by Eve Goldberg
“Leon Vanek.”
“That supposed to mean something to me?”
“It’s a long story.”
He nodded. “Okay, at the station.”
Terekov swept his flashlight beam across the blacktop, moving it methodically, side to side, like a windshield wiper. Eventually the beam found metal. It was a carbon-steel Smith and Wesson .357.
He left the gun on the ground, called over a uniformed cop to bag it. I followed Terekov back to my car where he pointed his flashlight beam at Dargin’s notebook which lay near the rear tire.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Another long story.”
He picked up the notebook and flipped through the pages. They were all blank. He ran his finger down the inside center binding which was ragged from where I had torn out the pages.
“Where’s the rest?” he asked.
I pointed to the diminished pile of ashes on the ground. Most of the cinders had already scattered in the ocean breeze.
“Another long story, huh,” he said.
I didn’t bother to answer. Suddenly, all I wanted was to lie down. I wasn’t sleepy. Just plain worn out.
Detective Terekov, however, wasn’t tired at all. He poked his flashlight through the open window of my Falcon, searching the car. The beam eventually landed on the rectangular object on the floor by the brake pedal. He reached in and plucked it out.
“What the hell is this?”
“A tape recorder,” I said.
Terekov examined the recorder, turning it over in his hand. “This thing?”
“It’s a new kind. German-made.”
“Fucking clever krauts. That’s why they were this close to getting the bomb. How does it work?”
I showed him. I rewound to the beginning and pressed PLAY. Nice spot you got here. Dargin’s sneering voice. I’ll bet it really sparkles in the sunlight.
We listened for a few minutes, then I pressed STOP.
“Well, fuck me,” Terekov muttered. “You recorded the whole thing?”
I nodded. The detective squinted, mulling things over. He snatched up the recorder, turned abruptly, and walked briskly towards the Savoy. I took off after him.
“Detective, wait. The recorder belongs to a friend of mine. It’s expensive. I’ve got to give it back.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? This is police gold.”
When we reached the police cars, the patrol cop was just clicking off the radio.
“Circus is on their way,” he said to Terekov.
Terekov nodded and turned to me. “Someone will take you down to the Venice station and get your statement. I’ll be staying here for a bit.”
CHAPTER 47
The Venice police station was a two-story Art Deco building with squat palms at each corner and enormous succulents running across the front. I followed a shirt-sleeved detective with a military style crew-cut down a dim hallway. I followed him past division offices with windows of translucent etched glass, a small kitchen, a row of iron-barred jail cells. Each cell had a lidless toilet, a cot with a grey wool blanket, and grey cinder block walls. The cells were unoccupied except the last one where a bearded man slept curled up on the cot.
I spent what was left of the night in a small office answering questions, waiting, answering more questions. With the police getting their hands on Tom’s tape recorder, I knew there wasn’t much I could do to keep Steve Sutton’s name out of the whole mess.
At about 5:00 AM Detective Terekov showed up. He had me go through the whole thing one more time. As we began, a man wearing a black fedora came in. I recognized him right off as the man Victor Dargin had met with at McArthur Park, the man I tailed to the downtown federal building.
“Mind if I sit in?” the man said to Terekov.
“Whatever you want.”
Fedora man nodded to me. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said. “Go ahead, I’m just listening.” He looked straight at me and didn’t blink.
When we finished the interview, the FBI agent left the room. He hadn’t said another word the entire time.
“So what’s with the FBI?” I asked Terekov.
Terekov answered by tossing my car keys onto the table. “It’s parked out back. I’ll walk you out.”
I followed him down another dim hallway and out the back door.
The early morning sky was streaked peach and pink. We stopped at my car which was parked by a trash dumpster. Terekov opened his briefcase and handed me Tom’s tape recorder.
“Thanks,” I said.
Then he held up the audio cassette itself. The plastic case was split open. The brown magnetic tape was a tangled up like a heap of leftover spaghetti.
Terekov dropped the cassette on the ground. He crushed it under his shoe like you would a cigarette, the case cracking into bits, the tape shredding.
“Some things are better left alone,” he said.
He lobbed the mangled mess into the dumpster.
“Why?” I asked because I was tired and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“That tape was trouble, Ryan. This way your client’s interests will remain private, and so will everybody else’s.”
The back door to the station opened and a Negro janitor in overalls came out. He was pushing a metal cart piled with trash bags. He wheeled the cart up to the dumpster, tossed the bags into it, one at a time, and went back inside the station.
“The official story will go something like this,” Terekov said. “Leon Vanek, transient immigrant, killed Victor Dargin, movie executive. Motivation remains unclear. Money, possible extortion. Shooter committed suicide on the scene. All of Hollywood mourns the loss of Victor Dargin.”
“Neatly tied-up,” I said.
“Neat enough.”
“Won’t Dargin’s family want to know more?”
“You’d be surprised what people don’t want to know.”
“And the newspapers, won’t they dig deeper?”
“Not if certain interests don’t want them too.”
“Meaning the feds.”
Terekov lit a cigarette and took a long drag. “Let it go, Ryan. You did your job.”
“What it looks like to me,” I said, “is that Dargin was some kind of middleman. Maybe the FBI fed him information that he passed on to the studios. Maybe the FBI doesn’t want anybody to know where they meddle. Am I in the ballpark?”
Terekov took another drag on his cigarette.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
Then he flicked me a crisp salute off his brow and went back into the station.
CHAPTER 48
When I got home, I took the phone off the hook, lay down on top of the bed, and fell asleep in my jeans and T-shirt.
Next thing I knew, my eyes snapped open. Sun was pouring into the room. Shit. I had forgotten to call Reno and tell him he could quit his watch over Lou. I looked at the clock: Almost noon. I could hear the faint strains of Sonny Rollins blowing “Bluesong” coming up from Tom and Tina’s apartment. I called the VA and got Reno on the line.
“I can’t leave now,” Reno said. “We’re playing poker and Lou’s taking me to the cleaners. I gotta at least break even.”
“Okay, but you’re off the clock.”
“No prob. Hey, hang on, man. Lou wants to talk to you.”
“Hi, kid,” Lou said in a raspy voice that bordered on a whisper. “What’s going on? Your buddy here is saying zip.”
“I’ll tell you when I get over there. Couple of hours, tops.”
“Take your time. I might be a millionaire by the time you get here.” Lou’s last few words disintegrated into a wheeze.
Before going out, I found Julie’s number and dialed long distance.
“Hi, Ryan.” Her voice was bright and she sounded happy to hear from me. Step number one accomplished.
“I was wondering when you were going to call,” she said.
“Well, I got your uncle’s case wrapped up.”
“Wow. Tel
l me everything! Have you told Niles yet?”
“No, but I’ll call him today.”
“So, who killed Uncle Oscar?”
I hesitated. A dog barked somewhere up Speedway. A screen door slammed shut.
“Ryan?” Julie said. “Are you there?”
“Yeah. Listen, I was thinking of making a trip. Thinking about coming up to Seattle. Maybe I could tell you about it in person.”
“Hmmm . . . so you want to come all the way up here to tell me stuff we could talk about on the phone?” she teased.
“Plus a few other reasons,” I said, grinning to myself.
“I hate suspense,” Julie said, “but maybe it’ll be worth it.”
We made a plan. I didn’t mention to Julie that I’d never been out of California, never even been on an airplane. But I could tell her all about all that later.
On the drive over to Steve Sutton’s house, I had time to think. Terekov, by his silence last night, just about admitted that the FBI was in up to its neck in HUAC and the blacklist. And the LAPD’s actions — destroying the audio tape I made — told me it was a serious hush job. On the tape, Dargin straight up acknowledged that he (and that meant the FBI) was still keeping tabs on people . . . .just in case. What did that mean: “just in case”? It was a lot to make sense of, a lot I had never thought about before, a lot that was now lodged in my brain and wasn’t going away.
Any way you cut it, though, I had solved the case. Dargin, Chip Jordan, Panozzo and the rest — the pieces of the puzzle had slotted into place. Southland Investigations was going to survive, even with Lou down for the count. And, oh yeah, it looked like I might get a new girlfriend out of the whole mess. Not too shabby.
By the time I got to West Hollywood, the sidewalk was baking and sweat dripped down my back. In the daylight, the waxy potted plants and climbing vines on his porch looked harmless. I rang the bell. Sutton opened the door. His jet black hair was slicked back, his face shaved and tanned, his eyes dark and apprehensive.
“Is this good news or bad?” he said.
“Both.”
I followed him inside, through the tiled foyer, into a living room with a large arched window that looked out onto a jungle of exotic plants.
“I found the photos,” I said. “And the negatives. I destroyed them all. Burned them.”
Sutton looked surprised. He took a deep breath and blew out the air.
“This is great,” he said. “I guess I underestimated you.”
“Just doing my job.”
“So, where’d Panozzo have them stashed?”
“Actually, I found them at Victor Dargin’s place, but —”
“Dargin!” he exclaimed. “That son-of-a-bitch. I never liked him, should never have trusted him. So Panozzo and Dargin were in this together. And that woman . . . what was she, the go-between?”
“No, no, nothing like that. She wasn’t involved at all.”
We sat in the living room and I told my client what I knew or surmised about Dargin, the blacklist, and Chip Jordan, and about Panozzo, Cora Flynn and their money problems. He nodded slowly as I talked, taking it in. He was subdued. No tennis-ball-tossing nerves today.
“There’s one thing, though,” Sutton said when I had finished. “The empty safe. I read in the paper that the police are calling Panozzo’s death a robbery-homicide. That means if there were photos in the safe, some thief may have them, and they could show up again one day.”
“There was no thief.”
Sutton looked at me quizzically. “Something tells me this is the bad news part.”
“It was Leon,” I said.
“Impossible.” But he said it without conviction. His body sagged.
“Leon never went to Yugoslavia,” I explained. “I think he turned around in New York. Anyway, he’s been following me, and Victor Dargin, and doing who knows what else. I don’t think he trusted me to do the job.”
“Where is he now?”
I told him the rest.
“Leon,” Sutton muttered, and shook his head.
I gazed out the arched window where a hummingbird hovered around a bottle brush tree — wings beating, long needle-like beak searching inside the bristly red flower.
“Loyal Leon,” Sutton said quietly. “And I repaid that loyalty by trying to get rid of him. Career first and all that.”
“Anyone in your position might have done the same.”
“Maybe. But I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Thinking about the world and how it is. And I’ve decided to can the whole political, running-for-office thing. It’s just not realistic. I was foolish to believe I could ever be in politics. Me. A blackmail target waiting to happen. Maybe someday a person like me . . . people who are different . . . won’t have to hide . . . or pretend to be something we’re not. Maybe someday things will change. Maybe in the future things will be different.”
I nodded, thinking: Sounds far-fetched. But then again, if Willie Mays can sign for a hundred grand, if a Catholic can be President, why not?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to express my gratitude to everyone who helped this book come to fruition.
First, thank you to those who read the manuscript at various stages, and gave invaluable feedback: Linda Evans, Nan Van Gelder, Mickey Ellinger, and Alex Street. And, thank you to Cindy Bishop who helped me get “unstuck” through her work with synchronicity.
Thank you also to those who patiently answered my questions — about police procedure, private investigations, surfboard production, and burglary methods: Lucia Wade, John Kilass, Ed Mead, Bill Harris, and Johnny Rice.
Thank you to all the members of my writing group for your encouragement and astute critiques: Jo-Anne Rosen, Nancy Bourne, Wray Cotterill, Richard Gustafson, Marko Fong, Amanda Yskamp, Judith Day, and Sarah Amador-Rusnak.
And finally, thank you to my supportive, insightful agent, David Haviland, who always believed in this book.
