Robin went to take a bath, I washed the dishes, Milo dried.
When we finished, I said, “Go get the file and we’ll divvy it up.”
“I told you: homework.”
“This is a home.”
—
Milo split the massive three-ring binder into two approximate halves, gave me the top, and took the rest for himself. Most of what I ended up with was decades of monthly brokerage statements recording Thalia’s wealth, and February 1 reminders from Ricki Sylvester to provide state and federal tax information so she could file in April on Thalia’s behalf.
Between Thalia’s training as a CPA and the bulk of her money coming from tax-free bonds, the short form had been a cinch. The only other income since Sylvester began handling the estate were two county pensions that had risen to around fifty thousand a year, plus eighteen K from Social Security, with deductions for Medicare.
A note from Sylvester every March 1 confirmed Thalia’s continuing intention to donate every cent of her taxable income to charity, “per your goal of obviating the need for burdensome accounting.”
Everything had been CC’d to Joseph A. Manucci, Certified Financial Planner, at Morgan-Smith’s Encino office. No personal correspondence from Manucci but the statements bore his name on top, as did stacks of boilerplate stock-market analyses from the brokerage house’s home office in New York.
Given the size of Thalia’s account, he’d probably sent holiday cards and calendars, too. She’d probably tossed them.
No records from the time when Sylvester’s grandfather had been in charge. Probably in Milo’s batch.
I kept going, came upon pages of photocopied pension and Social Security checks along with letters from Sylvester confirming direct transfer of yearly donations to Western Pediatric Medical Center of Los Angeles and the Shriners Hospital for Children. Subsequent letters listed smaller donations to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis and other pediatric institutions in Orange County, San Diego, Boston, Houston, and Philadelphia.
On the last page, a blank, white business-sized envelope resting in a plastic pouch. When I pulled it out the paper felt starchy and stiff.
Inside was a letter dated December 14, 1950, typed on the embossed stationery of
John E. McCandless, Esq., Attorney at Law.
McCandless had run a one-man operation out of an office on Green Street in Pasadena. No address listed for the recipient.
Dear Thalia,
Enclosed is the contract with Grammar. I trust you find the terms agreeable.
Betty sends her best.
Yours, as always,
Jack
JEM: tg
Paper-clipped to the letter was a plain white sheet specifying a rental agreement between Miss Thalia Mars and The Conrad Aventura Grande Deluxe, to take effect January 1, 1951. The hotel’s parent company was Conrad G. Grammar, Inc., St. Louis, Missouri, doing business in California and Arizona as Conrad Hotels and Banquet Services, Ltd.
Ricki Sylvester had told us Thalia was from Missouri. Had a personal link between tenant and hotelier enabled the sweetheart deal bemoaned by Kurtis DeGraw?
The terms of the contract blew that guess to bits.
Occupancy fees for “Deluxe Bungalow VIII” had been set at one thousand dollars a month, with service charges added to create a yearly rent of $12,667.67, plus a three percent escalator every anniversary to be applied “at the discretion of the property owner.”
Twelve grand had to be huge money in ’51, far beyond the reach of an unmarried municipal clerk.
I logged onto the Internet and confirmed it: U.S. median family income that year had been thirty-seven hundred dollars.
Somehow Thalia had come up with nearly four times that amount for the privilege of living in two rooms on a property recently cleared of vagrants.
Perhaps she’d already stockpiled cash from real estate deals. Maybe those records were also in Milo’s share of the file.
I told him what I’d found.
He said, “Yeah, all the property transfers are here, but if this is all of ’em, she didn’t start wheeling and dealing until ’53. Her last transaction was in the seventies. She sold six hundred acres of desert near Palmdale to a film ranch. Paid five grand and raked in six hundred twenty-five K. Not bad, huh? It’s all like that, huge profits for years.”
“But not in ’51,” I said. “Did Jack McCandless handle the deals?”
“Yup.”
“Ricki Sylvester reminds her to file taxes. Same for him?”
He said, “Nope. You’re thinking she wasn’t paying taxes back then?”
“Or someone was handling them for her. Handling more than taxes.”
“A kept woman,” he said. “Fronting someone else’s dough.”
“How else could she come up with twelve grand a year? No need for a front if you’re legal. Maybe that book inscription’s important. Monark financed Midget, put her up in a secluded hotel bungalow because she was his fun on the side.”
“Little Miss Moll,” he said. “Sure, why not. But it’s a big leap from that to murder seventy years later.”
“Unless Midget and Monark got together and made a little Monark or two who didn’t turn out so well. Thalia never acknowledged any descendants. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Maybe as she neared the end of her life, she decided to make sure they didn’t get a cut. Is the will in there?”
“Not yet.” He pawed through the rest of his pile, did a lot of head shaking, finally drew out another white envelope. The single page inside this one was dated earlier this year and printed on Ricki Sylvester’s letterhead.
Brief document, as uncomplicated as Thalia’s approach to taxes. Half of her estate was bequeathed to the Western Pediatric Medical Center, specifically to the Outpatient Division run by Ruben Eagle, M.D.
“Your buddy makes out like a bandit,” said Milo. “Hey, maybe I should look into your buddy.”
I said, “Feel free but on the morality scale he’s somewhere between Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.”
The rest of the will listed another twenty percent going to the Shriners Hospital, the remaining thirty to be divided up equally among the remaining institutions she’d long supported.
Milo said, “She had a soft spot for kids.”
“And left nothing for any relative.”
“So, what, a bunch of reprobate descendants sneak in, suffocate her, and make off with some loose cash? Another stash, not the three G I found?”
“They got a bigger stash, were in a hurry, missed the three.”
“What, ten, twenty, fifty? Compared with her net worth, we’re talking chump change. Wouldn’t it be smarter to try to butter her up and score big?”
“You take what you can,” I said. “Beyond that, you get to express your feelings.”
“Also, how would they know they were excluded?”
“Good question.”
“Got plenty of those,” he said. “Enough for tonight, I’m getting heartburn—not the dinner, my fragile emotional state.”
CHAPTER
13
After he left, I got on the computer.
Monark turned out to be a popular brand-word attached to bicycles, boats, golf equipment, auto parts, and beer. Lots of bands, also, many from Scandinavia.
Pairing the keyword with gangster caused the search-engine gods to inquire if I really meant gangsta and sent me back to the bands.
Monark and midget brought up a few sites specializing in vintage toys. Monark bikes tended to be grouped with midget cars, but never had the twain met.
An hour plus produced nothing. Milo was right. Enough for tonight.
—
The following morning, I reached Ruben Eagle at the hospital and told him about Thalia.
He said, “Oh, no! She was a wonderful person, who the hell would do that?”
“How did you meet her?”
“She walked into the clinic one day and asked for me. I was swamped and had no idea who
she was. It took a while to get to her but she waited patiently. I come out, see this cute little old woman, she smiles and hands me a check for ten thousand dollars. I was stunned. Getting Development to pay attention is always a challenge and a donor just walks in? She didn’t ask for a tour, didn’t want to be stroked like most of them. Someone killed her, Alex? Grotesque. What a screwed-up world.”
“How much contact did you have with her?”
“We invited her to affairs but she never showed up. Once a year, before Christmas, she’d bring bags of toys for the kids and give me a check. The second one utterly blew me away. Fifty thou. And that’s what it became for the next few years. It changed our whole budgetary setup, basically she became our patron saint. Now she’s—who the hell would do something like that? She was almost a hundred, for God’s sake, next month was her birthday, we were going to surprise her with a cake.”
“Are you aware of anyone she had problems with?”
“No one here, that’s for sure,” said Ruben. “My staff adored her. This is repugnant, Alex. I know bad things can happen to anyone but someone lasting that long, and then…it’s fucked up.”
First time I’d heard him swear. “Any idea how she found out about you?”
“When she gave me the second check, I walked her out to her limo and asked. She told me she was referred by Belinda Wojik. Know her?”
“I don’t.”
“She was one of my residents, stayed for a few years on staff then went into private practice. When I called Belinda to thank her, she seemed surprised. Said she’d talked about her work but didn’t push for a donation. But gift horse and all that. I really can’t believe this, Alex.”
—
Milo phoned at 11 A.M., sounding shockingly happy.
“Print tech came by early this morning. The place was wiped clean but she pulled up a couple of latents on the doorjamb and there was an AFIS match, scrote named Gerard Waters. History of money crimes but no violence. Physically he’s a match for Mr. Pudgy. Got a driver’s license last month, actually lived where he said he did. I just spoke to his landlord. Waters cut out a few days ago, owed rent. West L.A., not your zip code socioeconomically, but not that far geographically. I’m going over there, up to you, but if you feel like it—”
“You know the answer.”
“Not really,” he said. “Mostly I’m still trying to figure out the questions.”
—
The address was minutes from the West L.A. station so I left the Seville in the staff lot and Milo drove. As he turned onto Butler Avenue, he handed me a sheet of paper. “This is who we’re looking for.”
Gerard Brian Waters was forty-three years old, five-seven, two hundred four pounds, with gray hair and brown eyes. Daffy Duck tattoo on his left calf, crude rendition of crossed sabers on his right shoulder blade. Inked in places where viewing would be optional.
Not a face the camera loved, even accounting for the indignities of arrest and booking. Broad, pouchy, the skin rough and grainy, an off-kilter nose, spiky hair, a skimpy chin-beard devoid of mustache.
The mugshot was seven years old but Gerard Waters looked closer to fifty than thirty-six. Living in confinement can do that to you, and he’d spent a quarter of his life in various penal institutions. Charges ranged from shoplifting to drug possession to larceny. Most of the lockups were local jails but Waters’s most recent stint had been four years at a federal prison in Colorado for passing bad checks.
“No blood and guts on his record,” said Milo, “so they put him in minimum security. Model prisoner until he walked away from a work detail raking leaves in a park. That doubled a two-year sentence.”
“How close was he to getting out?”
“Six months.”
“For the sake of half a year, he loses two,” I said. “Impatient fellow. Any idea what he’s been up to since?”
“Other than defrauding an innkeeper and cutting out on his rent? Nope. He got full release, no parole, so he wasn’t reporting to anyone.”
I thought of Thalia’s question about criminal specialization. My response that it was a misconception.
“No blood and guts in his background,” I said. “But you know how it is.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Milo. “A few they get caught for, a bunch they get away with.”
—
Gerard Waters’s last known address was a block east of Sawtelle and the same distance north of Olympic. A neighborhood of modest one-story houses where elegant Japanese nurseries had once thrived along with the hardworking people who ran them. Sparse reminders of that time were a few sushi bars on Sawtelle and a scatter of landscaping niceties: topiary conifers, beds of Zen grass, bamboo peg border markers. But most of the front lots had regressed to weedy grass and uninspired planting.
The house we were looking for sported no Asian elements but it had been maintained well, with a lush lawn, thriving roses, long-established birds of paradise and hydrangea.
A man stood in front, hose in hand, watering grass that couldn’t get any greener. Sixties, medium-sized and narrow-shouldered, he was completely bald with a sun-spotted pate and a white croquet-wicket mustache that right-angled past a thin lower lip. Dressed for outdoor chores in a Catalina Jazz Club T-shirt, cargo shorts, and plastic sandals.
He turned off the water and walked to the curb, hose in hand.
Milo said, “Mr. Duke?”
“Yeah, I’m Phil.” Resonant radio baritone. “Don’t know what else I can tell you about the bum.”
“Mr. Waters rented a room in this house.”
“Had an extra bedroom, used to be my daughter’s then she got married. Nice room, including a shower and separate exit out back. I never rented before, figured why not and put it on Craigslist. Live and learn.”
“Not an ideal tenant.”
“First month he paid on time, second he was late, it kept getting later.”
“He pay with a check?”
“Nah, cash,” said Phil Duke. “Last month he didn’t pay at all. I called a lawyer, he said eviction was a real hassle, everything favors the tenant. So I tried talking to Waters. So sorry, didn’t mean it, some sort of bank problem, I’ll pay you by the end of the month. Instead, one night when I was out, he packed up and left. Took some of my plates and cups, to boot. Last time I do that.”
“Did you file a police report?”
Phil Duke’s lips did something that made the croquet wicket compress on both sides. “Lawyer said it was a waste of time unless he’d taken something valuable. The dishes were twenty, fifty bucks. Why’re you asking about him? He scam someone else?”
“His name came up in an investigation.”
“That doesn’t exactly tell me anything.”
“Sorry, sir. We can’t divulge. When did Waters begin renting and when did he leave?”
“All hush-hush, huh? Figures,” said Duke. “Let’s see…begin was five—no, six months ago, leave was three weeks ago. Daughter’s coming back, anyway, so it worked out.” Another compression. “Divorce, never liked the guy.”
“What kind of work did Waters say he did?”
“Sales and marketing. Don’t know what he sold or marketed, didn’t ask. Didn’t even get a last-month or a damage deposit, that shows you how stupid I was.”
“It could happen to anyone,” said Milo.
“It could if they’re stupid,” said Phil Duke. “I should’ve listened to myself.”
“Is there anything you can tell us about Waters that might help us find him?”
“Love to help you, respect what you do, a few cops in my family. But nah.” He rubbed his bare head. “Honestly, not a bad guy when you first meet him. Friendly, agreeable, talked softly. No bad habits that I could see. Smoking, drinking, he didn’t do neither.”
“What kind of hours did he keep?”
“Normal. Out by eight, back by six or seven. Like a normal job.”
“He ever entertain anyone?”
“Nah, kept to himself. Which I gues
s is strange, him being so friendly, you’d expect some kind of friend. But you never know with people. That’s why I like plants.”
He jiggled the hose. “If there’s nothing else, I’m going to watch my grass grow.”
—
Driving back to the station, I said, “Superficial charm, poor impulse control, criminal history. Waters might be the reason Thalia called me. And/or his bungalow-mates.”
“They show up on her doorstep, ‘Hi, Auntie’?” he said. “Talk about a family reunion.”
I said, “In my head it’s shaping up calculated. Chapter One’s a friendly drop-in. Two is returning to the hotel and checking in, asking for a nearby bungalow so they can stalk her and pick their moment. If they are kin, no mystery about motive. Like you said, they banked on being in the will. Or resented being excluded and were either taking revenge or looking for loose cash. Either way, the effort was minimal, the payout potentially high.”
“For someone to expect they’d inherit, there had to be some kind of relationship.”
“Maybe there was and we haven’t found it.”
“Or we’re totally off and Waters and his pals were staying there for another reason. Like being able to three-way in privacy. The big problem is we still don’t know a damn thing about Thalia. When are you gonna talk to your pediatrician buddy, whatsisname—Eagle?”
“Just did. One of Ruben’s former residents mentioned his work to Thalia in passing, she walked into his clinic with a check for ten grand.”
He whistled.
I said, “The following year she gave him fifty. That’s been her annual donation, since.”
We traveled a block. He said, “You know Eagle well.”
“I do.”
“Above reproach and wears a halo.”
I stared at him. “Oh, c’mon.”
“Hey,” he said, “follow the money, gotta ask.”
“What connection could Ruben have to Waters and the other two?”
“Solid citizen hires out? Like that never happens?”
“Not in this case.”
“Fine, he’s a saint but I still gotta ask.”
“Fair enough.”
“Would it be agonizing for you to do a face-to-face with him? Check out the nonverbals then maybe talk to the resident, see if Eagle’s story holds up? If I’m putting you in a bad position, do a Nancy R. and just say no. And if you feel like washing your hands of the whole damn mess, no problem.”
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