Jonathan Kellerman - Heartbreak Hotel

A dark patch nearly hid the tattoo on the left calf. Degraded but I could still make it out. Daffy Duck.

I said, “A lot of decomp for how cool it’s been.”

“C.I. guesses he was kept warm somewhere else before being moved.”

I said, “Any idea what killed him?”

“Single bullet, here.” Poking the back of his own skull. “No casing, no exit wound, and our chewy friends have enlarged the entry hole. But when you poke around, the tunnel’s narrow enough to say small caliber.”

“You stuck your finger in there?”

“After the C.I. okayed it.” He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Shake on it, buddy.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“In answer to your next question, until the pathologist weighs in, best estimate of time is the C.I.’s off-the-record guess. Days, not hours.”

“Soon after Waters cleared out on his landlord,” I said. “He went to meet up with his partners, maybe figured they’d all be traveling, and got a surprise. If Thalia’s bungalow had given up serious cash, the pie got reduced to two slices.”

“Miss Hotcha-Hotcha and Mr. Handsome,” he said. “That’s the scene I picture. I went back to the hotel today and showed Henry Bakstrom’s mug to Refugia and a couple of desk clerks. They all had trouble seeing past the Mohawk but no one said it couldn’t be Bakstrom. Then I showed it to Alicia Bogomil and she said ninety percent it was him.”

“Cop eyes.”

“Or she’s eager to please. Techs will be looking for prints on or near the body and with the bullet still in Waters’s head, maybe it’ll give up something.”

I said, “Why dump the body here when there are trails and canyons up the coast?”

“You’re thinking someone familiar with the neighborhood. Bakstrom and Bad Girl going high-rent?”

“Not necessarily. There are cheap motels in Santa Monica and Venice. I’m suggesting this isn’t random because bad guys tend to stay close to home and they’ve also been known to work freelance jobs, like pickup construction.”

“Maybe Bakstrom was here nailing or pouring concrete,” he said. “Good point, I’ll talk to the contractor. Probably the former contractor, the kids say no one’s worked here for a while.”

“People hike in rural spots, not in junkyards,” I said. “If Mr. and Ms. Cute were in a hurry to split and knew the job was abandoned, this would be the perfect dump spot. Give them a head start while decay sets in and hinders identification. Maybe they were hoping the remains would eventually end up in some recycling facility. Unfortunately for them, Romeo and Juliet intervened.”

“Head start,” he said. “So they’re already in the wind.”

“I was a criminal with a windfall, I wouldn’t stick around.”

Noise on the other side of the fence drew our attention. A quartet of well-dressed people in their forties passed through and converged on the young lovers. A rush of hugs was followed by angry adult oration and allegro finger-wagging.

Shawna stood her ground; Sean tried to hide behind her but his mother yanked him out by the arm and worked her mouth rapidly.

The uniform pretending to watch the kids looked over at Milo. Milo pushed his palm frontward. Permission to leave. The cop said something, the parents took the kids with them.

As the families separated, Shawna finger-waved at Sean and Sean blew a kiss.

Milo said, “Rome and Jule save the day and now they’re gonna get grounded.”

“Send ’em consolation prizes,” I said. “LAPD flashlights for future exploration.”

He laughed. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

I said, “Can your mental state handle some purely theoretical input?”

“I’m made of stern stuff. What?”

I told him what I’d learned about Leroy Hoke, the LaPlante/Fred Drancy robberies, the cute young blonde at Perino’s nestling under Hoke’s arm.

“You think she’s Thalia.”

“What’s your opinion?” I showed him the photo on my phone.

He said, “Could be. That’s Hoke, huh? Kinda country... who’s the hulk with them?”

“No idea.”

He returned the phone. “Let’s assume our gal made her fortune laundering the wages of sin. How does that help solve her murder?”

“Hoke was never arrested for the LaPlante robbery and I haven’t found any record of the jewels being recovered. But not long after, he got sent up for tax evasion. What if he was betrayed by an insider? Not Thalia. If she’d sold Hoke out, she wouldn’t have lasted a week. But a year before he died he sent her a book about a heist gone wrong due to betrayal. ‘Hey this guy got it.’ That could’ve been a warning about another potential back-stab.”

“Why warn her ten years after he got sent up?”

“Maybe because it was shortly after Thalia got active financially, until then she’d been lying low. Think about it: She’d just moved into the Aventura and was buying real estate. Maybe Hoke activated her because his priorities changed. He got sick, knew he didn’t have long and wanted to take care of Thalia. Or just the opposite, he was figuring to get out and wanted to take care of himself. Either way, a tax felon sitting on an illicit fortune risked discovery and confiscation. So he used Thalia as a shadow investor. But raising her profile brought its own risk, so he sent her the book, with a coded message to be careful.”

“Telling her to watch out for some other thug. An associate Hoke hadn’t managed to disappear.”

“Or,” I said, “the victim of the heist, not exactly a solid citizen, himself.”

“Count Whoever.”

“Aka Fred Drancy.”

He pulled out a panatela, jammed it in his mouth, unlit. As his jaws clenched and slackened, the cigar bobbed like a yardarm.

“Thalia couldn’t have been at serious risk, Alex. She survived another sixty-plus years.”

“Which supports what we’ve been saying: Hoke took care of the immediate threat but it crossed generations.”

“Third-, fourth-generation bad seeds.”

“One of whom could be lying right there. Wars have been fought based on thousand-year grudges, the same for family feuds. Maybe there’s a clan that’s passed down a story of being cheated out of a big score, and one of the offspring finally decided to do something about it. Thalia told me she chose me because I worked with you. Her plan was to make sure I could be trusted, then get you involved. Even at the risk of making herself an accessory to a whole lot of long-cold crimes. At her age, what could anyone do to her? Unfortunately, her timing was off.”

He took out a matchbook, tore off a match, bent it, slipped it into his pocket. The cigar followed. “So all I have to do is look for some lowlife who hung with Hoke in the bad old days and trace his family tree.”

“Or start with Waters and Bakstrom and work backward.”

“The natural history of nasties... lemme see that picture again.”

I retrieved the Perino’s shot.

“The other guy,” he said, “central casting, goon, no? We find out his name was Moose Bakstrom or Biff Waters, I’ll buy you a case of Chivas. Blue, green, name your color.”

I said, “We could start with the original case files on Hoke’s tax bust and the LaPlante robbery.”

“Something that old won’t be computerized, and paper files are dumped in some out-in-the-boonies place the department claims is an archive.”

“I’ll call Maxine Driver tomorrow, see if she has advice.”

“There you go,” he said.

As we headed for the Seville, he found the match and the panatela and lit up. “History’s peachy, but I’m kinda partial to current events.”

I reached Driver at ten A.M.