the Pallbearers (2010) (14 page)

"What'd you do to my car?"
I
asked as blood drops continued to land sporadically in my lap.

"You had the keys. I needed to hot-wire the starter," he said. "Back in the day, I used to steal cars for my set, but those old ignition boxes were a lot easier to open."

"Why didn't you tell me you were such an animal? That was awesome," I said, looking over at him with new respect.

He smiled at me and started massaging his scarred knuckles, kneeding them as his entire right hand began to puff up.

"My punch has lost nothing, homes," he said, sounding like the vato g-ster he'd been fifty years ago. "My first agg-assault in two decades. I forgot how much fun it is, clocking guys."

"And you say I'm the one who runs stop signs and makes legal messes."

"I looked in the front window. I could see it was going bad. It was the best I could come up with." He grinned.

"It was great, Sabas. Perfect. I'm definitely takin' you on my next beat-down."

He kept smiling, pumped by his adrenaline rush, while my blood continued to run down the side of my face, ruining my trousers.

"You're making a mess. You better stop that bleeding. Looks like it might need stitches," he said.

I reached into the glove box, got some tissues, and pressed them hard onto the open cut 011 my forehead. After a few minutes, I stemmed the flow.

"Let's see what we got here."
I
pulled the two wallets out of my pocket with my free hand, handed one to Vargas, and took the other myself.

I had Baldv s ID. It turned out Chris was somebody named Christian Calabro. According to his DL, he was thirty-two, six three, and weighed two-sixty, so I'd definitely been fighting out of my weight class. He had four hundred in cash and half a dozen credit cards, including a Visa that was issued to him from some outfit called the Mesa Investment Group.

I went through the glassine section. Mostly business cards from personal trainers, nutritionists, and sports doctors. I found several business cards that said:

CHRIS "CLUBBER" CALABRO

MMA CHAMPION, TRAINER

"What's the Mesa Investment Group?" Sabas asked.

I looked over and saw that he had removed a similar Visa card from Rick O'Sheas wallet.

"Don't know."

He turned on his BlackBerry, went to the Internet, and accessed some Web site. Then he started typing in information. After a moment, he looked over.

"It's some kind of a money-management corporation with an address on Wilshire," he said. "Wanta go look?"

"Might as well go bleed on them for a while," I said.

We headed out on Santa Monica Boulevard, took a left on Highland to Wilshire, then drove another ten blocks or so to the edge of the Miracle Mile.

Sabas pulled the Acura up to the curb across the street from the address.

It was a huge steel and glass building with twenty-foot-high letters on the roof that said:

There was a logo at the end of the name that looked like a desert mesa with a circle around it. The sign took up the whole east face of the building roof.

"I think we need to back off and think this over," I said.

"Don't want me driving your car through another lobby window?"

"One a day is plenty."

Forty minutes later Sabas parked behind his yellow '53 pickup truck next to my driveway in Venice. He didn't turn off the engine. There was a new easiness between us. We'd definitely bonded with our little fistfight, even though I hadn't hit anybody yet.

"I wouldn't turn off the engine," he said. "I think I ruined the coil getting it started. You might not be able to get it running again. Sorry."

"Small price to pay for saving my life."

He was still massaging his swelling, almost clown-sized right hand.

"I think we should all meet again, right away," he said. "Like even as early as this evening. Ill have some people in my office do a run on the Mesa Investment Group, see what they're all about.

"I can promise you, those two dump trucks we clocked aren't moonlighting as corporate investment managers. We need to find out how all this affects Creative Solutions and Huntington House."

I didn't want to tell him what I really had planned and how after the new autopsy tomorrow, he and the rest of the pallbearers were no longer going to be dealing with this anymore. Instead, I said, "I don't feel too hot. My head is still ringing. Let's put that meeting off and talk in the morning. I'll call you and set it up."

He nodded, said good-bye, and got out of my car, leaving me there. After he drove off, I made a U-turn and headed to the freeway, then took the 10 back toward Parker Center.

I parked in my assigned space in the underground garage, said the AAA prayer, then turned off the Acura. When I tried to start it up again, the ignition clicked at me. I had to make arrangements to get my car towed and check out a slick-back detective car from the motor pool.

I used my cell and set that up, then went to the men's room and cleaned up the blood as best I could. I took the elevator to Financial Crimes, which was on three, and looked up a civilian employee I knew who was assigned there. Her name is Trina Marks and she is one of those people who, if you give her any opening, will fill your ear with endless streams of personal and professional gossip. But she had a big heart, was always willing to do favors, and was a wiz on the computer. In the past she'd discovered things in the system that nobody else had found.

After I told her I'd cut my head in a traffic accident, I sat down beside her. I had my list ready and put it down on her console.

"You got a case number for this?" she asked.

"Use my badge," I said, laying it down in front of her. "I'm getting a fresh H-number tomorrow. I'll phone it down."

She punched in my badge number, then opened her LexisNexis file and started doing both civil as well as legal searches on the list of names I'd just given her.

While she worked, I heard about her nine-year-old nephew's All
-
Star game, her husband's hemorrhoids, her sister's breast reduction, and the juicy details on two messy cop divorces.

At six o'clock I left with some fairly provocative questions and a ringing left ear, which was the one closest to her keyboard.

When I got home, I couldn't find a place to park. Alexa's car was in the drive, taking that space. The narrow alley, which usually had open spots, was packed. Somebody must have been having a party.

I put the department slick-back in the only spot I could find, half a block away. As I was walking back to our house, I started paying closer attention and spotted Jack's red and black Harley, Vicki's blue Camry, and Sabas's yellow '53 pickup.

When I walked inside my living room, I found out that I was the one having the party.

The entire Pallbearers' Murder Club was in the backyard, drinking beer with Alexa.

Chapter
25

They were all staring at me as I stood in the open sliding-glass door that leads to the backyard.

As soon as she saw me, Alexa got up and crossed the yard. "Sabas said you two got in a fight, but he didn't say you got injured," she said. She raised her hand and touched the nasty-looking cut on my forehead.

I had checked my reflection in the rearview mirror before getting out of my borrowed D-ride. The cut had an ugly Frankenstein quality--jagged, crusted, filled with dried blood.

"Sometimes to get difficult facts, 111 punch my head through things," I said, smiling. "It s how I investigate."

"That needs stitches," my wife said, frowning.

Til pull it together with a butterfly bandage. The scar will go nice with all the others."

I turned to the rest of the group. Diamond was seated at the garde
n t
able. Her shoulders were sagging, and she looked used up. Seriana was beside the barbecue, sitting ramrod straight. Vicki and Sabas were facing me, their backs to the canal. Jack, as usual, was tipped back arrogantly in one of our cast-iron patio chairs, feet up on a bench, studying me with his usual fuck-you smile.

Sabas had already filled them in, explaining how we'd followed Rick O'Shea to the NHB Gym and how it had ended up.

"Mr. O'Shea recognized you? What am I supposed to tell him when he asks?" Diamond seemed mortified.

"Shortly this is going to be a full-fledged homicide investigation. If O'Shea gets frisky, I'll pull him in as a material witness and hold him," I said. Diamond frowned. She didn't like it.

"Sabas says that you told him as soon as this becomes a police case, we can't be part of it anymore," Seriana said.

"I have bosses and LAPD protocol," I replied. "The department won't tolerate an unauthorized vigilante investigation."

Seriana said, "Shane, I have to redeploy soon and I don't want to leave the country not knowing what happened here."

Vargas crossed to the cooler that Alexa had pulled out of our hall closet and filled with ice. He reached inside with his swollen right hand and gingerly pulled out a beer, passing it over to me.

"I ran the Mesa Investment Group through a legal search program I use in my office," he said. "They're a pretty big deal. The founder and CEO is a guy named Eugene Charles Mesa. People call him E. C. He's only fifty and already close to a billionaire. Mesa Group mostly does acquisitions. They're turnaround experts who buy distressed companies, fix the problems, and then either run them for profit or sell them."

I already knew all that from Trina's computer run.

Vargas continued, "I also did a deep financial search and found out that Mesa owns that entire block where the NHB Gym is located downtown. It's scheduled for redevelopment next year. There's been a bunch of stories in the L
. A
. Times. The city is very excited about it. He's gonna put in two high-rise office towers."

All stuff I'd also learned an hour ago from Trina. As Sabas indicated, Eugene Mesa had a lot of political juice in L
. A
., with tentacles deep into city government. That meant he also probably had some pretty good leverage with my sixth-floor bosses at the LAPD. E. C. Mesa would need to be handled very carefully.

"I'm now working with Diamond," Vicki Lavicki announced, changing the subject. "You're looking at the new secretary-treasurer of Huntington House. I'm taking some sick days off from Kinney and Glass so I can devote myself full time to helping us get ready for that state audit."

"And not a moment too soon, girl. I was dying over there," Diamond said.

"Starting tomorrow, I'm gonna begin building old records going back two or three years to sec if I can find out why there was never enough money to run that place."

"You're wasting time on that fucking audit," Jack said, suddenly taking his muddy feet down from my bench and sitting up straight. "This isn't even complicated. We need to hoist this Eugene Mesa guy up by his heels and start looking for wet spots."

"That's a bad idea," I said quickly. "We need to move very slow with those guys over at Mesa Group."

"Why?" Jack sneered. "We supposed to be afraid of a buncha guys with Princeton MBAs?"

"Shane's right," Alexa confirmed. "If we're not careful, Mesa could put us in a dangerous political situation."

From Jack's body language, it was obvious he didn't agree.

"I don't mean to throw you guys out," I said, "but I have a blinding headache. I think I might have sustained a minor concussion."

Everyone quickly finished their beers, and we agreed to meet at an IHOP pancake house up the street at 9:00 A
. M
. tomorrow.

After they left, Alexa wanted to call a doctor.

"
I
don't have a headache," I told her. "My head s been rated to break stone." I settled back into my chair and fished a fresh beer out of the ice chest. "I just wanted them out of here. I couldn't listen to any more of that. Fucking jack thinks because he breaks the law, he understands it. Sabas thinks he should run the case because he's a lawyer. Vicki is an adrenaline junkie who packs a .44 Bulldog in her purse, and Seriana wants to rush a result just so she'll know what happened to Pop before she goes back to Iraq."

"They just want to help, Shane. I don't think you're being fair."

"So far all we've done is alert those muscle heads at the gym that we're onto them. I'm the one who screwed that up. Bad as that is, now Jack wants to brace Eugene Mesa. This case is moving in the wrong direction."

Then I asked, "How you doing with the ME? He gonna issue a new finding tomorrow? We need this case to become official fast so I can stop dealing with these people."

"That's going to be a little harder than we thought," she said.

"Why?"

"Rico from Pico wants to make the next cut." She was talking about our Chief Medical Examiner, Rico Comancho, who rose up from a ghetto in Pico Rivera, put himself through UCLA med school, and now headed the Medical Examiner's office for the city of L
. A
. "He took the case away from Ray Tsu," she concluded.