Killer In The Hills (A Jack Rhodes Mystery)

by Stephen Carpenter

  “I’m not being paid at all,” I say.

  “Rightly so,” he says.

  The retired vice cop arrives. His name is Mike, he’s in his sixties, beefy and thick, with a pock-marked, go-to-hell Irish face and a cop mustache. The hostess greets him effusively, calls him by his first name, gives him a kiss on the cheek, and leads us immediately to the best table in the room, near the bar.

  “I feel like I’m having dinner with Brad Pitt,” I say as we sit down. Mike grins.

  “There’s a reason for that,” he says.

  Our waiter breezes over and takes our drink orders and then Mike talks.

  “This was my beat for a long time,” he says. “I know everybody here, and I know all the dirt. They tried to pay me off when the news of what actually goes on here hit the press. I wouldn’t take their money, but I still get the best table when I come in.”

  “So what goes on here?” I say, after the waiter brings our drinks.

  “It’s a whorehouse,” Mike says. His eyes do a quick scan of the bar as he sips his Scotch. “From here I can count at least six or eight women at the bar who are pros, and there are probably some new faces I don’t know.”

  I do my own scan of the bar. All of the women are young, beautiful, extremely well-dressed and bejeweled, and exuding refinement as they chat with the men around them.

  “You meet at the bar, make some conversation, do a little discreet negotiation, then it’s upstairs to a suite,” Mike says. “Most johns go for a full night—most of the girls won’t do anything less. Between the suite, the bar, room service, and the girl, you can party all night like Charlie Sheen for about ten grand. Depending on your tastes.”

  “That kind of thing goes on in swag hotels in every big city,” I say. “What was the big scandal?”

  “Dope,” Mike says. “About fifteen years ago, when everybody was a high-roller, johns started asking for drugs as part of the party package. Coke, rock, meth, pharmaceuticals—uppers, mostly. If you’re paying ten thousand bucks to party all night with a gorgeous gal you don’t want to fall asleep.”

  “Still not uncommon,” Melvin says.

  “Yeah,” Mike says. “The trouble came when a doctor named Veltzin started moving his celebrity clients in here to dry out. Only Veltzin’s method of treating addiction was to give his patients more drugs—different drugs, more potent drugs. Not to mention the fact that his patients could come and go as they pleased, and there was a bar one floor down, which was full of beautiful women available at a price that a celebrity could easily afford. By the time we busted the whole thing up, pretty much the entire hotel was full of rich, famous junkies. There were some fights, some broken furniture, then a john—a Wall Street big shot—OD’d in a penthouse upstairs and we had to clean it all up. Sent the owners to prison. The good doctor put himself down with a cocktail of morphine and Dilaudid the night before he was supposed to start a twenty-year stretch.”

  “Shame,” Melvin says.

  “Yeah,” Mike says. “So the girls still work—like you say, it happens all over the place—but the dope had to go. The new owners laid down the law and the pimps enforce it: no dope, no fights, no scenes at the bar. Nothing flaky. Any girls get out of line and they suddenly find themselves out of work—at best. A couple of girls tried to sneak in some rock and they were beat up pretty bad. Long story short, it took us a while to clean the place up, and in one of the last sweeps we did I arrested Penelope Fletcher, or whatever her name is, in a sting upstairs. We traced her bond money back to a guy named Leukatov. We don’t know much about him, but he’s big in the finance end of most of the porn shot here, in the Valley—which is most of the porn in the world. He was low on our radar until the porn business got hit hard by the recession, like everything else. So Leukatov came up with a clever business model to keep bringing in the cash. He produces about two or three hundred movies a year, and employs about twenty, thirty girls at any given time, give or take. He gets ‘em hooked on dope, turns ‘em into pornstars, then turns ‘em out, usually here. They make very high dollar hooking because the johns know their work from the movies. Feel like a big man, banging a pornstar, y’know?” Mike has drained his Scotch, and raises a thick forefinger to signal for another.

  “So this guy Leukatov makes coin on the movies, the drugs, and the hooking,” Melvin says.

  “Right,” Mike says. “We also think he’s making a fortune in sex trafficking. Bringing in Russian girls, Baltic girls, South Americans, Southeast Asians…girls from all over the world. We figured the guy’s worth around ten, fifteen million. Probably a lot more by now. Nobody knows much about him except he’s a Russian national and he’s a vicious son of a bitch. He and his crew nailed a rival pimp to the floor of his house in the hills. I mean, literally. With a nail gun. None of this we can prove, of course, but we know. Everybody is scared shitless of this guy, so nobody talks.”

  That’s Hollywood in a nutshell: a rat’s nest of creepy behavior, smoothed over by a veneer of willful ignorance. There is no vice, no crime, no type of misbehavior that is reprehensible except one—making trouble for the fabulous people who run it all. You could marry a goat and no one would blink, unless the goat wanted producer credit on a movie. And even then, no one would ever say there was anything wrong with marrying a goat. Just not that goat.

  “You think the Russian killed Penelope?” I say.

  “Hard to say,” Mike says. “Doesn’t seem to be his style. Penelope was a good earner. And so far as we know, Leukatov only kills when he wants to make a point. And there doesn’t seem to be any percentage in it for him.”

  A question has been nagging at me for the last twenty-four hours, so I raise it.

  “The way she was dressed and made up, at the Chateau Marmont,” I say. “She was posed, like for a photo shoot.”

  “Yeah,” Mike says. “That means something. Don’t know what, though. My background is vice, not homicide. Thing is, I wanted to also tell you that this guy Leukatov is moving into younger girls. More and more of them are minors.”

  Mike looks at me, letting me connect the dots.

  “You’re talking about Penelope’s daughter,” I say.

  Mike gives a brief nod.

  The waiter comes to take our dinner orders, but I have suddenly lost my appetite. I resist the urge to order a Jack Daniel’s and get a salad and some sashimi. When it arrives I can’t finish it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Melvin and I are standing in the downpour outside the Hotel Molique, waiting for our Chevrolet, when he turns to me.

  “Had enough?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I’m ready to get out of LA and Melvin knows it. I have left three messages for Nicki, which she hasn’t returned, and I know I’ll lose her if I don’t come home soon. I miss her, and I could use a couple of hours in the gym down the street from my apartment, and there’s nothing for me to do here. If the girl, Karen Rhodes, really is my daughter I will come back to help her when they locate her. And with Melvin on the hunt they will locate her, and Melvin will make sure she isn’t hurt. But Melvin doesn’t need my help. I’m a distraction; my presence only adds another sideshow to what is already becoming a circus. And if I ride around one more day through the rain and the sleaze I may kill somebody and marry a goat.

  “What about the LAPD?” I say. “Can’t imagine they’ll want me to take off right now.”

  “Let me worry about them,” Melvin says. “You don’t know anything useful and FBI already knows about Leukatov.”

  “Why didn’t you say so to Mike?” I ask.

  “Wanted to see what he could tell me,” Melvin says.

  “So what do you know about him?”

  “There is no Leukatov,” Melvin says. “We’re not sure there ever was.”

  I wait for more, but I’m not as patient as Melvin.

  “And?” I say.

  Melvin shakes his head. “All you need to know right now. Go home. I’ll call you if there’s anything els
e.”

  I want to press Melvin for more, but I know I won’t get anywhere. The car pulls up and we ride off into the deluge.

  Two hours later I’m standing beneath the awning in front of the Best Western, waiting for the car I hired to pick me up and take me to LAX, back to New York, back to the clean, freezing Atlantic air and out of this creep show.

  A black Town Car pulls up—from a service I called, not from Melvin—my brief government ride-along now officially over. The driver gets out, a thickset guy who says nothing, and opens the rear door on the passenger side. I get in and see there is a young girl in the backseat next to me. Just as the driver gets behind the wheel and drives off onto Franklin, the girl turns and looks at me with her wide blue eyes.

  “Hello, Daddy,” she says.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There haven’t been many events in my life that have left me speechless, but I have been through enough to learn that when you have nothing to say, say nothing. After a long, quiet moment, the girl turns away from me and looks down at her phone as she texts someone.

  It’s definitely the girl from the video, although her hair is longer and she looks skinnier, more frail. She is pretty, but she is wearing too much makeup and her hair is threaded with thin ribbons and cheap multi-colored beads. She is wearing a white, short-waisted fleece jacket over a long-sleeved, low-cut, tie-died T-shirt that is at least three sizes too large, leaving enough of her narrow shoulders exposed to reveal two lacy red straps of some kind of undergarment. The long T-shirt hangs over her short denim skirt, a few inches above a pair of pink-and-black striped leggings that disappear into her black suede Uggs. Despite the layers of clothing, she is curled up in the corner of the back seat, her legs underneath her, her thin shoulders hunched up against the cold.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she says, without looking up from her phone.

  The driver takes the ramp to the 101.

  “Where are we going?” I say to him.

  “Airport,” he says. His accent could be Russian, but I’m not enough of a linguist to judge after a single word.

  “Well?” the girl says, texting, not looking up. “Aren’t you happy to see me, Daddy?”

  “What makes you think I’m your daddy?” I say.

  “What makes you think you’re not?” she says.

  “Well,” I reach into my pocket for my phone. “Why don’t I call my friend at the FBI and he can run our DNA just to be positive.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she says.

  “Put the phone back in your pocket,” the driver says. I catch a glimpse of a pistol as he slips it out from inside his jacket. His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. I hold his gaze for a moment, then notice him glance back, behind us. I turn and look through the rear window and see a black Hummer following.

  “Told ya,” the girl says.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble,” I say to her, for lack of anything more clever.

  “Duh,” she says, twirling her hair as she reads a text.

  My friends who have teenaged children talk about how they sometimes want to strangle their offspring. After two minutes with this girl I understand the impulse.

  “So why are you here?” I say.

  “Just wanted to meet my real daddy,” she says. “And give you a message.”

  I wait. She stares down at her phone, thumbing through texts with one hand while twirling her hair with the other.

  “What message?” I say, finally.

  “I’ll tell you when we get to the airport,” she says.

  Twenty-five minutes later we crawl through the thicket of cars and shuttles at my terminal at LAX. No one has said a word for the entire ride, but the girl has texted the equivalent of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by the time the driver stops outside the entrance to my airline. I glance back and see the Hummer pull up and stop behind us. I count the silhouettes of three men in the Hummer.

  She looks up at me.

  “Alright, here’s the message,” she says. “Go back to New York and don’t come back here. Don’t tell anyone you saw me. Don’t cooperate with the police or talk to anybody about anything. Ever. If you do, they’ll kill me. And then they’ll kill you.”

  She says it in a bland, flat voice, as if she were reciting words she had been given. There is no fear or concern in her face. Nothing.

  “Go inside,” the driver says without turning back. “Don’t look back. Get on your plane. Go now.”

  I open the door, glancing around for an airport cop. There are none in sight.

  “Well then, I guess this is it,” I say, turning to lean back into the car. “Goodbye, Karen.”

  I hold out my hand. She hesitates, glances at the driver, then puts her cold little hand in mine and I grip her wrist hard and yank her out of the car and wrap one arm around her tiny waist and carry her toward the terminal door. I hear three car doors slam behind me. The girl squirms and I squeeze her so tightly that she can hardly speak.

  “Are you crazy?” she squeaks. “What the hell are you—”

  I shove my fist up into her solar plexus, squeezing the breath out of her. I hear footsteps rushing up behind us as the automatic doors open and I head inside, holding the girl against me, her Uggs flailing just above the ground.

  We enter the terminal and I shove through a long line of passengers waiting to check their bags at the counter. People curse and push us as I plow through them. The girl squirms violently.

  “Stop it,” I say, squeezing her so hard I’m afraid I might break a frail rib. She can’t weigh more than eighty pounds. “Don’t move. Keep your head down.”

  I elbow through the angry passengers, making a beeline for a TSA security guy near the counter. I walk up to him and speak in a low voice.

  “Three guys, behind us,” I say. “I saw one of them leave an unattended bag in the men’s room back there. They saw me, and I think one of them has a gun.”

  The TSA guard—a tall, rangy black guy with a 9mm on his hip—looks at the men following us.

  “Wait right here,” he says, and walks past me, behind us. I move forward as fast as I can without running.

  “You’re fucking crazy—” Karen says.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” I say, tightening my grip around her waist. “Lower your head, keep your hair in front of your face. There are guards and cameras all over the place and the cops are looking for you.”

  I hear loud voices behind us and glance back and see the TSA guard holding back the three men from the Hummer. The men look like triplets: all of them short, dark, and thick, with close-cropped black hair and dark eyes. They are arguing with the TSA guy, who has his arms spread out to hold them back as he says something into the microphone on his shoulder.

  We move through the crowd until I see a car rental sign ahead, at the end of the long ticket counter.

  “Where are you taking me?” she says.

  “Out of here,” I say. “In five minutes this place is gonna be full of cops and you don’t want to be here. Just do what I tell you and keep quiet.”

  She stops trying to squirm away from me. I let go of her waist but keep my hand gripped around her upper arm until we reach the car rental counter. I give my credit card and license to the kid at the counter and wait, hoping the kid hasn’t watched any local news in the last 24 hours. I hate using the credit card, since it will connect us to the car, but I have no choice.

  “Give me your phone,” I say to her.

  She hesitates, then an LAPD cruiser blips its siren as it noses through the traffic outside. She looks at the police car for a moment, then gives me her phone. I open it, remove the battery, then stuff the phone and the battery in my jacket pocket.

  “You realize you just got us both killed,” she says.

  “Me, maybe,” I say. “You, I doubt it.”

  She gives a contemptuous little snort and the kid comes back to us with the rental agreement.

  “Don’t make another sound until we’re alone
in our car,” I tell her, as two cops get out of the LAPD car and enter the terminal and I sign the rental agreement.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Half an hour later the shuttle from the rental agency lets us out at the car lot about a mile from the airport. Neither of us has spoken since we were at the rental counter. We find our car—a non-descript Ford sedan. I open her door and she gets in, then I get in and drive off.

  “Where are you taking me?” she says. I’m not sure where I’m taking her yet, so I don’t answer.

  “Hello?” she says. “Can I fucking talk now?”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “What?” she says. “You fucking kidnap me and tell me to watch my mouth? Are you kidding me?”

  “Let’s not get into who kidnapped who,” I say. “It’s a weak argument on your part.”

  My phone rings: Melvin. I show her the caller ID.

  “This is a friend of mine with the FBI,” I say. “Unless you want to meet him very soon you’ll keep quiet.”

  She is quiet.

  “Hey,” I answer the phone as I get on the 405.

  “Missed your flight,” Melvin says.

  “Yeah, there was some kind of bomb threat and everything got locked down.”

  “I heard,” he says. “Something you need to know. Marsh was holding out on us. LAPD found a twenty-five auto in a trash can in a hallway of the Chateau Marmont. Ballistics just came back. Looks like a match.”

  “So they have the gun,” I say.

  “Yeah, but that’s not all,” he says. “Prints on the gun match the girl—Karen Rhodes. She was printed as a juvie for possession when she was fourteen. They’re about to issue a warrant, very publicly. Wanted you to hear it from me first.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “You hear anything about where she might be, call me first, right away, alright?”

  “Right,” I say. I have never lied to Melvin and it feels very wrong. “Melvin, have they got any security video from the hotel?”

  “Nope,” he says. “No one seems to be able to locate it. I got a couple of guys on it. Something not right with that.”