JO01 - Guilty or Else (17 page)

“How long will that take?”

“A few months, at most.”

“Oh.”

“Jimmy, if it’s important, Sol can assign an investigator to check out the company using the shoe leather approach.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, snoop around, go to the last known address, ask questions. Detective work, a real investigation. I just tapped into the records, had a friend in Sacramento pull the file.”

“Better wait on that, Joyce. I’ll talk to Sol first. By the way, did you find out anything yet about Fischer, the pilot?”

“No, sorry. It’s still early, but Sol has a couple of our best men working full time on it. I’ll call you soon as we get anything.”

I hung up, leaned back in my chair and reflected on the news, trying to make sense out of it.

The connections: Gloria Graham/Welch/Karadimos, and now French. The Saturday flight, not logged. Welch’s pressure on Johnson—Karadimos’s pressure on me. What about the bank? Cantaloupes from Mexico, Joyce said. What was I missing? I shook my head and tried to clear my mind; nothing came.

I remembered a guy from years back, a guy who might know something. I put my feet on the floor and reached for the phone.

As a cop, I worked out of the Newton Street precinct of the LAPD, which covered the produce district located between Seventh Street and Olympic Avenue. I’d made friends with some of the brokers and dealers who did business there.

I looked at my watch: 10:30 A.M., a little late in the day for these people to be working. They usually started at around two in the morning and quit when their delivery trucks returned before ten. But one old guy, Barney Corby, a melon broker, always stayed late. He was like the proverbial little old lady, knew all the gossip in the neighborhood and didn’t mind spreading it around.

The information operator rattled off Barney’s phone number and I dialed it. When he answered, I said, “Hi, Barn. Jimmy O’Brien. You’re still working late, I see.”

“Jimmy, great to hear from you. Yeah, but I don’t come in so early anymore. Getting up there, you know. I’ll be eighty-four next month.”

We talked a bit about the old times and discussed getting together for lunch one of these days. But he didn’t seem too excited about the idea after I told him I’d quit drinking.

“Maybe you can help me, Barney. I’m working on a case and the name Hartford Commodities came up, a produce outfit. You know the company?”

“Hartford, sure I know them. Used to have a packing shed down on Terminal Ave.”

“Used to? They’re not there anymore?” I asked.

“They closed up. Moved out. Still have their shipping rights and a telephone number, but no trucks, or customers. It’s a dummy corporation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just a shell. Very strange. When I called the old phone number, it referred me to their new number. I called because I had a customer for them.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing, nada. They had one of those newfangled answer machines, some kind of a tape recorder. Left several messages. I think I did it right. But anyway, I never heard back.”

“Maybe they were busy,” I said.

“Maybe the trustees don’t give a damn about new business.”

“Trustees? Is the company in bankruptcy or something?”

“No, it’s held in trust. Some kind of offshore corporation owns the company now.”

“When was it sold?”

“It’s been a few years. A real hush-hush deal. But I used to do a lot of business with Hartford before the old man died and left it to his stepson. He ran it into the ground, never worked the business. Fooled around with chippies, then got involved in politics.”

“Politics?”

“Yeah, didn’t I mention it? The old man who started the company was Senator Berry Welch’s stepfather.”

C H A P T E R 
25

Shortly after I got off
the phone with Barney, Rita came in with a steaming mug. “Hope it’s okay,” she said.

The last thing I needed at that moment was a caffeine kick. After what Barney had said, my heart was beating a mile a minute, but I figured one sip wouldn’t kill me. I put the cup to my lips and tasted the coffee. “Wow,” I said. “This is the best cup of coffee you’ve ever made.” I wasn’t kidding, it was that good.

She beamed. “Thanks, Boss. It’s the new pot. Hard to make a bad cup with it. Has a timer on the thing, goes on and off automatically. What will they think of next?”

“Don’t know, Rita.”

“Maybe a computer to replace lawyers.”

“Think so?”

She winked. “It won’t have your blue eyes, though. I’ll miss that.”

“Aw, Rita…”

“Sorry about your car window.”

Earlier I’d told her kids playing baseball broke the window. I didn’t like telling her white lies, but didn’t want her to worry. “I’m not one to mope.”

“Can you give me a minute, Jimmy? There’s something we should discuss.”

I grabbed the phone, and started to dial. “Sure, Rita,” I said. “But first I have to talk to Sol. The case is starting to heat up. I’ll come out and talk after this call, okay?”

She turned and I watched the sway of her hips as she gracefully left the room. I finished dialing, and Sol came on the line.

“Hi, Jimmy. I’m just walking out the door.”

“Sol, I just found out something important.”

“Okay, meet me at Rio Hondo. I’ve got a tee off time in forty-five minutes. I’ll be on the practice green. I have news, too. We can talk while I warm up.”

“Why can’t we talk on the phone?”

“See you in ten minutes.” He hung up.

As I rushed past Rita’s desk, she looked at me and started to say something, but I kept going. When I climbed in the driver’s seat of my Corvette, I remembered she wanted to talk to me about something. I made a mental note to call her from the clubhouse at the golf course.

As I drove, I let the facts of the case rattle around in my brain. I wondered about Welch’s old company being sold to a trust controlled by an offshore corporation. Was Welch still involved? If so, what was he trying to hide? Maybe he didn’t want the government to see the company books. Could this whole thing be some kind of elaborate tax dodge? A tax dodge wouldn’t have henchmen in a Buick shadowing me, though. No, there was more to it than a simple accounting matter.

I turned into the Rio Hondo Country Club parking lot, killed the engine, and walked into the pro shop. The guy there said Sol was already on the practice green. I saw him through the window. He had on a yellow alpaca sweater, bright blue slacks with white shoes, and was crouched on his haunches holding a metal rod of some sort. One end of the three-foot long rod rested on the grass, and he held the other end about two feet off the ground.

When I walked over to him, he was rolling golf balls down the groove in the inclined rod. “Hey, Sol, what’s that thing?”

He glanced up, didn’t say anything, then looked down at the ball as it rolled to a stop about ten feet from the end of the rod.

“Sol, what the hell are you doing? Is that the way you putt, roll a ball down a piece of steel?”

“It’s aluminum, a Stimpmeter. Had it made special. I use it to check the speed of the greens. Someday all the golf courses will have one, but…” He took a tape measure out of his pocket and measured the distance the ball had traveled. “Nine feet, two inches, pretty fast.”

Nothing Sol did surprised me anymore. “Does that help your game?”

“I’m playing your old friend, Judge Johnson today. I’ll need all the help I can get. He’s good and he cheats on his handicap.”

“Yeah, he used to cheat a lot when we were on the job together. Mostly on his wife.”

“I gotta put this thing away before he sees it.” Sol said, indicating the aluminum rod. “Don’t want him stealing my secrets. C’mon, we’ll talk on the way to my car.”

As we walked back to the parking lot, I told Sol about my conversation with Barney. “So the Buick that shadowed me is related to Welch’s old company. That says a lot.”

“Not necessarily evidence of murder.”

“Yeah, but we know Welch and Karadimos are connected. Karadimos’s plane was flown down the day of the murder, and Karadimos is threatening me. Now it looks like Welch is the guy who had me followed. That means they’re both in on it together. I’ve got enough for reasonable doubt. It’s looking good.”

“Whoa, slow down, Jimmy. There’s an old Jewish saying. Don’t count your chickens—”

“I didn’t know that was a Jewish saying.”

“Yeah, we have sayings for everything. It means—”

“I know what it means, Sol.”

“Let me finish. It means,
mach nit kain tsimmes fun

Dem
.”

“Oh, that explains it.”

“See, before you start counting chickens—”

“I’m not counting chickens.”

“Forget about chickens. You have to think about what Welch and Karadimos are up to,” Sol said. “Think about this: Karadimos is a crook and we figure he’s working with Welch. Maybe Gloria found out something that she shouldn’t have.”

“I’ve been thinking about those calls Gloria had made that day.”

Gloria placed two long-distance phone calls on the day she died, the first one at around three in the afternoon to a Kansas number. The police didn’t investigate that call other than to report that it had been made to a friend. The second one about an hour later had been routed to the Sacramento Inn. It turned out to be a dead end. The hotel had no way to trace the call to any particular room.

“Didn’t we figure her Sacramento call was to Welch?” Sol asked as he opened the trunk of his Lincoln Continental Mark IV. He tossed in the rod and pulled out his golf bag. Leaning against the side of his car, he said, “It’d be good to know what they talked about on that last phone call.”

“What about the earlier call to her high school friend in Kansas? Wasn’t she the girl who told you Gloria and Welch were having an affair?”

“Yeah, Bonnie Munson. Lives in Manhattan, Kansas. She went to high school with Graham. That’s how we found her. We called the school and talked to a teacher. The teacher remembered Gloria, told us Bonnie had been her best friend.”

“Do you think Bonnie would talk to me if I called her?” I asked.

“No, I don’t think so. My investigators called her several times. She clammed up when they tried to get her to talk in depth about Gloria’s relationship with Welch. I felt there was more troubling Bonnie about Gloria than just the affair, but that’s just my thinking. I even called her myself, but could get nothing more out of her. She hung up on me.” Sol shook his head. “Nah, she won’t talk to you, Jimmy.”

“I think you’re right. She knows more than she’s telling. Might not even know it’s related to the murder.” I glanced off into the distance. Was that Big Jake’s Caddie about a quarter mile away, moving slowly along Old River School Road? I blinked, and didn’t see it again.

“Jimmy, I know what you’re thinking. You’re going to Kansas to see her, aren’t you?”

I turned back to Sol. “Yeah, I’ve gotta leave right away.

Today is Tuesday. It’ll be an overnight flight. I have to be back for the preliminary hearing Thursday morning.”

“Hold on, buddy boy. Even if she knows something, I doubt that she’ll see you, and if she does, she won’t talk.

Sounds like a long shot.”

“Sol, it’s the only shot I’ve got.”

“Maybe not the only shot.”

“You got something else?”

“You wanna talk to Welch, don’t you?”

“Hell, yes!”

“I’ve arranged for a sit-down, one on one. You’ll get ten minutes with Welch. Next Friday night at his fundraiser. It’s going to be held at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills.”

“Jesus, how’d you arrange that?”

“Remember I told you I was having lunch with a heavyweight when you called yesterday? By the way, did you call her yet?”

“Bobbi?”

“No, the Queen of Sheba, you schmuck.”

“She doesn’t want me to call. We’re on opposite sides— but anyway, who were you having lunch with?”

“Chuck Manatt.”

“The political guy.”

“Yeah, I complained about the way Rhodes took off after we went to all the trouble to show him a good time at Del Mar.”

“I treated him nice. I smiled when I called his client a crook.”

Sol laughed. “Anyway, I told Manatt the only way to square it would be to set up a face-to-face meeting between Welch and you.”

“What did Manatt say?” I asked.

“Done. It’s arranged.”

“He did? That’s what he said, just like that?”

“Well, just about. I had to buy ten tickets to the dinner.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

“Christ Almighty, you gave that asshole, Welch, five hundred bucks?”

“Each.”

“Whaddya mean—each?”

“Ten minutes, ten tickets, five thousand.”

“
Holy Christ
!” I gasped. “Sol, that’s a lot of money. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Jimmy, you’ll get food. Chasen’s makes great chili. And don’t forget, you get to have your picture taken with the Senator.”

“Yeah, I’ll hang it on the wall.”

“Look good if he’s the governor someday,” Sol said.

“Look better if he’s in jail,” I said.

C H A P T E R 
26

From Los Angeles, I’d flown
to the Kansas City Airport and stayed overnight at a Howard Johnson’s. I caught the early morning air taxi to Manhattan.

The six-passenger Beechcraft King Air made a sweeping turn and lined up for a straight-in approach to the Manhattan Regional Airport. This part of Kansas was wheat country, the breadbasket of the world. When I looked out the airplane window, I expected to see “amber waves of grain.” I didn’t. It was August and the farmers cut the wheat in June. From the airplane, I saw a sea of dirt and stubble that stretched to the horizon under a beautiful, spacious sky.

I’d stopped at the jail the day before on my way to LAX and explained to Rodriguez the purpose of Thursday’s hearing. His spirits seemed to be holding up, and I was relieved to find out he’d been removed from the psychopath section and placed in a normal cell, but at the same time I was nervous that he was now in the general population where someone could get to him. I told him to be careful and watch his back. I didn’t tell him what I’d discovered about Welch and Karadimos, though. I didn’t want to get his hopes up. I’d wait until after my meeting on Friday with the Senator.