Fatal Care (16 page)

She cleaned her windshield with the damp cloth; then she drove out through the main gate and turned left. The wind was picking up and sagebrush was being blown across the deserted highway.

Through her rearview mirror, Joanna could see the expanse of the Bio-Med complex. A strange place, she kept telling herself. Very strange. Particularly the specialized laboratory where the technician wore a space suit. Something in there was wrong. Something in there was off. But Joanna couldn’t put her finger on it. Damn! What was it?

The wind suddenly gusted and blew giant puffs of sand across the highway. The air turned a murky brown color. Joanna leaned over the steering wheel and concentrated on the road, her train of thought broken. All she could think about was getting through the sandstorm and finding her way safely back to Los Angeles.

Lou Farelli was drawing a big zero. So far he’d covered an eight-square-block area, starting at the mini mart where the Russian immigrant had last been seen alive. Farelli had canvassed dozens of shops and apartment houses and over a hundred private homes. Nobody knew or recognized the Russian.

Farelli was standing outside Young Mi’s grocery store, sipping a Diet Coke while he waited. The store owners were Korean, and their English was so bad Farelli couldn’t understand more than a few words. But their daughter was due home shortly from a nearby high school she attended. Farelli decided to wait for her, although he doubted the store owners would be helpful. Purchases at the store were placed in plastic bags, not paper. And the doughnut lady had told Farelli that the groceries the Russian carried were always in a paper bag.

Farelli finished his soda and tossed the can into a nearby trash container. It was a warm, muggy day, and he was sweating beneath his suit. He pulled out his collar and again surveyed the lower-middle-class neighborhood. The houses were made of stucco and all windows facing the street had iron bars over them. BEWARE OF THE DOG signs seemed to be everywhere. Directly across from him was an old apartment building, two stories high, with an exterior that was covered with rust streaks and gang graffiti.

Farelli checked his watch. It was almost three o’clock and he still hadn’t turned up a single clue about the dead Russian. He leaned against the wall of the store and again pulled his collar as perspiration ran down his neck.

Across the street, a small postal truck drove up to the front of the apartment building. The postman got out and stretched his back.

Farelli pushed himself away from the wall and quickly crossed the street. “Hey! How are you doing?” he called out.

“Doing good.” The postman was a tall, thin African American with prematurely gray hair. “Can I help you with something?”

“Maybe.” Farelli took out a snapshot of the dead Russian and held it up. “Have you ever seen this guy?”

The postman studied the photograph carefully. “Why is his head shaped so funny?”

“Because it’s got two slugs in it,” Farelli told him. “You ever seen him?”

“No.”

“Do you work this area on a regular basis?”

The postman nodded. “Every day but Sunday for the past five years.”

“Thanks for your time,” Farelli said and placed the snapshot back in his pocket. He wasn’t put off by the postman’s failure to recognize the Russian. The Russian was believed to be a workingman and wouldn’t be around the neighborhood during the day when the mail was delivered. Out of the corner of his eye Farelli saw a teenage girl with Oriental features enter the grocery store.

He hurried across the street and went in. The teenager was behind the counter, speaking to her nervous parents in Korean. She turned to Farelli and took a deep breath, like someone gathering up courage. “Is—is there something wrong, Officer?”

“No,” Farelli said, keeping his voice friendly. He took out the snapshot of the Russian and showed it to them. “I just need to know if they’ve ever seen this man. He was the victim of a crime, and we’re trying to identify him.”

The girl spoke quickly in Korean to her parents and waited for them to put on their reading glasses. After carefully studying the photo, the parents shook their heads.

“They have never seen him,” the girl reported.

“Okay.” Farelli put the photo away and exhaled wearily. “Tell me, are there any other small grocery stores nearby?”

The teenager pointed to the west. “There is a health food store one block down the street.”

“Thanks for your help.”

The girl stepped over to Farelli as he turned to leave. “Officer, I hope you will forgive my parents’ poor English.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Farelli said, and meant it. “My grandmother was in this country for twenty-five years before she could put a decent sentence together.”

The girl looked over to her parents, smiled reassuringly, and then came back to Farelli. “They work fourteen hours a day, and there is very little time for them to study. But they try so hard.”

“You tell them to keep at it.”

The girl bowed gracefully as Farelli left.

Outside, the day was becoming gloomy with an overcast sky. The humidity seemed to be increasing by the minute. Farelli opened his coat and fanned himself with it. He decided to make one last stop before checking in with Jake.

Farelli started up the street, which had a slight but definite incline. That made him put more weight on his right leg—the bad leg—and that caused it to throb. He walked on, trying to ignore the pain and wondering if it would ever go away as the doctors had promised.

Two years ago Farelli and Jake had been ambushed by some mean bastard with an AK-47. One of the slugs had torn into Farelli’s quadriceps muscle. The bullet had been surgically removed and the wound had healed. But any sort of strain on the muscle brought back the pain. The doctors had assured him that the pain would eventually disappear. Well, Farelli thought miserably, eventually hadn’t arrived yet.

Up ahead he saw the health food store and next to it a small hardware store. Farelli would have bet dollars to doughnuts that the Russian never went into the health food place. The Russian was a real drinker. He had been guzzling down double shots of vodka two or three nights a week. That wasn’t the type of guy who worried about his intake of vitamins and minerals.

The owner of the health food store looked like Mr. Universe with muscles that bulged out of his white T-shirt. He had never seen the Russian. He tried to sell Farelli a new antioxidant vitamin preparation that stopped aging. Only $12.95 a bottle. Farelli politely declined.

Farelli walked next door and entered Herman Rucker’s Hardware and Supplies. The store was small and cluttered. Merchandise was stacked on shelves that went from floor to ceiling. The place smelled like something metallic was burning.

“What can I do for you?” Herman Rucker yelled out from behind a wire cage at the rear.

“I need you to look at a picture for me,” Farelli yelled back.

“You a cop?”

“Yeah.”

Rucker came out from behind the wire cage. He was a short, thin man with horn-rimmed glasses and hawklike features. “What’s the guy done?”

Farelli ignored the question and held up the snapshot of the Russian. “You know him?”

“Sure,” Rucker said. “That’s Vladie. What’d he do?”

“He got in the way of two thirty-eight slugs.”

“Shit,” Rucker growled. “This fucking neighborhood ain’t safe for nobody.”

“Was Vladie his first or last name?”

Rucker considered the question carefully. “First—I think. I figured it was short for Vladimir. The guy was Russian, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” Farelli took out a pen and notepad. “You got a last name for this guy?”

“He never gave it.”

“What about an address?”

“Didn’t give that, either.”

“Did he pay in cash or use a credit card?”

Rucker pointed at a sign on the wire cage near the cash register. It read CASH ONLY—NO REFUNDS.

“What’d he usually buy?” Farelli asked.

“Electrical things,” Rucker answered. “Wiring, plugs, jacks, fuses. It was mainly simple stuff, but he knew his way around electricity, I’ll guarantee you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because we used to talk a lot. You know, about capacity and voltage and things like that.”

“You figure him to be an electrician?”

Rucker thought about that before nodding slowly. “I guess. I know for sure he did electrical work around the house. He would always say, ‘I have to fix this for the old lady or do that for the old lady.” ’

Farelli pricked up his ears. “Old lady” was a term usually used by the lower classes to denote their wives. “Was he married?”

Rucker shrugged. “I guess.”

“You ever see a ring on his finger?”

“Never looked.”

Farelli rubbed at his chin, thinking. If the Russian had a wife, she would have surely called the police or Bureau of Missing Persons by now. But she hadn’t. “You said he did electrical work around his house.”

“Right.”

“Did he ever tell you where his house was?”

“Nope.”

“But you were sure he was talking about his house?”

“It sounded like that to me,” Rucker told him. “He said he was going to fix the television cable, and that sounds like a house to me.”

“Me, too.”

“The cable company in this area ain’t worth a shit,” Rucker continued on. “Everybody bitches and complains about the poor-quality picture they get on their TV sets.”

Farelli’s eyebrows suddenly went up. “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!”

“What?”

“You said he had cable TV?”

“That’s right,” Rucker said, wondering what the big deal about cable was. “Everybody around here has got it. You can’t get a good picture on your screen without it.” He shrugged to himself. “Hell, you can’t get a decent picture with it, either. People are always bitching about the cable service. You call them, they come and don’t do a damn thing. The picture is still crummy.”

“Was that why Vladie was going to fix his own cable?”

“That’s what he told me,” Rucker answered. “His old lady called the cable company two or three times, and they sent a repairman out to fix it. But the picture still wasn’t worth a damn. That’s why Vladie bought all that stuff from me. He was going to fix it himself.”

“Do you know the name of the cable company?”

“Centurion.”

“Spell it.”

“
C-e-n-t-u-r-i-o-n
,” Rucker spelled it out slowly, wondering what was so important about a cable company. “Do you think they had something to do with Vladie getting killed?”

Farelli ignored the question. “Where’s your phone?”

“Jesus,” Joanna marveled, “that’s more than a yacht. It’s a ship.”

Joanna and Jake were walking on a wharf at Marina del Rey. Securely moored alongside was the
Argonaut
, a gleaming, white 110-foot oceangoing vessel. It was manned by a crew of eight and owned by a corporation that controlled the assets of a dead Greek shipping tycoon. Edmond Rabb had been leasing the vessel from the corporation for the past year.

“For two thousand dollars a day,” Jake was telling her.

“And I’ll bet that doesn’t include everything,” Joanna said, studying the thick ropes that secured the vessel to the wharf.

“It doesn’t. Booze, parties, and special foods are extra.”

They passed by open portholes. From inside they could hear the sound of high-pitched voices and the hum of a vacuum cleaner. Music was playing somewhere in the background.

Joanna glanced up at the side of the vessel and saw the polished brass railing. In the sunlight it shined like gold. “I guess two thousand dollars a day doesn’t matter very much when you’re worth a hundred million.”

“It didn’t matter a damn to Edmond Rabb,” Jake said. “According to the harbor master, the ship never went out more than a couple of times a month. The rest of the time it just sat here.”

“At two grand a day.”

“Plus docking fees.”

They came to the gangplank leading up to the ship. A large, heavyset man with a shaved head stood guard. He was dressed entirely in white and wore dark wraparound sunglasses.

Jake flashed his shield.

“You got papers to go with badge?” the guard asked, not budging. His accent was foreign—maybe Eastern European.

“No,” Jake said.

“Well, you come back when you got papers.”

It happened so fast Joanna almost didn’t see it. In an instant Jake shoved his forearm into the man’s throat, pinning him up against the gangplank. The guard began to choke and suck for air, his face turning a bright red.

“Next time you see that shield, you move your ass to the side,” Jake said, his voice grating.

The guard tried to nod, but Jake pushed even harder against the man’s throat.

“And you do it real quick,” Jake went on. “Otherwise I might get upset.”

The guard’s face was turning purple.

Jake released his hold and stepped back, watching the guard gasp and wheeze for air. “When I come back down this gangplank, you’d better be standing right here. I might have some questions for you.”

The guard nodded, but it was hard to see because he was bent over like a man about to throw up.

Jake took Joanna’s arm as they went up the gangplank. Two heads that had been peering over the railing quickly disappeared.

“That guard looked really mean,” Joanna commented.

“So?”

“So he looks like the type who could push a man overboard and not lose a wink of sleep over it.”

“Are you thinking he might be the one who did the deed on Edmond Rabb?” Jake asked.

“Maybe,” Joanna replied. “Of course, he would do it only on orders from somebody else.”

“Naw,” Jake said at once. “He’s too stupid. They’d never trust him to do that.”

They reached the gangway and stepped onto the deck of the
Argonaut
. A seaman dressed in tan shorts and a white T-shirt led them aft along a shiny deck made of teak. Joanna glanced at the brass railing and the teakwood ledge beneath it. Both were plenty hard enough to crack a skull.

Beyond the wheelhouse was a spacious area with lounge chairs and a portable bar. An exquisite brunette was stretched out on a blanket sunning herself. Standing next to her was a tall, handsome, deeply tanned man wearing a dark blue Armani suit with white shirt and yellow tie.