For the second time that day, modern machinery failed authorities. The hillside around the run-off channel was inaccessible to cranes and the treetops obstructed access from the helicopters above. So the task of removing Detective Fortin’s body from the wash fell on the Fire & Rescue team, which ended up performing a high-wire act of sorts, in which one unlucky member was lowered into the morass to secure a rope around the body so it could be lifted out.
Sierra Madre suddenly had three active crime scenes. A single murder threatened to overwhelm the small police force; three sent it into full-blown disarray. But in the immediate aftermath, it was surprisingly serene.
I rose up out of the mud and inspected the back of my leg, which was riddled with shotgun pellets. They stung mightily, but I gladly took the pain in exchange for my life.
The old man from the coffee shop broke the shotgun barrel into safety formation.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I’ll stay here while you go get help.”
I limped my way down the hill and returned some time later with a skeptical junior officer in tow. The old man was in the same position as when I’d left him.
“What’s going on, Pete?” the officer asked the old man.
It was the first time I’d heard the name of the man who saved my life.
“There’s a body down there,” he said, gesturing toward the run-off channel. “I shot him. There’s another down the hill a ways. The dead man shot her.”
The young officer looked into the channel and spotted the body and then looked around for Julie’s body, but it wasn’t visible from our position. By the time he turned back, Pete had the shotgun held out for him to take.
“Better use a handkerchief,” Pete suggested, and even offered his own after the officer’s pockets came up empty. “We’ll also need to talk about the body you all are digging up down there. I know a little something about that.”
That’s how it went. Pete told them everything, including the incriminating confession that he physically ended the old librarian’s life and helped bury the body underneath the house. I also went the full-disclosure route and divulged every last bit of information I had about Detective Fortin and the events in Arizona from thirty years ago.
It all felt a little overwhelming for the Sierra Madre police so they were more than willing to let their big sister to the west help out. Los Angeles forensics eventually matched the bullets that killed Fitch, Arturo, and Julie/Karen to the gun they pulled out of the water with Detective Fortin’s body. Pete was cleared of any wrongdoing as it related to the detective’s death, his actions justified by the circumstances and corroborated by the only witness at the scene. That left one more “murder”—the one involving the body buried under the old hunting lodge.
It was clear from the outset that the Sierra Madre police department had little interest in pursuing a charge against Pete. It was as if they were channeling Pete’s own plea to leave well enough alone. But he had made the confession and did so in the presence of quite a few people, including me. The police didn’t want to pursue it but they couldn’t ignore it, either.
Their way out came three weeks later while searching the safe deposit box at the Pasadena bank that Julie had visited hours after Lois’s murder. It contained an unopened letter postmarked 1985. In it, the real Julie St. Jean outlined the entire scheme to end her life. It was insurance in case the truth came out, as it had done some thirty years later.
I now understood the frantic visit to the bank. Julie needed to store the letter in a safe place in case she was ever caught. In the end, it didn’t save her neck but it did save Pete’s. The letter was all a reluctant police force needed to officially close the case with no charges levied. If pressed, they would ignore Pete’s confession and place the blame on a dead woman. For once, I was grateful for a police force that didn’t follow the rules.
Despite all the cases being wrapped up, the casualties continued to mount, though none as dire as the five dead—six, if you counted Maggie Fitch. Among the casualties was a professional career that never should have risen as high as it did and was already teetering on collapse.
My position as head of the group was tenuous from the start. Pat Faber never wanted me to have the role and probably looked for any reason to snatch it away. I gave him more than he needed.
While terminations were an extended ordeal, demotions were swift. I knew the hammer was going to fall but the form in which it would come was a mystery. The one thing I did know—it wouldn’t be straightforward. The first clue came in a predawn touch-base with Pat.
“How do we know we’re connecting the dots?” he asked me.
“Elaborate, if you could,” I requested, even though I knew this was the opening he sought.
“The connections between the work you’re doing, the work from the Wellness group, and the work Benefits is leading.”
As the head of all three of those groups, Pat was supposed to be the person “connecting the dots.” But I knew enough not to point that out, because he clearly had an agenda to deliver.
“Feels like there’s a gap,” he said.
And gaps always needed to be filled, I concluded.
A new role was created above me to address Pat’s nonexistent problem; then Paul Darbin was asked to fill it. That’s how we tacitly switched positions, and the man whom I lorded over became my boss.
Badger’s contract was the next casualty.
With Paul finally in charge of the group and the purse strings that kept it running, he decided that Badger and his consistently stellar work, trustworthiness, and rock-bottom hourly rate were just too good a bargain to keep under contract with our firm. He was soon replaced by an unscrupulous investigator with a nicer suit and a college-level vocabulary who charged twenty times Badger’s rate for a fraction of the work but at least wouldn’t offend Native American colleagues with culturally insensitive remarks about “wigwams.”
With what I assumed was his only income pipeline sealed off, I felt a need to put Badger right. For once, I wished he wasn’t so honest. The money delivered on the night Arturo was shot, which was eventually recovered from Detective Fortin’s car, had every last dollar accounted for.
“Couldn’t a few hundred K have gotten ‘lost’ in all this?” I asked him, as I wrote out a hefty check for his services from the last few weeks.
“No can do, chief,” he answered, bringing the check up to his nose for a deep inhalation. “I couldn’t afford to lose your respect.”
And I couldn’t afford for him to keep it. The list of home renovations would sit for another year until the next bonus cycle, as grim a prospect as that was becoming.
The thought that Paul was now the sole arbiter of my earnings made me shudder. I wasn’t exactly the fairest manager when I had the role as head of the department, and now that our positions were switched, I braced for retribution that would be fast and deep.
His first order of business was to ink ColorNalysis to a very generous contract to lead employee engagement. The second was to put me in charge of making them a success.
And so I was back in the workshop business, leading endless sessions featuring new gimmicks that tried to solve old problems. Bronson never worked on the programs directly. The guru talked strategy with his disciple, Paul, but the actual work fell on me and the matronly woman he had working for him.
“Let’s have Chuck and Ethel iron out the details,” he said, smiling.
One gem of an idea was to physically wear the color representing the personality you needed to develop. That way you projected an image of strength where you actually had weakness. All it did was set people back several hundred bucks on refreshed wardrobes. And it sentenced me to a month of wearing so much yellow that by the end of it I actually felt jaundiced.
“Hey, buttercup,” Bronson joked one day in the hall. “You should choose a personality that comes with a more appealing color.”
“Where’s yours?” I challenged, but he laughed it off as a foolish question not worth addressing.
“You’ll never get it, Chuck,” he said.
“Julie said that to me once. It must be in the consultant handbook.”
“Why can’t you see we’re doing good work here?” he asked. “We’re making progress.”
“Hamsters think they’re making progress, too.”
“Not think,” he corrected. “Believe. That’s what you’ll never understand.”
I finally got it a few weeks later during another engagement workshop. The young mom who had participated in the survey results, the one who foolishly shared her true feelings to a group of people who didn’t care, was at it again in front of the same set of managers. She looked to still be on the journey toward her “pre-baby weight” and she still got nervous when speaking in front of others, but there was something different this time. There was certitude in the way she talked about how much better things had gotten. And it all had to do with the workshop I led.
“Thank you,” her voice quavered, her splotchy cheeks an almost perfect match to the shade of salmon she’d been wearing for the last few months. “I’m a different person now.”
She really believed this nonsense. And trying to disabuse her of it felt like an unnecessarily cruel act. Also, she wasn’t the only one clinging to an irrational belief.
For six months, out of some silly fear that removing her belongings would somehow erase her memory, I delayed cleaning out the room where Rebecca had stayed. That sort of decision wasn’t exactly prudent when paying an exorbitant amount per square foot on a room that I would never use. But as a divorced man with no kids and no prospects for any, the small bedroom had little value to me so I just left it for another day.