About thirty minutes ago, an idea had come to him, appropriately enough, like a light bulb blinking on over his head.
“Nell, listen,” he said, motioning at the cylinders. “I arranged these on the counter according to type. Edison’s factory used three different kinds of cylinders. The oldest are his Gold Molded cylinders. They were sorta brownish and made of aluminum stearate, beeswax, and ceresine wax… a petroleum byproduct.” He paused. “They’re in the brown packing tubes to your left.”
She pointed her chin at the blue tubes on the right side of the counter.
“And these are…?”
“Blue Amberols,” he said. “Edison switched from wax compounds to celluloid in the nineteen-twenties. The newer cylinders weren’t as fragile as the originals.”
Nell stood looking down at them.
“I only see brown and blue tubes here,” she said. “You mentioned three kinds of cylinders.”
“The Black Amberols also came in brown storage tubes,” Eric said. “They fall in the middle chronologically. They’re stronger than the browns and weaker than the blues.”
She looked thoughtful.
“Help me get this straight,” she said. “First Edison made brown wax cylinders…”
“And packaged them in brown cardboard tubes…”
“Then he made black wax cylinders…”
“And also kept them in brown tubes…”
“And then he manufactured blue celluloid cylinders…”
“And changed the packaging. They came in blue cardboard tubes.”
Nell lifted one of the Blue Amberols off the counter in a nitrile-gloved hand.
“‘Missouri Waltz’ by the Jaudus Society Orchestra,” she said, reading the label on its lid. “Catchy.”
“How about the Orpheus Male Chorus?” Eric showed her another blue. “Featuring their smash hit ‘Dixieland Memories.’”
“A must for everyone’s stranded-on-a-desert island top ten list,” she said. Her expression asking how any of this had the slightest bearing on their efforts to find a killer.
He set down the Blue Amberol, nodding at the brown tubes again.
“Take a closer look at them,” he said. “Notice anything different?”
Nell examined them a minute, picked one up off the counter, and shrugged.
“Hmm,” she said. “There’s no recording artist’s name written on the lid. Just a serial number.”
“That’s because the Edison Company didn’t package them with labels,” he said. “Unless you were standing at the store display, the only way to identify the artist was to open up the cardboard tube and read a little slip of paper inside.”
She looked at the tube in her hand.
“This might be a dumb question… but if I open this up right now, will I hear a horrible disintegrating noise and then feel very sick and guilty?”
Eric shrugged.
“The only way to know for sure is to try,” he said. And grinned. “I tried.”
She gave him a questioning glance.
“You can open it,” he said, holding out a pair of tweezers. “Just don’t sneeze, cough, hiccup, or yawn.”
Nell carefully removed the lid, saw the paper slip between the tube and cylinder, and pulled it out with the tweezers.
After a second her doubt turned to surprise.
The information about the recording was written, rather than printed, on the insert in faded blue ink.
It read:
“I don’t get it,” Nell said. “Sutton must’ve written this himself. A long time ago judging from the date.”
Eric nodded. “Way, way, way, way, way back in the day, phonographs were hyped as being for personal recordings,” he said. “Those brown wax cylinders weren’t worth the fifty cents they cost if you wanted to score the Jaudus Society’s greatest hits. Their wax was so soft, the phonograph’s metal stylus would chew up their grooves like a power drill. They were shot after nine or ten plays.”
“Are you telling me the admiral was a closet crooner?” Nell asked, although her expression was telling him she knew full well where he was going with this.
“It was a kind of novelty item, and some people did torture their wives and kids with their ballads and fiddle playing,” Eric said. “But they also used the recordable cylinders for drafts of letters, diary entries, favorite sayings…”
“Beep-beep.”
“Beep-beep? What’s that?”
“My contradiction alert,” she explained. “You just said people knew the cylinders wouldn’t last long. Why bother with the recordings?”
Eric frowned. Nell always blamed her penchant for cutting him off on her Attention Deficit Disorder… but since when did the interruptions come with beeps?
“They weren’t usually making them for posterity,” he said. “Think of the cylinders as rewritable media—the equivalent of CD-RWs. People would refer to their verbal documents when preparing the written ones, then wipe the cylinders clean.”
“You could erase these things?”
“Yeah. Well, literally, you’d buy tools that would raze, or shave away, the grooves on their outer layers,” Eric said. “Edison boasted that the blanks could be reused a hundred times before they had to be tossed, but it was probably less.”
Nell thought about that.
“You said the phonograph needle would ruin the grooves,” she said. “What if they were never played? Locked away for safekeeping?”
“They still wouldn’t hold up,” Eric said. “The brown and black wax became so brittle with age they could shatter in a person’s hand with the slightest pressure… I mean, explode. They were also vulnerable to being attacked by fungus and mold—”
“Gives new meaning to Gold Molded,” Nell said, and grinned.
He looked at her. “You just stole my line.”
“Sorry, couldn’t resist.” She held the cardboard tube in her hand. “What do you think is recorded on here?”
Eric shrugged.
“Who knows?” he said. He adjusted a table lamp so its brightness shone directly over the tube. “I wouldn’t touch the cylinder, it’s too fragile. But take a closer look at it in the container.”
She immediately noticed the whitish-gray splotches across its surface.
“Speaking of mold,” she said.
“Yup,” Eric said. “All of Sutton’s brown cylinders have it, some worse than others, which ain’t good. The stuff eats away at their grooves like Pac-Man monsters eating, uh, Pac-Men.” He paused. “Back to the paper slip, if you want my not-so-wild guess—and for what it’s worth, that’s an index number below the date.”
“But it’s of no use to us without a key.”
“Right.” Eric motioned to the other browns. “There are three or four more tubes with handwritten labels, so we might find a pattern to the numbers—”
“What if we could listen to the recording?” she said, cutting him short a third time. “Then we wouldn’t need the numbers or an index key.”
He shook his head. “Okay… beep-beep. We’ve already established that playing the cylinder’s sure to mess it up, maybe even destroy it.”
“Right,” she said. “But I said listen. Not play. There’s a difference.”
Eric’s brow creased, his eyes leaping to hers. A moment later they filled with understanding.
“There is, isn’t there?” he said.
Nell smiled sweetly, nodding.
“X-awesome,” he said.
“Awesome-X,” she replied.
14
Deeks entered the interrogation room at 8:30 A.M. to find Dorani leaned forward over the table, snoring lightly, his arms crossed under his head.
His estimable lawyer had arrived a few minutes earlier looking drawn, caffeine-buzzed, and indignant over having to return to the Boatshed on very short notice… this after spending half the night here with her client, and the rest of it working at home to complete a petition that he be properly charged before a judge or magistrate, and then remand
ed to the custody of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Though Deeks commiserated, he wasn’t about to feel too sorry for her. The fact was that he and the rest of the OSP’s personnel also had been at it nonstop for an unholy span of hours, trying to solve a case with so many moving parts it was hard to keep track of them…
Ms. Scardella’s client being a key part. And one of the few they had managed to get their hands on.
“Rise and shine, Isaak,” he said now, slamming his palm against the edge of the table. “It’s almost go-to-jail time.”
Dorani snapped his head up, yawning.
“Nice’a you to give me a shake,” he said blearily. And sniffed. “Did I mention this joint smells like clams? Which, nothing personal, ain’t any worse on the nose than you.”
Deeks grinned as he sat down.
“That’s funny,” he said. “Positively chucklicious.”
“Hey, I got loads more where it came from.”
“Cool,” Deeks said. “You can write ’em all down on a yellow legal pad while you’re doing fifteen to life.”
Scardella frowned.
“You said you had some new questions,” she said. “Shall we get this latest session underway? Because the longer my client stays here in this room, the greater my inclination to trash my request for a transfer and demand his immediate, unconditional release.”
“Based on?”
“More violations of his constitutional rights than there are clams in the sea.”
Deeks’s smile broadened.
“The merriment never ends,” he said, then returned his eyes to Isaak. “One thing…”
“Here we go,” Isaak said. “You show me another picture of a stiff, I’m gonna puke my guts out.”
Deeks shook his head.
“Actually,” he said, “you have a visitor.”
Isaak regarded him with the same frightened, goggle-eyed expression he’d shown before the interview broke for the night.
“What kind?” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘what kind’?”
“I mean, it ain’t somebody who wants to kill me, is it?”
“There a lot of people in that club?”
“Funny guy,” Isaak said. “Now how about you tell me who this visitor is?”
“How about we just have him come in?”
“I have a better idea,” Scardella said. “How about you people stop springing surprises on us?”
Deeks spread his hands.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “I didn’t plan this.”
“Oh, really?”
“Cross my smelly heart.”
Scardella looked at him a moment and sighed.
“Say I accept you’re telling the truth,” she said. “Isaak promised he’d cooperate, not play ‘This Is Your Life.’”
Deeks’s expression suddenly turned grave.
“Nobody here’s slept in forty-eight hours,” he said. “This isn’t a game. We need your client to talk.”
“And if he does?”
“We won’t forget.”
Scardella hesitated a full ten seconds. Then she turned to Isaak.
“I suggest we proceed, and see who they’ve brought in,” she said. “What do you think?”
He looked at her nervously. Licked his lips. And nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “But it better not be my moron Auntie Evelyn.”
* * *
Ron Valli entered the room first, Kensi behind him. Callen and Sam stayed out in observation with Hetty, thinking five would be a crowd.
Dorani sat there stiffly, staring at them in silence. Tension and surprise mingled in his eyes as Valli came through the door.
“Zak,” Valli said. “How you doing, man?”
Dorani gave a mute shrug. He watched Valli approach the table, taking the chair Deeks had occupied moments before.
A moment passed. Scardella quiet behind her tablet, Deeks and Kensi standing against the wall.
All of them waiting.
Dorani kept staring at Valli across the table.
“You don’t look too good,” he said.
“You neither,” Valli said.
“I been up all night,” Dorani said.
“Me too,” Valli said.
Dorani smiled nervously.
“Terrific,” he said.
Valli smiled back but didn’t answer.
Finally he shifted in his seat.
“I had a helluva night,” he said, breaking the unearthly silence. “A helluva night.”
Dorani nodded.
“I heard,” he said. “Didn’t know if I should believe it—”
“I was gonna check out,” Valli said. “If that’s what they told you, it’s true.”
“I don’t get it,” Dorani said, shaking his head. “You didn’t do anything.”
Valli shrugged.
“Sometimes it don’t matter with guys like us,” he said. “Sometimes it’s what they think you did.”
“But everything’s okay?”
Valli shrugged again.
“I’m still here,” he said. “I saw Karyn and Lila.”
“And they’re good?”
“They’re good.”
Dorani nodded, smiled, turned his eyes down at the table, and abruptly burst into tears.
“Shit,” he said, reaching out sideways. “Will somebody here let me have a tissue?”
Scardella got some out of her bag and gave them to him.
“Zak… listen,” Valli said. “I don’t know what happened in the admiral’s house. All I know for sure’s you wouldn’t kill anybody.”
“I didn’t.” Dorani wadded the tissues in his hand. “I swear on my life, I thought the place would be empty…”
“I know,” Valli said. “I’m telling you man, I do. But they say you were in there with some bad dudes.”
Dorani wiped his eyes. “That don’t describe ’em,” he said. “We’re talking the biggest nuts in the nutcake.”
Valli was nodding.
“You need to tell these people who they are, Zak,” he said. “They—”
“Hold it,” Scardella said, turning to Dorani. “You don’t have to tell anyone anything.”
“Maybe,” Kensi said, “you should let your client decide for himself.”
Scardella shot a look at her. “Let me remind you that he’s been very forthcoming to this point,” she said. “Meanwhile, you’ve pulled one stunt after another, and given us no chance to prepare…”
“I wouldn’t call Mr. Valli a stunt,” Deeks said. “He’s your client’s closest friend. And Isaak used information he innocently gave him to lead Mr. Sutton’s killers into his home.”
“Again, this is news to me,” Scardella said. “Assuming it’s true…”
Dorani was trembling.
“Ronnie,” he said. “Is that what you think?”
Valli looked at him. “It don’t matter right now,” he said.
“It does,” Dorani said, plaintively. “It matters to me.”
There was a momentary silence. Valli took a long, deep breath and slowly released it.
“I told you I was taking the admiral to the cemetery,” he said, and inhaled again. “I told you Angie was supposed to have the day off. I told you a whole bunch of stuff about the house…”
“But I didn’t do it on purpose. I mean, I didn’t think the crazies would shoot—”
“Isaak,” Scardella said. “We’ve been all through this story already. It isn’t in your interest to repeat it…”
Valli kept his eyes on his friend.
“I’m asking you to tell the agents about those people,” he said. “Whatever you know.”
“But it won’t make up for things. It won’t make things right…”
“It’ll help, Zak,” Valli said. He reached across the table and grabbed his arm above the elbow. “Please. I’m asking you.”
Dorani was crying again, covering his eyes with his palms, his cheeks shiny with tears.
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“I’m in a spot,” he said. “Suppose I talk. The crazies’ll kill me. I know they will.”
Kensi moved up behind Valli.
“No,” she said. “I promise we won’t let that happen.”
There was another silence. Dorani looked at her across the table. Looked at Valli. Looked back at her for a long time.
“Okay,” he said finally, gulping down the lump in his throat. “You were right.”
“About what?”
Scardella shook her head. “Isaak, don’t. This is a mistake—”
“The crazies call themselves commandos,” he said, paying no attention to her. “Goddamn suicide commandos.”
Kensi kept her eyes on his.
“What else?” she said.
“They want to build a dirty bomb,” he said.
“A dirty nuke?”
“Right, exactly,” he said. “They been planning to set it off here in Los Angeles…”
“Do you know when?”
Dorani swallowed again.
“Not for sure,” he said. “But if you guys got some nice Samsonite luggage at home, I’m thinkin’ you should hurry up and pack.”
15
The OSP’s second all-hands-on-deck meeting in as many days got underway at 9:30 A.M., with agents Callen, Hanna, Blye, and Detective Deeks urgently reporting to the Operations Center to find both Henrietta Lange and Assistant Director Owen Granger awaiting them. Also in the room were Beale and Jones.
Granger watched the team file in. A lean, rugged-looking man of about sixty with intense brown eyes, a long taciturn face, and a receding hairline that gave his forehead a high, prominent appearance, he stood near the big plasma screen wearing a navy-blue sport jacket, dark-gray trousers, and an open-collared white Oxford shirt.
His presence reinforced what the agents already knew. The case they were working was now about far more than the bloody double homicide at Elias Sutton’s home, and the associated kidnapping of Theodore Holloway two months before. Add the apparent repercussions of those crimes—the killings of the hacker, Erasmo Greer, and the pawnbroker-slash-fence Zory Daggut—and you still fell incalculably short of its full, chilling immensity.
NCIS Los Angeles Page 21
