Kill the Messenger (15 page)

                        
      19

Eta heaved a sigh as she locked the front door from the inside. The iron grates were already down. The place was a damn fortress. Otherwise, the windows would have been busted out, and there would have been bums and winos and crazy people all over the damn place. Tonight, though, she thought it felt more like a prison inside.

She had been trapped all day, daring to try only periodically to make contact with her Lone Ranger. Not that it would have mattered if she had tried every twenty minutes to reach him. Either he didn’t have the radio with him, or he wouldn’t answer because he was afraid of some kind of trap.

She’d damn near had a heart attack when Parker had asked her to go out back. Something about her van. But Jace hadn’t been in it. And where he’d gone, she didn’t know. She fretted that he might have thought she had brought the detectives in, if he’d seen them. She had gone back out after Parker and his hoochie-mama partner had gone, but she couldn’t see any sign of the boy.

And then that dirt-for-brains Rocco had gone off on her. She’d better not think about trying to harbor a fugitive. He couldn’t have a criminal associated with his business.

Eta had pointed out to him that half his damn family were criminals, and that a place like this one couldn’t be waiting around for altar boys and Eagle Scouts to come through the door. Like Rocco was particular who was around him, she’d said, rolling her eyes at his friend, Vlad, who was putting golf balls, ash falling from the end of his cigarette onto the rug.

Rocco would have sold his sister for a dime if he thought that would keep his ass out of trouble. He didn’t want no truck with LAPD, and the word
loyalty
was foreign to him.

“Worthless, spineless weasel,” Eta mumbled as she set the place to rights, dumping ashtrays, throwing out soda cans and beer bottles. “Someone shoulda put him in a sack at birth and dropped him in a hole.”

When the second round of cops had come calling—some bug-up-his-ass Robbery-Homicide pretty boy and his mute partner—Rocco had been so far up their digestive tracks, they must have tasted that god-awful cologne he dipped himself in every day. He didn’t have a clue about Jace Damon or anyone else who worked for him, but he was quick to bad-mouth just the same. The detectives wanted Jace, therefore he must have done whatever they said he’d done, and Rocco had always had a bad feeling about that kid.

Eta had her doubts Rocco could pick Jace out of a lineup.

He had ordered Eta to tell the detectives everything she knew. She looked at him like he was stupid—which he was—and walked away from the lot of them. Until she knew more about the situation, what little information she had was staying right in her brain.

“Man needs a whuppin’,” she grumbled, working her way toward the back. As she went to turn the lights out in her office, the phone rang.

All she knew about Jace was that once she had been shopping in Chinatown, and she had seen him across the street with a boy about eight or nine. They had probably been there for fun. She had watched them go into a fish market. When she had mentioned it to him the following Monday, he had denied being there. Must have been someone else, he’d said, but she knew it hadn’t been.

She wouldn’t have answered the phone, but she thought it might be him.

“Speed Couriers,” she said. “What you want, honey? We closed for the day.”

“This is Detective Davis, ma’am. I need to ask you a few questions.”

Eta scowled at the phone, as if he could see her. “Don’t you people talk to each other? What am I paying taxes for? For y’all to all go running around asking the same questions over and over like a bunch of damn morons?”

“No, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. I just have a couple of questions about one of your messengers, J. Damon.”

“I know that,” she said with annoyance. “You got to get up to speed. What are you? The third string? I got better things to do with my night than talk to you, honey. I got babies at home need me. I’m hanging up.”

She slammed the receiver down, her gaze going to the radio. One last try.

She keyed the mike. “Base to Sixteen. Where you at, Lone Ranger? You gotta come home to Mama, sugar. ASAP. You got that? I’m still holding money for you. You copy?”

Silence. No static. No nothing. She had no idea if he even had his two-way with him. She wondered where he was, what he was doing. She tried to picture him safe someplace. She could only picture him alone.

Eta shut off the lights. As she made her way toward the kitchen, she pulled on her raincoat. It was late already. If Jace was going to call, he would have done it by now. She had her own two-way with her, just in case.

The alley was black as pitch. It had started to rain again. The light above the door had gone out like it did every time it rained. She’d told Rocco to call an electrician the last time it happened, but of course he hadn’t. He’d wait until the entire electrical system shorted out and burned the damn building to the ground.

Eta shook her head at the hopelessness of thinking Rocco might one day have some sense in his head. She dug her car keys out of her tote bag.

And then a light was in her face, blinding her.

“Detective Davis, ma’am,” he said.

This isn’t right,
Eta thought. If he’d been back here all along, why wouldn’t he have just come inside to see what she was up to? Why call on the telephone?

“I really need to get an address from you, ma’am.”

Eta inched her way to the side, a strange feeling crawling over her. This wasn’t right. She wanted to go. “What address?” she asked, inching toward the van.

“Your messenger, Damon.”

“I don’t know how many times I got to say this,” Eta complained, taking another step. “I don’t have no address for the boy. I don’t have no phone number. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t know nothin’ about him.”

The light moved closer. Davis moved closer. “Come on. He’s worked here awhile, hasn’t he? How can you not know anything about him? You can’t keep that up.”

“I can and I will. I can’t tell you nothin’ I don’t know.”

Her escape ended at the side of her van. She clutched the keys in her hand.

The light moved closer. She had nowhere to go.

“You want to do this the hard way?” he asked.

“I don’t want to do this at all,” Eta said, sidling toward the back of the van. If she could get in the van, lock the doors . . . She turned her key ring in her hand.

“I don’t care what you want, bitch,” he said, and lunged.

Eta brought her hand up, pressing the trigger on the mini-can of pepper spray she kept on her key chain. She guessed where his eyes might be and fired, a primal shout tearing up out of her throat.

Davis yelped and swore. The flashlight beam went straight up, then came down, the heavy flashlight missing her head, hitting her shoulder.

Eta cried out, kicked blindly, connected with some part of his anatomy.

“Fucking cunt!”

Davis spat the words at her, grabbed a handful of braids as Eta tried to bolt. He probably thought he could stop her in her tracks, or pull her back. But Eta was a large lady, and for once that was in her favor.

She kept her momentum moving forward. Davis swore and flung himself on her back, trying to knock her down. The flashlight went flying, beam flashing up, down, skimming the ground as it rolled.

One knee buckled beneath her and she fell, throwing him off. She tried to scramble up off the ground, but she was awkward and unbalanced, and she fell against the van, and had to get her feet back under her and try again.

Davis threw himself at her, slamming her back against the vehicle. She clawed at him, her long nails scratching down his face, and he cried out again. He hit her hard across the face. And then his body was pressed up against hers, and something sharp was at her throat.

“Tell me,” he demanded, his voice low, breath rasping in and out of his lungs, bitter with the scent of stale cigarettes and sour beer.

“I don’t know,” Eta said. Her own voice was unrecognizable to her, soft, shaking, frightened. She was crying. She thought of her kids. Her mother would have them at the dinner table by now. Jamal would be begging to stay up late. Kylie would be talking nonstop about what had gone on in fifth grade today.

“You want to live, bitch?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Where is he? Answer me and you go home to your family.”

She was trembling. She was going to die for keeping a secret she had no answer for.

The knife caressed her throat. “Give me an answer. You go home to your kids. If it’s the truth, I won’t come back for you—or them.”

Eta didn’t know the truth. She gave him the only answer she could.

“I seen him in Chinatown.”

“Chinatown.”

She drew breath to answer him, but when she tried to speak no words came out of her mouth, just strange wet sounds. Davis stepped back from her, picked up the flashlight, shined it on her. She lifted a hand to touch her throat and felt her life running out of her. Her hand was red with it.

Horrified, she wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. She wanted to shout for help, but she seemed not to have control of her tongue. She needed to cough, but she couldn’t breathe. She was drowning in her own blood.

She staggered forward. Her legs buckled beneath her. She fell like an anvil to the wet, oily pavement.

She thought of her husband . . . and then she went to him.

                        
      20

Diane Nicholson sipped at a glass of mediocre champagne and rolled an eye around the elegantly appointed room, bored. The Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel was the epitome of class and wealth, two things required to attend a political fund-raiser for the district attorney of Los Angeles. But very little in the political world impressed Diane. The glow had worn off long ago.

Her husband had spent a dozen years involved in city politics. Joseph’s second great love. His job was his first, the love that made him a wealthy man. Diane had been ranked somewhere further down the list—after golfing and his boat. The last couple of years of the marriage, the most they saw of each other had been at events like this one. And even then, all she had been was an accessory on his arm, like a pair of diamond cuff links.

At his funeral all his friends had given her their sympathy and had gone on about how much she would miss him. But they had seen more of him than she ever had. Joseph’s absence from her life was an absence of the anxiety of wondering what was wrong with her that the man who was supposed to love her would rather have been golfing than with her.

He had married her for her potential as a social asset. She had a good look, was well-dressed, well-informed, well-spoken. But her career was an embarrassment to him, and Diane had refused to give it up. And the more strained their relationship became because of it, the harder she had hung on to it, afraid to let go of the one thing that was a sure thing, because her husband’s love was not.

Better to have loved and lost, the saying went. What bullshit. She had learned that lesson the hard way, twice.

She allowed herself to be dragged to these events now because she enjoyed eavesdropping, and because appearing with someone warded off matchmakers. Also, she had agreed to come on the condition her date buy her dinner afterward.

Her date was Jeff Gauthier, forty-six, handsome, an attorney for the city of Los Angeles, chronic bachelor. He had been a friend for years and years. After Joseph’s death, Jeff had talked her into becoming each other’s event date. Jeff considered it bad policy to drag a real date to these rubber-chicken affairs. Not so much to spare his date-of-the-month the brain-numbing experience, but because he felt showing up with dates-of-the-month was bad for his image.

“I’m having the most expensive thing on the menu,” she said, leaning toward him and snagging a stuffed mushroom off the tray of a passing waiter. “And dessert.”

“That’s what you always do.”

“I might even order an extra dessert to take home with me.”

“We only have to stay long enough for me to be seen with three prominent people.”

“Do I count?”

“You’re notorious, not prominent.”

“I like that better, anyway.” This crowd had never known what to make of her. Married to someone as successful as Joseph, yet working for the county touching dead bodies every day.

She scanned the crowd. The usual suspects. District Attorney Steinman and his wife, the mayor and his wife, ADA Giradello and his ego, the assorted LA movers and shakers who thrived on this kind of thing, newspaper photographers and reporters, crews from the local television stations here for a sound bite for the late news. The media could have saved themselves the trouble and simply run photos and footage from the last event this crowd had gathered for. They all looked alike.

“I’m going to slip a twenty to one of the waiters if he’ll start spinning plates on a stick,” she said.

“Why don’t you just get up on a table and sing us a song?” Jeff suggested, herding her toward a big-deal downtown developer.

They did the meet and greet. A couple of flashes went off. Diane smiled and complimented the developer’s wife on the vintage brooch she was wearing.

“Did I hear you sold the Palisades house?” the woman asked.

“I didn’t want that much house,” Diane replied. “I’m trying to downsize and simplify my life.”

The woman would have looked puzzled if not for the Botox in her forehead. “Barbra Sirha said she thought you bought something in Brentwood.”

“West LA.” A much less impressive zip code than star-studded Brentwood or Pacific Palisades. Diane could sense the woman’s need to ask her if she’d lost her mind.

Gazes passed like ships in the night as everyone looked for the next important person to move on to.

And then that person walked into the room.

Norman Crowne was a man of average height and slight build, gray hair, and a beard precisely trimmed. Unassuming at first glance for a man who wielded the kind of power he did. People expected him to be an imposing figure, tall, broad-shouldered, with a booming voice. None of those traits applied to him, yet he still possessed an aura of power that preceded him through the crowd.

He was followed by his son, Phillip, and a pair of bodyguards who looked like they had come straight from the Secret Service. All four of them were impeccably turned out in dark suits and stylish ties. The crowd parted before them as if they were royalty, and the senior Crowne went directly to the district attorney and offered his hand.

The son, a product of Crowne’s ill-fated second marriage, turned to Anthony Giradello and was greeted warmly. They were of an age, and both graduates of Stanford Law, but Phillip had been born a Crowne, with all the opportunities and privileges that came with it. He had gone to work for his father and held a cushy position in Crowne Enterprises. Giradello had been spawned in a small town near Modesto, the son of fruit ranchers, and had hustled for every chance he could grab, clawing his way up the ladder in the DA’s office.

“One big happy family,” Diane murmured into Jeff’s lapel as they moved through the crowd in search of his second significant person of the evening. “That’s blatant. The trial of his daughter’s murderer is about to start, and Norman Crowne is all but laying money on the table for the DA in front of every media source in Los Angeles.”

Jeff shrugged. “So? There’s no conflict of interest. Giradello hardly needs to be bribed to go for the throat on this one. He wants to convict Rob Cole so badly, he can hardly stand it. Cole is his O.J. He’s not going to mess that up. To say nothing of using this trial to blot out the memory of that preppie murder your friend Parker screwed up for him.”

“Parker was a scapegoat. Giradello didn’t do his homework. That trial was his first big lesson in ‘money buys justice.’ This is his second,” Diane said. “You don’t think every average person in America isn’t going to look at this picture on the morning shows tomorrow and say Norman Crowne is buying himself a conviction? That more expensive lab tests of forensic evidence will be done, more expert witnesses will be called; that a bigger effort will be made to nail Rob Cole to a cross than to convict a gangbanger in South Central who’s killed five or six people.”

“Well . . . I don’t care, frankly,” Jeff said. “And I don’t see why you would, either. You’d have them stick Rob Cole’s head on a pike and feed his remains to dogs at the city pound. What’s your problem with Norman Crowne’s influence?”

“Nothing. He can have the pike custom-made. I just don’t want to see grounds for appeal.”

“Lady Justice,” Jeff chuckled, pointing her toward one of the DA’s biggest backers, a radio talk-show host with on-air politics so far to the right he should have fallen off the planet. “There’s the Diane we know and love.”

“I’m not making nice with this blowhard,” she said between her teeth.

“You know, for a faux date, you’re a lot of work.”

“Quality doesn’t come cheap.”

Jeff introduced himself to the blowhard. Diane gave him the cursory acknowledgment nod with the Novocain smile, and turned to get a bead on the Crowne clan, now joined by Tricia’s daughter from her first marriage.

Caroline Crowne was just twenty-one, short and somewhat stubby, like her mother had been, though Caroline had done a lot more with herself than Tricia ever had. Packaged in conservative designer labels and balancing on a pair of Manolos, her curly mop of auburn hair was stylishly cut in a chin-length bob. She gave the appearance of a well-heeled young executive type, and was supposedly slowly inserting herself into her mother’s role of seeing to the Crowne charitable trust.

Shortly after Tricia’s murder, the tabloids had hinted at the possibility of something sordid going on between Caroline Crowne and her stepfather, but the rumors had been squelched like a slug on the sidewalk, and Norman Crowne’s granddaughter had abruptly ceased to be of any interest to the press.

What a list of headlines an affair between Caroline Crowne and Rob Cole would have generated. Poor old Tricia whacked to make way for a May-December romance between her daughter and her sleazy rotten rat-bastard husband. Caroline had been nineteen when her mother died. Barely legal.

It wasn’t all that hard for Diane to imagine.

“One more and we’re out of here,” Jeff said through his teeth as he smiled and raised his glass to someone off to his right.

“I can already taste the sea bass,” Diane said, letting him steer her toward the district attorney.

From the corner of her eye she caught a door swinging open, maybe six, eight feet to her right. Bradley Kyle and his partner came in looking like kids who were being sent to the principal’s office. They were headed in the same direction that Jeff was taking her—toward the DA and the ADA, and Norman and Phillip Crowne.

Giradello turned and looked at the detectives, frowning.

Diane drifted a step in their direction as Giradello excused himself from Phillip Crowne and moved two steps toward the cops. Eavesdropping was the real reason she came to these things.

Jeff interrupted her briefly to introduce her to the district attorney, whom she’d met fifty times before. She smiled, shook the man’s hand, and tuned him out, her gaze sliding just to the right of him.

The conversation was terse, Giradello’s face darkened, Bradley Kyle turned his hands palms-up, like, What do you want me to do about it? Only the odd word escaped for the casual ear to catch.
Do, what, can’t, know.
Somebody was supposed to have done something, but hadn’t been able to.

Kyle and his partner had worked Tricia Crowne’s murder. Not as leads, as second team. As the trial began they would be called on to double-check, to dig up and polish off notes and memories, to pick at any tiny fibers that could become loose ends.

Rob Cole’s attorney, Martin Gorman, would know everything about them—who they were on the job, who they were off the job, whether one or the other had ever made a derogatory remark about Rob Cole or about actors in general or about too-handsome jerks who went around in vintage bowling shirts no matter what the occasion. Odds were good Gorman had spies in this very room, watching Giradello’s every move, looking for anything that could give him an edge, an opening, or at the very least keep him from getting surprised.

A trial as big as this one was a chess game with layers and layers of strategy. The pieces were being jockeyed into position. Giradello was bringing his army into line. Somebody was supposed to have done something but hadn’t been able to. She wondered what that something was.

Steinman said something. Jeff laughed politely. Diane smiled and nodded.

A word, a curse, a growl, a name she didn’t recognize . . . and one that she did.