Blue Heaven (39 page)

“At Santa Anita,” Villatoro said.

“Among other places. But yeah, Santa Anita was the most steady. In the counting room, but you knew that.” The way he said it made the hairs stand up on Villatoro’s neck. He began to believe that Newkirk thought he knew more than he did. In order not to dispel the notion, Villatoro told himself to keep his comments to a minimum.

Newkirk took a long swallow, then rubbed his eyes. “At that point, I was still damned proud to be a cop. I was
proud
of the LAPD. Despite what you see here in front of you,” he said, gesturing to himself, “I still think they’re one of the best departments in the country. There are thousands of dedicated men and women, risking their lives every day they go out. They’re good people, man. They’re tough and honest, with a couple of exceptions. Too bad everybody points out the few bad ones and makes us all out to be fucking criminals. They say it’s better now, too. That the new chief is cleaning things up. That’d be good if it’s true. But the city’s still a fucking cesspool, and the department needs twice as many cops. Hell, we need three times as many cops. But the taxpayers don’t want to pay the bill for them.”

Villatoro waited a moment, then said, “Santa Anita.”

“Is that all you care about?” Newkirk sneered.

“No, it’s not all,” Villatoro said, trying to sound conversational. “But I’ve spent the last eight years trying to figure out what happened there.”

Newkirk laughed. “Me too.”

Villatoro started to think they were getting nowhere, when Newkirk sighed and said, “It was a pretty good gig, basically just standing around, like so much copwork. We didn’t even open the doors until the security truck got there. Then we just stepped aside and guarded the perimeter while they loaded the trucks. We stuck around until all of the paying customers cleared out, then went home. A good gig, me and Rodale. We worked it all the time together. They liked us, we liked them.

“Gonzalez was our sergeant,” Newkirk said. “Everybody respected and feared the guy. He used to give us a lot of shit about working security at Santa Anita, saying we must have a couple of dollies out there to want to work it so much.”

Villatoro made the connection without saying anything. Gonzalez was one of the names on the list, one of the officers of the 501(c)3, one of the volunteers helping the county sheriff.

“Gonzo was great because he didn’t give a shit about anything. He always did what was righteous, whether it was PC or not. I could tell you stories about Gonzo that would curl your hair if you had any. You ever hear of a ‘guilty smile’?”

Villatoro said, “No.”

“Remind me to tell you about it later. Let’s just say when he took some scumbag into the Justice Ranch, the scumbag deserved whatever he got, okay?”

Villatoro had read something about an investigation into a place called the Justice House, but had never heard the results of the inquiry.

“Singer was our commanding officer, over Gonzo,” Newkirk said. “Singer was the toughest motherfucker in the department, even though he never shouts, never yells. He defended his officers to the death, though. He’d go to the mat for them, and he was so cool under pressure that the brass would always come get him whenever the situation was too hot to handle. There wasn’t a guy in our division who wouldn’t take a bullet for Lieutenant Singer or Gonzo. They were, like,
mythical.

“So when Gonzo invited me and Rodale for beers at a cop bar one night, after we’d been working security at Santa Anita for a year or so, we thought that was pretty cool, so we went. Swann was there, too—it was the first time we met him. After a few cocktails, Gonzo started asking us
how we would rob the place if we were bad guys—you know, what the best scenario would be to take the place down.”

Villatoro found himself looking over.

Newkirk curled his lip. “It’s not like that, man. It was just a conversation. You know how cops do it all the time, try to figure out how bad guys would do a job, so they can
prevent
it, you know? Sometimes you’ve got to think like a criminal to stop a criminal. Besides, it wasn’t like it was real money out there, like people needed it to feed their families. It was gambling losses. The idiots had already lost it, so it couldn’t have been all that important to them. Gambling money, you know, like all of that cash the state collects from lotteries and shit like that.”

“But it belonged to someone,” Villatoro heard himself say. “It belonged to the owners of the track.”

Newkirk laughed. “Like they didn’t have insurance? You expect me to give a shit about an insurance company? Everybody hates those guys. Turn here.”

“Where are we going?” Villatoro asked, taking another dark two-lane highway.

“Just driving. I told you that.”

Villatoro tried not to sigh, tried not to show that he was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

Newkirk drank. Then: “Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Shit. That wasn’t the plan.”

At last, Villatoro thought. Newkirk had admitted being involved. This is what he had worked years to hear.

“Me and Rodale figured out the part about putting the gas canisters in the money bags. That way, they could be set off by remote control when the truck stopped at the intersection.

“To start out, we had this big idea that Gonzo and Singer would bust into the counting room wearing masks and make everybody get on the floor. Shit, we had even worked out a deal where Gonzo would pistol-whip Rodale or me to make it look real. But the chances of them driving off after doing that and not being seen by someone or getting caught weren’t good. So Swann thought of the idea of waiting until the security truck was off the park, robbing it there away from everything. It was the best idea, and we went with it.”

“So it was Singer’s idea in the first place?” Villatoro asked.

“Shit, I don’t know whether it was Singer or Gonzo. It didn’t matter. But Singer was in charge, thank God. He wasn’t the kind of guy to rush into anything, either. We talked about the robbery and planned it for a year and a half. We had meetings where we went over everything and tried to shoot parts down. We did a couple of run-throughs at night so we could walk the route and time everything. Once we decided on the perfect plan, it was still another four or five months before we decided to do it. Singer didn’t even want to try it until he could figure out how to launder the money. I hadn’t even thought about it, but Singer was so fucking smart. He said the only thing worse than robbing a place these days was figuring out what to do with all of the cash, because nobody uses cash anymore. That’s when he came up with the idea to create a foundation and to make all of us officers in it. We’d hide the cash and dribble it into legit accounts, not deposit it all at once. Pay ourselves in officer’s salaries and big bonuses. It was fucking brilliant.”

Villatoro wished he was wearing a wire. But if nothing else, even if he never gained Newkirk’s trust, even if the ex-cop later denied everything, Villatoro would know how the robbery happened, who had been involved, where the money was.

“Also,” Newkirk said, tapping the dashboard with the mouth of the bottle, “we had to wait until all of the stars lined up perfectly. A big cash day at the track, me and Rodale on security, Singer and Gonzo off duty so they could trigger the gas and rush the truck, Swann on patrol so he could escort the getaway vehicle to the auto salvage yard, where it was crushed. Remember, no one ever found a car?”

“I remember.”

Newkirk chuckled. “Swann drove Singer and Gonzo and $13.5 million in cash back to L.A. in a police van we took the seats out of and dropped them off at their houses. Imagine that.”

Villatoro whistled. “But a security guard got killed.”

Newkirk seemed to darken. “Yeah, that still pisses me off. Some yahoo tried to be a cowboy. Gonzo had to take him out.”

“His name was Steve Nichols,” Villatoro said. “He had a wife and two children.”

Newkirk didn’t respond at first, just stared out the windshield. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.

The ex-cop remained silent while Villatoro drove. Finally, Villatoro
said, “What about the guy, the employee, who fingered the other employees in the counting room? Why did he do that if he wasn’t involved?”

Newkirk shrugged. He seemed to be losing enthusiasm for telling the rest of the story. “Singer’s boy,” he said. “The lieutenant had something really incriminating on the guy—totally unrelated to the track. Pictures of him dealing drugs, or with boy prostitutes or something. I never did know what it was exactly, but it was bad enough that the guy did what Singer told him.”

“But the employee died before he had a chance to testify in court,” Villatoro said.

“Yeah, wasn’t that convenient?” Newkirk said darkly. “He gets caught in a cross fire while he’s buying a pack of cigarettes at a 7-Eleven. The clerk gets popped, the witness gets popped, and the robber empties the cash drawer and escapes scot-free. All they can see on the security tape is a big masked guy in black walking in and blasting away.”

Villatoro let it sink in. “Gonzalez?” he asked.

Newkirk nodded slightly. “And Swann was the investigating officer.”

Jesus
, Villatoro thought.
It’s worse than I imagined.

“Creating the charity was a master stroke, I agree,” Villatoro said. “Making small deposits in a bank in northern Idaho never attracted any attention at all for years. The only problem was tracing a few of the hundred-dollar bills back to here. You must not have realized that some of them could be traced to the robbery.”

Newkirk turned, his face screwed up in contempt. “
Of course
we knew about the serial numbers on some of the hundreds. Me and Rodale were in the counting room, remember? We knew about that. Do you think we’re stupid?”

“No,” Villatoro said, feeling outright fear rise up in his chest. He tried not to show it.

“That’s where Tony Rodale screwed the pooch,” Newkirk said, his voice rising, his eyes flashing with either anger or tears, Villatoro couldn’t tell which. “He was the treasurer. He made the deposits. Singer had it all worked out. On a schedule, Tony made a cash deposit supposedly collected from random cops in L.A. and other places. But we knew about the hundreds, how a few of ’em were marked. So Tony’s job was to get in his car and drive all around the country to break the hundred-dollar
bills in restaurants, or gas stations, or bars, or wherever. He told his wife he was going fishing, but his job was to cash the hundreds and deposit the change later. That’s all he fucking had to do.”

Now, Villatoro started to understand. He thought of the mounted steelhead on Rodale’s wall, thought of the years Rodale had deceived his wife about his absences. Thought of the places of origin from some of the marked bills that had been identified, California, Nevada, Nebraska. All within a day or two driving distance of Kootenai Bay, but far enough from each other that no pattern could be established.

“But the asshole got greedy,” Newkirk said. “Singer noticed that some of the deposits were off, and figured Tony was skimming, which he was. The idiot was using some of the hundreds to bet on football, of all things, with some lowlife bookie in Coeur d’Alene. Tony wouldn’t admit it, of course, but Singer found the bookie and shook him down and proved it to us.”

Newkirk leaned across the car so his face was inches from Villatoro. When he talked, Villatoro could smell his sour whiskey breath.

“Tony risked
everything.
Not just for himself, but for all of us by paying his debts to a bookie in stolen hundred-dollar bills.
Our
money. When Singer found out he was afraid it would be a matter of time before someone like you came up here, tracing those bills back.”

“And here I am,” Villatoro said, not sure why he’d spoken.

“Here you fucking are,” Newkirk said, as if in pain.

“But where is Tony Rodale?”

Newkirk started to speak, then looked away. Beads of sweat sparkled on his forehead. The anguished look on his face was lit by dash lights.

“That’s what I’m going to show you,” Newkirk said.

“Oh no,” Villatoro whispered. “You killed him.”

“Not just me. All of us. The agreement was we all put a couple into him, so we were all equally responsible. All of us except for Swann, who was late.”

Another murder, Villatoro thought. It was too overwhelming to process. Steve Nichols, the inside witness, the convenience store clerk. Now, one of their own.

“It might have worked, too,” Newkirk was saying, “except that those two fucking kids saw us take Tony out. Hey, keep driving.”

Villatoro hadn’t realized he had slowed the car to a crawl. Things
were connecting in a way he had not anticipated. He felt as if all of the blood had drained from his hands and face.

“The Taylor children,” Villatoro said. “Oh, my God.”

“Everything keeps getting worse,” Newkirk said, and this time there were real tears streaking down his face. “One crime, one perfectly planned crime. We were set for life. Then Tony fucked up, and those kids saw us, then the UPS guy. I feel like I’m already in hell.” His voice cracked. “In fact, I think hell would feel nice and cool to me right now.”

Villatoro sped up but realized his hands were shaking. He had trouble staying in his lane. What did Newkirk’s reference to a UPS man mean?