January Justice (30 page)

“You did?”

He turned to smile at me, pipe clenched tightly in his teeth. “I did.”

“Okay. Was there anything else in that file they gave you?”

“They know you’ve been looking into Doña Elena’s finances.”

“How do they know that?”

“They took your computer. It was in your search history.”

“Oh boy.”

“It’s a motive, Malcolm. They’ll say you went looking to find out exactly what her assets are and exactly where they are. They’ll say it’s what you would do if you were thinking about a kidnapping.”

“I know.”

“Another thing. Doña Elena says Delarosa was in on the home invasion.”

“I know that, too.”

“Okay, but they have a statement from your buddy, Tom Harper. He says you were asking lots of questions about Delarosa but wouldn’t tell him why. And that Detective Russo with the LAPD confirms it in a separate statement.”

“Yeah, we had a talk over lunch.”

“Not good, Malcolm. Like I said, you’re gonna need a better lawyer. Maybe somebody who gardens in his spare time instead of the other way around.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, I definitely say so.”

33

We rode in silence
for a few miles. I ran through all the possible explanations for the Montes’s home invasion. The more I thought about the possibility that Vega had intended to murder the congressman and frame me for it all along, the more sense that theory made. With my court-martial conviction and dishonorable discharge, I was the perfect patsy. In fact, I had been a fool not to see it coming.

I said, “You got an hour or two?”

Teru said, “Sure.”

I pointed at an upcoming exit. “Take the 405 to LA.”

Teru took the exit, and we rode north.

We got off the highway at Century Boulevard, and I directed Teru to the Renaissance Hotel near LAX. He pulled under the porte cochere and waved off the valet. I hopped out, told the valet we would only be a minute, and went inside the lobby.

The desk clerk was convinced he had a moral duty to safeguard the privacy of the hotel’s guests until I placed a pair of twenties on the counter. He put the money in his pocket, turned to his computer, and started tapping keys.

He said, “Mr. Brown checked out this morning.”

I wasn’t surprised. I said, “Did he happen to mention where he was going from here?”

“No.”

“He was here for quite a while, wasn’t he?”

The clerk checked the screen. “Twenty-three days.”

“Maybe he got to know someone on the staff. A maid? A manager?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“What room was he in?”

“I couldn’t say.”

I said, “Answer me.”

He looked up. We made eye contact. I gave him the stare that had motivated many good marines to follow my commands.

He said, “Six sixteen.”

“Has it been cleaned?”

“I doubt it.”

“Give me a pass card.”

“You could get me fired, going up there with a card.”

“I can get you fired for taking that money, and I will unless you give me the card.”

He gave me the card. I crossed the lobby to the elevator. When I got to the room upstairs, the door was open and a cleaning cart was parked there in the hall. I went in.

A short Latino woman came out of the bathroom, carrying used towels. She wore a pink uniform and Reebok running shoes. She said, “Jes?”

I spoke to her in Spanish. “Mr. Brown left something in the room. He asked me to come back and get it.”

She frowned. “Okay…”

“It is not a problem. I have his key. Look.” I swiped the card in the mechanism on the open door. A small green light appeared.

She said “Okay” again, this time with more sincerity.

I went to a table and picked up a pad of scratch paper which had the hotel’s logo at the top. I held it at an angle to the window so the daylight fell across it, hoping for indentations left by the last note. There were none that I could see.

As the maid was leaving the room, I said, “Mr. Brown asked me to leave you a tip.”

She stopped and turned back to face me. I gave her a twenty. She said, “He is a very nice man.”

“Your accent. You are Guatemalan?”

“From Guatemala City, yes.” She lifted her chin a little. “But I have a green card. So does my husband.”

“I am sure you do. And you have family in Guatemala?”

“My mother and three sisters, and their children.”

I had moved to the bedside table. Opening the drawer, I said, “No father? Brothers? No men?”

“All dead, sir.”

“I am sorry,” I said, continuing my search of the room by looking in the trash can. “It is a very dangerous city.”

“Yes. There is much crime.”

“Well, it appears Mr. Brown was wrong. He left nothing here.”

“Maybe those other two found it already.”

“What other two?”

“The men from the consulate.”

“Oh, of course. Antonio and Manuel. I am sorry I missed seeing them. That Antonio, he is so funny looking, the way he wears that big gold chain.”

“You think that is funny? I like it. I was going to get one for my husband.”

“What do I know about fashion? Your husband will undoubtedly be very handsome with your gift around his neck.”

I passed her at the door, then left the room.

Back down in the lobby, I found a room marked “Business Center” and used the pass card to enter. In the room were several computers and printers on built-in worktops, available for hotel guests. I sat at a computer, brought up the Internet and did a little surfing. I found the address for the Guatemalan consulate, then went back outside, where Teru stood leaning on the Porsche with his arms crossed and smoke rising from his pipe.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Vega’s gone.”

“I assume he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“Nope.”

“Where should we start looking?”

“I have no idea. But the two guys who tried to kill me were here earlier. They might have a clue.”

“Where would we find them?”

“They claimed they’re with the Guatemalan consulate.”

“So let’s get over there.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

I gave Teru the address. We got back on the 405 and took it to the 10. We exited at Normandie Avenue and turned north, past Rosedale Cemetery on the right and Seoul International Park on the left. We turned left on Wilshire.

The consulate was in a fifteen-story steel-and-glass building at the corner of South Ardmore. On the corner was something called the “Woori America Bank.” I thought it was a strange address for them to choose, being in the middle of Koreatown, until I remembered that the next neighborhood to the east was Pico-Union. The government had picked a spot as close as they could get to the majority of the Guatemalan population in LA without having to expose themselves to the distasteful poverty and gangs that afflicted their people.

Teru dropped me at the curb across the street and drove on in search of a parking spot. I went inside and found suite 100.

There was a crest on the door, the same one I had seen a few blocks away in Pico-Union on the giant flag in the window of the Guatemalan Benevolence Society building. I wondered if the old men playing dominoes over there knew the Guatemalan government preferred an office here among Koreans rather than in their neighborhood.

I opened the door and entered a small room with chairs along two walls and a stack of Spanish-language magazines on a table in the corner. In the opposite corner was flag draped just so and hanging from a varnished wooden flagpole. Beside the flag was a modular work cubicle with a low countertop facing the room. In the cubicle sat a young woman in a tight red dress. She wore red lipstick to match the dress and large plastic hoop earrings, also red. The only thing missing was a hat with tropical fruit.

I considered telling her why I was there but decided that was unlikely to get me answers, so I just gave her my card and said, “I’m Malcolm Cutter, here to see the consul general.”

She checked her computer. “Forgive me. Your name again?”

“Cutter. I don’t have an appointment.”

She knitted her brow and shook her head. “I’m sorry. You must make an appointment.”

I said, “You speak English very well.”

She smiled. “Thank you. Now, if there is nothing else?”

“Would you mention one thing to the consul general?”

“Probably not. He is a very busy man.”

“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Just pick up your phone and mention Valentín Vega’s name. Also a failed attempt to murder me in the Santa Ana Mountains a few days ago. And while you’re at it, let him know the man who was arrested yesterday for breaking into Congressman Hector Montes’s house is standing in his lobby.”

She stared at me. I flashed my most winning smile. Many women have reported weak knees and butterflies in response to my smile, but the receptionist appeared to be immune. She simply continued to stare. There must have had a panic button behind her desk somewhere, because two soldiers in uniform entered the reception area through an opening behind her, a corporal and a sergeant. They joined the receptionist in staring at me with deadpan expressions on their Indian features. Their hands rested on their sidearms.

I said, “And here I thought we were getting along so well.”

She spoke Spanish to the soldiers. “Watch him closely. He could be an escaped criminal.” I was amused that she seemed to assume I spoke no Spanish. It was like the Japanese businessmen. So many people seemed to underestimate me.

She picked up the telephone handset and pushed some buttons. After a short pause she spoke into the phone, repeating what I had just said. She listened for a moment, said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up.

She switched back to English. “Would you allow these men to search you for weapons?”

Since my gun and knife were in an Orange County evidence locker, I held my arms out to the side. “Sure.”

The corporal stepped forward and frisked me. He said, “Nothing,” and stepped back.

The woman stood and gestured toward the corridor. “This way, if you would.”

The consul general was a small, clean-shaven man in a beige guayabera shirt. He had the cheekbones of an Indian and the eyes of a shark. He didn’t rise behind his desk when I was escorted into his corner office. He looked up at me, then down at a paper in his hand, which he read silently for nearly a minute before he sighed grandly—presumably to indicate the enormous burden that he carried for his people—laid the paper on the desk, looked up at me again, and said, “Yes?”

I told him who I was and that I had been working for Valentín Vega. I told him why. I mentioned the two men who had followed me and tried to kill me. Then I told him about the home invasion and my arrest. I explained that it seemed possible Vega had planned to murder the congressman or else intimidate him into withdrawing his opposition to the URNG, using me as a scapegoat for the crime.

I said, “I’m guessing you want to get rid of Valentín Vega and get the URNG out of the way, but Vega’s disappeared, so that just got a lot more difficult. I’m also guessing you didn’t like it when I went to work for Vega, so you told your guys to follow me around and try to scare me off and kill me and so forth. As you can see, I’m very hard to kill, but it still offends me when people try to do it. Normally, I’d return the favor and come after you. But I think Vega set me up to take the fall for the Montes home invasion, so in this case our interests are the same. Why don’t we stop stepping on each other’s toes and work on this together?”

He stared at me with a puzzled expression. “These two men you describe, who claim they disappear people, they are not associated with my government. Those days are far behind us now, and the evil men responsible for such atrocities are being brought to justice even as we speak.”

I said, “Maybe I got it wrong. I did say it was only a guess on my part. But I assume Valentín Vega is of interest to you?”

“We are interested in him, certainly. He claims he is merely a politician now, and there are some in my government who find it convenient to forget his crimes during our civil war, but many others believe he bears the same guilt as the junta and should be brought to justice.”

“I would like to help with that.”

“In what way?”

I said, “While I understand and certainly believe you when you say the two men that I mentioned are not your associates, I still assume your consulate makes it your business to know the whereabouts of prominent Guatemalan citizens when they visit this country. Only in order to protect them and serve them, naturally.”

He nodded. “Naturally.”

“So may I assume you have some idea where Valentín Vega is at this moment? And may I assume that it would be in your nation’s interest if I were to find him and bring him to justice for his role in this terrible attack on Congressman Montes’s wife?”