“They have a Dave Smith?”
“I sure wouldn’t know. Look, I’ll make a call and find out, if that’d help.”
“I’d appreciate it. So would Smith, if he’s got seven hundred grand coming his way. Know of anyone around here who might take the number from your statements, figure out a verified name, use that card for himself?”
Braga considered. “We’ve got a couple dozen on crews. Some are good men, been with us a while. Some are kind of edgy. You take what you can get at that level. We had a breakin a couple of months back. Some junkie could have lifted the number, if he was smart enough.”
“Would you mind passing along a name, if someone comes to mind?”
“Sure. Sure will.”
“I’d like a list of your employees, too.”
Braga shook his head. “I won’t do that. I don’t give that kind of thing away. Court order comes along, I’ll be happy to. You gotta understand, Weir, I hired most of these guys. They’re my men.”.
The more Jim talked to Lou Braga, the more he liked him. And the more he believed that Braga was caught between a rock and a hard place. The hard place was Dave Smith. It was time to turn things up a notch. “You know my mother?”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“You have a friend in common — Dale Blodgett.”
Braga just nodded.
“When you can’t make the patrol runs with Dale at night — like the night you blew Duty Free’s gasket — she goes with him instead. A few times, Ann went with him, too.”
Braga looked at Jim with a mystified expression. “Every time you ask me about something, you end up knowing more about it than I do. In fact, we’ve been talking here for twenty minutes and I don’t think I’ve told you one thing you didn’t already know. I got work to do, so if you’re just fucking with me, I think I’ll get back to it.”
Jim rose and followed Braga back into the oil-covered lot.
“I need Dave Smith,” said Weir. “Bad.”
“I can’t help you,” said Braga.
Jim gave him Becky’s card, with his number written across the back. “Just in case.”
Braga nodded, then joined the big blond at the engine. Weir stood and watched a moment as both men ignored him. A few feet away from him were the life preservers, toolboxes, tarps, engine cover, and bait tank from Duty Free, all cleaned and ready to go back aboard, all arranged neatly on a new canvas tarp. The fighting chairs, removed from the deck, leaned against an old truck parked in the shade. The vigilante patrol boat, he thought. The fishing boat that catches no fish, carries a bait tank that holds no bait. Why bother putting it aboard unless they’re fishing? Jim wondered. Why bother with the fighting chairs?
“Hey Weir! Beat it now. I said I’d do what I can for you.”
Jim waved at Lou Braga, and started off toward the gate. He was sure of two things as he climbed into his truck: that Marge was watching him from the side window of her office, and, more importantly, that Lou Braga would be talking to Dave Smith as soon as Weir got his truck out of eyeshot.
Halfway down the peninsula, two Newport Beach units pulled him over. Weir sat tight. Two officers came to his truck. One loitered behind it as the other came to Jim’s window. Weir read his nameplate — Lansing — Blodgett’s buddy, drinking coffee during the hour in question. He asked for Weir’s license, clipped it to his citation board, and went back to the car for the check. It took twenty minutes. When it was done, Lansing wrote him up for a broken taillight.
“Have a nice day,” he said with a smile, flicking the defendant’s copy of the ticket into the cab of the truck. “Been feelin’ scratchy down there, treasure boy?”
Chapter 23
Raymond hustled up the sidewalk from his house, still dressed in his funeral suit. He was carrying a paper shopping bag. He had it pinched between his thumb and first finger, holding it slightly out to his side, as if it contained something foul or dangerous. Whatever it was, Jim could see that it was light: A gust of breeze swayed the bag out toward the odorous water and Raymond’s arm extended, giving it play.
Ray’s face looked exhausted, but his eyes were sharp and clear. “He wrote me. At first, I thought it was a joke. It’s not.”
Jim could see the agitation on Raymond’s face, the need for movement, release. Raymond smiled and shook the bag as if it was a reward long overdue. “It came with the afternoon mail.”
Becky stepped forward and held out her hands to receive the bag, but Raymond shook his head and didn’t offer it. “No,” he said. “I don’t want it contaminated any more than it already is. Robbins is waiting for it.”
Becky asked what it said.
But Ray was too energized to answer directly. His eyes betrayed an almost-religious excitement, and the sack shook in his hand as if there was something live inside it. “It’s the real thing. I could feel it as soon as I read the first words. He’s close. I can smell him, man, smell his fuckin’ breath.”
Becky caught Ray by the arms and kissed him. “Good luck, boys. I don’t think my presence would be appreciated in Ken Robbins’s kingdom. Call me, please.”
Brian Dennison and Mike Paris were already with Robbins in his office, locked in a murmuring discussion that ended quickly when they walked in.
“Beautiful work,” said Paris.
“Getting your mail out isn’t too tough,” said Ray.
The Crime Lab was empty this late in the evening. The hallways echoed with their footsteps and the overhead lights seemed hungry for bodies to shine on. Robbins took them into Hair and Fiber Analysis, put on a pair of latex gloves, and turned on the light of his examination table. The surface was glass, with a clean sheet of butcher paper taped over it. The fluorescent tubes threw a bright clean light up around the corners of the paper. Using a pair of kitchen tongs, Robbins lifted the envelope up and held it steady against an overhead wire. He clipped it on with a red plastic clothespin — the same kind of clip, Jim noted — that Horton Goins used in his makeshift darkroom. Weir looked at Dennison and Raymond, but neither seemed to catch it. Dumb coincidence, he thought; put it out of your mind. Then Robbins clipped up the letter, one page at a time, three sheets.
He spoke from behind his magnifier, his breath making little condensation clouds on the bottom of the lens. “Printer paper, eight and a half by eleven, continuous feed, blank letter edge. Common as dirt. Twenty-four pin dot matrix printer, ten-point courier font, set to low speed for high resolution. Not fancy stuff, just the basics. Now.”
He pulled a standard stainless-steel table knife with a nonserrated edge from an alcohol jar like Weir’s doctor used for thermometers, wiping it on a cotton cloth. Robbins’s forehead glistened with sweat. “Don’t get your hopes up — paper doesn’t hold much. Tell me again where you touched it and when.”
Working from the top down, he tapped the knife against the envelope. Weir stared at the crisp fluorescent light for falling debris, but saw nothing. Robbins’s lined tan face stayed eye level with the pages, following the descending pattern of the knife. He finished the last page, then started in again, this time working the backs. “Squat,” he said. “Inside the envelope might be bonus time — things collect.”
Using the tongs again, Robbins reversed the envelope and clipped it upside down. With the gloved tip of his index finger, he lifted out the flap, then slid the knife blade inside and held the pouch apart. He tapped the outside with his finger, across the bottom, the middle, the top. “Zip,” he said. “Don’t worry. There’s the adhesive to check, and under the stamp.”
Next, Robbins photographed the pages, swinging the big camera into place like a dentist positioning the X-ray machine. He took a second set of photos with magnification, shooting each page four times. When he was finished, he went back over each sheet with his glass. “ ‘A heavy heart,’ ” he mumbled. “ ‘My own shock and fear of self... I am a brave man... helpless against me...’ ” Robbins looked at each of them in turn. “These guys are always so florid.”