The Murder Book (27 page)

“Bye,” said Milo. “By the way, what does Brad do?”

“Walks around with them,” she said.

“A walking-around guy.”

“You got it — they all need them.”

“Hollywood types?”

“Rich types with gross bodies.”

“Know Brad’s last name?”

“Larner. Brad Larner. He’s kind of a jerk.”

“How so?”

“He’s just a jerk,” said Val. “Not friendly, never smiles, never tips. A jerk.”

He drove the two blocks to Santa Monica Boulevard, made a right turn, and circled back to Melrose, this time approaching the corner from the east and parking just up from the shuttered Chinese place. The rest of the boulevard was taken up by art galleries, all closed, and the street was dark and quiet. He got out, stepped over the Chinese place’s heavy chain, and walked across a lot starting to sprout weeds through the cracks and dotted with mounds of dry dog shit. Finding himself a nice little vantage point behind one of the dead restaurant’s gateposts, he waited, taking in the Chinese place’s grimness up close — black paint flaking, bamboo shredding.

Another dream rent asunder; he liked that.

Nowhere to sit, so he continued to stand there, well concealed, watching nothing happen at Sangre de Leon for a long time. His knees and back began to hurt, and stretching and squatting seemed to make matters worse. Last Christmas, Rick had bought a treadmill for the spare bedroom, used it religiously every morning at five. Last month, he’d suggested that Milo give regular exercise a try. Milo hadn’t argued, but neither had he complied. He was no good in the morning, usually pretended to be asleep when Rick left for the ER.

He checked his Timex. The Cossacks and Brad “the jerk” Larner had been inside for over an hour, and no other patrons had materialized.

Larner was no doubt the Achievement House director’s son. The harasser’s son. Yet another link between the families. Daddy putting up Crazy Sister Caroline at Achievement House, buying jobs for himself
and
Junior.

Connections and money. So what else was new? Presidents were selected the same damn way. If any of this provided a hook to Janie Ingalls, he couldn’t see it. But he knew — on a gut level — that it
did
matter. That Pierce Schwinn’s forced retirement and his own transfer to West L.A. had resulted from more than Schwinn’s dalliances with street whores.

Twenty-year-old fix, John G. Broussard doing the dirty work.

Schwinn had sat on whatever he’d known for two decades, pasted photos in an album, finally decided to break silence.

Why now?

Maybe because Broussard had reached the top and Schwinn wanted his revenge to be a gourmet dish.

Using Milo to do the dirty work…

Then he falls off a docile horse…

Headlights from the north end of Robertson slapped him out of his rumination. Two sets of lights, a pair of vehicles approaching the Melrose intersection. The traffic signal turned amber. The first car passed through legally and the second one ran the red.

Both pulled up in front of Sangre de Leon.

Vehicle Number One was a discreet, black, Mercedes coupe — surprise, surprise! — whose license plate he copied down quickly. Out stepped the driver, another business-suit, moving so quickly the pink ladies had no time to get his door. He slipped a bill to the nearest valet, anyway, let Milo have a nice, clean look at him.

Older guy. Late sixties to midseventies, balding, with a sparse gray comb-over, wearing a boxy beige suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. Medium height, medium build, clean-shaven, the skin falling away from the bone at jowls and neck. No expression on his face. Milo wondered if this was Larner, Senior. Or just a guy out for dinner.

If so, it wouldn’t be a solo dinner, because the occupants of the second car nearly tripped over themselves to get to his side.

Vehicle Two was also black, but no feat of German engineering. Big, fat Crown Victoria sedan, anachronistically oversize. The only places Milo’d seen those things, recently, were government offices, but this one didn’t have state-issue
e
plates.

But neither did lots of unmarkeds and for a second, he thought,
department brass?
and experienced a rush of expectations met too easily: documenting cop honchos with the Cossacks, why the hell hadn’t he remembered to bring a damn
camera
?

But the moment the first guy out of the Crown Victoria turned and showed his face, it was a whole different story.

Long, dark, lizard face under a black pompadour.

City Councilman Eduardo “Ed the Germ” Bacilla, the official representative of a district that encompassed a chunk of downtown. He of the serious bad habits and poor work habits — Bacilla attended maybe one out of every five council meetings and a couple of years ago he’d been nabbed in Boyle Heights trying to buy powdered coke from an undercover narc. Quick and frantic negotiations with the D.A.’s Office had led to the draconian sentence of public apology and public service: two months on graffiti-removal detail, Bacilla working alongside some of the very gang-bangers he’d favored with city-funded scam rehab programs. Lack of a felony conviction meant the councilman could keep his job, and a recall effort by a leftist homeboy reformer sputtered.

And now here was ol’ Germ, kissing up to Tan Suit.

So was Crown Victoria Rider Two, and guess what: another civil stalwart.

This guy had looped his arm around Tan Suit’s shoulder and was laughing about something. No expression on Suit’s CEO face.

Mr. Jocular was older, around Tan Suit’s age, with white temples and a bushy, white mustache that concealed his upper lip. Tall and narrow-shouldered, with an onion-bulb body that a well-cut suit couldn’t enhance, and the ice-eyed cunning of a cornered peccary.

City Councilman James “Diamond Jim” Horne. He of the suspected kickbacks and briberies and ex-wives hush-moneyed to silence back in the good old days when domestic violence was still known as wife-beating.

Milo knew through the LAPD gravevine that Horne was a longtime, serious spouse-basher with a penchant for pulverizing without leaving marks. Like Germ Bacilla, Diamond Jim had always managed to squeak through without arrest or conviction. For over thirty years, he’d served a district that bordered Bacilla’s, a north-central strip filled with ticky-tack houses and below-code apartments. Once solidly working-class white, Horne’s constituency had turned 70 percent poor Hispanic, and the councilman had watched his vote pluralities tumble. From 90 percent to 70. A series of opponents with surnames ending in “ez” had failed to topple Horne. The corrupt old bastard got the potholes fixed, and plenty else.

Germ and Diamond Jim, walking arm in arm with Tan Suit, heading for the steel door of Sangre de Leon.

Milo returned to the Taurus and, using the ID of a Pacific Division Vice detective he despised, pulled up the Mercedes coupe’s plates.

He half expected another corporate shield, but the numbers came back matching a four-year-old Mercedes owned by a real-life person.

W.E. Obey

The three hundred block of Muirfield Road in Hancock Park.

Walter Obey. He of the billion-dollar fortune.

Nominally, Walt Obey was in the same business as the Cossacks — concrete and rebar and lumber and drywall. But Obey occupied a whole different galaxy from the Cossacks. Fifty years ago, Obey Construction began nailing up homes for returning GIs. The company was probably responsible for 10 percent of the tracts that snaked parallel to the freeways and sprawled across the smog-choked basin that the Chumash Indians had once called the Valley of Smoke.

Walt Obey and his wife, Barbara, were on the board of every museum, hospital, and civic organization that meant anything in the lip-gnawing, over-the-shoulder uncertainty known as L.A. Society.

Walt Obey was also a model of rectitude — Mr. Upright in a business that claimed few saints.

The guy had to be at least eighty, but he looked a good deal younger. Good genes? Clean living?

Now here he was, supping with Germ and Diamond Jim.

The Cossacks and Brad Larner had been inside for one hour. No shock, it was their restaurant. Still the question hung: table for three, or six?

He obtained Sangre de Leon’s number from Information and called the restaurant. Five rings later a bored, Central European-accented male voice said, “Yes?”

“This is Mr. Walter Obey’s office. I’ve got a message for Mr. Obey. He’s dining with the Cossacks, I believe they’re in a private room—”

“Yes, they are. I’ll get the phone to him.” Eagerness to please had wiped out the boredom.

Milo hung up.

He drove home trying to piece it all together. The Cossacks and Walt Obey and two city councilmen noshing on designer grub. Brad Larner along as a gofer, or his dad’s surrogate? Alex had pulled up something about the Cossacks’ trying to bring a football team to L.A., maybe reactivating the Coliseum. The scheme had died, as had nearly everything else the Cossacks had tried — movies, tearing down landmarks. On the face of it the brothers were losers. Yet they had enough clout to bring Walt Obey from Hancock Park to West Hollywood.

The Cossacks in their chauffeured Town Car with personalized plates screamed new money. But Obey, the real money man, drove himself in an anonymous, four-year-old sedan. The billionaire was so unobtrusive he could pass for your average, middling CPA.

What got vulgarians and bluenoses together? Something big. The Coliseum sat in Germ Bacilla’s district, and next door was Diamond Jim Horne’s domain. Was this one of those complicated deals that always managed to elude zoning laws and whatever else stood in its way? Taxpayers footing the bill for rich guys’ indulgences? Something that might be jeopardized by the rehash of a twenty-year-old murder and the exposure of the Cossacks’ role in covering up for their crazy sister and junkie-murderer Willie Burns?

Why
had
Georgie Nemerov gotten so antsy?

The only possible thread between Nemerov and the rest of it was the department.

And now the department was verifying his vacation time and maybe sending that Bartlettt asshole to spook him.

Health facilitator. Meaning what? Be careful not to get
un
healthy?

Suddenly, he wanted very much to make someone else deathly ill.

When he pulled into his driveway, the white Porsche was parked up near the garage, little red alarm light blinking on the dash, extra-strength lock bar fixed to the steering column. Rick loved the car, was as careful with it as he was with everything else.

He found Rick at the kitchen table, still wearing his scrubs and eating warmed-up Chinese food from last night. A glass of red wine was at his elbow. He saw Milo and smiled and gave a weak wave and the two of them shared a brief hug, and Rick said, “Working late?”

“The usual. How’d your day go?”

“The usual.”

“Heroics?”

“Hardly.” Rick pointed to the empty chair across the table. The final dark hairs in his dense cap of curls had faded to gray last summer, and his mustache was a silver toothbrush. Despite being a doctor and knowing better, he liked to tan out in the backyard and his skin had held on to summer color. He looked tired. Milo sat down opposite him and began picking at orange chicken.

“There’s more in the refrigerator,” said Rick. “The egg rolls, the rest of it.”

“No, I’ll just take yours.”

Rick smiled. Weary.

“Bad stuff on shift?” said Milo.

“Not particularly. Couple of heart attacks, couple of false alarms, kid with a broken leg from falling off a Razor scooter, colon cancer patient with a serious gut bleed that kept us busy for a long time, woman with a darning needle in her eye, two auto accidents, one accidental shooting — we lost that one.”

“The usual trivia.”

“Exactly.” Rick pushed his food away. “There was one thing. The shooting was the last case I pulled. I couldn’t do anything for the poor guy, he came in flat, never beeped. Looks like he was cleaning his 9mm, stared into the barrel, maybe making sure it was clear and boom. The cops who came in with the body said they found gun oil and rags and one of those barrel-reaming tools on the table next to him. Bullet entered here.” Rick touched the center of his mustache, under his nose.

“An accident?” said Milo. “Not suicide? Or anything else?”

“The cops who came in kept calling it an accident, maybe they knew something technical. It’ll go to the coroner.”

“Sheriff’s cops?” said Milo.

“No, you guys. It happened near Venice and Highland. But that’s not what I want to tell you. The body had just gone to the morgue, and I came back to chart and the cops who brought the guy in were in the cubicle next door and I heard them talking. Going on about their pensions, sick leave, department benefits. Then one said something about a detective in West L.A. division who’d tested HIV-positive and put in for retirement. The other cop said, ‘Guess, what goes ‘round comes round.’ Then they both laughed. Not a joyful laugh. A mean laugh.”

Rick picked up a chopstick and seesawed it between two fingers. Looked into Milo’s eyes. Touched Milo’s hand.

Milo said, “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

“Didn’t assume you had, or you’d have told me.”

Milo withdrew his hand, stood, and got himself a beer.

Rick stayed at the table, continued to play with the chopstick. Tilting it deftly, precisely. A surgeon’s grace.

Milo said, “It’s bullshit. I’da heard.”

“I just thought it was something you’d want to know.”

“Highland and Venice. What the hell would Wilshire Division know about West L.A.? What the hell would
blues
know about
D’s
?”

“Probably nothing… Big guy, is there something I should know? Some tight spot you’ve gotten yourself into?”

“Why? What does this have to do with me?” Milo didn’t like the defensiveness in his own voice. Thinking: the goddamn department rumor mill. Then thinking:
Health Facilitator. You never know…

Rick said, “Okay,” and started to get up.

Milo said, “Wait,” and came around and stood behind Rick and put his hands on Rick’s shoulders. And told him the rest of it.