Flat Spin (13 page)

“The week before Arlo got it, there was some retired schoolteacher got shot one block over. I know two women been raped in the last six months, walking down Ventura Boulevard in broad fuckin’ daylight. I mean, damn, the whole city’s going to hell, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Where’s the Lone Ranger when you need him?”

“Or Batman,” Mr. Clean said.

I gave him my card and told him to call if he came up with any superhero crime-fighting ideas.

I
awoke early the next morning, made coffee, took a quick dip in my ex-wife’s lagoon, an even quicker shower, and called the listing agent on Echevarria’s house. We made arrangements to meet there at nine-thirty a.m. I was out the door by nine a.m. Savannah was still asleep.

A few deviations onto side streets assured me there was still no one tailing me. I got on the freeway. The westbound 101 was moving at a respectable fifty miles an hour. A raven-haired hottie in a convertible Saab glanced my way and smiled as she passed on the left. I decided I was in a good mood. The mood lasted all of five seconds.

“Prepare to exit,” the GPS announced.

“That’ll be enough out of you.”

I didn’t need The Voice harshing my mellow. Good pilots have innate navigational skills. I knew where I was going. I’d been there the night before. I turned off the GPS.

I was northbound on Reseda when my phone rang. Caller ID showed a private number.

“This is Logan.”

“This conversation never happened,” Buzz said.

“What conversation?” I said.

My DIA buddy had done some snooping. Made a few backchannel calls “across the river” to Langley, he said, where he learned that the CIA had concluded its investigation of Echevarria’s murder. The agency’s Counterterrorism Center could find no connection between the interests of their directorate and Echevarria’s untimely demise.

“They could give a giant shit about him,” Buzz said. “As far as Christians in Action are concerned, the guy never existed.”

“A lot of help you are.”

“Did I say I was done, dickweed?”

Buzz had logged into ALIEN, the DIA’s super secret squirrel computer system, and queried whether Echevarria’s name had appeared in any recent requests for intelligence information. The computer spit back a hit.

“Some dumbass at CENTCOM stiffed in an RFI for him about three months ago and was dumb enough to input Echevarria’s name as the requester,” Buzz said. “Echevarria doesn’t show up on any cleared active TS-SCI registers so, boom, the request automatically gets dumped out of the system. The RFI never went through.”

“He never got the information he wanted?”

“I believe I just said that.”

A two-man LAPD cruiser proceeding southbound on Reseda Boulevard whipped a quick U-turn and settled in behind me. I could see the cop in the right seat typing on his Mobile Data Terminal—no doubt the Jaguar’s license plate number, to see if the car was stolen.

“I need the name Echevarria wanted on that request for information.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“My eternal admiration.”

“What about a gift certificate to Dave and Buster’s?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The subject Echevarria sought to research in official files, Buzz said, was none other than Pavel Tarasov, the independent oil broker I’d met in El Molino—the same guy my former father-in-law hoped to do business with in Kazakhstan. Buzz started to spell out Tarasov’s name for me phonetically. I stopped him.

“I know who he is,” I said.

“Wait. Lemme guess. Gay lover?”

“You’re my only gay lover, Buzz.”

“Eat me, Logan.”

“In your dreams, old friend.”

He laughed. According to Buzz, Tarasov’s name turned up in a handful of intelligence cables ranging as far back as the late 1990’s. The man from Minsk had been identified variously as a self-made tycoon, an international playboy with a taste for large-breasted Scandinavian teenagers, and a suspected asset with peripheral ties to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.

“Could be Echevarria was freelancing a counter-intel op,” Buzz speculated. “Drops his guard one night and this guy Tarasov fucks him up.”

“Doesn’t wash. I broke bread with Tarasov. He didn’t strike me as a killer.”

“When do they ever?”

Buzz had a point. The best killers rarely look the part, especially state-sponsored ones. Certainly, Tarasov would have been no exception to that rule. But Buzz knew as well as I did that “peripheral ties” to an intelligence operation did not a full-blown hit man make. Intelligence officers, theirs and ours, routinely debrief thousands of civilian business people every year whose travels take them to countries with perceived strategic importance. Tarasov, I suspected, was likely such an asset. Low grade. Hardly Boris Badenov. I told Buzz I appreciated his help, regardless.

“Just don’t say I never gave you anything,” he said.

“OK. I won’t.”

I signed off as the cops hit their candy bar lights and pulled me over.

A beefy black cop and his vertically challenged white partner climbed out of their patrol car and cautiously approached the Jaguar from either side, hands resting on the grips of their holstered pistols. I kept both hands on top of the steering wheel where they could see them.

“License, registration, and proof of insurance,” the little cop said.

No, “Good morning, sir.” No, “May I
please
see your license?” I don’t care for imperiousness and I have serious problems with authority—a potentially bad combination at any traffic stop—but even more so in the city of Los Angeles, where a rookie was once rumored to have asked his sergeant, “We collared a guy who was beating the hell out of some poor slob for no reason at all. What do we charge him with?” The sergeant was alleged to have responded, “Impersonating a police officer.”

I held my tongue, handed over my driver’s license and insurance card, then reached into Savannah’s glove box for the current registration that I assumed would be there. I could’ve just as easily been looking for a flamethrower given the way both officers tensed, waiting.

“You were clocked at twelve miles an hour over the posted limit,” the little cop said. “It’s also illegal to operate a motor vehicle in the state of California using a cellular telephone without a handsfree device.” He was shaking his head at me like any dummy knew better.

I couldn’t resist. “Well,” I said, “at least you’re short and to the point.”

He smiled wanly, then got out his ticket book and began writing.

A
fter I autographed the citation, I continued north on Reseda, made a left, another left, then a hard right, just as I had the night before. The addresses on Williston Drive ticked down until I came to the house with “5442” stenciled in faded black paint on the curb out front. I noticed that the Pontiac with the Denver boot and the “How’s My Driving?” bumper sticker was gone. So was the “For Sale” sign I’d seen planted in Echevarria’s front yard. Then there was the yard itself. In less than twelve hours, the patch of parched weeds had been miraculously transformed into a lawn as lush and manicured as the infield at Dodger Stadium. Thriving clumps of red and white impatiens bordered the front walk. I thought for an instant that I was having some kind of acid flashback. Only I’d never dropped acid.

The neighborhood looked exactly as it did the night before, but Echevarria’s former residence and the grounds surrounding it were definitely different. I double-checked the address against the one Savannah had jotted down for me: “5442” painted on the curb; “5442” in black numbers nailed up diagonally beside the front door.

The right address. Only I was on the wrong street.

Somehow, I’d turned one block before I was supposed to. Instead of making a left onto Williston Drive, I’d turned onto Radcliff Avenue. So much for innate navigational skills. I turned The Voice back on. Two minutes later, I parked in front of Echevarria’s house.

The real estate agent was waiting out front, pecking on an iPhone. She was squeezed into a white cotton blouse with a collar that spread over the lapels of her sunflower-yellow blazer, and a black skirt that Mr. Blackwell might’ve suggested was a tad too skimpy for a woman of such ample girth and mileage. The vanity plate on her pearl white Lexus read, “ISELL4U.”

I turned off the ignition and got out.

“You must be Mr. Logan.”

“If I must.”

“Hi, Julie Roberts, Century 21.” She shook my hand enthusiastically. “And, yes, I know it sounds like
Julia
Roberts, but we’re not related, though the family resemblance
is
undeniable. I like to tell everybody we’re sisters from other misters.”

She waited with an expectant smile for me to respond to her over-rehearsed little quip. I tittered and apologized for being late. She handed me her business card as we walked to the front door.

I noticed that she’d stationed a couple of potted palms on the porch to make the house look less like the hovel it was. She asked me if I was pre-qualified loan-wise. I said I was. This seemed to please her. She asked me if I was working with any other agents. I said I wasn’t. This seemed to please her even more. She put on a pair of frameless reading glasses, stooped to squint at the digital lockbox hanging from the knob, and punched in the combination. She removed a key from the box and turned the dead bolt. As she opened the front door, she looked back at me as if we were about to enter the Magic Kingdom and said, “Prepare to be ab-so-lutely amazed.”

“Can’t wait,” I said.

The walls were freshly whitewashed. The carpeting in the living room was camel color and new. The kitchen appliances were old but serviceable. The cabinets were knotty pine, with strap-iron pulls and matching hinges, better suited to a cabin in Yogi and Boo-Boo’s Jellystone Park than some downscale tract house in the San Fernando Valley; but who was I to play interior designer? I lived in a converted garage.

“Isn’t the light in here just
won
derful? And how about all this counter space,” the real estate agent gushed, rapping on the counter with her knuckles. “FYI, this is
real
Formica, not the fake stuff.”

“Wow.”

Nothing about the house whispered murder scene. Any trace of blood had long since been scrubbed clean. I wondered if Echevarria’s ghost roamed the place. I listened for it, but all I heard was a loud grinding sound.

“A full one horsepower,” Julie Roberts said, turning off the garbage disposal. “Anything you want—chicken bones, peach pits. Gone. They don’t make ’em like these anymore.”

“Remind me not to put any fingers down there.”

She led me into the bathroom. The tile top on the vanity was mint green with a darker green bull-nose trim. The grout had gone gray with age and was streaked with rust stains. Somebody had hung a new vinyl shower curtain with lime green polka dots. The bathroom reeked of Lysol.

“The seller, by the way, is highly motivated. He’ll entertain any reasonable offer.”

“Why’s he selling?”

“He owns several rentals. He’s just tired of the whole scene. Bad tenants, late payments, cats going pee-pee on everything, pardon my French—though not in this property, thank heavens, because you can
never
get that smell out, believe-you-me. He and his wife are retiring to Arizona. They want to be closer to the grandkids.”

California law requires that a homeowner disclose any known problems associated with the history of the property they’re selling. A leaky roof, barking dogs, people shot to death in the entryway— all must be revealed to the prospective buyer. The owner of the house had to have known about Echevarria’s murder. Whether or not Julie Roberts did was another story. If she did, she covered it well.

“Let me show you the backyard,” she said. “It has
loads
of potential.”

The backyard was a mirror image of the front. A small patch of parched earth, only populated with vastly more dandelions. There was a chain-link fence and a gate that led to an alley. Piled against the gate were three rolls of stained carpeting and a half-dozen black Hefty bags filled with trash.

“You could build a fantastic deck out here,” Julie Roberts said. “Put in a grill, hot tub, a privacy fence. Your own little Shangri-la. You ask me, the possibilities are ab-so-lutely endless.”