Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot Part 5

"I wish I knew a makeup person I trusted to keep your secret," Tess said, speculative dissatisfaction in her voice. "A pro, with professional-grade stage makeup, could give you a bruise that would fool an ER doctor."

"Don't run down your own work," I said. "This is pretty good."

Tess was in her bedroom, and I was in the attached master bath, where we'd done the work. The chemical-perfume scent of the dye still hung in the air, rising in part from several stained hand towels and the disposable latex gloves Tess had used, now lying in the sink.

While I'd been sitting on the bathroom vanity with my wet, dye-soaked hair covered in a plastic bag, Tess had called two friends in San Francisco, politely fishing for news and gossip about the Eastman murder, but without luck. Neither woman had known Eastman personally, nor had either of them heard anything that hadn't already been reported on the news.

"You know," she said now from the other room, "I have Joe Laska's phone number. He took over several of my father's businesses up there."

I came to stand in the doorway, leaning against the frame. "Meaning he filled the vacuum in the organized-crime scene, too," I said. "Bringing heroin and undoc.u.mented Eastern European immigrant labor into California."

"Somebody was going to," Tess said. "I seem to remember you giving me a little lecture on the importance of it not being me."

I lifted a shoulder in a half-embarra.s.sed shrug. "I was still in pain from my finger. It made me a drag to be around," I said.

"You weren't."

"Well, it doesn't really matter. I could call Laska, but if he knows which of his merry men sold my ID, do you really think he's going to tell me?"

"Actually," Tess said, pausing in the midst of smoothing the covers of the bed she was making, "I'm hoping he'll tell me."

"Wait," I said quickly. "I'm not sure you want to reopen an acquaintance with this guy. I've seen Joe Laska with his mask off. It's not pretty."

"So have I. I was in that projection booth, too, and I saw what he did to you," she said. "Then I successfully negotiated your way out of it, remember?"

I did remember, and I had to admit this situation was long-distance, and thus safer. "Just be careful what you say," I told her. "He's virtually the only person who knows that you and I know each other. You'd be best off leading him to believe that we didn't stay in touch. I wouldn't put it past him to drop a dime, if he suspects you're helping me."

"I'll be discreet," she said. "You can even listen in. There's an extension on the little table at the end of the hall."

I walked out into the hall, saw the table, and picked up the phone. "Ready."

I heard her pick up her receiver and dial. Three rings sounded, and then a male voice answered. "h.e.l.lo?"

It was Laska, no question. I hadn't expected to be certain, to remember so clearly his voice from the defunct adult theater, the tunnel in Mexico, even the hotel in El Paso where he'd first spoken to me. Such a calm, reasonable voice.

"Joseph," Tess said. "This is Teresa D'Agostino."

"Ms. Skouras?" he said. "It's been a while." Then, "Is there something I can help you with?"

"This isn't really a business call," she said. "I just ... I've been very busy and have only now caught up with the news from up north. Those two murders, isn't that the most extraordinary thing? I'm not mistaken-it is the same Hailey Cain, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is," Laska said. "I saw her DMV photo in the Chronicle. It's the same girl."

"What do you make of it?"

There was a short pause. "People will do anything for money, I guess," he said. "She was pretty resourceful, so it doesn't surprise me that she was capable of something like this. How she was wired up psychologically, I never really got a good read on that. I never understood what made her do the things she did last year, with Mr. Skouras's grandson."

"Mmm," Tess said noncommittally. "I just thought there seemed to be such ill will between her and you and your men, that when I read the news, I did wonder-you guys didn't have a hand in this, did you?"

"Why would we help her kill an old lady and a cop?"

"Not help her," Tess said. "Frame her. Last year it struck me that she was rather obsessed with honor and doing the right thing. So it occurred to me that if she didn't do this, then someone else did and planned for her to take the fall. And no offense, but I thought of you and your colleagues. You people do have your vendettas."

Laska chuckled, unoffended. "I'm Greek. We don't have vendettas." He paused. "I'm telling you, she's been off my radar since last winter. I'm a businessman. I do what has to be done; I don't waste energy chasing my ego needs around. Quentin Corelli, he was a little more personally bothered by her, but I see him all the time, and he hasn't mentioned her at all."

"Interesting," Tess said.

"Can I ask why you're asking about this?"

"My own ego needs, perhaps," Tess said. "I rather liked that girl. I hate to think my judgment of her character was so far off. Listen, I'll give you my number. If you hear anything interesting that's not being reported on the news, can you give me a call? Likewise, if you're ever in need of some information in my sphere of things, down here in L.A., maybe I could help you out."

Hearing that, I winced.

"That's nice of you, Ms. Skouras. You never can tell when it'll be useful to have the acquaintance of someone in the know."

They exchanged final pleasantries, with Tess giving him her phone number before hanging up.

Walking back into her bedroom, I said, "You didn't have to give him your phone number. If he doesn't know anything now, he probably won't down the line."

"It never hurts to ask."

"It does if you're agreeing to trade favors with a guy like Babyface."

"I've swum with sharks before," she said.

I leaned against her dresser, studied her, and said, "You suggested to him that this was a deliberate frame-up. You and I didn't discuss that possibility last night."

Tess tilted her head slightly. "You think it's too great a logical leap? If this were only about your ident.i.ty papers, I'd say maybe it was just a crime of convenience. The use of your gun, the failure to pick up the casing at the scene ... It was simply logical to me that there was an aspect of this that was about you personally. Don't you think?"

I shrugged. "Seemed egotistical to a.s.sume that."

"But maybe it's not. Laska did say that one of his guys was 'personally bothered' by you."

"Quentin Corelli. He was one of the other two guys in the projection booth." I played with a strand of newly brown hair, thinking. "He was making it kind of personal. We had a little history, from up in Gualala, where I took Nidia away from him."

"So that's not anything new, that this guy didn't like you."

"No," I said. "He has a grudge, and he was in the tunnel in Mexico, which would have allowed him to steal my ident.i.ty papers." I lifted a shoulder. "I have to start somewhere. I might as well make that my working theory, that he's the one who sold my papers and gun to some female con artist. If he isn't, maybe he'll know who is."

"You can't go to San Francisco alone and brace one of Joe Laska's men. You don't even know where he is."

"Laska said that he saw Quentin regularly," I pointed out. "And Laska took over your father's businesses. It sounds like he doesn't just see Quentin, he also signs his paychecks."

Tess's face had darkened. She stood up. "This is insanity. The last time you opposed these men, you nearly got killed. If it weren't for me, you'd be dead now."

"I know," I agreed. "Have I said thanks recently? Thanks."

"Don't be flippant. You know what I'm saying."

"Actually, I don't," I said. "You just helped me change my appearance. You knew I wasn't going to the police and that I was planning to go back out in the world and straighten this out. Where'd you get off that train?"

Tess looked away, out the window. She said, "I knew you were going to do something typically risky, but I didn't think you were planning something suicidal."

"Nothing's planned just yet," I said. "I'm still thinking through my options." I moved closer, put a hand on her shoulder. "If I go get my gym bag and walk out your front door, are you going to call the police? Tell them what I look like now, that I'm traveling on foot in the vicinity of Westwood?"

Tess shook her head silently.

"Then I hate to be a pest," I said, "but can you give me a lift?"

9.

A half hour later, I was safely on the other side of the locked door of my Crenshaw place. Tess and I had carefully cruised past the building and then around the back, scoping up and down the street for anything that looked like police activity. Nothing had struck me as suspicious.

Just before getting out of the little Crossfire, I'd leaned back in the open door and said, "I already owed you before this, Tess, and now I'm in twice as deep." I'd looked away, into the sun, and then back down at her. "I pay my debts. I'll pay this one, too."

I'd expected her to say something characteristically generous, like, Just come back alive, but she'd a.s.sessed me with serious gray eyes and simply nodded.

Tess hadn't been fooled by my little "Nothing's planned just yet" speech. I was going to San Francisco, because there were two people up there I needed to see, for vastly different reasons. One was Quentin Corelli, who had tortured me for Laska last year and would have been happy to kill me. The other was Jack Foreman, an a.s.sociated Press reporter, who had liked me and, I hoped, still believed in me.

The sky was clearing fast, and I shaded my eyes against the sun as I waited at the edge of the parking lot for a family returning from church to cross to their first-floor apartment. They were in the kind of Easter finery you didn't see much anymore, not in California: Mom in a wide-brimmed hat, father and son in clean-lined summer-weight suits, the little girl in a blue lace dress with a skirt splayed wide by an under-layer of tulle.

When they'd pa.s.sed without seeing me, I climbed the stairs to my second-floor place, unlocked the door, and went inside.

My apartment always greeted me with the sort of spare quietness you felt when you'd been away for weeks. I wasn't there enough to make the kind of welcoming, personal messes that reminded you of what you'd been doing before you went out, nor had I put any effort into making the place look like it was mine. Here it was now, an unloved and unlovely place, with worn-out lime green carpeting, a heavyset Zenith TV, my few books on cheap secondhand shelves.

In the bedroom I threw my gym bag on the bed, unzipped it, and took out the things I wouldn't need: my fight clothes and mouth guard. Then I packed. I pried up the carpeting at the corner of the living room and retrieved my emergency fund, five hundred-dollar bills, to add to the six hundred I'd carried away from the fights. Then a change of clothes, the baby Glock and ankle holster, soap and toothbrush and toothpaste in a Ziploc bag, as well as the makeup Tess had given me to re-create the fake bruise at will. A mini-flashlight and a little digital camera: I wasn't entirely sure I'd need those, but I was going to be doing some surveillance on Quentin, and they might come in handy.

My cell phone, lying on the center of the bed, buzzed, and I reached over and picked it up. I'd had this phone only since January, after losing the last one in my confrontation with Skouras's guys. I'd given the number to almost no one, which explained why I hadn't already been flooded with calls from people saying, Hailey, have you seen the news, what the h.e.l.l? I expected that this was Serena, wanting to know where I was and what was going on.

Then I saw the number on the screen, and my heart stopped.

CJ was calling me.

Immediately, before he could speak, I said, "CJ, I didn't do what they're saying. I don't know what's going on any more than you do. Please believe me."

The voice that answered was male, and it was slow and calm and unhurried, like my cousin's. But it was clearly older, with a rasp at the edges. "Miss Cain," it said, "I'm sorry, I'm not your cousin Cletus. Please don't hang up. You're talking to one of probably two cops in America who don't think you killed those people up in San Francisco."

"Who is this?"

"My name is Magnus Ford."

The hair p.r.i.c.kled on my arms and the back of my neck.

He cleared his throat. "This must be confusing. The call registered as from your cousin's phone because we got his account information from his cellular company and cloned a phone with his number."

"But how did you get my number?" I said. I had a cheap, pay-as-you-go phone and bought airtime cards at convenience stores. There shouldn't have been account information for him to access.

He said, "Before I answer that, Miss Cain, can I ask you one question? Are you missing a finger on your left hand?"

That was the last thing I'd been expecting him to ask, and that was how I knew the question was important.

"Yes," I said. "Can I ask you how-"

Then I stopped. I didn't like this. My phone might not have had an airtime plan with account information for Ford to access, but it did have a GPS system. As long as it was activated, Ford could track me.

"Miss Cain?"

I said, "Give me your phone number and I'll call you back."

10.

I'd left the Aprilia parked near the Slaughterhouse last night, thinking it too much a risk to be on the roads on something with a license number traceable to me. Now I wished I had it, as I slung my bag over my shoulder and locked my apartment behind me. The helmet would have been ideal to hide my features behind. Or I wished that I lived back east, where in early April the weather was probably still cold enough to justify hiding under a cap, behind a scarf. Instead I was in L.A., where the mercury was climbing steadily toward a hundred degrees at midday. I touched my fake bruise for rea.s.surance as I headed down the sidewalk, much as I used to touch my birthmark out of self-consciousness in my younger years.

A tall woman, addict-thin and with acne scars under her chestnut-colored skin, was doing some kind of personal business on the pay phone four blocks from my house, and she glared at me when I lingered too close, waiting for her to be finished. It was nearly fifteen minutes before she finally hung up and walked off without a backward glance at me.

The handset of the phone was warm and almost slippery where she'd been holding it. Ford answered on the first ring. Instead of h.e.l.lo, he said, "I'm not trying to track you, Hailey."

He was showing me he'd known that any unidentified pay-phone number was going to be me. All right, you're clever, we knew that, I thought. I also didn't believe him and knew I couldn't extend this conversation too long. Pay phones could be traced, too.

"Are you there?" he said.

"I'm here."

"I'm being up front with you, because I meant what I said about thinking you might be innocent. That doesn't mean I'm sure. It's a working hypothesis."

"How'd you come up with it?" I asked.

"You've been seen on several occasions in East Los Angeles, most recently the day after the Eastman and Stepakoff murders."

"By you?" I said. "Have we met and I don't know it?"

"No," Ford said. "This was an a.s.sociate of mine."

I am a G.o.dd.a.m.n idiot. "The blind guy in the park, Joe Keller," I said. "He's one of yours."

"Yes."