by Jesse Miles
I opened the window and took in two deep breaths of cool, clean air, then sat at the glass-top bamboo table in the dining area and gave the cookie tin a close inspection. Imprinted on the bottom was MADE IN ENGLAND. The lid was dented at the center. From the lack of heft, it felt empty. I lifted the lid. It was empty.
When I pushed myself up from the table, it let out a tortured cracking sound, and one of the legs went floppy. The cookie tin hit the floor. I grabbed the glass top before it crashed and gently set the table back in place.
I turned on another light and made a damage assessment. One table leg was broken almost all the way through. A chunk was missing from the edge of the glass tabletop. I got on my hands and knees and found small pieces of broken glass under the lower kitchen cabinets’ overhang. In the trash bag under the sink I found more shreds of broken glass and paper towels with brownish stains. Someone had done a quick-and-dirty cleanup job. I took fresh paper towels off a roll, moistened them at the faucet, and wiped the wooden floor around the table. The white towels came up with small brownish-red smears. There were dots on the wall which, when wiped with a damp paper towel, also appeared to be blood evidence.
It appeared that Rod had been on the receiving end of a violent abduction. If he hadn’t survived, he would be one of three people who had recently died in separate, suspicious circumstances. And they all knew each other. And I was connected to all three. It was time to execute the fast-exit strategy.
I grabbed a T-shirt from a laundry hamper in the bedroom, so I could wipe my prints. While I was at it, I sneered at the three cheap Monet prints on the wall. They still annoyed me, but something was different. In place of the middle Monet was a framed photo. A photo identical to the one hanging on Cinnamon Strauss’s living room wall—Cinnamon dancing on a table.
I took it down and examined it. The backing paper was slit. My knife blade enlarged the slit and fished out a folded sheet of paper on which a poem had been hand-printed.
Voices sounded through the bedroom window. I didn’t want to stick my nose through the curtains, so I stepped into the living room and peeked through a wooden shutter. Two men were standing by the corner of the neighboring house on the uphill side—the small house constructed of stone. One of them got into a car and drove away. The other man walked slowly toward his front door.
The framed print went back on the bedroom wall, and the poem went into my pocket. I used the T-shirt to wipe my prints on everything I had touched, then used my shirt tail for the final handling of the back-door knob.
I drove about halfway home, stopped at the curb, and read the poem from the framed photo. It was a two-stanza limerick.
In the Valley twelve oh five
Fatty was still alive
To get some kicks
Bullets five or six
Or seven put an end to his jive
Nostradamus gave an arcane quatrain
Make mine five and quite plain
A stretch unknown?
A stainless steel throne?
Two-Faced Queen of Disdain
The poetry led me to a few hazy conclusions. “Twelve oh five” could be May 2012 or December 2005. Someone named “Fatty” was shot and killed in the San Fernando Valley. It could have been some other valley, but for starters I went with the obvious. “Make mine five” might relate to the number of shots fired or it might be a play on words regarding the five-line limerick structure. The poet was angry at the “Two-Faced Queen of Disdain,” but the reason for the hostility was not clear.
One piece of information wasn’t the least bit hazy. “Five or six or seven” was the number of cartridges loaded into Zara’s SIG P238 at the Olympic Gun Club, depending on the girls’ moods and the condition of their fingernails at the time.
More questions were stacking up. Exactly what happened to Cinnamon Strauss? Exactly what happened to Rod Damian? What was the essential message in the limerick?
I whipped out my iPad and searched for murders in the San Fernando Valley in December 2005 and May 2012. Nothing came up.
On Wednesday, Zara had told me she was obligated to attend a charity event Thursday night. This was Thursday night. She would be at the Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA. That meant her house would probably be unoccupied, except for the two Great Danes. On the way there, I stopped at a market and picked up a bag of dog cookies.
I parked on the stone pavers near Zara’s front door and positioned my car for a quick getaway. The shadowy, narrow street looked more like an alley at night.
As I worked on the door lock, Atlas and Rex started making noise from inside. When I opened the door, they barked louder. I showed them two cookies from my coat pocket and said, “Sit.” They shut up, and their asses hit the floor in unison. I closed the door with my foot, fed the dogs, and punched in the alarm code. The dogs followed me into Zara’s office, sniffing my coat pockets.
Zara’s desk was at a window overlooking her backyard and the wooded slope to the stream. Floodlights illuminated Zara’s property most of the way down. From the house across the stream, pale ribbons of light filtered through the trees.
That was all the time I had for sightseeing. The computer was password-protected, and there was nothing of interest in the desk. I got off the chair and gazed at the file cabinets. The dogs sensed I was between tasks, and they hit me up for another snack.
My watch said eight-ten. I couldn’t imagine a charity gala finishing before nine o’clock, which would put Zara’s return to her house at nine-thirty, at the very earliest. I allowed myself twenty minutes on the file cabinets. That would give me more than a one-hour margin of safety, unless she bailed from the event early, in which case I would have to do some fast talking.
The payoff was in the middle drawer of the middle file cabinet, in the monthly financial statements from Zara’s accountant. A two-year-old report showed a disbursement of $73,500 to Latigo Alliance. The payment was made through a corporation owned by Zara Manning. The corporation was named Sparkes Investments. Dovetailing the financial statement with Sebastien Thurman’s information, it established that Zara paid Cinnamon’s tab at Latigo Alliance. How interesting.
40
4
Early the next morning, I got on my home computer and used my library card to access archived editions of The Los Angeles Times. It was a hell of a lot easier than earlier years, when I had to drive to a library branch and load reels onto a microfilm reader. I was looking for murders in the San Fernando Valley in December 2005 and May 2012.
The task reminded me of researching my father’s murder when I was ten years old. Since the age of eight or nine, I had known there was something wicked about his death, but neither Uncle Rocky nor my foster parents would give any details. I rode my Mongoose BMX bike to the library and conned a librarian into letting me use the microfilm readers, which were normally limited to adults. I told her I was researching dinosaurs for a school project, and I wanted to look for articles on the La Brea Tar Pits.
A half hour later, she caught me reading the Los Angeles Times article that appeared the day after my father’s shooting. I spouted out the truth, and the librarian read the article with me, giving me softened interpretations of the parts I didn’t understand. When I came back during the next few days, she helped me find follow-up articles on the shooting. In later years I realized she had steered me away from articles mentioning unsettling details such as the autopsy. That’s one of the reasons I like librarians.
I stopped daydreaming and found what I was looking for. An article told of a shooting in the Canoga Park district of the San Fernando Valley on Saturday, May 26, 2012. A liquor store owner named Luis Reguillo was found dead in the gutter, near his car. The shooting occurred a half mile from his store Louie’s Liquors. Reguillo was on the way to his bank deposit box after locking down his business for the night. It appeared to be a bungled robbery in which gunshots were exchanged. The deposit bag was on the sidewalk, loaded with cash. The shooting occurred in an industrial area, with no residences in the i
mmediate area. Neighbors on the next block reported hearing five to ten rapid-fire shots.
There were more details in a follow-up article dated two days later. Reguillo took three rounds. A .38 snubbie was found near him, with his prints on it. He had purchased the gun legally and had no criminal record. The police said Reguillo fired one shot but didn’t seem to hit anybody. No blood other than his was found at the scene. West Valley detectives recovered one expended shell casing from the robber’s pistol. They didn’t find the casing immediately, because Reguillo’s three hundred pounds were on top of it. The shooter tried to scoop up the expended casings before fleeing but missed that one. The police didn’t state the caliber of the stray casing.
The newspaper account said Reguillo was respected by neighbors and business owners in the area. Everyone said he was a solid citizen, always had a positive outlook. He was known to extend credit to low-income people who needed food from the deli section. The credit was on a verbal basis, and he didn’t always collect. There were no witnesses to the shooting, no video, no DNA, no nothing. The crime went unsolved.
Dewey Rubens had said Cinnamon Strauss was involved in a shooting accident in the Glassell Park district, which is not too far from Downtown LA. The newspaper said the Reguillo shooting was in the Canoga Park district, in the West San Fernando Valley. Dewey’s memory might have faltered, and he might have confused Canoga Park with Glassell Park. People make that sort of verbal mistake all the time. Dewey also might have been confused about the difference between an accident and an incident.
41
4
Louie’s Liquors was no longer in business. Now it was a health food store. The proprietor told me the liquor store went out of business immediately after Mr. Reguillo’s death, and his widow now worked at a nearby laundromat.
LAVANDERÍA DEL VALLE was less than a mile away. The laundromat owner was Rosie, a petite, fifty-something woman wearing designer jeans and a black V-neck sweater. I gave her my card and told her I would like to talk to Luis Reguillo’s widow.
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you want to talk to her about?”
“I want to ask if she knows anything new about the murder of her husband.”
Rosie looked across the room at a heavyset woman walking toward a table piled with freshly laundered towels. The woman rocked back and forth when she walked, and her upper arms jiggled vigorously. When she started folding the towels, her hands moved as though each movement took a cautious effort. Her face was blank.
Rosie discreetly pointed at the woman and lowered her voice. “Julieta is too old to still be working anymore. Her health is not good. She is diabetic, can’t get the weight off. She is sixty-eight now, and she needs to work till seventy to get decent Social Security. She is a slow worker, but she is steady and honest. I don’t have the heart to fire her, and I know all about her husband. Some asshole shot him, and the cops tried and tried to catch the robber. They did everything they could, but they never found out who did it. If you talk to Julieta now, she will just get upset and start crying, and then she will be depressed for the next week. She knows nothing the police do not already know. Are you with the police?”
“Not officially.”
“But you are looking into the murder of Mr. Reguillo?”
“I was investigating other matters, and the shooting came up. I thought Mrs. Reguillo might have thought of something or heard something new that would relate to the shooting.”
“If anything comes up new, I can guarantee you I will know. I also guarantee I will call you and tell you about it.” She looked at my card again, this time more closely. She looked back at me, cold and hard. “Is that good enough for you, Mr. Jackson, or do you need to make Julieta feel sad today?”
“I’m going to trust you on this one.”
“Where are you going now? The place where Mr. Reguillo’s liquor store used to be?”
“I was just there. Now I want to see the site of the shooting.”
“You know where it is?”
I nodded.
Rosie’s voice shifted to a faster tempo. “You catch the son-of-a-bitch who shot Mr. Reguillo, I would like very much for you to bring him to me and my husband and my brothers before you turn him over to the police.” She drew the edge of her hand across her throat and made a rude noise from the side of her mouth. She didn’t look like she was kidding.
As I was going out the door, I took a closer look at Julieta Reguillo. She was folding a fitted sheet, taking great care to align the seams and corners properly. I had to hand it to her. I had never been able to properly fold a fitted sheet. A few seconds later, I was standing across the street by my car, looking back at LAVANDERÍA DEL VALLE. Suddenly, I had a vision. Lady Justice was holding her scales in one hand and tugging down her blindfold with the other. She was looking me straight in the eye.
The site of the 2012 shooting was an industrial side street, just off Canoga Avenue. I parked next to a wide sidewalk bordered by a cyclone fence topped with razor wire. Concrete construction blocks were stacked behind the fence below a sign reading PRINCETON ENTERPRISES. Across the street were two commercial buildings, one for precision machining, the other for industrial electrical supplies. According to the LA Times articles, I was parked approximately where Luis Reguillo was found dead in the gutter.
I killed the engine, put my car windows down, and let the cool, dry air flow through. Other than a metal-on-metal sound coming from the machine shop, it was quiet. I ran an Internet search combining “Zara Manning,” “Cinnamon Strauss,” and the date of the shooting. It turned out Zara and Cinnamon attended a wedding in Santa Barbara on that day. The shooting occurred at 10:20 p.m., which could have been the same time Zara and Cinnamon were passing by on the Ventura Freeway, two miles from where I was sitting.
Dewey Rubens had said Cinnamon was angry at Zara over some issue with a car. I wondered what cars Zara and Cinnamon were driving at the time of the shooting. I called Gabe and extracted one more favor from him. Gabe’s numerous information sources include a DMV contact who could perform detailed vehicle ownership research on an expedited basis in exchange for Dodgers or Lakers tickets.
Gabe said, “I’ll email you as soon as I get the info. By the way, how about my date with Cinnamon Strauss?”
“Didn’t you see the news?”
“Yes, I did. I’ll bet she’s hot to trot.”
You can always count on Gabe for a sympathetic response to tragedy.
We ended the call, and I noticed movement in my rearview mirror. A large gray sedan stopped behind me and two men got out. They wore sunglasses, white shirts, and ties. Neither wore a jacket, which made the badges and pistols on their belts quite conspicuous. I opened my door slowly and got out even more slowly, making sure my hands were visible the whole way.
The driver was a thin, hawk-faced man, Hispanic, about fifty. Rough complexion, short gray hair. The other guy was a perfect Aryan. Round face, blond flattop. When he was a boy, he probably had rosy cheeks.
The driver said, “I’m Detective Mondrian, LAPD, and this is my partner, Detective Cassidy.”
He walked straight toward me, and Cassidy got closer, staying to my left side.
I said, “Is your name spelled like Mondrian the artist?”
“My wife says it is. I don’t like art.” He rocked his head toward his partner. “Cassidy’s name is spelled like Hopalong Cassidy. He always scores highest at the pistol range.”
Cassidy stood on the sidewalk, facing me with his arms at his sides. I knew the world quick-draw record was in the vicinity of a quarter second. I got the impression Cassidy was wondering how close to the record he could shoot with the handicap of his belt-mounted holster and the holster’s closed thumb snap.
Mondrian said, “Let’s cut to the chase. Your name is Jackson Salvo, and you’re a peeper from West LA. You’ve been snooping around Canoga Park regarding an unsolved murder from 2012. The murder occurred in our territory, but you did not have the courtesy to check with
us first. We find that offensive. We ran your plate, and we know all about you from that and other sources. I want to see your identification anyway.”
I handed over my driver’s license, California PI license, and concealed-carry permit.
He looked at the cards and returned them. “Where’s the artillery?”
“I have a .38 in the trunk.”
Cassidy said, “He has a knife clipped in his waistband.”
Mondrian turned his back on me and slowly walked away. “I saw it. If he pulls it, double-tap him.”
I said, “Do you sit up nights and try to think up tough cop wisecracks?”
He turned back toward me and folded his sunglasses into his shirt pocket, giving me a Clint Eastwood squint. “I don’t have to. It comes naturally.”
“Did Rosie call you from the laundromat?”
“Salvo, our style of police work is called community policing. We have close relationships with the members of our community, and we do not publicize all the details of those relationships. That’s the businesslike way of saying it’s none of your fucking business. Why are you poking into the shooting of Luis Reguillo?”
“I was working a case for a client, and I came across an LA Times article on the shooting. It caught my eye, and it offended me that the shooter got away clean.”
“Who is your client?”
“That’s between me and the client.”
“It’s between you and me. You don’t tell us what you know, we can bring you in for further questioning, and the interviews might stretch out over a certain length of time. We wouldn’t be old-fashioned and beat you with telephone books and throw you in the drunk tank, but your accommodations will be less than ideal.”
After a brief dramatic pause, I said, “Was the expended casing you found under Reguillo’s body a .380? The Times articles didn’t give the caliber.”
Mondrian looked at me as though he had caught me with my hand in a Salvation Army donation kettle. That told me what I wanted to know. He spoke softly. “If you’re withholding evidence in a murder case, we will not only haul you in for questioning, we’ll find a way to file a charge or two, and that could keep you busy for a while, regardless of whether or not the charges stick. You want to tell me what’s going on, or do we haul you in?”