Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (22 page)

The door to the construction office opened behind me, and instead of Hitchcock walking in, it was Jonathan Ricciardi. He was holding a large cardboard box, the kind that held reams of paper. I’d seen him holding a couple of those last night. I assumed this wasn’t one of those.

“Hi,” he said slowly, clearly surprised to see me again. He put the box down and wiggled the top off of it. Inside were flyers, and he handed me one. Whatever the rest of it said, in the center was a picture of Courtney. “The church is having a memorial service for her on Sunday. At two. If you’d like to stop by.”

His request seemed so surreal after the conversation we’d had last night. “Oh, that sounds lovely. How sweet of you.”

“She was a member of our congregation when she lived here in L.A. And, please, invite anyone else who knew her to come to.”

“I will.” I lowered the flyer. “Maybe you can help me right now.”

He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

“I need to talk to Greg.”

Jonathan’s immediate look of alarm might have been funny, except he was clearly scared to death. I’d shown up at his house and now I’d shown up here.
 

“Nothing about...that,” I said. “This is about his friend.”

Jonathan looked at the flyers, then back at me.

“The
other
friend,” I said. “Had a second run-in with him last night. Do you know where Greg is?”

He pulled out his phone and typed a few things on it. A map came up with a glowing dot on it. “He’s at the construction site.” He gave me the address.

“Thank you.” I leaned to one side and said, “I’m out of your hair now, Mary.”
 

I drove by the construction site—it was going to be a half-block-sized building, probably three floors tall to match the other buildings in the area, but for now it was a giant pit in the ground. Lots of men, all of them with reddish-brown skin, carrying rebar and tools and doing whatever they did. I parked a block away and walked back.

Hitchcock was standing off to one side, going over some drawings with a man I guessed was the foreman. Both were wearing yellow construction hats. The foreman was Hispanic, in his forties, holding a giant walkie-talkie. He was pointing to one area of the dig. “Jesús said the man said to dig there,” he said.

“It’s bullshit,” Hitchcock said. “Not on the schedule.”

“Call said it’s real urgent.”

I looked down at the giant hole as I walked toward the pair of men. There were large pipe segments in a pile, waiting to be connected to water or power. Long lines of concrete crisscrossed the bottom, with sharp red twirls of steel poking through, forming the base of the skeleton. I didn’t see anything special about where the foreman was pointing.
 

“Hey!” Hitchcock yelled. No cross on the lapel of this work shirt. “This is a closed site—”

“Hi, Greg. Remember me? Courtney’s friend?”
 

“You can’t be on a construction site without a hat.”

I smiled. “We need to have a little chat. In private.”
 

Hitchcock’s gaze flitted over to the trailer that sat on the edge of the site.

“That’s okay with me,” I said. “If we won’t be bothered.”

“Boss,” said the foreman, holding up the walkie-talkie. “What do we do about this?”

“Tell Enrique and Mike to check it out. Then we keep going.” Then Hitchcock pointed to me, because I was next on the agenda. “This way. Watch where you step.”

As we walked around the perimeter of the site to the trailer, I saw a small area marked with the ragged remains of police tape, floating to one side in the warm breeze.
 

“What happened there?” I asked.
 

“Break-in a couple of nights ago.”

“Oh? What got stolen?”

“Who cares what,” Hitchcock said. “It was Monday.”

Monday. The night Courtney died.

He opened the door to the trailer and waited for me to go in first. It was small, set up to act as a mobile field office, with a desk, a sofa, and a small kitchenette. Paperwork, staplers, rolling filing cabinets. As I glanced at the LAPD sticker stuck across one drawer of the desk, Hitchcock locked the door behind us.
 

“It’s terrible what happened to Courtney,” I said, sitting on the sofa. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Hitchcock sat next to me. Extremely next to me. His body up against mine. He turned toward me, put his hand on my leg. “You don’t have to worry about anything. I’m very good with problems.”

He smelled like onions and beer. Awesome. “My problem is the same as Courtney’s problem. Roger Sabo.”

Hitchcock’s eyes widened, then he smiled to cover it up. “Don’t know him.”
 

“Please let’s not. You know what kind of bloke he is. I want him to leave me alone. You’re going to help.”
 

Hitchcock leaned back. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You are providing valuable financial services not only for the credit-challenged of the San Fernando Valley but to its drug dealers as well.”

He got off the sofa and stepped backward. “Get out,” he said.

“I know what’s going on at Hitchcock Christian Financial, Greg. And not just the really shady credit counseling parts, either,
Señor Hache
.”
 

Now he moved forward. Crowding me. If he pinned me to the sofa, I wasn’t going to have much leverage—he weighed at least a hundred fifteen kilos. “What do you want?”

“Exactly what I said. I’m tired of driving over the hill to the valley, so I’m going to repeat myself one more time. You tell your mate Roger to drop the assault charges against me, or I tell a lot of people what you have going on in your financial counseling office. Your choice.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“Avoid doing bad things and that sort of thing won’t happen.”

He smiled and clapped his hands together twice. They made a loud slapping sound. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay. If you’re sure you want to do it this way. Things are about to get very messy, Greg.”

“Roger should have shut you up.”

“He tried. He failed. You think you can do better?”
 

“Look, honey, I don’t know what you think you can get out of me. Money? You want money?”
 

I shook my head. “Tell Roger to leave me alone. That’s it. That’s all I want.”
 

“You oughta be nicer to me,” he said. “I can be really nice to you.”

“I’ve heard what being nice to you entails. No thanks.” The moment got ruined by loud banging on the door of the trailer.
 

“What is it?” Hitchcock yelled.
 

“You better come out here,” said a man with a heavy accent.

“Not now,” Hitchcock said.

“Now,” said the man at the door.

Hitchcock pushed past me and yanked the door to the trailer open. The foreman standing outside paid no attention to me and whatever condition I might be in. “You gotta see this.” His accented words were hard to hear over the rising wail of a police siren in the distance. Hitchcock immediately followed him, leaving the door to the trailer swinging back and forth.
 

I was done with what I’d come here for. I could just leave. But I was curious to see what the excitement was all about.
 

At the edge of the site, the foreman pointed to a gathering of construction workers in the center of the site, standing around a giant block of concrete that they had broken open. One half of the concrete lay on its side, the jagged broken piece of metal inside pointing upward. This metal was chrome and black.
 

It was much easier to see what was in the other half of the concrete block: a formation that looked like handlebars and a steering column.
 

A steering column you might find on a small motorbike. The kind I saw the night Courtney died.
 

“We’re going to have to redo the whole area,” the foreman said.

On the other side of the pit a construction worker, a thin dark-skinned Hispanic man, was throwing a fit and yelling at another of the workers.
“What did you fuckers do?”
he yelled in Spanish. “
What the fuck, man, this isn’t funny.”
 

A couple of other guys were yelling back at him, wondering what the hell kind of game he was playing.

“Someone dumped a motorbike in the concrete?” I asked.

Hitchcock grimaced at me. “You can’t be here.”

“Story of my life,” I whispered.
 

The last time I’d seen a motorbike like that had been Monday night, through the window of Courtney’s motel room.
 

I had the distinct feeling it was the very same bike, dumped here in order to get rid of it.

Did covering something in concrete get rid of any fingerprints that might be on it?

“Okay, you need to leave now,” Hitchcock said. “Did you do this? You know about this?”

“Know about what?” I asked him.
 

Did Hitchcock know that this motorbike had been used the night Courtney was killed? Had he used it? He was a big man, taller than me, and he would have dwarfed that little bike. The workers who were now standing around were mostly young men, tending toward the lean and muscular. Hitchcock would have had a lot to lose if Courtney talked about his operation. He could have twisted one of their arms, gotten them to do it for him. And I could believe it, too—Hitchcock clearly had no problem exploiting the lower-class and powerless—except for one thing.

His concern right now was all about the messed-up construction site. “Esteban!” he yelled, waving one of the men toward him. He pointed toward a section of the site and called out a few commands in Spanish.

From the spot right behind the concrete block came an upwell of noisy, agitated voices. One man broke away from the group standing there. He held a burlap bag as he ran toward Hitchcock, yelling, “
It’s here
.”
 

“Oh, shit,” Hitchcock said. To the foreman he said, “Call the cops.”
 

I wondered what they had found.

On the other side of the site, a couple of the workers dropped their tools and started running. Not to do whatever Hitchcock had said, but away. Away from the guy running the show, away from the foreman, away from me. Or someone behind me.
 

The foreman said, “Too late, man.”

Two men were walking onto the site from the street. Not hard to guess who the workers with dodgy paperwork might be trying to avoid. One of the men had his badge visible on his belt. The other held the small leather wallet he kept his badge in open.

Detective Gruen was the one with the leather wallet, of course. He looked at me. “Going to have some questions for you.”
 

“I need to see that,” Detective Vilar said to the man holding the burlap bag.
 

The construction worker—couldn’t have been more than twenty—held it out. From the way the bottom swung, whatever was inside was small and had enough weight and solidity to form a compact weight at the bottom. Probably made of metal.
 

Vilar pointed to the ground and the man carefully laid it down. He pulled open the edges of the bag, enough to show the barrel of a revolver. He rapid-fired questions about it at the young man, and the worker pointed into the pit.

“We got an anonymous tip that evidence in the Cleary case could be found at this site,” Gruen said. “Is this the gun you reported missing?”

“I don’t know!” Hitchcock said. “They just found it.”
 

Vilar nodded toward what was visible of the motorbike. “We’re having a warrant delivered that allows us to search these premises, including the foundation you’ve been laying here. You need to cease operations until we can determine exactly what might be here.”
 

“We also have questions about your relationship with Courtney Cleary,” he added.

“Courtney?” Hitchcock looked down at the gun lying in the burlap sack. “Wait. You don’t think…”
 

How amazing. Either Gruen and Vilar were some kind of supercops, or someone had phoned them with a very big tip about where the motorcycle and gun used in Courtney’s killing could be found. Much as I lusted after Gruen’s person, my money was on option number two.

“Do you have somewhere we could have a word with you in private?” Vilar asked.

“Yes...yes, over...” Hitchcock looked around, clearly baffled about what to do next. He waved at the motorhome sitting off to the side, where I’d just spent a moment or two.

José nodded and picked up the ring of keys attached by a chain to his jeans.

Hitchcock and his foreman headed over to the motorhome. Vilar looked at me, then at his partner.

“We could save a lot of time investigating things if we just followed your girlfriend around this city,” Detective Vilar said.

“My girlfriend works for the Parks Department,” Detective Gruen said, not looking anywhere near me.

I raised an eyebrow at Vilar. He gave a tiny shake of his head before following Hitchcock. Gruen stopped next to me.
 

“Should I call my lawyer?” I asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“I needed to talk to Hitchcock about a problem. I thought maybe he could help me.” I waved my hand at the gun. “This...I had nothing to do with this.”
 

“You weren’t planning on being here today?”
 

“You think I would have dressed like this?” I asked.

He stopped to take in a more pronounced look at me in my tight capris and colorful blouse. I looked a wee bit healthier than I had when he’d stopped by the other day. “We need to talk.”
 

I smiled. “Will your girlfriend be there? I’ll bring my lawyer, we’ll make it a couples’ evening.”

He stared at me.
 

“You know I have nothing to say, Detective.”

“Is that a fact?” he said. “Even if I ask really nicely?”
 

“Well, can’t hurt to try,” I told him.