To Die in Beverly Hills

by Gerald Petievich

  He spun her ample hips around and pushed her against the police car.

  L.A.'s permanent layer of smog was hidden by darkness. Looking through binoculars, Charles Carr stood at the window inside a dark and bare-floored apartment. He knew that the black woman standing inside the bay-windowed apartment across the courtyard couldn't see him. In his line of work, he mused, invisibility was an ideal condition. His feet certainly didn't feel invisible. They were tired to the point of numbness. The stakeout was in its tenth hour.

  A fit man, Carr was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt, off-the-rack trousers and wing-tip shoes; attire that was neither fashionable nor particularly becoming, but served the Treasury Agent's Manual of Operations requirement "to be dressed in business attire at all times while on duty except when acting in an undercover capacity." Without the weight of a gold badge, handcuffs, revolver and bullet pouch on his belt to sag his trousers, he looked like most other middle-aged men with graying temples.

  In the corner of the room, Carr's partner, Jack Kelly, lay on his back on the hardwood floor. A bear-sized man with enormous ham-hock fists, he had his arms folded across his chest like a cadaver. He was snoring.

  Charles Carr adjusted the binoculars to get a better view. The lanky black woman lit a marijuana cigarette and took a puff. She was dressed in a pink velour outfit two sizes too small and had a foot-high brillo-pad hairdo. The woman fiddled with a stereo set. The muffled sound of rock music came from the apartment. For the next few minutes she lollygagged about the room puffing smoke, picking things up and putting them down and adjusting her frizz in a mirror over the sofa. At one point she answered her telephone and, having said a few words, hung up. Back to the mirror. More picking at her frizz.

  Because of fatigue, Carr's mind wandered. He remembered being on a similar surveillance over twenty years earlier when he was a young special agent still on civil service probation status. As he'd been taught in Treasury Agent School, he had kept a surveillance log and dutifully noted everything the suspect did and the time. During the trial, he had learned that such logs were nothing more than cannon fodder for defense attorneys. "Agent Carr, your log shows a notation that the subject read the newspaper at ten fourteen the lawyer had said. "How do you know that the suspect read it? Couldn't he have been just looking at the pictures in the paper?" From then on, he had prepared only the most concise of reports. This habit, among others, was a source of constant consternation to his superiors, few of whom he respected, either then or now.

  Perhaps that was why he was still a GS-12 special agent rather than agent in charge or a squad leader, as most other agents in his peer group now were. His frequent duty transfers, rather than being part of the Treasury Enforcement Career program (the Manual of Operations used the term career path) resulted from his ceaseless disputes with supervisors. The Agents in charge invariably handled threats of civil suits by criminal defendants and other bureaucratic headaches per the Treasury custom, by placing his name at the top of the most-eligible-for-transfer list. What the hell did he care? He was single. He had never looked at eighteen months working the streets of Miami or Detroit as a fate worse than death. The only hard part about leaving L.A. now and then was saying good-bye to his longtime girl friend, Sally Malone.

  As a matter of fact, he hadn't been able to get his mind off her all day. After much musing, he had decided that the next time she brought up the subject of marriage he would not automatically shrug it off. He would not make a commitment (her word), he said to himself, but would try to have more of an open mind about it. God knows he was sick of restaurant food and Laundromats.

  A black man carrying a briefcase approached the door of the woman's apartment. He knocked. A tall man, he wore white, skin-tight trousers and a purple long-sleeved shirt. The woman sauntered to the door and opened the peephole. She unlocked the door and let him in. Inside, the man and woman talked animatedly in front of the window.

  Carr pulled a mug-shot photograph out of his back pocket. He moved to the corner of the room and pulled the penlight flashlight out of Kelly's shirt pocket. In its small beam of light Carr examined the photograph. He returned to the window. Using the binoculars again, he focused on the man's face.

  "It's him," Carr said.

  Kelly snored.

  Carr tossed the tiny flashlight, landing it on his partner's barrel chest. Kelly scrambled to his feet, rubbed his eyes.

  "What happened?" he asked in an urgent tone as he staggered to the window.

  Carr adjusted the binoculars again. The black woman opened the refrigerator and removed what looked like a sack. She and the man sat down on the sofa. Because of the angle, Carr could not see what was taking place.

  "She's dealing," Carr said.

  Kelly snatched his suit coat off the floor and put it on. "How do you want to work it?"

  "He walked in carrying a briefcase," Carr said. "It'll be loaded with fifties when he leaves. Let's grab him first."

  The telephone rang. Carr reached down and picked up the receiver. "Carr," he said, keeping his eyes on the window.

  "Travis Bailey here, Beverly Hills P.D. Your office gave me this number. Can you talk?"

  "For a second," Carr said. He continued to watch the apartment.

  "Do you have a bank president who lives in Beverly Hills that is supposed to be a major witness for you in a counterfeiting case?"

  "Yes," Carr said. "His name is Hartmann."

  "I have solid word that he's going to be hit. We need to talk."

  "Hartmann is out of town right now," Carr said.

  "I know. He's going to get hit tomorrow when he comes back. My informant is reliable."

  "Can you meet me at Ling's in Chinatown in about three hours?"

  "See you there," Bailey said.

  Carr knelt and hung up the phone, again without taking his eyes off the window.

  "Who was that?" Kelly asked.

  "Bag-of-Wind Bailey from Beverly Hills."

  "Only the biggest bullshitter this side of Burbank..."

  As Kelly spoke, the door of the woman's apartment opened and the man walked out, carrying a briefcase.

  The T-men exited the vacant apartment and followed the black man down the sidewalk. Hearing their footsteps, he turned to face them.

  Carr held out his badge. "U.S. Treasury agents," he said. "We'd like to talk with you for a moment."

  The man tossed the briefcase into the street and ran down the sidewalk. Carr and Kelly chased him at full speed. The man vaulted a low fence into a backyard. In the middle of the yard the man suddenly slammed backward to the ground. The T-men grappled with him until Carr was able to snap on handcuffs.

  Kelly laughed and tried to catch his breath at the same time. "Ya gotta watch out for those clotheslines in the dark, brother." The prisoner missed the joke.

  Carr jogged back to the spot where the man had tossed the briefcase. It had broken open and counterfeit fifties in inch-high stacks were scattered in the street. Carr picked up the broken case and stuffed the money back inside. He carried it to the government sedan and locked it in the trunk.

  Kelly brought the prisoner over to the sedan as Carr made a little wave and pointed to the black woman's apartment. Kelly gave a thumbs-up sign.

  Carr trotted down the walkway toward the apartment and knocked on the woman's door.

  "Who's there?"

  "It's me."

  She opened the door a few inches. A look of surprise. She tried to slam the door, but Carr had wedged his foot against it. He held his badge up to the crack. "You're under arrest for dealing counterfeit money," he said as he shoved open the door. The woman backed away, shaking her head sadly. Carr fastened handcuffs on her outstretched wrists. She seemed more resigned to the situation than frightened. "Mind if I look around for more counterfeit money?" he said.

  "You got a search warrant?"

  Carr took the woman by the arm and led her to the refrigerator. He opened the door and pulled out a brown paper shopping bag. It was full
of counterfeit fifties.

  "How'd you know that was in there?"

  Carr took the bag and led the woman by the arm out to the sedan. He motioned her into the backseat next to the black man. After locking the door he climbed in next to Kelly, who started the engine.

  "I thought it was heroin in the briefcase," the black man said finally. "I don't know nothin' about no funny money."

  "He's the one put the funny money in my refrigerator," the woman said, "I didn't have nothing to do with it."

  After depositing their prisoners at the federal lockup downtown, Carr and Kelly spent the next hour filling out forms to officially book the two.

  ****

  TWO

  HAVING COMPLETED an hour's worth of paperwork, Carr took the elevator to the seventh floor. Kelly used the storeroom entrance to the Field Office to avoid walking past the special agent in charge, whom they hated.

  In their office, a small gray room void of any personal effects or decoration except for a blown up photo of a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill hanging lopsided on the wall (it had been a government exhibit in an ancient case), they sat down at their desks. By agreement, Carr meticulously counted the counterfeit money as Kelly wrote the arrest report. They spent the next hour and a half filling out the usual plethora of standardized forms, lists and inventory sheets required to book the counterfeit money as evidence. Having completed the forms, Carr stapled them together and attached them to a fresh case file folder. Kelly dug in his pocket and pulled out a quarter. "You call," he said.

  "Heads," Carr said.

  Kelly flipped the coin and showed it to Carr. It was tails. "You get the honors," he said, chuckling.

  Carr shook his head and sighed. He gathered up the forms and the counterfeit money.

  "Try not to get in an argument with him or we'll be here all night," Kelly said as Carr left the office and headed down the hall. He stepped into Norbert Waeves's (aka No Waves) office. No Waves sat behind the desk with an oversized nameplate that read Special Agent in Charge. A man younger than Carr, with bony arms and a trace of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheekbones, No Waves wore his usual uniform of short-sleeved white shirt with pen-heavy pockets and a thin red necktie. The tie had a rifle-and-pistols pattern.

  There was nothing on his desk except pipe-cleaning equipment and a stack of Guns & Ammo magazines.

  Carr set the reports and contraband on the desk and sat down in a chair in front of the desk.

  No Waves put the pipe in his mouth. He flipped through the inventories and made sucking sounds.

  "I take it both of you counted the notes?" No Waves said, without looking up.

  "Yes," Carr lied.

  No Waves pressed an intercom button. "Kelly," he said.

  "That's me," Kelly replied.

  "Who counted the counterfeit money?"

  "What counterfeit money?" Kelly said in a monotone enmity.

  No Waves bit the pipe. "The money you and Carr seized tonight," he said.

  "We both did," Kelly said.

  No Waves switched off the intercom. He signed the forms and filled out an Approval for Booking Evidence form. He pushed the forms across the desk to Carr.

  Carr picked up the forms. He turned to walk out.

  No Waves reached into a desk drawer. He pulled out two envelopes. "Here is your six-month evaluation," he said, handing them to Carr. "And Kelly's. Sign them and have them in the mail room by twelve hundred hours tomorrow."

  Carr walked out of Waeves's office as he sat lighting his pipe. He distributed the paperwork to various "in" boxes in the office, locked the counterfeit money in the vault and picked up Kelly.

  On the way to Chinatown, Kelly read aloud from his evaluation. "Special Agent Kelly has an acceptable record of properly maintaining his issued equipment and government vehicle. Though he is not a self-starter, he works his assigned cases in an acceptable manner and meets most report deadlines. I rate his investigative efforts as barely adequate. Kelly has entered himself into a number of disputes with the members of the Federal Public Defender's Office during this reporting period. I have counseled him about the importance of maintaining proper relations with other agencies, per Treasury Manual of Operations Section zero-nine-point-five-six. I frequently have to counsel Kelly to include more detail in his investigative reports. He does not accept criticism readily and has a bad attitude.

  "Special Agent Kelly is eligible for transfer and is not recommended for promotion."

  As Carr steered past Los Angeles Plaza, a restored city historical landmark where winos slept on benches, he pulled out his evaluation and handed it to Kelly,

  Kelly tore open the envelope and read the report.

  "Yours says pretty much the same thing except for the last sentence. Instead of eligible for transfer, he says you're ready for transfer." Kelly stuffed the evaluation in the envelope and handed it back to Carr.

  "It's hard to believe," Kelly said, "but at retirement parties when No Waves ends up sitting alone because no one wants to sit with him, or when I see him eating lunch by himself in his office, I actually feel sorry for him. It's like he can't help being the way he is...but most of the time I still feel like kicking his teeth out."

  "That's just the way he is," Carr said.

  Kelly's face turned red. "He's nothing but a pipe-smoking, draft-dodging, headquarters-created butt-boy. Just the idea of that pencil-necked, mealy-mouthed, back-stabbing mama's boy evaluating me and trying to get me transferred..."

  "Don't think about it," Carr said as he turned a corner. "He's not worth the trouble." He steered past a commercial area into old Chinatown, a maze of pagoda-style buildings with gaudy neon trim. The walkways were crowded with families of tourists milling about in a sea of souvenir shops and Chinese restaurants with anglicized names. Carr pulled the sedan into a small parking lot between Ling's bar and a tailor shop. As he climbed out of the car, the mild scent of incense, cooking steam and fried shrimp enveloped him.

  An hour later, most of the twelve seats at Ling's bar were still filled. It was the usual crowd, mostly detectives and federal investigators from various agencies, all dressed in cheap suits. At the end of the bar sat a pair of puffy-eyed blondes who Carr knew were secretaries at the courthouse.

  Carr and Kelly sat on their usual stools. God only knew why the dusty place had become the favorite hangout over the years. It certainly wasn't the wall decorations: cheap oriental tapestries of swans floating on a lake, an autographed black-and-white photo of a deputy chief of the L.A. Police Department, a family photo of Ling and his three homely brothers.

  Ling, a middle-aged man sporting a clip-on bow tie and granny glasses, stood by a sink at the opposite end of the bar giving cocktail glasses his usual one quick dip and drain treatment.

  "Any case Bailey touches is destined to turn to shit," Kelly said. "You can ask anybody in here... he never comes across with the whole story. Never. I'll tell you right now, the first thing he's going to say is that his informant is super-secret and the case is the biggest thing that ever came down the pike. It's his M.O. The man is a known bullshitter...a weasel. Working with him is like being a mushroom; he keeps you in the dark and feeds you shit." Kelly took a big drink of scotch. "It wouldn't surprise me if he had his finger in the till somewhere. He's definitely the type."

  "It wouldn't surprise me either," Carr said, jiggling the ice in his emptied glass.

  "And he doesn't drink," Kelly said. "Think of it. Have you ever met a man who wouldn't take a drink that could be trusted?"

  Carr shook his head.

  Travis Bailey moved past the inner door of hanging beads. His sport coat looked tailored and a red silk handkerchief was perfectly positioned in the lapel pocket.

  Kelly slid over one stool and made room for Bailey to sit down. The men shook hands. Bailey ordered a straight soda. "I'm glad I was able to get in touch with you fellas," he said grimly as he adjusted his gold cuff links. "This thing is for real and I don't like to work with people I do
n't know." He glanced around the bar furtively. "They're going to hit the bank president at his house. The word is they're going to kill his old lady too if she's there. They don't want to leave any witnesses. The informant was very sure of that."

  Carr sipped his drink. "Who let the contract?" he asked.

  Bailey shrugged. "Unknown at this point, but it's definitely family. A Mafia contract all the way. No doubt about that."

  "Tony Dio?" Kelly said.

  "It could very well be Dio," Bailey said. "Just a supposition, but judging from where my info came from, I'd say Dio would be a very good guess."

  "Where did the information come from?" Carr said, looking Bailey in the eye.

  "My informant has proven reliable at least twenty times in the past," Bailey said. He sipped soda. "If he says something is going to happen, it happens. I've locked up loads of people behind his information. Loads. His word is good enough for a search warrant."

  The three men were silent for a while, each mulling over what was about to go down. The blondes at the end of the bar giggled loudly about something while someone else dropped coins in the jukebox, bringing the noise back up to its earlier level. Carr waved at Ling for another round. "Hartmann was approached by one of Tony Dio's lawyers and a couple of muscle men," he said. "They tried to force him to switch three hundred grand in cash out of the vault for three hundred grand in phony twenties. Dio figured that even with a big investigation, the last person they would suspect would be the president of the bank. He offered Hartmann the choice between a trip to Forest Lawn Cemetery or a loss for which the bank was fully insured. Hartmann did the right thing and came to us. We wired him, made some tape recordings when they met again and arrested Dio's lawyer and one of his gunsels. As usual, we couldn't make a case on Dio himself. He was too well insulated."

  Bailey nodded. "It all fits."

  "Fits with what?" Kelly said.

  "With what the informant told me," Bailey said. "It all fits."

  Kelly was expressionless, sipped his drink.