by Stuart Woods
They sat in the courtroom until the morning’s arraignments had been completed, then the judge looked at Eagle and said, “Any further business?”
Eagle rose. “Matter of continuance of bail for Mr. Wolf Willett, following an indictment,” he said.
“Bring your client forward, Mr. Eagle,” the judge said. “Mr. Martinez,” he said to the district attorney, “may I hear from you on this subject?”
“Your Honor, the state requests that bail be revoked and that the defendant now be incarcerated until his trial. We have evidence placing him at the scene of the crime on the day of the murders; we have evidence of a further motive. The state believes that Willett is a dangerous man and should be jailed immediately.”
The judge turned to where Eagle and his client now sat at the defense table. “Mr. Eagle?”
Eagle rose and took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “Your Honor, I would like to present to the court nine letters from prominent figures in the film industry, attesting to the good character of Mr. Willett.” He handed the letters to the judge, who began leafing through them.
Wolf had written to fifteen people; he wondered who were the six who had not come through.
Eagle continued. “I would like to point out that Mr. Willett has kept the terms set for his current bail, that he has not left the jurisdiction, and that immediately on being informed of his indictment, he voluntarily surrendered himself to the authorities. Mr. Willett has no intention of fleeing; he looks forward to a trial so that he can clear his name. I would also like to point out that the state’s case is no stronger than it was at Mr. Willett’s last hearing. Mr. Willett has never denied being in his own home, and I believe that Mr. Martinez’s reference to a new motive is based on information that will, in fact, strengthen Mr. Willett’s defense. We are ready for trial, and request an early court date.” He sat down.
The judge continued reading the letters, then spoke again. “I am impressed with Mr. Willett’s references, and I am pleased that he has kept the terms of his bail and that he surrendered voluntarily. I will continue bail; however, in light of the seriousness of the charges, I will increase the amount to one million dollars. Can your client raise that sum, Mr. Eagle?”
“He can, Your Honor; he has already posted one hundred thousand dollars cash, and he will offer his house in Santa Fe, which is unencumbered and is worth well in excess of one million dollars.”
“That will be acceptable to the court. I will release Mr. Willett in your custody, pending receipt of the deed to the house by close of business today.” He flipped through a large desk diary. “I have had a postponement of a case, leaving a gap in the calendar, so I will set trial for January tenth. Is that acceptable to the state?” He looked at the district attorney.
Martinez rose. “It is, Your Honor.”
“There being no further business before me, this court is adjourned.”
“Thank you, Ed,” Wolf said when they had left the courtroom.
“Not at all. Where is the deed to your house?”
“In the safe in my study.”
“I’ll drive you back to your car, and you can have it delivered to the court later today.”
“Fine.”
When they were back in his car, Eagle raised another point. “Wolf, I want your authorization to hire two investigators. I know a good man who can look into Grafton’s activities in Los Angeles—Julia’s sister gave me the name of a man Grafton knew there who he might have contacted.”
“Fine, go ahead. What’s the other investigator for?”
“I want to send a man to the Cayman Islands and see what he can find out from the bank there.”
“Aren’t those banks very secretive?”
“Yes, but if we can present evidence of a crime in connection with funds they are harboring, they can choose to give us information. I know a guy in Washington who until recently was an investigator for the I.R.S., and who has a lot of experience looking into Cayman accounts. He’s a C.P.A. in Virginia now. He’ll be expensive, but he’s damn good.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“What are your resources following Julia’s theft of your investments?”
“I’m pledging the Santa Fe house, of course, but there’s the Bel Air house, and my company has got some cash; I can draw on that, if I have to.”
“Good. That should see us through.”
“When did Julia’s sister become so cooperative?”
“I had a chat with her last week, and she agreed to testify for us; then, when she had had a lot to drink on New Year’s Eve, I went over the Grafton business with her again. I don’t think she had really been holding back, but she came through with the name of a man in L.A. that Grafton had mentioned several times in the past. We may have to spread some money around to get information.”
“How much money?”
“Will you authorize twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Yes, go ahead. I’ll have my office in L.A. wire-transfer, say, fifty thousand to you today.”
“That should cover everything.” Eagle stopped the car next to the Porsche, and Wolf got out.
“Ed, keep me posted on these investigations, will you?”
“Sure, I will; I know how anxious you are.”
No, Wolf thought as he watched Eagle drive away, you don’t have any idea how anxious.
CHAPTER
40
Cupie Dalton sat in the tiny second bedroom of his small apartment in Santa Monica, which served as his office, and worried. He had earned his nickname when he had been on the force, because he was plump, pink, and resembled the prize dolls at carnival shooting galleries, and he was worried because he had four dollars in the bank and his pension check didn’t come for another week. “Please, God,” he said aloud. “I need some work.” The phone rang.
“Dalton Investigations.”
“Cupie, it’s Ed Eagle. How are you?”
He tried not to sound excited. “Okay, Ed. You?”
“Not bad. I need a guy looked into.”
“Okay. Who is he?”
“His name is—or rather, was—James Grafton, known as Jimmy, recently known in L.A. as Dan O’Hara. He caught the wrong end of a shotgun around Thanksgiving in Santa Fe.”
Cupie wrote down the names. “Never heard of him.”
“Armed robber, con man, escapee, murderer. He bounced out of a New York prison earlier this year and ended up in L.A.; apparently sold a screenplay to Warner.”
“That’s cute. You got anything else?”
“A name: Benny Calabrese, somebody he knew.”
“I know him; a sleaze.”
“What did you expect?”
“So what do you need on this guy?”
“I want to know every move he made in L.A., and anything else you think might interest me.”
“You know my rates.”
“Forget rates,” Eagle said. “I don’t have time for you to chalk up hours and an expense account. This is five grand straight, and anything you have to fork over comes out of that. I’ll have a messenger there in an hour with cash.”
“That would be nice.”
“It’s not a gift, Cupie; it’s for results. I want to hear from you tomorrow, and I want to hear a lot.”
“You got it, Ed.”
“I better have it, or this is the last you’ll see any of my money. Call me.”
Cupie hung up and raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Thank you, God,” he said.
When the messenger had gone, Cupie put four thousand dollars into the cheap safe that was bolted to the floor in the bedroom closet, then folded ten hundreds into his pocket. Feeling lighter than air, he strolled down to the parking lot and got into the elderly Continental that he loved so much. He took the freeway to Sunset and drove slowly through Beverly Hills to the Strip. Here he slowed even further and began looking. It took less than fifteen minutes to find Benny Calabrese’s red Camaro with all the stripes, parked in front of a fast-food joint near the co
rner of La Cienega. Cupie invented a parking place and walked into the restaurant.
Benny was heavily into a double cheeseburger, alone in a back booth; he had just taken a huge bite when he saw Cupie. He stopped chewing.
Cupie sat down and put a hundred-dollar bill on the table between them. “Now, listen to me, Benny,” he said. “You and I ain’t ever liked each other too much, so this is going to be a brief meeting. I’m going to ask you some questions, and you have two choices: first, you can take the hundred and talk to me good, or second, I can beat the shit out of you.”
Benny started chewing again. Cupie had his attention.
“Now, by the time you finish chewing, you better be talking to me about a guy named Jimmy Grafton.” He held up a hand. “Don’t worry, this won’t bounce back on you; Grafton ate somebody’s shotgun a while back. Now, what’s it going to be?”
Benny swallowed hard. “Jimmy’s dead? You ain’t shitting me?”
“Grafton is in somebody’s landfill by now. Trust me, Benny.”
Benny’s hand snaked out and snagged the hundred. “Me and Grafton did some time together—Riker’s Island, a few years back. We kept in touch, even after I came out here.”
Cupie made a beckoning motion. “Don’t pause for breath, Benny; keep it coming.”
“Jimmy was doing life in New York, and he busted out, turned up here calling himself—”
“Dan O’Hara,” Cupie said, completing the sentence for him. “I know just enough to know if you’re holding out on me.”
“We did some drinking together. Jimmy said he was writing a movie about busting out of jail. He even said he sold it to a studio—that’s what he said, anyway; who knows?”
“He must have had some other scam going. What was it?”
“He never told me about nothing else. He had money; he didn’t seem to be looking for anything to do. He was living in one of them suite hotels in West Hollywood, off Melrose—a hundred and twenty a day, easy—but Jimmy always had style.”
“Was anybody with him? A woman, maybe?”
“He said he was all fixed up in that department, no problem, you know? But I never saw him with a woman. We’d meet at some bar in the late afternoons and have a few, then he’d go off on his own at night.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
Benny screwed up his face and thought hard. “End of October. Jimmy had some Lakers tickets, and we went—the only time we spent an evening together.”
“You never saw him again?”
“Nope. That was the last time.”
“Come on, Benny, there’s something you’re not telling me. Don’t make me ask you the hard way.”
Benny looked around the restaurant as if he thought somebody might be watching him. “This goes no further?”
Cupie made a zipping motion across his lips.
“Jimmy wanted some paper.”
Cupie sat up. “Counterfeit money?”
“No, no: paper. Papers, like—you know, social security card, driver’s license, passport.”
“False documents.”
“No, not false; he was very up-front about that. Jimmy wanted the real thing, stuff that would work, you know?”
“And where would he get that?”
“Well, I had to ask around, you know? It wasn’t easy.”
“So you worked hard, Benny. Where’d you send him?”
Benny looked around again. “There’s this guy in Venice.”
“What guy, Benny? I’m getting short-tempered.”
“Around town he’s called Doc Don.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Document Don. Last name’s Dunn.”
“Document Don Dunn.”
“He’s a photographer—you know, the wife and kiddies? Passport pictures? Right along the beachfront. I don’t know the exact address, but I didn’t hear from Jimmy, so he must have found it.”
“So how does Doc Don produce the real thing?”
“He’s got some system of getting hold of birth certificates and other I.D., so he can get real stuff instead of forging it; it’s like you buy a new identity, you know? The real thing.”
“Anything else, Benny? Search your heart.”
Benny thought. “Nope, that’s it. I didn’t see Jimmy after the end of October.”
“I found you this time, Benny; I can find you again.”
“Honest, Cupie.”
“Honest,” Cupie repeated, then he burst out laughing. Honest? From Benny Calabrese?
CHAPTER
41
Russell Norris stepped out of the airplane in George Town and into the hot Cayman sun. Sweat immediately broke out on his forehead and under his arms, and he was glad he’d worn one of his old Brooks Brothers I.R.S. suits instead of something better. He’d be soaked by the time he got out of here. He walked straight through the airport and found a cab. It was a measure of his confidence that he carried no overnight bag, only a briefcase.
Norris had labored in the Internal Revenue Service vineyard for twenty-five years, had retired with a pension that covered his mortgage payments and basic expenses, and had promptly begun offering himself as a hired gun against the auditors who had been his colleagues for so many years. Mostly he represented taxpayers who had trod too near the line and were being audited; he negotiated settlements that only a former auditor could manage, and his clients loved him for it.
For the last years of his career, Russell Norris had headed a service task force that had put the fear of God into Cayman banks. He had begun by simply auditing the hell out of anybody who had a Cayman account and prosecuting those who had lied about such an account; this made many people reluctant to deal with the banks, and finally, as a result, in 1986 he had been able to negotiate a new treaty with the Cayman Islands government which significantly altered the terms under which the banks could surrender information to the American authorities, principally the I.R.S.
Beyond that he had made himself personally felt in the Cayman banking community in such a way as to enable him to successfully elicit information not covered by the treaty—on a strictly confidential basis, of course. He had done this by force of personality and by implied threats—in fact, not always implied.
As he shuffled through the copies of bank statements and other documents faxed to him by Ed Eagle, he recalled the past hoops through which he had put this particular organization. They would stand him in good stead today.
The taxi stopped in front of the bank, and Norris got out into the burning sun once more. Tourists were paying thousands to experience this climate in January, but Norris was warm of nature and could not wait to get back to the chilly joys of a Virginia winter. He walked into the bank, marched straight through the customer area until he came to a mahogany railing broken by an electrically operated gate. He cast an eye around the small sea of desks until he found a bank officer who knew him, then stood quietly, burning his gaze into the fellow’s face until he caught the man’s eye. The officer blanched, frowned, and looked around for assistance. Everybody else had busied himself with work. Forced to make a decision, the man pressed the release button, and Norris proceeded through the gate.
He kept straight on toward a paneled wall, opened a door, walked past a secretary who had not been quick enough to halt his progress, and stepped into a large, beautifully appointed office.
The president of the bank, a Cuban named Rouré, nearly bit through the Upmann cigar clenched between his teeth. Norris waited a moment for the full effect to set in. This was why he had worn the old suit, instead of one of the more recent ones from the Polo Shop; he wanted the memory in the man’s mind to match what he now saw—a hard-nosed, no-nonsense civil service warrior. Norris walked over to the desk, sat down in a large chair, and pulled out the stenographer’s shelf from the desk.
“Now,” he said, opening his briefcase, “let’s begin.”
“I thought you had retired,” the astonished Cuban managed to say.
“You don’t believe everything you hear, do you, Mr. Rouré?” He took a sheet of paper from the man’s desktop and wrote down a number, then handed it to him. “I want to see the records on this account,” he said. “All the records.”
The banker did not look at the number. “You must be mad,” he said. “You know very well I would be breaking Cayman law if I disclosed any information about one of our accounts.”
“I am mad,” Norris replied calmly. “Imagine how much trouble a madman in my position could cause you.”
Rouré stared at Norris for a moment, and Norris could almost see the wheels turning. He picked up the sheet of paper. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said.
Norris held up a hand. “No,” he said. “Sit down.”
The banker sat down.
“I don’t want you to go and get the records; I want you to pick up the telephone and order the records brought in here. We’ll see them together.” Norris smiled.
“I am of a mind to telephone the American ambassador right now,” Rouré said.
“You may do that if you wish,” Norris replied, “and if you do, the world will fall on your bank from a great height. I know a federal prosecutor in Miami who is working on the Noriega case, and he would just love to know a few things I could tell him.” Norris tried not to hold his breath. This was a bluff, and if the banker called it, he wouldn’t have the cards. He did have one more card, though. “There’s also the business you were doing with BCCI.” The huge international bank had collapsed recently, and it was likely that Rouré had done business with them.
He knew he had won when beads of perspiration appeared on Rouré’s forehead. He filed the Noriega and BCCI connections away in his memory for possible future use.
“Why do you want this information?” Rouré asked, obviously buying time while he made a decision.
“Señor Rouré,” Norris said placatingly, “let us say that these records are not yet the subject of an official investigation; I emphasize, not yet.”
Rouré puffed rapidly on his cigar. A cloud of smoke rose above him and drifted toward an air-conditioning intake. “Your sight of this file will not go beyond this office?”