“Which leads us to you guys,” Billets said, looking at Russell and Kuhlken. “You got anything to tell us, yet?”
Kuhlken said they were still waist-deep in the financial records but they had so far traced money from TNA Productions to dummy corporations in California, Nevada and Arizona. The money went into the corporation bank accounts and was then invested in other, seemingly legitimate, corporations. He said when the trail was fully documented they would be in a position to use the IRS and federal statutes to seize the money as the illegal funds of a racketeering enterprise. Unfortunately, Russell said, the documentation period was long and difficult. It would be another week before they could move.
“Keep at it and take the time you need,” Billets said, then she looked at Gregson. “So then, how are we doing? What should we be doing?”
Gregson thought a moment.
“I think we are doing fine. First thing tomorrow I’ll call Vegas and find out who’s handling the extradition hearing. I’m thinking that I possibly should go out there to babysit that. I’m not that comfortable at the moment with all of us here and Goshen over there with them. If we are lucky enough to pull a match out of ballistics, I think you and I, Harry, should go over there and not leave until we have Goshen with us.”
Bosch nodded his agreement.
“After hearing all of these reports, I really have just one question,” Gregson continued. “Why isn’t there someone from OCID sitting in this room right now?”
Billets looked at Bosch and almost imperceptibly nodded. The question was being passed to him.
“Initially,” Bosch said, “OCID was informed of the murder and the victim’s ID and they passed. They said they didn’t know Tony Aliso. As recently as two hours ago I had a conversation with Leon Fitzgerald and told him what it looked like we had. He offered whatever expertise his people had but felt we were too far along now to have fresh people come in. He wished us best of luck with it.”
Gregson stared at him a long moment and then nodded. The prosecutor was in his mid-forties with short-cropped hair already completely gray. Bosch had never worked with him but he’d heard the name. Gregson had been around—long enough to know there was more to what Bosch had said. But he had also been around long enough to let it go for the time being. Billets didn’t give him a lot of time to make something of it anyway.
“Okay, so why don’t we brainstorm a little bit before we call it a night?” she said. “What do we think happened to this man? We’re gathering a lot of information, a lot of evidence, but do we know what happened to him?”
She looked at the faces gathered in the room. Finally, Rider spoke up.
“My guess is that the IRS audit brought it all about,” she said. “He got the notice in the mail and he made a fatal mistake. He told this guy in Vegas, Joey Marks, that the government was going to look at his books and his cheap movies and the scam was likely going to come out. Joey Marks responded the way you expect these guys to respond. He whacked him. He had his man Goshen follow Tony back home from Vegas so it would happen far away from him and Goshen puts him in the trunk.”
The others nodded their heads in agreement. This included Bosch. The information he’d received from Fitzgerald fit with this scenario as well.
“It was a good plan,” Edgar said. “Only mistake was the fingerprints Artie Donovan got off the jacket. That was pure luck and if we didn’t have that, we probably wouldn’t have any of this. That was the only mistake.”
“Maybe not,” Bosch said. “The prints on the jacket just hurried things along, but Metro in Vegas was already working a tip from an informant who overheard Lucky Goshen talking about hitting somebody and putting them in a trunk. It would’ve gotten back to us. Eventually.”
“Well, I’d rather be already on it than waiting for eventually,” Billets said. “Any alternative theories we should also be chasing? Are we clear on the wife, the angry screenwriter, his other associates?”
“Nothing that sticks out,” Rider said. “There definitely was no love lost between the victim and the wife but she seems clean so far. I pulled the gatehouse log up there with a warrant and her car never left Hidden Highlands on Friday night. She seems clean.”
“What about the letter to the IRS?” Gregson asked. “Who sent it? Obviously, someone with pretty good knowledge of what this man was doing, but who would that be?”
“This could all be part of a power play within the Joey Marks group,” Bosch said. “Like I said before, something about the look on Goshen’s face when he saw that gun and his claims later that it was a plant…I don’t know, maybe somebody tipped the IRS knowing it would get Tony whacked and that they could then possibly lay it off on Goshen. With Goshen gone, this person moves up.”
“You’re saying Goshen didn’t do it?” Gregson asked, his eyebrows arched.
“No. I think Goshen is probably good for it. But I don’t think he was counting on that gun showing up behind the toilet. It doesn’t make sense, anyway, to keep it around. So say he whacks out Tony Aliso on orders from Joey Marks. He gives the gun to somebody in his crew to get rid of. Only that person goes and plants it at the house—this is the same person who sent the letter to the IRS in the first place to get the whole thing going. Now we come along and wrap Goshen up in a bow. The guy who stashed the gun and sent the letter, he’s in a position to move up.”
Bosch looked at their faces as they tried to follow the logic.
“Maybe Goshen isn’t the intended target,” Rider said.
Everyone looked at her.
“Maybe there’s one more play. Maybe it’s someone who wants Goshen and Joey Marks out of the way so he can move in.”
“How will they get Marks now?” Edgar asked.
“Through Goshen,” she said.
“If those ballistics come back a match,” Bosch said, “then you can stick a fork in Goshen because he’ll be done. He’ll be looking at the needle or life without possibility. Or a reduced sentence if he gives us something.”
“Joey Marks,” Gregson and Edgar said at the same time.
“So who is the letter writer?” Billets asked.
“Who knows?” Bosch answered. “I don’t know enough about the organization over there. But there’s a lawyer who was mentioned by the cops there. A guy who handles everything for Marks. He’d know about Aliso’s scam. He could pull this off. There’s probably a handful of people close to Marks capable of doing it.”
They all were silent for a long moment, each one thinking the story through and seeing that it could work. It was a natural conclusion to the meeting and Billets stood up to end it.
“Let’s keep up the good work,” she said. “Matthew, thanks for coming out. You’ll be the first one I call when we get the ballistics in the morning.”
Everyone else started standing up.
“Kiz and Jerry, flip a coin,” Billets said. “One of you will have to go to Vegas to work the extradition escort with Harry. It’s regulations. Oh, and Harry, could you wait a minute? There’s something I need to discuss with you about another case.”
After the others left, Billets told Bosch to close the door. He did so and then sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk.
“So what happened?” she asked. “Did you really talk to Fitzgerald?”
“Well, I guess it was more that he talked to me, but, yeah, I met with him and Carbone.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Basically, the deal is that they didn’t know Tony Aliso from a hole in the ground until they, too, got a letter, probably the same one that went to the IRS. I’ve got a copy of it. It has details. It was from somebody with knowledge, just like Kiz said. The letter OCID got also was postmarked in Las Vegas and it was addressed specifically to Fitzgerald.”
“So their response was to bug his office phone.”
“Right, illegal bug. They had just started—I have nine days’ worth of tapes to listen to—when I call up and say Tony got whacked. They panicked. You know h
is situation with the chief. If it came out that first of all they illegally put the bug on Tony and second of all might have somehow been the cause of his death because Joey Marks found out, then the chief would pretty much have all he’d need to move Fitzgerald out and reestablish controls on OCID.”
“So Fitzgerald sends Carbone in to get the bug and they play dumb about Tony.”
“Right. Carbone didn’t see the camera or we wouldn’t know any of this.”
“That prick. When this is over, the first thing I’m going to do is give it all to the chief.”
“Uh…”
Bosch wasn’t sure how to say it.
“What is it?”
“Fitzgerald could see that coming. I cut a deal with him.”
“What?”
“I cut a deal. He gave me everything, the tapes, the letter. But their activities go no further than you and me. The chief never knows.”
“Harry, how could you? You had no—”
“He’s got something on me, Lieutenant. He’s got something on you, too…and Kiz.”
A long silence followed and Bosch watched the anger flush her cheeks.
“That arrogant bastard,” she said.
Bosch told her what it was Fitzgerald had come up with. Since Bosch now was privy to her secret, he thought it was only fair that he tell her about Eleanor. Billets just nodded. She was clearly thinking more about her own secret and the consequences of Fitzgerald having knowledge of it.
“Do you think he actually put people on me? A tail?”
“Who knows? He’s the kind of guy who sees opportunities and acts on them. He keeps information like money in a bank. In case of a rainy day. This was a rainy day for him and he pulled it out. I made the deal. Let’s forget about it and move on with the case.”
She was silent a moment and Bosch watched her for any sign of embarrassment. There was none. She looked directly at Bosch, her eyes searching him for any sign of judgment. There was none. She nodded.
“What else did they do after the letter came?”
“Not much. They put Aliso on a loose surveillance. I have the logs. But they weren’t watching him Friday night. They knew he’d gone to Las Vegas, so they were planning to pick him up again after the holiday if he was back. They were really just getting started when it all went down.”
She nodded again. Her mind wasn’t on the subject. Bosch stood up.
“I’ll listen to the tapes tonight. There’s about seven hours but Fitzgerald said it’s mostly Aliso talking to his girlfriend in Vegas. Nothing much else. But I’ll listen anyway. You need anything else, Lieutenant?”
“No. Let’s talk in the morning. I want to know about the ballistics as soon as you know.”
“You got it.”
Bosch headed to the door but she stopped him.
“It’s weird, isn’t it, when sometimes you can’t tell the good guys from the bad.”
He looked back at her.
“Yeah, it’s weird.”
The house still smelled of fresh paint when Bosch finally got home. He looked at the wall he had started to paint three days before and it seemed long ago. He didn’t know when he’d finish now. The house had been a ground-up rebuilding job after the earthquake. He’d only been back a few weeks after more than a year of living in a residence hotel near the station. The earthquake, too, seemed long ago. Things happened fast in this city. Everything but the moment seemed like ancient history.
He got out the number Felton had given him for Eleanor Wish and called it but there was no answer, not even a machine picking up. He hung up and wondered if she had gotten the note he left for her. His hope was that they would somehow be together after this case was over. But if it came to that, he realized, he wasn’t sure how he’d deal with the department’s prohibition against associating with a convicted felon.
His thoughts about this spun into the question of how Fitzgerald had found out about her and the night they had spent together in her apartment. It seemed to him it was likely that Fitzgerald would maintain contacts with Metro, and he guessed that maybe Felton or Iverson had informed the deputy chief about Eleanor Wish.
Bosch made two sandwiches of lunch meat from the refrigerator and then took them, two bottles of beer and the box of tapes Fitzgerald had given him over to the chair next to his stereo. As he ate, he arranged the tapes in chronological order and then started playing them. There was a photocopy of a log and pen register with entries showing what time of day Aliso either received or made the calls and what number he had called.
More than half the calls were between Aliso and Layla, either placed to the club—Bosch could tell because of the background music and noise—or a number he assumed was her apartment. She never identified herself on any of the calls, but on the occasions Tony called her at the club he asked for her by her stage name, Layla. Other than that, he never used her name. Most of their conversations were about the minutia of daily life. He called her most often at home in the midafternoon. In one call to her home, Layla was angry at Aliso for waking her up. He complained that it was already noon and she reminded him that she had worked until four at the club. Like a chastened boy, he apologized and offered to call back. He did, at two.
In addition to the conversations with Layla there were calls to other women involving the timing of a scene that needed to be reshot for one of Tony’s movies and various other film-related business calls. There were two calls placed by Aliso to his home but both of his conversations with his wife were quick and to the point. One time he said he was coming home and the other time he said he was going to be held up and wouldn’t be home for dinner.
When Bosch was done it was after midnight and he had counted only one of the conversations as being of even marginal interest. It was a call placed to the dressing room at the club on the Tuesday before Aliso was murdered. In the midst of their rather boring, innocuous conversation, Layla asked him when he was coming out next.
“Comin’ out Thursday, baby,” Aliso replied. “Why, you miss me already?”
“No—I mean, yeah, sure, I miss you and all, Tone. But Lucky was asking if you were coming. That’s why I asked.”
Layla had a soft, little-girl voice that seemed unpracticed or fake.
“Well, tell him I’ll be in Thursday night. You working then?”
“Yeah, I’m working.”
Bosch turned off the stereo and thought about the one call that mattered. It meant Goshen knew, through Layla, that Aliso was coming out. It wasn’t much, but it could probably be used by a prosecutor as part of an argument for premeditation. The problem was that it was tainted evidence. In legal terms, it did not exist.
He looked at his watch. It was late but he decided to call. He took the number off the log where Layla’s number had been recorded by a pen register which read the tones that sounded when a number was punched into a phone. After four rings it was answered by a woman with a slow voice laced with practiced sexual intent.
“Layla?”
“No, this is Pandora.”
Bosch almost laughed but he was too tired.
aging
“Where’s Layla?”
“She isn’t here.”
“This is a friend of hers. Harry. She tried to call me the other night. You know where she is or where I could reach her?”
“No. She hasn’t been around for a couple days. I don’t know where she is. Is this about Tony?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she’s pretty upset. I guess if she wants to talk to you, she’ll call you again. You in town?”
“Not right now. Where d’you guys live?”
“Uh, I don’t think I’m going to tell you that.”
“Pandora, is Layla scared of something?”
“Of course she is. Her old man gets killed. She thinks people might think she knows something, but she doesn’t. She’s just scared.”
Bosch gave Pandora his home number and told her to have Layla call if she checked in.
After
he hung up he looked at his watch and took out the little phone book he kept in his jacket. He called Billets’s number and a man answered. Her husband. Bosch apologized for the late call, asked for the lieutenant and wondered while he waited what the husband knew about his wife and Kizmin Rider. When Billets picked up, Bosch told her about his review of the tapes and how little value they had.
“The one call establishes Goshen’s knowledge of Aliso’s trip to Vegas, as well as his interest in it. But that’s about it. I think it’s kind of marginal and we’ll be okay without it. When we find Layla, we should be able to get the same information from her. Legally.”
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