After a flatbed from the police garage arrived to impound the van, Ballard and Perez each took two of the women in their cars to the shelter in North Hollywood.
Ballard did not get back to the station until five a.m. She wrote up the arrest report on the driver of the van, using the name Juan Doe because he still refused to identify himself. That was okay with Ballard. She knew his fingerprint would provide his ID if he had had any previous engagement with U.S. law enforcement. She thought the chances of that were good.
The department had a human trafficking task force operating out of the PAB. Ballard put together a package on the case and put it into the transit box to be delivered downtown first thing. It was one of the few times she didn’t mind passing on a case, as late-show protocol dictated. Human trafficking was one of the ugliest crimes she encountered as a detective and it left scars as well as drew up memories of her own past, when she’d been left alone on the streets of Honolulu as a fourteen-year-old.
She left the station at seven a.m. and headed toward her van. She knew she had to be in the Crenshaw District by noon at the latest to be on-site and ready to shadow the meeting between Elvin Kidd and Marcel Dupree. But at the moment she needed the beach. As tired as she was, she wasn’t planning to sleep. She needed to get her dog and get out on the water to push herself against the current. To dig deep with the paddle until she had exhausted her body and mind and nothing could get in to haunt her.
Bosch
31
Bosch had risen early to complete his assessment of the five investigative tracks abandoned in the Montgomery murder case. He wanted to finish before he needed to leave the house to back up Ballard at Dulan’s soul food restaurant.
The night before, after Ballard had left, he had reviewed the fourth branch of the investigation and found that it needed follow-up. It revolved around a ruling Judge Montgomery had made in a civil dispute. It started when a Sherman Oaks man named Larry Cassidy began marketing a lunch box that he claimed to have invented. The lunch box had insulated hot and cold compartments, but what made it stand out was its clear plastic window on the inside of the lid; a parent could slip a note or photo behind it for their child to see at school lunchtime.
Sales of the lunch box were moderate until Cassidy’s wife, Melanie, started appearing on the Home Shopping Network cable channel to hawk the boxes for $19.95 each. She was going to the HSN studios in Tampa, Florida, twice a month to sell the boxes and was moving thousands of them during each appearance. Cost of manufacture was low and after HSN’s cut, the couple were making almost $200,000 a month. That’s when Cassidy’s ex-wife, Maura Frederick, demanded a share for being the one who designed the box while still married to Cassidy and raising their son, Larry Jr.
Cassidy refused to share even a small percentage of the income generated by the so-called Love for Lunch box and Frederick sued him. He countersued, claiming her suit was a malicious money grab for something she had no right to.
At an evidentiary hearing, Judge Montgomery had both sides proffer their stories on the inspiration for the product’s invention. Cassidy provided original drawings dated well after his divorce from Frederick, as well as the patent application he had filed, and receipts from a plastic manufacturer that produced the first mock-ups of the colorful lunch boxes from the design sketches.
Frederick produced only a notarized statement from her son, Larry Jr., now seventeen years old, in which he said he remembered finding notes and cards and drawings from his mother in the Star Wars lunch box he carried to school as a young boy.
Montgomery dismissed Frederick’s lawsuit and held for Larry Sr., ruling that while Frederick’s actions of long ago certainly might have inspired the Love for Lunch invention, her involvement stopped there; she took on none of the risks or creative aspects in the manufacture and sales of the product. He likened it to someone who used to prop their phone against a book or other object for viewing the screen suing the manufacturer of phone attachments that prop the devices for viewing. Frederick could not be the only parent who ever put a note in a lunch box for their child.
It all seemed cut-and-dried and Bosch initially wondered why the case was included as a potential avenue of investigation in the Montgomery murder. But then he read a report stating that Larry Cassidy Sr. and his new wife, the public face of Love for Lunch, had been found murdered in Tampa, where they had gone to tape an HSN spot. The couple were found shot to death in a rental car in the empty parking lot of a country club, not far from a restaurant where they enjoyed dining while in town. Both had been shot in the back of the head by someone who had been in the back seat of the car. It was not a high-crime district and the assassinations remained unsolved as of the time Montgomery was murdered in Los Angeles. A copy of a probate filing in the case documents showed that Larry Jr. was the heir to his father and to the money earned by the Love for Lunch business. Larry Jr. still lived in the home of his mother, Maura Frederick.
LAPD detectives Gustafson and Reyes included the case in their list of potential avenues of investigation under the theory that if Frederick was involved in the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife, her anger toward the couple might have also extended to the judge who ruled against her. They made initial efforts to interview Maura Frederick, but those efforts were blocked by an attorney representing Frederick and then dropped altogether when Herstadt was arrested and charged in the judge’s murder.
Bosch put the name Maura Frederick on his list beneath the name Clayton Manley. He thought she should be given a fuller look.
Now, with a mug of morning coffee on the table before him, Bosch took up the final strand of the original investigation. This was the third civil action that had caught the investigators’ attention. It again involved a lawsuit and a countersuit. This time the dispute was between a well-known Hollywood actor and his longtime agent. The actor accused the agent of embezzling millions of dollars over his career, and now that that career was on the wane, he wanted a full accounting and the return of everything that was stolen.
A Hollywood dispute would not normally become the stuff of murder investigations, but the actor’s lawsuit contained allegations that the agent was a front for an organized-crime family — and that he had used his position in Hollywood to siphon money from clients and launder it through investments in film productions. The actor said he had been threatened with violence by the agent and his associates, including a visit to his home — the address of which was a carefully guarded secret — by a man who said the actor would get acid thrown in his face and his career ruined if he persisted with the lawsuit or attempted to change agents.
In a case that spanned the entire three years that Montgomery occupied his bench in civil court, the judge ultimately ruled in favor of the actor, awarding damages of $7.1 million and voiding the contract between actor and agent. The case was included in the Montgomery murder investigation because at one point in the long proceedings Montgomery reported to court authorities that his wife’s pet cat had turned up dead in their front yard by what appeared to be foul play. The animal had been slashed open from front legs to back and did not appear to have injuries that could be attributed to a coyote, even though Montgomery and his wife lived in the Hollywood Hills.
An investigation of the incident pointed toward the dispute between the actor and his agent because of the threats alleged in the action by the actor. But no connection was found between the cat killing and the case, or any other case Montgomery was handling.