by Jodi Compton
I said, “A lot of the shit that sticks to him seems to be sexual-the X-rated theaters and the prostitution and an affair, and yet he was a family man. He had this genius kid.”
“He had two sons,” Jack reminded me. “Milos was a chip off the block. Followed his father into the family businesses, until the day he died of ‘food poisoning.’” He put finger quotes around the words.
“You think he was murdered?”
“Seems likely,” Jack said. “The kid was a piece of work. I guess Adrian was different. If you read his obituary, you’d know more about him than I do. Adrian never comes up much in conversations about his father. He certainly didn’t go into the family business. I think they were estranged.”
Nidia had said as much in our one conversation about him.
“Is his wife still alive? No, she’s not,” I said, remembering Adrian’s obit. “Not a very long-lived family, are they?”
Jack shook his head. “The funny thing is, though, Tony Skouras was never a good bet to outlive his wife, much less both sons. He had heart trouble and had undergone major bypass surgery four years ago. It wasn’t supposed to be a real long-term fix,” he said. “People keep expecting this guy to drop in his tracks, but it never happens. He’s a survivor. He just goes on and on.”
I couldn’t think of anything else I needed to ask. So I said, “You want some coffee?”
We went back to the cafeteria line and bought some, Jack stirring his a little too much, with the random gestures of a smoker who’d rather be outside having a cigarette. Then he asked the question I’d been expecting: “So, what’s your interest in Tony Skouras?”
“Sorry,” I said, “I can’t talk about it.”
“Yeah, I knew you were going to say that,” Jack said.
I’d expected him to dig, and said as much. “That’s it? You’re satisfied with that?”
“I don’t think it’s going to help me any to be dissatisfied.”
“I thought all reporters refused to take no for an answer.”
“Are you kidding? We hear no all the time,” Jack said. “And you’re thinking of the Hollywood version of journalism, where a reporter hears a hot tip one day and two days later there’s a big story splashed across A1. Real investigative journalism takes time. It takes slow circling around your subject, Freedom of Information Act requests, compiling and synthesizing of information. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
I wasn’t sure what he was telling me. “You’re saying that after today you’re going to look a bit harder at Skouras?”
“People are always looking at Skouras,” he said. “But since you’re feeling guilty, throw me a bone. Answer just one question, totally unrelated to the rest of this.”
“No, you had your chance,” I said. “You already traded your information for a free lunch. Too late to change the deal now.”
“You sure that’s all the information you’re going to need? You don’t have to stay in my good graces in case of follow-ups?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“Fine,” I said, making my voice sound more impatient than I really felt. “One question.”
“The school you went to back east, the one that didn’t work out, was that Annapolis or West Point?”
“I… yes. How the hell did you know that?”
He’d turned serious. “I observe people, Hailey. I always knew you were something more than you let on. So it made sense that the school wasn’t any State U. But at the same time, I didn’t get Ivy League vibes. That left one of the military academies.”
I nodded. “It was West Point.”
“Why didn’t you finish?”
“I almost did.”
“Maybe you’ll tell me about that someday.”
“No. Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t talk about that. Don’t take it personally.”
That afternoon, I called Serena to tell her what I’d learned. When I was done, she said, “You’re thinking that the guys in the tunnel were gangsters.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “They were obviously well-funded and disciplined.”
“So it sounds like you shoulda searched Nidia’s suitcase,” said Serena. “She took something from that rich guy.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “Think about it: If they just wanted an object, they’d have taken it from the car, shot her, and left her where they left me.” I smiled, though she couldn’t see my face. “She had something, though.”
“Stop giving me an IQ test over the phone and tell me what it was.”
“Something that belonged to her and Adrian both,” I added.
There was a brief silence on the line. Then Serena said, “No way, prima. She was still getting over her boyfriend dying.”
“Grief in itself can make people do funny things,” I said. “I’m not saying she fell in love with Adrian, but there was something between them. She got a little weepy talking about his death. I thought it was because it reminded her of her fiancé. And she was thin except for her belly, and she was nursing ginger ale a lot in the car, to settle her stomach. Pregnancy makes women more prone to nausea. Not just in the morning, but anytime. None of this registered with me then, because I was used to thinking of her in a certain light, as a virgin-slash-war-widow, since the first time I heard her name.”
“Say you’re right,” Serena said. “How would the grandfather find out, if he and his son didn’t talk?”
“Fathers and sons tend to talk over deathbeds,” I said. “Probably Adrian asked his father to take care of Nidia and the baby financially. A guy like Tony Skouras would probably react in one of two ways to that kind of news. Either he’d be appalled at the thought of having a half-Mexican grandchild and refuse to acknowledge Nidia’s baby at all, or he’d embrace the fact that this is the only grandchild he’d ever have, and want full control of its upbringing. He doesn’t strike me as the type to write support checks and let his grandchild be raised Mexican in working-class Mexican neighborhoods.”
“Damn,” Serena said. “All that for a kid? Most of the guys I know run away from their responsibility to a baby.”
“This is a lot different,” I said. “Skouras isn’t just trying to build a fortune, he’s been trying to build up his family again, after the troubles in his homeland. Everything that Skouras has amassed, the money and influence-what’s the point if it all just disperses into the hands of strangers?” I paused. “That explains why he took the full-control route. He must have told Nidia he wanted his grandkid, and she freaked and ran away. We know the rest. In a way, this is good news. Because if Skouras wants the kid, then Nidia is still alive. She’s only about six months’ pregnant by now.”
“Oh, God, she’s living like… he’s got her…”
“Don’t trip,” I said. “It’s in his best interest to take care of her not just medically but psychologically. Trauma is very bad for pregnant women. He’d know that.”
“Until she gives birth,” Serena said. “Then what happens to her?”
“Well, he might feel that he’s too powerful and she’s too insignificant for her ever to get the American law to listen to her,” I said. “Maybe he’ll let her go.”
Serena was doubtful. “Wouldn’t it be safer for him just to kill her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It would.”
twenty-four
Was there anything in my West Point training that could help me with the problem at hand? A criminal like Skouras wouldn’t operate like a conventional military enemy. He’d be more like a terrorist. But the times being what they were, we’d studied a bit about counterterrorism in school.
Terrorists lived among the general population. They didn’t wear uniforms. Sometimes you knew who they were but couldn’t prove it. You could watch them, but their actions looked innocent on the surface, and their communications were carefully coded. You couldn’t be sure who around them was a disciple and who was an innocent acquaintance. They attacked in small-scale but sometimes very deadly operations. They always needed money, and if you coul
d disrupt their flow of funds badly enough, you could cripple their operation.
I knew how the Army would deal with a high-level terrorist: It would watch his home and track the movements of his vehicles with spy satellites capable of reading numbers off license plates. That didn’t help me. That was the difference between being the United States Army and a twenty-four-year-old with one gun. If anyone was going to be crippled by dwindling funds, it was me.
I could try to watch Skouras, but I doubted that would lead me to Nidia. Surely she wasn’t in his own home. It seemed unwise, in the first-place-anyone-would-look sense. And I just didn’t think he’d want her around, no matter how many rooms his place had. Home was where a guy like Skouras went to ground. It was where he locked out his complicated world and poured himself a Macallan. He wasn’t going to want a frightened teenage hostage in the next room.
Start over. You’re going at this wrong. Imagine you’re them, kidnapping Nidia. Start from the tunnel and go from there.
They shoot me, I lose consciousness and probably crash the Impala at a slow speed into the tunnel wall. They drag me out of the car, strip me of my ID, and take me outside the tunnel and shoot me, far enough off the road that no one is supposed to find me. That had been the important part of the story to me, but in terms of the kidnapping, it wasn’t relevant. I hadn’t been their objective. Nidia had been.
She might have been injured in the crash, though not badly. I hadn’t had enough time to work up any speed. So assume she was basically all right, maybe dazed. Either she got out and tried to run, or they reached in and got her. They put her in one of the cars and drove away. They also drove the Impala away and disposed of it, probably in a river or a lake. Again, not important to the story. Where was Nidia at that point?
Getting a Mexican without papers across the border would have been difficult. Illegal Mexicans crossed the border all the time, of course. They simply walked across at unguarded, unobserved areas or were smuggled across in trucks allegedly carrying consumer goods. But Nidia wouldn’t have been cooperative, and handling her roughly or drugging her would have been too risky; she was pregnant, and a healthy Skouras grandchild had been the point of the whole operation.
But Skouras had something better than a truck: He owned a shipping line. What if the tunnel rats had taken Nidia to a port and onto one of the Skouras cargo ships? They could have sailed her right to San Francisco. That made a lot of sense.
Whatever the logistics of getting Nidia where she was going, Skouras would then have to have someplace fairly private to keep her. That was most likely a second home or a vacation home, which could be almost anywhere. Once they had her safely there, the rest would be easy. It wouldn’t take more than one guard to keep her in line, maybe a second to relieve the first one from time to time, and to keep him company. Other than that, Nidia would require only healthy food, some fresh air, maybe some prenatal vitamins, and-
I sat up. I’d been thinking, an occasional checkup from a doctor, but how were they going to work that? They couldn’t just take a kidnap victim into town to sit around in a doctor’s waiting room. I drummed my fingers against my thigh, thinking.
Like everyone else, I’d heard casual references in movies to “Mob doctors,” but those films were never quite clear on where those guys came from. They were just there, available at any hour of the night, corrupt and unconcerned about whom they worked for. Or they couldn’t have a conventional practice, because they’d never finished med school or been barred from practicing.
I thought about that a moment longer. Maybe I’d just found a way in.
twenty-five
An hour later, I was waiting at a bus shelter for a MUNI bus over to UCSF medical school. It was a little before six in the evening, the going-home hour, and several other people waited with me. Others moved around us in a thin but steady stream.
I wasn’t sure whether the medical library would be open to the general population, or exactly what data base or archives I needed to ask for, but if somehow I could find a listing of doctors who’d been barred from practicing medicine in San Francisco in the past several years, I might find doctors who would be open to an overture from Skouras.
My theory was that Skouras would feel most comfortable reaching out to a man. No matter how ruthless he was, I didn’t believe he’d ask a woman to help him use a powerless teenager as an incubator. So if I was right about that, it would narrow the field of candidates some. There weren’t as many men practicing obstetrics as there used to be; it was an area increasingly dominated by women. A male ob/gyn who’d been suspended or expelled from the profession: That just might be a narrow enough bottleneck that I could catch the right suspect there.
In addition, a doctor with a prescription-drug problem, once separated from his supply, might quickly need money. That’d be an extra incentive to get in bed with someone like Skouras.
I was theorizing wildly and I knew it. This kind of work was uncharted territory for me. Not to mention the fact that all of this depended on my initial premise being correct: that Nidia was pregnant with a Skouras baby. This bordered on pointless.
The bus was approaching, but now I was undecided. As the people around me began to move into boarding position, I stayed back and glanced away, then stepped directly into the path of a well-built, nicely dressed man, who happened to be the lead gunman from the tunnel, the one I’d called Babyface.
When he saw me, surprise rippled clearly across his face and his steps faltered. Then a mask of normalcy fell over his face. He was very good. All this took maybe two seconds.
The bus opened its doors with a pneumatic hiss, and a section of the Chronicle skated around my feet. As if nothing had happened, I turned my attention away from him and stepped up, onto the bus. I’d been distracted enough that I didn’t have the fare ready, and it took me a moment of rummaging in my messenger bag to find the coins inside.
I paid and moved down the aisle. Behind me, I heard someone else dropping coins into the fare box. I didn’t look back but kept going until I found a seat close to the back of the bus.
When I was seated and looked up, Babyface was standing over me.
“Hailey?” he said. “That’s your name, right? We met in Texas, remember?” He was looking at me with that same half-benign curiosity in his heavy-lidded eyes that he’d shown in the tunnel.
“Yeah,” I said. “Hailey Cain.”
I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t know. Clearly, he and his guys had looked through the personal items they’d taken off me down in the tunnel.
“You mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for an answer, he slid down into the seat, forcing me to move over.
He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over a cream-colored shirt, dark trousers, good shoes, but no tie, no briefcase or PDA. It would have been hard to say what his line of work was or where he was coming from.
He said, “I wasn’t expecting to run into you here. I thought you lived, what, in Los Angeles?”
I understood where he’d gotten that idea: The driver’s license he and his guys took off me in Mexico had my old L.A. address on it. But we both knew the truth: Babyface hadn’t been expecting to run into me anywhere aboveground.
“I do,” I said. “I’m just up here for a few days.”
We were playing a game. I wasn’t sure what it was. But he hadn’t been shadowing me. I’d seen surprise clearly on his face, however briefly, when he first caught sight of me. Had he been shadowing me, intending to kill or even seriously question me, he would have waited to get me someplace private. I didn’t think Babyface had any idea of what I was doing in San Francisco. He’d seen me on the street, his curiosity was provoked, he’d followed me to satisfy it. This was plain-view reconnaissance, the kind you did with an enemy so inferior that you had no fear of it. That was how he saw me, as no threat.
That was how I wanted to keep it, then. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride and get away clean.
I spoke softly. “I don’t kn
ow what happened to Nidia, and I don’t care.” I hunched my shoulders slightly, trying to project fear. “All I want is to forget about it. Every night I feel guilty, wondering why I came home alive and she didn’t.”
“You don’t need to feel guilty about that,” he said. “You’re just a kid who got mixed up in something a lot bigger than you realized.”
I nodded and stared straight ahead, at the grab bar on the seat in front of me.
Babyface’s voice was almost kind as he said, “If you forget all about this, you’re going to live a long and happy life, Hailey.” He took my hand, squeezing it as if to comfort me.
I nodded again.
“Well, this is my stop.”
It wasn’t his stop. But now his curiosity was satisfied.
Babyface said, “One thing, though. One of my guys couldn’t get out of the way of your car in time.”
In my mind’s eye I saw the Mexican tunnel, how two men had been almost directly in my path as I floored the Impala’s gas pedal.
Babyface took my little finger between two of his and said, “He’s never going to walk right again.”
Then he did something quick and efficient with his hand, and I both heard and felt bone crack as he broke my little finger.
twenty-six
“I need to get out of the city,” I told Serena. “It’s gotten too hot up here.”
It was around ten in the evening. I was sitting on the bed, holding the cell phone in my uninjured hand. My broken finger was splinted to its neighbor, the left ring finger.
The splint wasn’t a doctor’s handiwork; I hadn’t gone to the ER. After Babyface had gotten up and walked to the exit door, I’d stayed where I was sitting, bent over with pain, feeling the aftershock ringing up the bones of my hand and past my wrist. If anyone around me understood what had just happened-and believe me, I’d made noise when the bone snapped, a sound between a yelp and a short scream-they were determinedly refusing to show it. Rule number one of city life: Don’t Get Involved.