Conflict of Interest

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  “She’s your cousin, right?”

  “Yes,” Dreiser explained, rubbing his eyes. “Let’s get back to the murder-for-hire cases. Another reason I’m not that familiar with this type of crime is most of the homicides in the Los Angeles area don’t involve professional killers. Where are you from?”

  “Everywhere,” Eli told him, tossing a handful of empty shells into the trash can.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Dreiser said. “I mean where did you grow up?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Forget it,” Dreiser said, holding up a palm. “I don’t care anyway.”

  “Okay,” Eli said, dusting his hands off, “a professional killer would spend weeks, even months watching and analyzing his victim’s activities before he got down to plotting the actual crime. We’re speculating this person would be a male, even though there are a number of competent female assassins.”

  “Where?”

  “In the phone book.” Eli said, chuckling. “Are you really an attorney or did you have too much to drink?”

  “Look,” Dreiser said defensively, “I know the law. Like I was trying to tell you earlier, most of what I know about professional killers comes from movies, newspapers, or old case law I studied in school. I’m trying to get a grasp on what you’re telling me. Cut me some slack.”

  “You got it,” Eli said, falling serious. “From my experience, a killer is considered a professional if they’ve killed more than once and haven’t been caught. They’re smart, see, devious. They’re also cautious, partly because they don’t want to end up in prison, and also because this is their trade. Even a killer takes pride in his work.”

  Eli shoved his empty coffee mug aside and picked up a bottle of water, squirting it into his mouth. “What I’ve been trying to do for a number of months now is to determine if this person exists. The first thing I had to do was to familiarize myself with the residents of Seacliff Point. I don’t want to end up shooting an innocent man. Get the picture?”

  Dreiser nodded, listening intently.

  “So,” Eli continued, “now that I’m familiar with all the residents, I’m looking for someone who doesn’t belong. A third of the houses in this community are unoccupied. The owners use them as second homes. This makes my job even more difficult.”

  “Are you implying that this alleged killer might be hiding out in one of the empty houses?”

  “That’s what I’d do,” Eli said, closing up the bag of peanuts. “Because the people who live at Seacliff Point are lulled into a false sense of security due to the gate and the cliffs. Most of the houses don’t even have burglar alarms. A professional wouldn’t have a problem disabling an alarm system anyway. An alarm is nothing more than an inconvenience.”

  “And you’ve been working for Joanne without pay for some time now?”

  “Like I said,” Eli told him, yawning, “she’s a special lady. She paid me all she could afford to pay. I wasn’t going to split and then find out someone had killed her. One of the reasons I’m willing to help find this Decker fellow is that I’d rather hang around until I’m certain she’s not in any danger.”

  Dreiser said, “But you’ll have to go onshore to search for the body.”

  “Nothing will happen during the day,” the detective told him. “Outside of weekends, Joanne is at the courthouse. She’s safe there, and her ex-husband would never have someone harm her when the children are awake. The crime would occur at night, and the location would more than likely be her driveway or somewhere close to her house. They’ll hit her when she’s getting out of her car.” He opened a drawer in the console and shoved the bag of peanuts inside. “There’s another element that has to be considered.”

  “What’s that?” Dreiser asked, knowing he should leave soon. Eli had been right about the weather. The rain had stopped and the boat was barely moving.

  “Kuhlman may have hired someone to snatch the kids again.”

  “But the guy’s in jail,” Dreiser said, wondering if Eli was getting carried away For all he knew, the man might be infatuated with Joanne. Dreiser glanced over his shoulder at all the surveillance equipment. Eli certainly fit the profile of a stalker, watching her every move. What did they really know about this man? “Why would he take the kids? Who would look after them?”

  Eli shrugged. “I have no idea,” he told him. “According to Joanne, the authorities in Los Angeles have frozen Kuhlman’s domestic bank accounts. But the majority of his money was deposited in foreign accounts under another man’s name. Whoever had access to those funds has probably claimed them as their own by now. That’s what happens with those offshore operations when you get yourself thrown in jail. Kuhlman could have money stashed everywhere, for all we know. That means he could hire someone to look after his children until he got out of prison, maybe ship them off to Europe where no one could find them.”

  “You’re describing a vicious person,” Dreiser said, holding on to the back of the chair. “I thought Kuhlman was just a computer genius.”

  “Genius or not,” Eli said, “the man’s royally pissed off. He negotiated a fifty-million-dollar deal, and unless there’s a problem with the criminal case that I’m not aware of, he’s headed to prison. And don’t forget, this man took the kids and kept them for almost two years. A person has to be coldhearted to deprive a mother of seeing her children, don’t you think? This bastard didn’t even drop her a postcard to let her know they were okay.”

  “I agree he might try to get his children back,” Dreiser said, a concerned look on his face. “I’m just not certain why he would go out of his way to harm Joanne.”

  “He blames her for his present predicament,” Eli continued. “He also has a hard-on for me because I’m the one who tracked him down. I doubt if he’d go as far as to pay someone to come after me. I wish he would, to tell you the truth. Then I could bust the sucker and move on.”

  “Speaking of moving on,” Dreiser said, glancing at his watch and noting that it was past two o’clock. “I have a court date in the morning.”

  Dreiser followed Eli up the stairs to the main deck. Watching as Eli began lowering the dinghy, he recalled their conversation in the car. “I thought you said you wouldn’t discuss Joanne’s situation without her consent.”

  “I got her consent,” Eli told him. “I called her while you were in the head. She must think highly of you, my man. Said I could tell you anything you wanted to know.”

  Dreiser inhaled the brisk sea air, his mind soaring with the possibilities of what might unfold. Trust was certainly a good starting point for a relationship. Over the past five years, he’d dated dozens of women. No one had managed to hold his attention for longer than a few weeks. It didn’t matter how young they were, how good-looking they were, or even what they did for a living. In most instances, he’d had to force himself to call them, just so he wouldn’t have to spend every evening alone. Joanne, however, had captured his attention from the first day he’d seen her in the courtroom. How many dinners had he paid for just to listen to some daffy woman rattle on about her weight, her job, her kids, her finances? With a simple kiss on the cheek, Joanne had excited him more than all the women he’d slept with since his divorce. He felt the stirring of something he hadn’t felt in years—anticipation.

  Dreiser saw the lights from other vessels flickering in the distance. With the moon out, he could see the swell of the waves. The need for instant gratification had almost removed the word expectation from the vocabulary. Women expected a man to make a move on them right away. People played the stock market, dreaming of becoming rich overnight. Everyone was in a hurry. No one wanted to wait. He remembered when he was a kid counting off the days until Christmas, too excited to sleep, sitting in front of the tree every day trying to imagine what was inside the brightly wrapped packages. As soon as Christmas came, regardless of how many presents he received, there was always the inevitable letdown.

  Dreiser’s thoughts returned to Joanne. It wasn’t unre
alistic to think that Eli might have romantic inclinations toward Joanne, especially considering the effect she had on him. He stared at the sinewy muscles in the detective’s arms, back, and legs. In addition to Eli’s physical strength, he had access to high-powered weapons and the skill to use them. He definitely wasn’t a man Arnold wanted to compete with, regardless of the circumstances.

  “The wind’s picking up,” Eli told him, handing Dreiser a life vest. “We’d better be on our way or you’re going to end up bunking with me tonight.”

  Dreiser suddenly realized they’d never reached an agreement. “We haven’t discussed your fees.”

  The dinghy splashed into the water. Eli dropped the ladder, then turned around and faced Dreiser. “Ten thousand as a retainer,” he told him, “and another ten when I find the body”

  “What if you don’t find the body?” Dreiser asked. “We’re not even certain he’s dead.”

  “If he’s dead,” Eli said, his voice laced with conviction, “I’ll find him. The only thing I can’t tell you is how long it will take me. The phone call to his mother could have been a ruse. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that it was valid. You can’t find a body if you don’t know where to look.”

  “When do you need the money?”

  “Tomorrow night will be all right,” the detective told him. ‘We’ll meet at nine in the parking lot of the Cliff House. Joanne told you it has to be cash, right?”

  Dreiser tensed. “How am I going to explain a ten-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal to my accountant? I could use a man with your kind of expertise in my law firm. Why don’t we make this legit?”

  “No can do,” Eli told him, shaking his head. “I thought I’d start searching for Decker first thing in the morning. It’s your call.”

  Dreiser fastened the straps on his life vest, then began descending the ladder to the dinghy. They were far from land, it was almost three o’clock in the morning, no witnesses around, and Eli was peering down at him waiting for an answer. At a time like this, Dreiser decided, a man would agree to just about anything. “I guess I’ll see you at the Cliff House tomorrow night.”

  Eli tilted his head back and laughed, a deep boisterous sound. “I thought you’d go along with the program,” he said. “Otherwise I was going to set you adrift and let you find your own way back to shore.”

  Dreiser’s jaw dropped. The wind had picked back up and the small boat was thrashing around, pulling against the tethers. He had to grip the bench beneath him to keep from falling overboard. He looked up and saw Eli holding two paddles in his hand. He looked for a motor but didn’t see one. “Good God, you were serious, weren’t you?”

  “Not really,” Eli said, dropping the paddles into the dinghy Once he was in the boat and rowing them toward the shoreline, he told Dreiser, “I spend a lot of time alone. A little amusement now and then keeps me from getting into trouble.”

  “Glad I could be of service,” Dreiser said, annoyed. “For ten grand, I’d wouldn’t exactly classify myself as entertainment. I’m your employer, even if our little arrangement isn’t entirely legal.”

  “Not until you pay me,” Eli said, intentionally splashing water into Arnold’s face with the paddle. “And it’s twenty thousand, remember. The ten is only a retainer.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Thursday, February 15, 2001, 7:15 A.M.

  WILLIE CRENSHAW was sprawled out on the rumpled sheets in his one-room apartment at 349 Lewis Street on the west side of Ventura. Fast-food containers and empty beer cans were strewn across the kitchen counter and the end tables.

  “Damn,” Willie said, the bright morning sunlight burning his eyes. He rolled over onto his stomach, burrowing his head into the pillow. He didn’t use cocaine or amphetamines, so it wasn’t drugs that were causing his bout of insomnia. Ian Decker was the problem. On the occasions when he did manage to fall asleep, Willie was plagued by nightmares. One night he dreamt he’d been buried alive. The man who lived above him threatened to call the police when he woke up screaming like a maniac.

  It had been almost a week since Willie had run into Gary Rubinsky at the Sunny Day car wash on Ventura Avenue the morning after Gary and his brother had killed Ian. Why did the stupid moron have to tell him what they’d done? He wasn’t in the confession business. He was already sweating out a warrant for dealing. The last thing he’d needed was to become involved in a murder. Besides, Willie abhorred anything even remotely violent. He should have never let his friends talk him into stealing the shipping container off the loading dock in Long Beach. Once Willie had seen the decoy guns inside, he’d freaked. Even your run-of-the-mill gun spelled trouble, and the guns they’d removed from the container were anything but ordinary. He’d wanted to wash his hands of it, but he was short on cash. Having the police on your tail made it difficult for a dealer to earn a living. To avoid arrest for as long as possible, Willie had restricted his sales to long-term customers like the Rubinskys.

  He picked up a half-empty can of Coke off of the nearest end table. Although the soda was flat, his throat was parched and he didn’t feel like going out for breakfast. He never hit the street before ten or eleven. A man could peddle heroin or crack around the clock. The only people looking to score marijuana this early in the morning were schoolkids, and Willie didn’t sell to minors.

  Reaching underneath the mattress, Willie pulled out a wrench, then walked over to the defunct radiator where he kept his product. Squatting on the floor, he used the wrench to remove the radiator cap. Setting the cap aside, he probed inside the radiator, his fingers clasping on to the knotted end of a rope. He gently pulled on the rope until an industrial-strength plastic bag popped out.

  Depositing the bag on the bed and dropping the wrench on the floor by the end table, Willie rummaged around in his bureau drawers. He removed a pair of Levi’s, a plain black T-shirt, and some clean underwear. He never wore clothes with emblems or any kind of distinctive design on them. Those were the kind of things people remembered. He got his hair cut every two weeks at a different barbershop, did his best to wear clean clothes, tried to switch vehicles whenever possible, and he didn’t have a single tattoo on his body. Staring at his image in the mirror, he decided he looked pretty good. He wasn’t buffed like a jock, nor would anyone mistake him for a pencil pusher His goal was to blend in, to pass as an average working-class guy.

  Before he got dressed, Willie went to the bathroom and relieved himself, then he brushed his teeth and dabbed at his underarms with a sliver of stick deodorant. He tossed the empty container of deodorant into the trash. He’d have to go to the market. He knew he should take better care of his room, throw out all the trash, and change the sheets on his bed. Right now, though, his surroundings didn’t matter.

  After he’d dressed, Willie stuffed all the dirty clothes piled on the chair into an army-style duffel bag. Then he picked up the sack of drugs off the bed, wanting to take a quick inventory. Dropping down in the brown leather chair, he counted twelve bags, each bag containing an ounce of marijuana. In addition to the twelve bags of pot, he also had four ounces of hash that he’d picked up from a dealer in Oxnard a few days before he’d seen Gary at the car wash. Although Gary had admitted he and his brother had been drinking and drugging for days, Gary had flashed a roll of bills and asked for something stronger than normal. Willie had suggested he try the hash.

  Gary had looked ragged and tense that morning, but Willie hadn’t noticed anything to make him think the man had committed a murder. The only thing that struck him as strange was that Gary was washing the blue Chrysler Cirrus the men had been driving since Ian’s Firebird had been impounded. The Rubinskys were pigs. When they’d had the Jeep Pioneer, the only time the car was anywhere close to clean was the day after a rainstorm, and that was only the exterior.

  Not only was Gary washing the Chrysler, he was doing a bang-up job of it, even scrubbing out the trunk and the backseat. Sunny Day was a self-service operation. Gary must have gone through ten bucks. For that kind of mon
ey, he could have gone to the Wind Tunnel down the street. Gary even bought a stack of those paper towels they sold out of a dispenser, making certain he went over every square inch of the car. At first, Gary lied and told him the car had to be clean because Tom was making a deal with a guy to buy it.

  Willie left the Jeep parked on the street near his apartment. Now that he thought about it, when Gary traded their car for that newfangled gun, Willie should have realized that the Rubinskys were out of control. Once again, Willie’d acted on impulse. He’d needed a new set of wheels and although the interior of the Jeep was trashed, the engine was in fairly good condition.

  Gary had wanted to go to the beach and sample the hash before he handed over the money. Willie didn’t mind, because whatever Gary sampled was added to the buy. Even when a customer didn’t ask to sample his goods, Willie always ended up getting a free smoke because he carried a rolling machine and papers. He was amazed at how many potheads didn’t even know how to roll a decent joint, and none of them ever had papers. Everyone was always impressed with the way the rolling machine turned out neat little joints that looked just like cigarettes. Willie got a kick out of the amount of attention he got from such an inexpensive device. Practically every head shop in town sold rolling machines, so it wasn’t as if he’d reinvented the wheel.

  Willie stared out over his one-room apartment, traveling back in time to his childhood. He remembered Ian giggling as he jumped through the sprinklers on a hot summer day, his skinny arms and legs burned to a crisp by the sun. A few moments later, his mind’s eye saw the two of them huddled together in Scottie Defoe’s treehouse, playing Monopoly on a Saturday afternoon. Ian had been a cute kid. He was always doing funny things—tripping over his shoelaces, using the wrong words, repeating what people said like a parrot. Now that Willie thought about it, Ian giggled more than he talked. If he wasn’t giggling, he was clapping. Years later, Willie figured out that Ian didn’t understand half of what people were talking about and that the giggling and clapping were his primary means of covering it up. Before they started school no one ridiculed him, though. They were the neighborhood gang. Ian’s clapping had given some of the parents headaches, but the fact that he laughed a lot didn’t bother anyone. His giggling was contagious, uplifting. The others boys would find themselves laughing over nothing, laughing so hard they’d fall on the ground.