“Male. Thirty-five or so. Wearing a bulky red sweater and blue jeans. She says he looks like an Arab of some sort.” The cop looked around, saw the faces of confusion on Warren, Corso and Andriatta. “We got a teller on the other end of the line. She was in the break room when it started. She’s peeping out through the door.”
They were crowded together in the front window of the El Torito Grille, diagonally across Dayton Way from the Wilshire Boulevard branch of the U.S. Bank. According to the officers on the scene, the suspect had been inside for nearly eleven minutes, nearly all of which had been chronicled by a teller, whose call to 911 had been transferred to the scene by LAPD Emergency Services.
El Torito’s crew of chefs and waiters had been rounded up and banished to the bar. Morales was seated at a table in the rear corner of the dining room working his cell phone like a telemarketer. Warren and Corso had shouldered their way up to the window. Warren had shoved the café curtains aside and now had his nose pressed to the glass like a waif at a bakery window. Chris Andriatta was standing on a chair looking out over their heads.
The restaurant was two blocks east of Rodeo Drive. No more than five minutes from the scene at Fifth and Figueroa. On one side of the bank, Louis Vuitton offered a colorful line of upscale luggage and women’s accessories; on the other side, Barneys of New York sought to set the style, then a Burberry and a café and Saks Fifth Avenue and a bistro and Niketown. You name it and it was here at the very epicenter of West Coast retail grazing. You had some money burning a hole in your pocket, this was just the neighborhood to help you put out the fire.
The streets teemed with tricked-out shoppers, the beautiful people seeing and being seen, focused inward, oblivious to the drama unfolding inside the bank, as the ripples of well-heeled humanity flowed this way and that, eddying here and there to gaze at the wares in the windows before moving on to deeper water, to one of those little salons and boutiques dotting the streets at regular intervals, places that played odd electronic music, places with trendy French names like Mal Maison, where a haircut or a sweatshirt would likely cost you five hundred bucks. Probably the last place in this part of the country where any politically savvy cop wanted a bomb going off.
“He’s on his way out,” the officer announced.
Morales left the table and hustled up to the front of the room just in time to see the victim shrug himself into the red backpack, negotiate the two steps down to sidewalk level, turn right and melt into the unsuspecting crowd on the sidewalk. Morales whispered into the phone.
“Moving west on Wilshire.”
Soon as he was out of sight, Morales hurried over to the front door and let himself out. As he jogged across the street, Corso looked over at Warren, who shrugged. “The protocol is that the Bureau takes the lead.” He looked away in embarrassment. “LAPD provides backup as necessary.”
“What do you guys do?” Corso asked.
Warren ran a hand through his hair. “We wait.”
Andriatta climbed down from the chair. She hooked a thumb at the bar. “I’m going to see if I can’t rustle up something to eat,” she said.
Corso grinned and shook his head. She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “Sheeesh…it’s a restaurant, isn’t it?” She peeled off from the crowd at the window and picked her way through the closely arranged tables toward the buzz of conversation coming from the lounge area.
“Any idea what’s going on in Malibu?” Corso asked as they stared out into the street. “It’s over,” Warren said. “Vic was an older guy named Louis Erbach. Lives in the Colony. They took him out of his home about two hours before the robbery. Wired him up and sent him on his way. He walked out of the bank with $450,000…give or take.” He paused to swallow. “A guy named Prichert, calls himself a professional astrologer, found Erbach lying in the middle of a dirt road way up in Topanga State Park. The techs think he had a heart attack. Took him back to Santa Monica to the hospital. Bureau’s got a team on hand, in case he wakes up.”
They stood and watched the passing parade in silence. A sign reading CLOSED appeared in the bank window. A swirling breeze rippled the café umbrellas along the sidewalk.
“Much as I hate to belabor the obvious…” Corso started, “…whoever’s doing this…there’s sure as hell more than one of them.”
“That’s a whole new paradigm.”
“Hey,” a voice called. Corso and Warren turned toward the sound. Andriatta was holding something on rye in both hands. She tilted her head toward the doorway behind her. “I think you boys better come in here,” she said.
They slalomed their way through the tables over to where she stood. She held up the sandwich. “Want a bite?” she asked Corso. “Pastrami and provolone.”
Corso smiled and shook his head.
“The newshounds are on it,” she said. Again she motioned with her head. She led them into the cool darkness of the bar. Half a dozen waiters and half as many cooks lounged around the bar area. Above the bar a new flat-screen plasma TV was tuned to the news. Aerial shot. No narration at the moment, only the whop, whop, whop of the chopper’s rotor blades slapping the dirty air just above the rooftops.
The center of the screen was filled with a white Toyota Tundra. Over in the right lane, driving like an old lady. As the camera zoomed out to a wide-angle shot of downtown Beverly Hills, the truck put on its blinker and turned right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, heading west toward the San Diego Freeway and the ocean.
“This is Barry Logan in the Action News chopper high above an unfolding bank robbery in Beverly Hills.”
“It was inevitable,” Warren said.
“…the same type of robbery we’ve reported for the past three days. The victim enters the bank…”
Two blocks down Santa Monica, a nondescript van pulled into the line of traffic behind the Toyota. Warren pointed. “The Bureau,” he said.
“They don’t get rid of that news jockey, the guy in the Toyota’s gonna be in a world of hurt,” Corso said.
As if on cue, another helicopter swooped into the picture. “Whoa, baby…” the newsman said. “Looks like we’ve attracted some official attention.” The passenger in the second copter could clearly be seen motioning for the news chopper to leave the area…to go down. The bright yellow FBI letters were visible on the sleeve of his dark blue jacket.
The newshound, however, was having none of it. “This is unrestricted airspace,” he shouted above the slap of the rotors. “We’ve got every bit as much right to be here as you do,” he shouted, as if the cops in the other chopper could somehow hear him. The station’s logo flashed on the screen. “This is Barry Logan, Action News Four. Once again safeguarding the public’s right to know.”
The news copter peeled off to the west, moving lower and slower, hovering just to the rear of the fleeing pickup truck. The camera jiggled slightly as it refocused on the white Toyota, which had stopped at a traffic light at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Manning Avenue. The Toyota was in the center lane, third in line behind a flatbed truck carrying lumber and a bright blue PT Cruiser.
“I don’t believe this,” Warren said.
And then it happened. A bright yellow flash and, in an instant, the busy intersection disappeared. The News Four helicopter shook so violently it seemed about to join the pile of smoking rubble on the ground. By the time the camera was repositioned and steady, most of the torrent of flaming metal and broken glass had found its way back to earth; the smoke had cleared, leaving the carnage on the street visible to the camera’s unblinking eye. Both the cab and the bed of the Toyota pickup had been vaporized. Nothing but a twisted frame and four blown-out tires remained. From the sky, the remains looked more like the unearthed skeleton of some ancient beast than anything vaguely mechanical. The adjacent vehicles and their occupants had been left in various stages of destruction. Those nearest the victim’s vehicle, even from a distance, revealed little hope of survival. Those farther removed from ground zero were without windows and pocked by falling debris but seemed otherwise intact. As the camera rolled, the bleeding and the uninjured poured out of their cars and trucks and SUVs, stepping around and over twisted, smoking chunks of debris as they made their way forward, hoping to help those less fortunate than themselves. “See dat?” Somebody asked from the back of the bar. “Look at dem people comin’ out to help. We got spirit here, man.” A couple of other somebodies agreed.
“What we have just witnessed…” Barry Logan panted. “What we have…” And then he did the smart thing. He shut up and let the picture tell the story.
Took Chris Andriatta three tries to swallow a mouthful of sandwich.
“Oh my God,” she said.