by Jodi Compton
Except I kept thinking about one thing: I sincerely hoped that all the shit that was gonna go down in the Lopezes’ neighborhood had gone down already, because if any of the guys from the tunnel came around doing cleanup work, and they talked to the neighbor lady, I’d laid it right out there: Hailey Cain, looking for Nidia Hernandez. Without that, the would-be assassins would have no reason to think I was still alive.
Sometimes I didn’t really think things through.
At home, I took the Finlandia out of my little refrigerator, cracked the seal, and drank. Then I called Serena and told her what I’d learned.
“I’m pretty sure Mrs. Lopez is dead,” I said. I was standing near the window, looking down at the street. “If she realized she was in danger and left town, she wouldn’t have left her kids in danger. I think the guys from the tunnel picked her up, found out what she knew, and killed her so she couldn’t warn anyone.”
“God,” Serena said. “This is getting serious, Hailey.” Like me nearly dying in Mexico and then later jumping her with a boning knife was all light sparring.
“What do you think she knew?”
“Well, where Nidia and I were going, for one thing,” I said. “I’d wondered how, if they were just tailing Nidia and me, they knew to get ahead of us and set up that trap in the tunnel. This answers that. Herlinda Lopez knew about the village.” I played with the drawstring of the blinds. “If Nidia told her something else, like what all of this is about, I still don’t know what that was. That’s the same guessing game we’ve been playing for days.”
I tipped my head back and drank again, the vodka cool and antiseptic on my tongue.
“You still there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking, this doesn’t make me feel good about cousin Lara being unaccounted for. Maybe she really did fight with her mother, but she knows the stuff Mrs. Lopez knew, maybe more, and recent events are proving that’s not a safe position to be in.”
Serena said, “Be careful, okay?”
“I don’t know how to do that and still find anything out,” I told her. “Being careful would be forgetting all about this. Either I’m going to do this or I’m not. In fact…”
“In fact, what?”
I drank again, then leaned on the window frame and looked down at the street. Cars shuttled back and forth, red brake lights flaring and fading. I said, “Maybe it’s best they know I’m out there looking for her.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I have no idea who these guys are,” I said. “I could look for them the rest of my life and not find them, but if they come looking for me, that’ll streamline things, if nothing else.”
“Don’t streamline yourself into an unmarked grave, prima.”
twenty-one
What little there was to know about Herlinda Lopez’s disappearance, I learned from the San Francisco Chronicle.
She was apparently taken from her own garage, in her own car. The garage had a back door that opened directly onto the Lopezes’ small yard, and then another into the house. The investigating officers found that the door leading into the yard had been pried open, its cheap lock broken. A short time after that, Herlinda’s old crimson Toyota was found in a parking lot in a quiet, light-industrial area. The implication was that whoever had taken her had broken into the garage in the small hours of the morning via the yard door and simply waited for her to come through the house door to her car, which she’d done at five that morning, on her way to her bakery job. She had raised no cry when confronted, probably intimidated by a gun and aware that her children were still sleeping in the house. She apparently let her attackers drive her away in her car, then they transferred her to a second car in the parking lot, where the trail stopped.
There had been an unfortunately long lead time on the case, because her coworkers at the bakery had been patient with her failure to show up, assuming that responsible Herlinda must have had a good reason to be tardy. They didn’t call her home until ten, long after her kids had left for school through the house’s front door, never going into the garage or seeing the broken door there. No one knew she was missing until her daughter played the answering machine message at four that afternoon.
The accounts of Herlinda’s disappearance shed new light on the men who’d taken Nidia. My theory had been that they had waited to take Nidia in Mexico because it was too risky to try to kidnap someone from a dense urban area with lots of potential witnesses. That was true enough; the neighbor lady who caught me looking through the garage windows was proof of that. But with Herlinda, these guys had proven themselves capable of an urban kidnapping. That suggested that they hadn’t known where Nidia was until just before I came to get her. If they’d had time, they would have done the same job on Nidia that they’d done later on Herlinda.
So they’d tracked Nidia down, but before they could move, I’d come and gotten her. That had forced their hand. Almost on the fly, they’d put together their plan to kidnap Herlinda and find out where Nidia and I were going.
That worried me more than anything else. These guys could think on their feet. The way they’d extracted Herlinda from her house had been almost surgical, and that had been their Night at the Improv.
This was where I should have been saying, Imagine what they could do with a little lead time, but I didn’t have to imagine. I’d seen it, in the tunnel.
I didn’t learn anything else useful that day.
Serena called me and told me that no one had a line on Nidia’s cousin Lara Cortez, and that Nidia’s family was somewhere in California’s vast agricultural-worker community. That could have meant picking strawberries near Santa Maria or garlic in Gilroy. Though I would have liked to talk to them, when I thought about what had happened to Herlinda Lopez, I was glad Nidia’s family weren’t anywhere they could easily be found.
twenty-two
West Point prides itself on being a four-year university with a broad, well-rounded curriculum. But it’s also very much an Army post, and from your first day there, you’re a soldier.
That was why, when I surfaced from BART and walked up onto the campus of UC Berkeley the next day, I stopped for a moment to look around at the student body all around me. I’d gone to college in a sea of cadet gray, and after all this time, the sight of a civilian student body gave me culture shock. Some wore jeans and Cal-logo T-shirts or caps, like the model students in a course catalog, but many more wore clothing as diverse as costumes: motorcycle boots, skater motley, Buddy Holly glasses, Afros, Birkenstocks, minidresses. Some wore tank tops and cutoffs that showed amazing amounts of skin; others were swathed almost head to foot in flowing ethnic prints. They drank lattes on the steps of Dwinelle Hall and Web-surfed on their phones. I’d nearly forgotten that students lived this way.
I wondered what they would do if they knew the student with the blond ponytail and the birthmark on her face had a loaded SIG Sauer in her backpack.
I was here to look for an obituary, that of the mathematician whom Nidia had cared for until his death. I didn’t have a name, except Adriano, which Nidia might have Spanicized from Adrian. That would have made searching the Chronicle’s obits difficult. And if this guy hadn’t done anything of real note, his death might not have made the Chronicle at all. I was fairly certain, though, that the university paper would have covered it.
So that was how I ended up outside the offices of the mathematics department, looking at a glass case on the wall where news and events were posted. There it was, an obituary for Adrian Skouras. Both the Daily Californian and the Chronicle story were posted. When I saw the accompanying photo, I had a dawning sense of understanding.
All along, I’d made a sloppy assumption: that a professor dying of cancer would have been a white-haired old man. But cancer is indiscriminate. Adrian Skouras had died at thirty-three. The photo both papers used had probably been taken years before that. The young man the camera had captured had almost sensual features-he was obviously olive-complected, though the
photo was black-and-white, and he had dark curly hair and deep-set eyes. The effect, though, was offset by the thin sharpness of his face and his wire-rim eyeglasses, and like many people unused to attention, his smile for the camera was almost a wince.
I read both obituaries. They didn’t disagree on any points. Adrian Skouras had been born and raised in San Francisco and had been fascinated with math and science at a young age. He’d graduated high school at fifteen and gone back east to study at Princeton. In his second year, he’d become a star in the world of mathematics by discovering a rare subspecies of prime number, now called a “Skouras prime,” the definition of which went over my head. After that, he’d gone overseas to Oxford for graduate work, then come home to settle at Berkeley, working among some of the leading lights in the field.
He had never married and left no children behind. Associates said that Skouras had been “married to his work, in the best possible way,” in the words of one. “When he was working on something that fascinated him, which was almost all the time, he’d forget to eat, much less to get out and have a social life. But if you knew him, you wouldn’t have any doubt that he was completely fulfilled.”
The best work of his career was undoubtedly ahead of him, they said, if only cancer had not stolen a fine mind from the world.
His father, Anton Skouras, was a San Francisco businessman and philanthropist; one brother, Milos, had preceded Adrian in death five years earlier. In lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the American Cancer Society.
I looked at his photo again. Adrian Skouras appeared shy, gentle, unsettled by the photographer’s attention, and impatient to step back into academic anonymity. This was no cliché-the graybeard professor. This was a real person. Looking at him, I thought I knew what happened between this man and Nidia Hernandez.
According to his colleagues, Adrian had been totally satisfied as a bachelor, living his life on the higher plane of numbers and ideas. Of course, that was what anyone would want to think about a newly dead colleague. Between the lines, Adrian had likely been one of those geniuses who would have been able to converse easily with Newton and Sagan-and hard-pressed to make small talk with real people at a cocktail party or a university mixer. Adrian had probably spent his weekend nights in the company of ideas, not women. Maybe, as his colleagues wanted to think, he had been satisfied with that. And then he got cancer, and his whole life became about the survival rate.
But Adrian had had just a little time, time he’d spent with a very lovely nineteen-year-old living in his house, a girl who had the same otherworldliness about her. He’d denied himself simple human warmth and pleasure for too long; she was recovering from a terrible loss. Put two people like that in close proximity alone for too long, and anyone could tell you the result.
What if that little potbelly she’d had, the one I’d assumed was puppy fat, wasn’t? What if it had been a baby, and Nidia had been going to Mexico to have her child away from the eyes of anyone who knew her?
It was a theory that made sense until the entrance of the seven armed men. That changed things. It said that Nidia hadn’t run to Mexico to escape gossip and character assassination. She’d foreseen the approach of the men in the tunnel, whoever they were. And she’d warned her family, who’d effectively disappeared into the migrant worker community, for once using poverty and anonymity to their benefit. Nidia could have gone with them, except that if these guys were determined to find her, that wouldn’t have been enough. A beautiful green-eyed redhead, and, if my theory was correct, increasingly pregnant? Anywhere she went, people would have remembered her.
So Nidia had 911’d cousin Lara, and Lara had called Serena, playing the card of loyal dead soldier Teaser. And Serena had called me, and that was how the only person without a stake in the matter nearly bled out in the mountains of Mexico.
I walked out into the midday sunlight. It wasn’t going to help me to talk to people who’d known Adrian in the math department. Whatever there had been in Adrian’s life that had involved him with men like the guys in the tunnel, his colleagues weren’t going to know about it. I needed the story behind the obituary, the whispers that had never made it to print.
I sat down on the steps like a student, minus the latte. I dug my cell from my backpack and made a phone call.
“AP, Foreman.”
“Jack? It’s Hailey.”
“Hailey?” he said, mildly surprised. “I thought I’d said something to piss you off. I called you and you never returned my message.”
“My phone was stolen,” I said.
“Really? That’s too bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I need a favor and I don’t have a lot to exchange for it. Maybe I could buy you a lunch or something.”
“Depends what the favor is,” he said.
“For you, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “I need some background information, the kind of things reporters talk about but can’t or don’t print.”
“About what?”
“A man named Adrian Skouras. He was a mathematician at UC Berkeley and died of cancer three months ago. His obit was glowing, but I need to know if there were things about him that were, I don’t know, unsavory.”
“Mmmm,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Right off, can I ask you if this guy grew up locally?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Do you remember if he’s related to a guy named Anton Skouras?”
“That was his father. You’ve heard of him?”
“Sure, he’s probably the biggest unindicted racketeer in San Francisco.”
“He is?”
“Unofficially, yeah. Officially, he’s a ‘prominent businessman.’ I haven’t had the opportunity to write about him that often. Someone who writes for the business pages over at the Chron would know his story better than me, printable news and unprintable rumors both.”
“Could you ask someone over there?”
“It depends: Where are we going to lunch?”
“Anywhere,” I said, guessing that his innate decency wouldn’t let him hold me up for anyplace expensive.
“You know where Lefty O’Doul’s is?” he said.
“I know it,” I told him. Dim and comfortable, with old-style cafeteria-line food.
Before we hung up, Jack said, “Why are you interested in Skouras, anyway?”
I said, “I think he stole my cell phone.”
twenty-three
When I saw Jack Foreman waiting on the sidewalk outside Lefty’s, he was smoking, of course. I noticed that he’d let his hair grow since I’d seen him last. He’d probably just been too busy to bother getting it cut. He wasn’t the type to change styles out of vanity, or to care that the new length made his gray more noticeable.
When he saw me, he tossed the cigarette down on the sidewalk and stepped on it, looking at me appraisingly. “You’ve lost weight,” he said. “Come inside, we need to get some calories into you.”
We went in and moved through the cafeteria line, then settled in at a booth. Lefty’s was never empty, but it wasn’t packed, either, and quiet enough for us to talk. We sat under the photographs of Tinker and Evers and Chance, and I looked at Jack and said, “So tell me about this Skouras guy.”
“Well,” Jack began, “he came from a big family in Greece. Before World War Two, they had money and landholdings, all that. But then came the German occupation, then the civil war, and it all went away. Tony Skouras talks about this in interviews, how he came here as a teenager with nothing, determined to rebuild. It’s his bootstraps story.
“What he doesn’t talk about,” Jack said, “is that his first business venture in his twenties was to buy a pair of X-rated movie houses. He built those into a chain, and added a line of adult DVD-rental stores. They were so profitable that he was able to sell by the age of thirty and buy a shipping line, which was, on the surface, a more respectable trade.”
“Why ‘on the surface’? That sounds a lot more respectable than pornography.”
&nb
sp; “Well, he’s using the shipping line and his import business to bring stolen art and antiquities into the country,” Jack said, “but that’s not the big deal. The bigger problem is he’s bringing in illegal immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He’s got contacts in the Balkan states, where a lot of people’s lives have been ripped up by the civil wars there, and they’ll do anything to get out. If it were just undocumented young men looking for work that Skouras was bringing in, that’d be one thing, but a big part of the trade is young women. Skouras supplies prostitution rings. Essentially, the guy’s a human trafficker, and he’s said to dip into the rings he supplies quite a bit, like a private dating pool.”
I nodded.
“None of that’s been proven. The feds have sniffed around him; the SEC has subpoenaed papers, but he’s got good accounting and good lawyering and nothing’s stuck. In the past few years he’s branched out further into legitimate enterprises. He owns a minority stake in a film studio in L.A., and he opened a seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero, Rosemary’s, named for his wife. As far as I’ve heard, there’s nothing dirty about those operations.”
I nodded.
“But then there’s this. About ten years ago, Skouras got interested in horse racing. He went in big, bought a costly colt from Dubai and had it brought here and stabled at Golden Gate Fields. Then it didn’t live up to its potential. After it finished out of the money in several races, its heart just exploded during a routine exercise gallop.”
“Drugged?”
“That was never proven,” Jack said. “Which probably wasn’t much of a consolation to the exercise groom who suffered a compound pelvic fracture in the fall.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. Let’s see, what other Skouras rumors can I dazzle you with? Oh yes,” he said. “There’s a very faintly whispered story that Tony had a daughter on the other side of the sheets, but that’s never been confirmed.”
