Silent Joe (9 page)

Alex Jackson Blazak

Weapons Rare and Collectible War Memorabilia

Appointment Only (949) 555-2993

On the other side was an address, written in a woman's elegant longhand.

"Alex might have held her there. It's kind of a secret, because, well . . . Alex isn't a licensed dealer. Maybe something there can lead you to her. Jack doesn't know this place, neither do the police. I tried to get in but it was locked."

For the second time that morning, she had astounded me. "Why you protecting him?"

"Because if you find him first, he's got a chance, and so does my daughter."

"I'll arrest him."

"I hope so. Jack is so absolutely furious. I'm afraid for everyone."

"Anything else I should know, Mrs. Blazak?"

"I love my children. Go."

I thanked her and she shut the huge door behind me.

Driving out of the hills I thought this was a beautiful place. Tan hills and blue water and mansions.

I wondered why Savannah Blazak hadn't made it home. I wondered if Alex had caught up with her before she could get to the cops, or to some responsible adult. I wondered why Lorna was protecting someone who had threatened to send her daughter's head home in a freezer-pack.

And I wondered for the hundredth time how Will had found Savannah. How did he know where to look? Why had he kept me out of it?

Savannah gets kidnapped on Monday morning. Her parents tell no one but their spiritual advisor and his security man.

By Wednesday morning Will Trona has solved the mystery, found girl, arranged to get her back home safely. That night, ten minutes after he tries to claim her, he's dead.

When I went through the marble archway there was a video crew shooting some footage, maybe something about Miguel Domingo, the sixteen year-old Guatemalan with the machete. But like Jaime Medina, I doubted if the media would pay that much attention to the story. The camera crew was probably just a promotional segment for Pelican Point development, where one million dollars gets you nothing. The guard was vibing them as hard as he could, but they were on a public street.

I
walked up the stairs to the FBI Orange County Investigative Resident

Agency. The public entrance door was heavily fortified with bulletproof glass and mesh and a video camera was trained on the entryway. In the lobby I walked past the Wall of Martyrs—photo-plaques of FBI personnel who'd lost their lives in the line of duty.

Steve Marchant led me into the FBI War Room, set up for Savannah. Impressive: ten agents, six computers, a phone bank with recording and listening equipment, a big radio console. There was a handwritten timeline on a twenty-foot sheet of butcher paper tacked to the wall, so you could see at a glance what had happened. Pictures of Savannah and Alex Blazak hung above it.

Some of the agents turned and looked at me, others stayed at their tasks.

"I wanted to give you a look at this before we talked," said Marchant. "Joe, we've got up to two hundred agents ready to roll when this thing breaks. We hate kidnappings, and we use every resource we've got to make them go our way."

He took me to a small conference room. There were a tape recorder and a video camera set up and ready to go.

"Make yourself comfortable, Joe. We're going to go through Wednesday night in detail. Coffee?"

"No thank you."

"How's your memory?"

"Very good."

Marchant sat down across from me and tested the tape recorder, said the case number, date and time, my name, and asked me if I ^ here of my own free will, volunteering information. I said I was, and Mirandized me anyway.

"Let's get started. Okay, Joe, tell me about Wednesday night."

Two hours and two tapes later I'd gone through a lot of what I remember Marchant was particularly interested in Will's conversations in the Will's relationship with Savannah, and my talk with Jack Blazak earlier the morning. He made notes on a computer-generated sheet that may have been a phone company readout, or may not have been. He played his information very close to the chest—I learned nothing I didn't know already; The Feds are famous for being closed and tight when they want to.

For my part, I said nothing about Lorna Blazak's card, and Alex’s "business" address. And nothing about Will's words to Jennifer Avila, or the money he'd passed to her, or about Mary Ann being blue that night. I'd been entrusted with those things and I didn't feel right about offering them to a man I barely knew.

After Marchant turned off the tape and video recorders, he sat back looked at me. "What do you think of the father, Jack?"

"Intense. Distraught."

He nodded. "And Lorna?"

"Dazed."

"Yeah. If they contact you again, I want to know, immediately."

I agreed.

"At the tennis courts, when you dropped off the ransom cash—did get a look at the players?"

"Doubles on one court—an older foursome. The other court were two teenagers, male, pretty good players, hitting hard."

"Those young men pay any attention to you?"

"None that I noticed."

"Joe—your mother and father have a good relationship?"

"I think it was strong. They loved each other and faced things together."

"You have any reason to think Will was sexually involved with Savannah?"

"None. He loved women, sir, not girls."

He made a note, then closed his book. "Joe, we'll be using sheriff's department personnel on this. Local PD's too, if we need them. I want you to know we're here to help, not to take the glory."

"I understand."

"But I'm going to get that girl back safely. Nothing is going to keep me from doing that. I'll do what it takes."

"It sounds like you're warning me, but I'm not sure what about."

Marchant stood and smiled. He's a tall man, but he stoops a little, like he's trying to hide it. "What I'm saying is, I appreciate your help. I'm on your side. All two hundred of us are on your side. Birch wants to run the homicide. That's fine by us. He's a little . . . protective sometimes. But I want you to know we'll help you out any way we can."

Half an hour later I was telling Rick Birch everything I'd told Marchant. But nothing more. Nothing about my mother, Will's lover, his anxious mood. Maybe I was trying to salvage some scrap of his privacy. Maybe I was trying to honor our pact of doing night business together, even though Will had flagrantly left me out of the darkest night business of his life.

By the time he finished asking me questions, I felt like I'd told my story to every person in Orange County law enforcement.

"Alex Blazak?" said Sammy Nguyen with an innocent look. "Why would I know Alex Blazak?" "You're both in the gun business."

"I'm out of that now. But my business was legitimate. He'd sell machine guns to little kids if he could make money. He's got a sword that Hitler gave to Goering, first belonged to Napoleon, worth about a million three."

"How well do you know him?"

He eyed me, slipping on his glasses. "Joe, what are you doing here?’’ You're off work for a while. Bereavement, deputy-involved shooting, that."

"Tell me about Alex."

"Nice hat, Joe. Hides part of your face."

"Come on, Sammy. Help out."

It was early afternoon and Mod J was going through its daily drowsy time. About an hour after lunch the inmates run out of venom and energy, and they'll shut up for a while, take naps, maybe read. By three o'clock they'll be stirring again.

Sammy was lying on his cot, staring up at his picture of Bernadette.

"They call him Crazy Alex because he's crazy. Crazy people annoy me, Joe. Bad for business."

"If you wanted to find him, where would you look?"

He looked over at me, as if the idea interested him.

"I saw the news last night. His sister gets kidnapped, and you can’t find
him?”

"Correct."

"Then maybe he kidnapped her."

Some of the inmates put things together quickly. Takes one to know one.

"I doubt it. He skipped on a deal." I thought I could draw him out talk of his competition.

"Who's the buyer?"

"None of your business."

"Probably some rich man who lives by the beach. Wants pink
nunchuks
to tickle his boyfriend. That's the kind of business Crazy Alex does best.”

"It was small-caliber handguns, brand-new, numbers etched off."

Sammy considered this. Maybe he was in on something like it himself. Maybe he'd like to get in on this one.

"How can I find him, Sammy?"

"You ask me for information about a former business associate and I still don't have a rat trap."

"Try this."

I pulled a rat trap out of my coat pocket and held it out to Sammy through the bars. It was the kind that uses an adhesive to trap the animal, which then dies because it can't move. I got it from the supply desk, one of just a handful we've managed to keep on hand. He hopped off the cot and came over.

"This isn't the kind I need. I need the old-fashioned kind that breaks their necks."

"You didn't specify. These are the only kind allowed in a cell."

He cast his dark eyes on me. Measuring. Figuring.

"I talked to some people, you know, on the phone, but I couldn't find out anything about that girl. You probably got what you needed from that press conference yesterday."

"I need to find her."

"I can't do that, from in here."

"I just wasted a good rat trap."

"I don't do things like that, Joe. When I say I'm going to produce, I produce. You know, within my capabilities. The girl got kidnapped, the FBI can't find her, and I'm supposed to? No. Not from in here. Now, her brother, maybe. Maybe I can do that. I know people who know Alex."

"I'd appreciate your help."

Sammy sat down with the trap, looked at me with pronounced sympathy.

"It's bad when a father dies. Mine was murdered in San Jose when I was eleven—did you know that?"

"Yes."

"They shot him while he locked up his nightclub."

"Robbery."

"They took the night's cash off him—eight hundred dollars, forty-eight cents. The forty-eight cents made me angry."

I'd read his sheet, and the report by a county psychologist, who included Sammy's account of his father's death.

Sammy's version of what happened after the murder interested me. I learned some of it by sneaking into the plumbing tunnel in Mod F of the old Men's Central and squatting behind the cell belonging to one of Sammy’s lieutenants. You can hear through the vents. We deputies are encouraged to gather intel however we can, and lingering in the plumbing tunnel is one way. Another way is to use a mechanics' sled to roll quietly down guard walk that separates the tanks in the older part of the jail. The walls of the guard walk are concrete up to waist height, then they're Plexiglas. If you stroll down the walkway, the inmate in the first cell yells out " walking!" and all the other inmates stop doing whatever they're doing, if you slide along quietly on the mechanics' sled they can't see you, you can stop and peek over the concrete and spy. We call it "sleighriding.”

The rest of what I learned was put together by the court-ordered psychiatrist who had read letters that Sammy had written to a then-thirteen-year old girl named Bernadette Lee, and never mailed.

According to Sammy, by fourteen he was immersed in the Asian underworld, which is pretty much where he'd spent his whole life. He eventually learned who killed his father, and was actually brushing shoulders them by the time he was sixteen. They were traveling home-invaders, which was a good criminal living in the early Vietnamese refugee years, because the refugees didn't trust American banks. Thus, riches under beds, in safes,
etc.

Anyway, Sammy got himself included in a job with these guys, did it well, and was invited along for another. Maybe they thought it was funny, using the son of a guy they'd killed. Maybe they were trying to help him----Sammy didn't know and obviously didn't ask. The next piece of work well. Working off a tip, Sammy and his bosses had almost $65,000 in cash and jewelry and one terrified family duct-taped and gagged in the garage; But just as they were ready to get out, young Sammy used his sawed-off twelve-gauge to force one of his bosses to tie and gag the other and sit him down with the family. Then Sammy tied up the other. He cut the one's throat, made the other watch him bleed out, then cut the second one's. He used a Boker ceramic carried in a calf scabbard. He didn't harm the family, but he made sure they saw everything he did. And he told to tell everybody they knew except cops that Sammy Nguyen was a good guy but if you crossed him, he'd damage you. In a compromised version of chivalry, he left the family about ten grand's worth of stuff—mostly jewelry.