January Justice (10 page)

I shook my head. “I’ve lost about a month of time, near as they can tell. Couple of weeks before to a couple of weeks after. It’s like it never happened.”

“That’s tough. But it’ll come back to you eventually. Bound to.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Bound to.”

Russo picked up a menu. “What’s good?”

I said, “I was gonna have the cheeseburger and fries.”

Turning around, Russo made a big production out of waving for the waitress. She came right over. She was about fifty, but she wore a form-fitting T-shirt tucked into a tight pair of jeans. She could get away with it. She had the figure of a teenager. “What can I get you guys to drink?” she asked.

“Got no time for that,” said Russo. “We’ll order lunch right now.”

After the waitress had taken our orders and left the table, I said, “You seriously have no leads?”

“Seriously,” said Russo.

“Nothing at all?”

“Look,” he said, “you two were alone together, you both got doped, she went over the edge, and you went to the nuthouse. The drugs in your food and in your systems are the only evidence. I had nearly forty guys go over the scene for two days. There was nothing. No evidence whatsoever.”

It wasn’t good enough. They simply had to find her killer. I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Wow. You looked for two whole days?”

Russo turned to Harper. “This is why I don’t usually talk to civilians about cases.”

Harper said, “I know Malcolm appreciates this, don’t you Malcolm?”

“Oh, I do.”

Russo said, “Yeah, whatever.”

We sat there, the three of us saying nothing. I took a sip of water. Harper sighed. Russo stared at the wall and blinked sometimes.

“So, Malcolm,” said Harper at last. “You been working?”

“A little.”

“Anybody interesting?” Harper looked at Russo. “Malcolm drives movie stars for a living.”

Russo said, “I know that, Harper.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Harper. “So, how about it, Malcolm? Who you driving lately? Jennifer Aniston maybe? Angelina Jolie?”

I said, “Nobody like that. Business is pretty slow since I got out. So far just a couple of guys from Guatemala.”

“I never heard of a movie star from Guatemala.”

“They weren’t movie stars. They were sort of unofficial diplomats who used to be terrorists.”

Harper laughed. Russo looked bored.

I decided to tell them about it, thinking maybe they could shed some light on the Doña Elena Montes case. I started talking, beginning with pickup at the hotel when I first spotted Vega and Castro’s handguns, then covering everything else in detail, from the high-speed drive to Hollywood to the proposition Vega made in front of Musso & Frank. I didn’t mention that he and Castro were with the URNG, and I didn’t mention their names.

When I was done, Harper said, “Did you take the case?”

“I turned them down. But I thought you guys might be interested.”

Russo said, “Why’d they go to you?”

Harper said, “Sal, I told you what Malcolm does.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not big on private dicks.”

I said, “They came to me because you guys wouldn’t help them.”

Harper sighed.

I watched a couple of Latino men come in and take a seat in the booth across the restaurant. They were both nicely dressed. One wore tan slacks and a cream-colored raw-silk shirt with the top three buttons open to expose a gold medallion on a chain around his neck. The other wore a pair of jeans, but they were pressed and starched, and his shirt was also silk. It seemed like the one with the medallions glanced my way, but he was wearing sunglasses so I couldn’t tell for sure. I was pretty sure I’d seen them before. I watched the waitress bring them menus. It occurred to me that I wasn’t really angry with Russo. I was just angry.

I said, “So, do either of you know anything about the Toledo murder?”

“Sal, you were in on that one, weren’t you?” said Harper.

“Yeah. They give me most of the cases with movie stars.”

“How come?” I asked.

Russo looked at me. His eyes barely showed behind his squinting, fleshy lids. He said, “I don’t know. Maybe
ʼ
cause I can keep a secret.”

I could feel my face turning red. I looked down. I took a breath. I looked back up at him. “I’ve been feeling pretty angry lately. Sometimes I take it out on the wrong people.”

Russo looked at me another moment, then nodded. “Don’t worry about it.”

Harper said, “That Toledo case, we never collared the perp, right?”

“No,” said Russo. “She’s still out there.”

I said, “How much money did she get?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

I thought I’d heard him wrong. “Two hundred thousand dollars?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Did Toledo talk her down or something?”

“He did, yeah. Five hundred is what she asked for.”

“Why only five hundred? The Guatemalans told me Toledo was supposed to be worth something like sixteen million.”

Russo said, “That’s a good question.”

The waitress brought our food. Russo took a massive bite out of his burger. He chewed with his mouth open. Bits of burger fell onto the table. I looked at Harper and raised my eyebrows. Harper shrugged and dug in.

“So,” I said, “what do you know about the kidnapper?”

Russo made no comment.

I took a bite of my cheeseburger, chewed, and swallowed before saying, “I heard the woman’s name is Alejandra Delarosa. I heard she was Toledo’s mistress.”

“How about that. I think we heard that too.”

“Were you able to confirm it? Anybody see them together at hotels? Unexplained gaps in both of their calendars? Anything like that?

“Nope,” said Russo, “but that don’t mean a thing.”

“Do you have proof they even knew each other?

“She worked for him. A secretary. Or administrative assistant. Whatever.”

“How long did she work for Toledo?” I said.

“About a year, maybe. We’re talking about a seven-year-old cold case here, so I could be wrong. But she was with him for a while.”

“She knew him pretty well?”

“Looked that way to us.”

“It’s hard to kill someone you know well.”

“Baloney. Almost every killer knows the victim.”

“In cold blood, I mean. It’s harder to do it in cold blood when you know someone well.”

Russo talked around a last big bite of burger. “If you say so.” Even someone clear across the dining room could have seen the contents of his mouth. Then, just for a second, I looked him in the eye. He looked away immediately, but I had seen the raw intelligence there, and I realized all the rest of it was probably an act. I decided to call him on it.

I took a huge bite of my own burger and let a little bit of it fall out when I talked. “I heard the Delarosa woman was with the URNG.”

“Seems like you heard a lot.”

“Do you think she was with them?”

“She most likely was, yeah.”

“What makes you think that? Because she said so?” My mouth was still full. It was hard to say the “s” sounds without spewing bits of burger across the table, so I did.

Russo was watching me suspiciously, his eyes aimed at my mouth. He said, “Because of the evidence, all right?”

“What evidence?”

“She knew a lot of details about Toledo’s life back in Guatemala. She talked about him like he stole his money from the Indians. She sent her demands to a TV station. She sent in videos. You probably saw them, right? Everybody else did.”

“I remember.”

“Yeah, well, the uniform she wore and the insignia checked out. And she mentioned several known members of that commie group of hers.”

“The URNG aren’t really Communists. At least not anymore. Nowadays they’re just another Guatemalan political party.”

“Whatever.”

“Why would she shoot videos?”

“To convey her demands.”

“Yeah, but videos contain a lot of extra information. It’s harder to control. It’s not safe. Why not just send notes?”

Russo pushed back from the table. “Obviously Delarosa wasn’t trying to play it safe, because the deal wasn’t about the money. It was personal. She believed Toledo was responsible for her father’s disappearance in Guatemala.”

This was new information to me. “How do you know that?”

He looked at me. “We did our job. She could of picked any of the guys who used to run things down in Guatemala, but she picked Toledo. We wanted to know why, so we asked around. Turned out she had a grudge against him personally because of her father. But it was also an act of terrorism. A way for the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca to make a statement in a big way. If you steal from the Guatemalan people, the URNG will get the money back, and they will kill you, okay?”

I nodded. He had pronounced Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca perfectly. I felt a little foolish for underestimating him earlier. I said, “That makes a lot of sense.”

He brushed bits of food off his potbelly, slid out of the booth, and stood up. Looking down at Harper, he said, “You ready?”

Harper started to go for his wallet. “I guess so.”

I said, “Don’t worry about the check.”

Russo said, “We won’t.”

11

The next day was Haley’s birthday.
It was the first thing on my mind when I opened my eyes that morning. I ached at the thought. I probably would have rolled over and gone back to sleep in self-defense, except I didn’t want Simon coming over with a cup of french roast at three in the afternoon. So, although it took a few minutes to summon the gumption, I got up. I decided the time had come to go see Haley.

After a shave and shower, I put on my best black suit. I walked across the property to the garage and got into her Bentley. As I waited for the gates to open at the end of the driveway, I saw Teru standing in the distance. He wore his usual green shirt and trousers, and a pair of black rubber boots that came up nearly to his knees. He was sending smoke signals skyward from his pipe and spraying water from a hose onto a flowerbed. I saw a little rainbow in the mist around him. I realized he was watching me. The gates were open and I drove out. I didn’t wave good-bye.

They must have picked me up outside the estate, but I was in my own little fog of grief. I didn’t notice until I had already turned south on the Pacific Coast Highway and had gone nearly all the way through Corona del Mar. I glanced in the mirror as I drove by the Five Crowns restaurant, and there they were, three cars back in that same black Suburban.

The anger came back all of a sudden. It drove away the grief. It seemed to be my only other setting. I decided it might feel good to do something about the guys behind me, so after I passed Cameo Shores and the shopping center, I turned left at the light toward the upper parking lot for Crystal Cove State Park. I paid the ranger lady with the Smokey the Bear hat, and she raised the traffic bar. I drove in about one hundred feet, then stopped. I shifted into reverse and waited.

The Suburban pulled up to the kiosk about a minute later. After the men had paid and driven past the upraised bar, I stepped on the accelerator and moved in reverse. About a second later, I was right in front of them. With the kiosk on their left, the curb on their right, and the bar already down behind them, they had nowhere to go.

They got out.

I got out.

We met on a little gravel-covered area beside the driveway.

One of them wore the top three buttons of his shirt undone, showing off a gold medallion that he wore around his neck, just as he had done the day before at the Galley Cafe. When we were about six feet apart, the other one moved a couple of steps to Medallion’s right, so they had me flanked. It’s what I would have done.

I shifted my weight slightly forward to the balls of my feet. My knees were bent a little, and my left foot was a little farther forward. I held my arms down with my elbows flexed to place my hands slightly in front of my hips with the thumbs rotated up. I didn’t take up the stance consciously. After countless hours of hand-to-hand combat training, it was second nature. I noticed both of them were standing the same way. I thought that was interesting.

I said, “Hi, there.”

“Hello,” replied Medallion. “How can we help you?”

“I don’t know. I think my car might be stuck here.”

“Stuck, he says,” said the Other One. I noticed that he had a Beretta M9 holstered in plain sight at his right hip. I thought that was another interesting thing.

The ranger lady opened the kiosk door and said, “What’s going on out there?”

The Other One said, “You better stay inside.”

She looked at me. “Do I need to call the police?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” I said.

“Okay.” She closed the door.

“That’s fine,” said Medallion. “But while we wait, I do think maybe we can help you. Do you mind if I offer some advice?”