Motive (37 page)

“Sticks and stones,” said Milo, dialing 911.

She called herself Kashmeer Katte, had fake I.D. to prove it. The same bogus document listed her age as twenty-five. The card shared scant space in her rabbit-fur purse with four hundred dollars in cash, two condoms, two plastic-wrapped nuggets of cocaine and one of methamphetamine.

Her real name was Agnes Brzica, her actual age, thirty-one. No sense disputing that, she came up five times on NCIC. Arrests for solicitation and drugs and once for assault.

Despite being found out, she lied about everything, starting with how long she’d known J. J. Williams.

“Just a couple weeks, sir.” She’d managed to cadge a jail uniform one size too small, setting off a power struggle with the silicon implanted in her chest.

Milo said, “A girl who dances with you at Black Velvet says Williams has been coming in for months, lots of times you two went home together.”

“Which girl?” said Brzica.

“That matters?”

“Some a them lie.”

He waited.

“Okay,” said Brzica. “Yeah, I partied with him, I just didn’t want to get in trouble.”

“I see.”

“Honest, sir. I had no idea what he was.”

“You thought he was a wholesome guy.”

Long pause. “He was okay.”

“He used you to lure Darius Kleffer outside so he could kill Kleffer.”

“No way, sir.”

“Yes way, Agnes.”

“Uh-uh. It wasn’t like that, sir.”

“What were you doing in Kleffer’s restaurant? Don’t say eating.”

“Eating.” Giggle. Hair toss. “Okay. I just went in ’cause he said he was a friend, wanted to surprise him.”

“Williams said Kleffer was a friend.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So he did use you to lure Kleffer?”

Silence.

“Agnes?”

“Not really, sir.”

“If all Williams wanted was to surprise Kleffer, why not just bop in himself?”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Kinda hard, Agnes.”

Big smile. Hair toss.

“Why’d Williams use you if it was just a surprise?”

“I guess I was a bigger surprise.”

“Kleffer said you worked at getting him out of the kitchen. Sent three compliments-to-the-chef messages, nagged the server.”

“He’s alive?”

“No thanks to you, Agnes.”

“Wow, that’s awesome, sir. I was surprised when that happened. Really. He’s got really stinky breath.”

“Kleffer or Williams?”

“The German. Really stinky.”

“He’s lucky he’s got any breath at all, Agnes.”

“You can call me Kashmeer, I like it better.”

“Fair enough, Kashmeer. What else are you going to tell me?”

“I didn’t do nothing, sir.”

“Sounds like you actually need to believe that.”

“I don’t need, I know, sir.”

“Okay, Kashmeer. Let’s talk about Richard Corey.”

“Who?” Exaggerated innocence.

Milo smiled. “Kashmeer, Kashmeer.”

“What?”

“Your DNA came up in the apartment next to Richard Corey’s. It’s not exactly a huge complex.”

“All right,” said Brzica. “J.J. said he was a friend. Also.”

“All those friends. J.J. was a popular guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Just a regular social butterfly.”

“I guess. He did live next to him, said he wasn’t paying rent. That’s what a friend does. Right? They help.”

“When did Williams tell you what he planned to do to Corey?”

“Never, sir. I didn’t even know until you told me, sir. Honest.”

“Williams goes into Corey’s place, comes out with bags of money, you didn’t wonder.”

“If I knew, maybe.”

“He never showed you the money.”

“No, sir,” she said. “I’d a liked that.”

“Liked what?”

Big smile. “When they show me the money.” Dropping her hand to her crotch. “When it drops into the g-string. The greatest feeling, sir.”

“Okay, let’s move on, Ag—Kashmeer. Meredith Santos.”

“Who?”

“A girl who used to work with Williams.”

“Don’t know her. I’m sorry, sir.”

“For what?”

“Calling you fat and ugly. I was scared.”

“Hey,” said Milo, “reality is reality.”

“No way, sir. You’re muscular and masculine.”

“Gosh.”

“Can I go now? It’s almost time for lunch.”

“Not quite yet, Kashmeer. We need to talk about Meredith Santos. She’s disappeared.”

“Okay.”

“Williams never mentioned her?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Meredith Santos, Kashmeer.”

“Nope.”

“Hispanic, a little younger than you.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Gorgeous girl,” said Milo. “I’m talking beauty-queen caliber.”

Anger striped Brzica’s face. “He didn’t need that.”

“Didn’t need what?”

“Fancy
pussy
. He had
me
.”

He spent another two hours with her, gave me a try, allowed Frank Gonzales to have a go. By the time she asked for a lawyer, all of us were tired but Agnes Brzica remained full of energy and refusing to say where she’d lived before meeting Williams.

Hard to say how much of that was temperament, how much a residual effect of the meth she’d smoked.

Left alone in the interview room, knowing she was being videotaped, she danced and sang and shimmied and fluffed her hair and her
breasts. Removing her jail slippers, she waved them like cheerleading props.

When her public defender arrived, she was standing on her head and wiggling her toes.

Her legal representation was a twenty-something named Ira Newgrass. He forbade her from saying another word, assured Milo he was wasting his time, anyway, “nothing is going to stick.”

The Oxnard deputy D.A. assigned to the case, a woman named Pam Theroux, agreed privately. “All you have her on is flirting with Kleffer.”

Frank Gonzales said, “C’mon, we’ve got her living with Williams right next to Corey, leaving before Corey’s murder, waiting at that motel and meeting up with Williams and then coming to L.A. to abet a homicide.”

“Residing and waiting aren’t crimes, Detective.”

“She’s evil,” said Gonzales.

“Evil isn’t my business,” said Theroux. “The penal code is.”

“You can’t do anything?”

“The most we could attempt would be conspiracy and that’s a stretch. We’re not wasting time on something that isn’t winnable.”

“What about the dope in her purse?”

“Oh, sure,” said Theroux. “We can get her a couple years on that, some of it’ll probably be suspended. I thought you were talking a serious charge.”

Milo said, “I’m less concerned with punishing her than finding out where Meredith Santos is. If we can’t hold anything over her head, there’s no leverage to get her to talk.”

“So dangle a totally suspended sentence on the dope and see if she bites.”

Later that day, Milo called Newgrass and made the offer.

The PD said, “I’ll ask her.”

An hour later: “She says she’d love to make a deal but she really never heard of this person. How about you don’t file on the drugs, anyway?”

“Why not?”

“She’s being sincere.”

“Just like you,” said Milo. He slammed down the phone.

When Frank Gonzales heard the news, he said, “That’s the way it goes. Cookies crumbling all over the damn place. No, forget that. No more food analogies.”

Three days after the death of John Jensen Williams, Milo called Albert Tranh.

“It’s safe for the girls to come home now, Mr. Tranh.”

“Why’s that, Lieutenant?”

“The bad guy’s out of the picture.”

“Arrested?”

“Six feet under.”

“Oh,” said Tranh. “I see. Well, that’s good but I’m not sure why you’re telling me.”

“If you find yourself in a situation where you can pass along the information, I’m sure the girls will appreciate it.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, Lieutenant.”

A day later, Tranh phoned. “Ashley and Marissa are appreciative, though obviously there’s a lot else on their minds.”

“When are they coming back?”

“I’ve been informed that they may remain where they are.”

“In Vancouver.”

“Apparently,” said Tranh, “they’ve found employment. Seem to be learning responsibility.”

“Good lesson for rich girls,” said Milo.

“All the more reason,” said Tranh.

“Any horses up there?”

“The topic has come up.”

Eight days after the death of John Jensen Williams, the combined force of Milo and Frank Gonzales finally convinced one of Kashmeer Katte’s fellow dancers to spill.

Kashmeer had sublet off the books, scoring the converted garage of a dingy bungalow in East Hollywood rented by three of the other strippers.

“Another back house,” I said.

“Unbelievable,” said Milo. “We’re talking carbon copy of Frankie’s place. No taxidermy, this place yielded better treasure. Three handguns, including the .25 used to kill Ursula, the 9mm used to shoot Frankie, and another 9mm with both Williams’s and Richard Corey’s prints that had never been fired.”

“The gun Corey waved at his daughters.”

“Brand-new, not loaded. Idiot was a paper tiger to the end. We also found the cash Williams took from Corey. Hundred and eighteen K, Williams didn’t bother to hide it, just kept it in bank bags under the bed.”

“He was living there with Kashmeer?”

“Since leaving Oxnard. I informed her PD, he calls back an hour later, his client is now ready to ‘discuss.’ I told him my priority is finding out what happened to Merry Santos, she doesn’t give that up, she bores me. Nothing from him since. We’ll see.”

I said, “Williams leave behind any souvenirs?”

“Best I can say to that is maybe. There was a jewelry box on Brzica’s nightstand with some interesting contents. Starting with a Lady Patek with a dead battery, way too classy for Brzica.”

“Ursula was taking two watches to be fixed?”

“I called her jeweler, and he never sold her a Patek, but she could’ve picked it up somewhere else. The other stuff is trinkets, no reason for
Williams to have them unless they meant something to him. I’ve sent photos to Kathy Hennepin’s family, they think one pair of costume earrings
might’ve
been hers. What was more probative was—get this—a stuffed baby owl that had to come from Frankie.”

“Trinkets,” I said. “That poor woman in Connecticut couldn’t have afforded Tiffany. Maybe something will come up.”

“I’ll try, but good luck after all these years. Sean did find one strong possible in New York, two and a half years ago, when Williams was living there. A Japanese woman named Yuki Yamada here on a work visa so she could be a sous-chef at a fancy fish place in Midtown Manhattan. She was found strangled and stabbed in her Lower East Side apartment. Dinner for two on the table—sashimi, et cetera—but no one made anything of it because she was a pro, the assumption was she’d set up a meal. No sexual assault, no DNA. NYPD didn’t sound fired up. The new mayor’s prioritizing traffic fatalities.”

He rotated his mouth. “There have to be others but I’m gonna concentrate on sweeping out my own stables.”

Horse analogy.

I said, “Makes sense.”

Ten days after the death of John Jensen Williams, Al Bayless called. The cameras we’d installed in the building had nabbed one would-be car thief and “a pervy-looking dude hiding behind an SUV. Any way we could hang on to the gear?”

“Sure,” said Milo. “Consider it a gift.”

Bayless said, “Two offenders. And that’s just a couple of weeks, no telling.”

“Bosses happy, Al?”

“Wish I could say they cared, Milo, but I’m happy—that steak’ll be on me.”

“Sounds good.”

“I mean it, man.”

“I know you do.”

Fifteen days after the death of John Jensen Williams, Milo and I were at Café Moghul celebrating the return of his appetite.

Agnes Brzica continued to profess ignorance about the fate and whereabouts of Meredith Santos.

“Idiot’s holding out, for what I don’t know, but her lawyer’s even a bigger cretin, it’s like talking to a stain.”

He forked, chewed, and swallowed a massive chunk of tandoori lamb.

“Yum—think of this as therapy, Alex.”

“Eating?”

“It’s not merely ingesting, my friend, it’s therapeutically recontextualizing the whole food thing.”

“Self-help,” I said.

“Is there any other kind?”

The previous night, he’d treated Robin and me to dinner at a Beverly Hills steak house. Two nights before that, he’d dragged Rick out for Mexican, and twenty-four hours before that Al Bayless had treated him to “a T-bone the size of Argentina.”

I watched him make his way through the lamb and the lobster and the snow crab. Big bowl of rice pudding waiting in the wings, he had only to blink at the woman in the sari to summon more.

He was chewing hard—tough piece of lamb—when his phone rang.

He swallowed. “Sturgis.”

What he heard made him smile. He said, “Yessir!”

I reached over and triggered the hands-off.

Captain Henry Santos’s voice, sharp and clipped as ever, said, “Okay, here she is.”

A woman said, “Lieutenant Sturgis? This is Meredith Santos. I hear you’ve been looking for me. So sorry if it’s been a hassle.”