Jonathan Kellerman - Heartbreak Hotel

I said, “You met Thalia through your grandfather.”

“At Grandfather’s house. Several times when I came to visit Grandfather, she was there. Often she had a briefcase with her. When I came in, she always said, ‘I’ll give you two your special time.’ She smiled at me, patted my head, said I was cute, then she left. Later, when I was an adolescent, she didn’t pat my head.”

“A briefcase,” said Milo.

Belinda Wojik knitted her hands. “Grampa was social but it was probably business. Grampa invested money for people. From his office but also from his home. He had a huge house in Hancock Park with an office full of books.”

“Where was his office?”

“Encino. I didn’t believe Father. But then Thalia didn’t deny it and she hinted and winked about herself. That’s when I started to believe it. It bothered me. But I loved him. I still don’t know how to process it.”

She looked at us. “Was Thalia murdered because of something Grampa did?”

Milo said, “No reason to believe that.”

“I hope you’re right, Lieutenant. At Grampa’s funeral, Thalia came up to me and said feel free to call if I needed someone to talk to. So I called her the next week and we had coffee. I talked to her about becoming a physician. It seemed a crazy idea but I couldn’t get rid of it. Thalia encouraged me. I gave up the idea, anyway. Years later I came back to it. I was forty-one and didn’t think I’d get into medical school. I tried anyway because I didn’t want to work anymore as a secretary for an extremely hostile movie producer, Marvin Redman.”

A tear stream ran down her cheek. “I did it. I told Thalia. She kissed my cheek and we had coffee.”

I said, “The cemetery you visited—”

“Hollywood Legends. It’s close to Western Pediatric Medical Center. I stop in on Grampa’s anniversary. I don’t go other times. I might get into a habit. I have to maintain a structured schedule. By point of illustration, when you’re finished with me, I’ll drive straight to the hospital and see my CF patient. I’ll drive past the cemetery but I won’t stop.”

“When Thalia told you she’d participated in criminal activities, what was her affect?”

Her eyes returned to the floor. “Discerning other people’s emotions is difficult. It’s like a foreign movie. Unless I’m paying strict attention and watching for subtitles, it passes me by.”

“Did she seem to take it lightly?”

“She didn’t laugh,” said Belinda Wojik. “She didn’t cry, either. She was... somewhere in the middle. Then she looked away. I interpreted that as wanting to change the subject. Then she said she was looking for a worthy cause. Oh, I remember something: She said she was looking for a cause because she was as old as Methuselah’s wife and wished to do good with her money. May I go, now?”

Milo said, “Soon, Doctor. Do you recognize either of these men?” Showing her Waters’s and Bakstrom’s mugshots.

She said, “Obviously, they’re criminals.” She shuddered. “Their eyes are blank. They scare me. Are you saying Thalia associated with them?”

Milo said, “Not necessarily.”

“You’re showing me these pictures for a reason.”

He smiled.

Belinda Wojik said, “You’re telling me nonverbally to shut up so I will. May I go now?”

—

As we walked out to Bedford Drive, Milo said, “That was different. How the hell does she work with kids?”

“She’s nonjudgmental and kind of child-like, herself.”

“Beverly Hills parents would dig that?”

“She probably has a sparse outside life and is available twenty-four seven.”

“A slave with an M.D.? Yeah, that would do it,” he said. “So Gramps might’ve moved money around for thugs and Thalia ’fessed up to being a bad girl.”

I said, “This goes way back. Time to learn more about Gramps. Ricki Sylvester’s, too.”

He said, “Your place. Faster computer plus catering.”

Twenty minutes later, we were in my office. I expected Milo to commandeer the keyboard but he slumped on the old leather couch. “Go for it.”

William P. Wojik was mentioned in several newspaper articles from 1940 and 1941, all to do with Leroy Hoke’s tax evasion trial. As Hoke’s “accountant” he’d been subpoenaed to testify, no record of what he’d said.

Several papers added another label: “reputed mob moneyman.”

“Reputed” in order to avoid a libel suit. I kept scrolling, found no evidence Wojik had ever been charged criminally. Following Hoke’s conviction, he avoided the public eye until 1975, when he, along with other alums, had been honored at a Yale Club of L.A. gala.

New tag: “esteemed financial consultant and philanthropist.”

A photo from the party showed a white-haired man with a toothbrush mustache and an easy smile. A chubby girl clutched his arm and gazed up at him. Eleven or twelve, pigtails, glasses, a frilly pink dress that threatened to consume her.

The round, perplexed face of a young Belinda Wojik.

Milo said, “His dinner companion. Like he told her, common enemy.”

I keyworded jack mccandless.

Even more coverage on him. A “mob lawyer.” “Reputed” not necessary because the facts were clear. Formerly from Chicago, McCandless had defended “Capone soldiers and other organized crime figures” before moving to San Francisco, where he’d served as the “legal mouthpiece of union bosses and political figures accused of corruption.”

Living in L.A. by the midthirties, McCandless had faced a “potential conflict of interest due to his work on behalf of both jewel-theft victim Count Frederick LaPlante and the chief suspect in the case, mobster Leroy Hoke. However, with no one ever charged in the heist, the necessity of making a choice was avoided.”

I kept scrolling.

Similar to William Wojik, public attention on McCandless had faded soon after Leroy Hoke’s imprisonment. I came across a few anniversary trial rehashes then nothing until a twenty-year-old obituary in the American Bar Association Journal.

McCandless was lauded, in memoriam, as a longtime ABA member who’d served on numerous committees, including several that dealt with professional ethics. Another “noted philanthropist.” He’d died at age ninety-six “peacefully, in his sleep.” Interment at Hollywood Legends Memorial Park, in lieu of flowers any sort of charitable donation was appreciated. Predeceased by his wife and son, Mark McCandless. Survived by his granddaughter, Richeline Sylvester, also an ABA member.

Milo said, “Mob moneyman makes ninety-five, mob lawyer goes him one year better, Thalia pushes a hundred. Maybe the good die young because they bore God.”

I laughed, switched to an image search. “Well, what do you know.”

Half a dozen color shots, like Wojik’s, all in formal garb. Planned Parenthood benefit, same for the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, three for the art museum, the zoo.

Even in old age, Jack McCandless had been a forbidding presence, well over six feet tall and three hundred pounds or more, with a hairless bullet head and crushed features. Tiny porcine eyes aimed like handguns intent on demolishing the lens. Or the photographer.

One black-and-white shot, decades older, was familiar: Perino’s, Hoke and a tiny blonde. McCandless the hulk we’d assumed to be a bodyguard. That one traced to an eBay auction featuring “classic L.A. restaurant images,” this one peddled as “Rich folk enjoying the Beverly Hills high life.”

Not quite; Perino’s had occupied a stretch of Wilshire five miles from B.H. No surprise, on any given eBay day, you could bid on a five-hundred-dollar Stradivarius.

Milo said, “Even as a geezer he looked like a gangster.”