No one who ever came here had ever read a book in their lives unless it was assigned by a producer.
Gary liked the library because visitors were so awestruck by it they transferred their high opinions of it from the room to him. I liked it because those comfortable sofas and chairs were wonderful for curling up on and having a nap, especially in the late afternoon sun as it came in over the Pacific. Stevie liked it because it was a library with lots of books in it. The library was genuinely her favorite room in the house.
When I joined her, she was not enjoying one of the books. She was working on whatever project had consumed her the past several days. Normally, the Oriental rug near Gary’s desk had a set of four armchairs on it, all of them massive wooden things with enormous carved armrests and a delicate paisley print, that sat like points of the compass on the rug. Stevie had pushed the armchairs off to the side and the entire area was covered in piles of folders. Papers and scraps were arranged in towers of varying heights and structural integrity. On the bit of parquet flooring between the rug and one of the sofas facing the windows were smaller, neater piles, each one marked by a small card that had one word on it written in black marker.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Stevie scanned the paper in her hand and then put it, neatly, in one of the labeled piles. “Organizing. Gary asked me to organize his papers. He’s been avoiding it for a while.”
“Several years, by the look of it.”
She would be in here for days, happily pushing paper around. The whole world was out there, waiting to be explored. She had a cushion on the floor to sit on. She wouldn’t see anything out the windows while she worked.
Stevie dropped the pages she was holding and rocked backward onto her haunches. Her mouth was open and she let out a huge sigh. “I forgot to make you coffee.”
“What?”
“That’s why you’re here. Because you’ve had no coffee.” She stood up and wiped her hands on her skirt.
“Sit down. No, not on the floor. On a chair. I am not here because I need coffee. I do need coffee, but that is not why I am here. I just finished a very depressing conversation with Randi.”
At the mention of Gary’s hook-up Stevie looked very morose. “Oh.”
“Don’t you start getting all weepy. She told me the most dismal story about Greg Hitchcock’s financial operation.” I gave Stevie the short version of what Randi had told me. “I’m not even certain I have enough of a connection between Hitchcock and Sabo. She did, however, give Greg Hitchcock a hell of a motive to kill Courtney.”
“You’re assuming Courtney knew everything Randi does.”
“I’m assuming Courtney brought me into Hitchcock’s office so I could ‘be nice’ to him. I’m nice to him, he’s happy, maybe she tells Sabo to back off. She certainly thought she had the upper hand.”
She closed her eyes and looked away for a moment. Then she took a large breath and let it out slowly before turning back. “If Hitchcock killed Courtney because of what she knew about his activities, then Randi would be in an even deeper spot of trouble. But she doesn’t seem very concerned about her own safety.”
I screamed in frustration and punched the cushion of the chair I was sitting on. “None of this helps me with Roger Sabo.”
“Leave him be, Drusilla. Stay away from him.”
“Sabo has already put me in a bind with...my friend in New York.” I slapped my hands together and stood up. “Speaking of whom. Let me get what he needs me to do out of the way and be done worrying about him. Tell me about Erica Rose.”
Nothing makes my sister happier than expounding on research. “Erica Rose’s father is named Chris McClanahan. He’s also her manager, and he has quite the checkered history.” She pulled up a couple of pages that were lying off to the side. “He also worked in the construction industry, in Simi Valley.” She pulled out one in particular. “And, in what I am hoping is a gigantic coincidence, he was acquainted with Mr. Greg Hitchcock.”
She laid the paper down in front of me. It was a newspaper picture of a line of middle-aged white men, in suits and ties, standing in front of a giant seal, with a headline below it. Except here Greg Hitchcock’s hair was mostly dark brown, with the beginnings of gray appearing. And he was younger, and thinner, and his jawline hadn’t filled out quite so much.
No matter how suspicious I was of coincidences, finding a story about Greg Hitchcock while looking for information about Chris McClanahan seemed to be an actual matter of random chance. It happened both of them worked in the construction industry, and at one point they’d known one another. Everywhere is a small town, when you get right down to it.
I flapped the paper up and down. “What is this?” I asked.
“Chamber of Commerce awards dinner, honoring construction industry excellence. This was fifteen years ago. I haven’t found any other ties between the two of them. A year after Mr. McClanahan went to prison—”
Prison? I held my hand up. “Whoa. What? I think you skipped something.”
“Oh, right, sorry. About a decade ago Mr. McClanahan was arrested and convicted of drugs trafficking. His workers smuggled in methamphetamine from Mexico and distributed it off construction sites. He served five years, released five years ago, on probation. He can’t work in any licensed industries.”
“Really? Then the music industry is an awesome fit. Not especially concerned with people’s legal histories. Or moral ones. Or—”
“His daughter is doing quite well for someone who’s just starting out.”
I couldn’t get over the coincidence of a man I was looking into for Roberto also knowing a man I was looking into for my own problems. Did Roberto somehow orchestrate this? “When did Hitchcock move to Los Angeles?”
“About eight years ago. Mr. McClanahan was already serving time.”
“Back in Simi Valley...did they compete for contracts, or—”
She shook her head. “Mr. McClanahan did residential construction, particularly these instant developments that spring up overnight. Mr. Hitchcock has always worked in commercial. From what I’ve been able to gather, there’s not a lot of overlap between those.”
There had to be some link. McClanahan had been arrested, I had gotten into trouble with the police... “Who arrested McClanahan?”
She glanced at one of the papers in the stack, although if she’d read it once, she knew the answer. So charming of Stevie to act like she needed to refresh her memory. She flashed the page at me. It showed a smiling young man in full uniform, posed shaking hands with his lieutenant. “Officer Broderick Tennyson. He got a commendation.”
I glanced at the paper, which showed a young uniformed cop. I didn’t recognize the name, so he probably wasn’t one of the cops I’d had the pleasure of meeting during my short time in Los Angeles, particularly the night Courtney died. And, as Stevie had said, he worked in Simi Valley. I wasn’t exactly sure where Simi Valley was, but it wasn’t Los Angeles.
“Okay, skip it. Chris McClanahan plays tough. He has a daughter who is probably supporting the family. He’s clearly comfortable with playing hardball.” I looked at my sister. “I’m okay with that.”
“Be careful.”
“Erica Rose and her father are no problem. I’ll call you after I’m done in Tarzana.”
She nodded.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RANDI’S COMMENTS ABOUT the financial counseling office had piqued my interest about what kind of place it was. Since I had an appointment in the San Fernando Valley later anyhow, I could hit both of the places on the agenda, and maybe take care of all the problems on my plate. Greg Hitchcock claimed to be big on helping people, and I needed help with Roger Sabo. In order to nudge him along the path of maximal aid, I needed to know everything there was about him. And it was strange that a man who clearly did so well in construction—Stevie’s research revealed he had a booming business that had weathered the recent economic downturn with few problems—would do such a half-assed job with his f
inancial counseling center. Sure, maybe he enjoyed chasing the secretaries around the desk once in a while, but there were easier ways to do that than setting up an entire office for it.
I parked at the strip mall in Panorama City and went into the gyros shop. It had a giant (if slightly discolored) window that looked out at Hitchcock Christian Financial Counseling. I bought a soda and sat at the counter to watch who went in and how they looked coming out.
The big glass front window of the financial counseling office had a curtain pulled over half of it, to prevent people from seeing inside. The logo and other words that been painted on the inside of the window had been seriously scratched up by people waiting on the inside, using their thumbnails or car keys to carve graffiti into the paint, or simply peel the paint off.
Even before someone got in the door of the financial counseling office, the place gave off a vibration that it was run-down and shabby, and you were too for going there. I tried to imagine the mindset of someone heading into this place to sort their finances. They had to be at a place in their life where assistance from this operation looked good, which meant things had to be bad.
One of the things that had baffled me when we moved to Los Angeles were these signs that seemed to be stapled to every telephone pole. Stevie told me most of them were about weight loss—people were selling herbal formulas that were supposed to help with weight loss as part of a multilevel marketing scheme. The sellers had to buy a whole bunch of this product and then sell it to other people. Except you didn’t start making money until you got more people to sell the product, and then you got a teeny little bit of every sale they made. Which led to even more of these signs going up on telephone poles.
The only people who made money were the ones running the herbal supplement company.
The people selling the supplements were the types of clients walking through this door, looking for a way out of their mess.
I sat there for an hour and four people went in, three of them Hispanic women. Two had long thick black hair and the third one had bleached her hair. It had come out red. Two of the women were pudgy and one was stick thin. One of the women had two kids with her, a baby strapped to her chest with a Baby Bjorn and a little boy barely able to walk on his short little legs. The man was young, wiry, wearing very baggy jeans and a white hoodie that was now some shade of tan. Not one of them had dressed up for their financial appointments, dressing in jeans or jean shorts or denim cutoffs.
Even with my relatively casual outfit, there was no way I could go in there without standing out like a sore thumb. My skin was so pale I made white people feel ethnic. If there was something illegal going on inside, when I walked in everyone was going to shut down faster than a glass factory during a riot.
Several people exited while I sat and watched. The man in the hoodie came out five minutes after he went in. A couple of women I hadn’t seen before left. A Caucasian man, with a mustache that screamed used car dealer, walked out. He was wearing a shirt and tie and stripped off his suit jacket as soon as he left the financial counseling services office. He headed straight into the gyros shop, where he checked me out openly.
I ignored him. Openly.
He took his sandwich and drink and walked over to my table. “Mind if I join you?” he said, in the process of sitting down. He had a Southern California accent. He’d been here a while, maybe his whole life.
I rated the likelihood that anyone was going to get together and talk about my accent. “Could I even stop you?” I asked, speaking pure Angeleno.
“What brings a pretty lady like you here?”
“Do you work at the financial place?” I asked.
His chewing slowed down, and then he swallowed and smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. My name’s Dan. What’s yours?”
“You work there? What do you do?”
“We help people who’ve run into financial difficulties. You know, overrunning your credit card or borrowing too much money. What’d you say your name was?”
“And you can really help?”
“We sure can. You want to come next door and talk about it?”
The woman with the bleached red hair left.
“Yeah, I got some problems with money I owe? My friend told me to talk to Mr. H if I ever ran into problems.”
“Who’s your friend?” Dan asked.
“Randi Narvaez? You know her?”
His eyes didn’t even widen. He’d never heard the name. Fame is so very fleeting. “Nope. But if she’s a friend of yours I’m sure she’s the best.”
“She’s real good friends with Mr. Hitchcock.”
“I didn’t get your name,” Dan said.
“Brittany,” I said.
“Why don’t we talk about where you are in this process, Brittany? You have some unsecured debts? Maybe some credit cards?”
“Credit cards, my car loan, this doctor who took out my wisdom teeth—” I yanked the side of one cheek back, like I was going to show him where the teeth had been cut out. “And now I need to get veneers, you know, to make my head shots better? For auditions? And when you don’t have the money...” I shrugged.
“Well, we can totally help you with that,” Dan said. “We have helped a lot of our clients reduce what they owe to just a fraction of the original amount.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a lot of money, obviously,” I said.
“We charge only a small percentage of the total amount you end up saving,” Dan assured me. He wrapped up the second half of his gyro wrap and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He still had sauce in his mustache. “Why don’t you come next door with me and we can run some numbers?”
He’d already told me two things about Hitchcock Financial and both things were clear indicators the entire operation was a scam. “Great!”
Dan held the door open for me at the gyros place and at the financial counseling office like we were on a date.
The interior of Hitchcock Christian Financial looked pretty much the way I expected it would: a lot of plastic and a lot of linoleum. The stale air in the waiting area smelled of sweat and spices and something sweet, like spilled soda. Everyone working behind the front desk was Caucasian, everyone sitting in the orange plastic chairs was Hispanic. Two of the women I’d seen, including the one with the two little kids, were still waiting. The one with the kids was talking to the woman next to her about Señor Hache. Two middle-aged men and one man in his early twenties. Everyone waiting had headphones on or around their necks.
Behind the front desk were eight cubicles, curtained on all sides with heavy gray drapes.
The receptionist was a woman in her sixties, her hair dyed slightly too dark for her skin tone, wearing a polyester scoop-neck blouse and jeans. She also wore a headset, had a fan on her desk, and was ignoring the woman who was trying to talk to her in halting English. The receptionist did a double-take when I walked in with Dan. Perhaps I didn’t look like their usual customer.
Dan pushed open the gate by the receptionist’s desk. “Hey, Linda, I’m going to talk to her right now. Let me get her started on some forms.”
Linda picked up a clipboard with a cracked ballpoint pen attached by a chain and handed it to Dan.
He held open the wooden gate for me. “Right through here.”
I followed him to the first curtained cubicle on the left. “Randi didn’t say I’d have to fill out any forms,” I said.
“Okay, so let’s just talk.”
“Is Mr. Hitchcock coming by?”
Dan smiled tightly. I was his, not Hitchcock’s. “No, he’s not coming in here today.”
“Randi said I had to talk to him.”
“Well, why don’t you just talk to me for a couple of minutes.”
We talked for five minutes. I whined a lot, he kept trying to get me to fill out the forms. Finally I burst into tears and ran out, calling him “mean.”
I hoped no one got a good look at my completely dry eyes.
Nevertheless, I went back to my car, which was bro
iling, and waited. I needed to talk to one of the women who were in there, and if I got lucky she’d be someone who’d visited more than once. I had the feeling the financial counseling office wasn’t just a way to skim a little money off a lot of desperate people.
The young woman with the two kids came out. The toddler, a little boy, was crying. The woman, who was twenty-two at the most, yanked him by the arm hard and pulled him along with her. I grabbed a handful of tissues out of the box in my car and ran to intercept them.
“Perdóname, señora, por favor,” I said. “Para su niño.”
My Spanish is Castilian and not Mexican or Guatemalan or any of the other dialects popular in Los Angeles. They’re practically different languages, and when you start lisping everything, you stand out like the stranger you are.
She was going to be suspicious of me. If I was right about the financial counseling office, she was right to be.
“May I talk to you?” I asked her.
“What about?”
“There’s a McDonald’s on the next block,” I said. “Can I buy the three of you some lunch?”
She shrugged and we walked over to the Golden Arches. I bought her and her son three burgers and a large fries, which cost all the money I had on me. The little boy looked at her for permission before digging in. She ruffled his hair and he started inhaling the food so fast I thought he might choke.
“Slow down,” I told him. “It’s not going anywhere.”
He kept his gaze on me, as though I might snatch it away at any moment. I tried smiling. It didn’t help.
“I wanted to ask you about the financial office place.”
Her walls went up hard. She glared at me and leaned back. “What about it?”
“Is that your first time there?”
She shook her head.
“Have they helped you?”
“Yeah, Mister H helped me.” Señor Hache. Mister H. Something about the way she said it told me it was the standard way they referred to him. She grunted a laugh and it was not a happy sound. “I didn’t want to come back, you know?” She curved her arm around the boy, who was still staring. “But this one had to go to the doctor’s and I need the money.”
Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) Page 14
