by Dave Stanton
“What about the time the UC Berkeley wide receiver got pulled over?”
“That was the biggest bullshit of them all,” Cody said with a laugh. “He was going ninety in a Mustang that was illegally gifted to him by recruiters. He had a gram of blow in the ashtray and a joint tucked in his sock, plus he blew a one-point-two in the breathalyzer. Next thing you know, he’s got a high-priced attorney claiming racial profiling.”
“Did he get off?”
“I don’t remember. I think his attorney pled him out on a lower charge.”
“Speaking of attorneys,” I said, exiting the freeway, “let’s go see if Darrian Bannon is in.”
• • •
At times I question certain things I do. There’s a part of me that clings to the idea that my motivations and ethics are an extension of my late father’s. I think he did what he believed was right and just and would bend the rules to accommodate his vision. But he died before I was old enough to understand the true nature of his professional behavior. Regardless, I thought he was a man of virtue and integrity. But those can be hazy terms.
In my life I’ve done much I regret, some of which will weigh on my conscience to the grave. I’ve drunk too much and cheated on a wife I loved and had a child out of wedlock whom I will probably never meet. I’ve beaten men unconscious in anger and killed in self-defense when it might have been avoidable. I’ve also, on two occasions, pocketed significant chunks of dirty money that otherwise would have ended up wasting away in the hands of the federal government.
I’ve photographed couples having illicit sex, planted illegal wiretaps, represented myself as a police officer, trespassed, vandalized, and even tortured individuals. I committed these crimes because it was required to bring evil men to justice, but also because this is my chosen profession, and I’m committed to doing what it takes to be successful. I’m not interested in failing.
Sometimes there are lines that must be crossed and rules that must be ignored. When Ryan Addison hired me, he called me a liar when I said I wouldn’t break the law.
He was right.
• • •
The office building where Darrian Bannon practiced law was on an industrial street in El Segundo. The concrete marker in front of the two-story structure listed a dozen businesses. Darrian Bannon Legal was sandwiched between a digital editing service and a certified public accountant’s office.
We opened a glass door and went down a white hallway to a door marked with the number eight. Cody put his hand on the knob.
“Hold on. How rough you want to play it?” I asked. The words felt pointless as soon as they left my mouth.
“That depends on him.” Cody opened the door, and inside was a desk where I assumed a receptionist would sit, but it was vacant. To the side I saw another door, half open. We went in and found Darrian Bannon at a file cabinet, his back to us. He wore a brown, pinstriped business suit that was a shade darker than his skin.
“Yes?” he said. His head was buried in the contents of a file.
“I got a question about your rates,” Cody said.
Bannon turned, and the skin at the corner of his eyes pinched. “You two,” he said.
“Sorry we didn’t call first for an appointment,” I said.
“What is it you want?” Bannon stood facing us. He put his hand in his pocket, then withdrew it.
“We’ve got questions about the Tucker case, counselor,” Cody said. He picked up a paperweight shaped like a piece of abstract art from Bannon’s desk and weighed it in his palm.
“We had this conversation before, when you accosted me in Tahoe. If you expect to come here and intimidate me, I think you’ll find I’m not—”
I looked away for a moment, out a window stained with water streaks. In that instant Cody took two quick steps and pounced on Bannon, shoving him face down on the desk. Papers scattered, and a keyboard fell to the floor. Cody put his knee in the center of Bannon’s back and fitted his hand around the attorney’s neck, pinning his face against the desktop.
“You get to make an important decision today, asshole,” Cody said. I closed the door and lowered the shades on the window.
“What?” Bannon hissed. His lips were pushed up and distorted over his small teeth.
“Who is Farid Insaf?” I said.
“Never heard that name.” He had to force the words as Cody angled his body to push harder on Bannon’s face.
“Who hired you to represent Tucker?” Cody said. “Who paid you?”
“You’re crushing me,” Bannon croaked.
“And I’m just getting warmed up,” Cody said. “You get to decide how bad it gets.”
“I took the case pro bono.”
With his free hand Cody held the paper weight, which had two spiked metal edges. He put one of the spikes up to Bannon’s eye. “Pro bono, my ass,” he said. “Lie to me again, I’ll take your eye out.”
Bannon’s tan skin flushed a deep red. His hands were balled into fists.
“I was paid a modest retainer. For expenses.”
“By who?” I said.
“The caller never identified himself. He mailed me cash.”
“How much?”
Bannon, his eye clenched shut, took a moment before answering. “Ten grand.”
“A modest retainer, huh?” Cody said.
“That’s right.”
“You better come clean with a name,” Cody said. “Who paid you?”
“I swear I never knew. The cash came in an unmarked box, no return address, local postmark. Can you let me up, please?”
Cody looked at me. I stepped around the desk to the file cabinet in the corner. In the top drawer were alphabetized folders. I opened the second drawer, then the third. Toward the back was a green folder titled TUCKER. I removed the file, then checked the bottom drawer, which was stacked with a mess of unorganized papers.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Cody pulled Bannon up and sat him in his chair.
“You can’t take that,” Bannon said, his necktie askew, his collar tight against his sweaty skin. His eyes were wide with fear and indignation.
“I’ll mail it back, if you ask politely.”
Bannon started to say something but thought better of it.
“You need to get some air freshener for this place,” Cody said. “It smells like someone shit their pants.”
• • •
The airport was two miles away. It was almost six P.M. and we’d booked the nine o’clock flight out. I was hoping we could get an earlier flight, but when we got to the terminal, the ticket agent said everything was full.
We went to wait in the security line. Waist-high poles and synthetic straps formed a serpentine pathway. There were probably a couple hundred people ahead of us. Parents with small children, businessmen, elderly folks. A wide mix of races, all waiting and shuffling forward with their luggage.
“The curse of Osama Bin Laden,” Cody said. “Got to hand it to him, he screwed us pretty good.”
There was a large group of college-aged guys ahead in the line. They were clean-shaven and wore jeans and T-shirts. One was Asian, and two were of Mideastern descent, with black hair and dark skin. The rest were white.
One said something that prompted the others to laugh. They joked back and forth as we proceeded toward the TSA agents checking boarding passes and IDs.
“We’ve shafted the Mideast pretty good too, for the last hundred years,” I said.
Cody raised his eyebrows. “How so?”
“We use our military power and money to make sure the oil keeps coming. We buy the cooperation of sheiks and regimes who don’t give a shit about the welfare of their people.”
“And that’s justification for killing three thousand innocent American civilians?”
“That’s how they see it.”
“Sounds like we’re the scapegoat for their shitty state of affairs,” Cody replied.
Cody’s phone beeped, and after studying the screen, he sa
id, “I just got an e-mail with an audio file.”
“The bugs from Suggs’s house?”
“Yeah. We’ll listen to it when we get back.”
We waited another twenty minutes before nearing the metal-detecting machines. I wondered if anyone had calculated the lost man hours and drop in productivity resulting from post-9/11 security measures. Then I saw TSA agents, followed by a pair of uniformed cops, converge around the two young Arabs who had just passed through one of the imaging booths.
A burst of raised voices caused everyone to look. One of the Arabs had his shirt pulled up and held a shoe. Four more policemen rushed to the scene, and words were shouted in a foreign language. The Arabs, eyes flashing, struggled and tried to resist when the police accosted them, and one went down, shocked with a jolt from a stun gun. The second wasn’t as lucky. He ducked a baton, but another cop caught him alongside the head, and blood poured from a gash above his ear.
Within two minutes, the Arabs and the other men in their group were whisked off to back rooms. The crowd was abuzz, but quickly quieted while TSA personnel notified us that there would be an indeterminate delay before the security checkpoint reopened.
For a minute there was a confused pause, then the noise level resumed. Groans of despair were followed by the inevitable questions and conjectures. They didn’t look like terrorists. Maybe he just had a bag of pot in his crotch. It could have been an underwear bomb. Al-Qaida will never give up. We should nuke the whole region. Forty virgins—what a joke. Life means nothing to them. I’d kill myself too if I was one of those pieces of shit.
After a while some folks sat and tried to get comfortable on the hard floor. Cody and I stood in stoic silence. I tried to shift my mind to the almost meditative state that I practiced during long hours of surveillance. When that failed, I removed half the papers from the inch-thick file I’d taken from Bannon’s office and handed Cody the remainder.
An hour passed. Flights were missed, and I wondered if ours would be canceled. I was hungry, and my cursory reading of Bannon’s file revealed nothing I didn’t already know. Later I’d give it a more thorough examination.
We waited another hour before the checkpoint reopened. After we cleared the screening process, we went to our gate and saw our flight was not canceled, but was pushed back an hour. The nearest bar was jam-packed. We settled for cold sandwiches and bottled beer, which we consumed at an abandoned gate, where I stared out at the runways. The blinking lights set in the pavement stretched until they were swallowed by the black abyss of the night. I stared out and thought of explosions and war and atrocities, and then I thought of my home and my girlfriend and the surrounding mountains and the lake that was sometimes so blue it appeared from an alien world. I tried to hold those thoughts in my mind, and when that didn’t work, I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing.
6
When I woke the next morning in Cody’s guest room, the previous day’s events seemed as fuzzy as a whiskey dream. I went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, then began writing down and organizing the details of what we’d learned from the trip south. I started with Leo Rosen’s claim he’d been threatened by an anonymous party, which prompted him to flee to Mexico during the trial. Next I noted Amber Meline’s lack of testimony, which she did not elaborate upon. Then there was the input from P. W. Huggins, an obvious hustler whose comments may have been exaggerated or contrived, but I felt likely contained some elements of truth.
And then there was Darrian Bannon’s file. If, from something buried in the papers, I learned who hired Bannon, that would steer us in the right direction. If not, we were still at ground zero, because nothing we’d discovered so far provided any clear path to answering the central question, the question we needed to keep at the core of our investigation. I looked up from where I sat on the couch, watching steam rise from the cup I held in both hands. “Who was behind the disappearance of the DNA evidence?” I said aloud.
“Talking to yourself again?” Cody said, lumbering around the corner in his boxer shorts.
I stood and flexed my shoulders. “We need to refocus. We need to know who Farid Insaf is, or whoever the person is at the high-rise.”
“Can I have a cup of coffee first?”
“I think yesterday was mostly a waste of time.”
“I don’t.” Cody poured himself a cup and began poking through his refrigerator.
“Based on what?” I asked.
“You know how it works, Dirt. Sometimes cases get solved in a circular path. Like spiraling in on the truth. Every data point brings us a little closer.”
“Yeah, yeah. But I’m running low on patience.”
“Hey, it was your idea to go to LA.”
“Right, but now it’s time to quit screwing around. I want to stake out that high-rise until we know who lives in 1602, and what his connection is to Tucker.”
“Don’t you think we ought to listen to the recording from Suggs’s place first?”
I sighed, and said, “All right, fine.”
• • •
The program Cody used downloaded everything the bugs recorded via cellular signal and generated audio files that we could play back on our PCs. We were able to skip over periods of silence, and the program even differentiated television noise from actual live voices. Updated files would be sent every twenty-four hours for seven days, which was the projected battery life of the bugs.
I sat with my PC on the coffee table, listening through earphones to the section from ten P.M. to ten yesterday morning. Cody replayed the portion from ten A.M. until the recording concluded after twelve hours. In this fashion, we were able to cover the entire twenty-four hours in less than two hours.
There were only two conversations Suggs had during my time frame. Shortly after he got home and found his dogs asleep, he’d called someone and discussed the possibility of a robbery attempt, but said his supply was secure in his safe, and he didn’t see any indication anyone had broken into his house. After that, he had another phone conversation, presumably with a woman. After some references to their sexual relationship, Suggs said, “After this shit’s done, we’ll get away to an island somewhere.”
Cody had started later than me, and while I waited for him to finish, I reread Bannon’s case file. Most of the information I’d already seen in the trial transcripts. Still, I looked at every page carefully, hoping to find a reference that might reveal a clue to who hired Bannon. There was nothing even remotely helpful.
• • •
By noon we were parked on the street outside the Skyscape condominium building. I sat in the passenger seat of Cody’s Toyota holding my 35 mm camera, the long telephoto lens resting on my thigh. Cars passed in and out of the underground garage. Every now and then, people would appear on the balconies that stretched upward in a vertical column.
Across the street from the Skyscape was a long brick office building. I moved from the car into one of a few shady alcoves the building offered and pointed my camera up at the balcony for unit 1602. At full zoom I thought I’d be able to get a clear shot if anyone appeared.
Cody joined me, and we watched the balcony from the shadows.
“There was one phone conversation on the tape that was weird,” Cody said, sitting on a shaded bench next to a dark doorway. “Suggs kept referring to ‘the timing.’ He said, when will we know the timing? Then he repeated it.”
“Any idea who he was talking to?” I asked.
“No. He didn’t use any names.”
“It could mean anything,” I said.
“He said it with emphasis. Like it was a big deal.”
We continued staring up at the balcony. “He’s got to take a smoke break sooner or later,” I said.
“You’re assuming anybody’s home.”
Two hours passed. While we waited, I aimed my camera at the garage entrance, where drivers had to punch in a series of numbers to enter. I was able to get three separate four-digit codes.
Finally, at
about two o’clock, a figure appeared on the balcony. I knelt, pointed the camera upward, and started clicking away. After ten shots I paused to check the camera’s LCD and saw a middle-aged black man smoking a cigarette. The display was too small to make out much detail, but the shots were in focus.
“These ought to blow up nicely.” I handed the camera to Cody.
Cody looked at the pictures. “What would be nice is if he’d leave. Get his license plate, see where he goes. Maybe get him alone somewhere.”
I pointed the camera back at the man on the balcony.
“If that’s Farid Insaf, he must be a Muslim convert,” I said.
“Think how much easier this would be if he didn’t live in this freaking high-rise,” Cody said.
“Be patient. It’s all just billable hours, right?”
“You keep on using my lines.”
“I’ll try to work on some of my own.”
“Check it out.” Cody pointed at the garage. A tan Ford Taurus had pulled up. I zoomed in with the camera and saw a young black woman entering a code at the kiosk. The garage door opened, and I clicked a couple photos before she drove in.
I lowered the camera and I looked at Cody, and our eyes blinked almost simultaneously.
“How many black—”
“I got her code,” I said. “Wait here.” I handed him the camera and ran across the street to the Skyscape’s lobby entrance.
After tapping in the code on the outside wall, I went inside and saw a teenage Asian kid working the reception desk.