Chasing Charlie Chan - Special Edition: Includes Catching Water in a Net

by J. L. Abramo

  At exactly three-fifty, Raft’s pager beeped. He went to the wall phone in the barbershop and called the number lit up on the pager display. Less than a mile away a pay phone on Cliffside Drive rang once before it was picked up by Nick Sedway.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Down at the beach.”

  “Find Dume Drive and meet me at the barber shop at Greenwater Road in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be there,” said Sedway.

  The street was quiet and deserted Sunday afternoon. A few minutes before four, Boyle watched a rental car park a few doors down from the barber shop. A man left the vehicle and approached the shop entrance. Boyle saw the man rap on the door. The door opened and the man stepped inside.

  What the fuck? thought Boyle.

  Then he heard a gunshot, jumped from his car and rushed to the shop entrance.

  Boyle drew his weapon as he reached the front door. He tried the door and found it locked. He looked through the glass pane and found himself face to face with Frank Raft who stood on the inside pointing a gun. Two gunshots rang out, shattering the glass between them and knocking Boyle backwards and down to the sidewalk.

  He was lying there when the first police car arrived at the scene.

  From our bench on the Santa Monica Pier, Jimmy and I watched the sun sink into the bay.

  “I don’t know why Raft came after me and the girl, but he did. He had to have believed Boyle was dead. If he thought Ray Boyle would live to identify him as the shooter, Raft would have run as fast as he could down to Mexico and laid low until he decided what to do about getting the three hundred thousand dollars he expected. When the Malibu PD arrived they found Ray on the sidewalk and a corpse in the barbershop who was later identified as Nick Sedway, a paid assassin out of New York City. We guessed Sedway had been sent to kill Raft, but Raft had been prepared for the contingency and turned it around.”

  “What happened to Raft?” I asked.

  “He showed up at my place. The girl spotted him from the window as he came in. I locked Angel in the apartment and I waited on the landing, halfway up to the floor above mine. I was above and behind Raft when he came to the door of the apartment. I had a gun on him and I called his name. I wanted to take him alive but he turned on me and got off a few shots before I put a bullet into his chest from the stairs. A lucky shot, and fatal. I ran to Raft and asked him why he had killed Lenny Archer and the reporter and he said, for the money.

  “Were those his last words?” I asked.

  “No,” Jimmy answered. “He said, This is funny, and then he died.”

  “Those were Doc Holliday’s last words,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised. Are you as hungry as I am, Jake?”

  “I could eat.”

  “So, let’s eat. It’s about time you met Margaret Kelly.”

  I followed Jimmy Pigeon off the pier and we walked in silence to Meg’s Café.

  Part Three

  PIGEON HOLD

  “Investigation is a lot like poker,

  you need to choose what to discard

  and what to hold.”

  —Jimmy Pigeon

  TWO WOMEN

  I sat opposite Jimmy and Meg in a window booth at the café. Meg Kelly was an extremely attractive forty-three-year-old redhead who could easily have passed for thirty. Even in a plain dress under an apron she looked elegant. Jimmy and I had just finished a huge meal and he had asked me to hold any further questions until we were done with our food. When we pushed our plates away, Meg took it as license to join us at the table. After complimenting the cook, I couldn’t wait any longer.

  “How did Raft know the girl was with you?” I asked.

  Jimmy let Meg field the question.

  “It was my assistant manager, Pamela Walker. The SMPD found the phone number of the café on Raft’s pager and they questioned me and all of my employees. Pam finally broke down and confessed she had been taking money from Raft to keep an eye on Jimmy,” Meg said, as a party of six walked into the café. “I need to get back to the kitchen. How about coffee?”

  “No, thanks. We’ll head back to my place for coffee,” Jimmy said. “I think Jake is anxious to hear more of the story.”

  Meg ran off. Jimmy and I left the café and walked to his apartment.

  I started in right away.

  “What happened after you shot Raft in the hallway?”

  “I tried reaching Ray Boyle, no luck, so I called the Santa Monica PD and we waited for Detective John Barnum to arrive. He invited us both to the station for questioning. Finally, he told me I could leave, but said Angel would have to remain to tell him everything she could about the deaths of Carlos Valdez and Officer Billings here in Santa Monica. Then she would be turned over to the LAPD to talk about the deaths of Ricardo Diaz and Bob Tully. I asked Barnum if he had spoken with Ray Boyle. That’s when I learned Ray had been shot.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “It was touch and go for a while. Ray had lost a lot of blood. I went to visit him at the hospital a few days later. I told him how sorry I was and he told me I had nothing to be sorry about. He said he considered himself one fortunate bastard. Getting shot that Sunday in June was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him.”

  “Oh?”

  “Boyle was on call that night. If he hadn’t been at the hospital recovering from three hours in the operating room, he would have been called to the double homicide on Bundy Drive. You know the one. He was very grateful he missed it. Boyle said he watched the beginning of the fiasco on TV from his hospital bed and he thanked God he was hooked up to an IV.”

  “And you never found out why Frank Raft and Bob Tully killed Lenny Archer and Ed Richards?”

  “It was a dead end after Raft died. Nate Archer’s wife gave birth to a son that day. They named the boy Leonard. Nate seemed satisfied. His brother’s murderers had paid with their lives, although we still had no idea why they had killed Lenny and Richards. Discovering the motive became less a priority for Nate. He was much more interested in staying in San Diego to get acquainted with the newborn Lenny Archer than he was in coming back here to face what he guessed would be more unanswered questions surrounding the murder of the boy’s namesake.”

  “So?”

  “So, with Ray Boyle recovering from his gunshot wounds and Nathan Archer opting out, it looked as if nothing was going to help me discover exactly why my partner had been killed. And then, late that week, out of the blue, Peter Quince showed up at my office.”

  Jimmy Pigeon neatly folded the LA Times in half, folded it again and dropped it into the wastebasket beside his desk. All of the news was about O. J. Simpson and the double homicide in Brentwood. Pages and pages of articles and photographs of the Ford Bronco car chase and Simpson’s subsequent arrest at his Rockingham estate. Hidden in the depths of section two was a short piece on the murders of Lenny Archer and Ed Richards with yet another conclusion.

  Archer and Richards had been murdered by Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department detectives, Frank Raft and Bob Tully. The motive? Investigator Archer and journalist Richards had uncovered and were about to disclose information that pointed to illegal activities linking the detectives to a convicted drug dealer, Ricardo Diaz, also deceased. Case closed, once again, with expedience and a strong emphasis on law enforcement damage control. No one appeared to be very interested in light of the recent public and media frenzy surrounding a certain former football player. And Jimmy disliked and disbelieved the latest incarnation of the official line as much as he had the assorted versions reported earlier. Jimmy was convinced there was much more to the story, but all Pigeon had to go on was a cryptic reference to Charlie Chan and the photograph of a very big house in a book of celebrity homes.

  Jimmy’s eyes moved from the discarded newspaper to the empty desk across the office. Lenny’s desk. Then he looked over to the office door, it’s newly replaced pane of glass, which remained untitled. Not very good for business, Jimmy t
hought. Then, again, in the past few weeks he was finding it difficult to remember what was good about the business.

  A rap on the door brought him out of his reverie.

  Jimmy opened the office door to find a tall man in his early thirties wearing a corduroy jacket over a t-shirt and jeans. In his extended arms he held a black plastic case.

  “What do you have there?” Jimmy asked.

  “A notebook computer.”

  “Salesman?”

  “School teacher.”

  “Are you sure you’re in the right place?”

  “Are you Jimmy Pigeon?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Then I think I’m in the right place,” said Peter Quince. “I hope I’m in the right place.”

  “Come on in,” Jimmy said. “Maybe we’ll find out.”

  A few minutes later Jimmy was looking at the screen of the laptop. Gazing at two photographs, side by side, two different women, standing in front of the same large mansion, a house that looked strangely familiar to Pigeon.

  “What am I looking at?” Jimmy asked.

  “I’m not positive, but I believe you’re looking at something that has to do with the death of your partner,” said Quince. “And there’s more.”

  “Show me more,” Jimmy said.

  The teacher had done his homework.

  After hours of research at the USC library the weekend before, Quince had spent his after school hours attempting to make sense out of the deceased journalist’s apparently disconnected files and trying to figure what Virginia Hill, Lenny Archer, Frank Raft, Bob Tully, Charlie Chan and one of the most powerful men in California could possibly have in common—other than a renowned Beverly Hills home and a slew of unexplained deaths and disappearances.

  Toward the end of the week he had managed to arrange the files in order, somewhat like a classroom presentation. Arranged in a way Quince felt told a story, though he couldn’t decide what the story was about. He also couldn’t decide where to take his presentation. When the news broke about Frank Raft’s death and Raft’s complicity in the death of Robert Tully, Peter was reluctant to take what he had to the police. Had he been inclined to do so, he was not sure which of three involved police departments he should trust.

  When Peter woke up Saturday morning, he finally made up his mind to take his chances with Lenny Archer’s partner. So here he was a few hours later, giving Pigeon the show. A disjointed story spanning fifty years.

  The curtain dropped. The show was over.

  “That’s it,” Peter said.

  Names, places, dates, photographs. Meyer Lansky, Joey Adonis, Virginia Hill, Moe Sedway, Jack Dragna, Alliance of Extras and Stagehands, Mickey Cohen, Teamsters Union, Las Vegas, Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner, Cheryl Crane, North Linden Drive, House Un-American Activities Committee, the Kefauver Hearings, Monogram Pictures, the LAPD and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. A history of murder, graft, coercion, embezzlement, police corruption, strikebreaking, mob warfare, scandal and more murder spanning the forties and fifties in Hollywood. And in the middle of it all, a couple of men with the same insatiable ambition.

  Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel and Reginald Masters.

  “What the fuck was Richards on to?” Jimmy asked.

  “I have no idea, and I’ve been through it a hundred times, but I’m sure this mansion is a clue,” said Quince, bringing the photographs of the two women back up on the laptop screen. “The woman in the photograph on the left is Virginia Hill; the one on the right, standing in front of the same house, very recently, is someone who has more than a passing resemblance to Virginia Hill. Bugsy Siegel was gunned down in the same house in June, 1947. Reginald Masters was in Europe at the time, drumming up markets for his cash cow, the Charlie Chan film series; reestablishing overseas contracts that were severed during World War Two. When Masters returned, he moved into the mansion on North Linden where Siegel had been shot to death. The mansion once occupied by Warner Oland, the actor who portrayed Charlie Chan, before Oland vanished from Hollywood.”

  “I feel like I’ve heard this all before,” Jimmy said, recalling his last sit down with Vinnie Stradivarius.

  “The mansion is the key. I’m guessing that stumbling upon the young woman on the right is what hooked Richards and got him nosing around,” said Peter. “And his snooping apparently put a huge scare into someone.”

  “So, you’re saying we need to find the girl.”

  “I’m saying you might want to find the girl. That woman, whoever she is, puts a huge scare into me, too. I came here to get this off my hands. It’s all yours if you want it. I’ve numbered all of the files and you can hold onto the laptop computer as long as you like. Just forget where you got it.”

  There goes another prospective ally, Jimmy thought.

  All he could do was thank Peter Quince for the lead and send the school teacher on his way.

  Alone again, Jimmy sat at his desk and looked at the laptop. The technology scared him. He doubted he could shut the thing down and start it again, let alone find his own way around the maze of files Peter had walked him through.

  He needed someone who was comfortable with computers, who was somewhat familiar with post WWII Hollywood fact and legend and who would jump at the opportunity to help sift through the ashes.

  Jimmy picked up the phone and called Vinnie Strings.

  Assistant LA County District Attorney Jackson Masters sat at his desk in the Downtown Criminal Courts Building.

  The building had been a madhouse for days.

  He had found the short piece on the Archer/Richards case deep in section two of the Times. The double murder in Brentwood had made the resolution of the Raft debacle relatively insignificant and nearly invisible.

  Masters closed the newspaper and looked at the front page. He thought about the DA. He didn’t envy Garcetti, as much as he wanted the other man’s job.

  Masters wondered if Garcetti would consider him for the prosecution team if the Brown/Goldman case ever got to trial. He wondered how he would react to the proposal. It was a case that could make or destroy an Assistant DA, could make or break the DA himself.

  The old man would strongly discourage his grandson’s involvement. If Jackson wanted the DA’s job, the old man would recommend a much safer route. Gain the DA’s office with a very well-endowed campaign coffer and the years of political clout commanded by his family.

  Masters expelled a sigh of relief. He had survived Frank Raft and was once again free to entertain thoughts of his political future. It had been a close call, a nightmare since the day the old man had given him the mandatory task of solving the problem of Ed Richards. Reginald Masters was not pleased with the death of Nick Sedway, but the old man seemed satisfied. His grandson had managed to make the problem go away and Jackson’s father had been kept in the dark. It had been weeks since Jackson felt he could face his father without exposing the mess he’d been in.

  Jackson telephoned his father, former Governor William Masters. He suggested a long overdue luncheon date, Sunday at his father’s home.

  The old man sipped his espresso after completing the arrangements for the flight east. He understood the trip to New York was necessary to personally handle the fallout caused by Nick Sedway’s death. Unfortunate. He had sincerely liked the young man.

  The old man was a survivor.

  He had survived the unions, the movie studios, the politicians, the gangsters. For more than fifty years he had survived and triumphed in the most ruthless business in the most ruthless place in America. Hollywood. He had earned fantastic riches and unequaled influence. He had put William Masters into the Governor’s Mansion and would see to it that Jackson Masters was the most powerful legal figure in the entire state. He would not be brought down by a two-bit private dick, a third-rate journalist and a crooked LASD detective. And certainly not by a blackmailer, the granddaughter of a whore. Silencing the woman had been the only acceptable course of action and covering it up had been the only way to protect
himself and the family.

  For the old man, it was simply necessary.

  He glanced at the photo of the former football hero on the front page of the LA Times. Handcuffed.

  “Imbecile,” the old man mumbled into his demitasse.

  LEG WORK

  Jimmy found Pam Walker at home. A studio in a cinder-block apartment building on Eighth. Pseudo-art-deco.

  The laptop sat locked in the trunk of his Chrysler. Vinnie had given him fail-safe instructions about how to transport the computer to LA without damage. Vinnie was elated by the prospect of helping make sense of Richards’ research and deflated when he learned Jimmy needed to make a couple of stops along the way.

  “Jesus, Jimmy, I’ve been waiting all week. I’ve been through Hollywood Meets the Mob so many times, I can quote chapter and verse,” Vinnie whined. “I’ve got all sorts of juice for you.”

  “Keep your shirt on, Vinnie,” Jimmy had said and then he packed up the computer and went to find Pam Walker.

  Walker had been questioned by the Santa Monica police and the County Sheriff’s department after Raft was killed. She admitted to being recruited by Detective Raft as a paid informant. She insisted she believed she was doing a good deed. The SMPD and LASD both talked with her briefly and let her go. And then Meg let her go. Jimmy was hoping Pam Walker knew more than the police were satisfied or interested in hearing about.

  When she opened her door, Pam looked surprised to see Jimmy standing there, and very uneasy.

  “Can I talk with you, Pam?” he asked.

  “Jimmy, I’m really sorry. I had no idea I was putting you in danger.”

  “How could you? I’m sorry you were taken in by Frank Raft. He was bad news. And I’m sorry it cost you your job.”