Tampa Two, page 7
part #8 of Burnside Series
“Yeah, I guess. And she told me about you. About how you tried to help her. She said you were a good guy.”
I frowned. “She tell you anything else?”
“Nope. Just that you were a guy who helped her. Along the way.”
“Right,” I said dryly, wondering if Judy had related the entire story of how she betrayed me. Certain details get left by the wayside, especially when they do not add to whatever narrative she may have been creating in what she told Candy.
“Look, I don’t know where Judy is,” she said, looking back over at the Pleasure Cove across the street.
“But you live in the condo on 6th and Broadway.”
“No. I live with somebody. Not in Santa Monica.”
“Boyfriend?” I asked nosily.
“Kind of.”
“What do you know about what happened on Saturday night?”
“Just that Judy gave the recording to the football player. Walter, I think his name was. He gave her the money and left. What happened after that, I have no idea. Just what I heard on the news.”
I looked at her and decided to take a shot. “There’s a technology called license plate readers. They photograph your license plates when your car crosses certain intersections. Yours were picked up on Saturday night at Lincoln and Broadway. So I know you were there.”
Her wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look told me I had hit some pay dirt. In reality, I had no idea whether Candy’s car had been there or if there were plate readers at Lincoln and Broadway. But there are times when employing a lie will propel the other person to come forward with the truth. It’s funny how the two can be crookedly intertwined.
“Wow,” she said. “Look, Judy’s car wasn’t running, so I was giving her a ride. But I can’t help you with how that guy got murdered. I wouldn’t know.”
“Okay,” I said, pondering this for a moment. “Who was there on Saturday night? Judy must have said something about it to you.”
“Just that something bad went down. The side of her face was all red, like she had been hit. But she wouldn’t tell me much about it.”
“And to your knowledge, it was just Judy, the guy she hired for protection, and this big football player who she was collecting money from. That’s it?”
Candy shook her head. “Judy told me there was also a girl in one of the bedrooms, she had a client. But they weren’t part of this.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sadie. Judy said that Sadie never came out of the room.”
“Okay. Go on. What else did Judy say?”
“Once that football player handed over the money, Judy said she gave him the recording. It was on some kind of little device, a thumb drive I think it’s called. Then he left.”
“And Judy stayed behind with the guy protecting her. Who turned out not being so good at protecting himself. Why did he and Judy stay behind?”
“I think they had an arrangement.”
I shook my head. So much for offering one or two thousand dollars for standing around. Especially when you can pay someone off with a freebie.
“But Judy got smacked in the face. Who do you think did it? The bodyguard?”
“I don’t know. Again, she didn’t tell me,” she insisted.
I tried another tack. “The bodyguard was named Henry Knapp. You know who he was?”
“Nope.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
Candy shook her head. “Look, I have no idea.”
“Ever hear of a private investigator named Carl Hillebrand? Sounds like that’s how Knapp got involved with this.”
“Nope.”
“What can you tell me about the other owner of the condo. His name’s Lucas Jerikoff.”
Candy looked past me. “He and Owen have some kind of a deal. Not my concern.”
“Have you been back to the condo since?” I asked.
“No, of course not. I mean, would you? With all those cops around?”
“Cops, yeah, who would want to be around them,” I said aimlessly. “And did you hear anything from Owen after this?”
“Yeah.”
“How did that go?”
“Not too good, he told me. Judy never delivered the money to him. She was supposed to. But something went wrong.”
I nodded. Famous last words.
Chapter 6
It was 4:00p.m. and I was approaching the North Hollywood police station. I glanced to my right, just past a cheap beige-colored stucco apartment building. I saw the two of them sitting on a bus stop bench arguing. She was still wearing the same skimpy clothes from last night. The young man sitting next to her was lecturing her angrily and pointing his finger in a threatening way. I stopped my Pathfinder and got out.
“There a problem here?” I asked.
“What’s it to you, Jack?” the young man snarled. “Take a hike. Before you get hurt.”
I flashed my LAPD badge and drew my jacket back to reveal the butt of a .38 tucked away in my holster. “Sorry, Jack. You take a hike. Before I run you in.”
“On what charge?” he asked, standing up, not looking nearly as tough.
“Being a jerk for starters. But if you push me, I’ll come up with something. And you’ll be out of circulation for a while. Now beat it.”
The young man turned to look at the young girl. He was about to say something, but thought better of it. He began ambling down the street. I watched him until he looked back, like I knew he would. I moved my hand and rested it on my .38. He turned back, kept walking, and did not turn around again.
“You’re Judy, right?” I asked.
She nodded apprehensively, the blue eyes looking worried.
“Where are you from?”
“Iowa. Des Moines.”
“How long have you been in L.A.?”
“A few weeks,” she said.
“You do this type of thing in Des Moines?”
“Nope. I wasn’t planning to do it here, either.”
“You come out here to be an actress?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I came to get out of a bad situation.”
“And now you’re in a worse one.”
Her big eyes lowered and faced the pavement. I had seen girls like this before, but never one who looked so young and innocent, so pretty and waif-like. When I booked her last night, a search showed she was just seventeen, too young to be on her own, and a candidate to go into foster care. But at seventeen that was a stop-gap which would soon go away. And foster care was no picnic for anyone.
“You have family you can call?” I asked.
She shook her head. “That’s what I’m trying to get away from.”
“Friends?”
“None out here.”
“And that guy?” I asked, jerking my thumb at the figure growing smaller and smaller.
“He’s just a guy.”
“Your pimp.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s what you’d call him.”
I sighed and tried to think of some options for her. None came to mind. I thought of leaving her here, but I knew her pimp would return. I thought of buying her a bus ticket back to Iowa, but she’d probably get off before the bus reached San Bernardino.
“Come on,” I said and motioned for her to follow me into my Pathfinder. I had a funny feel I might regret this. In no way could I have imagined just how much regret I would come to have.
*
I didn’t bother to press Candy for Lucas’s address; the internet was an easy way to locate just about anyone. Lucas Jerikoff owned the condo on 6th Street in partnership with this Owen Magid. Jerikoff was also listed as a member of a trust that owned a house on Butler, just south of National. This was part of the Trousdale section of West L.A., not to be confused with the Trousdale Estates in Beverly Hills, a more prestigious neighborhood, but built by the same developer. The one in West L.A. was a tract of well-maintained post-war homes tucked away in a quiet, serene neighborhood. Driving through there made me feel like I was in a secluded suburb, more resembling Mayberry than Tinseltown. But Los Angeles was full of hidden nooks like this, the Trousdale tract just happened to be one of the nicer places.
The Jerikoff house was a two-story that looked like it had been remodeled fifty years ago. The exterior was in dire need of a paint job, and the overgrown lawn hadn’t been cut in a few months. Tears of rust had streamed down from the side window ledges, and the roof should have been replaced years ago. A screen from a window facing the driveway was slightly off of its hooks, hanging precipitously in the air. The appearance of this house was in stark contrast to the other homes on the block, which were all well-manicured.
I rang the bell, and even though I heard noises from a television inside, no one answered. Then I knocked a few times, before progressing to rapping and then pounding. Eventually I heard footsteps. The door opened and an elderly woman wearing a pink bathrobe appeared.
“Yes?” she asked pleasantly. “How may I help you?”
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “I’m looking for Lucas.”
“What?”
“Lucas,” I said a little louder. “Lucas Jerikoff.”
“One moment,” she said, and walked to a table a few feet away. Pulling something out of a drawer, she had gotten a device inserted it into her left ear, and walked back to me.
“I’m sorry, young man. I didn’t have my hearing aid in.”
“No problem,” I smiled. “I’m looking for Lucas.”
“Oh, yes. Lucas lives around back.”
“Around back?”
“In the garage. We had it converted. This way he can still live with us but have his own space. Kids, you know.”
“Yes,” I said. “Kids. Just how old is Lucas?”
“Oh, he just turned 38.”
“Ah,” I said. “Thank you.”
I walked to the side of the house and across a black asphalt driveway with a myriad of cracks in it. Opening a squeaky white gate, I noticed the garage and heard music coming out of it. There was a side door with a doorbell, but this time I skipped the preliminaries and just pounded a few times. The door opened and a tall, skinny man looked at me. He had rust-colored hair and what looked like a four-day-old stubble. Part of his chest was covered by an assortment of stupidly designed green tattoos.
“Yeah?’
“You Lucas?”
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked pleasantly.
I flashed my fake badge at him. “I need to talk to you about Santa Monica.”
“Huh?”
“The condo,” I said. “What went down there on Saturday night.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that. That was weird,” he said, scratching his ribs. “I don’t know nothing. Got nothing to tell. I’m just the landlord.”
“Oh, you’re the landlord, huh? Is that what you call managing an escort service?”
He looked blankly at me. “What do you know about the escort service?”
“What I know is you’re running an illegal business.”
He processed this slowly. “Look man. There’s no law against running an escort service. It’s a legitimate line of work.”
“That’s a bunch of crap,” I snarled. “Women may have the right to rent themselves out for dates. But once it extends to sex, it’s as illegal as hell.”
“Hey, man. Two consenting adults and all. We just put ’em together on a website. It’s all cool.”
I stared at him. People shouldn’t be this ignorant. “Let me explain something,” I said slowly. “There are laws against pandering. And pimping. And we can probably get you for human trafficking too, if I ask enough girls.”
“Trafficking?”
“Forcing girls into prostitution.”
“Hey, I’m just a businessman. I don’t force anyone to do anything.”
I sensed this conversation was going nowhere fast and decided to ratchet it up a notch. “Tell me about that blackmail plot you were trying to hatch. Or do you think it’s perfectly legal to charge a guy $20,000 to record him on a sex tape? And threaten to post it on the internet and ruin his career.”
Lucas’s mouth opened and didn’t close right away. I thought of asking him if he was trying to catch flies. Finally, there was a glint in his eye, and he spoke, albeit in a hoarse voice. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you were blackmailing a football player. Or it could have been a former player. And I know you were too chicken to show up and make the exchange yourself, so you and your partner sent your girls to do your dirty work. Brave guy. I ought to nominate you for a medal of valor.”
“Get out of here,” he said, his voice rising. “I don’t know anything and I don’t have to talk with you.”
“I think you had something to do with that guy getting killed in your condo. I don’t have proof yet, but I’ll get it. You don’t know me.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to know you. And this ain’t Santa Monica, it’s West L.A., so you’re out of your district. Screw off, pig.”
I felt I had entered a time warp and had returned to the 1970s. No one had ever called me a pig before. That type of reference ended around the time the Vietnam war wound down. I took a confrontational step toward him.
“Watch your mouth,” I said.
“Or what?” he said, starting to enjoy himself. “You’re not going to do anything here. You’re not gonna risk getting kicked off the force. Pig.”
“You think you’re tough?” I asked, my frustration starting to boil over.
“I’m not scared of you, you p …”
My first punch was a left hook to the mouth, which sent him reeling back against the door. Lucas put both hands over his mouth, which left his midsection vulnerable. I slammed my right fist into that soft spot just underneath the rib cage, and he grunted in agony and dropped to one knee. I took a step back, not to give him the opportunity to get up, but because there was no reason to hit him again. He wasn’t going to respond. In fact, he had already started to cry.
“What’d you do that for?” he whimpered, still keeping one hand over his mouth, the other holding his abdomen. “I wasn’t going to hit you.”
“You don’t get to say anything you want without repercussions. This isn’t the internet. You don’t get to hide behind a screen name.”
“I told you everything I know,” he said, brushing a couple of tears away. “Leave me alone.”
“Where’s Judy Atkin?”
“I don’t know any Judy Atkin,” he said, his breathing coming in spurts.
I ignored him. “Who’s Owen Magid?”
He looked up at me, wincing. “How do you know about Owen?”
“There’s no secrets any more, pal. The internet took care of that. You bought a condo together.”
“Yeah, he’s my business partner.”
“Where does he live?”
“Hollywood.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “Look. You are already up to your eyeballs in trouble. Maybe you’re in over your head. But you better stop stonewalling. You’re already looking at doing some prison time. And if you can’t take a punch from me, the inmates at Pelican Bay are going to mess you up but good.”
“Okay, okay,” he said and stumbled into the garage. I followed him. The garage was a mess, it looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in forever. On the back wall there was a bed and a dresser and a TV tuned to ESPN; a panel of sportscasters were discussing the Dodgers chances of going to the World Series. Lucas Jerikoff sifted through some papers on a folding table before coming up with a note written on a piece of scratch paper. He grabbed a business card from a gardener named Jesus Rodriguez and copied Owen Magid’s address on the back. He handed it to me, his breathing starting to return to normal although he did keep massaging his waist.
“If this is wrong, I can come back.”
“That’s his address, I swear,” he said, then started to back up. “And I don’t know anything about no $20,000. I’m going to ask Owen, though.”
“Yeah, you go do that,” I said.
“Man, you shouldn’t have hit me. Just for calling you a name?”
I looked at him and softened ever so slightly. “It’s all about what you said. Words have consequences.”
*
It was almost 4:00 p.m., that bewitching time in L.A. when offices and schools emptied out, and streets and freeways became flooded with cars. Any drive to Hollywood this time of the day would remove over an hour from my life, not counting the time it took to get back home. And with no guarantee that Lucas had provided the correct address or that Owen Magid would even be there. I decided I had clocked nearly a full day already, on a case which was paying me absolutely nothing, and one where the only end game might be the avoidance of a felony murder charge. That I was just five minutes from home made the decision to knock off work even easier. The fact that it had started to drizzle cinched the deal. The quilted clouds from Saturday were indeed a harbinger of wet weather.
Gail was home early from work and was busy shooting baskets with Marcus on his four-foot-high hoop in the den. I watched quietly as Marcus managed to sink ten baskets before Gail got to five. I wasn’t convinced that she was actively trying to lose the match.
“Well, good job,” I said to him as I walked up and gave both of them a kiss. “You’re developing quite a touch.”
“Daddy, I think I can beat you!” he exclaimed.
“I think he can, too,” Gail said as she handed me the light, orange rubber ball that was about one-half the circumference of a regulation basketball. “I’m going inside to start on dinner.”
I let Marcus beat me 10-9, making sure he managed to engineer a come-from-behind victory, even though I almost sank a late basket by accident, clanking it off the rim, a shot that came much closer to going in than I had intended. I taught him how to play H-O-R-S-E, and he beat me in three straight. At that point, Marcus got bored and apparently decided I wasn’t much competition and told me so. He also wanted to watch TV. After setting Marcus up with a video on sea creatures, I went into the kitchen, where Gail was chopping vegetables. I took a bottle of Blue Moon from the refrigerator and opened it.
