Private jm-1 Page 18

  After returning home, Crocker took a shower, singing “Unbreak My Heart” off-key but with meaning. He watched CNN’s Your Money, and then everything inside his front-facing apartment went quiet. Justine guessed that Crocker might have been working on his computer. Or maybe he’d gone back to sleep.

  “Is he in for the frickin’ night?” Nora fretted. “I thought this guy needed excitement.”

  “Lean back. Close your eyes,” Justine said. “If he is, then so are we.”

  “I can’t catnap in a car. You?”

  “How do you like your coffee? There’s a deli at the corner. I’m buying.”

  At just after five, Crocker emerged from his apartment building again, this time in a smart blue blazer over a pink shirt, gray slacks, and loafers that looked like they cost a lot.

  He walked to a late-model blue Sienna minivan parked at the end of Bora Bora and got inside. He backed out smoothly, then turned up Via Marina.

  Justine was a professional stalker and she was good at it. She followed Crocker’s van, staying two to three car lengths behind him.

  She almost lost him when a light changed, but Justine gunned the engine and blew through the light.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cronin murmured. “Did he make us?”

  “Don’t know,” said Justine. “We’ll find out soon.”

  They entered Westwood on Westwood Boulevard and cruised onto Hilgard. They saw Crocker pull into a driveway, leave his keys and van with a valet, then take the stairs into the lobby of the W Hotel.

  The bar, located at the corner of the building, was visible through the plate glass windows on two sides.

  “He’s going to the Whiskey Blue,” Justine said. “It’s a pickup joint for richy singles. Perfect for our purposes, really.”

  Their agreed-upon mission was narrow and very precise. They weren’t going to confront Rudolph Crocker. They weren’t going to arrest him. They didn’t even want to meet his eyes, though Justine wouldn’t have minded scratching them out.

  They just needed a smear of saliva, a microscopic sample of skin cells, a hair, or a flake of dandruff. That was all it would take.

  Easier said than done, though.

  “How do I look?” Nora asked Justine.

  “Adorable. Use this.”

  Justine took a lipstick out of her bag and handed it to Nora while watching the door Rudolph Crocker had just entered. He was still in there.

  “Let your hair down,” Nora said. “Shake it out. Open a few buttons.”

  Justine did it and said, “Let’s go. Let’s meet the devil.”

  Nora slammed the door, showed her badge to the valet, and said, “Our car stays right here at the curb. Police business.”

  Justine gave the kid a ten, then followed Nora up the stairs.

  “I get it,” said the kid. “Good cop, bad cop.”

  Nora turned to him and laughed out loud. “No, this is fat cop, skinny cop!”

  Chapter 100

  “A good laugh always helps,” Justine said as they entered the bar.

  Since Justine had last been at the Whiskey Blue, it had undergone a modern makeover. The lounge was swathed in earthy neutrals; there were angular couches in chocolate and umber, and soft lighting over the bar. Techno music pounded out of the speakers, making real conversation impossible.

  The place was jammed with young execs and wannabes savoring the remains of the weekend. Still a chance to score. Girls with great hair and tight clothing, breasts squeezed up to their collarbones, laughed into the faces of young guys obviously on their way up in the world. Every other one of them seemed to have dark hair and very white teeth; most wore sunglasses.

  Justine felt an unnerving sense of urgency. This was it, all she had. Rudolph Crocker had to be their guy, and he was here.

  For too long she’d been working this case as though the murdered girls were her own children. It had been months of frustration and grief, hearing the indelible cries of the girls’ parents etched into her mind like the grooves of an old-fashioned vinyl record.

  She and Nora had given themselves a difficult but critical task. If they pulled it off, they might shut down a heinous fucking killer-but there were so many ways this could go wrong.

  Chapter 101

  Justine signaled to Nora with her eyes, and they inched and edged through the crowd.

  When they got to the bar, Justine said to a big, bluff twenty-something red-faced guy wearing a shirt that matched his complexion, “Mind if I slip in there and order a drink?”

  “What are you having?” said the guy, checking her out from the neck down.

  “My girlfriend and I, we’re together.”

  The large guy looked at Nora, then quickly back at Justine. This time, her eyes. He sneered, but he backed away.

  Justine nabbed a stool, put a hand around Nora’s arm, and pulled her close. She leaned in and whispered, “Got a clear view of him?”

  “Yeah. Crocker’s asking for a refill. The bartender just took away his glass.”

  The bartender was in his early thirties, sandy hair thinning in front. He was buffed and looked bored, had the name Buddy appliqued on his shirt.

  “What can I get for you ladies?”

  “Pinot Grigio,” said Justine.

  “Perrier,” said Nora. There was a jostling movement at Justine’s back, someone bumping into her.

  “What the…?”

  “Don’t look now. Crocker’s got company,” said Nora. “Skinny guy, hair down over his eyes. Looks like a total geek.”

  “I can’t hear what they’re saying,” Justine said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Cronin. “As long as we can see them we’re cool.”

  The bartender put their drinks on the bar. Justine paid with a twenty, told Buddy to keep the change. The bartender palmed the bill, took a bowl of nuts out from under the ledge, and placed it in front of her.

  Justine lifted her eyes and watched Crocker in the mirror behind the bar.

  He had the stand-out ears, the memorable nose. The rest of the picture was just un-freaking-believable: how could a guy this ordinary be vying with legendary psychos for a top spot in the killer lineup?

  The busboy brought a rack of clean glasses to the back bar, and the bartender took a few orders. Crocker’s friend had a beer from the tap, and the two of them talked without looking around.

  Justine dropped her eyes when Crocker signaled to the waiter for the check. She watched him sign it, then both men got off their stools and left the bar.

  Buddy moved to clear away the glasses, and Nora slapped her badge down on the bar in a fraction of an instant.

  “Don’t touch the glassware,” she said to Buddy. “I need it. It’s evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” the bartender asked.

  “I think that pretty girl over there is looking for another drink,” Justine said to Buddy. “Why don’t you go give one to her.”

  Nora and Justine each wrapped a paper napkin around a glass: the one belonging to Crocker and the one belonging to his friend.

  Only when they were out of the bar, sitting together again in the Crown Vic, did they allow themselves to smile.

  Justine opened her phone and tapped in some numbers.

  “Sci. Can you meet us at the lab in twenty minutes? I think we’ve got something good.”

  Chapter 102

  As Yogi Berra would have said, it was “deja vu all over again.” Rick was sitting beside me in the Cessna. We landed at the Las Vegas airport at dusk and rented a car.

  Then we drove out past the sandy lots of stillborn subdivisions that had gone silent in ’08. Eventually, a gray wall appeared, blocking the view of the gated community from the street.

  We stopped at Carmine Noccia’s front gate.

  Rick pressed the button, and a voice answered, then someone buzzed us in. We crossed the bridge over a man-made recirculating river that could only have existed in Las Vegas, or maybe Orlando. We continued past the spotlit stables and came into the
forecourt with its island of date palms outside the massive oak door.

  Squint your eyes and you were in Barcelona or Morocco.

  The Noccia goon we’d last seen wearing a red shirt was now in a tight black pullover and leather-like jeans.

  He opened the door for us, then took Rick’s gun and mine and put them on top of that double-wide gun safe masquerading as a Moorish armoire in the hallway.

  The goon took the lead as he had before: through the billiards room, filled with the clacking of colored clay balls, to the great room where Carmine Noccia sat in his leather chair.

  This time Noccia wasn’t reading. He had his eyes on the ginormous screen over the fireplace, watching a rerun of the Titans’ flat-out massacre of the Raiders a few hours ago.

  He shut off the TV and, as before, offered us seats without shaking our hands.

  I was feeling heady.

  On the one hand, we’d been warned off by Carmine Noccia and his “family,” and they had good reason to dislike us. I’d snubbed his lawyers, beaten up his guys at Glenda Treat’s whorehouse, and I’d been disrespectful to Carmine’s father, the don.

  Now I was back with Del Rio, my loosely wrapped bodyguard buddy, wanting to make a deal. Took some nerve. I had asked Rick to keep his mouth shut, his eyes open, and his ass on the sofa. He’d said, “Yeah, boss,” and I could only hope that he’d firmly chained his loose cannon to the deck.

  The pool outside the glass doors reflected waving bars of light across Noccia’s face, making his expression unreadable.

  Would he tell me what I wanted to know? I sure hoped so.

  “What is it now, Morgan?”

  “You saw the game?”

  “Call that a game? More like a turkey shoot.”

  “I’ve brought something to show you.”

  I took the packet of still shots out of my pocket and handed them to Carmine Noccia.

  He took the photos with his cool, manicured hand and flipped through them. His eyebrows lifted minutely as he recognized the people in the pictures and realized what they were doing and what it meant to his business.

  “How did you come by these photos? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I shot them myself. But here’s what matters. The game was rigged, and it’s been going on for a while. If we hadn’t intervened, money was going to keep hemorrhaging out of the bookie joints, and you might have bled to death.

  “Instead, the Marzullos got it in the teeth. It should set them back for a while. Keep them out of sports betting on the national level. That’s what I think. What do you think?”

  Carmine put the pictures down on the table between us. He leaned back in his chair and watched my face. I watched his.

  I tried to imagine what he was thinking. Did he believe that I’d done something this enormous that actually benefited him? Was he mapping out a war against the Marzullos? Or was he simply composing a way to tell his father how narrowly they’d avoided a calamity that could have sunk a very important component of the family business?

  No words were spoken for a long time. Time expanded beyond the beveled glass windows in the great room, out past the man-made paradise and into the desert.

  As I’ve said, Del Rio is a patient man when he wants to be. I needn’t have worried, because he was showing me what he’d proven many times as my copilot in Afghanistan. He was waiting, watching and waiting.

  Carmine Noccia finally blinked.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said.

  Chapter 103

  Carmine Noccia had asked me what I wanted. It was like a genie granting one of those fairy-tale wishes-you just have to be careful not to wish for a sausage on the end of your nose.

  “I’ve shown good faith,” I said. “I cleaned up a mess you didn’t know you had. I want your father to know what we did. Here’s my point in all of this. You’re not going anywhere and neither are we. Let’s accept the reality of that.”

  “You want detente. Peace between our operations. Stay out of one another’s way.”

  “Pretty much. And I want to know who put out a hit on Shelby Cushman.”

  Noccia smiled. It was a small smile, but it seemed real. “No better friend. No worse enemy,” he said.

  I’d been expecting him to say anything, anything but that. The words Noccia had just spoken were what the Marines say about themselves.

  No better friend. No worse enemy.

  Like Del Rio and me, Carmine Noccia had been in the Corps.

  “Can I get you boys something to drink?” he said. “Or maybe you’ll be my guests for dinner? We can talk while we eat.”

  “Thanks very much for the offer, but it’s late. And I’m flying.”

  Noccia nodded, got up from his chair, and asked me and Del Rio to follow him into the billiards room. He said to the men around the table, “Go outside, guys. Take a break.”

  The room emptied quickly. There was a score counter over the billiards table, but Noccia walked past it to the chalkboard that hung on the wall. It appeared to be the long-running tally of winning games.

  Noccia picked up an eraser from the tray below the board and wiped out some phone numbers that had been written in the corner.

  His back was to me as he spoke. “We have a partner in a number of construction projects: a hotel in Nevada, a couple of malls in LA and San Diego. This partner came to us with a request,” said Noccia. “We had no choice except to honor it.”

  I was mesmerized as he began to write his partner’s name with a square of blue pool chalk. At first I didn’t get it. I thought maybe he was going to draw a diagram from the partner to the man who had hired the hit.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Carmine Noccia scratched letters onto the slate and said, “This is who contracted the hit on your friend Shelby Cushman.”

  When he was sure that I had seen what he’d written, he spat on the eraser and rubbed the name out.

  He put the eraser down and walked me and Del Rio to the door, where he said good night.

  And he shook my hand.

  Chapter 104

  It was past midnight again, and I was back in LA. I had told Del Rio I’d see him in the morning, and he looked at me like he was a dad who’d just put his small son on a school bus for the first time.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said.

  But would I? Rick was still watching me as I got into my Lambo and strapped myself in. I got on the 10 East and then took the exit toward Sunset.

  If I’d been driving a Volkswagen, I could’ve gone faster. It was the downside of owning a fast car. It alerted every cop in the state and every good-doin’ citizen with a cell phone.

  My mind was flying out in front of my hood, and still I stayed within the speed limits, finally slowing down and stopping at the entrance to the Chateau Marmont Hotel.

  I took the elevator from the parking garage without seeing anyone, and pressed the button for Andy’s floor. I stood outside his door and used my cell phone to call him.

  The phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, he answered.

  “Jack? What’s wrong? It’s one in the morning.”

  “Everything’s wrong. I’m right outside your door. Open up.”

  Andy was wearing the same pajamas he’d worn the last time I saw him. Crumpled silk, wide maroon stripes interspersed with thin black lines.

  The room smelled like flatulence and the garlic bread sitting on the coffee table.

  “You don’t look so good,” Andy said.

  “I just flew in from Vegas,” I told him. “Then I drove here.”

  “Sit down, Jack.”

  I stood.

  “I spent some quality time with Carmine Noccia. I was at his house.”

  Andy looked into my face. There was no fear in his eyes.

  How could he not have thought that I would find out? Had he underestimated how I would react? Or was Andy a far cooler customer than I’d ever known? This was not how I thought of my fraternity brother, my close friend since we were li
ttle kids.

  I said in a voice that was ringing with shock, “Carmine told me about your request, that you were the one who asked him to have Shelby killed. How could you have done that? Tell me something I can believe.”

  Andy’s face fell and his knees caved. I watched him drop to the floor, then I grabbed him up roughly, two steely hands at his shoulders, and threw him into an armchair that almost went over.

  He was sobbing now, but I’d seen this embarrassing and pathetic act before.

  “Come on, Andy. Really pour it on, you fuck.”

  “She was a whore, Jack. You told me so yourself, but I already knew that. She was doing every perversion with every scumbag with a buck. And I had to find out about it from some lowlife greaser who didn’t know or care that Shelby was my wife.”

  “There are divorce courts,” I said, but I was thinking of Shelby, seeing her face, remembering the belly laughs at the Improv, how she’d been a rock for me and maybe my salvation right after I’d come back from the war.

  It killed me that she’d gone into whatever drug hell had made her fall so far. And then I thought about how I had introduced her to a man who had paid to have her murdered. If I hadn’t introduced them, Shelby would still be alive. I had loved her, and I had trusted him. And I missed her badly.

  How could Andy have done that to Shelby? How could anybody want to kill Shelby? She was gentle and kind and she made us all laugh-she made me laugh.

  Andy’s weeping was infuriating. The last time he’d sobbed his heart out, I’d felt his grief. Now there was no hiding it from myself: I’d been perfectly played. And my friend had done it to me.

  I didn’t know Andy Cushman anymore.

  I said, “For a bean counter, you’re a damned fine actor. Maybe overplaying it a touch right now.”

  The sobbing stopped, and Andy sobered. “Please, Jack. You don’t understand what it was like living in the same house with her. Knowing what she was doing: the junk, the men. I had to do it-but I couldn’t do it myself. I did love her, Jack. I honestly did. Please. Don’t tell the police.”