House Justice (26 page)

The drafting table and stool were well-publicized affectations. He had used a drafting table for a brief period when he obtained his first patent and he told reporters that he still used the table because it helped him think, because it reminded him of his roots. That was all bullshit, of course. A PR gal he had hired said he needed a few quirky things to set him apart, to make him
colorful
—as if his appearance wasn’t enough. The drafting table had been one of those quirky things. His Japanese garden planted with exotic bonsai plants, the ponds surrounding his house filled with butterfly koi, his position on the board of the children’s cancer foundation—those were all part of his manufactured image, too.

He didn’t give a damn about the koi, the dwarf plants, or the bald-headed kids.

He didn’t even care about making money anymore. He had more money than he could possibly spend and it had been a long time since simply buying something—a piece of art, a mansion, the most expensive car in the world—thrilled him in any significant way. What he really cared about, what he really loved, was power.

He had discussed this with his psychiatrist when they explored the subject of what made him happy and why he was so unhappy. It was then that he realized the thing that made him happiest was
knowing thousands of people worked for him and he could, any time he desired, disrupt and even destroy their lives by firing them. He loved that the arrogant, high-powered executives he employed cowered around him, like obsequious priests kissing the cardinal’s ring. It thrilled him that powerful politicians danced to his whimsical tune, terrified if they offended him he would use his wealth to run them out of office. And there was absolutely nothing he liked better than swooping down on a company and taking it over, knowing everybody in the company was just
sick
with anticipation, realizing that their fate was in his hands.

His therapist couldn’t cure him and had shown him that he would never be truly content, not the way normal people were. But were it not for one thing, he could have been
almost
content, or at least as content as it was possible for a man like him to be. He had wealth, he had fame, and, most important, he had the power of a wrathful god over a large segment of the population on several continents. The one thing that prevented him from reaching his own distorted version of bliss was Marty Taylor.

What he felt for Taylor was something
beyond
hate. Hate, he reserved for the human race. His feelings for Taylor went so far beyond hate that there wasn’t even a word for it, at least not one he knew. He could have had Taylor killed, and had thought many times about doing just that, but killing him wasn’t enough. Killing him, no matter how slowly and painfully it was done, was just too quick. It would be over too soon. He didn’t want Taylor to die; he wanted him to
suffer
, and suffer for years, and not just physically. He wanted to humiliate him and strip him of his wealth and put him in a cage. Yes, he loved that image: some tattooed skinhead making pretty Marty Taylor his prison bitch—over and over and over again.

Rulon Tully was in his forties when he married for the first and only time. Prior to that time, he had had many, many women. He paid a good number of those women to sleep with him, but there were others, beautiful women, who gave themselves to him even as stunted and ugly as he was. The problem was he knew that these
women didn’t love him and only wanted him because of the lifestyle he could give them, and he never allowed himself to be seduced by some grasping gold digger with an angel’s face and a perfectly sculpted body. Being a misanthropic genius, he was incapable of deluding himself into thinking that any of those women really loved him or wanted him for who he was.

And then along came Shelly. She had been his masseuse. Because of the body that God had so cruelly given him, he needed daily massages to loosen knotty muscles, to relieve the pain of aching joints, and to make bearable a spinal column that felt like a bony snake gnawing at the flesh surrounding it. And that had been Shelly’s job, to use her wonderful, strong hands to treat all those ailments, and she’d been good at it.

Shelly was pretty but she wasn’t beautiful. She was short and somewhat stocky; she reminded him, physically, of the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. “Cute” was the word most often used to describe her. Right from the beginning, he sensed that she wasn’t repulsed by his looks. She was a simple person with a good heart and he could tell she genuinely enjoyed his company. The fact was, though, and he was objective enough to realize this, she enjoyed
everyone
’s company; she was just one of those perpetually optimistic, good-natured souls who liked 99 percent of the people they met. So, the fact that she liked him wasn’t unusual, but what was unusual was that she was the only person he’d ever met who liked him for who he was and not for what he owned. She didn’t laugh at his jokes because she wanted a bigger tip; she didn’t flatter him outrageously to pump up his ego; she even kidded him for being just as short as she was, and
nobody
—absolutely nobody—dared to make jokes about his size.

Five months after he met her, he convinced himself he loved her— although it’s hard to be sure you’re in love when you’re a misanthrope— and he asked her to marry him. And for a brief time, for almost two years, it was as if his misanthropy went into remission, as if he were afflicted with a cancer rather than a mental illness.

Then handsome Marty Taylor stepped in and destroyed his life.

He and Shelly had attended the film festival in Cannes that year, and Marty was there. He didn’t like Marty Taylor, of course, but he’d met him on several occasions and had to admit that the man was as charming as anyone he’d ever known. Shelly, of course, thought he was delightful. Then, as luck would have it, he had to return unexpectedly to California because of some business disaster, one that could have cost him millions had he not reacted, but Shelly wanted to stay in Cannes. She loved seeing all those movie stars. Before he left, he made the mistake of asking Marty to make sure his wife had a good time while he was gone—and Marty made sure that she had a
very
good time. And as bad as her unfaithfulness was, he learned of the affair via a front-page picture in a tabloid newspaper. So not only did he have to suffer her betrayal and the agony he felt when he lost the one person in the world that he thought had genuinely loved him, but he also had to endure the humiliation of the entire world knowing he was a cuckold.

There was just no word to describe how much he hated Marty Taylor.

Rulon Tully considered himself to be a ruthless man, but he was hardly the most ruthless man that Xavier Quinn had known. Quinn was a West Point graduate and he had the military skills to be a good officer but not the political ones. Realizing this, he resigned his commission in his early thirties and became a military consultant—a mercenary, in other words—to some men who were
truly
ruthless: African dictators and Russian oilmen.

At the age of forty-two, Quinn looked at his bank account and the scars on various parts of his anatomy, and accepted a job as Tully’s head of security. And although Tully had never resorted to mass murder as some of Quinn’s previous employers had done, he had asked Quinn to do a number of illegal things on his behalf. Quinn had blackmailed Tully’s competitors. He had stolen industrial secrets.
He had bribed politicians and IRS investigators and, if bribes didn’t work, he blackmailed them, too. But the things he did for Tully were not as risky as what he had done in the past, and the benefits were enormous.

He had started out at a salary of two hundred thousand a year and, thanks to Tully’s advice, invested his money wisely. And because he lived with Tully, he paid nothing for food, had no home, and didn’t own a car. The only things he spent money on were health insurance and clothes, and he was frugal when it came to his wardrobe. He had decided, arbitrarily, that he would retire when his savings reached two million but now, because of this thing with the CIA spy, he was thinking that retiring short of his goal would be prudent.

Reflecting back on it, he should have retired after Tully killed the whore.

Tully had been impossible to be around after his wife slept with Marty Taylor. He fired people left and right and verbally abused anyone who came near him. He had temper tantrums like a four-year-old. One night, possibly to lessen his torment but more likely because he wanted to inflict his pain on someone else, he sought out a prostitute. Before his marriage he had used prostitutes frequently, usually preferring small Asian women who were as short as he was.

That night Tully, a man who had little control over his emotions at the best of times, unleashed all the rage and shame he was feeling on an eighteen-year-old Filipino hooker. Quinn had no idea what caused him to snap, but Tully beat her to death. He hit her with his tiny fists until he broke a bone in one of his hands, then pounded her face with a lamp. Afterward, when he came to his senses—when he saw the red-splattered walls and the mangled body on the blood-soaked sheets—he called Quinn. Quinn cleaned up the crime scene as best he could but he knew that if the police pursued the case with any diligence they’d arrest his employer. Fortunately, the victim was a prostitute and the detective in charge of the case was a flexible person. In the end, the crime was pinned on the prostitute’s pimp and the detective took an early retirement to fish on his new boat.

It was after that that Tully began to resort to murder when no other solution presented itself. It was as if the death of the prostitute had completely loosened those weak moral shackles that had previously constrained him, if only marginally. He took any loss in an intensely personal way—as if he was still that odd-looking little kid in school and the butt of every joke—and his ego demanded that he win every time. And if he couldn’t win honestly, or if his lawyers and paid politicians couldn’t win for him dishonestly, then he’d do whatever needed to be done: blackmail, bribery, and, following the whore’s death, murder.

The second killing had been an SEC investigator who just wouldn’t go away. It was possible that the SEC man could have put Tully in jail after years and years of legal wrangling, but if Tully had gone to jail it would have been a Martha Stewart experience. And Quinn pointed this out to Tully—that if the SEC succeeded, the worst thing that would happen to him was a few months in a country-club prison and possibly some community service. It may have been the remark about community service—the degrading image of having to wear a reflective vest while picking up trash on the highway—that pushed Tully over the edge.

So he told Quinn to take care of the SEC investigator, and Quinn did, using Jimmy Franco as the mechanism for disposing of the man. And then came Acosta.

In the case of Acosta, Quinn could somewhat understand why Tully had Acosta murdered, because the death of the CIA spy had raised the consequences of leaking the story to a whole new level. But still…

It was time to quit working for Rulon Tully.

The taking of Jimmy Franco went badly.

On his first day in LA, the florist picked up the gun that he had mailed to general delivery, bought ammunition and two extra magazines, then spent the remainder of the day researching Franco. Using a computer at a public library, he found an Internet site that, for forty-five dollars, would provide available public records for any U.S. citizen. It amazed him how little privacy people had these days. He learned that Franco, in addition to owning a pawnshop as Benny Mark had told him, had other business licenses. He owned a used-car dealership, a strip club—called a “gentlemen’s club”—and an apartment building. He had also been arrested twice. The first arrest was for allegedly prostituting the strippers in his club and the second time was for hiring men to assault a tenant in his apartment building who had refused to be evicted. He wasn’t convicted in either case. He also found a photo of Franco on the Internet; in the photo Franco was posing with a girls’ softball team and the girls wore T-shirts that advertised his pawnshop.

His second day in LA, the florist decided to visit the pawnshop and question Franco if he was there. He knew he was taking a risk by doing this because Benny Mark could have called Franco and warned him that the florist might be coming his way. He wasn’t too concerned, however; he expected that Franco would either be alone in
his shop or, at most, have a single employee helping him. He could handle two men by himself.

As soon as he entered the pawnshop, he realized he had made a mistake. There were five young Hispanic men in the shop, loitering in battered chairs. All were well muscled and heavily decorated with body art. As soon as the florist stepped through the door, they all looked at him, tensed up, and two of the men put a hand behind their back—the florist assumed that they were reaching for weapons. For an instant he considered turning right around and leaving but changed his mind. He pretended to ignore the young men and walked directly up to the sales counter where Franco was standing.

Franco was about the florist’s height—six foot three—slender and gray-haired. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that had bifocal lenses, and he was dressed casually in a polo shirt and jeans. He didn’t seem alarmed or guarded or suspicious in any way when the florist approached the sales counter. All he said was, “What can I do for you?”

The florist asked to see a Martin guitar hanging on the wall behind the sales counter. He strummed it a couple of times like he was trying to judge the quality of the instrument, asked Franco the price, shook his head as if it was more than he could afford, and left the shop.

It had never occurred to him that Franco would surround himself with so much protection. He knew Franco was a criminal—a middle man for hiring contract killers—but why all the muscle? Then, thinking about Franco’s arrest record, it occurred to him that the man was most likely the kingpin of a small criminal enterprise—the strip club that was actually a brothel, the used-car dealership that would be ideal for moving stolen cars and purloined auto parts, the pawnshop that could be used for fencing stolen merchandise. It was also possible that in the course of his business, Franco had offended gangs in the area or other criminals, and that’s why he employed all the bodyguards. Whatever the case, taking him wasn’t going to be as easy as the florist had thought.