To Die in Beverly Hills (15 page)

"Drinks?"

"Keep going."

"Dinner?"

"You're on. What's the nickname?"

"Bones. A male white about forty years old. He has gray-streaked hair and may have a record for burglary."

"Do you know how many people have the nickname Bones?" she asked smugly.

Carr nodded. "I have a photo I can compare with the mug shots." He pulled the nude photograph of Bones from his shirt pocket and showed it to her.

Della Trane curled her lower lip as she examined the photograph. "I've seen better."

Carr returned the photograph to his pocket.

Della Trane's fingers tapped keys. The nickname appeared on the computer screen. In a moment, the following message flashed onto the screen:

407 records match criteria

She tapped the printout button and the teleprinter raced as it printed the names of arrestees nicknamed Bones. "What you see is what you get," she said, squirming to point her breasts. "I mean the printout of course." Della Trane laughed with cigarette smoke in her mouth.

Six hours later Charles Carr still sat at a long wooden table in the musty-smelling Records Bureau. Next to him was a wheeled cart full of manila arrest folders. Who would believe that there were literally
boxes
of
file packages on criminals nicknamed Bones?

He opened another manila folder, flipped pages until he found the mug shot envelope and opened it. Oddly, the prisoner, a man with greasy hair and beard, was smiling. Carr compared the mug shot to the photograph of the man in Sheboygan's bedroom. They weren't the same. He replaced the mug shot in the envelope and tossed the file back onto the cart. He stood up and stretched. His mind wandered back to the time he and Jack Kelly had sorted through hundreds of photos of red-haired men in order to identify a murderer. Was it three or four years ago?

Carr sat down and dug into another file. A mug shot, which was stapled to a booking form, was of a man with gray-streaked hair. He wore an open-collared shirt. Carr held the bedroom photograph up to the mug shot. It was the same man. Carr sorted through a stack of hand-printed arrest reports in the file. They showed that Robert Chagra aka Bones had been arrested nine times during the past twelve years. Six arrests were for conspiracy to commit burglary, three for illegal gambling (the arrests took place at private homes during the course of crap games). A note by one sheriff's detective in the file read as follows:

Forward copy of this arrest report to Organized Crime Intelligence Division: Chagra hangs with heavy hoods in Hollywood/Beverly Hills. He is a dice hustler, a mechanic. Games are usually set up by someone else. Conventioneers or other suckers are invited to a game usually at a private home. Chagra is brought in with loaded dice, suckers are allowed to win a little, then fleeced. He takes a piece of the action. When there is no game in town, he acts as a middleman between burglars and Beverly Hills types who want their homes burglarized to collect the insurance. For a fee, he gives back the swag after the burglary and the victim collects the insurance claim. Sometimes he just sets up burg's. He doesn't do them himself, but farms out the address and steers the stolen property to his own fencing channels. For a while, he worked as a chauffeur for movie actor Rex Piper, who reportedly bought lots of stolen jewelry from him.

Carr copied Chagra's address off the bottom of the form. On his way out, he stopped by Della's desk.

"Ready for some more files?"

Carr shook his head. He handed her the mug shot of Bobby Chagra. "This is our boy."

She looked at the photograph and handed it back.

"Thanks for all the help," he said, stuffing the photo in his pocket.

She turned back to the computer screen. Her fingers moved on the keys. "I'll be ready at eight. Do you remember how to get to my house?"

"Of course," he said.
Was
it Highland Park or South Pasadena?

"Be there or be square," Delia Trane said in a Mickey Mouse voice. Her lips made a kiss movement.

Carr stopped at a pay phone in the downstairs lobby. He dropped a dime and dialed.

"Judge Malcolm's courtroom," Sally Malone answered.

"Hi."

"It's Friday afternoon," she said. "You're going to tell me that something came up at work and we're not going to be able to go out tonight, right?"

"How did you know?"

"Because I've known you for nine years of Friday nights. I had reservations for us at a real nice place too. I may just go anyway."

"I'm sorry, Sal. I'll stop over tomorrow and we'll make some plans. Maybe we can drive up to Santa Barbara for the day. How does that sound?"

"Unless you call me tomorrow morning and tell me that you're on a stakeout somewhere and you can't get away. Does that sound familiar?"

"What can I say?" Carr said, humbly.

"You could say that you miss me."

"I miss you."

"Sometimes I hate you. I really mean that." She hung up.

Back at the Field Office, Carr searched a telephone directory for Della Trane's address. It wasn't listed. He flipped through his address book, though he knew it wasn't there. Having completed this ritual, he opened his wallet and pulled out a stack of business cards, matchbook covers and other scribbled-on miscellanea. On his second tour through the material (on the way he tossed out four or five cards with names and numbers written on them he couldn't match with faces) he found a Ling's bar matchbook cover with Della Trane's name and address written on the reverse. It was Highland Park and not Pasadena. He breathed a sigh of relief.

No Waves stepped quietly into the office. "Cleaning out your wallet on government time?" His hands fiddled nervously in his pockets.

Carr ignored him. He dropped the matchbook cover in his shirt pocket and stuffed the wallet full again.

"Yoo-hoo."

Carr looked up, expressionless.

"Have you come up with anything on the Tony Dio angle? I say he's still the best suspect. Hiring a hit man to kill a federal witness is right down his alley. I smell 12 Cosa Nostra in this thing from top to bottom. It reminds me of when I worked in the New York Field Office."

Carr nodded. He knew that Waeves had been in charge of the Treasury vehicle fleet in New York.

"I want you to check the airports and see what you can put together," Waeves said, using his best intimidation voice.

"The airport?"

"Dio probably flew his hit man in the day before," Waeves said. "That's the way it's done." His hands worked feverishly in his pockets. Change rattled loudly. "So I want you to check with the airlines and see if this fellow Sheboygan flew in from out of town. I have a hunch. And you'd better get together with ... uh ... what's his name?"

"Hartmann."

"Right. Hartmann. To cover our asses, so to speak, we probably should offer him-"

"I've already offered him witness protection," Carr interrupted. "He declined."

"Do we have that in writing?"

"Have what in writing?"

"We ought to have his refusal to accept protection in writing," Waeves said with his mouth formed into a sardonic smile. "This will be CYA for us if anything happens to him.
Cover your ass is
the name of the game in any case involving organized crime. Once when I was working in New York we had a case that-"

"No problem," Carr said.
You'll forget you asked in a day or two
. "Is there anything else?"

No Waves cleared his throat. He gave the change in his pockets a healthy jingle, then pulled a pipe out of his shirt pocket. He shoved it in the side of his mouth. "Be sure and use an OC suffix."

Carr furrowed his brow.

"On your report number," Waeves said. "Add the letters OC to the end. OC stands for 'organized crime'. This came out in the revised Manual of Operations." Waeves rattled change with both hands. Pipe jutting, he sauntered back down the hallway.

****

EIGHT

THE RUSH-HOUR traffic had just ended. Charles Carr steered through the Mulholland Pass past signs for a high-priced hilltop condominium development constructed on what he knew was the site of an abandoned public dump. There was a warm breeze; Mojave Desert air wafting, at its own speed, across L.A.'s landscape of ranch-style homes, fast-food stands, parking lots and gas stations on its way to the ocean.

Delia Trane sat beside him. She wore a low-cut black dress with an open back that revealed a deep and even tan. Her perfume mingled with the summer air rushing in the wind-wings, as did the smell of alcohol on her breath. Earlier, when he picked her up at her tiny two-bedroom place in Highland Park, he could tell immediately that she'd been drinking.

So far, the conversation had been small talk about police acquaintances: rumors of promotion and demotion.

"No more shoptalk," she said finally.

"That's a deal."

"Do you remember the first time you met me?"

"Sure."

"I doubt that. But I remember. It was in Chinatown. I was with a group of friends. We'd just come from a retirement party and we were gassed. We needed another drink like we needed a hole in the head. You were sitting at the bar with your partner. You know why I liked you? Because you could carry on a decent conversation and you weren't crazy. Most of the men I meet are crazy. I mean that. Either married and on the make or just plain crazy. It seems like the men I meet are either one-night-stand artists, or I end up sitting there all night trying to make conversation while they stare at my tits. I mean how would you like it if I sat here staring at your crotch?" She leaned over and mocked a groin stare.

Carr laughed. "I see what you mean."

"I didn't really think you'd call me. Men always take numbers and never call. Isn't that right?"

Carr shrugged.

"I've been married four times," Della Trane said,"...all policemen. One is a captain now, one is a sergeant, one was killed in a shoot-out and one retired on a disability. He was a beeroholic. Not an
alcoholic;
a
beeroholic.
He used to drink a six-pack of those large cans of beer on his way home from the station house. For him it was just a warm-up. He gained lots of weight and finally took the cure, but by then things were finished between the two of us." She stared out the window for a moment. "Where are you taking me? I hope it's not straight back to your apartment. When I go out with a cop, nothing surprises me."

"Trust me," Carr said jovially. He swung the sedan onto a transition road that led to the Santa Monica Freeway.

A few minutes later Carr turned off the freeway at Pacific Coast Highway and wound along some narrow streets to the strand. Having parked in a lot near the decrepit Santa Monica Pier, he helped Della Trane out of the car. She held his hand tightly as they wandered toward a small building. Over the bay window facing the ocean hung a sign that read Prince Nikola of Serbia-Yugoslav Food.

Carr opened the front door and they stepped into a restaurant that consisted of ten or so tables with checkered tablecloths and a tiny wine bar. On the walls were black-and-white framed photographs of a shaved-head, muscle-bound wrestler in aggressive poses. In the photos, his midsection was adorned with a metal-studded championship belt. The only hair above his chest was bushy Slavic eyebrows.

The crowd in the place was a potpourri of Muscle Beach types, young people who looked like college students and a few red-cheeked Yugoslavs that looked enough like Prince Nikola of Serbia to be relatives.