They arrived at the Long Beach pier in the midst of a flurry of activity. Cranes and backhoes and Caterpillars crisscrossed the beat-up pavement of the pier with such frequency that the area almost needed traffic signals. Buildings were being torn down and buildings were under construction and already renovated structures brimmed with activity. Carole Ann shaded her eyes with her hand and peered south, the sun bouncing off the pale blue of the Pacific making it difficult to see. Like the true Angeleno he had become, Tommy wore sunglasses. Like the true Easterner she had become, her sunglasses had been put away with the first frost. “What’s that down there, Tommy? Is that really a ship’s mast?”
“You better believe it,” he said with feeling. “That’s what they’re calling the ‘upscale’ end of the pier. There’s a restaurant going in there to rival anything in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. And that schooner is part of the dining pleasure. Weather permitting, those with the most money can dine al fresco, attended by stewards from Queen Elizabeth’s yacht.”
“You’re kidding!”
He raised his right hand. “Swear to God! I’m telling you, this area is so hot even the real estate developers can’t keep up with what’s going on.” He made a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn and pointed north. “You see that crane? The tallest one? That’s the site of a loft renovation—”
“Loft renovation?” she interrupted with a skeptical frown. “In Long Beach, California?”
“And it was sold out before the ink was dry on the offering. Do you know how many Hollywood actors are transplanted New Yorkers? And most of them homesick? That woman, what’s her name, the one they keep calling a young Katharine Hepburn?”
Carole Ann nodded. “I know who you mean. What about her?”
“She bought three of ’em. Two to live in and one to use as guest housing when her New York friends and family come visit,” he relayed with a wide grin.
“Amazing,” she said with a grin of her own. “Absolutely amazing.”
“And,” he said with a flourish, dragging the word out into several syllables, “I’ve been courting the developer harder than I courted my wife and I think we’ve got the inside track on their security.” The pride spread all over his face.
“Way to go, Fish!” she said, clapping him on the back and calling him the not exactly complimentary nickname he’d left behind in D.C. when he moved permanently to L.A. “How does the title Vice President of Sales sound to you?”
He groaned through his grin. “You really know how to spoil a guy’s fun. Quickest way to ruin somebody is to give them a title, C.A. You know that!”
She gave him a gentle pat on the arm and wondered aloud whether GGI could manage a job the size of the loft conversion at the same time as the warehouse installation. He shrugged off her concern with an airy wave of his hand. “Let’s go see our client,” she said to him.
“And after that, let’s go see our client-to-be,” he said smugly.
David Tyrone gave her an expansive if dusty welcome to his office in the rear of the warehouse, and told her he’d already signed the contracts and written the check; indeed, they were stacked in the center of his desk in the distinctive though dust-covered GGI aubergine folder, check-containing window envelope on top. Tyrone, too, was covered in dust and Carole Ann wondered how it had had a chance to settle on him. The man was motion itself, electrically charged and wired and pulsating with energy.
“We’re happy to be doing business with GGI, Miss Gibson, and more so now that I’ve met you. I rely a lot on my feelings about people, and both you and Mr. Graham, not to mention my buddy Tommy here, give me a real good feeling.”
She accepted his compliment then turned serious so quickly that it startled him and he dropped down on the edge of the metal desk.
“Well, yeah,” he said hesitantly, answering the question she’d abruptly put to him. “We outbid a few boys for this spot, and it was pretty intense there for a while. Why?”
She chose her words carefully. “I wonder if your bidding success resulted in any long-lasting hard feelings among your competitors, Mr. Tyrone? And whether those hard feelings could manifest themselves unpleasantly?”
His eyes narrowed and he squinted at her. “You’re talking about sabotage, Miss Gibson. You’re asking me if anybody was a sore enough loser to sabotage my project.” He made them statements and not questions, so she didn’t attempt to answer the questions he hadn’t asked. She sat and waited and watched him turn over the possibility in his mind. And she watched him slow down physically—as if the power to his body had been shut off.
“I know all the developers who bid against us except one and those I know would never stoop so low. And what I can tell you about the one guy I don’t know is that he was a mighty sore loser. Downright nasty, as a matter of fact. And now that you mention it, yeah, I could stretch my mind wide enough to picture him sabotaging my site.” He reached behind him and grabbed up the GGI folder. “I guess you’d better amend this contract to provide us with some on-site security and surveillance starting yesterday, Miss Gibson.” And he extended the folder to her.
Taking it, she asked, “Do you remember, Mr. Tyrone, the name of the sore loser’s company? And would there be a way to take a look at their bid?”
“Outfit called OffShore Manufacturing,” he said with a crooked grin, missing Carole Ann’s hastily covered-up reaction. “We had ourselves a good chuckle about the name. They’re based in Ohio or some place like that. Waaayyyy off shore,” he said with a laugh. “And yeah, I’m sure I can lay hands on that bid. Can’t do it ’til tomorrow, though,” he said.
She stood up. “Tomorrow’s fine, Mr. Tyrone. By that time, I’ll have your amended contracts ready to sign.”
They shook hands and he thanked her for thinking of something he said he wouldn’t have considered. “This is a risky business,” he said, pumping her hand. “Everybody who does it knows that and nobody bothers getting mad at the other guy. Hell, I’d have been disappointed to lose this bid. But mad?” He shook his head. “No way. I’d have been too busy looking for my next opportunity.”
She left him, she and Tommy as covered in dust as he was, and thinking of one of the first lessons she’d learned from Jake Graham: “Don’t get mad, lady, get even,” he’d growled at her as he was sending her on her way to find her husband’s killer.
“What the hell was that all about?” Tommy demanded as soon as they were outside. “How did you get from not having any answers to my questions to knowing that there was a connection? And what’s with this ‘OnShore-OffShore’ business?” He was waving his arms back and forth and breathing hard and looking mean and mad. Several hard-hatted men slowed to observe them, to be certain, Carole Ann knew, that she was in no danger.
She took Tommy’s arm and steered him toward the truck. “Will you calm down? It was a hunch, Tommy, that’s all. You made me think. There had to be a reason GGI was singled out, something we don’t understand. But for some reason, OnShore or Seaboard or both wanted us involved.”
“And they’re the same? OnShore and OffShore?”
She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she replied, remembering that Richard Islington was an Ohio native but that he had nothing to do with this case. “I just asked a couple of questions, Tommy, and instead of answers I got more questions. So there still are no answers.”
“But what made you ask the questions in the first place? You had to be thinking something, you had to know something—”
“I was,” she said wearily but hastily, needing to halt his intense, attacking barrage. “I was remembering something you said, actually, about OnShore and Seaboard being uglier than we knew. What could be uglier than what they’ve already done? Except, perhaps, to use GGI to hurt somebody else. Now don’t ask me anything else, Tommy, because I don’t have any answers.”
Tommy was silent and reflective on the brief drive down the pier to the lofts-to-be, an unimpressive site in its present state: four three-level co
ncrete squares single file along the pier’s edge, and not even the vastness of the Pacific spread out before them could mitigate their unattractiveness.
“Wait ’til you see the architect’s drawings,” Tommy said, reading her thoughts. “They’re gonna be Moorish on the outside, and the Village on the inside.”
She raised an eyebrow at him and looked again at the four ugly squares. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Fish.”
He laughed and accused her of having lost all traces of her California dreamin’ nature. She acknowledged that he might have a point, and followed him into a double-wide construction trailer. Three men were inside: two of them, seated side by side on a well-used couch, looked stereotypically like construction workers, from hard-hatted heads to steel-toed shoe tips. They halted their conversation, looked up at the new arrivals, nodded identical greetings, and returned to their conversation. The third man was seated behind a metal desk—obviously the best kind for a construction site, Carole Ann thought—holding a phone to his ear. Carole Ann’s first impression was that he appeared too young to be managing a multimillion-dollar construction job: he was about Tommy’s age, not yet thirty. Her second impression was that he looked more like a graduate student than a builder. He also looked annoyed, though he was working hard to keep his face expressionless. “I’ll give him the message but I don’t think it’ll change his mind,” he said, barely concealing the annoyance. He listened for another moment before ending the one-way conversation. “Look, I’ve got people here and work to do. If Dad wants to talk to you, he’ll call you.” And with exaggerated gentleness, he returned the phone to the cradle and looked up at Tommy and Carole Ann. His expression changed from pained to welcoming.
“Sorry to barge in like this, Mr. Wainwright.”
“No problem,” the man said, standing and extending his hand to Carole Ann. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Gibson, and I look forward to meeting Mr. Graham, since your glue stick here isn’t gonna leave me alone until I hire you folks.”
Carole Ann laughed out loud. “Glue stick,” she repeated looking at Tommy. “I’m afraid he’s stuck with that one, Mr. Wainwright.”
Tommy blushed as Wainwright and the two other men joined in the laughter. They were introduced to her as the architect and the construction superintendent and, after a hurried and low-volume conversation with Wainwright, they left and he waved them onto the now vacant sofa.
“Are you a New Yorker, Mr. Wainwright, or merely a brilliant visionary?” Carole Ann asked.
He laughed. “My wife is a New Yorker and a brilliant visionary. This was her idea,” he said, pointing in the direction of the empty blocks out on the pier. “She sold my dad first, and I ultimately—and wisely—saw the light. These days my new mantra is ‘Yes, dear, whatever you say, dear.’ ”
“Well, GGI would be delighted to work with you, Mr. Wainwright, should you decide you want to work with us.”
“I’m sold, Miss Gibson. I talked to Tyrone the other day and even sneaked a peek at your contract—” He held up his hand at the look on her face. “Not to worry! I’m not focused on the numbers, just on the service, and we want everything he’s got plus on-site security during construction. I don’t trust that damn Islington as far as I can throw him, though that MacDonald is a much more decent fellow.”
Carole Ann felt like the butt of a joke everybody knew but her, as if she had a “kick me” bull’s-eye pinned to her back. First David Tyrone tosses out “OffShore” with unknowing casualness and now here was Wainwright dropping Islington’s name into the mix, in the same breath with MacDonald’s. Now they were all connected: Seaboard and OnShore and Islington. She was busy navigating the quickly converging paths of her thoughts and feelings and premonitions. There were too many coincidences to ignore. She slowed her mind enough to return it to a single path. “What does Richard Islington have to do with this project?”
“Not a damn thing!” Wainwright exploded in exasperation. “He didn’t even bid it. He was a Johnny-come-lately, by way of this MacDonald character, who, it seems, he partners with on a project-by-project basis. MacDonald tried to butt in and when he got the brush-off, he called in Islington, like that should make a difference!” Wainwright seemed genuinely injured by the thought.
Carole Ann frowned. She’d learned from Patty Baker’s thorough research that Richard Islington was a tough competitor, and a ruthless one, given to bullying to get his way. She also recalled Patty saying that Islington bought land, not buildings; nor did he himself own a construction company. His business was acquisition and development of land. She raised this point with Wainwright, allowing her confusion to show through.
“That’s what this MacDonald does,” he said, nodding his head up and down. “You’re right about Islington but this is new territory for him and I don’t mind telling you, I wish he’d stick to land acquisition. He’ll be a hell of a competitor if he turns developer.” And he shook his head at the thought.
“What do you remember about MacDonald?” Carole Ann asked. “Do you recall his first name? What he looked like?”
“Sure. John, and he was tall and thin and a few years older than me, maybe even forty. And kind of a nice guy. But next to Islington, Attila the Hun could seem like a nice guy.”
On the drive from Long Beach to GGI headquarters in south-central L.A., C.A. filled Tommy in on the Islington case and what she knew about the man himself. He listened, asking the periodic question but not poking and prodding as he had earlier. His introspection served to increase her own worry, and by the time they’d inched their way up the 405 and abandoned it for the thick, late-afternoon traffic of Crenshaw Boulevard, she was anxious and edgy.
The L.A. GGI office also was housed in a warehouse, a smaller one, but the security was just as tight, though here as much out of necessity as good business practice. South-central’s reputation as one of the toughest neighborhoods in the U.S. was well deserved. GGI chose the location at Anthony’s insistence: it was cheaper to buy the warehouse here than in other locations in the city, and the GGI presence would be an aid to other businesses in the area. Since practically all of GGI’s investigators were former LAPD and L.A. Sheriff’s Department officers, their presence definitely constituted a deterrent to would-be criminals, and local business owners were grateful.
As with GGI-D.C., employees first entered a card-controlled, gated parking lot; and from there, a card-controlled steel door led into the building. Before she was fully in the lobby, C.A. was met by an operative with a message: she was to call Jake Graham immediately.
“Like that’s not what I was about to do,” she muttered under her breath, and rushed down the hallway, trailed by a grim-looking Tommy.
She picked up the phone and punched a button—both her direct number and Jake’s were programmed into Tommy’s phone. It was only after the third ring—Jake always answered on the first—that she looked at her watch. It was after eight in D.C. “It’s me and we’ve got problems,” she said when finally he answered. Then she listened rather than talked, her expression growing grimmer. Tommy began rubbing his hands together and cracking his knuckles. Carole Ann said he fidgeted when he was nervous or upset, and he was proving the point. She glared at him and he stilled. For a moment.
“What, C.A.?” He jumped up as soon as she cradled the phone. “What?” he said again.
“Marshall’s on his way here,” she replied quietly. Marshall was their security expert, the one who actually performed the most complex surveys and recommended the most efficient kind of security system for a client’s needs and plotted the location of cameras and sensors. “Two bodies were found in what was left of the OnShore warehouse and plant. One of them was Harry Childress, the CEO, the other one’s a John Doe.”
“And what else?”
He’d spoken quietly, almost reverently, but there was no mistaking the tension beneath his words. Or their prophetic nature. And she managed a real smile for him.
“You’re getting good at this, Fish.”
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He produced his own honest smile through the tight mask of control he wore. “I’ve got good teachers,” he said, and waited for her to answer his question.
“There were bullet holes in their skulls. They didn’t just get caught in an out-of-control blaze, they were murdered and, it would seem, the fire was set to cover up the killings.” She paused. “Naturally the police want me back in D.C., since what began as an abduction-turned-arson is now a double homicide.”
“Naturally,” he responded, the attempt at sarcasm falling short and flat. His intense concern made him look frantic and slightly wild-eyed. “What kind of mess is this, C.A.?”
“A big one, Tommy,” she answered, forcing more levity than she felt. “Big and smelly and stuck to our shoes.”
6
“TELL ME WHAT WE’RE LOOKING for, C.A.”
“I don’t know for sure, Patty.”
“Tell me what you think we’re looking for, then.”
“Some tie, some connection between Richard Islington and OnShore, OffShore, Seaboard, Wainwright Construction, Tyrone Construction.” She threw up her hands, then brought them down on the desktop with a smack. “And John-damn-MacDonald! The OnShore John MacDonald with the phony Social Security number, who’s really dead, is also, according to Jake, a shortish blond guy in his early thirties. Mr. Wainwright’s John MacDonald is tall, in his late thirties. The real MacDonald—the dead one—would be about fifty-five if he were alive. And when the hell did Islington become a developer!”
“Shit,” Patty whispered. “This could take days, C.A.” She closed her eyes, as if tuning in to a computerized brain. “It could take weeks,” she said, eyes still closed.
The Step Between Page 10
