by Dave Stanton
Cody’s lone attempt at marriage had ended after two years, and his love life ever since had been a parade of closing-time bimbos, strippers, assorted nut cases, and gold diggers. His stories were endlessly sordid, and he took great pleasure in the recounting, but behind it I always sensed an undercurrent of regret and sadness. This had become more pronounced in the year I had been seeing Candi.
I picked up my beer mug and my lip touched a coating of ice on the rim. A sip turned into a couple large swallows. I put the mug down and stood.
“What’s up?” Cody asked.
“You still drink boilermakers?”
“No, but I like Shirley Temples.”
I went to the bar and asked Lana for two shots of Jack Daniels. When I brought the shots to the table, Cody was grinning broadly. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.
“I feel like a drink,” I said.
“What a coincidence. So do I.” He dropped the shot glass in his beer, drained it, and returned the mug to the table with a loud bang. “Not bad.”
I followed his example and wiped my mouth. The booze hit my gut, and almost instantly I felt more relaxed.
“You got any Doggie Doze at your house?” I asked.
“I should. What’s your thinking?”
“I’d love to bug the high-rise Tucker’s at, or even Suggs’s ride. But we need to find the path of least resistance.”
“The bugs I use won’t work in a car,” he said. “They only work with a stationary transmitter nearby.”
“I know—the vehicle bugs cost a fortune. And there’s no way to get into that high-rise, at least no easy way. I think the best thing is to put those pit bulls asleep and bug Suggs’s house.”
Cody looked at me, and after a moment he said, “You mean tonight.”
“Why wait? Suggs doesn’t strike me as the type who’d sit around that shit pit all night long. I bet by dark he’s gone. Maybe headed to a night club, on the prowl for a piece of ass. Or otherwise blessing the general population with his presence.”
“Give you a shot and you’re a man of action.”
I poured a beer from the pitcher. “What else we got to do?”
Cody toasted me with his mug, then nodded toward the bar. “There’s Pronto Schneider.”
I looked and saw a heavyset man perched on a barstool in the corner behind the bar. He had white hair and gray stubble and sat with his arms crossed over his thick gut.
“Pronto?”
“Yeah,” Cody said. “I started calling him that when his gout flared up and he was tending bar. All the boozers were pissed because he was so slow. Everyone kept telling him to hang up his cleats. But Schneider’s a cheap bastard, and stubborn too. It wasn’t until his regulars boycotted the place that he finally hired a couple bartenders. Now he’s got a squad of floozies pouring drinks.”
“Business is booming, I bet,” I said.
“Never been better, he says. He sits there in the corner, counting his money.”
I caught Schneider’s eye, and after a moment, he blinked in recognition. Then he hefted his weight off his stool and shuffled over to where we sat.
“I haven’t seen your face in here for a while,” he said.
“Sobered up,” I said. “Moved away.”
“I hate it when my customers do that.”
I smiled, and Cody leaned forward. “I hear heroin’s getting popular again, Ed. Cutting into the cocaine trade. You hear anything like that?”
Schneider pulled at his ear, and his eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I see it. It’s bad for business. People love boozing on coke. But not on heroin.”
“It’s that’s noticeable, huh?” Cody said.
“Heroin’s a downer. It’s a substitute for alcohol. The cartels are even getting concerned.”
“Coke sales are down?”
“That’s the word out there,” Schneider replied. “The heroin on the street is cheap and plentiful. And it’s not the Colombian black tar the cartels bring in. It’s all high grade, coming out of Afghanistan. And the Mexicans don’t have any relationship with those camel jockeys.”
“Who does?” I asked.
“The Afghans don’t trust the West. Imagine that, huh? They operate mostly through Lebanese or Turk smugglers.”
From his pocket Cody produced the small bag of heroin he’d bought on the corner of Suggs’s street. He pulled it open with his fingernails. The powder was a dull tan color.
Schneider put on a pair of reading glasses and poked at the contents with a toothpick.
“What do you think?” Cody asked.
“I haven’t seen junk like this since the eighties. You picked it up local?”
Cody nodded.
“You want to have it tested?”
“Not really,” Cody said. “You think it’s Afghan?”
“I’d bet on it.”
We all stared silently at the coarse powder resting in the torn scrap of black plastic.
“Go flush it,” Schneider said.
• • •
We hung out in the bar until well past dark. Cody bought a round for the house, and Schneider acknowledged it by ringing a bell mounted behind the bar, which prompted another patron to shoot the rail. After that, the middle-aged happy hour regulars began migrating out. A younger crowd filled their seats, and the room grew crowded. A short, buxom woman came on shift and began working the floor, tray in hand. We drank slow beers and carefully avoided the lure of whiskey. At 9:30 we left for Cody’s house.
While Cody crushed pills and mixed the powder into two balls of raw hamburger, I changed into black clothes. When I was done, I saw he’d set a bag on his kitchen table. In the bag were self-adhering, nickel-sized discs, each capable of gathering and sending auditory activity in a twenty-foot radius. The bag also contained a transmitter, a device roughly the size of a tennis ball. Attached to it was a tapered plastic wedge, designed so the transmitter could be secured into the ground, typically hidden in bushes.
We decided to take my truck, as the modified Camry had already been seen in Suggs’s neighborhood. My truck was older than Cody’s red rig, the bronze paint less conspicuous.
It was a little past ten when we turned down the street where Suggs lived.
“No GMC,” I said, eyeing the empty driveway in front of the dark house. I turned off my lights and backed into the driveway of the vacant house where we’d previously parked. A couple hundred yards away, several gangbangers were hanging out at the corner. There were no streetlights except for the one under which they stood.
I stretched rubber gloves over my hand, grabbed the small sack holding the hamburger balls, and took a final glance up and down the avenue.
Moving swiftly, I crossed the street and approached the chain link gate at Suggs’s side yard. Barks erupted, and the two pit bulls raced from the back of the house. I tossed the first ball, and the nearest dog stopped; in a second, the meat was gone. I lobbed the second ball to the other dog with the same result and retreated to my truck. A couple more barks sounded, then it was quiet.
Cody was in my passenger seat, looking at a stop watch. After three minutes he said, “Your cell phone on?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll ring if anyone’s coming.”
I nodded, went back across the street, and shook Suggs’s metal gate. After a quiet pause, I scaled the fence and dropped to the other side. The side yard was packed dirt bordered by weeds and a scattering of trash. I looked over the fence into the neighboring yard. The windows were dark, and I could see the gate latch did not have a lock. An emergency exit route, if need be. When I came around into the backyard, I saw the dogs lying on a patch of dirt, dead asleep.
There was a small concrete patio under a corroded awning. At the foot of the patio was a sliding glass door. I switched on my flashlight and saw the door was bolt locked at the base. I moved to a bedroom window. It was reinforced with a mounted slide lock. A very basic design, and very effective.
On the far side of the house was ano
ther window. This one was not secured with a slide lock. I inserted a steel strip between the frames, gave a quick twist, and the catch released. I slid open the window, climbed up, and quietly stepped into the room. My flashlight panned the walls. It was a bedroom, unfurnished and vacant. There was no obvious place to hide a bug. I looked around for a minute until I found a nook behind a shelf next to the window.
I went down a hallway to the main room. A big, flat-screen TV was mounted on a wall above a cable box and DVD player. Against the opposite wall was a leather couch. I stuck a bug beneath the couch, pressing firmly against the frame. I looked around for a phone but didn’t see one.
In the kitchen I found a good spot beneath the counter ledge, then I went back down the hall to the closed door of a second bedroom. It was not locked, and I stepped inside.
The room was neat, the bed made, a desk clear of clutter in one corner, a bookshelf in another. The books were a mix of old paperbacks and highschool textbooks. I removed a couple books on the lowest shelf, secured a bug against the shelf above, and replaced the books. I scanned the desk with my flashlight and pulled open a metal filing cabinet. The file folders contained bills, parole paperwork, and car insurance notices. I spent a few minutes rifling the files and found nothing interesting.
Before leaving I checked the closet. It was packed with clothes on hangers surrounding a three-foot iron safe bolted by L-joints to the floor and walls.
My cell beeped. It was Cody.
“Suggs is coming,” he said. “Move.”
“Shit.”
I closed the door behind me and went into the empty bedroom and out the window. The dogs were still lying motionless in the dirt. I crept across the yard to the slatted fence and saw the flash of headlights in the driveway. I moved back and hopped the fence into the neighbor’s yard. A few feet from me, an overgrown hedge lined the rear fence. I thrust the transmitter deep into the thicket until I felt it lodge firmly. Crouched low, I moved down the side yard to the gate. The headlights went dark, and I heard the engine shut off and the car door close. I waited until I heard the front door to the house open and shut. Then I went out the gate and hustled back to my truck, where Cody waited behind the wheel, headlights off, the motor idling.
We pulled out of the driveway and turned away from Suggs’s house. From the passenger seat, I saw yellow light shining around the blanket in the front window.
“How long until those dogs wake up?” I asked.
“At least an hour.”
“He’s gonna be suspicious.”
“Unless he’s a dumbass.”
“He’ll probably think someone was trying to rip him off,” I said.
“Good,” Cody replied.
5
I usually sleep like a rock wherever I am, but when I woke at three A.M. in Cody’s spare bedroom, my head was beset with a nightmarish swirl of voices and images. Lindsey Addison on a hospital bed, her legs spread and her face gruesomely distorted. Outside her door, Duante Tucker jabbed his finger at a doctor’s chest. Marcus Grier’s voice said he didn’t want to get involved, and then a group of men in turbans and white robes appeared, and Tucker smirked and vanished.
I sat up and turned on the light. The room was stuffy, and I lay back down and tried unsuccessfully to fall asleep. After a few minutes, I took my notebook computer from its bag and went out and sat at the kitchen table.
The first site I tried provided no hits when I typed in the address for the Skyscape condominiums, unit 1602. I tried another site without luck, and finally went to one I subscribed to but didn’t use often. This time, when I entered the address into the reverse directory, a name came up: Farid Insaf. I ran a public records search on the name, and it produced eight individuals.
Of the eight, three were elderly, one was deceased, and two had addresses in the eastern United States. The remaining two were slightly more promising. One was for a fifty-two-year-old man with a Texas address. The other was a forty-three-year-old in Seattle.
I spent another half hour typing the name into various databases. None of the responses identified anyone living in San Jose. The only thing of interest I found was a reference to the Muslim meaning of the name. Farid Insaf could be loosely translated to mean “unique justice.” What did that mean, if anything? Probably nothing.
“Typical,” I muttered. Public record sites are notoriously incomplete and outdated. But there are plenty of armchair private investigators who make a living selling public information to unsuspecting clients. Some of these investigators are ex-cops, some are wannabe cops who never made the grade, and some are enterprising college kids, unlicensed and advertising on the Internet. What do they all have in common? Lack of scruples, lack of competency, and laziness.
Bottom line, real detective work is a bitch. I once met a PI who dedicated twenty years to a cold case involving the murder of a friend’s daughter. The investigator traveled all over the United States, even spent a month in Vietnam, interviewing people, following up on leads, digging through scraps of evidence. When he hit dead ends, he reset and started all over. Eventually he identified a strong suspect and closed in, intending to extract a confession by any means necessary. But when he broke into the suspect’s house, he had a face-to-face encounter he didn’t expect—the suspect had hung himself minutes before, the still-warm body swaying over an upended chair in the living room.
I turned off the lights and sat on Cody’s couch in the darkness. The composite information we’d uncovered so far suggested Tucker was involved in drug dealing. That alone meant next to nothing. Drug dealing is probably the most common crime in the world. It’s lucrative, easy to engage in, and pervades many other criminal activities. But factor in the possibility of Tucker buying heroin from Arabs, and you have something a bit more unusual.
Equally unusual was the concept of Tucker living in a fancy San Jose high-rise with a man who might be named Farid Insaf. What kind of person would house someone like Tucker? What could the motivation be? One obvious thought was there could be an Islamist connection between Farid Insaf and the Arabic restaurant that Tucker and Suggs visited. Something to consider.
I thought back to the attorney, Darrian Brandon. He claimed his reasons for representing Tucker were altruistic, which I didn’t believe for a second. I wanted to ask Brandon if he knew Farid Insaf. Of course, the counselor wouldn’t be inclined to answer. Unless leverage was applied. Maybe Cody’s style of leverage.
An hour passed, and I returned to the bedroom. We needed to get to the bottom of Farid Insaf, if that was truly the name of Tucker’s benefactor. But there were other angles as well. We’d never spoken to either of the reluctant witnesses. They both lived in Southern California. And so did Darrian Bannon. That was something that should be explored. With that thought in mind, I fell asleep.
• • •
I woke to a pounding on the door. “Rise and shine, Dirt.” I looked at the clock. Eight A.M.
Cody handed me a cup of coffee when I walked into the kitchen. “You’re always up early,” he said. “Catching up on your beauty rest?”
“I was working in the middle of the night. I got a name for unit 1602. Farid Insaf.”
“Huh? What the hell is that? Afghan? Pakistani?”
“Arabic. I think it comes from the Quran. It means unique justice.”
He hooted a laugh. “Lovely. If his sense of justice means catering to ghetto thug rapists, yeah, I’d say it’s unique.”
I sipped at my coffee. “I ran a people search on the name. Found two possibles, one in Dallas and one in Seattle.”
“Nothing in California, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Balls,” said Cody. “We want to find out about this dude, looks like we’re gonna have to get creative.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“That depends how many laws we want to break.”
“How about none?”
“Maybe we could bribe someone at the Skyscape,” Cody said. “Or con them.”
> “Pretty tough. And if it backfires, all we’ll have accomplished is putting Insaf on alert.”
Cody didn’t respond, and I went to his refrigerator and poured some milk into the scalding tar in my cup. “You got anyone on the force you can run the name by?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Only as a last resort. Even then it’s no sure thing.”
“I got another idea, then. Let’s go find the two witnesses, Leo Rosen and Amber Meline.”
“They’re from Southern Cal.” Cody looked up at me from where he’d sat at the table.
“Right. And so is Darrian Bannon.”
“So?”
“I want to have a follow-up conversation with Bannon. See if he knows Farid Insaf.”
Cody smiled. “You do, huh?”
I nodded. “Why don’t you check on flights to Los Angeles while I confirm a few things?”
• • •
At noon we took off from San Jose on an American Airlines regional jet. It was an hour-long flight to Los Angeles International Airport. I’d been able to verify that Bannon was in his office today, in El Segundo, only a mile or two from the airport. Also, I’d learned that Leo Rosen had resurfaced. He’d picked up when I called his number, and when I told him I was from FedEx and had been unable to deliver a package a week ago, he said he was at his Santa Monica address. As for Amber Meline, she didn’t pick up her cell, but I had her address, also in Santa Monica.
I sat crammed next to the window, shoulder to shoulder with Cody, watching as the plane descended over the Angeles National Forrest and then down over Santa Clarita and Van Nuys. Coach seats are large enough to comfortably fit a narrow-shouldered, 150-pound man. Cody was about 300 and I was 215 or so. I tend toward claustrophobia and couldn’t wait to get off the plane.
Twenty minutes later we walked through the terminal at LAX and took a shuttle bus to the rental car lots. I know people in Northern California who like to refer, with a certain disdain, to any destination in Southern Cal simply as “LA.” Maybe there still exists some form of regional sibling rivalry between Northern and Southern Cal, but there’s no doubt who is the bigger of the two; with over two hundred cities populated by twenty-two million residents in a 150-mile-long-by-50-mile-wide geography, SoCal dwarfs the San Francisco Bay Area.
