“All right, Henry. This is what I can do. If you tell me what happened up there with the buffalo, I’ll go to bat for you. I can’t promise you a deal that keeps you out of jail, but I will protect you here. Tomorrow morning when the DA is here for court, we’ll sit with her and she’ll evaluate what you have and make a deal or not. You understand how that will work?”
“That’s bullshit. I need something solid. I need you to get me off the island and to someplace safe. My wife too.”
Stilwell shook his head.
“It doesn’t work that way. I can put you in a cell here overnight. Monika Juarez, the deputy DA who handles court here, will be coming in tonight for court tomorrow. I’ll meet with her either tonight or first thing in the morning and we’ll try to work something out. But before we get to that, you need to tell me what you can give her to make a deal.”
“Fuck me.”
“Yeah, that’s about right. But you need to choose which way you want to go. Should I leave you here to think about it? I can bring in a phone if you want to call your wife to talk it over.”
“No, man, I talked to her. She’s scared to death they’ll go after her to get to me.”
“That seems unlikely. We’re talking about a dead buffalo.”
“No, man, I know more. I heard things. This is big, man. This is the Big Wheel. Him and the mayor had their meetings out at the barn, and I was there.”
“The mayor? What are you talking about? What meetings?”
“I’m not saying till I have a deal.”
“Henry, we’re talking in circles here. There is no deal; we’re not even going to talk about a deal until you tell me what you can provide. It’s called a proffer. I take it to the DA and then she makes the call on what she’s willing to do. Understand?”
“Fuck me.”
“Yeah, you said that. Now you have to decide if you want my help or not.”
Gaston raised his hands and wearily rubbed his face. He was all over the place but Stilwell was intrigued about what he was hinting at — the things he had overheard, his mention of the mayor. And then the tip Stilwell had received from Lionel McKey about the Big Wheel project. Stilwell felt as though he was fishing in dark water and something down there was nibbling at the bait. He could feel it. He had to be patient and wait to set the hook.
“I’ll let you think on it for a while,” Stilwell said. “Just knock on the door if—”
“No, man, I don’t need to think anymore,” Gaston said. “Let’s do this. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“You sure, now?”
“I’m sure.”
30
Stilwell had his head down, eyes on the text he was writing to Tash, when Monika Juarez approached him in the small lobby of the Zane Grey.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.
He looked up. He had been sitting here waiting for her, knowing her weekly routine of coming out to the island the night before court.
“Monika, hey, did you check in?” he asked.
“About to,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you about a case. A deal, actually. Why don’t you check in and I’ll finish this. Get into your room and come down when you’re ready.”
“You sure? We can do it now.”
“It might take a while to walk you through everything. Go ahead, check in, and I’ll be down here.”
“All right, give me twenty minutes.”
“Perfect.”
She went to the front desk and Stilwell went back to his phone. He sent the text to Tash telling her he would probably be working later than usual. A few moments later he got a return from her.
So who is she?
She did this often, a humorous way to hide her insecurity about their relationship. He played along.
A tough-as-nails prosecutor named Monika.
In response to this he received a green-faced emoji symbolizing jealousy, and then:
Invite her to dinner?
At least once a month they invited Juarez out to dinner. She was one of the first people they had revealed their relationship to.
I’ll ask.
He put the phone away and opened his laptop, which he had brought with him in case the wait for Juarez went long. He connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, went to the California Secretary of State website, and searched for Wheelmen LLC, the company mentioned in the Catalina Call story on the proposal to build the giant Ferris wheel on the Avalon harbor.
A listing of incorporation documents filed on behalf of the company appeared on-screen. He opened Wheelmen’s application to incorporate, filed on February 7 of that year. This showed that the company had initially formed as a Delaware corporation two months earlier and then applied to California. The corporate address listed was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, with a registered corporate agent named Ellen Sparks. Stilwell opened a Word document and typed in both pieces of information. The application listed the company as a public-entertainment enterprise.
Stilwell started going through the other documents on the state site, identifying the company officers. He typed these into the Word document as well.
President and CEO: Marcus Rifkin
Vice president: Stanley Banks
Secretary: Nathan Cabot
Chief operating officer: Susan St. Jacques
The attorney who filed the documents was named Bryson Long. Stilwell recognized none of the names except Marcus Rifkin, who had been mentioned in the Call story. It was Rifkin who had submitted, with Mayor Allen’s endorsement, the design and other documents pertaining to the Big Wheel project to the Avalon planning board for initial review.
After closing out of the California Secretary of State site, Stilwell started googling the names one by one to see if anything else came up. Several references to Rifkin appeared, most concerning other cities where his company had proposed building either giant Ferris wheels or zip line systems. Some had been turned down, but most were still in play or had been initially approved and were in the designing stages. As far as Stilwell could tell, none had become operational yet. These projects were in towns in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana that depended heavily on tourism.
He plugged the Wheelmen corporate address in Los Angeles into the search engine and soon was looking at a photo of an office building in Koreatown.
“What’s that?”
Stilwell looked up from the screen to see Juarez, who had changed out of her DA clothes into blue jeans and a white blouse.
“What I want to talk to you about,” he answered. “You okay to talk here? Or we could go to the sub, if that’s better.”
Juarez glanced around. There was no one else in the small lobby, and the clerk who had checked her in had left the desk.
“We can talk here,” she said. “What’s up?”
“What’s up is that I have a guy in my jail who admits he cut up the buffalo on the preserve a couple weeks ago,” Stilwell said. “He wants to make a deal where he skates on the buffalo but gives us the man who put him up to it, and for good measure, he’ll throw in what he knows about the mayor being a silent partner with that same guy in a multimillion-dollar project that he’s pushing through the public-approval process.”
Juarez nodded eagerly, as any prosecutor with a public-corruption case dropped in her lap would do.
“Well, tell me more,” she said.
“You want to start with the buffalo or the city project?” Stilwell asked.
“Let’s go with the buffalo.”
“Okay, I know this made news on the mainland and you might have seen it, but two weeks ago somebody killed one of the buffaloes up on the conservancy preserve. He decapitated it and took the head. They’re protected animals, and that makes it a felony. The guy in jail is named Henry Gaston. I’m holding him there in protective custody because I’ve got nowhere else to put him. He’s a mechanic who takes care of the carts used by Island Mystery Tours, which got a franchise license from the town about five years ago. I wasn’t out here then but I’m told it was controversial.”