Reckless Disregard (9 page)

Poniard:

>OK then, I will send you the originals; but you must protect them with your life

PStern

>FedEx them for overnight delivery; I want them by tomorrow.

Poniard:

>No fedex. I’ll get them to you in my own way

PStern

>
Immediately. And I hope for your sake they’re legit.

Poniard:

>Security measures?

PStern

>JADS has an office safe.

Poniard:

>NO!!! Somewhere only you know about

He’s right. Too many people have access to the safe in this office.

PStern

>My personal safety deposit box, then.

Poniard:

>Where?

PStern

>Community Bank of Marina Del Rey. It’s stable and reputable.

I wait a long time for the response.

Poniard:

>OK, better be secure

PStern

>I have another question. Who’s Scotty?

Poniard:

>Don’t know

I don’t believe him. But as Harmon Cherry would say, a good lawyer knows when to ask questions, but a great lawyer knows when to stop. I close the chat program. So, either Poniard is a forger or William Bishop is a liar.

I wait until my anger at Poniard cools and then pick up the phone and ask Brenda to bring Philip back to my office. She’s at my door thirty seconds later, alone, carrying some papers.

“Where’s Paulsen?” I ask.

“Gone,” she says. “He doesn’t think it appropriate for him to be working at the JADS offices.” She walks over and hands me the documents. “He wanted to give you these, in case we don’t have the information, which we don’t, though I’ve been looking . . .” Flustered, she primps at her hair. “I thought I should’ve found this, but Mr. Paulsen says he has a special subscription to the St. Thomas More University archives, their entire library network, that he’s a librarian, and. . . . He’s so nice. Anyway, he says good things really do come in threes.”

Philip Paulsen has located three potential witnesses whom we haven’t been able to find. The first, Natalie Owen, now Natalie Jones—no wonder we couldn’t find her with that name—was Felicity McGrath’s roommate at the time of McGrath’s disappearance. She lives in Florida. In a phone call, she rebuffs my offer to fly to Tampa and meet with her, insists that she told everything she knows to the cops back in 1987. After some prodding from me, she says that she placed an ad for a roommate, was surprised when a famous actress like Felicity McGrath answered it, and then found herself chasing McGrath for the rent every month. They roomed together for only five months before McGrath disappeared. The women never became friends—Owen would return in the evening from her job as a bank teller, and McGrath would immediately leave, never saying where she was going and often not returning to the apartment until the next day. Or sometimes McGrath would stay in her bedroom for days at a time, as if depressed. Owen thinks that McGrath was out partying, sleeping around with men, drinking and doing drugs. McGrath was secretive, which made their last encounter odd—Felicity went out of her way to tell Owen that she was meeting with a friend and going on a movie shoot. I probe for more information, but Owen doesn’t know anything else. Or maybe she doesn’t want to get involved.

So Brenda and I get in my car—we have to dodge Banquo and his cosplayers—and drive to Century City, hoping to have better luck with Herman “Bud” Kreiss Jr., a former LAPD detective and current owner/operator of Kreiss Security & Protection Services, LLC. Kreiss’s office is located on Santa Monica Boulevard, on the ground floor of a white stucco low-rise strip mall that also houses a dry cleaner, a Tarot card reader, and a “We’ll Sell It for You on eBay” shop. This is the side of the street where the homeless are allowed to loiter and crash so as not to disturb the wealthy mall and restaurant patrons on the south side of the wide thoroughfare. Despite the rundown condition of his offices, Kreiss bills himself as
Protector of the Stars
. Hardly.

We walk up to Kreiss’s address, a wrought iron fence that encloses a small, grimy concrete slab that passes for a patio. The gate is locked, so I press the intercom button. There’s a loud buzz that makes Brenda flinch. I open the gate, and we walk across a patio that’s bare of greenery except for an overgrown juniper hedge and a pathetic overwatered ficus. When we get to the actual entrance to Kreiss’s office, there’s another galvanized security gate, and we have to be buzzed in a second time.

A heavy-set fiftyish brunette sits behind the reception desk, her gray roots so uniform that they appear to have been dyed in under the brown rather than the other way around. She’s looking down at the desk.

“Parker Stern and Brenda Sica to see—”

“He’s waiting for you,” she says, pinching her brows together and lifting her eyes into a glower.

I open the office door to find Kreiss standing behind a massive walnut desk, which has only a pen in a holder and an ink blotter on it. An obsolete PC and monitor sit on the credenza behind him. There isn’t a single piece of paper on the desk. The walls are covered with black-and-white publicity-grade photos of Kreiss with people I surmise are his “celebrity” clients, mostly one-hit-wonder pop singers and small-time character actors, the names of whom only someone with a show business past will recognize. He motions for us to sit down and then sits behind his desk.

He has a wiry build for a man in his sixties. His face is so scored with wrinkles that it looks as if it once served as a restaurant chopping block. He’s wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons, a solid red tie that isn’t quite long enough, and khaki slacks. His gray hair is cropped short, and his moustache is neatly trimmed. He could be a mall security official.

As soon as Brenda and I introduce ourselves, he says in a cop-like monotone, “It appears that your client has some major obstacles to overcome.”

“Not if you can help me prove that William Bishop is involved in Felicity McGrath’s disappearance,” I say.

“What makes you think I have information that relates to your case?”

It’s a fair question. His name doesn’t appear in the police report that Philip Paulsen located, or in the citywide newspapers of the era—the
Times
and the
Herald Examiner
—or in any of the tabloid articles that obsessively characterized Felicity McGrath’s disappearance as a modern-day
Black Dahlia
crime. I hand him a printout.

“It’s a story from the
Venice Beach Breeze
dated July 27, 1987,” I say. “Four days after McGrath’s disappearance. Written by a reporter for the Breeze named Dalila Hernandez. The article identifies Detective Sergeant Bud Kreiss, LAPD Venice substation, as the chief investigator. Quotes you as saying that you had a lead on a person of interest. We’d like to know who that person was.”

He tosses the piece of paper back at me. “The
Venice Beach Breeze
was a throwaway rag devoted to the legalization of cannabis sativa and to following the career of that chainsaw juggler who performed on the boardwalk. There’s no such person of interest.”

“Why were you taken off the case, then?”

“That’s not accurate, sir.”

“Sure you were. We’ve done our research, Mr. Kreiss.”

“I was based in the Pacific Area station and Ted Gorecki, my superior in Downtown Central, decided to take over the investigation. So I watched over the case for a few days at the beginning and then went on to other things. Nothing more sinister than that.”

“Please take a look at this, sir,” Brenda says, and hands him another printout from the
Venice Beach Breeze
. This time, his eyes deaden, and I’d bet my SAG residuals that if his skin weren’t a weather-beaten bronze, I’d see the color leave his cheeks. This article reported that six weeks into the McGrath investigation, Kreiss was busted back down to patrolman, working the graveyard shift.

“So you were taken off the case,” I say.

There’s a loud creak from the outer office, and the receptionist appears at the office door. “Your eleven o’clock will be arriving shortly, Bud.”

“Isla, stop.”

“Please,” she says.

“Isla’s my wife and business partner,” Kreiss says. “Also the Protector of the Stars’s protector.” He swivels his chair to the side and says to her, “Everything’s OK.”

She nods without conviction and leaves the room. Kreiss gets up and shuts the door.

“You were demoted because of the McGrath investigation,” I say. “Why?”

“They said . . .” He clears his throat. He appears to be a man who rarely speaks haltingly, but now he has to force the words out. “The brass claimed I engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Dalila Hernandez. It was a damn lie. She and I were just friends.” He gazes at me—past me, really—for a long time.

“What happened to Felicity?” I ask. “Because I think you truly believe that William Bishop kidnapped her.” How odd my profession—I literally want to hear that Bishop, by all accounts a devoted family man, a renowned philanthropist, someone with no criminal record, has committed a heinous crime.

He leans forward, rests his chin in his hands, and waits for a long time. It’s all I can do not to repeat the question, but I know I’ll lose him if I do. Eventually, he sits up and inhales deeply.

“There’s this wino who crashed on Venice Beach during the summer,” he says. “Luther Frederickson. Boardwalk Freddy, they called him. A polite panhandler who’d always say
god bless you
even if you didn’t give him a handout, even when the patrolmen were rousting him for loitering. He’d been an accountant in the late sixties who’d gotten into LSD. He quit his cushy desk job, deserted his wife and two kids, and moved up to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. By nineteen eighty-five, he was a Thunderbird lush living on the streets. The night McGrath disappeared, Freddy was sleeping one off in the alcove of the Pacific Avenue Hotel—it was a flophouse back then, trendy now. He told me he saw McGrath leaving the Windward Bar with two men, one tall and one short.”

“So did ten other people,” I say.

“What isn’t in the police report is that Boardwalk Freddy saw a yellow Volkswagen Rabbit pull up,” he says. “The two men put her in the VW, which sped away north toward the Santa Monica Pier. According to Freddy, thirty seconds later the two guys were picked up by a blue Mercedes Benz. The driver stepped out of the car and went into the backseat. The shorter man got behind the wheel. The tall guy got into the passenger seat. They drove away south down Pacific Avenue, the opposite direction from the VW.” He speaks as if he were testifying at trial, the experienced police witness dispassionately recounting facts to a jury.

“They found her blood at the pier,” Brenda says, visibly shuddering.

“Her blood
type
,” Kreiss says. “AB positive. Doesn’t mean it was hers.”

“Yeah, but only three percent of the population has it,” Brenda says.

Kreiss hesitates and then seems to gather courage again. “According to Boardwalk Freddy, the man in the Mercedes was William Bishop.”

Brenda turns and taps me on the shoulder excitedly, but if she thinks I’m going to jump out of my chair in glee, she’s mistaken.

Kreiss understands. “Mr. Stern’s next question is why would I give any credence to the word of a drunk and an addict like Freddy.”

“Especially a drunk sitting in an alcove in the dark of night who supposedly glimpses a man from fifty yards away and identifies him as Bishop,” I say. “Who, by the way, wasn’t nearly as famous in 1987 as he is now.”

“That’s what my superiors thought,” Kreiss says. “But I already told you that Freddy was an accountant before he tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. A cost accountant for the movie industry. He knew very well who Bishop was.”

“It’s still pretty thin,” I say.

“Maybe. But why did my superior order me not to follow up? And when I went over his head, why did they back him up and send me out on the streets? Maybe a witness like Freddy was reliable, maybe not. But a good cop follows up on all leads. My bosses didn’t.”

“And after that you just let it go?” Brenda says. “Just like that, you ignored what you knew and maybe let a killer go free?” It’s a harsh indictment, all the more caustic because it comes from timid Brenda Sica.

He looks up at the ceiling, embarrassed.

“What happened to Luther Frederickson?” I ask.

“A week after Felicity disappeared, some regulars on the beach reported him missing. They found his Samsonite suitcase in an alley off Rose Avenue. He’d never have abandoned that suitcase. It contained everything he owned.”

“Who else knows about Boardwalk Freddy?” I ask.

“Isla knows, of course. And my superior Gorecki and whoever was in the department back then who covered it up.”

“Names?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Only Gorecki. I don’t think the Chief would. . . . I hoped the demotion would be temporary, an object lesson, but when it became clear I’d never be a detective again, I quit the department.”

“Do you truly believe that William Bishop kidnapped Felicity McGrath?” I ask. “That he was behind the disappearance of Luther Frederickson?”