“Which one’s real?”
“The one that says the investment is a bust.” I go on to explain the stock scam and why everyone was scrambling for the geologist’s reports.
“So the broad wants to blackmail this Hamel character for her husband’s money so she can disappear with it.”
“Right. And her husband wants the report so he can get his money out before the other investors tie everything up in court.”
“So where’s the money?”
“I’m going to take you to it.”
Our meals arrive. We chew steak for a while. The place is buzzing around us, but we’re in a bubble of our own: the smell of our food, the clink of ice in Dave’s glass, the occasional glance as he looks up at me, the muted colors in the low light. What did Alan Hunter say—I’m bumbling through a minefield without a map of the terrain?
Dave puts down his knife and fork and says, “All right. Three homicides. Jason Hamel’s one of them, right?”
“Three homicides and two more attempted. Yeah, Hamel’s one.”
“Walk me through it.”
“Let me start with the first attempted. That would be on me, the night I tried to deliver the papers.” I tell him about the interrupted handoff at the Cheesecake Factory and how I got shot at while riding my bike home. I leave out the part about getting high at Jimmy’s and, of course, the matter of the bullet in my brain.
“So this guy you met at the restaurant waits for you and shoots at you. What happened?”
I hate lying, but so often it just seems necessary. I tell him, “I fell off my bike. A guy got out of the car and grabbed the briefcase. A neighbor opened his door and yelled and the Mustang took off.”
Dave stares at me, inviting more, but I keep my mouth shut. A hint of a grin starts and stops on his face and he shakes his head and starts eating again. With a fork full of potato and sour cream at his mouth he says, “Hamel.”
“Not yet. I Googled the name of the geologist on the report. It turns out he and his brother both died in the last six weeks. I interviewed his widow and she thought Hamel did it. I did too, at the time. Then I went back to my friend’s house and found him with a bullet in his chest.”
“That would be Jimmy Ortiz.”
“Yeah.”
“He was your drug connection.”
I was hoping to keep Jimmy on the sidelines, but it looks like Dave’s ahead of me here.
“He’s a friend of mine.”
“Okay, but why did you go there and why would somebody shoot him?” Dave looks at me with that cop look, the one that says people have been bullshitting me all my cop life, and now you’re spoon-feeding me some more.
“After the restaurant, I went to Jimmy’s and stashed the papers in his bathroom. I think he got shot and they tossed his place looking for them.”
“So that’s when you got picked up and went to County.”
“Yeah. Gotta love it there.”
“Are we getting close to Hamel?”
“Coming right up. I get out of jail . . .”
Dave interrupts: “A free pass, no bail, charges dropped.”
“Alan Hunter. He’s part of this story.”
Dave whistles. Cops don’t like Alan Hunter; he’s destroyed too many cases for them on technicalities.
“Tanya picks me up. I take her car and go to my house, but it’s not there anymore. And Mindy’s gone. My neighbor said you had stopped by.”
“Semper Fi.”
“That’s him.”
“So I follow the money and go to Jason Hamel’s house. I’m there five minutes when the kid that took the briefcase shows up. I draw on him and ask where Mindy is. That’s when the window shatters and a bullet hits Hamel.”
“Who shot the bullet?”
“The kid’s got a sidekick. Big dumb brute named Luke. I wing the kid in the shoulder and he bails. Now I get a story from Hamel while he bleeds out.”
“You didn’t call 911?”
“It wasn’t happening, and he didn’t want me to.”
“So what’s his story?”
“The kid is his adopted son, a pain-in-the-ass speed-freak who was directed to kidnap my daughter but decided to take her to Mexico because he was a psycho and thought he was going to marry her.”
“Directed by whom?” I seem to have his interest now.
“I’m getting there. Hamel knows the kid killed the geologists, but he’s only now coming around to admitting it. Anyway, he thinks the negative report on the mine investment is all wrong. He’s convinced there’s a huge deposit there, so he tries to quash the report so he can buy some time.”
“Is that it?”
I shrug. “He died. The kid had a twenty-minute jump on me, but I knew where he was going. I followed him to the mine in Mexico and got Mindy back.” There’s not much point in telling him about Herbie and Melinda and their smuggling plan, or the Mexican gangbangers and their red devil tattoos, but Dave’s going to make me squirm over Ratboy and Luke.
“You don’t want to tell me how that went, do you?”
“Maybe another time?” The waiter is clearing our plates. Dave orders another drink and turns his attention back to me.
“Your story’s an interesting one, but it isn’t worth shit if it doesn’t deliver me a perp. You promised I could close cases. So far, you owe me a dinner.”
I don’t have enough to pay for dinner, but I still have some story left. I tell him about Alan Hunter aiming me at the third party in this investment circus, Tanya’s husband.
“Alan Hunter is the prime mover behind every piece of the puzzle, except for the kid being a wild card. I’m betting that by the end of the evening you’ll be able to put the homicides and the kidnapping on Hunter. Fraud, too, if you can put it all together.”
Dave looks at me suspiciously. His drink arrives and he treats it like a fat lady treats dessert. He signals the waiter for another and says to me, “What do you mean, by the end of this evening?”
“I still have to go somewhere, but I’ll call you in the next hour or two and give you an address to meet me at. Do you have a pocket recorder?”
“Yeah, of course I do.”
“Bring it.”
“I’m never gonna find the kid and his partner, am I?”
“You might if you find a certain cave in the mountains near Ensenada.”
Dave shakes his head and pulls out his wallet. The waiter brings his third drink and the bill. Dave slaps a credit card on the table and says to me, “So that’s it?”
I say, “That’s it for now.” I don’t like the look on his face.
He produces a manila envelope from the seat bench next to him and passes it to me. I undo the clasp and remove a glossy black-and-white photo. It’s disturbing to look at, but fascinating, the blood caked in my hair, my eyes open, my teeth slightly showing.
Dave says, “That’s a picture of a John Doe at the morgue. He disappeared in the middle of the night last Tuesday. Wednesday morning, actually.”
I study the hole in my temple, touch the picture with my finger; I remember when my vision was black and white, and finally dull shades of gray.
“Charlie?”
I look up at Dave. His expression is almost sympathetic, but then it could be the Black Label. I’m at a loss for words.
“Maybe you had a twin brother you never told me about?”
I say, “Nope,” and slide the picture back in the envelope. “Weird, huh?”
34
I’m sitting in the Saturn, paralyzed. My hands are shaking and there’s a muscle twitching where the bullet hole in my chest used to be, while a part of me watches calmly but can’t intervene.
Too much has happened too fast and I haven’t had time to digest the indigestible, to process the impossible and unacceptable fact of my experience.
I reach in my pocket and pull out my battered and nearly empty wallet. Daniel’s card is barely readable. I dial the number.
After two rings a woman’s recorded voice says, “Please en
joy the music while we locate the party you’re calling,” and I hear the Beatles singing, “Baby you’re a rich man, baby you’re a rich man . . .”
“Hello? Charlie, how dey be hangin’?”
“Cut the shtick, Daniel, I’m in trouble here.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I almost killed a man in a rage a few hours ago, I nearly broke down leaving my daughter, and now I’m frozen. I’m overwhelmed and I can’t move.” I watch Dave leave the restaurant and walk unsteadily to his car.
“It sounds to me as if you had a glitch in your repair job.” He talks like he’s describing a computer hardware problem.
“What kind of glitch?” I think back to my session in front of the mirror in the mine bunker, and the voice feeding me weird technical instructions.
“It has to do with the chemistry regulating emotions. Glutamate uptake transporters, that kind of thing. Once a strong feeling takes hold, it takes over and you don’t have the mechanism to modulate it.”
“What can I do about it?”
“Nothing right now. You’ll need my help and some time in a safe environment.”
“So why do you do this anyway? Follow me around and help me?”
“It’s an obligation. I think it helps keep me alive. It’ll be like that for you, too.”
“Terrific. Now what?”
“Follow your plan. Depend on no one.”
“That’s it?”
“One thing. If you are gravely threatened, leave the body before it gets damaged.”
Dave is fumbling with his keys. I don’t have a good feeling about this.
¤ ¤ ¤
Tanya answers her door in a pale blue silk kimono. Her hair is loose, and without her boots she looks small and fragile. She has a drink in her hand and stands in my way as I try to walk in, her hand on my chest as she says, “Charlie, I’m so glad you called me.”
I phoned her from the restaurant parking lot after signing off with Daniel, telling her I had her phone, did she want it? You bet she did.
She has music playing again, something exotic and slinky, a woman’s smoky voice half singing, half talking in Portuguese. Scented candles barely illuminate the room and leave the edges in shadow. Tanya leads me by the hand as if we were on a dance floor, moving in time to the congas and acoustic bass coming from the speakers. She turns to me and lets the robe fall open. I place a hand on her breast and she moves in close. Her hair smells of fresh lemon with a hint of bergamot; I breathe it in and am transported. We dance in a cocoon of warmth and safety, there are no emergencies, there is no world outside of her scent and my hand on her breast and our slow movement and the voice singing Eute amo, estou enlouquecendo. Desire floods my veins, more powerful than any drug I’ve known. From somewhere inside myself I watch and want to say No, not now, not this, but I’m only an observer and don’t have a vote.
The sofa is covered with upholstery that’s soft as velvet. Her skin, the fabric, my skin, the mix of fragrances, her slick wetness, my hunger, all become a hypnotic blend of sensation. Her beauty fascinates me; her body clings to me ferociously; we enter a timeless delirium where even my silent observer gets lost in the dream.
The music finally stops. A muscle in my leg twitches to its own rhythm. We lie drenched in sweat, staring at the moving shadows on the ceiling. Tanya rolls toward me and props herself up on an elbow. She runs a fingernail lightly across my chest.
I excuse myself and take my clothes to the bathroom. Jason Hamel’s phone is in the left pocket of my jeans. I use it to text Dave: Hamel house, gate/path from street, quiet, now. I use Tanya’s phone and find Alan Hunter’s number, then text him: Hamel house, the money, front yard, now. I delete the record of the message and put on my clothes.
In the living room, I tell Tanya, “Get dressed. I have a surprise for you.” She walks, stunningly naked in the half-light, to her bedroom.
¤ ¤ ¤
We take her car. The Oceana is on Ocean Avenue, the street that runs the length of Palisades Park, a strip of green that runs along the top of the cliffs overlooking the Pacific a hundred feet below. The north end of Ocean Avenue feeds down into Santa Monica Canyon. We arrive at Hamel’s house in about three minutes. It’s midnight, and I hope Dave is closer than Hunter.
Sitting in the BMW, I pull the key from the ignition and ponder the scene. The house is dark and protected from view from the street. I turn toward Tanya.
“Didn’t you wonder why there were two reports with conflicting conclusions?” I still don’t know how much she knew, and when.
“Alan told me that Jason faked the positive report so that he could buy time with the investors.”
Something’s rotten in Denmark, but I can’t quite sniff it out.
Tanya follows me around the house to the place where I left the shovel. We walk to the front yard and I hand Herbie’s flashlight to Tanya and point at the roses.
“Watch this.”
Tanya watches in silence. I dig up the plants and set them aside. The flashlight illuminates the patch as it gets deeper.
Tanya says, “I’m sorry I got you into this.”
I have no answer for her. The dirt piles up and I step into the recess as if into a shallow grave.
“Is your daughter okay?”
“Yes, thank you. My house has seen better days.”
“I can help you with that if this is what I think it is . . .” She gestures with the beam of light.
“Money in the ground.”
“Jason didn’t trust the banks and he didn’t trust cash. I should have figured this out.”
“That’s what private investigators are for.” I look up and see that she’s smiling.
I ask, “What are you going to do with it?” I feel the shovel hit the plywood cover.
“Cash out and run. Want to go with me, Charlie Miner?”
I dig out the dirt at the edges of the plywood and pull it out of the ground.
“I know a place in Puerto Vallarta. We could live there and travel. Bali, Majorca, Buenos Aires, we could do them all.”
For some reason, the story of the frog and the scorpion occurs to me. I pull up the tarp and Tanya steps up to the edge of hole and plays the flashlight over the chests.
A burst of light floods my vision. I shield my eyes and look up to see Alan Hunter shining his own flashlight in my face. He’s ten feet away. In his other hand is a gun with a silencer, also pointing at me.
“Well done, Charlie. I knew you’d come through in the end.”
Alan Hunter is about five and a half feet tall, which puts him head to head with Tanya with her boots on. I squint down at him and wonder where Dave is.
“Actually, I had to connect the dots before I figured it out.”
Hunter shifts his light to Tanya, who has turned around and is standing at the end of the hole, in front of the pile of uprooted rose bushes. She, too, shields her eyes, and says, “Alan, darling . . .”
He interrupts her and says, “Yes, Tanya, darling. Unpredictable as ever, but well done!”
She starts to step toward him, but now the silencer swings toward her and Hunter says, “No, Tanya, not this time. You stay where you are.”
Tanya glances at me, confused, not in possession of all the information. For the first time since I met her, I see her unsure of herself, struggling for dominance at the wrong end of a gun. She says, “What are you going to do?” with a tremor in her voice.
“Tie up the loose ends and get back to the plan, Tanya. Everything was on track until you started meddling.” He turns back to me. “Well, Charlie, how about you start piling those nice little chests over here?” He gestures with the light toward a spot on the path to the driveway. I pull the first chest out of the ground and place it on the path.
“So you had my daughter kidnapped and my house burned down.”
“Yes to the first part. I needed the reports back. I already told you, the kid started the fire on his own. Then he went psycho on me and took off with your daugh
ter. He said he wanted to marry her. Anyway, you caused all your own problems when you substituted copies for the real documents.” He gestures, this time with the gun, at the hole. “Keep moving.”
“I was looking out for my client. Something wasn’t right; I just didn’t know what it was.” I pull another case out of the ground and look up at him. “And the dead geologists? What was that about?”
Hunter shakes his head and says, “You still don’t get the whole picture, do you?”
I shrug and say, “I’m completely in the dark.” I hope Dave’s got my back, and that he’s got a recorder on.
“Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder why there are two reports?”
“Yeah, it occurred to me. The positive one never made any sense. I thought maybe it was a forgery to show investors and keep them quiet.” I pull out another case and put it on the ground.
Hunter bares his teeth, a hyena imitating George Clooney. “The negative report that Jason and Mickey wanted so badly to suppress is a fabrication. As managing partner, I was the first to hear the results of the report, which I assume you still have. It states that there are over six million ounces of gold at Santa Clarita, high grade and easily mineable. After expenses, that’s probably a billion dollars. So I gave James a hundred thousand in cash and a promise of shares in the new company I was going to form if he would write an official report that the mine was a failure. He needed the money and took the deal.”
“But he kept the original.”
“We recovered it during his funeral.”
Tanya’s mouth is hanging open. She stamps her boot and says, “You miserable little prick. You were going to fuck all of us over!”
Hunter turns the gun back to Tanya. I watch her eyes go wide as Hunter says, “Lights out, baby,” and shoots her in the forehead. The sound of the bullet striking bone and splashing into soft wet tissue is louder than the report from the muzzle. Tanya falls into the bed of thorns and roses. I stand, frozen, next to the hole, and wonder where Dave is.
Hunter swings the gun back my way and shoots me in the stomach. I fall backward on top of the remaining chests of gold and land splayed over them, my head propped against the edge of the hole. Hunter stands over me and shows teeth again.
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