by Stuart Woods
“Do you have anything on the woman that would give me probable cause to arrest her?”
“No. I think what your people could do best would be to find out who she hired to do it.”
“And where do we start?”
“She has a friend named Jimmy Long, a successful movie producer. He was her alibi at her trial, and it was his story that got her off. He’s her only friend here, as far as I know, so she might have turned to him to help her find a contract killer.”
“Would this Jimmy Long be likely to know a contract killer?”
“He’s in the movie business, Joe.”
“Oh. All right, I’ll assign some people to track down his connections and see if a likely hit man turns up. Anything else I can do?”
“If I can think of anything, I’ll call you, Joe. Thanks for your help.” Eagle hung up.
“You’re carrying?” Susannah asked.
“You know I usually do, especially when I’m in L.A.”
“Should I be carrying?”
“Maybe so. Barbara saw you at the trial, and she may have recognized you from the movies. Do you have a license for L.A.?”
“Yes. So you think she would really come after me?”
“Yes, because she knows it would hurt me.”
36
DETECTIVE ALEX REESE found the apartment building in West Hollywood where Tina López and her roommate, Soledad Rivera, lived and rang their bell.
The door was opened by a short, plump, pretty woman. “Yes?”
Reese flashed his badge. “I’m Detective Reese, Santa Fe Police Department. Are you Tina López or Soledad Rivera?”
“I’m Soledad,” she replied. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to ask you and Ms. López some questions regarding an investigation I’m conducting. Is she here?”
“Maybe.”
“May I come in?”
“What do you want to know?”
Before he could reply, another woman came down a hallway and approached the door. She was taller and quite beautiful, wearing low-cut jeans that exposed an expanse of belly from well below her navel to just below her deeply cut cleavage.
“Are you Tina López?”
“He’s a cop from Santa Fe, Tina,” Soledad said.
“What do you want?”
“I’d like to ask both of you some questions concerning an investigation I’m conducting. May I come in?”
“I guess so,” Tina replied.
Reese took a seat in the small living room. “It’s my understanding that you were both in Tijuana for the bullfights recently.” He gave them the dates. “Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Tina replied.
“Who were you with?”
“Grif Edwards and Jack Cato,” Soledad said quickly.
“And where did you stay?”
“At the Parador,” Soledad said.
“Before I ask you the next question I should tell you that my investigation is of a double murder, a mother and her son, in Santa Fe, and that anyone who gives false information to me with regard to those killings is liable to be charged as an accessory. Being an accessory to murder carries the same prison sentence as that for the actual murderer. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Both women stared at him blankly, and he thought he saw tears begin to well in Soledad’s eyes.
“Do you understand?”
“We don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Tina said.
“Grif and Jack weren’t with you in Tijuana, were they? It was two other men, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t …” Soledad began, but Tina elbowed her.
“We don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Tina said again.
“In that case, I’ll have to have the Los Angeles police take you to police headquarters, and we can start all over again with a written record of your questioning.” Reese changed his tone. “Ladies, let me give you some good advice: You don’t want to go to prison for protecting these two guys. They’re not worth it.”
Soledad turned and looked at Tina, and tears began to roll down her cheeks.
“Shut up, Soledad,” Tina said. She turned to Reese. “Now you get out of my house.”
“I’ll see you at the police station,” Reese said, “and if I were you, I’d get a good criminal lawyer, and that’s going to be expensive.”
Soledad began to bawl.
Reese turned to her. “Soledad, do you want to talk to me and save yourself a lot of grief?”
“I told you to get out!” Tina cried.
“Soledad hasn’t asked me to leave.”
Soledad continued to cry loudly.
Tina jumped to her feet, went to the door and pointed outside. “Get out!”
Reese got up, taking his cell phone from his belt. As he walked to the door he made a show of calling a number. “LAPD? I’d like to speak to the chief of detectives, please.” The door slammed behind him.
Reese went back to his rental car, got in and waited. Ten minutes later, Soledad Rivera ran out of the apartment building, carrying a nylon duffel bag, got into a Volkswagen Beetle and drove away. Reese started his car and followed at a distance.
Soledad drove to a neighborhood that seemed to be completely Hispanic, judging from the signs on the storefronts and the people on the streets. She turned into the driveway of a small, neat house, got out of her car and ran inside.
Reese noted the address. “Soledad has run home to Mama,” he said aloud to himself.
ED EAGLE LANDED at Santa Monica Airport, picked up a rental car and drove with Susannah to her Century City apartment. Eagle called Don Wells at Centurion Studios.
“Ed? How are you?”
“Very well, thank you, Don. May we have lunch today?”
“Sure, why don’t you come out to Centurion, and we’ll go to the studio commissary.”
“All right.”
Wells gave him directions, and Eagle hung up.
“How long are we going to be here?” Susannah asked.
“One night, maybe two,” Eagle replied.
Susannah went to a wall safe behind a picture, opened it and held up a small semiautomatic pistol. “This goes into my purse,” she said.
“Good.”
EAGLE WAS GIVEN a studio pass at the front gate and directed to the commissary. Don Wells was waiting at a table inside. He stood up and waved.
Eagle made his way across the crowded dining room to Well’s corner table and sat down.
“Drink?” Wells asked.
“No, thanks, just some iced tea,” Eagle replied, accepting a menu from a waitress. They ordered lunch.
“So, anything happening with the Santa Fe D.A.?” Wells asked.
“Do they have any leads on the killer or killers?”
“They seem to be concentrating on you,” Eagle said.
“You mean Jack Cato?”
“You know about that?”
“He told me he and Grif Edwards had a visit from a Santa Fe detective.”
“Does that concern you?”
“Why should it?”
“It seems clear that the Santa Fe police are theorizing that you hired Cato and Edwards to kill your wife and son.”
“Listen to me, Ed …”
Eagle held up a hand to stop him. “Before you say anything else, let me explain something, Don. Hypothetically speaking, if a client tells his lawyer that he’s guilty of a crime, then when he is tried for it, the lawyer can’t put him on the stand.”
“Why not?”
“Because if the client, having told the lawyer he’s guilty, claims innocence on the stand, then the lawyer is suborning perjury, since he knows his client is lying. Do you understand?”
“Yes, and don’t worry; I’m not going to tell you I’m guilty.”
“Good. What is your relationship with Cato and Edwards?”
“Not much of one. They’ve both worked on a number of my pictures as stuntmen or extras, and they’re part of a group that plays poker at
my office once a week when I’m in town.”
“Do you think that these two men are the sorts who would hire out to commit murder?”
“Beats me,” Wells said. “All I know about them is that Cato is hard to read at the poker table, and Edwards scratches his head when he draws good cards. Anything beyond that would be news to me.”
“Ever heard any rumors about either of them?”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Rumors about their hiring out for murder.”
“Nope. Stuntmen are a funny breed, though: a lot of swagger and big talk. It wouldn’t surprise me if one of them bragged about something like that, whether he did it or not.”
“From what you know of them, do you think they might become loose cannons if put under pressure by the police?”
“I honestly don’t know, Ed. My impression of Cato is that he’s the sort who’s steady under pressure; I’ve seen that in his stunt work. Edwards? Who knows?”
“Don, at the very least, the police investigation of these two men means that they are taking you very seriously as a suspect. Have you ever given either of these men sums of cash?”
“Yeah, after a poker game, but I think I’ve won it back.”
“You’ve said that you keep cash and Krugerrands in your Malibu safe, just as you did in Santa Fe. Is that money still there?”
“Yes, of course.”
“See that it doesn’t disappear. You may have to open that safe for the police, before this is over.”
“I get it,” Wells said.
Eagle hoped he did.
37
BARBARA WAS SOAKING in a hot tub when Jimmy knocked on the bathroom door.
“Come in,” she called.
Jimmy let himself into the bathroom. “There’s what looks like an unmarked police car parked near the end of the driveway,” he said.
“What kind of car?”
“A green Ford, I think.”
Barbara stood up, allowing soapy water to cascade down her still beautiful, naked body. “Well,” she said, “I think I’ll take them shopping.”
JACK CATO WAITED until the mailman arrived before leaving for work. He took the mail inside; among the overdue bills was a manila envelope. It bore no return address. He opened it and shook out the contents, a Ziploc bag containing two stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills. He stuffed the money into his jacket pocket, then got into his truck and drove to work. On the way, he stopped at a drugstore that took payments for the electric, gas and telephone companies and paid his bills in cash. He was now up-to-date on all his bills, and he intended to stay that way.
Once at the studio stables he found a pry bar and left the barn through a rear door. He looked around for spectators, and, seeing none, he opened the door of a prop outhouse, pried up some of the floorboards and, with his hands, scraped the loose dirt away, revealing a safe set in a concrete pad. He opened the safe and dropped the money into it, retaining enough for his day-to-day expenses. He closed the safe, raked the dirt back over it and hammered down the floorboards with the pry bar.
Soon he would have another fifty thousand dollars to add to his stash, and he had only ten days to accomplish his task. He had no doubt that this woman would make good on her threat to kill him if he didn’t fulfill his mission on time. He had no idea who she was, so she could walk up behind him anywhere and put a bullet in his head. He began planning his work for the coming weekend.
He called Tina López at work, on her cell phone. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey, yourself.”
“You up for a trip to Tijuana this weekend?”
“Listen, Jack, we had a cop from Santa Fe come see us yesterday. Soledad went nuts and went home to her mother’s house. She’s scared shitless, and she might crack if she’s pressed anymore.”
“That’s not good, sweetheart,” he said. “You need to talk to her and tell her to get a grip. The story will hold, if she doesn’t crack.”
“I’ll do the best I can. That’s all I can promise. What the hell are you doing that I have to cover your ass again?”
“You don’t want to know, Tina. Don’t ever ask me that again.”
“Look, we’ve got what we want. If you keep doing stuff, you’re going to blow the lid off this thing, and we’ll all go down.”
“This is my last weekend’s work,” Cato said. “Just get your ass down to Tijuana on Friday, and don’t come back until late Sunday night. There’s five grand in it for you.”
“You think I need five grand? I’m going to have more money than you could believe!”
“Yeah, but you don’t have it yet, and you’ve got rent and car payments to make, right? Five grand should tide you over until it can come through.”
She fumed for a moment. “All right, but this is the last time, you hear me?”
“I hear you. I’ll give you your money on Monday.”
“Right.” She hung up.
BARBARA NOTED THE police car as she pulled out of Jimmy Long’s driveway, and she made it easy for them, driving a steady thirty miles an hour and stopping for all the stop signs. She had never understood why there were all these four-way stop signs in Beverly Hills. Hadn’t these people ever heard of right-of-way streets?
She drove down Rodeo Drive and gave her rental car to the attendant behind the Ralph Lauren store. She had not been inside the shop for more than a minute before she spotted a woman browsing whose cheap pants suit made her look out of place in the elegant store. Well, she could just eat her heart out, Barbara thought.
She tried on half a dozen things and chose a slinky, black dress and a couple of cashmere sweaters. She made sure the policewoman saw her black American Express card as she paid for them.
She walked out the front of the store and made her way down Rodeo, window-shopping, occasionally going inside and buying a dress or a pair of shoes. She had lunch alone in the garden at Spago, then worked her way back to the Ralph Lauren shop and retrieved her car. She was back at Jimmy’s by midafternoon, and so was the police car. Let them report that!
JACK CATO REPEATED his actions of the weekend before, but this time he brought along a set of lock picks. What he wanted from the armory was locked in a large room that he had never been able to get a key to.
He let himself into the building and walked into a windowless hallway, closing the door behind him so that he could switch on the lights. He knelt before the double steel doors and took a close look at the lock. It was the sort of thing you’d see on the front door of a house, really, nothing special. He put on his reading glasses and unzipped the little case holding his lock picks. He selected two and began probing the lock, feeling it out.
It turned out to be a pain in the ass before he could get it open, but at least he knew the lock now, and it would be easier to deal with later. He swung open the heavy door and switched on the lights inside. The fluorescent fixtures flickered on, and he was staring at enough weapons to equip the SWAT teams of a city: assault rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, even half a dozen mortars. He’d love to have sacked the whole room, but he wanted only one thing: an ordinary-looking aluminum briefcase, tucked away on a high shelf. He pulled up a stepladder and got it down.
It had two combination locks securing it, but it turned out that the combinations were just three zeros. He opened it and checked out the contents: a beautifully crafted, disassembled sniper’s rifle that had been made by an old man named Al, a gunsmith who had a shop on Melrose, for a spy movie that had been made on the lot. Jack doubted if it had had more than half a dozen rounds put through it.
He closed the case and helped himself to a pocketful of .223 ammunition from a drawer. He knew the armorer didn’t log ammo use, so he was safe. He relocked the steel door, let himself out of the building and returned to the stables.
He had already checked the shooting schedules for work under way. Nobody would need the sniper’s rifle anytime soon, so he was good through the weekend.
He called a phone number and waited.
“Compton Flying Club,” a woman’s voice said.
“Hey, Sheila, it’s Jack Cato.”
“Hi, Jack. What can I do for you?”
“Is the Bonanza available this weekend?”
“Let me check.”
He could hear her turning the pages of her desk calendar.
“All weekend,” she said.
“Great, I’ll take it Friday evening and have it back by Monday morning. I’m going up to San Francisco this weekend. Can you have it fueled and left on the line after about five on Friday? Leave the key under the nosewheel chock.”
“Sure thing. Have a good flight.”
Cato hung up. Everything was all set now.
38
EAGLE GOT A call from the LAPD a couple of days after his request to the chief.
“Mr. Eagle, this is Detective Barnes; the chief asked me to call you.”
“Yes, Detective.”
“We’ve had a team on Barbara Eagle for two days now, and all we’re seeing is shopping trips in the daytime and restaurants in the evening. Mr. Long seems to work at home as much as he does at the studio. I don’t know how much longer the chief will let us keep this up.”
“Has she met anybody on her shopping trips or in the restaurants?”
“Hasn’t spoken a word to anybody but store clerks and waiters and the diners, but we don’t have the phone tapped, so who knows? Oh, I don’t know if this is important, but she stopped in the Beverly Hills Post Office and mailed a package.”
“What sort of package?”
“Just a manila envelope.”
“She mailed a payoff to the hit man. Were you able to see an address?”
“No, sir, we couldn’t get close enough.”
“Okay, thanks very much, and thank the chief for me. Be sure and tell him about the envelope.” Eagle hung up. The weekend was coming, and he had an idea the hit man was coming, too.
He called Susannah, who was at her house, dealing with a washing-machine repairman. “Hello, there.”
“Hi, what’s happening?”
“Barbara is still in L.A., and the cops are keeping an eye on her.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Don’t let it be. She was seen at the post office, mailing a package. That has to be the payment for killing Joe Wilen. I have a feeling we’re going to hear from her hit man this weekend, and I’d like you to stay at your house.”
