“Damn.” I suddenly felt like a fool. “Tarkauskas saw me coming.”
“Yep. But don’t worry. I put Zavala on his tail. Something’ll turn up.”
Jessica Zavala’s one of our ops. She’s a heart-faced knockdown-gorgeous Latina, and nobody’s fool. If anybody could finesse a smartass bigoted gangster, it was her.
“You knew something like this was going to happen.” I tried to keep any hint of admiration out of my voice. Sometimes I think Malone has the second sight.
“Bound to. He’s a player.” He tapped a file on the desk marked “Darryl Tarkauskas” in a Sharpie scrawl. “Son of a gun sure makes for an interesting read.”
Tarkauskas came to the attention of our company, California Operatives, Inc. (more colloquially, “Cal Ops”), when a chubby twenty-four-year-old computer geek was missed by his mother.
His dad, Barry Pincus, was a fifty-two-year-old attorney who specialized in family law. “Family law” sounds very wholesome, but believe me, it isn’t. It’s like being a divorce lawyer, only your clients are more vicious and less civilized. We had done a few background checks and some other routine investigative work for Pincus, and when his son Buddy hadn’t been heard from in over a week, Barry’s wife Helene called Cus Malone, mainly I guess because he was the only private detective she’d ever heard of. Barry wasn’t too thrilled that she called us in, but he knew better than to cross Helene.
Malone and I decided to send Stanley Stowicz, one of our more experienced ops, to interview Helene Pincus, because he has a very reassuring way about him and always manages to have a good rapport with nice middle-aged Jewish ladies. This time, it was a mistake. She sent him packing. By the time Stowicz got back to Cal Ops, he was fuming.
“She called me a clerk,” he said. “Twenty-six years a private detective, never a complaint, and you know before I came here, I worked for Continental, and Pinkerton also? — and yet she has the chutzpah to call me a clerk. Me! Says she’ll only deal with the boss.”
“Guess she wants the best,” said Malone drily, quickly adding: “I’m kidding, Stowicz.” He pulled out his PDA, checked it, and frowned. “I’m booked solid the rest of the afternoon — appearance downtown. How about it, Red? Feel like visiting the old yenta?”
“I’ll go,” I said. “Don’t take it personally, Stan. We all know what an asset to the firm you are.”
“You’re welcome to it,” he replied. “Yenta is right. Give me somebody polite, instead, like a hopped-up biker on crank, maybe.”
But Mrs. Pincus didn’t want to meet me at her Fairfax District condo. When I called, she asked me to meet her in the Palisades at her son’s home. A lot of the streets in Pacific Palisades are as tangled as a can of bait as they switch back on themselves up the hills north of the Pacific Coast Highway. It took me longer than I expected to find the house. It was one of those flat-roofed modern things painted a startling white with glass bricks and steel rails everywhere.
There was a spectacular two-story ocean view from the living room. A loft bigger than my entire apartment overlooked the room itself. In spite of its size, the house had the appearance of a bachelor’s place, like a set from a James Bond movie — all steel, chrome, and glass. Spare and clean.
Helene Pincus was an expensively dressed woman in her forties, her hard blue eyes unsoftened by liberally applied makeup. She had probably been extremely handsome in her twenties.
Her first words to me were, “You look like a Vegas lounge singer. Where’s the cowboy?”
“Mr. Malone had to be in court and couldn’t make it. I’m Carmine Ferrari. Stan said you wanted the boss, and Mr. Malone and I are partners.”
“What’s your background?”
“Six years as Cus Malone’s partner here in L.A., eight years with the NYPD before that. Bachelor’s and master’s from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.”
She nodded curtly. “Come upstairs. I want to show you something.”
I followed her up a series of carpeted steel slats coming out of the wall to the loft. She led me into what was obviously the master bedroom suite. It was very nice, with a 42-inch LCD HDTV mounted on the wall, a domed skylight big enough for Mount Palomar, and sliding doors leading to a teak deck. The king-size bed was made up. The walk-in closet contained jeans, black dickies, aloha and hip polo shirts, one cheap blue Men’s Wearhouse suit, and an assortment of expensive sneakers and Doc Martens. From the clothes, I judged Buddy to be about five eight, weighing somewhere around two hundred and twenty pounds. There were framed science-fiction-film 1-sheets and colorful travel posters of the Grand Canyon on the walls. The whole setup was fussily neat.
“I hate this room,” she said, crossing her arms. “It has all the charm of an operating theater. So, Mr. Ferrari, you’re a detective. What do you make of it?”
“He likes Star Trek.”
“Buddy is twenty-four. His idea of a nutritious meal is a pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of light beer.”
“You’re saying that it’s too clean.”
She nodded. “He was nineteen when he graduated from Stanford, summa cum laude. After he was accepted to do his master’s at Caltech, he moved back in with us, before he dropped out and got this place. Don’t think I’m just being a Jewish mother when I say he’s a genius. Brilliant, math whiz, and all that, but a pig, much as it pains me to admit it. He wouldn’t pick his briefs up off the floor where he dropped them unless he ran out of underwear.”
“He probably has a cleaning lady.”
She frowned. “As I said, he’s twenty-four — a young twenty-four. When he was a teenager, he was the kind of kid who put a ‘Keep Out’ sign on his door. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, at least not that I know about. Somebody cleaned up here, all right, but I don’t think it was any cleaning lady.”
“Then who?”
She turned on her heel and I followed her back out to the loft. She sat down in a Danish leather-and-chrome settee in front of a glass coffee table and I sat opposite her. She pulled out a case from her purse, deftly removed a cigarette, and lit up.
“He’s been gone over a week,” she said, sucking on her cigarette. “The message on his business phone says he’s away on business.” She gave a sharp little bark of a laugh, totally without mirth. “What Buddy knows about business would fit in a thimble. When he says he’s taking a business trip, it usually means he’s schlepping to Las Vegas or Hawaii with one of his friends to get away from it all. But he’s never been gone this long before. Not a whole week.”
She took another drag and looked around, noticing there wasn’t an ashtray.
“Tell me about Buddy’s business,” I said.
She shook her head, dumped her ash on the glass of the table, and looked directly in my eyes. “What do I know from computers? When Buddy decided to set up the business, he asked Barry for a good entertainment lawyer. Barry suggested this Armenian, Haig Yarjanian. I don’t like him. Too Hollywood. You should start with him.”
“Entertainment lawyer — whatever for?”
She shrugged and smashed her cigarette butt out on the surface of the table. “Like I should know?”
Los Angeles has one of the most diverse ethnic populations of any city on earth, and you can take it from me, because I’m from New York. L.A. has the third-largest global concentration of Jews, and the largest populations of Koreans and Iranians in the world outside their countries of origin. The immense size of the black and Latino communities is well known. Little Tokyo downtown and the Sawtelle neighborhood on the Westside have been Japanese for almost a century. East Hollywood and Glendale are Armenian enclaves. And then there are the Chinese, Vietnamese, Russians, Ethiopians, Indians — you name it.