Forty Thieves (8 page)

After a moment, the manager said, “That’s a cell phone.”

“Can you get me the billing address?”

“Sure. Give me ten minutes, and I’ll call you back.”

“Good enough.” He hung up. Ed was tempted to use the landline to call a contact he had at the DPW while he was waiting. He had another one at the gas company. If he had taken the license number of the Abels’ car last night he could have cooked up some nonsense about a hit-and-run accident to put on the DMV form to get the address of the car’s owner. He had lots of ways to get an address, and some that he hadn’t even used yet.

6

The Abels went out to their garage, where one space was empty, a reminder that the BMW was in the dealer’s shop having its windshield replaced. They got into the black Volvo that was left and drove out of the gate at the end of their driveway. They had bought this house in Van Nuys while they were still police officers.

Ronnie had noticed the house while she was patrolling the old, quiet neighborhood. She had driven past it many times, until one night shift she saw a newly posted sign that the house was for sale. She had always been curious about the house because it had a bit more than a triple lot. There was nothing else special about the house or the neighborhood. The house itself was a white ranch-style bungalow that sprawled on its plot without apparent planning because rooms seemed to have been added whenever the place grew too small for its occupants. The trees on the block were old, but they were mostly the low, bumpy magnolias that infested this part of the Valley. They provided little shade and dropped their thick, leathery half-brown leaves twelve months a year and their oversized white flowers for one
week, leaving cone-like seed carriers the size and shape of grenades. Ronnie had simply been ready for her own house, and she liked this one.

On the first break of her shift she had called Sid, who was working homicide from the Metro Division at the time, and told him there was a house he had to see. They had not been able to meet at the address until after 8:00 a.m., when they were both off the clock.

They had walked the perimeter, gone off to breakfast together, then called the realtor and returned with him to look at the inside. Sid had been largely silent, because he knew by then that Ronnie was already determined, and the walk-through was a formality, a concession to his need to persuade himself that he wasn’t participating in a purely emotional decision. Ronnie did not believe that emotion was a bad basis for a decision about where and how a person lived—certainly better than numbers—but she let him look and pretended to listen when he spoke.

Over the years, the house had changed little. It still looked like thousands of other houses in the center of the San Fernando Valley—a small and undistinguished old house that had a two-story addition in the back. The house had a bit more land around it than some. Most of the first ones on their street had been orange groves or apricot orchards two generations ago. This had been out in the country then.

After many years and raising two children here, they had needed to replace the cracked and uneven asphalt driveway, and so Ronnie had picked out a style made of artificial paving stones, and Sid had decided they may as well add a new gate that didn’t require him to get out of the car to shut it. As they drove out of their driveway in the Volvo, they could
hear the automatic gate roll along its track and then give a satisfying clank.

“You know,” said Sid, “I sometimes forget how much I like this car. I get used to driving that BMW, but this thing is like an old friend.”

“It ought to get us up to Osborne Street if you can keep from chasing down any more shooters.”

They were on their way north to the Foothill station to meet with Detective Hebert, the officer in charge of the investigation of the shooting. When they arrived, Hebert came out to the lobby to meet them. “Come on in,” he said. “Let’s go into an interview room so we can talk.”

Sid and Ronnie exchanged a glance so furtive that he didn’t see it. Ronnie said, “All right.”

“Here,” he said, and opened the door of an interrogation room. “You can wait in there while I get us some coffee.”

Sid and Ronnie entered and sat down in the two seats normally reserved for the two officers conducting the interview. The video cameras were aimed downward from above and behind them at the empty chair. They shared an understanding that Detective Hebert had gone to turn on the cameras and microphones to record what they said to each other, so they did not speak.

Hebert returned with a uniformed cop who carried two paper coffee cups. Hebert carried his own and opened the door. “Thanks,” he said, and the cop set down the two cups and went away. “I brought you cream and sugar.” He reached into his coat pocket and then placed some thimble-sized creamers and small envelopes in front of them on the table.

“Thank you,” said Ronnie.

Hebert hesitated for a few seconds, then sat down in the only empty chair and pulled it closer to the table. “Well, let’s talk about this shooting incident last night,” he said. “I’d like to go over some of the impressions I got last night, to be sure we’ve got all the information we need. What were you doing up there on Clovermeadow Lane last night after nightfall?”

Sid said, “The reason we were up there was that we had visited the Department of Public Works office, where we got a list of the construction sites where there might have been an open storm drain on March fifth of last year. That site was number three, the last one of the day.”

“And that was part of the investigation you’re on?”

“Right,” said Ronnie. “The body of a man named James Ballantine was found stuck in a storm sewer under a street in North Hollywood around then. There was no easy way for him to have gotten there, because the drains along the streets are designed not to let anything big, like a body, get into the system. So it had to be an open drain somewhere upstream.”

“And of course, you’re both former LAPD officers.” He paused. “I assume you both left the department without any issues?”

“You didn’t check?” said Sid.

Ronnie said, “No issues. I left after ten years and Sid left after twelve because we wanted to work together on our own.”

“Is that working out pretty well?” asked Hebert. “I think I’ve heard your names a few times.”

“It’s okay,” said Sid.

“Good, good,” said Hebert. “And you just said you were looking into the death of James Ballantine last March.”

“Yes,” said Ronnie. “We did.”

“A homicide. Who hired you to do that?”

“Mr. Ballantine’s employer, Intercelleron Corporation. The contact person is named David Hemphill.”

“Hemphill,” said Hebert, and wrote the name on his note pad. “And what does Mr. Hemphill say his company wants?”

“Two new pairs of eyes looking at the case. He says the directors of the company are concerned because one of their employees was murdered, and they’re willing to pay to keep someone working actively on the case. It seemed to us that reaching the anniversary of the crime was the trigger.”

“I’ve seen that before,” said Hebert.

“We see it often,” Ronnie said. “The survivors get a lot of information at first, but then the flow slows down and they tell themselves they’ll give the police until some particular time. If the case isn’t solved when that time comes, they’ll hire their own investigators.”

“You ever get any results on that kind of case?”

“Sometimes,” said Sid.

“Really? Ever apprehend any perpetrators and get them convicted in a court?”

“Some,” Sid said.

“How many?” Hebert said. “One?”

“Sid doesn’t like to keep score,” Ronnie said.

Hebert leaned back in his chair and his lips began to curl upward into a smile.

But Ronnie wasn’t finished. “But I do. Since we left the LAPD we’ve had twenty-one homicide convictions, about half of them murder one and the others bargained down to second degree or voluntary manslaughter. There were also four who were guilty but got themselves killed while
officers were trying to make the arrests. I think a couple of those were suicide by cop.” She paused. “Of course, we don’t usually take on murder cases. When we do, we usually work for defense attorneys.”

Hebert was silent for several seconds. “Ever think of coming back to work?”

“No,” said Ronnie. “Not once.”

“Why not?”

“We still have a lot of friends on the force, but—”

“I’ll bet you do, with all those convictions.”

Ronnie ignored the interruption. “We like to work together. No department in the country would let us do that.”

“I see,” said Hebert. “But I guess it’s safe to assume we can count on you to cooperate with the official investigation of the shooting.”

“We always do,” Sid said. “At the moment we haven’t got much to share. We’ve just started to look at the Ballantine case.”

“That case belongs to somebody in North Hollywood homicide. I’d be satisfied to get the person who shot out your windshield. That’s my case. What’s your theory?”

Ronnie said, “We put out ads online and in print offering twenty-five thousand dollars for the Ballantine case. We were followed, so we decided maybe we should go after the other car and see who was following us. We got too close, and they fired.”

“You’re sure that it wasn’t because you found the place where they’d put the body?”

“We don’t think we’d found anything,” said Ronnie. “We were there because one of the streets was at the stage of construction when a storm drain might still have been open,
not paved over, and we wanted to see what it looked like. When Ballantine was murdered, that street was probably still empty field. The street where it could have happened would be one or two streets west of there.”

“You’re pretty sure that your going out there was what caused the shooting?”

Ronnie said, “Has anybody else been shot at out there?”

“Not that we know of,” said Hebert. “We’ll have to look into it. Any other thoughts on what happened out there last night?”

“Not right now,” said Sid. “We hope to later.”

“Well, then, thanks for coming,” said Hebert. He stood and held out his hand. “It’s been interesting. Don’t hesitate to get in touch.”

“Thank you,” Sid said. He shook Hebert’s hand.

Sid walked out of the small room. As they moved down the hallway toward the foyer, they heard the door open and close again. When they reached the front of the building and were out in the open air again, Ronnie said quietly, “I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to share anything.”

“I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to have anything.”

Sid Abel walked up the sidewalk toward the Figueroa Club at eleven o’clock that evening. There were the usual three men watching the door from outside the club. One looked like a valet parking attendant standing behind a black podium of the sort that contained a pegboard with car keys on it. Sid knew that this pegboard held a lot of car keys that didn’t go
to any car, and that the board was on hinges, just the door to a hidden cabinet containing a steel plate to make the podium bulletproof and a short-barreled semiautomatic shotgun. The attendant switched off about once an hour with one or the other of the two men sitting in a car along the curb. They were there to pull ahead at high speed and make any unfriendly intruders unhappy in proportion to their sins.

The setup had not changed in at least three decades, since about the time when the club had moved here from Figueroa Street. This was a bad neighborhood, and the club was one of the principal things that made it that way.

“Hi,” Sid said to the attendant. “Is Jimmy Pascal around tonight?”

“I can ask,” said the attendant. “Who can I say wants him?”

“Sid Abel.”

“You look like a cop.”

“I’m not. You look like a parking attendant.”

“I’m not.”

Sid took out a fifty-dollar bill and handed it to the attendant.

The attendant pocketed it. “This isn’t much money.”

“Jimmy’s not much of a guy.” He stepped past the attendant. “Sit tight. I’ll go find him myself.”

The Figueroa was a private club, founded many years ago by a group of people who had shared a belief in after-hours drinking, and free enterprise that often included the exchange of goods and services that were not supposed to be for sale. It had retained that character long after many of those activities had gone out of style and been replaced by something worse, or become legal.

He walked in and could see the club had not changed since his last visit years ago. There was a long polished bar with stools and shelves of bottles backed by a big mirror. The rest of the front room was filled with round tables, where men and a few women played cards or just drank and talked. Beyond a broad arch was a room with three pool tables and long benches along the walls.

Sid spotted Jimmy near the end of the bar talking with two men. Jimmy Pascal was a short black man who weighed about three hundred pounds. He habitually wore a voluminous pair of khaki shorts, a billowing Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of size nine and a half quadruple-E sneakers. He was in his sixties, and made his living now in indirect ways—brokering agreements, selling items of mysterious provenance, introducing people—but when Sid met him twenty-five years ago, he had been a killer.

Sid went to the bar and sat on a stool where he could use the big mirror as a way to watch his back. The bartender, a young, strong-looking man with a beard, said, “Are you a member, sir?”

Sid took out his wallet and produced a tattered card.

The bartender was shocked. “That’s really an old one. I haven’t seen you before.”

Sid shrugged. “I haven’t come much since you were born. Can you get me a beer?”

“Yes, sir.” He turned toward the draft beer taps. “On tap we have—”

“Miller’s fine.”

The bartender turned away and picked up a glass, and Sid felt the heat of a large body close to his shoulder.

“Hey, Sidward.”

He raised his eyes to the mirror and saw Jimmy. “Hi, Jimmy. How have you been?”

“So-so. You like getting old? Me neither.”

“I’ll take it,” said Sid. “You got a couple of minutes?” His glass of beer appeared in front of him and he put a ten on the bar.