January Justice (36 page)

“I’m sorry.”

“As I mentioned, it was quite some time ago. One does move on.”

“Really? How?”

He turned his pale gray eyes toward me. “One finds a way, if one is wise.”

We ate silently for a while. The soup was extraordinary.

Finally I said, “Thanks for the gun.”

“My pleasure.”

“Olivia Soto is Alejandra Delarosa’s daughter.”

“Is she indeed?”

“She is. The case files I was given only mention the Delarosa’s daughter by her first name, Maria. It turns out her full name is Maria Olivia Delarosa Sotomayor. What do you make of that?”

He took a bite of salad and chewed for a moment. “She is working for the Delarosa woman’s victim. For her mother’s victim. That is concerning.”

“It is.”

“But has she broken any laws?”

“Not that I know of. It’s not illegal to use an assumed name, except on contracts and so forth. And she was born in Los Angeles according to the file, so she’s an American citizen, not here illegally.”

Simon said, “There’s the woman Mrs. Montes saw during the home invasion.”

“Doña Elena seems pretty certain that was Alejandra Delarosa.”

“Family resemblance? Dim lights? Extreme stress?”

“It had crossed my mind.”

“One thinks of reporting this to the authorities or of warning Mrs. Montes directly. But given your current situation and the fact that you left Orange County to obtain this information, perhaps it would be best to gather more intelligence before taking that step.”

“That had also crossed my mind.”

“Of course, the authorities could be advised anonymously.”

“Of course.”

“But if a person in possession of this information were to interview Miss Soto, and if Miss Soto were unaware that the person knows her actual identity, she might reveal more unwittingly than she would in direct interrogation.”

“Unwittingly?”

“A perfectly useful word.”

We ate together quietly a little longer, then I pushed back from the table. “Excuse me a minute.”

I went inside and checked my cell phone for the Montes’s phone number. I dialed it. A woman’s voice came on the line. “Montes’s residence.”

I said, “Olivia, I’m sorry.”

There was a pause, and I wondered if she was going to hang up. Then, “It took you long enough to call.”

“I’m sorry about that, too. I’ve been confused. I have lots of feelings, and I’m not sure what they mean.”

“Feelings about me?”

“I think about you a lot. I’d like to apologize in person. Could we get together?”

“When?”

“How about tonight, for dinner? I could pick you up somewhere. Not at the Montes’s place, obviously.”

“Meet me at my apartment.” She gave me an address in Venice Beach. “Seven o’clock.”

“Listen, I owe you a fancy meal, so dress nice.”

“Don’t I always?”

She hung up.

I went back outside, where Simon was still sitting at the patio table. I sat down. “I’m taking her to dinner tonight.”

He nodded. “She has affected an attraction to you.”

“Affected? I’m shocked, Simon. All women are irresistibly attracted to me.”

“One is pleased to hear it.”

“I don’t think she’s been trying to set a honey trap.”

“No, that seems doubtful since the approach involves blackmail, usually associated with the victim’s urgent desire to conceal the illicit relationship from a concerned third party. In your case, there is no concerned third party, if I may apologize for saying so.”

“Never apologize when you’re right,” I said, knowing he meant Haley wasn’t around to object, so Olivia couldn’t get me into bed and then blackmail me. “I think it’s simple enticement. Get close to keep an eye on what I’m doing. Maybe get me making decisions based on lust instead of logic.”

“It does seem a more plausible explanation.”

“But decisions about what?”

“Perhaps you will learn the answer to that question this evening.”

“Well, if that’s her plan, it has one fatal flaw.”

Simon nodded. “The lady is quite beautiful, but she is not Miss Lane.”

40

When I left the guesthouse
heading for the garage that evening, I was wearing a black silk sports coat over a white Egyptian cotton shirt open at the collar, a pair of bone-colored pleated linen slacks, a pair of brown leather Cole Haan loafers without socks, and the SIG Sauer P228 in a matching brown leather holster.

Haley and I rarely drove the Aston Martin One-77 because it made both of us nervous to be on the road in a car worth nearly two million dollars. When I asked her why she bought such a car, she patiently explained it was an investment, which appreciated about ten percent a year. Even parked inside the garage I kept it covered. But Olivia was a car fanatic, and I thought it might help soften her up. Besides, there was off-street parking at the restaurant, and I was pretty sure I could pay the valets to give it plenty of space and let me do the parking myself. I removed the Aston’s cloth cover, fired it up, and drove it over to Venice Beach.

Olivia lived in the rear unit of a duplex property about five blocks in from the ocean. I parked in the driveway and approached a modernistic gate of steel and frosted glass. Beside it was an intercom with the name “Soto” on a piece of tape under the button. I pushed the button.

Her voice came from the speaker. “Yes?”

I told her it was me.

She said, “The gate doesn’t have a lock. Come on in.”

I entered a long and narrow courtyard with a walkway alongside the front apartment. On the left was the two-story blank stucco wall of the apartment in front. On the right was a tall stucco wall between that property and the one next door. Horsetail reeds filled the planting beds on both sides of the walkway, packed tightly and trimmed flat on top like a hedge. There was a palm tree every ten feet or so, with low-voltage lighting shining up along the trunks. Her door was about halfway back, with frosted glass like the gate and sheltered by a steel trellis overflowing with riotous red bougainvillea.

Olivia answered my knock right away. She was dressed simply in a pair of open-toed high heels that brought her up almost to my height, a very low-cut beige silk blouse, and slacks made from some kind of bronze-colored fabric that shimmered and clung to her in all the better places. She wore her hair loose, the first time I had seen it out of a braid. It fell around her shoulders and glistened in the light as if she had a halo.

She looked absolutely stunning, so I said, “You look absolutely stunning.”

“Very good,” she said. “Keep up that talk, and I may forgive you.”

I wanted to see the look on her face when she laid eyes on the Aston Martin, to find out if she really knew as much about cars as she claimed. I made sure to go first down the walkway toward the street. I held the gate for her and watched.

She came to a full stop and whispered,
“Santa Maria, madre de Dios!”
Then she turned to me. “Is that really a one seventy-seven?”

“It really is.”

“But…but…how?”

“Like the Bentley, it’s sort of a perk. I get to drive it on special occasions.”

She tapped me on the shoulder as I held the car door for her. “There’s a lot more to that story, mister, and I intend to hear it.”

“Maybe we can work something out. You tell me I’m forgiven, and I’ll tell you about the warranty.”

When we rolled up in front of the Seven Palms, one valet opened Olivia’s door while another came to mine. “I’ll park it,” I said, handing him a fifty.

He said, “Certainly,” and then dashed off to remove a traffic cone in front of the restaurant. He stood by while I backed it in, and then he replaced the cone. When I got out, the valet said, “I assume you want to keep the keys?”

I said, “You bet,” and then walked over to Olivia, and we went inside.

They gave us a nice U-shaped booth in the corner. I sat with my back to the rear wall, and Olivia slid around to the middle, facing out toward the dining room.

She said, “Have you ever been here before?”

“Once I drove Miss Lane to a meeting here with a couple of producers. They were trying to attach her to a picture. She kept me close by in case of overzealous fans and so forth.”

Olivia said, “Doña Elena is the same way.”

“She has personal protection?”

“A service she calls in when she thinks she needs them. Any time she’s going someplace with a crowd.”

I thought about the two men who had tried to kill me in the mountains. They had obvious military training, but maybe they were in the personal security business now, as I was. Maybe they had been called in to escort Doña Elena and decided to capitalize on the inside information that was always available to bodyguards. Maybe they had been in the process of setting up a kidnapping, with Vega and the URNG as the fall guys, when I came into the picture. Maybe they decided I was making things too complicated, so they changed their plan a little and set me up to take the fall instead. Of course, that the idea only worked if Doña Elena’s security team had been around long enough to get access to the kind of details they would need to orchestrate such a complicated plan.

I said, “Does Doña Elena always ask for the same bodyguards?”

Olivia looked at me. “No. It’s usually someone different. Why?”

Ah, well. So much for that theory. I said, “Just making conversation.”

The waiter dropped by. Olivia ordered a martini. With the drive home in the Aston Martin in mind, I asked for mineral water.

After the waiter left, I said, “So, tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up?”

“Not too far from here. You know Pico-Union?”

“Wow. Not far as a crow flies, but you’ve come a long way. I’ll bet your folks are proud.”

“How about you? Are you from LA?”

“Uvalde, Texas. Down near Mexico.”

“That explains your Spanish.”

“The schools were about three-quarters Mexican. I pretty much had to learn it or miss out on all the gossip. How about you? Your parents teach it to you?”

“We spoke it all the time at home.”

“But you’re not Mexican American. I can tell from the accent. So, what? Colombian? Puerto Rican?”

“Kind of a combination, actually.” She was looking at the menu. “What’s good here?”

“I had a filet mignon that one time. I think Miss Lane said she enjoyed the swordfish.”

The waiter came back with our drinks. We went ahead and ordered dinner. Olivia and I both opted for the filet.

“Tell me about Haley Lane,” she said after the waiter had gone. “What was she like?”

I gave my stock answer. “She was a good woman. Easy to work for and very kindhearted. Not jaded or impressed with herself at all. What’s Doña Elena like?”

“You met her, so you know she can put away the Chablis. Sometimes that makes her a little bit mean-spirited, but mostly I like her. And the congressman is very kind and thoughtful. He can be curt, but only when he’s in a hurry, and he almost always apologizes later. It’s interesting how normal these people are behind the scenes, isn’t it?”

“In my line of work, I’ve met all kinds. Like they say, the rich are different; they have lots of money.”

“Really? Doña Elena and the congressman are my first rich and famous bosses. At first I was intimidated, but they treat me better than I would treat them if I were in their shoes, probably.”

“That’s an interesting thing to say.”

“I think it’s the power. Being able to make people do pretty much whatever you want them to do. I’d have trouble managing that. It’s seductive.”

Watching her sip from her martini, I said, “What did you do before you went to work for the Montes?”

“This and that. I went to college in Spain, then worked for a bank in a little town called Alzira in Valencia. That’s where I met the HRT Formula One guys.”

“What did you do at the bank?”

“Account management. I have a degree in international banking.”

I stared at her. “Seriously?”

She smiled. “Seriously.”

“Why are you working as a personal assistant?”

“Jobs in my field are kind of scarce at the moment. There’s a little recession on, as you may have heard.”

I smiled. “I did hear something about that.”

The sommelier arrived. I ordered a bottle of Rioja in honor of Olivia’s time in Spain.

When he had left the table, I said, “So how did you get from Pico-Union to Spain?”

“My father sent me.”

I admired her technique. The most convincing lies are always those that contain as much factual information as possible. It’s the same with a false identity. Soto instead of Sotomayor. Olivia was quite good at telling convincing lies. If I had not gone to Guatemala, I might never have known.

She took another sip of her martini, staring at me with her huge brown eyes. I felt her leg press against mine below the table. She maintained the pressure between us. Maybe she thought my leg was the table base, but I doubted it.