Blond Cargo

by John Lansing

  Jack spun, flashed a winning smile, thrust his hand forward. “Raul, how are you? Jack Bertolino.”

  A wary Raul Vargas, who didn’t want to offend, accepted the handshake. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m on a case and won’t take more than two minutes of your time.”

  Raul forced a smile, thought about blowing off Jack, and decided to keep up some semblance of goodwill until he knew what the hell this intrusion was all about. And who the intruder was.

  “Are you with the LAPD? We’ve got a lot of friends.”

  “Good to hear, me too. Retired,” Jack said. He lowered his voice. “Working a missing-persons case. Could we do this in your office?” He glanced toward the receptionist, who was pretending not to listen.

  “Halle, when am I due at the planning commission?”

  “The meeting starts in five minutes.”

  Good one, Jack thought. Little Halle was well trained.

  “It won’t take but a minute,” Jack said in as unthreatening a manner as he could muster. He already didn’t like the man, who had turned on his heel and walked up the hallway toward his office. Jack winked at the receptionist and followed in his wake.

  “What a view,” Jack said, once inside the palatial office. “Thank you for taking the time.”

  “What can I do for you, Jack?”

  Raul sat back in his black leather chair. King of his domain. He gestured for Jack to sit in one of two Barcelona chairs, but Jack stayed on his feet. The thirty-year-old had a thick veneer that covered a lot of scar tissue, Jack thought. Six years behind bars could do that to a man. His face was handsome enough, but his eyes had that hollow prison stare. A trimmed brown mustache matched his razor-cut longish hair, which couldn’t hide Raul’s red-rimmed brown eyes.

  Jack cut to the chase. He pulled out the picture of Angelica at Club Martinique. He slid it across Raul’s glass-and-chrome desk. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

  Raul picked up the printout, looked at it thoughtfully. “I don’t think so, I don’t know. There are so many beautiful women in this town.” He handed it back to Jack. “Should I know her? Who is she?”

  “Her name is Angelica Cardona. Her father’s Vincent Cardona. Owns the Chop House?” Jack asked, voicing a question.

  Raul didn’t blink, just shook his head.

  “You might know her as Angelica Curtis,” Jack continued. “Maybe this will help.” And he showed him the picture of Angelica and Carol sitting shoulder to shoulder.

  “Not really. Cute, but—”

  “The bartender said you took the picture,” Jack lied, protecting his source, Carol Williams.

  Raul’s brow furrowed and then he asked, “Where was this?” And then he answered his own question with a question. “Was this at Club Martinique? Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” He used his best one-man-to-another low, commiserating tone. “I was loaded. Walked by, they were taking photos with their iPhone. I offered to take a picture of them both.”

  “And?”

  “And they said yes. I snapped the shot, tried to work my charm, and they said no. I walked back to the bar with my tail between my legs, where I spent too much time and too much money.”

  “And you never spoke with either of these women or saw them again after you took the photograph?”

  “Are you kidding me? The club was insane that night. Speaking of which, how did you happen to find me?”

  “You make quite an impression,” Jack said, evading.

  “Good to know,” Raul said with a weak grin.

  Jack thought about showing him the other pictures, but he saw nothing to be gained.

  “I’m afraid I have to go,” Raul said, tapping his watch. He stood up from behind his desk and extended his hand. “I wish I could have been more help. How long has the girl been missing?”

  Jack shook his hand and exerted more pressure than necessary. “The woman disappeared that night.”

  “That’s terrible, really.” Raul met the grip and then broke it. “What a city,” he said sincerely.

  Jack handed him his card. “Do you mind?” And he took one of Raul’s cards out of a gold tray that looked like an antique. “In case I think of anything else or you think of anything, a call would be greatly appreciated by my client.”

  “I’d love to help. But . . .”

  Jack took his cue. “Thanks.” He casually walked out the door. Yet he didn’t think it was the last time he was going to cross paths with young Raul Vargas. An ex-con rubbing shoulders with a mafioso’s daughter the night she disappeared seemed like . . . another coincidence.

  * * *

  The door to Malic’s office exploded open. He lurched out of his seat with a Beretta Sub-Compact in his hand as Raul charged in. He was stopped in his tracks by the sight of the pistol.

  “You forgot to knock,” Malic said, python deadly. When he realized his life wasn’t in any danger, he replaced his favorite Italian weapon in his hidden drawer.

  “Get rid of her,” Raul said.

  Malic sat down comfortably and stared at Raul like he was an amoeba in a petri dish.

  “A PI is sniffing around asking questions about the girl,” Raul said, sliding Jack’s card across Malic’s desk. “And her name isn’t Curtis . . . It’s Cardona,” he hissed. “Are you aware of who Vincent Cardona is?” Raul asked, challenging Malic, the red blossoming from his neck to his ears. “He’s a ‘made man.’ A man with a reputation that makes you look like a fuckin’ pansy.”

  Dead silence in the room.

  A blush colored Malic’s stonelike cheeks. Finally he said, “Who set her up, Raul? Angelica Curtis, you said. A perfect replacement, you said. I believe this is on you.”

  Raul continued, undeterred. “Vincent Cardona owns the Chop House on Canon Drive in Beverly fucking Hills. He’s in the Mafia. He’s got more connections than we do. You have his daughter. You should have checked. We are fucked. No, we are severely fucked.”

  Malic let his silence hang in the air for effect.

  “Did you enjoy getting violated in prison before my men interceded?”

  “Don’t you dare.” But the threat was as impotent as his jailhouse bravado.

  “If you ever raise your voice to me again, you and your father will lose everything.”

  He gestured toward the view from the thirty-eighth-floor window. Ground was about to be broken on a new high-rise construction site. A hard-fought addition to the Los Angeles skyline. Without Malic, permits would be denied, loans would be called, construction would cease, and so would Vargas Development Group. Stark reality froze Raul in place.

  Malic wasn’t finished talking. “It was my infusion of cash that saved your father’s business and my connections with the State Department that saved you. Make sure your father is clear on that. It’s been brought to my attention that he is meeting with architects next week on a new project, the Spring Street project, and I wasn’t brought into the loop. He can’t cast me aside now that I’ve guaranteed his solvency.”

  Raul’s throat was too dry to respond. Malic was turning the screws. He hadn’t even mentioned the video that Raul had shot of himself having sex with the woman who died in the Paradise Cove boat crash. That was enough to put him away for twenty years. Added to his commuted drug sentence it would mean life behind bars.

  The woman had clearly been unconscious and the act was undeniably rape. How Malic possessed copies of his personal tapes was beyond him. But they now controlled his life.

  “And your father, keep him in line,” Malic said. “Our partnership is mutually beneficial.”

  Raul felt like he was drowning. There were no life pre­servers. Nothing to hold on to but primal self-preservation, and he worried he was losing his grip.

  “And in the future,” Malic added, “think before you speak or you won’t be fucking women that I provide for your entertainment. But
you will be bleeding from your anus to your throat.”

  “Get rid of her,” Raul rasped.

  Malic wasn’t happy with this new complication, but he couldn’t have Raul spinning out of control.

  “Take an early lunch, Raul. No worries.” And then, “Everyone has a father. She will be gone in a week and it will be as if she never existed.”

  Raul stood frozen in place, gathering himself.

  “Now, go,” Malic said. “I’ve got a full schedule. And tell your father . . . Raul, concentrate,” he said in even, controlled tones. “Tell your father that I’m ready with the numbers. At his convenience, of course.”

  Malic picked the card up off of his desk and read Jack Bertolino & Associates, Private Investigation.

  When his gaze shifted, Raul was gone.

  12

  Jack and his son, Chris, exited the Café Venetia and headed for Sunken Diamond baseball field on the Stanford campus. Chris stood eye to eye with his father, but with his sandy brown hair and blue eyes, he took after his mother’s side of the family. He’d lost some weight since the accident, and his T-shirt and jeans hung loosely on his wiry frame.

  “I thought I’d have to call Tommy to bail me out again,” Jack said, continuing the story he had started in the restaurant. “Having the incident on film didn’t hurt. Lawrence Weller made an appearance with a phalanx of lawyers, and I can tell you, the man was not a happy camper.”

  Jack knew he was running at the mouth, but his son had remained silent through their entire meal.

  “What with three ambulances, five arrests, and leaks from the hotel staff about the stacks of hundred-dollar bills papering the suite.”

  Chris didn’t seem to be listening. He tried to adjust the heavy plaster cast on his arm, looking clearly uncomfortable. “I read about it. You made the paper,” he said.

  “Today was just the arraignment,” Jack continued. “It turns out the gunmen were tipped to the scam by a junior from Stanford. A kid in a coffee shop on a phishing expedition. He got greedy and his life’s in the crapper now.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Chris’s bored tone of voice was wearing thin, but Jack pressed on.

  “With two separate trials, I’ll be making more trips up north. Means more time we can spend together.”

  Chris’s silence was thunderous, only equaled by Jack’s guilt.

  Arturo Delgado, the man who piloted the Cadillac Escalade like a heat-seeking missile, had tried to kill Chris, knowing it would destroy Jack. A reasonable expectation. It would have worked. Delgado was dead, but the pain lingered on.

  “Can I borrow your key? Gotta take a whiz,” Chris said as they approached the Garden Court Hotel, where Jack was staying.

  Jack handed off the key and Chris disappeared inside. Jack had taken a room for the night and was headed back to Los Angeles in the morning to continue the search for Angelica Cardona. The sooner he found his missing person, the sooner he could get back to his life.

  He took in the local scene while he waited. The street was lined with upscale boutiques, restaurants, and coffee shops under a thick canopy of sycamore trees. Their mottled bark—patches of tan, gray, and green—looked like Desert Storm camo. The diverse ethnicity of the students, faculty, and locals walking with purpose gave Stanford a cosmopolitan feel. Not a bad place to spend four years, Jack thought.

  Then he spotted the only body at rest, sitting at a small table outside a coffee shop, with a newspaper conspicuously covering his face. But his peg-legged black pants, black socks, and pointed black boots screamed Peter Maniacci.

  Jack blended with a group of students crossing the street until he was standing at Peter’s side. The anxious man lowered his paper and frantically scanned the front entrance of the Garden Court Hotel. He did a near-comic double take when he sensed Jack at his shoulder.

  “Yo, Mr. B.” Sheepish.

  “How’d you find me?” Pissed.

  “You made the news, going into court, and then I just figured . . . You look good on camera,” he said, deflecting. “I think maybe you missed your calling.”

  “What the fuck, Peter?”

  “I’m what you call in my business between a rock and a Mr. Vincent Cardona. If I don’t report on your whereabouts, he’ll shoot me. If he knows that you know, and I knew, and withheld said information, he’d also shoot me.”

  “Do the right thing, Peter: disappear. Now. I’ve got no time for this.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. B. Uh, can we keep this, uh, between . . . ?”

  “Now.”

  Jack crossed the street just as his son pushed through the door of the hotel. When he looked back, Peter was in the wind. Father and son headed up University Avenue toward the baseball stadium.

  “You okay? You didn’t eat much,” Jack said.

  “Not hungry.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Not sleeping,” he said, slipping on his Oakley sunglasses.

  “Want to talk about it?” Jack said, knowing the answer. Had to ask.

  “Not really.”

  Jack wasn’t crazy about the attitude, but he was too worried to push it. “I need some caffeine. You want an iced Americano?” he offered, knowing it was Chris’s favorite.

  “Sounds good.”

  Was that a thaw in the ice floe? Jack hoped. He’d take anything he could get because his son was obviously in turmoil, and it was killing him.

  At a break in the traffic, Jack and Chris did a New York dash across the street. A large truck sped up and then leaned on the air horn and brakes at the same time. Chris blanched. He froze in the middle of the road at the sound of the squealing tires. And then he recovered, flipped off the driver with his good hand, and finished crossing. Head down.

  Jack pretended he hadn’t seen, but they both knew. He threw a protective arm around his son. He couldn’t help it. Chris spun, disengaged, and power-walked up the street away from his father.

  * * *

  Jack exited the tunnel that led to the Sunken Diamond playing field. Old-growth eucalyptus trees surrounded the well-appointed stadium. The sky was blue and the sun hidden behind huge, white, billowing cumulus clouds.

  The Stanford baseball team had been broken into small groups, going through the rigors of batting, fielding, and pitching practice. Five players were running laps and Jack could see one of Chris’s teammates give a thumbs-up to a solitary figure sitting in the nosebleed seats in right field.

  Jack sat down next to his son and they watched the action in uncomfortable silence. A leggy freshman at the plate went after a fastball and swung from his heels. The crack of the bat and the hustle of the outfielder were usually enough to put a smile on Jack’s face. Today, they fell short.

  “If it’s any help, that truck scared the hell out of me too.”

  “Doesn’t help.” And then, “Dad, don’t take this the wrong way, but I need to go through this alone. You can’t do it for me.”

  Jack understood with his brain, but not with his heart. He got that after being run down by a seven-thousand-pound vehicle, no warning—one minute you’re fine, the next you wake up in an ICU—he got that his son would never really be the same. And he understood painfully well that he was to blame.

  He and his ex-wife had set Chris up with a psychologist. Their boy shrugged it off. They couldn’t force him to go. His head was as thick as Jack’s. He was willful, stubborn, and Jack found himself at a total loss.

  “Team looks sharp.”

  It was all Jack could think to say.

  “It’s hard to watch. Really,” Chris said. “I get rid of this thing in three months and two days,” he said, referring to his cast, “and then I can start strength training. They want me to build the muscles in my arm again before they’ll let me throw. If I can still throw.”

  Jack felt the fear, honesty, and anger
in that statement and it shut him down.

  “Makes sense.”

  Chris stood up and looked down at his father. Jack met his gaze.

  “I don’t blame you,” Chris said.

  “Good to know.”

  “Mom does, but I don’t.”

  Chris eased out of the aisle and started walking down the steep cement stairs. He turned and looked back up at Jack. “I’ll call you next week. Don’t worry about me. And tell Mommy I’m fine. I don’t need the pressure.”

  Jack fought the impulse to follow. He watched his son walk down the stairs, past his team, and out of the stadium. It felt like a knife through the heart.

  * * *

  The Boeing jet looped over the San Francisco skyline. The lights illuminated the Golden Gate Bridge as a thick cloud bank swallowed the stream of incoming traffic.

  Jack had checked out of his hotel and caught the first flight back to L.A. No reason to stay. He dug under the seat in front of him, retrieved his small carry-on, and pulled out his dopp kit. His back was spasming from the emotion of the day. The Excedrin wasn’t cutting the pain by half. He pulled out his prescription for Vicodin.

  Jack shook the plastic bottle and let out a distressed breath. He knew before he pried off the cap—his emotions twisting in the wind—that the pills were light. His son was the only one who had been in his room, and at least four Vicodin tabs were missing.

  Jack Bertolino had spent his career working narcotics, and his son, the love of his life, his reason for being, had just stolen prescription drugs from him.

  Jack never heard the flight attendant offer him a glass of water.

  13

  Hassan, a lean, swarthy man with military-cut copper-red hair, a close-trimmed full red beard, and chiseled features, stepped off the multicolored cigarette boat and expertly tied it to the wooden dock.

  He wore green cargo pants, black leather boots, and an army-green T-shirt that accentuated his ropy muscles. A lit Camel hung lazily from his lips. He took a last deep drag and flicked the cigarette into the ocean. Then he grabbed two canvas rucksacks filled with provisions out of the boat and started the steep climb up the weather-beaten wooden stairs built into the side of the cliff.