing storefront after the next. A forgotten JCPenney. A ninety-nine-cent store. An abandoned building that I’m pretty sure used to be a RadioShack. Too bad, because I was in the market for an enormous Texas Instruments calculator.
And there was traffic, semibad traffic, even on a Sunday.
I found the little parking lot for Helton’s building. His office, Teamwork Insurance, was wedged between a sad-looking Italian restaurant and a Laundromat. I parked my car and got out. It was 140 degrees, and still. I walked in through the glass door that had TEAMWORK INSURANCE stenciled on it.
Inside, there were six desks and one guy. Craig Helton sat at the back left desk. As I entered, he stood up and waved me in, waved me back. He was wearing dark, sort of mom jeans and a black sport shirt, tucked in. He had on a braided brown leather belt, and his loafers, which I could see under the desk, were new but cheap.
Fashion did not appear to be his thing.
Craig had dark hair that he’d kind of spiked up a bit and a brown goatee, and he was about five-ten. We shook, and he gave me what I believed was a genuine smile.
He motioned to the chair in front of his desk and said, “Have a seat.”
As we both sat down, he said, “So the family’s looking back into it, huh?”
I nodded.
“And I’m the guy Keaton burned in business, so you gotta talk to me.” He didn’t phrase it as a question.
I nodded again and said, “Yeah. So, you know, I read all the police reports. I know the basics of your story with Keaton, the business, the bar, the falling out. And I also know where you were at the time of the murder, and that you were never a suspect.”
Craig had been at home with his wife and two kids, not too far away from where we were right then. And he, like everyone else, had all sorts of verification. He had his wife, of course, and his two kids, ages six and seven at the time. All of them were home, awake, eating breakfast at 6 a.m., the time of the murder. This was also verified by a neighbor, a single mom named Sandy Simpson who lived right next door. Sandy had been having plumbing problems at her house, so she and her daughter, Zola, had been using the Heltons’ bathroom and shower. And they were at Craig’s house that morning at 6 a.m. as well. Craig was covered.
I continued. “If you don’t mind, can you run me through your relationship with Keaton? How you met, the situation with the bar. Anything else you think might be helpful.”
Craig started right in, no problem. “Keaton and I met because he started hanging around some people I knew who were in a band called the Test. They broke up, they’re not around anymore, but they were kind of a popular band for a while around here. I knew them from growing up. Keaton knew them from going to their shows and partying with them. And, you know, everyone loves Keaton. At first. So that’s how we met. We were twenty-six, twenty-seven. Keaton and I were the same age. We became friends pretty fast. We both weren’t afraid of a good time. After a while, I told him I wanted to start a bar. Knew of a great location, thought I could run it well. And let me tell you, you get a bar up and running, you can print money. Print it. Sure enough, a couple years after we met, we ended up doing it together. It was here in the Valley, not too far away, near Laurel Canyon. I took out a big loan—the loan was in my name, but we had agreed, we’re partners. I’d hire everyone, run the bar, do all the work, but Keaton would make half the payments on the loan.”
He gave me a look that said: You know where this story is going.
Craig said, with a heartbroken fire in his eyes, “You get a bar up and running and you can print money. Print it. Anyway, long story short, Keaton started drinking way too much at the bar, giving away a ton of free booze, and then eventually not making his payments. And telling me, ‘Hey, man, I told you I’d help you get started, that’s it.’ Which was total bullshit. We had talked over and over about how you have to keep funding a business, any business, until it catches on. And that you need capital to persevere. And that he was going to continue making the payments for as long as we needed. Two years, minimum. Anyway, eventually he just disappeared. As did all those random people he’d invite to the bar. So then I started having to put too much of the bar’s money back into the loan payments, I was stressed out of my mind, some people quit, we had a few bad months in a row, I didn’t have Keaton’s promise in writing, and, you know, I defaulted on the loan and the bank took the bar. It totally fucked up my credit. And believe it or not, I’m still making payments on that loan. Still, to this day. Some four years later.”
“What about the family? Phil and Jackie? Did you tell them the situation? Did they help you out?”
“You know what? I did tell them. And they did help me out. A little. Mr. Fuller wrote me a check one time. Not for nearly what Keaton owed me, but it was nice, I guess. I don’t hold it against the family, really. Except for the fact that they didn’t instill any values in their son. Maybe they tried. I don’t know.”
I looked at Craig. A nice, if naive, guy. Probably saw something of a ticket out in his wealthy, fancy friend. Only he didn’t know it was a ticket to being a health insurance agent in the Valley wearing mom jeans, a Marathon Bar belt, and morbidly depressing loafers.
I said, “Where’d you grow up? Around here?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right near here.”
I said, “I grew up not too far from here too.”
Craig shrugged a bit and said, “I’m not from a neighborhood like Keaton’s, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Do you think that’s why he didn’t keep his promise to you?” I asked. “Because he thought you were beneath him or something?”
He didn’t have to think about my question to answer it. Not even for a split second. He said, “I don’t. I think he would have done it to anyone.”
He continued, because he wanted to. “It didn’t matter who you were. You said you’ve read the police report. And you’ve probably talked to other people. I’m sure you’ve heard similar stories. Not necessarily on this scale, or for money, but he let down all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. I found all that out too late. And not just people from the Valley, like me. His brother. He was always letting Greer down. Keaton tried to get in with him after his marina started doing okay, and I heard that Greer just said no. No way. I actually heard this story before the bar—Keaton told me, actually. And he convinced me that Greer was jealous of him and didn’t want to get outshone at the marina. I bought it at the time. I’ll tell you, there’s a guy, Dave Treadway, he was in Keaton’s crowd, or from his neighborhood—he was really Greer’s friend, I think, and not a prick. A pretty good guy, as I remember. He came by the bar a few times. But then later I ran into him randomly, after all this shit went down. He gave me some good perspective on Keaton. He was the one who made me realize that my getting screwed over had nothing to do with me. Told me a story that Keaton had fallen out with some guys from USC, right after college, some other rich kids, over some movie one of them was trying to get funding for. Over some promise Keaton broke. Point being, Keaton would shit on anyone. And then I heard later that after the bar, Keaton got into the tropical fish business for a while, and that didn’t work out, you know, for some reason. Keaton bailing in one way or another, I’m sure. The guy was just a douche, man. Just a douche.”
You could tell that he was still hurt by it all, getting worked up, but that it gave him at least some relief that others had been burned too.
I said, “You got talked to by the cops a lot, even after they determined that you weren’t a suspect.”
“Yeah, I got talked to a lot. They knew I didn’t do it. But they came back to me a few times, I think because I was so open about how much I disliked Keaton. I mean, even more than everyone else. I’ve calmed down a lot about it. But, man, at the time, I was saying stuff like, I’m glad he’s dead, and I wish I’d done it. Probably not too smart, but I was still mad. Really mad. Truth is, even now, when I start to get back into it, the anger comes up. It’s coming up a little bit now.”
He sat there thinking, and the more he thought, the more he heated up.
“Listen to this,” Craig began. “One time, he was dating this girl. Some random girl. Nothing serious. This was when we had the bar. And he was out with her, and he met another girl while they were out. So he picks up the new girl and just leaves the first one at the bar with no way to get home. Now, I know that’s not the end of the world in the grand scheme. It’s not like he killed anyone. But the thing was, he came in the next day and told me the story as if it was a joke. As if it was a story I was supposed to find really funny and, like, laugh at. I remember looking at him like he was from a different planet. And I remember thinking, This guy has no clue that the story he just told makes him seem like a total asshole.”
I looked at Craig. Burned, hurt, but on to something with that last story. People often don’t know how they really are. Aren’t connected to what’s really happening with respect to their behavior. This was obviously an extreme example. Leaving a girl at a bar when you’re on a date with her is a strikingly clear asshole move. But people do things—lame things, insensitive things—to a much less severe degree all the time, and they often have no clue that they shouldn’t be doing them.
Looking back, I know I’ve committed that crime before.
“You know what else I heard,” Craig said, in a way that suggested he wanted to prove to me, if I wasn’t convinced already, that Keaton was terrible. “I heard he date-raped a couple of girls in college. Like, forced himself on a couple of girls who were too drunk or too wasted to stop it. I heard this, again, after the bar. I was at a party at a Mexican restaurant in Studio City. Big table. And at the next table over, another big table of people, I see one of the guys who used to come into the bar. So I start talking to him, and the guys with him tell me this date-rape stuff. I didn’t know those other guys, and I have no idea if what they were saying was true. And they didn’t give me names. They just said they’d heard it. Shit, maybe they knew I was licking my wounds and they were trying to make me feel better by telling me what an asshole Keaton was. But that would be a pretty fucked-up way to make me feel better. I believe it. And, man, think about that. Sleeping with a girl as she’s about to pass out. As she’s saying no, stop, don’t. I mean, who would even want to do that? I’ll tell you, what’s even weirder about that story is that Keaton got girls. When I knew him he did for sure. But I think he always did. Plenty of them. So he just did it for some kind of twisted power trip. What a freak. But I could see it. I could totally see it.”
Man, this guy just loathed Keaton Fuller. Loathed him. Greer, Sydney—they didn’t have a lot of good things to say. But they at least kept their emotions somewhat in check. Not Craig Helton. His heart was right there on his sleeve. I appreciated it.
I said, handing Craig my card, “I’m not really sure what else to ask you right now. I’d like to know I can call you if I come up with something. I’d also like to thank you for taking the time.”
Craig nodded and said, “Call me anytime.”
We stood up. We shook hands. And I left.