by Paul Bishop
“I know at least two things you’re worried about,” Pagan continued, his voice had dropped an octave and was filled with an intonation both comforting and assured. “You’re worried about your reputation. In your business, everything is about reputation. If you let your guard down for a second, your competitors are going to smell weakness like blood in the water and come after you.”
None of what Pagan was saying had anything specifically to do with Unicorn’s disappearance, but it had everything to do with opening Smack Daddy up on a psychological level. Two of the main keys to any interrogation are finding a socially acceptable way for the subject to confess, and becoming the person the subject needs you to be in order to confess.
For the first key, the subject needs to believe the explanation you’re offering for his or her actions is a socially acceptable excuse the interrogator will accept without judgment. The interrogator doesn’t actually have to believe it is socially acceptable, but the interrogator has to be able to sell it.
Pagan clearly didn’t think anything having to do with Smack Daddy’s reputation could justify his attitude toward his missing daughter. However, in Smack Daddy’s self-centric world, Smack Daddy might feel protecting his reputation was an acceptable excuse for being a total jerk. Reputation was a theme, another fishing lure thrown out to see if Smack Daddy would bite.
Through his demeanor, Pagan was also turning himself into a shoulder for Smack Daddy to cry on. Pagan was becoming an intimate confidant, somebody with whom Smack Daddy could share his deepest secrets.
Pagan had been talking nonstop for over thirty minutes. You had to admire his gift for gab. He relied a lot on repetition, saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways. However, I could tell he was now getting to the heart of the matter.
“I want you to know,” Pagan was saying, “I know what going through a divorce does to a person. I’ve been through it twice and it’s a nightmare.”
I was glad I could see the royal purple streamers attached to Pagan’s words. He was lying his ass off, but if I couldn’t see the lies, I’d believe him in a heartbeat.
“You have to protect yourself because you know the bitch you’re trying to escape from is going to take you for every cent she can get. When somebody you love turns on you it is frightening. They turn on you in an instant. One second it’s all hearts and flowers and the next minute they are out to destroy you.”
“I loved her,” Smack Daddy said quietly. Then more loudly. “I picked her out of the gutter. She was another crack whore, but I saw something in her. I gave her everything. Made her what she is today.”
Smack Daddy had taken the verbal bait. His words were all pastel streamers. I had to take in a deep breath, but Pagan just nodded his head.
“She took advantage of everything you had to offer her, and then gave you a child she wanted to pass off as yours. Who knows who that child’s baby daddy really is?” Pagan was in full flow – taking advantage of the information he had obtained from Arlo and his TMZ contact to manipulate and twist the facts to his advantage. He was keeping it impersonal, not using Unicorn’s name at the moment, turning her into an object – that child.
It didn’t matter whether Unicorn was or wasn’t the fruit of Smack Daddy’s loins. Pagan was saying what Smack Daddy wanted to hear, what he needed to hear in order to be pulled further and further into Pagan’s whirlwind of words.
“Anyone looking at that child would wonder if she was actually yours,” Pagan said, continuing down the dark path he’d chosen.
I felt it was a horrible thing to say, but Pagan was feeling his way through the situation, saying the things he felt he must in order to connect on a base level with Smack Daddy.
“She’s not mine…she’s not mine.” Smack Daddy was blubbering now, but suddenly I could see royal purple streamers. He was knowingly lying.
I opened my mouth to alert Pagan, but he looked up at that exact second and caught my eyes in the rear view mirror. I snapped my mouth shut and gave a slight nod. Pagan was way ahead of me.
I watched Smack Daddy rocking back and forth while Pagan rubbed his back, as if comforting a distressed child. It was both a brilliant and disgusting performance at the same time.
I turned down a quiet side street. After about a block, I eased the Navigator to a stop at the curb under a spreading oak tree. I’d done it smoothly enough Smack Daddy wasn’t even aware we’d stopped. I caught Pagan glancing at me again in the rear view mirror and saw him nod his approval.
I sat as quietly as I could, not wanting to shatter the fragile, intimate, almost tangible texture of the world Pagan had spun.
It was weird, but I could see Pagan literally shifting gears. Smack Daddy’s statement about Unicorn not being his had been tinged with the tone of desperation. Pagan had heard it and interpreted not what the words literally meant, but what their tone and intonation indicated they meant.
Smack Daddy didn’t hate Unicorn. He loved her. She was his child. Pagan was untying the knot of raw emotion a strand at a time.
“Unicorn may or may not be yours,” Pagan said softly. “But you still love her.”
Using Unicorn’s name at the right moment, with the right inflection, broke whatever reserves Smack Daddy had left. He began to cry with full, body wracking, sobs.
Smack Daddy was bent fully over now, rocking, his face buried in his hands. Pagan kept gently rubbing a palm over Smack Daddy’s back, the human touch a powerful bonding technique.
Pagan didn’t speak, just let the pent up emotions flow. If he felt any embarrassment or revulsion, you couldn’t tell. Instead, compassion flowed out of his expression, his body language, his gentle movements.
I couldn’t believe it was all an act. This was Pagan’s gift as an empath – the ability to feel the pain and emotion of others, to channel and respond to it in kind. Pagan had transformed himself. He actually believed, for this moment, everything he was saying. I knew the words coming out of his mouth would no longer have even a tinge of purple streamers attached.
I suddenly realized I had never thought much about truth. As Pagan had said, like most cops, I would have said truth was a fixed point. I would have turned to cultural platitudes: You can’t hide from the truth; the truth will set you free; it has the ring of truth. Even after all my time on the job, from rookie to experienced detective, I had simply gone through the expected motions in the pursuit of truth. After all, wasn’t the truth simply the truth, plain and guileless, black and white? Truth and lie? If doubt ever entered the picture, it was just the truth becoming more evasive. Cynicism took the place of objectivity.
It doesn’t take long for any detective, especially one who is cursed with the ability to actually see lies, to begin believing everybody lies about everything…all the time. We begin looking for only lies and forget to look for the truth.
However, Pagan was different. He didn’t look for lies. He looked for truth. He had the ability to see truth through perspective. As he’d said, the truth wasn’t a fixed point for Pagan. In his world there wasn’t one truth – there were as many varied truths as there were perspectives of those involved. His gift was in finding which truth carried the most weight. His was a gift of the subjective, a constant balancing act on the edge of a razor blade.
I didn’t quite know how Pagan managed to keep his own perspective. If he truly felt the pain of others over and over again, and I could see he did, it had to be a soul sucking experience. He might be the best at what he did, but at what price?
And what price was I expected to pay while working with him? Right now, I was riding the lightning of my own emotions. My own truth had changed, channeled through Pagan, but would this emotional high last…would there be a crash?
Looking in the rear view mirror, I realized I needed to stop worrying about my own crash for the moment and concentrate on Smack Daddy’s.
“You’ve got to be in so deep you can’t see up,” Pagan said still rubbing Smack Daddy’s back. “What if I could tell
you they don’t have her?” Pagan asked.
Smack Daddy immediately raised his face from his hands, looking askance at Pagan, his eyes bloodshot and wide.
Who the hell were they, and how did Pagan know they didn’t have Unicorn? I’d lost the thread somewhere, but Pagan and Smack Daddy still appeared to be tied together.
I thought Pagan must be winging it, but that didn’t feel right. Pagan had put something together I had missed. The question was when did he put it together? Since he’d been in the back of the car, or earlier? If earlier, why hadn’t he shared his thoughts?
Maybe because he expected me to keep up.
They? They? Then I got it. They were organized crime. In this case black organized crime. Not street gangs, but what had evolved from street gangs. I remembered the example of Death Row Records – hip hop as fueled by drugs, guns, and gangsters. Hundreds of millions of dollars had flowed in and out, tempers had flared and the bullets had flown. The black mob had risen from the ashes, eschewing street level violence for something more sinister and more deadly.
The LAPD even found itself unwillingly in the mix when a federal informant provided testimony that Los Angeles police officers David Mack and Rafael Perez – both implicated in the Rampart scandal – had worked as security for Death Row when off-duty. Things had gotten very ugly, very fast.
If black organized crime had their hooks into Smack Records, then Smack Daddy was in a world of hurt.
Pagan had been talking levelly and calmly, without hesitation or pause, to Smack Daddy for almost forty minutes. All that time, he’d been subtly probing, looking for some kind of solid reaction from Smack Daddy – and now he had it.
“How do you know they don’t have her?” Smack Daddy asked. There was a pleading tone to his voice.
Pagan had hit a nerve. I hoped he had something he could use to drill down.
For his part, Pagan maintained his calm exterior without even the flicker of an eyelid – he kept talking, monologing, moving Smack Daddy along to a point where he would spill whatever information he was concealing.
“The music business is as cutthroat as the movie business – as any business where millions of dollars can be made or lost,” Pagan said, explaining the obvious, but with a purpose. “When you’re up, everybody wants a piece of you, but when you’re down the only place you’re going to find the money to keep going is by making deals with very dangerous people. People who expect you to not only repay them on time, but with heavy interest.”
Smack Daddy was nodding his head. “They never let go. They keep tearing at you until there’s nothing left.”
“I know. I’ve seen it before,” Pagan said. “But then Changeling came along and suddenly you have an artist who gives you a chance to dig your way out, even get back on top.”
Changeling? We were suddenly back to the artist who could change the fortunes of Smack Records. I’d discarded him as somewhat irrelevant, but Pagan hadn’t.
“But that’s not how it works, is it?” Pagan said, then went on to answer his own question. “The people you owe don’t want to let you off the hook. You’re a cash cow, or a money laundry, or a legitimate front. You’re too valuable. They threatened your family, didn’t they?”
Tears were streaming down Smack Daddy’s cheeks. Pagan handed him a tissue he pulled out of nowhere, like a magician.
Smack Daddy blew his nose, nodding his head at the same time. “I finally cut a deal. Five million. Do you know how hard it is to get that kind of money in cash? The freaking banks are impossible to deal with and report everything over one hundred thousand to the feds. Getting that much cash is a nightmare.”
Talk about your first world problems.
I had turned slowly in my seat to watch the fascinating tableau in the back seat of the Navigator.
“But you knew it would take more than cash,” Pagan said. “You had to make them think their threat to your family wouldn’t work. You began trash talking your wife and your child.”
Smack Daddy seemed to startle, but Pagan shut him down.
“It’s okay. It’s us. I know Unicorn really is your child. I know how much you really love both Unicorn and Judith, but you couldn’t even let Judith know what you were trying to do. You had to sell it. You needed them to think Unicorn wasn’t your child, that you didn’t want her. That’s what this has all been about. You were sacrificing everything you loved, tearing them both down, to keep them safe.”
This was a completely different tangent than the one Pagan had taken earlier. Before, he’d been agreeing with Smack Daddy that Unicorn couldn’t be Smack Daddy’s child. That he was right to not want to support her, that Smack Daddy’s wife had betrayed him.
Smack Daddy had originally responded in the affirmative to these statements, but Pagan must have seen something in Smack Daddy’s body language, which made it clear he was being deceptive. Following his instincts, Pagan had changed the tune. Now Pagan was giving the situation a completely opposite spin – and giving Smack Daddy a much more socially acceptable out.
Smack Daddy started, stammered, and started again. “I had the money, but they took it all when they took Unicorn. They took my baby girl…” Smack Daddy began drowning in his tears again.
Pagan was calm. “I need you to breathe, Theo. Breathe with me.” Still rubbing Smack Daddy’s back, Pagan began taking slow deep breaths. I found myself breathing in unison with him and, eventually, so did Smack Daddy. His crying stopped and he became much calmer, almost docile.
“Let’s look at this logically,” Pagan said. “You were going to give your business partners the money.” Pagan’s inflection put quotes around the term business partners. “They didn’t need to take it from you. And even if they did, they wouldn’t take Unicorn. There has been no ransom demand. No threats to harm her if you don’t come up with more money.”
“Then who took her? Who took the money?”
I was concentrating so hard, I almost missed the mottled colors in the streamers coming from Smack Daddy’s mouth. I was so used to seeing colors, I sometimes didn’t even notice them. I needed to go back and see them again – I’d missed something – but it was too late. The streamers faded almost as soon as they appeared. There was no instant replay.
“Ah,” Pagan said, with a surprising smile on his face. “That’s the question, isn’t it?
Chapter 22
“Lying to ourselves is more deeply
ingrained than lying to others.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Livia Nelson was scowling at Pagan. “A camera?” she asked.
“A camera,” Pagan replied calmly.
“How big?” Livia asked, scowling even deeper. It was clear she didn’t like Pagan’s unstated assertion she may have missed something.
We were again standing in the living room of Smack Daddy’s house. For me, the surprise bigger than Pagan’s theory about cameras was Smack Daddy and Judith Davis holding each other on the couch like long lost lovers. In an amazingly short period of time, they had gone from tabloid divorce fodder – with an unwanted child caught in the middle – to, I’m so sorry, darling. I can’t live without you. They were even appropriately concerned about Unicorn.
Pagan’s breakthrough in the back of the Navigator – that Smack Daddy had been trying to lessen the threat to his family from his dangerous creditors by making out Unicorn and Judith weren’t important to him – had been on point. Or at least as on point as it needed to be to clear up much of the mystery surrounding Smack Daddy’s actions. It remained to be seen if his theory about cameras would be similarly inspired.
Then there was the money. The five million dollars Smack Daddy said went missing along with his daughter was somehow a detail Pagan had failed to mention to Livia Nelson, or anyone else connected to the investigations of the two missing children.
My silence made me his accomplice.
Pagan hadn’t told me not to say anything about the money. But he didn’t say anything, so I didn’t. It was a partner
thing. Right or wrong, I trusted him. Partners backed partners. It didn’t mean you condoned illegal behavior or violence. There was a line, but I couldn’t tell you where it was until I reached it.
Not saying anything about the money didn’t even need thinking about. If Pagan tried to pocket the money, that would be another thing. But I instinctively knew that wouldn’t ever be an option for Pagan. It wasn’t part of his being.
If he wasn’t saying anything about the money, I knew the reason would have something to do with furthering the investigation – something to do with finding the missing children. I’d either figure it out along the way, or Pagan would eventually explain.
Clearly, the things Smack Daddy had done to get five million in cash were not things of which the IRS or the LAPD would approve. However, in the intimate setting of the interrogation room Pagan had established in the rear seat of Smack Daddy’s Lincoln Navigator, whatever the crimes committed to get the money together were of negligible importance. What was important was the bond the kept secret had established.
Pagan now smiled at Livia. It wasn’t the full wattage charmer he could turn on and off at will. It was more that of an innocent cherub about to pull the rug out from under you unless you played nice. “I’m talking about something like a hidden nanny cam. Nobody would notice it at first glance.”
“Those things don’t have a long transmitting distance.” This was Johnny Hawkins’ contribution to the conversation. He wasn’t saying anything Pagan hadn’t already considered.
“At the Martin house in Sherman Oaks, they’d made a series of prowler complaints and a break in where nothing appeared to be taken,” Pagan said. “I believe there is or was a camera there as well. The prowler was most likely the suspect getting close enough to download the video remotely.”
“How far can they transmit?” Livia Nelson asked. “Through walls? From upstairs.” She was smart enough not to challenge Pagan further at this point. Probably had been burnt by him before. However, she was a good detective and was immediately trying to narrow the field.