by Ben Rehder
I could tell that Armbruster was contemplating the offer. He wasn’t wasting time with denials anymore.
Mia said, “He’ll keep trying to kill you. Despite what you’re thinking, he is obviously intent on it, and he thinks if it looks like an accident, he’ll get away with it. He almost succeeded last time, didn’t he? That’s why you’re here. You’re lucky you’re alive. You’re not going to be safe until he’s in jail.”
We gave him a moment to think about it.
“I could just tell him I won’t be bothering him anymore,” Armbruster said.
Finally. He was ready to spill.
“Meaning you won’t extort any more money from him?” Mia asked.
“Right. Yeah.”
“That won’t be enough,” I said. “You know something incriminating about him, and he’ll always worry about that. Hell, he’s sent men with guns after me twice simply because he thinks we’ll figure it out. He’s worried about what we’ll dig up. I need to know what you know, and then we—Mia and me—can take him down.”
He let out a long sigh.
“You don’t even need to be involved after this,” Mia said. “But if you don’t come clean, you’re going to be in danger as long as he’s free, and it won’t be long before the cops come around asking about Brandi Sloan.”
“Damn it,” Armbruster said. “This sucks.”
We waited. Then he broke.
“What do you want to know?” he said.
“Just start at the beginning,” Mia said.
“Okay. Shit. Whatever. The thing is, I had no idea who Joe Jankowski was until I stole a bunch of shit from his car.”
“When was this and what did you steal?”
“Couple of months ago,” he said. “His SUV was unlocked, sitting there in his driveway. What kind of retard—I mean idiot—leaves his vehicle unlocked?”
“What did you get?” I asked.
“A GPS unit. A dash cam. An iPad. And his wallet was in there. What a moron. I took the cash and left the rest. I’m not into using hot credit cards, because that’s a good way to get busted. Oh, he had a gun in the glove compartment, so I took that, too.”
That made me think of Armbruster’s former neighbor, Claudia Klein, who suspected that Lennox had burglarized her duplex and stolen a gun. She was obviously right, and it made me wonder how that gun ended up with Damon Tate, but that part of the story would have to wait.
Mia said, “Okay, but how did you end up blackmailing him? Did you find something in the SUV?”
“It was the dash cam,” he said. “I thought I might keep it instead of selling it, so I was fooling around with it, seeing how it works and all that. It had video files on there from being in Jankowski’s car.”
“And you saw something on one of those files?” I asked.
“It wasn’t what I saw. It was what I heard.”
Damn. I’d been so focused on what might’ve been recorded on video, I’d never considered audio.
“What did you hear?” I asked.
“You should close the door,” he said.
I did what he asked.
Then he quietly said, “The sound wasn’t real great—lots of road noise—but Jankowski was talking to somebody on the phone about a body.”
Now my adrenaline was really pumping. It took effort to keep my voice calm and quiet. I’d learned it was better if you didn’t let a guy like Lennox Armbruster understand that he was providing enormously valuable information.
“Who was he talking to?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear the other person.”
“He never said a name?”
“Not that I could hear.”
Later, when the time came, the cops would be able to figure out the date and time of the phone call, then review Jankowski’s phone records to determine who he’d been talking to.
“So what did he say about a body?” I asked. “What did he say exactly?”
“I can remember it mostly word for word, because the call didn’t last long. He answered, then he said, ‘I’ve been wondering if you need to move the body, or whatever’s left of it.’ Then there was a pause, and he said, ‘You sure about that?’ Then he said, ‘How deep?’ And that was pretty much it.”
How deep? How deep was it buried? How deep was the water? Could mean either one.
“Did he say whose body it was?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“And what came next?” Mia asked.
Armbruster said, “He hung up and said, ‘That guy is almost fucking worthless.’
“Talking to himself?”
“No, to Brandi Sloan.”
“What? On the phone?”
“No, she was in the SUV with him.”
25
I was momentarily speechless. I had not expected that answer, because I had never considered that scenario—that Brandi Sloan was working with Joe Jankowski, not with Armbruster.
I eventually said, “How did she reply? How did you know it was her?”
“Well, at that point, I didn’t know who it was, but she said, ‘Do you think you can trust him in the long term?’”
The subtext in that question was chilling. Do you think you’ll have to kill him, too?
“What did he say?” Mia asked.
“They stopped at a light right next to a loud motorcycle and I couldn’t understand what they were saying for about two minutes. When they pulled away, they weren’t talking anymore.”
“They didn’t say anything else relevant?” I asked.
“Nope, although she did call him ‘baby’ at one point, so it’s obvious what’s going on there.”
How had I missed this?
“Did you review every file on the camera?” I asked.
I could see on the bedside monitor that Armbruster’s heart rate and blood pressure had gone up. I’m sure mine had, too.
He said, “Yep. There wasn’t anything else good. That was it—the part about the body. I did some poking around online and found out that one of his employees had gone missing, and that dude had been trying to pull a workers’ comp scam, and Jankowski got real upset about it, so I figured it was probably that guy they were talking about.”
Mia and I had questions, of course. Many questions. And he answered them all. Mia and I learned that our theory was basically spot on, and we were also able to fill in the blank spots.
“How did you go about blackmailing Jankowski? How did you contact him?” Mia asked.
As we’d guessed, Armbruster had bought a burner phone and called JMJ Construction. Brandi answered. He recognized her voice and realized she was the woman in the SUV with Jankowski. She wanted to know what Armbruster was calling about, so he said he had something that used to belong to Jankowski and wanted to give it back. It went from there.
Armbruster told Jankowski what he’d heard on the dash cam and asked for $20,000 in cash to keep quiet, promising it would be a one-time payment. He was lying and I’m sure Jankowski knew that. Jankowski gave him the $20,000, then more cash in smaller increments, because what choice did he have? Armbruster specified several different drop spots, with the last one being the golf course.
Armbruster didn’t realize that Jankowski was cooperating only until he could figure out a way to identify the blackmailer. He—Armbruster—hadn’t taken as many precautions as he should have to conceal his identity. Jankowski, or one of his minions, had apparently staked out one of the drop points and then followed Armbruster home. An amateur mistake on Armbruster’s part. The kind of mistake a first-time blackmailer makes.
“Do you know if Brandi Sloan knew what you were doing?” Mia asked.
“At first, no, I don’t think so, but then, on later calls, I could tell from her voice that sh
e wasn’t happy to hear from me. Either she knew what was going on or Jankowski told her I was a deadbeat client or something. Who knows?”
“You never got Jankowski’s cell phone number to call him directly?”
“I didn’t ask and he didn’t give it. I figured why make things complicated?”
I wanted him to explain why he’d gone over to Brandi Sloan’s house that night, but all in good time. One thing at a time.
“Tell us what happened on the night Jankowski hit you with his SUV,” I said.
Armbruster said he had parked at Randall’s and was immediately approached by Jankowski, and now it was clear that Armbruster had been identified.
“It probably shoulda freaked me out a little more than it did,” Armbruster said, “because this was a guy who’d already killed one dude, apparently. But I’d been drinking vodka that night and was feeling kinda ballsy. He told me this was gonna be the last payment or I was gonna regret it, and I said like hell it was. I was thinking, like, what’s he gonna do right here in the parking lot of a grocery store? He made some vague threats, like how he could make me disappear, too, and then he left.”
Armbruster thought that was the end of it—until a few minutes later, when he began to cross the street and suddenly Jankowski’s vehicle was bearing down on him.
“That’s when I knew the dude was serious,” Armbruster said without any hint of irony. “And then it got even worse when I got out of the hospital and went back to my apartment.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“They had broken in and took a bunch of my shit. That included the dash cam and my laptop. I guess they figured I would’ve downloaded the file from the dash cam to my laptop, which was right.”
I said, “Please…tell me you had it backed up on something else.”
Before I was even done talking, Armbruster was shaking his head slightly, neck brace and all, and then cringing from the pain.
“Oh, jeez,” I said.
“I didn’t expect to get ripped off, you know?” Armbruster said.
“How stupid do you have to—”
“How was I supposed to know that would happen?”
“You could’ve just emailed the file to yourself,” I said, the exasperation plain in my voice. “Or put it on a flash drive. Then you would’ve had a—”
“Too late now, bro,” he said.
It was incredibly stupid on his part, but shouldn’t I have expected that? Obviously, Jankowski had taken the gamble that Lennox hadn’t backed up the file, and that gamble had paid off.
“When did they break in?” Mia asked. Being pragmatic. Wanting to learn everything we could learn.
“Sometime while I was in the hospital. I don’t know for sure, because technically they didn’t break in. They must’ve picked the lock, because they didn’t kick the door in or break a window or anything like that.”
“Or you left the door unlocked,” I said.
Armbruster glared at me. “Whatever. There was no sign of them being there, except for the shit that was missing.”
“How about the gun you took from Jankowski’s SUV?” I asked. “Did the burglar get that, too?”
“Yeah.”
“And what about the gun you stole from Claudia Klein?” I asked.
“Who’s that?”
“Your old neighbor in the duplex off South Lamar,” I said.
He appeared puzzled for half a second, then grinned with guilt when he realized who I was talking about. “I’d forgotten about her. Y’all are pretty thorough.”
“Remember when I said Jankowski tried to kill me, too? The man he sent was carrying her gun, a forty-caliber Ruger. When I talked to her, she said she figured you were the one who stole it.”
“Well, that wasn’t very nice of her.”
“But she was right,” I said.
“Yeah, but she didn’t know that for sure.”
I glanced at Mia, and her amused eyes said, Why bother?
“Back to the question,” I said. “Did the burglar take that Ruger, too?”
“Yeah.”
Now I knew how Damon Tate had ended up with it.
“I’m assuming you didn’t report the burglary,” I said.
“Hell, no. I don’t want the cops in my life if I can avoid it. And what would I tell them—that a bunch of stuff I’d stolen had been stolen?”
“So what happened the next time you tried to get money from Jankowski?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t take my calls at first. Finally I pestered him enough and he talked to me, and I said I was about to send the video clip to the cops. Then he agreed to pay me.”
“How much in total did you get?” I asked.
“None of your business,” he said.
That left just one question.
“What were you doing at Brandi Sloan’s house that night?” I asked.
“Well, when Jankowski finally refused to pay me any more, I decided I’d work on her a little. Tell her I’d testify against her if it came to it. Try to scare her.”
“Scare her into what?” Mia asked.
“Coming up with some cash,” he said.
“You were trying to milk some cash out of a receptionist?” I asked. What a total sleaze.
“Yeah, but she has a nice house, so I figured she has some money. And even if she didn’t, I figured she’d turn around and put the squeeze on Jankowski, considering that they’re sleeping together. She’d get the money from him.”
“Did you contact her first or just go over there unannounced?” Mia asked.
“I just showed up,” Armbruster said.
“And what did you tell her?”
“I said I had audio of her and Jankowski talking about a dead body, and man, I could tell he hadn’t said a word about it to her. She turned totally white, like a damn ghost. But she denied everything, and she told me to get the hell out. I kept pushing her, and then she got up and went into another room, so I hauled ass. I figured she might be coming back with a gun or calling the cops or something. She could say I forced my way in or that I threatened her or whatever. I bailed before she came back.”
His heart rate had climbed even higher—now at 122 beats per minute—as he recounted his experience that evening.
“Did you talk to her anytime after that?” Mia asked.
“No. Why would I? It was a dumb idea to begin with. If I hadn’t gone over there that night, I probably wouldn’t be lying here right now. But I kept pushing, so Jankowski pushed back. She must’ve told him I’d been over there.”
That explained why she’d gone missing two days later. The visit from Lennox freaked her out and she decided to take off.
“Did you get a good look at the men in the truck on MoPac?” Mia asked.
“The passenger, kinda, but it wasn’t anybody I’d seen before. He was wearing sunglasses and needed a shave.”
“Ever hear the name Damon Tate?” I asked.
“No.”
“How about Nathaniel Tate?”
“No. Who are these people?”
I said, “Damon Tate works for Joe Jankowski. He came after me with Claudia Klein’s gun on my porch last week and tried to make me leave with him. I think he was planning an intimate trip for two to Barbados, but I could be wrong.”
“Roy opted to knock one of his teeth out and take the gun away from him,” Mia said.
“Which is how the cops knew where it came from,” I said. “But I didn’t know until now how Damon Tate got ahold of it.”
“Then there’s Nathaniel Tate, Damon’s brother,” Mia said. “He showed up at the house, too, and tried to shoot Roy through a bedroom window. Roy shot him with a twelve gauge.”
“Fuck,” Armbruster said, looking at me
with new respect.
“He’s clinging to life in this very hospital right now,” Mia said. “Which brings up a question: Whose side do you want to be on? Ours or theirs? The people who walk away unscathed or the people who wind up in the hospital?”
“I don’t want to be on anybody’s side,” Armbruster said. “Leave me out of it. I don’t want to choose sides. I’m done.”
“Too late for that,” I said.
“I was having a pretty good day until you people showed up,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for you to leave.”
“First I’m going to tell you what you need to do now, Lennox,” I said.
“Oh, goody. Can’t wait.”
“You need to tell the police everything you’ve told us.”
“Not gonna happen. No way. Not a chance in hell.”
“Why not? You could make a deal with the prosecutor. I bet you wouldn’t serve a single—”
“Forget it,” he said loudly.
Mia said, “We have some connections, and we’d stick by your side to make sure—”
“I said no!”
The bedside monitor began to sound a beeping alarm. His face was bright red.
“What’s the problem?” I said. “So far, you haven’t done a very good job of—”
“Stop!” he said. “Just stop for a second, okay?”
I shut up. The monitor continued to beep.
Then Armbruster said, “I’ve got a nephew named Jack. Eight years old. My sister’s kid. Jankowski came in here two days ago and said Jack could disappear, too. So he can’t know I told you anything, you understand? This was between you and me and now you’ve got to leave me out of it. If you tell anybody what I said, and if something happens to Jack, so help me God, I’m not a violent guy, but I’ll come after you and—”
He went silent as the door swung open and the same nurse came into the room, saying, “Everything okay in here?”