“Like what, Don?” I asked.
“Little things at first. For instance, Byron was seen being wined and dined at nightspots on Sunset—Ciro’s, Café Trocadero, Mocambo, places like that.” Don paused for a moment, looking down at his hands. “I mean, the committee didn’t expect him to be an altar boy, anything like that. But he seemed to be making friends with a lot of questionable characters. Then there were the rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?” Sol asked.
“Nothing that could be proven. But a number of big criminal cases never made it to court.” Don shook his head. “Especially cases involving gambling interests and crooked politicians.”
“How’d he get away with it?” I asked.
“Dad found out Byron had formed a secret goon squad while in office, a small group of investigators that reported only to him. My father wasn’t exactly sure what they did. But he figured Byron used the goons to intimidate possible witnesses. Maybe that’s why no one came forward with information about Byron’s activities.”
“All through the years Clifford kept files and notes relating to his investigations,” Bugliosi said. “There was a notation in one of the files about the goon squad. An unnamed informant came forward and gave him the names of the members. Guess whose name popped up.”
“Who?”
“Rinehart. He was a young lawyer back then, working for the DA’s office.”
“The DA worked for Byron in the forties?” Sol said. “That’s interesting.”
“Yeah, and here’s the grabber. Rinehart was the leader of the goon squad. Actually went out with his boys on the so-called raids.”
Sol stubbed out his cigar in an upright ashtray that stood next to the couch. “My God, Vince!” he said. “Why didn’t you bring this out during the campaign?”
“Couldn’t. There was no concrete proof. The other members were long gone. No one could verify that such a squad even existed, much less that Rinehart was the leader. I would’ve looked like a fool making allegations against Rinehart regarding something I couldn’t prove.”
“My dad said Byron was the biggest mistake of his life,” Don added. “He became obsessed with digging out the truth. Even after Byron left office in ’46, Dad kept pursuing his investigation. He worked on it until the day he died in 1947. He left his files to me, but I had a business to run. As far as I was concerned it was ancient history. Changes were starting to take place; the reform movement had done its job. Clean government was coming back.”
I began to wonder what this meeting was all about. How could any of this possibly be related to my case?
Sol must’ve been reading my mind. “Thanks for the history lesson,” he said. “But what does all of this have to do with Jimmy? How does it tie into his client, Al Roberts?”
Don remained silent for a moment then glanced at Bugliosi, who nodded. He reached in his desk drawer, pulled out a large manila envelope and handed it to Sol.
“Take it with you. You can study the contents later.”
Sol opened the envelope and thumbed through it. With his thumb and forefinger he slowly pulled out a glossy, black and white photo.
He looked up and said, “My God. Is this stuff for real?”
C H A P T E R 37
Sol and I thanked Don Clinton and Vince Bugliosi for their help and left. We walked out the front door together, and Sol’s limo drove up to the curb immediately. He reached out to open the passenger door.
“Wait, Sol. What’s in the envelope?” I asked.
He looked up and down the sidewalk, then pulled a grainy photo of a group of heavyweights standing in a circle outside a restaurant at night. It was obvious from the clothes they wore—wide ties, big lapels, and fedora hats—that the picture had been taken back in the forties. “Let’s meet at my office,” Sol said. “We need to talk in private.”
“I’ll see you there in a half-hour.”
As soon as the limo pulled away I jogged south on Broadway, heading back to the parking lot. When I came to the Seventh St. intersection I waited for the light to change. When it turned green I started to walk across the street. Halfway through the intersection, someone rushed up behind me. Suddenly, I felt a hard object jammed in my ribcage.
A male voice whispered in my ear, “Don’t turn around. Just keep walking.”
My heart raced. “What the hell!”
He jammed the gun harder. “Keep walking, asshole.”
I made it to the other side of the street without turning around. But my eyes shifted from side to side. I didn’t see a soul. That old line flashed in my mind: There’s never a cop around when you need one…
A couple of seconds later the same black Buick that’d haunted my nightmares pulled up to the curb. The back door flew open. My assailant shoved me into the seat and climbed in after me.
The car sped away and quickly merged with the traffic.
In addition to the driver, another guy sat in front. He turned and faced me, his gun pointed at my head. I glanced at the asshole next to me: one of the goons that had worked me over after smashing my car. The bastard in front was the other one. They were fat ugly guys, hardboiled and rotten to the core.
“Hey! What’s this all about?”
“Shut up. You’ll find out soon enough,” the guy in front said.
“You’re the same sons-of-bitches that—”
The heavyweight reached over the seat and pistol-whipped the side of my head with his revolver. I slumped back in the seat as pinpoints of light danced in front of my eyes.
“I told you to shut the hell up!”
The guy next to me wrapped tape around my wrists. My shoulders hurt like hell when he yanked my arms up tight behind my back. I decided I’d better calm down before I got myself killed.
The driver said nothing. He kept his eyes on the road as we traveled west on Seventh. A few minutes later we cruised south on the Harbor Freeway. Transitioning to the 405, we headed toward Long Beach. We got off the freeway at Cherry, drove a few miles, and entered Signal Hill, a small area of decrepit oil derricks and rusty tanks just north of Long Beach.
We turned right onto a winding dirt road, climbed a small rise, and came to an oil field at the top of the hill. I could almost taste the petroleum fumes and methane gas that hung in the air as we splashed through oily mud puddles and wound around numerous pumpjacks, all nodding slowly, up and down, up and down.
We finally stopped in front of a dilapidated brick building designed in the classic Eyesore Style of Architecture. A faded sign painted on the wall of the abandoned structure read Signal Oil Tool Warehouse.
The driver got out of the car, came around and opened my door. Without saying a word, he reached in and jerked me out. The other two thugs grabbed my arms and half dragged me across the dark, slimy dirt toward the warehouse door. The driver unlocked and opened it, then stood off to the side while the other guys shoved me through and followed me in.
The driver locked the door after us.
I stood in semidarkness—the only light filtering in from a row of dirty windows running along one wall, located close to the ceiling fifteen feet above the cracked and buckled concrete floor. Upright wooden beams supporting the roof were laid out in a grid pattern and spaced about twenty feet apart. At the far end, a small office with broken windows and a missing door looked as if it were about to collapse under its own weight.
My original abductor gave me another hard shove in the direction of the upright beams. I stumbled, but caught myself before I fell. “Keep your goddamn hands off of me,” I snapped.
Lightning fast, he slapped my face… hard. I tried to kick him. He stepped aside and I missed. He clobbered me again, this time with the butt of the gun. I went down. “I told you to shut the fuck up,” he shouted.
“Hey, Danny, cool it,” the driver said. “Let’s get him tied to the post first.”
He grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me up and hauled me over to one of the beams. He undid the tape on my wrists as the goon from th
e front seat kept his gun trained on me.
“Don’t be an asshole, O’Brien,” Danny said. “Don’t make it hard. We’re just going to tie you up, ask you a few questions, then we’ll be outta here.”
I felt my face. It hurt like hell and I knew I’d been cut. The sticky metallic taste of blood filled my mouth. I felt woozy, nauseated. Blood mixed with sweat dripped to the floor. The building was like a huge hothouse with heat waves radiating from below. Maybe I should’ve tried to fight, but I was too weak, and they might’ve killed me anyway. I just looked at the floor, wondering why they were doing this to me.
The driver took hold of my arms and wrapped them around the support beam behind me. “Toss me the duct tape and the rope,” he ordered.
With my arms secured behind the post, he looped a piece of rope tied in a slip knot around my neck and jerked me up until I had to stand practically on my toes. Then he fastened the other end to a spike nailed high in the beam. If I tried to slide down into a sitting position I’d hang myself.
“Hey, Morelli,” the thug named Danny said to the driver, “we’ll handle this guy. Find a phone booth. Call the Tower and tell the boss we got him. Use that phone number I gave you. Hurry back; this won’t take long.”
“Okay, I’m on my way,” The driver left, and the door slammed behind him.
With my arms and legs bound to the wooden support beam, Danny and the other jerk started in on me. Danny backhanded me across the face. His gaudy ring sliced my skin. “Listen up. We can make this easy or hard. Tell us what we want to know and we’re gone.”
My face must’ve looked like hamburger. It throbbed and burned; I felt like it’d been mauled by a junkyard dog. “What do you want, for chrissakes?” I mumbled.
“Where’s the paper?”
“What are you talking about—” The guy hit me again. I started to get woozy. My head nearly hit my chest, but as soon as it fell an inch, the rope around my neck tightened, cutting into my windpipe. I had to keep my head up, or I’d be strangled.
Danny grabbed my hair and pulled my head back. He moved in close, eyeball to eyeball. His breath could peel paint. “You know what we want: the old lady’s paper. We know you got it.”
My God! These guys were after Mrs. Hathaway’s blackmail documents. They killed her but didn’t find what they were looking for. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Let me at ’im, Danny,” the other guy said as he whipped out a switchblade. The six-inch blade snapped open. “I’ll make this bastard talk. I’ll have a good time cutting up the prick.” He laughed and moved closer to me.
“Back off, Rollo. I don’t want him dead.”
“Maybe, I’ll cut him a little, he’ll bleed, maybe he’ll live…for a while.”
“Look, damn it, I don’t have her papers. She didn’t give me anything, just some old phone numbers. That’s all.”
“C’mon, man, let me cut ’im,” Rollo said again.
“Not now.” Danny turned back to me. “Tell us where you hid the paper and we’ll let you go.”
“I figure you guys had found the papers… when you searched her shed… before you killed her.” I felt weak. My eyelids weighed a ton, but by a force of will I kept them open. I couldn’t let my head drop.
Rollo moved in close, waving the knife back and forth in front of my face.
Danny held him back. “Look, Rollo, let’s just do what we we’re told. We’re in no hurry. C’mon, let’s go. Let the asshole stew here for a while. He’ll tell us all about the paper when we come back in the morning.”
“In the morning? Hey, you can’t leave me here like this all night! I won’t make it,” I shouted.
Ignoring his cohort, Rollo moved in even closer. Our noses almost touched and I felt his hot breath on my face. “I’ll cut you, man. You’ll bleed red, man. Your stinkin’ blood will gush.”
He raised his knife slowly. I felt the sharp pressure of the tip of the blade pressing against my jugular. One more millimeter and I’d die.
“Rollo, let’s go! Morelli will be back by now.”
“Then I’ll cut ’im? When we come back?”
“Yeah, Rollo. If he don’t talk, you can cut him up. You can cut him in as many pieces as you want.”
C H A P T E R 38
Danny and Rollo left and I heard the rattle of a padlock on the door outside. I stood there alone, sweating like a hog. My hands, behind my back, started to tingle from lack of circulation. The bastards had wound the duct tape too tight. I struggled to get loose but couldn’t move my wrists even a fraction of an inch. The tape around my shins didn’t seem as tight as the tape binding my wrists. Standing on my toes, I kept working my feet, moving them from side to side a millimeter at a time.
Time crawled. I continued working my feet and legs, tightening and loosening my calf muscles. What little light there was at the start of this ordeal had soon disappeared with the onset of night, leaving the inside of the warehouse pitch black. But it remained hot and my clothes were drenched with sweat.
Soon my eyes became accustomed to the darkness. In the shadows, I was able to identify outlines of the beams. I saw puddles of standing water, lengths of broken pipe, and other debris that littered the floor. There were holes in the walls where some of the bricks had separated. One good earthquake would level this dump.
I stopped working the tape with my feet and listened, thinking I heard a car outside. I shouted and my voice reverberated inside the building. Listening again, I heard nothing.
More hours passed. My muscles ached, my throat was parched, and my stomach growled. I hardly had anything to eat all day and was getting hungry.
I wondered about Roberts. Had the hospital called the office? If so, Mabel would be pissed when she tried to locate me. And Sol would be out of his mind by now.
I thought about Rita, lovely Rita, and also remembered that I told Kathie I’d call her later. I wondered what she’d told her mother. With Roberts, I had opened a twenty-nine-year-old wound, and now the hurt and suffering was spreading.
More time passed and I began to think that maybe Danny and Rollo weren’t coming back at all. I wondered how long this nightmare would drag on. Would I still be here, a dried-up piece of skin covering yellowing bones, when some archaeologist from the future dug up this place? “Eureka, I’ve found the remains of a twentieth century man, a perfect specimen, a Hominidae Lawyerus!”
Hours went by at an agonizingly slow pace. The anguish and fatigue continued to build, and I didn’t feel that I was making any headway at freeing myself. I kept flexing my fingers in an effort to enhance the blood flow to my numb hands. They felt as if they had swollen to twice their normal size. The throbbing pain from the wounds on my face bothered me for sure, but if this went on much longer it would be boredom that would finally do me in.
I started to nod off, damn near strangling myself when my head dropped. I took several deep breaths of the hot stale air, trying to stay awake. Twisting and turning as much as possible, I strained every muscle in my body, struggling against my restraints with every fiber of my being.
I broke one leg free.
Not long after, I gave up. I couldn’t move anymore. My body was like a hot engine racing without oil. My muscles screamed in pain and my joints had locked up tight. In all this time I had only managed to get the one leg free. The wound on my face had opened more and blood dripped to the floor, splattering at my feet.
Without help, it would be impossible to get loose. I’d have to wait until someone—a guard, caretaker, anyone—showed up and untied me. But then I remembered what the goons had said: they’d be back in the morning.
I had one leg free—but what good would that do? I had to get my hands loose, but I couldn’t even feel them now.
My most important challenge would be to stay awake until I got out of this mess. If I fell asleep, my head would drop and I’d die of strangulation, I warned myself for the hundredth time.
Staring at the far wall and the support beam
s in front of me, I thought I saw a flicker of movement in the darkness. Did I imagine it, or did something scurry across the floor at the edge of the wall? No, it was real. I heard the clicking sound of clawed feet skittering on the concrete floor as another form squeezed in through an opening in the back where a number of bricks had given way. The creature scampered to one of the support beams and hid behind it.
More of them came through the hole, four or five at a time now, and they kept coming. I shouted. They froze in their tracks. Two dozen or more animals stared at me, their red eyes glowing in the dark.
Sewer rats.
The back of my throat filled with bile. I wanted to gag.
One of them, a large albino about a foot long, moved forward cautiously, sniffing the air. After a few feet it stopped and looked up at me for a moment before continuing on. Others followed, moving slowly at first, zigzagging across the floor. A few of them circled around to the sides, like troops setting up a flanking maneuver. Reinforcements poured in from the hole and joined their predecessors.
Soon a small army of rats surrounded me. They had formed up in a circle five feet away from me. Their eyes, red slits in the dark, locked on me. Their noses twitched. They had smelled my fresh blood on the floor and they were hungry.
I’d always thought that rats were afraid of humans. Looked like I was wrong; they were preparing to attack. It was just a matter of time before the battle would commence.
All at once, they rushed forward, crowding at my feet, climbing over one another in a frenzy to get at me. Their horrible squeals rang in my ears. A few of them nibbled at my shoes, going for the blood that had splattered on them. I stomped my foot with my free leg, but that didn’t slow them down. I kicked a big one as hard as I could, like I was going for a fifty-yard field goal. It disappeared in the darkness. Then I kicked another one and I kept kicking, my leg moving in quick thrusts, back and forth, like a heavy pendulum on speed. I connected more often than I missed, and one by one the rats started to back off. A tactical retreat.
JO03 - Detour to Murder Page 24
