Strange Bedfellows v5

by Paula L. Woods

  “Because Mr. Zuccari was the one who told me to leave!”

  As I headed north I called Thor to fill him in on what I’d learned. “Engalla had independently discovered the bogus invoice, three months after Christopher Deinhart had brought it to the attention of Mario Zuccari and his audit partner at Shuttleworth and Bezney. Nilo was working on an assignment with Accounts Payable to calculate how much extra cash the company could generate if it changed its payment policy from thirty days to something longer. That’s when he stumbled across a company called Sonrisa Safety and Security in the Philippines, which was being paid well into six figures each month, always within five days of submittal of its invoices. But, like Deinhart, Engalla couldn’t find a contract or IRS paperwork filed at the company’s headquarters in Irvine, nor could the divisional headquarters in Hong Kong produce any documentation.”

  Engalla had summarized his findings in a memo to Natalie Johnson, the manager of Accounts Payable, who’d promised to send it “upstairs for investigation.” But when Engalla rotated to Internal Audit as part of his internship, neither Howard Hebson, his supervisor, nor any of his staff had seen or heard of his memo. “Engalla didn’t know if the memo had been buried by Johnson or her boss, Felton Carruthers, in the controller’s office, so he came in early one morning to talk to Mario Zuccari and ran into Chuck instead.”

  “When was this?” Thor asked.

  “May of last year, two months before the shooting.”

  “That was three months after Deinhart confronted Mario about the same thing. What did Zuccari do?”

  “Told him he wanted him to try and get more information on the vendor, reporting exclusively to him. And gave him five thousand dollars for expenses.”

  “So Chuck Zuccari hadn’t heard any of this from Natalie Johnson or his son?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Using his parents’ business and family connections in the Philippines, Engalla had discovered that Sonrisa Safety & Security’s corporate headquarters was merely a mail drop some three miles from where CZ Toys had a plant in the Laguna province. “Remember our meeting with Gabriella and Mario? They left us to take a call from some guy in Laguna. I assumed they were talking about Laguna Beach, but they were probably talking to someone at the company’s plant in the Philippines.”

  “How’d Chuck Zuccari react to what the kid found?” Thor asked.

  “He was livid, told Engalla to keep digging. Gave him another ten thousand to pay for private investigators if he needed them.”

  “There’s something suspect about Zuccari giving an inexperienced kid that much money,” Thor said. “How’d he expect Engalla to find P.I.s in the Philippines?”

  “You remember Pete Collins, the surfer dude security chief? Zuccari had him source P.I. firms over there. Zuccari gave the names to Engalla, who contracted with them through an uncle and gave them their assignment. They sent their report to the uncle, who forwarded it to Nilo’s box at Pinoy Mailbox Services, and his aunt forwarded them to Nilo, who then shared the results with Zuccari. That way the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing.”

  “Engalla and Zuccari went to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks. Was keeping Collins out of the loop Engalla’s or Zuccari’s idea?”

  “Engalla says Zuccari, which I figure had to have been motivated by either Zuccari not wanting anyone in the company to know because he was behind the embezzlement, or because he had a good idea of who was.”

  “Too bad we can’t ask the poor bastard,” Thor murmured. “Why the hell didn’t Collins say anything about these Filipino P.I. firms in the initial investigation?”

  “Probably didn’t put two and two together. Collins may be pretty, but he’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the pack. Think about those goons he hired to watch over the Zuccaris—Leykis and Ybarra. Are they the type you’d hire to protect a corporate mover and shaker like Zuccari?”

  “Thanks for reminding me. I wanted to check those two out.” He was silent for a moment, writing something down. “This note that Zuccari was supposed to have sent Engalla—when did he receive it?”

  “A couple of weeks after he left the company, at his box in Stockton.”

  “But Zuccari was in a coma by that time.”

  “But Nilo didn’t know that. Someone must’ve got hold of Zuccari’s files, realized what he and the kid were up to, and decided to impersonate Zuccari and pull the kid off the trail.”

  “Did Engalla hold onto the alleged note from Zuccari?”

  “It’s in an envelope at the box in Stockton, along with the private investigator’s reports. Engalla put them there for safekeeping in case someone robbed his car or one of the motels where he’s been hiding out. I’m headed up to Stockton to get them from the aunt now. And I’ve got the cash that the CHP found in Nilo’s car, too, although the Chippie didn’t want to turn it loose.”

  “Who’s watching the kid?”

  “The Modesto police agreed to provide added protection for him until his folks can get him transferred to a hospital in the Bay Area.”

  “You think someone’s out to harm him?”

  “Maybe not, but the news down there widely reported him being hospitalized in Modesto, and there aren’t enough of them to provide him with any anonymity. Plus, there’ve been reporters milling around in the hospital lobby since Saturday. Keeping him in Modesto is just asking for trouble.”

  “Good thinking, Justice,” Thor agreed. “You gotta go with your gut on these things.”

  The genuine warmth in Thor’s voice made me smile for the first time in what seemed like days. “Thanks.”

  I then gave him an update on my conversation with Rashaan Muhammad and the meaning behind Aycox’s blue-eyed devil comment. Thor asked if I thought Rashaan Muhammad or Habiba Shareef should be considered as suspects.

  “Him no, but you’ve sensitized me about these wives. So I’d like to reinterview Mrs. Shareef, see if she corroborates Muhammad’s version of the facts, and see what else shakes loose.”

  “Take Truesdale with you. This Shareef woman may respond more positively to someone who knows about the Muslim community.”

  “I will.” I reached for my marble and reminded myself that Thor’s suggestion was a good call, not a sign that I’d messed up the first time I’d interviewed the victim’s widow. “But you should still move ahead on Mario Zuccari.”

  “Absolutely! In fact, given what you’ve learned from Engalla, I’m going back to the judge for a separate search warrant to cover the company’s accounts payable and internal auditing records as well as Natalie Johnson’s and Felton Carruther’s homes.”

  “It makes sense to cast the net as wide as possible. If other people in the company are involved, once they hear we hit Mario’s offices, they’re gonna start shredding documents right and left.”

  “This feels right to me, Justice.” I could hear Thor making a few notes. “I think we’re making some real progress here.”

  “At least we know the Black Muslim bill of goods Taft was selling was just that.”

  “I hate to admit it, but the Feds suckered us big-time on that one. Between the months you all wasted pursuing Taft’s bogus Muslim lead and the Nazi rumors, you could’ve had this case solved by now.”

  Given how gung-ho he’d been on the Muslim lead, it was an amazing admission of error on the part of one of the department’s legends. I wondered what it cost his pride to make it. “Has Taft surfaced yet?”

  “He’s gone underground. Hasn’t checked into the FBI’s office here in L.A. or up in San Francisco. Wunderlich prevailed on the L.A. bureau chief to send a car to his house, but other than his SUV missing, it doesn’t look like he’s been there either. And, what’s worse, the Bureau’s closed ranks. Agent in charge said they weren’t going to move against a sworn agent of the Bureau based on an interpersonal beef with local law enforcement.”

  “They talk like they think I’m sleeping with the man!”

  “It pissed me off,” Thor
admitted. “But I’m afraid that puts us no closer to knowing why Taft’s gone off the rails, or what his next move will be.”

  I didn’t know either, but I had a couple of ideas on how to find out.

  16

  The Four-One-One

  By Friday morning, the office was in high gear. Armed with the warrants, Thor and Perkins were wrangling with Wunderlich and a team of his colleagues from Justice and the FBI over the particulars of an early afternoon visit for our combined teams to search CZ Toys’ offices; the homes of Mario Zuccari, Natalie Johnson, and Felton Carruthers; and the offices of Shuttleworth & Bezney. Since coming home the night before, I’d been busy too, summarizing my notes from the interviews up north and the reports from Engalla’s P.I. on CZ Toys’ sham vendor so I could review my findings with the team prior to the raid.

  I had just finished taking Nilo’s cash to Latent Prints for processing and was logging into evidence the documents I’d obtained up north when I realized it was almost ten and I still hadn’t talked to Billie about Malik Shareef and Alma Zuccari. I pulled her away from the Feds and took her into MIA’s empty office to fill her in on my run-in with Special Agent Taft as well as my interest in approaching Shareef’s widow. “We need to tie off that loose end ASAP, but I was hoping you could review my interview with Muhammad on your own while I handle this Taft thing.”

  She took the interview summary. “Sure thing, Charlotte. Whatever it takes to nail that asshole.”

  After she closed the door behind her, I dialed Pearline Taylor. I’d hung out (and been hung over) with Pearline one wild weekend at a black police convention three years earlier in Las Vegas. I found out that in addition to loving card games and single-malt Scotch, we were both trailblazers of sorts, me the only black female in RHD, Pearline the only one in the FBI’s Sacramento office. She was such an asset to the FBI that in addition to her fieldwork she’d been charged with recruiting, but I wasn’t calling to put out any feelers about a job with the Feds.

  We chitchatted for a few minutes, catching up each other’s plans to attend the upcoming convention, before I got down to the reason for my call. “As few of us as there are, sure, I know Taft.” Pearline had put me on a speakerphone, her voice growing more distant as she closed the door. “He’s been with the Bureau—what?—maybe nineteen years. What else can I tell you?”

  “A lot more than that, I’m hoping.” Since I’d thought of calling her yesterday, I’d been wondering how I could get Pearline to give me the four-one-one on Taft without raising her suspicions. I’d decided a sister-to-sister approach would be best. “Taft and I’ve crossed paths on a case I’m working down here and . . . well . . . between you and me, Pearline, he said some things to me that were highly unprofessional.”

  Billie came into the office, a pink message slip in her hand. I motioned her to sit down, indicating I’d be just a few minutes.

  On the speakerphone, Pearline said, “Personal things?” her voice echoing sharply.

  “Which are too disgusting to repeat,” I said, checking with Billie to see if I was striking the right note. “But he seems nice enough otherwise, so I don’t want to bust the brother’s chops if he’s under some kind of job or family pressure or something. Lord knows we all have enough of that.”

  I heard a loud snort, then Pearline picked up the receiver. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am to hear this.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Shit, I’m not talking about you, Charlotte!” She was silent for a moment, then: “I’m out here busting my ass to recruit minority and female personnel to the Bureau, and Taft, and some of his frat brother cronies are sabotaging my efforts behind the scenes!”

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t thinking of joining the Bureau.”

  Billie rolled her eyes and lifted her feet off the floor as if to say, the shit’s gettin’ deep in here.

  “That’s not it. You know how it is when you’re a minority. We’re always being used as examples, and if it’s a bad one, that works for some of these prejudiced white people just fine. And, unfortunately, Paul Taft’s one of these dangerous brothers who thinks that just because he’s wearing the badge, he’s above the law.”

  “You’ve got that right,” I said fervently.

  She cursed again. “This has got to remain strictly confidential, okay?”

  “Ditto for what I told you,” I said, giving Billie a wink.

  “Of course. All I know is, last fall Taft was scheduled to help me on regional recruiting visits at Berkeley, Stanford, and UC Davis, but they had to send a substitute because he got bounced out of the San Francisco office, allegedly for trying to play grabass with a civilian employee.”

  “Girl, no!”

  “Way I heard it, he gave this female a ride home in his government-issued car and tried to put the moves on her a few blocks from her house. Her husband happened to see them as he was jogging by with their dog and knocked out four of his teeth with a five-iron!”

  Taft’s artificially white smile now made sense. “That must have been messy.”

  “It was, especially for the husband, because the Oakland PD had rolled up and arrested him for aggravated assault. Taft tried to play it off as consensual until the female started making noises about telling what she knew if Taft pressed charges, and suddenly the whole thing went away.”

  “What she knew about what?”

  “That I never heard. But the fallout set affirmative action in the San Francisco office back ten years. The agent in charge of the office had to transfer Taft out of San Francisco, and his running buddy over in the DEA, Verdelle, got demoted for cutting the woman’s tires so Taft could get her alone.”

  I felt my skin tingle. “Did you say Verdelle?”

  “You working with Agent Owens, too?”

  “I think I might have met him,” I said carefully, “but I’m not sure if Owens was the name he gave me. Is he a medium-complected brother with acne scars on his cheeks? Real square-looking?”

  “That’s Verdelle.”

  I scribbled a note to Billie: Taft’s been playing us. His Nation of Islam informant’s a DEA agent.

  “What he was doing abetting Taft in assaulting that young female I will never know,” Pearline was saying. “But those two go way back—worked the Birmingham and Mobile field offices when there weren’t too many of us in the South, so I guess Owens was caught between a rock and a hard place.”

  My hand had grown so sweaty I almost dropped the phone. Eddie Aycox’s crooked vending machine business was in Mobile, Alabama. Taft and Verdelle Owens aka Shabazz had probably worked that case together, and then trailed Aycox to the West Coast, in search of his hidden assets. But the way they were approaching it—using Malik Shareef’s murder as a smoke screen to trick us into delivering up Aycox—suggested that they weren’t exactly on the up-and-up. And I wasn’t having it.

  “You need me to drop a dime on Taft from up here?” Pearline asked. “I know the agent in charge down in L.A. He’s a good guy.”

  Not so good that he had taken my complaint seriously when Thor had presented it to him the day before. “No, that’s okay. I can handle it from my end.”

  I never had a good feeling about that guy,” Billie said after I told her what I now suspected about Paul Taft.

  “He and his buddy Verdelle are up to something. I’ve just got to make sure Perris isn’t caught up in this somehow.”

  “Your brother?” Billie said, her brow furrowed. “How?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s connected to Taft—I’m almost sure of it. I was going to wait to confront him in person, but now I think I’d better call him, give him a heads-up.”

  “Speaking of calls,” Billie said, “I almost forgot.” She handed me the message slip. “This came in while you were on the phone.”

  It was from my godfather, Chief Youngblood, asking me to call him back ASAP. “Did he say what it was about?”

  “Something about some documents he requested. He
didn’t sound too happy, either.”

  Billie left me in Stobaugh’s office while I tried to decide who to call first. Uncle Henry had obviously found out I’d forged his signature on that request for the PDID files on the Black Freedom Militia, so I knew I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I dialed Perris’s office instead, but his receptionist said he was tied up in a deposition in Century City, so I left a message at his cell phone number telling him about my encounter with Paul Taft and my concern for him. “I don’t know what Taft has to do with you taking Keith’s files, or maybe they’re not related, but just watch your back and call me as soon as you can, okay?”

  Back in the bullpen, Billie was talking to Thor about how we should approach Habiba Shareef. “I say we bring her in,” she argued.

  I disagreed. “I don’t want her thinking she’s a suspect and turning up with a lawyer.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, she is a suspect,” Billie countered. “Based on my reading of Muhammad’s statement, Mrs. Shareef could have contracted to have her husband killed because of the affair.”

  “We don’t know that for a fact,” I reminded her.

  Billie flipped to the last page of Muhammad’s statement. “‘If that baby comes out black, you die,’ sounds like Mrs. Shareef did!”

  Although I’d wondered myself if Habiba Shareef had had her husband murdered out of anger at an alleged affair, I wasn’t completely sold on Billie’s interpretation. “That could just be a figure of speech.”

  “It was,” Billie said as she craned her neck. “Until her husband turned up dead.”

  “It may be a long shot, Justice,” Thor conceded, “but something made Collins hire those two felons as muscle.”

  “You checked them out?”

  “Leykis did two stretches for possession with intent to sell and aggravated assault, while his little sidekick, Ybarra, has some convictions from when he rolled with one of those Santa Ana gangs that would curl your hair. For Collins to turn to guys like them must mean they’ve got some serious concerns for the Zuccaris’ safety.”