Alone

by Loren D. Estleman

  “She told you the blackmail letter shapes up to be a fake. You call that casual?”

  “You talked to her, didn’t you?”

  “You’re damn right I did, and I put in a complaint with her team captain. If it was up to me she’d be on suspension. You’re a suspect in an official homicide investigation. Or you were.” He snapped shut the notebook and jammed it into his hip pocket.

  “Why past tense?”

  “Rankin was arraigned this morning. The judge released him on his own recognizance. We pulled Roger Akers’ bank statements and matched regular deposits of between five and ten thousand dollars going back six months; they matched withdrawals from Rankin’s accounts according to statements provided by Rankin’s lawyer. That supports his claim his assistant was extorting money from him. Even the fact the letter’s probably a fake works out in his favor. The more effort Akers put into it, the more likely he was to lose his temper when Rankin put the brakes on the gravy train and try to brain him with bric-a-brac. My chief of detectives is considering recommending the prosecutor drop charges. Meanwhile I’ve been reassigned.”

  Valentino’s relief shaded into curiosity. “If you’re off the case, what are you doing here?”

  Padilla dropped his mangled cigarette into an ashtray that hadn’t held one since it left Schwab’s Drug Store and stuck a fresh one between his lips. It bobbed up and down as he spoke. “Don’t blame me, blame Robert Blake and O.J. I have a hard time working up the enthusiasm to tank a nineteen-year-old gangbanger for life for shanking another gangbanger when people who have all the advantages walk away for the same crime. This guy Rankin has a mansion in Beverly Hills, a penthouse in Manhattan, a villa in France, and a private jet. I’ve seen his passport; during the six months Akers was bleeding him, he’d been to London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Stockholm, Tuscany, and the Galapagos, which I don’t even know what that is. He spent more in the souvenir shops than he was paying Akers to keep that letter under lock and key, and he still wanted to bribe you to get him off his back. It’s that sense of entitlement that grinds my gut. I got two weeks’ personal time coming. I’m making this one my hobby.”

  “So this isn’t an official visit.”

  “It’s official as hell. No police officer is ever off duty. If I turn something that can be used in evidence, the department will be right behind me. Individual initiative’s hot since the Terminator went to Sacramento.” His teeth ground on his filter tip when he referred to Arnold Schwarzenegger; the man seemed to harbor a pathological hatred for movies and movie stars.

  “How does your department feel about personal vendettas?”

  “Nothing of the kind. I was ready to wrap this one up as justifiable homicide, then I found out what happened at the party. Rankin’s a heavyweight, an alpha male in a dog-eat-dog business. No history of illness according to his doctor, who’s been seeing him for twenty years. He did a tour in Korea, got a medal of valor. He didn’t faint when the bullets were buzzing around his ears, didn’t faint when the medal was being pinned to his chest, didn’t faint when his wife became terminal or when department stores went down the toilet or when he got all those shots to hop all over the globe. Suddenly a pretty girl rigged out like a dead actress shows up at his blowout and he drops like a bucket of mush. Twelve hours later his assistant is dead by his hand. That’s why I asked about any change in Rankin’s behavior. There’s always a connection, always.”

  “Coincidences bother me, too,” Valentino said, “in films. Screenplays are supposed to make sense. That’s one of the many places where movies differ from life.”

  “You know a lot more about that than I do. I haven’t been to one since Clint Eastwood started playing with monkeys.”

  “You haven’t gone to the movies in twenty-five years?”

  “Why? They changed?”

  The archivist waved his hands, dismissing a subject that would take twenty minutes to explain. “So do you get a lot of gangbangers in Beverly Hills?”

  “They got cars now.” He laid a second mutilated cigarette next to the first. “You know what Rankin wore to his arraignment? No? It was on TV.”

  “The only thing I’ve seen recently on TV is a Japanese quiz show.”

  “A thousand-dollar suit. I guess his best one was at the cleaner’s. He was in lockup over the weekend and they let his lawyer bring him a complete change of clothes every day. Everyone else goes to court in the county jumpsuit. I guess you think I’m hammering on the rich.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “Well, I’m not. I hope to be rich someday myself. This is America; you never know when that four-oh-one-K I got will climb out of the grave and up to the top of the Hollywood Bowl. I’m not mad at Rankin. I got a bone to pick with the system for treating him like a weekend guest instead of a possible offender who might be around for a while. Who needs a defense lawyer when the prosecutor’s in on the joke?”

  “If you’re hounding an innocent eighty-year-old man, your department will turn on you faster than you can say ‘vascular stroke.’”

  “If shooting a man down at point-blank range didn’t bust a vessel, he’s as indestructible as they come. As for the brass back at headquarters, I’m already hanging on by one little toe. I’d’ve been a precinct captain by now if I spent as much on a necktie as I do on my suits. They could find a hundred reasons to can me if I didn’t have the best arrest record in Homicide. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I’m not. I’m worried about Matthew Rankin. If he’s getting special privileges, he’s earned them.”

  “I expected you to feel that way. He’s the moneybags keeps your racket afloat. I saw his bank statements, remember.”

  “Do you have any other questions, Lieutenant?”

  “Just one. Who pasted you in the eye?”

  “Did you see the press party downstairs?”

  “Ah. Got up close and personal with the equipment. So how’s it feel getting star treatment?”

  “I vant to be alone.”

  Padilla grinned and let himself out.

  **

  Ruth came on the intercom as Valentino was dumping the lieutenant’s masticated Kools into his wastebasket. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so popular. Usually the office was just a place to put up his feet between making inquiries about something rare and unobtainable and waiting for someone to call back to confirm it.

  “Who is it now, the FBI?” he asked.

  “A lawyer.” The curious fact about her voice coming through an outmoded speaker that made everyone else sound as if he were speaking through a comb and tissue paper was that it was the same in person. “He says he represents Matthew Rankin.”

  “What does he want?”

  Silence ticked. After thirty seconds she came back on. “Turns out he wants to discuss Rankin’s case. I guessed that, but it took a while to wade through the Latin.”

  The man she was talking about had to have heard her. He wondered if she’d simply been born lacking the gene for discretion, the way some people were born without legs or with the heart on the wrong side. “Send him in.”

  The door opened almost immediately. “Mr. Valentino? Clifford Adams: Klein, Benito, Lohengrin, Adams, and Adams. I’m the first Adams. No relation to the second. He traces his ancestry to Greenland.”

  Valentino rose to shake his visitor’s hand. Adams was tall and trim, encased in gray Armani with a thin violet stripe, with a tie to match, and as black as unexposed silver nitrate; his skin glistened with the same liquid sheen. His well-shaped shaven head threw back light in flat sheets. Valentino suspected he ran waxed paper over it twice daily. His extravagantly orthodonted smile made Valentino’s pupils shrink.

  He carried no briefcase. Both hands were empty. The archivist thought that a nice touch. He always sat straighter in his seat whenever an actor went the extra mile to explode the stereotype.

  “Lohengrin,” Valentino said.

  Adams uncased his teeth agai
n, throwing the room into dazzling negative. It was like a desert shot coming hard on a nighttime campfire scene in a western. “A fictional member of the cast, as it were. The late Messrs. Klein and Benito were very aware of the cultural nature of Los Angeles, and felt their names alone sounded too much like a burlesque act. Wagner’s epic happened to be playing at the Music Center the week they hung out their shingle—quite literally, I might add. L.A. was an oil boomtown then and sign painters were doing land-office business.” He shut off the grin, leaving behind little chain haloes of light. “Unfortunately, the laws of corporation make it difficult to correct the caprices of a more innocent time. I can’t tell you how many billable hours we lose explaining the derivation of that one name.”

  “Something tells me you could to the penny, if you felt so inclined.”

  A spark of mutual understanding flashed between the two, and they sat. The lawyer took in the posters and stills framed in rows, shelves of bobble-head Charlie Chaplins and W.C. Fieldses, stacks of shooting scripts bound with brads, jumbles of VHS tapes, DVDs, and laser discs, and books on motion picture history leaning drunkenly against one another and spilling to the floor, bloated with colored slips of paper marking pages and passages for further study. “I like this space,” he said. “I’m junior to the other Adams, who has a policy of office uniformity. All chrome and glass and black leather and nothing on the walls that doesn’t meet his approval. It’s like sitting in an airport waiting room.”

  “Why does a junior partner represent Matthew Rankin?”

  “I brought him into the firm. That’s how I made partner.” Nothing in Adams’ demeanor showed that the conversation had shifted gears. He was obviously trained for the courtroom, where a flicker of reaction from the defense could sway a jury the wrong way. “As you may know, Mr. Rankin was released from custody this morning. He’s at home, recuperating from his ordeal.”

  “I hope he’s well. I’m sure he wouldn’t have spent more than two hours in custody if he’d been arrested on a weekday.”

  “Thank you for that compliment. I did manage to interrupt one judge’s softball game to obtain a writ of habeas corpus, but the police in Beverly Hills were determined to charge my client with manslaughter. A lot of people who learned our legal system from gangster movies think habeas is a get-out-of-jail-free card, but that’s only when the authorities have no evidence to detain the suspect. In this case they had Roger Akers and the weapon that killed him.”

  “This is the second time this morning I’ve been obliged to defend the movies, Mr. Adams. If people want to know how the courts work, they should read a book on the subject. Thomas Edison, one of the inventors of the motion-picture process, considered it a toy. Movies are supposed to be fun, not educational.”

  Adams waited politely through this address, then resumed as if there had been no interruption. “By this morning, of course, the prosecutor knew the absurdity of his case and made no objection to Mr. Rankins’ release. Of course, the firm will file a suit against the city for false arrest, unlawful incarceration, defamation of character, and emotional stress as soon as the charges are dropped.”

  “You’re certain they will be?” Valentino wondered if the firm had a spy in the police department. But the lawyer was discreet.

  “It’s prima facie, and a foregone conclusion. There is no evidence against my client’s statement, because he’s innocent. An individual who believes his life is in danger in his own home is entitled to employ deadly force in the defense of his person, even in California.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t come here, braving the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate swarming downstairs, to deliver a lecture on elementary law. What’s your mission?”

  Again, the attorney appeared intractable. “Mr. Rankin asked me to invite you to his home this evening at seven, for cocktails and dinner. He wants to thank you for your defense of his character throughout this heinous episode.”

  “That’s not necessary. I merely told the police the truth as I saw it.”

  “You say ‘merely,’ as if it’s a minor thing. You’d be surprised how rare truth becomes when justice thunders. I’m the messenger in this situation because the prosecution may interpret even so humble an invitation as evidence of payment for collusion. Attorney-client privilege entitles me to proffer it without submitting to interrogation should the police catch wind of it.”

  Valentino said, “I must look more pathetic than I am, if they think I’d perjure myself for a lamb chop and a glass of merlot.”

  The lawyer let his pearlies blaze. “Poached salmon, I’m informed, and a riesling reputed to be irreproachable. He also asked me to employ all my powers of persuasion to ensure that you bring Ms. Johansen with you. Apparently he found her quite charming. Will you accept?”

  “It’s short notice. I’ll have to check with her, and then there’s the problem of shaking the press, unless he wants to set places for them at the table. I don’t have any experience at that. Wouldn’t he rather do it another night, after they lose interest?”

  “Mr. Rankin has all the experience required—and the security—to keep the jackals at bay. He’s been a private man a very long time.” Before the other could respond he added, “There is in addition a matter of unfinished business he wishes to discuss with you, regarding—” He paused to flick through his mental BlackBerry. “—How Not to Dress. Did I get that right? I know nothing of the significance of the allusion.”

  Valentino’s pulse rate spiked. His life had become so crowded over the space of a few days that he’d almost forgotten Rankin’s offer of the film in return for his cooperation in the counter-blackmail scheme. He’d assumed it had expired with Roger Akers. Including Harriet in the invitation suggested that this time there were no extralegal strings attached; however, Rankin had clearly intended him to reach that conclusion. He’d hardly had time to be charmed by Harriet between laying eyes on her for the first time and fainting dead away.

  He proceeded with caution. “Will you be at the dinner?”

  “No. I know less about the retail business than I do about movies, so I’m afraid I’m a boring companion for him socially.”

  “Seven o’clock,” Valentino said, encouraged by this information. “Thank you, Mr. Adams.”

  The lawyer rose. “I’d try a piece of steak on that eye.”

  “I’m in the middle of a construction project. Tofu, maybe?”

  After Adams left, chuckling politely, Valentino tried to reach Harriet at police headquarters, but the person he got said she was at a crime scene and would be answering her cell only for official business. He left a message for her to call back.

  His day resumed at its normal pace. He set up his Moviola and cranked through footage of turn-of-the-twentieth-century L.A. for the public library, a contract job, noting and numbering frames needing restoration by the technicians in the lab. The work was time-consuming, but intensely interesting, and he pursued it straight through lunch. He was rewinding the reel, preparing to leave, when Ruth put through a call from Harriet.

  “Domestic murder,” she said when he asked how her day went. “Those amateurs sure make a mess. Hey, I got a dressing-down from my team captain. Apparently I treated with the enemy when I told you what we’d learned from the Garbo letter.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I ignored him. Want to hear the latest?”

  He paused. He’d been about to mention the invitation from Matthew Rankin. “Not if it gets you fired.”

  “This place would fall apart without me. I’m the only one on the detail who can operate a spectograph and brew a decent pot of decaffeinated.”

  “In that case, go ahead.”

  “We took your advice and put in a request with the Swedish Military Archives for copies of samples of Greta Garbo’s handwriting to compare with the fake love letter. If you remember, we had to confirm similarity before we tackled the problem of where Akers obtained a specimen extensive enough to
scan into his computer and make it plausible.”

  “I remember.” He sat up straighter. He sensed something coming his way.

  “The curator got back to us an hour later. He was so uptight he kept forgetting his English. The last time anyone looked at the documents was a year ago last March, when an independent researcher checked them out and then checked them back in. Sometime between then and this morning, two long letters and two postcards were removed. No one knows what happened to them.”

  **

  CHAPTER

  10

  “VAL, ARE YOU there?”

  He’d been silent a second longer than needed to take in the information she’d given him. In a flash, he’d remembered something Lieutenant Padilla had said, and had almost blurted it out, but vetoed the urge because it looked as bad for Matthew Rankin as it did for Roger Akers—possibly worse—and in any case if the police didn’t want Harriet talking to Valentino about the investigation he wasn’t disposed to tell them anything they could find out for themselves. He didn’t like Ray Padilla; the man could wage his personal crusade against the upper class by himself.