by Hart Hanson
“What?”
“What what?”
“Why did you flinch?”
“I stifled a beer burp,” I said, “hurt my sinuses.”
“Cone of silence?”
I zipped my lips, sealing them forever.
“Willeniec was a couple days from suspension and indictment.”
“Indictment? For what?”
“An internal sheriff’s investigation found an illicit income stream. Three months ago, an ex-girlfriend disappeared.”
I was starting to feel better about ending the guy. On the other hand, if I’d known all this, I could have called Delilah immediately after I killed Willeniec, told her what happened, and be free and clear of the whole mess.
“The ex-girlfriend who disappeared . . . Nice woman?”
“Not at all. White-collar embezzler in Orange County who avoided jail by ratting out her boss.”
“Faking warrants, Willeniec was sure to get caught, right?”
Delilah nodded.
“So Willeniec was desperate? Out of options?”
“Fuck you, Skellig. Say what you think.”
“I think Willeniec figured out you were following him, panicked, and took off.”
“Hey, I wasn’t following Willeniec,” she said. “I only found out about any of this after somebody tried to kill Avila on my watch.”
“Where’d Willeniec get his illicit income stream?”
“Kickbacks from crooks. Payoffs. Maybe even a couple of hits.”
“You mean killing people, right? Not moonlighting as a singer-songwriter?”
To my great relief, Delilah laughed. We listened to the breeze rattle the palm trees, watched a siren flash past over on Lincoln, heading south, toward the airport.
“How about this?” I said. “The girlfriend vanishes herself, goes someplace warm with no fear of extradition, sets up a new life on a beach. Willeniec stays behind to make one more big score before joining her.”
“The last big score being Avila’s barrels?”
“Right. Willeniec finds the barrels and whatever’s in them and then joins her in paradise. That’s why he’s missing.”
“Makes sense,” she said evenly. “It scans.”
When cops say two things encouraging about a case quickly in succession, like makes sense followed by it scans, it means that they are trying to convince themselves and failing. Personally (for selfish reasons), I was a big fan of the theory in which Willeniec makes one last score, changes his identity, and vanishes forever, because if enough cops and prosecutors bought into that, then the physical search for Willeniec’s actual, corporeal self in the real world would grind to a halt. The only place they’d be looking for Willeniec was on the Internet.
Excellent outcome for me and mine.
I had no evidence to push Delilah in that direction, so I tried the next best thing: innuendo.
“Something happened today,” I said.
“Aside from you ditching the cops following you?”
“Yes. Aside from that. Didn’t I already apologize?”
“Sorry. Yes, you did. What else happened?”
I hesitated in an artful manner.
“I showed you mine,” she said, taking the bait. “Show me yours.”
I told her about Nestor getting bonked on the head by the Slavic-looking kid who shot Avila’s bodyguard in the gut.
“You’re positive it was the same kid?”
“It’s getting to the point where I’d recognize his ass crack in a lineup.”
“Skellig!”
“What? The kid should wear underpants.”
“No, not that, fuckwit. How long were you gonna wait before telling me? I’m the lead investigator in that homicide, at least until Robbery-Homicide steps in to take it over.”
I explained to Delilah that it had been my intention to come home, have a beer, and then call the lead investigator in the homicide of the bodyguard, which was her, but unfortunately I’d been waylaid and unfairly maligned for ditching some cops earlier in the day.
“Which,” I said, “raises an interesting question.”
“About what, now?”
“You’re all over the place, Delilah. You’re the investigator on the bodyguard’s murder, but it feels like what you’re really interested in is whatever’s going on with Willeniec.”
“So?”
“Willeniec’s a sheriff’s deputy from Whittier! You’re Pacific Division LAPD. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have as much jurisdiction as you.”
“Did Avila recognize the Slavic kid?”
My mother always told me that when you argue with someone, if they head for the back door in an effort to escape, let them go. Winning is not the most desirable outcome of an argument; getting what you want is the most desirable outcome.
Delilah was headed for the back door. I not only let her go there; I ran ahead and opened it for her.
“If Avila recognized the kid, he didn’t tell his security guy.”
“Did Avila have any explanation for the assault?”
“Avila told his security guy that it was probably a crazy fan.”
“Who’s this security guy?”
“Avila called him Cody.”
“Cody Fiso?”
“Is Fiso a Samoan name?”
“Did your Cody look Samoan?”
“What self-respecting Samoan would name their kid Cody?”
“Skellig! Did the security guy look Samoan?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Cody Fiso. Heads up Fiso Security Outcomes. Very highly regarded. Did Cody get actual footage of the attack?”
“Yep, both attackers show up Charlie Foxtrot Bravo.”
“What’s that? Some Army acronym?”
“CFB . . . clear as a fucking bell.”
“Did you recognize the other guy?”
“No. Obese biker type, early thirties, tatted up, beard, lice, swastikas, etcetera.”
“So, definitely not the other kid from the hit?”
“Ten years older, two hundred pounds heavier. Smelled like sour milk.”
“How the fuck you know that? You only saw him on video.”
“You could see how he smelled on the video.”
“Avila didn’t recognize either one?”
“He told Samoan Cody he didn’t.”
Delilah sighed.
“To be fair,” I said, “Avila might not have gotten a good look at the kid who shot at him. There was a lot of panic and he got pushed to the floor.”
“Oh, please.”
“I know I’m not a professional investigator and I’m sure you’re ahead of me on this—”
“Fuck! Skellig! Just say it!”
I tossed Keet into the salad by reminding Delilah that Keet had biker ties, and the obese guy was a biker, and that she’d told me that Keet was linked to Avila, and that maybe that link was being investigated by Commercial Crimes.
“Willeniec’s specialty in Commercial Crimes was money laundering.”
“There you go. Barrels are an excellent place to store and transport cash that needs laundering,” I said. “Willeniec is trying to find barrels. He thinks Avila has the barrels. Delilah, what we have here is a fiery nexus.”
“Just say pattern. Fiery nexus my ass.”
“Is anybody working that angle?”
“I can’t discuss that with you!”
“Because you’re only supposed to be solving the part where Avila’s bodyguard got killed?”
Delilah grimaced.
Bingo.
Delilah had been shouldered aside. She wasn’t part of the investigation into Willeniec’s disappearance. Which sucked for me because if Delilah was a principal in that investigation, then I could use her to muddy it
up (which sounds like a terrible way to use a friend, I know, but you have to admit, I was juggling a lot of friends in this circus, all with conflicting needs).
“That explains why you weren’t in the car following me and Avila today, which means you should be thanking me for making them look like idiots, not hollering at me.”
“Wow,” Delilah said, giving me a sarcastic slow clap, “that was beautiful. I bet you never had to shoot anyone in the war. I bet you could talk the enemy into shooting himself.”
“Who was following me?”
“My promotion to Robbery-Homicide; that’s who was following you.”
Delilah’s deep professional desire is to be a member of the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division. It figures Robbery-Homicide would help the sheriff investigate the disappearance of a sheriff’s detective—especially if the detective in question was corrupt, suspected of murder, and maybe murdered himself.
“Delilah, if I’d known it was Robbery-Homicide, I’d have done anything in my power to make you look good to them.”
“Thank you, Skellig. The opportunity has passed.”
“Don’t give up. All you need is to provide them with a link between Avila and Keet.”
Delilah looked at me in a way that showed that while I’d been showing her my back door, she’d been showing me to hers. She’d made me look at her throat drinking her fizzy lemon instead of her eyes, and now I was trapped.
“Oh,” I said, “you horrible, evil, manipulative lady.”
“I’m just standing here with a friend, enjoying the evening air and some bubbly water.”
“That’s why Robbery-Homicide is following Avila,” I said. “To see if he’ll lead them back to Keet.”
“Not Robbery-Homicide. A task force.”
“LAPD and sheriff’s department?”
“And the Bureau of Investigative Services.”
“So yesterday I embarrassed LAPD, the sheriff’s department, and the California Bureau of Investigation?”
“And the FBI. It’s a task force, Skellig.”
I felt a little sick. Task forces are well-funded political entities that never give up without an indictment, a whirring multibladed machine where careers in law enforcement are made or ground up like cheap beef. That’s why ambitious Delilah wanted on board. If this task force figured out what happened to Willeniec, then she’d be certain to get promoted to Robbery-Homicide. I had a sudden horrible thought: what if this whole multijurisdiction task force only existed because Willeniec was a hero, working undercover, pretending to be a crooked cop in order to catch Keet?
“Willeniec’s a full-on bad guy, right, Delilah?”
I know I sounded like a ten-year-old putting it that way, but that’s how cops label enemies: bad guys. Soldiers don’t think that way, or at least we didn’t before the Global War on Terror.
“What?”
“He wasn’t undercover working Keet?”
“No.”
“Because that would explain the task force.”
“No, Skellig. Willeniec was a corrupt son of a bitch who probably murdered his girlfriend.”
Thank you, Jesus, I thought. My lips might even have moved.
“This task force exists because, dirty or not, Willeniec was one of ours. You understand? Ours to catch and punish. Maybe we’ll get some additional bad guys along the way, like Keet or Avila, but the main thrust is the identification and apprehension, pure and simple, of whoever murdered Antony Willeniec.”
“You aren’t buying that he’s happy on a beach in Belize?”
“We have reason to believe Willeniec’s been murdered.”
I could see only one way to keep tabs on the task force and, if at all possible, influence their investigation. “Tell the task force that you have someone next to Avila.”
“Who?”
“Me. That’s what you’ve been angling for, isn’t it? You win. Tell them I’ll work for you but I won’t even talk to anyone else.”
Delilah blinked.
She was touched.
“Do you want another fizzy water?”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, but it was something else she had on her mind. “There’s two kinds of people,” Delilah said abruptly.
Words do not just slip out of Delilah Groopman. She uses them like silver bullets, always with a point.
“People who like jazz guitar and people who don’t?”
“People who work on the surface of the earth and people who fly above us all and change history. Connie is a flying, change-history person.”
“Where does that leave the people who like jazz guitar?”
What Delilah said was “Fuck you, Skellig,” but she said it fondly.
Delilah was trying to talk about me and her (or was it me and Connie?) or was it Connie and her? One thing I knew for sure was that we weren’t talking about Willeniec and task forces.
“Somehow I feel like it would be a mistake to say anything more about jazz guitar,” I said.
“The flying people spend their lives fixing big problems, and to do that they mostly ignore, or never see, smaller problems, like the people around them or their families. Then there’s the people who walk on the ground, take care of their families and the people they love, and let history take care of itself.”
“Surface-of-the-earth people,” I said.
She said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “I’m being silent because apparently silence means consent.”
“I know what you mean,” I said finally. It was generals and sergeants all over again. Of course I understood. “Steve Jobs. Martin Luther King. They make the world better but they treat the people closest to them like crap.”
“Maybe you have to be a fucktard to make the world a better place.”
Had Delilah just called Connie a fucktard? Or was she suggesting that she and I were surface-of-the-earth types who’d be a better mix?
It felt like the room was thrumming, that if I told Delilah that I agreed with her, she and I would be having full-on, jolly, fun, man-on-woman, Olympic-caliber sex in about five mikes.
“Mother Teresa, Thomas Mann, Christopher Columbus,” I said, “Thomas Edison, Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant—”
“All right, Skellig.”
“Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, all the Kennedys—”
“You can stop. Relax,” Delilah said. “I’m not looking to seduce you, asswipe.”
“Einstein, Picasso—”
Delilah said, “You are such an asshole,” but she was laughing.
“All I offered was fizzy water,” I said, “with lemon.”
“I like the way you take care of those around you. I like that you left the big world of politics to run a limo company and hire veterans down here on the surface of the earth where people actually live.”
But Connie didn’t find the surface of the earth extremely attractive? Was Delilah telling me that was the reason that I had no future with Connie? My life was too small?
Delilah put down her empty glass, crunching on the last piece of ice. “You’ll either think about it or you won’t. I’ll find my own way out.”
I said nothing because silence is consent.
ARKS, PROJECTILES, AND VECTORS
Seven o’clock the next morning, right in the middle of a six-mile run along the Santa Monica Bluffs, dodging street-corner preachers, the homeless, tai chi enthusiasts, yoga dorks, and Segway douches, I get a call from Connie. She wants me to go with her to see Ripple in the hospital. She has a get-well gift for him. I tell her that if her gift isn’t a donor maraca, then Ripple is unlikely to be gracious.
“Maraca?”
“Single form of maracas,” I said, following up with my best vocal impression of maracas, hoping to get a laugh.
“Thanks for the clarification, Skellig, me being Hispanic a
nd all, the definition of maracas could’ve remained a mystery.”
“Maracas, in this case, being slang for testicles.”
“Where’d you get the idea that get-well gifts should be replacement parts?”
The answer is my pragmatic mother (who else?), though Mom is the first to say that such gifts can be symbolic on the subconscious level, which is why I was bringing Ripple a bag of almonds. (I know. Almonds aren’t nuts; they are seeds. But Ripple didn’t know that.)
“No offense to Dolly, but the best gifts are simply reminders that a person isn’t all alone in this world,” Connie said.
You’ve probably guessed that Connie and my mom do not like each other. It could be a communist/fascist thing (yes, that’s how they refer to each other) but it’s obvious to me that Hippocrates would say they were made of the same humors in proportions just different enough to make them hate each other.
“What did you get him?” I asked Connie. “Something engraved: You are not alone in this world?”
In fact, what Connie had found for Ripple was an antique walnut lap desk with a top that swung up on brass hinges to reveal a sketching pen and a ream of thick cream-colored sketch paper.
Even unmanned (literally) by the operation and nauseous from the general anesthesia hangover, it was obvious from the way Ripple ran his hands over the desk and the paper that he loved Connie’s gift.
“I guess that’s all my lap is good for now,” he said, not wanting to admit he was thrilled, “holding up a sketch pad.”
“I know quite a few men would do better with a sketch pad in their laps than what they got there,” Connie replied.
I admired the way she managed to call Ripple a man without making a huge deal out of it. Perfect PsyOps.
“Thank you,” Ripple whispered.
I tried (and failed) to remember the last time I’d ever heard him say those words.
“De nada, Darren,” Connie said, and kissed his pale, downy, freckly cheek. “Maybe you could sketch my portrait.”
“Ripple only draws portraits of severed heads,” I said.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Connie said, which made Ripple smile again because it was true.
Heading toward the parking lot, Connie told me I had to be more conducive when it came to Ripple and less enabling.