Del Rio shook his hand. “Rick Del Rio. This is Emilio Cruz. My sidekick.”
Cruz said, “Yeah, I kick him in the side from time to time. Nice to meet you, Scotty.”
“Thanks. You too. Is this the place?” he asked, looking out at the Red Cat warehouse.
“We’ve been told it is.”
“Have you checked it out?”
“Nah, we’re just watching the paint fall off. They should be closing up in about a half hour.”
“Okay with you if I do a little reconnaissance now?”
“No problem,” said Del Rio.
Scotty got out of the car. There was a little spring in his step as he crossed the wide street, went over to the loading dock on Artemus, and shouted something up to the forklift driver.
The driver pointed to a door up a flight of metal stairs and Scotty waved at him, took out his phone, sprinted up the steps, and pulled the door open.
“I don’t know if he’s gay,” said Del Rio. “A little bouncy on his feet, maybe.”
“Bet you a hundred this Scotty was a cop.”
“How do you figure?”
“I know eleven hundred cops. He feels like one of them.”
“Then I’ll keep my money. And I’ll ask him,” Del Rio said.
Another fifteen minutes had passed-Del Rio feeling uneasy that the guy had been in there for so long, wondering what Jack knew about him and how Scotty was supposed to fit into the team-when Scotty came around the corner, a piece of paper rolled up in his hand.
He looked both ways as he negotiated the street traffic, then he got back into the car.
“I inquired about a job,” he said, grinning. “This is my application form. I got a little tour of the place.”
Del Rio was laughing inside, but he didn’t show it. The kid was smart.
“What did you see?”
“Very decent security,” he said. “Got cameras over the doors, wires in the windows. The van, gotta be the one we want. It’s white, scraped all to hell on one side. Parked in the back northeast corner. I didn’t want to be too obvious, but I walked by it.”
“Jesus,” said Cruz. “You do a lot with fifteen minutes, dude.”
“Let’s get this fifty-thousand-dollar ride off this block,” Scotty said. “I got pictures.” He showed his phone. “Maybe we can work up some ideas.”
CHAPTER 31
I drove the Lamborghini into my short stub of a driveway and swiped the key fob across the pad. The iron gates rolled open, and I saw a notice taped to my front door. I wasn’t close enough to read it, but I knew what it said.
“Do Not Enter by Order of the LAPD.”
I turned off my engine and sat for a couple of minutes, trying to imagine my brother walking Colleen up to the door at gunpoint. I saw him jabbing a gun into her back, going into the house with her. And then I couldn’t see any more.
Was Tommy so sick, so morally corrupt, he could actually kill Colleen? Honest to God, I didn’t know.
I got out of my car and walked down the narrow side yard, along the fence and out to the beach. The sun was still bright at five p.m. Yesterday at about this time, someone had been readying Colleen for her last mile.
I headed south, parallel to the shoreline, passing two enormous houses and one small one that had resisted the real estate brokers and the bulldozers. The fourth house had a hybrid Victorian-contemporary design with a high profile and a wide deck.
It was where Bobbie Newton lived.
Bobbie was a gossip columnist, the queen of prime-time celebrity news, and the ex-wife of some Wall Streeter back east. She was sitting out on her deck, tall drink in her hand, feet up on the railing. She wore an open shirt over her hot-pink bikini, a white visor in her blond curls, dark glasses, and a Bluetooth cuddling her left ear.
She was talking and watching the waves.
I called to her and she took down her feet, sat upright.
“Bobbie-can I come up? I need to speak to you.”
“I’ll come down,” she said. “Call ya later,” she told whoever she was talking to. “I gotta go.”
She set her drink on the deck and came down the short flight of wooden steps, holding on tight to the handrail.
I thought about my history with Bobbie. It had happened after my first breakup with Justine, way before Colleen. I thought it had ended okay-no-fault incompatibility. But when I found the envelope at my back door without a note, my key inside, it was a crystal-clear “Screw you.”
Bobbie was combustible, and I didn’t like that about her. I’m sure there were a few things she didn’t like about me. But we’d been neighborly since our split.
Now, as she crossed the beach and came toward me, seabirds flew up from the sand. And I saw from her expression that we weren’t friends.
She put her hands on her hips and said, “If you want to know if I told the police I saw you last night, the answer is yeah, Jack, I damn well did.”
CHAPTER 32
“I wasn’t on the beach last night,” I told Bobbie Newton. She had taken off her glasses, and I was looking into her little bloodshot eyes. She drank early and often. Another thing I hadn’t liked about Bobbie.
“I wasn’t hallucinating,” she said. “You were on your phone. I heard it ring. I ran by and called out to you, ‘Hey, Jack.’ You pointed to your phone, like, ‘I’m talking.’ And then you waved. That signature wave of yours.”
“What? You’re saying I have some kind of…wave?”
“Like this.”
She lifted her right arm, cocked her hand back, fingers spread like she was holding a football.
I used to play college ball. Tommy didn’t.
“Nobody ever told me I have a unique wave.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling you. I’ve seen you wave, what? A hundred thousand times?”
“It was past six o’clock, Bobbie. That’s what you told the police.”
“So?”
“The sun was going down. Maybe you thought it was me because you expected to see me. It wasn’t me, Bobbie.”
“Tell it to the judge,” she said.
Bobbie raised her hand above her head, cocked it in a football hold, and trotted up the beach.
I stared after her. What the hell was she talking about?
I hadn’t been on the beach the night I found Colleen’s body in my bed. But Bobbie was unshakable. And as a gossip reporter, she was well-connected. She had to be the one who’d set the Internet wildfire naming me as the number one suspect in Colleen’s murder.
I hiked back up the beach, twenty yards behind Bobbie, wondering if she’d actually seen Tommy, thinking he was me. Or had she seen no one?
Had she made this story up to show me payback is a bitch?
I walked from the beach to my driveway and got into my car. I took off, south on PCH toward Santa Monica. I wanted to see Colleen’s closest friend. Through her, he’d become a friend of mine. I had to be with someone who knew her, felt what I felt, who would understand my grief.
My mind churned, and the next time I checked, I was on the 10 going east, not knowing if I was driving the Lambo or it was driving me.
But I knew exactly where to find Mike Donahue. I pictured him as I had last seen him, standing behind the bar.
CHAPTER 33
Mike Donahue’s tavern was an Irish pub with a restaurant that could have been transported from Galway or Cork and simply planted in Los Feliz.
When Colleen first came to Los Angeles, she was determined to get her citizenship. In the hours between quitting time at Private and going home to study, she stopped at Donahue’s. It was where everyone knew your name, and nearly everyone in front of the bar and behind it had relatives in Ireland.
Mike Donahue came from a town only a few country miles from where Colleen grew up. He had gone to school with Colleen’s father, and when they met, Donahue became an uncle to her in the City of Angels.
I was outside Donahue’s Tavern, the red-painted, gold-lettered sign hanging above the doorway, patrons spilling out to the curb.