“Then I opened the door and got out and went to my bike. I stopped about halfway across the parking lot and looked back at the white Lincoln Navigator. Nice car. A power-punk operator’s ride. I pictured a guy with soft smooth hands, perfect teeth, and a great haircut. I still couldn’t see nothing inside. The plate was 9KYF334, trapped photographically in my brain. I assumed it was stolen or faked. End of chapter one.”
“When and where did you see this car and these men again?” asks Mendez.
Gale’s already on the radio, calling in the plates.
“Curtis called me the next day. Said they could sweeten the deal. Asked me to be waiting for them at the Nordstrom in South Coast Plaza. Ten thirty.”
Mendez parks near the main South Coast Plaza Nordstrom entrance, elegantly sweeping granite steps leading up to glass doors that slide open and closed, flashing in the late-morning sun. Well-dressed shoppers climb and descend.
Gale mulls the stolen plates as he watches the gilded men and women on the granite steps. Thinks of Marilyn, who loved this place. She’s been in his dreams again. He hears wisps of her voice, nodding off at night.
Fragments.
And fragments of fragments.
He notes the hard set of Daniela’s jaw as she watches the shoppers, too.
“Where the beautiful people spend their money,” she says.
“Don’t see them types at the Bear Cave,” says Jeffs.
South Coast Plaza is one of Orange County’s premier shopping malls, Gale thinks, designed and expanded over the decades years by the Tarlow Company, led by the now ninety-five-year-old Bennet Tarlow.
He takes pictures of beautifully dressed shoppers, climbing up and down the steps.
Camile Tarlow’s kind of place, he thinks.
And Norris Kennedy’s and Patti DiMeo’s and his own Marilyn’s.
The kind of place that when he walks in, he feels alien — not only as an Acjacheme Native unrecognized by his own country, the country he was born in and almost died for, but as a human being.
“So just like the first time, I get in the Navigator,” says Vern. “I was hoping that it being daytime would give a better look at them, but nothing doing. Windows that dark aren’t even legal unless you’re famous, or law enforcement, or a politician.
“And this time we don’t just sit there and talk. They don’t say more than hi Mr. Jeffs and we head through the lot to the freeway. Half an hour later we’re in some park I’ve never even heard of. So, Detective Mendez, get back on the freeway and I’ll show you where we went.”
“Is this white Navigator a runaround?” asks Mendez. “Two guys you can’t even describe. Just a bunch of make-believe to keep your butt free? It makes me wonder if you killed Tarlow and this is just a bunny trail you’re showing us.”
“No, ma’am, no. It’s not. I’m just taking you where they took me, and telling you what they said. That’s what we agreed to. You can make your own decisions from there.”
Mendez sweeps past the sign for Aliso and Wood Canyons Wilderness Park, follows the entryway through dense green hills of coastal chapparal.
“Another county wilderness park,” she says. “Maybe we’ll get lucky again.”
“What’s lucky about that?” asks Jeffs.
“Bennet Tarlow III was murdered in a county wilderness park,” says Gale. “After being seen with you the previous evening. As I’m sure you remember. Your photographic memory seems to be coming and going.”
“I know that, just didn’t put it together ’til now. The pain’s back. Had to have myself a fent bump with my breakfast, so now the brain fog’s setting in. By the way, why won’t you tell me who this alleged witness is? The one who’s lying about me being with Tarlow. Does he really exist or just more lame-ass cop game from you two?”
Gale gives him a long look, trying to pry his way past Jeffs’s photographic memory bullshit and into the truth behind it, if any.
But all he gets are those Killer Cat eyes again, cool and unamused.
“There’s a parking lot around the bend,” Jeffs says. “I’ll show you the exact spot we took.”
Mendez parks on the far side of the lot, per instructions. There’s only one other vehicle, and it’s not far away, a tall putty gray Mercedes Sprinter with the side door open and a small man sitting on a narrow bed with a laptop across his thighs. Beside him is a small woman, engaged with a computer, too. A Chihuahua sits between them, its ears perked, barking intently on the invading Explorer.
“Second time you’ve seen these guys, then,” says Gale. “Or at least one of them. Same white Lincoln Navigator. Walk us through it.”
“Steve — the guy on the right — said he might have been wrong in presenting his offer. Wrong about the target. Wanted to know why I didn’t kill the woman. I told him again I never did that. I don’t do that. Not Vern. Something doesn’t fit right inside, I don’t do it.”
“Why do you call yourself ‘Vern’ sometimes and ‘I’ the rest?” asks Mendez.
He glowers at her. “I look at myself from the outside and the inside. So it depends.”
“On what?” she asks.
“Sometimes I’m me and sometimes I’m me looking at me.”
“Which were you doing when you shot Tarlow?” asks Gale.
Jeffs’s big head pivots, dragging the scowl with it. “We made a deal, piglets: You drop your fake charges and I lead you to Steve and Curt.”
“Curtis?” says Mendez.
Jeffs leans forward, uses both hands to adjust his knee on the balled vest.
“Quit trying to confuse me,” he says. “Police harassment is not part of our deal. Go ahead, bust me right now if you want. Watch your case collapse in court.”
Both Gale and Mendez let the silence speak.
“So you told Steve you don’t do that,” says Gale. “Meaning murder for hire.”
“He said he wouldn’t have done it either,” says Jeffs. “She didn’t deserve it, says Steve. But our target richly deserves it. We mentioned that he’s stealing away close to fourteen billion dollars from his own company? Fine. But he also rapes women. Women he knows and dates. Two of them for sure, maybe three. Quite likely, more. Our private eyes and lawyers are working up the big reveal for the media. They’ve got video. Graphic video. So, Steve says, Caesar — let’s call him Caesar — is a multimillionaire businessman costing his company billions that will end up in his own pockets. And drugging and forcibly raping a series of women he’s deceived into believing they mean something to him. Vern, he says, you’d be doing humanity a favor by taking him out.
“‘How old a guy is he?’ I ask. Steve says early forties. Movie star kind of face and hair. Makes you want to punch him. Top schools, comes from more money than I can even dream of. Which is what you want, is his money, I say. Only what’s ours, Steve says. Only what we have worked very, very hard for, and Caesar wants to take from us. There are the women, too. They didn’t do a thing to be defiled like that. The video would make you ill, Vern. You have a strong moral compass. That’s why you disgusted yourself at the drugstore, whether you killed her or not. We want a man like you. I told them I’d think about it. And asked them about that pay raise they brought up.