I thought all the people taking this stuff seriously were distressed properties.
Then it was time for Sam DeCosse Jr. to take the stage.
After a glitzy video intro, of course.
In the space of about ninety seconds, we were given a window into the lifestyle of this rich and famous developer. They showed some of the projects he had overseen, and naturally showed him walking along in a hard hat on a project. Like those candidates who run for office always show themselves in a hard hat, never having been on a site like that in their lives. Except when the cameras were rolling, of course.
Then the lights came up and out walked Junior, looking sharp in his Italian cut.
He smiled and pointed at the audience in response to their applause.
Then said, “Let me tell you how to get rich beyond your wildest dreams.”
And I thought, Make sure you have a daddy who is rich beyond your wildest dreams.
He started in with some story I didn’t believe for a second.
“I bought my first property when I was nine,” he said. “It was my friend Dave’s front lawn. He gave it to me for nothing down, and a flat fee deferred, to come out of the profits from the lemonade stand I was going to put there. Why? Location, baby. His house was on one of the busiest streets in town. And I cleaned up. Gave Dave the dollar I promised him, and kept the profits for myself.”
Applause. Any sentence with the word profit in it and these people would clap. You could say, “Four hundred baby seals were slaughtered today, and the fishermen who did it made a profit,” and they’d cheer.
“And that’s how I learned about finance and negotiation,” Junior said. “And that’s what I want to teach you today, in my DVD series, which is on sale for the first time anywhere in the lobby.”
I thought I heard crickets chirping.
“Now, let me continue with my story,” Junior said.
Not interested, I tuned out the rest and started scanning the people near the stage.
Then saw someone I recognized. He had the look. The lawyer look. The lawyer who’d been up to see Sister Hildegarde.
I slipped over to him and bumped his shoulder slightly. He cast a quick glance my way and moved a little.
I said, “This guy know what he’s talking about?”
“Yes,” he snapped.
“Then this is a guy I definitely have to talk to.”
The lawyer said nothing, kept his eyes straight ahead. He was about six feet tall, impeccably dressed in a dark gray pin-striped suit.
And a great big diamond-studded tie clip.
“I have some questions I really want to ask him,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Please, I’m trying to listen.”
“You think you can arrange that for me?”
“Arrange what?”
“To meet with Sam Junior.”
“He’s a very busy man.”
“I think he’ll want to talk to me—”
“Are you a reporter?”
“No.”
“Mr. DeCosse has a full schedule. Now, I’d like to finish—”
“Busy with the Lindbrook Hotel?”
The guy whipped a glare at me. “Who are you?”
“The name’s Buchanan.”
“What do you want?”
“A few minutes with Junior.”
“Why?”
“I have some questions for him.”
“Who cares?”
“Maybe the tenants at the Lindbrook. Maybe some nuns.”
His jaw twitched at that one. “What are you talking about?”
“The little development you’re planning in the Santa Susana Pass. The piece of ground you’re going to purchase from St. Monica’s. Nice property. You’re one of Junior’s lawyers, right?”
For a moment he said nothing, but I sensed a vibration. Was he trying to call in all the forces of the universe? Make lemonade? At the very least there was an instant weighing of options. Maybe a single bead of sweat forming in a random pore somewhere.
He turned to face me fully. “Who are you?”
“We passed like ships in the night in Hyrum Roddy’s office the other day.”
He looked like he was trying to remember. “Who do you work for?”
“I’ll talk to Junior about that.”
“You’ll talk to me.”
“I don’t have any reason to talk to you.”
“This is as close as you’re going to get to Mr. DeCosse.”
I handed him one of my cards. “You tell Junior to get in touch with me. You tell Junior that people dying in his hotels is not a good thing. And tell him a lot of things can go wrong when you try to buy land from nuns. You tell him that for me. Tell him Daddy would want him to see me.”
He looked at the card. Then he crumpled it and dropped it on the ground.
“Now is that any way to reach the mountaintop?” I said.
“I can have you forcibly removed,” he said.
“You guys seem to like forcible removal. What if I forcibly remove our whole matter to the courts? You think Junior would like that? The public spectacle?”
I looked at the giant monitors and saw the smiling face of Sam DeCosse Jr. He looked so happy. I was looking forward to doing something about that.
The lawyer gave me the silent stare. I smiled, nodded, and went to look for some popcorn. My work here was done. I’d probed and hit something. I’d be hearing from Junior, I was sure.
80
OUTSIDE I MADE my way around toward the back, where all the limos and security guys were. The celebrity entrance. Private parking. It didn’t take me long to spot Junior’s Ferrari.
Guy has a car like that, he drives it. It’s part of his image. And something told me Junior was all image. An empty suit. Sam Senior, at least, was a self-made man. Ruthless, yes, because you can’t be a slug in commercial real estate.
But he made his way up by fighting and clawing.
Junior had everything handed to him. Probably including this Ferrari.
I walked with purpose through the cars, fumbling with my keys. Wanted it to look like I had a car here.
At the Ferrari I dropped my keys. Bent over. Took out Blumberg’s GPS from my pocket, peeled off the tape, and stuck it under the car. Solid.
Stood up and continued my walk. Got to the other side of the arena and circled all the way back around to my car.
81
I STOPPED OFF at the Ultimate Sip. Pick McNitt made me what he called a Darwinian. “If you can survive this, you’re one of the fittest.”
It was like all the espresso beans in Los Angeles in a single cup.
“Wow,” I said.
“Exactly,” McNitt said. His big moon face was beaming under his snowy beard. “You think it’ll sell?”
“Oh yeah. What’re you going to charge?”
“Five bucks.”
“A little high, isn’t it?”
“All the writers will buy it. I’ll tell ’em they can be the next Balzac.”
“Balzac?”
“You know Balzac. Guy drank about forty cups of black coffee a day. Had his servants wake him up at midnight, got to his writing table, and wrote until exhausted. Then he’d start with the coffee and keep going. Wrote a hundred books that way. Before the age of fifty-one.”
“What happened when he turned fifty-one?”
“Died.”
“How?”
“Caffeine poisoning.”
“Ah.” I took one more sip and started to feel like I could jump over the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
McNitt handed off the coffee bar duties to Megan, a student from CSUN. McNitt only hires students to work for him. His way to have an opportunity to teach because he’ll never be able to get another teaching gig again. He took me to the back room where he keeps his butterflies.
Barton C. McNitt may be a rabid atheist and recovering mental patient, but he lovingly raises monarch butterflies for funerals. He feeds them, inspects t
hem, and constantly talks—some would say, lectures—to them. Then he packs them in little triangular cardstock boxes, puts them in another box with bubble wrap, and ships them overnight to the bereaved, who order off his Web site, Barton’s Butterflies.
“Heat is the enemy,” he said as we entered the room he keeps at sixty-eight degrees exactly. “You’ve got to keep them out of the heat. I had a hysterical woman call me from Phoenix one time, dead summer. They opened the boxes and all the butterflies went straight down. It was 110 degrees and they kept my beauties in the back of their gas-guzzling, Middle East– supporting Suburban! I almost booked a flight to Phoenix so I could set up another funeral myself.”
“You love your work.”
“Coffee and insects. There are no two purer things in this wide world. They are the top of the evolutionary chain.”
“Higher than man?”
“Way higher than man! Do you think a world of Insecta Lepidoptera would have invented war?”
“No,” I said. “But also no Bach.”
“They have their own music. Bach to them might sound like gangsta rap does to me! By the way, a sniffer came by.”
“Sniffer?”
“Guy asking about you. When you might be in.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I said, I don’t know anyone by that name.” McNitt reached into one of the mesh cages and lightly touched a butterfly wing with his fingertip. The wing fluttered.
“And did this fellow believe you?” I asked.
“He copped a little attitude on me, so I just quoted Marcus Aurelius to him.”
“You did what?”
“Stoic philosophy, son. I said to him, ‘Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.’”
“That must have changed his life.”
“I don’t think so. He didn’t look pleased.” McNitt faced me and touched his head with his index finger. “He was not fully in control of his ruling part. Are you, Ty?”
“In control of my ruling part?”
McNitt nodded. “You see, for some men, the ruling part is not in the head, but south of the equator, and that is what gets them into trouble. You’ll recall that was the point of the exchange in The Republic between Socrates and Cephalus.”
I cleared my throat. “I have to admit it’s been a while since I’ve cracked The Republic.”
“Cephalus is the old man reflecting on his youth. He finds a calm in his age because he is no longer a slave to, as Sophocles called it, that mad and furious master. You see?”
“So, Pick, what did this guy look like?”
“Cephalus? No one knows. He—”
“No, the guy who came sniffing around for me.”
“Ah. Black, dressed fine, about your size, maybe a little bigger.”
“He say what he wanted with me?” I said.
McNitt shook his head. “He gave me a few choice words, then left. But the words did not bother me.” He touched his cranium again.
“You make a fine receptionist,” I said.
“You gonna chase me around the desk?”
“First,” I said, “that’s a sexist remark. And second, it wouldn’t be much of a chase.”
“I move a lot faster than you think,” he said, then ambled back to the store with all the speed of an excited mollusk.
I opened my phone and checked out the program Blumberg had given me. Came up with a road map and a blinking red dot. That was DeCosse the Younger.
A couple of clicks got me closer, so I could read street names. The dot was heading south on the 710 Freeway. Every fifteen seconds the map and location refreshed.
I sat there feeling powerful and paranoid. That I could spy like this on a private citizen was stunning. But also the mark of our age, when privacy was an ever-decreasing commodity.
Which was one reason I was glad, but also a little nervous, about being at St. Monica’s. Kept thinking I was like Harrison Ford in Witness, hiding out in Amish country.
Until the bad guys found him and showed up with guns.
82
BEFORE I COULD get in my car I got stopped. By a guy fitting the description McNitt just gave me.
“Hey,” was all he said.
He was a little taller than me and about my age. Either his eyes were naturally narrow or he was glaring. Whatever, he didn’t look happy.
“Hey what?” I said.
“I need to talk to you.”
I studied his look, tried to think of what business he would have with me. Then I said, “You wouldn’t be James, would you?”
His eyes opened wider, so I guess the original look was a glare. How very observant I am.
“How’d you know that?” he said.
“And Lana talked to you. That’s how you found me.”
“That’s pretty good, man.”
“Yeah, well, I imagine things aren’t pretty good for you right now.”
He looked at the ground as he shook his head. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill her. I loved Avisha.”
“You talk to the cops?”
“No way. They’ll take me down. I can’t go down. I got two strikes. That’s why I’m talkin’ to you.”
I looked around the parking lot. Like I expected to see a deputy sheriff or Brosia, or even a security guard named Petey watching us through binoculars.
“Let’s go inside,” I said.
“Where?”
“You drink coffee?”
83
HE DID. MCNITT fixed him up with a regular cup and left us alone at a back table.
“I really loved her, man,” he said. There was real pain in his voice. “I wasn’t there to protect her.”
“Where were you?”
“My brother’s, Inglewood.”
“You have a last name, James?”
“Kingman.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Reatta told Avisha about meeting you here.”
I nodded. “What do you do, James?”
He hesitated, wrapped his hands around his cup, and wiggled his fingers. “Don’t laugh.”
“Hey, I’m a lawyer. I get abuse all the time. I won’t laugh.”
“Standup,” he said.
I laughed.
“See?” he said.
“But you want laughs. You’re a comedian.”
“I’m tryin’. You know how hard it is?”
“What do you do in the lean times?” I asked.
“That’s like all the time. I pick up jobs. That’s how I met Avisha. She and some of the girls at Night Silk had a party. I did some catering for it.”
“How long had you been with her?”
“Over a year. She was gonna quit the trade.”
“Why were you at your brother’s the night she was killed?”
“We had a fight. She was nervous lately. She wouldn’t tell me why. I wasn’t working. She didn’t want to do what she was doing anymore. She said she was working on something, but she wouldn’t say what. I got mad at her for that. I wish I didn’t.”
“You don’t know anything about what she was working on?”
“She said it was a score. That’s all. It was gonna be a score.”
“Drug deal?”
“No way. She never did any of that. Me neither.”
“Anything else she might have said about it?”
He thought for a moment. “She called it an operation. Like Operation Spice Deal or something like that. Pepper or ginger or something.”
“Spice Girl thing?”
“Spice Girls? They still alive? No, that’s not it.”
I said, “When’s the last time you saw her?”
“It was Wednesday. We had a big fight and I was yellin’ and screamin’ and she was givin’ it right back to me and I left and drove to my brother’s place.”
“How long were you there?”
“Three days, I think. Yeah, three.”
&
nbsp; “Can you account for your time there?”
“Like how?”
“Anybody besides your brother see you?”
“Some guys came over that night. I tried out some material on ’em.”
“How many guys?” I said.
“Three, four maybe.”
“No maybes. I want a definite answer. You have to think definite from now on.”
He nodded and gave it some thought. “Four guys. One guy left early.”
“I hope he didn’t walk out on your routine.”
“I wasn’t too on. Hard to make people laugh when you just had it out with your woman.”
“Show business, huh? Now, do you know the names of these guys?”
“A couple I remember.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Did you try to call Avisha?” I said.
“Nah. I was waiting on her. I wasn’t gonna make the first move.”
“Very male of you.”
“What do I do now?”
“You want my advice?”
“Yeah.”
“You need to turn yourself in.”
He shook his head.
“You’re an obvious suspect in a murder,” I said. “You stay outside, it’ll look like you’re guilty.”
A sound came from his throat. Muffled anguish.
“Look at me, James.”
He did.
I said, “You tell me you can cover yourself, where you were at, with more than your brother doing the talking. Think real hard before you answer.”
There was definitely thinking going on, for about a minute. Then James said, “Yeah. I can.”
“Because they will check out your every move.”
“You gonna help me?”
“I don’t work for free.”
“Oh man, I don’t have lawyer money.”
“What kind of money do you have?”
“Chump change.”
“How much of a chump are you?”
“You serious?”
“When it comes to my fees, I’m very serious.”
He frowned and reached for his wallet. Opened it and fingered the contents. “Like thirteen bucks,” he said.
“Give me ten.”
James hesitated.
“Give me ten dollars,” I said.
He took out two fives and handed them to me. I put them in my shirt pocket. “Now it’s official. Now I’m your lawyer.”
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