by David Chill
Juan stood up and shook my hand. “Glad you could be of service to me, too.”
Chapter 10
Driving back to the Westside, I called Drew Slick and told him to expect to hear from a Culver City detective named Gottschalk. I asked him if he had talked to Wyatt Angstrom and he told me they had finally found him at the studio, but had failed to learn much. Angstrom hadn’t been back to his apartment, so they had gone inside. After tossing the place, Slick said he came across an unregistered handgun, which was passed on to ballistics. The initial finding was that it did not appear to have been fired recently, and it was clearly a different caliber than the gun used to killed Moose. They had no other leads on the case, and finding Amanda Zeal was one of many things on Slick’s to-do list. It did not strike me this was an urgent matter for him. I decided it was urgent for me.
I headed for the Fox lot on Pico. The security guard who flagged me down asked for my name, but I told him I wouldn’t be on anyone’s list. He dramatically removed his mirrored sunglasses and started to launch into his stump speech about no one being admitted without being on the sacred list, but I short-circuited his lecture by flashing my fake badge. He stopped talking and I grabbed that moment to remind him that the penalty for interfering with law enforcement was time in the state penitentiary. He stared at me for a second and then let me go through without further discussion. I didn’t bother pulling into the garage, but rather slid my Pathfinder into a parking space with an executive’s name painted on the asphalt.
I headed up to the sixth floor, passing a multitude of workers headed in the opposite direction, undoubtedly going to lunch. Wyatt Angstrom’s office door was open and I breezed past Dirk, who tried in vain to play traffic cop, but I ordered him to back off in no uncertain terms. I was running out of patience, it showed, and I didn’t care. When he started to protest, I shut the door in his face.
“Burnside?” Wyatt exclaimed, glancing up from what looked like a report summarizing last night’s Nielsen ratings. “What’s the meaning of this?! You can’t just barge in here!”
“I just did. Where’s Amanda?”
“I don’t know,” he yelled. “Don’t you think I’d go get her if I knew?”
“What were you and Ed Zellis talking about?”
Wyatt Angstrom slammed the report down and stood up. He glared at me angrily. I looked into his intense eyes for a few seconds; one eye still looked pretty red. I noticed the marks on his face had barely begun to heal.
“I don’t have to tell you anything!”
“You’re doing a bang-up job of it,” I said.
Angstrom stormed around his desk and pointed a finger in my face. “You better watch your mouth,” he declared. “I’m getting a little tired of this.”
“Me, too.”
With that, he grabbed my left arm and tried to pull me toward the door. I jerked my arm away, and then I hauled off and shoved him hard in the chest. He stumbled backward, a look of shock on his face. I shoved him hard again and got much the same reaction. I wanted to get his attention, and I did. And I also wanted to show who was in charge right now. It wasn’t him.
“What the hell?!” he exclaimed, blinking a few times, his breath starting to heave. “What on earth did you do that … “
This time I grabbed him by his button-down shirt and threw him against a wall. He began to get flustered, as if he didn’t know what to do next. I then yanked his face inches from mine.
“Now you listen to me and listen good. I’m tired of this crap. You know something and you’re not telling me. I’m not leaving here until I get some answers from you. If I have to hang you out the window by your ankles, so be it.”
“Okay, okay,” he whined. “Let me go.”
I released my grip, but I shoved him again to let him know his reprieve would be brief if he didn’t start cooperating. My right hand moved to the left side of my waist in case I needed to pull out my weapon. But Wyatt Angstrom was not about to ratchet things up to the next level.
“Geez,” he panted. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I know I didn’t have to, but I did. Where’s Amanda?”
“Honest,” he said, holding his hands up. “I really don’t know.”
I took a breath. It was always possible he was telling the truth. “Okay. Let’s talk about what you do know. You and Ed had a bunch of phone conversations lately. Tell me what you talked about.”
Wyatt hesitated, so I shoved him once more. I saw him flinch and pull back. “Okay, okay. It’s about Amanda. She’s been taken.”
“By whom?” I asked.
“This group of guys. Gangbangers.”
“Keep going,”
“These guys we owe money to. For gambling.”
“Gambling on what?” I asked.
“Football games. She had an in. Tips. We were doing really well in the beginning of the season. Then not so much. We started losing. Amanda decided the best way to get whole was to bet more.”
“Not smart,” I said. “Not smart at all.”
“Yeah, well, we know that now.”
“You were betting, too?”
“Not as much as her. She was in deep, a good fifty large.”
“Where were they getting their tips from?”
“Ed.”
I stared at him and tried to piece this together in my mind. Nothing fit. “And why were you speaking with Ed so much yesterday?”
“Trying to work out how to get Amanda back.”
“So you, Moose and Amanda owed these guys a lot of money. Why’d they kill Moose?”
“I don’t know. I think maybe he got in the way when they were going for Amanda. Moose wasn’t worth much.”
“You’ve got a funny way of placing value on human life.”
“No, listen, I’m not making this stuff up. Look, if they grab Moose, no one cares. If they grab Amanda, they know she has access to money. Her father, her grandfather, maybe Fox corporate, too, who knows. They might pay to get her back. No one’s paying for Moose.”
I stepped back and looked at him. Kidnapping was a dumb crime, but criminals are rarely the best and the brightest, and they didn’t often think things through carefully.
“But why didn’t they go to Phil? He’s Amanda’s dad, and he owns a mansion in Beverly Hills. He’s got more money than Ed. More money than most people.”
“Phil said no.”
I stared at him. “He said no to getting his daughter back?”
“He felt they were bluffing. Phil said they had no choice but to set her free. If he didn’t pay, then killing Amanda would be pointless, because then they’d never get their fifty grand.”
I rolled my eyes at the logic. “Did anyone think to call the police? Or the FBI? We’re talking about a serious crime here, by some serious bad guys.”
“The kidnappers said they’d kill Amanda if we brought in law enforcement, or even if we told anyone about it. They also said they’d hunt all of us down and kill the lot of us. After Moose, no one wanted to call their bluff. These are some really messed up dudes.”
“So Phil said no. How does Ed get involved?”
“Ed called me after Amanda got taken, he said he was going to investigate. He wanted information, everything I knew about these people. I guess he made contact with them. He was going to go see them yesterday.”
“Was he going to pay them?”
“I don’t think so. He said he was going to put them away. And teach them a lesson.”
I shook my head. Ed had to have been almost seventy. At a certain point, no matter how tough a guy is, no matter how smart, no matter how cunning, advanced age has a way of frittering all of that away. You’re not as sharp, not as quick, and the things you were once good at don’t come as easily. In some fields like medicine, people could have careers well into their eighties. For other fields, like football, most players’ careers don’t go beyond age thirty. For everyone else, the sweet spot is somewhere in between.
“Was Ed ga
mbling on games, too?”
“Yeah, but I think he had his own bookie. And I don’t think he was doing it at the level Amanda was.”
“Then where’d Ed get these tips?”
“I think he knew a few refs. One of them may have been shaving points. At least that’s what Amanda and I figured out. We had our doubts in the beginning, but then we saw the tips were paying off most of the time. Until they weren’t.”
I gave a sigh. This was among the worst possible scenarios a former athlete or coach could hear. You played the game hard and you played it honestly. You encouraged your players to do so as well. If everybody gave one hundred percent and they did their jobs right, then good things happen. But refs were human and there would always be the occasional blown call. A penalty flag thrown late in the game. Or conversely, a penalty the other team actually committed, but no flag was thrown because the refs didn’t see it. The net result was your team was unable to finish what should have been a game-winning drive. We usually chalk that up to human error on the part of the ref. No one wanted to believe it could be anything more sinister.
“The Beverly Hills police finally talked to you.”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I guess you haven’t been around much.”
“Can you blame me? Ever since Amanda and I got attacked the other night, I’ve been nervous. Stayed away from home. I checked into a hotel.”
Maybe with good reason, I thought. “I take it you haven’t heard about Amanda’s grandfather.”
“No. He was supposed to call this morning, but I never heard from him.”
“He’s dead,” I told him. “The maid found his body a few hours ago.”
The look of shock on Angstrom’s face seemed genuine, the type of blank, confused look one has when they encounter something they were wholly unprepared for and could never have rehearsed. There were curious pieces to Angstrom’s story, why he was laying low, and what his place might have been in all this. His role in the gambling ring was unsavory and illegal. But one thing seemed clear. Whatever he had been planning, murder did not seem to have been a part of it.
“What happened to Ed?” he finally managed.
“Gunshot wound to the head, looks like it’s a homicide. Probably in his home, although he could have been shot somewhere else and they moved the body. But that’s a lot of effort to go through, lugging a body around, don’t you think?”
Angstrom nodded blankly in agreement. I watched him for a beat and continued.
“So Ed told you he was going to meet up with the guys who took Amanda.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said.”
“He tell you anything about them?”
“Not much. Just that they lived in Compton.”
I stared at him. “Compton,” I repeated. “He tell you an address?”
“No,” he said, but then Wyatt Angstrom’s head perked up. “But I do remember something else. He said the guy he was meeting was named Alex. He likes to call himself Ax. That mean anything to you?”
*
Leaving the Fox lot, I drove down Pico and deliberated on how best to proceed. There were now multiple cities involved in this case, one homicide in Beverly Hills, and another in Culver City. A former Largo Beach detective had been murdered, and all roads pointed to Compton, another independent city woven into the chaotic fabric that is southern California. The only connection to Los Angeles was that the other homicide victim, Moose Machado, lived in a downtown apartment.
For a brief moment, I thought of contacting a detective at one of these local police departments, but I sensed that would be problematic. Compton no longer had its own police force; it was served by the L.A. County Sheriff’s department, which was almost as bureaucratic as the LAPD. When a kidnapping occurs and someone is being held against their will, any wait time, even to coordinate resources was not advisable. This was one of the biggest problems with bureaucracies. Red tape caused delays and delays did not lead to good things. We could not show up too late. There is nothing worse than being too late.
I could have simply driven down to Compton by myself, but there were inherent dangers to that. I was dealing with a lethal person, or worse, a lethal group. Times like these made me wish I had a partner to back me up. But admittedly, these times were the exception. Good partnerships were rare in my business because they required a level of trust and a level of competence. Partners picked up half the money but they did not always pick up half the workload. And in the private investigator field, the quality of the investigators varied wildly. Even factoring in the number of former cops, there were often good reasons they no longer wore a shield, and there could be dire consequences if they failed to handle themselves properly. But still, there was safety in numbers.
As I hashed this over in my mind, I was jolted back into the present by the buzzing of my phone. It was as if the universe noticed me rolling this case around in my brain and sent someone to help me. Phil Zellis was on the line. He asked me to come over. It took me twenty minutes.
“Burnside,” he said, opening the door quickly after I knocked. He stood there rigid, his breathing heavy as he clenched and unclenched his fists.
“Phil. How are you holding up?”
“Okay. I think the shock has worn off. I’m more angry than anything.”
“Angry?” I asked.
“Amanda’s still gone. Wyatt’s been worthless. I’m angry with Dad for jumping into this mess when he shouldn’t have. You name it. Everything about this week has been rotten. Nothing’s been uncovered about what happened to Moose. The Culver City cops don’t have any leads on Dad. Feels like they’re going to move as slow on this as Beverly Hills did on Moose.”
“So you knew Amanda’s been kidnapped,” I said.
“I knew. And it stinks. I can’t put my finger on it, but this feels all wrong.”
“They contacted you for ransom.”
“Yesterday. They wanted five hundred thousand dollars. I said no. I don’t believe in negotiating with kidnappers, terrorists, you name it. You give in once, they’ll take you again and again.”
“What’s their move now?” I asked.
There was a pause. “I don’t know,” he said.
I thought about how best to pose the next question. It was something I had been mulling over on the drive to Phil’s. There was good and bad to involving Phil. He knew how to handle himself, but his emotions were raw. I started to think that might be exactly what I needed here. I also started to think I didn’t have any other options, and time was not on our side.
“What if I told you I think I know where Amanda might be at. Want to take a spin?”
Phil’s eyes raged. “You know where she is?”
“Maybe. Not certain. But it’s worth a shot. One thing you have to promise is to try and keep your emotions in check. Follow my lead. Back me up. Do what I say and you should be fine. Think you can manage that?”
Phil’s answer did not come in the form of a verbal reply. Instead, he strode purposefully out the door and slammed it behind him.
“Let’s roll,” he said.
Compton was located just below South-Central L.A., and for many years had earned a notorious reputation for urban decay. Up until the 1960s, Compton was a middle-class black city, but when nicer homes in Baldwin Hills began attracting African-Americans, Compton fell into a steep decline. Crime-ridden for decades, the city began to right itself a few years ago. It disbanded its police department for excessive corruption, and it struck a deal where law enforcement would be handled by the county sheriff. It was far from a good area, but at least the decline seemed to have been stymied.
Traffic was moderate, and it took us half an hour on the Largo Beach Freeway to get to the Rosecrans exit and head west. We arrived at the address on Orchard Street that Alex Solis had generously provided me during our call, one that was only yesterday. It seemed like a week ago. We came upon a faded pink house on a quiet, sun-drenched street. The houses on the block were small, and all of them had
gates or fencing surrounding what passed for front lawns. Bars covered all of the windows. The grass, what little of it there was, looked depressingly brown. But a shiny new white van with the name Star Rentals on it sat in front of the home where Alex Solis told me he lived, the van looking distinctly out of place.
A young man of about twenty years old sat on the curb in front of the house. He had a swarthy face and a bored expression. A three-inch scar ran along the skin above his jawbone. He wore a white t-shirt and had on a blue Dodgers baseball cap. In his hand was a large bottle of Olde English 800 beer. He did not make any effort to hide it, not even to slip it inside of a brown paper bag. Clearly, he didn’t care what people thought, but there simply weren’t many people around. We got out of the car and approached him.
“We’re looking for Alex Solis,” I told him in my most authoritative manner.
The young man gave us a bored look and took another sip of his beer. “What you want with him?” he asked.
“We want to ask him a few questions,” Phil said, not bothering to follow my lead.
“About what?”
“That’s between him and us,” Phil continued.
“Why don’t you ask me. I’ll give him the message. If I feel like it.”
“Why don’t you get off your butt and go find Alex.”
The young man stood. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, cochon.”
Phil stalked over and slapped the beer out of his hand. The bottle broke, and golden liquid splattered along the front walk. Some of it got on Phil’s pants, but he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed the young man by the front of his t-shirt, but the man broke his grasp and punched Phil in the face with a quick left-right-left combination. Phil staggered for a moment before regaining his balance and unleashing a hard left hook to the temple, and the man fell to one knee.
“Oh, you’re gonna pay for that, you gringo fuck,” he sneered, and all of a sudden another man came out of nowhere.
The new guy leaped onto Phil’s back, but before he could do anything, I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and flung him to the ground. He jumped right back up, but I hit him with a back punch to the mouth which sent him reeling. By this time, the young man with the beer had gotten to his feet and was trying to box Phil, but not getting anywhere. Phil blocked two punches and then hit him solidly in the jaw. I was beginning to feel good about middle age being able to handle youth when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. The young man I had sent to the ground had gotten up again, but this time he had a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at us and yelled something unintelligible. Phil must have heard it, too. Everything came to a standstill.