by David Chill
*
My phone buzzed on the way home, and the detective from the Largo PD was on the other line. Bart Sokolov said he’d meet me tomorrow morning, that is, if I were inclined to drive down to Largo Beach for breakfast before he started work. He spoke glowingly of a beachside diner that served the kind of waffles worth driving out of your way for. I agreed to meet, but was quickly reminded I was dealing with a cop here. Their hours are not the hours of most people. But the drive to Largo Beach would, at least, be a breeze before the crack of dawn.
I slept fitfully, and could have used a few more hours, but that wasn’t in the cards this morning. I sensed it was going to be a long day. The temperature was pleasant when I left Mar Vista at five-fifteen, but it was also a bellwether that this afternoon would be on the warm side.
Polly’s Pies was a chain coffee shop, and I used to frequent its Santa Monica restaurant until it abruptly closed one day, replaced by another chain coffee shop that wasn’t nearly as good. In addition to clear traffic, the other nice part about an early morning rendezvous was I could find parking in front of the restaurant. Bart Sokolov was easy to find. Even though he sat in a round booth in the far corner of the restaurant, there just weren’t many people eating breakfast yet. He was a thick man in his early fifties, wearing a blue windbreaker and sporting a walrus mustache. All he needed was a pile of doughnuts sitting next to him to scream cop. He was already digging into breakfast, not doughnuts, but a large plate of waffles with an overload of maple syrup dripping off the edges of the crust.
“Good morning,” I said, slipping across from him in the booth.
“Burnside, huh?” he said, shoving a forkful of sticky looking waffles into his mouth and chewing vigorously.
“That’s me. Thanks for agreeing to meet.”
“Don’t get too comfortable,” he said, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, swallowing, and rising from the table. “I got to take a leak. Follow me.”
With that, he waddled across the restaurant with me in tow, and I wondered just what kind of a show he had in store for me at this hour. We entered the small men’s room, and he opened the stalls one by one to make sure we were alone. Then he turned to face me.
“Okay, look. I’m sorry, but I got to do this. If you want to talk, that is.”
I stared at him. “You want to frisk me?”
“Only way we talk. You can save me the trouble and tell me if you’re wearing a wire.”
“No wire,” I told him. “But I have to tell you I’m packing. Got a .357 under my left armpit. My guess is that a wire’s a bigger a concern for you.”
“Got that straight. No, I checked you out. You’re former LAPD. I’d be surprised if you weren’t carrying anything. But still. Why don’t you turn around. This won’t take long. You know the drill.”
I knew the drill for frisking someone for a weapon, but never for recording equipment. This was normally mob stuff. The only ones who were concerned about someone wearing a wire were people who were about to have a private conversation they didn’t want anyone else to hear. That alone made going through the frisking acceptable, although Detective Sokolov was remarkably thorough in his procedure.
“Sorry about that, buddy,” he said as we walked back to the table. “But it’s part of the deal.”
“I don’t know if I should be ordering breakfast now or having a cigarette,” I said as we slid back into the booth.
He laughed and picked up his fork. “Try the Belgian waffles. If you’re tough enough to handle the whipped cream.”
A waitress came over, and I ordered black coffee and plain waffles, butter and syrup on the side. Sokolov snorted and told me I sounded like an L.A. guy.
“That’s not far from Culver City,” I said, as the waitress returned with a steaming cup of black coffee. I took a sip. It wasn’t bad for a diner, but I’d need to drink twice as much to get the same jolt as I got from a Starbucks roast.
“Nope,” he said. “I like living there. My kids went to school at Culver High, the education was decent. Plus, they both played football and liked playing for the coach. My eldest got into some trouble, but he worked through it with them. I guess you know Coach Fultz.”
“I do. He was my coach, as well.”
“Been there a long time, I guess.”
“I think he started coaching when I got there,” I said with a wink.
Sokolov snorted again and took another big bite of a waffle. “So what can I do you for?” he asked. “You said something about Ed Zellis.”
“I did. You know him well?”
He nodded. “Well enough. I was getting going with the department around the time he was finishing up. We overlapped for a few years. But he was my training officer when I first went into plainclothes. Was supposed to teach me the ropes. I got quite a lesson, let me assure you.”
“What can you tell me?”
“I could tell you plenty, but I won’t. Not yet anyway. First tell me your interest.”
“Like I mentioned on the phone. I’ve been a P.I. for about ten years now since I left the LAPD. I’m working a case regarding Ed’s granddaughter. Name’s Amanda Zeal. Her father hired me to find out about an assault that happened to her a few nights ago. He also hired a bodyguard who quickly ended up dead. Amanda disappeared, so my next task is to try and find her.”
“Okay,” he said, still chewing. “How does that involve Largo Beach?”
“I’m not sure that it does or doesn’t. But I’m running out of leads. And no disrespect, but I’m aware of Largo Beach’s reputation. I don’t know that Amanda has a connection with this place or the police department, but I suspect her grandfather was a dirty cop. Let’s just say I’ve found that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe there’s nothing here, maybe there’s something. I won’t know until I ask.”
Sokolov chewed and listened. I finally picked up the coffee and took another sip. He put his fork down and looked out the window at the black sky.
“I started off here like most cops start off. Driving a patrol car. Did that for years and then moved into plainclothes. I knew all about Largo being a port city, and port cities are often where the drugs come in. Seemed like an interesting gig. My first plainclothes assignment was in narcotics. And my first collar was with Ed and his partner, Jimbo Thomas. That was also the last collar I got in narcotics.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We did this sting, okay. Four of us, including Ed, Jimbo, and this sergeant, Kim Sponsler. We took the dogs onto some of the boats that came in from Colombia. Sniff out drugs. They found coffee grounds, so we knew we were onto something. Pried the crate open and saw three kilos of blow. Tagged it and waited for the guys to come pick ‘er up. We followed them back to an apartment on Pine. Two guys were waiting for them, we let them go into the apartment and then, two minutes later, we kicked the door down. That was the fun part.”
I frowned. “Coffee grounds. How could the sniffer dogs find it? Won’t coffee throw them off the scent?”
“At one time it did. Smugglers used coffee grounds to hide the smell of the drugs. So we just started training the dogs to sniff through the coffee. Pretty simple. The dealers didn’t catch on for a long time. Crooks aren’t the brightest lights.”
“True.”
“Yeah, well, anyways, we nabbed these clowns with over a hundred grand worth of blow. Plus, we picked up thirty grand in cash. That’s where things went off the rails.”
“Because the cash disappeared,” I said.
“Most of it. I didn’t take the evidence, my job was to book the perps. When they were arraigned, they were charged with possession, but only half the blow went in as evidence and there was no mention of any money. The perps weren’t about to say anything, so it all went unnoticed.”
“You say anything?”
“I was thinking how I’d approach them. But then something funny happened. I was getting into my car one night to go home and noticed a package on the floor of the backseat. There was five
grand in cash sitting there. No note, nothing written, just a wad of bills stuffed into a big envelope.”
“What’d you do?”
“I was kind of jammed up, you know. I wasn’t about to keep it, but I couldn’t give it back. It was a blank envelope, who would I give it to? Offer it to Ed or Jimbo, and they’d just smirk and ask what I was talking about. I finally decided to transfer out of narcotics. A few days later, Ed comes up to me in the squad room and asks if I got a package recently. He had this mean little smile on him. I looked him dead in the eye and said I didn’t know what he was talking about. No idea. He watched me pretty close for a while, but eventually he left me alone. He knew I wouldn’t rat him out.”
“It’s called balance of terror,” I told him, thinking back to my international politics class at SC.
Sokolov scrunched up his nose. “What’s that?”
“It’s where both parties have something to lose. I think it might have been a military term once. Imagine two countries where both have nuclear weapons. Neither one can use them on the other country, because if one did, the other would simply launch their own nuclear weapons in response. If one country deployed these weapons, it would assure their own destruction. Balance of terror means both sides are scared to utilize what they have.”
At that point, the waitress came by with my plate of waffles. I tried a bite without butter or syrup and decided it was uninspiring. I picked up the small pitcher of maple syrup and poured a generous amount over the waffles, making sure to distribute it evenly.
“Interesting. Yeah, Ed wasn’t going to run me out of the department, because he knew I had something on him. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Pretty much,” I said, taking a bite with syrup and liking it more. “So what did you do with the money?”
Sokolov paused and glanced around the restaurant. “I thought of giving it to charity. But it would have to be anonymous, I couldn’t have anything traced back to me. That’s tricky. But a friend of mine was having health issues back then, heart problems, he had a bad ticker. Needed to pay his medical bills. Let’s just say a package wound up in his car.”
“Charity begins at home,” I observed.
“Well, I couldn’t keep it and I couldn’t give it back. Imagine trying to deal with that kind of dilemma. Tossing it off the Largo Pier was my only other option. I can live with how things ended up. I got caught in something and found a way out.”
I agreed. The money was a double-edged sword, a blessing and a curse. If he had gone and flashed it around like some small-time hood who suddenly got a cash infusion, it would have drawn attention. Buying drinks for the house at a local pub, purchasing a new BMW, or plunking some of it down for an eighty-inch flat screen might have alerted someone that something fishy was going on. A cop spending a lot of money is often a cop that seized it illegally.
“So you moved on to what?”
“Vice,” he laughed. “Can you believe that? I got into vice because I wanted to work on something clean. But busting hookers and perverts turned out to be less dirty than narcotics. At least I didn’t have to look over my shoulder all the time.”
“Did Ed finish his career in narcotics?” I asked.
“Nope,” he replied. “That guy I mentioned, Kim Sponsler? He left narcotics pretty soon after I did, turns out he had a similar problem with what Ed was doing. Best way to get rid of the problem is to move on to another area, like I did. He actually moved up the ranks and became captain. And when he did, he instituted some new policies. Things got strict. And Kim finally built a case against Ed and Jimbo.”
“What happened to them?”
“Moved them out of narcotics. Onto desk jobs in the station. Just had to keep them away from the evidence locker.”
“I imagine they weren’t pleased with that,” I said. “Took a hit on their bottom line.”
“I’m sure it did. But the weird thing is, and I got this from one of the guys that used to work with them. They felt they were doing something noble all that time. Taking drug money from dealers. Putting them out of business. If the dealers owed any money to bigger dealers in their upline, they were in trouble. A few of those perps got killed. Others got out of Largo Beach fast, moved out of state. For Ed and Jimbo, that meant they were helping the community.”
“Like Robin Hood. Except instead of giving to the poor, they were keeping the money for themselves.”
“Yeah. Good way to put it. And eventually the two of them retired. Or I guess they took disability, that’s how it’s done a lot of times. But the way it was handled, quietly pushing them aside, yeah, it was probably for the best. Let them leave with some dignity. No need for a scandal.”
I nodded. “So, in the end, Ed and his partner got away with it.”
“Pretty much. All that money over the years. I don’t know how he kept from bragging about what he did. That’s what drags down a lot of guys. They have to tell people how smart they are. If you want to get away with something, the easiest route is keep your mouth shut.”
“I wonder how that worked for Ed,” I mused, recalling the nice car he drove and the nice vacations he took his family on. Maybe that’s why he lived in Culver City, far away from Largo Beach.
Sokolov shrugged and dipped some waffle into a puddle of syrup. “Didn’t seem to pose a problem.”
“Let me get back to why I’m here. Trying to figure out what happened with Ed’s granddaughter, Amanda Zeal. Any ideas?“
“Hard to say. I still see Ed around once in a while, we both live in Culver City. He hasn’t taken any hits over what he’s done. But I’ll tell you something. Karma’s a real bitch. You never know how things even up. But they always seem to.”
I frowned. Could Amanda’s disappearance be some sort of cosmic answer to her grandfather’s crimes? Things often did even up in life, in ways we usually never imagine. I thought of Gail and I thought of Marcus and I thought of whether any of the unsavory things I did for a living would come back and haunt them. I shuddered as I considered this.
*
I left Polly’s with a stomach full of waffles and not much more. As I chugged onto the northbound 405 freeway, I decided that since I was headed toward home, a slight detour over to USC would not consume much more time. I had no idea if Amanda Zeal was hiding out at her brother’s apartment, but I also had no idea of where else to look.
The Harbor Freeway turned out to be as gridlocked as the 405, and perhaps even more so. The traffic inched along, bumper-to-bumper all the way to Vernon, where I finally spun off onto surface streets and things moved a little bit quicker. I reached the USC Village, just north of campus at half-past seven, and after wasting fifteen minutes hunting for a parking space, I finally pulled into a red zone and crossed my fingers.
The apartments in the USC Village had just been erected a few years ago. A sprawl of gorgeous five-story mixed-use buildings began on the corner of Hoover and Jefferson and spread outward for many blocks. There was a wide, open-air plaza with a bell tower nearby, and a dining hall featuring stained glass and gothic-style seating. High-end restaurants came in. A Target and a Trader Joe’s were built. The result was fifteen acres of loveliness sitting within a cradle of nearby poverty. Whereas this section of the extended campus had suffered numerous safety and crime issues for decades, it now gave the impression of something more akin to a college-town atmosphere, albeit one that came complete with a cappuccino bar and upscale shops. There was undoubtedly a Starbucks nearby, but I decided I had had my fill of caffeine for the moment.
I knocked on the door of Aaron Zellis’s apartment, and then I knocked some more. At this hour, unless a college student was an unabashed morning person, the odds were good that they were fast asleep. I started pounding, which caused a few doors down the hallway to open, and a number of sleepy-eyed students wandered out, blinking and looking around to see what all the fuss was. One of them held a phone at the ready, perhaps to record a newsworthy event that might be valuable to share with the world.
I flashed my badge and, without identifying myself as anything other than an important person, ordered them to go back inside their apartments. Most did, and rather quickly. Except for one.
“Hi,” he said, looking more alert than most, but likely about twenty-five years old, and probably a graduate student. “I’m the building manager. What’s wrong?”
“I need to find Aaron Zellis,” I said in an official voice, glancing behind him to make sure there were no phones pointing in our direction. “Police business. You’re the manager? I need you to unlock the door.”
“Um, I don’t think I can do that,” he frowned.
“Do you want to go to jail this morning?” I said, giving him my best glower. “Because right now you’re interfering with a criminal investigation. And you may be charged with aiding and abetting a felon.”
“A felon? Aaron?” he said, trying to process this. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding and I don’t have time to waste. If you don’t open this door right now, there may be criminal charges filed,” I declared, not bothering to clarify that right now, the only crime being committed was by me, impersonating a police officer.
“Okay, okay,” he finally said and reached into his pocket for a set of keys. He fumbled with them until he settled on the proper key, slipped it into the deadbolt and unlocked the door. He pushed open the door and started to go inside, but I put a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s all. I’ll take it from here.”
Nodding, he continued to look a bit confused, not entirely sure he was doing the right thing by following my orders, not entirely sure what other options were at his disposal. I entered the apartment and told him to go back to his own unit. I shut the door behind me and flipped the deadbolt closed to emphasize my point. I had briefly thought of ordering him not to say anything to anyone, but that alone might be enough to elevate his concerns to the point where he might actually go and say something to someone. Like the LAPD.
