Trey Fellows lived in Pacific Beach. PB, La Jolla’s slacker little brother to the south, was a sandy strip of beach dotted with dive bars and panhandlers. Everybody was laid-back until after midnight or the sixth beer. The bums sometimes carried eight-inch butcher knives under their Goodwill camo jackets.
Fellows lived in a cottage behind a house two streets south of Garnet, the main drag. A beach cruiser bicycle was chained to a fence on the left side of the front patio. I hadn’t called for an appointment. I wanted to get Fellows’ story unrehearsed. It was ten a.m. on a Sunday, but the heavy skunk smell of marijuana smoke seeped through the doorframe.
I knocked on the door and it opened in a puff of smoke. A tall, wiry man appeared when the haze cleared. He wore faded board shorts, flip-flops, and nothing else except a smattering of tattoos on his chest and shoulders. Red rings around blue eyes on a long face. A tangle of mud-blond dreadlocks fell down past his shoulders. Fine, if you’re a musician in a reggae band or a third-year philosophy student. Not so much if you’re a thirty-eight-year-old white dude. But, hey, this was PB. Maybe I was the one who looked out of place.
“This is medical, bro.” He held a two-foot-long glass bong in his hand with a wisp of smoke still trailing out its mouth. His words came out in the lazy cadence of a SoCal surf dude. “I got a doctor’s prescription I can show you.”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“Yeah.”
“Close.” I handed him my La Jolla Investigations card with my cell number scribbled on it. My paper badge. “I’m a private investigator working for the Eddington family. May I come in?”
The glaze burned out of his eyes and he blinked a couple times. Then his eyes rolled up and I worried that he might be having a seizure, but decided he was just thinking. Finally, he swung the door open.
“Yeah. Sure.”
The cottage was a fifteen-by-fifteen square-foot room. Tiny kitchen with dishes overflowing the sink. Surfboard in the far corner opposite an unmade bed. Bathroom door next to a hall closet in a home without a hall. Hardwood floor under discarded clothes. Coffee table with a baggie of weed, a lighter, and some surfing magazines. A lone picture of a suntanned couple in their thirties hung on the wall. The musk of marijuana bud and smoke hung in the air like Elizabethan curtains.
Fellows grabbed a wet suit off a frayed green loveseat and tossed it onto the bed. I sat down, and he did the same onto a duct-taped leather recliner that didn’t match the loveseat. He pinched a tiny bit of weed from a large bud in the baggie, stuffed it into the bong’s glass bowl, brought the open end to his mouth, and lit the marijuana with a Bic lighter. The water in the bong gurgled and smoke filled the cylinder until Fellows pulled off the bowl and vacuumed up the smoke. He held his breath as long as he could before a cough spat smoke out of his mouth.
“You know, that stuff can hurt your memory.”
Not to mention your ambition and IQ. I spoke from experience. After my wife was murdered and I quit the force in Santa Barbara, I tried anything I could get my hands on to help me forget. The ambition went, but the memories stayed.
“I got a bad back, bro. Helps the pain.” He set the bong down onto the coffee table and averted his bloodshot eyes.
If this was the magic witness the Eddingtons hoped could free their grandson from prison, their dream was burning up in a puff of marijuana smoke, and my vacation started tomorrow.
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Fellows?” Brain surgery was out, but I hoped that he at least had a job.
“I’ve been on disability for six months.”
Perfect. This guy would come across as credibly as a politician at a fundraiser. I guessed his back only hurt when he worked but not when he surfed. A couple of hits off the bong and he was as good as new.
“Where did you used to work?”
“UPS shipping center in Kearney Mesa.” He put a hand on his lower back and Method-acted a wince. “Until my back went out.”
“I understand that you contacted Jack and Rita Mae Eddington with information that you think could help free their grandson from prison.”
“Yeah.” His eyes hit mine, then moved down to the left. “I heard someone brag about murdering the family and getting away with it.”
“Steven Lunsdorf?”
“Yeah.”
“Where and when did you hear this?”
“The Chalked Cue in Clairemont last Monday night.”
The Chalked Cue was a dive bar known to attract bikers. That seemed like rough trade for this wannabe Rastafarian to hang out with.
“Is Lunsdorf a friend of yours?”
“More like an acquaintance.”
“And he just blurted out to an acquaintance that he murdered a family eight years back?”
“No.” Quick. Defensive. “I guess we’re more than acquaintances, but we don’t really hang out. I see him at The Chalked Cue sometimes. Anyway, we were shootin’ pool and he was pretty drunk. There was a show on TV about some kid in the Carolinas murdering his family. Steven said those family murders don’t always go down the way they say they do on TV.”
“That’s it?”
“No.” He reached a hand out to reload the bong. “He said it could have been just like that Eddington family eight years ago that the son got blamed for. Maybe someone else did it. Someone like him.”
“And you believed him?”
“Not right away.” He hit the bong again and blew out a skunk cloud. “I said, ‘Sure, bro, whatever you say.’ Then he got mad and told me he could take me to the hillside behind the house and show me where he buried the golf club he used to beat the family to death.”
“Did you take him up on it?”
“No, man.” He set the bong back down. “I was kinda freaked out. Steven’s a member of the Raptors, and I didn’t want to be down some hill with him when he dug up the murder weapon and decided I knew too much.”
The Raptors were white supremacists born out of the California prison system who sometimes partnered with the Aryan Brotherhood. If Fellows was telling the truth, I can’t say I blamed him. The Raptors were armed and usually skittering on meth. A volatile cocktail.
“So you expect the Eddingtons to hire somebody to dig up the hillside behind their late son’s house until they stumble upon the murder weapon?”
“No. I think I know where it is. Steven kept rambling on all night about it. He told me it’s buried under a cactus fifty yards below the house.”
“Did anyone else hear the story who can corroborate it?”
“I don’t think so.” His eyes skirted from the curtained window to the door, like he was expecting someone to peek through or walk in. “We were at the back table by ourselves.”
Convenient.
“You said he was drunk. How drunk were you?”
He hesitated. Probably gauging his believability if he copped to being smashed. “I wasn’t drunk. I’d only had a couple beers.”
“While he was rambling on, did he tell you why he murdered a family of perfect strangers with no apparent motive?”
The crime scene had been staged like a burglary, but the police never bought it.
“He said it was a job. Nothing personal, but he wished the little girl hadn’t walked in when he was doing the parents. He felt bad about killing her.”
Hit man with a heart of gold.
“What do you get out of all this, Trey? There was no reward offered for information on the crime. This thing had been put away cold for eight years until you called the Eddingtons with your little story.”
“It’s not a story! It’s the truth!” His red eyes got big. “Why you giving me a hard time when I’m just trying to do the right thing?”
“So, you’re just a Good Samaritan with nothing to gain.”
“Just because I smoke pot and don’t work, doesn’t mean I don’t care about people. I felt sorry for the kid and the grandparents.”
A stoner with a heart of gold. I’d put him up on the pedestal right next to the gold-hearted hit man. Maybe two years of peeking at people betraying their spouses and their vows before God had made me cynical. Or maybe it was just a lifetime of questioning my own motives, but I doubted Fellows’ heart was anything denser than gold leaf. However, right now, I was just there to collect the story.
“So, after eight years, the Eddington case was fresh enough in your mind to remember the kid and the grandparents?” I asked.
“I followed it every day on the news. Something like that doesn’t happen every day around here. Especially in La Jolla.”
“If it comes down to it, you’ll testify in court about everything you just told me?” The Raptors might have a say in it if they got the chance.
He eyed the picture of the couple on the wall and took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. This time, no smoke came out. Just a whiff of fear. He finally looked at me and nodded his head. “If it comes down to it.”