Let me guess, you want to help me recover the money,” he said.
Mr. Hearns moved gingerly back to the stool in his garage. If he hadn’t still been recovering from the beating he took, he might have dished one out on me. I made the detour to Burbank because there seemed to be too many loose ends in the narrative the authorities had built, including the whereabouts of Detective Fortin. Badger had put in some hours on it but came up empty. One of the few people—alive that is—who could address some of these unanswered questions was one of the alleged participants. But first I had to convince him it was worth talking to me.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you up front,” I said. “I was just trying to find out some information.”
“Who are you?” he asked. “Really.”
“I guess I’m nobody.”
“Everyone’s a nobody.”
I explained my relationship with Rebecca and why I had pretended to be someone I wasn’t. He didn’t seem interested in the details or care much that I lied to him.
“So why are you here?”
“Just looking for some answers.”
“Ain’t got many of those,” he said, and offered me a beer, which was his way of saying he would try anyway.
We sat on stools with the portable heater at our feet.
“Who did all that to you?” I asked, gesturing to the marks on his face.
“I thought it was you.”
“You know it wasn’t.”
“Didn’t get a look at him. I heard someone in the garage, came out to look, and then got cracked on the head. I never got the light on so I couldn’t make them out.”
“You sure it was a man?” I asked.
“It better the hell have been,” he said, laughing. “It was a dude, trust me on that.”
I nodded even though I couldn’t make sense of who it might be.
“It wasn’t her. I’d have wrung that wrinkly neck if it had been.”
Hearns seemed to get lost in reflection.
“Everything all right?”
“I told Lois not to get involved with that lady,” he began. There were many interpretations to what kind of involvement he was referencing, but in this instance it was purely the business kind. “I smelled a phony the minute I met her. She talked a lot but she never said anything.”
My affinity for Mr. Hearns grew, if for no other reason than because of his apparent ability to see through in a single encounter with Julie what scores of Ivy League–educated executives had failed to over three decades.
“The police believe blackmail was behind everything,” I said.
“First those dirty cops think I killed Lo, then they say I’m the mastermind of a blackmailing ring. No one was blackmailing nobody. At first.”
Hearns explained the business proposition presented to Lois. There was a pool of money sitting in a bank account in Phoenix that Julie couldn’t access but needed. If Lois helped her get the money, “through legal means,” Hearns was sure to clarify, she would get a percentage of the total. “You know Lo was a lawyer, right?”
“Yes, I think you said that before.” He’d mentioned it a few times, as any proud spouse might. “How much are we talking?”
“Way less than she deserved.”
“What’d your wife have to do?”
“The owner of the bank account was dead, apparently. Had been for a long time. Lo had to make it official.”
To get access to the money in Maggie Fitch’s account, Maggie needed to legally be declared dead. A claim could then be made by the next of kin on her estate’s assets. This new detail shed some light on a few murky areas in the police narrative, particularly around the events in Arizona some thirty years earlier.
With the authorities circling Arturo, his wife Karen seized on an opportunity to save her neck. It came in the form of Maggie Fitch’s arrest on a drug possession charge. Perhaps Karen knew Maggie from the start or even framed her for the charge. But the arrest and subsequent bail she offered through the family charity gave her the opening to exact some gratitude in the form of a secret safe deposit box in Maggie’s name. The authorities would turn the world over looking for the missing money. But one place they’d never look for it was in a random safe deposit box under the name of a homeless addict.
Maggie probably never knew what was in the box, if she even knew of its existence. She’d never get the chance anyway. She met her end in the desert, unaware that her life was more valuable than her name because it gave Karen the chance to escape forever. I wondered how much Arturo knew. Perhaps he was in on the plan all along, only to be betrayed by his wife at the eleventh hour. Only Julie could answer that now.
Julie probably thought that entire chapter of her life was safely behind her. But thirty years later, under financial pressure from an ill-advised expansion of her business, she had to revisit it. There was “free” money just sitting there. It was the answer to all her problems. All she had to do was get the owner of the box, Maggie, to be legally declared dead, then have Maggie’s brother James Fitch claim his sister’s property. But one part of the plan with Lois didn’t make sense.
“Once Fitch learned about the money in his sister’s name, why would he need you guys?” I asked.
Mr. Hearns shook his head sadly.
“I told her over and over to walk away. This was a bad deal.”
Fitch’s barroom claim that he was cheated out of a fortune actually had validity. Julie and Lois must have spun a story about the money and conveniently left out how much actually was in the account. He barely got a finder’s fee on what should have been all his.
“He wasn’t happy,” said Hearns.
“So Fitch found out what they were up to.”
“He was an idiot but he was no dummy. He started to make noise. That’s when Lo asked me for help.”
Hearns soon found himself embroiled in the whole affair. I probed for what he knew about the original source of the money, but it didn’t sound like he was aware of Julie’s past. He just knew the money didn’t come from legitimate means.
Fitch started doing his own investigating in Phoenix and all the secrets began to trickle out. I assumed that Fitch’s snooping around had alerted Arturo to what his ex-wife was up to. Now her secret was fully exposed to all the participants.
“What happened the day Lois was killed?”
“She and Fitch were supposed to meet at Julie’s house. I told Lo that I would go with her, you know, to try to help out. This Fitch guy was pissed off. He didn’t seem all there, either. Supposedly they all were going to work out a deal. She told me not to come along.” His words fell flat. It was hard, even after the fact, to believe a deal could be worked out with anything less than one hundred percent of the money going to Fitch. “And that was it. The last I spoke to her.”
He jiggled his can to calculate if it was too much to drain in a single pull.
“The cops say Fitch killed her,” Hearns said.
“It looks that way.”
“Nah,” he shook his head. “That old hag killed her.”
He stared into his beer for some support but didn’t find any there.
“Whatever happened to the money?” I asked casually, after a few moments of silence. I wanted to see how honest he was being with me.
“Lo got some, Fitch got less, that witch got the rest,” he replied. “Lo tried to give me some. Maybe ten grand, I don’t know. I never counted it. Kept it in a bag in the freezer,” he said, pointing to the garage fridge, which served as his beer cooler. “You know that night you came out here, I took the money and burned it. Got an old hubcap, a little gasoline…gone.”
His eyes were getting glassy.
“Dirty money,” he whispered.
I declined the offer for another beer. He again had that look of a man determined to get drunk and he didn’t need my help doing it. I left him alone in his garage with his tools and tall boys and didn’t say goodbye.