No Accident

by Dan Webb

  * * *

  In front of the library, Alex found Sheila standing alone in the damp, heavy air, her hair starting to curl. Alex had changed into dry clothes and a light jacket. It was warmer inside but empty, except for a few drowsy retirees in sweaters.

  Sheila led the way toward a grid of tables with shaded lamps that filled the center of the room. Her bee line there was diverted only as she neared a homeless guy hunched over a book. There her path bellied out into a gentle arc before returning to its original course, as if she and the man were the ends of two magnets repelling each other.

  Sheila and Alex sat at a table away from the other patrons. Alex leaned across, ready for a quiet conversation, but she held back, sitting erect, with her hips planted firmly in the uncomfortable wooden chair. Alex asked how she had found him, and felt foolish when she said his address was in the phone book. After no one answered at Alex’s door, a barista in the coffee shop told her Alex could often be found surfing, and the barista was right. She preferred to speak with people in person rather than over the phone, she said, answering the question that Alex was about to ask.

  “My lawyer says you have information that could help me. What is it?”

  She faced him with a lifted chin and eyes that remained half shut, like two flower buds weighing whether to open on a cloudy day. So much for small talk, Alex thought.

  “I think your husband may have killed some people,” he whispered.

  She laughed, too loudly for a library, and over her shoulder a shriveled man with white hair looked up at the noise and shot Alex a lively, mischievous smile. Out of the cold, with the color coming back to her cheeks, she was pretty. Beautiful, in fact.

  “My husband’s a prick, but he’s not a killer,” she said. “How’d you get such a crazy idea?”

  “He took out insurance policies on five employees who died in . . . suspicious circumstances.”

  “You mean his company did.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re just talking about the recent stories in the paper.” Now she leaned in, pivoting on her elbows. “That’s a question.”

  It didn’t sound like a question, but Alex answered anyway. “Yes. But there’s more to the story than what’s in the papers.”

  “What, exactly?”

  The truth was, Alex didn’t know. He only had suspicions. And the coverage in the papers, all based on his leads, made his revelations old news. Yet Roberta Cummings still needed a way to save her house. And Alex still had five mortgages to pay.

  “That’s what I’d like your help to find out,” Alex said.

  “Fine. You have my benediction.”

  “I need more than that.”

  Her eyes narrowed again. Up close, Alex noticed mascara and pores and crow’s feet. She was a bit older than him. None of that changed his opinion of her looks.

  “I don’t have time in my life for another greedy person,” she said.

  She started to rise. Still seated, Alex grabbed her wrist before she could turn away from the table. For someone who came off as highly strung, Sheila’s reaction was less alarmed than Alex expected. She looked down at him, stern but patient, like he was a rescue dog from the pound who had just peed on her shoes.

  “I’m the one who gave the story to the papers,” Alex whispered. Sheila looked at him impassively for a moment, and then sat back down, resting her hands on the table in front of her.

  Alex quickly delivered the heart of the story—how he had been an investigator for Rampart, how he had been assigned to investigate the accident, how the police report raised more questions than answers, how the cops couldn’t be troubled to care. The early events tumbled out in an eager monologue that was just hushed enough not to draw the attention of the sleepy readers around them.

  Alex mentioned with casual detachment that his bosses at Rampart had found a quick resolution more appealing than a drawn-out investigation. He skipped the Cummings widow, her toddler and their overgrown lawn. Alex explained that his interview with Zeke got him fired—she could verify the interview just by finding the newspaper article on-line, he pointed out. Zeke owed him one, that’s why Zeke started reporting on the accident and Liberty Industries. And those insurance policies that Zeke used to stoke public outrage? Alex had supplied Zeke with the copies.

  He supplied them to Sheila, too. He plucked a folded sheaf of photocopies from inside his jacket and passed it across the table as if it were a hit list.

  “Just like I said, the time stamp on the fax is weeks before Zeke’s story,” Alex said. He gestured toward the fax header on the top edge of the page. Sheila didn’t look down.

  “So you just carry these pages around with you?” she said.

  “I had them in my truck.”

  “OK,” she said. She seemed to be considering all she had just heard. It didn’t take long for her to speak again, and when she did she remained very composed.

  “Suppose everything you just told me is true. What’s your plan? Where will you get more evidence? After all, you just admitted the police botched the forensics.”

  “I know a guy.”

  She laughed amicably. “Figures.”

  “Have you ever met a man named Rigoberto Capablanca?”

  She laughed again, almost a giggle. “I’d remember if I had.”

  “I just wondered, because I read you were the head of human resources for Liberty. Anyway, Capablanca works there. He knew the employees who died. If you can help me get into Liberty to find him, I can find out what your husband knew about all this.”

  She frowned and looked down at her hands, which lay solidly folded in front of her.

  “I think we want the same thing,” she said eventually.

  “The truth.”

  One side of Sheila’s mouth twitched upward in a half-hearted smile. “Just money.”

  Alex’s wind-burnt lips cracked apart, as if he meant to say something, and then drifted shut again.

  She spoke again more clearly, enunciating her words as if Alex had trouble with English. “What I’m saying is that I’d pay handsomely for evidence that my husband actually caused this accident.”

  Alex didn’t respond. This was exactly the opportunity he’d hoped for, but now it had arrived suddenly, when he was ready to give up. It was disorienting.

  “What’s the problem?” Sheila leaned over the table again. “Let me guess: money disgusts you, but only when it’s earned. You’re one of those surfer, lifestyle types, aren’t you?”

  Alex shook his head. “No. I mean, I like surfing.”

  “You seem confused, Alex. I’m sorry we couldn’t help each other.” She stood for a second time. For a second time Alex grabbed her wrist. He’d meant to say he was pursuing the case for personal reasons, not for money. But this Sheila needed an uncluttered message.

  “I mean I’m in,” Alex said. “You get me access to Liberty and, if your husband really did it, I’ll find the proof.”

  23

  Alex spent the next day at home on the internet learning as much as he could about Luke Hubbard and Liberty Industries. The truth was, Alex didn’t know whether the evidence pointed to Luke. Alex didn’t even know if Luke was capable of murder. Sure, the cynic in him said that anyone was capable of murder. Yet agreeing with Sheila to investigate Luke made Alex curious about the man. Would Luke kill for an amount of money that Uncle Hugh said was just a rounding error for his company?

  By all accounts Liberty Industries was big and growing fast. In fact, they were the darlings of Wall Street. In the last few months, several business magazines had run cover stories on the company. They all told the story of a rise from modest beginnings—for Liberty as well as for its celebrity CEO, Luke Hubbard.

  It started with what was, by L.A. standards, some ancient history. Liberty Industries started life as Liberty Oil Company, a local outfit founded by a Dustbowl refugee who puttered around Los Angeles County in a rebuilt Model T during the Great Depression signing up mineral rights. He drilled holes
across what was then farmland in search of oil.

  He found it. By the 1950s, Jarvis “Mack” MacNeill was one of L.A.’s richest men. But by the late 1980s, when suburbia had swallowed up the farmland and the oil ran out, Liberty’s business model was exhausted as well. During the recession of the early 1990s, its stock traded for pennies.

  That was when Luke Hubbard entered the story. The more recent articles described him with terms like “visionary” and “ground breaking,” but in 1994 people were using words like “naïve,” “untested” and “foolish.” The expansive clan of MacNeill children and grandchildren, more interested in spending money than reviving a dying business, thought Luke was a fool for offering to buy out their Liberty shares. So did every bank that he asked for financing. He ended up begging the MacNeill family to accept payment in installments out of the earnings of the business.

  Hubbard brought a reputation to Liberty. The old timers there, cynical, hard-bitten engineers, were vocally skeptical of the young consultant with zero experience running an actual business. After all, his limited leadership opportunity had not endeared him to L.A. sports fans. In each of the two seasons in which the schoolteacher’s son with movie star looks started as quarterback for USC, the Trojans lost more games than they won, including embarrassing losses to archrival UCLA.

  On day one, Hubbard gave the old timers something else to complain about—pink slips. Luke brought in his beautiful young wife as head of human resources and a cadre of like-minded young executives, and they set about revamping the business model.

  But first they needed cash. The MacNeill family had been milking ever-shrinking dividends from the company’s dwindling oil reserves. Luke Hubbard’s training as a lawyer helped him see a different opportunity. Every well came with a drilling easement from the landowner, a right to enter the property and dig an oil well. That had been a trivial matter for the landowners to sign away when Southern California was all farmland. But it was worth much more now that the land had been developed. Hubbard went back to every dry oil well and started digging, or threatening to dig—in the manicured front lawns of mansions, beneath new glass-and-steel office parks, anywhere an oil well would most be a nuisance.

  At the airport he struck gold. He found a geologist to testify to a “substantial likelihood” of oil under the land slated for a new runway, and LAX paid millions to buy back the easement from him. “Hubbard versus the hub” was how the papers dubbed the showdown. People didn’t talk about Luke Hubbard as the pretty boy quarterback anymore.

  Five years later came a name change to Liberty Industries and a fresh stock exchange listing. With access to the capital markets, Liberty grew at a faster pace than ever before.

  Under Hubbard’s leadership, Liberty always seemed to be one step ahead of the rest of the energy industry. From Canadian tar sands to speculative solar panels, Liberty invested a year or two before everyone else piled in.

  New technologies, new sources of energy. It was hard even for Alex, jaded environmentalist though he was, to resist feeling excited by the descriptions in the company’s annual report. Politicians, academics and plenty of slick executives gave lip service to a green energy revolution. Liberty was actually making it happen—and tallying eye-popping profits along the way. The sleepy local company had become a global powerhouse to match Luke Hubbard’s vision.

  Luke and his wife also built up an impressive record of local philanthropy in a way that the MacNeill family never did. There was a Hubbard wing at the art museum, a Hubbard center of law and policy at USC, a Julius Hubbard Memorial Children’s Medical Research Center, named after a stillborn child. When people thought of Liberty these days, they thought Hubbard, not MacNeill.

  He was a workaholic, the articles said. He combined grand strategic vision with exacting attention to detail. Alex thought of the life insurance policies on the dead employees and found it hard to imagine anything of significance happening at Liberty Industries without Luke Hubbard’s say-so.

  Not all the press coverage was favorable. Rumors—never more than that—had surfaced of competitors being threatened. From time to time, lawsuits were brought against Liberty, then mysteriously dropped. And whenever a junior executive fell out of favor, look out. Luke’s protégés didn’t move on to leadership positions at other companies, as Alex would have expected. Instead, once they became too powerful, Luke forced them out of the company or sued them or did both.

  Alex’s thoughts turned to Sheila. He recalled their conversation in the library—the way her jaw set as she listened to him, the way she locked her fingers tightly together on the tabletop. Beneath her casual exterior, she was tense, like there was a glass vessel inside her and if she twisted the wrong way it would break. That’s what you get from life with Luke Hubbard, Alex thought. Maybe Sheila wasn’t as hard as she appeared to be. Maybe she was OK, for a vindictive, over the hill, still beautiful ice queen.

  Alex looked again at one of the articles about Luke he’d found on the internet. It included a photo of Luke in a tuxedo. He and his wife posed with another couple at a charity dinner. The other three were beaming—deep in their cups, from the look of it. Luke’s smile looked like it was pinned to his face. It was more formal, more reserved, almost withdrawn.

  Was it the face of a killer?

  Wealth, power, respect. These were all things people might kill for. Luke Hubbard already had them. Would he kill to add a few cents to his earnings per share figure? Would anyone?

  Alex didn’t know. Sheila’s face appeared in his mind again. What must it be like to lie down at night next to a killer? Alex tried to read the other articles he’d collected, but his mind kept coming back to Sheila.

  She seemed so different from other women he’d known—especially Pamela. Sheila’s brusqueness raised his hackles, but maybe that was just because he didn’t like feeling bossed around. But Sheila hadn’t really been bossy at the library; she’d just been direct, clear about what she wanted, what she proposed and—what really annoyed Alex—effective at pulling out an equally direct response from him.

  Being pulled out of your comfort zone was unsettling, but Pamela had lived safely within Alex’s comfort zone, and how well had that gone? Alex got the sense that if Sheila was unhappy she’d waste no time in telling him, rather than keep her frustrations a secret and betray him. He knew it was silly to think of Sheila this way—they’d only just met, and she was all business anyway. But Sheila was the first woman he’d met since Pamela that he couldn’t stop thinking about. Maybe, despite their differences in age and background, this was a woman he could relate to. A part of him hoped so.

  24

  Chip Odom walked next to Luke. Petra and Crash came behind. The symphony hall was crowded, and so they stayed close together.

  It was slow going. Luke was stopped every few steps with greetings from one acquaintance or another, all of them interchangeable old men in tuxedos. The greetings mostly came with words of encouragement.

  “Even for the newspapers, what they’re doing to you is outrageous . . .”

  “Let me know if I can help . . .”

  “Give ’em hell, Luke . . .”

  “We’ve pulled our ads from The Chronicle, just so you know . . .”

  Whenever Luke had the chance he introduced Chip as well, as a friend and an up-and-comer at Rampart Insurance. By the time they reached Luke’s box overlooking the stage, Chip was beaming from the attention. Petra was sulking from a lack of it. Luke and Chip took the two front chairs. Behind them, Crash and Petra headed for the two chairs in back. Crash unchivalrously barged ahead of Petra, but Petra took the initiative anyway, darting past Crash to take the further chair and giving Crash a quick pinch on the ass as she did so. She didn’t bother looking back to acknowledge his glare.

  “With all these friends, I’m surprised you use a bodyguard,” Chip said to Luke.

  Luke looked puzzled for a moment before he replied. “Oh, you mean Crash—he’s an old friend. I don’t bring him for protectio
n, though that’s within his repertoire. I bring him because he loves the music. You’ll see.”

  The audience was reminded to turn off their mobile phones. Luke twisted around and smiled at Petra, touching her knee to draw her attention from a text message she was tapping out with red-lacquered thumbnails that fell like little hammers.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  “I turn ringer off, darlink,” she said without looking up. Luke turned back around.

  The orchestra began to play, softly at first, with gentle strains that seemed to Chip to radiate from the walls, enveloping him in sound from all directions. Soon a sound coming from behind him stood out. Chip turned to find Crash, his head tilted back and his eyes closed, moaning softly and swaying with the music. Petra smirked contemptuously at him.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Chip said to Luke. “He loves the music.”

  Luke chuckled. “He’s full of surprises, and often misunderstood. But more than anyone I know, he understands the importance of what Liberty is doing for the environment.”

  Chip smiled weakly and cast another glance back at the enraptured giant.

  “He’s also my most loyal friend,” Luke said. “With a divorce . . . well, you learn who your friends are. It makes you appreciate those who stick by you. Popularity’s overrated, don’t you think?”

  Chip smiled at Luke in acknowledgment, then stifled a cough.

  “You may have started to find this in your own career,” Luke said, “but having responsibility sometimes means pissing people off.”

  Chip laughed loudly, and a bejeweled old woman whose eyes flashed with malice leaned out from the box to their right and ostentatiously shushed them. Unchastened, Luke smiled and waved.

  “We can keep talking,” Luke said quietly to Chip after the woman’s wrinkled face had withdrawn into the box. “She thinks her seat on the board lets her shush anyone, but she’ll be fast asleep by the end of the first movement. After that, nothing’ll wake her but the tympani.”