Hailey's War (15 page)

I read both obituaries. They didn't disagree on any points. Adrian Skouras had been born and raised in San Francisco and had been fascinated with math and science at a young age. He'd graduated high school at fifteen and gone back east to study at Princeton. In his second year, he'd become a star in the world of mathematics by discovering a rare subspecies of prime number, now called a “Skouras prime,” the definition of which went over my head. After that, he'd gone overseas to Oxford for graduate work, then come home to settle at Berkeley, working among some of the leading lights in the field.

He had never married and left no children behind. Associates said that Skouras had been “married to his work, in the best possible way,” in the words of one. “When he was working on something that fascinated him, which was almost all the time, he'd forget to eat, much less to get out and have a social life. But if you knew him, you wouldn't have any doubt that he was completely fulfilled.”

The best work of his career was undoubtedly ahead of him, they said, if only cancer had not stolen a fine mind from the world.

His father, Anton Skouras, was a San Francisco businessman and philanthropist; one brother, Milos, had preceded Adrian in death five
years earlier. In lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the American Cancer Society.

I looked at his photo again. Adrian Skouras appeared shy, gentle, unsettled by the photographer's attention, and impatient to step back into academic anonymity. This was no cliché—the graybeard professor. This was a real person. Looking at him, I thought I knew what happened between this man and Nidia Hernandez.

According to his colleagues, Adrian had been totally satisfied as a bachelor, living his life on the higher plane of numbers and ideas. Of course, that was what anyone would want to think about a newly dead colleague. Between the lines, Adrian had likely been one of those geniuses who would have been able to converse easily with Newton and Sagan—and hard-pressed to make small talk with real people at a cocktail party or a university mixer. Adrian had probably spent his weekend nights in the company of ideas, not women. Maybe, as his colleagues wanted to think, he had been satisfied with that. And then he got cancer, and his whole life became about the survival rate.

But Adrian had had just a little time, time he'd spent with a very lovely nineteen-year-old living in his house, a girl who had the same otherworldliness about her. He'd denied himself simple human warmth and pleasure for too long; she was recovering from a terrible loss. Put two people like that in close proximity alone for too long, and anyone could tell you the result.

What if that little potbelly she'd had, the one I'd assumed was puppy fat, wasn't? What if it had been a baby, and Nidia had been going to Mexico to have her child away from the eyes of anyone who knew her?

It was a theory that made sense until the entrance of the seven armed men. That changed things. It said that Nidia hadn't run to Mexico to escape gossip and character assassination. She'd foreseen the approach of the men in the tunnel, whoever they were. And she'd warned her family, who'd effectively disappeared into the migrant worker community, for once using poverty and anonymity to their benefit. Nidia could have gone with them, except that if these guys
were determined to find her, that wouldn't have been enough. A beautiful green-eyed redhead, and, if my theory was correct, increasingly pregnant? Anywhere she went, people would have remembered her.

So Nidia had 911'd cousin Lara, and Lara had called Serena, playing the card of loyal dead soldier Teaser. And Serena had called me, and that was how the only person without a stake in the matter nearly bled out in the mountains of Mexico.

I walked out into the midday sunlight. It wasn't going to help me to talk to people who'd known Adrian in the math department. Whatever there had been in Adrian's life that had involved him with men like the guys in the tunnel, his colleagues weren't going to know about it. I needed the story behind the obituary, the whispers that had never made it to print.

I sat down on the steps like a student, minus the latte. I dug my cell from my backpack and made a phone call.

“AP, Foreman.”

“Jack? It's Hailey.”

“Hailey?” he said, mildly surprised. “I thought I'd said something to piss you off. I called you and you never returned my message.”

“My phone was stolen,” I said.

“Really? That's too bad.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I need a favor and I don't have a lot to exchange for it. Maybe I could buy you a lunch or something.”

“Depends what the favor is,” he said.

“For you, it shouldn't be a problem,” I said. “I need some background information, the kind of things reporters talk about but can't or don't print.”

“About what?”

“A man named Adrian Skouras. He was a mathematician at UC Berkeley and died of cancer three months ago. His obit was glowing, but I need to know if there were things about him that were, I don't know, unsavory.”

“Mmmm,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Right off, can I ask you if this guy grew up locally?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“Do you remember if he's related to a guy named Anton Skouras?”

“That was his father. You've heard of him?”

“Sure, he's probably the biggest unindicted racketeer in San Francisco.”

“He is?”

“Unofficially, yeah. Officially, he's a ‘prominent businessman.' I haven't had the opportunity to write about him that often. Someone who writes for the business pages over at the
Chron
would know his story better than me, printable news and unprintable rumors both.”

“Could you ask someone over there?”

“It depends: Where are we going to lunch?”

“Anywhere,” I said, guessing that his innate decency wouldn't let him hold me up for anyplace expensive.

“You know where Lefty O'Doul's is?” he said.

“I know it,” I told him. Dim and comfortable, with old-style cafeteria-line food.

Before we hung up, Jack said, “Why are you interested in Skouras, anyway?”

I said, “I think he stole my cell phone.”

When I saw Jack Foreman waiting on the sidewalk outside Lefty's, he was
smoking, of course. I noticed that he'd let his hair grow since I'd seen him last. He'd probably just been too busy to bother getting it cut. He wasn't the type to change styles out of vanity, or to care that the new length made his gray more noticeable.

When he saw me, he tossed the cigarette down on the sidewalk and stepped on it, looking at me appraisingly. “You've lost weight,” he said. “Come inside, we need to get some calories into you.”

We went in and moved through the cafeteria line, then settled in at a booth. Lefty's was never empty, but it wasn't packed, either, and quiet enough for us to talk. We sat under the photographs of Tinker and Evers and Chance, and I looked at Jack and said, “So tell me about this Skouras guy.”

“Well,” Jack began, “he came from a big family in Greece. Before World War Two, they had money and landholdings, all that. But then came the German occupation, then the civil war, and it all went away. Tony Skouras talks about this in interviews, how he came here as a teenager with nothing, determined to rebuild. It's his bootstraps story.

“What he doesn't talk about,” Jack said, “is that his first business venture in his twenties was to buy a pair of X-rated movie houses. He built those into a chain, and added a line of adult DVD-rental stores. They were so profitable that he was able to sell by the age of thirty and buy a shipping line, which was, on the surface, a more respectable trade.”

“Why ‘on the surface'? That sounds a lot more respectable than pornography.”

“Well, he's using the shipping line and his import business to bring stolen art and antiquities into the country,” Jack said, “but that's not the big deal. The bigger problem is he's bringing in illegal immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He's got contacts in the Balkan states, where a lot of people's lives have been ripped up by the civil wars there, and they'll do anything to get out. If it were just undocumented young men looking for work that Skouras was bringing in, that'd be one thing, but a big part of the trade is young women. Skouras supplies prostitution rings. Essentially, the guy's a human trafficker, and he's said to dip into the rings he supplies quite a bit, like a private dating pool.”

I nodded.

“None of that's been proven. The feds have sniffed around him; the SEC has subpoenaed papers, but he's got good accounting and good lawyering and nothing's stuck. In the past few years he's branched out further into legitimate enterprises. He owns a minority stake in a film studio in L.A., and he opened a seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero, Rosemary's, named for his wife. As far as I've heard, there's nothing dirty about those operations.”

I nodded.

“But then there's this. About ten years ago, Skouras got interested in horse racing. He went in big, bought a costly colt from Dubai and had it brought here and stabled at Golden Gate Fields. Then it didn't live up to its potential. After it finished out of the money in several races, its heart just exploded during a routine exercise gallop.”

“Drugged?”

“That was never proven,” Jack said. “Which probably wasn't much of a consolation to the exercise groom who suffered a compound pelvic fracture in the fall.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah. Let's see, what other Skouras rumors can I dazzle you with? Oh yes,” he said. “There's a very faintly whispered story that Tony had a daughter on the other side of the sheets, but that's never been confirmed.”

I said, “A lot of the shit that sticks to him seems to be sexual—the X-rated theaters and the prostitution and an affair, and yet he was a family man. He had this genius kid.”

“He had two sons,” Jack reminded me. “Milos was a chip off the block. Followed his father into the family businesses, until the day he died of ‘food poisoning.'” He put finger quotes around the words.

“You think he was murdered?”

“Seems likely,” Jack said. “The kid was a piece of work. I guess Adrian was different. If you read his obituary, you'd know more about him than I do. Adrian never comes up much in conversations about his father. He certainly didn't go into the family business. I think they were estranged.”

Nidia had said as much in our one conversation about him.

“Is his wife still alive? No, she's not,” I said, remembering Adrian's obit. “Not a very long-lived family, are they?”

Jack shook his head. “The funny thing is, though, Tony Skouras was never a good bet to outlive his wife, much less both sons. He had heart trouble and had undergone major bypass surgery four years ago. It wasn't supposed to be a real long-term fix,” he said. “People keep expecting this guy to drop in his tracks, but it never happens. He's a survivor. He just goes on and on.”

I couldn't think of anything else I needed to ask. So I said, “You want some coffee?”

We went back to the cafeteria line and bought some, Jack stirring his a little too much, with the random gestures of a smoker who'd rather be outside having a cigarette. Then he asked the question I'd been expecting: “So, what's your interest in Tony Skouras?”

“Sorry,” I said, “I can't talk about it.”

“Yeah, I knew you were going to say that,” Jack said.

I'd expected him to dig, and said as much. “That's it? You're satisfied with that?”

“I don't think it's going to help me any to be dissatisfied.”

“I thought all reporters refused to take no for an answer.”

“Are you kidding? We hear no all the time,” Jack said. “And you're
thinking of the Hollywood version of journalism, where a reporter hears a hot tip one day and two days later there's a big story splashed across A1. Real investigative journalism takes time. It takes slow circling around your subject, Freedom of Information Act requests, compiling and synthesizing of information. It doesn't happen overnight.”

I wasn't sure what he was telling me. “You're saying that after today you're going to look a bit harder at Skouras?”

“People are always looking at Skouras,” he said. “But since you're feeling guilty, throw me a bone. Answer just one question, totally unrelated to the rest of this.”

“No, you had your chance,” I said. “You already traded your information for a free lunch. Too late to change the deal now.”

“You sure that's all the information you're going to need? You don't have to stay in my good graces in case of follow-ups?” He cocked an eyebrow.

“Fine,” I said, making my voice sound more impatient than I really felt. “One question.”

“The school you went to back east, the one that didn't work out, was that Annapolis or West Point?”

“I … yes. How the hell did you know that?”

He'd turned serious. “I observe people, Hailey. I always knew you were something more than you let on. So it made sense that the school wasn't any State U. But at the same time, I didn't get Ivy League vibes. That left one of the military academies.”

I nodded. “It was West Point.”

“Why didn't you finish?”

“I almost did.”

“Maybe you'll tell me about that someday.”

“No. Sorry,” I said. “I just don't talk about that. Don't take it personally.”

That afternoon, I called Serena to tell her what I'd learned. When I was done
, she said, “You're thinking that the guys in the tunnel were gangsters.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “They were obviously well-funded and disciplined.”

“So it sounds like you shoulda searched Nidia's suitcase,” said Serena. “She took something from that rich guy.”