‘Do they at least know what it was?’
‘Nine-millimeter semi-auto, possibly a Glock.’
I finally started taking notes of my own on a legal pad I’d brought along for the purpose. ‘Tell me about the car.’
He read from his notebook. ‘Ninety-eight Buick LeSabre four door, dark blue, license number 5TNC641. Registered owner one Irene Duffy, D-U-F-F-Y, of Los Angeles. You want the address?’
I jotted it down. ‘Where is that, exactly? Hollywood?’
‘Hollywood or Los Feliz. Sounds more like Los Feliz.’
‘And that’s where the car was stolen?’
‘According to the owner’s statement, yeah. What’s the problem?’
‘He stole a car in Los Feliz to make a drug connection twenty miles away in Santa Monica?’
Fine gave me a blank look, unmoved by the discrepancy.
‘Had Ms Duffy reported the car stolen prior to it being found out at the pier?’
‘No. She said she didn’t even know it was gone till the detectives called to question her about it.’
‘And did she know either R.J. or Eastman?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Fine shook his head, ground his spent cigarette into the stone surface of the picnic table, and expelled one last lungful of smoke through the side of his mouth.
‘Besides Eastman. Are they looking at anybody else?’
‘Like who?’
‘Like somebody with a motive other than the coke in the car. R.J. must have had an enemy or two somewhere. At work, at church . . .’
‘My guy said, according to everybody he and his partner talked to, your boy Burrow was a very nice man who got along well with everybody. Bein’ on the pipe was apparently the only vice he had worth mentioning.’
Fine turned his head to watch a young blonde in workout togs and running shoes do her pre-jog stretching nearby. He would have recalled I was still sitting there eventually, but I decided not to wait. I capped my pen and stood up.
‘You’ve been very helpful, Sergeant. I appreciate your time.’
He turned around to face me, gave me that poker liar’s grin I found so unsettling again. ‘Hey, no problem. Any friend of the mayor’s is a friend of mine.’
There were other questions I could have asked him, of course. Like how a uniformed cop could be in so good with the plain-clothes detectives of the Santa Monica PD, when the latter breed of policeman generally loathes having anything to do with the former. But I had a hunch I already knew the answer to that: Fine used to be one of the plain-clothes boys himself, before he’d either turned his detective’s badge in voluntarily, or had it taken away.
Which of the two it had been wasn’t all that hard to figure out, either.
TWELVE
Excel’s people in Inglewood had a thing for Chinese.
They ordered take-out from a local restaurant called the Jade Inn at least once a week, and it was always the same lanky Asian teenager who made the delivery. R.J., O’ and I saw him come and go on so many occasions, we eventually came to realize that only Excel Rucker himself came in contact with the safe house’s four occupants with greater regularity.
‘That’s our in,’ O’ said one day, referring to the delivery boy.
R.J. and I agreed immediately, and the three of us set about learning as much as we could about the kid and his place of employment. By following the little weather-beaten red Toyota he drove, we discovered that the Jade Inn was located on Manchester Boulevard, less than two miles from the home we intended to rob, and that he almost always took the same route there. A quiet, long-haired teenager with the stooped-back posture of an old woman, he never got beyond the apartment’s front porch, but he was sometimes left standing before the cracked front door while whoever had answered it for him disappeared inside to find his money.
It wasn’t much of an opening, but we knew it was more than any of us were likely to get. If we hijacked the kid on his next run to the apartment so that one of us could make the delivery in his place, nobody inside the house was going to buy it. In fact, we were reasonably certain that Excel’s people would respond to a black man showing up at their door, claiming to be an employee of a Chinese owned and operated eatery, with a bullet between the eyes, no questions asked.
That meant the kid would have to go up there himself, just as he always did. And then . . . what?
Our initial thought was that he’d go with the understanding that we had a man back at the restaurant who would kill every soul in the building, staff and customers alike, if he didn’t do exactly as we said. We’d tell him to talk his way into the apartment somehow, maybe by asking to use the phone or the bathroom, then leave a window or back door open for us to slip through later that night, when we’d have at least an outside chance of catching most or all of the occupants sleeping. We’d go in, take what we wanted, and get out without ever having had to fire a shot.
Such a plan might have worked, with a lot of luck and flawless execution, but it wasn’t foolproof enough for our tastes. It involved too many variables that could get somebody killed, starting with our delivery boy patsy, and for O’ and I, if not for R.J., this last was simply an unacceptable risk.
We needed another, less unpredictable way in, and so the three of us spent two days trying to devise one, tossing ideas back and forth at each other like bickering old women. When we eventually succeeded, we had pieced together a scheme that didn’t hinge on the kid’s ability to perform, and seemed to all but guarantee that we’d encounter no resistance upon entering the apartment.
It was a perfect plan that blew up in our faces, but not in a way that any of us could have possibly anticipated.
We were worried our first little trick hadn’t worked until O’ got a late night call from Frankie Chang, a classmate of his at UCLA, who said he’d just taken an order for some Peking dumplings and sweet and sour spare ribs from a woman named Linda Dole.
Dole was the hot-tempered female resident of Excel Rucker’s Inglewood safe house, and she’d called Frankie instead of the Jade Inn because we’d put a fake flyer in her mailbox the day before alerting her to the restaurant’s ‘new’ phone number. In order to intercept the restaurant’s delivery boy on his next trip to the apartment, we had to know exactly when that trip would be happening, so O’ was paying Frankie $50 a day to answer his second house line with the proper greeting and inflection of a Jade Inn employee, and alert us to any calls intended for the restaurant he might receive.
It was money well spent.
Frankie tipped O’ off just after nine on a Friday night, our third week of watching the Inglewood duplex, and as soon as O’ thanked him and hung up the phone, he and I left O’s apartment to tell R.J., who was out in Inglewood monitoring the place.
It was showtime.
How much thought either of my friends gave to calling the whole thing off, I will never know. It was the riskiest and most complicated job we had ever attempted, so they must have had their doubts. All I can say for certain is that, now that the moment had come to fish or cut bait, the idea of doing the latter crossed my own mind more than once. Suddenly I could see all the myriad ways this train could fly off its tracks and how high the body count could be if it did. Did I still need to hurt Excel Rucker that badly?
I did.
The three of us went over the game plan one last time, then O’ drove me to the Jade Inn, where I went in alone to place a food order identical to the one Linda Dole had given to Frankie Chang. I left with the food fifteen minutes later and O’ stayed behind in the car, where he waited for the kid in the red Toyota to attempt delivery of Dole’s original order, which R.J. had just called in on Dole’s behalf.
The route the kid always took to the safe house invariably led him south down a stretch of Tamarack Avenue that was as dark after ten p.m. as it was desolate, and when he arrived there, O’s Camaro riding close enough behind him to peel a sticker off his bumper, I was waiting, strolling along the sidewalk with the sack of Chinese food under my arm lik
e an elderly local out for his evening exercise.
The kid heeded the stop sign at Kelso and O’ plowed right into him, hard enough to do some damage without causing injury. The kid got out of his car first, instinct taking over before common sense could kick in, and O’ joined him, the two men meeting at the point of collision to shower insults and accusations upon each other.
O’s size and theatrical outrage should have had the teenager paralyzed, but the kid was in his face right up until O’ showed him the gun. At that, his hands fell limp at his sides and he froze, peering so intently down the barrel of O’s Smith & Wesson, I feared he might see all the way into the nine’s empty magazine. But no – the gun had his attention and his respect, and when O’ used the nose of it to order a 180 degree turn, the kid came around to show me his back like a trained seal.
It only took me a few seconds to slip over to the red Toyota and exchange bags through the driver’s side door the kid had left open. He sensed something going on behind him, but O’ put the gun to his nose the instant his head started to turn, and I was back on the sidewalk, leaving the scene with R.J.’s order of Chinese food, before he had a chance to register anything amiss.
I was three blocks away when O’s Camaro burbled up to the curb alongside me, the man behind the wheel grinning like a crazed degenerate.
I jerked the door open and got in. ‘You didn’t hurt him, did you?’
‘Naw.’ He smoked his tires taking off again. ‘He’s gonna have to go home and change those pants, though.’
We laughed, slapping two open palms together loud enough to raise the dead.
‘Just as long as he makes his delivery first. If you scared him too bad, he might run, and then we’re fucked,’ I said, voicing one of our greatest concerns about the plan we’d just set into motion.
‘I don’t think he will. He’s a pretty tough little bastard.’
I began to rummage through the contents of the brown paper sack in my lap, looking for the container of spare ribs. ‘You want some of this?’
‘I do if that’s the right bag.’
‘Shit. You saw me make the switch.’
‘Yeah, I saw you. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t fuck it up.’
I found the ribs, popped one into my mouth to gnaw eagerly on the bone. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Not yet. Ask me again in an hour.’
In one hour, if I had fucked up, I was going to be out on my ass. Only moments after picking it up, I’d spiked every course of the meal I’d ordered at the Jade Inn with a liberal dose of chloral hydrate, a liquid sedative we’d purchased from an intern of R.J.’s acquaintance who worked at a hospital in Culver City and dealt prescription meds on the side. He’d given us his assurance that a few ounces of chloral hydrate would render a large adult unconscious less than an hour after he’d ingested the drug, and the test we’d done using O’ as a guinea pig had proven his sales pitch to be not only accurate, but somewhat understated. A chloral hydrate-spiked chocolate shake had knocked O’ out in exactly forty-six minutes, and left him that way for several hours afterward.
‘This all going to work, O’?’ I asked him now.
He checked my face, saw that I’d grown serious.
‘Guess we’ll just have to wait and see,’ he said.
THIRTEEN
The Coughlin Construction business complex was in Torrance. It took up most of a full city block, and consisted of one four-story office building and a half-dozen or so utility structures, all surrounded by a security fence crowned with razor wire any minimum-security prison would have been proud to own. Heavy machinery spread colors of gold and green in various lots all around, tractors and earth movers, forklifts and bulldozers. The guard at the gate didn’t care for my looks, but I’d called ahead to arrange for a pass, so he had little choice but to instruct me where to park and wave me on through.
The man I’d come to see had been R.J.’s immediate supervisor. He was Coughlin’s chief of security, a bullish, stone-jawed black man I remembered seeing at the funeral named Mike Owens, and getting him to agree to see me on such short notice, just before three on a Tuesday afternoon, had been the hardest work I’d ever done over the phone.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have much time for you, Mr White,’ he told me the minute I’d taken my seat in his office. It had a window looking on to a vast spread of workers’ cubicles, but the view it afforded him of life in the Coughlin lane was hardly worth the cost of the glass. ‘Tell me again who you are?’
‘Just a friend of the family. R.J. and I went way back.’
‘And you’re here because?’
‘Because his wife and daughter would like to be sure the police don’t miss anything significant in their investigation into his murder.’
‘Anything significant. Like what?’
‘I’m not really sure. Anything that could lead to the right people being held responsible, as opposed to the wrong ones, I suppose.’
‘I see. You’re a private investigator, then?’
‘No.’
Something in the room was intermittently making a dry, buzzing noise that was wearing on my nerves, and the focus of my thinking kept shifting to the mystery of its origin. Between that, and answering the same questions about how R.J.’s murder was any of my business, I was becoming one impatient sonofabitch.
‘No?’
‘I’m just doing the ladies a favor, Mr Owens. They’ve asked me to talk to some of R.J.’s friends and co-workers to see if anybody might know what happened to him, and that’s what I’m doing. If you don’t feel comfortable talking to me because I lack a private investigator’s license, I’m sure they’ll understand.’
Which, of course, was my way of telling him they wouldn’t understand at all.
‘I’ve got no problem talking to you,’ Owens said, straightening a necktie that could have come off the rack at any drugstore in the world. ‘Anything I can do to help Bobby’s family, I’m only too happy to do. But there are matters of confidentiality to be considered here, Mr White, as well as the trouble I could conceivably get into with the police, who’d probably take my talking to you as some kind of sign that I’m as concerned about their competency as you are.’
‘Of course. Except that nobody’s saying the police are incompetent. Yet.’
He fell back in his chair and nodded, determined to be as difficult to move in person as he had been over the phone. The irritating buzz in the room erupted again; it was coming from somewhere on the computer workstation behind him. ‘So what would you like to know?’
‘Why don’t we start with the most obvious question first: You have any idea who might have killed R.J., or why?’
‘Absolutely none. The man was an extremely likeable person and a fine employee. We’re going to miss him here at Coughlin a great deal.’
‘How long had you worked together?’
‘Nine years. He was here when I hired on.’
‘Did you consider him a friend?’
‘A friend?’
‘As opposed to just a fellow employee.’
‘We didn’t socialize with each other outside of the office, if that’s what you’re asking. I was his supervisor, and he was my subordinate. But we were friendly, sure.’
‘Was he more than “friendly” with anyone else here?’
‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’
‘I’m wondering if there was anyone here at Coughlin in particular he might have spent considerable time with away from the job.’
‘You talking about a woman?’
The question caught me off guard. ‘Not necessarily.’
‘Good. Because if you were, I’d have no comment on the subject. We have rules against employee fraternization here, Mr White, but anything our people choose to do after hours that has no impact on their work performance is entirely their own business.’
He was telling me R.J. had been having an affair with a co-worker by way of not telling me. What I couldn’t determine was whether this was intention
al, or inadvertent.
‘Assuming their relationship with R.J. was strictly platonic, if I wanted to speak to the people who were closest to him here at Coughlin, who would they be?’
‘You thinking somebody here killed Bobby?’
‘Not at all. I’m simply thinking it might be helpful to ask the people who knew him best how he’d been doing lately.’
We stared each other down. Owens, because all this was making him extremely uncomfortable, and me, because he was giving me nothing else to do. Meanwhile, the raspy, cough-like sound that kept drawing my attention rejoined our conversation, and this time I caught enough of it before it went away to recognize what it was.
‘Sylvia Nuňez and Doug Wilmore are the ones who first come to mind,’ Owens said. ‘Sylvia works in HR and Doug’s one of our senior uniforms; he and Bobby came in together, I believe.’
I wrote the names down. ‘Any chance either of them are here right now?’
‘Doug’s out in the field, but Sylvia should be around. I’ll point the way to HR on your way out if you like.’
‘I would, thanks.’
‘We about done? Don’t mean to rush you, but I’m a little pressed for time this afternoon, like I said.’
‘I just have two or three more questions. I’ll make them quick.’
‘Please.’
‘R.J. was a security consultant for Coughlin, is that right?’
Owens nodded.
‘Could you explain what that means, exactly? What did he actually do?’
Owens had to give his answer some thought before offering it. ‘Basically, he toured all our work sites to assess their potential for theft, and suggested ways to make them more secure.’
‘That’s it?’
Owens shrugged. ‘Pretty much.’
‘Sounds like a fairly simple gig.’
‘It isn’t rocket science. But it does require a certain amount of knowledge and expertise.’
‘And R.J. had it.’
‘After eighteen years in the field? Most certainly.’
‘Would you consider the work stressful in any way?’
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