The Big Bitch

by John Patrick Lang

  Although more than fifty patrons were present, as well as six policemen, no one witnessed the assault. Whoever didn’t owe Mickey Mahoney a favor probably figured that someday they might need one.

  “Devlin Investigations,” the answering service woman pretending to be a secretary said.

  I stated my name and asked for Danny Boy. In almost exactly a minute he came on the line.

  “Jackson Holiday? As in Doc Holiday?”

  “It’s Les Holiday’s son.”

  “And Mickey Mahoney’s godson.” He made it sound like an indictment. “I’m with a client. Only have half a minute, Doc.” He made my nickname sound like an indictment as well.

  “Thirty seconds is all I need, Danny Boy. And a bit of professional courtesy. Seems you and I have been going down the same trail—looking into a Mary Grace Smith.”

  “Smith? Common name.”

  “John Q. Smith. Junior and Senior. Mary Grace Smith, now Grace Lowell.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells,” he said after a beat.

  “Of course, I would never ask you to reveal a client’s identity, but I heard you were paid to look into Grace and her family by a woman named Muriel Lichtman.”

  He waited one beat too long. “Don’t know the name.”

  “And I was so hoping you could help me out,” I said, even though he just had.

  “Sorry,” he said, picking up the sarcasm in my voice, “but maybe you could help me on something. Youngest boy is in college studying business administration and wants to go into banking. Maybe you could give him some tips.” Danny Boy was laughing.

  “Be happy to,” I replied. “First tip is this: tell him to become a better liar than his father.”

  When I reached Hobbs, I first corrected him on the proper pronunciation of Oregon and then told him what I had.

  I decided for the time being to hold off on telling him what I had found and surmised about Danny Boy Devlin and Muriel. I did tell Hobbs why she’d lawyered up and how I had read the letters from Jesus, which seemed to reveal nothing we didn’t know. I told him I would let him see them, and then I told him about my meeting with Heloise.

  “She said there was another woman staying with the Smiths about the time of the murder. She thought the woman might have been a babysitter or a sister of either Smith or Eve. She never met the woman, her memory is sketchy, but she thinks the woman disappeared the same day as the murder.”

  “Name? Description?”

  “No. Too long ago.”

  A pair of hurried travelers walked past me with three crying children. I told Hobbs to repeat himself.

  “Police report didn’t say anything about another woman,” Hobbs replied. “Report was so brief and sloppy I wonder if I have all of it. It does mention a next of kin with a disconnected phone number. No follow-up on that.”

  “Heloise said the police did a cursory job. They were in a hurry to see the World Series. A history of threats, man confesses on the spot—”

  “Just close the case,” Hobbs said. “Means, motive then a confession. Pretty fucking basic. Make sure it stands up and don’t chase after loose threads that might muddy the waters.” Hobbs seemed to be talking to himself. “If the woman was a relative, a sibling of either, I don’t see us finding that out,” he continued. “Assuming that she’s still alive, and/or has anything substantive to tell us. See, John Q. Smith was born in the Ozarks where they didn’t—maybe still don’t—record births. They keep them in the family Bible. Never served in the military and outside of a few teamster, court, and prison records, he doesn’t have much of a paper trail. Only next of kin anywhere is his wife, Eve, and two kids, John Junior and Mary Grace. She came from some Podunk town in Texas where the courthouse burned down, destroying all records. It has been common for people who wanted to change their identities to say they were born there. No way to prove otherwise sixty or seventy years ago. So we have no next of kin but Smith.”

  “If there is anything else to find out about the first murder, it isn’t at the trailer park,” I added. “Maybe the murder of Eve Smith is just as simple, cut and dried as it seems.”

  “Murder is never simple, cut and dried,” said Hobbs, “but that doesn’t mean we don’t have all the pertinent facts of the Eve Smith homicide. Moving on to the kids,” he continued, “here’s what I got: boy and girl are separated after the murder and become wards of the court. As we both established, there was no known next of kin. The boy, John Junior, known as Jack, is in a foster home for a while, and despite his age, gets adopted. Adopted by Eric and Maria Polozola. The family moves to Riverside, California. An older couple, now dead. After high school Jack moves to Hollywood to become one of a million failed actors. Goes to cosmology school, ends up working in the TV/film industry for a while as a hair dresser and makeup artist. As you know, he becomes a transvestite sweetie, and you know the rest of his history from car salesman to realtor to dead.”

  A schedule of arriving flights was announced. I asked for him to speak up.

  “Your client Grace Lowell’s given name is Mary Grace Smith,” he said, raising his voice, “and she went through a long succession of foster homes. Dropped out of school at sixteen to get married for the first of five times, and at eighteen became a swimsuit model. There is no doubt that Grace Lowell and Jack Polozola are brother and sister, and no doubt that John Q. Smith in San Diego is their father. Your theory of the murder and money laundering had not much more than an internal, logical consistency, but now we have some facts to put some legs under it. What do you know about taxes?”

  “Enough to calculate qualifying income from a federal return to underwrite a mortgage loan.”

  “Estate taxes?”

  “Enough to know that they never have, or likely ever will, affect me.”

  “We have a forensic accountant that contracts with the city. I tossed him the theory of trust and family and the hypothetical, and he told me something interesting. Said that in this calendar year the estate tax was suspended to a rate of zero percent. If the elder Smith were to die by the end of this calendar year, there would be virtually no federal taxes on his estate. If we can believe Grubb, and apparently your review of the closed files confirms this, then practically all of the stolen funds are already laundered. Motivation by the millions for Smitty to die before the end of the year, and if all the money is laundered, the sooner the better.”

  “I’m on my way to San Diego now to see him, and soon all that motivation may be moot,” I said. “My goal is to smoke out—what did Grubb call it?—yes, smoke out the other hog at the trough.”

  “How?”

  “By ‘how’ do you mean ‘just how far off the reservation do I plan to go to do that’?”

  For the first time since I met him, Horace Hobbs said goodbye before he hung up.

  Chapter Fifty

  After I suffered through airport security I received a call back from Father Dunphy. “It’s her,” he said. “I’m pretty much positive.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “At first I thought that maybe it was just that she had the same type of glasses. But, no, if it’s not the woman from the airport, then it’s her double.”

  I thanked him for his help, but I wondered just how grateful I was. Every time a question was answered in this case, it just raised more questions. If his identification was correct and that had been Grace Lowell, what was she doing with Jesus? The obvious? An affair? The obvious didn’t seem so obvious anymore. Jesus was always gone on Wednesdays and was in Portland the Wednesday he was seen by Dunphy. But what got him killed? What did Grace know? Why had she really hired me? And where was she, by the way? She hadn’t returned calls for two days. I let these questions rattle around in my head during my flight south. As I thought of Grace, it occurred to me that I still had more than six thousand dollars of her retainer left.

  I landed in San Diego at 8:45 p.m. that Saturday night. I had a voicemail from Rosa Morales waiting for me. When I returned it I told her I was standing in fo
r Jack Polozola and had some papers for Dr. Smith to sign. I told her that Jack had a medical emergency and that we were up against the clock on this transaction. It was true enough. Jack’s heart, brain and central nervous system had completely shut down, and Smitty’s days, like his usefulness, were close to being numbered if I didn’t get to him first. Rosa had said she was a Christian who “kept holy the Lord’s Day” and never worked on Sundays, but when I countered that I could make a two hundred dollar cash contribution to her church on top of her usual fee, she said we could meet at Smitty’s at Sunday noon. I said I would arrange it with Smitty. She asked if I knew her fee, and if I knew that, I should know she always got paid in cash. I knew her fee from the closing statements in all the files Grace had given me. I told Rosa cash wouldn’t be a problem and yes, I knew her fee.

  I then called Smitty and told him I was in town and needed to see him tomorrow at noon to sign some papers. He complained about how busy he was, but I assured him that my visit was critically important to the future of The Smitty Corporation. When he asked about Polozola, I told him that Jack had had a medical emergency. Smitty seemed to buy that, but then turning suspicious, he asked why I was helping Jack. I reminded Smitty that Jack Polozola was an old friend of mine. He seemed to remember that but he still seemed confused about who I was, so I reminded him that I was the man who recently carried him into his house when he slipped on the oil in his driveway.

  “Oh, now I remember you,” he said. “You know I didn’t ask for your help.”

  When I agreed that, yes, he hadn’t asked for my assistance, he seemed to relax and said, “Well, see you at noon. I guess that Mexican bitch who wears too much perfume will be here, too, stinking the fucking place up.”

  I confirmed that Rosa would be there, while I tried to imagine what fragrance might foul the air in Smitty’s place.

  I rented a car and took Harbor Drive to the famous Gaslamp Quarter. The women were all seemingly brown-eyed blondes who in the dim light aged exponentially the closer they came to me. Restless, tired and not caring much for blondes of any eye color, I found a Holiday Inn and turned in before eleven.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  I squinted in the noonday sun as I reached Smitty’s house and found him with a wrench in his mouth looking under the hood of one of his Edsels. He stared at me twice, then told me he would be right in but didn’t have much time. I assured him it would only take a few minutes.

  “I’m Rosa. I always get paid in cash like I said on the phone,” is how the woman sitting on Smitty’s couch introduced herself. She was fortyish, forty pounds or so overweight with too much makeup, and as Smitty had warned me, wore too much perfume.

  I pulled out the agreed-upon amount of hundred dollar bills and the church donation and counted them out to her. “This shouldn’t take long,” I said, pulling out the paperwork.

  I was prepared for her objections. She studied the paperwork and then said she wouldn’t notarize these papers, or any papers, without talking to Jack. As she started to leave, I blocked the door. I told her that Jack was dead, probably because of the crimes she was involved in with him, and that the entire scam was unraveling. When Rosa claimed to have no knowledge of any crimes, I told her that I had reviewed every closed file of every transaction with Dr. Smith. I pointed out that she had been the notary and escrow officer on all the deals. She countered that she was a licensed escrow officer and notary. She said she wasn’t a party to anything unlawful.

  “I’m a neutral third party,” she insisted.

  I disagreed. “You are either an accessory or accomplice to mortgage fraud and money laundering. Probably wire and mail fraud, too. And that’s just for starters. We can let the FBI and the U.S. Attorney General figure out the exact charges,” I said, bluffing. And I was bluffing, but I was still reasonably confident after the exorbitant fee she’d quoted me for escrow and notary services, that she had at least guilty knowledge of what was transpiring. “The sentence for mortgage fraud is thirty years in prison. Federal prison. No parole,” I added as she stood silent.

  When she asked, “Just who the fuck are you?” I asked if her laptop had wireless Internet access. When she said it did, I told her to Google Jackson “Doc” Holiday.

  Several minutes later she stared at the screen, then stared at me, then at the screen again. Giving me another long look she said, “You’re that guy. You’re him. You’re Doc Holiday.”

  “Yes, I’m Doc Holiday. Do I have your attention now?”

  “Look, all I did—”

  “Rosa, I’m not the one you need to convince. This thing might be falling apart, but what I brought for Smitty can divert the scam and keep the law away. If you can get him to sign this, you will likely be home free.”

  “That crazy old bastard,” she said, sotto voce. “I could get him to sign his own death warrant if I needed to.”

  It was very likely that’s exactly what she had been doing, but I didn’t mention it.

  “Is Jack really dead?” she asked after a moment.

  “Yes. Do you know who else was in this with him?”

  “I honestly didn’t know exactly what was going on,” she said. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that, except that I think there was this crooked mortgage broker in Portland who knew what was what. And maybe Jack’s boss, the broker of his real estate company. Maybe. But we never talked about that. Jack kept everything close to his vest, and I only dealt with him.” She looked around nervously. I was certain she was lying, but it didn’t suit my purposes to force the issue. In any event, the immediate mission now was to get the paperwork signed and notarized.

  “I’ll do this, but let’s just do it so I can go.” She pulled at her hair. “Then I don’t do anything with you or Smitty or anyone else involved ever again. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I agreed.

  As if on cue, Smitty walked in and without a word walked to the bathroom. In a moment he was back with a prescription bottle and a water glass half full of what I guessed to be vodka.

  “You know what I think?” he shouted in an accusatory tone. He glared first at Rosa and then at me. “I think someone thinks I’m a fucking fool.” He popped four tablets in his mouth and drank down the entire contents of the glass.

  “Why do you say that?” I inquired.

  “I say that,” he shouted, “because some motherfucker’s been in my pills.” He continued to glare at me and Rosa and shake his prescription bottle.

  “Smitty, I assure you it’s not me, and I am certain Rosa wouldn’t be in your medicine. But I know you’re busy, and if you could just sign this one form—it’s not like the usual bunch of papers, we’ve got it streamlined this time—we’ll be out of your way so you can get back to your ground-breaking work.”

  Some thought seemed to misfire through the scorched synapses and blown circuit breakers of his brain. His face softened, he smiled, and with a faraway look in his eyes said, “Damn, that’s it!”

  Two minutes later he had signed and put his thumbprint on the paperwork. Rosa completed her notary book, and she and I both walked outside with Smitty.

  “You know how close I am?” said a grinning Smitty. “A little tinker here, a little tweak there, and we’re home.”

  I bid farewell to Rosa and left Smitty there staring at the engine compartment of his Edsel. I assumed he was envisioning tanker trucks full of sea water pulling into Chevron and Shell stations.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The next morning at eight I drove directly to the San Diego Country Recorder’s office on my way to the airport. After I left the recorder’s office, I got a call from Hobbs at the car rental return.

  “Gass,” he said, dispensing with any formalities, “how well you know him?”

  “As you recall, Gass was the reason I came to California. He and I worked together for several years, early in my career. My former career.”

  “Did you know he was a regular at John and Mary’s?”

  I reviewed the bill, took back m
y credit card from the clerk, and put the receipt in my wallet.

  “No,” I said, surprised, “I never saw him there.”

  “Owned a house three blocks from the saloon. Moved across the Bay to San Mateo just over two years ago.”

  “Just before I arrived here. Had no idea he ever frequented the place.”

  “I think Mary missed the first day of school. You know, the day the teacher tells you that the policeman is your best friend?”

  “Yeah? Even after meeting you, she didn’t get it?”

  “Yeah, talk about a mystery. But anyway, pulled up a picture of Gass from DMV and showed it around. Mary wasn’t real helpful, said she remembers those who don’t pay or give her a bad check, or those who create trouble. Said he must have been a good customer. It was easier to get info from the good citizens who drink there. ‘Have you seen this guy, or do you want me to shake you down for outstanding warrants?’ No question he used to hang out there, but no one remembers seeing him for a couple of years. One person remembers seeing him with a good looking–blonde; he met her there several times. But that was three or more years ago. You know Gass. How do you think we should work him?”

  “Let me handle him.”

  “Like you handled Muriel Lichtman? Like you dug up anything substantive on the Eve Smith murder? And as for John Q. Smith, all I know is that I probably don’t want to know what you’ve done. And what about your client, Grace Lowell? She had an appointment to come claim the body of Polozola and never showed. I’ve given you a lot of latitude, and now you need to start giving me some fucking results! Whatever you’re doing, Holiday, you’re moving awfully slow. If you were moving any slower, you’d be going backwards.”

  I began to respond but the line was dead. So I called David Gass and left a message that I wanted to talk about Grace Lowell. I made it a point to sound friendly and casual.