by Neil Russell
“And?”
“Mostly blue chips and T-Bills. Couple pieces of real estate. On the other side of the ledger, there’s a bequest to the Orange Empire Railway Museum, and a bullshit grant to some USC professor named Felton who’s traveling the world collecting sperm from Arabians. According to DeHoff, he’s creating a DNA database to facilitate breeding. I’m praying that means horses.”
“Very droll, Groucho. How much?”
“A hundred grand with a hundred more due next year.”
“I don’t think locomotives or Arabian sperm have anything to do with this.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
There was more on the horizon, but apparently, Jake had to reaffirm my position as supplicant before he got to it. Fucking lawyers.
“A few months ago, Lucille leased a ship. Did it through an offshore shell, Brando Maritime Holdings.”
I gazed across the desert landscape. “Chuck had to take Dramamine to watch Jaws. Said if The Big One ever turned Victorville into oceanfront, he’d cash out and move a hundred miles farther inland.”
“No, schmuck, a ship ship. As in mutinies and stowaways. Container vessel. Old fucker. Built in Stockholm way back in ‘88 as the Princess Zenzi. Captain gashed her side on a breakwater a few years ago, and the insurance company walked away when he blew a .21. She was collecting barnacles in the Philippines until Lucille signed a six-month contract at $20,000 per, then popped for an extra $17,000 to change her name to the Resurrection Bay II. A place that actually exists, if you’re interested. Middle of nowhere Alaska.”
“Lot of money for a name.”
“Rush job, I’m told. Right now, the RBII is sitting at an old submarine-refueling installation left over from that little dustup with the Japanese back in the forties. Vuku Island. Tonga, if you didn’t know. The uninhabited part.”
“A container ship in Tonga? I thought their primary exports were shell necklaces and laundered money.” Then something clicked in. “Passports,” I said.
“Yeah, what about them?”
“Back a bit, they had something called a T.P.P. Tongan Protected Person. For a few grand, you could buy a passport with a citizenship chit attached. All kinds of people grabbed one. Billionaires with tax problems, drug kingpins, even Imelda Marcos. Easy money for the Tongan king until somebody realized they were naturalizing thousands of Hong Kong businessmen and whole Triads. They’d probably still be doing it if they hadn’t gotten up one morning and found the Chinese running everything in the country.”
“Greedy royals with a room temperature IQ. There’s a surprise.”
“They killed the scam, but I’m betting it wasn’t retroactive.”
“I’ll see if the Brandos made the cut. You want me to make a run at getting the manifests?”
As slick as Mr. Praxis is, my company has substantial holdings in the Bahamas, and I knew firsthand that their bureaucracy moves like a studio sending out profit participations. “Seems like an errand we can postpone. Can I presume there was an original Resurrection Bay?”
“You can. A flattop. Same war as the refueling station. But you might want something more to go on than Wikipedia.”
“Where would one find Brando Maritime Holdings?”
“If you happened to be in Miami, you could dash across for lunch.”
“Freeport.”
“Yep. Had a house on Grand Bahama once. Nice place to fuck with the tax man. Then I met my first hurricane and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Give me the IRS and earthquakes any day.”
The Bahamas registration probably didn’t mean anything. Ninety percent of oceangoing ships are registered in places where they’ve never dropped anchor. Flags of convenience are based on financial considerations, not patriotism. “What did DeHoff say happens the day Chuck and Lucille are no longer with us?”
He cleared his throat. “I thought you might already know.”
“Take off your cross-examination hat.”
“The Brando Trust has a single successor trustee. Rail Sheridan Black. Want his address?”
First Yale Maywood, now this. “We never discussed anything like that.”
“So what? They had Super Bowl tickets too. Looks like they left you a mandate and the means. Now, all you need is a mission.”
“You think that up all by yourself? If you weren’t so thin-skinned, I’d tell you my father’s plan to keep lawyers from breeding.”
“Sounds like a personal problem. See the chaplain.”
He was right. I was angry, and I didn’t even know why. Actually, I did know. I find satisfaction in helping those who need a hand, but I don’t like being presumed upon. I took a moment to collect my thoughts. Jake or no Jake, DeHoff wasn’t going to release documents without an okay from the Brandos or a death certificate, neither of which was going to be forthcoming anytime soon. “I don’t suppose you asked about instructions to go along with the trustee job?”
I could hear him smiling over the phone. “Didn’t have to. DeHoff volunteered. One sentence, handwritten by Lucille: ‘Rail, I’m so sorry, but it’s in your hands now.’”
I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I might have muttered something I’d have to apologize for later. Jake started to say something, but I cut him off. “You have a size on this Resurrection Bay!”
I heard him shuffling papers. “Panamax mean anything?”
“It means another foot in any direction, and it couldn’t get through the Canal. Think three football fields end to end.”
“If my life weren’t in jeopardy, this wouldn’t be even mildly interesting. There’s a thirty-million-dollar actor in my lobby who just walked off a picture.”
“I’m sure that was Chuck’s last thought. ‘I hope Jake’s got a couple of minutes.’”
There was silence on the other end. He didn’t deserve that. “Sorry, Counselor, you done good.”
“Just pay your bill for a change.” Click.
With the ship’s lease, Lucille would also have gotten unlimited Bahamian passenger permits and entry visas, no questions asked. All Brando Maritime’s agent had to do was file a short-form request over the Internet, and in seventy-two hours, the documents could be printed out by any consulate. And under international law, once aboard, passengers would be answerable only to the Resurrection Bay II’s captain and the government in Freeport.
I didn’t know how it fit, but suddenly, Lucille’s monthly FedEx pickup to a South Pacific import house moved from curious to very interesting. And gently nagging at the back of my brain was Wes Crowe’s antenna farm.
* * * *
Without the music, the Pullman seemed strangely quiet. The LAPD had been as efficient at clearing it of evidence as they had the house. However, most railroad car furnishings are either built in or bolted down, so it hadn’t been stripped bare. Fortunately, someone had left the air-conditioning on, and I welcomed the coolness.
There was nothing visual to indicate that violence had been done, but murder changes the character of a room forever. No amount of time or redecorating can put it back the way it was. Twenty years later, a dog will know instantly. People who deal in death will too.
I slowly walked the car’s length, pausing from time to time to allow my other senses time to absorb what my eyes couldn’t see. There may be genuine psychics among us, I just haven’t met one. What everyone does have to one degree or another is the ability to intuit minute changes in our surroundings. To “feel” a small radius.
Delta and SEAL teams advancing on a target aren’t planning their next meal or thinking about getting laid. Every nerve ending is taking in tiny details. Cracks in the walls, the way water runs off a roof, background noise, cooking smells. And especially energy. High or low; positive or negative; anxious or calm?
The engineers at Bragg and Dam Neck can build an exact replica of an objective, and the command structure and intelligence analysts can train and brief you until you’re able to execute the mission blindfolded. But as true-to-lif
e as they try to make it, it’s never going to be the real thing ... where one small cue might be the difference between a celebratory cold beer or being dinner for the carrion eaters.
Anyone can learn to be more perceptive. It’s about paying attention. If I were running the country’s educational system, I would make awareness instruction as mandatory as math—especially for young women. We’re terrific at telling our girls they can do or be anything—urging them to take risks. But we’re criminally negligent by not warning them about the predators who lie in wait, watching for exactly that profile. To a nation of “liberated,” good-news-only parents, the hunters say thank you.
After several minutes, I turned and went back to where I had last seen Lucille and took a seat in the booth directly across the aisle. Her table was bare now, the blood on the seat and floor gone, but I didn’t need those things to replay the scene. Whoever had done the face-to-face torturing had probably sat opposite her while his associate knelt in the booth behind and managed the strangulation. That meant Razorblade Man had been in charge, because he would have been monitoring the victim’s reaction to having her air cut off—the back and forth between half death and one more excruciating breath.
I wasn’t a homicide detective, but I didn’t believe the indignities visited on the Brandos would be in the toolbox of very many murderers. They were too organized and too time-consuming. And though I disliked applying the word professional, the questioning had been exactly that—mercilessly so. The sexual overtones were also impossible to miss.
I took out my phone. A minute later, Gianatta Sabatini’s secretary put me through to her boss. In her day job as head of a Beverly Hills CPA firm, Gianatta is as buttoned up as any Stanford-degreed money manager for the well-to-do is expected to be. What her other clients don’t know, however, is that she earns less pushing numbers around a spreadsheet than by writing erotic novels under the nom de plume, Countess Paloma.
Normally, this is the kind of thing that would triple business among Tinseltown’s diamond-heeled, but Gina says being identified with seventeen kinds of fellatio would play hell with her treasured membership at the Los Angeles Country Club—a place still iffy about corned beef because it might attract the wrong element. I wouldn’t have suspected her secret either if, a few years ago, she hadn’t come to me, frantic about a Countess groupie who’d cracked her identity and shown up in her kitchen in the middle of the night. When she found him, he was eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes and wearing nothing but wingtips and a catcher’s mask.
In the black humor of Hollywood, if you don’t have a stalker, you’re not a player. In truth, if you have any connection to the business at all—even driving the prop truck— you’ve probably had your very own whacko whose car you’re always on the lookout for. The LAPD has a unit devoted to these crazies, and there are tough laws on the California books, but in a litigious world, deterring the obsessed is a legal no-man’s-land.
I’d fixed her problem the only way these guys understand, meaning I’d stayed inside the law just enough to avoid San Quentin, yet gotten close enough to the edge that the guy didn’t want any part of a next time. It’s instructive how quickly you can get through to someone with a pair of handcuffs and a pitching machine. So he’d appreciate the lesson’s poetry, I’d let him wear the mask and wingtips.
A grateful Gianatta had torn up my accounting bill for the year. The Countess handled it a little differently, spending the weekend at my place while we worked on ideas for her next book. Despite the autographed copy on my shelf, I won’t be reading it. When you drink that much red wine naked, it’s better to skip the replay.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Gianatta asked. “It certainly can’t be the taxes I saved you last quarter.”
“I never look. Take off your glasses, I want Paloma.”
“Ready when you are. Please talk dirty. And if your current lady is longing for a threesome, I’m free all weekend.”
Without giving a name, I described what had been done to Lucille. When I finished, she peppered me for clinical details that, even over the phone to a sex author I’d been intimate with, were uncomfortable.
Finally, she said, “The dead woman’s Asian, isn’t she?”
Apparently, I’d called the right person. “Chinese,” I replied.
“I’d have guessed a little farther east, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
“Remember the Japanese Red Army?”
“Before my time, but yes.”
“Mine too, but they hold a special place in my cold, dark feminist heart. Before they and their associated degenerates came along, it was pretty much unheard of for a woman to have power in a terrorist network. Mostly, chicks did what they always do, run errands, cook and sweat under smelly men. Then the repressed daughters of Nippon put forth the lovely and demure Fusako Shigenobu who could have taught Himmler a thing or two.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said. “During the Indian Wars, the worst thing a prisoner could hear was, ‘Give him to the women.’”
“Fusako went on the lam early, but her ideas were copied by the United Red Army. In the dead of winter, 1972, twenty of them traipsed into the mountains for a little light purging. A couple of weeks of sexual indignities and creative torture later, twelve were dead, and the rest were in a pitched battle with the cops.”
“You’re saying this was some kind of ritual?”
“All sex murder is ritual to one degree or another. We just don’t usually waste time figuring it out. Was this dame from Taiwan or the Mainland?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Interesting. Okay, the crap in one of the bottles is venom. My guess, cobra. The other will be acid and concentrated capsaicin—which is about fifty times hotter than a mouthful of habañeros. First the blades, then the venom. It impedes coagulation, and as a man with your experience knows, unchecked bleeding plays tricks on the psyche.”
I did know. Absent severing a major blood vessel—and there are very few of those—it’s almost impossible for someone to bleed out. Even on the battlefield, you’re more likely to die from shock or infection than loss of blood. But when it’s your red stuff running onto the ground, logic runs right along with it, and even pros have to fight down panic. Deep in our prehistoric subconscious, we’re imprinted that seeing our blood is a prelude to death. It’s why we get a sick feeling in the pits of our stomachs when we visualize a sharp blade cutting us or have to turn our heads when a hypodermic-wielding hematology tech heads our way. It’s also why a person who might stupidly challenge a gun backs away from a knife. Few of us ever see a real bullet wound. Everybody knows what it feels like to be cut.
Gianatta continued, “So once your lady had the full visual effect, her torturer painted on the pain agent, which also constricted the capillaries and shut off the flow. Presto, time to get a few questions answered. Only from what you told me, that didn’t happen.”
“It doesn’t appear so.”
“Poor thing. Eventually, seeing that much blood becomes so emotionally distressing that the victim actually begs for the acid.”
In other words, submission. The essence of interrogation. Choking would have accelerated the process. I said, “The sandpaper seems like overkill.”
“That’s because disfigurement doesn’t get your rocks off.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The killer was a woman. Ten to one her helper was too. And they would have been naked . . . and stopping every now and then to masturbate—or more.”
Even though I hadn’t considered this combination, my question to Phil had been on the money. There was sex involved, just no semen.
“You still there?” she asked.
“What about the tiger in the mouth?”
“That will be personal. Very personal. Something that meant a great deal to the dead woman.”
“Any chance you’re wrong?”
“Sure, and I might give up shopping, but I wouldn’t count on eithe
r.”
After I hung up, I stared at Lucille’s booth, trying to will myself to see her attackers. Gradually, something pushed its way past the haze. The green leather where she had been sitting was indented. Since we’re creatures of habit, that was probably where Lucille always worked, and the seat had taken on her shape. The bench on the other side of the table was firm, new. Chuck probably didn’t come out very often, and if he did, he probably did what I was doing, sat across the aisle with his legs out. If I was correct, then the other bench never got used.
But as I stared at it, the half next to the window wasn’t entirely pristine. Where the back of the booth met the seat, there was a slight irregularity. I focused on it, then I remembered the dirty knee prints on Chuck’s bed. If someone had been kneeling here too, they would have unconsciously pushed their toes into the gap, widening it. Eventually, it would return to its original shape, but for the moment, the twin anomalies were like matching signatures.