Witness for the Persecution, page 11
The van slowed down and I did not consider that a great sign. ‘Nothing you’ve seen in the movies is gonna work, Ang,’ I told her. ‘We’ve got to figure our own way out of here and promise never to tell it to a screenwriter.’
But the grunting went on even as the van came to a halt. ‘It’s all about my butt,’ Angie said.
‘You’ve met guys who thought so.’
‘Not the good ones.’
It felt like the van parked, possibly on gravel from the sound of it. ‘We should have been thinking of a plan,’ I said.
‘Oh, I have a plan,’ Angie assured me.
Then the van doors opened and I felt someone pulling on my ankles. I must have been facing toward the door with my back toward the cabin of the van. I thought about kicking but that wasn’t getting me out of this burlap bag (which, just so you know, smelled like burlap and that was not great) or these ropes.
The hands pulling me were not rough and calloused. I couldn’t tell whether they were different hands than had dragged me into the van. Either way, this guy was going to have some major problems with the American Bar Association when I was done with him. ‘Hey,’ I said involuntarily.
‘What?’ Angie, not my abductor.
I didn’t answer her other than to say I was all right. My hands were tied behind me and I had a bag over my head, so it’s possible I wasn’t in the best mood.
They stood me up (and I assumed Angie as well but how would I know?) on what felt like a paved surface. Then the bag was lifted off my head and I blinked in the increased light. I mean, burlap isn’t that thick.
The two men from before were standing between Angie – whose burlap sack had also been taken off her head, which probably made her think of high school or something – and me. It was like a weird sandwich, casting the two guys as filling and Angie and me as the bread.
We were no longer on the studio lot, which was not even a tiny surprise. But it was a little odd that we appeared to be in the actual middle of nowhere. It was paved, with asphalt, on the small stretch where we and the van stood, and appeared to have once been a driveway for some structure that had long been demolished and overgrown. Everywhere around us there was nothing but dirt and weeds. It was like being in the least exotic desert on the planet.
‘So let me get this straight,’ Angie said as soon as we were upright and unmasked. ‘You put the bags over our heads and drove us here, then took the bags off. Were you afraid we’d know what the inside of the van looked like in the dark?’
‘Turn around,’ the dark-haired man said. ‘We’ll cut the ropes.’
Not wishing to question our good luck but wondering whether they thought this would make the bodies look less like they’d been abducted, I turned my bound hands toward the dark-haired man. The blond held a gun on me while the one I’d decided was my kidnapper pulled a knife out of a sheath on his belt and cut the ropes.
All the clichés are true. I shook my hands and rubbed my wrists. It’s what you do when your hands have been tied. I told you that so you won’t feel that you have to experience it yourself.
As soon as my bonds were cut, the blond put the gun in the pocket of his jacket and my kidnapper turned toward Angie.
Except she was already holding her gun on him, hands still tied but in front of her. The blond, completely flatfooted, reached back into his pocket. ‘Don’t,’ Angie said. ‘I’ve never missed anyone I’ve aimed at.’ That was, I assumed, technically true, since she’d never pointed a gun at anyone before in her life. ‘Now reach into that pocket and pull out the gun using your thumb and your pinkie and nothing else.’
‘How’d you get your hands free?’ I asked her. ‘And I thought they’d taken your gun.’
‘They took my purse.’ Angie was still intent on her target. My guy, still holding the knife, was clearly trying to figure out if he should rush her. The look in her eyes convinced both of them to make no sudden moves. ‘I had the gun out of it as soon as I saw the van when we left Reeves’s office.’
‘Drop the knife,’ I said from behind the dark-haired man, who had his back to me. ‘And don’t turn around or you’re a dead man.’ I didn’t know what I meant but it sounded good.
The guy dropped the knife and I picked it up. I wanted to ask him for the sheath too. ‘Take off your belt.’
‘Sandy!’ Angie found that amusing. Meanwhile the blond-haired man had removed the gun from his pocket just like she’d instructed and laid it carefully on the asphalt in front of him.
‘Don’t be gross,’ I told her. ‘And how’d you get your hands free?’ It was worth asking again.
‘Yeah, how?’ asked the dark-haired man. ‘I tied those ropes tight.’
‘The belt,’ I reminded my kidnapper. ‘Now.’
The guy started undoing his belt. I glanced back at Angie.
‘I told you it was all about my butt,’ she told me. ‘I managed to squeeze my way out right at the end there. I’ll be sore for a couple of days but it was worth it.’
‘I’ll say.’
‘See?’ Angie exulted. ‘Sometimes the movie stuff does work.’
The dark-haired criminal had his belt off. ‘The pants now?’ he asked.
‘Ugh, no. Just give me the belt.’
He did and I removed the sheath to put the knife in. Then I made the guy take off his jacket and found a small handgun in the right-hand pocket. I put that in my own belt but did not remove it to put the knife and sheath on my waist. It would have ruined the line of my outfit.
‘OK, let’s hear it,’ Angie said. ‘Who sent you and what did they tell you to do with us?’
‘I got a call from a guy I don’t know,’ the dark-haired guy said. ‘They offered us money to take you two out here and leave you here.’
Angie and I looked at each other. That gave blond guy the idea that he had a moment to act, and Angie immediately fired directly into the ground in front of his feet. A piece of asphalt flew up and missed his head by inches. The guy put his hands up, visibly shaken.
The shot reverberated in the nothing around us for a good few seconds.
‘Get the message?’ Angie growled. The guy nodded his head convincingly.
I directed my attention at my personal prisoner, who had at one time been my captor. It’s funny how things work out when you’re with Angie. ‘This anonymous person just calls you out of the blue, doesn’t identify himself, and asks you to kidnap two women and leave them in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason?’ I shook my head. ‘Couldn’t you have gotten into at least a community college?’
‘The money was good.’ He was looking at his shoes, probably in shame.
I tied my abductor’s hands behind him using his belt. Then I used his knife to cut the ropes on Angie’s hands but made sure to leave enough length to tie her kidnapper up. We got them into the back of the van without putting our hands on them – a technique that hopefully they would learn from the next time they decide to take hostages – and locked the door behind them. The keys were actually left in the van’s ignition.
‘Those are some really bad kidnappers,’ Angie said as she slipped behind the steering wheel.
‘Be thankful they are,’ I said.
‘By the way, when I shot the ground in front of that guy?’ Angie looked sideways at me.
‘Yeah?’
‘I was aiming for his leg.’
EIGHTEEN
Patrick was waiting outside Lieutenant Trench’s office while the good policeman, as usual doing nothing that would betray a human emotion, flayed me verbally for having brought him a van full of kidnappers. You’d think a cop would be grateful for such a thing.
I had called Patrick first, of course, and then Trench, while we were driving our haul to his office in the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, a strange-looking building that seemed to be leaning on one side. Trench, meanwhile, was upright and straight as a rail like always. At the moment he seemed to be having a rhetorical conversation with himself while aiming it at me.
‘You hold two men at gunpoint, tie them up and trap them in a van, all of which you admit to, and then you expect me to charge them with conspiracy to inconvenience?’ Trench was in rare form. ‘You say they told you the idea was to strand you in an area less than twenty miles from the center of the city. And you brought them specifically to me, so I wonder why you think this has anything to do with your case in the James Drake murder.’
‘I’m not thinking about the James Drake murder!’ I shouted. ‘I just got kidnapped and you want me to care about Robert Reeves?’
Trench grimaced the slightest bit, which for him was the equivalent of a public mental breakdown. ‘I am an officer of the law,’ he said. ‘My only connection to you right now is the Robert Reeves case. So I am asking where you thought they were taking you so I can draw some connection.’
‘Forgive me for not knowing how to calibrate my position while being blindfolded and tied up in the back of a moving van with no windows,’ I countered. ‘How exactly is what these two guys did not kidnapping with a side of terroristic threats and assault? Why are you aiming all this at me when they are the ones who abducted Angie and me because they were following up on the threats that guy made in the restaurant the other night?’
‘Did they tell you who they were working for?’ Trench asked.
‘No. You’re always telling me I should let the police do that sort of work, so I delivered them directly to your door. You’re welcome, by the way.’
Patrick, I should point out, had been considerably more understanding, meeting Angie and me at the cop shop and following us in his Tesla to the drop-off point, where he watched as our sheepish abductors were loaded off the back of the van and marched into police headquarters without saying a word. Not even Angie’s taunt of, ‘You got tied up and taken by a couple of chicks!’ appeared to register. Some days it’s hardly worth having a Jersey attitude in California.
‘Don’t worry, Ms Moss.’ Trench’s voice took on a tone of weariness that I’m sure he was putting on. ‘We’ll be happy to charge your two new friends with everything we can possibly conjure. And we will try, unsuccessfully I’m sure, to get them to tell us who employed them to take you on that little adventure. But with all you and your accomplice have done, I’m not sure we can convincingly tie them to the murder charges against Robert Reeves.’
Was this some odd Trench pod person who didn’t really want to be a cop? ‘They told us the message was to get me off the Reeves case,’ I said. ‘What more do you need?’
‘The only thing they said before their attorney arrived – without the benefit of their obligatory phone call, mind you – was that they didn’t know why you were so angry with them. They claim they were driving by in their van when you and your partner in crime flagged them down, pulled a pistol on them and abducted them.’
I lowered my eyelids to half-staff. ‘With the purpose of driving them to the police?’ I said. ‘How’s that going to stand up in court?’
‘Not my department, Counselor.’
A stress headache was starting up in my temples and I didn’t blame it a bit. ‘Lieutenant,’ I said. ‘Their attorney showed up despite them not calling. Who’s their attorney?’
‘Samuel J. Cogley.’ Trench certainly knew the name well.
I’m not familiar with the Los Angeles criminal law community the way I was in New Jersey, but I had heard of Samuel J. Cogley. ‘Isn’t he a mob lawyer?’ I asked.
Trench didn’t miss a beat. ‘Alleged,’ he said. ‘None of his clients has ever been convicted.’
‘Alleged,’ I said.
He’d taken my statement personally while Sergeant Roberts dealt with Angie. The two guys who had just been arrested were somewhere in the bowels of the building, conferring with the Perry Mason of mob lawyers, and Patrick, wearing an expression as much like the one my mother would have (if I were ever foolish enough to tell her about this) as I was willing to admit, was almost pressed up against the glass separating Trench’s office from the police station bullpen.
Almost.
The one tactic I’ve ever used with Trench that had gotten even a modicum of information out of him has been the just-short-of-combative direct approach. So I looked sideways at him. He was looking at the lone piece of loose paper on his desk. I assumed that everything else he received had been memorized verbatim and then burned in a Trench ritual that took place at the end of every shift he worked.
‘How come you’re not treating this whole thing more seriously?’ I said.
‘I’m not treating it seriously?’
‘You are the most organized man I’ve ever met,’ I told the lieutenant, and it was true. ‘You never miss anything and you never dismiss anything. But I come in here with a couple of kidnappers all trussed up and ready to go, and you’re falling just short of asking me why I’m bothering you with such a trivial matter. That’s not the Lieutenant Trench I know. So tell me what’s different.’
Trench actually looked up from whatever document he’d been studying and locked eyes with me. ‘Ms Moss, it never fails to astound me that you seem to believe the Los Angeles Police Department exists for the sole purpose of seeing to your needs. You brought me two men whose alleged crimes do not in the least overlap with my area of the department and I have seen to their arrests. They have been processed and are seeing their attorney as we speak. I’m wondering exactly what other services you expected from your friendly neighborhood policeman.’
I sat there stunned for a moment. Coming from Trench, that was the equivalent of an expletive-heavy dismissal with an invitation to never darken his doorstep again. Finally I stood up, nodded and walked out of the room.
Patrick engulfed me in his arms the second I was in the corridor outside Trench’s office. ‘What’s wrong, love?’ he asked. ‘Did the lieutenant tell you that you’re in danger?’
I held onto him a little longer than I probably should have but I’m sure Patrick would not have complained. ‘Let’s go someplace warm,’ I said.
NINETEEN
The next morning Angie and I went to see Nate Garrigan. It was Angie’s ‘official’ day to tag along with my investigator, and I wanted to see the video footage of the stunt that killed James Drake, which Nate had told me he’d have by today. Win-win.
But Nate, after the usual grumbling about being ‘saddled’ with Angie because Patrick was a lunatic and so on, had other developments he wanted to discuss first. ‘I’ve been looking into our client and his wife Stacy,’ he said.
‘Tracy,’ Angie corrected.
Nate waggled a finger. ‘No. I’ve been able to trace back to a marriage certificate issued in San Bernardino nine years ago to Robert T. Marciano, which by the way is his real name, and Stacy Rabinowitz. There is no record of a divorce, legal separation or Mrs Reeves’s death, so as far as I can tell they’re still married.’
I had known that Reeves had changed his name through the police report of his arrest, when he’d been compelled to answer after giving his professional name four times and then admitting to his birth name. He’d had every right and opportunity to change it legally and had not bothered to do so. People make choices. Personally, I thought Robert Marciano was a perfectly good name.
‘So how did he get a marriage license for Tracy?’ I asked.
‘As far as I can tell,’ Nate answered, ‘he didn’t. There’s no record of the marriage to Stacy ending and there’s no paperwork I can find that indicates he’s married to the woman he’s introducing to everyone as his current wife.’
Angie, who could have seen the devious side of Mahatma Gandhi, took on a concerned expression. No doubt a conspiracy theory was on its way.
‘So did Reeves – that is, Marciano – ever divorce his first two wives, or are there four women running around thinking they’re married to this guy?’
Nate shook his head. ‘The first Mrs Marciano divorced him while he was still Marciano,’ he said. ‘The second one divorced him ten years ago. It’s just the third one who’s still hanging in there.’
‘But Tracy,’ I said.
‘Hey, you’re the lawyer,’ Nate reminded me. That was helpful, because for a minute there I thought I worked at the M&M Store. ‘If there’s no marriage certificate anywhere and no divorce decree from Stacy, is the current Mrs Reeves the current Mrs Reeves?’
‘It doesn’t make sense.’ I felt like I was trying to rouse myself from a deep sleep. First Trench was acting like I was even more of an annoyance than he usually considered me, and now my client had been lying to me about his marriage(s). I’d have to call my mother later and see if she still remembered me. ‘Why would Reeves introduce Tracy as his new wife and listen to all the rumors about her sleeping with the stuntman on his movie if they’re not really married and he has another wife somewhere else?’
‘Variety?’ Angie attempted.
Suddenly it occurred to me that I was at least theoretically in charge of this ragtag band of investigators. ‘So it seems to me that you need to follow Reeves when he goes home at night and see which wife greets him at the door,’ I said. ‘But if that’s Tracy, we need to find out where Stacy lives so we can go talk to her as well.’
‘I can’t be in two places at once,’ Nate said. Then he looked at Angie with an expression men don’t usually have when they look at Angie. He had a shifty smile on his face. Wait. That was the expression men usually have when they look at Angie. ‘But I can send an operative to do some of that, can’t I?’
Angie looked positively flattered. ‘An operative?’
There followed a good deal of commotion, much of it devoted to the proper title Angie should hold in the investigation agency that Nate was now apparently opening just for her while she was still working full-time as Patrick’s executive assistant. On the prospect of pay, Nate was quite clear: there wouldn’t be any. Angie, no doubt wondering if she’d have to pay all the rent on our two-bedroom should I move out and live with Patrick, spent some time trying to convince him otherwise and came up short.
