13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  “If you could have anything in the world for la nganga, what would it be?” Tino asked.

  Fausto pretended to think, but he had fantasized the answer to the question many times already. “The skull of Adolf Hitler,” he answered.

  Tino laughed. “I’ll get right on it,” he said in English. “I think, dear brother, that you may actually be a genius.”

  Fausto allowed an expression of pride to cross his face. “Well, I take pleasure from the craft,” he said. “And it terrifies the piss out of people.”

  For the upcoming return invasion of America, he would create more sicarios, insert more aspa blades into the eye sockets of more willing volunteers. When next they ventured North, Fausto promised his siblings, they would be accompanied by a platoon of zombi warriors, fearless, powerful and, since they were undead, difficult to kill.

  Chapter 17

  In the new year, Remington started in again at the police academy for the winter session but was barely holding her own. The letter of commendation from the director of the FBI was impressive enough, but in practice it backfired. Her achievement set her apart from her classmates, which was not a positive development in a training course designed to obliterate individualism in favor of team spirit. Her instructors now singled her out for special attention, much of it unwanted.

  Initially, during the previous session, the physical element of the curriculum had come easy for her. She led the four-mile runs on the beach near LAX, with the whole class singing out military-style Jody calls in cadence: “Everywhere we go/People want to know/Who we are/So we tell ’em/LAPD! LAPD!/Boo-yah!” But after her experience in the desert she felt exhausted all the time. She was convinced that she was in danger of washing out.

  Her mind, too, was often elsewhere while she was in class. At least in some sense, Remington was concentrating on police matters. Just not those on the academy’s syllabus. In the middle of a presentation on arrest and booking procedures, she might find herself thinking about the common pitfalls of deduction.

  Sherlock Holmes, Remington decided, didn’t fit with real-world criminal deduction. Performing a quick visual examination of the mud on a person’s boots, for example, to instantly conclude where he had journeyed from, was the kind of reasoning that led to error.

  She fantasized about an alternative universe where Holmes’s complex conclusions always turned out to be comically wrong. Colonel Mustard was not just back from India, as the spice fragrance on his clothes might suggest to Sherlock. No, he had only passed through a peddler’s bazaar on the way to Baker Street. We desperately want to believe in Holmes, because we desperately hunger for some kind of perceivable order in the universe.

  “The key failings in investigative thinking,” stated an article Remington read in Police Chief magazine, “can be grouped into three areas: cognitive biases, organizational traps and probability errors. Efforts to solve a crime by ‘working backward’ (from the suspect to the crime, rather than from the crime to the suspect) are susceptible to errors of coincidence.”

  In the evening, when she should have been studying subjects such as community relations, tactical communications and missing persons, Remington found herself mulling over the manifold aspects of the Loushane case. She had the same maddening sense that had dogged her for months—that there was a vital element hovering just out of reach.

  Julieta usually sat curled up in the little Los Feliz studio apartment, watching TV, attempting to absorb the nuances of American culture through repeated viewings of American Idol. The girl mimicked the English phrases of her favorite judge, Paula Abdul. Remington refrained from pointing out that the woman wasn’t exactly a model of articulate speech.

  This particular night Remington woke from a daze to find that she had doodled a single name over and over in her academy notebook, like a schoolgirl. Val Duran. Or, actually, not like a schoolgirl, unless poisonous hatred was an element of a schoolgirl crush. No, this was more like a detective thinking on the page. Because, for Remington, though her thoughts about the Loushane case might circle extravagantly, from Malibu, Granada Hills and Tijuana to Rosarito, they always began and ended with Val.

  The phone he had used to call her cell proved to be a disposable. Sergeant Chuck Tester solemnly pledged to help her track down Tino Zaldivar, aka Val Duran. But then nothing happened. Remington got the idea that Tester and her father had conferred, and concluded that any freelance investigation on her part would be hazardous to her delicate mental health. She was on her own. No one else worked at linking the murders of the Loushane children. The official world of law enforcement accepted the Atzlándia theory of the crime.

  Error enters in when proceeding from the suspect to the crime, rather than from the crime to the suspect. Okay, Remington asked herself, what was the crime?

  Crimes, plural. She wrote down the names of the three victims: Simon Loushane, Cynthia Loushane, Caroline Loushane. After a moment, she added another, Evelyn DeYoung Loushane, placing a question mark after it.

  Three murders. Not even that, three homicides. And that wasn’t right, either. Let’s just say three suspicious deaths. One by a fall from the fourth story of an Av. Revolución hotel. One by exsanguination after attack by a machete. One by heatstroke. Then the question mark—the mother, dead by misadventure.

  She tallied the locations of each crime. Tijuana, Wisconsin, the Tucumba Mountains. And again, the mother, at Wildermanse.

  She wrote down the word “Santería,” and put a question mark after it. Added “lobotomy” after that, but then crossed it out.

  All the victims were from the same family. She puzzled over the order of the deaths, which did not match the birth order. Simon, Cynthia, Caroline. Might the killer or killers have a reverse alphabetical scheme in mind? Brock next? She gave a snort of derision at her flights of speculation.

  From the crime to the suspect. What was the relation of the victims to the suspect, Tino Zaldivar? As Val Duran, he had been a friend to Simon and a lover to Caroline. But, as far as Remington knew, he had no connection to Cindy and Evelyn.

  She was veering off course again, she scolded herself. Forget the suspect. First, focus on the crimes.

  What did the victims have in common?

  Wealth.

  Wildermanse.

  Family.

  She circled that last one, and wrote after it, “Victor Loushane.” She stared at the name for a long time, then circled and underlined it. The idea of the family being punished for the sins of the father had already been floated, of course, with Subcomandante G having the Loushane children killed for political revenge.

  But Victor surely had many more enemies than the recently deceased Chicano radical. His political views were to the right of the Pope’s, and, given Pope Benedict’s strict medieval mindset, that was saying a lot. The Republican chairman’s shrill spouting off about Mexican rapists, feminist baby-killers and homosexual filth had earned him praise in his own party, but also the enmity of a whole lot of people. He would respond, of course, that if his children were being punished it was for the virtues of the father, not his sins, since Victor Loushane felt certain that his opinions were exquisitely correct.

  And, of course, there was the money, too. Remington didn’t know precisely where it came from, having only a vague idea of holdings in oil and real estate. Evelyn had brought most of the family’s wealth to the marriage. It now totaled somewhere in the vicinity of a billion dollars. An amount like that is always born in blood. How had Mario Puzo misquoted Balzac? Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. The money was another avenue to pursue, another path that could possibly lead from the crime to a suspect.

  Remington questioned her sanity, mucking around in a great man’s affairs. Who was she? A police-academy cadet, for pity’s sake. On the scale of social insignificance, you couldn’t go much lower than that. People in positions of power could flick her away like a gnat. She thought of George Sarin, the Loushane operative who had visited her in the hospital. The world was
full of sociopaths who worked diligently in the employ of other sociopaths. They probably had a secret sign by which they recognized each other, like Masons. They preyed on ordinary citizens like wolves on sheep.

  All right, Remington told herself. Victor Loushane. You have to start somewhere, so you might as well begin there.

  First things first. She decided to apply for another leave from the academy, pleading lingering aftereffects from her brush with death in the desert. That would free up her time considerably. Academy days began at 6 A.M. and ran late. At this rate, though, she would never become a police officer. The LAPD would get tired of waiting for her. She’d have to move back in with her dad, with no job and no prospects.

  So be it. In the early weeks of the New Year, she learned all she could about her chosen subject. She began with the internet, moved on to the law-enforcement databases available to her at the academy, then plundered the area’s public libraries and the back-issue files of the Los Angeles Times. Remington detected an elusive quality to the research. She had the tantalizing sensation that she was accessing only the fit-for-public-consumption story of Victor Loushane’s life, and missing an underbelly kept carefully concealed. She dug deeper.

  Victor Ellison Loushane’s Scotch-Irish parents fled Galway with the establishment of the Irish Free State in the early twenties. They wound up in Detroit, where the father, Ellison Brockton Loushane, freely participated in the Canadian border trade in bootleg liquor during Prohibition. Searching among the writings of left-leaning reporters with a political bone to pick, Remington turned up various mentions of Ellison’s seedy associations with Detroit’s Purple Gang and with Fred “Killer” Burke, the suspected hitman in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  The Kennedys proved that a family could remain respectable even when rumor portrayed its patriarch as a bootlegger. Though widely circulated, the report about Joe Kennedy, Sr., was actually false, but it helped lend the family a rogue, outlaw flavor. That’s the way it was with the Loushanes, too. Later in life, whenever Victor was confronted with the “wasn’t your daddy a bootlegger?” rumor, he would merely smile and say all that was a long while back.

  Ellison Brockton Loushane managed to escape his flirtation with the underworld relatively unscathed, his reputation intact, continuing to maintain his upright businessman façade. Since the production of alcohol required generous amounts of sugar, the Purple Gang always traded in corn, the basic ingredient used for corn sugar. Ellison served as the front man for the Purple Gang’s commodity concerns. He emerged from Prohibition a wealthy man.

  Ellison’s son Victor was born in 1929, the year the market collapsed. The father prospered even during the Great Depression. When the young son turned up in California’s Central Valley during the postwar boom years, he carried on the family commodity business, effortlessly segueing into buying and selling agricultural real estate. Rising in conservative Catholic circles, Victor kept his father’s association with the Purple Gang quiet, not because the gang members were thugs but because they were Jewish.

  In the archives of the Los Angeles Public Library, in a magazine called Confidential, Remington discovered a publicity photo from the 1950s. It showed a dashing twenty-five-year-old Victor Loushane posed with a pneumatic beauty-pageant starlet and soon-to-be Playboy Playmate named Jayne Mansfield. “Too Busy for Romance?” read the caption, testifying that the well-heeled young man was still an eligible bachelor, and hiding the fact that Mansfield had a husband at the time.

  Victor was by then a successful real-estate mogul, partnering in huge land deals all over California and the Southwest—in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. But his real money shot came in the late 1960s. Approaching forty years of age, he met and began dating Evelyn DeYoung, an heiress then in her early twenties. The DeYoung family’s fortune dwarfed Victor’s. Remington followed the public progress of their courtship in decades-old society pages of the Los Angeles Times. The breathless coverage of the Loushane-DeYoung engagement had the flavor of a noble hunter bringing down a trophy elk.

  A marriage of two fortunes, one great and one very much greater. But no great crime, not in the Balzacian sense, unless you counted the Prohibition violence of the Purple Gang. Remington still found hints of underworld associations. One of the prominent guests at the Loushane-DeYoung wedding was Sidney Korshak, aka the Fixer, the mob’s man in Hollywood. But that was just the normal course of affairs in society back then. Korshak, who could bring film sets or Las Vegas casinos to a grinding halt with a single phone call, was welcomed in all the finest circles.

  Pershing International was the business umbrella for the far-flung Loushane family enterprises. It was headquartered in one of downtown L.A.’s first modern skyscrapers, the Mercantile Mart, on Temple in Little Tokyo. Pershing International owned the place outright and, more important, owned the priceless piece of land on which it was situated.

  “That’s our place,” Caroline had told Remington once when they were teenagers, gesturing toward the grand black-glass tower. They were speeding through downtown late at night. The word “Pershing” loomed atop the skyscraper in illuminated red block letters.

  Now, on a bright January afternoon, Remington visited. She told herself that it was part of her research, but she felt as though she were playing a high-stakes game of chicken. She could see how it might appear suspicious just being there, that she could be exposed for poking around in things that weren’t her business. But from all that she had read Victor Loushane no longer showed his face at the HQ. He emulated Howard Hughes. Preferring to hole up at Wildermanse, he conducted business via electronic secondaries. The Great Oz had retreated behind his curtain.

  The Mercantile Mart featured a tidy little museum on its first floor, the Evelyn DeYoung Loushane Hall of Antiquities. Remington ventured in. The collection was really world-class, including the greatest Olmec artifacts outside Mexico. The massive sculptures scattered around the space were some of the most ancient art of the Americas. Colossal stone heads and jade face masks over three thousand years old, every piece scowling and grimacing at Remington as though they knew what she was up to.

  A gray-haired docent adopted Remington as her special charge. “Human sacrifice hasn’t definitively been proved in the Olmec culture,” the woman said. “Although there is some evidence of infant sacrifice.”

  The hall was pretty much empty of other visitors, and the guide—her name was Janet—walked among the sculptures at Remington’s side.

  “The collection was from Evelyn DeYoung?” Remington asked.

  “Actually, Mr. Victor Loushane is responsible for much of it,” Janet replied. “He named the hall in his wife’s memory after she died, but he was an avid collector even in his youth.”

  “What did he do, lug these ten-ton sculptures out of Mexico on his back?”

  “You could say that he had a transformative experience,” Janet said. “When he was twenty-seven, he made a visit to the Gulf Plains, south of Veracruz. Olmec territory. You can read all about his story in our exhibit catalog. Copies are free.”

  “Sort of an odd type of art for a young man to seize upon.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “So these sculptures, they would be illegal immigrants now? I thought Victor Loushane was dead set against all that.” Remington had taken it a step too far. Janet’s good nature evaporated in front of her eyes.

  “You seem interested primarily in the man, not the art,” she commented. With that, the woman closed up her information shop.

  As Remington left the Mercantile Mart a town car with a driver passed her. She saw George Sarin in the backseat, talking on a cellphone. She had just a glimpse of the Loushane operative’s face, and felt unsure whether he had seen her as well.

  It wasn’t as if she was doing anything wrong. Just strolling along in downtown L.A., paging through a catalog from a museum exhibit. Evil is he who sees evil in it. Still, ever since the unpleasantness with the man as she was recovering in the Imperial Valley medical c
enter, Remington thought she might prefer never to encounter George Sarin again. And there he was, and there she was, on the street in front of the skyscraper headquarters of the Loushane family businesses.

  A throwaway line in the exhibit catalog intrigued her. “Pershing International maintains extensive holdings throughout Mexico….”

  Wealthy tax-dodger Leona Helmsley’s classic sneer, “Taxes are for little people,” still held true. And in a multinational business world borders were for little people, too. Global conglomerates paid little attention to such artificial lines drawn upon the face of the earth, playing with them as though they were mere chalk marks on a tennis court. Wealthy residents jetted across them at will, glancing down at the border-crossing traffic jams with passing looks of satisfaction.

  It was only natural, Remington told herself. Victor Loushane was a multinational kind of guy. Ever since he was a young buck, he’d always had doings south of the border. As she headed toward Union Station that day, Remington heard an interior click as a piece of her puzzle fell into place. She had been searching for an overlap between the worlds of Tino Zaldivar and Victor Loushane. Now that she had it, she realized it had been staring her in the face all along.

  Mexico.

  —

  Jordan “the Stag” Callens wasn’t dead, but he wanted a lot of people in his past to believe that he was. On the computers in the police academy’s library, Remington had access to DMV records, Bureau of Corrections files, even voting registrations. Government databases were becoming ever more refined. It took her less time to track Callens down than it did to convince Tino Zaldivar’s old hippie tutor that she wasn’t a threat.

  Callens lived in an unremarkable ranch house in a very expensive location, snug up against the hills in Santa Barbara, up the coast from L.A. His view of the Pacific wasn’t much and didn’t include the Channel Islands floating offshore, but still the place was an awful long way from the beach bungalow in Playa de los Volcanes. Remington wondered where Callens came up with the money. She also wondered if he knew that his house could be burned to the ground at any moment, what with the wildfires that swept down every so often and took out million-dollar homes without consideration of their cost.