“And that’s when you met at Horner’s?”
“Right. Except he didn’t run anything by me. We just talked bullshit. You know, sports, girls, old college times, stuff like that.”
“That’s it?”
“I mean he asked me how work was going and all. I was pretty drunk and started telling him about how good things were going for me, you know.” Fein looked around to see if somebody might be listening in on our conversation. “He already knew that Lionel Stroud was one of the clients whose books I audited. He wanted me to talk about that.”
Another lie exposed: Fein did know Stroud. “So what did you tell him about Stroud.”
“Not a lot really. I mean he seemed to know a lot about him already. He’d done an analysis of Stroud’s returns compared to the market. He took out these spreadsheets, graphs and other shit. He sounded like he was a huge fan of the guy.” This part jived with what Horner had told me about the meeting.
“I was drunk by that point,” Fein continued. “I told him that Stroud was my biggest cash cow and I didn’t have to do squat to earn it. I was bragging because he thought Stroud was such a big shot. It was stupid to say. I basically said I rubber-stamped the books that Stroud’s firm gave me and collected seventy-five grand a year in return.”
“Did that impress Ziebell?”
“I thought it did,” Fein said. “He gave me a high five when I told him how much I made on the account. He made me say it again.”
“Say what again?”
“That I made seventy-five thousand dollars for auditing Stroud.”
“Why would he do that?”
Fein looked like he might be sick. “Because he recorded everything I said. He just wanted to be sure he got it on the tape.”
“He told you that?”
Fein’s expression became even more hang dog. “No, Lionel Stroud did.”
“Ziebell gave Stroud the recording?”
“No, Ziebell played it to him over the phone. He said he would give him the recording if Stroud gave him two million dollars. Stroud was not happy. He went ballistic on me, called me an irresponsible little shit and fired me on the spot. I don’t blame him.”
“I’m not seeing why you telling Ziebell that you did a bad job of auditing Stroud’s books would be worth two million dollars to Stroud.”
A roar erupted from the fans as a River Cat hit a home run. Celebratory music blared over the PA system while the hitter circled the bases. Fein let the noise abate before speaking again.
“I don’t really know why either,” he said. “But then the next thing I know the SEC sent me a letter, followed by a phone call, demanding that I appear before them on matters related to Lionel Stroud Investments. I figured that Stroud didn’t pay the two million and that Ziebell turned the tape over to the SEC to spite him.”
“And then the SEC contacted you to investigate your lax auditing practices. That still doesn’t put Stroud in hot water.”
“No, but it put me in deep shit. Since I might be up against Stroud and the SEC, I knew I needed a good lawyer. Prudence took me on because she can’t stand Stroud for some reason. Some perceived slight or something from years ago. Anyway, she took me on for a quarter of her usual fee.”
“So what did you talk to the SEC about?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “That’s privileged stuff, but it was mainly about Stroud and how I handled the books. That’s what I did all day today—going over Stroud’s books. They looked okay to me. To be honest, though, I don’t really know what they are looking for. But it sounds like whatever it is, Stroud is in deeper shit than I am.”
thirty-eight
Between my house and my destination stretched 413 miles of road, mostly freeway, mainly through lonely farmland interspersed occasionally with gas stations and fast food restaurants. Interstate 5 and its first cousin Interstate 405—built to eat up the miles between the metropolitan areas of the north state and those of the south—gulped about 400 of those miles with stern, straight line efficiency.
I packed light for the trip—a change of clothes and some toiletries thrown into a gym bag—intending to do little more than drive to the address Jill had given me and return, stopping only when I felt too tired to drive safely. The judge told me not to leave Sacramento County. Taking a commercial flight would risk someone seeing me at the airport, prompting the DA to check local flight manifests to learn that I’d broken the judge’s order. I didn’t look forward to the desolate drive, but it seemed the only way to leave town cleanly.
I merged onto I-5 not one mile from my house and prepared to hunker down until I needed gas and caffeine. It was nine o’clock at night, the River Cats-Padres game no doubt continuing on as I started my journey. If I limited my stops as planned, I would arrive in Seal Beach between three and four in the morning.
I flew by Elk Grove, Lodi and Stockton, averaging 80 miles per hour, the traffic light at that hour. Ziebell’s failed blackmail attempt and Barry Fein’s assessment that Stroud was likely in deep shit all but confirmed that the old man was behind the killings. If he had left the country, then there was little I could do to track him down, other than maybe getting my hands on his flight plan and ultimate destination, but even then he could go anywhere once he touched down.
Yet something about his trip abroad didn’t seem right to me. The man had shown no proclivity in his seventy-plus years to travel overseas and had never before, according to Jill, leased a jet for personal travel. A paranoid or overly careful or whatever kind of man Stroud was at the moment typically doesn’t run to some unknown. It made more sense to me that he would go where he felt safe. If that couldn’t be his Sacramento home, then my guess was that it would be his home in Seal Beach, the big to-do with the Learjet a ruse to throw law enforcement off the tracks. Admittedly, the theory was a stretch. But pursuing it beat the alternative of sitting around at home doing nothing.
As I entered into the rolling hills in the vast central valley between Stockton and Coalinga I kept noticing self-illuminated signs beyond the barbed wire fences bordering I-5. “Thank Congress for the California Dust Bowl,” read one, “Congress—sticking it to the farmers,” read another. Several other signs featured variations of this same theme.
I passed the Harris Ranch in Coalinga after midnight, the stench from the huge cattle farm overpowering in the cool night air. The smell reminded me of the several trips Pam, Sara and I made on this same route to Disneyland in Anaheim, SeaWorld in San Diego, or just to hang out as a family on the Southern California beaches. Sara used to act so grossed out by the smell as we drove past that she would leave her shirt over her nose for nearly a half-hour after we’d passed by the ranch. Clichéd as it sounded it seemed like yesterday; it also seemed like a different lifetime ago, when I was both a husband and parent to a child. Now I was neither.
A quarter of a tank later I pulled off at the Buttonwillow exit. The freeway oasis offered several choices for gassing up the car and filling up the belly. I filled up at a Chevron station, locked the car and went into the attached convenience store. I poured myself a reasonably fresh extra large coffee and chose an egg salad on wheat sandwich from the refrigerator. I set them on the counter in front of the cashier and pulled out my wallet.
“What are all those signs about the California dustbowl and Congress?” I asked as I handed over a ten-dollar bill to the cashier.
He rang up the coffee and sandwich and gave me surprisingly little change back. “Not from around here are you?” He was pot-bellied, white, maybe my age. The name tag sewn onto the breast of his shirt identified him as ‘Nate.’
“Sacramento,” I said.
“Sacramento. Please. We do real work here. Sacramento’s a den of thieves.”
“I can’t argue with that, I suppose. Capital of the state attracts its share of vermin.” I had no desire to argue with this guy or defend Sacramento.
“Only thing worse is Washington D.C. Their water policy is to give all of it to LA so all th
e wetbacks don’t go thirsty. Meanwhile, the poor farmers don’t have enough to grow a decent crop.”
“I thought the drought was over.”
“Don’t matter to them. First they caused the entire economy to collapse because of the mortgage crisis, then they don’t let you earn a decent living on a farm that people have owned four and five generations. It’s a damned crime. People around here are broke, the whole system is broke.”
I started to leave, eager to get back on the road, but Nate wasn’t through.
“I used to have a good job. Now I’m lucky to have this, a clerk in a goddamned mini-mart. My pension’s all gone thanks to the bankers and politicians. Everyone’s getting ripped off. Everyone but the rich. They just keep getting richer.”
“Have a good night,” I said. I don’t think Nate had a good night in him.
The Grapevine broke the monotony of the straight, flat drive down the valley. As I climbed the Tehachapi Mountains, their summits peaking at 8,000 feet, I started singing “Hot Rod Lincoln,” the 1951 song by Charlie Ryan in which he gets pulled over by the police for racing up “Grapevine Hill.” Later, when I passed by Westwood, where Sara lived, I gave a wave in her direction, sad that I could not stop in to say hello on this trip.
I passed the north city limit sign of Seal Beach at exactly three thirty in the morning. It took another five minutes to find the Seal Avenue address of Lionel Stroud’s home. I cruised by slowly. The beachfront home had no fences or gates to prevent either a street or beachside entrance. The blockish, three-story structure towered above the single-storied homes on either side. As were all the homes on the street, the Stroud house was dark with no signs of life, the driveway empty.
I contemplated knocking on the door now to surprise Stroud if he was in fact inside, but rejected that plan because he could simply pretend not to be there. Breaking in would almost certainly trigger a burglar alarm. Impatient as I felt, I decided it best to wait until dawn.
I drove into the parking lot of a Ralph’s Supermarket on Pacific Coast Highway, reclined the driver’s seat and dozed fitfully for three hours. At sunup I walked to the Seal Beach pier and then along the shoreline until I was even with Stroud’s home. It felt good to get some exercise after the long drive and the nap in the car. I trudged inland, the going tougher as the sand became drier the farther from the surf. Already joggers had begun their morning rituals along the shoreline. The tide was out leaving a wide expanse of wet sand for them to run on. On the north side of the pier a handful of people walked their dogs along the boardwalk. A slight breeze drifted in from the ocean, and the sky filled with seagulls gliding in from the sea.
Fifty yards from the house I could see the lights on in all three stories of Stroud’s house. The blinds had been drawn so I could not see inside.
With no fence or anything to deter me I walked onto the low, beachside porch. There was a French door to the right of two first-floor picture windows shuttered from the inside. I walked to the door, cupped my hands around my eyes to reduce the glare and put my nose against the glass.
Inside, Lionel Stroud sipped a cup of coffee while examining the newspaper. I reached for the door handle, twisted it and pushed. The clanging of a burglar alarm violated the morning calm. Out of my peripheral vision I sensed movement on either side.
“Freeze there, maggot,” said a voice to my right.
From the left another figure appeared. Two men. And both of them pointing guns at my head.
thirty-nine
They escorted me into the living room and told me to sit on the couch. Stroud glared at me, standing now at the kitchen table a few feet away.
“You can put the guns away,” he told the two men. They were large, well over six-feet and two-hundred fifty pounds, in their 30s and looked like ex-cops or military. Stroud turned his attention to me and shook his head. “You don’t learn do you?”
“I’ve always been a slow learner. But I make up for it with my looks.”
“You can leave us,” he said to the two bodyguards. Stroud wore a dark blue jogging suit with matching sweat top and pants, three white stripes running down the sides of the arms and legs.
The two men took a moment to give me a dirty look, but did as told. One exited through the beachside French door through which we entered the house, the other went out through the front door, presumably to return to their posts.
“I thought you were heading to South America via the Cayman Islands?” I said, my voice tight, nerves strangling the swagger I tried to effect.
“How did you figure out I didn’t? I didn’t tell anyone, not even the pilot until we were almost over Texas.”
“A hunch. It didn’t make sense to me that you’d leave the country, even if the police are swarming after you.”
“The police? I’m not worried about the police.”
The man’s arrogance inspired awe. Lionel Stroud thought—no, knew in his mind—that he stood above the law.
“You figure you can kill two people and have the police look the other way? You think your money buys you immunity from justice?”
He looked at me long and hard. He walked in from the kitchen, still holding his cup of coffee and sat down in a plush chair on the other side of the coffee table from me.
“You think I killed Norris and Ziebell? That’s why you’re here, to instigate a citizen’s arrest or some other equally misguided stunt?”
“Did you know that I’ve been arrested for their murders?”
“I heard that rumor. It’s preposterous. You’ve been a complete nuisance and in no way a benefit to me, but a murderer? I doubt that’s the case.”
“But you implied when we last met at the golf course that you were going to talk with Trujillo and tell them that I might be involved,” I said.
“I was angry. It was very impudent of you to confront me at the country club like that.”
“You are a hard man to find, Lionel. And you know what? I’m not buying that you didn’t kill those men. They were blackmailing you and the only way you thought you could stop them was murder. So what did they know? That you were ripping off your clients?”
“Oh, dear lord, you are so in over your head.” He set his coffee cup down on the table and then slumped back in the chair.
“If you didn’t kill those guys then why did you run out of town and come here to hide?”
“Because I’m afraid for my life,” he said. “Whoever killed Norris and Ziebell is probably after me. Why do you think I’ve got the bodyguards? And that’s just two of them. I have six more—two upstairs and two each in the houses I own on either side of us.”
I thought about that. If not Stroud, then who? No, it had to be Stroud. I just needed to know the right buttons to push.
“When you met Ziebell at Capitol Park that day what did he show you? What did he have that pushed you over the brink? Was it the tape of Fein admitting he barely looked at your books?”
“Goddamnit!” Stroud slammed the palms of both hands against the arms of the chair. “I didn’t kill them. That little weasel Ziebell caused all of this. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Anything to get you out of my business.”
Stroud seethed for several moments, his eyes piercing me with contempt. I thought that despite what he’d just said that he was done talking and would call in the bodyguards and either kill me or, more mercifully, show me the door.
“You were saying?” I said, unable to endure his hard, silent stare any longer.
“From what I can tell, Craig Ziebell somehow infiltrated Del Paso Country Club and became a member. After their round of golf, Ziebell overheard a couple of my clients talking about how well their investment portfolios performed. He asked them who their broker was and they told them me. I heard about this from a couple of them later on. My success as a financial advisor sent him on a fishing expedition.”
My puzzled reaction prompted Stroud to clarify.
“He went snooping around and learned that Andrew Norris worked for me and h
andled several high profile accounts. This is where the little piece of filth got lucky. He bulldozed his way into a meeting with Norris and told him that the returns his clients were getting were too good to be true in this economy and that my firm was running a Ponzi Scheme. He told Andrew that unless he paid him five thousand a month that he would go to the SEC.”
“He would know a Ponzi Scheme if he saw it,” I said. “He had a history, you know.”
“Of course I know. So little scared wimp that Andrew is, he goes in and checks the books for his accounts, or at least a handful of them.”
“Including Charles Burke, Blake Rios and the Tylers,” I said. Stroud nodded.
“Then Andrew, who has taken maybe two accounting classes in his entire life, determines that the returns the clients are getting are in fact artificial. At that point, he thinks Ziebell is right and starts paying him the five grand a month to keep him quiet.”
“Because he thinks the authorities might think he’s in on the scheme.”
“Alleged scheme. There is no scheme. If Andrew had come to me immediately we could have avoided this entire fiasco.”
That was two months ago,” I said. “What happened after Norris started paying Ziebell?”
“That’s why I called it a fishing expedition. If Andrew had simply told him to go away, Ziebell would have thought he guessed wrong and backed off. But once he got Andrew to pay him off, he knew that he had been right. Or, more accurately, that he got Norris to think he was right. That’s when he decided to go for the big score rather than a mere five thousand dollars a month.”
“So he contacted you.”
“Called me up and said that he knew what I was up to and that he would go away for $5 million. I laughed at him, but he said he had proof. He played a recording of a drunken Barry Fein bragging about how he never looked at my books but rubber stamped them because they were golden. Ziebell said he had more proof, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. I needed to know what he thought he had.”
Courage Matters: A Ray Courage Mystery (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 17