REUNION
Phil?” she exhaled, taking a step back.
“You’re not going to run again, are you?”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” she said. “It’s really you.”
It felt like a reunion of lost love but without all the shrieks of joy, rushing into each other’s arms, twirls, and faces cradled in hands. They stood awkwardly facing each other. Julie made the first move and wrapped her arms around him. Arturo stood stiffly.
“It’s been too long for hugs,” he intoned.
Julie’s embrace loosened. She returned to her original spot, a suitable distance for acquaintances.
“I finally found you,” he said. Arturo seemed unprepared for the moment he had dreamed of for more than thirty years. “You never said goodbye, Karen.”
“I panicked,” she explained.
“You had enough time to frame me for your murder. I’d still be in prison if that had actually stuck,” he said with a shudder.
For the first time since my quest to ensnare Julie St. Jean, I finally felt like I had her. It had less to do with the physical capture and more with an understanding of this ever-elusive figure who had vexed me for decades.
Each new discovery I had made over the last handful of weeks got me closer to the truth—but never quite close enough. When she was the former librarian from Sierra Madre, her reinvention to a brash leadership coach, while great storytelling, never made much sense. When she was the former drug addict from Phoenix, although it was appealing that her roots began in such sordid circumstances, it still didn’t match up to the self-made guru of Power of One. But the wife of a con man, and a con artist herself, who jumped ship when the authorities came knocking, who tried to frame her husband for murder so she could save her own scalp, who stole identities (and possibly lives) while on the run—that was the Julie St. Jean I knew and despised.
To Arturo, she was the woman he’d always known, and, judging by the sadness in his voice, it seemed she was the woman he still loved.
“Shit, Karen, I never thought I’d see you again.”
“I know,” she replied.
Her two words reminded Arturo of the cold truth about the circumstances of their separation.
“But I was the only one looking.”
“Phil, I had to leave. You know what was going on. It was chaos. It wasn’t safe.”
“All the rats jumped ship. Head rat went first.”
“As if you would have done any different,” she shot back.
Sensing the contrite approach would lead nowhere, Julie went on the attack. It came naturally to her, and having been on the receiving end many times, it was an area of strength for her.
“I never loved you, Phil,” she said. “I thought I did but I was wrong.” She left off the apology that usually accompanies that kind of statement. “I only loved one person.”
The scene quickly deteriorated into pettiness and personal gripes. I felt like an interloper at the breakfast table when one morning a lifetime of marital disappointments comes to a head over coffee and runny eggs. I just wanted to crawl away. Instead, I drifted out of the room without calling much attention to myself. I worked my way over to the elevator banks and hovered near the engine room, where the hum behind the heavy door somewhat drowned out the voices across the way.
I stood there in the half-light and tried not to focus on the muffled voices. Most of the words were incomprehensible but every so often a few were shouted with clarity so I couldn’t help but pick them up. If I’d had my cell phone, I might have called the police or texted Detective Ricohr—yet I felt an odd need to hold up my end of the bargain with Arturo.
But the voices were rising, becoming more heated, and the slurs they slung at each other grew more serious and that much more nasty. At one point I heard Arturo shout something, a single word, over and over. I believe it was: “Again.”
Then there was a loud pop. I heard some shuffling and then came two more pops in quick succession. Then silence.
I trained my eyes back to where Julie and Arturo had been standing. I couldn’t see any movement against the backdrop of flashing lights from the billboards. There were no more voices either.
I stared up at the light dangling overhead and suddenly felt very exposed. A twenty-five-watt bulb held in yellow plastic was a beacon to whomever had fired the shots and might need to fire more.
A hand gently pressed my forearm then squeezed tightly as I instinctively tried to spin away from it. The grip was firm and slowly pulled me out of the light and down to the floor.
Badger crouched on one knee in the shadows and scanned the room.
“What happened?” I whispered.
He made the quiet sign with the barrel of his gun serving as the index figure in the gesture. He cocked his head from side to side, trying to pick up any sounds beyond our hiding spot, but the hum of elevator engines made that difficult.
I gestured for him to call the police, but Badger gave me a disapproving look. We waited a few more minutes, which felt like twenty, then ventured out of the safety of our hiding spot. I made my way back toward the original spot where Arturo and I had waited. A haze of smoke hovered in the air and, without a running ventilation system, remained there in the hermetically sealed room. The acrid stench prickled my tongue.
As I approached, I saw something on the floor that I might have mistaken for a bag of mortar if I hadn’t been looking for a person.
Arturo lay on his side, the bowling ball figure finding a flat enough spot to come to rest. His big belly heaved with sporadic gasps. I bent down to him and placed my hand on his shoulder, while Badger called for an ambulance.
“It’s all right,” I soothed, “they’re coming to help.”
Arturo’s eyes fluttered open and got a look at his rescuer.
“You betrayed me, too,” he wheezed.
UNCOURAGEOUS COURAGE
Phil Arturo died later that morning at Good Samaritan Hospital.
Badger and I were a half-mile away in separate interview rooms at the local precinct. We had more answers than they had questions, and I could see the growing annoyance on their faces. The detectives just wanted to understand what had happened up on the twenty-second floor that led to Arturo being shot, and I kept talking about blackmail schemes, a librarian from Sierra Madre, and a Ponzi scheme from 1980s Arizona.
“Who’s the woman you say shot the victim?” the detective asked again.
“Her real name?”
“Any name,” he gritted.
“Well…” I began, and watched them wilt.
We forever seek simplicity in the chaos. We want crisp answers to complex things. Sometimes those answers exist but mostly we have to make one up to satisfy the need. I made a career out of doing this successfully but this was one instance when I laid everything out in all its ugly truth. My meddling had gone too far and it was time to show all of my cards and deal with whatever repercussions might come with the reveal.
The police were convinced that we were behind Arturo’s murder, and by we they really meant Badger, and gave him a good working over. But the gun they found on him hadn’t recently been fired and there were no powder burns on him, proving he hadn’t fired another gun, either. He had the legal right to carry his gun and there was nothing left to pin on him or me outside of a trespassing charge that the building management had no interest in filing. They, too, wanted nothing more to do with Julie St. Jean and Power of One.
I was relatively fortunate that Badger was the less desirable of the two of us—he had a questionable job and sketchy past and just didn’t look presentable—and thus bore the brunt of their efforts. Also, I had a friend on the inside.
“Still playing games?” Detective Ricohr asked as he waddled into the room. “You look like hell.”
“I almost called you before all this happened,” I told him.
“I’m glad you didn’t. Did you do anything stupid?”
“Probably.”
“The illegal
kind?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, let me see what I can do.”
Despite the help, I was held for five hours and all we did was talk. We went through the events over and over again. Once they decided I wasn’t a lunatic, they actually started to listen to what I was saying. Soon they were helping me piece together the various parts of the puzzle, though it wasn’t until many meetings and several days later that a single narrative came together.
Eventually, the representatives on the cases of the three murders—Palos Verdes Estates and Lois Hearns, Sierra Madre and James Fitch, Los Angeles and Phil Arturo—worked to weave together the entire story. The fourth player—Detective Fortin from Phoenix—was still missing, and his section would remain unfinished until he was found, if ever.
The path that led to the three murders began when Karen Arturo’s true identity was revealed. There was a lot of debate among the detectives over the source of that development. One theory had Julie herself divulging the secret to Lois after one of their lovemaking sessions in Sierra Madre. Another had Fitch doing his own research on his murdered sister, like the amateur sleuth who stumbles on something far bigger than he can handle. One outlandish idea was that it came from Bronson Thibideux. Doing his due diligence on the purchase of Power of One, he uncovered Julie’s secret and used it as a bargaining chip when negotiating the deal with Lois. Regardless of how the truth came out, it launched a series of events that ended with Arturo being shot on the twenty-second floor of a commercial building overlooking the 110.
The theory was that Lois and her ex-husband, armed with this new information, teamed up with Fitch and together put the squeeze on Julie. Payments were quickly doled out, but these amounted to short-term fixes; the calls for more money wouldn’t stop until the well was dry. With Power of One’s financial struggles weighing on Julie’s ability to pay, she turned to an old source of cash, the money she’d absconded with when she fled Phoenix. While this provided a deep pool to draw from, it alerted Fitch to its existence. His snooping in Arizona in turn alerted Arturo that the woman he thought was dead, the one whose “murder” almost sent him to prison, was actually still alive. Arturo descended on Los Angeles and further complicated an already complex situation.
A falling-out had likely occurred between the Hearns tandem and Fitch, most certainly over the proportion of the split. Some theorized that the split wasn’t organic and might have originated with Julie herself. She convinced Fitch to eliminate his business partners and they’d work out a deal together. Fitch kept his end of the bargain by murdering Lois, but then he foolishly believed Julie would uphold her end of the deal. His life came to an end in the Sierra Madre house with a bullet in the back.
At this point, the only thing keeping Julie in Los Angeles was the box of money in the trunk of my car. It was all she needed to flee and reinvent herself, yet again, in another part of the world. Several attempts to recover the cash had ended in failure. She eventually got the money but she had to go through her ex-husband first, and yet another murder was added to her tally.
By the end of it, Karen Arturo, aka Julie St. Jean, was wanted for the murders of James Fitch, Maggie Fitch, and Philip Arturo. She was also a person of interest in the disappearance of Detective Richard Fortin of Phoenix, Arizona. Many believed it was only a matter of time before his name was added to the list of the dead.
I emerged from the precinct a little after five in the morning to the empty, rain-slicked streets of downtown Los Angeles. With no idea of what to do and without a clear head to come up with an answer, I just started walking. I worked my way back toward the freeway in the direction of Bunker Hill. Empty of thoughts, I walked all the way back to my office in a slight drizzle.
I made my way upstairs and poured myself a hot cup of coffee. I downed it faster than I should have and immediately poured another. My shirt was damp and this made the room feel colder than it actually was. The hot coffee did little to counter it. I remained in the break room for some time and then heard movement behind me.
Pat Faber shuffled in with his head down, unaware of my presence.
“Just getting in?” I startled him.
He wasn’t used to anyone arriving at the office before him.
“You’re in early,” he said, but not as a compliment.
I thrust my coffee mug a little too close to his face.
“My third cup!” I announced, to prove just how early I had come in.
Pat looked at me the way you’d look at the homeless man you encounter on the street at night and need to ascertain if they are deranged or not. He took a half-step back.
I filled him in on the recent developments with Power of One, Arturo’s murder, and Rebecca’s passing, and all the blood spilled in their wake. It was overwhelming.
“How did we get in so tight with them?” he asked.
“We’re going to play that game now?” I retorted.
“What game?”
“Come on, Pat, you know how it happened. You brought them in.”
“I understand that, but how did it get this far?”
“And so it starts,” I said, exhaling audibly.
Having done this so many times with associates, I saw it coming even before Pat did. This was the part where he convinced me to take the fall for something I didn’t do and then actually made me feel responsible for it. Carried to the extreme, it would lead to my voluntary exit from the firm. But there was no need for that.
The prudent path was to play along with the charade—publicly “own” the failure and then under the banner of “lessons learned,” casually outline all the factors that were outside of my control that led to the failure. I’d then bravely close with, “regardless of all that, it’s on me.” This aggressive-passive approach would give me the appearance of the courageous leader without my having to admit that I did anything wrong.
But that was too easy. And prudence wasn’t in the cards after the events of the last several days.
“I’ll take the fall,” I said.
“Chuck, this isn’t about finding blame,” he offered, alerting me that this could be very painless if I played along.
“Of course it is.”
They’d actually go easy on me, knowing full well that they’d extract a little flesh come bonus time, and it would appear on my review alongside the fraction of a special payout I was supposed to get.
“It’s on me, Pat,” I declared. “But we all know who’s to blame.”
A COLD NIGHT IN BURBANK
Let me guess, you want to help me recover the money,” he said.
Mr. Hearns moved gingerly back to the stool in his garage. If he hadn’t still been recovering from the beating he took, he might have dished one out on me. I made the detour to Burbank because there seemed to be too many loose ends in the narrative the authorities had built, including the whereabouts of Detective Fortin. Badger had put in some hours on it but came up empty. One of the few people—alive that is—who could address some of these unanswered questions was one of the alleged participants. But first I had to convince him it was worth talking to me.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you up front,” I said. “I was just trying to find out some information.”
“Who are you?” he asked. “Really.”
“I guess I’m nobody.”
“Everyone’s a nobody.”
I explained my relationship with Rebecca and why I had pretended to be someone I wasn’t. He didn’t seem interested in the details or care much that I lied to him.
“So why are you here?”
“Just looking for some answers.”
“Ain’t got many of those,” he said, and offered me a beer, which was his way of saying he would try anyway.
We sat on stools with the portable heater at our feet.
“Who did all that to you?” I asked, gesturing to the marks on his face.
“I thought it was you.”
“You know it wasn’t.”
&n
bsp; “Didn’t get a look at him. I heard someone in the garage, came out to look, and then got cracked on the head. I never got the light on so I couldn’t make them out.”
“You sure it was a man?” I asked.
“It better the hell have been,” he said, laughing. “It was a dude, trust me on that.”
I nodded even though I couldn’t make sense of who it might be.
“It wasn’t her. I’d have wrung that wrinkly neck if it had been.”
Hearns seemed to get lost in reflection.
“Everything all right?”
“I told Lois not to get involved with that lady,” he began. There were many interpretations to what kind of involvement he was referencing, but in this instance it was purely the business kind. “I smelled a phony the minute I met her. She talked a lot but she never said anything.”
My affinity for Mr. Hearns grew, if for no other reason than because of his apparent ability to see through in a single encounter with Julie what scores of Ivy League–educated executives had failed to over three decades.
“The police believe blackmail was behind everything,” I said.
“First those dirty cops think I killed Lo, then they say I’m the mastermind of a blackmailing ring. No one was blackmailing nobody. At first.”
Hearns explained the business proposition presented to Lois. There was a pool of money sitting in a bank account in Phoenix that Julie couldn’t access but needed. If Lois helped her get the money, “through legal means,” Hearns was sure to clarify, she would get a percentage of the total. “You know Lo was a lawyer, right?”
“Yes, I think you said that before.” He’d mentioned it a few times, as any proud spouse might. “How much are we talking?”
“Way less than she deserved.”
“What’d your wife have to do?”
“The owner of the bank account was dead, apparently. Had been for a long time. Lo had to make it official.”
To get access to the money in Maggie Fitch’s account, Maggie needed to legally be declared dead. A claim could then be made by the next of kin on her estate’s assets. This new detail shed some light on a few murky areas in the police narrative, particularly around the events in Arizona some thirty years earlier.
The Big Con Page 17