Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  30

  We went south, Jim flailing against the duct tape. He hadn’t seen my face yet, and I hadn’t spoken to him. I rolled down the windows as we passed through the garlic fields surrounding Gilroy. The night air blew in, cool and damp and fragrant, like a cellar full of onions.

  “Carl?” Jim asked. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  I put the windows back up so I could hear him.

  “If it’s about the trust account,” Jim said, “it’s not a problem. I can fix it.”

  I said nothing.

  There was a sheriff’s car ahead, parked on a pull-off. The driver’s window was down. I kept a steady pace, sixty miles an hour. I didn’t look at the cop as I passed him.

  “If this is about DeCanza, I don’t know anything,” Jim said. “I got that information in the mail—no return address. All I did was ask the man some questions.”

  I had to smile at that. The back of the van had become his confessional. I was his invisible priest. And he was telling flat-out lies, though at least on this point I was ready to absolve him. If he thought he was talking to a rogue Agent White, he could have offered me up as a sacrifice.

  I checked the rearview mirror again and saw only darkness. The sheriff had stayed put.

  “If this is just about money,” Jim said, “we can work something out. It’d be easier if we could talk, and if I could have my phone. I know people who could help.”

  Again, I said nothing.

  Jim may have had an impaired sense of right and wrong, but there was nothing else defective about him. I didn’t discount his intelligence because he hadn’t figured out who I was or where I was taking him. He had enough enemies to fill a midsized sports arena. Picking one from that crowd while bound and hooded in the back of a van would be hard.

  “Lansdale—right? You got out last month,” Jim said. “Keep in mind, I told you not to move the cash that way. Twice. In writing. And you did it anyway. You should be thanking me. You only got ten years. Could’ve been more.”

  He wasn’t speaking out of guilt, but out of fear. If he’d had half his wits, he would have shut up. He could advise his clients all he wanted about remaining silent, but he’d never been bound and blindfolded and thrown in the back of a van. I hoped he’d keep talking. The more he ran his mouth, the more afraid he’d become, which meant he’d be all the weaker when I finally asked him a question.

  And he obliged me.

  In the hour it took to reach the Gravesend place, he scrolled through half a Rolodex of his transgressions. Clients screwed, witnesses thrown to the wolves. Frame jobs and cover-ups. There were a few married women, and more than a few of their daughters. Claire Gravesend must have been at the very back of his ledger, because by the time we reached Olivia’s gate, he hadn’t mentioned her. I got out of the van and shut the door before I hit the intercom. I didn’t want Jim to hear us speak. I listened to the ringer’s low tone, and then my client came on the line.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Crowe.”

  “What’s that you’re driving?”

  “A van.”

  “Where’s Mr. Richards?”

  “Seeing a young lady home,” I said. “Meet me out front. Mr. Richards mentioned a wheelchair—”

  “It was my father’s. It’s in his dressing room.”

  “Bring it.”

  She cut the connection and then the gate began to roll. I opened the door and leaned in to check on Jim. He was curled on his side. It was the only viable position since his hands were bound behind him. I got in and drove the rest of the way up to Olivia’s house. When I killed the engine and switched off the lights, she opened the front door and came out pushing a wheelchair. There were stone stairs leading up to the front door and she came up to the edge of the first step and then stopped.

  I got out of the van, shut the door, and went up to her. She looked at my face, with its bruises and bandages. Then she looked at my clothes, probably pricing everything and wondering if I planned to expense it on her invoice.

  “What is going on, Crowe?”

  “You’ll know in a minute,” I said. “Go wait for me in the gun room and unlock the French doors. I won’t be long.”

  “All right.”

  I took the wheelchair from her and carried it down the steps to the van. When I heard her shut and lock the front door, I opened the van’s door and grabbed ahold of Jim’s shoulders. I slid him out and let him drop into the wheelchair. With his hands behind him, he was liable to tip out. The only thing I could do about that was to hold on to his shirt collar while I pushed him with one hand.

  We went down a flagstone path that led around the side of the house, into the gardens. A fountain trickled somewhere, out of sight. The waves were louder over here, the wind a steady force coming up from the edge of the cliffs. We reached the terrace and I wheeled Jim up to the threshold of the French doors. He was shaking. I leaned close to the pillowcase and whispered.

  “Try not to wet yourself,” I said. “She’ll think less of you.”

  Then I opened the door and pushed him into the room. Olivia was waiting in the straight-backed chair. The fireplace was as cold and as dead as the first time I’d met her. I wheeled Jim up until he was between the two chairs, and then I put my hands on his shoulders. He flinched away from my touch.

  “Would you like some answers?” I asked her.

  She looked at the bound and hooded prisoner I’d brought into her house. Her face displayed no horror at all. Merely curiosity. She lifted a glass of brandy from her chair and sipped it.

  “He told me you were flexible about rules,” Olivia said. “That you’re a dogged sonofabitch. Now I understand.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Jim Gardner.”

  “Jim said that? That’s the nicest thing he’s ever said about anyone.”

  I unwrapped the tape that held his black hood in place, and then I pulled the pillowcase away.

  Attorney and client looked at each other in silence. As far as I could tell, neither of them even took a breath for the first ten seconds. I could hear the waves washing against the rock faces. I thought of Claire. Spinning downward, into the dark. It was Olivia who spoke first.

  “Jesus, Jim.”

  For once, he had no answer. He looked from her to me.

  “You’ve got a conflict of interest, don’t you?” I said. “A pretty big one.”

  Jim swallowed, and found his voice.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lee.”

  “You’ve got two clients. Olivia, and the man who killed her daughter. You know his name.”

  “I don’t know who killed Claire.”

  “You do,” I said. “I know you do.”

  I turned to Olivia then, because she hadn’t heard this next part. But I was speaking to Jim, too.

  “When I was up in Boston, in Claire’s house there, a man broke in and attacked me,” I said. “I killed him—not because I’m any good at that, but because I was lucky. I thought it had to do with one of Jim’s other cases—that the man had followed me to Boston, and that he came into the house for me. Not for Claire. But I was wrong.”

  “A man broke into— You killed a man?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ma’am me, Crowe,” she snapped. “You killed a man in my house?”

  “I stabbed him in your house. He died outside, in the park.”

  Jim was looking at the fireplace. A study in silence.

  “What’s this have to do with Jim?” Olivia asked.

  “I followed the blood trail, through the park. This was at night, so you can relax. No one saw. I found the man and pulled off his mask, and took a picture. When I got back to the city, I showed it to Jim.”

  “And?”

  “He erased it. He told me to forget you and go to Mexico.”

  Olivia got out of her chair and walked within a foot of Jim. She looked down at him.

  “Why, Jim?”

  He hadn’t just
been staring at the fireplace. He’d been thinking. Trying to come up with a way out of this situation. I knew him well enough to guess the route he’d take. He’d try to paint himself as Olivia’s savior.

  “I had to protect you,” he said. “You asked me for a detective. One who’d go all the way. I set you up with Crowe, and he went too far. I don’t know what you told him to do. But taking the picture was stupid. It was evidence. It would convict him and bring you down with him.”

  He’d walked into a trap he’d taught me how to set. He’d started lying before he knew how much I had on him. It was a classic mistake, one he exploited every time he walked into court. He didn’t know about the NTSB report on the impact damage to the Wraith. He didn’t know about the shoe on the roof, or my trip to the radar facility. There was an aircraft registration document in my pocket with his signature. It wasn’t just a helicopter anymore. It was a murder weapon. And Jim knew who owned it.

  “Here’s what I think, Jim,” I said. “When Olivia came to you, you didn’t have a clue. She wanted a detective, and you sent her to the best one you knew. If you’d had any idea she was trying to find one of your own clients, you’d have sent her to a loser. Some guy who couldn’t put two and two together if you wrote it out on a chalkboard. But you sent her to me. So the way I’m looking at it, you were in the clear.”

  “I am,” Jim said. “I am clear.”

  “You were. Back then,” I said. “And then I showed you the picture. You recognized the face and you put it together. You knew one of your other clients killed Claire. You might not have known how, or why. But you knew you had a problem. So you did what you do best—what you’re famous for.”

  Jim said nothing.

  “What did he do?” Olivia asked.

  “He looked the other way. And asked me to do the same.”

  “Jim?”

  Olivia had taken a step back. I saw her gaze go to the side of the fireplace. She was eyeing the poker, considering its heft and the arc of its swing. She and I weren’t so different. We were in a room full of guns, and she wanted to bludgeon someone.

  “It’s bullshit, Olivia,” Jim said. “He’s playing you for more money. He’s gone off the reservation. I’m sorry I brought this man to you.”

  “How did Claire die?” I asked. “Quick, Jim. Tell your client.”

  “I know what I read in the paper. She jumped off a roof in the Tenderloin.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Says who?”

  “Physics.”

  “Now he’s a physicist. Olivia, do you know how dangerous this man is?”

  Olivia backed toward the fireplace and took the poker off its stand. When she stepped forward again, Jim was within the reach of her swing. So was I.

  I knew I was in the right. I just had to explain myself before she took a swing.

  “Before he got called off the case, Inspector Chang got an NTSB report on the car,” I said, struggling to keep all the facts straight through the lingering fog of concussion. “Long story short, Claire couldn’t have done that much damage falling from the roof of that building. She only weighed so much. The Refugio is fourteen floors high, with nothing higher around. Did you know one of her shoes was missing? I found it on the building across the street.”

  “You—what?” Olivia said. “You’re not making sense, Crowe.”

  I knew I was stammering. I had to show her what I meant. Moving slowly, I took the sheet from my pocket and unfolded it. Olivia scanned it with a couple flashes of her eyes. I saw her focus alight on Jim’s signature, and stay there. Then I turned and held the page in front of Jim’s face.

  “I went out to NorCal TRACON,” I said. “Because, as you said, I’m a dogged sonofabitch. We tracked the helicopter over the city. It flew directly over that block of Turk Street on Tuesday morning.”

  “What are you saying?” Olivia asked.

  “She didn’t jump off a roof,” I said. “She was thrown out of a helicopter. Jim’s client’s helicopter.”

  “It’s purely circumstantial,” Jim said. “And you can’t prove anything without a time of death.”

  “I’ve read her autopsy report,” I said. “Have you?”

  He stared at me in silence, and I spoke to Olivia without looking at her.

  “What kind of watch did Claire have?”

  “A Rolex. I gave it to her.”

  “A Pearlmaster,” I said. “It’s listed on the property schedule, in the appendix. A good-quality watch, right, Jim? But could it survive a fall from two thousand feet? Do you really think they don’t know the exact time of death?”

  “The radar—”

  “Be real, Jim. When someone hits a pop fly in Pyongyang, they know it. They know where the helicopter was. It’s all in the record.”

  He looked at the fireplace again. I waited for him, wanting to see what he’d come up with. Ten seconds stretched to twenty. An eternity in front of a jury, which in this case was Olivia Gravesend.

  “Jim,” she said.

  When he spoke, it was slow and firm. He could put on his confident, courtroom voice like another man puts on a jacket.

  “I registered a helicopter for a limited liability company. You’re asking me to divulge the name of the member. Which is attorney-client privileged information. No judge would compel me to answer.”

  “I’m not asking a judge,” I said.

  I took out Elijah’s cell phone and made a video call.

  31

  “How you guys doing?” Elijah said.

  He was sitting in Jim’s kitchen, holding the butler’s phone at arm’s length. He’d helped himself to a glass of wine from Jim’s refrigerator. There was a plate of hors d’oeuvres next to the glass. The cook had probably left it so Jim could offer something to the redhead. Elijah used a little knife to slice off a piece of foie gras. His state of repose was what I wanted to see. It meant he’d found what I needed.

  “We’re just fine,” I said. I was holding the phone so that Jim and Olivia could see the screen. “Just three people sitting by the fireplace, in a gun room, talking about murder. All we’re missing is the butler.”

  “He’s not back yet?”

  “Maybe he hit it off with the young lady,” I said.

  “You wanna see what I found?”

  “Sure.”

  Elijah turned the phone around so the camera faced in front of him. He began to walk, going through the kitchen, down a set of broad stairs to the den, past a wet bar, and to the antique cage elevator that Jim’s architect had scrounged from a bankrupt Kansas City hotel. Elijah stepped inside, pulled the brass gate shut, and hit the lever. We watched as he rose up through the den, past the second floor, and into the all-glass room at the top of the house. He stepped out and panned the camera around. There were wooden filing cabinets surrounding the central desk. Their drawers were open, and empty. Stacks of paper were arranged in neat rows on the carpet, and on the desktop.

  “How many clients did you find?” I asked.

  “Seventy-two.”

  “That many?” I said. “Complete information—bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, everything?”

  “And emails, printed out,” Elijah said. “And tapes. Your boy is old-school. He tapes his phone calls.”

  On the phone’s screen, Elijah’s hand came into view as he picked up a small envelope at the top of one of the paper stacks. He opened it and shook a miniature cassette tape into his hand.

  “You found a lot of those?”

  “Thirty, forty. Who does that?”

  I looked at Jim and shrugged. I’d known about the tapes and Jim’s habit of making them. He did it in case he needed to blackmail his own clients. If they balked at his invoices, he’d get out the recordings. That was page one of the Jim Gardner playbook. In making them, he’d never imagined that they might all fall into the FBI’s inbox in a bulk delivery, whether his clients had paid their bills or not.

  “Can you imagine what they’d do if my friend boxed that up and lef
t it on Agent White’s doorstep?” I asked. “You’ve got a lot of clients. Lorca’s not the only one who can make a man disappear.”

  “You’re on some of those tapes.”

  “And you’re on all of them,” I said. “So your clients won’t wonder where they came from.”

  I watched him while that sank in.

  “I just need a name, Jim. The guy doesn’t have to know where I got it.”

  He looked from me, to Olivia, and then back at the phone’s screen. Elijah panned around again. There were tens of thousands of pages of documents. Bank statements. Wire transfer requests. Sham invoices. Swiss accounts and numbered lockboxes in the Cayman Islands. Entire empires could fall overnight. Most of them would file lawsuits, but a few of them would think of stronger measures.

  “The name,” I said.

  “It’s not going to mean anything to you,” Jim said. “He does everything through shells and holding companies. He puts on two pairs of gloves before he touches an elevator button. He’s a ghost.”

  “So tell me the name.”

  “Stefan Larsen.”

  “What’s he worth?”

  “Plenty. More than anyone in this room.”

  “How’d he get it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jim.”

  “I really don’t. I think he’s got a science background.”

  “In 1994, you helped him recruit a Dr. Park Kwung-ho, out of South Korea, right?”

  Jim’s face showed a rare flash of surprise. He suppressed it, but not fast enough. I caught it, and so did Olivia. She was watching me as closely as she was watching him. She had no idea where this was going.

  “Recruit . . . no.”

  “Then what?”

  “Larsen asked me to help track Park down. After he recruited him.”

  “He wanted you to track him down after Park went missing the second time. In 1996. Is that what you’re telling me?”