Hard News

by Mark T Sullivan

  “Even if I don’t believe Blanca and Patrick did it?”

  “Without a doubt. We might come up with zero on this angle. I can afford a zero. But you—even with the wallop you’ve laid down of late—can’t.”

  McCarthy didn’t like being out of the action, but he knew his friend was more a newsroom scholar than he was. “All right, I’ll talk with Fisk, see what he thinks.”

  News sipped from the daiquiri. “You learn so quickly.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re only as good as the piece you wrote yesterday. A two-week-old news story produces methane in the landfill.”

  Later, at the Pink Stag …

  “WHY THE INTEREST IN A nouveau decorator, and one of the wrong sex at that?” Carl Tracy asked.

  Prentice LaFontaine shrugged. “Call it men’s intuition.”

  “C’mon, Prenty, you can do better. You know how the gossip universe works: you titillate me, I electrify you.”

  News hesitated. They were in the Pink Stag’s back office behind the stage the female impersonators used for their evening shows. Tracy, a small man in his late fifties, reached across the table for an espresso cup. Tracy was among the most socially and politically active people LaFontaine knew. He was also one of the biggest blabbermouths in town. The subtle withholding of information was crucial.

  “Okay, okay. She’s got the contract to decorate the Cote D’Azure project. And I don’t know who she is.” All that was true. Tracy needn’t know that McCarthy also suspected she was the second coming of Mary Magdalene.

  “That’s better,” Tracy said smugly. He rearranged himself in his chair, then confided that Tressor had moved to town three years before from Chicago. She was highly visible on the social scene, often at political fund-raisers with Sloan Burkhardt. Several designers in town were furious that Tressor, a relative neophyte in the field, got the plum Cote D’Azure deal.

  “They figure it was rigged from the get-go,” Tracy said. “I mean, honestly, News, how can you compete with a pillow talker?”

  “From what I hear his pillow talk borders on the perverse.” LaFontaine went on to explain to Tracy all that the ex-Mrs. Burkhardt had related about the developer’s sex life. With the exception of the UCLA rape. Throw the guy a bone, not the carcass.

  “Lovely!” Tracy giggled.

  News grinned, too, praying silently that Tracy would reveal something that would make this morning’s work make sense.

  California secretary of state’s records had given him the following picture: Blue Coast Partners Ltd. was composed of Sloan Burkhardt as managing and general partner and Diane Tressor as the only identifiable limited partner under the name Tressor Ltd. The rest were blind corporate entities: River Inc., Rock Inc., Tree Inc., and Perennial Inc. All, according to the snotty bureaucrat, were Nevada corporations.

  The Nevada secretary of state’s office was only slightly more helpful. The corporate offices of River, Rock, Tree, and Perennial were all at 1190 Pierce Way, Suite 3B, Las Vegas. An attorney, Max L. Crisp, was listed as agent and sole director for each of the companies. On a hunch he asked them to run Tressor Ltd. Same thing. He’d called up Crisp’s office, and, as he expected, Crisp politely declined to discuss his clients.

  News decided the only fresh angle was to find out as much as he could about Diane Tressor. Which was why he was in Tracy’s office. Tracy grinned, then told him he wasn’t surprised at Sloan’s activities. His father, Coughlin, was the same way. A very well connected, tightly controlled bastard and political advisor to the mayor.

  “But that was before he decided to build Alta Bay,” News said.

  “No, no, Prentice. You’re thinking of Jennings. I’m talking about Portillo, the mayor now. Back in the seventies when Ricardo first ran for city council, Coughlin was behind the scenes, running the campaign, raising money. Funny, Ricardo really came out of nowhere. He was an obscure district attorney and then, bang, the most powerful man in town was on his side. I always wondered what the connection was.”

  “Maybe he just realized Ricardo was a bright guy.”

  Tracy laughed. “No one in politics does anything for altruistic reasons.”

  “Coughlin was making some kind of payback to Ricardo?”

  “It was always my assumption.”

  “For what?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that one out for years.” LaFontaine thought about all of that for a minute, then asked. “And you figure Sloan has the same relationship with Portillo?”

  “Possible, though certainly not as public as the relationship his dad had.”

  News smiled and got to his feet. “Appreciate it, Carl.”

  “Glad to help, Prentice. That little bit of slime about Sloan and the scenes is worth its weight in gold. Maybe I can get your delicious young friend with the big muscles to play opposite me in a scene featuring leather loincloths?”

  LaFontaine tensed up inside. “I didn’t know you knew Brad.” The nightclub owner made a dismissive gesture with his fingers. “Oh, we’ve met.”

  “Uh-huh. Any loincloth scene will be played chez moi.”

  “So Brad’s still with you?” Tracy looked up at LaFontaine half-lidded, a gossip iguana. “I’d heard he’s been … out and about.”

  LaFontaine swallowed at the ball in his throat. Don’t let him see you sweat. Don’t let him see your fear. Throw him some gristle, then get out the door. “We had a little row over the weekend, but all was patched up by last night.”

  “So, so happy to hear it,” Tracy said.

  McCarthy studied News’s chart of Blue Coast Partners. He’d just come in for his shift and caught LaFontaine about to leave for a dentist’s appointment. “There’s got to be some kind of connection here beyond the same lawyer we’re not seeing.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” News said. “I mean, what are the odds there’s any kind of link between a streetwalker like Carol Gentry and these companies?”

  “Thousand to one,” McCarthy admitted.

  “I don’t think they’d even give you those odds out at the Sea View Race Track.”

  “Last day of the season, isn’t it?”

  “Post time at four. All the fashionable ladies will wear their straw hats for the last time. And their wealthy fops in blue blazers, linens, and cream bucks.”

  “You usually attend.”

  “Not this year,” LaFontaine sighed. “Brad finally returned Saturday night.”

  “Beach Blanket Bingo?”

  LaFontaine smiled. “You know I never kiss and tell.”

  “You just show off your bruises.”

  LaFontaine turned away and pouted.

  “I won’t mention it again,” McCarthy said.

  “He told me he loved me if you must know,” News declared. “We’re attending a bodybuilding contest tonight. Love has its costs.”

  “All those oily bodies and you aren’t interested?”

  “I was never one for the vicarious.”

  “You’re a reporter. Vicarious thrills are your life.”

  “Don’t make things difficult, Gid. I have enough contradictions in my personality to justify as it is.”

  McCarthy checked his watch. “I have a meet with the ever-forthcoming Lieutenant Fisk. Feed the monster, protect my hide.”

  He grabbed a notebook and headed toward the door.

  “Gideon!” LaFontaine called. “You forgot to tell me how it went with the kids and Charley Owens.”

  McCarthy stopped, his face clouded. “They had a good time.”

  “A serious complication,” News said.

  I’d call it the shits, McCarthy thought two hours later as he sat in his car in the parking lot outside Diane Tressor’s office. When he had returned home Saturday evening the kids were playing out back. Miriam said she ate two huge puffs of cotton candy and a foot-long hot dog. Carlos said Charley had explained the system of relay throws from outfield to infield.

  Outwardly McCarthy had done his best to show pleasure that th
e visit with their father had gone well. Was he an asshole for thinking it would be somehow better if Charley had hurt Carlos? That notion, which had been plaguing him since last night, sickened him. Then it twisted and became a panicking force that said: get your butt out of here with those kids and don’t look back. He laid his head on the steering wheel. Maybe it’s too much. This story. The bomb. He laughed, then began to dry heave at the absurdity of it. The explosion could have resolved the custody issue once and for all.

  His cynicism deepened when he thought of the conversation he’d just had with Lieutenant Fisk. He’d gone to the homicide detective’s office directly from The Post. Fisk continued to maintain that the bombing of his car was a coincidence. McCarthy argued the point, which annoyed Fisk. Then Fisk slipped him a story lead. The department was looking into Patrick and Blanca as possible suspects in the serial killings.

  McCarthy was stunned. He told Fisk he didn’t believe it because of everything Anna Blanca and Maria Patrick had described about their husbands. At that point Fisk had gone ballistic, calling him and all other reporters he knew hacks.

  “The first thing you learn as a cop,” Fisk said, “is that wives and mothers would tell you that Hitler was an okay guy.”

  Then Fisk threw him out of his office.

  McCarthy lifted his head off the steering wheel. Pegging Blanca and Patrick as possible serial killers was a good tale, better than their wives’ protests of innocence. He thought about what Fisk had said about being a hack only interested in a flashy copy. Not true, but it did raise the question: where did reporter end and investigator begin? Being an investigator implied following the trail until truth was discovered. Being a reporter was something altogether different; one could legitimately chronicle the different trails of information, even if they didn’t lead to a final truth.

  When Dusk told him the story of the hit, he believed it. Was it because the story was good for his comeback or because it held water? He shook his head, confused. But one thing was certain: McCarthy didn’t believe Patrick and Blanca were serial killers.

  Carol Gentry’s killer? A chance of that. But the two police officers didn’t fit the mold of murderers who slew women for twisted sexual gratification. While logic might play a supporting role in a single murder, contorted desire drives the protagonist through strings of slayings.

  He tied together the threads of what he knew until they knotted and frayed. He slammed his hand on the steering wheel in frustration. Then he remembered something Lawlor had told him years ago when McCarthy was a cub reporter. “Don’t try to prove what you think you know, try to disprove it. If it stands up, it’s real; it’s a story.”

  As good a method as any right now. He couldn’t spend his time disproving Patrick and Blanca as serial killers. That could take months. He couldn’t disprove what the wives said. Their analysis was too subjective. That left Diane Tressor and whether she was connected to Flower Ltd. and Tiger’s Escort Service. That was dis-provable. That was why he was here in the parking lot outside her office.

  Steven Bird came out of his shop and rode down the street on a black matte-finished mountain bike with an odd-looking pair of handlebars. A couple of customers went into the computer store. McCarthy was about to get out to stretch when a black BMW sedan cruised into the lot and parked before Suite H. Sloan Burkhardt in a blue blazer, white pants, and white bucks got out. The developer considered himself in his side view mirror, then took the sidewalk past the flowering bougainvillea to Tressor’s suite.

  Two minutes later, Burkhardt held the door for Diane Tressor, who wiggled down the walkway toward the BMW, pressing a huge floppy straw hat to her head. The band about the crown was purple silk to match the color of her outfit, which included a backline that plunged almost to the rift of her ample fanny.

  They climbed into the car and drove off. McCarthy followed, keeping a car between them as they traveled east through steep canyons, past vast housing tracts and strip malls, over an estuary toward the ocean where for five weeks a year the Southern California horse-racing scene gathered at the Sea View Race Track. The lot beyond the gates was mobbed. College kids in baggy white pants and Doc Martin boots stood shoulder to shoulder in the brilliant sun with grandmothers in floral print muumuus, grizzly bikers in leather skullcaps, and marine buck privates raw from boot camp. Above it all, the din of touts brayed the value of their racing tip sheets.

  Like a lord among the great unwashed, Burkhardt drove his BMW crisply into the VIP lane, where he showed the attendant a red card. A gate opened. The black sedan disappeared in a cloud of dust. McCarthy swore and crawled through the general admission lane, finally passing the gate a full ten minutes later. Inside, he shouldered his way through the crowd at the betting windows. He climbed the stairs above the grandstands, looking for the entrance to the exclusive glass boxes and the turf club.

  McCarthy was halfway up the staircase when Augustus Croon and Abby Blitzer appeared out of the crowd. Dark bags hung under Blitzer’s eyes, which were devoid of their normal spark. “We’re here to do a feature on bonnets,” she said dully.

  “A few of them could be called tragic,” McCarthy offered.

  “This is farce, not drama.”

  Croon put a hand on Blitzer’s shoulder. “Abby’s pissed.”

  “I’m not pissed, I’m feeling nothing,” Blitzer interrupted.

  Croon nodded. “Claudette pulled us off the calamity beat for a couple of days.”

  “Said I couldn’t handle the constant agony we’ve been getting the past week,” said Blitzer, who rocked on her feet. “Humph! No one can handle agony better than me. So my lead wasn’t right on that day-care center fire yesterday, so what?”

  “You didn’t include a verb, Abby,” Croon gently chided. “And you sort of moved the facts around to make it seem like all the kids didn’t make it out safe and sound.”

  Blitzer twisted from underneath his hand. “Whose side are you on?” she snarled.

  “Yours, Abby,” Croon said. “I’m always on your side.”

  Her jaw twitched. She flexed her hand so hard she broke her pen. Tears formed in her eyes. “Then show it! You just show it or I’m busting up this partnership.”

  “I’ll try to do better,” Croon soothed. “Why don’t you wash your hands?”

  Blitzer examined her ink-stained hands. “Wash?”

  Without another word, she wandered off, clutching her notebook. Croon played with the leather tabs on his camera bag.

  “Ever since that nut with the pony,” he said, “she been talking crazy, talking about how she’s been reading the Bible at night after she goes home and should be sleeping, how the Old Testament’s just chock full of bloody pathos and nothing seems to match it. It’s like she needs more every day, Gid, like she wants to see the ripped limbs and floating bodies of old Pharaoh and his boys after Moses laid the Red Sea on them. It’s scaring the shit out of me, Gid, and being an ex-SEAL, I’m not easily spooked.”

  “Get her to take some time off,” McCarthy suggested.

  “I asked her a dozen times the last two days. She hasn’t had a vacation since she got out of Betty Ford. She says she wants to work. Says work is a vacation.”

  “Vacation from what?”

  Croon looked like he’d just broken his best camera lens. “I don’t know.”

  Then his cheeks softened. Abby was coming back through the crowd. She seemed surprised to see McCarthy. “What’re you doing here, Gid?”

  McCarthy let it pass. “The usual, Abby, nosing around in somebody’s business. You have a pass into the turf club and the swank seats?”

  Blitzer nodded. “I suppose that’s where the story is. As you can see the masses don’t go for five-hundred-dollar dyed straw hats.”

  “Mind if I tag along?”

  “Suit yourself,” Blitzer said. “Let’s get this over with, Croon.”

  Croon sighed, picked his green canvas camera bag off the floor, slung it over his shoulder, and hurried after the love of his lif
e like a sergeant after his major.

  Inside the turf club, McCarthy kept to the walls, trying not to stand out. He slunk along, scanning the upper crust crowd for Burkhardt and Tressor. It was almost fifteen minutes before he caught a fleeting glimpse of the interior decorator’s muscular back.

  Tressor sipped from a tall glass of champagne. One bejeweled hand rested lightly on Burkhardt’s arm. The developer leaned against a white pillar. His attention lazily focused on a tall man with dark hair who had his back to McCarthy. Tressor giggled at what the man said, then reached out to touch him, too. The man turned, obviously engulfed in the same energy McCarthy had felt talking with her the other day. Police Chief T. Leslie Lawrence sported the leer of a sailor heading for shore leave after six months at sea.

  “This has potential,” McCarthy murmured to himself. He considered tactics for a moment, then went on instinct. The direct confrontation can be a wonderful lever. When you let the quarry know he is a bull’s-eye, he often makes fatal mistakes.

  “Chief Leslie!” he cried gruffly. “I didn’t know you were a race fan.”

  Leslie turned, grinning at first in his practiced political manner, the smile melting from his face when he realized who had called to him.

  “McCarthy,” he coughed, then reached out to shake his hand limply. “How are you?”

  “Wired.” McCarthy opened his mouth in a mock grin.

  “Yes, err, I heard,” Leslie fumbled. He gestured toward Tressor and Burkhardt. “Do you know …?”

  “Mr. Burkhardt? Just from the stories in the papers. But Diane and I have met. Just the other day in fact. Her receptionist, Caitlin, has a resonant, sultry voice.”

  Tressor glanced at Burkhardt, who held his hand just below the break of his jaw.

  “I’ve never had the pleasure,” Leslie said, coughing again.

  “It’s distinctive,” McCarthy went on brightly. “I’ve only heard one other like it.”

  “And when was that?” asked Tressor, without expression.