January Justice

by Athol Dickson

  Olivia shook her head. “You saw how he is. It’s heartbreaking to be with him, to watch him go on pretending. God forgive me, I was glad to go away to Spain.

  “I spent the first year over there taking general-studies courses. I had no idea what I wanted to do. Then I met those guys on the racing team and spent a lot of my spare time playing around with cars. I thought about dropping out and doing that full time, but they were real good guys. They said they’d only hire me if I finished school. So I entered the mechanical-engineering program, because that would be most helpful with the team.

  “Then as time went by, I began to think more carefully about what my mother had done, and I realized something wasn’t right. If she really wanted revenge on Arturo Toledo for what he did to our family, why bother kidnapping Doña Elena? Why not take Toledo directly? And she would never have believed that Toledo had only two hundred thousand dollars, so why demand so little?

  “I decided my mother must have kidnapped Doña Elena because she couldn’t get to Toledo. He was always surrounded by armed bodyguards. He called them his ‘friends,’ but they were bodyguards. So my mother took his wife instead. And then she asked for such a small amount to get him to bring the money to her personally. Toledo always claimed he had taken nothing from the people, so if my mother had demanded more, he might have simply claimed he didn’t have it. She knew he would have certainly allowed Doña Elena to be murdered before he put his millions at risk. But she also knew his pride was monumental. So she trapped him. With the police there and the videos released to the press, he couldn’t pretend he didn’t have a sum as small as two hundred thousand dollars. When she made that demand, she left him no choice. He had to bring the money to her or else allow himself to look like a heartless coward, which was something he would never do.”

  I interrupted her. “You think the plan all along was to get him alone so she could kill him?”

  “No no no! That must have been an accident. My mother’s not a killer. She wanted to get him away from his bodyguards so she could make him give her access to wherever he had hidden all that money. An offshore account, probably.”

  I leaned back, considering Olivia. I didn’t believe for a second that Toledo’s death had been an accident, but if that was what she had to tell herself, it seemed unnecessary to debate the point. Instead I said, “You think she got away with millions.”

  “I do, yes.”

  “Interesting. It would explain how she’s been able to elude the law for all these years.”

  She nodded. “Living on the run is much easier with money.”

  “It also explains your international banking degree.”

  “Yes. When I realized what my mother had done, I decided to change my major from mechanical engineering to business management with a concentration in international banking.”

  I said, “You planned to find your mother by finding the money.”

  “At first I didn’t have such a clear-cut plan. I only wanted to understand how people move large amounts of money around, and how they hide it from governments. My plan came later, after I graduated. I went back to Guatemala to be close to Papa, but he was just the same. That’s when I realized the only way he’ll ever get over this is if I bring my mother home, or else prove to him once and for all that she’s never coming back.”

  I said, “So you came back here to find your mother. You came back for your father’s sake. To find a way to save him.”

  “He’s dying, little by little. I had to do something. I decided to try to get close to the Guatemalan community here, since this was where she was last seen. I have dual citizenship, so I came back with my American passport and moved into a hotel in Pico-Union, hoping somebody would know where she was. But I couldn’t predict how my mother would react if she heard I was looking for her. It had been five years already at that time, and she hadn’t made one attempt to get in touch. If she heard I was back and looking for her, she might just go deeper into hiding. So I found a guy and bought a driver’s license and a social-security card in the name of Soto, hoping my mother wouldn’t realize who I was until I at least had a chance to talk to her.”

  I said, “She’s famous in Pico-Union.”

  “I know. They call her La Alejandra. Their defender. To tell you the truth, I was surprised when I came back and found out she’s been doing good things for the community all this time. I think I thought… I hoped…” Olivia looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. I saw a tear escape her eye and trace its way along her cheek. “Actually, I was disappointed she’s alive. It means she doesn’t want to come back to us. Do you think God will forgive me for that?”

  “You’d rather be orphaned than deliberately abandoned. If I can understand that, I’m pretty sure God does.”

  “I hope so. It feels good to finally admit it to someone. I’m tired of thinking about this all the time and never being able to talk about it.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m so tired of being ashamed of her. I know that’s probably hard to understand.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not hard.”

  She looked at me.

  I said, “My father is in prison for murdering my mother.”

  “Oh, Malcolm.”

  “Nobody should have to face a thing like that alone.”

  “Do you think…I mean, do you think you could hold me?”

  I patted the sofa cushion at my side. “Come on.”

  She moved over from the chair, sat down, and leaned against me. I put my arm around her shoulders. I thought about her story. Except for the part about Toledo’s death being an accident, I was pretty sure most of it was true. But I was also pretty sure she had gotten one other thing wrong, and that one thing changed it all.

  She took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “There’s more I ought to tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I got a part-time job working as a clerk for an escrow service, and I moved into a cheap one-room apartment in Pico-Union and spent as much time as I could at churches and the library and some of the neighborhood bodegas, telling people I wanted to meet La Alejandra. I volunteered at La Sociedad Guatemalteca Benevolencia a lot, talking to the old folks.

  “One day, Congressman Montes held a town-hall meeting there. I was in charge of the accommodations, making sure he had coffee or bottled water, whatever he wanted. Doña Elena came with him. It felt surreal, meeting this movie star my mother kidnapped. She was very friendly and easy to talk to. Well, you’ve met her, so you know. She asked me all kinds of questions, like she really wanted to get to know me, and at the end of the evening, she offered me the job as her personal assistant.

  “It seemed like fate. Like I was following in my mother’s footsteps, taking a step closer to her somehow, because of the connection with Doña Elena. I didn’t think very much about it. I just went to work.

  “Now I spend my days keeping her appointments straight, making the calls Doña Elena doesn’t want to make, running all kinds of errands, you name it. It’s actually a good job. I’ve met some amazing people. But there’s never any mention of the kidnapping and murder.

  “I was starting to think I’d never get anywhere, but then one day my computer died. It was bad timing because we were hosting a fund-raiser the following night, and I had a million details to get organized. There was no time to buy a new computer, so Doña Elena told me to use an old one she had stored in a closet off their garage. I set it up and went to work. It was a little slow but better than nothing. Then I opened an old file on that computer by mistake, and I realized the person who had created the file was Arturo Toledo.

  “It turned out to be one of the computers he was using at the time my mother…when he was killed. It had hundreds of his files still on the hard drive. I guess Doña Elena didn’t realize that, or else she didn’t care.

  “I had moved to Venice Beach by then, and I had bought my own computer, so I made copies of the files and took them home. Over the next few weeks, I read every word of his
old emails in my spare time. I looked at all his photos. He had hundreds of snapshots of everything from vacations to baseball games to pictures of his backyard. Finally I found one little document, a single page with three numbers on it. If I hadn’t studied banking in Spain, I wouldn’t have realized it was a bank code, a password, and an account number.

  “It took another five weeks to find the bank. It was in the Cayman Islands. The account was still active, but it had a negative balance. The bank had been levying fees for seven years, but nobody had paid them because, of course, it was Arturo Toledo’s account, and he was dead. And the account had been emptied on the day he died.

  I said, “So you hit a dead end.”

  “Not really. I was able to hack into the bank’s records and—”

  “Wait a minute. You bypassed a bank’s security system?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how did you do that? I mean, how do you know how?”

  “I taught myself a lot about computers while I was in high school, and when I got to college, I kept learning. I’m pretty good at things like that.”

  “And at working on performance race cars.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What else can you do?”

  “Well, if your toaster breaks, I can fix it for you. Or a television. Or an air conditioner. Like I told you before, I just have this thing about machines. Sort of an intuitive understanding of how things work. I grew up taking things apart to figure out how they work. Anything mechanical, really. And electrical. Any kind of logical system. Mathematics comes super easy for me. I do calculus equations in my head. I can program in most languages. I know most of what there is to know about electronics. Whatever.”

  “So you’re a genius.”

  “I kind of am, actually. But only when it comes to machines and things. I don’t understand much about people.”

  “Okay. So you’re a genius, and you’re inside the financial records of an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands. What next?”

  “Well, I was able to find out where the funds in Arturo Toledo’s account were wired. So I went to that bank, which was in Argentina, and once I hacked that one, I saw the money had been moved again immediately.”

  “Moved immediately? You mean seven years ago, on the day Toledo was killed?”

  “That’s right. Someone really knew what they were doing. It took me three days to follow the money through six banks before I found it.”

  I sat up straight, forcing her to move away a little on the sofa. “Wait a minute. You found Toledo’s money?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How much is there?”

  “A little over nine and a half million dollars.”

  I whistled.

  She said, “It was eleven million originally. There have been regular withdrawals over the years. I like to think my mother has been spending it on the people. You know, being La Alejandra.”

  I said, “So, you’re close to finding her.”

  “I don’t know for sure. It was a numbered Swiss account. That means there was no name associated with the account, just a number. So I can’t be sure if she’s the one who set it up.”

  “Can’t you watch the account and track the withdrawals?”

  “No. The account holder moves any funds they want to withdraw into a separate escrow account maintained by the bank. From there I guess it must be wired to them. But the escrow account is on a different server, and the security is too good. I’ve been trying to get into it for the last few weeks, but there’s just no way.”

  “Then there’s nothing you can do?”

  “Well, I did try one thing, but I kind of wish I hadn’t done it now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I took the money.”

  “You what?”

  “It seemed like the best idea at the time. Just because the account holder chose to move withdrawals into the bank’s escrow account doesn’t mean it has to be done that way. So I set up my own numbered account and moved the money into that.”

  I couldn’t sit still. I got up and began to pace. “How careful were you to cover your tracks?”

  “Actually, I wanted them to trace it back to me, so I made it pretty easy. I mean, they can’t find the money, but they can tell I’m the one who has it.”

  I stared down at her. “You’re using yourself as bait.”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “That’s what the men wanted at your house. They kept asking you where it was. They want the money.”

  She looked up at me and nodded.

  “ Toledo was murdered for that money, Olivia. What were you thinking?”

  “There was nothing left to do. I had to try something. I guess I kind of hoped my mother would be the one who came. But even if she sent someone else, I thought all I’d have to do is tell them who I really am. I didn’t believe my mother would let them hurt me.”

  I started pacing again. “That night at your apartment, did you tell those men who you really are?”

  “Of course. But it didn’t make any difference. That man kept right on beating me and asking where the money is.”

  “Next time they might kill you.”

  “They might have done that before, but now I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because now I have a backup plan.”

  “Yeah? What is that?”

  “Not what, Malcolm. Who. My backup plan is you.”

  45

  The next day Olivia slept a lot. I cleaned the M11 at the kitchen counter and clipped the weapon to my belt. Then I went outside and washed a couple of the cars. I never let the guesthouse out of my sight, but it was good to have a little distance from Olivia. I needed time to think about her story.

  When I was done with the second car, I went and sat on Haley’s favorite bench beneath the bougainvillea. From there I could see both Newport Harbor and the guesthouse. It seemed clear Olivia had told the truth as far as she knew it. Her story didn’t hang together in a couple of places, but that was probably because of the one mistaken assumption I was pretty sure she’d made. And her information did explain some things that had been puzzling me.

  It was a perfect day for sailing. The wind was steady out of the northwest, the skies were cloudless, and the chop was under a foot. A good sailing day is a good thinking day. By the time I stood up to return to the guesthouse, I was fairly sure I knew what was really going on.

  Olivia and I walked around the grounds for a while before sunset, then we ordered pizza and watched a movie, Wall Street. It was good to sit and relax a little, knowing there were finally no secrets between us. But there was a limit to my relaxation. I kept the M11 on the table at my elbow.

  Olivia’s black eye had turned from red and purple to a more uniform dark brown. On most women it would have been an ugly mark, but even with the bruising, she was beautiful. She said she needed fresh clothes for work the following day, so we spent another night in separate bedrooms and then rose before the sun and drove up to her apartment in the Bentley.

  When we arrived, I took her keys and asked her to stand in the small courtyard outside her front door. Before I stepped inside the apartment I pulled the M11, put a round in the chamber, and slipped the safety off.

  The living-room furniture was still askew, the potshards were still scattered on the floor from my diversion, and the slugs were still in the walls from the shots I had exchanged with Medallion’s partner. Otherwise the place was fine.

  I tidied up the living room while Olivia went to her bedroom to pack some things. Twenty minutes later, she came into the room with only a purse over her shoulder. She had done wonders with makeup. It was hard to tell she had been beaten just three days before. But I had expected her to come back with a suitcase full of clothes.

  “Where’s your other stuff?” I asked.

  “What other stuff?”

  “I thought you’d pack for the week.”

  “I can’t stay at your place, Malcol
m. There’s the walls, and you and Simon and Teru. Those men won’t come for me there.”

  “They might, but we’d be ready. And you sure can’t stay here. It’s too exposed.”

  “If we make this too hard for them, they can’t take me to my mother.”

  “Olivia, be reasonable. You don’t even know for certain that they work for your mother. They kept beating you after you told them who you really are, remember? All we know for sure is that they only care about the money, and there’s nothing they won’t do to you to get it.”

  “It’s still the only way to find her, and if I don’t find her, my father’s going to drink himself to death. You saw him. You know it’s true.”

  “I’m not leaving you here alone.”

  She smiled. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  She took her little Japanese car to the Montes’s place overlooking Beverly Hills. I hung back a couple of blocks, since I knew where she was going. She took Lincoln Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard, and then turned inland. At Beverly Drive she turned left, and at the little Will Rogers Park where Beverly meets Sunset Boulevard, she bore left again. We passed the Beverly Hills Hotel and crossed Sunset to climb into Benedict Canyon. Up near the top, she turned right on Wallingford and then left into the Montes’s driveway.

  The last thing I needed was for Doña Elena or the congressman to see me there and think I was stalking them or casing the place for another home invasion. So while Olivia paused to push the code into the gate keypad, I drove past her, made a U-turn, and parked in the shade of a live oak tree about a hundred yards up the road, out of camera range from the gate.