Murder Season Page 3

  She started to reach for that pack of cigarettes after all, but stopped when she heard movement in the foyer behind her. It was a group of about ten people walking toward the front entrance as if on autopilot. She recognized the mayor’s chief of staff, a city councilwoman from Hollywood, and the LAPD chief’s new adjutant, Abraham Hernandez. It seemed like a good guess that this was the group who had been whispering in the darkness from the balcony outside Bosco’s office. When she saw Steven Bennett and Debi Watson, she reached out for Rhodes and gave him a nudge.

  Bennett and Watson were the deputy district attorneys who had brought the case against Jacob Gant to trial. Until Buddy Paladino humiliated them in front of a courtroom wired for TV and the electronic universe beyond, they were considered to be two of the best and brightest deputy DAs in Los Angeles. Particularly Steven Bennett, whom the district attorney had taken to and was grooming to replace him if he won reelection for his third term in office. Tonight, it looked like Bennett and Watson were anything but the best and brightest. Tonight, they were shuffling their feet and keeping their heads down. Tonight, they were passing the investigator from the coroner’s office at the door—mere shadows of their former selves—and leaving another crime scene in shame.

  5

  She found Dante Escabar in the courtyard at a table by the pool. Although it seemed clear that he wanted to be alone, she pulled a chair out and sat down. Several moments passed before he even acknowledged her presence. He was deep within himself, sipping bourbon and brooding on automatic, with sheets of sharp blue light from the water ricocheting off his dark eyes.

  “I’ve already told you people everything I know,” he said finally.

  He hadn’t looked up, but was still staring at his drink. The ice was melting away.

  “Sometimes in the heat of the moment details get left behind,” she said.

  “Heat of the moment? Is that what the LAPD calls it?”

  She could hear the fury in his voice. The venom. Escabar was younger than his partner by at least ten years. He was a handsome man with clear brown skin, a strong frame, and black hair as fine as silk cut just above the shoulders. Lena knew very little about him because Bosco had been the front man for Club 3 AM. She thought that she could remember reading somewhere that Escabar had spent his childhood on the street. That it had been a long climb that began at a taco stand on San Fernando Boulevard. That he met Bosco, who gave him a job and eventually took him under his wing. A few months back The Times photographed Escabar’s home on Mulholland Drive and the actress he was living with. The climb was part of his history, but Lena wondered about his temperament. She watched him take a long pull on the glass, his eyes settling somewhere over by the pool.

  “How much will you benefit from Johnny Bosco’s death?” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How much will you make?”

  Escabar finally turned to her. “You’re right, Officer. After tonight I’ll be rich. I’ve been sitting here, counting it in my head. All that fucking money. While you assholes have spent the last three hours trying to cover for the fact that every one of you fucked up, I’ve been out here celebrating the murder of my best friend.”

  A long moment passed. A long stretch of jagged silence.

  “I know it’s not easy,” she said. “The timing’s worse than bad. But I need to clear a few things up and I need to do it quickly.”

  Escabar took another swig of bourbon. “Sounds like you need to clear up more than that. You’re way off base.”

  “I hope so,” Lena said. “But I still need an answer.”

  “This isn’t about my partner. This is about that asshole kid.”

  “How much are you gonna make from your partner’s death?”

  Escabar glanced back at her, shaking his head at the inevitable. “Nada,” he said. “Nothing. Not a single cent. I’m lucky to be one of seven partners. More than lucky.”

  “Who are the other five? Studio execs?”

  “Three of them are. The other two are actors. If you want their names you’ll have to call our lawyer. But no one profits from Johnny’s death. The club grew out of his business with the studios. This was his place. His idea. Nothing changes, not even the split. He’s got family on the East Coast. South Jersey. A mother and father. If you really want to waste time, talk to them. Maybe they killed their own son tonight. It’s either that or you’ve gotta face the fact that Johnny Bosco’s dead because the LAPD couldn’t cut it. Someone else had to put Jacob Gant down, and he fucked it up. He killed Johnny. He’s even more lame than you are.”

  Escabar turned away. As she thought it over, she studied his posture. His face and hands. Although she didn’t trust him, she believed that his reaction to her questions was genuine. That her gut instincts about the case were more right than wrong. Gant was the target. Bosco got in the way.

  “Why did you tell the deputy chief that you thought this was a robbery?” she said.

  Escabar didn’t move, didn’t blink—his eyes fixed on the memory.

  “I heard the shots,” he said in a quieter voice. “I ran upstairs and found them. I saw Johnny lying on the floor, but the kid’s face was all fucked up. I didn’t recognize him. When I found out who he was, I knew I’d been wrong. It wasn’t a robbery.”

  “Who told you his name?”

  “I don’t know. I overheard some cops talking about it in the bar after you showed up.”

  “What time did you hear the shots?”

  “About twelve-thirty,” he said.

  “What was Gant doing here? Why was he upstairs with Bosco?”

  Escabar tossed his drink on the ground and set the glass down. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I have no fucking idea.”

  “You ever see him here before, Dante?”

  He shook his head again. “No.”

  “Did Bosco ever talk about him or mention his name?”

  “Never.”

  “What about the girl’s father? What about Tim Hight?”

  In spite of the blue light masking Escabar’s eyes, something changed. Lena could see him thinking it over. The fire inside the man was flaring up again.

  “He knows the club,” Escabar said. “Way back before his kid got killed, he used to come here. Not often, but enough to know how the place works and where things are.”

  “How could Tim Hight get into Club 3 AM?”

  “He used to direct a TV show on cable. People liked it. The show did well.”

  “Did you see him here tonight?”

  “No, and I’ve already checked. He didn’t walk through the front door and sign in. But like I said, he knows the place.”

  Escabar’s voice died off. After a long moment, he climbed to his feet and reached for the table to steady himself. Lena glanced to her right and saw Barrera wave at her through the windows as he circled the foyer inside and searched for the door.

  “One more thing, Dante.”

  “Just one, Detective Gamble?”

  “You know my name.”

  He nodded, but remained silent.

  “The cocaine,” she said. “You knew it was there. Why didn’t you get rid of it?”

  He paused to consider her question, but only briefly. “What cocaine? I never saw any cocaine. It must have been planted by the killer.”

  “Nice try. Why didn’t you get rid of it?”

  He looked down at his empty glass and wouldn’t answer.

  “What?” Lena said. “You think that I’m gonna bust your partner? After tonight, I don’t think it would play in court. Tell me why you left it there.”

  The door opened and Barrera stepped out. As he approached from the other side of the courtyard, Escabar lowered his voice.

  “I was trying to take care of things,” he said. “I needed to call my partners and tell them what happened to Johnny. There was confusion. People were frightened. I gave myself an hour to shut the place down.”

  “Did you call the DA?”

>   He appeared surprised by the question and didn’t know how to answer it.

  “They were friends,” Lena said. “It’s seems only natural that Higgins would be your first call.”

  He shook his head, but kept quiet.

  “Is that an answer?” she said.

  “I didn’t call the DA.”

  He walked off just as Barrera reached them. Lena turned to her supervisor. From the look on his face, Barrera had news.

  “We’ve got him,” he said under his breath. “It’s Tim Hight. Street cameras picked him up driving away from the club. His car. His plates. His face behind the wheel.”

  “When?”

  “About a half hour ago. He probably hung around to watch the chaos. Most of them do.”

  Lena checked her watch. The night was slipping away. Too many people were involved.

  “I want to notify Gant’s parents,” she said. “I don’t want them to find out what happened to him on their own.”

  “He had a father and one brother. His mother’s dead.”

  It had come up during the trial. Gant’s mother had been murdered when he was fourteen, her body found on a ball field a block from Santa Monica High School. Lena had forgotten. As Barrera handed her a three-by-five card with Gant’s contact information, she realized that she needed to pace herself better. Think things through more carefully and keep focused.

  “Take Rhodes with you,” Barrera said. “Tito can help me get started on the warrants. But these guys need rest. I want to release them as soon as you’ve talked to Gant’s father. We’ll meet back at Parker by seven. The deputy chief is setting something up with the DA’s office. We can work things out then. You okay?”

  She nodded, slipping the three-by-five card into her notepad. Then Barrera met her eyes and offered a shrug.

  “I’m sorry, Lena,” he said gently. “I’m sorry that it turned out to be Hight. I’m sorry that you got stuck with this one. I kept hoping we were wrong.”

  “I’m okay, Frank. I’m okay.”

  “Maybe so. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re using you. The way your last two cases played out. You’ve got capital to burn, and they’re gonna burn it.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to put this behind us,” she said.

  Barrera flashed a warm smile beneath his mustache. “That’s what I told them you’d say. Now grab Rhodes and hit the road. And remember, Hight lives next door. Keep your eyes open. Be careful and be safe.”

  6

  The wall of heat hit them as they exited Club 3 AM and started down the steps. Lena glanced at Rhodes, caught his weary smile and pointed at the Crown Vic parked in the back of the lot.

  “Hope the air works in that thing,” he said. “How’d you get a take-home car with all the cutbacks? You pay somebody off?”

  She knew what he was up to. Next-of-kin notifications were never easy. Under the circumstances, letting Jacob Gant’s father know that his son had been murdered tonight was almost beyond the pale.

  “I stole it,” she said. “Two days ago when my car died. No one’s noticed.”

  Rhodes laughed. “But they will. And then a little man with a clipboard’s gonna show up and ask you for a credit card. I’m not kidding. They’re gonna charge you for the ride. The money goes to—”

  Lena grabbed Rhodes’s arm and pulled him to a stop, her eyes on the Crown Vic. There was movement in the car. It was difficult to see, yet it was there in the darkness. A set of bad shocks moving ever so slightly on a still night. A rear window cracked open to let in air.

  “I locked the car,” she whispered.

  “You sure?”

  “I locked it.”

  They traded looks and separated. Rhodes drew his gun, moving slowly around the passenger side. As Lena approached the left rear door, she slid in behind the slope of the roof and hit the clicker. Then the alarm chirped, the locks popped, and the interior lights switched on.

  She peered through the darkened glass and saw a man in the backseat hiding below the window line. He was staring up at her through a pair of glasses and trying to conceal his face beneath the bill of his baseball cap.

  “Out of the car,” she called through the window.

  The man shook his head at her.

  “Step out of the car right now, mister.”

  The man shook her off again without saying anything.

  Lena’s eyes flicked up to his hands gripping the front seat. When she didn’t see a weapon, she nodded at Rhodes and they ripped open the doors. Unaware that Lena wasn’t alone, the man panicked and started squirming. As Rhodes dragged him backward, Lena pushed his legs through the car and they wrestled him onto the ground. The guy was still kicking, still pushing and pulling, but they had him. Rhodes rolled him over onto his stomach, driving a knee into his shoulder and pushing his face into the pavement. Once Lena got him cuffed, she turned him onto his back and looked him over.

  The odd-looking man appeared soft and round. His suit and tie, rumpled and sweat stained and permeated with body odor. For some reason he couldn’t stop bouncing up and down off the asphalt. She had seen it before when she worked narcotics, particularly with people overdosing on ecstasy. Once their core temperature overheated, they became the equivalent of a live fish hitting a hot frying pan. As Lena watched, she couldn’t decide if he was using or just writhing in anger. Either way, the ground was hard and it looked painful.

  She reached out to check his forehead. When he tried to bite her, she pulled her hand away, leaned over him, and shouted.

  “You got a name, mister?”

  He shook his head back and forth and started grunting. It sounded a lot like he was telling her to fuck off.

  She glanced at Rhodes. “We don’t have time for this, Stan.”

  Rhodes agreed and they started going through the man’s pockets and tossing his possessions aside as quickly as they could. When Lena found his wallet, it seemed larger than most and she flipped it open. Inside were a set of press credentials. She read the ID, then checked the man’s face against the photo. She hadn’t recognized him with the baseball cap and glasses, but she could see it now.

  “Who is he?” Rhodes said.

  She held up the ID and noted the fear and uncertainty washing over their captive’s face. Rhodes scanned the document and started laughing.

  The man squirming on the pavement was Dick Harvey, a lowlife gossip reporter from Blanket Hollywood. Seven nights a week, Blanket Hollywood played in the mud, promising its viewers another thirty minutes beneath the sheets with their favorite stars. Lena suspected that the TV show and the Web site that went with it killed brain cells.

  “Dick Harvey,” Rhodes said, his voice peppered with a joyous sarcasm. “Crossing a police line and breaking into an LAPD car at a homicide investigation. Man, you’re good.”

  Harvey finally settled down and found his voice. But it all seemed a little too smooth, and Lena wondered if the convulsions hadn’t been some weak attempt to fake them out.

  “Come on, guys,” he said, pleading. “You’ve gotta understand the spot I’m in.”

  Rhodes laughed again. “We get it, Harvey. You’re on a secret mission. You’re working undercover. But what I really want is your autograph. I can’t wait to see it right below your fingerprints when you get booked tonight. Remember to smile when they take your picture. I guarantee it’ll make the rounds.”

  “But I’ve got a deadline to make. Give me a break. I’m just covering a story.”

  Lena had reached her limit. “Not anymore,” she said. “What were you doing in the car? What were you up to?”

  Harvey’s voice rose an octave and he began whining. “It was just a mistake. It’s late and I didn’t know where the fuck I was going. Come on. I’m working a story, guys. Jacob Gant’s dead, right? Lily Hight’s old man blew his brains out. You’re in charge, right, Lena?”

  Something inside her clicked as she measured him. The hat and glasses, the sudden barrage of questions, his use of her first
name. The dirtbag reporter was cuffed but still busting—still running out line.

  “You stink, Harvey,” she said. “You need a shower and clean clothes. And what’s with the hat and glasses? What are you up to?”

  She reached out for his glasses, but he jerked his head away.

  “Fuck you both. I want a lawyer.”

  He flashed a big smile at them like he’d just said the magic words. Like he thought he was in charge.

  I want a lawyer.

  Rhodes slapped the smile off his face and yanked him back. “You’re gonna need one, Harvey. And if you bite me, you’re gonna need a new set of teeth. Now shut up and don’t move.”

  Lena ripped away the glasses, tossing the baseball cap over to Rhodes. Within a few moments, she knew that they were on the right track. Both items were wired for video and sound. Harvey had probably hoped that he wouldn’t be seen in the car. At least not until he’d recorded a sound bite with enough juice for tomorrow’s broadcast of Blanket Hollywood.

  “I want a lawyer,” he repeated. “I want one now.”

  Lena didn’t respond to the magic words. She’d found the camera lens, but the frames were split. On the left was a battery pack. On the right, a small thumb drive. She switched off the power and turned to watch Rhodes. The camera hidden in the hat was about the size of a dime with a high-capacity media card attached. Rhodes was holding them in front of Harvey’s face as if he’d won them at the racetrack.

  “You’re a wild man, Harvey,” he said.

  “I’m a reporter, and I have rights. That’s my stuff and I want an attorney.”

  Rhodes shook his head. “Sounds like a mantra, but it won’t work until we’ve processed the crime scene. You’re the crime scene, Harvey, so answer the question. Did you plant something in our car?”

  “I don’t have to say anything. I’m a reporter. This is a free country. You guys are assholes.”

  “And I think I saw you running out of the building,” Rhodes said. “Where did you hide the gun, Harvey? Is that what you were doing in our car? Getting rid of the murder weapon?”