by G. M. Ford
“What we have just witnessed…” Barry Logan panted. “What we have…” And then he did the smart thing. He shut up and let the picture tell the story.
Took Chris Andriatta three tries to swallow a mouthful of sandwich.
“Oh my God,” she said.
22
M orales tapped the microphone three times. The conversational buzz in the room slowly subsided. “Ladies and gentlemen…” he began. “…I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce the other members of the team.”
Corso laughed out loud. Andriatta elbowed him sharply in the ribs. He bent at the waist and whispered in her ear. “If this is a team…” She pulled her head away and elbowed him upright again. He leaned against the wall and smirked.
On the dais, Morales had introduced his way through the assembled law enforcement dignitaries and was ready to begin. He stepped up to a bank of microphones worthy of a presidential press conference. “I’m going to read a short statement, after which, I will field as many questions as time permits.” He unfolded a small sheet of white paper, flattened it on the rostrum and began to read about how the Bureau was but one arm of the investigatory task force you saw before you this afternoon. About how the task force was dedicated to solving the series of bank robberies plaguing the Los Angeles area in recent days and how they felt certain the cowardly perpetrators of these heinous crimes would be brought to justice in a timely manner. And finally how all of those involved in the case would like to express their heartfelt sympathy for the victims of this morning’s tragedy and for their families. At which point, he refolded the paper and slipped it into his suit jacket pocket.
The rush of shouted questions overwhelmed the acoustics. Morales pointed at the CNN reporter in the front row. The roar gradually subsided. “Can you give us an exact figure on the number of dead and wounded from this morning’s explosion?” he wanted to know. Morales took a deep breath. “The last figures I heard were that we had four dead, thirteen others injured seriously enough to require hospitalization and another thirty or so treated at the scene and released.”
“The victim,” shouted another reporter. “Do we have an ID on the original victim?”
Morales produced a three by five card from his pants pocket. “The victim’s name was Fazir Ben-Iman. Mr. Iman was a Lebanese immigrant who had been in the country for twenty-three years. He was a clinical psychologist, trained at UCLA, and worked at an outpatient clinic in the San Fernando Valley.”
“What about the La Crescenta victim?”
“The victim’s name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.”
“Has the investigation turned up any connection among the victims?”
“That’s not something we can comment on at this time,” he deadpanned.
“Are we to assume that all of these robberies were committed by the same…” She groped for a word. “…person or persons?” A grandmotherly woman in the front row asked.
“As this is an ongoing investigation…” The crowd wasn’t in the mood for disclaimers. The second half of his answer was swept away by a rush of shouted questions. “Which is it?” someone yelled. “Person or persons?”
Morales could see he needed to throw them a bone or they were going to eat him alive. “We believe that today’s incidents were the work of more than one person,” he said.
“A group representing itself as ‘America First’ has taken credit for the bombings. They are demanding the release of abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph. They claim the bombings will continue until their demands are met.”
The press jumped all over it. How seriously did the Bureau take this claim? Quite seriously but by no means exclusively. Prior to this, was this group known to the Bureau. Yes, it was. The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. It went on and on. The assembled media gnawed the news like a bone.
For his part, Morales hedged for all he was worth. “At this stage of the investigation…’’ became his much-repeated disclaimer.
“The usual suspects.” Corso turned his head to the right. Paul Short wore a pair of blue coveralls. A prosthetic stainless-steel hook had been fitted over the stump of his right arm and a fake foot and shoe at the end of his right leg. A smudge of what looked like oil or grease adorned his right cheek.
“You just come from the scene?” Andriatta asked.
He nodded.
“Anything?”
He shook his head. “They’ve upped the ante,” he said. “This last one had enough C-4 to stop a Bradley, let alone a Toyota.” He paused to let his words sink in, “We found pieces of the victim’s vehicle seven hundred feet away from ground zero.”
Corso whistled. “Same type of bomb?” he asked.
He shrugged. “According to the people in the bank,” he said. “Same handcuff arrangement around the neck. Same keypad on the front of the device.” He stirred the air with the hook. “Could be one of the Bureau’s techies is going to pry something useful out of one of the palm trees or one of the building facades, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
He smiled as much as the scar tissue would permit. “Only in L.A.,” he said. “We got a multiple murder crime scene and all LAPD is worried about is traffic. Tell me they need to reopen the intersection as soon as they get the mess cleaned up.” He shook his head in disgust. “They say…‘Hey, man, this is Santa Monica Boulevard’ and that’s supposed to cover the destruction of a crime scene.”
Corso turned his attention to the dais, where Morales, without actually saying the words, was blaming the deaths on the interference of the media, on poor intelligence information regarding the size of the explosive device, which meant Warren and the ATF, sliding the blame toward everyone not connected to the FBI.
Short fiddled with the joystick, sending the chair in an angry circle. “Bullshit,” he said. “There was no way to know they were going to increase the size of the charge. How were we supposed to know that? It was random. Or maybe even unintentional. Hell, if they’d put that much in the Vietnamese device, they’d have brought down the whole damn shopping center.
“If anybody’s to blame, it’s those idiots in the Bureau who don’t seem to realize they’re in over their heads here.”
“So what do they do?” Corso asked. “Just stand around and let these people rob all the banks their little hearts desire?”
A flush of red appeared in Paul Short’s cheek. “Until somebody comes up with a better idea…yeah…that’s exactly what you do. You don’t risk innocent lives. You play it safe and wait for these guys to make a mistake.”
“You and I both know the Bureau isn’t going to stand around while somebody blows up things and robs banks right under their noses. Not gonna happen.”
Short wasn’t listening. His attention was riveted to the ongoing press conference.
“Repeat the question,” someone shouted.
The question, whatever it was, had drained the color from Morales’ face, leaving him the color of leftover oatmeal. “The gentleman from MSNBC inquires as to the specifics of the instructions…” He was choosing his words carefully. “…the specifics of the instructions given the victims by the perpetrators.”
Not satisfied with Morales’ translation, the MSNBC reporter raised his voice. “Is it true that law enforcement agencies were warned not to interfere? Not to attempt to follow the victims after they left the banks? Not to attempt any type of tracking devices?” He went on to enumerate the exact thou-shalt-nots listed in the holdup notes. Obviously he’d seen a copy. Morales tried to say something, but the guy kept talking. “And isn’t it the case that when the instructions have been followed to the letter, the victims have been returned unharmed?”
“As this is an ongoing investigation…” Morales began. The buzz in the room swallowed the usual disclaimer. He tried to excuse himself. The buzz got louder.
“I smell lawsuits hatching all over the L.A. basin,” said Andriatta.
“By the score,” Corso added.
“You
can’t sue the government anymore,” Short said. “Award limits make it impossible to come out of it with any money. Only the attorneys end up with their pockets lined.”
“Well then there’s going to be a bunch of happy lawyers in town tonight.”
“Bunch of bloodsucking scum,” Short said.
Morales and the others were filing off the dais in the opposite direction. The crowd of media types was nipping at their heels like terriers, preventing them from escaping into the elevators.
“Let’s get out of here.” Corso took Chris Andriatta by the elbow and steered her toward the door. “Warren’s looking for us, we’ll be at the hotel,” he said to Paul Short.
“Kill all the lawyers,” Short responded with a smile.
Corso skirted along the black curtains, holding Andriatta by the hand and keeping as far from the shuffling crowd at the end of the room as possible. They reached the alcove beneath the green-and-white EXIT sign. Corso turned and surveyed the media event taking place over by the elevators. After a moment, he straight-armed the long safety handle and shouldered the door open. Before either he or Chris Andriatta could move, however, a Japanese guy with a wireless microphone stepped into the doorway…then a second later, another guy, African-American, this time, with a digital video camera up on his shoulder. “You’re Frank Corso, right?”
The red light on the front of the camera began to blink. Corso felt Andriatta’s hand slip from his grasp. As he turned her way, the reporter stepped between them, holding the microphone up to Corso’s lips. “I’m Gordon Nakamura…” the guy began.
Corso slapped the microphone aside and stepped around the guy. Andriatta had vanished into the throng.
23
C orso dropped his room key onto the nightstand and picked up the remote. He stretched out on the bed, snapped on the TV and checked the bedside clock: 6:05 P.M. Pacific Standard Time. World News. Earthquake in Pakistan. Thousands dead. He turned off the sound, closed his eyes and drifted into dreamless sleep.
Seemed like seconds later, a loud rapping brought him to his feet. It was 7:16 P.M. He walked to the door, started to jerk it open, then thought better of it and peeked out through the peephole. Nobody in the hall. Then the rapping started again. This time long enough for him to realize it was coming from the adjoining door to the room next door.
He ran a hand over his face, crossed to the side of the room, pulled back the dead bolt and opened the door. Chris Andriatta stood in the doorway wearing one of the hotel bathrobes, white terry cloth, Beverly Wilshire embroidered on the right breast.
“You eat yet?” she wanted to know.
Corso shook his head and motioned her into the room. “You certainly got lost in a hurry,” he said.
“I told you. I don’t like having my picture taken.” She settled a towel across her shoulders and shook her wet hair. “Besides, I needed to do a little laundry. I feel like I’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week.”
Corso nodded his understanding. “You should have called the valet,” Corso said. “They’d have had the stuff back to you in an hour or so.”
She made a face. “You’ll have to excuse me if hotel valets are usually out of my price range.”
Corso held up a hand. “Sorry,” he said. “There I go throwing money at it again.”
“What about dinner? I’m famished.”
“You want to walk over to Westwood Village?”
She pulled at the sleeve of the bathrobe. “Can I wear this?” she asked. “’Cause everything else I own is drying in the bathroom.”
“You could,” he offered. “I, for one, think you look great in it, but my guess would be that it might be a bit, how shall we say, libertine…even for L.A.”
“Room service then?”
“If you were hungry, you should have ordered something.”
“I tried. They wouldn’t let me use my own money. Everything had to be charged to the room.”
“So?”
“So?…So I don’t know you well enough to be spending your money.”
“Neither do I, but I never let it stop me.”
She laughed. “It’s bad enough I’m standing around in your hotel room in a bathrobe.”
“What’s bad about that?”
“You know what I mean.”
“You look fine. You smell great. What could be bad?”
She wagged a finger at Corso on her way across the room. “Don’t start. Just because you’re filthy rich and impossibly handsome doesn’t cut any slack with me.”
“Me neither,” he assured her.
“The part of the world I just came from, I’d be stoned to death for being here with you”—she picked at the robe again—“like this.”
Corso reached down and pulled at the hem of the robe. A crude tattoo adorned her right ankle. At first he thought it was a flower, but when his eyes adjusted to looking at it upside down, he could see that it was a parachute with some numbers along the bottom. She didn’t wait for the question. “I had a lover once. He was in the airborne.” She turned a palm toward the ceiling. “What can I say. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Corso dropped the hem. “Major portions of my life fall under that category.”
Her mouth took a downward turn. “It’s like what we were talking about last night.” She stopped, listening to herself but looking at Corso. “Was that just last night?” she wondered aloud. “With all that’s happened…seems like some other century or something.” She made a wry face. “Anyway…like somebody said the other night, ‘life just seems to happen.’”
“Even if it is something you planned, by the time you get there, it doesn’t look anything like you imagined it would.”
“And nothing’s as good as it used to be.”
Corso smiled. “Listen to us. What a pair of geezers.”
“Geezerdom doesn’t scare me a bit,” she snapped. “What scares me is the prospect of living to be a hundred. The way medical science is advancing, we’re all going to have a half-life of twelve thousand years.”
The line sounded rehearsed, but Corso played along anyway. “And you don’t want to live to be a hundred?”
“Hell no,” she said. “I don’t have that much goodwill left in me. I don’t think I can smile for that long. The sooner I get out of here, the better.”
Corso kept his mouth shut. She sensed his discomfort and lightened up.
“Not like that,” she said. “I didn’t mean like…you know…” She put a hand on his shoulder. “What I meant was…the sooner I eat, the better.”
She didn’t wait for the laugh track. Instead, she bounced off the bed, walked over, seated herself at the desk and flipped open the room service menu.
Corso watched with amusement as she studied the menu as if a test was in the offing, before deciding on a chateaubriand for two…for one…baked potato, creamed spinach and a piece of macadamia nut cheesecake for dessert. Corso opted for pasta carbonara and two bottles of Heitz Brothers 1998 Cabernet. “The Martha’s Vineyard vintage,” she repeated into the phone before hanging up.
“What’s so special about the Martha’s Vineyard vintage?” she asked.
“The price,” Corso said.
“You have no respect for money.”
Corso laughed. “That’s exactly what my mother says about me.”
“She’s right.”
“I’m just a conduit through which money passes.”
She crossed the room again and climbed onto the bed, where she sat cross-legged.
“Then give it away. The world’s full of people who could use it.”
“For some reason, I can’t do that either.”
“There you have it.”
She picked up the remote and turned up the volume. Local news. This morning’s explosion. The big bang was less than a minute away. The news copter had the white Toyota centered in the frame. “This is Barry Logan in the Action News chopper high above an unfolding bank robbery in Beverly Hills.”
And then the FBI helicopter swooped into the picture. “Whoa, baby…” the newsman said. “Looks like we’ve attracted some official attention.”
They’d edited out about thirty seconds of helicopter hijinx, then switched back to the studio, where the anchorman’s solemn voice warned that what was to follow was perhaps not suitable for the young or the infirm, followed by the obligatory pause and a cut to the moment when the entire intersection seemed to disappear in a cloud of smoke.
Cut to the grim visage of L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa calling for an independent investigation of today’s debacle. He wants to know who saw fit to endanger the lives of his citizens. Who is to be held responsible for the death and destruction on Santa Monica Boulevard this afternoon. Who cared so little for Angelenos as to ignore the robber’s instructions, especially after what happened in La Crescenta earlier in the week. He notes that, thus far, death has been visited only upon immigrants to our country and wonders out loud if the authorities don’t somehow value such lives substantially less than they do others. Villaraigosa wants somebody’s feet held to the fire. As long as they aren’t his feet, of course.