The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  As they rode the elevator to the fifth floor, Scheiber asked, “You mentioned that someone else had been looking for her. Did he identify himself?”

  “No, but offhand,” Latham said, “I’d bet he was a fed of some sort.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve been in the hotel business twenty-two years, Detective. If you stand at a front desk that long, you get to the point where you can spot certain types at a glance. Like cops. Married people stepping out on their spouses. Hookers—which is why I would have known Ms. Bolt wasn’t one, even if I hadn’t found out who her father was. You know what I mean. You must do the same thing in your line of work. This way,” she added, directing him to the left as the elevator door opened.

  “And this caller who might have been a fed…?”

  The assistant manager stopped at a door near the end of the hall, rapped twice, then slipped her pass card into the key slot. “Well, not FBI, for sure,” she said as she depressed the latch and pushed. “I’d say he looked more like—”

  Her words froze in midair and she gasped. Scheiber peered over her shoulder, his left hand preparing to shove her out of harm’s way, his right reaching instinctively toward the holster at his back.

  But Latham recovered quickly, and she merely shot him a grimace. “I’d describe the other man as looking exactly like this fellow here,” she said.

  Following her into the pastel-decorated suite, Scheiber saw a very solidly built, bald, middle-aged man standing before the open closet in the inner room, checking out the contents, which included a hanging garment bag and some dresses, from what Scheiber could see. The other man was casually attired, tieless in a sport coat over a black knit shirt. Even so, he looked like the type who might hear the phrase “Yes, sir” on a frequent basis. His smooth dome was certainly no trendy fashion statement. It was the kind of functional simplicity adopted by practitioners of certain hazardous professions with no margin of safety for distractions, like loose hair that flopped in their eyes or got snagged in tight spaces.

  When the man looked over toward them, his dark eyes had a single-minded intensity that most people would probably find pretty intimidating. The assistant manager of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, however, was undaunted.

  “Would you mind telling me what you think you’re doing?” she demanded, planting her hands on her hips. “And how you got in here?”

  The man closed the closet, unhurried, then turned to face them full-on, seeming neither worried nor embarrassed to have been caught red-handed. Nor did Scheiber think he’d make a run for it—although the thought did cross his mind that stopping him would be no simple matter if the big fellow decided to steamroller over them and stroll off.

  But finally, the other man deigned to reply. “I’m looking for Mariah Bolt.” His voice was deep and gravelly, like a reluctant cement mixer starting up.

  “And you thought you’d find her in the closet?” Latham asked dryly.

  He liked her a lot, Scheiber decided. She had spunk. But he stepped around her, deciding it was time to take charge of the situation himself. “Who are you?” he asked.

  The intruder’s focus shifted, and he arched one black eyebrow. “Who am I?” he repeated. “Who are you?”

  “Detective James Scheiber, Newport Beach P.D. Homicide.”

  “Homicide, huh?” The big man glanced around him. “No bodies here. Anyway, aren’t you a little outside your jurisdiction?”

  “A little,” Scheiber agreed. “And you would be…?”

  The big man hesitated—as if he was trying to decide who he was today. Not a good sign. “Frank Tucker, Central Intelligence Agency,” he said finally.

  The assistant manager turned to Scheiber with an I-told-you-so look. “See? Just what I was about to say.”

  “You’re good,” Scheiber agreed. That explained the hesitation, he supposed. “You’ve got some identification, I presume?”

  The man scowled and reached into his back hip pocket, withdrawing a laminated photo-ID card. It was the kind with a metal clip for attaching to lapels, worn full-time in certain high-security establishments. “You?” he asked.

  Scheiber pulled out the leather folder with his NBPD badge. They peered at each other’s credentials while the woman from the hotel stood by, arms crossed over her chest. “Now that we’ve all been formally introduced,” she said, “would somebody mind explaining what the hell is going on here? And you,” she added to Tucker, “I still want to know how you got in. I could have you arrested, you know.”

  “Not by him,” Tucker said, cocking his thumb at Scheiber. “He’s off his turf.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d wait while I call the LAPD?” she asked.

  “No, I’m about done here.”

  “Oh, good,” she crooned, “I’m so glad to hear it. How about you move along then?” She turned to Scheiber once more. “And you, Detective? Have you seen enough?”

  Scheiber did a quick survey of the place. In addition to the dresses he’d spotted in the closet, there was a flowered cosmetics bag in the bathroom and tissue paper strewn on the bed. A shopping bag from Saks Fifth Avenue sat on one of the curved, upholstered chairs. He decided to restrain himself from going through the drawers. Even if it hadn’t been out of his jurisdiction, as this Tucker character kept reminding him, he had no business searching a room without a warrant. At the moment, he felt the need to claim a little moral high ground here.

  He nodded to the assistant manager, and she extended one arm toward the door. “Then, gentlemen, if you please?” She glared at Tucker as he passed him into the hall. Riding the elevator back down to the lobby, she looked from one to the other. “Is there anything else either of you will be needing?”

  The two men glanced at each other. It occurred to Scheiber that he should leave a message for the Bolt woman to get in touch with him when she returned, but he didn’t want Tucker getting away before he’d had a chance to ask him a few questions. He could leave the message afterward. Tucker was watching him, obviously going through some mental calculations of his own. In the end, the two turned simultaneously to Latham and shook their heads.

  “Good. And I trust no one will be breaking into any more of my rooms tonight?” she added, glaring pointedly at Tucker. He nodded curtly as the elevator doors opened on the hotel’s round, marble-tiled rotunda. “Then if you gentleman will excuse me, the exit is that way.” One hand on her hip, she pointed across the lobby to the front door, standing guard until they walked through it.

  Outside on Wilshire Boulevard, under one of the hotel’s bright yellow, semicircular canopies, Tucker paused, waiting for Scheiber, then followed him a little way up the sidewalk toward Rodeo, out of earshot. The evening was warm and fragrant with the smell of the night jasmine dripping from the hotel’s window boxes, and the air crackled now and again with the sound of illicit firecrackers as the holiday weekend kicked off early. LAPD Patrols would spend half their time over the next couple of nights chasing down reports of kids with Mexican cherry bombs, Scheiber mused.

  “So, CIA, huh?” he said quietly, leaning against the hotel’s gray brick walls. A couple of elderly German tourists in matching plaid shorts stood at the corner, trying to explain to a passerby how to use their complicated-looking camcorder.

  “Guilty as charged,” Tucker said. He turned his back to the video camera, Scheiber noted, dropping casually into deep shadow as the couple took up a pose under the Rodeo Drive street sign and smiled for the agreeable stranger they’d dragooned into service. Obviously, the man’s instinct for camouflage was deeply ingrained.

  “You work out of Langley?” Scheiber asked him.

  “That’s right. What about you? What are you doing up here, so far off your turf?”

  “Not as far off as you are, but I’m here for the same reason. Looking for Mariah Bolt.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk to her about a possible homicide.”

  “Who’s the victim?”

  Scheiber fro
wned. “What is this, Twenty Questions? Look, let’s get one thing straight. This is not your field to control. I’m willing for the moment to overlook this little break-and-enter stunt you just pulled, instead of hauling your ass into the nearest LAPD division, like I should—”

  “Like you could.”

  “Don’t get into a pissing contest with me, Tucker. In the first place, I spent eighteen years on the LAPD, and I know this city like the back of my hand, not to mention every cop in it. No matter what the badge says, this is my turf. In the second place, I’ve been stuck in traffic nearly three hours. I’ve got a dead guy on my hands down in Newport, and it’s looking more and more like my Fourth of July with my family is about to be shot to hell. All in all, I’m in a really lousy mood. So what do you say we extend a little professional courtesy both ways, huh?”

  “Fine. Who’s the victim?” Tucker repeated.

  Scheiber sighed. “Guy by the name of Albert Jacob Korman, nickname Chap. Ever hear of him?”

  The stony face finally broke and revealed some kind of reaction. “Korman’s dead? How?”

  “He was found this morning on the bottom of his hot tub.”

  “Murdered,” Tucker said. It was a statement, not a question.

  “You say that like you know it for a fact,” Scheiber said, eyes narrowing. What did all this have to do with the frigging CIA?

  “Wasn’t he?” From the skeptical way he said it, there was little doubt he thought Korman had been murdered.

  “It wasn’t obvious from the body. We won’t know for sure until the autopsy. What do you know about him?”

  Tucker shrugged. “Never laid eyes on the man. I just know he was a literary agent.”

  “That’s right, and he represented Mariah Bolt’s father.” The other man nodded. Scheiber asked, “And the CIA? Why are they so interested in this business that you’d break into Ms. Bolt’s hotel room?”

  “I didn’t say the CIA was interested in her. I said I was looking for her. She’s a friend,” Tucker added quickly, just as Scheiber was getting ready to rip into him for yet another evasive answer. “I spoke to her this morning.”

  “A close friend?”

  “Yes.” The man’s monosyllabic answers said a lot more than the longer ones, Scheiber noted. He had a feeling that, however friendly Tucker and this Bolt woman were, maybe their relationship wasn’t as close as the big guy would have wished.

  “From what I hear, she seems to have a lot of friends,” he said.

  Sure enough, Tucker bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” And then something flickered across his face, the look gone before Scheiber could read it, and his expression went blank again. “Paul Chaney,” he said. “He’s staying with her.”

  Aha! Scheiber thought. So that was the high-profile friend the starstruck waiter had delivered breakfast to. “I gather he checked out this afternoon,” Scheiber said. “Ms. Bolt, meantime, apparently did a fair amount of coming and going last night. You know anything about that?”

  “I doubt it’s important. She’s working here.”

  That was the doorman’s theory, too, Scheiber recalled wryly, but somehow he didn’t think Tucker meant to suggest she was that kind of working girl. “What does she do?” he asked. When the other man didn’t answer, he groaned, “Oh, lordy. Don’t tell me she’s a spook, too?”

  “I can’t talk about that.”

  “Yeah, right. Why am I not surprised? Well, in that case, try this. What can you tell me about her father’s unpublished papers? Some journals and a novel, apparently?”

  “What about them?”

  “Where they are, for example? I gather Korman was supposed to be holding them, but if they’re in his house, I couldn’t find them.”

  Tucker frowned. “Could he have given them back to Mariah?”

  “She never got to see him before he died,” Scheiber said, relaying what he’d learned from the woman’s phone message and from Korman’s next-door neighbor. “She doesn’t even know he’s dead, for that matter. That’s one of the reasons I was trying to track her down. She mentioned someone named Urquhart when she called. My partner looked into it and found out there’s a Louis Urquhart who’s some kind of literary bigwig?”

  Tucker nodded. “He’s working on a biography of Mariah’s father.”

  “Is there any chance Korman would have given the papers to him? Maybe to study?”

  “Unlikely. But on the other hand,” Tucker added, “if they are missing—”

  “Those papers would have to be pretty valuable, I would think. Valuable enough to get Korman murdered?”

  Tucker shifted restlessly. “I’ve got places to go,” he said. Another non-reply.

  “Where?” When he didn’t answer, Scheiber guessed. “You’re planning to pay a call on this Urquhart character, aren’t you? Uh-uh, I don’t think so. Not without me, anyway.”

  Tucker said nothing, but eighteen years of working the streets had taught Scheiber to recognize the early warning signs of a situation quickly going south—the cornered drug dealer getting ready to bolt, the gangbanger who didn’t want to be frisked, the traffic stop that turned deadly. Tiny indications appeared, like the first flicker of muscle movement that precedes sudden action. Before the big man could actually move, Scheiber had already dropped back to steady his stance and simultaneously withdraw his gun from his waist holster, taking no chances. Tucker saw it and froze, his black eyes assessing and evidently calculating the odds. Scheiber flipped out his cell phone, too, and one-handedly hit the rapid dial button to his old division.

  “I’m connecting to the LAPD area watch commander,” he said. “You have mere seconds before they pick up, Tucker, so think carefully. You figure you can run and I won’t try to stop you? Think again.” His thumb flicked the safety off his nine millimeter. “And even if I miss, which is doubtful at this range, how far you think you can get in three minutes? Because that’s the squad car response time in this neighborhood. Average. This place—” he cocked the phone back at the hotel “—this place they’d come a lot faster.” He held up the cell phone, speaker toward Tucker as the first ring sounded.

  “Scheiber, look—”

  “No, you look. I still haven’t heard a single word of explanation why my dead guy down there in Newport should be presumed murdered, but you seem to think he was. That makes you a material witness from where I’m standing. What are you doing here, anyway? Is this some kind of rogue Company operation? You guys think you’re going to drop a murder down some black Ops hole where the light of day never shines? Well, think again, pardner. Not on my watch.”

  The line on the other end rang a second time.

  The big man studied him closely, and Scheiber had the sense his measure was being taken. He steeled himself, anticipating the possibility of a head-on tackle. Hating the idea, knowing it would be like being run over by a refrigerator. The fact that the guy probably had a few years on him was small consolation.

  “We’re both getting too old for this macho shit, Tucker. What do you say you drop the Company tough-guy routine and we just cooperate, huh?”

  As the phone on the other end of the connection rang again, Tucker seemed to make up his mind. “I’m not here in any official capacity,” he admitted.

  Scheiber broke the phone connection.

  “The fact is,” Tucker went on, “I’m so far off the agency clock you’d be doing them a favor by hauling me in. But if you do, Scheiber, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll never get to the bottom of what really happened to Korman. There’s people who’ll make sure of it. And the worst of it is, I’m not sure it’ll stop there.”

  “And you, out here looking for the Bolt woman? Is that against orders, too? Is she AWOL like you?”

  Tucker didn’t reply.

  Scheiber raised the phone once more, finger poised over the rapid dial button. “Last chance,” he said.

  “It’s personal,” Tucker muttered. Once again, Scheiber imagined a world of detail in those turgid respons
es.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “You tell me what you know. If I think it’s worthwhile—and if you can convince me you had nothing to do with Korman’s death—we’ll go together and pay a call on Professor Urquhart. Then we come back and wait for Ms. Bolt to return. I’m guessing she’ll want to know that her father’s agent has died, and I want to hear what she can tell me about him.” When Tucker didn’t immediately answer, Scheiber nodded at the cell phone. “The alternative is that I just haul your ass in. Did I mention, by the way, that the watch commander on duty tonight is a Lieutenant Al Green? He and I go back a long way. I’m godfather to his firstborn child, as a matter of fact. If I say you need to be booked, Green will arrest first, ask questions later. It’s now—” Scheiber glanced at his watch “—9:03 p.m. on the eve of a Fourth of July holiday. How long do you suppose you’ll have to sit in a jail cell before you get a bail hearing? What happens to your lady friend while you’re cooling your heels in there? And what do you suppose are the chances your Company friends won’t track you down in the meantime? In fact,” Scheiber added, “I’m about ready to call them myself and ask what the hell a loose cannon like you is doing out here, messing up my day. So, what’s it going to be?”

  “Fine,” Tucker grumbled. “We’ll do it your way. Let’s go see Urquhart.”

  In retrospect, it turned out to be one of the worst bargains he’d made in a while. But he’d stood in one place long enough, Tucker decided, and the best chance of moving forward with minimal fuss seemed to be to accept Scheiber’s deal.

  The Newport cop had already saved him some trouble by researching Urquhart’s home address. But the UCLA campus was closer, Scheiber said, so they decided to try their luck there first. En route, Tucker gave him an extremely abbreviated account of his relationship to Mariah and what he knew about Korman and Urquhart. He certainly wasn’t about to tell him about his trip to Moscow to meet the Navigator, nor the thirty-year old files that pointed to another set of murders that Korman’s death was probably designed to keep hidden. The question was, did Korman’s killer know someone else had stumbled onto the truth about the death of Benjamin Bolt?