23
Polished brown granite sheathed the monolithic KPMG building on Bunker Hill. Jack stopped in front of the glass atrium that connected the two towers that comprised the Wells Fargo Center, sipping a Starbucks, watching the flow of well-dressed professionals enter and exit the downtown high-rise.
He knew that Raul Vargas was securely ensconced on the thirty-eighth floor because he had followed him from his father’s estate in Malibu, right into the lobby, and then watched as the elevator carried Raul all the way up to his father’s corporate offices.
“Hey, Bertolino.”
Jack turned as Tim Dykstra appeared behind him. Jack wasn’t surprised to be approached by the mayor’s head of security and main fixer. He hadn’t expected the hammer to drop so soon, though.
“Just the person I wanted to see,” Dykstra said, wearing a tight smile as he proffered a handshake. It was as hard as the man’s disposition and reminded Jack why he’d turned down the mayor’s job offer.
“The mayor didn’t come right out and say it, but I know he’d be pleased if you’d let up on Raul Vargas,” Dykstra said, running his hand through his gray, military-cut hair. His probing eyes were unblinking, as if he could control the outcome of this conversation with sheer willpower. “The kid paid his debt to society, and the mayor holds Philippe Vargas in high esteem.”
“So, tell me, Tim, what did Vargas have on the mayor that got him to intercede in the release of his son? A letter to the president, no less?”
“Don’t go there, Jack. You’re a political animal. Don’t be naïve.”
“And the cardinal? And two members of the city council? Did Phil butter all of their bread?”
“You made the right decision, Jack.”
“How’s that, Tim?” Jack held his gaze until the old warrior blinked.
“Not coming on board. You’re not a team player. You’ve got to go along to get along in this world, Jack.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Jack caught Cruz out of the corner of his eye exiting the parking structure in Jack’s BMW and driving up Grand Avenue, away from Jack and his unscheduled street meet. The kid had great instincts, Jack thought as he turned to walk away.
“You can take the wop out of the neighborhood—”
Jack spun on his heel. “What’d you say?”
“I vetted you, Jack. There were rumors circulating that you were dirty. A hired gun for the mob; I guess they were more than rumors. Another greaseball on the pad.”
Jack struck like a cobra. Grabbing Dykstra’s lapels, he muscled all two hundred pounds of the man off the pavement and slammed him up against a nine-foot steel sculpture that rang like a bell when his head whiplashed back.
“Call 911!” someone in the gathering crowd yelled. Jack knew this was the wrong time and place for an extended confrontation.
What he didn’t know was Peter Maniacci was standing in the crowd, all eyes and ears.
Jack let Dykstra’s feet touch the ground and stepped back, assuming the stance as two armed security guards exited the building and strode in their direction. Tim Dykstra, red-faced and apoplectic, straightened his shirt and wisely fought the urge to charge.
“Stay away from Raul Vargas. And uh, when you go down, Jack, I’m gonna be there to pound the first nail in your coffin.”
“Send my regards to the mayor,” Jack said through a relaxed grin. He casually sauntered away, blending with the flow of pedestrian traffic to meet Cruz at the Music Center, their fallback location.
Raul Vargas had worked himself into a manic froth by the time he slid behind his desk and drained the last of his coffee. Who the hell did Jack Bertolino think he was, asking questions about him on his own stomping grounds? Defaming his name. Bertolino had to go. First he’d try to enlist someone in Malic’s gang to do the dirty work, but if Raul had to take matters into his own hands, he would. Bertolino was tenacious, and if he continued to make waves, Raul ran the risk of losing his father’s support.
Somehow, Bertolino had connected him to the dead woman at the cove, and he had clearly tied him to the kidnapping of the Cardona girl. As he’d known for several weeks now, Angelica was a liability. As long as she was alive, on American soil, his freedom was in serious jeopardy.
Raul told himself to calm down. He was due in a meeting with the entire staff, and he had to appear cool and collected. He wasn’t well liked by the rest of the Vargas organization, which he could live with, until he had rebuilt his nest egg. But Malic was a different story. He had to be brought on board and dealt with in a calm, controlled manner, or the man could be his undoing.
All Malic had to do was send his sex video to the police, or to one of the local news hounds who were always snooping around, and Raul would be tied to the death of one woman he had raped and the disappearance of another. The evidence would be circumstantial on both fronts, but a jury would convict him out of pure malice. Everyone hated the rich kid. He would spend the rest of his days as some Rufus’s boy toy until there was nothing left of his ass, his dignity, or his life.
But come to think of it, he wouldn’t last a night in prison if Vincent Cardona heard that he had set up his only flesh and blood. With the Mafia’s connections in the federal prison system, Raul would be dead by first light.
He had to be smart. He couldn’t let that happen.
“Halle, could you be a sweetheart and bring me a cup of coffee?” Raul said into his phone. “And are we still meeting in the conference room?”
“The meeting started ten minutes ago. I thought you were already there.”
“Shit!” Raul said as he gathered himself, grabbed a file, and ran down the plush carpeted hallway.
Cruz was tapping out an inscrutable beat on the dashboard as Jack pulled to a stop at 201 North Figueroa. Mateo was just exiting the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, where he was doing research on the Vargas development project.
“You’re going to love this,” he said as he jammed Cruz forward and squeezed his six-foot-two frame into the tight backseat. “No worries, I’m fine,” he said, giving Cruz a hard time for not relinquishing the shotgun seat. “Straight ahead and make a right onto Second. I’ll tell you when to pull over.”
Mateo directed Jack to stop in front of the Regent Hotel. The fifteen-story building might have been tony in the twenties, but it looked tired now, and ready for the wrecking ball. The brick façade was stained almost black; the signage was missing the E in Hotel. Men and women who looked more transient than genteel walked through the pitted brass doors while small groups congregated on the sidewalk in front of the building, smoking, furtive eyes tracking for dealers, hoping to score. Jack knew the unmistakable look and body language.
“I thought you were staying at the Hyatt,” Jack tossed out dryly.
Cruz barked a laugh. Mateo batted the back of his car seat.
“It’s a revolving door,” he said, referring to the hotel. “They get busted for possession or public intoxication, spend a few dry nights on the county, and when they get out, they check back into the no-tell hotel, where it’s one-stop shopping for crack.”
“And we’re here why?” Jack asked, knowing there was more and wondering where he got his info.
“Well, the woman at the records counter got very chatty. Her name’s Cathy; I think she’s a lapsed Catholic.”
“If she wasn’t before she met you . . .”
“She was having unclean thoughts,” Mateo said in agreement.
“And her religion is germane to the discussion because . . . ?” Jack asked.
“The L.A. archdiocese owns this property. And it’s the cornerstone of Vargas’s new development project. It went from being a tax and insurance liability to being worth ten times its appraised value. Philippe Vargas made the cardinal a true believer and coerced the august man of the cloth to write a letter to the president extolling the virtues of his drug-dealing son.”
“A win-win,” Cruz chimed in.
“The mayor’s also a very happy camper. He can take credit for eradicating a blight on his new downtown, raising tax revenues, and cleaning up a drug-infested cesspool, which is a drain on local law enforcement.”
“And that’s why two members of the city council were also pulled into the letter-writing loop,” Jack said.
“That’s right, jefe. The Catholic Church is happy, Vargas gets what he wants, and the mayor and city council members get reelected for fulfilling campaign promises to rejuvenate their City of Angels.”
“And Raul Vargas is a free man,” Jack said tightly as he pulled away from the curb.
“Where to?” Mateo asked.
“I’m dropping you at the Hyatt. Cruz and I are going to track Raul. What time are you having dinner with ‘Chatty Cathy’?”
“I’m not going to dignify that question with a—”
“What time?”
“Six o’clock, straight up.”
The three men shared a laugh.
Raul looked ragged from the day at the office and had no idea that the BMW that shadowed him to his condo in Brentwood contained Jack Bertolino and Cruz. A BMW in Los Angeles was so common, it didn’t raise any alarm bells.
Cruz had his nose buried in his laptop, admiring his handiwork. The GPS system he had planted on Raul’s car was working like a charm.
Jack drove past the condo building as Raul pushed his electronic key out the window, swiped the pad, and drove down into the secure underground parking garage. Jack took note of the alleyways and surrounding buildings in case he had to do some up-close-and-personal surveillance.
Jack was double-parked on San Vicente while Cruz made a Starbucks coffee run when the laptop emitted a pinging sound, alerting Jack that his quarry was on the move again. He paged Cruz, who hustled out of the store with two iced coffees and a bagful of doughnuts.
Five minutes later, they were traveling south on the San Diego Freeway, wiping powdered sugar off their lips. Jack finally eyeballed Raul’s Mercedes traveling ahead of them. Jack corrected his speed to follow at a safe distance. Cruz shared a small fist pump before returning to the moving car icon on his computer.
Raul’s Mercedes would have looked out of place in the tired strip mall he pulled into in the city of Costa Mesa if not for the other incongruous cars that populated the lot. Over a million dollars’ worth of exotic cars. The sun was oblong and looked like a Dalí painting dripping below the horizon. The orange glow did little to dress up the string of faded yellow stucco retail shops that called the strip mall home. A hair salon, liquor store, video rental, and head shop completed the loop. It was a classic sixties spread, without any pretension of architectural detail.
Jack continued past the lot as Raul exited his vehicle. Jack executed a U-turn on Pomona Avenue before pulling to the curb a half a block down on Nineteenth with a clear view of the mall.
Raul had already disappeared inside one of the shops, and unless he was getting his hair permed at Raphael’s hair salon, he was probably headed to the very end of the L-shaped complex.
The red-lacquered door had no name over the entrance and no windows. With his cell phone Jack took a photo of an address painted over the door in black. It was a private club, bar, or restaurant of some kind. Jack wouldn’t know until he got a look inside. He snapped off a few quick shots of the nearby license plates and made a mental note to run them by Nick Aprea.
He ducked down in his seat as another car pulled into the lot and parked. Two men exited a silver Porsche 911. They checked out the neighborhood before walking the length of the concrete lot and disappearing behind the red door.
“Guy on the left was packing heat,” Jack said, “wearing a shoulder rig. You get a fix on their ethnicity?” he asked Cruz, who had mirrored Jack’s movements and was sitting low in the car’s leather seat.
“Middle Eastern.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
“But you think?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too. What the hell is Raul doing out here?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Cruz said knowingly.
“Too risky at this point. We sit and wait.”
“I’m starved.”
“You just ate three doughnuts.”
“Yeah, but that was an hour ago.”
Jack laughed and his own stomach growled loud enough to set Cruz to laughing. It got instantly quiet when a Lincoln Town Car pulled into the lot and an impeccably dressed, dark-haired man slid out of the backseat, walked directly up to the red door, and stepped inside without ever looking back.
“Hmmm,” Jack said. “El jefe has arrived.”
The odd grouping of hard, armed young men who were seated at multiple tables scattered around the room stood as Malic made his entrance. It looked like a meeting of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. Yet Raul remained seated, a slight not missed by the eighteen Iraqi gangsters. Malic ignored him and shook a few hands, clasped a few shoulders, and shared a few whispered comments with his men, who seemed lifted by his attention.
A fully stocked bar lined one end of the room, and Middle Eastern music played softly in the background. Raul finished his Grey Goose on the rocks and went to pour himself another while he waited for an audience with Malic. In the office they were business partners; in the Iraqi social club Malic was the man.
Raul stood at the bar and drank until he felt Malic’s presence next to him.
“I’ve got a problem,” Raul said as he locked eyes with Malic.
“Make it quick, I’ve got a pickup tonight,” Malic snapped.
Not the way Raul had played the conversation in his head. He took another sip of his vodka to save face but knew he wasn’t fooling anyone.
“Jack Bertolino,” Raul stated. “He’s asking a lot of questions. Too many questions. About the girl, about Paradise Cove, about me.”
“And this is my concern why?”
“Because if my problems bleed over to the Vargas Development Group, it will affect your bottom line. The deal is tenuous at best. Bad publicity will bury us. He needs to go.”
Malic seemed to give that some thought. Raul couldn’t read the man. His eyes were like black pits. Raul wanted to scream. If Malic hadn’t killed the girl at Paradise Cove, there wouldn’t have been a trail leading to his doorstep. If he hadn’t kidnapped the Cardona bitch, none of this would have been happening.
“It was on the news. A gangbanger tried to take Bertolino out. A drive-by on a cycle, for crissake. We could do it the same way, and they’d take the heat.”
Malic finally spoke. “It should all be handled by the end of next week,” he said, no inflection in his voice. “The girl will be out of the country and no longer our concern. If Bertolino remains an irritant, we’ll handle him then.”
The imposing man turned on his heel and walked away, leaving a red-faced Raul standing impotently at the bar. Also not missed by the young Iraqi gangsters.
Jack snapped a tight photo of Malic’s face as the red door swung open. He took another picture of Hassan, the red-bearded driver, who emerged from the limo and opened the rear door for his boss.
“Definitely Middle Eastern,” Jack said to Cruz. “Iran, Iraq. Some-damn-where in that part of the world. We’ll find out.”
“The guy with the red beard had crazy eyes.”
Jack nodded and photographed Raul, who stormed out of the club, jumped into his car, and did a tire-burning exit.
“Doesn’t look like our boy’s riding high,” he said as he threw the BMW into gear. When it became clear that Raul was driving toward Malibu, Jack peeled off 10 West and headed for home.