Fatal Conceit

By John Ritter

A cold-case homicide winds through a trail of murders to an international criminal conspiracy.

A new PI joins an eminent list, bursting with humor, pugnacity, and a leaky moral code, bent on one-upping San Francisco’s finest while wooing a prosecutor-turned-lover. A talented investigator, Beaupre muddles through his own hubris and missteps, leaving a trail of bodies and recrimination. Booted from the police force—for knocking a skinhead comatose and allegedly battering a girlfriend—he radiates confidence spiked with arrogance. Hired to find the killer in a moldy double murder, he sniffs out a drug trail, misreads a string of homicides, and not until he and a computer hacker sidekick track down a fugitive in Asia does the scope of a vast criminal conspiracy reveal itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TouchPoint Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 1952816246

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

SHE FOLLOWED THE WAITER to my table on the terrace and sat down, angling toward Union Street, buttoning a satin jacket against the wintry August morning.

David, the owner, had stopped by and was leaving. I stood, we embraced, and he smiled at her and went back inside.

Your lover?

Not in the biblical sense.

Brother or something?

Former client. Twice a client.

I’m sorry. It’s just that…

Just that what?

A waiter broke in for orders: Irish coffee for her, milk and chocolate croissant for me. She shivered in a suede mini, fingering a single pearl on a thread of silver chain. You didn’t hesitate, meeting on short notice.

Hard to resist. I’m a sucker for celebrity.

Who wants my kind of celebrity?

You don’t gussy up for red carpets.

Watch me stock a Sunglass Hut. She settled back and checked her phone, as if to say, Can we lose the banter? She took a week with a text. Milk and coffee arrived, she tested hers, gulped a quarter of it. I’m looking for an investigator. I want to find the killer.

You’re stuck down in the Mariana Trench, you wouldn’t know who she’s talking about. The rest of San Francisco would.

Cops are optimistic they’re close to making an arrest. Obviates need for somebody like me. Tacky to float a word like that, knowing the buzz about her.

Optimistic, the police mantra from day one. The police are idiots.

Pointless to argue.

She couldn’t sit still, couldn’t stay off her phone. She’d asked me to work for her but came across ambivalent, mechanical almost, like she didn’t give a shit whether I did or not, like soliciting my help was something she felt she ought to do. You’ll be able to find him, won’t you, Mr. Beaupre? A professional of your caliber.

You’re leagues ahead of the cops already. You know it’s a him.

What kind of woman does a thing like that? Her face pinched up like she smelled warm dung.

No glass ceiling I know of. Bookies will take three-to-one you did it.

That called for a pull on her drink, then another. She picked at a fuchsia nail and looked down the street, fog catatonic, in no mood to burn off. Why would I hire an investigator if I was the killer?

Deflect suspicion. Or you knew my rent’s past due.

My lawyer warned me you had a smart mouth.

But zealously genteel.

He said you were quite good and had a knack for seeing a case from fresh angles.

I need legal work, he’s my man.

He told me you’d picked up a reputation in the department.

"Humble, gallant, eschews foie gras?"

A cowboy. Never met a crime he couldn’t solve.

You’d hire some private dick who had? She might’ve hurt herself forcing down a smile. I pantomimed the waiter—coffee for me, refill for her—and picked at chocolate flakes on my plate. Put aside Lady Justice for a sec, why do you want to find the killer?

Van Trebeloff was a degenerate—pardon my speaking ill of the dead—but I cared about him.

Cared? Big category. Anything like love?

It’s complicated.

Wouldn’t be love if it wasn’t. Can you elaborate?

I find it tiresome. Is it necessary right now?

It is if you think you had something to do with why he was murdered.

I’ve thought a lot about it the past few months and can’t come up with anything remotely related. She wiggled her ass in the hard metal chair, trying to get comfortable. You knew about his sexual… I’m blanking on the right word.

Proclivities?

When I saw you and your ex-client, the thought struck me that if you were gay you’d bring more empathy to the case.

I swallowed the last of the milk. "Empathy’s not healthy in my business. It clutters, obscures. I do get emotional over a good prison break."

The waiter brought another round, stared at her a moment too long as he left.

Why don’t I wear a name badge, help these fools out? ‘Triste Baer, human curio.’ She finished her first drink, went after the second, wiping a rim of cream off her upper lip.

The cops, most of them, aren’t cattle-brains. The case has gone cold for a reason. I can jump in, apply prodigious talent, and who knows, I might find the killer. If I don’t, I let you down while pillaging your bank account.

She kept sipping her caffeinated booze, both hands around the warm glass. The whole world knows my money problems are behind me.

Finding a killer’s one thing. What happens after can get sticky.

Would you shoot him? Or her?

An option, certainly. You might not want me to.

The rest of her second drink went down, like she had someplace to be, concentration wrinkles plowing her forehead. So you’ll take the case, Mr. Beaupre?

Give me a day or two to think about it.

She stood, stuffed hands in jacket pockets, the fog-borne breeze tousling her Dutch bob. Have you seen the video?

The video a million words’ve been written about but nobody’s seen? I’m waiting for wide release, catch a matinee.

Watch it, if the police let you. It might help you decide.

You’ve seen it?

It’s evidence. A person of interest is not allowed to see it. It’s been described to me, leave it at that.

Real sudser, huh?

You wouldn’t take your girl to see it.

CHAPTER 2

WARDELL DRAKE SLID a DVD into his laptop. Remind me why I’m doing this.

You want a bleach boy godfather for the kid.

Kids, for chrissake. Think twins. Think diaper shifts for bleach boy.

We sat side by side at a bolted-down metal table in a homicide interrogation room. We opened sodas, unwrapped deli sandwiches. Anybody comes knocking, here’s two guys eating lunch, butt-chuckling over Jim Jeffries on YouTube.

Here we go, and Wardell clicked play.

A bedroom dropped into focus, white as desert bone—walls, bed, dresser, everything but silk-shiny emerald sheets. A gauzy white curtain rustled across a wide window facing the bay, open to late-day sunlight.

I bent closer. Guy knew how to set a scene.

Van Trebeloff and Valentine Lopes strode in with a champagne bottle and glasses, passing a spliff, fumbling with each other’s buttons. She slipped out of her jeans, and he put a hand inside her bikinis. She arched in close, tongue-mining for molars.

She drew away, mouthed the spliff’s lit end, shot-gunned his throat. He fell back on the king bed and pulled her on top. Things progressed.

Trebeloff—lanky, hairy, jerky—moved around like a giraffe in a bathtub. When he didn’t forget, he sucked in his Buddha belly, checked himself out in a mirror on the far wall.

I sat rooted, If he’s a beached whale, scavengers think twice.

Valentine Lopes didn’t seem to mind. His joint against her tonsils, icicles dripping around, he had to push her off. Olive-skinned and curvilinear, she’d be fighting fat by thirty-five, but for the moment was tightly put together. A fondness for thongs, judging from tan lines. She found a balance between teasing and aggression, howled both times she came. The booty buddies collected themselves against the headboard, sipping bubbly. Before long, he had her on all fours backhoeing, both of them gazing in the mirror.

Trebeloff, hands full of cheek, couldn’t shut up. Yeah, baby, hard like that. Grind it. You got it.

Lopes balled the sheet in her fists, tits brushing the mattress, as the black-gloved grip on a handgun edged into the screen. The lovers uncoupled and sprang up, a voice mumbling behind the gun. The first slug caught Lopes above her left eye, hurling her backward off the bed. Trebeloff raised both hands over his head as two dark holes opened in his sternum. He pitched face down on emerald. The DVD ran on.

Wardell and I speechless, face-palming, in a room fixed in time. Nothing to say, my voice, my words utterly unseemly. I remembered to breathe, caught a whiff of tuna and sweet pickles on rye, about puked. Wardell checked each fingernail. On the screen, the gauze curtain stirred in the breeze, blood spreading on the sheet like spilled Merlot. A death scene still and complete—and nobody there to shut it off.

Wardell ejected the disc, slipped it in a sleeve and into his jacket. Let’s take a drive.

We left homicide, down the Hall of Justice front steps, and Rico Filippone yelled, Hey, hold up, slamming the door of a black plain jane double-parked on Bryant. He jogged over. Fuck you doin’ here? Send another poor bastard to the ICU?

I turned to Wardell. Visit the zoo, don’t miss the hyenas.

We ran your Frenchie scumbag ass outta here once Beaupre, and—

English. I know, Rico, sounds very French. My forebears crossed the sleeve around 1066. Settled in the Midlands. Too much too fast?

Heredity had tripped him up, or somebody two-by-foured his frontal lobe and the swelling never went down. He took a quick step toward me, but Wardell, unbuttoning his jacket, planted between us.

Coming down here like this, somebody’s gonna Botox that mouth a yours. The chief hears you were here he—

How’s therapy, Rico?

Therapy? Fuck you talking about?

For back ache, what with all the bending over for Rachow. Give him my best.

Filippone laid on his stare, the one to choke off arterial flow, and stalked off. Wardell and I went up Bryant to his Crown Vic and drove south toward Franklin Square.

Your audio geeks decipher what the shooter said before he fired?

Night-night, best they can make out.

Original.

Off the cuff, most likely.

Unless he thought he’d just put something bigger to sleep.

***

Wardell double-parked on Seventeenth, and we found a bench off the playground under shedding eucalyptus. Cloudless, bright, summer-chilly, nanny mafia bundled up yakking and texting, Latino club team drilling on the soccer field. We hadn’t spoken ten words since leaving Southern Station.

Homicide lifers wallow through fifty shades of death, all but numb to it, but never—most of them—firing their service piece outside a range. I’d broken leather once in a decade, spooked by some harmless nutter in a crack alley. Cops rush in while the vic’s still warm, miss the deed going down. Miss the soul-cringe I had watching an ad lib snuff video in a shit-drab trick room.

All those years, all the crazy douche nozzles, never once close to clipping anybody. Talking to be talking. Wardell was eight years older; we’d been partners for four.

Remember that juvie turdzilla got me blaster-happy? Over in Dogpatch? Fucker screaming he’s gonna blow granny’s tits off? Nothing but a punk skel with a spud wrench.

Forgot how that ended.

Granny wrestled the wrench away and slapped him. Kid started crying.

Van Trebeloff and Valentine Lopes—ageless now, caught in a breezy foo-foo boom tomb. Getting high and getting it on, punked up, never more alive. Bang bang, not alive. We’d all pick a hundred worse situations to cash it in. But I couldn’t shake what I’d seen, couldn’t get the skunk spray off.

Client of yours, you figure she did it? Wardell took a penknife to his nails. Long-limbed, oily-jointed, a decent college half-miler.

For the record, no.

Motive’s there. Nasty breakup, stood to inherit a couple mil. Can’t see it though, hasn’t got it in her. You catch the same vibe?

When her other vibe didn’t throw me off.

Wardell grinned. Filippone yanked her in on any bullshit pretense. Stained his jeans staring at those legs. Her lawyer threatened him with harassment.

Case go stale because it’s Filippone’s or the perp’s that good? In and out, Spic and Span.

Little of both, be my guess. Filippone’s moving on, you can see it. Pretending he ain’t but he is.

Across the soccer field, beyond chain-link, homies huddled around a pipe, a sweet funk drifting over in the wind. High-profile double murders seldom fade to black. Too many loose tongues, petty jealousies, dumb-ass moves at work. A case not wrapped in forty-eight hours, as most are, buckles under pressure, and a kind of momentum takes over. I’d seen it. Reporters troll for leaks, keep a froth on the pot, sooner or later the perp’s coughed up. Death and taxes. Commend the higher forces, whatever. This was not a crime for cold case files.

Shooter go in for her or the photog? Journos, bloggers, tweeps, Mama Leone all had theories; I wanted Wardell’s.

He snapped the knife shut, doffed his aviators, wiped them with a handkerchief. We sit here long enough, he’d buff his brogues. No motive we can find associated with either vic. You know what that means.

Shooter cleaning his Glock? Went off three times by accident?

Means Filippone should to be chasing down every pissant detail about those two. Before they’re gleams in Daddy’s eye.

In this regard, the inspector comes up short? Miraculous.

Thirty days hath September.

With some clincher—witness or confession, prints, hair, blood—detectives could’ve blown off limpdick back stories they’d put together on Trebeloff and Lopes. But from the moment they stepped inside the Marina condo, dicks flapping in the wind. Not a single fiber to hang a killer on, not a soul stepping forward. Sifting through the vics’ lives had been their best angle, their only angle.

Wardell took a call and stood. Triple homicide up in Mendocino, kids shot point blank on a beach.

City kids?

Should’ve been in school where they belong.

Should’ve shit. School starts next week. And when do we see somebody clipped when there’s no should’ve?

Execution-style, this one. Be a shit storm.

***

Soccer practice wound down, players grunting through wind sprints. Nannies wiped snotty First World noses, counted down till nap time. If cops had phoned in their investigation, I’d retrace their steps, acquire some feel for the vics, try to expose an angle. A place to start—if I could shake qualms about my client.

The media had gnawed on Triste Baer like feral dogs, sucked the marrow from a life story without a peep on-the-record. None of her stripped-down hopes, fears, or regrets found airtime, her old guard lawyer snubbing every outlet. Friends and neighbors gushed the usual pap to reporters: she was a quiet soul, kept to herself, but rock solid when you needed her. Yackety-yak.

She’d hit bottom and clawed up more often than Robert Downey Jr. A survivor, ventured her lawyer. Aren’t we all? Foster-home merry-go-round from age eight. Waitressed a college semester, said fuck that, scrimped along as a travel agent till the Internet tsunamied the industry. A headlong marriage, scorched-earth divorce months later. Bankruptcy filing. A DUI. Two whiffs before she passed the real estate exam, caught a tailwind in Marin and bought in Tiburon about the time she and Trebeloff hooked up. Hot and cold for years, by most accounts, making it sort of believable she cared about him. Something bound them—Trebeloff made her his sole heir.

Months later, a double murder case sputtered on, marked down to the odd cable-show crawler. Until she dipped a pedi toe back in the honey bucket when she didn’t have to, when she’d been cruising home free, riding a circus down to a yawn yard. To indulge herself? Because she could afford someone like me? Needed me like she needed a harelip.

The body politic pins her up the odds-on shooter, while a poky third branch sorts things out. She’d be cleared, if muscleheads like Wardell and me knew anything. Meantime, she’d spread that flash fortune in the cause of hauling her lover’s killer to the dock. He being such a patootie, serial dumper when it suited him, a wanker poking anything with a temperature. Cockeyed to me, this drive to bag the shooter. Yet as I juggled my ingigantic bank account, nothing better cracked the horizon. Take it, and stop pretending it’s just another case.

CHAPTER 3

THE NINETEEN BUS took me from Seventeenth and Kansas to the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue. Running late, some zit-head sag pants slubbering aboard with Carl’s thick burgers, MUNI driver waving uh-uh, kid going buggy, driver pulling over to bounce his ass. I passed through security and rode to eleven, scrolling a mental index of lawyers. A man behind Plexiglas checked ID, picked up a phone, buzzed open a door. A woman walked through with a file under her arm, moving like her body felt constrained by clothes.

Mr. Beaupre, I’m Meredith Whelan. Follow me please. A walkaway worth filming.

Down a hall, we stepped into a frigid gray conference room with stained carpet and a sickly snake plant.

Where’s Connie?

Constance is on maternity leave for three months. Her cases have been parceled out.

You feeling like you hit the lotto?

She opened the file, lifted a yellow stickie. Intelligent, intuitive, wit of a ten-year-old. Gotcha smile.

That insufficiency we could address, say, over lunch. My table manners could use a role model.

She closed the file. As you know, Mr. MacKenna has been reviewing the allegations against you. I’m pleased to report he’s decided to go along with the district attorney and not prosecute.

Bloody Irish, forever colluding.

I really don’t think Mr. MacKenna and Ms. O’Dwyer could find time to discuss your case.

"Cowed by vox populi, my irrepressible popularity?"

Mr. Beaupre—

You can drop the ‘mister,’ Meredith. There’s one adult in the room.

Decisions in cases like yours are often made less on substance than on whether we can win. That shouldn’t surprise you.

My ego’s positively preening. He’s letting me off the hook, convinced I’m a headbanger.

Whelan locked onto my gaze a full ten seconds, drumming the table with long strong hands, hands that could pluck a cello, climb a rock face. This woman bore a pedigree, or facsimile, from somewhere; see it in her jaw line, the arc of it, and her outfit—dark, tailored, snug. I wouldn’t have put it exactly like that.

Kinda like that?

The attack—excuse me, the altercation—was quite brutal. The result speaks for itself. The fact that a bystander with a camera lit up YouTube makes it a foregone conclusion in—what was your term?—the court of public opinion.

I wanted to jump in and rifle my file, strike any mention of Mei Cheng. Connie hadn’t brought her up, never exhumed that moldy episode when she took my statement. Now was not the time or place to clear the record. I didn’t give a rat’s if Connie and the Bible study class knew about Mei Cheng, knew I barbecued puppies. Connie was forty-two and home nursing her third kid. Connie’s out of the game.

Whelan closed the door. There were mitigating circumstances, Mr. MacKenna felt.

Oh, like preventing manslaughter?

Even though you were off duty, your lawyer would’ve argued that in your judgment as a police officer, you had to step in.

Zaunbrecher being such a cretin, not to mention the half a foot and hundred pounds he had on the tranny.

His priors wouldn’t have been admissible, you know that. A jury would only—

Hear how he schlepped hospice bed pans and rescued hoarded cats.

Friendly advice? Let it go.

Easy in theory.

Not a day passed I didn’t relive that mad minute in the Tenderloin, all these months later praying a skinhead misanthrope wakes up and forgives me. Nights tossing in the small hours, wired and wide-eyed, pipes serenading through the walls, my old man’s voice clear and cool as a Pacific monsoon: Son, the world’s full of people who want to do the right thing, same as it’s full of people who want to be president.

At least I can stop throwing down for my legal defense fund.

I wouldn’t yet. Whelan took off her glasses, a look as though she wanted to pat my shoulder. Herman Zaunbrecher’s lawyer, when Mr. MacKenna informed him of our decision, indicated that his client would pursue alternatives.

Alternatives? I pictured serfs, dangling from gibbets.

A civil rights lawsuit. State superior court.

JC on toast. Has he filed yet?

It’s not something this office would keep track of.

I slouched in the chair, my head a blender. Two prosecutors reviewed my case and chucked it in the circular file. What state judge disregards that?

Mr. Beaupre—the long exhale, the folding of the arms—nothing’s too trivial to litigate. A New York man, perhaps you recall, sued police after they arrested him for giving them the finger. He asserted his constitutional right to a one-gun salute. Two judges threw the case out. Two federal appellate courts reinstated it.

Better he’d mooned them. So what am I looking at?

Zaunbrecher will undoubtedly request a jury trial. I don’t have to tell you the man on the street’s disposition toward police brutality.

I can hear TV’s gas bags now, braying full tilt: was the cop justified or did he cross a line? Aren’t sworn officers trained to subdue, cuff, and call for backup? The cop happened on a tranny in a tough spot, but didn’t he overreact? Was she really going down? Did Zaunbrecher deserve a mush brain, life ever after as a machine-breathing veggie, for committing assault? To most of us, he’s nothing but a subhumanoid neo-Nazi shitheel, and oh yeah, protected by the same rights. I’d be tarred a thug cop, cakework for Zaunbrecher’s lawyer. Mine would scull vainly upstream, balance the savage image as best he could, play on a jury’s sympathy and dramatize the circumstances. Prognosis: crapsauce in any venue—courtroom or street.

So don’t bag the defense fund?

Keep it liquid.

I sat up. Would you like to go to a match?

Boxing? If two syllables could frame a sneer, she’d managed.

Yeah, the skinhead card, watch ’em maul each other.

If this is your way of—

Stanford women’s volleyball. Best ticket nobody knows about.

She closed the file, did a meeting-ending stand-up, looking like she’d bitten down on a nutshell in her Mars bar. Do all your dates come so cheap? I don’t recall mentioning I played in college.

Intuitive, like the file says.

There might be a conflict.

Pray we’re so lucky. I mean, six-foot girls in a catfight? Tie me down.

CHAPTER 4

TWO MORNINGS LATER, at my office window with coffee and days-old danish, watching hip young women bound down Sutter to hip jobs around Union Square. A courier broke my train with a thick manila envelope, the murder book Wardell had copied. I’d all but begged for a dupe of the DVD, and he said sure, soon as the pope airs the Shroud on a clothesline.

Atop a two-inch stack was August’s San Francisco magazine and a note: Light reading, page 32. I’d seen Irving Johnstone’s profile, the latest slobber over a lawyer adept at neutering neighborhood activists while fast-laning developers’ high-rise wish lists. I.J. Rides to the Rescue—Mr. Fix-It Takes on City Hall. Three-pointer to the trash.

By noon, I was up to speed on the Marina murders. Which, tallied up, left room in a thimble. The killer, luckier than Frane Selak or a pro, had dropped no latents and sprinkled no DNA. Audio analysis of say goodnight narrowed the field like floods narrow streams: male or female, twenty-five to fifty-five, race inconclusive. He or she fired 9mm hollow points from a Glock 19, ballistics failing to match skid marks with a handgun discharged in other crimes.

From autopsies the obvious: the mid-coital timing, booze and weed dregs, Trebeloff’s seven-inch woody. Lopes had played in the snow within three hours of her death. The photog’s labs came up HIV-positive, and his load, unencumbered by a condom, joined another man’s in Lopes’s tuppy hole, neither matching database DNA.

His HIV status and her mystery semen stamped their profiles Didn’t Give A Fuck. More intriguing was Trebeloff’s sexual sweet tooth. Cops had found twenty-seven more DVDs stacked in a wall safe, unlabeled, undated. They ID’d eleven partners but struck out on a buxom MILF-type wearing a red Venetian mask. Trebeloff, mister diversity, indulged males, females, transsexuals, and one couple. Blacks, Asians, Latinos. A little bondage here, domination there. Larry Flynt, tip your cap.

His business manager, accountant Sidney Blowitz, vanished days after the murders but wasn’t a suspect. Security video verified his three-grand hemorrhage at a Vegas crap table the afternoon his client bit it. Two of Trebeloff’s hook-ups claimed shaky alibis. Cops added Triste Baer, duly leaking their favorite kitchen-sink chickenshit—persons of interest. No honest-to-god suspects? For fuck’s sake, don’t sew on a scarlet letter.

I locked the book in the file cabinet, walked up Powell to Chinatown. I’d never pried enough English from the old fud behind the hanging smoked ducks to know why he’d named his hole-in-the-wall Proper Job, but he dished up superb egg foo yung. I wandered up Grant with takeout, scarfing from the carton, elbow-to-elbow with tourists.

I could see color draining from the schtup pals when Filippone or somebody broke the news Trebeloff was poz. Holy torment, Batman, what slow ticks of the clock, waiting for blood tests. Nothing like a killer virus to focus the mind. Was payback for passing it motive enough to waste him? I’d give a qualified no. People make choices, they know the odds.

But the photog comes off loose-ass either way you dice it. If he didn’t know he had the virus, he should’ve. If he knew—knew good and well the bareback fallout—hoist him up among the psychopathic. Here’s a professional with no money worries, a shooter of celebrities and big-time fashion spreads, go-to guy on fat West Coast ad accounts. Luxury condo on the bay, bungalow on Maui. All the while dipping his nozzle in a melting pot, preserving it all in a private archive.

An archive absent Valentine Lopes. Her first taped pop-in to the carnal rumpus room had been her last. Not that the twenty-eight-year-old was any stranger to the penetrative arts. Older guys, neighbors told cops, while unable or refusing to name any. A Cal language grad, she’d hired out on contract to U.N. agencies and fallen into a sweet gig: translator/interpreter working international conferences in Latin America. Adjectives fell into place: smart, skanky, edgy, term du jour for free spirit. But no long-term relationships, no family photos, no romantic ties.

I headed back to the office, side-stepping foragers poking through salvage outside a fire-gutted walk-up. A young Chinese woman made off with a half-melted boom box, to hoots from four musicians strumming folk instruments outside Canton Bazaar. I wanted to see Lopes’s apartment and talk to neighbors. Filippone had interviewed her parents, come away with a verbal slice of prosciutto. That was Filippone—don’t burden a report with human insight.

***

Blue skies, pinch-me marine views, and jammed up on the Bay Bridge while CHP cleared a jack-knifed semi and pancaked BMW. Distracted