Devil Wind (Sammy Greene Mysteries) (9 page)

Reed gave Sammy’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “You did the wise thing, calling.”

“I hope so.” She blinked to push back tears. “Gus didn’t say much. It was,” Sammy thought for a minute, “almost like he’d been expecting bad news.” She told Reed how, according to Pappajohn, Ana had run away almost a decade ago, blaming him for spending too much time at work when her mother was dying of cancer. “I don’t know if she ever forgave him.”

“Fathers and daughters.”

Sammy was glad Reed didn’t say more. She knew he was aware of her estrangement from her own father. She certainly didn’t want to talk about that now. “Pappajohn plans to catch the noon nonstop from Boston. I think I’ll meet him at the airport.”

“You want me to come?” Reed leaned down and closed the drawer.

“Thanks, but you don’t need to. Besides,” Sammy added with a soft smile, “you’ve been up all night.”

“Yeah, and I can’t get out of here til after the Y2K disaster drill tomorrow.” Reed checked his watch. “Today.”

“This town and Y2K.” Sammy shook her head. “Then you’d better get a few hours of beauty rest.”

Reed made a vain attempt to straighten his rumpled white lab coat and ran his long fingers through his thick sandy blond hair. “I must look terrible.”

Sammy’s admiring glance didn’t need a voice, but she said it anyway. “Actually, you look pretty good.”

“You, too. I, uh, like the hair.” Reed took her arm and gently turned her toward the doors. Obviously uncomfortable, he added, “We’d better go before we’re caught in here.”

“Just say it was my fault. As usual,” Sammy offered, half joking as they left the morgue and headed down the hall. After several uncomfortable moments of silence from Reed, she ventured, “Speaking of my fault, I’m sorry I, uh, rained on your parade earlier. With Michelle.”

At the elevator, Reed finally spoke. “There’s no parade. But I did figure I wasn’t on your contact list any more.”

Sammy stared at her feet, wishing the elevator would hurry. “I still have your number in Boston.”

The elevator doors opened, and Reed extended a hand to wave her into the car. His tone was only lukewarm as he said, “Welcome to L.A”.

CHAPTER SIX

December 24, 1999

Friday

Ana woke just before the first gasp of daylight, smoke burning her nostrils. Blearily, she looked around to get her bearings. She was in a Santa Monica park, blocks from her apartment. The two homeless women in the nearby bushes she’d found last night in the darkness were still asleep, sharing a thin blanket, curled against each other on the cold ground like stray cats. This was no dream.

Slowly, she stood, rubbed a twinge in her back and stretched, trying not to wake the women. Neither looked familiar. There was no point in involving these poor souls in her troubles. And she was, she thought with regret, in deep trouble.

At least Teddy was safe. Her son’s foster mother had taken him up north to Hayward to visit a sister for Christmas and they wouldn’t return until Wednesday. Ana hoped Teddy liked the Nintendo Game Boy she’d bought him. She desperately wished she could spend the holidays by his side.

She brushed dirt and grass from her T-shirt and jeans and made a futile effort to smooth her hair. She longed for a shower and a bite to eat. Neither would be an option until she figured out what to do. Sylvie was in bad shape. Ana had no doubt someone had tried to kill her friend. The same person who ransacked the apartment? And smashed Sylvie’s computer?

Why? What were they looking for?

Ana picked up the disk she’d laid on the ground so as not to damage it while she slept, and tuned it over and over in her hand. She stared at the Jazz label. Sylvie’s boyfriend was a really lame musician. His tunes couldn’t be worth much. But, if the disk had no value, why would Sylvie take such trouble to hide it? It had to be Sylvie’s Plan B.

Better find out what was on it, Ana finally decided. She’d need access to a computer. The Public Library on Sixth Street had free PCs, but opened at nine. Without a watch Ana had to guess the time. From the way the sun’s rays were starting to burn through the haze, she figured it was no later than seven a.m. She took out Sylvie’s phone and saw that the battery was dead. Damn, Sylvie was so forgetful. Now she’d have to find a charger. Going back to the apartment was out of the question.

Ana’s stomach growled, a reminder that her last meal had been midday yesterday. She selected a twenty from the roll of bills stuffed in her pocket and tucked it under the blanket where the women slept. At least they’d have something to eat for the next few days.

Tiptoeing off in the direction of Lincoln Boulevard, she headed for a twenty-four-hour diner on the corner of Lincoln and Broadway. She could wash up, grab a cup of coffee and some breakfast, and use the pay phone to call Kaye. The madam had always taken care of her girls.

On the eighth floor CCU of the Schwartzenegger Tower, Julia Graves Prescott stood by her husband’s bedside until he was fast asleep. She refused to acknowledge the part of her that wished his sleep would be permanent. She’d done her duty for thirty years, and would do so for thirty more if the fates so decreed.

Still, Julia was grateful that Franklin Bishop had been here tonight. Memories of her high school sweetheart had always remained fond ones, despite the years and their divergent paths from Houston. The Graves family fortune that had paved Neil’s path to the Capitol, had sent the man she once loved to the Killing Fields. Frank’s survival was a miracle; her marriage to Neil, her penance.

Who would have thought they’d find themselves together again here in Southern California? The fates, indeed.

Sammy hesitated before declining Reed’s offer to follow her home after his shift. A polite gesture or something more? Sammy wasn’t sure. She only knew that seeing Reed again had roused feelings she’d assumed long dead. The few years and hard-earned smile lines had made him even more handsome. Perhaps just being alone in this new, impersonal city at the holidays was behind the stirring in her heart. Better to keep some distance between herself and Reed until she could sort things out.

Rays of pink began painting streaks in the brown night sky. The sun would soon be visible, and Sammy was eager to get home, take a bath, and catch a few winks before facing Pappajohn at LAX. Morning rush-hour traffic was just getting into full swing by the time she’d driven from Westwood to Palms. Weary, she parked her car and trudged up the stairs to the second floor. Then as she did every day since moving into this matchbox of an apartment, Sammy stepped inside her door and cursed the lack of heavy brick construction and thick insulation used in buildings in the Northeast. Through the thin plasterboard walls, she could hear her next door neighbor taking his crack-of-dawn shower and singing his out-of- tune version of “Cabaret” that woke her each morning after too few hours sleep.

Too tired for a bath, she took a quick shower with the building’s remaining hot water, gobbled a cup of yogurt from her fridge, and, wearing only a long T-shirt, hopped into bed. She set her alarm for noon. The airport was no more than half an hour away on surface streets. The old blinds didn’t keep much sunlight from the room, so she grabbed a second pillow and covered her face.

Though her eyes were shut, she clearly saw the unwelcome image of Ana lying in the hospital morgue, her pale features horribly burned. A picture so at odds with the one in Pappajohn’s wallet years ago. How terrible those last moments must have been, running to escape the flames whipped up all around her by the winds. The smoke getting thicker, choking her breath, the ashes singeing her tender skin and burning and blinding her eyes. Stumbling on twigs and roots, falling, her head cracked by a branch or a stone. Unconscious as the fire washed over her, leaving charred footsteps behind. Or injured, but awake, feeling every second of the the hellish blaze.

Sammy sat up, agitated by memories of the fire that had killed her engineer at the college radio station years before.The doctors had assured her that Brian had been anesthetized by the smoke as he’d burned alive. It was the only straw she could grasp to make her old friend’s death bearable. That in the end, he hadn’t suffered. But Ana?

Sammy frowned, replaying the scene with Reed in the hospital morgue.

Wasn’t it the fires that killed her?

“Probably, but—

But—Sammy knew Reed. Something about his hesitation made her wonder now if he’d been hiding something.

Sammy lay back down. But what? If not the fires, what else could have killed Ana? Or, she shuddered, who?

We have to wait for the medical examiner to determine the official cause of death.

Okay, she’d wait. Acknowledging her exhaustion, Sammy considered that she might be going off the deep end this time, looking for murder where there was just a terrible, tragic accident. Moments later, when she fell into a deep sleep, she dreamed of Reed and Ana and Gus Pappajohn. Of old friends, past lives, fathers and of daughters. And loss.

For the president of Greene Progress, LLC, there was no question that L.A. had given him a second chance. Born on the wrong side of the Hudson River, son of a paperhanger, scion of what the well-to-do disdainfully called the “road-and-tunnel crowd,” he’d spent years trying to make a go of it in New York City, without success.

Yes, he’d made plenty of mistakes. Got married the first time too young. Even worse, had a kid right away. Twenty-three years old and living in a duplex in Brooklyn, with a hysterical wife and Bubbe Rose, the mother-in-law from Hell. Between his wife’s drama and her mother’s harping, there was no room to breathe. “Monster Mama” wouldn’t stop nagging him to “get a real job,” calling him a loser, trying to crush his big dreams. Which was why he finally had to get away from the voices of defeat. Before they defeated him.

With two women to micromanage her upbringing, his daughter would be fine. Girls needed mothers anyway. Or grandmothers who never stopped being mothers. No sense in compounding a mistake by sticking around. If he was going to start fresh, he needed to put distance between himself and his past and travel light.

Whoever said “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles” was a very smart man.

Now, twenty-one years after leaving New York in his rearview mirror, Jeffrey Greene stood at the window of his corner office, on the thirty-sixth floor of Fox Plaza with a view to the sea, admiring the city he’d conquered. The “loser” from Brooklyn had become king of a multimillion-dollar real estate empire, on a first name basis with Hollywood megastars, business tycoons, and powerful politicians.

Marrying Susan had been a good move. She’d helped him get his real estate license and capitalized the first fixer-uppers he’d flipped in the early eighties. But, when the market started to heat up, and the time was ripe to strike it big, she got cold feet. Leveraging, buying everything he could find with only 10 percent down, and racking up dozens of 18 and 19 percent mortgages—that was the ticket. Susan never got it. People like him, people who weren’t born with silver spoons in their mouths, had to take risks. No risk, no reward, he’d tell her. It didn’t take long before she started to say “no reward” back to him more and more.

Her loss. Because now he’d found the key to the big leagues. He was playing pro, and he needed a pro by his side. Susan couldn’t cut the mustard, so he’d had to cut the cord. For the briefest moment, Jeffrey wondered how his ex-wife was doing. Last time they spoke—almost a year ago—she was selling the Encino ranch and moving to a condo down the coast in Costa Mesa. Which, of course, she paid for in cash. So typically Susan.

Thank goodness Trina had come into his life at the perfect time. Not only beautiful, smart, and gutsy as all get out, she was a pro, a partner who didn’t fear taking chances and who seemed to know everyone who was anyone from San Francisco to San Diego. Everyone, in turn, was captivated by her exotic beauty, blending the grace of a Monaco princess with the sexy earthiness of Sophia Loren in her prime.

It was Trina who helped Jeffrey start a real estate partnership, bringing in investors like Danny Tice from CompCity.com, Barry Rogers from Panoramic Studios, even a few Saudis with money to burn. It was her political connections that greased the bureaucratic wheels to make the big deals happen. The old cliché: “it’s not what you know, but who you know” sure had it right. Thanks to receptive politicians like Congressman Neil Prescott, Jeffrey Greene was a very rich man today.

Jeffrey turned his back to the view and sat down behind his antique mahogany desk. Trina insisted he make the high bid at Sotheby’s last winter. “You work so hard, cheri. You deserve it,” she’d said. Well, she was right, dammit. He lived to work. Even with the fires raging in the city, he’d slipped out of bed at five a.m., ran an hour on his home treadmill, then fought the still backed-up traffic from Orange County to Century City to arrive at the office well before the secretarial staff. He needed some privacy to make his call this morning.

Jeffrey unlocked the desk drawer and removed a file labeled PLAYA BELLA PARTNERSHIP #2. This was his deal of deals. For years he’d set his sights on the last remaining undeveloped tract of land in Southern California where the Marine Corps was closing its El Avestruz air station. A dream property with hundreds of open acres right next to the ocean-misted hills overlooking Newport Beach, one of Orange County’s most popular coastal resorts. Tipped off by Trina, who never actually told him her source, he’d snapped up an adjacent old hotel built on land leased from the Marines, giving him an inside track to buying the rest when the base finally shut down.

Prescott, head of the House Armed Services Committee, had introduced him to the Department of Defense official who could work out a sale. When talks stalled over price and water supply, Prescott’s legislative aide had smoothly interceded, resolving the matter with one call to a deputy assistant secretary at the Pentagon. Jeffrey had finally bought the land for twenty million, obtaining an unusual guarantee from the Marines that gave him a generous water allowance outside the standard allocation process—a bonus that he knew had rankled municipal officials like that prosecutor in Irvine.