Payoff

by Douglas Corleone

  Lepavsky stepped in from the back porch. “You have a minute, Simon?”

  I took Emma’s hand. “Excuse me.”

  Outside, Lepavsky offered me a cigarette but I declined.

  “I just got off the phone with the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” he said. “They’re not prepared to drop the charges against Edgar.”

  “They really think Edgar used his daughter’s kidnapping to hide the money, do they?”

  “The feds discovered that Edgar had several offshore accounts set up in Grand Cayman. Apparently, he was hiding money. Some money. From his wife, though, not from the IRS. And not because of the coming divorce.”

  “No?”

  “No. He was socking it away for his assistant, Valerie. She’s three months pregnant herself. She and Edgar are going to have a kid.”

  I gazed at the sky. Thought about the old-timer on Seven Mile Beach. I took a step back, lowered my head, and took in the manicured lawn.

  “Grass needs a good trim,” I said.

  “Gardener quit. Can you blame him? The Trentons aren’t going to be able to pay staff for very long. Their majordomo’s a real saint. He’s agreed to stay on and maybe keep Nicholas. Everyone else, though, is out the door. Hell, I’m not even sure what the hell I’m doing here. I’m not going to take on a case like this pro bono. I figure I’ll wait and see what Edgar can get for his Veyron. Car’s worth about three million bucks.”

  I nodded absently.

  Lepavsky shrugged. “And hell, maybe I can get his story. It’s got to be worth a fortune, right? In this town, you can always find a payday if you’re really looking for one.”

  My eyes remained fixed on the grass.

  “Edgar’s criminal case,” I said. “It’s just a matter of tracking down the ransom, then, isn’t it? The eight and a half million? Proving Edgar didn’t commit a fraud?”

  Once more, Lepavsky shrugged. “Sure. Simple as that,” he said.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Dr. Kurnz came downstairs and announced that Olivia was doing well, considering the circumstances.

  “She’s more concerned about her dad right now than anything else,” Kurnz said to Emma before turning to me. “Also, Olivia asked to see you, Simon. She said she slept most of the way on the plane and didn’t have the opportunity to properly thank you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  When I knocked on the door, Olivia didn’t call me in; she opened the door herself and gave me a hug. She’d just showered, was as fresh and clean and beautiful as she was standing between her mother and father in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in the framed photo sitting on her nightstand.

  This is what Hailey would smell like.

  I tried to push the thought aside. But not far this time.

  Olivia offered me a seat across from her bed. She was even more stunning in person than she was in the pictures I’d been carrying around for days.

  I dug into my pocket. “Oh, before I forget, this is yours.”

  I handed her the diamond pendant.

  “Please,” she said, handing it back. “Keep it. I don’t need it.”

  I was about to argue when I thought of the old treasure hunter. I’d give it to him. He’d never spend another day hungry again. Or thirsty, for that matter.

  “Will you speak to the woman again?” Olivia said. “The one from Colombia?”

  “I certainly hope so.” I smiled, thinking of her. “That’s the plan, at least.”

  “Please, please, give her my thanks,” Olivia said. “I was in a daze when I met her, and I feel terrible now that I know everything she did for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “What is her full name again?”

  “Mariana Silva.”

  “Mariana Silva. That’s a beautiful name for a girl.”

  Not much catches me unawares these days, but those last three words caught me by surprise. “You’re thinking of names,” I said.

  Her cheeks burned red and she turned away from me. “I don’t know how to tell Mom and Dad,” she said quietly.

  I stood from the chair and sat next to her on the bed. I took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and held her close to me. “Just tell them,” I said. “They’ll understand.”

  Epilogue

  Late that evening I arrived at Tocumen International Airport in Panama City. Technically, I was off the clock and had been ever since Olivia Trenton was returned to her home in Calabasas. But something continued to gnaw at me, and as much as I wanted to let it go, I couldn’t.

  With Edgar cleared, there were too many questions left unanswered. Emma remained sure she armed the alarm that night; so who unarmed it? Edgar maintained that he loaded the .38 Special himself with live ammunition; so who replaced the bullets with blanks?

  Who gained access to Edgar’s office in Burbank to steal the knife?

  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced—there was someone on the inside. Someone who could have “borrowed” the majordomo’s keys and made copies. Someone who could have watched the majordomo arm and unarm the alarm and memorized the code. Someone who could have gained access to Edgar’s gun vault to replace the .38’s bullets with blanks. Someone who could have remained behind and hidden in Emma’s home office after the rest of the staff left for the night.

  Someone who could have snatched the pass to the studio out of Edgar’s limousine and used it to get onto the lot at Carousel Pictures to steal the knife.

  So after leaving Olivia’s room, I asked Emma if I could have a look around her home office, specifically at the files for her employees, past and present.

  Edgar had been right about his wife: she kept meticulous records. So it wasn’t long at all before I located the file belonging to Raúl Corpas, the Trentons’ former gardener.

  Raúl and Luis were the only individuals who had been at the Trentons’ house when I told them I was leaving for Grand Cayman. Of the two, only Raúl was of Latin American descent. Which meant that he had to be the one to pass the news along the chain to Delgado’s people. There was no other explanation for how they came to be in Grand Cayman. Delgado’s people had bribed and threatened and stolen evidence; there was no disputing it. It was how Barney the jeweler at Rum Point knew my name.

  Less than an hour after finding the file, I had a taxi drop me off in Commerce, a city located in southeast L.A. County. Among other things, Commerce was known for having a large Panamanian American population. And according to Raúl’s papers, the city had been his place of residence since 1992.

  Raúl Corpas had lived in a large low-income housing complex just off the I-5 Freeway. Once I arrived there, it wasn’t difficult to locate his apartment.

  When I knocked on the door, a woman answered. Probably in her early thirties, she appeared frazzled in a bathrobe with a toddler hanging on her hip.

  “Is Raúl at home?” I said.

  “Raúl? You looking for Raúl?” Her voice rose sharply with every syllable, and the kid on her hip began to wail. “Quiet, Enrique,” she said. Which didn’t seem to help. “Raúl’s not here, mister, and he’s never coming back.”

  The way she said it made me think it wouldn’t be a good idea if Raúl did come back.

  “Are you his wife?” I said.

  “Might as well be. We’d been living together eight years. This is his son I’m holding.”

  “I take it you’ve had a fight?”

  “A fight? Yeah, you can call it that. Few days ago, Raúl gone and quit his job and called me from a pay phone, said he was going to be out at the bar shooting pool all night.”

  “He say why he quit?”

  “The people he work for, they the family whose teenage daughter went missing. FBI was crawling around, wrecking his grass and garden and shit, he said. Told me he couldn’t take it no more.”

  “And when he got home?”

  “That’s the thing. He never came home. I was worried as all hell, thought maybe someone killed him or he got picked up by th
e cops for some bullshit like public drunkenness. So I went upstairs to the sixth floor where my girlfriend Rosie lives to ask her to come down to the police station with me because I couldn’t get answers and take care of Enrique at the same time. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “Rosie’s husband didn’t come home either that night. He worked as a mechanic somewhere in Morningside. Left his job, too. So we went across the street to see our other friend, Franny. Franny’s man hadn’t come home either. And he wasn’t no grease monkey. He was a paralegal over in Inglewood, wore a shirt and tie every day. All three just up and disappeared, along with one of their other friends from the block.”

  “Any idea where they went?”

  “Where else they going to go? They went home.”

  “To Panama.”

  “You bet, Panama. Panama City.”

  Which was why I was now here. She hadn’t noticed until well after he was gone, but he’d destroyed every picture of himself, taken or burned every document related to his identity, and left her and the kid in case anyone came around looking to rip his thieving head off.

  So had the others. So all I had was a grainy Polaroid Emma had taken for his employment folder, along with worn photocopies of his passport and driver’s license. It wasn’t much. But it would have to be enough.

  “By the way,” I’d said before Raúl’s wife closed the door on me. “Does your husband speak English?”

  She stared at me as though it were the silliest question in the world. “Of course he does,” she said. “Raúl speaks English even better than me.”

  The Trentons had had no idea; it was why everyone had spoken so freely when he was around. And how he was able to gather as much information as he did in order to plot what he’d thought was the perfect crime.

  Seventy-two hours after landing, I was no closer to finding Raúl and his boys than I was when I left Commerce, California. I had spent the past three nights at salsa clubs like Habana Panamá, jazz clubs like Bar Platea, and lounges like Oz Bar, which catered to the city’s elite. With the weekend come and gone, I was losing hope that I’d find them. It was possible they’d played it smart, decided to lie low for several months, maybe even hopped a train down to Argentina or Peru. If so, I’d never find them. If I never found them, I’d never find the money. And I wanted to find the money.

  For the third night in a row, I was spending the wee hours of the morning walking around the Vegas-style casino at the Veneto Hotel, where I was staying. You figure, a few men who had never had money come into a ridiculous amount of it, and chances are they’re going to try their luck at a craps or blackjack table sooner or later. But no, not these men. For all I knew, they’d double-crossed the Panamanian mara that hired them by never telling them about the ransom, which had been all over the television. If so, it could be that the four men I was looking for were already dead, their bodies weighed down at the bottom of the Panama Canal.

  Almost 4 A.M. Time to call it a night.

  Time to call it a trip.

  Time to call it a case.

  The U.S. Attorney didn’t have enough to convict Edgar Trenton anyway, not if the eight and a half million was truly gone. The prosecutor would play hardball for another few weeks, see if he could talk Lepavsky into a deal, maybe a lesser-included offense with time served, just so that the Justice Department could save some face and preempt a possible lawsuit for unlawful imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

  This wasn’t about finding a stolen kid anymore; this was now nothing but a former U.S. Marshal chasing money in Central America. There was no nobility in that. At least none that I could see.

  I pulled my BlackBerry from my pocket. From here, I’d head to Bogotá to see Mariana. If nothing else, I needed to give her her share of the earnings from the case. She’d put her life on the line just as I had. And she needed a break much more than I did.

  Then I’d head north to San José to thank Aubrey Lang. I’d offer her a piece of the fee and she’d tell me where to stuff it and we’d laugh. Then I’d propose we set up a foundation for the kids of La Carpio. I couldn’t get those slums out of my mind, but maybe I could get some kids out of those slums. At least I could try.

  After my conversation with Aubrey, I’d head over to Grand Cayman and find the old-timer who spent his days hunting treasure. I’d watch him through field glasses for a while, and when I was sure no one but him could find it, I’d plant the diamond pendant a foot or so deep in the sand. Once I had caught the expression on his face, I’d head home to Washington, D.C., and once again get to work in earnest to discover what happened to my daughter, Hailey, all those years ago.

  I knew now, I’d never let her go.

  And I’d decided I didn’t even want to try.

  I took a deep breath of the oxygen-rich casino air and searched for Mariana’s name in my phone. As I did, I came across that number I discovered in Jason Gutiérrez’s Craigslist e-mail back in Eagle Rock.

  I tapped the button to delete.

  Then canceled.

  Thought, What the hell?

  With the phone in my left hand, I dialed the number, fully expecting to hear the familiar mechanical voice tell me, The subscriber you have called is not able to receive calls at this time.

  Instead I heard a ring.

  Not just in my ear but from somewhere in the casino.

  Somewhere not far off; in fact, just past the row of slot machines stationed to my left.

  I poked my head around the corner, and there he was, the gardener Raúl Corpas, and three friends at a table playing Texas hold ’em. The guy sitting next to Raúl set down his drink and picked up his phone.

  “¿Hola?” he answered over the sounds of the casino.

  I smiled, said, “I have a message for Raúl.”

  “A message?”

  “Yes, a message. Tell him I’ll see him soon.”

  “Soon?”

  “In about thirty seconds.”

  I started walking toward them, reaching with my other hand into my jacket.

  “Thirty seconds?”

  “Thirty seconds,” I said as I wrapped my fingers around the rubber grip of my Chief’s Special. “Give or take a few.”

  Author’s Note

  Payoff is a work of fiction. In writing this novel, I endeavored to remain true to the laws and geography of the locations Simon visits in his efforts to find Olivia Trenton. However, I also took the liberty of altering facts and places whenever I felt such changes would enhance the story. All characters appearing in Payoff are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Accordingly, certain historical events, such as the death or resignation of public figures, have intentionally been modified or erased in order to create and intensify the universe in which Simon Fisk resides.

  ALSO BY DOUGLAS CORLEONE

  Simon Fisk Novels

  Good as Gone

  Kevin Corvelli Mysteries

  Last Lawyer Standing

  Night on Fire

  One Man’s Paradise

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DOUGLAS CORLEONE is a former New York City defense attorney and winner of the MB/MWA First Crime Novel Competition. He now lives in the Hawaiian Islands with his wife and three children. This is his fifth novel.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  PAYOFF. Copyright © 2014 by Douglas Corleone. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

  Cover photographs: man on bike © DBURKE/Almay; cathedral © Ms643

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

 
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-04073-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-3601-3 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466836013

  First Edition: August 2014