Murder Season (22 page)
“But you’re not gonna be a police officer after tonight.”
“Turn around,” she said. “And keep it slow.”
Higgins and Spadell made the turn and looked at her holding the gun on them. A long, dark moment passed. Lena had never entertained more than her share of bad thoughts before tonight. She’d never spent too much time thinking or fantasizing about revenge. But in this moment she could feel a certain joy overtaking her anger and disappointment for who Higgins turned out to be. She could see herself pulling the trigger and dumping both bodies off the cliff. The problem was that they were big men. Too big to get over the fence.
“Pick up your things,” she said. “Grab your stuff and get out.”
Higgins had his eyes on the roll of cash she was holding.
“That’s my money,” he said.
“Not anymore, Higgins. Tonight it’s the price of admission. Five grand in one-hundred-dollar bills. Now get the fuck out of here.”
“Your ass is grass, bitch. You understand what I’m gonna do to you?”
Spadell gave Higgins a jab with his elbow. And Lena didn’t care about who Higgins was or what he thought he could do to her. She watched them pick up their keys and wallets, and noticed Spadell hesitate slightly when he saw that she had kept his case of lock picks. He gave her a look without saying anything. The Grim Reaper was a quiet man.
Lena stepped back to let them pass. She could hear a siren in the distance. The Sheriff’s Department on their way.
While she waited, she looked at the CDs and DVDs tossed all over the couch and coffee table and tried to make sense of what had just happened.
What had Higgins and Spadell been looking for?
Her eyes moved to the DVD player. It was playing something, but the TV had been switched off. She looked around for the remote, found it on the floor, and hit the
POWER
button. When an image rendered on the screen, she understood what she was seeing, but not why.
Higgins and Spadell had been screening video recorded by the security cameras at Club 3 AM. Each frame included the camera’s location, along with the time and date. Curiously, the date on these images went back nearly fifteen months.
Lena ejected the DVD, noted that it was labeled with a Sharpie, and slipped it into the paper sleeve she found on the player. She skimmed through the DVDs stacked on the coffee table. Each one was labeled the same way. When she checked the dates, she realized that every week was accounted for from eighteen months ago to the present.
But why?
As she began to gather up the DVDs, she heard footsteps in the foyer and turned just as a pair of deputy sheriffs burst into the room with their guns raised. The one on the right looked young and nervous and began screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Stop,” he said. “Or I’ll fucking shoot.”
Lena rolled past the gate at Club 3 AM
and pulled around the building. The place was closed tonight with only two cars in the lot. It was a safe bet that the Toyota pickup belonged to the guard she’d just passed, and that Dante Escabar drove the Ferrari.
As she parked and walked up the steps around the fountain, it felt like she was on a timer.
Once the sheriff’s deputies had cooled down, she identified herself and told them that she had walked in on a robbery. She left most of their questions blank, claimed that she didn’t see the intruders but thought that the DVDs in the living room might be related to her own investigation. It wouldn’t help though. Because the Sheriff’s Department serviced the address, getting the DVDs into Henry Rollins’s hands at SID would not be seamless. It could take time. And it could become complicated. Because celebrities were involved, privacy issues could surface and attorneys representing the club could slow things down. But even more, at a certain point in the very short term, Deputy Chief Ramsey would be calling her. Given the story Higgins was probably telling him, there was the chance that Ramsey might become aggressive and have her picked up.
She reached the top step and found Escabar holding the door for her. After she entered, he pulled the door closed and locked the place up. Then he led her into the bar and offered her a stool.
“How’s your night going?” he said. “How’s business?”
She could hear the sarcasm in his voice, and watched him step behind the bar and pour a bourbon over ice. He was wearing black leather pants, and his hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Even in the dim candlelight, his face seemed paler than the other night and it looked like he wasn’t getting much sleep.
Lena grabbed a stool and sat down. “I just caught the district attorney of Los Angeles burglarizing your dead partner’s home in Malibu.”
Escabar smiled at the thought. “What was he looking for?”
“You tell me.”
“Could have been anything.”
He reached for his pack of cigarettes. Beside the pack Lena noticed a 9-mm Glock with the safety switched off. She watched him light up, then return the pack to its place beside the gun.
“You staying?” he asked. “You want something to drink?”
“No thanks. I’m on a short leash tonight.”
He met her eyes and pursed his lips. For a brief moment he seemed amused.
“Does Higgins spend a lot of time here?” she said.
“He isn’t a regular, if that’s what you mean. Once or twice a month. Sometimes more.”
Lena gave Escabar a long look. “They weren’t really friends, were they?”
He took a drag on the cigarette and shrugged.
“Come on, Dante. Bosco and Higgins weren’t friends.”
Those pursed lips were back. “I guess you could call it a matter of convenience.”
“But that’s all over now,” she said. “That’s why you left the cocaine upstairs. You hate Higgins. Anything you can do to embarrass him, you’ll do.”
She had been thinking about it on the drive over. Higgins breaking into Bosco’s house could only mean one thing. Escabar’s gun on the bar felt like verification.
“Let’s just say that we come from different worlds,” Escabar said. “I don’t need Higgins the way Johnny did.”
“It’s obvious that your partner had something on him. And now Higgins is searching for it. He was going through video taken from your security cameras here at the club. DVDs that your partner kept at home. Did Higgins use drugs? Is that what Johnny had on him? Video of Higgins doing coke?”
“I can’t answer that because I don’t know.”
“Why are you holding back?”
Escabar glanced at his gun and lowered his voice. “Because the world is a scary place, Detective Gamble. Because crime is what the powerful say it is. You could be a Wall Street motherfucker who stole fifty billion dollars—but that’s okay because the government says it is. Shit, they’ll do everything they can to bail you out. But try stealing a frozen dinner from a market on Pico Boulevard because you’re starving to death. If it’s strike three on a three strike count those fucking assholes will put you away for twenty years and use it as a cheap talking point to get into politics. So don’t ask me about holding back. Crime is what the man says it is. Nothing more and nothing less—and I don’t have Johnny’s clout. Things are different now.”
Escabar’s voice faded into silence. There was a certain sadness to it.
“Are you afraid of Higgins?” she asked. “Has he threatened you in some way?”
“Not at all. I just don’t want to get chewed up in the grind.”
“If you’re not worried, why is that gun on the bar?”
He shrugged without an answer, then took a bigger pull on that glass of bourbon.
“Why did Bosco keep security videos at his house?” she said.
“You sure ask a lot of questions, Lena Gamble.”
She coaxed him on with a look.
“Because of our clients,” he said finally. “Because they’re celebrities. We need a record of what happens in the public areas of the club. It’s like an insurance policy. Johnny had backups made and moved them to a second location, just in case something happened here like a fire or another earthquake. He probably should have put them in a vault somewhere, but he didn’t.”
“Higgins was searching through the last eighteen months.”
Escabar gave her a look like he didn’t know or couldn’t guess what that meant.
“Are the DVDs at Bosco’s house a complete backup?” she said.
“Johnny handled that, not me.”
“But everything’s here, right?”
“Sure,” he said. “What are you getting at?”
“Just two questions,” she said. “Two loose ends. You respected your partner. You admired him. Your life changed when you met him and he gave you a job. Johnny Bosco was bigger than life. An L.A. success story. The front man for a club that catered to everybody who’s anybody in the business. An exclusive club where people with clout met other people with clout. So, why would he have risked any part of his world and agreed to help Jacob Gant when everyone in the city thought Gant murdered Lily Hight and got away with it? Why would Johnny Bosco have agreed to help Gant when the result would have embarrassed the district attorney and everyone connected with the trial? Like you said, their relationship may have been only one of convenience. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t necessary. Because Gant was involved, because a teenage girl is dead, Higgins would have been embarrassed publicly with no way back. So tell me, why was your partner willing to put everything on the line?”
Escabar remained silent, his wheels turning. “Are you trying to say that Gant didn’t kill the girl?” he said finally. “That Johnny knew?”
Lena nodded slowly. From the look on his face, she could tell that he was hearing it for the first time. Something shocking enough to deaden nerves. But she could also see him putting it together. The next logical step.
If Johnny Bosco knew that Jacob Gant was innocent, so did the district attorney.
“How can I help?” he said.
“The security videos we found tonight are probably gonna be tied up for a while. I need to know what’s on them. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s a lot more than that. But you’re here every night. You know everyone involved better than anyone else. I’d like you to go through your footage and let me know what you find. I’m gonna guess that you’ll know what it is when you see it.”
“You want me to start eighteen months back?”
“I’m more concerned about the month leading up to Lily Hight’s murder. After that, sure, make a pass through all eighteen months. I need you to work quickly though.”
“I understand,” he said. “I’ll do it for Johnny.”
He killed his drink, and Lena could tell that he was still tossing something over in his mind. As she studied his face, she wasn’t sure that she could trust him. And when it came to Higgins, she still thought that he was holding out on her. But she didn’t have much choice. Not with her cell phone vibrating in her pocket. It was after 11:00 p.m. and she could see her supervisor’s name flashing on the touch screen. Somehow she doubted that Barrera was calling just to check in.
“You cool?” Barrera asked.
His voice was stuck in neutral. She couldn’t get a read on him.
“I’m good,” she said.
“You need to come in, Lena. We’re burning the midnight oil down here. Sixth floor, Deputy Chief Ramsey’s office.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Good,” he said. “Sooner is better than later.”
Ramsey’s door was open, the overhead
lights switched off, his office illuminated by a couple of table lamps spread about the room. Lena tried not to show any surprise when she saw Vaughan sitting at a small meeting table. Ramsey was behind his desk watching Barrera type something into a notebook computer. She had expected to see Higgins, but he wasn’t here.
Ramsey pointed to a chair without saying anything, his steel blue eyes pinned on her. The silence was overwhelming. The weight of the air made it hard to breathe. She glanced over at Vaughan, who nodded at her almost imperceptibly. As his eyes moved slowly but deliberately across the room, Lena followed them to the phone on the credenza behind Ramsey’s back. The line light was burning. Someone was listening over the speaker phone. She didn’t think that it would be Higgins. And while it might have been Chief Logan, still on the East Coast recruiting students for SID, it could easily have been something much darker. She took a quick look around the office, wondering if Internal Affairs had hidden a camera somewhere.
Ramsey leaned over his desk. “Mr. Vaughan has already informed us that Jacob Gant passed a polygraph six weeks before the trial. Did Paladino use one of his people?”
“No,” she said. “One of ours.”
“Who?”
“Cesar Rodriguez.”
Ramsey grimaced like he’d just eaten bad food, then rubbed his hand over his shaved head. As Lena gazed at his rough face, he seemed both worried and amped up—a combination that on any other night would have made him all the more frightening. But not now—not with so much on the line.
“Well, let’s have it,” he said. “What happened in Malibu, Gamble?”
She decided not to dwell on the consequences and just get it out of her system. Tell them what happened and worry about defending herself later. She got out of the chair and started emptying her pockets on Ramsey’s desk. Her voice was low and scratchy, but didn’t crack.
“The district attorney broke into Johnny Bosco’s house with the help of a man named Jerry Spadell,” she said. “They used this set of lock picks to get past the front door. I wasn’t there long enough to see how they beat the alarm system. But Spadell looked like the kind of guy who could handle the job. I found this .38 on him and I don’t think that it’s registered. I found five grand in Higgins’s pocket. I think it’s Bosco’s money, and that the district attorney stole it from the house.”
Ramsey traded looks with Barrera. “Higgins didn’t mention the money.”
“I didn’t think he would,” Lena said. “When I identified myself as a police officer through the front door, both he and Spadell tried to make a run for it.”
“He didn’t mention that either,” Ramsey said.
Lena sat down at the table with Vaughan. She couldn’t get a sense of where things were going. She had expected her termination to be quick and decisive. Expected to hear Ramsey’s smoked-out voice raging in her ear. No matter what the circumstances, she had fired her weapon at the district attorney. Most politicians have a thing about being shot at. It’s not just a matter of form.