Perfectly Good Crime

by Dete Meserve

  “I’ve seen you on the news.” he said.

  I glanced at my father before answering. “Yes, on Channel Eleven.”

  “Stephen is hosting the fundraiser for Congressman Blair on Sunday,” my dad said, changing the subject. “Kate will be attending with me.”

  This was the part of these fundraising events I dreaded. From my experience, most of the evening would be dominated by polite introductions, pointless chitchat, and subtle bragging, occasionally punctuated by an interesting, but always brief, discussion about a noncontroversial subject.

  My dad lowered his voice. “I’m sorry to hear about the incident at your home,” he said to Stephen.

  Stephen shifted his weight to the other leg and looked down at his drink. “Everything should be ready by Sunday.”

  “Incident?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what my father was referring to.

  “If you’d rather not—” my dad started.

  “I’m not talking publicly about it,” he said, looking straight at me. “But my home was robbed in the recent heists.”

  “By a very sophisticated group of thieves,” I said. “Are there any suspects?”

  He shot me a frosty smile. “It would be my luck to meet the only reporter invited to tonight’s event.” There was no mistaking the irritation in his tone.

  My dad smiled nervously at me. No doubt Stephen was a big fish in my father’s world, and I could feel my dad silently urging me not to ask any more questions.

  “I’m not here as a reporter,” I said, touching my father’s arm. “I’m here to spend time with my father.”

  “Good, then,” Stephen said. “Completely off the record? I think the police know more than they’re saying. They’ve refused to share the results of their investigation with me. The other victim—Richard Ingram—told me he’s experiencing the same wall of silence. And…there have been other irregularities.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Like?”

  “Katie, no more questions,” my dad chided.

  “This is off the record,” Stephen continued in a tone that left no doubt that it was. “But it looks like an inside job. The police know that it’s a group of their own that’s behind these heists.”

  Before I could ask any more questions, a trio of political types introduced themselves to my father and started talking about Social Security and some energy initiatives in public buildings. I wanted to continue the discussion with Stephen but there wasn’t a polite way to do that now that the conversation had shifted to weightier matters.

  I used this interruption as an opportunity to slip away. In all the fundraising events I’d attended at my dad’s request—er, demand—I had developed a survival technique of finding moments where I could take a break in a different room of the hotel or home. Since this event was in a tent outdoors, there wasn’t any place to escape to. So I stood near the corner of the bar and pretended to look at my phone as I thought about what Stephen had said. Was he right about this—police officers being responsible? Was that why Jake had said the police had put a cone of silence around the investigation and spoken cryptically about “someone spending a lot of time and money to orchestrate these burglaries and not for the reasons we all suspect”?

  Or was Stephen just a disgruntled estate owner, blaming the police out of frustration that they had no suspects and no leads?

  After the brief speeches made by a number of politicians, including my dad, and after the exclusive group had dug into the braised beef short rib with fingerling potato hash, I found my opportunity to leave.

  “I’m taking off,” I told my dad, who had been seated next to me at dinner but had spent most of the first and second courses engrossed in a conversation with a Nebraska senator to his right.

  “You’ll miss the dessert,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder.

  “I’ll be at the fundraiser at Stephen Bening’s on Sunday. I’ll get dessert then.”

  “Katie, please don’t go after Stephen to talk about the heist at his estate. Promise me you’ll respect his privacy.”

  “I will,” I said, kissing him on the cheek.

  As I left the tent, I scanned the room to see if Stephen was still at the event. He wasn’t. But if he had been, I wouldn’t have kept my promise.

  Hurricane Juanita had expanded to become a superstorm with high winds covering about five hundred miles, cutting a swath from Charleston, South Carolina, to Virginia Beach. Drenching rains and high winds had traveled up the East Coast, causing massive flooding, toppling trees and power lines, and plunging cities and towns into darkness. Three days had passed and I still had not heard from Eric. Now my worry was at its peak. Had he been injured—or worse—in the hurricane? Twenty-seven people had already died in the storm and dozens more were reported missing. Had the storm wiped out cell communications? Or had he simply lost his phone?

  I rose early the next morning, skipped my run, and jumped online from home to gain access to the station’s news databases. I searched all of them, looking for information on the firefighters who were trapped in the collapsed school building, but according to the Associated Press, the names still had not been released.

  I wondered what other girlfriends, partners, and spouses of firefighters did—those who didn’t have access to Reuters, Associated Press, and every news database in the country. How did they manage their anxiety when they couldn’t comb through reams of reports and information?

  I called the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Station No. 8 where Eric’s team is based. The firefighter who answered the phone said he couldn’t release any information about the Urban Search and Rescue team in South Carolina, but he could connect me with the public information officer.

  In my experience it could take hours and maybe days to hear back from a busy PIO, especially in the midst of a superstorm on the other side of the continent. “Would you put me on with your captain?”

  I waited on hold for a long time until a man’s voice finally came on the phone. “Cap’n Smythe.” He sounded irritated.

  “Captain, this is Kate Bradley from Channel Eleven News. We have reports that some USAR team members are trapped underneath a school building in South Carolina in the midst of Hurricane Juanita. Can you tell me if any of them are from the LA-based task force?

  “It’s Fire Department policy not to release that information. We don’t make announcements until we know everything, until the family has been notified. We don’t want to give out the wrong information. That why Firefighter Heyman suggested you contact the PIO.”

  “Can you tell me anything?” I said, my voice wobbling. “This is not just a news story for me. It’s…personal. I’m worried about Eric Hayes.”

  His voice softened. “Even our own families can’t get information about us at an incident. All I can tell you is that some LA firefighters have sustained injuries in Hurricane Juanita. I can’t tell you who or the extent of the injuries.”

  I kept it together after I hung up. My hand shook as I clicked on the website for the NBC affiliate in South Carolina but otherwise, I was oddly calm as I watched a report on a small town that had been swamped by a huge morning tide, which raged over a concrete seawall.

  I tried to grasp the allure of traveling three thousand miles to rescue strangers from rushing water, fires, and disaster. Eric’s training had instilled in him a real understanding of the dangers involved, yet he still woke up every day ready to put himself in harm’s way in order to help others.

  On the surface, the lives of a fire captain and a TV news reporter may seem very different, yet in many ways we understood each other. After a particularly difficult rescue, I could look into his eyes and know exactly what he was feeling, even though I had never been in a burning building or pulled someone out of rushing water. And he was the only one who understood why I had curled up on the couch with exhaustion after a long day reporting about a young boy lost in the Angeles National Forest.

  Now I
wanted him home. Away from the excitement and action he loved. I wanted him here with me. I’ve never been one to long for things or to pine for another person. So this feeling of needing him—the hollow place inside that yearned for him—was new territory for me.

  “Overnight flooding led to a dramatic rescue this morning after a family of three was caught in rushing water on a road, overturning their car,” the reporter was saying. “Large chunks of asphalt and boulders cascaded down the road as firefighters from the Urban Search and Rescue task force used ropes to stabilize the vehicle, then evacuated the family.”

  In the blinding rain, a team of rescuers was lowered into the churning waters, then the tall rescuer wrenched open the car’s door and the others brought out a little girl, no more than four years old, and then her parents. I stopped the video and studied the profile of one of the rescuers.

  I would recognize that face anywhere. Handsome, even wearing a yellow dry suit and bulky black flotation vest. Eric’s gaze was locked on the little girl he was carrying, reassuring her as he waded through rushing waters in the powerful storm.

  I peered again at the screen, making doubly sure that the blurry image was Eric.

  “Come home,” I whispered to his image on the screen.

  The assignment meeting had already started by the time I arrived in the Fish Bowl that morning. David was in the midst of a mini-lecture and, thankfully, didn’t seem to notice my late arrival.

  “This is clearly a sophisticated operation,” he was saying. “Folks, already ten million dollars in cash and high-priced items have been stolen in what are easily the largest hauls in LA history. The thieves are going for high-end, highly saleable items that only the ultra-rich can afford. Susan, tell us what was stolen from La Villa de la Paz.”

  My blood pressure rose as Susan opened her leather-bound notebook and flipped through the pages. From the satisfied expression on her face, I had no doubt she was gunning to make this her story.

  “The owner of the estate refused an interview. But his assistant gave me a list of a few of the items reported stolen. I have a feeling he’s going to get in trouble for that but here it is: A Hublot watch worth thirty-nine thousand, a Lana Marks Cleopatra bag worth two hundred fifty thousand, a rare Cartier gold bracelet that sells for nineteen thousand dollars, a Patek Philippe Reference 1436 watch that goes for two hundred ten thousand, a Fendi dyed mink and fox bag that retails for seven thousand dollars. They also took a case of wine that he bought at auction for a hundred twenty-three thousand—”

  “That’s crazy,” Russ interrupted. “What kind of wine costs a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars a case?”

  Susan shot him a withering look. “You’re missing the point. The owner—a billionaire named Don Chase—has a wine cellar with over two thousand rare bottles. The thieves knew exactly which case was the most valuable and didn’t disturb any of the others.”

  Russ shrugged. “Clearly an inside job then. Did they interrogate the sommelier?”

  That got a few laughs from the group, even though I suspected some in the room thought a sommelier was someone from Somalia.

  “Let’s be vigilant on this story.” David took a gulp of green juice from a sixteen-ounce jug. “It’s got stickiness with our viewers and sweeps start next week. We need a bump this month.”

  In the last ratings period, Channel Eleven had jumped from fourth to second place out of seven stations, but a lot of that gain had been attributed to my Good Sam reports. I knew our senior VP of news, Bonnie Ungar, and the executive team were worried we’d slip back to fourth place.

  “Police aren’t talking about the heists,” David continued. “What we really need is to talk to the billionaires whose estates were robbed.”

  “Good luck with that,” Russ said. “We’d be more likely to score an interview with the president than one of those highly guarded plutocrats.”

  “Actually, I am going to be meeting Stephen Bening, the owner of Chateau de Soleil, at a fundraiser at his home on Sunday,” I said.

  Susan turned to look at me. When she realized I wasn’t joking, her face turned pale with surprise.

  David smiled. “Exactly what we need.”

  Apparently Andrew Wright, the executive vice president of news at ANC, has a short list of places where he’ll meet for lunch in LA. All of them were on the west side, which meant a thirty-minute commute for me; all of them had low noise levels so we could speak without shouting; and, unfortunately, all of them were fairly high-traffic restaurants where I was likely to run into colleagues and news sources.

  Which is why I argued with my dad’s assistant, Lisa, about where I would meet Andrew for the lunch my dad had set up. Smart people don’t argue with Lisa. In the twelve years she’d been working with my dad, she had developed a way of making her intentions clear without ever raising her voice. And she almost always got her way.

  But thankfully she’s also practical. When I explained that I couldn’t take off in the middle of a news day to meet Andrew across town, she tried to make it a dinner. And when I relayed that it wouldn’t be smart for a reporter under contract with one station to be seen meeting with a highly placed news executive of a cable network, Andrew agreed to move the lunch to a small bakery on Melrose Avenue, the kind where you sit at rough-hewn wooden tables and choose from a menu of organic items like couscous and quinoa salads. Because the bakery was on the ultra-trendy part of Melrose Avenue—between a vintage shop named Resurrection and another named The Way We Wore—I was pretty confident I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew.

  Andrew might have been dressed like a network executive in his gray suit and polished shoes, but he had reporter blood in his veins. Before he rose through the ranks to executive heights, he had been a field reporter for local news—first for an all-news radio station in Buffalo, New York, then as a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Washington, DC.

  “I get it,” he said as we lunched on winter quinoa tabbouleh and hummus. “My news director would have put me on the shit stories for weeks if he found out I was meeting with another network.”

  “I hope I’m not wasting your time. Because, as my father knows—and I hope he told you—I’m not interested in shifting focus into political reporting.”

  “I’ve known your dad a long time and I know his agenda. But I’m not here to do his bidding. I’ve watched your reel, and your reports are excellent. I mean it when I say you’re probably one of the top breaking-news reporters out there right now.”

  I felt warm at what he said. David and Bonnie weren’t ones to dole out praise very often, and hearing it from someone with Andrew’s experience felt good.

  “I’m eager to hear what you want to do next,” he continued.

  Next. What did he mean by that? I had turned twenty-nine a few months before and hadn’t given much thought to what came next.

  He leaned forward. “Do you want to anchor? Report for a news magazine? Network news? Have your own news show?”

  His words made me dizzy. “I actually like covering breaking news.”

  Andrew had seen a lot in his years as a reporter and he had the wrinkles to prove it. In his early fifties, he still had a full head of curly brown hair. “I was like you too, you know. I reported from Tiananmen Square the night of the government’s crackdown and it took me weeks to recover. But covering murders, disasters, tragedy…that can take a toll on a reporter.”

  He’d hit a nerve and knew it. As much as I liked covering breaking news, stories of tragedy chipped away at my optimism and hope.

  “You can’t do it forever.” He rolled up his right sleeve. “You might find that reporting for ANC gives you a wider array of stories to cover.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Where would a job in New York leave Eric and me? Our relationship was still so new that we hadn’t talked about either of us leaving LA.

  Andrew must have sensed my reluctance because he took an unexpected approach. “I have an idea. Why don�
�t you come on James Russell’s show and talk about the heists?”

  James Russell was a political reporter on ANC who hosted a nightly hour-long talk show and was known for tackling big issues, but not without controversy.

  “My news director—”

  “They’ll say yes. This’ll be great promotion for you and Channel Eleven. If it’s okay with you, I’ll call this afternoon. It’s Bonnie Ungar running that shop, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. He worked so fast he made my head spin. I’d come here expecting to declare all the reasons for my disinterest in political reporting, and within minutes, he had me coming aboard as a guest on a political talk show.

  “I’m not a pundit—”

  “I don’t need another pundit,” he said, waving his hand. “What I need is someone out there relentlessly investigating, reporting on the big stories firsthand.” He smiled and leaned back in his chair. “I think you’re going to like the experience more than you know.”

  Chapter Five

  Stephen Bening’s Chateau de Soleil is hardly a chateau. In fact, it probably dwarfs most French castles and manor houses. The mega mansion, situated on ten acres of formal gardens, orchards, and ornate fountains, is located in what’s called the Platinum Triangle—an exclusive area that includes Bel Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Hills and is home to Hollywood celebrities, luxury shopping, and some of the most expensive estates in the world.

  The fundraising event, featuring a speech by the vice president, was held in a ballroom that rivaled those in most fine hotels. Priceless artworks lined walls graced by pilasters with gold crowns. A painted ceiling with majestic chandeliers soared twenty feet above our heads.

  A symphony orchestra and band entertained guests while they mingled with political stars. Unlike the other fundraising event, however, there were no celebrities or famous athletes in attendance. I’d seen a few of the faces in the room grace the pages of the Wall Street Journal and a few others from various lists in Forbes magazine.