Blindman's Bluff

by Faye Kellerman

  He closed his eyes. “I see one…two…” He was counting them in his foggy brain. “Three…” His face, pale to start, went ashen. “Flashbulb in my eyes…then bang…Bang, bang, bang!”

  Beep, beep, beep went the monitor. Gil”s heartbeat started to race.

  “So fucking loud! Hurt my head!”

  Didi, the nurse, said, “You”re exciting him. You”re going to have to leave!”

  Gil was still talking, his eyes moving rapidly under closed lids. “Happened like…” He tried to snap his fingers and his eyes popped open. “My heart…pumping. I”m running away…I feel fire…I fall.”

  Didi was about to inject him with more Demerol, when he said, “Stop!”

  Both she and Decker were taken aback. Gil spat out, “Get the…bastards!”

  “We have the same goal, Mr. Kaffey,”Decker said. “What about their faces? Can you describe any of them?”

  The eyes closed partway. “One…two…three of them.”

  “You remember three people attacking you.”

  “Three people…”

  “Can you describe them?”Decker asked.

  Tears formed in Gil”s eyes. “Bastards…the one with the gun…I saw the arm…he had tattoos.”

  “What kind of tattoos?”

  “Beeexcel…” His eyes blinked, and the tears ran down his face.

  “Pardon?”

  “The letters…B…X…L…L.”

  Decker thought a moment. “Could it have been B-X-I-I with a capital I?”

  “Maybe.”

  The Bodega 12th Street gang contained nasty, nasty men, most of them with origins from El Salvador and Mexico. It had originated in the Ramparts division years ago but had spread like a cancer into just about every state in the union. They numbered around fifty thousand loosely organized criminals. There were men at the top, but most of the bastards were drug runners and hard-core felons. It was one of the most violent gangs in the country.

  Gil was one lucky sucker.

  “He had B-X-I-I tattooed on his arm,”Decker said. “Can you tell me which arm?”

  Gil was breathing shallowly. “Right-handed. On his right arm.”

  “His right arm was exposed then?”

  Gil didn”t answer.

  “He was wearing short sleeves?”

  “Black T-shirt.”

  “Good,”Decker told him. “Any other tattoos?”

  “Black cat…with Spanish words. Something negro.”

  “Negro is black in Spanish. Can you close your eyes and see that arm…tell me the other word?”

  Gil closed his eyes. “G…A…” He shook his head.

  “Could it be G-A-T-O? Gato means cat. So gato negro would be black cat.”

  No answer. Gil”s lids were closed with eyes moving underneath them.

  “Do you see the man”s face, Mr. Kaffey?”

  “I…more tattoos…” He touched his neck. “A snake…B…1 or something.”

  “B12?”

  Gil opened his eyes. “You know tattoos?”

  “I know a few gang tattoos. B12 and BXII are two of them.”

  “Gangs…Why?”

  The most likely answer was that someone hired hit men from the Bodega 12th Street. But no assumptions. Not yet. “That”s what we need to figure out. Did your parents keep a lot of valuables in the house?”

  “There were…guards.”

  “Some of the guards are missing.”

  “Who?”

  “Rondo Martin and Denny Orlando. Maybe others as well.”

  “Not Denny.”A long pause. “Dad liked Rondo.”

  “Did you know the men?”

  “Denny”s good…Rondo is cold.”Gil raised a tube-injected hand to his face. “Cold eyes.”

  “Good to know.”Decker tried to keep him on track. “The tattoos are a big help. You saw the neck…can your eyes go up a little bit more to the face?”

  Gil closed his eyes and was quiet for such a long time, Decker thought he had fallen back asleep. His voice was very soft. “Dark eyes…a rag on his head.”A big exhale. He touched his chin. “A soul patch…” Another long period of silence. Tears were falling down his cheek. “Then the flash and my father…” More tears. “I started to run…I”m very tired.”

  Gently, Decker patted his arm. “We”ll talk again when you”re feeling better.”

  He closed his eyes. Decker waited until Gil was asleep. Lord only knew the dreams that awaited him.

  AS THE ELEVATOR door opened, Dr. Rain stepped out. “Lieutenant.”

  “Dr. Rain.”Decker skipped the elevator. “I just finished a brief conversation with Gil Kaffey. He was a lot more coherent than the first time I saw him.”

  “I hope you didn”t tire him out. Gil needs to conserve his energy to heal.”He checked his watch. “Try to keep your future interviews short.”

  “Nurse Didi called you?”

  “She did, and it was the right thing to do.”

  “I”ll be more aware,”Decker told him. “Do you know who Guy Kaffey”s primary physician was?”

  “For any medical information, you”ll have to consult with the family. I”m not at liberty to discuss that.”

  “I found out he was taking medication for bipolar disorder.”

  “I wouldn”t know. Guy Kaffey wasn”t ever my patient so I can”t address that.”They both heard his name being paged. “I”ve got to go, but really, Lieutenant, what relevance does something like that have to solving a homicide?”

  “It helps to know as much about the victim as you can find out.”Decker pressed the elevator down button. “They say dead men don”t talk, but if you listen carefully, they sure as hell do.”

  THE FOLDER CONTAINED summaries of each member of the Kaffey clan. Wang said, “I felt an overview would help the both of us and maybe satisfy the brass until I can wade through all the hits. If I printed out all the articles, we”d totally deforest an entire South American country.”

  “Can”t do that. Not green and not PC.”Decker looked at the first heading: Guy Allen Kaffey. Wang had included a brief bio on Guy, Gil, Grant, Gilliam, and Mace.

  “These are the principal players in Kaffey Industries.”Wang handed him a separate folder. “Mace has a son named Sean who”s working at one of the big brokerage firms. I don”t know why he”s not in the family business—maybe he”s an independent kind of guy—but as the oddball, he attracted my attention.”

  “Oddballs deserve a second look.”Decker nodded. “Thanks. This is a start. Send two copies to Strapp. What are you up to now?”

  “Back to my Mac.”Wang stretched. “No matter how ergonomic the setup is, I still leave with a sore back from sitting incorrectly, burning wrists from all the typing, and tired eyes from peering at a computer screen. Man was not meant to work a desk job.”

  “Tell me about it. Most of my last six years as lieutenant have been spent with my butt glued to a chair. But I”m not complaining.”

  “Neither am I. It”s been a long time since I was in the line of fire. Sometimes I think I miss it, but I betcha I really don”t.”

  Decker said, “When I actually get to do some genuine police work, it feels really good. Then I get shot or shot at and it cures me for a while.”

  “Yeah, the last one was a close one. What happened to the nutcase guy?”

  “He”s at Patton State.”

  “He took out the guy behind you, right?”

  “He did. He meant to get the guy behind me. The man was definitely mental, but lucky for me, his aim was true.”

  COFFEE CUP IN hand, Decker sat down at his desk and picked up Lee Wang”s summaries, making notes in the margins in his illegible scrawl.

  Guy Allen Kaffey”s date of birth put him at sixty. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to immigrant parents who had long been deceased. A terrible student, Guy had dropped out of high school at sixteen with no marketable skills. But as he told Business Acumen Monthly, “I could keep up a steady patter better than anyone on the planet. That meant
I could be a disc jockey or a salesman.”

  He chose real estate. Flat broke, he began peddling houses shortly after leaving high school and within a year, he had amassed enough cash to start his own real estate firm. As he told the magazine, “My first employee was my sixteen-year-old brother, Mace. Like me, he was flunking high school, but when he dropped out, at least he had instant employment. Still, my parents couldn”t figure out where they went wrong. It was more like where they went right.”

  Five years later, Guy Kaffey picked up from the Midwest and moved his operation to the Land of Opportunity, switching from residential to commercial real estate. At twenty-two, Guy had his first million in the bank. Three years later, he qualified as a multimillionaire. Forbes listed Kaffey as a first-time billionaire when he reached the advanced age of thirty.

  At thirty-one, he met his wife, Jill Sultie, at the craps table in Vegas after asking the beautiful woman next to him to blow on his dice. That evening, he had walked away with a hundred grand in profit and asked if the beautiful woman would like to celebrate by joining him for dinner. Sparks flew that night. The affair was intense and four months later, they were married.

  “It was kismet,”Kaffey told e-zine CorporationsUSA.com. “She was recently divorced and I wandered in at exactly the right time.”

  At Guy”s request, Jill changed her name to Gilliam so they could be G and G, or as Guy used to say when introduced, “We”re two grand.”

  Two children followed: Gil seven months after the wedding and Grant two years later. The family was portrayed as cohesive, although Gil and Grant both had called Guy a “taskmaster.”

  The financial road to billions hadn”t always been steady. There were dips and ditches and sometimes even trenches and foxholes. CEO Guy Kaffey nearly went out of business fifteen years ago due to a downturn in the real estate market, mismanagement, and embezzlement charges leveled at the president of the company and second in command, Mace Kaffey.

  Decker sat up. As he underlined the sentence, he immediately thought of Milfred Connors, the accused account executive who was caught embezzling by Neptune Brady. Was there a connection between Connors and Mace Kaffey?

  It appeared that the brothers were involved in litigation that lasted several years, and neither Mace nor Grant thought it important enough to mention. Maybe that was because things eventually resolved. Mace remained in the business, but no longer sat on the board of directors. He was given a new title of executive VP of East Coast Operations, that sector eventually operated by Guy”s younger son, Grant. The rest of the summary dealt with the Greenridge Project, some analysts implying that it was Mace”s last shot to redeem himself with the company.

  If that was the case, Mace seemed to be on shaky grounds. From the start, Greenridge was plagued with problems. The location demanded several dozen environmental impact reports that resulted in many changes of plans. Eventually the project found a design that was approved, but the delays and the added costs coupled with the downturn in the economy and funding deficits had swelled the original budget by a factor of five. There was a quote from the Journal of News and Business about the Greenridge Project:

  Isn”t it time that Guy Kaffey do what he should have done years ago? Pull the plug on his dead-weight brother, Mace? Filial loyalty is an admirable trait, but a company—even a privately owned company—cannot be run on sentiment.

  If Mace went down with the Greenridge Project, what about Grant? Wasn”t he part of it as well? If there were problems, why would Mace be the goat and not Grant?

  The last paragraph of the synopsis was “An Insider”s Look at Guy Kaffey”from PropertiesInc.com that was more about Guy the man than Guy the businessman. His friends spoke about Guy”s exuberance: his foes described him as a hothead. He was well known for his outbursts, and his moods could turn at a moment”s notice. Guy was described as bold and daring, but he was also detail oriented and meticulous.

  Decker wondered how much of his outbursts had to do with his possible bipolar disorder. Did he sue his brother in a manic fit or was there just cause? Certainly it would seem that the charges were unjustified if Guy agreed to hire Mace back into the company.

  Decker put Guy”s summary down and moved on to Mace. There wasn”t anything too illuminating in the summary. Mace was a high school dropout. He worked for his brother. He moved out to sunny Cal with his wife, Carol, to work with Guy in Kaffey Industries. He had a son named Sean. Everything seemed to be hunky-dory with Mace until the embezzlement charges were leveled against him.

  This time Lee Wang got specific. Mace Kaffey was accused of stealing five million dollars. Decker couldn”t help it; he whistled out loud. There weren”t any specifics on how the embezzling was done except to say that Guy got wind of the discrepancy during a routine inventory check and one thing led to another until he was forced to confront his brother. Mace vehemently denied the charges and even offered to hire a private detective to find out who the real culprit was. But Guy had his own sources.

  The battle of the brothers lasted several years and during that time, the company”s stock plummeted. The charges and countercharges seemed equally matched until Guy prevailed. A month later, the case was settled. Guy retained the title of CEO, Gil Kaffey moved into the president spot, Grant was named in charge of East Coast operations, and Mace was shipped to upstate New York with a VP after his name.

  Decker was confused. If Mace really was guilty of such blatant embezzlement, why would Guy retain him? Did Milfred Connors frame Mace for his theft? Or just as likely, did he take the fall for Mace”s stealing? Perhaps the two of them schemed together. And what happened to the money? Was it ever at least partially recovered?

  He wrote notes in the margin and moved on to the next generation—Gil, thirty-two; Grant, thirty; and Sean, twenty-eight. Grant was the only married man; his wife was named Brynn and there was one child—a toddler boy. Gil was gay; Sean was still unmarried. All three boys had graduated from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. Gil and Grant were immediately sucked into Kaffey Industries, but Sean struck out on his own. He had just graduated from Harvard Law and was doing case law and business law at a small university in the Northeast.

  Definitely the smart one, Decker thought.

  The last bio had to do with Gilliam Kaffey née Jill Sultie. She grew up as trailer trash. Somewhere along the way, she blossomed from a bony adolescent into a beautiful woman and got a job as a Las Vegas showgirl when she was just eighteen. A year later, she was sporting a rock on her finger courtesy of her first husband, Renault Anderson, and buying her mother, Erlene, her very first house with a foundation instead of wheels.

  For a while, it seemed as if Jill had found the golden goose and she was living on twenty-four-karat omelets. Then life came crashing down, mainly due to Renault”s philandering. The divorce was said to be amicable. She met Guy during a low period of her life. They clicked instantly, and like they say in the movies, the rest is history.

  Rubbing his eyes, Decker checked the wall clock and realized he had been reading for over an hour. He got up and stretched, then peered through the glass walls of his office. He spotted Wang typing away on the computer and opened the door.

  “Lee?”Wang looked up. “Do you have a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  Decker told him to come inside and have a seat. “I finished your synopses. The family history reads like a soap opera script.”

  “Yeah, could you make up a name like Renault Anderson?”

  “That”s one for the books. I have a couple of questions about Mace Kaffey. There are these allegations of embezzlement against him, and then all of a sudden, the lawsuit”s settled.”

  “Yeah, weird, huh?”

  “More than weird. There had to be a backstory. I”m wondering if the accusations were related to the embezzlement charges leveled against Milfred Connors.”

  “Yeah, I thought about that, too. Maybe that”s why the lawsuit was settled. Maybe Connors framed Mace and when he was made, Gu
y dropped the suit.”

  “But then why would Mace have been demoted if he were innocent? And if Mace wasn”t innocent, why would Guy keep his cheating brother in any aspect of the business?”

  “Maybe that was part of the settlement.”

  “But from talking to Mace and Grant, Mace is heavily involved in the multimillion-dollar Greenridge Project. Why would Guy keep him in something so costly, especially if he thought that Mace was embezzling?”

  “Maybe it was Grant who was embezzling, Mace took the fall for him, and Guy put Mace back east to keep an eye on Grant.”

  Decker frowned. “Sort of a convoluted theory, but I”m open to anything. The Greenridge Project sounds like a big boondoggle.”“You wrote Guy up as a hard-nosed business type. If something was flushing money down the toilet, I don”t think Guy would hesitate to pull the plug.”

  “On Mace, for sure, but maybe not on Grant. Maybe the old man had a soft spot for his sons. I found a year-old interview with Mace”s son, Sean, on Kaffey Industries. Sean said a lot of things, but one particular thing stuck in my mind. Sean said and I quote, “My uncle has more than a soft spot for his sons. It”s actually a blind spot.””

  ELEVEN

  THEY STOOD TWENTY abreast, police officers interspersed with volunteers trained in this tedious aspect of protocol. All of them had a whistle around their neck and held a map in their hands.

  They were waiting for Wynona Pratt to give the signal—one long toot to begin and two short toots to stop. The detective had come down to the ranch several hours earlier to scope out Coyote Ranch. The vast acreage beyond the buildings and the riding corral was hard-packed terrain pocked with clumps of grasses, thorny briar, silver-leaf shrubs, purple sage, wild daisies, yellow dill weed, and chaparral, the land stretching out until it collided with the foothills. There the fauna climbed and joined forces with fragrant pines, eucalyptus, and stunted California oak, greening the mountainsides and shading the trails that cut through them.

  Adjusting her sun hat, Wynona peered through UV-protected spectacles at the map in front of her. She had divided it into five sectors, and with a little luck they”d finish it today. She had dressed comfortably—cargo pants to hold extra items, a cotton T-shirt, and sneakers. Her fair skin necessitated that she slather on sunscreen, and she hoped sun damage would be limited to freckles. She held her hand aloft, then brought it down with a snap along with a long, shrill whistle. The line walked forward in a unit, eyes on the ground in front of them. The list of what they were looking for was long and varied—footprints, tire tracks, drag marks, bits of clothing, popped buttons, bloodstains, food and food wrappers—any kind of evidence that pointed to human contact with nature.