“Does Binion still represent him?”
“Well, that’s the beauty part. He takes the scumbag on as a client, and I’m left with egg on my face with the DA. Then as soon as he’s in Binion’s tender care, the guy disappears, never to be heard from again.”
“He was out on bond and skipped?” Terry asked.
“Exactamundo.”
“Huh,” I said. “What was the guy charged with?”
“International drug trafficking.”
“Heroin?”
“No.” Eli blinked once or twice. He scratched his nose. Something was gnawing at his consciousness.
“What, then?”
“Uh, prescription drugs,” he said. “Hijacked painkillers from Canada.”
“Hmm,” Terry said. “That’s an interesting coincidence. But I wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions or anything.”
“Yeah—no,” Eli stammered. “That kind of thing goes on all the time.”
“Right,” I said. “So what was the scumbag’s name, just out of curiosity?”
“His name? Oh, it’s a—” he cleared his throat, “it was a Russian name, come to think of it. Who was the guy that tortured dogs with bells and shit?”
“Pavlov?” Terry and I said in tandem.
Eli stabbed the air with his finger. “That’s it,” he said, grinning.
Okay, in all fairness to Eli, we hadn’t mentioned Tatiana Pavlov’s name. If we had, it might have precipitated a cascade of connections in his mind. We learned that his Pavlov was named Sergei. Thirty-two years old and part of a big wave of Russian immigrants during the eighties. A known felon who’d bounced in and out of the penal system starting at the age of fifteen.
Eli described him as slender and wiry, on the short side, with blue, soulless eyes. He’d never mentioned a sister or a wife, or any female relative, so we couldn’t establish a definitive link between Sergei Pavlov the international drug trafficker and Tatiana Pavlov, the “medical assistant” in Hattrick’s office. But the common last name seemed more than coincidental.
The good news was that we now had a partner and ally in Eli. He was intrigued by the idea that Binion might be involved in some indictable criminal activity, and he was more than happy to help us bring home the Bacon.
“I’ll leave things in your capable hands,” Reba said to Eli as we stepped into the hallway, seeming buoyed by his interest in the case. “I’m off to plan Lenore’s memorial. There’s so much to do.”
It was the first I’d heard of it. “You’re planning her funeral?”
“Yes. The hospital confirmed that she died of a thrombosis, a not uncommon occurrence, sadly, after cosmetic surgery. So I’m having her body transferred to the crematorium.”
I must have made a face, because Reba put a hand on my arm. “There’s really no one else,” she said. “Lenore deserves better than to go into that good night without a remembrance. No matter what she’d got into recently, she was a dear friend at one time.”
“Hey, that’s aces,” Eli said. “Really decent of you.”
Reba blushed again. “Ta,” she said, heading down the hallway.
“Toodle-oo,” Eli said, wagging his fingers at her.
“’Bye, Reba,” we said.
And with that she slipped into the elevator, waving at Eli once again.
Eli gave us access to his stealth weapon, Greg Adams, a law clerk and investigator who worked out of Eli’s office, and who had a genius for dealing with people. When I had been employed by Eli, Greg usually worked the phones and I did the legwork.
At first glance, Greg defined the word “nerd.” He was in his late twenties, tall and scrawny, with a too-big shirt collar around a pencil neck, and traces of teenage acne still scattered across his cheeks. But he had the patience of a Zen master and the soul of a Yakuza assassin.
He had amassed an incredible Rolodex over the last seven years, which he kept on a state-of-the-art PDA, and he could put his hand on the most amazing, arcane sources of information you could ever want due to his uncanny knack for cultivating personal contacts.
He billed Eli yearly for thousands of dollars in gifts, flowers, and liquor for weddings, christenings, Christmas, Ha–nukkah, bar mitzvahs, anniversaries, and probably Flag Day celebrations. He had the important dates meticulously recorded for all of his contacts in various bureaucracies, agencies, private business, and on the streets, and he never, ever, missed a life event, no matter how small. He always made people feel valued, thus there was always someone willing to give him valuable information for the asking.
He was also relentless in his efforts to get me to sleep with him.
Within two hours of catching our case, Greg had landed some interesting scoop on the doctor. Hattrick had been investigated by the Medical Board of California, and the results had been sealed. But not well enough to keep Greg out. He ushered us into his office excitedly.
“What’d you get?” I asked him.
He gave me a crooked smile, waggling his eyebrows. “What’s it worth to you?”
“Greg, we’ve been through this before,” I said. “We’re colleagues. I don’t mix business with pleasure.”
“Oh, right,” he said, turning his attention to Terry. “How ’bout it, Ter? Still batting for the other team?”
She gave him a warning look.
“Kidding! Just wanted to see if you were paying attention,” he said, straightening some files on his desk. “Okay, here’s what we’ve got on your doctor . . .”
He opened the top file and began to fill us in. It appeared that Hattrick had been reported to the board by a former nurse named Tish Werner who lived in an apartment on Doheny Drive. Ms. Werner’s allegations had been nothing short of bizarre.
She contended that Hattrick had decided his eyes needed a lift, and he had performed the operation on his own lids while looking in a mirror.
“He botched it,” Greg said. “I mean, how could you know how much flesh to take from the very eyes you were looking out of? He took too much, and as a result, he has perpetually open eyes.”
“My God,” Terry said. “That’s exactly what Reba told us! He wore dark glasses and he never blinked his eyes!”
“He’s operating on people with eyes that never shut?” I said.
Greg shrugged. “He should have been defrocked, but he had some high-priced legal talent, a guy named Hugh Binion—”
Terry slapped the arms of her chair. “That’s beautiful!”
“What?”
“Binion represents everyone in this scenario. Our conspiracy is really shaping up. Sergei gets the drugs, the doc distributes them, and the shyster Binion keeps them all out of prison.”
“Well, Binion definitely got the doc off the hook. Hattrick passed peer review, probably on the grounds that he hadn’t hurt an actual patient, and there was nobody to sue but himself.”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
“But here’s the best part,” Greg said. “This is hot off the medical grapevine. Hattrick became a hopeless drug addict. Because of his eye thing he was using drops containing narcotics—”
“Which breed tolerance,” Terry said.
“Yeah, and soon he moved up to pills, as many as twenty a day—eighty-milligram tablets. Finally, he started shooting up morphine.”
“Jesus,” Terry said. “Everyone knew this and he was still practicing medicine?”
“You know doctors,” Greg said. “They’d rather turn in their own mothers than rat on a colleague.”
“But there’d be a limit to what he could prescribe to himself without raising suspicions,” I said.
Terry nodded. “So he tapped into a prescription drug ring, fronted by Sergei Pavlov. And that’s how he came to hire Tatiana.”
Which brought us back to the Russian beauty.
“So who is Tatiana to Sergei?” Terry said. “A sister? His wife?”
“I’ll look into it,” Greg said. “See if there’s a marriage record. And if I come up with some invaluable p
iece of information . . . ?” he asked, hope springing eternal.
“We’ll see you in your dreams,” Terry said, giving him a wink.
In the course of his sleuthing, Greg turned up an interesting tidbit on Sergei Pavlov’s personal life. He had indeed married one Tatiana Dmitriyevna, but she had instituted divorce proceedings immediately after his arrest. A fair-weather wife, it seemed. Greg also discovered that she’d moved out of the apartment on Argyle Avenue a week before Mario was killed, but he couldn’t find a current address of record.
By four o’clock, we were brain-numb from grubbing after blackmailers and drug dealers. We gave Eli a briefing, and Greg went back to working on another case for the rest of the day. Terry and I were left sitting alone in the small conference room beside Eli’s office, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups, pondering the situation.
“Sounds like Tatiana’s out of it,” I said. “She bailed on her husband and on the doctor. Hit the road.”
“She still could have murdered Mario.” Terry had kicked back in one of the gray pleather chairs, her long legs and chunky black biker boots resting on the table.
“Maybe. But she didn’t strike me as the murdering type. Women like that are usually content to slay people with their looks.”
“I wonder why Janice was meeting with her? Especially after all the not-nice things she had to say about her.”
I shrugged. “Maybe they were dishing the doc. They could have been discussing strategies for dealing with the lawsuits—”
Terry suddenly sat up, excited. “Listen, why don’t we call Janice and see if we can get her to admit to the drug thing.”
“You think she’s involved?”
“She’s the office manager. She has to know what’s going on. She’s in charge of the drug supply, knows every package that comes in or goes out.”
“Yeah, but why would she tell us? Why would she give up her boss?”
“Because she likes us. And she doesn’t like him.”
“You’ve got a high opinion of us,” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Besides, the police are bound to connect Suzie’s death with the funny stuff going on at the hotel, which will lead them directly to Hattrick. We should tell Janice what we think we know, then let her decide if she wants to go to the cops herself. Turn state’s evidence or something. Especially if they get the doc for murder.”
It was the first time either of us had said it out loud. Had the doctor murdered Suzie Magnuson? And possibly, in some invisible way, Lenore Richling?
“You think a prominent plastic surgeon would go around murdering his patients?” I asked.
“It’s not a big leap from maiming your patients to killing them, is it?”
She had a point.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get Janice on the phone.”
I called Hattrick’s office, announcing myself as Ms. McAfee and using a fake, high-society voice, hoping the receptionist wouldn’t remember me or see through my attempted disguise. She told me Janice couldn’t come to the phone, so I gave her our cell phone number and hung up.
Terry looked out the window. “I feel like we’re leaving loose ends somewhere. Something’s bothering me.”
“Well, perhaps it’s time for the diagram,” I said, pulling it out.
“Yippee, the diagram!” She pushed back from the table with her foot, spinning herself in the swivel chair. “We’re having some fun now!”
“Do shut up.”
I’d been tinkering with my “case graph” for the past couple of days, and it was a mess of crisscrossed lines and arcs. It looked like someone had done his geometry homework on acid.
“Okay, we got Hattrick, Sergei, Tatiana, and Binion, all connected to each other, and all associated with Lenore, Suzie, and Mario,” I said.
“And Alphonse. Don’t forget Alphonse,” she said, getting interested in spite of herself.
“He’s a second banana.”
She tapped the pad with her finger. “Humor me.”
I drew an arc between Alphonse and Hattrick, sketching a picture of a banana underneath.
“And you need to indicate who’s dead now.”
I drew a skull and crossbones next to Mario, Lenore, and Suzie. As I did, Suzie’s name popped out at me.
“Suzie’s the wild card,” I announced.
“Why do you say that?”
“She may have been both victim and perpetrator, know what I mean?”
“No. ’Splain me.”
“A perpetrator in the sense that she was working with Lenore and Mario on blackmail or whatever dirty doings they had their hands in. But what if they turned on her for some reason and killed her, making her a victim?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, a case of dishonor among scumbags?”
Terry sighed and leaned on the table. “Look, we think it was her painting that was at Lenore’s house. We know she was murdered. And we know she reported a break-in prior to her murder—”
“Right!”
“What?”
I dug through my pockets and found the card I’d gotten from Sidney Lefler of Whitechapel Mutual. “Let’s call this Sidney guy and see if we can nail him down on the painting. He might be able to give us a gigantic piece of the puzzle.”
Priss drove us home to pick up our bike, and within an hour we were back on the road going east.
We took the 10 Freeway to the Pasadena Freeway, curving past the Staples center, and hooked a right on Sixth Street, then a left onto South Grand on the western edge of downtown LA. There are a lot of “downtowns” in the area, since most of what people think of as LA is actually a bunch of small towns connected by the freeway system: Century City, Culver City, Pasadena, Burbank, Santa Monica, and so on.
But downtown LA is the mother of all area downtowns, the one with high-rise buildings, public artworks and fountains, the Mark Taper Forum and the Disney Concert Hall, a garment district, a financial district, and ethnic neighborhoods like Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and El Pueblo. There’s lots of hustle and bustle during the workday, but at night it’s as lively as Tombstone, Arizona. The professional types head back to the West Side or the Valley, the wind whistles through the high-rises and trash blows down the deserted streets, and gun- and knife-slingers come out to infest the night with mayhem. At the moment, though, it was full of people in suits and sensible shoes toting leather briefcases, blabbing on cell phones, rushing to their meetings, as buttoned-down and slick as the denizens of midtown Manhattan. You’d never know they coexisted with the fruits, flakes, and nuts of California legend.
We hung a left on Fifth Street and pulled into the underground garage of a granite skyscraper, then took the elevator up to the lobby. There we caught the express, whizzing up twenty-one floors to the offices of Whitechapel Mutual.
Sidney met us in the lobby. “Hey, good to see you again,” he said, extending a hand. “Didn’t expect the pleasure this soon. Come into my office.”
He turned and headed down the hall with short, quick strides. Terry and I fell in behind, following him until we reached a cubbyhole of an office that was crammed with map books, camera equipment, and volumes on every conceivable subject from anatomy to biology, metallurgy to stamp collecting. It would have been suffocating, but for his window on the world—a floor-to-ceiling pane of tinted glass that gave us a view all the way to the snow-tipped San Gabriel Mountains.
He plunked himself down behind his desk, the vinyl executive chair whooshing as he sat due to a hole in the cushion. He pulled up an Igloo cooler and opened it on his desk, displaying a range of soft drinks and a couple of sandwiches.
“Drink?”
“We don’t want to drink your lunch,” Terry said.
“It’s not my lunch, it’s my stash. I take it with me when I do surveillance.”
“You do a lot of that?” I asked, as we each took a bottle of spring water.
“It’s what I do most of the time. Investigating injury claims, theft claims, that kind
of thing.”
“We’ve done our share of surveillance, too,” I said, glad we could establish a rapport along these lines.
“So what can I do for you today?” he asked, looking magnanimous.
Terry sandbagged him. “You can tell us the truth about Suzie Magnuson’s claim.”
So much for rapport.
Sidney blanched and leaned against his desk. “Th-the truth? What do you mean, the truth?”
“She reported something stolen other than the silver, didn’t she?”
He frowned and hunched his shoulders. “Who do you represent, again?”
“We represent our aunt, who was a friend of Suzie’s,” Terry said. “Two of her women friends have met with an ugly end in the past few days, and we’re trying to find out why.”
“I see.” His nose twitched and his eyes darted, giving him the furtive look of a ferret in human drag.
“How did you get to the scene of Suzie’s death so quickly?” I said.
He leaned back in his chair and made a temple out of his hands. “Can I expect reciprocity?”
Terry looked at me. “Yes,” I said. “You tell us what you know, we’ll tell you what we know.”
Some of it, anyway.
“I had her under surveillance,” Sidney told us.
Terry’s mouth fell open. “Who, Suzie Magnuson?”
“Yeah. She had submitted a theft claim on a valuable painting—”
“A Francis Bacon,” I said, and immediately heard his foot thumping under the desk. At least I hoped it was his foot. I was relieved to note that both hands were present and accounted for above the desk, nervously worrying a pencil.
“Yes. How did you—?”
“In a minute,” Terry said. “Please, go on.”
He tapped his lip with the pencil eraser. “There were questionable aspects to the case. She put in a claim of three million, but the company was stalling on payment in the hopes the painting would be recovered.”
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 17