Bloodthirsty

by Marshall Karp

  “Happy to help out, Robyn,” Terry said. “Did you pick up some script revisions for Damian this morning?”

  Her right hand instinctively reached over and touched a box on the front seat. The outside said HammerMill Paper. 500 Sheets.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s why I was driving so fast. Damian needs this.”

  “Open it for me,” Terry said.

  “I don’t think Damian would want me to—”

  “Robyn, you’re in a little bit of trouble right now,” Terry said. “One of us is going to open that box. If you do it, we can say you were cooperative.”

  “I thought Damian sent you to help me get out of a speeding ticket.”

  “I promise I will make your speeding ticket go away. Open the box.”

  The sides of the box were taped shut. “Do you have a knife?” she said.

  It’s not good police work to give a suspect a knife, especially when your boss is watching, so Terry politely said no. “Use your nails.”

  She split the tape on all four sides and lifted the lid. Blank white paper. Terry removed the top ten pages. All blank.

  “Maybe it’s a script for a silent film,” he said.

  He dug in and pulled out another hundred pages. And there, beneath the pure white paper, were plastic bags filled with pure white powder. Lots of it.

  Whatever bravado Robyn had left disintegrated in an instant. “I didn’t know. I swear to God I didn’t know.”

  “I’m betting this isn’t prop cocaine,” Terry said.

  He got a narcotics field-test kit from our car, and in less than five minutes there was no question. “Step out of the car and put your hands on the roof,” Terry said.

  One of the female officers patted her down.

  “This is so humiliating,” Robyn said. “Do I look like the kind of person who would be carrying a gun?”

  “You don’t look like the kind of person who’d be carrying large quantities of nose candy,” Terry answered. “But you know what they say in Hollywood—looks can be deceiving.”

  He cuffed her, then turned and gave me his best Jack Lord imitation. “Book her, Danno.”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” I began.

  Robyn’s eyes were burning with anger and wet with fear at the same time. “This is so not fair,” she said. “I’m a lowly messenger making a lousy $450 a week.”

  Kilcullen couldn’t resist jumping in. He’s got six kids of his own, but he’s always up for lecturing someone else’s. “So you’re a low-paid peon,” he said. “That’s the profile of a drug mule. Now before you dig yourself an even deeper hole, don’t say anything until the man gets to the part about anything you say can and will be held against you.”

  She shut up and let me finish the Miranda. “Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?”

  “I graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. Of course I understand.”

  “My name is Detective Mike Lomax. With these rights in mind, are you willing to answer some questions?”

  “No,” she said. “I want my lawyer.”

  The L-word. I don’t think any of us expected the kid to lawyer up so fast.

  “Do you want the court to appoint an attorney for you?” I said.

  “No, my mother is a lawyer.”

  “Let me guess,” Terry said looking down at Robyn’s license. “She handles real estate closings for the First National Bank of Upper Saddle River.”

  “She’s an assistant prosecutor for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office,” Robyn said. “She puts scumbags in jail; she doesn’t raise them.”

  “Officer, help the young lady into our car,” I said.

  “Uncooperative little shit,” Kilcullen said, once Robyn was out of earshot. “What kind of a prosecutor raises her kids to talk to cops like that?”

  “She’s angry, she’s embarrassed, and she thinks she’s innocent,” I said.

  “Well, she thinks wrong,” Terry said. “She’s in possession of four or five thousand bucks worth of blow. And don’t tell me she had no idea what she was delivering. She was doing what she had to do to get ahead in The Biz, and she got caught. That’s jail time.”

  “You are really pissed at this girl,” I said. “Which one of your daughters does she remind you of?”

  “Up yours, Dr. Phil,” Terry said.

  “Looks like I hit a hot button,” I said.

  “Knock it off, ladies,” Kilcullen said. “Barry Gerber was yanked out of his car Sunday morning. By Monday they had sucked every ounce of blood out of his body. Now we’ve got another abduction. You better pump this girl fast, before the people who took Damian Hedge pump him.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  We called Anna DeRoy and told her to meet us at the station. I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers and Anna is the smartest I’ve ever had on my side.

  Terry disagrees. “She graduated at the top of her class from Columbia Law School. She could be a partner in a big Wall Street firm. How smart can she be if she’s a deputy DA doing drug busts for the county?”

  Anna has dark hair, dark eyes and is disarmingly pretty. She doesn’t look like a killer lawyer, so people who go up against her for the first time totally underestimate her.

  Robyn was no exception. She checked her out, and I could see the self-satisfied smirk that said, My mom can kick your ass around the courthouse, lady.

  “Robyn, are you sure you want to call your mother?” Anna asked once the four of us were in the interview room.

  “Absolutely,” Robyn said.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jill Higgins.”

  “Your last name is Tate.”

  “So was hers until she got a better offer. Now she’s Jill Leslie Weissman Tate Higgins.” Robyn paused, then added a bitchy “Esquire.”

  I dialed the phone and put it on speaker.

  “You get to listen in on my call?” Robyn said.

  Anna smiled. “Absolutely.”

  Somewhere in Bergen County, New Jersey, a woman was about to have her day ruined. Mom answered. “Jill Higgins.”

  Robyn leaned in close to the speaker. “Hello, Mom. I’m in jail. I was arrested. I’m on a speakerphone, and the cops are listening in.”

  Higgins didn’t stop to ask any mother-daughter questions. She was all lawyer. “What are the charges?”

  “I went to pick up a package for Damian and I got caught speeding. The cops looked in the package and it had some cocaine in it. I swear I didn’t know. I need you to come and get me out of jail.”

  “Dammit, Robyn,” Higgins said. “I can’t. Even if I could practice in California, a sworn prosecutor can’t serve as a defense attorney in a private case. Not even for her own daughter.”

  “They never told me that,” Robyn said. The smirk was history.

  “Let me talk to the arresting officer.”

  “Mrs. Higgins,” I said. “My name is Detective Mike Lomax. I’m here with my partner, Detective Biggs, and our deputy district attorney, Anna DeRoy. Your daughter was in possession of four ounces of cocaine.”

  “You mean four grams, don’t you, Detective?”

  “No, ma’am. I mean four ounces.”

  We could hear Higgins breathe in sharply, then let out a long slow exhale. “First of all, since when can you search a vehicle on a speeding ticket? Second, even if the search were legal, she’s obviously an unwitting drug mule.”

  “This is the prosecutor,” Anna said. “She may or may not be unwitting, but she is definitely uncooperative. We need to ask her questions to help us in our investigation. Damian Hedge was abducted a few hours ago.”

  “Oh my God.” It was Robyn. “How did—”

  “Keep quiet,” Anna said. “You’ll get your turn.”

  “Damian Hedge was abducted?” Higgins said.

  “Yes, and unwitting or not, Robyn has vital information about the people involved in this drug deal.”

  “This is unreal,” Higgins said. “Her father and I trie
d to convince her to go to law school, but she, but she…” Higgins was stammering. Motherhood had trumped lawyering.

  Anna took charge. “Mrs. Higgins, Damian Hedge is at great risk, and time is precious. If you can convince your daughter to cooperate I can kick the charges.”

  “Robyn, are you listening?” Mom said. “Do I need to convince you to cooperate?”

  Robyn whimpered out a meek ‘no.’

  “She needs an attorney present,” Mom said.

  “Do you know someone in LA who can represent her?” Anna asked.

  “No, but I will in five minutes. And dammit, Robyn, you better do whatever your lawyer tells you.”

  “I will.”

  “And do you want to know what I’m getting you after I get you a lawyer? A plane ticket. You’re coming home to have a long talk with me and your father. Maybe some good can come of this, and you can get this show business bug out of your system and get on with your life.”

  Robyn didn’t answer. She was crying.

  Another starstruck kid from New Jersey gets chewed up and spit out. Hooray for Hollywood.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Anna, Terry, and I went upstairs for coffee and a vending machine lunch

  “I got an old joke,” Terry said. “Want to hear it?”

  “I’ve heard them all,” I said. “Spare me.”

  “I was talking to Anna.”

  “Go for it,” she said.

  “How come California has the most lawyers and New Jersey has the most toxic-waste dumps?”

  Anna shrugged.

  “Jersey had first choice.”

  She laughed. “We do have a shitload of lawyers. I once dated an agent from William Morris. His secretary had passed the bar exam, then she spent the next two years answering phones and making lunch reservations until they promoted her to junior agent. All Robyn’s mother has to do to find an LA lawyer in a big hurry is pick up the yellow pages.”

  As it turned out, Jill Leslie Weissman Tate Higgins was not the type to shop for a lawyer in the phone book. Within twenty minutes she had retained one of the most powerful attorneys in the state.

  “I can’t believe it,” Anna said. “I’m squaring off against Rella.”

  There are a handful of people who are on a first-name basis with the public. Oprah, Angelina, and Hillary come to mind. And, if you move in legal circles in California, Rella.

  Rella Shwartz started out as an LA prosecutor. She was so successful that at one point the Democrats wanted her to run for district attorney. She turned them down with two words: “Power corrupts.”

  Then, about thirty years ago, she went over to the dark side and became a defense attorney. It’s been said that if you strangle your grandmother at high noon in Macy’s window, you can probably walk if you can get Rella to defend you.

  “Talk about overkill,” Anna said. “It’s like having Springsteen doing a supermarket opening.”

  Rella showed up at 1:15. She was five-feet-nothing, somewhere north of seventy-five years old, and entered the room like she had downed a couple of cans of Red Bull for lunch.

  She was smartly dressed in a tailored gray suit and had a slim black leather attaché case, which was being carried by a not-so-slim black man. He too had on a gray suit, only he was wearing a skintight black silk tee underneath. Rella introduced him as “my legal assistant, De-John.”

  “What does he assist you with?” Terry said.

  Rella smiled. “Troublemakers. He’s a graduate of Muscle Beach Law School. And no, Detective, he’s not carrying a weapon.”

  “Can’t imagine he’d need one,” Terry said.

  Rella asked for ten minutes alone with Robyn. She only needed five. Then she finalized the deal with Anna, and we sat down at the table. De-John waited outside the door.

  “Okay, Robyn, tell us about the cocaine we found in your car,” I said. “All the details. Who, what, where, how, everything.”

  “The whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Rella said to Robyn. “And no bad language. Go ahead.”

  “On Monday, Damian told me to contact this guy Carlos and pick up script revisions. I called him, but he said he needed two more days.”

  “Can you give us his phone number?” I said.

  “It’s programmed into my cell, but you took that.”

  “We’ll get it later. Keep going.”

  “Yesterday I arranged with Carlos to meet him at the McDonald’s on Whittier Boulevard in East LA at eight o’clock this morning.”

  “Did you think it was strange to pick up script revisions at a fast food restaurant?” I said.

  “I’m a gofer. Actually, I’m a slave. I work for Damian Hedge and whatever he asks me to do, I do it. Believe me, with Damian nothing is strange. I’ve gone to much weirder places and dealt with much weirder people.”

  “Did you suspect there were drugs in that box?”

  “Don’t answer that,” Rella said. “Detective, this is an innocent young woman with an extremely demanding employer, in an utterly bizarre business, in a highly unconventional city. She is at the lowest rung of the food chain and cannot be expected to analyze every request that is made of her. The box she picked up could have contained Cuban cigars, stem cells, or two cheeseburgers and an order of fries. Her assignment was to pick up and deliver, not to ask questions.”

  “So she was only following orders,” I said.

  “Legitimate, forthright, seemingly innocuous orders, Detective. Her mother is an officer of the court, and I can assure you that if Damian had asked Robyn to steal a pack of Juicy Fruit from a 7-Eleven, she would have refused. But picking up a script in a restaurant from a man she believed to be an eccentric writer is perfectly normal for the totally abnormal environment she works in.”

  “We’re not trying to incriminate your client, Counselor,” Anna said. “But it might help if we knew her frame of mind.”

  “Her frame of mind was that of a young woman hoping to make her employer happy, so she could get ahead in a difficult business. Next question.”

  “Robyn, had you ever picked up packages from Carlos before?”

  “I picked up script revisions from Carlos four or five times.”

  “How often?”

  “Maybe once a month.”

  “And did you pay him?”

  “Don’t answer,” Rella said. “No payment was involved. Try again, Detective.”

  “Did Damian ever give you anything to give Carlos in exchange for the script revisions?”

  Robyn looked at Rella, who nodded. “I always gave Carlos an envelope with script notes from Damian.”

  “So Damian was giving Carlos script notes before you even brought back Carlos’s script revisions?”

  “I asked Damian that once. He said they were notes for the next project.”

  “Does Carlos have a last name?”

  “Probably, but I never heard it.” She paused. “But he does have a nickname. I’ve heard people call him Carjack.”

  “Carjack?” I said. “As in to force someone out of a car at gunpoint? So do you think that in addition to being a drug dealer this Carlos is a carjacker?”

  “Stop,” Rella said. “This is exactly why the Supreme Court decided that a person has the right to have an attorney present during any questioning. My client doesn’t think Carlos is either a drug dealer or a carjacker. She was told he’s a screenwriter, and that is all she thinks.”

  “Robyn, do you know why they call him Carjack?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Did you ever hear anything about him being involved in a carjacking?”

  “No. When I was little my father used to call me Robin Hood, but that didn’t mean I stole from the rich and gave to the poor.”

  That got a smile from Rella. “Detective, I think you’ve pushed this carjack business far enough. Move on to something more productive.”

  “Can you describe Carlos to us?”

  “Hispanic. About forty years old. Short, like maybe five-foot-seven
. Dark hair, a mustache, and pretty decent-looking, but not great. Just kind of Spanish.”

  “Any distinguishing marks or tattoos?”

  “One tat that I could see on his right wrist. A gun with smoke coming out of the barrel and then at the bottom there were red letters that said RIP.”

  “Did you get the sense that Carlos might have been mad at Damian?”

  “No. He was always sort of pleasant. He asked me how I liked my job, what I wanted to do in show business, stuff like that. And very polite. He always walked me out to my car and told me to lock the doors, because it’s not the best neighborhood. Then he’d watch me drive off.”

  “And you would always take the script revisions directly to Damian?”

  “Always. He gave me specific instructions never to give them to anyone else. That’s why I was upset when Detective Biggs made me open the package.”

  “He asked you to open it, Robyn,” Anna said. “Nobody made you.”

  “At this point, Ms. DeRoy, it’s academic,” Rella said. “This young lady is walking out of here as soon as we’re done, her records will be sealed, and the subject of Detective Biggs’s blatantly illegal search and seizure will never have to embarrass the department in court.”

  “And don’t think I’m not grateful for that, ma’am,” Terry said. “It’s a terrible habit I have, but I hear there’s this twelve-step program, Blatantly Illegal Searchers and Seizers Anonymous, that might be able to help me recover.”

  “Did you ever pick up any packages of any kind for Barry Gerber?” I said.

  “No. I never met him, but I knew Damian didn’t like him.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Everybody knows that. It was in the papers.”

  The interview lasted another twenty minutes. The truth was none of us really gave a shit whether Robyn understood what she was actually doing at a McDonald’s at eight in the morning. There was a thriving drug business in LA, and Damian Hedge was a frequent buyer. The fact that he got abducted at the same time one of his drug deals was going down might or might not have been relevant.

  Rella stood up. “She’s a little fish, Detective. Can you throw her back now so I can call her mother and turn the meter off?”

  “We need her to look at some mug shots to see if she can identify Carlos for us,” I said.