Leo Sealy was watching the Spengler-Nash building through the rearview mirror of the parked white Toyota he’d rented when his phone buzzed. He wasn’t expecting a text message, so he looked at it, guessing it would be a wrong number. The screen said it was from a woman named Tania Marsh, and all it said was “Same place, now.”
The only person who had this number was Mr. Conger, so Sealy didn’t bother to think about it much, just started the engine, took a last look in the mirrors to be sure it was safe, and drove. Sealy had to expect this kind of thing. Clients were all reluctant to speak to him on any electronic device, so certain things had to be said in person. He would have ignored most of them, but Mr. Conger wasn’t somebody he could ignore. Sealy headed for the Griffith Park golf course.
When he arrived at the parking lot, he saw Mr. Conger walking toward him from the direction of the eighteenth green pulling a two-wheel cart with a bag of clubs. Sealy easily recognized the three men following him pulling golf bags on carts. Mick Noore was a very tall Black man, Vaughn Pineda had tattoo-sleeved arms and a shaved head, and Ducky Sanders had an unusually muscular torso and arms he’d built lifting weights in prison, but noticeably short legs. It didn’t seem possible to Sealy that any of these men played golf.
They were all crew bosses with ties to Mr. Conger, whose operations included fencing stolen jewelry and other items. The golf bags were the perfect carrying place for a long gun, and the thought gave Sealy a tight feeling in his chest for a few seconds. He had hidden rifles that way himself. He gained control of the feeling by reminding himself he was in Mr. Conger’s good graces. The three men couldn’t be there to harm Sealy. They were just the rest of a foursome.
The other men went to three different cars and busied themselves folding carts, putting bags in their trunks, and changing their shoes. Mr. Conger walked to his own car, opened the door, and sat on the seat to remove his spikes. Sealy approached and Conger looked up and smiled. “Hello, Leo. Thanks for coming.”
“Happy to.” Sealy tried to make it sound true.
“Well, unless you got her today and hid the body, I’d say you’re stuck.”
Leo Sealy shrugged. “It’s taking a little longer than I wanted. I almost caught up with her this morning at a hotel near the airport, but by the time I made the rounds of the parking lot she was gone. I was pretty sure she was just trying to make it look like she was flying somewhere, because I figured she’d want to stay in LA until the police gave her the okay to leave. I saw her getting into a cab at the airport and followed her, but ended up losing her in the Valley. I was about to check for other leads when I got your message.”
“If you’d gotten her at the airport, you would never have made it to the freeway anyway. You don’t see many cops there, but they see you. You’re always on a bunch of cameras.”
“Probably, but I was hoping to follow her to a safe place to do it. What can I say? I lost the cab, and so far, I haven’t found her again.”
“I figured it was worse than that. You were a genius to get that close in two days. Don’t be embarrassed. You bought us both time by getting Benjamin Spengler right away. All of the amateurs will be thinking it’s over. Want to know why I texted you to meet?”
Sealy said, “You’ve got me curious.”
“Well,” Mr. Conger said, “the parents of the two guys she shot have been complaining to me. These two were regular employees with balls and loyalty who had brought me money over time, not just part of a pickup team for one night.”
Sealy said, “I don’t know what I can do except get her for them.”
“No, this isn’t about doing anything for them,” Mr. Conger said. “The bitching about it was starting to annoy me, but then it gave me a brilliant idea. A beautiful, elegant idea.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It’s not like there was any doubt about what happened. They got into a gun fight with somebody who was better at it. There isn’t going to be a lawyer saying they were miles away at the time of the robbery. They were found with guns that they had fired at her. Both mothers are heartbroken. Both of them have told me that part of the hurt is who killed them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This was a girl, outnumbered and defending an elderly couple. It’s humiliating. Their young sons are being made to look like punks. The least they wanted for their sons was to be remembered as serious badass men who were shot down in an ambush. I want that too, for my own reasons.”
Leo Sealy wasn’t sure why Mr. Conger thought he could change what had already happened and been reported, but he knew it was always best to wait and listen while Mr. Conger talked.
“It occurred to me,” Mr. Conger said, “that I could build the shooting into something better. I could get these two families to demand to know why Justine Poole hasn’t been arrested and brought in. She’d been lying in wait and shot two boys who didn’t actually get far enough to commit a crime. If the roles had been reversed, they’d certainly both have been locked up that night. That much is true.”
“Reversed? You mean if she and the Pinskys had tried to rob them?”
“No. If they’d been the ones who had seen her first and won the shootout. Why isn’t she being interrogated and investigated by the police?”
Leo Sealy widened his eyes and said, “It’s genius. If they can get under the police department’s skin, the cops might make her stay in one place.”
“Not the cops. The DA is the one I want to get to. He’s a politician, so he’ll do anything to help himself win his next election. If you know she’s coming, you can be waiting near police headquarters. Bang, it’s over. But you don’t even have to get her right away.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Right. If the cops bring her in, some assistant DA will be there to tell her not to leave town. They might make her turn over her passport and call in every day. If not, they can get a judge to order it.”
Leo Sealy felt uncomfortable. He had been in her condominium and could have searched for her passport but hadn’t because he’d been trying to kill her quickly and hadn’t expected her to live long enough to leave the country. He said, “If she has to stay around and be available to the cops, it might give me good chances to trace her to where she’s staying.”
Mr. Conger smiled. “I think we can keep her available to be dragged in and questioned again and again. The families can prolong this stuff for months, or for as long as it takes.”
“The one thing I wonder about, though—isn’t it dangerous for you to deal with the parents directly?”
“I won’t,” Mr. Conger said. “I’ve already retained a couple of my favorite lawyers to represent these two families. They’ve been paid cash in advance, but they’re going to say they’re doing this pro bono, so there won’t be any money to trace.”
Leo Sealy said, “I don’t want to be presumptuous, but if you’ve already protected your reputation by getting Spengler, why do this?”
Mr. Conger looked down and shook his head, then brought his head up and stared at him, the pupils of his eyes like pinpricks in the afternoon sun. “Don’t think of reputation like popularity. It’s more like the opposite. What I want is that when somebody hears my name, they start to feel a little shaky and sick to their stomach. So far, you’ve brought a boost to my name, and that’s better than money. But what kind of fool ever gets half of what’s on the table and then says, ‘That’s enough. I’ll leave the rest in case somebody else needs it’? I can see the way to have more, another boost to my name, and killing her is it. Over the next day or two, watch a lot of local news on television.”