The Murder Book

by Jonathan Kellerman

  "Well, good for you."

  Silence. "Let me tell Robin you're on the phone."

  "Gee, thanks," I said, but he'd put down the receiver, and I was talking to dead air.

  She came on the line a few moments later. "Alex?"

  "Hi," I said.

  "What's wrong?"

  "With what?"

  "Sheridan said you sounded upset."

  "Sheridan would know," I said. "Being a sensitive guy and all that."

  Silence. "What's going on, Alex?"

  "Nothing."

  "It's not nothing," she said. "Every time I call you're more . . ."

  "Insensitive?" I said. "As opposed to you-know-who?"

  Longer silence. "You can't be serious."

  "About what?"

  "About him." She laughed.

  "Glad to amuse you."

  "Alex," she said, "if you only knew— I can't believe this. What's gotten into you?"

  "Tough times bring out the best in me."

  "Why in the world would you even think that?" She laughed again, and that was probably what set me off.

  "The guy shows up with a damned dog biscuit," I said. "Let me tell you, hon, men are pigs. Altruism like that always comes with strings—"

  "You are being totally ridiculous—"

  "Am I? Each time I call your room, he's right there—"

  "Alex, this is absurd!"

  "Okay, then. Sorry." But there was nothing remorseful in my tone, and she knew it.

  "What's gotten into you, Alex?"

  I thought about that. Then a rush of anger clogged my throat, and out it came: "I suppose I can be forgiven a bit of absurdity. The last time you left me didn't turn out so great."

  Silence.

  "Oh . . . Alex." Her voice broke on my name.

  My jaw locked.

  She said, "I can't do this."

  Then she hung up.

  I sat there, perversely satisfied, with a dead brain and a mouth full of bile. Then that sinking feeling set in: Idiot idiot! I redialed her room. No answer. Tried the hotel operator again, was informed that Ms. Castagna had gone out.

  I pictured her running through the lobby, tear-streaked. What was the weather in Vancouver? Had she remembered her coat? Had Sheridan followed, ever ready with consolation?

  "Sir?" said the operator. "Would you like her voice mail?"

  "Uh . . . sure, why not."

  I was connected, listened to Robin's voice deliver a canned message. Waited for the beep.

  Chose my words carefully, but ended up choking and letting the phone drop from my hand.

  I moved to my office, drew the drapes, sat in gray-brown darkness, listened to the throbbing in my head.

  A fine fix you've gotten yourself into, Alexander . . . the hell of it was Bert Harrison had warned me.

  Bert was a wise man, why hadn't I listened?

  What to do . . . send flowers? No, that would insult Robin's intelligence, make matters worse.

  Two tickets to Paris . . .

  It took a long time before I was able to shove my feelings somewhere south of my ankles, turn suitably numb.

  I stared at the wall, visualized myself as a speck of dirt, worked hard at disappearing.

  I booted up the computer and downloaded Google, because that search engine could locate a hamburger joint on Pluto.

  "Walter Obey" pulled up three hundred and some-odd hits, 90 percent of them pertaining to the billionaire, with a quarter of those repetitive. Most were newspaper and business journal articles, about evenly divided between coverage of Obey's philanthropic activities and his financial dealings.

  Walter and Barbara Obey had contributed to the Philharmonic, the Music Center, Planned Parenthood, the Santa Monica Mountains Convervancy, the Humane Society, shelters for homeless youth, a slew of foundations raging battle against tragic diseases. The Sierra Club, too, which I found interesting for a developer.

  I came up with no connection to organized sports nor to any link between any of the aborted plans to bring sports teams to L.A. In none of the articles was Obey's name mentioned alongside those of the Cossack brothers or the Larners. He and his wife socialized very little and lived an understated life— for billionaires. A single, albeit baronial, residence in Hancock Park, no live-in help, off-the-rack clothing, no expensive hobbies. Barbara drove a Volvo and volunteered at her church. If the press could be believed, both Obeys were as wholesome as milk.

  One item, a year-old Wall Street Journal piece, did catch my eye: One of Obey's development companies, a privately held corporation named Advent Builders, had invested in a huge parcel of land south of the L.A. city limits— an unincorporated county area where the developer planned to build an entire community, complete with ethnically diverse, low-to-middle-income housing, public schools, well-landscaped commercial districts and industrial parks, "comprehensive recreational facilities."

  Obey had taken ten years to accumulate fifteen thousand acres of contiguous lots and had spent millions to rid the earth of toxic waste left behind by a long-defunct county power depot. Unlike other empire-builders, he'd considered the environmental impact of his projects from the beginning, was out to crown his career with something culturally significant.

  The new city was to be named Esperanza— Spanish for "hope."

  I combined "Esperanza" with each of the Cossack brothers' names and the Larners but came up with nothing. Tossing John G. Broussard into the mix proved no more fruitful. I tried "Advent Properties" and "Advent." Still nothing on the Cossacks and the Larners, but a back-page construction journal article informed me that L.A.'s police chief had been hired as a security consultant to the Esperanza project. Broussard, hamstrung by city regulations, was working for free, but private shares in Advent had been gifted to the chief's wife and his only child, daughter, Joelle, a corporate attorney with a white-shoe downtown firm.

  Broussard hadn't shown up at the private dinner but Milo's hunch was right on: The chief's hand was in everything.

  The bitter aftertaste of my bad behavior with Robin kept rising like vomitus as I worked hard at concentrating on Obey and Broussard and the others and wondering what it could possibly mean.

  "Comprehensive recreational facilities," could mean playgrounds for kids, or it was a buzzword for bringing pro football back to the L.A. environs.

  Billionaire with a big dream— I could see that being the crowning glory of Obey's long career. And it made good sense to place the top cop on your masthead.

  But if the PR about Obey's righteous mien and the size of his personal fortune was accurate, why would he waste time with the Cossacks, who alienated their neighbors and couldn't seem to get any projects off the ground? And in the case of the Larners, the association would be even more hazardous— they were outright hustlers tainted by the Playa del Sol debacle.

  Unless Obey's balance sheets weren't as glowing as the press believed, and he needed financial backup for his dream. Even billionaires could lose sight of assets and debits, and Obey had spent a decade buying up land and financing and detoxifying his holdings without a single spadeful of Esperanza dirt dug.

  Big dreams often meant cataclysmic problems.

  I switched to several financial databases and probed for thorns in Obey's numerous gardens. At least seven separate corporations were listed under his leadership, including Advent. But only one outfit was publicly traded, a commercial leasing company named BWO Financing.

  BWO. Probably stood for Barbara and Walt Obey. Homey. From everything I could tell, the company was doing great, with common stock trading at 95 percent of its high, preferred units paying consistent dividends, and solid ratings from Standard & Poor.

  Still, Wall Street's top analysts had been known to be caught with their pin-striped trousers around their ankles, because, at root, they were dependent upon what companies told them. And because their interests lay in selling stock.

  Was Obey's empire teetering and had he sought out the Cossacks and the Larners for support? Did
the Cossacks and the Larners have enough to offer Obey?

  Bacilla and Horne's involvement was puzzling. Obey's planned city was located outside city limits, so what use could a pair of councilmen be?

  Unless plans had changed and the focus had shifted back to downtown.

  Nothing really sat right. Then I thought of the cement that held it all together:

  John G. Broussard's aid in covering up the Ingalls murder implied he'd had connections to the Cossacks and maybe the Larners. Walt Obey was one of the chief's major patrons. Maybe Broussard had put them all together, earned himself a big fat finder's fee in addition to the private stock assigned to his wife and daughter.

  Had the chief concealed a substantial lump sum payment from public scrutiny? With Obey's multiple corporations as shield, concealing cash would've been easy enough.

  Payoff. Payback. For all his power and status, John G. Broussard remained a civil servant whose salary and pension by themselves would relegate him to upper-middle-class status, at best. Playing with the big boys could mean so much more.

  I imagined the deal: Walt Obey salvaging his dream, the Cossacks and the Larners offered a big-time social and economic leap upward, from strip malls and parking lots to the grandest of monuments.

  For Chief Broussard and the councilmen, good old cash.

  So much at stake.

  And now Milo had the opportunity to blow it all to smithereens.

  CHAPTER 27

  "Interesting theory," said Milo. "I was wondering along the same lines, except that night Obey's body language was more grantor than grantee. Bacilla and Horne were kissing up to him big-time."

  I said, "Bacilla and Horne would be supplicants any way you look at it because their political life depends on fat cats. And Obey's been alpha-dog with politicians for a long time. But you never had a chance to watch him interact with the Cossacks."

  "No," he admitted.

  We were at his kitchen table. I'd spent a miserable hour mulling how to mend things with Robin, had made another attempt to reach her at the hotel. Out. When I reached Milo he was on the way home from the Hall of Records with a briefcase full of photocopies. He'd combed through the property tax files and found fourteen fleabag hotels operating near Skid Row twenty years ago, but no ownership by the Cossacks or any of the other players.

  "So much for that." I scanned the tax roster he'd spread out between us. Then a name jumped out at me. A trio of Central Avenue hotels— the Excelsior, the Grande Royale, the Crossley— owned by Vance Coury and Associates.

  "A kid by the name of Coury hung out with the Cossacks and Brad Larner back in high school," I said. "They all belonged to some club called the King's Men."

  "Coury," he said. "Never heard of him."

  He brought his laptop over from the laundry room office. A search yielded three hits on two men named Vance Coury. An eleven-year-old Times piece described a Vance Coury, sixty-one, of Westwood, as having been brought up by the city attorney on slumlord charges. Coury was described as "the owner of several buildings in the downtown and Westlake districts who had failed repeatedly to correct numerous building and safety violations." One year prior to his indictment, Coury had been convicted of similar charges and sentenced, by a creative judge, to live in one of his own buildings for two weeks. He'd rehabbed a single unit in two days and set up housekeeping under protection by an armed guard. But Coury's empathy quotient hadn't risen a notch: He'd done nothing to improve his tenants' living conditions, and the judge lost patience. A follow-up article three weeks later reported that Coury had avoided a felony trial by collapsing in his attorney's office and dying of a stroke. An accompanying headshot showed a rail-thin, silver-haired, silver-bearded man with the defiant/frightened eyes of one scrambling to remember his latest tall tale.

  Vance Coury, Jr. appeared in a two-year-old Sunday Daily News item, having contributed the custom paint job to the winning entry in a California hot rod contest. Coury, forty-two, owned an auto body shop in Van Nuys specializing in "ground-up restoration of classic and specialty vehicles," and his outfit had sprayed forty-five coats on a chopped and blown 1938 Dodge Roadster known as the Purple People Eater.

  "Another father and son duo," said Milo.

  "Father owns the hotel, son makes use of the premises," I said. "And son was a pal of the Cossacks. Meaning he might very well have been at that party. Which turns the prism a whole new way. What if it went down this way: Janie separated from Melinda and tagged along with Burns and Caroline. Burns gave her some dope, introduced her to some of his rich-kid pals. All of a sudden, Janie finds herself face-to-face with Vance Coury, the Prince Charming who tied her up and raped her and dumped her in an alley like garbage. She freaks out, there's an altercation, and Coury, maybe with a little help from his friends, spirits Janie away before she can cause a scene. They subdue her and bring her somewhere secluded, and Coury thinks, hmm, why not take advantage of the situation? We know he's into bondage, and what would be more arousing than helplessness? He does his thing, and this time the others join in. It gets out of hand, goes really bad. Now they need to dump the body. Because of his father's properties, Coury's familiar with downtown, and he picks a spot he knows is quiet and relatively deserted late at night: the Beaudry on-ramp. He takes a buddy or two along, which would explain taking the risk of leaving Janie out in the open. With one person as lookout and to help with the body, the danger would've been minimized."

  Milo stared at the tax roster and placed his finger on Coury's name. "Boys being boys. The Cossack brothers themselves, not just Caroline."

  "Them, Coury, Brad Larner, maybe the other members of the King's Men— I think their names were Chapman and Hansen."

  "A high school club."

  "A party club," I said. "Noted for liquid refreshment, high jinks and other good fun. Janie's murder took place a few years after graduation, but that doesn't mean the fun stopped."

  "So where do Caroline and Burns fit into a gang-bang killing?"

  "Both had reason to dislike Janie. So they could've participated. The fact that Caroline was stashed at Achievement House indicates her involvement. So does Burns's disappearance. A gang-bang killing also meshes with the absence of a sequel. It took the right combination to turn things bad: dope, a defiant victim, and the ultimate adolescent drug— group conformity."

  "Adolescent?" he said. "All the males were in their twenties."

  "Arrested development."

  "Funny you should say that. When I saw the Cossacks' current house, that's exactly what went through my mind."

  He described the eyesore mansion, the cars, the history of neighbor complaints.

  "It also matches something else you said early on," he added. "Women tend to be affiliative. Caroline wouldn't have had the drive or the strength to slice Janie up by herself, but once Janie was incapacitated, a few cuts and burns would've been easy enough."

  "But Caroline's involvement— and Willie Burns's— created a new level of risk for the boys: two weak links who couldn't be counted on to keep their mouths shut. Caroline because of her mental instability and Burns because he was a junkie with a tendency to flap his gums. What if Burns found himself in a desperate situation— poor cash flow and a strong heroin jones? What if he tried to scratch up some money by blackmailing the others? To a street guy like Burns, a bunch of rich white boys with a very nasty secret would've seemed perfect marks. That would explain Michael Larner's rage at Burns's disappearance. Burns had made himself a very viable threat to Larner's son, and now he was gone. Burns blackmailing would also explain his skipping on Boris Nemerov, even though he'd always been dependable before. Given all that, his paranoid rant about people being after him when he phoned Boris Nemerov makes perfect sense. Burns wasn't worried about going to jail. He'd been part of a brutal murder and had gotten on the wrong side of his coparticipants."

  Milo flipped his notepad open. "Chapman and Hansen. Any first names?"

  "All I read in the yearbook were initials, and I don't r
emember them."

  "High school," he said. "Oh, the glory days."

  "They were Garvey Cossack's glory days. He lied about being class treasurer."

  "Preparing for a career in finance . . . okay, let's go have a look at that yearbook."

  Within moments of our arrival, we'd filled out details on the other King's Men.

  At eighteen, Vance Coury, Jr. had been a good-looking, dark-haired boy with heavy, black eyebrows, a curled-lip smile that bordered on sneer, and a piercing stare. A certain type of girl would've thought him hot.

  "Teenage lothario," I said. Just as Janie described. "Despite what Melinda said, she wasn't always fantasizing. Ten to one his dad owned a Jag twenty years ago."