by Avery Duff
“Trespass-growing on public land for decades. We were moving in on them up north, but we bit on a decoy dope run they’d set up, and they slipped through. There was evidence they’d swapped out all their product for a significant amount of cash before heading south.”
So far, Robert was thinking, he, Gia, and Erik had been on target about Boris.
“Along their way to getting out of the dope-growing business,” Pascoe said, “this clan has murdered as many as five people. Small-time growers, primarily, hippies who got in their way, and most recently, a college girl from Los Gatos who got mixed up with them, probably starting off as a trimmer. Her father put considerable heat on us to get to the bottom of what happened to her. Now, these guys in the house right down the street? One of them’s the Draganov clan’s Gospodar.”
“And that means . . . ?”
“Boss or master. Not that bright, from what we can tell. Inherited the job from his father, Ivan Draganov.”
Bright enough to screw my clients.
“But he calls the shots now, given how this family was set up, and he’s getting some top-notch advice on money laundering. The pot-growing business, sooner or later, will be legal all over the country; profits aren’t what they once were, so they’re getting out. We had a Draganov body shop in San Bernardino under surveillance—a black Lexus SUV came in with a busted grille, night of your hit and run. There was a lot of talk in the shop . . . vague talk . . . but we never put any of it together with a hit and run way over in Santa Monica. Should’ve, maybe, but we didn’t. That’s the who of it for your client and her father. But the why? That, I can’t help you with, because hell if I know why they tried to kill Matteo Famosa.”
Robert decided to stay silent about the Draganovs’ trust scam, at least for now.
“At this point,” Pascoe said, “adding in a couple million they just transported south, the Draganovs have at least twenty million floating around LA. We have no idea where it is. Do you?”
Floating around LA? Some of it, no doubt, had floated up to the high desert. But Los Angeles?
“Twenty million floating around Los Angeles? I do not. That woman driving the Lexus? You ID’d her?” Robert asked.
Pascoe said, “An online escort, Alexandra Pavlov. She’s already had a few drug-related run-ins with LAPD. Could be productive to bring her in, see where her loyalties really lie.”
Erik woke up on the other couch. Still groggy, he rolled into sitting position. “Hey, Pascoe, you cuttin’ us loose or what?”
CHAPTER 43
For the last fifteen minutes, a BMW 7 Series had been parked at a Foothill Boulevard curb. The UberLUX driver and his passenger looked out at the flashing lights ahead, at the FBI agents’ activity in the vanilla subdivision.
“Any idea what you’d like to do?” the driver asked, turning around in his seat.
His passenger said, “I’ll tell you when I know. Until then, turn around and don’t look at me.”
Evelyn Levine rose above the growing pain in her abdomen, sitting in this soft leather seat and wondering where the world had gone wrong. Just a christening. A Draganov gathering in San Bernardino, and she’d made a big effort to get here. Gone were both her unnecessary wig and the breast-cancer chemo port she’d threaded into her own arm. With the wasting diuretics now flushed from her system and a few decent meals, her face and skin were—though not normal—full and rosy enough for the San Bernardino crowd. After layering herself with a black Dolce & Gabbana business suit and Jimmy Choo Romy 85s, she would look to them like the picture of success and sophistication.
But doing her song and dance for these people was no longer necessary. Sharon Sloan had driven away about five minutes ago, and Sharon had not returned Evelyn’s calls on her own burner phone. That fact, in and of itself, was very bad.
Worse was that she’d also seen Robert Worth being escorted by federal agents. Taken into a house, along with his cop friend. Seeing Robert, she’d gained some visibility into the current situation, but not nearly enough.
Gospodar had never heard from Kiril after he’d checked in from the desert. Last she’d heard, Kiril had her instructions—don’t make a move until you see Carlos’ money in Robert Worth’s hands.
She’d been clear about it with Gospodar, and Gospodar with Kiril. Get the money, then kill Robert Worth.
Yet seeing Robert here, alive, meant he might’ve come out on top in the desert. And somehow, he’d learned enough to put himself right here.
“Now,” she told the Uber driver, “take me back to the Westside. Take the 210.”
“App’s telling me the I-10’s better.”
She looked in the rearview until his eyes met hers.
“Do as I say,” she told him.
“The 210 it is,” the driver said.
Sharon. Best guess, the FBI had already interviewed her. It might help for Gospodar to contact Sharon right away, secure a criminal lawyer to ease her anxiety. But in her heart of hearts, Evelyn knew Sharon would cave because Sharon was weak. She had none of the stuff that Ivan, Evelyn’s first cousin once removed, had possessed.
Ivan had been a powerhouse. Evelyn recognized that the first time she’d met him at her own father’s funeral. The Draganov family had turned out for his open casket service at an Orthodox church in Hollywood, because Emil had been Ivan’s first cousin.
One thing had been obvious: Ivan’s side of the family differed from Emil’s. Violence inhered in them, same as it did in her. That quality made them her kindred spirits. Uncle Ivan—he’d asked that she call him that—told her how beneficial it might be to have a lawyer in the family. Someone who practiced at a higher level, flesh and blood he could grow to trust in strategic matters.
In her Uber, Evelyn studied the back of her driver’s head. Her father and this driver had that much in common: the back of a head to a person of stature. Even though Emil had driven movie stars, he’d speak when spoken to, and when they’d reach their destination, he’d be instructed: “Wait here until I’m ready to leave.”
In spite of the studio tales he’d told her when she was younger, the stars were never his friends.
Her father’s funeral had been in ’95. That same night, she’d serviced Uncle Ivan in his hotel penthouse suite. He was a seventy-year-old man, but still, she wanted him; even at that age, Ivan had been virile, a visionary.
It had been Ivan—not Emil, Ivan told her—who’d murdered that Turk in Chicago. Who’d cut off the Turk’s hands and fled that city with Emil for the West Coast.
“But Emil, your father,” Ivan had told her, “he cowered in the corner while I did a man’s work.”
That same night in bed with Ivan, Evelyn had taken the biggest risk of her life, telling him how Emil came to die. Ivan, it turned out, wanted to know everything, so Evelyn had begun to share bitter memories of her molester father.
Starting with how Evelyn’s Latina mother begged young Ewa to leave her father, to return with her to Costa Rica. Yet Ewa—before she changed her name to Evelyn in tenth grade—refused to leave. She stayed on in Emil’s house, knowing that with patience, over time, she’d find a way to crush him.
In their hotel room, Evelyn had told Ivan, “For fun, I’d tell him I’d spotted my mother down the street, or anywhere else I fancied seeing her. That sent him out of the house in a fury, searching for hours, only to return raging, empty-handed, to his devoted daughter.”
With time, she’d told Ivan, came Emil’s dementia.
“Soon, he lost his job with the studio. Money was in short supply, a blessing for me. That house,” she had told Ivan. “Emil’s two-story wooden castle on the hill. That was his pride and joy. A home he owned in a neighborhood of renters, looking down on them all.”
“A prick, always,” Ivan had said, turning toward her in bed.
“Especially when he drove home in the studio limo,” Evelyn had told him. “That’s when he would drink his rakia on our front porch, inviting our neighbors up for a drink. None came, of
course. They hated him, but liking him had never been Emil’s point.
“Once I took charge of his household, a woman’s work, important bills went neglected. Taxes on our home, overdue, unpaid. He would beat me for failure, and I welcomed it, remaining to the world a dutiful daughter. Finally losing his home, that broke Emil. Turned him into an apartment dweller on food stamps until I petitioned the court to have him committed.”
In the Uber, she checked her Rolex. An old one, a man’s timepiece, her favorite ornament. It always made her think of Chet Jordan for one simple reason: it had belonged to him before she’d stolen it from his house.
In the hotel with Ivan, she’d told him, “I would often visit Emil’s pitiful apartment, only this time it was me in Chet Jordan’s limousine. I would tell Emil, ‘He’s a real movie star, Emil, like all the movie stars you said you knew so well. Chet looks like Marlon Brando, doesn’t he, Emil? Your good friend Marlon Brando.’ Sometimes, I would tell the chauffeur to take us for a drive. ‘How do you like it back here, Emil? You’ve never seen a driver’s neck, have you? It was always your neck important people were looking at.’”
“My Ewa,” Ivan had said, using her old-country name, “what a cruel and cunning bitch you are. Tell me. How did you finish it with Emil?”
“In that nursing home, near the end, I waited for one of Emil’s rare lucid periods and told him that Turks now owned his home. And every time they walked through the front door, they spit on his Orthodox cross nailed onto the doorjamb.
“In the home,” she’d told Ivan, “Emil raved to the nurses with tales of my treachery, but they didn’t listen. He was mad, and I was his kind and loving daughter. I allowed him to live another week before paying a final visit. I choked him to death in his bed with my gloved hands. Seeing that happen with my own eyes . . . I witnessed a moment of great beauty.”
Once she’d told Ivan how she’d murdered his cousin, she’d said, “Emil was a molester of his own female child. He deserved to die by my hand, but he was your blood, so kill me if you want, Gospodar. From you, I welcome it.”
Instead, as she’d hoped, he’d become hard again.
Afterward, she’d said: “You are old, your body unappealing. I fuck you out of respect, because I worship you.”
Ivan had responded by giving her his confidence. They had spoken of the future. Even back then, the first marijuana legalization laws had been voted on, and Ivan had known it was only a matter of time before his black-market profit margins withered and died of legality.
“Not in a year or two,” Ivan had told her. “But eventually. One day we will need to get out. I want you to think strategically. Very, very long term.”
After that night with Ivan, word got around to his people that the family had a new resource who was smart, patient, and hard.
Over time, she’d found two deals for him. First, in the late ’90s, a concrete parking structure. But even with a legal, hard asset, people had to show up and sit in the booth all day, keep up with maintenance, repairs, cleanup, and reconcile cash reports. Actually work without stealing from themselves. She’d done better with small parcels of semi-improved Nevada desert. She’d caught the initial upsurge of a housing boom, fueled by overheated Las Vegas, and Gospodar had doubled his money in three years, all of it now clean and taxed as proceeds from a land sale.
“A fluke,” she’d told him.
“Counts the same,” Ivan had replied.
As the BMW neared San Dimas, sharp pain seized Evelyn’s abdomen. For the next ten minutes, the surge bent her over and brought tears to her eyes. Not from breast cancer; that was her visual prop for Robert Worth. This came from pancreatic cancer, diagnosed by her doctors on the same afternoon Carlos Famosa had been found dead in his study. Facing chemotherapy, no reasonable odds of recovery, only a temporary respite from devastating pain, she’d already chosen to die.
Outside the BMW, LA’s downtown skyline hid behind a yellow haze. There were a few last memories she wanted to treasure before the end.
“Excuse me,” she said to the driver. “I’d like to go to Highland Park instead.”
He checked his rearview, wary of her, and didn’t speak.
“I’m terribly sorry how I spoke to you earlier,” Evelyn said. “I met with my doctors today—does cancer run in your family, too?”
“No, but I’m so sorry,” he said. “Don’t worry about it, ma’am, not one bit.”
As she chatted him up about his family and his interests—softball, really?—she snapped open her Christian Louboutin clutch and took out her chemo port, an item she would need for her last few tasks. Another wave of pain seized her midsection as she started threading the needle back into her arm.
Too many variables were in play now; too much lay beyond her control. The FBI . . . Sharon . . . Robert. No telling how much more time she had on this earth, but she had a few items left on her agenda before the end.
“What takes you over to Highland Park?” her driver asked.
“A house,” she said. “Just a house.”
CHAPTER 44
Over in Mar Vista, Erik closed the garage door behind the Yukon, and Robert opened the Yukon’s rear hatch. They removed Carlos’ two money bags from inside the Yukon’s gun safe.
In the back of the garage, Erik unlocked his massive, free-standing Liberty safe.
“That’s badass,” Robert said of the black-enameled behemoth.
“One-inch diameter pry-prevention pins, weighs seven hundred thirty-eight pounds, a thirty-minute fire rating at twelve hundred degrees. Without dynamite, you’re outta luck, and even then.”
Erik swung open the Liberty’s pry-prevention door. Inside: shopping bags from Gucci, Valentino, Balenciaga—Priya’s shopping swag.
They loaded Priya’s swag into the Yukon’s gun safe. Robert gave Erik a ten-second grace period before asking, “Dude, where do you keep your actual weapons?”
“The closet,” Erik said, pointing to the nearest corner of the garage. Two combination padlocks secured its door. “Not a word about her shopping bags ever leaves this room,” Erik said.
“It won’t. I’d never tell Gia who really runs the show over here.”
Erik actually liked it when Robert ratted him out to Gia. And Gia loved Erik: the kind of husband who’d let his wife commandeer his cherished Liberty safe for her things.
“Not a word to Priya, either. She’d slaughter me if she found out about this.”
“I hear you. She’s a frightening woman.”
“Tell me about it. The money,” Erik asked. “How’re you going to pull it off?”
“Not sure yet,” Robert said.
He knew what Erik meant. He couldn’t show up in probate court or at a bank with a pile of cash. At some point, the authorities, maybe even Agent Pascoe, would take an acute interest in it. Stacking Carlos’ desert cash into the Liberty took ten minutes. As he worked, Robert gave the problem more thought.
The concept of constructive trust had banged around his brain as a solution ever since leaving San Bernardino. It was one of those ideas law students tossed around that almost never applied to a real situation. The core idea lay in fairness—in equity, as judges like to say. Robert needed a judge to look at the money like this: the trust’s money had been lost by a corrupt trustee, given in exchange for a worthless investment. At the same time, cash had been paid to the trustee under the table. The question before the court would be: Who owned the money? Because it was illegal drug money, the government had a claim to it; so did the trust, because of the trustee’s scam. Robert’s argument would be: Because the trust had been most directly wronged, it was more equitable to give the cash to the trust than to the government.
Surely, there were tons of constructive-trust nuances, but if push came to shove, he liked his clients’ chances. His essential fairness argument would always come down to this: “She’s nine, Your Honor. She and her father are homeless. Your call. Them or the FBI?”
By the time they made it inside
Erik’s house, Erik was asleep on his feet, admitting he’d downed two painkillers in the driveway. After he went upstairs and called Priya, he planned to lie down and disappear for twenty-four hours.
“I don’t know how to thank you, man. Above and beyond,” Robert said.
“You’da done it for me, right?” Erik asked.
“Depends on the circumstances,” Robert said.
Erik grinned and pressed the Beast’s keys into Robert’s hand. As Erik slowly made his way upstairs, Robert walked out the back door, locked it behind him, and climbed in the Yukon.
Before cranking it up, he checked his calls and messages—tons of each. Sonny from the gyro shop; framer Drew Freize; Gia and Delfina; his Ozone landlord; texts from Reyes with attachments; a call and a text from Philip Fanelli; other numbers he didn’t recognize—aluminum siding . . . erectile dysfunction?
First, he called Gia and Delfina, asked if they’d already eaten dinner. They had, so he told them he’d bring home a surprise.
“What is it?” Delfina asked.
“Can’t say,” he told her, because he didn’t know yet. “You’ll have to wait.”
“Evelyn said she was going to drop by,” Gia told him. “She has a present for our best houseguest ever.”
“Know what it is? Robert asked.
“No, it’s a surprise,” Gia said. “Bring my T-shirt home, Roberto. And bring yourself with it.”
Next, the calls from Philip. Several of them with no message and a text: Call Dorothy ASAP. Important. A second text from Philip. Unusual. Philip rarely texted.
A generational thing, he guessed. He called Dorothy, and when she picked up, she got right down to it.
“Robert,” she said, “I want you to call Bradley Holtzmann. He’s expecting your call. Don’t give your name, just say, ‘I’m a friend of Dorothy’s.’ Hurry, though. He’s holding off on his pain medication until he hears from you.”
