Kill the Messenger (23 page)

                        
      31

Parker called Joel Coen from his car as he made his way to the City National Bank branch where Lenny Lowell’s safe-deposit box lived.

Coen picked up on the second ring. Still young enough to be eager.

“Joel, Kev Parker. I’ve got something for you on the Lowell B&E, but you have to jump on it ASAP, got it?”

“What is it?”

“I’ve got your getaway car. It’s sitting behind a fish market in Chinatown. Black Mini Cooper, damage to the left taillight, match on the partial plate.”

“Geez, how’d you get that so fast?”

“I’m hyperactive. Do you know what color the minivan was?”

“Silver.”

“That’s it. I couldn’t get a warrant—extenuating circumstances—but you won’t have a problem. Call the DA’s office and make sure you
do not
talk to Langfield. And when you get the car dusted for prints, make sure they go to Joanie at Latent. Tell her I sent you, and that she’s looking for a match with my homicide.”

“Got it.”

“And move fast, Joel. There’s a shitstorm coming. If Robbery-Homicide gets a sniff of this car, it’s gone, and so’s your case.”

“RHD? Why would they—”

“Don’t ask. The less you know, the better. Beat it over to Chinatown. I’ve got a unit sitting on the car.”

He gave Coen the address, and ended the call as the bank came into sight. Half expecting to see Bradley Kyle and his partner waiting at the door, Parker parked his car and went inside, court order in hand.

The manager checked the document for crossed
t
’s and dotted
i
’s, and escorted him to the lower level, to the location of the boxes. Lowell’s was the largest size available. They put the box on a long walnut table in a private room. Parker put on a pair of latex gloves, took a deep breath, and opened the lid.

Cool, green, cash money. Stacks of it. Stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Parker took them out and piled them on the table. Twenty-five thousand dollars. And under the money, at the bottom of the box, a small envelope containing a single photographic negative, and a bank deposit slip with numbers scribbled on the back.

“That slimy old son of a bitch,” Parker murmured. He didn’t have to know who was in the photograph to know what this was about. Blackmail.

Turning on one of his own clients. That had to be it. Lowell had put someone between a rock and a hard place and squeezed. That explained the pricey condo, the new Cadillac, the cash.

He held the negative up to the light. Two people, shot from a distance. They might have been shaking hands or exchanging something. It was impossible to tell.

The first line of numbers written on the deposit slip looked like an out-of-the-country phone number. The line of numbers below might be an account number, he guessed, and he thought back to finding the travel brochure on the floor of Lenny’s office. The Cayman Islands. Lovely place to visit—or to hide money in a numbered account.

Parker put the negative and the slip back in the envelope. He asked the manager for a bank bag for the money, tagged it as evidence, and put everything in a brown paper Ralph’s grocery sack he had brought in with him.

The elevator ride to the ground floor was silent. If the bank manager wondered what was going on, he didn’t show it, and he didn’t ask. He had probably seen cops take stranger things than money out of clients’ boxes. Parker himself had once popped the lid of a suspected murderer’s safe-deposit box and found a collection of mummified human fingers.

The elevator doors opened, framing a live portrait of Abby Lowell sitting on a marble bench, waiting. She had a hell of a wardrobe for a law student. Camel tweed wool suit with a slim skirt and a forties-inspired close-fitted jacket, belted at the waist with a thin band of brown crocodile. Matching shoes, matching bag. Maybe it paid to be the daughter of a blackmailer.

In one elegant move, she unfolded herself from the bench as Parker stepped out of the elevator. She looked directly at him, her expression calm but with an underlying quality of steel that had to scare the crap out of guys her own age.

“Did you find my father’s papers?”

“And good morning to you, Ms. Lowell. I see you survived the night. Great suit. Prada?”

She didn’t answer, but fell into step beside him as he started for the side door.

“Did you find my father’s papers?” she asked again.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What does that mean?”

“Neither his will nor his life insurance policy was in the box,” he said, sliding on his shades as they walked. The heels of her crocodile shoes clacked a staccato rhythm on the terrazzo floor.

“Then what do you have in that bag?”

“Evidence.”

“Evidence of what? My father was the victim.”

“Your father is dead,” Parker said. “Anything I can find that will point to why he was killed or who killed him is evidence, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t worry. You’ll get it all back eventually—unless it turns out you killed him.”

She snatched a breath to say something, thought better of it, tried again. Frustration knit her brow.

“What’s the matter, Ms. Lowell? Can’t figure out a way to ask the question without incriminating yourself?”

The doors whooshed open before them, and they stepped out into the shade of an overhang. The morning was already blindingly bright.

“I resent the implication,” she said angrily. “I cared about Lenny.”

“But you said yourself, he wasn’t much of a father,” Parker said. “When you were a kid, he dragged you along behind him like you were a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe. That had to hurt. Little girls love their dads. They want to be loved back.”

“I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed by you,” she snapped. “I pay someone quite handsomely to do that for me.”

“You certainly have Beverly Hills taste, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said. “Most students I know have beer budgets. Was Lenny footing the bill for your lifestyle? I wouldn’t have guessed he made that kind of money defending the people he defended. Did he have some other source of income?”

“I have my own money,” she said. “From my mother. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Then maybe you were footing the bill for
his
lifestyle,” Parker suggested. “Condo downtown, new Caddie . . .”

“And who pays for your lifestyle, Detective?” she asked pointedly. “Gucci loafers, Canali suit . . . I wouldn’t have guessed you made that kind of money as a public servant.”

Parker conceded the point with a tip of his head. “Touché, Ms. Lowell.”

“Are you taking bribes?” she asked. “Fixing cases? Ripping off drug dealers?”

“No, but I believe your father was blackmailing someone,” he said bluntly. “I just took twenty-five thousand dollars out of his safe-deposit box.”

If she wasn’t shocked, she was a fine actress, Parker thought. The brown eyes went wide, some of the color left her cheeks. She looked away, trying to collect herself. She covered by opening her handbag and fishing out a pair of Dior sunglasses.

“Where do you think all that money came from?” Parker asked.

He started across the parking lot, popping the trunk of his car with the remote. He didn’t mention the negative, just to see if she would ask if he had found anything else in the box. But if she wondered, she was too smart to say anything.

Parker glanced at her as she followed him. “Any idea?”

“No.”

“You’re delusional if you think I’m a fool, Ms. Lowell.” He put the paper sack in the trunk and shut the lid. “Your father is murdered and the killer calls you on your cell phone to tell you. He breaks into your apartment, tosses the place, threatens to kill you, but you claim you don’t know what he’s looking for. You’re desperate to get into Lenny’s safe-deposit box, then I find twenty-five K in the box and you claim to know nothing about it. Do you think I was dropped on my head as a child?”

She had no answer to that. She pressed an elegantly manicured hand to her lips, as she always seemed to do when a moment became too difficult for her. Her other arm banded across her stomach, holding herself.

Supporting, comforting herself, Parker thought. It was probably something she’d learned to do as a little girl while sitting as an afterthought beside her father at the racetrack. Whatever else he thought about her, he felt sorry for the lonely child she must have been.

She turned in a slow, small circle, not knowing where to go. Couldn’t run, couldn’t hide.

“Who was he blackmailing?” Parker asked.

“I don’t believe that he was,” she said, but she didn’t look at him when she said it.

“Do you know a guy named Eddie Boyd Davis?”

She shook her head. She was fighting tears, fighting some internal battle Parker couldn’t read.

“If you know something about this,” he said, “now’s the time, Abby. Bail now before it goes too far. Lenny’s gone. His killer has you in his sights. A sack of money isn’t worth dying for.”

Her shoulders rose and fell as she let out a slow, measured breath and composed herself again.

“Don’t I pay taxes for you to serve and protect me?” she asked. “You’re supposed to keep me from getting killed.”

“I can’t fight what I don’t know, Abby.”

“What don’t you know?” she asked, impatient and frustrated. “Why can’t you find that bike messenger?”

“I don’t think the bike messenger had anything to do with it,” Parker said.

“He attacked me!”

“It doesn’t hold water.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“If he killed your father for the money in the safe, why would he stick around to come and see you?” Parker asked.

“I don’t know! Maybe he’s just a psycho and he singled out Lenny and now me.”

“That only happens in the movies, doll,” Parker said. “The kid got sent to your father’s office by chance. I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Even through the sunglasses he could see she was livid.

“Oh, I see,” she said curtly. “He came into my home and attacked me, but he’s just an innocent bystander? And I’m, what? The scheming femme fatale? Talk about fantasy. You have me cast in your own little film noir.”

“It works that way,” Parker said. “The way I see it is this: Lenny was blackmailing somebody and he got killed for it. And yes, I think you’re in it up to your pretty little chin.”

“I’d slap you if I didn’t think you’d arrest me for it,” she said.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Parker said. “If you don’t come clean with this, I think I’m going to have plenty of better reasons to arrest you, Ms. Lowell.”

She shook her head and looked away. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“No? Well, you certainly seemed to take in stride the fact that someone beat your father’s head in. I’d say you have a pretty skewed way of looking at things if you think I’m your worst problem.”

She slapped him then, hard. The sting on his cheek and the ringing in his ear seemed to be one and the same.

Parker shook it off. “Well, I can’t say I didn’t give you permission to do that.”

Her lips flattened in a line of disgust. “I am so through with you, Detective Parker.”

She turned like a soldier and marched away, her crocodile bag clutched tightly under her arm. She was parked five cars down. A blue BMW 3 Series convertible. New. She turned and faced him before she got in.

“Your captain will be hearing from me.”

“I’m sure he’ll look forward to that.”

Parker watched her back out and drive away, the first thing on her agenda to get him kicked off the case.

“Sorry, doll,” he muttered, climbing behind the wheel of the Sebring. “Somebody already beat you to it.”

                        
      32

Parker turned in at the gates to the Paramount Studio lot and waved to the security guard.

“Good to see you, Mr. Parker.”

“You too, Bill.”

“You here to see Mr. Conners?”

“Not today. I need to see Chuck Ito. He’s expecting me.”

The guard made a note on his clipboard and waved Parker through.

Chuck Ito’s office was a building toward the back of the lot. He worked as a film editor, but his hobby was still photography, and he had collected all the latest gizmos in his studio and had declared them as business expenses on his tax forms.

“Look what the cat dragged in.” Ito’s greeting. Parker had known him going on five years, and this was always his opening line.

“My suit takes offense at the implications of that remark,” Parker said.

“So? It only speaks Italian,” Ito said. “It doesn’t know if I’m insulting it or not.”

He checked his watch and grimaced. “We have to make this quick, Kev. I’ve got a meeting in ten with someone much more important than you.”

Parker looked perturbed. “Who’s more important than me?”

“Just about everyone.”

“That’s harsh.”

Parker dropped into a chair and tossed the envelope from Lenny Lowell’s safe-deposit box onto the desk.

Ito reached for it. “What have you got for me, Kev? Something I’ll get arrested for?” He plucked the negative out and held it up to a light. “Who’s in it?”

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“So it’s got something to do with your secret life as a woman?”

“I’m letting that slide in the interest of time,” Parker said. “I’ll knock you on your ass later. I need this developed ASAP.”

Ito looked at him like he was stupid. “Go to the mall. They can do it in an hour.”

“Or some kid making minimum wage will accidentally run it through a shredder. This is evidence in a homicide.”

“Then why aren’t you taking it to the LAPD lab if it’s evidence?”

“You’re kidding, right? I’d be lucky to get it back by Christmas, if ever. I think they have one person and he’s only up to date on equipment through the tintype machine.”

A mixture of truth and exaggeration. The general public has been led to believe that every crime lab in every city in the nation is just like the one on
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,
when in truth none of them are. The great majority are understaffed, underfunded, and overloaded. In LA County, famous for making DNA evidence the talk of the world during the O. J. Simpson trial, there are three people who deal with DNA evidence. Most of the time their findings aren’t even in until well after a trial is over.

Besides, Parker couldn’t tell Ito he wasn’t exactly supposed to have this piece of evidence. If he could get the thing developed, he could see who he was dealing with and have a bigger jump ahead of Robbery-Homicide. That was why he hadn’t bagged and tagged the negative at the bank. He figured to get the thing developed, then seal it in the bag to be taken in as evidence, and no one would be the wiser.

“I need it ASAP.”

“ASAP for me today is going to be more like late in the day. Dinnertime. I can have one of my assistants—”

“No. I can’t have a lot of people handling this thing.”

“I could go to prison for this, couldn’t I?” Ito said.

Parker made a face. “Prison? Nah . . . the work farm, maybe. You don’t have a record of prior convictions, do you?”

“Some friend you are,” Ito said, pretending to be upset.

Parker got up and started toward the door. “It’s fine,” he said with a casual wave of the hand. “Just don’t tell anyone you have it. If you get caught with it, I don’t know you.”

Blackmail. Parker stirred the word around in his mind as he drove back toward downtown. If Eddie Davis turned out to be one of the people in the photograph, then that gave Davis a strong motive to kill Lowell. If the two of them had been in on something together, one might have turned on the other out of greed. Another good motive.

Whichever way it went, Davis was after the negative. That was why he had ransacked Lenny’s office, busted out the windows of his car. He would have done the same to Lowell’s condo if not for the fact that it was in a secure building. It was probably Davis who had tossed Abby Lowell’s place. The missing negative probably explained the implication in the note he had scrawled in lipstick on her bathroom mirror.
Next You Die
. . . If you don’t give up the negative.

But there had to be more than one. Parker figured the one in the safe-deposit box would have been insurance, something Lenny could hold on to, just in case. And Parker had a hunch that the person holding them was J. C. Damon. He wondered if the kid had any idea what he had.

Parker’s phone rang, breaking him out of his thoughts.

“Parker.”

“Well, since you don’t have any friends, I called one of mine.” Andi Kelly. “There is no one named Davis in Robbery-Homicide.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?” She sounded offended not to have the scoop.

“Because I’m better than you are, doll.”

Kelly laughed. “What bullshit.”

“I know it because a witness identified Davis in a mug book this morning.”

“He killed that woman last night?”

“Not my case,” Parker said. “You’ll have to talk to Ruiz.”

“I don’t like her.”

“Nobody likes her,” Parker said. “She’s rude and abrasive and bratty. And she’s not a woman’s woman.”

“How do you know about that? Men never get that.”

“I’m in touch with my feminine side,” Parker said.

“She’ll sell you out for a dime and give back change,” Kelly said.

“Well, there’s definitely some truth in that,” Parker muttered, wondering if Ruiz wasn’t even at that very moment selling him out to Bradley Kyle, describing in detail every piece of paper Parker had taken with him when he’d gone.

“You’re her training officer,” Kelly said. “Usurp her power. Grab the case for yourself. What do you care if she hates you?”

“She already hates me.”

“See?”

“Okay,” Parker said with resignation. Kelly was like a Jack Russell terrier. If she wanted something, she was relentless in her pursuit. She would bite into a story and hang on, no matter what. “Yes, I like Davis for the murder last night.”

“Why? What’s his motive?”

“I’m still working on that,” he hedged. “But it’s a good bet that he went to Speed Couriers to get a line on the bike messenger.”

“The bike messenger. Wasn’t he a ‘person of interest’ last night?”

“He’s still a person of interest. I just don’t consider him to be a suspect. I need to get with him, talk to him, before RHD barges in and blows everything. They’re taking the Lowell case.”

“You’re kidding. Why would they be interested?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“And you’ll let me know when you do?”

“You’re the only pal I’ve got in this, Andi,” Parker said seriously. “I’ve got bogies all around me. Don’t make me think you’re just using me like a cheap gigolo.”

“I think you should know better, Kev,” she said. “Nothing about you is cheap. I’d say I have your back, but I’d rather have your front. And I do like the idea of you playing the gigolo.”

“You shameless tart.”

“Yes. You know I’m pushing forty. I don’t have time to mess around. Anyway, have I ever let you down?”

Parker ignored the opportunity to keep the innuendo going. “No. You haven’t,” he said on a sigh. “The head of Robbery-Homicide told my captain they feel the Lowell murder might relate to something they have ongoing.”

Kelly was silent for long enough that Parker thought she might have lost the connection.

“And we’re back to Bradley Kyle and Moose Roddick talking with Tony Giradello, your name coming up in the conversation,” she said at last.

“That’s right,” Parker said. “I’m looking at a blackmail scheme here, Andi.”

“Who versus who for what?”

“I don’t know yet, but two people are already dead. And there’s only one case Bradley Kyle has ongoing with stakes that high.”

“Tricia Crowne-Cole.”