My heart was pounding. “What did he say?”
“He was sorry he didn’t come last Saturday, but he’d be back for our usual get-together tomorrow.”
“Anything else?”
“He said the capital of Arizona was still Phoenix, but there was a new capital of California. North Hollywood. I think he just made that up to tease me.”
North Hollywood was a town in the San Fernando Valley and certainly not the capital of California. I wondered what Eugene meant by it. Maybe he’d found some evidence linking the city to the chocolate pot. If so, he was closing in on a killer, which meant he was in more danger than ever.
Armed with the photo of Eugene, I drove to the Long Beach airport to meet Jordan Rich for our flight to Catalina. I hadn’t been to the island in years. I remembered it as rustic and quaint, an unspoiled treasure twenty-six miles across the sea from a string of crowded cities linked by ribbons of freeway. At one time or the other, Catalina had been home to Native Americans, Spanish explorers, Yankee smugglers, and Union soldiers. In 1919, William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum mogul, bought controlling interest of the island and turned it into a playground for sport fishermen, yachts-men, and Hollywood celebrities. The island was now under the control of the Catalina Island Conservancy, whose mission was to preserve the land for posterity.
Once at the airport, I turned into the hangar parking area under the SIGNATURE AVIATION sign and left the Boxster in the visitor’s area. I found Jordan inside the hangar, looking through a metal binder.
A young man stood behind the counter, speaking to him. “The seven-twenty X is right outside. Oil is checked, windshield cleaned, and preflight complete.”
Jordan nodded but kept reading, as if he appreciated the information but preferred to verify it himself. I didn’t want to disturb him, so I paused by the door to watch. He was dressed casually. His hair was ruffled by the wind, which made him seem boyish, but it was the compassion in his eyes that made him handsome. I waited until he set the binder down before walking toward him.
He flashed a warm smile when he saw me. “Are you ready to go?”
“I think so. What’s that book you were just reading? I hope it wasn’t Flying for Dummies.”
He laughed. I was glad, because I hadn’t meant to offend him.
“It’s an aircraft logbook,” he said. “I always check the maintenance history myself. Good pilots don’t take anything for granted.”
“That’s comforting news.”
I followed him through the hangar. Just outside the door, I spotted a miniature airplane perched on three toylike tires. I was hoping it was some kind of horrible mistake. The thing looked too frail to play with, much less to fly.
“This is your airplane?” I said.
“Actually, no. I have a Cessna Citation at John Wayne in Orange County. It’s perfect for long-distance trips, like to Central America, but the Catalina runway is too short for the jet, so I borrowed this Piper Warrior from a buddy of mine. He’s too busy with work to fly much, so he’s always trying to get me to take it out more.”
Contrary to its menacing name, the Piper Warrior didn’t look as if it would fair well in a fight. Jordan helped me up to the wing and into the airplane. Then he climbed into the pilot’s seat and focused on his preflight ritual.
“Here. Put this on,” Jordan said, laying a pair of large earmuffs in my lap. “The headset has a voice-activated hot microphone intercom. Talk in a normal voice and I’ll hear you just fine. You can also hear me talk on the radio to Air Traffic Control, so that might be a good time to just listen.”
Jordan Rich was telling me to keep my mouth shut. He didn’t know me well enough to realize it was a risky move and not for the faint of heart. He saved himself by flashing a teasing smile to show he meant no offense. He fastened my seat belt and then his. A moment later, a twin-engine aircraft swung around in front of us, blasting the Piper with a gust of air so strong it made the airplane shudder.
“Maybe I should just interview Aidan Malloy on the telephone,” I said.
Jordan smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s just prop wash.”
Prop wash or not, the mini Piper wasn’t winning any points with me.
Jordan shouted out the window. “Clear!” He put on his headset and glanced around the airplane. A moment later, he engaged the starter. The Piper shook. Instrument dials spun into position. Panel lights flickered on.
“Are you sure this thing can fly?” I shouted over the noise.
Jordan raised a finger and tapped one ear of his headset. I slipped mine on and glanced around the cockpit, looking for parachutes.
Jordan’s voice echoed through the headset. “We have a beautiful day for flying. You’re going to like this.”
Yeah, sure. Easy for him to say.
“Long Beach tower,” he said. “Piper seven-twenty X at Signature, with information Kilo, ready for taxi. VFR to Catalina.”
I heard an unfamiliar voice. “Piper seven-twenty X cleared to taxi to runway three-zero via Alpha, Foxtrot, Bravo, altimeter twenty-nine-point-ninety-seven inches.”
Jordan responded. “Long Beach tower, Piper seven-twenty X is ready for takeoff, runway three-zero.”
“Roger—cleared for takeoff. Wind three-ten at twelve knots.”
I was so concerned about ceding control to a man I barely knew that I didn’t notice the Piper lifting off the runway. Below us, the airport, the freeways, and soon the entire Southern California coastline slipped away as the airplane climbed in a gentle banking turn across the beach and headed out toward the Pacific Ocean.
We were in the air less than thirty minutes when Jordan said, “Okay, here’s something you should know. The runway at Catalina is safe, but depending on the weather, the approach and landing can either be a nonevent or very challenging. In a minute, you’ll see a fifteen-hundred-foot cliff in the distance. Gusty winds come up that slope. They can make for a bumpy ride. I’ll put us down in the first five hundred feet, but it may be a little rough.”
My breathing felt shallow. “Sounds tricky.”
Jordan scanned the skies, looking for air traffic. “Not really, but you have to pay attention.”
All I could think was, What happens if you don’t?
As we approached the airport, I saw a barren hill dotted with sagebrush and a narrow strip of pavement that dropped off into nowhere. Beyond the cliff was nothing but the endless blue of the Pacific Ocean. It felt as if we were about to land on an aircraft carrier in the middle of nowhere. I hoped Jordan would tell me if we got into trouble. If my life was going to flash before my eyes, I wanted time to watch the show.
Despite my image of flaming wreckage, Jordan kept the Piper steady, countering the destabilizing gusts of wind with practiced ease. The airplane lightly touched down with an audible tire chirp and rolled smoothly to the runway exit. There was no control tower in Avalon, but nevertheless Jordan announced our arrival to no one in particular.
“Catalina Traffic. Piper seven-twenty X clear of runway twenty-five.”
Jordan switched off the engine and removed his headset. I studied him for a long, pensive moment, admiring his capable handling of the flight and his jittery passenger. Surgeon. Pilot. Humanitarian. Nice guy. He could do it all. If he wanted to add a relationship with me to his resume, it would likely be a bigger challenge than landing at the Avalon airport.
When I planted my feet on terra firma, I began to breathe normally. The wind had cleared away the clouds. The air was crisp and the sun warmed my face. We walked to the terminal building and boarded a van that took us along a winding road through the arid hills. We passed a herd of mangy buffalo, which, according to the driver, was brought to the island in the twenties to work as extras in a movie. When the film wrapped, the actors and crew went back to the mainland. The buffalo stayed on the island. I hoped they were still getting residuals, because it could be a long time until their next acting gig.
Twenty-five minutes later we arrived in Avalon, the larger of two sm
all towns on Santa Catalina Island. We strolled along Casino Way, a narrow walking street lined with palm trees and small shops. Beyond the small, pebbly beach was a harbor filled with dozens of boats tethered to white mooring balls.
We found the golf cart-rental stand where Aidan Malloy had once worked, but he wasn’t there. His former boss told us he had taken a job as a busboy at the Catalina Country Club, so we hiked a short distance up the hill, past a row of Hansel and Gretel cottages, where we found Aidan Malloy filling saltshakers at a busing station on the patio outside the restaurant.
Malloy was a lanky, good-looking kid in his late teens. He told us he’d moved to L.A. to find work as an actor. He’d been living with an aunt in Rancho Park and supporting himself by working at Rossi’s restaurant while he waited for Hollywood to come calling. He’d grown up on the island, where the main mode of transportation was golf cart, so he wasn’t an experienced driver. Denting the Bentley had dampened his hunger for life in the big city. Getting fired was the tipping point. He decided to come home to rethink his future. I showed him the photo of Eugene and asked if he was the person he spoke to on Saturday night.
“That’s the guy,” he said. “He told me he was a reporter, investigating the murder of that cleaning woman. He wanted to know if I was working the night she died.”
“And were you?”
Aidan unscrewed the caps of all of the saltshakers and began wiping them with a towel. “Yeah. From six till eleven. He was interested in a car I saw parked behind the chocolate shop.”
“A black Mercedes with a dealer plate from Garvey Motors in Alhambra?”
He eyes opened wide in surprise. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Just a wild guess.”
“Wow. That’s awesome.”
“Not really. I saw it, too, around eight fifteen.”
Aidan began filling each shaker with salt from a carton. “I drove through that alley about a million times a night, checking for parking spaces. I saw everybody who parked there. The Mercedes came at about seven thirty.”
“Did you see anybody going in or out of the store?” I said.
“I saw the cleaning woman come out earlier in the evening. I can’t remember what time it was. She was throwing a plastic sack into the Dumpster.”
Jordan was leaning against a nearby wall, watching me operate. He listened intently but didn’t interfere. The guy was perfect.
“Did you recognize the driver of the Mercedes?” I said.
“He was all dressed up, so I figured he was one of the owners.”
“Dressed up how?”
“Suit. Tie. You know, geezer wear.”
“Was he tall, short, young, old?”
Aidan topped off the shakers and replaced the caps. “I’m eighteen. Everybody looks old to me. It was dark outside, but he seemed like average height.”
“What else did Eugene ask you?”
“A bunch of questions, mostly about Mr. Rossi. I told him what I knew, which wasn’t much. He almost blew a gasket when I told him about the cell phone I found by the Dumpster Thursday night.”
My gaskets were ready to blow, too. “What did it look like?”
“It was a girl’s phone, real dorky. And purple. It had all these sparkly things pasted all over it. The battery was dead, so there was no way to find the owner. I kept it for a few days in case somebody came back asking for it, but nobody ever did. I finally tossed it out when I got to work on Saturday.”
Helen Taggart had described Lupe Ortiz’s cell phone as purple and gaudy. It had been missing since the night of the murder, at least according to Detective O’Brien. The phone had to be Lupe’s. She must have dropped it when she went out to empty the trash.
“Where did you toss it?”
“In a trash can on Bedford.”
“So what happened next?”
“Your friend wanted to leave his old Volvo by the curb for a few minutes. He couldn’t find a place to park, and he wanted to see if the phone was still there.”
“Nectar was closed. Why didn’t he use those spaces?”
Aidan held his palms up in a gesture of apology. “There were already cars parked there.”
“So you let him stay?”
“I felt sorry for him, but I told him he had to be back in ten minutes—max. He said okay, but he didn’t come back for half an hour. Man, I was sweating bullets. It was only a matter of time before Rossi noticed the guy wasn’t in the restaurant. He gets totally freaked out about parking because it’s hard to find space for the customers.”
“Did Eugene find the phone?”
“Yeah, but I guess it took him a while to fish it out. Boy, was it ever grody. I told him the battery was dead, but he kept trying to find a signal, anyway. When he couldn’t get it to work, he asked me where the nearest Radio Shack was so he could buy a charger. I told him not to bother. It was cheaper to buy a new phone.”
I was proud of Eugene. It took an enormous amount of courage for a world-class germophobe like him to scavenge through a garbage can looking for clues. He obviously bought the charger, because I’d found the Radio Shack receipt in his desk drawer.
“What else did he say?”
“Not much. I saw Rossi watching us. I told him to move his car, and he did.”
“Did he say where he was going next?”
Aidan finished with the salt and began the same ritual with the pepper shakers, starting with the caps. “He said something about the CIA. I thought he was full of it, but he paid the valet fee and tipped me ten bucks, so what did I care?”
I didn’t understand why Eugene wanted to talk to the CIA, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t want to talk to a fake reporter. I imagined him being held in an undisclosed prison in a country that ended in stan.
“Did he say who at the CIA he planned to contact?”
“The guy’s not with the agency anymore. He’s some kind of teacher at Santa Monica College.”
Dale Ewing taught there, too. It was a big place, but maybe he’d heard of a colleague who once worked for the CIA. As soon as I got back to the mainland, I planned to ask him about it.
A middle-aged woman wearing a white chef’s apron came out of the bar. She put her hands on her hips and glared at Aidan.
“Look,” he said, “You have to go, or I’ll get fired from my second job in a week. That would be a record, even for me.”
I gave him my business card and asked him to call if he thought of anything more. Jordan and I returned to the main drag and bought a couple of burgers from Eric’s on the Pier. After that, we walked to Descanso Beach, where we sat on a retaining wall overlooking the bay and had an impromptu picnic.
Jordan told me he was from Chicago, an only child. His father was a judge. His mother raised money for various charities. He’d attended Yale as an undergrad, and Harvard University Medical School. Although he didn’t say, I gathered the family money went back more than just a couple of generations. Regardless of whether his money was ancient or merely old, Jordan Rich had lived a life of privilege. Maybe his name had been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My story wasn’t as straightforward. I told him my mother was a working actor who wasn’t always working, until she married an aging hippie yoga teacher with memory lapses and a trust fund. He listened to my story. Said it sounded like an interesting life. Maybe, I thought, but not when you’re living it.
“Have you ever been married?” he said.
“Once. You?”
“I was engaged, but we never set the date.”
“Don’t tell me she cheated on you and you found out.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Nothing so dramatic. The truth is we had different priorities. We just grew apart. I’m glad we found out before things got complicated.”
We retraced our path along Casino Way, stopping at Big Olaf’s for a homemade waffle cone before heading to the van station. It had been a pleasant day, but Eugene was still missing and I had to find him. For some reason, he wasn’t checking in
with me. Either he didn’t want to or he couldn’t. I just hoped it was the former.
I pondered what I’d learned about Eugene’s movements so far. On Saturday, he found Herbert Osteen on the Internet and called his wife. He stopped by Nectar that night to search the alley behind the store where he found Lupe’s cell phone. Later, he drove to Radio Shack to buy a charger.
On Sunday morning, he packed a bag and told his mother he was going away on business. Maybe he planned to drive to Montecito. If so, he never made it. He may have collected enough information from Osteen on the telephone to make the trip unnecessary. Osteen told him about quetzal feathers and chocolate pots, and referred him to Marianne Rogers at the Natural History Museum.
Eugene left a message on my machine on Monday, telling me he was okay but he’d gone deep undercover. He also visited Marianne Rogers and learned about the stolen chocolate pot. If Eugene suspected the pot was an authentic relic of an ancient culture, he would have tried to find out where Helen got it. Maybe he already knew. He’d been talking to her on the telephone every day and had learned her whole life story.
On Tuesday, Eugene called Lupe’s cousin to learn the name of the customer who’d given her the pot. Connie didn’t know, but during that call he found out about Lupe’s difficult life in Guatemala.
Roberto Ortiz had told me the chocolate pot’s former owner had called Lupe so many times she no longer answered her telephone. If Eugene had been able to read her call history, the numbers he found might have led him straight to her killer.
Charley was on the trail of Lupe’s customers, so I decided to contact Dale Ewing and ask him if he knew a former CIA agent who now taught at Santa Monica College. Finding the guy was a long shot, but Ewing was a friendly informant; at least that’s what I thought.
Chapter 29
Despite Friday-afternoon traffic, I made it from the Long Beach airport to my office by three o’clock, where I tried but failed to reach Dale Ewing. When I searched the Santa Monica College Web site looking for information on his classes, I discovered he taught a three-unit political science class called International Politics, which explored the “issues of war and peace among states in the international system.” It was a topic that needed more attention than a three-day-a-week course at a community college, but at least it was a start. The class was held every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 2:45 to 4:05 p.m. I didn’t want to compete for Ewing’s attention with hoards of students, so I called the school and learned he held office hours immediately following his classes. I decided to arrive early so I’d be first in line.
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