January Justice (42 page)

“One day, Congressman Montes held a town-hall meeting there. I was in charge of the accommodations, making sure he had coffee or bottled water, whatever he wanted. Doña Elena came with him. It felt surreal, meeting this movie star my mother kidnapped. She was very friendly and easy to talk to. Well, you’ve met her, so you know. She asked me all kinds of questions, like she really wanted to get to know me, and at the end of the evening, she offered me the job as her personal assistant.

“It seemed like fate. Like I was following in my mother’s footsteps, taking a step closer to her somehow, because of the connection with Doña Elena. I didn’t think very much about it. I just went to work.

“Now I spend my days keeping her appointments straight, making the calls Doña Elena doesn’t want to make, running all kinds of errands, you name it. It’s actually a good job. I’ve met some amazing people. But there’s never any mention of the kidnapping and murder.

“I was starting to think I’d never get anywhere, but then one day my computer died. It was bad timing because we were hosting a fund-raiser the following night, and I had a million details to get organized. There was no time to buy a new computer, so Doña Elena told me to use an old one she had stored in a closet off their garage. I set it up and went to work. It was a little slow but better than nothing. Then I opened an old file on that computer by mistake, and I realized the person who had created the file was Arturo Toledo.

“It turned out to be one of the computers he was using at the time my mother…when he was killed. It had hundreds of his files still on the hard drive. I guess Doña Elena didn’t realize that, or else she didn’t care.

“I had moved to Venice Beach by then, and I had bought my own computer, so I made copies of the files and took them home. Over the next few weeks, I read every word of his old emails in my spare time. I looked at all his photos. He had hundreds of snapshots of everything from vacations to baseball games to pictures of his backyard. Finally I found one little document, a single page with three numbers on it. If I hadn’t studied banking in Spain, I wouldn’t have realized it was a bank code, a password, and an account number.

“It took another five weeks to find the bank. It was in the Cayman Islands. The account was still active, but it had a negative balance. The bank had been levying fees for seven years, but nobody had paid them because, of course, it was Arturo Toledo’s account, and he was dead. And the account had been emptied on the day he died.

I said, “So you hit a dead end.”

“Not really. I was able to hack into the bank’s records and—”

“Wait a minute. You bypassed a bank’s security system?”

“Yes.”

“But how did you do that? I mean, how do you know how?”

“I taught myself a lot about computers while I was in high school, and when I got to college, I kept learning. I’m pretty good at things like that.”

“And at working on performance race cars.”

“That’s true.”

“What else can you do?”

“Well, if your toaster breaks, I can fix it for you. Or a television. Or an air conditioner. Like I told you before, I just have this thing about machines. Sort of an intuitive understanding of how things work. I grew up taking things apart to figure out how they work. Anything mechanical, really. And electrical. Any kind of logical system. Mathematics comes super easy for me. I do calculus equations in my head. I can program in most languages. I know most of what there is to know about electronics. Whatever.”

“So you’re a genius.”

“I kind of am, actually. But only when it comes to machines and things. I don’t understand much about people.”

“Okay. So you’re a genius, and you’re inside the financial records of an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands. What next?”

“Well, I was able to find out where the funds in Arturo Toledo’s account were wired. So I went to that bank, which was in Argentina, and once I hacked that one, I saw the money had been moved again immediately.”

“Moved immediately? You mean seven years ago, on the day Toledo was killed?”

“That’s right. Someone really knew what they were doing. It took me three days to follow the money through six banks before I found it.”

I sat up straight, forcing her to move away a little on the sofa. “Wait a minute. You found Toledo’s money?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How much is there?”

“A little over nine and a half million dollars.”

I whistled.

She said, “It was eleven million originally. There have been regular withdrawals over the years. I like to think my mother has been spending it on the people. You know, being La Alejandra.”

I said, “So, you’re close to finding her.”

“I don’t know for sure. It was a numbered Swiss account. That means there was no name associated with the account, just a number. So I can’t be sure if she’s the one who set it up.”

“Can’t you watch the account and track the withdrawals?”

“No. The account holder moves any funds they want to withdraw into a separate escrow account maintained by the bank. From there I guess it must be wired to them. But the escrow account is on a different server, and the security is too good. I’ve been trying to get into it for the last few weeks, but there’s just no way.”

“Then there’s nothing you can do?”

“Well, I did try one thing, but I kind of wish I hadn’t done it now.”

“What’s that?”

“I took the money.”

“You what?”

“It seemed like the best idea at the time. Just because the account holder chose to move withdrawals into the bank’s escrow account doesn’t mean it has to be done that way. So I set up my own numbered account and moved the money into that.”

I couldn’t sit still. I got up and began to pace. “How careful were you to cover your tracks?”

“Actually, I wanted them to trace it back to me, so I made it pretty easy. I mean, they can’t find the money, but they can tell I’m the one who has it.”

I stared down at her. “You’re using yourself as bait.”

“You could put it that way.”

“That’s what the men wanted at your house. They kept asking you where it was. They want the money.”

She looked up at me and nodded.

“ Toledo was murdered for that money, Olivia. What were you thinking?”

“There was nothing left to do. I had to try something. I guess I kind of hoped my mother would be the one who came. But even if she sent someone else, I thought all I’d have to do is tell them who I really am. I didn’t believe my mother would let them hurt me.”

I started pacing again. “That night at your apartment, did you tell those men who you really are?”

“Of course. But it didn’t make any difference. That man kept right on beating me and asking where the money is.”

“Next time they might kill you.”

“They might have done that before, but now I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because now I have a backup plan.”

“Yeah? What is that?”

“Not what, Malcolm. Who. My backup plan is you.”

45

The next day Olivia slept a lot.
I cleaned the M11 at the kitchen counter and clipped the weapon to my belt. Then I went outside and washed a couple of the cars. I never let the guesthouse out of my sight, but it was good to have a little distance from Olivia. I needed time to think about her story.

When I was done with the second car, I went and sat on Haley’s favorite bench beneath the bougainvillea. From there I could see both Newport Harbor and the guesthouse. It seemed clear Olivia had told the truth as far as she knew it. Her story didn’t hang together in a couple of places, but that was probably because of the one mistaken assumption I was pretty sure she’d made. And her information did explain some things that had been puzzling me.

It was a perfect day for sailing. The wind was steady out of the northwest, the skies were cloudless, and the chop was under a foot. A good sailing day is a good thinking day. By the time I stood up to return to the guesthouse, I was fairly sure I knew what was really going on.

Olivia and I walked around the grounds for a while before sunset, then we ordered pizza and watched a movie, Wall Street. It was good to sit and relax a little, knowing there were finally no secrets between us. But there was a limit to my relaxation. I kept the M11 on the table at my elbow.

Olivia’s black eye had turned from red and purple to a more uniform dark brown. On most women it would have been an ugly mark, but even with the bruising, she was beautiful. She said she needed fresh clothes for work the following day, so we spent another night in separate bedrooms and then rose before the sun and drove up to her apartment in the Bentley.

When we arrived, I took her keys and asked her to stand in the small courtyard outside her front door. Before I stepped inside the apartment I pulled the M11, put a round in the chamber, and slipped the safety off.

The living-room furniture was still askew, the potshards were still scattered on the floor from my diversion, and the slugs were still in the walls from the shots I had exchanged with Medallion’s partner. Otherwise the place was fine.

I tidied up the living room while Olivia went to her bedroom to pack some things. Twenty minutes later, she came into the room with only a purse over her shoulder. She had done wonders with makeup. It was hard to tell she had been beaten just three days before. But I had expected her to come back with a suitcase full of clothes.

“Where’s your other stuff?” I asked.

“What other stuff?”

“I thought you’d pack for the week.”

“I can’t stay at your place, Malcolm. There’s the walls, and you and Simon and Teru. Those men won’t come for me there.”

“They might, but we’d be ready. And you sure can’t stay here. It’s too exposed.”

“If we make this too hard for them, they can’t take me to my mother.”

“Olivia, be reasonable. You don’t even know for certain that they work for your mother. They kept beating you after you told them who you really are, remember? All we know for sure is that they only care about the money, and there’s nothing they won’t do to you to get it.”

“It’s still the only way to find her, and if I don’t find her, my father’s going to drink himself to death. You saw him. You know it’s true.”

“I’m not leaving you here alone.”

She smiled. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

She took her little Japanese car to the Montes’s place overlooking Beverly Hills. I hung back a couple of blocks, since I knew where she was going. She took Lincoln Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard, and then turned inland. At Beverly Drive she turned left, and at the little Will Rogers Park where Beverly meets Sunset Boulevard, she bore left again. We passed the Beverly Hills Hotel and crossed Sunset to climb into Benedict Canyon. Up near the top, she turned right on Wallingford and then left into the Montes’s driveway.

The last thing I needed was for Doña Elena or the congressman to see me there and think I was stalking them or casing the place for another home invasion. So while Olivia paused to push the code into the gate keypad, I drove past her, made a U-turn, and parked in the shade of a live oak tree about a hundred yards up the road, out of camera range from the gate.

I killed the engine and settled in to wait. Like so many other roads above West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, if you didn’t know there were mansions all around, you’d never guess. Only one of the Montes’s neighbors had erected a wall along the road. All the others had planted landscaping that looked natural but was artfully positioned to conceal fences and state-of-the-art security systems. So from where I sat, mostly all I saw was vegetation, a couple of gates, and blue sky.

After twenty minutes, a woman drove a white Honda Civic past me. I watched in the rearview mirror as she slowed and turned into a driveway on the other side of the street. She seemed to know the gate code. Somebody’s maid, probably.

After about an hour, I decided to see how many bird species I could spot from where I sat. There were quails and doves and crows and smaller blackbirds. Also hummingbirds and one hawk gliding in a giant circle on the thermals rising from the hills. I saw several little brown birds, which I couldn’t distinguish from each other, so in fairness I could only count them as one species. Also some kind of a finch that looked like a sparrow, except it had a yellow breast.

At eleven-thirty my cell phone rang.

She said, “You still out there?”

“You bet.”

“I just had a thought. You know how Teru thinks the guys who attacked me were the same ones who tried to kill you? Maybe they were also the ones who did the home invasion. Maybe it was me they were after, not the congressman or Doña Elena. You know, I spend the night here sometimes. Maybe there was a mix-up. If you catch them trying to get to me again, you might be able to prove a connection with the home invasion and clear yourself.”

“Maybe so.”

“You already thought of this?”

“Something like it crossed my mind.”

“Well, good. I’m glad you’re getting something out of this too. Why don’t you go for lunch? I’d bring out some food, but Doña Elena might notice, and it’s probably not a good idea for her to know you’re hanging around out there.”