Silent Joe (33 page)

His face went hard when he heard his voice, then Millbrae's. He stared at me. Brown eyes under bushy eyebrows. Small eyes, and keen, like a vulture's. "So?"

"The
usual spot
was the wild buckwheat bush northeast of the Windy Ridge toll plaza.
Her
is Bridget.
Thursday night
was May tenth, which was the supervisors' vote on the toll road purchase. The reason for the conversation was money—ninety grand—that you paid Millbrae to vote your way. Millbrae ended up with nothing, because Will took the money. And Mr. Millbrae voted against you that night, because Will had played him this same tape."

The eyebrows raised, then lowered. "Try this. The
usual spot
was the Grove, for drinks and a strategy session.
Her
is Bridget, all right, who loves sticking her nose into Millie's business, and, quite frankly, influences his decisions in ways I don't like.
Thursday night
was the supervisors' vote, and it was important, just like I said in the tape. The reason for the conversation was how to get Millbrae into our camp with time running out. Now, Joe, just how in the hell do you get ninety grand and blackmail out of it?"

I couldn't answer that without exposing Bridget, so I took a chance.

"Will told me. I made the pickup that night at Windy Ridge. I filled the sack with rocks."

Rupaski's face went red. He shrugged. He looked out the window. "So what the fuck do you want?"

"I want to know who paid John Gaylen to kill my father."

"And I'm supposed to know?"

"When I heard the tape, sir, I realized he was blackmailing Millbrae. You put a transmitter on Will's car. You said he asked you to, but I don't believe you. I think that story is like the one you just told—convincing and quick and a lie. I think you bugged his car so you could get him on something like he had on you and Millbrae. Some kind of leverage. Anything—an affair, a pay-off, anything that you could use against him. Your men followed him on the Tuesday before he died. They followed him to a beach in Laguna and saw him with Alex and Savannah Blazak. You told Jack. He told you that Alex was using Will to deliver Savannah and collect the money. So you knew Will would go to the girl, as soon as Alex told him where she was. You had a motive to silence Will, and the means of locating him. One of your men could follow at a distance, use the transmitter and get word back to Gaylen as fast as a voice travels through a telephone cell."

"So
set him up for Gaylen?"span>

"That's a possibility I'm considering, sir.

"He shook his head and kept staring at me. "That tape isn't evidence, you know. It's illegal—you can't tape a conversation when there's an expectation of privacy. And there's no chain of custody on it. I've already talked to the DA about it—a hypothetical case, of course. It's useless

"The grand jury might not think so, after I tell them about the ninrty thousand for Millbrae's vote. You see, sir, Will's dead. So if it come that he was blackmailing you, well, that really isn't going to hurt him any more than Gaylen's bullets already did."

"You'd do that? Crap on his name that way?"

"To get to who hired John Gaylen? Yes, sir."

Rupaski stood and looked down at me. Then he went to the big map of the county on his wall, the one with all the roads that the county was planning to build. The roads were shown in different colors: black for now; blue for the next decade; red for the one after that.

"It's going to be a great county, Joe. And Will, you, me—we all did our part."

"Will didn't like most of those blues and reds. He fought you on them."

"His part was to fight them. That's what I said."

I looked at the dizzying blue and red future. The lines looked like veins and arteries wrapped around a funny shaped heart.

"I'll come clean with you, Joe. This alleged ninety-grand payola?’’ I don't know anything about that, or a bag full of rocks. You want to your father out to be a blackmailer, go ahead. But I do admit that my guys were following Will. Why? Because Jack came to me when Savanna taken, just like I told you. And Jack confided in me when Will got himself into the middle of it. So I bugged up his BMW in the service yard, hoping he'd lead us to the girl.
I did it for Savannah.
It worked, because we found all three of them down at the beach in Laguna that night. Yep, my boys followed that radio signal all the way, right to them. I told Jack what we found. So we decided to stay with you, so as not to lose Savannah. Honestly, my best guys were on you the night Will died. But you lost them somewhere between the Grove and Lind Street, Joe. You're too damned good a driver. That damned BMW is too fast. You outran us. That transmiter's only good for about two miles. And I'll tell you this, too, young man—I never heard of John Gaylen until you told me about him."

Rupaski was as convincing a man as I'd ever met. He'd halfway fooled me with the original transmitter story. Now this. I gathered up the tape recorder and slid it back into my pocket.

"And remember this, too, Joe. Bridget is a good woman and a good employee and you don't want her hurt. I get the feeling Bridget was behind that recording. I can't prove it. But a court can make her testify and ask her some hard questions. Perjury is a felony. You might not be concerned about her well-being, but Will was. And I am."

"Bridget has nothing to do with this."

He smiled. "Let me ask you something again. Are you
really
willing to drag Will's name through the mud? An illegal wiretap, blackmail of a fellow supervisor, stealing
ninety thousand
dollars that weren't his?"

I stood. "I'm going to solve his murder."

"At any cost?"

"Absolutely, sir."

He shook his head. "What if he wouldn't have wanted you to?"

"I would anyway."

"Maybe you didn't learn as much from him as I thought you did. You're looking for blame in the wrong places. You're pissed off. I understand that. But be careful, Joe. Don't go making enemies out of your father's friends."

"A lot of people, sir, say they were his friend. But they never said that when he was alive."

"It's a system, Joe. It's a process. Preserve and utilize. Build and condemn. Tax and spend. Conservative and liberal. All parts of the same system. Think
forest
, Joe. Don't think trees. Millions of trees, but just one forest. And that's where all of us live."

L
ater that evening I walked into the house in the Tustin hills just had as I had a hundred thousand times, And I felt exactly what I'd felt every one of those hundred thousand times except maybe the first few hundred; safe and part of.

Not much had changed. Same worn Mexican paving tiles, same white walls in the entryway, same black wrought-iron table with a big cot blue vase for flowers, same mirror that threw your reflection back at as soon as you opened the door. I was eleven before I was tall enough see my whole face in that mirror, and I remember believing that when I was tall enough to see it, I'd be a man and not a boy. I also remember believing that by the time I was tall enough to see my whole face, I’d would have found some cure for it. Neither was true, but the belief was.

I hugged my mother, then followed her down the hallway, past the room on our left, then around the corner and into the big living room. Same good leather furniture, same smell of fresh-cut flowers and sautéed garlic and the faint, high-pitched scent of the ammonia that Mary Ann used to clean the windows every week.
Can't have a clear view through dirty glass, can you, Joe?
I used to help her with that chore, her on the inside and me outside, worrying away the streaks with our squeegees and newspaper. It was one job she didn't leave to the maid. Between us, we never left a streak.

"Sit, Joe. I'll make drinks."

"I'll help."

"Get a lemon, will you?"

I went out the slider to the backyard and picked a good lemon. The Tustin hills are lovely in the evening, with the light softening and the trees drooping in the heat and the precise lines and angles of the homes showing through the foliage. I wanted to be ten again, living there with Will and Mary Ann and Junior and Glenn.

Mom made lemonade and vodka, sliced two wheels off the lemon and floated them on top. We took the drinks back outside and sat by the pool. The pool furniture was new, bright blue canvas on white enamel frames. A big umbrella, tilted west. Made you feel like you were in a resort. I took off my hat and set it on the table, hung my coat over the back of the chair.

"What's wrong, Joe?"

I told her about Luria and Miguel, Ike Cao. I told her about Savannah and Alex. "Sometimes I wish I could just wash it all off."

"It doesn't help, working in the jail."

"No."

Mom cleared her throat, took a sip of her drink. "Have you ever thought about dropping that line of work? I know you wanted to be a deputy. I know Will pushed you into it, because that's how he started out. But really, you've got a four-year degree and a good head on your shoulders. You've got friends in the community, people who know you. You can choose something different if you want."

"I like it."

"But what about it do you like?"

It took me a minute. Answers are hard for someone brought up not to question. "The usefulness."

"Of being a cop?"

I nodded. I looked at the breezy glimmer of the pool and thought about a baptism I had in Los Angeles one hot May morning, a full-immersion one with a band playing Christian rock in the background. One of the best I ever had, even though I think Christian rock is bad for both God and rock and roll. I don't know why, but that baptism just seemed to wash everything away, and the feeling lasted a full week.

"Well, there's a million other ways to be useful, Joe. And they don’t leave your heart stained at the end of the day. Will got out just in time. Almost twenty years for him, with the sheriff's. When he got elected supervisor, it was like a new world for him."

"He planned it that way."

"Maybe you should have a plan, too."

"Carl Rupaski tried to get me over to the Transportation Authority, pay raise, different kind of work. He said I could go anywhere from there. It would be more of a white-collar kind of job. I think he changed his mind, though."

She was quiet for a while. "Rupaski's unprincipled."

"He put a homing device on Dad's car."

"Why?"

"He says he hoped Will would lead him to Savannah. But I think Rupaski was looking for something to shut Dad up. Something to use against him. Dad had proof of some pretty big money going from the Grove Action Committee to Rupaski to Millbrae. For Millbrae's vote on the road sale to the county. Will was using that proof to buy Millbrae's vote back to his side."

"Will was blackmailing them."

"Yes."

I told her about the tape I'd just listened to, and the notes Will had written. I even told her how the mini recorder got attached to Dana Millbrae's desk.

She sighed and set her drink down on the table. "Always collecting on the sly. Always finding things out without anyone knowing. It seen harmless enough when we were young, because Will was a cop working vice and that's what vice cops do. And he was always kind. So, I adjusted to it. But the older he got the more . . . surreptitious he became. I mean, a week before he died he spent three hundred dollars on some gadget you put on the phone, encrypts your voice or something.
He ...
he actually filmed us in the dining room once, without my knowing. I was furious when he showed it to me. He'd hidden the camera in a special briefcase with a hole for the lens. Another stupid toy he bought, I suppose. It disgusts me that he'd put you up to breaking the law, to advance his career.
Bugging a supervisor's office!
I'm getting furious at him again, Joe. I don't like it. But I can't help myself."

"I was always eager."

"Because he made you that way. And you know something, Joe? I
asked
him about that. I asked him if he was drawing you into all that night business, all his games. He said he wasn't. He said you were just driving and watching out for him. What an idiot I was. What a naive fool."

I was culpable, and I knew it. Over the years I could have told her any time what Will had asked me to do. The bug in the desk was only one of scores of furtive deeds I did for him. There was the summer job he got me with the County Risk Management Department so I could report which deputies and firemen were suspected of scamming the county with phony bad backs. I was eighteen, then. There was the famous defense lawyer's Cadillac I disabled late one night outside a yacht club in Newport Beach; the college professor accused of statutory rape that I roughed up in a university parking lot, my face hidden inside one of Mary Ann's cutoff panty hose. There was the house I'd burgled while Will was attending a fundraiser hosted by the owner of that house. I'd found what Will suspected was there—counterfeit stocks and bonds—and weeks later, they busted the guy. There were the envelopes I'd shuttled from various drops to various destinations. For that matter, there was the standard cheap briefcase that Will had purchased and given me to make "movie-friendly." I'd managed that with an X-acto knife, jigsaw, some padding, glue and black window screen. For that matter, just keeping my mouth shut about his affairs was furtive ten times over.

But I never told her. I didn't because I loved Will and I loved her and I loved doing what he needed me to do. Because I loved being useful.

A dog can keep a secret, but a man has to learn when he's doing more harm than good with it.