Blood Money

by Doug Richardson

  Conrad recalled when he was a boy, stuffed into the corner of his tiny bedroom, window cracked so he could listen to Chicago’s elevated trains as they rumbled across the skyline. And through his open door when the night grew silent, he would occasionally hear his father wandering from room to room, the sound of whiskey-soaked ice cubes tinkling in a water glass.

  Only Pop’s whiskey wasn’t as good as the stuff I can afford.

  Conrad poured himself another serving of thirty-year-old Scottish single malt. The ice cubes crackled under the assault of the golden liquid. He lifted the diamond-cut tumbler and listened to the ice cubes plink inside the fine crystal. Was the sound any richer than that he recalled of his father’s salve? Or was expensive whiskey just whiskey and Waterford glass just glass?

  “Yeah, sure. Gimme that number,” said Conrad, looking like a heftier version of Hugh Hefner in his silk pajamas, blinking Bluetooth stuck in his ear. “Don’t text it to me. Just tell it.”

  As with most of Conrad’s conversations, his assistant was listening in on the call. It was the assistant’s job to write down the number and connect to the next call. That way, Conrad could continue his insomniac’s march while keeping his hands free from touching a computer or a keypad that might carry germs. The scotch, he reasoned, was by its own alcoholic virtue, antibacterial.

  “You said her name is Lilly?”

  “Lilly Zoller,” answered Garvin.

  “And these are her personal numbers?”

  “Home and cell. And you didn’t get them from me.”

  “What else you got?” asked Conrad.

  “Nothing new yet. I’ll have a full report in your inbox by 6:00 A.M.”

  “I’ll be up.”

  “How you holding up, sir?”

  “Numb, I guess,” said Conrad. “Dunno how I’m supposed to feel.”

  Conrad instinctively pressed the five key, the cue for his assistant, David Kang, to disconnect the call.

  “Anything else, sir?” asked Kang.

  “Yeah. Call that number.”

  “For Lilly Zoller?”

  “Whatever her name is. Yeah.”

  Kang knew better than to remind his rest-ravaged boss of the time of day. Conrad could read a clock, and really didn’t give a rat’s shit who he disturbed. Privately, Kang entertained his friends with stories of his boss’s practice of dialing at late hours. He called it no-napping. And in Conrad’s ten years as a producer-slash-motion-picture-financier, he had no-napped just about everybody. Movie stars, studio execs, directors. Even mayors and governors who had promised tax incentives in exchange for filming in their home zip codes. Conrad would no-nap them, grind out the best deal of the moment, and unapologetically move on to the next sleeping soul.

  Kang prepared to no-nap Assistant U.S. Attorney, Lilly Zoller.

  “Home or cell?” asked Kang.

  “Flip a fuckin’ coin.”

  * * * *

  The dog growled at the noise. But that was his job. Somewhere, deep inside its mongrel DNA, there was a strip of code that demanded the feral creature protect the realm. In the case of the three-year-old rescue mutt, the realm was the two-thousand-square-feet of a downtown Los Angeles loft, an architectural space softened with natural wood and corduroy-upholstered furniture. But in the monochrome of night, it was cast in grays and blues and the occasional flash of red from the lights outside.

  Then came the noise again. Like a drill bit in the wall. Hollow. Reverberating. Danger. The dog’s growl evolved to a bark. Its eyes practically glowing in the dark. There were times when Lilly liked that about her magic mutt. He was born with slightly bulging eyes, gray brown in color with girlish eyelashes. The dog’s head would sometimes lift up from the bed covers, look from the floor to ceiling and, as if soaking up the reflection from all the ambient light, appear to be irradiated.

  “Dingo. Shut up.”

  Pretty as the pup’s eyes were, his bark could be sharp. A hatchet to the back of Lilly’s skull. Something about the frequency. It got her right behind the ears. This time, it had woken her.

  “Dingo!”

  The dog's ears lowered. He spun a quick couple of revolutions and curled up at her feet. Lilly flipped her pillow to the cool side, rolled over, but before laying her head down again, she heard the sound, followed by a mild growl from Dingo.

  “Ssshhhhh!”

  She wanted to get an earful of the sound again. Then memory hooked in with the logic lobe of her brain. The loud drill-like interruption was the sound of her cell phone, still switched to vibrate after the party she had attended. The device was now buzzing across the top of her dining room table. The solid oak planks acted like a speaker’s diaphragm, amplifying the smartphone’s jitterbug into the sound of a full-blown invasion.

  “Crap.”

  Lilly slid from the bed and trekked over to the dining table. She had half a mind to answer without so much as looking at the incoming number. Just press talk and unleash a blitzkrieg of expletives. Her other half thought she might want to check the caller’s ID then customize her curses for whichever legal idiot thought phoning the assistant U.S. attorney after midnight was a wise idea. A “damn ’em” if it was a wrong number unworthy of her wrath.

  “Private fucking caller,” read Lilly off her smartphone’s screen. Then she clicked the green-lit button and spoke. “Whoever the hell this is, you’re either drunk or stupid or too horny to exercise good flippin’ judgment.”

  Horny, indeed, she calculated at the last millisecond before mouthing off into the receiver. Most of her booty-buddies had the smarts to wait for Lilly to be the aggressor and dial them.

  “Please hold for Conrad Ellis,” said the strange voice.

  Before Lilly could say “Conrad who?” the line clicked and the man introduced himself.

  “Ms. Zoller?” asked Conrad in what was less a question and more a statement about the social order of things. “I’m Conrad Ellis. You might or might not have heard of me. I’m a motion picture producer. But most importantly, I’m the father of Pepper Ellis.”

  Still jarred from the waking, Lilly’s brain lagged. She was still trying to place the name of the caller when he’d dropped his famous daughter’s name.

  “Pepper Ellis?” asked Lilly. “Am I supposed to know you or her?”

  “This is Lilly Zoller of the United States Attorney’s office?”

  “It is. How did you get my number?”

  “I’m a simple man of power and means,” said Conrad. “My daughter was everything to me.”

  “Your daughter, yes,” said Lilly, finally catching up. “Your daughter is the murdered TV kid.”

  “She was seventeen and emancipated,” said Conrad. “Emancipated not because she wanted to divorce her parents or anything—well, maybe her mother. Just saying she was her own person so she could legally work adult hours.”

  “I’m sorry.” Lilly found command of her manners. “You must be devastated.”

  “Yes. I suppose. I’d like to know what you know.”

  “We’ve only just begun our investigation—”

  “You know something. Or else you feds wouldn’t have gotten involved. Now, I’ve already lived through the corn-fed runaround from the clowns up in Kern County.”

  “Well, it is their jurisdiction.”

  “Lilly? Can I call you that?” said Conrad. “I made my bones buying and selling Chicago real estate. That’s Chicago, okay? Not much I don’t know about how the Department of Justice operates, considering I’ve been investigated by them while at the same time I was their Goddamn landlord. You hear me?”

  Yes, Lilly could hear Conrad. The subtext being that he was connected and from Chicago. And nowhere in America did commerce and both local and federal politics intersect in such a sticky tangle. She needed to tread carefully because the man on the line had implied that either he or somebody he knew probably had the Attorney General’s phone number on speed dial.

  “I understand, Mr. Ellis. Would you like to come in and
meet tomorrow? The afternoon? I’d be more than glad to show you what we have.”

  “Show me? Sure. But tell me now.”

  “Of course,” said Lilly, knowing exactly how the obedience game was played. Keep the voice flat and without affect. Answer questions directly. Just not necessarily to the fullest extent. Appearing compliant was paramount when trying to keep a secret. And Lilly had a whopper.

  “Our unsub,” Lilly continued. “That’s unknown subject—we believe he’s driving a truck full of stolen biological materials. He was bound from Reno to Southern California when he crossed paths with the three victims.”

  “Biological? Like hazardous waste?”

  “No sir. Refrigerated blood products. Medical use products.”

  “There an underground market for that?”

  “We think possibly overseas. But that’s still speculation. We need to stick with the facts of—”

  “Why her then?

  “Her?” asked Lilly. “As in your daughter?”

  “What did she have to do with any of it?”

  “As far as we know, nothing more than impeding the perpetrator’s path. Your daughter and her…companion…were in a traffic accident with the deceased sheriff’s deputy, who was in the process of assisting your daughter when the murders occurred.”

  Lilly, who had stood in front of as many mirrors as judges, rehearsing arguments, learning to measure her own words and tone with precision, pleasured in listening to herself talk to the bereaved father. Sleep be damned. On the end of the line was an eight-hundred-pound gorilla who she needed to tame. Her only concern was whether she had sounded too cold. As if she had been sitting at the boss’s conference table, surrounded by other deputy U.S. Attorneys, merely running off the deets of her case.

  “So this…man,” said Conrad. “He’s of interest to the feds because he crossed a state line with a load of blood products?”

  “He’s of interest to us because he’s a criminal. Because he’s committed multiple offenses—”

  “Because he murdered a pretty little TV actress.”

  “Sir?” asked Lilly. It was a stall. Was Conrad calling her out or just cutting to the chase?

  “C’mon, Miss Zoller. Nobody likes headlines more than federal attorneys. If it ain’t mob or politicians on the menu, what’s tastier than celebrities?”

  “Mr. Ellis. All due respect. Before this morning, I’d never even heard of your daughter.”

  “But you’ve heard of her now. You know she’s getting more famous by the minute. You know she’s got a popular TV show. Double the usual eyeballs for tonight’s episode.”

  “She sounds very special, sir.”

  “Here’s something you don’t know. I gave that show to my little girl. Put up the money for the pilot and guaranteed the first twelve episodes on her perky pair of dimples.”

  “You produced the show for your daughter?”

  “No. That woulda looked wrong,” said Conrad, keeping a half-step in front of her. “Not that anybody in Hollywood gives a shit about nepotism. For her, I guess. I wrote the check and watched her grow up on TV.”

  There it was, she thought. The man at the other end of the phone had just played his first note of melancholy. A tinge of regret had crept up on him. Lilly heard Conrad catch himself, inhale deeply, exhale, in an effort to gird his voice.

  “You loved her very much,” said Lilly between the man’s grieving breaths. “I can’t begin to imagine—”

  “You’re not anywhere on this,” said Conrad. “If you were you woulda said it already.”

  Lilly bit her lip. A habit left over from her teenage years.

  “Like I said, Mr. Ellis. We’re just at the beginning but—”

  “If I went to the press,” said Conrad. “Put up some kinda big dollar reward, leading to the blah blah blah of it. You wouldn’t object?”

  “As a private citizen, you can do whatever you—”

  “I can also take that money and promise to put it to work politically against you or your boss or anybody else who supports the local U.S. Attorney’s office if I discover you withholding information from me.”

  “I hear you,” said Lilly. “I assure you that I hear you.”

  “That’s the thing about money. Makes everybody listen,” said Conrad. “So go and get your headlines. But you sure as hell better get a result that satisfies the victim.”

  “I assure you that my office will do everything in our power for your daughter.”

  “Not her!” barked Conrad. “My little girl’s dead and there isn’t a Goddamn thing you can do for her. I’m the Goddamn victim! You do this for me!”

  Then the call was over. Conrad Ellis had hung up. Still, she left the phone stuck to her ear as she stood at her floor-to-ceiling windows, stark naked and staring out over the blue and red neon of the downtown Staples Center and the collection of theaters, clubs, and restaurants known as L.A. Live.

  The heat of the day was still leaking from the scorched earth, rising in horizon-dissolving waves. The window radiated heat, making her skin tingle until it began to itch and bead with sweat. That was okay by her. She wouldn’t be able to sleep until she showered again. There, under a lukewarm spray she would war game whether or not to include Conrad Ellis in her circle of trust. Just moments before she had first drifted off to sleep there had been another call. There had been a tip from some pool contractor in Granada Hills. He’d told the FBI a believable tale about a nefarious shipping deal gone sideways. The pool contractor, who had been acting as some kind of middle man, claimed to be spooked and wanted to help the feds set up a sting. Dulaney had conceded to his boss that he’d initially put little faith in the caller’s veracity. But, after a few calls and some simple keystrokes through the Department of Justice database, everything except the name of the perp had checked out.

  Lilly emptied her hot water tank and still hadn’t reached her verdict. That faceless man on the other end of the phone call had given her a good shake. There was some animal in his bark. Would Conrad Ellis really bite if she didn’t play things his way? Of equal importance was what might happen if she broke FBI protocol and allowed the angry father in on the possible takedown plans that were still forming.

  “Shit,” she said aloud. “I gotta change my phone numbers.”

  19

  “Hey Mom, guess what?”

  Gonzo had barely crossed the threshold of her two-bedroom duplex when she heard Travis shouting over his Xbox.

  “Hey, Trav. How are you? I’m fine thanks,” said Gonzo, preferring a gentler home landing than a verbal barrage of “guess whats” from her eleven-year-old.

  “Mom!” said the boy, undeterred, on his feet and greeting her where the front corridor met the dual kitchen-den. “Chaps scored another one.”

  “Oh, Christ. Killed another skunk?” Gonzo was getting a sudden case of heartburn at the mere thought of the oversized mutt having gutted another skunk. After the last one it had taken a month to get the stink out of the poor dog’s fur.

  “Huh uh,” said Travis. “Chaps got another one of the crazy lady’s chickens.”

  “Dammit, Chaps!” Gonzo dropped her Beretta into the quick safe she kept inside a decorative, wicker basket and slammed the lid shut and locked. “Where is that stupid dog?”

  “Not his fault. Chickens are just on the other side of the fence. She’s supposed to keep ’em in a coop.”

  Only then did she catch the tension in Travis’ young face. Nary a pimple yet, but full of nervous tics brought on by stress mixed with the disorder known as Tourette Syndrome. Gonzo put her arms around the young beanpole who was barely five inches short of her own six gangly feet.

  “She doesn’t have to keep ’em in a coop,” said Gonzo, dropping her voice into a more calming frequency.

  “But she does. I looked it up. City of Pasadena says chickens gotta be in a cage and not near a fence or where people sleep.”

  “You found that out?”

  “It’s called the Internet,
mom.” Travis spun and returned to his Xbox controller and bag of microwave popcorn.

  “Did you eat dinner?”

  “Pop-Tarts.”

  “Awesome,” said Gonzo, choosing not to spark a fight with her precious child. “And did Chaps eat anything other than Mrs. Lorena’s pet chicken?”

  “He ate.”

  “You know she’s gonna call animal control on us,” said Gonzo. “But…at least when they come, we’ll be armed with the law.”

  “And Mr. Kyle?” added the boy. “He sorta fixed the fence.”

  “What’s sorta?”

  “He put the old wheelbarrow in front of the hole.”

  “Well good for Kyle,” said Gonzo, referencing her tenant on the other side of their common wall. Kyle, sixty-two-years-old and closeted, was a gentle soul who worked in a small pet shop in nearby Altadena. The man kept mostly to himself, but when around was glad to train a watchful eye on Travis and clean up after Chaps as long the pup wasn’t harassing his house cats.

  “Hey Mom. Can we order a pizza?”

  That was the last thing Gonzo remembered hearing. Her eyes must have been shut when the boy had made the junk food request. She was stretched across the couch, bottle of Gatorade stuck in the crook of her arm. Sometime while watching her boy battle computer-generated brain-chowing zombies, sleep had overtaken her. Had she snored? Who was there to hear her? Travis and the big mutt had long scuttled off to bed. Gonzo had been left to dream of nothing fanciful—not even able to escape her day handcuffed to the shaved-head hard ass from Kern County.