Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  “If I let that piece of shit live, every two-bit punk in L.A. is gonna think he can walk all over me. Despite what you might have heard, I run this town—the whole town, see, not just the white neighborhoods, or the black neighborhoods—every neighborhood. Frankie knew the risk he was takin’ when he decided to pull this job without my say-so. Now, he pays the price. He dies. End of story. I can’t have nobody laughing at me because I didn’t clean up the garbage around here.”

  “Nobody will be laughing when they find those two guys in the other room,” Sam said. “And we need Frankie alive.”

  “Don’t worry about Frankie. Anytime you want to talk to him, give us a call. We’ll put him on, if he feels up to it.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Frankie’s still lying.”

  Sam had been silent as they drove back to the hotel, while he played all the scenarios over again in his mind. Something still didn’t add up. “Babe Ruth” didn’t pick Frankie at random to run the kidnapping scam. He knew about the earlier blackmail attempt. One of Frankie’s boys might have talked, but there were other possibilities.

  When Sam told Heather that Frankie was lying, she didn’t seem impressed with his deductive skills.

  “Of course he’s lying,” she said. “He figures he’s going to die by the time this is over, anyway. The sooner he tells all he knows, the sooner Mink kills him.”

  Sam glanced away from the road to look at Heather. She had brought a red three-quarter-sleeve jacket with her, and had slipped it on when they got back in the convertible for the ride back to Santa Monica. The pre-dawn air was making Sam shiver, but Heather seemed unfazed—either by the temperature or the thought of negotiating a $2,000,000 deal with mobsters. Sam wouldn’t have imagined how hard-edged she could be. Even looking at her now, there was a disconnect between the cover-girl looks and the hard-boiled—not to say cynical—analysis that was coming out of those nicely rounded lips. Sam had worked with cops who were more trusting of human nature than Heather was. The violent world they were navigating didn’t seem to daunt her, either, though she obviously hadn’t enjoyed finding two dead mobsters in a heap at Laswell’s gym.

  Somewhere along the way, Heather had learned that there wasn’t much difference between a CEO with financial leverage and a crook with a gun. Both would use whatever means they had at their disposal to get what they wanted, if they wanted it badly enough. You just had to know when they were bluffing, and when they were ready to pull the trigger.

  And then there was Frankie Navarro. What would it take to get him to give up Babe Ruth? A gun to his head hadn’t worked. Killing his three soldiers hadn’t worked. What did he want—besides his life? Obviously he’d blackmailed Miranda in the first place for money. Heather was already paying Mink to keep Frankie alive. Could she pay Frankie to talk? Probably not. Frankie would see it for the empty gesture it was. What good was money going to do him if Mink killed him?

  No, all Frankie wanted now was to live. If Sam could figure out a way to make that happen, he might get Frankie to talk.

  “How much do you think Lou would pay to cut this thing short?” Sam asked Heather. “You’ve already promised Mink two million. It might cost a lot more than that to keep Frankie alive until we find Babe Ruth. How high would Lou go before he just says ‘Screw it’ and wires the $50,000,000 to the Babe?”

  Heather had her arms folded in front of her. She didn’t immediately reply. Sam knew she was doing the cost-benefit analysis in her head. They were exiting off the freeway near their hotel when she finally spoke.

  “Lou can afford the $50,000,000, and that’s probably the most likely way to keep all of this quiet, but he’d sure as hell rather pay nothing. But if he pays off Mink for anything over $10,000,000, with Frankie Navarro still alive, what guarantee does he have that no one talks? One loose end shoots his mouth off, he’s wasted enough money to buy a starting pitcher.”

  “So you figure we’ve got, maybe, eight million more to work with?”

  “Max.”

  Sam pulled the car up to the valet stand at the hotel, and waited until a young man in a burgundy vest emerged from the lobby to take the keys. It was not quite five in the morning; the sun would not be coming up for another hour and a half. He bought a copy of the L.A. Times from a stack near the front desk and leafed through it as he and Heather rode up to their rooms.

  “Good news,” Sam said to Heather.

  “What?”

  “Sox beat the Yankees. They’re just four back. And the murders at Laswell’s gym won’t be in the paper till tomorrow.”

  ***

  Sam was desperate to get some sleep, but he checked the clock next to the bed and picked up the phone. It was past seven a.m. back in Minneapolis—not too early to call Marcus Hargrove at home.

  He heard the sleepy cop’s voice answer, “Hargrove.”

  “Marcus, it’s Sam Skarda. You didn’t return my call.”

  “Hey, man, you know what time it is?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Here’s a favor: I won’t slap you upside the head the next time I see you.”

  “Late night?”

  “What do you think?”

  “How’s the kid in the coma.”

  “He came out. Not doing too good, but looks like he’ll live.”

  “I need you to ask him about a guy named Frankie Navarro.”

  “What about him?”

  “Small-time L.A. mobster trying to make the bigs. Can you run an NCIC search on him, Marcus? I need anything you can get. I wouldn’t ask you, but there are lives at stake. And don’t let Stensrud know. He already turned me down.”

  “Hey, you know I got your back, but you gotta tell me what’s goin’ on here.”

  Sam couldn’t ask Marcus to go fishing without doing him the courtesy of telling him why, but he still had to keep the core issue a secret. He told Marcus he was working for the Red Sox, who were being shaken down by an L.A. mobster named Frankie Navarro. He suspected that it was Navarro who’d sent the Minneapolis gang-banger to whack him, but he had to find out how Navarro knew he’d been hired.

  “I know this is a lot to ask, but I’ve got two more names for you to run,” Sam said.

  “Hell, all I was gonna do today was arrest a couple of Bloods on a murder charge. That can always wait.”

  Sam ignored the sarcasm and asked Marcus to run a background check on Paul Eugene O’Brien, thirty-seven-year-old white male, born in South Boston, now a professional chauffeur in Boston. He gave Marcus O’Brien’s birth date, address, and Social Security number, and said he once worked as a truck driver and would have had a commercial driver’s license, and maybe a Teamster membership, in addition to a chauffeur’s license.

  “And get me whatever you can on a Bruce Kenwood. He was the son of Lou Kenwood, the Red Sox owner. He drowned somewhere on the West Coast a couple of years ago. See if he left a wife or a kid.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Marcus said with a sigh. “How soon you need it?”

  “Noon.”

  “You mean noon, my time?”

  Sam thought about it. Noon there would be ten in L.A. Hell, he could use more sleep, but….

  “Yeah. Call me at this number, or on my cell.”

  Sam gave him the hotel number, hung up, kicked his shoes off, and crawled under the covers of his bed without undressing.

  If Heather came knocking, looking for something to take her mind of Miranda, she could keep knocking.

  The call came at 11:30, and pulled Sam out of a sleep so deep and dreamless that he was unsure where he was. He stared at the ceiling, then looked over his shoulder at the palm trees and sandy beach outside his balcony window. Santa Monica. The Loews hotel. The phone. Marcus.

  “Yeah, Skarda,” he mumbled.

  “Got what you wanted,” Marcus said. “Ready?”

  “Hold on.”

  Sam sat up in bed and grabbed the hotel note pad and a pen from
the nightstand.

  “Okay, go.”

  Frankie Navarro came first. He was 36, born in Albuquerque, moved to L.A. fifteen years earlier after a string of arrests for small-time stuff like burglary and drug possession, now lived in West Hollywood, did a four-year stretch at the Federal Prison Camp in Lompoc, California, for drug distribution, and had been mentioned in several organized crime investigations in L.A. He was also a bit-part player in several action films, the most prominent being “Death Bus.” Marcus had an address for him in West Hollywood. Sam took it down.

  “I didn’t have his acting credits, but the rest of it checks out,” Sam said. “What about the punk who shot at us? Does he know Navarro?”

  “Nathan DeWayne Shelton denies knowing Navarro, but the way the kid reacted to the name, there’s no doubt he’s heard of him. He was surprised we knew about Frankie.”

  “Okay, what about Paul O’Brien?”

  Marcus didn’t have much of a paper trail on O’Brien, other than that he was thirty-seven, graduated from South Boston High School, now lived in Salem, Mass., had worked for the Kenwood Companies for the last ten years as a driver, was a member of the Teamsters, and had been in trouble with the law only once—arrested for gambling at an after-hours club in South Boston when he was twenty-two.

  “What did he do between high school and getting hired by Kenwood?” Sam asked.

  “Commercial driving jobs. Delivery truck, courier service, school bus—”

  “That gambling bust would keep him from driving a school bus now, wouldn’t it?”

  “Depends on the school district, I suppose. It wasn’t like he was making book. It was just misdemeanor sports betting.”

  Even so, Sam didn’t like the sound of it. He was investigating a sports betting case, and guess what pops up in Paul O’Brien’s background check? The primary cash crop of the Boston Mob was gambling. On the other hand, O’Brien had a good job and hadn’t been in trouble for a long time. Most wiseguys weren’t employed, and didn’t have clean rap sheets for fifteen months, much less fifteen years.

  “Anything on Bruce Kenwood?”

  “I think you’re going to find this interesting,” Marcus said. “He was the only child of Louis Kenwood and his first wife Mary. Born in Springfield, Mass., went to Phillips Exeter Academy—what’s that, some snooty prep school?”

  “Yeah. New Hampshire.”

  “And then a couple of years at Amherst before dropping out. He might have been expelled—can’t tell. He enrolled at U.C. Santa Barbara a couple of years later, but never got a degree. He started a couple of businesses in Santa Barbara that went belly-up…”

  “What kind of businesses?”

  “First real estate, then financial planning. He got nailed for back taxes and did some time in federal prison.”

  “Don’t tell me…”

  “That’s right. Lompoc.”

  “Same time as our boy Frankie?”

  “The sentences overlapped.”

  “Then what?”

  “Bruce Kenwood got out five years ago. He got into the sports memorabilia business, but that tanked. Investigated for arson after a warehouse fire in Anaheim burned up about thirty million baseball cards from the ’80s and ’90s that he couldn’t sell. Nothing was proven.”

  “So his insurance company settled?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Then what?”

  “Drowned in the Pacific while sailing. Body was never found.”

  “Any family?”

  “No.”

  Babe Ruth’s face was finally coming into focus. Lucky Louie’s son was a serial scam artist and, very likely, an acquaintance of Frankie Navarro. As the son of the owner of the Boston Red Sox, Bruce would have been intimately familiar with Ruth’s role in the so-called curse that had hung over the franchise for nearly a century; and as a New Englander, he’d have known how much a betting scandal would tarnish the long-awaited World Championship. If Bruce were still alive, it would explain everything: Bruce, bitter over being excluded from the family business, would be extracting his revenge no matter what happened with Miranda. If his father decided to pay the hush money, Bruce took a huge gouge out of the Kenwood fortune, putting it back in his own bank account. And if Lucky Louie refused to pay, and Miranda went public with the fix story to save his mother’s life, the Red Sox owner lost something he valued far more than money.

  But Bruce Kenwood was supposed to be dead. If he wasn’t, Frankie would know.

  Whoever Babe Ruth was, Sam had to convince Frankie that giving him up would be in his best interests. Kicking his chair again wasn’t the answer; Sam’s big toe still hurt from that stunt.

  He rang Heather’s room. No answer. He punched her speed-dial entry on his cell phone. She picked up on the third ring.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “At the pool. Come on down.”

  “No, you come up. I think I know who Babe Ruth is.”

  “Then get your ass down here and tell me.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sam put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and took the elevator down to the pool, in a courtyard facing the beach and surrounded on three sides by the hotel. The pool was protected from the wind and shaded by perfectly spaced, identical palm trees, each trimmed at the same height. Plush chaises circled the pool, and a patio with umbrella tables separated the pool area from the sand. Dozens of people were sunning on the beach or splashing in the breakers, but Heather had set up shop on one of the lounge chairs at poolside. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses, a tiny blue string bikini, and was sipping iced tea through a straw while reading a copy of Forbes, strategically propped on her bikini bottom at an angle that did not block the sun from hitting her stomach or thighs.

  Heather felt Sam’s shadow when he arrived, and put down the magazine.

  “So who’s Babe Ruth?” she asked.

  “Bruce Kenwood.”

  “He’s dead, remember?”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

  Sam pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “Did you know?”

  “Of course not,” Heather said. She lowered her sunglasses and looked into Sam’s eyes. “I had no idea.”

  “Do you know him? Have you ever talked to him?”

  “No. All I know about Bruce is that Lou was embarrassed by him and didn’t want anything to do with him. As far as I know, Lou hadn’t talked to him for years before he died.”

  “Did you know he was in prison here in California?”

  “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. Lou said he was no good. That tells you something.”

  “He was in the federal prison camp at Lompoc the same time Frankie Navarro was there.”

  “So they knew each other.”

  “Seems like too much of a coincidence. And they never found a body when Bruce supposedly drowned.”

  “Where are you getting all this?”

  “Cop friend of mine. Don’t worry, he doesn’t know the whole story.”

  “Now what?”

  “If you’re done browning, we have to take a field trip.”

  ***

  Sam showed Frankie’s address to the concierge in the hotel and got directions to Ogden Drive in West Hollywood. As they drove there, Sam explained to Heather that he hoped to find some connection between Frankie and Bruce Kenwood at Frankie’s house—perhaps a way to contact Bruce without going through Sid Mink. If they could find Bruce without Frankie’s help, it would save Lou Kenwood $2,000,000. And if the $50,000,000 extortion plot failed, Sid Mink just might let Frankie live.

  Sam stayed on Santa Monica Boulevard until he got to La Cienaga, then went south to Ogden Drive. He had the radio on, listening for newscasts. Several stations had the story about the two bodies found shot to death in Roy Laswell’s gym in Glendale. Apparently the cops hadn’t released their identities yet, but at least one station was already going with “execution-st
yle murders” to describe the crime. That news wouldn’t help Laswell’s business, and Sam wasn’t sympathetic.

  On the streets of West Hollywood, gawking tourists and gay couples drifted in and out of antique shops, jewelry stores, and trendy restaurants. The basic motif was sweaters tied around the neck and T-shirts with filthy slogans. There wasn’t much in the way of glamour on display, but that depended on your definition; Sam’s imaginary point of reference was Hollywood in the ’30s and ’40s, before the hippie music culture took root in West Hollywood. Sam would have loved to be on the Sunset Strip in the short-lived heyday of the Byrds, the Doors, and Buffalo Springfield, but sex and drugs had soon replaced film and music at the core of that scene. He could understand why a star-struck kid like Frankie Navarro would think West Hollywood was the place to be when he arrived from New Mexico, but he could also see why a struggling actor would soon find drug trafficking an easy way to make a living off the desperate and disillusioned kids who ended up here.

  Frankie’s house was a vaguely Spanish-style bungalow with peeling paint, shrouded in shrubbery and short, fat palm trees and squeezed onto a narrow lot with a one-lane driveway that ran past the house from the street to a garage behind the house. Right out of a Joan Crawford movie. Sam and Heather walked up the front sidewalk, looking around for neighbors or any other signs of life, but it appeared to be a quiet afternoon in Mr. Navarro’s neighborhood. Marcus had said that Frankie had no family, so Sam didn’t expect anyone to answer the front door when he knocked. He was surprised when the wooden door opened just as he was about to turn the knob.

  They were greeted by a sleepy-eyed woman who looked older than she probably was, thanks to day-old makeup and large, fake breasts that looked ready for their 50,000-mile tuneup. She stood in the foyer wearing a long T-shirt and nothing else that was apparent. Her reddish-blond hair was mussed in a way that suggested she’d just gotten out of bed. Sam knew the feeling.

  “Yes?” she said, in a voice that was more innocent than the face suggested.

  “Hi,” Sam said. “My name is Skarda. I’m a private detective. This is my associate, Ms. Canby.”