Strange Bedfellows v5

by Paula L. Woods

  As I drove the unmarked through traffic to the I-5 interchange and headed south, I was reminded of my childhood, when riding south along the stretch of I-5 known as the Santa Ana Freeway was a magical journey, the long drive from my parents’ house through fragrant orange groves and dairy land culminating in our arrival at my brother’s and my personal kingdom—Disneyland. Behind that orange curtain, I could be Sleeping Beauty awaiting her Prince Charming or Becky chasing Indians with Tom Sawyer on our own private island, while Perris played out his big-game hunting fantasies on the Jungle River Cruise. We were too young to know that while the Magic Kingdom welcomed children like us (and our parents’ money), the reality was that colored girls and boys couldn’t be Becky Sharp, a big-game hunter, or any other “cast member” until a good decade after the park opened.

  “And those first jobs were shoeshine boys and tap dancers!” my father, Matt, always reminded us. As I drove that road now with Thor, I wondered whether it was facts or fantasies that drove Nilo Engalla south from the Bay Area to behind Orange County’s mythical curtain.

  A quick scan of the case file Billie had retrieved hadn’t provided many clues. The interviews Gena Cortez had conducted with Nilo Engalla’s parents, José and Rhea, had revealed that the boy was the only child of a union organizer father and an accountant mother. He’d grown up and attended public schools in Daly City, south of San Francisco, as part of a close-knit Filipino community. The boy’s only act of rebellion, it appeared, was going to UC Irvine instead of Berkeley, his mother’s alma mater. His parents had told Gena there were relatives in a province not far from Manila and in Northern California, but Gena’s subsequent notes and interviews confirmed that Engalla had neither left the country nor contacted any family members since his disappearance last summer.

  “The parents were probably lying,” Thor pointed out when I recapped the file for him. “Filipinos can lie you around the block and you’d never know it. And before you drive the car off the road, I’m not saying this to be racist.”

  They never do. “Then why are you saying it?”

  “Years ago, we arrested a Filipino suspect at the scene of a crime, covered in blood, knife in hand. The little bastard beat the machine. The polygraph examiner said it wasn’t the first time it’d happened with Filipinos, either.”

  “And how do Filipinos allegedly do that?”

  “Not allegedly.” Thor looked past me toward The Citadel, a recently opened outlet mall on the site of a historic tire factory. “The examiner’s theory is that Filipinos attach no cultural shame to lying. Saving face at any cost, especially with outsiders, is what matters most. So, when necessary, they’ll lie. And, true to form, our guy had no discernible physiological response to the key questions we were asking.”

  I knew there were some suspects—particularly among psychopaths and sociopaths, who lack the guilty conscience that motivates most people—who could beat a polygraph machine, but to make that assumption about an entire ethnic group sounded racist to me. Did Thor and that examiner have similar “theories” for every ethnic group not their own? I shook off the possibility and focused on the case at hand. “Regardless, that’s why we asked the Daly City PD to surveil the parents’ house, just in case the boy showed up there.”

  Thor patted my shoulder. “No need to be so defensive, Justice. Nobody’s saying you weren’t doing your job. With Steve supervising, I’m sure you covered all the bases.”

  I must have bristled at hearing Firestone’s name, because Thor then asked how long Steve and I had worked together. I exhaled and kept my mind on the road ahead. “Long enough.”

  “Two and a half years altogether, am I right? I worked with the man for seven years before he was promoted to D-three and you transferred in. Steve Firestone is aces far as I’m concerned—always eager to learn something new, always willing to go the extra mile on a case.”

  I took in a breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  I didn’t have to wait long. “It’s a shame what this whole sexual harassment charge has done to him. He’s started drinking again, you know.”

  I bit my tongue and remembered my vow: Go along to get along.

  “Jessica’s left him for good,” Thor went on, “and giving him one hell of a custody battle over the kids. All because some coochie-coochie split tail he was banging on the side got pissed off when he and his wife reconciled.”

  That was it for me. I was tired of seeing red; whether from biting my tongue or from Thor’s comments didn’t matter. “You should have your polygraph examiner administer a test to Firestone, if that’s what he’s telling you! Firestone started hitting the bottle when Jessica first left him last spring, Thor. I know because he showed up at my house, stinking of beer and trying to make a pass at me. If I hadn’t threatened to kick his ass, he would have done me the same way he did Gena Cortez!”

  “Come on, Justice! Steve was just kidding around. You know how he is.”

  I realized this conversation was going nowhere fast and might even be engineered by the crafty senior detective to get me to reveal what I might say at Firestone’s upcoming hearing. Thoroughly annoyed at Thor and myself, I clamped my mouth shut and concentrated on the traffic while leaving him to leaf through his notebook. Several minutes passed in awkward silence. Finally, in an effort to put Firestone behind us, I said: “How’s your daughter—what’s her—?”

  “Julia.”

  “—yes, Julia—liking Oregon?”

  “Salem’s okay,” he replied, lips drawn tight as he read through his notebook. “Her daughter Kate’s just having a little trouble adjusting to her new middle school. I promised Julia that my wife and I’d go up there this weekend and have a little talk with her.”

  “Middle school can be quite a transition. All those different classes, and the heightened social scene.”

  “Yeah, the social scene.” I could sense Thor’s restlessness in the seat beside me, as if he were making up his mind about something. “I want your opinion on something, as a woman, not a cop, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure where this was headed.

  “Some boys at Kate’s school found out she had, uh, you know, had her first, she’d . . .” His gaze fell on his notes as if the missing phrase was there.

  “Gotten her period?”

  He nodded, relief suffusing his face. I was sure mine was flushing. This was not a conversation I wanted to have with a man my father’s age.

  “They decorated her locker with those, you know . . . those sanitary things. That’s what Julia was calling about yesterday, crying and arguing with Kate because she wants to come back to L.A. to live with her grandmother and me.” He sat back in his seat. “Damn near broke my heart. I’m just wondering if I said the right things.”

  Moved by the emotion in the old detective’s voice, I told myself I should just shut up, pretend I had no opinion at all.

  Chicken!

  Oh, all right. “What did you tell her?”

  “That she couldn’t let a bunch of losers shame Kate into shortchanging her education!”

  “Sounds like good advice to me.”

  “My wife and I are hoping to go up there this weekend. But until we do, I told Julia to take Kate up to the school and file a complaint with the principal. Can’t let a bunch of bullies ruin your daughter’s life, I told her.”

  “I think that was the right call. It’s nice that you stood up for Kate. It’ll teach her not to be afraid.”

  “She’s had a rough go of it. Heart defect when she was a baby, then her dad and mom divorced a couple of years ago. I feel like I’m all she’s got sometimes, so I gotta stand up for her.”

  His comment lingered in the air for a bit. “I’d do the same thing for my niece or my sisters,” I said gently. “Same goes for my sisters in blue.”

  If looks could kill, Thor had just put me six feet under. He slapped his notebook shut, hunkered down in his seat, and covered his eyes with his right hand. “Let me know when we get there,”
he muttered.

  The headquarters for CZ Toys was located in one of Irvine’s numerous office developments, clusters of reflective glass buildings that had been spreading like the plague since the city’s incorporation in 1971. We checked in with a guard in the granite-floored lobby and made our way into an elevator that was decorated with posters for the company’s latest line of interactive toys.

  The lobby on the top floor was a plush affair, adorned on one wall with oil paintings of what must have been the company’s earlier headquarters in the mountains of Germany and the flatlands of New Jersey, and the other with full-length portraits of Carlo Zuccari and his son Chuck, the current CEO and a chip off the old man’s block, down to the piercing blue eyes and ramrod-straight bearing. Seeing the two men together, at about the same time in their lives, made me wonder again if the rumors of the father’s ties to the Nazis were true, and how much like the father was the son.

  The receptionist on the top floor directed us down a long hallway to the boardroom where we were to meet the Zuccari family. Someone had gone to the trouble of laying out the latest in chi-chi waters, lattes, frappés, and fancy cookies, artfully arranged on silver trays. Yet as trendy as the spread before us was, the room itself was a throwback to an earlier time, down to the dark paneling and high-backed leather chairs surrounding a mahogany conference table with a raised shelf. On the buildings’ outside I could see the logos of everything from accounting firms to insurance companies, all of which I bet paid handsomely to be first among equals in this particular circle of corporate hell.

  Our Dante was the sixtyish Barbara McIntyre, Chuck Zuccari’s helmet-haired assistant, whom I’d met when we first caught the case. Greeting us as she briskly entered the room, she shook hands with Thor, took his card, and made sure we had everything we needed. A squawk-box conversation could be heard coming from the adjoining office, which belonged to Chuck Zuccari. “Ms. Zuccari is just finishing up an overseas call,” she informed us after we were seated. “Is there a new development, Detective Justice?”

  “Will she be long?”

  “Not too much longer, I suspect.”

  “Has Ms. Zuccari recovered from her injuries?”

  Mrs. McIntyre turned a bright red. “I’m sorry, Alma is not employed by the company,” she explained in a clipped voice. “I was referring to Gabby.”

  “Who?”

  “Pardon me. Gabriella, Chuck’s daughter. The board named her interim president and chief executive officer last December.”

  “I’m impressed. How old is she?”

  “Thirty-four, four years younger than Mr. Zuccari when he moved the company to California.”

  And five years younger than me. “Impressive. So now you’re her executive assistant?”

  Mrs. McIntyre smoothed the sleeves of her jacket and crossed her arms. “Until we can find a replacement.”

  Thor shot me a look. “Has Ms. Zuccari worked for the company long?” he asked.

  “She was executive vice president of European marketing until she was called back from Paris at Thanksgiving, once the board realized Mr. Zuccari couldn’t . . .” Mrs. McIntyre swallowed hard and dropped her head, unable to continue.

  There was a pained silence until I inquired about Mr. Zuccari’s condition. Mrs. McIntyre cleared her throat. “There’s been no change. When you called about wanting to speak with the family, I took the liberty of contacting the current Mrs. Zuccari, too.”

  I noticed the coldness in her voice, how she emphasized the word current in referring to Alma. “Will Mrs. Zuccari be joining us?”

  “She’s down at the hospital with Chuck and their baby. She wondered if you could meet her there when you’re finished.”

  McIntyre offered me a slip of paper on which she’d written the name and address of a hospital in South Orange County. She then excused herself and glided to the outer door, closing it softly behind her. I opened a Perrier and took a seat closer to Gabriella’s closed door, thinking I might overhear something useful. Thor wandered over to an oversized glass display case at the other end of the room to study a selection of the company’s vintage toys. He still hadn’t spoken to me directly since our little set-to in the car.

  “It’s amazing how long CZ Toys has been in business,” I tried.

  No response.

  “I remember the first of their toys I ever had—a talking Gabby doll. Maybe the doll was named after Zuccari’s daughter. You heard how Mrs. McIntyre called her Gabby?”

  “My daughter Julia had one of these Gabby dolls.” Thor was peering at a doll about fifteen inches high, with brown ringlets and chubby cheeks, wearing a blue-and-white gingham checked dress and black patent leather shoes.

  “Me, too.”

  He continued to gaze at the doll. “Chatty Patty—”

  “You mean Chatty Cathy.”

  “Cathy, Patty, Catty, whatever the hell she was called, had just come out and by Christmas of that year, every little girl had to have a talking doll.”

  “I remember that Christmas.” It was the year after our rambunctious family had moved to View Park, into a stately house architect Paul Williams had designed for my parents.

  “But the damn things were scarce as hen’s teeth,” Thor went on. “I couldn’t find one until the night before Christmas. The store had run out of Chatty what’s-her-name, so I brought home a Gabby doll instead. Boy, was that ever the wrong thing to do! My little girl cried and cried because Santa didn’t bring her the right doll.”

  “Santa brought me a Gabby doll that year, too.” I didn’t tell him I was so disappointed in her skin color that my father helped me dye her brown, with disastrous results.

  Thor turned away from the display case. “That squeaking little voice drove me nuts! Always begging for a bedtime story.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I heard that damned line so many times, I would pull the string after Julia went to sleep and tell it stories about the homicide cases I was working!”

  “Maybe you would have preferred the phrase Mattel included in a couple of their Chatty Cathy prototypes.” The female speaking had emerged from Chuck Zuccari’s old office, accompanied by Robert Merritt, whom I recognized as the head of the company’s legal department. The woman was tall and lean in that gym-addicted way usually seen in women with too much money and time on their hands. Her heavily made-up cheeks were sunken; her shoulder-length highlighted brown hair was pulled into a ponytail that bore little resemblance to her curly-headed namesake in that display case. As if to accentuate their differences, this Gabby wore a black satin bustier decorated with studs under a black skirted suit that shrieked couture, and a diamond-studded Rolex worn on her right wrist that I was sure cost more than a month of my salary.

  I could see Thor sizing up the thirty or so feet from where he stood to the door Merritt and Gabriella Zuccari had entered when they ruined his punch line. Was he thinking the same thing I was—how in the hell did she hear what he’d just whispered? “What phrase was that?” he asked, surreptitiously glancing around the room.

  “Now remember,” she cautioned, a twinkle in her brown eyes, “these were the days when male sales reps sold to male toy store buyers.”

  Thor’s smile faded as he looked warily from the advancing executives to me.

  “The phrase was ‘Put me down, you bastard!’ My dad said it helped Mattel move tens of thousands of units. They outsold us five to one that Christmas.”

  Although Thor laughed, he had turned a bright red. I stifled a smile, pleased to see another female get the veteran detective’s goat.

  Gabriella approached the spot where I was sitting and stuck out her acrylic-nailed hand, the diamonds in her watch winking at me in the overhead lights. “You must be Detective Justice. Mrs. McIntyre tells me you have some news for us.”

  I shook her hand and introduced her and Merritt to Thor, who, recovered by then, explained his supervisory role in the case. “Then perhaps I should be asking you that question,” Gabriella said, tossing her ponytail and giv
ing him a brilliant smile as she pumped his hand in turn.

  Thor’s eyes drifted to Gabriella’s exposed chest, then shifted quickly to her face. “There have been some developments,” he muttered, and sat across from me.

  “Then we need to hear them,” Merritt said. A conservatively groomed man in his early sixties, Merritt was the typical corporate attorney and as different from Gabriella as night and day. Merritt had been a thorn in the side of our investigation from the beginning, always trying to block us from talking to employees, insisting that he or one of his staff be in the room during every interview. I knew he was only doing his job, but I couldn’t stop thinking that Robert Merritt was more of a hindrance than a help in solving the crime, even the kind of man who would push his own agenda, regardless of anyone else’s needs.

  Merritt sat at one end of the table while Gabriella took the seat at the other. With her supermodel affectations and garish outfit, she was a little out of place in this traditional conference room, as if she were playacting the role of mistress of the universe, even if her domain extended only to dolls and model cars and things that go beep in the night. God only knew what a corporate veteran like Merritt thought of her.

  “Did you find the gangbanger who shot my dad?”

  “Will your brother be joining us?” I asked.

  “He’d better.” She checked her watch and frowned, causing an ugly crease to form between her eyes. “We’ve got a big conference call in fifteen minutes. My sixth for the day.”

  It was not quite four. “That’s quite a schedule,” Thor observed.

  “I don’t know how my dad did it. And the day’s just getting started at our Asian manufacturing plants.” She cast a petulant look in Merritt’s direction. “I won’t leave here before ten tonight.”

  “It must be quite a challenge,” Thor went on, “taking the reins from your father at so young an age.”

  Merritt checked his cufflinks and smoothed his rep tie before saying, “Pending the results of the search, the board has placed its complete confidence in Ms. Zuccari’s abilities.”