Tahoe Heat Page 28

  My hotel had the words Marina del Rey in its name, and the glass doors had a sand-blasted design of two sailboats. But I couldn’t see the ocean or the water of the marina or even a sailboat mast poking up above any of the nearby buildings.

  I went to the lobby and asked the well-dressed concierge where the marina was.

  “Not far,” he said in a Mexican accent, his black, pencil moustache stretching to accommodate his big grin. He pulled out a small map and made some marks with a felt-tip pen.

  “How far is not far?” I asked.

  “Very close. Just around the block.” He pointed to the map, then pointed out the window. “Only five minutes.”

  “Five minutes by car, or five minutes by foot?” I asked.

  “By foot, of course.” He grinned some more. “You run fast, sí?”

  “How far is the ocean?” I asked.

  “Not far. Ten minutes.”

  “If I run fast,” I said.

  He grinned. “Maybe fifteen minutes for you.”

  “If I follow the main channel to the ocean, and then walk northwest up the beach, I’ll come to Venice, right?”

  “Venice, California.” He shook his head like a father thinking about a child who has failed. “Nothing much good to say about Venice. Of course, there are many nice places in Southern California. Santa Monica. Malibu. Beverly Hills. And you will find that Marina del Rey has everything you need.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” I thanked him for the map and went to my room.

  The next morning, I called Ryan to make sure they were all okay. Then I started calling the names on my list. Most people were out, but according to their voice messages, my call was very important to them, and they’d get back to me pronto.

  I managed to get through to four actual people, all of whom were realtors. All claimed to know nothing about any problems associated with the Village Green On The Water. But they did know all about the 168 condo units in the four-plex cottages, complete with customizable floor plans, energy-neutral designs, and the promise that my purchase included the planting of one seedling in the tropical rainforest for every twenty-five thousand dollars of my purchase price. Also, my name would be inscribed on a community plaque as a defender of the environment. And one of them said that if I came in today before noon, she was certain that I would still qualify for the free kitchen upgrade with granite counters and my choice of eco-design, soft-focus wallpaper in a limited edition, signed by the famous artist.

  When I pressed about problems, just one of the realtors said that she supposed that I could call the Venice Connection Association president, a woman named Ingrid Johanssen, and maybe she could answer my questions.

  She gave me the number. I dialed, and a woman answered. After a long explanation on my part, she agreed to meet me for a happy-hour drink later that day.

  That afternoon, I walked several long blocks over to the main entrance channel to Marina del Rey, and then followed it past a line of mansions for another long block out to the ocean.

  The channel led me to one of those Southern California beaches that is to a normal beach like a Hollywood blockbuster is to a home video. It was two hundred yards of fine sand from the sidewalk to the surf, and the beach stretched as far as I could see.

  I headed northwest, and after a mile or so came to Venice, the hip, black-sheep sister of glamorous Santa Monica and sensible, everything-you-need Marina del Rey.

  Runners, skate-boarders, and roller bladers careened past gaudy shops and street vendors that specialized in tie-dyed T-shirts with raunchy catchphrases, and whole-body tattoo services, and sunglasses that no one but a feather-boa-ed drag queen would ever purchase. I bought a fun pair for Lily.

  A group sitting on the grass passed around a joint. Near the Muscle Beach sign, a group of young men focused their steroid-drenched bodies on pumping weights. Some nearby girls didn’t seem to notice. Some nearby boys paid close attention. In the distance beyond them, surfers wearing wetsuits rode low waves. A beach vendor had stacks of rental kayaks.

  Now and then I passed people who appeared to be auditioning for unseen casting directors. A mezzo-soprano deeply lost in a Puccini aria, a pundit in a trench coat explaining to the world the great Federal Reserve conspiracy, a ceramic artist on a pedal-powered cart, complete with rotating potter’s wheel, raising a glistening, graceful pot as she recited what sounded like gibberish. Or maybe it was Beat poetry. When a unicycler juggling bananas pedaled past me, I turned to watch.

  Spotting a tail without being noticed by the tail takes practice. The trick is to not react. I didn’t jerk or stare or even pause to look as the familiar face came into view in the crowd behind me. I just watched the juggler for a moment, then turned back and continued to amble along up the sidewalk.

  Coming up on my left was a tent canopy with panels displaying framed photographs. I stopped to look at colorful, vertical towns on the cliffs of Italy. I concentrated on my peripheral vision, noticing the movement on the sidewalk. I moved from one photo to the next, looking at the seaside towns but seeing only the people to my side, getting one more glimpse of the thin, hard man with the dirty brown hair that looked painted across his forehead. Stefan, bodyguard for Preston Laurence.

  I tried to put it together as I studied the photographs. Preston was probably so enraged by me that he had his man follow me to see what I was up to. Not an easy trick getting a last-minute ticket on the same plane as me, or watching me get on the plane and then flying Preston’s jet to my destination.

  Either way, it seemed likely that Stefan was sent to find a way to take me apart, physically, or financially, or both. The billionaire had made it clear that no one threatened Preston Laurence. And if Preston had murdered Eli Nathan and Jeanie Samples, he would want to prevent me discovering that, regardless of the cost.

  I decided to make Stefan work for his pay.

  The worst work in the world for a tracker trying to shadow a target is having to wait while the target sits still in a public place, enjoying a cool libation on a warm summer day.

  The sidewalk café where I was to meet Ingrid Johanssen had several small bistro tables roped off from the passersby. One was vacant. I stepped over the rope and sat down. I was a half-hour early for my meeting, so I ordered a beer. They didn’t have Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, so I ordered a West Coast IPA by Green Flash Brewing. The beer was good, and the scenery, an endless parade of bizarre people in front of the vast blue-gray Pacific, was entertaining.

  At 6 p.m., a tall woman in a navy pantsuit stepped through the tight formation of tables and stopped at mine.

  “You’re the only person alone, so I’m guessing you are Owen McKenna,” she said.

  “Then you must be Ingrid. Thanks for meeting me.” I stood and reached across the table to shake her hand, then nudged the opposite chair out a bit.

  She carried a large leather shoulder bag. She hung the strap over the back of the chair and sat down. She had silver hair cut short, and her dangling earrings looked to be miniature wooden chairs, painted a brilliant red that contrasted with her eyes, which were the color of turquoise swimming pools.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Your day job involves furniture.”

  “Oh,” she smiled, “you mean my earrings. No, these little chairs are what I call wish-prayers. For twenty-five years, I’ve been a tradeshow demonstrator for a library services company. When I’m not on planes, I’m on my feet all day long, setting up a ten-by-twenty booth, then chatting up librarians, then taking the booth down. I do my song and dance in forty-two states and twelve countries in the EU. What I pray and wish for is a future where I can just sit a bit. That’s what the earrings are about.” She touched one of them, gave it a little swing.

  “How was I fortunate enough to find you in town?”

  “I have an agreement with the company. When I’m stateside, and if I have two or more consecutive days where I’m not at a show, I always get a ticket to fly home.”

  “So you can work your other
job as the Venice Connection Association president.”

  She smiled and nodded. “I know. It gets a little crazy sometimes. But when you travel for a living, you recognize more than most the importance of community.”

  “So I’m not taking up your valuable personal time?”

  “Yes, you are. And Howard is almost certainly upset with me as we speak. He’s probably sitting in the kitchen window waiting for me. I will get an earful when I walk in the door.”

  “Your cat,” I said.

  “All twenty-two pounds of him, yes.”

  The waiter came back. Ingrid ordered a vodka martini. I had another beer, and we decided to split a calamari appetizer.

  “You told me on the phone that you are an investigator. What is it that I can help you with?”

  “My client is an investor in the Village Green project. He has received threats at his home in Tahoe by an unknown person or persons. I understand that the property manager had trouble evicting some tenants. I wonder if one of them could be the person threatening my client.”

  “Where does your client live?”

  “The Bay Area and Lake Tahoe.”

  “And you’re wondering if a tenant from Venice has gone to Tahoe and threatened your client?” Ingrid’s tone was dismissive. “If a tenant is under enough financial stress that they are unwilling to move out, how are they going to find a way to go up to Tahoe and harass the landlord? The whole idea seems melodramatic.” Ingrid said it with a certain disdain. I was suddenly in the enemy’s camp. Evil by proxy.

  “Yes, but the threats are real.”

  “So you’re turning over rocks,” she said.

  I nodded.

  The waiter brought our calamari. We ordered dinner, grilled sea bass for Ingrid, salmon for me.

  “Been a long time since I’ve visited Tahoe,” Ingrid said. “It is one of my favorite places. Does your client work for a living? Or is he one of those portfolio princes?”

  “He works out of both the Bay Area and Tahoe. But he’s Washoe, so his roots are Tahoe.”

  “Washoe?”

  “The Native Americans who lived at Tahoe for ten thousand years while our ancestors were hanging out in caves in Europe.”

  “He’s an Indian who also happens to be rich?” She said. “Casino money?”

  I was disappointed in Ingrid, but I needed info, so I didn’t comment. “Yes to the first. But he made his money in bio-tech. He’s the founder and chairman of CalBioTechnica, a genetic engineering company. You may have heard of them.”

  “CBT? Oh, my God. They’ve donated money to some of my librarian customers. I’ve really put my foot in it, haven’t I? I’m so sorry. You must think I’m a terrible bigot. Really, I’m not. Please don’t think that. I have great respect for our native people. Indians. Or Native Americans. Whatever the proper term is these days. Really, I do.”

  “Right.” I ate the last calamari. “Can you tell me about any problems you’ve heard of with tenants at the units that were torn down to put up the Village Green?”

  The waiter brought our food on hot platters. Our fish sizzled.

  “It’s the same whenever developers try to build new projects.” She stabbed a large chunk of her fish, chewed with vigor, and swallowed it fast. “The difference is that our situation here ended in tragedy. They had a tenant who wouldn’t move out. A woman had started a new commercial cleaning company. I think it’s pretty obvious that she understood the eight-month term of the lease. But there was some vague language in the lease. I gave it to a guy in our association who is a lawyer, and he agreed as well. Of course, the landlord filed an unlawful detainer. The tenant brought up the lease-language ambiguity, but the court held for the landlord.

  “The eviction came at the worst time for the woman. She’d gotten several contracts, and she had three teams out working all night long. But two of her biggest accounts were companies whose headquarters were back east, Atlanta and DC, I think the paper said. And they were shuffling her invoices up the ladder for approval because she was a new vendor for them. They’d strung her out to a hundred twenty days. But of course, her cleaning teams wanted to be paid every week, just like she’d promised.”

  “And she didn’t have enough capital,” I said.

  “Nor credit. So she resisted the eviction and was eventually moved out by the sheriff. She had to lay off her workers. Her contracts fell through, and the business fell apart. She couldn’t rent another place because she couldn’t show income.

  “In the end, she ended up homeless. A week or two later, the woman was killed by a hit and run driver. An observer said it appeared as if the woman had deliberately stepped off the curb at the wrong moment. It made a big impression on our little community. The Times did a story on her. ‘Entrepreneur Squeezed to Death by System,’ or something like that.”

  “Do you know the woman’s name?”

  She shook her head. “No. The property manager was so shaken by it that she quit and moved back to Hawaii. But it was in the newspaper. You could look that up.”

  I nodded, and changed the subject to the local town.

  As we ate, Ingrid explained to me how the original developer dredged out the canals in an attempt to create a West Coast Venice. They dug many canals back in the early 20th century, but later most of them were filled in to make streets for the burgeoning population of automobiles.

  Ingrid finished her dinner and looked at her watch. I told her that it was fine if she needed to leave. She said that Howard the cat needed her, and after two more apologies for her insensitive remark about Native Americans, she left.

  I took my time with the rest of my dinner, formulating a plan to talk to Stefan, my tailgater, on my terms.

  I paid the bill and left, taking a leisurely stroll up the winding boardwalk on the beach side of the street. I didn’t need to turn around to know that Stefan was out there, his gun on his belt, and his brain on his plan to exact a revenge for how Spot and I turned them away without Carol the day before.

  Learning from Ingrid about the tenant tragedy at the Village Green suggested that not all the clues pointed to Preston. Which made Stefan’s presence more interesting.

  FORTY-ONE

  My plan to trap Stefan was simple.

  I walked northwest up the beach, staying on the boardwalk so I’d be near other people and Stefan would be less likely to put his gun in my back. My demeanor was calm, and my pace was slow enough that the sun set, and twilight gathered in close. I went a mile and then another, my sights set on the Santa Monica Pier, twinkling with lights like a fantasy spot for teenagers on first dates.

  A quarter mile from the pier, I went past a second kayak rental operation, then turned down the sand and followed the water’s edge toward the dark pier posts. I slipped into the shadows under the pier, picking up a piece of driftwood. The tide was out, and there was a long expanse of wet, mucky sand. I walked into the darkest area of posts, moving at a steady pace. There was a place where one post met another. I didn’t know if I might end up tussling on the wet sand, so I wedged my cell into the V of the posts.

  I knew that the darkness would temporarily hide me from Stefan’s vision until his eyes adjusted. I stepped to the ocean side of one of the posts and stopped. I watched for Stefan from behind the post.

  He came running, then slowed and walked under the pier. His movement made his position easy to track. Then he stopped, and he disappeared into the darkness.

  I stared at the vague black shapes of posts, watching for movement. Crowd noises came from above. Mechanical rumbling from the rides throbbed through the structure of the pier. In the distance behind me, the surf worked its calming, rhythmic music.

  Patience is everything in cat and mouse pursuits. I stood still for four or five minutes. Behind me came more water sounds, waves slapping against posts, the gurgling of little eddy currents in the wave backwash, the fizz of wave foam seeping into the sand, other water noises that sounded like a disoriented fish slapping its tail in shallow wate
r.

  The first movement I saw came from left of where Stefan had disappeared. He stepped out from behind one post and over to another. From his position, I could tell he was looking for me far to the right of where I stood. He probably had his gun out, but it was too dark to see.

  I moved from one post to another. I focused on his position, never looking away. The sand was wet, and I had to lift my feet with careful deliberation to avoid a sucking sound as they came free. It was a slow circular navigation, coming around behind him, one soft step followed by another.

  When I was twenty yards away from him, the sand became drier. I thought I could sprint to him, silent steps on soft sand, and get hold of him before he realized what was happening. I readied myself, one foot back like a sprinter, my hand on the barnacled post for support, the other hand holding my driftwood club.

  Just as I burst forward there was a stunning crack on the back of my head. I collapsed onto the sand and was out.

  FORTY-TWO

  Play dead.

  I didn’t know where I was. My head was on fire. I went with my instincts.

  You want to buy time with a pair of killers, you need to convince them that you are not a threat.

  So you play dead.

  Perceptions came in bits.

  I was on my back. Being dragged. Two men. One on each foot.

  Stay limp.

  My head dug in to the soft sand. Water soaked my hair. My arms trailed out behind me. They pulled me over a log. Something caught on my belt.

  “Damnit, he’s stuck.”

  “Roll him.”

  My feet twisted, legs twisted. I flopped over onto my front.

  Stay limp.

  “Wait, let me get his wallet.” A hand dug into my pockets, found the wallet and my pocketknife. “Okay, pull.”

  My face gouged the sand, my nose filled with muck. I scraped over the log. It caught on my chin. I shut my eyes hard and turned my head just the tiniest amount as if twisting were natural to the way they dragged me.