Once bitten

by Stephen Leather

  I had been hoping he wouldn't ask that because I'd stolen it from his desk. I shrugged. "God, I can't remember, Samuel. Somewhere, I don't know."

  "Don't suppose you've got the picture on you now, have you?" he asked.

  It was in my inside jacket pocket. "No," I lied.

  "Just as well, I suppose," he said, looking me steadily in the eyes. He stood up and stretched his arms behind his back, interlocked the fingers of his massive hands and squeezed until his shoulders cracked. He sighed. "That's better," he said. "So, you went all the way to Big Sur, spent almost half an hour with this guy Turner, and got nothing from it. Is that right?"

  "That's about it."

  "You ever heard of a Lisa Sinopoli?" he asked. I recognised the technique, the curve-ball question trying to catch me off guard, so I kept my face straight and looked him in the eye and said no, never heard of her. He didn't appear to be convinced by my "what, me?" act. "Why do you ask?" I said.

  "Seems Turner hired a detective to track down someone called Sinopoli. That and whoever was paying the nursing home bills."

  "Bills? I don't follow."

  "Most of Turner's money ran out long ago, according to Dr Lyttelton. Seems the studios didn't pay their movie stars as much then as they do these days. But his bills have been paid by a bank in LA for the last ten years or so. A dick called Matt Blumenthal had been hired to find out whose account was paying his bills."

  "Maybe he thought it was this, what was her name, Sinopaul, who was keeping him. Maybe he wanted to thank her."

  "Sinopoli," said De'Ath. "Her name was Sinopoli. No I don't think so, Beaverbrook. I think you should stick to messing with their psyches and let me get on with the detective work. By the way, Filbin tells me you were asking about Blumenthal earlier?"

  Another curve ball. "Not specifically. I was just wondering how the case was going, that's all."

  "You don't seem surprised, Beaverbrook," he said.

  "I don't follow you."

  "Filbin told you the victim in the Ferriman case had been identified and that his name was Blumenthal. I just told you that Blumenthal was hired by Turner. And you didn't seem surprised."

  Shit. I'd dropped myself right in it. I'd been too busy working out what his next trick question was going to be. I let my mouth fall open. "You mean it's the same guy?" I said, faking astonishment as best I could while mentally kicking myself.

  De'Ath looked at me with hard eyes, and I knew he was weighing me up. He shook his head.

  "Christ, man, this city sure is lucky that you weren't hired as a detective, that's for sure. Yeah, it's the same guy. There's obviously some connection between Ferriman and this guy Turner. I just wish I could find out what it is. Then maybe we'd be able to find out why she killed Blumenthal."

  "Come on Samuel. You still don't have any proof."

  "Not yet I don't," he admitted. "But it's just a matter of time."

  He seemed a lot less angry now. "What are you planning to do?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Visit the bank, I guess. The one that pays Turner's bills. It's one of those small ones, handles a lot of private accounts." He told me the name. "Ever heard of it?" he asked.

  Yeah, I'd heard of it, but I didn't let on to De'Ath and he left the office. I toyed with a gold pen that Deborah had given me for our third wedding anniversary while I figured out what to do next.

  At the rate he was going, it wouldn't take Black De'Ath too long to figure out that Lisa Sinopoli and Terry Ferriman were one and the same because the bank that was helping to keep Greig Turner in the style to which he'd become accustomed was the same one that had been collecting the rents for the building she owned on North Alta-Vista. If De'Ath asked the bank manager about Terry, chances were that he'd find the link, though whether or not he'd realise that Sinopoli should now be in her eighties was another matter completely.

  I'd really wanted to ask De'Ath if I could go with him to speak to the manager myself but I knew that there was no way I could do that without telling him everything I knew, but I wasn't prepared to do that, not until I'd had a chance to speak to Terry. I watched from the window of my office until I saw De'Ath get into a car with Filbin and drive off and I gave it ten minutes and then drove downtown to the bank, parking some distance away from it because a bright red 1966 Sunbeam Alpine is fairly conspicuous, even in LA.

  They were in the building for about half an hour and when they came out De'Ath seemed a hell of a lot more relaxed than when he'd left my office. Filbin drove away with De'Ath talking animatedly in the passenger seat.

  I waited until they were out of sight before walking into the bank and asking the girl if the Lieutenant De'Ath was still in with the manager. When she said no, I'd just missed them I pulled a face and asked her for the manager's name, and then asked if she'd call through and see if he could spare me a few minutes.

  He was waiting at the door of his office, a dapper man in his fifties in a black suit with a thin grey pinstripe, a crisp white shirt and a small gold tiepin in the shape of a horseshoe in a dark blue tie with small white dots. He had the flabby handshake of an undertaker at the end of a long day and a worried frown on his face.

  "You've just missed your colleagues, Mr…?" he said.

  "Beaverbrook," I said. I'd already decided it wasn't worth the risk of lying to him because if De'Ath heard that someone had been asking questions about Terry Ferriman he'd know right away it was me. "Jamie Beaverbrook. I work with Lieutenant De'Ath." Which, of course, was true, strictly speaking, and I hadn't actually said that I was a policeman, so if De'Ath threw me up against a wall and grabbed me by the throat and asked me what the hell I was doing pretending to be a cop then I could put my hand on my heart and tell him that there had been some misunderstanding, Samuel.

  "Come in, come in," he said and stepped aside to usher me in the office. As I walked by him he patted me in the small of the back as if checking for a hidden transmitter, the sort of gesture which could have got him summoned for sexual misconduct if he'd done it to a woman.

  His name was Piers Whitbeck and his office was plush enough to soothe the egos of the bank's wealthy private clients, but not so luxurious that they'd worry about whose money was paying for it. Deep pile carpet, rosewood furniture, comfortable black leather seats and a few tasteful watercolours on the walls. A computer terminal sat discretely on a table in a corner as if silently apologising for its presence in the room. He shuffled behind his desk like a ballroom dancer, sat down, raised his eyebrows, looked over the top of his gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles and asked how he could help me. I wished my own bank manager could have been half as accommodating but I didn't think it worth asking him if he'd consider taking on my overdraft. Not with Deborah and her Rotweiler breathing down my neck.

  "I was hoping to catch Lieutenant De'Ath before he went," I lied. "I'm working on the case with him and Detective Filbin, but I came across some new information shortly after they left the precinct house." I made a show of taking a notebook out of my jacket pocket and flicking through its pages. There was nothing written on them, but he couldn't see that from across the desk.

  "Lieutenant De'Ath was here to ask you about a Lisa Sinopoli, and payments made from an account to an old people's home in Big Sur?"

  Whitbeck nodded. "That's correct."

  "Well, just after he left the station, we received another name, and we believe that another account at this bank may well be involved." I looked down at the blank page in front of me. "A lady by the name of Terry Ferriman." I spelled the surname out for him. "I wonder, Mr Whitbeck, if you could confirm that Ms Ferriman has an account at this branch?"

  He pushed the spectacles up his nose with the index finger of his right hand. "That is so, yes. In fact, Ms Ferriman has several accounts at this bank." I was impressed that he knew the names of his customers without having to consult his sullen computer.

  "Would she be a major client?"

  He looked at me curiously. "All our clients are equally important to us, Mr
Beaverbrook. We pride ourselves on our standard of personal service."

  "I suppose what I'm asking, Mr Whitbeck, is how big a customer she is? Would you be able to give me an idea of the assets she has with the bank?"

  He shook his head emphatically. "Not without a court order. We have to abide by client confidentiality, I'm afraid, much as I'd like to help."

  "A court order is certainly a possibility, but it'll involve us both in quite a bit of time and trouble, and to be honest I don't think Ms Ferriman's case actually merits it," I said. "Look, if you could give me a ballpark figure of her assets, nothing too specific, then hopefully I'll be able to eliminate her from our enquiries. You needn't tell me how many accounts, or how much is in each one, or even exact numbers. Just a ballpark figure which I won't even write down."

  He looked over at his computer terminal and back at me and I smiled ingratiatingly and nodded.

  "Well…" he said.

  "Just a ballpark figure," I pressed. I put the notebook away and sat back in the chair.

  He nodded as if he'd made up his mind. "Very well," he said, "but I'll deny that you ever got the information from this office. If you want a figure you can use, you'll have to come back with a court order. Understood?"

  "Understood," I said.

  "If you went on a figure of sixty you wouldn't be too far out," he said quietly as if he was a Russian agent giving me details of the Kremlin's nuclear capability.

  "Sixty thousand dollars?" I said.

  He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head, sighing mournfully as if dismayed at my stupidity. "Come, come, Mr Beaverbrook, we are not some down-at-heel savings and loan, you know. Sixty million dollars. Or thereabouts."

  The Basement One of the perks of being a police psychologist is that you get to meet a wide range of people.

  Sure, a fair number of them are murders, rapists and perverts, but every now and again I'd come across a pearl among the swine. Dave Burwash was a case in point. You might even say that he was one my successes, seeing as how he wasn't doing life in a State penitentiary and he hadn't gone out and raped and killed a group of underage cheerleaders. Dave was one of the first criminals, make that alleged criminals because he got off on a technicality, that I came across. He'd been pulled in on a charge of breaking into a broker's office while wearing a Mickey Mouse mask and I ran him through the Beaverbrook program to see if the mask was a symptom of an underlying mental problem. He was fine. He was better than fine, he had an IQ of 156 which put him in the top half of one percent of the population, and I ran him through a few other tests that showed he had a particular aptitude for numbers. Yes, he'd told me, he'd always been good at adding up figures in his head, he'd worked in a bar for a while and no matter how busy it had got he'd beat the electronic cash register hands down every time and at school he'd amused his friends by multiplying numbers, big numbers, in his head. The sort of school he went to was the sort where the teachers were just glad if they got through the day without a shooting in the corridor, so they weren't exactly on the lookout for hidden talents of the type that Dave possessed. His father had run off soon after he was born and his mother was often ill so Dave took a succession of jobs but then she got worse and he turned to crime. He had a particular knack for lock-picking, I guess because of the mathematical side of it, the combinations and the tumblers, it was physical but required a keen mind, and he was, he told me proudly, having no problems getting to grips with electronic alarm systems. He was a criminal, there was no doubt about it, but there was a problem with missing evidence – the Mickey Mouse mask, believe it or not – when the case came to court, and Dave walked.

  I took an immediate liking to the guy, he was five years or so younger than me and had a sarcastic approach to life, the sort of slant that Archie Hemmings would have called "English humour". I helped get him onto a computer programming course and within a year he was running his own consultancy and earning five times what I was paid by the good old LAPD. He was a natural, better even than suggested by the Beaverbrook program. I wasn't sure how he'd react to being asked to resume his old habits for one night, but he jumped at the chance.

  He arrived at my house in shiny new two-seater Mercedes but I made him leave it outside my house and I drove him to North Alta-Vista in the Alpine. We parked some distance away and I carried the brown leather wallet containing the tools of his former trade and insisted that he walked a dozen or so paces behind me just in case, God forbid, we should attract the attention of an overzealous member of the local constabulary. Dave thought it was all great fun, but there was no way I was going to risk his future. We walked down an alley at the side of Terry's building and when we were sure that we were alone in the darkness I tiptoes towards him and whispered in his ear.

  "This is it. Can you see a way in?"

  "There's always a way in," he whispered back.

  "As soon as you've got me in, get the hell out of here," I said. "I don't want you anywhere near the building if anything goes wrong. Walk up to the Boulevard and catch a taxi from there. And leave the picks with me. And wear gloves. And…"

  "Jamie," he said, interrupting, "you're making me nervous."

  "Right," I said, handing over the soft leather wallet. "Right. OK. I'll keep quiet. Are you sure you…"

  He held up his hand to silence me and took the wallet. "Watch," he said. "And learn."

  In the distance we heard a siren wail and somewhere in the dark a bottle smashed.

  "Relax," he whispered. "It's probably just a cat."

  The windows were protected by metal grilles which appeared to have been locked from the inside and after Dave had checked them out he shrugged disappointedly. Steps led down to a door and he ran his hands over it and tapped it cautiously. "Metal," he whispered.

  "Can you do it?" I asked.

  There were three locks, evenly spaced down the left hand side of the door, and he examined each one. "I can, but it'll take time," he said. "Let's see if there's an easier way." We walked further down the alley and took a right turn, walking by a pile of fetid cardboard boxes and a cat which was chewing on something unsavoury. It mewed as we went by, warning us not to tamper with whatever it was it had between its sharp teeth.

  By now our eyes were used to the gloom. The moon was still out but there were tall walls either side of the alley and the moonlight couldn't penetrate down to where we were. Just starlight. It was enough. The windows there were also shuttered and covered with grilles. At the end of the alley was the yellow glow of street lights and I hung back to let him go out first. He turned to the right and then stopped to examine the door of the double garage door there before walking on and back to the main road. I caught up with him about fifty yards from the building. "Let's go get a drink," he said. I took the wallet back from him and put it into my jacket pocket.

  He waited until we were in a bar on Sunset Boulevard with a couple of bottles of lager in front of us before leaning over conspiratorially. "It's just like the old days, this, Jamie," he said, and winked. In his dark sweatshirt and blue jeans he looked a lot more like the burglar of old than the successful and highly-paid computer programmer which he'd become.

  "Don't get to like it, Dave," I warned. I knew all too well the adrenaline kick that comes with breaking the law, I'd seen it many times in the interrogation rooms in precinct houses all over Los Angeles. I didn't want to turn Dave back to his old ways, and not for the first time I regretted asking him along. I had no right to jeopordise his new life, even if I had been the catalyst who caused it. It was as if I was playing God, and the way he was reveling in it and treating it like an adventure just made me feel worse.

  He raised his bottle in salute and drank from it, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand, realising as he did that he was still wearing his black leather gloves. He slid them off and put them into his back pocket.

  "The windows are too difficult," he said. "We'd have to cut our way in. That in itself isn't a problem, a good pair of bolt-cutters will do the
job, but we don't have a good pair of bolt-cutters.

  And there's a chance that they're wired, though I wasn't able to see anything. The door would be easier, but as I said if you want them picked it'll take time. In a perfect world I'd drill them out but that'll make noise, even with a muffled drill. And again…"

  "We don't have a drill," I finished for him. "Or a muffler."

  "Ain't that the truth," he laughed.

  "OK, so you saw the door to the garage, one of those up-and-over jobs it was?"

  I nodded.

  "That I can have open in two minutes. It's operated by remote control but there's a lock too, and I can pick that with no trouble at all. The one snag is, it's pretty exposed. Street lights, cars going by."

  "Dave, I don't want you taking any risks, OK? It's just not worth it."

  He put a hand on my shoulder. "If it wasn't important, you wouldn't have asked, I know that.

  It'll be OK, but I'm going to need you to keep a lookout for me. We'll walk back, and when we get to the building you hang back thirty feet or so, and start whistling as soon as I reach the door. I'll make it look as if I'm using a key, if I don't get it open in a minute or so I'll leave it and we'll try later. If you see anything that might give us problems, you stop whistling. That's all. No shouting, no waving, just stop whistling. We'll move on and try later. Clear?"

  "Clear," I said, though I was far from happy about what he planned to do.

  He picked up his bottle of lager and clinked it against mine. "Jamie, we'll make a criminal out of you yet," he laughed.

  "What do we do when the door's open?" I asked.

  "I guess there'll be another door inside leading to the basement itself. I'll have to pick that for you, too."

  "Dave, I don't want you inside that house. You get me in, and then you get the hell away."

  He shook his head. "Just getting you into the garage won't be enough. I'll have to go inside and deal with the rest of the locks before you can get into the house. And what will you do if there's an alarm inside?" He saw that I was about to argue and he held up his hand to silence me. "Jamie, no arguments. Besides, as soon as we're in the garage we'll close the door. We'll be safer there than in the alley."