I took surface streets into work, not from a need to skirt traffic, but because it was better to see if I was being tailed. This time, however, I actually wanted to be followed.
I thought I caught a glimpse of it on San Fernando as I wound under the 110 Freeway. When I turned onto Pasadena Avenue and then the bridge over the river, I spotted it again a few cars back. I came up through Chinatown and instead of heading to the office, I drove to Echo Park to Badger’s “office.”
I fumbled with the parking meter and used the time to survey the street. There was no sign of the car and not much foot traffic other than an occasional homeless man emerging from the park. Making my way down the sidewalk toward Badger’s office, a voice called out from one of the storefront vestibules.
“Pretend to look interested in the store,” it commanded.
“Huh?” I said, and turned toward the voice.
“Don’t look,” it commanded.
“Badger?” I asked, recognizing the voice.
I had ruined whatever clandestine meeting arrangement he had planned, so he hastily grabbed my coat and guided me into the vestibule next to him.
“Why are you out here?”
“We have a problem,” he stated.
“What happened to the money?” I asked, immediately jumping to that as the source of the issue.
“Nothing’s happened,” Badger said, gesturing back toward his office. “It’s safe and sound.” That put my mind at ease, until he added, “I count it every morning to make sure.”
My vision of Badger “counting” the money didn’t include an accountant’s green eyeshade as much as it did him rolling around on mounds of cash in a state of half-dress on the army cot that he called his bed. I just hoped none of it was misplaced during his daily ritual.
“Then what’s the problem?” I asked.
“We have a visitor,” he said, and pointed through the glass to a car parked down the road with the engine running. A lone figure sat at the wheel. Badger then casually revealed the gun he had under his coat.
“Relax,” I said. “I told him to meet me here.”
I walked across the street toward the idling car. The driver got out to greet me.
“Detective Fortin?”
We shook hands. He was taller than me and reeked of cigarette smoke. His cop mustache was almost full gray and didn’t look like it had been groomed since he retired.
“Thanks for coming out. This is Badger—” I said, but realized he was still lurking in the vestibule. “That is Badger,” I corrected, and waved in his direction. “Let’s go inside.”
We sat at a table rescued from a school supply surplus depot and I brought everyone up to speed on everything that had transpired. There was immediate tension between the two “cops” on the single set of turf. But Detective Fortin seemed oblivious to it. Or he justifiably didn’t feel the need to be in competition at all.
“Did anyone follow up on the Florida lead?” he asked innocently, which Badger took as a direct assault on his character.
“Of course we did,” Badger replied, annoyed at having to answer the question in the first place. “She never left California.”
I filled in all of the necessary details that Badger was disinclined to share. The search for the librarian named Julie St. Jean came up empty in Florida. Badger couldn’t uncover a single record of her ever having lived there, except for the original documentation of her early life that he had already discovered. The likelihood that she’d moved out of the Sierra Madre home and returned to her birthplace was less likely than it had been.
“We’ll probably never know the specifics of what happened to her,” I concluded, “but we’re pretty sure that the woman who took her name also took her life.”
“Why didn’t you follow up on that charity?” Badger threw out.
It was unclear what charity he was referencing and to whom the question was directed. Detective Fortin and I shared a look.
“Which charity?” he asked.
“The one that posted Maggie’s bail.”
I watched Detective Fortin shift uncomfortably, but it wasn’t because of the steel surplus chair. A seemingly small detail in the story of Maggie Fitch and her arrest on a major distribution charge was her ability to post bail, no small feat for someone living on the streets at the time. The hefty sum a charity put up for her release should have, at a minimum, drawn suspicion.
“It was a…curious development,” Detective Fortin stammered.
“Did you know who was behind the charity?” Badger asked.
“We did.” After a pause, he added, “And you would like to know why we didn’t have someone tail Maggie after her release.”
“Not my place to question the work,” Badger said, but everyone knew he was doing just that.
“I appear to be the only one in the dark,” I said, trying to ease the tension. “Can someone please fill me in?”
Detective Fortin deferred to Badger. “You seem to have a good grasp of what happened.”
It must have been complicated because this time Badger pulled out actual sheets of paper. His documentation consisted mostly of internet printouts of newspaper articles with notes scratched in pencil in the margins. This was an impressive feat given that Badger didn’t own a computer. He had printed the articles on the backs of fliers posted at his local library. The colored sheets still had pinpricks in them from where tacks had once held them to the corkboard.
“Phil Arturo,” he announced.
“No idea who that is,” I answered. Badger was trying his hand at a dramatic unveiling and neither I nor Detective Fortin had the patience to oblige him. “Let’s keep it moving. Who is Phil Arturo?”
“He was a real estate developer in Phoenix back in the eighties. He did planned communities but on the cheap side. Glorified trailer parks,” Badger said, sniffing. I let it pass that his current residence could only dream of being elevated to “trailer trash” level. “It wasn’t a bad business, made decent cash.”
“But?” I prodded.
“But Arturo ran around like he was Timmy Tycoon.”
Badger listed off all the clichés of the newly wealthy—vacation homes, sports cars, boats. And the kind of things you never stop paying for—prostitutes and drugs.
“When the last of the money went up his nose he came up with a new idea and a new buyer: the savings and loans.”
I recalled the scandal that rocked the financial industry and sent the country into a recession. The thrifts were in a pickle. They borrowed money at one rate and lent it out at a lower rate. That unsound practice forced them to find ways to make up the difference. The answer was to invest it, but all that did was move them further out on the risk spectrum, well past the point of “risky” and fully into “you’re a buffoon” territory.
“Arturo was their guy,” said Badger.
He continued: Arturo promised outsized returns on short lock-up periods. The too-good-to-be-true investment was far worse than that phrase implied. He was running a Ponzi scheme in which he paid old investors with new-investor money. The money moved from hand to hand but where it never went was into an actual investment.
“Then it ended,” Badger said.
The wave couldn’t go on forever and it came crashing on shore. When new S&L money dried up, so did the source to pay the old S&L folks. That’s when the investigators came knocking.
Badger slid a printout across the table. It was a photograph he had pulled off an old article on Arturo. Not the best of pictures but good enough for me to recognize the face.
“The guy in the Cadillac,” I said.
“He’s here?” Detective Fortin asked.
Arturo hadn’t changed much over the years. He’d kept his bowling ball physique and apparently never had hair. I couldn’t tell but it looked like he still wore the same gold necklace from the 1980s.
“No mistaking him,” I said, and tried to make sense of all the new information. “You knew about Arturo?”
“H
e was well known to our department,” Detective Fortin replied. “For all the reasons just outlined.” He turned to Badger. “Nice work, son.”
Badger finally got the recognition he so coveted, and it was even more special coming from the retired investigator. He pretended to shrug it off.
“Listen,” began the speech, “it’s what I do—”
“Yeah, I know,” I quickly jumped in. No one was in the mood for an ego-stroking session, particularly the old detective who looked a little sullen at having his deficiencies in detection exposed. The last thing this newly formed team needed was two sulkers who felt underappreciated. I got us back to the details of the case. “So how does this connect to Maggie?”
“The charity was a women’s advocacy group run by Arturo’s wife,” Detective Fortin explained “and funded with Arturo’s money. As far as anyone could tell, the only contributions they made toward their advocacy cause were throwing fancy galas where a few ladies of ill repute were in attendance.”
“So they were a sham,” I said.
“More than that. Once the Ponzi party ended the Feds went straight for the charity.” It was the first mention of the FBI getting involved, and the way the detective mentioned them, I assumed the involvement was unwanted. “That’s where they thought the money was hidden.”
Authorities recovered only a fraction of the money stolen by Arturo and his investment scheme. Large amounts were unaccounted for—even factoring in the portion that went up his nose, it should have been several million dollars.
I feared Badger might divulge the fact that over two million in cash was sitting in boxes just behind the dusty curtain. But he never brought it up, and I assumed he shared my concern over how our handling of the money might come across to a longtime law enforcement officer.
“So the Feds jacked up your case,” Badger surmised.
“Yup,” nodded the detective.
“Figures,” he commiserated, and in that instant, Badger and Detective Fortin formed a bond over a mutual enemy.
“So the wife had to be in on it with Arturo from the start,” I riffed.
“Maybe,” Detective Fortin replied. “We’ll never know. She was murdered.”
Karen Arturo’s body was found in the desert by a couple of hikers a month after her charity posted Maggie’s bail. Her body was badly mutilated and partially burned and left for the elements and animals to do their damage.
“What a mess,” Detective Fortin shuddered. “Couldn’t even tell it was her.”
The scenario the police developed involved Arturo and Maggie concocting some plan to run off with whatever money remained. Arturo’s wife got wind of it and thus became a threat that had to be removed.
“We tried to hang it on Arturo.”
“Tried?” I asked with trepidation, knowing what was coming.
“Couldn’t make it stick. We had a rock-solid motive and no evidence. Feds eventually got him on fraud, among other things. Thirteen years,” he said and whistled. “He’d still be in if I’d gotten him.”
“Redemption time,” Badger said, and patted the detective on the knee in a surprisingly tender gesture.
That seemed to lift the old man’s spirits.
“So how do we find Maggie?” he asked.
SMOKE OUT
Detective Fortin’s redemption would have to wait a few days. Despite our shared desire to bring Maggie/Julie in, I had a personal reason that superseded whatever justice he wanted to mete out.
We set a time for the next day for the three of us to regroup, giving Detective Fortin time to find a reasonable hotel room. As soon as he was gone, I turned to Badger.
“I’m going to need those boxes.”
“Which boxes?” he asked.
“With the money.”
Badger blanched.
My suspicion that he was using the money for extracurricular activities suddenly felt much more severe, like maybe those activities involved him spending it. But as we pulled away the tarp that covered the boxes and lifted a lid, I saw all the bills there in their stacks.
“How’d it get so wrinkled?” I asked.
“Maybe when we transported it over here,” he said sheepishly.
Badger and I made an elaborate display of loading the Power of One boxes into my car. All along, it felt like someone was monitoring my activities, and I wanted to leave no doubt that I was in possession of the money. I drove over to the office and then made an equally elaborate show of unloading the boxes in front of my building and wheeling them into my office.
Then I waited.
I waited for everyone to leave for the day, which was pretty much accomplished by 4:55 p.m. Then I waited for the cleaning crew to pretend to dust and run a vacuum over the spotless carpet. And then I waited for someone to come for the Power of One boxes.
I heard the click of the electric doors sometime before 3 a.m. Sitting in a cubicle a few doors down from my office, I watched a figure comfortably make its way down the darkened hallway toward me. The figure went straight for my office and stopped in front of the boxes that I had left on the table.
“Need some help?” I asked, coming in behind her and flicking on the overhead light.
“If you have to ask,” Julie replied, “then I assume you had no intention of giving any.”
“Probably not.”
“It’s good to see you, Chuck.”
“You missed your memorial,” I said. “It was a nice service. Just enough insincere gibberish to honor Julie St. Jean properly. Or is it Maggie Fitch?”
Her demeanor didn’t betray if I had succeeded in surprising her with that pronouncement. Julie just eyed me coolly. I decided to rattle off all of the things I knew about her—the car purchase in Baldwin Park, the drug arrest in Phoenix, the Bakersfield meetings with Lois and her ex-husband, the sale of Power of One to Bronson. The breezy fashion in which I relayed these details had the intended effect of demonstrating that I had many other discoveries to relate. I later realized that despite my assertions that Julie was a fraud, I still had a need to prove myself to her. Like all great manipulators, Julie took advantage of this.
“You always were good at pointing out people’s mistakes,” she said. “A man’s shortcomings manifest in the criticisms of others.”
“Was that Gandhi?”
“Pat and I talked about you,” she started, “trying to figure out where someone of your makeup should sit in the organization. Pat never had faith and neither did I. Actually, that’s not fair. No one gave you much thought.”
“I know misplaced confidence is one of your strengths, but given the position you’re in now, I’m not sure it’s warranted.”
I saw her make a slight movement with her right hand in her raincoat pocket, and then I understood why she felt so free to eviscerate me in that moment.
“One other detail I forgot to mention earlier.” I motioned to her pocket. “I think you bought more than a jalopy from that skinny fellow in Baldwin Park. I’m sure the Sierra Madre police would like to match that with the bullet they pulled out of Jimmy Fitch.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Police think you did. What about Lois?”
“What about her?”
“They think you did that, too.”
“I’ve never killed anyone in my life!” she snapped, then seemed to hesitate.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You forgot Karen Arturo.”
That jab clearly landed.
“Just give me the money,” she said flatly.
“You really think I was dumb enough to leave the money in the boxes?”
“I need that money,” she said.
Gone was the bloviating I had come to expect from Julie. In its place were crisp declarations that if not for the content of their message, I’d have found rather refreshing.
“It’s somewhere you won’t find it.”
“You’re a fool,” she spat, not so much an insult as a warning.
“Probably.”
“No
, you don’t get it,” she said, and shifted to a more conciliatory tone. “You got a lot right but you also got a lot wrong, and even more you didn’t get at all.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s better if I don’t,” Julie said. “I know that sounds like a cop-out, but it’s true. This is deep, Chuck. I was involved in some stuff a long time ago, but it got far worse. It’s more than just me.”
“Your friend from Arizona?” I asked.
Julie looked at me like she didn’t know who I was referring to. I described him the best way I knew how.
“Is he here already?” she asked nervously, even glancing over her shoulder as if he might be coming down the hallway at that moment.
“What happened?”
“Stay out of it.”
“I’m already in it,” I explained. “Arturo posted your bail, then you skipped with his money and now he wants it back.”
Julie smiled, but it didn’t look like she was impressed with my discoveries.
“If only it was that simple,” she said wistfully. “You’re going to get yourself killed, Chuck. I’m the least of your concerns right now.” To punctuate the point, she revealed the gun that I had assumed all along was in her pocket and waved it casually. “Just give me the money and go play somewhere else.”
The words were more threatening than the gun.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Where is it?” she said, sighing, relieved to finally put an end to my meddling. Her victory was short-lived.
“Sorry, that’s not the deal.”
I watched her calculate how big a cut I was going to demand. It pleased me that the leadership guru was so poor at discerning my motivations.
“I don’t want any of the money,” I continued. “You can have it all, no questions asked, no cops, nothing.”
She waited for the demand.
“You have to meet with Rebecca first.”
“How is she?” she asked, her bravado suddenly deflating.
I thought of many retorts to her sudden concern for Rebecca but opted for the truth instead. “She’s sick.”
I waited for an impassioned defense of her actions or maybe even a sign of contrition. Instead, I got insulted.
“You always were such a one-dimensional thinker,” she hissed.
The Big Con Page 14