“Just casual meetings to keep her up to date is all. Coffee, lunch, nothing more.”
“Come on, you can tell me. You’re hot for her aren’t you?”
“We broke up two years ago. It’s history.” I continued leafing through the file, hoping this part of the conversation would end.
“You are no fun at all. I’d tell you if I had a new boyfriend.”
“She’s not a girlfriend,” I said. “And I thought you said the other day that you found Mr. Right?”
“I thought so, but overnight he turned into Mr. Extremely Wrong.”
“Sorry.”
Rios appeared to have made his money buying and selling businesses. He currently owned, in full or as the majority investor, thirty different businesses, everything from a small chain of liquor stores to a factory that manufactured PVC pipe, fittings and valves. The businesses were all over the country, though most operated in California, primarily Northern California. The profits from these ventures he apparently invested with Stroud, to the tune of $400 million.
“This guy must be brilliant,” I said. “He’s been out of business school a little over four years and he’s made almost a half billion dollars. Must be some kind of record. I’m surprised there hasn’t been much publicity about him.”
“Some guys like to keep a low profile.”
“True.” I closed the file and stacked it on top of the other two. “Do you think your guy can do a little bit more research on the Tylers, especially the pysch thing and the florist business? And while he’s at it could he get more background on Rios and look into Burke’s stripper girlfriend?”
“Sure. Cost you another couple hundred bucks or so.”
“Fine,” I said. “It’s worth it if only to cross them off the list.”
I got up from the bar and retrieved a couple of coffee mugs. I poured us two cups of black coffee, which I set on the bar. Rubia poured a generous amount of half and half into her mug and followed that with a four-count pour of sugar. I kept mine black.
“I tried getting into Ziebell’s laptop this morning,” I said. “It’s password protected so I couldn’t even get to first base.”
“I know somebody who knows a guy can crack any computer on earth,” Rubia said. “You want me to call him?”
“That would be great. Is this guy a computer engineer?”
“Yeah, that’s it, computer engineer.” She laughed. “I’ll call my friend now to see if this guy can meet us over at my place later today.”
“The sooner the better. I think Trujillo is going to come down on me any minute now. It won’t look good if he finds me with that laptop.”
“I asked around about Trujillo for you,” she said. “He’s a bad hombre. Got a reputation for closing cases fast. Leads the department. My guy said he takes each case personally. You don’t want to mess with a guy like that.”
“Tell me about it.”
twenty-four
Rubia’s non-profit foundation, It’s My Life, resided in the city of West Sacramento, across the river from Sacramento. Long the poor stepchild to Sacramento with its state capitol, larger population, better restaurants and nightlife, West Sacramento had undergone a revitalization starting when it built the baseball stadium for the Triple-A River Cats and then developed the land adjacent to the Sacramento River with upscale condos, business parks, restaurants and shops.
It’s My Life, or IML as it was commonly called, could not afford the rent in this new, tony part of town. Rubia settled for a former auto repair service station in a less-than enviable part of town where her neighbors consisted of a Vietnamese nail salon, a Mexican Mercado, a Hmong hubcap and tire reseller, a Korean massage parlor, and an American Goodwill Industries store. The businesses on either side of the IML office were long shuttered, weeds sprouting through cracks in their parking lot.
Rubia and I pulled into the small parking lot fronting the IML office and saw a kid no more than fourteen sitting on the step by the front door.
“Que pasa?” Rubia said to the boy after we parked and approached the entrance.
“Nada,” he replied, remaining seated, his eyes cast to the ground.
“Why aren’t you in school?” Rubia’s voice was soft, consoling, not accusatory.
The boy did not answer. He did not look up from the ground.
“Is there a problem?”
Again the boy did not answer. Rubia squatted down and gently slid her hand under the the boy’s arm to stand him up. The kid stood maybe five feet tall and couldn’t have been much more than a hundred pounds. We went inside the office, where four desks were crammed together along with a battered couch and an easy chair smudged with grease.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said.
“My Feng Shui consultant is on vacation,” she said. She sat the boy down on the couch and sat beside him, putting her arm around his shoulders.
I could see now that the boy had been crying. I went to the desk as far from the couch as possible to give them some space.
“Carlos, tell me what’s wrong,” Rubia said.
“They said if I go to school they will beat me up,” Carlos said. “And if I don’t join their gang then they will burn down our house when we are sleeping inside.”
“Which gang is this?”
“The Willow Creek Mob. But they can’t know I came here. It would be bad.” Tears started to stream down the boy’s face.
“Why have they picked you?” Rubia said.
“They live in a house one block from mine. About ten of them. And there are others in the gang that don’t live there.”
“I know the Willow Creek Mob,” she said. “They have maybe thirty members. All punks. Do you know anyone who’s in the gang?”
The boy nodded.
“Who?”
“Kid used to be my best friend in elementary school. Antonio. He used to be nice to me, but in middle school he changed.”
“When he hooked up with the Willow Creek Mob?”
Again the boy nodded.
“I’m not surprised. They make their money selling marijuana. They sell meth, too. Make it in that house of theirs. Most of them are stoned all the time. Buncha zombies.”
“Antonio said he is supposed to recruit new members or he’ll be in trouble. So he and two other guys have been after me for the last two weeks. I’m scared.”
“What’s Antonio’s last name.”
“Rodriguez, but please don’t tell him I talked to you.”
“I won’t. Does he live at home or in the gang’s house.”
“Home.”
“I’ll take care of it and it won’t get back to you,” Rubia said. “I promise. Now you go home. Tomorrow you go back to school. Everything will be taken care of.” Rubia hugged the boy and then escorted him to the front door before returning to the couch.
“How are you going to help him?” I asked.
“It’s what I do. This happens four, five times a month. There’s at least a dozen gangs on this side of the river alone. Most are looking to grow. The Willow Creek Mob is not the worst of them. I know how to deal with them. I pay a visit this afternoon to their house the whole thing should be handled.”
“How?”
“First I reason with them to leave a kid that wants to be straight alone. If that doesn’t work then I tell them I’m going to call in a chit with the gang task force. That’s my hammer and it works every time. But usually it doesn’t come to that.”
I shook my head at how different this world was from the one I knew. Drugs and the money they generated created a sub-culture that only people like Rubia could understand and do anything about, even in a small way, one life at a time.
Not five minutes after Carlos had departed a second kid arrived, entering the IML office with the same hangdog posture as the previous boy. Also Hispanic, this kid was closer to eighteen and considerably taller and heavier. Even on a chilly March morning he wore baggy black shorts and a white wife beater tank that revealed
swirling tattoos from wrist to neck on both sides of his body. Atop his head at an angle, he wore a Detroit Tigers ball cap, the manufacturer’s sticker still affixed to the flat brim.
“You Rubia?” When Rubia nodded, the kid said, “CK sent me over here. Said you had a computer problem.”
“That would be right,” she said. “You got a name?”
“Nope,” the kid said. “You like my work and ever need me again, just call CK.”
I walked over carrying the laptop, setting it on the nearest desk. “I can’t log on because I don’t know the password,” I said.
“That’s it?” the kid said, looking disappointed.
“Not a problem?”
“Not a problem,” he said. He moved behind the desk and sat down, pivoting the laptop so it faced him. He pushed the start button and watched the laptop come to life before turning his attention to Rubia and me. “You mind?”
“Huh?” I said.
“I need to work alone. How about giving me fifteen minutes?” It was a command in the form of a question.
“Kicked out of my own office,” Rubia said, rising from the couch. “Punk-ass kid.”
We started out the door, when he spoke again. “Oh, I almost forgot.” When we turned he had his palm outstretched. “Two hundred.”
I paid him his two hundred in ATM twenties—this case was going to bankrupt me—and we walked outside just as it started to drizzle. We sat in my car and watched water bead on the hood of my car.
“How do you know this kid?” I said.
“I don’t. Friend of a friend.”
“CK. And let me guess, I don’t want to know who CK is.”
“Yep.”
Fifteen minutes to the second we went back inside. The kid sat kicked back in the chair, hands behind his head, awaiting our arrival.
“Piece of cake,” he said, standing. “I removed the need for a user ID and password so you can just leave those blank at the prompt. I also ran a scan of all the documents on the hard drive to see if any were password protected or encrypted, but everything is clean. You should be good to go.”
After the kid left I started going through the document files on the laptop. Rubia excused herself to take care of the business for Carlos. I considered taking the laptop back to the house or the bar, rejecting the idea in case Trujillo came looking for me again, this time with a warrant.
I went through the Word documents first. These included mainly letters to clients soliciting business, thanking them for their business, summarizing details of their investments, that kind of thing. Straightforward stuff. Except for the boilerplate documents, all the file names started with the client name filed by a shorthand description of the type of letter. I scanned the list of files, not recognizing any similar names to those we’d found in Norris’s home office.
Next I looked at the Excel spreadsheet files. Ziebell used a similar naming protocol here as well so I looked again for a client name or something that might jump out at me. Two-thirds down the list I found something, a file entitled “Stroud_vs_Market.” I clicked on the link which opened a simple financial chart titled at the top “Stroud Investment Performance* compared to NYSE and NASDAQ for the past five years.” The asterisk directed my attention to a note at the bottom of the page that said the Stroud numbers were taken from Stroud-issued prospectuses. Two of the lines on the graph corresponded to the performance of the two stock exchanges and the third showed the performance of Stroud’s investments. While the two stock exchanges showed an up and down pattern that trended slightly up maybe a couple of percentage points over the five-year period, the Stroud line went almost straight as an arrow between year one and year five, growing at a steady twenty percent per year. At the bottom of the graph, in a box titled notes, someone had typed in “Who are SI’s clients?” and “Talk to Barry.”
I took out a flash drive and copied the file to it. None of the other folders showed much promise until I reached the “My Pictures” folder. When I clicked on the icon the folder opened to reveal five JPEG thumbnails that I recognized at once. Each photo was taken in a public place with the subject apparently unaware that he or she was being photographed. The first photo showed Andrew Norris having lunch or dinner with Joanne Tyler and a man I assumed to be Eric Tyler. The second showed a close-up of the probable Mr. Tyler at the same time and place. The rest of the photos consisted of close-ups of Blake Rios, Charles Burke and Lionel Stroud. I opened the file properties box, which showed that each of the photos had been taken within a one-week span a little over two months before.
After copying the photos to the flash drive I opened the Outlook calendar. Ziebell didn’t have a lot of appointments set on his calendar, but he did appear to use it. I went back to the week that the photos had been shot and the week looked blank except for a golf date on Friday at Del Paso. The following week, however, indicated a meeting on Tuesday at 10 am. The notation read “Andrew Norris at Starbucks, Alhambra and L.”
I continued scrolling forward through the calendar, not seeing any mention of Norris or any of his clients. On a Wednesday, two weeks before Ziebell was killed there was a two-hour lunch meeting with a Barry Fein at Horner’s. I wondered if it was the Barry mentioned in the spreadsheet note. The following week on Thursday at 9:45 am there was this: “L. Stroud at Capital Park, Rose Garden.”
I clicked over to his Outlook e-mail and did searches for Norris, Stroud, Rios, Tyler and Burke. That yielded nothing.
I opened the laptop’s internet browser and checked the bookmarks. Not surprisingly, Stroud Investments had been bookmarked. Checking his browsing history showed that he had been interested in finding information about a dozen different names, including those at the center of the Norris-Stroud case, namely Blake Rios, James Burke, and Erik and Joanne Tyler.
I was about to shut down the laptop when another thought occurred to me. There was an icon to a Yahoo e-mail in-box. The e-mail address was simply a bunch of random numbers, no indication of who owned the address, clearly Ziebell had created it for anonymity. There were no messages in the sent, draft or trash boxes, but there was one message in the in-box dated the day before the meeting between Stroud and Ziebell. It read: “You better have what you say you have or you will be very sorry.”
The e-mail had been sent from Lionel Stroud’s corporate e-mail address.
twenty-five
“You’ve been busy,” Jill said, just after her first sip of Husch Chardonnay. We sat at a corner table inside Riverside Clubhouse, a too trendy for my taste neighborhood restaurant, but Jill chose it for our dinner and that was fine with me. “What did you do with the laptop?”
“I went downtown, found a street person, gave him $150 and had him send it from a UPS store to police headquarters, attention Detective Nick Trujillo,” I said. I hadn’t yet touched the Black Butte porter that I ordered.
“What if they find the guy and he ID’s you?” she said.
“Not likely. It’s a long shot they even find him from the security camera photo at UPS and even longer that he would be able to ID me from a photo. Even if he does, he wouldn’t be the most credible witness. I’ll take my chances.”
At the rectangular bar were a myriad of middle-aged men and women intent, it appeared, on finding spouse number two or three or maybe just a casual hook up. Two women at one corner of the rectangle were making out, lipstick lesbians who had already found what they were looking for.
“Aren’t you afraid of this Trujillo?” Jill asked.
“Concerned? Yes. Afraid? No.” In truth he did scare me more than a little but I had my macho reputation to uphold. “He doesn’t really have anything on me for the murders except circumstantial evidence. He’s working on motive but he won’t find anything because there is nothing there.”
“What a mess.” She took another sip of wine.
“That it is.”
“When you called you said that you had information about my father.”
“I’m worried about him,” I said. “I
think he may be involved with something illegal.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Do you know a Barry Fein?”
She shook her head.
“How about Craig Ziebell?”
“No, but I don’t know much about my father’s business, let alone who he conducts it with,” she said. “Why do you think he’s in trouble?”
“Ziebell seemed sleazy and he was up to something with Norris. They met for coffee about ten weeks ago. A couple of weeks later Norris has opened up an investment account with Ziebell’s firm and starts giving him $5,000 a month.”
“Do you think Ziebell had something on Norris and was blackmailing him?” she said.
“That looks like a good possibility. Then just last week there was an entry in Ziebell’s calendar about a meeting with your father at the Rose Garden next to the capitol.”
“That’s a weird place for a business meeting,” she said.
“And I found an e-mail from your dad sent to Ziebell that said he better have what he promised or he’d be sorry.”
“A threat?”
“Now both Ziebell and Norris are dead. Your dad’s the last one standing.”
“You think my father killed them?” Jill’s face had turned ashen.
“I don’t really think so, but if you look at it from several different angles your dad plays into almost every single one.” In truth, I considered Stroud very strongly for the murders but didn’t want to alienate Jill by pointing the finger at him before I knew anything for certain.
“If he was involved with something illegal with Norris or Ziebell, then why would he agree to hire you to snoop on him? He wouldn’t want anybody scrutinizing anything remotely to do with his business.”
“I agree,” I said. “I haven’t figured that out yet. I haven’t figured much of anything out yet, to be honest.”
I drank the porter and watched the lesbians make out some more. Jill saw me staring and kicked me under the table.
“Men,” she said.
“Guilty as charged.”
Courage Matters: A Ray Courage Mystery (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 11
