by Matt Coyle
The phone call I’d received while I was in the jail was from Jack Anton. He’d left me the phone number of Trent Phelps’ widow, Ingrid. Now Ingrid Samuelson. I called the number as I headed north on Interstate 5 out of downtown San Diego.
The woman who answered had a Scandinavian accent and didn’t sound old enough to be Phelps’ wife twenty-eight years ago and the mother of a now forty-five-year-old daughter. I asked to speak to Ingrid. The woman said I was talking to her.
“Jack Anton gave me your number.”
“Yes, he told me you wanted to talk to me about Trent’s murder.”
“Can we do it in person?”
“Well, my husband’s at a business dinner. Can you come over now?”
“Yes.”
She gave me a Carmel Valley address, and I told her I’d be there in a half hour.
Carmel Valley was east of Del Mar across Interstate 5. No ocean views but huge parcels of undeveloped land, horse country, and gated communities. I punched in Ingrid’s address on the keyboard at the gate and the massive wrought-iron barrier swung open to the gated community.
Ingrid’s home had a horseshoe stone paver driveway in front of a five-thousand-square-foot home that looked like it had been built, stone by stone, from an English castle complete with a turret at the entrance. Across the highway in Del Mar, the house would be worth five to six million dollars. My recollection was that Phelps had lived in Pacific Beach. It had taken a while, but Ingrid had married up. Or she’d found a career that paid better than doing laundry for the mob.
I rang the bell and an attractive woman in a flowing Mumu opened the door. Silver hair swept back from a perfectly symmetrical face accented by rounded cheekbones and blue eyes. She would have been stunning at any age, but, doing the math, I knew she had to be at least in her midsixties.
“Mr. Cahill?” The lilting Scandinavian accent I’d heard on the phone.
“Yes.”
“Please come in.” She opened the door into a spotless foyer with travertine floors and a soaring ceiling. Ingrid led me into a living room that had a grand piano in the corner with plenty of room for a sing-around, and an L-shaped sofa that was as big as the patio in my backyard.
Ingrid sat at one end of the sofa. I sat halfway down from her to still be within hearing distance.
“May I get you a refreshment? Wine? Lemonade? Water?”
“No, thank you.”
“So, Jack tells me that you’re investigating my late husband’s murder.”
“Yes. But the police seem to be interested now.”
“According to Jack, only because you stirred things up, right?” A high-wattage smile.
It would be too difficult and too personal to explain the safe, the safe deposit box, and the dead surveillance crew.
“I guess so. Have the police contacted you?”
“No, and I doubt they will.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They never really seemed interested in finding the truth twenty-eight years ago, I can’t imagine why they would be now.” She cocked her head to emphasize her disdain. “They interviewed me and my daughter one time and never followed up.” She laced one leg over the other exposing a tan ankle. “I told them who killed Trent, but they didn’t listen.”
“Who?” I edged forward on the sofa.
“Whoever was blackmailing my husband. Someone at the police department.”
My stomach dropped into a bottomless well. If she was right, my father wasn’t just guilty of hiding evidence in a murder. He was the murderer.
“Your husband told you he was being blackmailed?”
“He didn’t call it that. I did. Someone on the police force was extorting money from him. The police officer called it a surtax to allow my husband to stay in business.”
“Who?” Ingrid knew my last name. She had to know the familial connection.
“He wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t talk much about the business.”
“Did he ever report it to the police or the FBI?”
“He couldn’t.” She frowned and suddenly looked close to her age.
“Why not?”
“My husband borrowed money from the wrong people to start his business when he couldn’t get a loan from a bank. They made him do things. He didn’t really own the laundromats. They did—and they cleaned more than just clothes.”
“Did your husband tell you that?”
“Not at first. I did the books for the business the first few years we were open. I started asking questions when things didn’t add up quite right. Trent made me quit and hired a bookkeeper after that. But the bookkeeper was a cousin of one of the men Trent borrowed money from.”
“How did you find out about the police extortion?”
“I didn’t. My daughter did.”
“How?”
“Callie used to walk to the Pearl laundromat after school and do her homework in the office until Trent was done with work. Then he’d drive her home for dinner. She—”
“I thought you lived in Pacific Beach. That would be a long walk.”
“We lived in PB, but we used Trent’s parents’ address in La Jolla as our residence so Callie, I mean Tonya, could go to the La Jolla schools.”
“Who’s Tonya?”
“It’s Callie. The same.” A sad smile. “She changed her name after her father died because of everything in the papers about Trent being connected to organized crime. I agreed with her decision because I thought her real name might hurt her chance to go to a good university. Everyone calls her Tonya now, but she’ll always be Callie to me.”
“Sorry for the interruption. Please, continue.”
“It is not a problem.” She flashed the Nordic queen smile again. “One day Callie was doing homework when she heard shouting outside the office door. She listened against the door and heard a man say that Papa, I mean Trent. Callie called him Papa. The man said that he was late with the tax. If he didn’t pay the next day, there would be consequences. Then the man left. Callie looked out the office window and saw a police car drive away.”
“Did she recognize the police officer or describe what he looked like?” I held my breath hoping not to hear that he had brown hair, blue eyes, and a square jaw. Anything but a description of my father.
“No. She just saw the police car drive away.” Liquid sparkled in her blue eyes. “Callie wasn’t like most teenagers. She still believed her father was perfect. Strong. A good man. She loved him more than anything in the world. More than me. When she walked out of the office, she said Trent looked scared, beaten. He wouldn’t tell her what happened when she asked. She told me about it when she got home. I pestered Trent for days until he finally told me about the loans from the mob and the policeman extorting him.”
“But he never gave you the name of the cop?”
“No.”
“Did Callie ever see the policeman again?”
“No.”
“How close was this in relation to Trent’s … death?”
“You can call it murder, Mr. Cahill.” Her eyes steeled. “That’s what it was, and the person who killed Trent is still free.”
“Call me Rick.” I nodded my head. “That’s right, it was murder, and I want to help find the killer.” Even if it was my father. “Was this years or months before Trent died?”
“Months. Less. He was murdered six or seven weeks after Callie heard the conversation.”
“Did you tell the police what Callie told you about the cop demanding money?”
“Yes.” Her eyes and lips squeezed down, showing the flip side of a Nordic queen. “The fat detective took notes and nodded his head like what I told him mattered, but he never questioned me again.”
“The fat detective? There was only one?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Two. The fat one, Detective Davidson, told the black one to interview my daughter.”
“Where’s your daughter now?”
“She’s a linguistics professo
r at UCSD.”
“Do you think she’d talk to me?”
“I’ll ask her. She doesn’t like to talk about those times. She likes to remember her Papa as the man she thought he was, not the man he became.”
Callie Phelps and I had at least one thing in common. I was just a bit further along in facing reality.
“Please give her my phone number. Maybe learning who killed her father will eventually make it easier to remember her father at his best.”
“I would like that. She’s had a hard life. She never recovered from her Papa’s death. I had to find a job to keep us going. It forced me to move forward and leave the past behind. I found love again and started a new life. Callie never did. She’s smart, works hard, but she has no husband. No one to love. She was a happy child. After her father died, she was never happy again.”
“Is there anything else you can think of that could help me find out who killed your husband?”
“No. You find the policeman who extorted money from Trent and you find the killer.”
“Why are you sure they are the same person? Why would the cop extorting your husband kill a source of income?”
“Because Trent was going to stop paying and go to the police. He knew one policeman he could trust. Three days after he told me he was going to talk to the police, someone murdered him.”
“What was the name of the policeman he was going to tell?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.”
Could it have been my father? A man Phelps thought he could trust, but who may have gotten him killed.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE AUTUMN EVENING had pulled the sun down early and it was dark by the time I got home. A black Hummer sat in front of my house when I pulled into my driveway. A man got out of the driver’s-side door and walked toward my car. Tall, fit, bald. Black skinny-legged suit. I got out of my car and walked back to the trunk. Where I kept a gun.
“Mr. Cahill, someone would like to speak with you.” An accent. Slavic, maybe Russian.
I popped the trunk with my key fob and reached in for the holstered Smith & Wesson .357 inside.
“Don’t move.” A different Slavic voice. Behind me.
My hand stopped six inches short of the .357. Cold steel against the back of my neck. Fight or flight buzzed along my nerve synapses and my internal radiator hit radioactive. The hand not holding the gun patted me down, then grabbed my collar and pulled me backwards. I didn’t resist. Fight or flight weren’t options, just instinct.
“This way.” The driver waved toward the Hummer. “Don’t keep the boss waiting.”
The person behind me pulled the gun from my neck and let go of my collar. I walked toward the Hummer. It had tricked rims and chrome finishes. The driver opened the backseat passenger door. I stepped up into the car and sat down on a black leather seat under the flash on the ceiling light.
A woman stared at me from the other seat. Long goth black hair. Jutting cheekbones. Black leather everything including knee-high boots. Raccoon-eye makeup and black lipstick. Underneath the makeup, she may have been attractive and may have been twenty-five or thirty-five.
“You have something that belongs to me. Give it to me and we’ll become friends.” Just a trace of her friends’ accent hiding under an American millennial disinterested lilt.
I noticed a man in the front passenger seat turned toward me just as the ceiling light went dark.
He held a gun with a silencer screwed into the barrel. Pointed at me.
“I want to be your friend.” I smiled in the dark and tried to keep my voice from cracking. “But I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”
“This isn’t a good start, Rick.” She slung a leather boot up into my lap and pushed the heel into my crotch. Hard enough to know it was there, but not so hard to kill offspring I’d yet to have.
“Why don’t you tell me what you think I have so I can solve the misunderstanding?”
“What you took from Sophia.” She ground her heel deeper. The pain sucked the breath out of me. I would have punched her in the face if not for the guy with the gun. And the other guy with the gun outside.
“I didn’t take anything from Sophia. I never even spoke to her.” The woman pushed harder. I groaned. My eyes adjusted to the dark. Front Seat still had a gun pointed at me. The Hummer’s windows were tinted, so the boys on the outside couldn’t see inside.
She ground harder. I groaned and doubled over, sliding my hand against my pocket until I found the outline of the key fob. I pushed against what I thought was the upper button. The alarm on my car chirped and flashed yellow lights. The man in the front seat moved his eyes from me toward my car outside.
I sprang at him and grabbed the gun’s barrel. The woman leaped at me, and I got a knee up just in time to fend her off. Pain shot into my right thigh. I slammed the top of my forehead into the man’s nose and kicked the woman in the face as she stabbed a knife at me again. The man’s grip on the gun loosened. I yanked it free and hit him in his bloody nose with it then whipped it on the woman. She swung the knife wildly missing me by a foot. I grabbed her arm, yanked her toward me, and slammed my elbow into her temple. She slumped back against the door. The knife dropped onto the car seat. I grabbed it and pointed the gun at the man in the front seat. He leaned against the dashboard groaning like a sedated bear.
Someone outside tapped on the woman’s window. Shit.
“Don’t move or say anything,” I said to the man in the front seat.
The woman was unconscious. I gently slapped her cheek a couple times. More taps on the window.
“Boss?”
The woman’s eyes blinked open. They stared at me, but looked confused. Her bottom lip had puffed up where I kicked her.
“Do you know where you are?” I made sure she saw the gun.
She nodded and the gun brought her eyes into focus.
“Boss.” Another tap on the window. “Are you okay?”
“Do as I say or I use this.” I rolled my hand holding the gun. “You understand?”
She nodded. No panic in her eyes. Just a calm hatred.
“Open the window an inch and tell your man to stop bothering you. If you show him anything but your eyes, the gun goes off.” I glanced at the man in the front seat. He still had his head in his hands against the dashboard.
The woman tapped the window button in the arm of the door and nothing happened. Shit.
“Boss!” Outside.
I hit the door lock button and all the doors clicked locked. The man outside pulled on the door hard enough that I could feel the Hummer tremble.
I grabbed the woman by the lapel of her leather jacket and pulled her toward the opening between the two front seats.
“Push the ignition button.”
She pushed the button on the dash. I yanked her back into her seat.
Pounding on both the passenger- and driver-side windows now.
“Boss!”
“Crack the window.” I pointed the gun at her and leaned back against the opposite door.
She opened the window an inch.
“What?” she shouted.
“Are you okay?” The voice from outside.
“Don’t bother me. I’m playing with my new toy.” The last sentence came out as a purr. She closed the window and looked at me. “Okay. Now what?”
The adrenaline vibrating my body cinched down a notch. My leg stung to life. I glanced at my thigh and saw a hole and dark splotch on my Levis. If she’d hit the femoral artery, I’d already be woozy if not unconscious on my way to bleeding out. Alive, but in pain, still leaking blood, and would need medical attention soon.
“What’s your name?”
“Tatiana.”
“Okay, Tatiana, you and I have to figure out how to get out of this without guns going off and feelings getting hurt.”
“You already hurt my feelings, Rick.” She touched her lip then looked at the man in the front seat. “You hurt Petrov’s, too.”
Hearing his name, the man in the front seat leaned back from the dashboard and looked at me. His nose had a hump in it and blood circled his lips like a war paint Fu Manchu.
“You stabbed me in the leg, so we’re even.” I nodded at my thigh. “I don’t know what you’re looking for and I don’t care what it is. But, isn’t it possible that, now that Sophia’s dead, the police found whatever it is when they searched her car and where she was staying?”
“The police don’t have it. Trust me.” She smiled a nasty jag. “But you already know that.”
“No I don’t. And if you keep thinking that, we’re never going to become friends and we’ll all die inside this Hummer.”
“You can’t live forever.” She gave me the smile again. “Let’s try it this way. How much do you want for the flash drive? Maybe we can work something out.”
Sophia? Flash drive?
The goth psycho had to mean Peter Stone’s flash drive. Stone was hooked up with the Russian Mafia. No wonder he was worried. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He owned a ten-million-dollar home in La Jolla. There had to be some dirt in all that clean money he donated around town. No matter how many crony capitalism contracts he secured. He’d gone from one mob in Las Vegas to another one in San Diego. Only this one was more dangerous.
“I don’t have your flash drive. I don’t have anything that belongs to you or anyone else. I’m not in that kind of business.”
“Peter Stone might think differently.”
“Stone?” I played dumb out of instinct. Preservation. Even with a gun in my hand.
“Yes. Peter. I know you two had an arrangement concerning Sophia.”
“He hired me to find her.” Dumb didn’t work with people who knew the truth. My leg throbbed. “And I did, but she was already dead. I never went into her car. I never went into her home. The closest I ever got to Sophia was tailing her in my car.”
“Well, that leaves your ex-lover and her husband, then. Jeffrey Parker. He must have the flash drive. If he does, he’s putting his wife in danger. You have seventy-two hours to get me back the drive. If you fail, you’ll be responsible for what happens.”
Kim.
I waved the gun in front of Tatiana. “You forgot who’s holding the gun.”
