Forty Thieves Page 7

  Ronnie said, “We put out ads online and in print offering twenty-five thousand dollars for the Ballantine case. We were followed, so we decided maybe we should go after the other car and see who was following us. We got too close, and they fired.”

  “You’re sure that it wasn’t because you found the place where they’d put the body?”

  “We don’t think we’d found anything,” said Ronnie. “We were there because one of the streets was at the stage of construction when a storm drain might still have been open, not paved over, and we wanted to see what it looked like. When Ballantine was murdered, that street was probably still empty field. The street where it could have happened would be one or two streets west of there.”

  “You’re pretty sure that your going out there was what caused the shooting?”

  Ronnie said, “Has anybody else been shot at out there?”

  “Not that we know of,” said Hebert. “We’ll have to look into it. Any other thoughts on what happened out there last night?”

  “Not right now,” said Sid. “We hope to later.”

  “Well, then, thanks for coming,” said Hebert. He stood and held out his hand. “It’s been interesting. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.”

  “Thank you,” Sid said. He shook Hebert’s hand.

  Sid walked out of the small room. As they moved down the hallway toward the foyer, they heard the door open and close again. When they reached the front of the building and were out in the open air again, Ronnie said quietly, “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to share anything.”

  “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to have anything.”

  Sid Abel walked up the sidewalk toward the Figueroa Club at eleven o’clock that evening. There were the usual three men watching the door from outside the club. One looked like a valet parking attendant standing behind a black podium of the sort that contained a pegboard with car keys on it. Sid knew that this pegboard held a lot of car keys that didn’t go to any car, and that the board was on hinges, just the door to a hidden cabinet containing a steel plate to make the podium bulletproof and a short-barreled semiautomatic shotgun. The attendant switched off about once an hour with one or the other of the two men sitting in a car along the curb. They were there to pull ahead at high speed and make any unfriendly intruders unhappy in proportion to their sins.

  The setup had not changed in at least three decades, since about the time when the club had moved here from Figueroa Street. This was a bad neighborhood, and the club was one of the principal things that made it that way.

  “Hi,” Sid said to the attendant. “Is Jimmy Pascal around tonight?”

  “I can ask,” said the attendant. “Who can I say wants him?”

  “Sid Abel.”

  “You look like a cop.”

  “I’m not. You look like a parking attendant.”

  “I’m not.”

  Sid took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to the attendant.

  The attendant pocketed it. “This isn’t much money.”

  “Jimmy’s not much of a guy.” He stepped past the attendant. “Sit tight. I’ll go find him myself.”

  The Figueroa was a private club, founded many years ago by a group of people who had shared a belief in after-hours drinking, and free enterprise that often included the exchange of goods and services that were not supposed to be for sale. It had retained that character long after many of those activities had gone out of style and been replaced by something worse, or become legal.

  He walked in and could see the club had not changed since his last visit years ago. There was a long polished bar with stools and shelves of bottles backed by a big mirror. The rest of the front room was filled with round tables, where men and a few women played cards or just drank and talked. Beyond a broad arch was a room with three pool tables and long benches along the walls.

  Sid spotted Jimmy near the end of the bar talking with two men. Jimmy Pascal was a short black man who weighed about three hundred pounds. He habitually wore a voluminous pair of khaki shorts, a billowing Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of size nine and a half quadruple-E sneakers. He was in his sixties, and made his living now in indirect ways—brokering agreements, selling items of mysterious provenance, introducing people—but when Sid met him twenty-five years ago, he had been a killer.

  Sid went to the bar and sat on a stool where he could use the big mirror as a way to watch his back. The bartender, a young, strong-looking man with a beard, said, “Are you a member, sir?”

  Sid took out his wallet and produced a tattered card.

  The bartender was shocked. “That’s really an old one. I haven’t seen you before.”

  Sid shrugged. “I haven’t come much since you were born. Can you get me a beer?”

  “Yes, sir.” He turned toward the draft beer taps. “On tap we have—”

  “Miller’s fine.”

  The bartender turned away and picked up a glass, and Sid felt the heat of a large body close to his shoulder.

  “Hey, Sidward.”

  He raised his eyes to the mirror and saw Jimmy. “Hi, Jimmy. How have you been?”

  “So-so. You like getting old? Me neither.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Sid. “You got a couple of minutes?” His glass of beer appeared in front of him and he put a ten on the bar.

  “Bring your beer. There are always people in here who will put stuff in it.”

  “I know,” said Sid. “I didn’t plan to drink it.”

  They walked to the back of the room past the pool tables where men who seemed to be waiting for something played listlessly. They went past the open door of the kitchen, and then out to a small parking lot in the rear of the building where Jimmy leaned against the hood of a car. “So?”

  “We were out working on a case last night up in the northern part of the Valley. I noticed that a car had been behind us for way too long. They were waiting for us while we made our last stop, so I drove toward them to see who they were. The car took off, and I chased it. I started to gain on them, but I was still at least three hundred yards back. And then a passenger stuck a .308 rifle out the window and put a bullet through my windshield just above my head.”

  “From a moving car?”

  “At least ninety miles an hour on that stretch. And from the passenger side, it’s a left-handed shot.” He paused. “I’m wondering if you’ve heard anything that might give me some insight into my future.”

  “You’re probably right that it’s a pro,” said Jimmy. “But I don’t know who. Nobody has been shopping a hit on you that I know of. Of course, LA is a big place, and the only times I’ve been in the North Valley I was on the freeway driving past it to somewhere else. A lot of people hated you in the old days, but they don’t usually wait ten years to let you know. Are you working on something now that would worry that kind of people?”

  “A week or two ago we helped get a guy named Alex Rinosa arrested for murder.”

  “The music guy? That was you? I’ll ask around and see if he’s been trying to hire anybody, but I don’t think so. He’s got to have too much attention on him to try that, and nobody I know would even talk to him now. What else you been up to?”

  “We’re trying to find out who killed a man a year ago and put his body in a storm sewer up there,” said Sid. “We’re not close to finding out.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about that either. What was the guy’s name?”

  “James Ballantine. He was a chemist working for Intercelleron in Woodland Hills. A black guy.”

  “A chemist, huh?”

  “Not that kind.”

  “They’re all that kind if they want to be.”

  “No sign that he wanted to, though.”

  “I’ll listen for you. I’m always listening. If I hear anything about you or him, I’ll tell you.”

  Sid said, “I know you don’t owe me a favor.”

  “No, but if I get you something, you will.”

  “Thank
s, Jimmy.” He stepped to the alley beside the lot and poured the beer out on the ground. “Good night.” Then he walked off down the alley, and turned toward the street where his car was parked. He had other people to see.

  * * *

  Ronnie watched the back door of the halfway house swing open to let a young Hispanic woman with a scrollwork tattoo on her neck step outside. Ronnie lunged forward, caught the door before it closed, and went inside.

  Coming up the hallway was a stern-looking middle-aged woman with no makeup and her hair pulled back tight. Her eyes narrowed when she saw Ronnie, but during the five steps before they reached each other, their eyes met and stayed locked, and a change took place in the woman. “I’m sorry. I have to ask,” she said.

  Ronnie said, “I’m Tiffany’s mom.” As she flashed a driver’s license, her shoulder holster with the Glock in it was just visible under her tailored jacket.

  “There hasn’t been a Tiffany in two months.”

  “Then I’m Maria’s mom.”

  The woman passed by, on her way somewhere. Ronnie kept going. Whenever she passed one of the small residential rooms, she glanced inside. She went up one corridor and then turned to walk along the next.

  “Ronnie?”

  She turned. There was a small bedroom, outfitted to look something like a cell and something like a room in a bad motel. A small, too-thin woman with dyed red hair, a pointed jaw, and protruding cheekbones came to the doorway.

  “Hi, hon,” said Ronnie. “I thought you might be getting out just about now, so I made a couple of phone calls.”

  “You came to see me?”

  “No big deal,” said Ronnie. “I was working on something and it happened to bring me by here. So I thought, ‘I think I’ll stop in and see how Elaine is doing.’”

  Elaine shrugged. “You can come in if you’d like.”

  There it was, Ronnie thought. After a stint in prison, having a room you could invite people into or throw them out of seemed to be a great luxury. “Well, just for a minute.” Ronnie entered the small room. She looked around at the sparse furnishings, and then lifted a chair that was in front of a small, plain table. She spun it around and sat down. “So tell me, honey. Is everything all right?”

  Elaine shrugged again, and Ronnie could see her collarbones protruding. “While I was gone my boyfriend sold all my stuff and went off with a woman who wasn’t nearly as good-looking as me.”

  Ronnie nodded. “They can be like that,” she said. “They don’t say no a lot to the one who’s right there in front of them.”

  Elaine gave a little laugh. “Like I needed another reason to stay out of jail.”

  “Any reason will do. Have you got any money?”

  “When he took off, I lost my apartment, of course. That was where I’d stashed my money. But they give us food and clothes, and this time they’re going to get me a job.”

  “Wow, that’s great,” said Ronnie. She patted Elaine’s thin arm with her left hand, reached into her jeans pocket with her right, and pulled out a pair of hundred-dollar bills. She held on to Elaine’s arm and put the bills in her hand. “Here’s a little bit to hold you over until you get your first paycheck.” She looked at her watch, stood, and put the chair back by the table.

  Elaine looked confused. “What do you want for this? I haven’t told you anything. I just got out.”

  “It’s okay,” said Ronnie. She took a business card out of her purse and handed it to her. “In case you’ve forgotten my phone number. If anything comes up that you think I’d like to know, you won’t forget me.”

  “I won’t forget you,” she said. “You said you’re working on something tonight. What is it?”

  “A man got shot and shoved in a storm sewer almost exactly a year ago. Nobody knows why. He was a scientist, a black guy named Ballantine. Well, got to go, hon.”

  Ronnie made six more stops in different parts of the city during the night, talking to women she had met before. They were business contacts made in the course of a long career. Two were escorts who went on outcalls together because it was safer than working alone. They had stopped in a coffee shop for a late dinner, and when Ronnie called, they invited her to meet them. Another was a woman bartender in a restaurant where men had been known to be offered jobs that could be done quickly but paid very well. Ronnie drove up Sepulveda Boulevard very late and spotted two women on the street in spots they had worked when Ronnie was still a cop in the Valley. At each stop, Ronnie gave someone a business card and a hundred-dollar bill as a present, and asked for nothing specific except that the recipient call her if anything that might interest her came up.

  She got home at three thirty, in time to see Sid arrive in the rental car he’d gotten to replace the BMW. He had made ten stops, making the rounds of his own informants.

  “Anybody know anything?” she asked.

  “Nothing so far. They’re all going to listen.”

  “Maybe we don’t know the right offenders.”

  “I guess that’s not entirely bad. Let’s go get some sleep.”

  The next day they were up and out of their driveway in their black Volvo by noon. After an hour, a white van with magnetic signs and seals on the doors that said LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF WATER AND POWER pulled up in front of the gate and a man in hard hat and coveralls got out and unloaded a few tools. The van pulled ahead a few feet and parked.

  Nicole Hoyt sat in the van and watched Ed in the rearview mirror until he had gotten the electric gate at the Abels’ house open and gone in to work on their driveway. She had studied the place on aerial photographic maps she found online. Ed had been happy when he found that the driveway was made of paving stones all fitted together like puzzle pieces. Now he was prying up pavers and digging.

  Nicole had set out orange traffic cones in front of the van and behind it. Anybody willing to buy a few cones could get away with just about any nonsense he wanted. The van was a good place to be while she served as Ed’s lookout. She watched for cars and for dog walkers and delivery people, but there were very few on this quiet block today. As she sat there she thought about Ed, and pictured him working. He was prying up the stones as quickly as he could, then digging a trench in the dirt, putting the dirt into buckets, and dumping it in the flower beds. Next he would place a thin layer of plywood over the trench and cover that with pavers so it looked the same as the rest of the driveway.

  Ed was strong and had machinelike stamina, but he was racing against an unknown deadline. The people who lived in that house might come home at any time, and Nicole was the only one who could warn him. If they arrived too soon, Nicole was determined to start the van and back it into their car. If she and Ed had to finish this contract the simple, direct way in daylight, then they would, and just hope they could get away without leaving too many eyewitnesses.

  Nicole looked down at the digital clock on the dashboard. As each second passed, she hoped Ed was getting closer to finishing. She tried not to look at the clock again to see if it had changed to the next minute yet. At times like this she was always worried that she would lose him, and the clock watching made her anxiety worse.

  Meeting Ed had solved a lot of problems. She had been alone for a long time, and had never liked it. She had grown up in a small, hot town in southern Arizona, the sort of place illegal immigrants hurried through because it was neither big enough to hide them nor nice enough to make them want to stay. When she was younger she went through men like a woman trying on shoes at a sale, hoping each one would fit, but never finding one that did. The right man never appeared, and nothing seemed to take her mind off her loneliness.

  She had tried drugs in most of their common forms while she was still a teenager, and accomplished a lot of throwing up, a heart that raced enough to make her think her blood was about to burst out of her ears, and some very ugly scabs where she had clumsily injected drugs into her veins. She had liked drugs. They seemed to combine her two favorite feelings, being uncontrollable and then being unconsci
ous, but they had begun to weaken her in preparation for killing her, like a friend who was really a sly and patient enemy. There were only two ways for a girl like her to afford drugs, and her parents caught her at one of them—stealing cash and credit cards from their wallets—and threw her out. Fortunately, she had already stolen enough to get to Phoenix.

  Once there, she decided she needed to recover her health. While she was working to repair herself, her narcissism emerged and made her obsessed with the way she looked. She wanted desperately to be pretty. She enrolled in cosmetology school so she would be an expert. The instructors taught her to cut, style, and color hair, gave her enough of a basic understanding of aesthetics to take care of her skin, and taught her to do nails. She became a model of her own skills and a showcase for the beauty supplies she pilfered from the school. When she graduated, her appearance got her a job, mostly dying hair and doing makeup for proms and weddings. She lasted three months. The constant exposure to formaldehyde, dibutyl phthalate, ammonia, and other chemicals had already made her sick.

  She had never lost her interest in men, only lost men’s interest in her during the final phases of her drug period when she got too skinny and lizard-like for most of them. Once she looked better she’d resumed her effort to try to sort out the available men and end up with a good one. All she got was a growing memory of men she didn’t like very much, and a familiarity with disappointment.

  Men were astoundingly simple. They were motivated by sex and greed. The greedy ones were always trying to manipulate her into paying for things that they should have bought—dinners, tickets, airline reservations, hotels. They were always calculating and straining for advantage over everybody, and she was nearest and easiest.

  The ones who were primarily motivated by sex were better, because she could withhold or grant it to manipulate them, and be in charge most of the time. The one drawback was that they liked sex, but they weren’t always particular about whom they had it with. Ed was one of those men, but she had so far been able to keep him where she could see him and make sure he was happy she was around.

  She met Ed only after she had come down to her last idea. She had not found a man she could tolerate who would be willing or able to support her, so she needed a career. She had tried many different jobs and failed at each of them. She had enrolled in four schools of various kinds, joined three churches, gone online in a hundred guises. All that was left was military service. That would not only provide her with necessities and a little spending money, but would surround her with men.