A Savage Place Part 21

"Yeah. You need an explanation?"

"No," Samuelson said. "I don't. Okay. We let them in, and I come too, and when it's over, you surrender them and you to me."

"You know why I want it this way," I said.

"Yes."

"Okay," I said. I hung up the phone. I took the typescript out of the typewriter. I handed it to Brewster. "When the TV people get set, you read that the way I wrote it. If you don't I'll shoot you six times."

"What's the difference," Brewster mumbled. "I read this, and the state will kill me."

"Not you," I said. "They haven't done away with anyone out here in years. They probably have never done away with anyone as connected as you. You got all kinds of clout, Brewster. You could be back on the street in a few years. You can get into court and claim you were coerced. It might work. If you read that, you got lots of chances. If you don't, you have none. Look at me when I am speaking. Look at me. You know I'll do it."

Brewster stared at me with his eye and a half. He nodded. I walked over to the door and unlocked it and opened it up. I stayed out of the line of fire when I did. You can't tell when some SWAT cop will forget it's not television. Samuelson came in first, wearing his tinted gla.s.ses and looking relaxed. Frederics followed, not a hair out of place, gleaming and perfectly groomed. Behind him came a scruffy bearded black guy with a camera on his shoulder and a large shabby black bag hanging from a shoulder strap. Last came a young woman who was obviously having a scruff contest with the black man. She had equipment slung around over a man's s.h.i.+rt, jeans, and moccasins, and she carried a long pole with a microphone on it.

Samuelson went to the other side of the room and stood near Simms. Simms was looking at the floor. Frederics nodded at me.

I said to Brewster, "Get up." I had the gun held out full-length and shoulder level, pointed at him. A little drama doesn't hurt. Brewster got wearily to his feet. The black man muttered "Jesus" as he looked at Brewster's face.

Samuelson looked at me. "He was difficult to subdue," I said.

"I can tell," Samuelson said.

Frederics looked at his a.s.sociates. "We ready?" They both nodded. The soundwoman took the mike off its extender and handed it to Frederics. He looked at the camera. Then he said, "This is John Frederics. I'm speaking to you from the offices of Oceania Industries at Century City, where an apparent hostage situation is in progress. The resolution of that situation requires that one of the hostages, Peter Brewster, the president of Oceania, read a statement. Mr. Brewster."

The cameraman moved the camera onto Brewster. Frederics held the mike in front of him. I kept the gun steady. Brewster was leaning against his desk, a little wobbly, but upright. He had my typescript in his hand. He read: "A reporter from KNBS, Candy Sloan, through persistently good investigative reporting, finally uncovered the fact that I have been engaged in Mob-related criminal activity. She was about to report her story. To prevent that, I had her killed by a man named Rollie Simms. If it had not been for Candy Sloan, I would never have been caught."

There was silence. I brought the gun down, reversed it, and held it out, b.u.t.t first, toward Samuelson. He reached around behind the soundwoman and took it and dropped it in his side pocket. Brewster simply stood where he was. Frederics brought the mike back to his own face, the camera s.h.i.+fted slightly. "Right now in this room there is silence. A colleague is dead. This is John Frederics for KNBS News." He stood still for another moment, then made a safe sign with his hands. He looked at me for a moment. "It'll be on the air as soon as I get it back to the studio," he said.

I nodded. He nodded his head toward the door, and the three TV people left. The soundwoman was last and she looked back at me as she went. Her eyes were wet.

"Okay," Samuelson said. "Let's go downtown."

Chapter29.

IT WAS 11:03 P.M. in downtown Los Angeles. Since I'd come in about twelve hours ago with Samuelson, I had talked with three detectives, two a.s.sistant D.A.'s, a sheriff's investigator, a homicide captain, the chief of detectives (who called me "a bush-league f.u.c.king hot dog"), the department public relations officer, a guy from the mayor's office (who said something about "civic responsibility" that I didn't fully follow but seemed to be in substantial agreement with the chief of detectives), and a lawyer who KNBS had sent over to protect my const.i.tutional rights, the same one they'd sent before. Now I was in Samuelson's office with the door closed, drinking maybe my eighty-third cup of really despicable black coffee and watching the latenight news with Samuelson on a nine-inch TV on top of a file cabinet in the left corner of the room.

On the screen Frederic, the news director, looking bigger and more natural, was sitting on the edge of a desk in what was obviously the KNBS newsroom, speaking directly into the camera.

"Every reporter covers stories of sudden death," he was saying. "But for all of us at KNBS News this has been a different story. This time the victim was one of us."

Samuelson was coatless, his tie was hanging unknotted, his s.h.i.+rt was unb.u.t.toned, his sleeves rolled up above the elbows. He had his feet up on the corner of his desk as he watched, and he drummed with the fingers of his left hand softly on the desktop. I sipped some coffee. I didn't want it, but there wasn't anything else to do while I watched.

"KNBS feature reporter Candy Sloan was killed last night in the course of an investigation that linked motion picture industry figures to organized crime," Frederics said. I looked at myself in the dark window behind Samuelson's desk. My clothes had dried on me in complex wrinkles, my hair was stiff and angular. I had a two days' growth of beard, and I hadn't slept for a couple of days. I looked like a doorman at the drunk tank.

"Tinsel Town," I said. "Glamor."

Samuelson looked at me. "Land of dreams," he said. On the tube Frederics was summarizing the events that culminated in Candy's death.

"You ever notice that they never get it quite right," Samuelson said.

"Not even this one," I said.

"You want any more coffee?" Samuelson said.

"No." I felt a little sick from all that I'd drunk that day. I hadn't eaten in nearly as long as I hadn't slept. Samuelson got up and turned the sound down on the television so that Frederics was reduced to pantomime. "You want to know what we got?" Samuelson said.

"Yeah."

"Okay. We got lucky. Brewster couldn't wait to blame Simms for everything. We read him his rights and warned him about using what he said and told him he needn't talk without his lawyer, but he was in such a G.o.dd.a.m.n sweat to get it on record that Simms was the one who did everything, that he just kept right on bleating, and Simms got mad and started replying, and we got about everything they had. They might have been a little punchy from having been forcibly apprehended."

I nodded.

"Anyway," Samuelson said, "we got the files out on Simms, and he's got a yellow sheet, looks like it belongs to Attila the Hun. He's a Mob enforcer. Brewster's tied into the Mob and that means they're tied into him. They put Simms into Oceania to keep an eye on things."

"Can you use what you got in court?" I said.

Samuelson shrugged. "Ain't my department. D.A.'s guys say maybe. But you know how it goes. There's going to be expensive lawyers defending Brewster. They'll say he was coerced by you. They'll say he was not competent when he spoke without a lawyer. They'll mention the fundamental concepts of American justice. Our side will be argued by some kid two years out of U.S.C." Samuelson shrugged again.

"Start earlier," I said. "Why did Franco kill FeIton?"

"Franco was a collector. Most recently for Ray Zifkind. About five, six years ago, Summit Studios was going down the chute, and Ray Zifkind bailed them out. That put the head of Summit, guy named Hammond, in the Mob's pocket."

"I know Hammond," I said. "Zifkind the stud duck out here?"

"Yeah. Anyway, one thing led to another, Brewster got in on it. The way you might if you were playing cards and caught a guy cheating. Instead of blowing the whistle, you play along with him. Let him make you money too. You ever play cards?"

"Yeah. I get the idea."

"Pretty soon Summit Pictures and Oceania products were getting the edge in the marketplace, and Zitkind was making dough and Brewster was making dough, and Summit was making dough. Now and then some theater owner in Omaha would get roughed up, or a lumber wholesaler in Olympia, Was.h.i.+ngton, would have his warehouse burned, but that's business, and everything seemed jake to everybody-except maybe the lumber wholesaler or the movie theater guy in Omaha-until Candy Sloan comes along."

On the silent TV screen Frederics had stopped speaking. The camera zoomed back and held for a long shot of the whole newsroom, then the screen went gray. I got up and turned it off.

Samuelson kept on talking. "Some of this I picked up here and there-we been looking into this for a while ourselves. We picked Hammond up this afternoon-some of this I got from the two crooners downstairs. She talks to Felton, and Felton gets nervous and tells Hammond, and Hammond bucks it along to Brewster, and so forth, and eventually Franco Montenegro gets sent out to slap Sloan around a little and scare her off. They don't want to burn a reporter if they can help it."

"I still don't know why Franco burned Felton."

"Patience," Samuelson said. "I'm getting to that. What me and you don't know is that Felton has been the conduit for profits from Summit to Zifkind. And what n.o.body knows, including Brewster and Hammond and Zifkind, is that Felton is skimming. But Franco knew."

If I'd been a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head. "And Franco cut himself a piece," I said.

"Smart," Samuelson said. "Smart eastern dude. You go to Haavahd?"

"I have a friend who's taking a course there," I said.

"Must rub off," Samuelson said. Through the clear gla.s.s door of his office I could see a wall clock in the squad room. It said eleven thirty-eight. "So Felton and Franco are nibbling some vigorish of their own off the Mob's vig. And n.o.body knows this."

"And when we got so close to Felton that he was sure to take the fall, Franco had to kill him," I said. "'Cause if the Mob found out what they were doing, it-"

Samuelson nodded. "Yes," he said, "slow, painful and certain. The part I like is that Felton puts in a call to Franco to come bail him out and of course invited in his own killer."

"Franco was right," I said. "Felton didn't have the stuff. He'd have told everything he knew to everybody who asked him about thirty seconds after you got him in here."

"The thing is that what Sloan's boyfriend-what's his name?"

"Rafferty," I said, "Mickey Rafferty. But he wasn't her boyfriend."

"What Rafferty saw when Felton gave Franco some dough wasn't what they and you and me thought it was. It was just Franco's private little gig with Felton. But it got the whole thing rolling, and it got Hammond scared and Brewster and, I suppose, eventually Ray Zifkind, but we'll never get close to him."

"And Brewster," I said. I felt as if I would never leave the chair I was in. As if I were slowly fossilizing, the living part of me dwindling deeper and deeper inside. All my energy was focused on listening to Samuelson. "Franco try to shake him down?"

"Yep. Needed the dough, I suppose, to get out of here and away from Zifkind and us."

"And Brewster figured Candy was getting too close?" I said.

"Yeah. He didn't believe she was as taken with him as she acted."

"So he got Simms, and maybe somebody else-anybody else?"

"Yeah, soldier named Little Joe Turcotte. We're looking around for him now."

"So he got Simnxs and Little Joe to go out early and wait for Franco, and when Franco showed up, they gunned him. One of them used an automatic."

"Turcotte," Samuelson said.

"And they killed both of them while I was wandering around in the oil field."

"Don't make you happy, I guess," Samuelson said.

"Nope. I haven't been right since I got here."

"Can't see how you could have done much better," Samuelson said.

I didn't say anything.

"She was going to keep at it," Samuelson said. "No way you could have kept her from it."

"The thing is," I said. My voice didn't seem to be very closely connected to me. I paused and tried to think what I wanted to say. "The thing is," I said, "that she did what she did because she didn't want to be just another pretty face in the newsroom, you know. Just a broad that they used to dress up the broadcast. She wanted to prove something about herself and about being a woman, I guess, and what got her killed-when you come down to it-was, she thought she could use being female on Brewster. When it came down to it, she depended on-" I stopped again. I couldn't think of the right phrase.

"Feminine wiles," Samuelson said.

"Yeah," I said. "Feminine wiles. And it got her killed."

Chapter30.

THE PHONE RANG on Samuelson's desk. The clock in the squad room said twelve twenty-five. I sat almost insentient while Samuelson listened to the phone. He said "Mmm" two, maybe three times, then listened some more. Then hung up without saying anything else.

"D.A.'s office wants to prosecute you," Samuelson said.

I nodded.

"Charges include resisting arrest, a.s.sault and battery on the Oceania security people, and being a bushleague f.u.c.king hot dog."

"They been talking to your chief of detectives," I said.

"They were toying with a kidnapping charge, but since the two guys you held were murder suspects, they don't think it will stand up. But they also got some new hostage laws they want to try out, and they'll probably charge you under one of them."

"Good chance for them to practice," I said.

"Yeah."

We were quiet. The squad room behind us was nearly empty. Samuelson rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand.

"They want me to bring you down and book you." The air conditioner under the window behind Samuelson cycled on with a small thump and a sound of air blowing.

"You got an airline ticket?" Samuelson said.

"In my wallet."

"Okay," he said. "Let's go."

We went out of his office. He shut off the lights and closed the door carefully behind him. We walked through the squad room and out of the corridor and took the elevator down to the first floor.

"This way," Samuelson said.

We walked out the front door and down the steps. The rain had stopped but the dampness still hung in the air. The night was hot and steamy. And you knew it would rain again soon. We walked around the corner and got into an unmarked Chevy sedan. Samuelson drove. We went onto the Harbor Freeway and headed south.

I had my head back against the seat, almost asleep. "You going to book me in Long Beach?" I asked.

"No."

We turned off the Harbor Freeway at the Santa Monica Freeway and went west.

There was no traffic and Samuelson drove fast. In a few minutes we were in West L.A. We turned off the Santa Monica and onto the San Diego Freeway around a big involute cloverleaf. We went south toward the airport.

It was ten of one when Samuelson headed down Century Boulevard toward the L.A. airport.