Murder Season

by Robert Ellis

  She moved with determination and purpose.

  She grabbed the flashlight out of her briefcase, and wrote down the plate number on the Chrysler. But when it came to making a call for officer assistance, she hesitated. Malibu was serviced by the Sheriff’s Department, not the LAPD. The station was a long way off in Agoura Hills. If their response began from there, it would take them too long to get here. She thought it over for all of about five seconds. Then she made the call and gave the deputy Bosco’s address.

  After that, it was play as you go.

  She jacked the slide back on the .45, moved up the steps, and entered the house. For several moments she didn’t move, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness and trying to quiet her rapid breathing. Once she settled down, she listened to the house and concentrated on the silence. Her flashlight was small enough that she could hold it against the grip of her gun. She switched it on, moving through the foyer quickly.

  When she hit the corner, she noted the open floor plan and realized that Bosco’s house had been ransacked. She could see CDs and DVDs strewn all over the couch and coffee table. While the kitchen remained undisturbed, the contents of a closet beside a large flat panel television had been dumped on the floor.

  The two rooms took up most of the first floor, faced the ocean, and included a massive fireplace. Lena worked her way through the darkness. The silence remained steady and true. But when she reached the staircase, she sensed something had changed, and stopped.

  She could hear the waves crashing against the rocks below the cliffs. The sound seemed too loud and too clear.

  She turned around, bolting through the living room. One of the sliders was cracked open. Switching off the flashlight, she looked outside and saw two men running across the lawn. The property extended all the way to the edge of the cliffs and was fenced in.

  Lena raced off the terrace into the yard. Both men were peeking over their shoulders and appeared panic-stricken. She could hear their deep and rough breathing. She could see their short and choppy steps. When they finally reached the wooden fence, they made a leap for the top and used their feet to help push them over. Unfortunately for both, they were big men—too big for the climb.

  Lena switched on the flashlight and raised her gun.

  “Stop,” she said, “or I’ll shoot.”

  The two men froze—still hanging from the top of the fence with their feet dangling above the ground. It was dark and windy. A dog was barking from somewhere in the neighborhood. Lena moved closer, shining the flashlight on them and measuring them. Several moments passed before one of the men finally spoke, his voice strained.

  “I can’t hold on any longer,” he said. “I need to drop down.”

  “Me, too,” the other one said.

  “Then drop,” she said. “Drop and turn around with your hands raised. And think real hard about what you’re doing. You guys pull anything, you’re both dead.”

  She stepped back far enough to give herself room if she needed to fire her weapon. She hoped that they weren’t stupid. Hoped that they wouldn’t force her to do something she didn’t want to do tonight. She watched them drop to the ground. It was all of about two feet, but they had to steady themselves against the fence. And they were taking too much time doing it.

  “Turn around,” she said. “And raise those hands.”

  They hesitated. Lena could feel her heart pounding.

  “I said, raise those hands.”

  Time ticked by. She couldn’t see their hands. They were stupid. They were fucking around. She pulled the trigger, driving a .45 slug into the fence one foot above their heads. Both men almost leaped out of their skins. Then slowly, as the sound of the gunshot faded over the ocean, both men raised their hands and turned around.

  Lena’s heart almost stopped.

  It was the district attorney of Los Angeles standing beside that goon he’d brought back from the dead. Jimmy J. Higgins and Jerry Spadell. And the ocean breezes hadn’t been very kind to Spadell. That bad dye job turned out to be a cheap toupee after all, and it was flapping up and down on his buffed head like a bird with a broken wing.

  Higgins took a step toward her. “Lower your gun, Detective. This farce is over.”

  Lena grimaced, feeling the anger well up from a place so deep inside her that she wasn’t sure she could control it. Higgins was two or three light years past being a piece of shit. She jerked the muzzle at him and he stopped.

  “I’ll tell you when I’m ready to lower the gun, Mr. District Attorney. Let’s go into the house and talk. Same rules apply. You guys do anything stupid, and I’ll shoot.”

  Her body was going numb, the situation over the top. But she could tell that she wasn’t showing it. Her voice didn’t break and her hands were rock steady. She turned to Spadell, who seemed too quiet. He was staring at her with those eyes he’d brought back from the other side. And he was a scary-looking guy when you got this close—mean and rough.

  “Do you realize what you’re doing?” Higgins said, shaking with fury. “Do you understand who I am?”

  Lena jerked the .45 at him again. Spadell’s eyes were still on her.

  “Do what the woman says, Jimmy. Let’s go inside and talk.”

  Higgins hesitated—thinking it over and incensed—but finally started walking back to the house. Spadell fell in line, with Lena keeping a safe distance. As they passed through the slider and entered the living room, Lena switched on the lights and steered them over to the fireplace.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now put both hands on the mantel and take two steps back.”

  “I’m the fucking district attorney, you bitch.”

  “I know exactly who you are,” she said. “Now lean against the mantel and step back.”

  Spadell gave Higgins a look. “Do what she says, Jimmy. Do it.”

  The two men grabbed hold of the mantel and stepped back until their bodies were at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. Lena wasn’t too concerned about Higgins, but she knew Spadell would be carrying so she frisked him first. She found the piece holstered behind his jacket—an old .38 that had the look and feel of a throw-down gun.

  “Is this thing registered?” she said.

  Spadell shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “Somehow I didn’t think you would.”

  He looked back over his shoulder and winked at her. Lena slipped the revolver into her jacket, patting him down quickly and tossing his keys and wallet on the floor. When she found a case containing a set of lock picks, she slipped it into her pocket with Spadell’s gun. Moving over to Higgins, she took a moment to reel in her anger before frisking him as well. Higgins remained livid, his neck and face swelling out of his shirt collar like a hot-air balloon in the middle of a long burn.

  “So, what were you doing in here?” she said.

  “Fuck you,” Higgins said.

  Lena ran the barrel of her .45 between his legs, knocked the muzzle against his balls, and watched him take it. She couldn’t believe what she was doing or who she was doing it to. Couldn’t believe what was roiling through her veins.

  “What were you doing here?” she repeated.

  “Bosco was my friend,” he said, his voice seething. “I left something here. We were looking for it.”

  Lena glanced at the way they’d tossed the room. “Oh, yeah?” she said. “Did you find it?”

  Too exasperated to speak, Higgins shook his head.

  “What did you leave? What were you looking for?”

  “Stuff,” he said. “Personal stuff. It’s none of your fucking business.”

  “Did you use a key to get in?”

  “Of course we used a key.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I think I left it on the table by the door.”

  Lena smiled, but there was no pleasure in it. “That’s what I would have done, too,” she said. “Only there isn’t a table by the door here.”

  “Then maybe it fell out of my pocket when we were in the
backyard.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened,” she said. “The key fell out of your pocket when you were running away. If you had a key, why were you running away?”

  He stammered. “I have no fucking idea.”

  “I agree,” she said. “You don’t have a clue.”

  Lena had already tossed his wallet and keys on the floor, but felt a large roll of cash in his pants pocket. Higgins flinched slightly as she wrapped her hand around the money and pulled it out. It was a roll of fresh hundred-dollar bills—the same kind that Johnny Bosco used to keep in his pocket before he was shot in the back. She went through the cash as quickly as she could. Higgins was carrying five grand.

  She grimaced at the discovery, then picked up his wallet and opened it. Inside she counted three twenties, two fives, and ten ones. It didn’t take much to put it together. The district attorney of Los Angeles had found the five grand in Bosco’s house and stolen it.

  “You’re so dead,” he whispered through his teeth. “So fucking dead.”

  Lena dropped the wallet on the floor. “You need to watch what comes out of your mouth, Higgins. Especially when you’re speaking to a police officer holding a gun. Things can happen.”

  “But you’re not gonna be a police officer after tonight.”

  “Turn around,” she said. “And keep it slow.”

  Higgins and Spadell made the turn and looked at her holding the gun on them. A long, dark moment passed. Lena had never entertained more than her share of bad thoughts before tonight. She’d never spent too much time thinking or fantasizing about revenge. But in this moment she could feel a certain joy overtaking her anger and disappointment for who Higgins turned out to be. She could see herself pulling the trigger and dumping both bodies off the cliff. The problem was that they were big men. Too big to get over the fence.

  “Pick up your things,” she said. “Grab your stuff and get out.”

  Higgins had his eyes on the roll of cash she was holding.

  “That’s my money,” he said.

  “Not anymore, Higgins. Tonight it’s the price of admission. Five grand in one-hundred-dollar bills. Now get the fuck out of here.”

  “Your ass is grass, bitch. You understand what I’m gonna do to you?”

  Spadell gave Higgins a jab with his elbow. And Lena didn’t care about who Higgins was or what he thought he could do to her. She watched them pick up their keys and wallets, and noticed Spadell hesitate slightly when he saw that she had kept his case of lock picks. He gave her a look without saying anything. The Grim Reaper was a quiet man.

  Lena stepped back to let them pass. She could hear a siren in the distance. The Sheriff’s Department on their way.

  While she waited, she looked at the CDs and DVDs tossed all over the couch and coffee table and tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  What had Higgins and Spadell been looking for?

  Her eyes moved to the DVD player. It was playing something, but the TV had been switched off. She looked around for the remote, found it on the floor, and hit the POWER button. When an image rendered on the screen, she understood what she was seeing, but not why.

  Higgins and Spadell had been screening video recorded by the security cameras at Club 3 AM. Each frame included the camera’s location, along with the time and date. Curiously, the date on these images went back nearly fifteen months.

  Lena ejected the DVD, noted that it was labeled with a Sharpie, and slipped it into the paper sleeve she found on the player. She skimmed through the DVDs stacked on the coffee table. Each one was labeled the same way. When she checked the dates, she realized that every week was accounted for from eighteen months ago to the present.

  But why?

  As she began to gather up the DVDs, she heard footsteps in the foyer and turned just as a pair of deputy sheriffs burst into the room with their guns raised. The one on the right looked young and nervous and began screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Stop,” he said. “Or I’ll fucking shoot.”

  34

  Lena rolled past the gate at Club 3 AM and pulled around the building. The place was closed tonight with only two cars in the lot. It was a safe bet that the Toyota pickup belonged to the guard she’d just passed, and that Dante Escabar drove the Ferrari.

  As she parked and walked up the steps around the fountain, it felt like she was on a timer.

  Once the sheriff’s deputies had cooled down, she identified herself and told them that she had walked in on a robbery. She left most of their questions blank, claimed that she didn’t see the intruders but thought that the DVDs in the living room might be related to her own investigation. It wouldn’t help though. Because the Sheriff’s Department serviced the address, getting the DVDs into Henry Rollins’s hands at SID would not be seamless. It could take time. And it could become complicated. Because celebrities were involved, privacy issues could surface and attorneys representing the club could slow things down. But even more, at a certain point in the very short term, Deputy Chief Ramsey would be calling her. Given the story Higgins was probably telling him, there was the chance that Ramsey might become aggressive and have her picked up.

  She reached the top step and found Escabar holding the door for her. After she entered, he pulled the door closed and locked the place up. Then he led her into the bar and offered her a stool.

  “How’s your night going?” he said. “How’s business?”

  She could hear the sarcasm in his voice, and watched him step behind the bar and pour a bourbon over ice. He was wearing black leather pants, and his hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Even in the dim candlelight, his face seemed paler than the other night and it looked like he wasn’t getting much sleep.

  Lena grabbed a stool and sat down. “I just caught the district attorney of Los Angeles burglarizing your dead partner’s home in Malibu.”

  Escabar smiled at the thought. “What was he looking for?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Could have been anything.”

  He reached for his pack of cigarettes. Beside the pack Lena noticed a 9-mm Glock with the safety switched off. She watched him light up, then return the pack to its place beside the gun.

  “You staying?” he asked. “You want something to drink?”

  “No thanks. I’m on a short leash tonight.”

  He met her eyes and pursed his lips. For a brief moment he seemed amused.

  “Does Higgins spend a lot of time here?” she said.

  “He isn’t a regular, if that’s what you mean. Once or twice a month. Sometimes more.”

  Lena gave Escabar a long look. “They weren’t really friends, were they?”

  He took a drag on the cigarette and shrugged.

  “Come on, Dante. Bosco and Higgins weren’t friends.”

  Those pursed lips were back. “I guess you could call it a matter of convenience.”

  “But that’s all over now,” she said. “That’s why you left the cocaine upstairs. You hate Higgins. Anything you can do to embarrass him, you’ll do.”

  She had been thinking about it on the drive over. Higgins breaking into Bosco’s house could only mean one thing. Escabar’s gun on the bar felt like verification.

  “Let’s just say that we come from different worlds,” Escabar said. “I don’t need Higgins the way Johnny did.”

  “It’s obvious that your partner had something on him. And now Higgins is searching for it. He was going through video taken from your security cameras here at the club. DVDs that your partner kept at home. Did Higgins use drugs? Is that what Johnny had on him? Video of Higgins doing coke?”

  “I can’t answer that because I don’t know.”

  “Why are you holding back?”

  Escabar glanced at his gun and lowered his voice. “Because the world is a scary place, Detective Gamble. Because crime is what the powerful say it is. You could be a Wall Street motherfucker who stole fifty billion dollars—but that’s okay because the government says it is. Shit,
they’ll do everything they can to bail you out. But try stealing a frozen dinner from a market on Pico Boulevard because you’re starving to death. If it’s strike three on a three strike count those fucking assholes will put you away for twenty years and use it as a cheap talking point to get into politics. So don’t ask me about holding back. Crime is what the man says it is. Nothing more and nothing less—and I don’t have Johnny’s clout. Things are different now.”

  Escabar’s voice faded into silence. There was a certain sadness to it.

  “Are you afraid of Higgins?” she asked. “Has he threatened you in some way?”

  “Not at all. I just don’t want to get chewed up in the grind.”

  “If you’re not worried, why is that gun on the bar?”

  He shrugged without an answer, then took a bigger pull on that glass of bourbon.

  “Why did Bosco keep security videos at his house?” she said.

  “You sure ask a lot of questions, Lena Gamble.”

  She coaxed him on with a look.

  “Because of our clients,” he said finally. “Because they’re celebrities. We need a record of what happens in the public areas of the club. It’s like an insurance policy. Johnny had backups made and moved them to a second location, just in case something happened here like a fire or another earthquake. He probably should have put them in a vault somewhere, but he didn’t.”

  “Higgins was searching through the last eighteen months.”

  Escabar gave her a look like he didn’t know or couldn’t guess what that meant.

  “Are the DVDs at Bosco’s house a complete backup?” she said.

  “Johnny handled that, not me.”

  “But everything’s here, right?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What are you getting at?”

  “Just two questions,” she said. “Two loose ends. You respected your partner. You admired him. Your life changed when you met him and he gave you a job. Johnny Bosco was bigger than life. An L.A. success story. The front man for a club that catered to everybody who’s anybody in the business. An exclusive club where people with clout met other people with clout. So, why would he have risked any part of his world and agreed to help Jacob Gant when everyone in the city thought Gant murdered Lily Hight and got away with it? Why would Johnny Bosco have agreed to help Gant when the result would have embarrassed the district attorney and everyone connected with the trial? Like you said, their relationship may have been only one of convenience. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t necessary. Because Gant was involved, because a teenage girl is dead, Higgins would have been embarrassed publicly with no way back. So tell me, why was your partner willing to put everything on the line?”