Alex Ames - Calendar Moonstone 02 - Brilliant Actors (30 page)

I unscrewed the lid and fished for the rat in the sucking water rush. I found it, pulled it out, pinned it under my knee, and stored the new package. There was some kind of filter mesh inside the outlet tube that probably was easy to remove when you drained the pool, and neither package nor dead rat were in danger of being swept away by the outlet’s current. I let the rat slip in again and screwed the lid back on. Easy piece of work.

I got out of the pool and gave a small whistle to Mick. His whistle tune returned the okay signal, and I packed my stuff, got out a large towel, and tip-toed back the way I had come, removing any wet spots on the teak wood deck with the towel.
 

Ten minutes later, we were back at the car.
 

“That was almost disappointingly easy,” Mick said as we were driving back. “Where to?”

“Back to my car, please. I have to be home when your call comes in, in case things move fast afterward.”

“Don’t forget to sleep, my little zombie-cousin,” Mick said.

Fowler Wynn’s LA office received the anonymous call at 9:30 in the morning. What we didn’t know was that all overflowing calls to the LA number were routed automatically to a headquarters call center in London, England, where a call manager took the call. As things got broken, gems got stolen, and ships went down all over the world, there were about one-hundred calls queued before ours, and it took some hours until a case manager was assigned to the tip-off of Mr. Rip Delaware, Van Nuys. The case manager duly routed the case to the LA office.

At that time, the incident manager in LA was at lunch with a client and came back around 2:00. He had twenty-five emails in his inbox and got into official case action around 2:30. Fowler Wynn, so it is said, had one of his famous super-shit-fits in the office which resulted in a broken chair and a frightened case manager. The second Fowler had taken action, things were moving quickly. Fowler called Henry, and Henry called Van Nuys PD, Beverly Hills PD, and then me.

“Cal, someone gave Fowler’s insurance a tip-off about Rip. He is holed up in Van Nuys, and we plan to hit him soon.”

“Yes!” I exclaimed through the phone. “That is great news!” I tried to sound as enthusiastic as possible while I had sat on hot coals most of the day. “Who called in?”

“We don’t know. It was an anonymous phone call by a male person.” He made it sound as if it that let me off the hook. “We don’t know the exact words as the call came in through London, but it basically said that it was a tip regarding the Hollywood jewelry thefts and that a certain Rip Delaware was residing at a certain address in Van Nuys. We will receive a transcript soon.”

“Okay, that’s great. I will be so glad if we catch that little rat,” I said.

“Listen, Calendar, would you like to accompany us to Van Nuys? I am driving over any minute.”

“I don’t think it would be a good idea, Henry. If he sees me, he will build up a larger grudge against me than necessary.”

“The Van Nuys police will want some kind of identification that he is the guy who was involved in the Beverly Hills theft of the Collins jewels. Can I ask you to come over to the Van Nuys PD later to make that identification?”

“Sure, where should I go?” What else could I say?
 

The “later” part turned out to be early the next morning. Not that I was complaining, still catching up with my sleep. It appeared that getting a search warrant and questioning Rip had taken longer than anticipated. At 6:00 A.M., my phone rang, and Henry summoned me over to the North Hollywood Police Station. Just to be on the safe side, I asked for directions.
 

The ride was uneventful as the freeways held only the very early morning manager traffic. I parked my car in the visitors’ parking lot beside the faceless architecture of the station. I registered at the front desk, and Henry picked me up and led me upstairs.
 

“Sleep well?” he asked and pecked me on the cheek.
 

“More or less. I expected your call sooner.”

“Yeah, I had hoped for better results so far. Your friend Rip is a cool customer and has just asked for his lawyer so far. We grilled him for an hour, but he is very polite, so we had to give up.”

“And the search of the house?” I asked.

Henry’s forehead crinkled. “No such luck. The detectives searched the house and parts of the premises but found nothing of relevance so far. He either hides it well or outside of his domain.”

I bit my lip in anger. Stupid, stupid, stupid! If only we had placed that call two hours later.

Upstairs in the detective’s area, I was introduced to the detective who had led the arrest and the search—Falk Doren, a large blonde hulk, who could have defended Norway singlehandedly against the Romans. I shook hands with Lucas Graves, who nodded gravely, and with Franco Timpani, the Hispanic Redondo Beach detective who investigated the Propers break-in. There was an assistant DA present, a woman whose name I didn’t catch; she just waved from her cellphone.

Falk Doren, as the MC of the morning, asked me officially to please identify Mr. Delaware.

“Couldn’t Lieutenant Graves do the honor? I mean, he was present when….”

“Yeah, but you make it even more official,” Doren said gravely.
 

I wondered what kind of strange circus this was all about, but maybe they wanted to cross the
t
’s and dot the
i
’s. Doren checked with two colleagues and after a thumbs-up led us into a room where we could look into an interrogation room, a one-way mirror, no doubt. Rip stood between four unlikely candidates and managed even to look amused.
 

“Are you sure you have him arrested?” I asked Doren. “He not only looks smug, he even looks optimistic.”

Doren shook his head. “If we don’t find anything, we have to release him. So the tip-off better be good.”

“Did the caller give any leads where to look?” I asked, steering him.

“We are waiting for an email transcript of the call, now that London is working again, but I doubt it.” He cleared his throat. “Do you recognize who you were with the moment you were arrested by Lieutenant Graves?”

“Yes, second from the left, that’s the guy I know as Rip Delaware.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s it?”
 

“What did you expect? Rip making a scene? He is a cool customer.”

There were some discussions among the detectives about how to proceed. Doren picked up the phone when it rang, said, “Thank you,” and fired up his computer and accessed his email. The printer started. “What you will see now is the transcript of the tip that the insurance office in London received that led us to the Adlon apartment.” Doren had printed it out with large font size, and we all gathered around the paper.
 

“Why is the caller-ID blocked?” Henry asked, annoyed. “Don’t the English trust their old colony?”

“Are you aware of the definition of ‘anonymous tip line’?” Doren looked at Henry.

“And, technically, California has never been a British colony,” Lucas Graves stated.

“Limes & Limes has an elaborate process to shield the call. The tip line receives the call, and the computer automatically transcribes the call into text. After the call, the agent has five minutes to check the transcription against the recording of the call, after which the audio is deleted automatically and non-recoverable. All that is left is the word,” I added.

“And you know all of this how?” asked Doren.

“The insurance guy Fowler has explained it to me” Graves said. “You should….”

“Shut up and read!” the woman DA said, and the boys behaved.

Inbound ID: 10005426788

LLU Route: ++1 213 555-34456100

April 2, 17:32:35 GMT

CA: Limes and Limes Underwriters. My name is Carl; how may I help you?

UIC: Is this Limes and Limes, the insurance?
 

CA: Yes, sir, how may I be of assistance?

UIC: I have information about a break-in that your insurance is covering.

CA: Sure, what can you tell me?

UIC: There has been a series of break-ins in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills area.
 

CA: I am not aware of that case personally, sir, but I will channel that information promptly. Would you mind giving me your name, or do you want to stay anonymous?

UIC: You will find some of the stolen goods at 16 Adlon Place in Van Nuys at the residence of Rip Delaware, also known as Robert Dearson.

CA: That gentleman has information regarding that particular break-in?

UIC: Not only that, he has the stolen goods hidden.

CA: Why are you calling this in?

Pause for about 3 seconds

CA: Sir? Are you still there?

UIC: Let’s say, I got wet feet! (Laugh)

CA: Sir? Are you still there? Can you give me more information? Sir?

Inbound terminated

April 2, 17:33:14 GMT

Henry pointed to the
hidden
paragraph. “He has it ‘hidden,’ but the caller didn’t say that it is on Delaware’s property. Or elsewhere!”

Graves said, “He gave us Rip, who we had lost track off after the Oscar party, but all in all he didn’t give us anything.”

Doren just read it through again, silently, chewing his lower lip.
 

I didn’t dare to say anything yet. Let them sit on it for a few more minutes.

Doren tapped his pen at the last line of the unidentified caller. “This thing with the wet feet….”

“Come on, just a guy who tried to sound cool and come up with a great exit line. You know, like: he used to be my partner, but today I am going to fuck him over,” Henry said. I could have kicked my almost-boyfriend for that remark but just nodded dumbly, like a bimbo may have done.

Graves looked at Henry again. My boyfriend didn’t earn many points with these hotshots. “The term is: ‘getting cold feet,’ not ‘wet.’ So it could be a word game?”

“No, no, you could read it differently,” Doren argued. Hooray for Van Nuys bravest. “Wet feet. See here. Could be a hint. Did we look at the pool?” He looked up and waved at another colleague working away on a computer on his desk. “Jamie, did we check out the pool more closely?”

Detective Jamie stopped typing on his computer. “We dragged the bottom, and we checked the filter machine and the tubes. Nada.”

“Homer and Washington are still searching?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Let’s drain the pool.”

“Are we covered?”

“Let him sue us; it is just one filling. Hundred bucks or something.” He looked around us. “He is too slippery and—how did Miss Moonstone here put it? Too optimistic. That means he is overly self-assured.”

Doren walked over to the desk without waiting for the opinion of his colleagues and called Detective Simpson for a change of plan.
 

“What’s next?” I asked Henry.

“Donuts,” he said as the desk sergeant brought in a box of Dunkin’s. “We continue the search. We will hold Rip until tonight; after that, we will have to release him.”

“I thought you could hold him for forty-eight hours?”

“Theoretically, yes, but we have to bear in mind that the case so far is pretty shaky. If we exercise the full forty-eight hours without a case in the end, we may get into trouble with civil right groups. All we have is the anonymous phone call, and we don’t even have that but only an unofficial transcript.”

We had a round of bad coffee—well, I had fountain water—and bad donuts—well, I skipped. We made small talk for a while. Doren went back to question Rip for a few more minutes.
 

When he came back, he just shrugged. “I told him about our fishing expedition in the pool. No reaction. The pool action will take at least three to four hours, so we might as well call it a day. No need for most of you to stick around.”

Graves looked at his clock. “Yeah, back to the chain gang. Keep me in the loop. Miss Moonstone.” He nodded and went his way. I shook hands, and Henry walked me back down and out into the morning.
 

He stretched and breathed in heartily. “Ah, I could use a walk on the beach with my favorite jewelry maker!”

I nudged him. “Stop it. I will be so glad when this is over. Even Graves acted a little bit friendlier toward me.”

“Think we will find something in the pool?” Once a cop, always a cop.

I shrugged. “Who knows? In my opinion, it’s silly to hide something there. Very incriminating. Why not somewhere else where the police wouldn’t think of looking? Or somewhere completely off the premises?”

Henry gave the parking lot a routine glance, probably looking for car thieves or daylight muggings. “Yeah! But who knows? Maybe we—and you—are lucky. See you tonight for a walk on the beach?”

“What about dinner? I’ll cook. We can meet around five-thirty, watch the sunset on the beach, and then eat at my place.”

Henry beamed genuinely at me. “Sounds great. I am beat after last night’s action. Let me give you a call around, let’s say, five. Just to confirm the date. Hopefully no jokers will rob a bank just at that time so you have to throw my food into the disposal.”

He pecked me on the cheek again, I gave him a quick hug, and Henry went back in. I made my way over to my car. I started and, just when I got out of the police plaza parking lot, spotted a supermarket on the other side of the road.
When in LA, do like the Angelinos do.
I drove across the street and parked the car just fifty feet from my last parking position.
 

I breezed through the aisles and collected some fresh ingredients for a yummy salad and some pasta sauce. Then I bought the most expensive bottle of wine on the rack. While I was waiting to check out, I spotted a display with five different styles of condoms. I looked left and right to see how embarrassing things could turn out and finally selected a five-pack of Trojans, making sure they were properly tagged to avoid unnecessary clarification shouts through the market.

The checkout girl didn’t even look up as she scanned the incriminating pack and I paid. I received my two brown bags and made my way across the parking lot toward my car.