Hot Start (17 page)

“This is the guy,” I heard her say.

A thin young Asian man in gray sweatpants and a UCLA T-shirt was lounging on a brown Naugahyde couch with his fingers interlocked behind his head, watching
Jeopardy!
on a flat-screen television. He wore a stringy Fu Manchu mustache.

“Who is Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones?” he said without looking over at either of us.

“Did you hear me?” the receptionist asked him, annoyed.

“Her album, ‘Come On Over,’ sold more copies than any other female artist of the nineties,” Alex Trebek said on TV.

“Who was Britney Spears,” the Asian guy said.

I reached over and turned off the television.

“What the hell, dude?” he said.

“Not Britney Spears,” I said, correcting him. “Shania Twain sang ‘Come On Over.’ You the owner of this fine establishment?”

“The manager.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Couple years. What’s this about?”

“I need to talk to you about Dino Birch.”

“Who’s Dino Birch?”

“A customer of yours, supposedly.”

Fu Manchu looked me up and down. “You ain’t flashing tin. You ain’t no detective, which means I ain’t gotta tell you jack.”

He gave the receptionist a condemning look. “You should’ve never brought him back here, Gloria.”

“I thought he was a cop,” Gloria the receptionist said.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not a cop. Nothing says you have to talk to me. And nothing says after I walk out of here that I have to go to the Rancho Bonita PD and tell them I have firsthand knowledge that your employees are getting paid for sex. You’ll be out of business by morning.”

“You got nothing,” he said, smirking.

“Fine.” I smiled and turned to go. “Have it your way, cowboy.”

“Give him what he wants, boss,” Gloria said nervously.

“Shut up.” Fu Manchu sat up. “What’s this dude’s name?”

“Birch,” I said. “Dino Birch.”

He thought about it for a second. “He’s the guy, the one they arrested for offing those people in their pool down in The Knolls.”

“One and the same.”

The manager jerked his head—Gloria’s signal to leave. She did so, shutting the office door behind her.

“Yeah, he’s been in a few times,” the manager said. “Always asks for the same girl, pays cash, don’t make no trouble. I don’t know what more I can tell you.”

“He says he was here the night of the murders.”

“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know nothing about that. If he paid by credit card, maybe. But like I said, the dude pays cash. Comes in, gets a nice straight massage. He wants to tip her for something extra on the side, that’s strictly between him and the girl.”

“Don’t give me that. You take your cut. And your rooms are wired for sound and video in case something goes wrong— a customer gets kinky or violent—or so you can grind him for bigger bucks while you threaten to share the tape with his wife or the cops.”

“I don’t know who told you that. We run a clean business.”

“A clean business. And if you expect me to believe that . . .”

He looked away and ran the back of his hand over his mouth. “OK, what do you want?”

“Would you be willing to sign an affidavit to the effect that Birch was here that night?”

“Jesus, I just told you. How can I sign anything if I don’t know whether he was or he wasn’t?”

“You have digital security cameras. Rewind them.”

Fu Manchu stared up at me. “Are you serious?”

“As serious as a subpoena.”

He sighed and got off the couch and strode to the computer sitting on his desk. He asked me the date of the Hollister murders. I told him and he typed it in. The computer screen suddenly split into the high resolution color images of four massage rooms as seen through ceiling-mounted cameras, with the date and a running digital time stamp under each image. I stood over his shoulder and watched more than 120 minutes of recorded video at four times normal speed.

The Hollisters had been shot around 0100 hours. Fu Manchu showed me security footage recorded between shortly before midnight and a few minutes after 0200. In some of the rooms, there’d be no activity for long stretches, while in others, depending apparently on the popularity of the individual masseuse, the action was nonstop. All of the customers were male. Most were there for rubdowns, about half of which concluded with masturbatory “happy” endings. A few men were serviced orally. Only one engaged in intercourse with his masseuse—a brief, mechanical encounter that, watched at high speed, reminded me of one of those old, Charlie Chaplin silent movies. The scene would’ve been comical had it not been so pathetic. If Birch was among the clientele, I didn’t recognize him.

“You told me he’s been in a few times,” I said, “and that he always sees the same girl.”

“Most repeats have a regular they like to work with.”

“I’d like to talk to her.”

“You just told me he’s not on the tape. You see for yourself. He wasn’t here that night.”

“Regardless, I’d like to talk to her.”

He took off his glasses. “If I give you her name,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “will you go away?”

“Little would please me more.”

T
HE
GIRL
said she was from Merced in California’s Central Valley. She claimed to be twenty-one. She looked more like seventeen, an Asian with porcelain skin and long hair, dyed blonde and parted down the middle. I couldn’t tell if she was one of the girls on the security footage.

Yes, she said, she remembered Birch: He never asked her for anything other than a deep tissue massage and always tipped her well afterward. No, she said, she couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in. She was certain, however, it hadn’t been on the night of the murders.

“How do you know that?”

She curled her hair nervously around one finger, her large dark eyes avoiding mine, and spoke with Fu Manchu in what sounded like Laotian. He put his Nikes up on his desk and answered the question for her.

“Because she has other customers who pay to be with her all night. Sometimes she works at my house.”

“Birch ever pay you to stay with her at your house?”

“No.”

The girl said something in Laotian. The manager responded to her curtly.

“What did she say?”

“She wants no trouble.”

“Tell her if she tells me the truth, there won’t be any.”

They exchanged a few words before both falling silent.

“She don’t know nothing,” the manager said. “You want a massage, or something? On the house. All you gotta do is leave after and never come back.”

I was hungry, but not for a rubdown or whatever came with it. I left.

The all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet next door was shuttered for the night. I drove a couple of miles down the street to a halfway decent barbecue joint called Skeeter’s. The pungent aroma of barbecue demanded that I order pork ribs, but I could feel my arteries clogging merely thinking about them. A smoked turkey sandwich and a side salad with oil and vinegar would have to do.

“Might as well go vegan at that rate, chief,” said the teenager with the dreadlocks and the Skeeter’s T-shirt, manning the counter.

“The only way I’d go vegan is if meat grew on trees.”

Even slathered in Skeeter’s not-so-secret secret sauce (catsup, honey, Tabasco), the turkey tasted like cardboard. I sat alone at a sticky wooden table, the floor purposely awash in sawdust, and scarfed down the sandwich anyway while adhering to military training: Eat as much as you can right now because you never know when you might eat again. My phone vibrated in my pocket as I was finishing. The screen said, “Alicia.” I licked my fingers clean.

“I tried calling you,” I said.

“Why didn’t you leave a message?”

“I don’t know. Because I’m a guy?”

“Pretty thin excuse, Logan.”

“Yeah, probably.”

She said she’d tried calling me several times and wanted to know where I’d been.

“Business trip.”

“Uh-huh.” Alicia was a cop. She could smell a half-truth a mile away. “Just tell me, Logan. Are you still interested in seeing where this goes?”

“You mean us?”

“No, I mean Brad and Angelina. Of course I mean us, Logan, because I really don’t have time for games right now in my life. We’ve had three homicides down here this week; my supervisor’s freaking out. I don’t have time or the energy to go chasing after some guy who has no time for me.”

“I’m interested, Alicia.”

“You don’t sound it.”

“I’m not sure what that means. How should I sound?”

“More enthusiastic than you are. Look, Logan, if you have misgivings, I’m a big girl. I can take it. But please don’t jack me around. Don’t keep me on a string. If you’re done, we can call it a day right here.”

“I’d like to see you again.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d say that.” Her voice cracked. “When do you think you can come down to San Diego?”

“A couple of weeks, maybe sooner. It’s a little hard to say right now, Alicia. I’ve got a lot going on up here. I’ll have to check my schedule and get back to you with specific dates.”

” What followed was strained silence.

“You still there?”

“No, Logan,” she said, “I
was
here.”

Then the line went dead.

I finished my sandwich, replaying in my head the train wreck that had been my effort to connect with Alicia. Once again I was reminded of how there are many strategies men can employ when trying to make themselves understood when communicating with women. Unfortunately none of them work.

D
RIVING
HOME
, I called Gil Carlisle to tell him his nephew wasn’t at the massage parlor that night.

“That’s a crock,” Carlisle said. “Dino said he was there and I believe him.”

“Believing it doesn’t make it true, Gil. All I’m telling you is what I learned.”

“What you’re telling me is you didn’t get anybody to sign affidavits, like I asked you to do.”

“You want people to lie?”

“Look, I’m trying to save my sister’s son. You said you’d help. You said it was the least you could do, remember?”

There it was, and there it would always be. I may have lost the love of my life when Savannah died, if you want to subscribe to easy flowery sentiment, but Gil Carlisle had lost his only child, and it was my fault. The message couldn’t have been clearer: no matter what I did, not matter how much I did, it would never be enough to compensate him.

“I’m sorry, Gil,” I said, “but I’m not built that way. Not a day goes by, not an hour, that I don’t wish I could rewind the clock and bring Savannah back, but I can’t. If you want to go on hating me for what happened, well, that’s your business. I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But just know, I did my best.”

Seconds passed before he said, “If you’d done your best, my daughter would still be alive and my nephew would be out of jail. I don’t know why I even bothered with you in the first place.”

Thus ended my conversation with Gil Carlisle and for all I knew, our relationship—to the extent we’d ever had a relationship.

I don’t remember the rest of the drive home other than the relentless heat and the way the stars looked as I stepped from my truck, their shimmering brilliance. Some people glean joy from the night sky. They find omens of good fortune in streaks of meteors, the man in the moon. All I ever see are enigmas. Where does the universe begin and end? Why are we on this planet? What does it all mean? Who killed the Hollisters, and for what reason, were trivial questions by comparison. I was too tired to ponder any of it.

Inside the garage felt like the Mojave. Sleeping outside on Mrs. Schmulowitz’s rope hammock the night before had left indentations on my body and a nagging crook in my neck. I grabbed my pillow and a sheet and bedded down on the grass. Kiddiot soon joined me, curled at my feet, far enough away that I couldn’t touch him, the tip of his tongue sticking out the front of his mouth, purring. I hadn’t been asleep but three hours when Buzz called.

“Ever heard of APIS?”

“The insect?”

“No, Logan, not aphids. APIS—the Advance Passenger Information System. You’re a pilot. I thought pilots knew this stuff, for Chrissake.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s time to wake up and pay attention.”

“I know what APIS is, Buzz,” I said, the cobwebs beginning to fade. “Any pilot flying into or out of the United States is required to file a passenger manifest with Customs and Border Protection.”

“That’s affirmative. And why are you flyboys supposed to do this?”

“So Homeland Security can keep track of the bad guys, coming and going. But if you think DHS has the resources to screen every executive jet coming into the country, I’ve got a timeshare in Boca I want to sell you. Terrorists usually fly commercial. Corporate jets are deemed low risk. You’re more likely to find J. Lo flying into Teterboro than you are the head of ISIS. Homeland Security knows this. That’s why their coverage is spotty.”

“That’s not the point,” Buzz said.

“OK, what is the point?” I glanced at my watch. “At three in the morning?”

“The point, Logan, is that you’re king of the jungle. Roy Hollister did what he was supposed to do before he got greased. He filed passenger manifests under his jet’s tail number flying in and out of Europe, or the pilots flying for him did. Guess whose name shows up about twenty times over the last couple years?”

“I don’t know. J. Lo?”

“Try Congressman Pierce Walton. And here’s the thing: All those flights? They’re considered gifts under congressional ethics rules. He was required to report them and he didn’t. Not one of them.”

“Did the names of any known call girls show up with Walton’s?”

“Customs is still running the records. Regardless you have new tasking orders.”

It occurred to me how much my back hurt. Sleeping on the ground is for the young. I felt anything but young.

“I’m listening,” I said, stretching my aching lumbar.

“In light of developments,” Buzz said, “POTUS wants to sever all ties with the honorable Mr. Walton and force him to resign before he becomes one giant, mud-sucking political liability. You’re going to personally deliver that message and make him quit.”