The Second Goodbye

by Patricia Smiley

  Ending the call, Davie sat for a few minutes processing the information. It was interesting the Pontis declared their daughter dead so soon after the Coast Guard had suspended their search. In Davie’s experience, families generally waited longer because they didn’t want to accept the loss of their loved one. Darleen Ponti had told her Sabine’s parents were upset with her over the affair and the firing, but this reaction seemed extreme.

  Davie had to speak with the widow of Sabine’s employer at the Seaglass Cafe. After a short search, she located Ms. Lacy Gillen still living in Florida in the house she had once shared with her husband, Nate. A housesitter answered the call and explained that Gillen was on vacation on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands without her cell. In the event Gillen called home, she promised to pass along Davie’s message. The sitter refused to say where she was staying and warned Davie in the politest terms not to hold her breath waiting for a return call.

  Since the widow was out of her reach at the moment, Davie used her desk phone to call the Fort Lauderdale Police Department and was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Division and a female detective named Brooks.

  “Nate Gillen’s death is classified as Vehicular Homicide,” Brooks said. “The case is still open. I was just reviewing the file a few days ago. If it helps, I can give you an overview from my notes.”

  Davie poised her pen on her notebook tablet. “That would be much appreciated.”

  She heard Brooks typing on a keyboard and then a pause. “The night Mr. Gillen died, he called for a tow, said he had car trouble. He was standing by the side of the car waiting for the truck to arrive when another vehicle hit him. The tow driver found the body. There were no skidmarks to indicate the other vehicle tried to stop. It was night and there were no witnesses, so no license plate number or descriptions. No suspects.”

  “Did you inspect the car?”

  “The only thing the mechanics found was a faulty fuel gauge. Mr. Gillen simply ran out of gas.”

  “Are you sure the gauge hadn’t been tampered with?”

  An edge crept into Brooks’s tone. “Are you suggesting we don’t know what we’re doing?”

  “Of course not,” Davie said. “I assume you interviewed Lacy Gillen.”

  “We did. She took it hard. Why are you asking these questions? You have information about the case?”

  “Maybe. Have you heard of a woman named Sabine Ponti? She worked at Gillen’s restaurant. She disappeared on a sailing trip shortly after her boss was killed.”

  “Sure, I remember her. That was a Broward County Sheriff’s Department investigation, but our two cases dovetailed so we shared information. Her disappearance caught our attention. The owner of a restaurant dies under suspicious circumstances and a few days later his employee turns up missing and presumed dead.”

  “What do you know about the search for Ms. Ponti?”

  “The marina office called the Coast Guard when she didn’t return the boat, so they were first on the scene. They did everything possible to find her, even took a specialized cadaver dog on a boat to see if it could pick up a scent from the surface of the water. The dog had a ninety-five percent success rate, but it never alerted to a body. They kept looking but eventually they shifted from rescue to recovery.”

  “I hear the near-shore water is shallow,” Davie said, remembering Grammy’s memory of her trip to Fort Lauderdale. “Did they ever find the boat?”

  “Not at first. There are three large reefs that parallel the shoreline. In some places you can swim out a hundred yards and the water’s still only fifteen feet deep. It’s a mile to the second reef line, where the water drops to fifty feet deep. Once you get to the third reef, it’s a hundred feet deep and the current can be strong but the moving water makes for better visibility. That’s why they expected to find the boat, but even from the air there was no sign of it or of any floating debris.”

  “Could the boat have floated beyond the reefs and sank in deep water?”

  “Possibly, but that’s not what happened. The vessel drifted off in the current and eventually ran aground in South Carolina and broke apart. The boat was identified by a documentation number painted on what was left of the hull. Otherwise, there was no evidence to be found. The boat was a total loss.

  Davie guessed that would explain why no one notified the insurance company that the boat had been recovered. “How did it get so far without anybody noticing?”

  “Good question. The boat had a head start because it took a while for the marina office to report Ponti missing. I’m not making excuses, but the Gulf Stream current flows north at a fast pace through the Straits of Florida. It’s a big ocean out there with lots of boats. Fort Lauderdale alone has fifty thousand registered yachts—not that they’re all out of the slip at the same time. There’s nothing to stop a ghost boat except for land or another vessel.”

  “Did you ever find a connection between Gillen’s death and Ponti’s disappearance?”

  “Nope. Between the two agencies, we questioned over seventy people, including Ponti’s coworkers and Gillen’s friends and known associates.”

  “I heard a rumor that Gillen and Ponti were having an affair. Can you confirm that?”

  “A waitress named Karen Nord floated that theory in my interview with her, but there was no corroborating evidence—in fact, just the opposite. A cook leaving the restaurant after his shift told me he saw Gillen and Nord making out in his car in the parking lot. And Nord may not have been the only employee he was screwing. Almost everyone who worked there described Gillen as a horndog who went after pretty women, including Ms. Ponti. A couple of people said her attempts to avoid him made them uncomfortable.”

  “And yet nobody reported him.”

  “People need to keep their jobs.”

  “Did you find any witnesses who saw Ms. Ponti’s boat leave the marina?”

  “We found a dockworker who claimed he saw her with a man the day she disappeared, but his description of the guy was hazy. We thought it might have been the boat owner, but Blasdel denied it and the witness couldn’t identify him from a photo lineup. Later, we found out the witness had several citations for disorderly intoxication and driving while under the influence. That neutralized him as a witness. After all was said and done, we found no clear connection.”

  “What can you tell me about the restaurant?”

  “Several employees told me Gillen was having financial problems until he consulted a business advisor. That helped for a while, but I guess it wasn’t enough. After he died, his widow closed the place.”

  “Who was the business advisor?”

  “Lacy Gillen had no idea. Seemed weird her husband hadn’t told her, and we found no records of the consultations. So what do you know about the case?”

  Davie told Brooks that Sabine had survived the boating accident. She had moved to Los Angeles and resurfaced as Sara Montaine, only to die in a gunstore a year later.

  Brooks whistled. “Well, that’s interesting.”

  Davie tapped her pen on the desk. “Can you email me a copy of your report and maybe the witness statements so I can compare notes?”

  Brooks hesitated. “I’ll ask my boss. I don’t anticipate a problem as long as you send information our way, too.”

  Davie felt relieved. “I found a photo in Ponti’s property. If I email it to you, can you tell me if you recognize anybody?”

  “Can you send it now?”

  Davie emailed the scanned photo and waited on the phone for Brooks to respond. It only took a few moments.

  “The man in the Hawaiian shirt is Nate Gillen,” she said. “The other two men I don’t recognize, but I can run the photo through our facial recognition technology to see if either of them is in our driver’s license database.”

  All law enforcement agencies in L.A. County, including the LAPD, had access to FRT
and wireless video cameras that did real-time face recognition. Since one of the men in the photo had been murdered and that murder might be linked to Sabine Ponti’s death, Davie had a responsibility to identify the other two men. The picture was taken in Florida, so she took Brooks up on her offer.

  But Davie adhered to the belt-and-suspenders philosophy of law enforcement, so as soon as she ended the call with Detective Brooks, she arranged for the photo to be analyzed by LAPD facial recognition analysts as well.

  30

  Davie had just cradled the phone when she noticed the blinking message light. She punched in her code and listened to a voicemail from Reggie Banker in the Gang Unit. She walked upstairs and found him checking a Cal-Gangs profile on his computer.

  “Got your call,” she said. “What’s up?”

  Banker glanced up from the screen. “I might have a lead on the whereabouts of Alma Velez. Thought you’d want to know. I got a tip last night about a drug dealer I’ve been tracking—street name Loco. My snitch tells me when Loco isn’t selling drugs in Venice he crashes at his cousin’s house in Inglewood. Loco hangs with Velez. He might know where she’s staying. A few of us are going to the boardwalk tomorrow afternoon to make a buy. You ever work undercover?”

  “I’ve bent the rules in a few interrogations. Does that count?”

  He chuckled. “In that case, I won’t ask you to come along. Too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous for me or for you?”

  “You’re all kind of dangerous, Davie. For one thing you look too much like—”

  Davie held up her hand to stop him. “If you say Raggedy Ann, Howdy Doody, a fire hydrant, or a member of the Irish Mafia, our friendship is over.”

  He tilted back his head and laughed. “You know me better than that, but I don’t see you passing as a gangsta queen.”

  Davie put her hands on her hips so he wouldn’t miss the point. “I can look ‘street’ if that’s your worry.”

  “That would be something to see. You’ll need a couple of tats and a hoochie-mama dress.”

  She didn’t have anything in her closet that qualified, but there was a thrift store on Venice Boulevard. She’d carve out some time to drop by and look through the gang-queen couture. There must be a few pieces that would suit her purpose. Of course, she’d have to sterilize them before they touched her body.

  She gave him the thumbs-up sign. “I can manage that.”

  Davie returned to her desk and opened the Hernandez Murder Book to Section 14, the witness statements. Everybody in the Palms apartment building where Javi Hernandez had lived and died had been interviewed. At the time, all claimed they hadn’t seen anything. Davie intended to interview all of them again. First, she needed to find out how many of those tenants still lived in the building. After two years, somebody might have had a crisis of conscience and be willing to talk.

  The place was under new ownership. Over the phone, the current manager told her the rent had been raised after the building underwent a major upgrade. A lot of the old-timers had moved out. Davie read the list of occupants from the time of the murder while the manager gave her the dates they’d moved and a forwarding address, if the tenant had left one. Her interest spiked when he got to Emma Wainford, who had moved out the day after the murder.

  “Do you have Wainford’s address?” Davie asked.

  “Nope. She didn’t give notice, so she forfeited her first and last month’s rent and the security deposit. Didn’t even take all her stuff, just her cat.”

  “What did you do with her possessions?”

  “We paid a service to haul everything to the dump.”

  After Davie ended the call, she searched through the witness statements for the interview with Wainford. It wasn’t there. There was a printout of her driver’s license photo and a criminal records search, showing she had no arrests. The detective’s notes stated he’d found her at her parents’ home in Oregon but was told her doctor had left instructions that the young woman was “too traumatized to speak to anyone.” It didn’t appear there had been any further follow up. That was about to change.

  31

  Before Davie had a chance to search for Emma Wainford, she saw Giordano walk into the squad room carrying several sheets of paper clenched in his fist.

  “My sis came through,” he said, grinning. “I hope you can decipher this. Doesn’t mean shit to me.” He handed her the documents and headed for his desk. “Let me know when you figure it out.”

  “Thank her for me.”

  “Already did.”

  Davie placed the Hernandez Murder Book back on the shelf above her desk between the 187 bookends. She fanned the doodle pages across the desktop. Giordano’s sister had done a good job. There were two sets of documents—a simple translation of the doodles and another with the numbers organized into a pro forma monthly cash flow statement, four pages in total. The top of each page read receipts, which included cash sales and loans. The bottom was reserved for disbursements. Each page represented a month of income and expenses for the Seaglass Cafe, Nate Gillen’s Florida restaurant. The increase in sales over the four months before Gillen’s death was dramatic.

  Davie used the calculator on her cell to work the numbers. In November, Seaglass’s sales averaged around $1,200 per day for a monthly total of $36,000 for the month. Over the next four months, the gross receipts doubled every day until the income reached a plateau of $9,600 per day, over a quarter million dollars for the last month recorded in Sabine’s doodles.

  Under disbursements was a list of payments to various vendors, including liquor and food suppliers, linen service, and personnel. Davie had never run a restaurant, but the costs seemed normal until she came to several exorbitant expenditures for advertising and public relations to companies called Advantage, Hydra, and Pomme. All of them had LLCs after their names, which she’d learned from a previous case stood for limited liability company. Some payments didn’t reference invoice numbers or even services rendered. It was possible those exorbitant payments were legitimate expenses. Overcharging wasn’t a crime as far as she knew, but she was suspicious.

  Davie searched online for the companies but found no websites identifying who they were or what they did. She knew from that previous case that an LLC’s ownership was hidden from the public. That wasn’t illegal, but many of those organizations had little or no physical presence except for a post office box. Some were shell companies used for tax evasion or other illicit transactions.

  On the final sheet was a list of banks, some in Florida, but many outside the US, including Panama, the Cayman Islands, and one account in the British Virgin Islands. Davie didn’t need to be a forensic accountant to peg those places as safe havens where rich people parked their money to avoid government scrutiny. Next to each bank was a list of dates and wire transfers for large amounts of money. She knew there was a way to search for the history of wire transfers, but she didn’t know how.

  Gillen’s windfall profits at the Seaglass Cafe looked too good to be true. Boyd Ponti had told Davie his sister suspected something shady was going on at the restaurant and wanted to check it out, but how did she get access to its financial records and why hadn’t she photocopied the actual documents or at least taken shots with her cell camera?

  Written at the bottom of the final sheet was a ten-digit number with a question mark behind it. A short search confirmed it was the telephone number of the Miami, Florida, field office of the FBI.

  If Sabine had discovered evidence of a crime at the restaurant, the question mark might indicate she was planning to blow the whistle. Before doing that, she may have conveyed her fears to somebody she shouldn’t have trusted. When her boss ended up dead, she had reason to believe she was next. She staged her death with the help of Jack Blasdel and resurfaced in Los Angeles as cat-loving Sara Montaine. A year later somebody silenced her permanently. The question was, how did they find her?


  One of the offshore accounts listed in the doodles was in the British Virgin Islands. Lacy Gillen was at this moment somewhere in Tortola. Davie wondered if she was visiting her money.

  Davie left a message for an FBI special agent she knew, asking if the bureau had been investigating Nate Gillen. After that, she tapped another number on her cell display and waited.

  “Homicide Special, Detective Striker speaking. How can I help you?”

  “You can tell me everything you know about money laundering.”

  32

  Striker was due in a meeting but promised to call her as soon as he was free. Until then, she would search for Lacy Gillen, because the wife might be the connection between her husband’s death and Sabine’s disappearance.

  Davie had never been to Tortola and had no idea where Lacy Gillen might be staying, but she’d searched for obscure information before, so she found an online list of resorts on the island, created a pretext, and began calling each of them. It took over an hour, but she finally found Gillen booked at the Apple Bay Resort & Spa, not far from the Beef Island airport. Davie asked to speak to her but was told Gillen did not wish to be disturbed during her stay.

  Frustrated, she turned her attention back to the Hernandez case. Emma Wainford had moved out of the apartment the day after the murder without giving notice. The young woman had left behind food, personal items, and a boatload of forfeited money. Her parents and an attending physician claimed she was traumatized. Not surprising; her neighbor had been stabbed fifteen times and left to die. Davie had to speak with her.

  Emma Wainford had no criminal record, so she searched through a non–law enforcement database and found the woman living in North University Park, a historic neighborhood near the University of Southern California in Southwest Division.

  Vaughn was out in the field investigating the anonymous tip he’d received. Normally she would have asked one of the other detectives to go with her to the interview, but everybody was busy working their own cases. She felt no threat from Emma Wainford and decided to go alone.