The Fallen
- Автор: Паркер Т. Джефферсон
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-06-056238-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Fallen». Краткое содержание книги:
April came into the room, fresh in her SeaWorld uniform. Luckily, a print file was on-screen by then. She looked so innocent and young and I suddenly fully understood what a good thing Asplundh had done for her. She handed me a key and asked me to give it to Davey on our way out.
“I hope you get whoever killed Jimmy,” she said. “I’ll do anything to help. You can call me anytime if you have more questions.”
“Call us if you think of anything,” I said. I wrote down her cell phone and driver’s license numbers. She took my card with a nod and walked out.
I sat back down next to McKenzie in front of the laptop.
Garrett had collected more than just dirty videos. Print files on his laptop included names and numbers, addresses, job descriptions, biographies, even financial and medical information on the johns. I wondered if he’d hit up Hollis Harris for a few free hidden threat assessments to help protect America’s Finest City. Holding together these informational paragraphs were Garrett’s own comments and notes and questions, easily identifiable in a large, bold typeface. Some of the pages looked like the Bible with Christ’s words in bold type that my parents gave me when I was twelve and baptized. There were thirty-two print documents and some of them went on for almost a hundred pages.
Into one file Garrett had scanned phone bills from the Squeaky Clean girls, apparently trying to close the loop between them, the johns, the spot callers, and the madam herself.
Tough job, because none of Jordan Sheehan’s six phone numbers appeared in any of the girls’ bills, although the numbers of three spot callers did. But there was no way to prove what any of them were talking about without a wiretap, and Garrett had noted caustically that Abel Sarvonola says the city doesn’t have the money to buy the Ethics Authority one piece of phone-intercept equipment, but it can pay for empty seats at Chargers games.
He rambled on about the wiretap problem for a while, then this interesting paragraph:
Think about it for one second, Stella. Sarvonola says no money for Ethics. Just like there was no money for fire protection while half the county burned and the firefighters didn’t have enough batteries for their walkie-talkies. And don’t forget we’ve got good honest city workers with a failing pension after some of them paid into it for thirty years. These are just more examples of the collapse that’s coming, Stella. The crash that nobody will talk about.
“He’s pissed at Sarvonola,” said McKenzie. “Because the Budget Oversight Committee calls the money shots at City Hall. And Abel Sarvonola rules the Oversight Committee.”
“Because Sarvonola values a losing football team over the Ethics Authority,” I said. I’d always thought that the Budget Oversight Committee was too eager to please the wealthy businessmen who profit so hugely from our city.
Garrett angrily went on to note that his attempts to get any SDPD Vice recordings between the Squeaky Clean Madam and her business associates had been denied, twice, by Captain Fellowes, whom we’d just seen on disc.
“He’s even pissed at us,” said McKenzie. “His old employer.”
“You can’t have cops doing stuff like that,” I said.
But my comment made me think again of decking the muscular husband after claiming Gina’s engraved Hikari shears. I had broken the law, too.
Another line in Garrett’s voluminous notes caught my eye, largely because I’d seen part of it before:
Could lay all or most of this out at the 3/16 meet with Kaven, JVF & Att. Gen, though the backfire could consume us all.
“What do you think he meant by this?” I asked McKenzie. I turned the monitor to face her.
“He means if the state attorney general gets involved, the cure may be worse than the disease.”
That put Garrett in an interesting situation, I thought: He wanted to clean up the dirt without hurting the city. Could you really do that? That was the trouble with corruption. The bigger the players who went down, the bigger the headlines got and the worse the city looked. So it was always the little ones — the ones mixed up in things they didn’t necessarily ask for, the ones who wouldn’t be missed — who were sacrificed. And the big fish eased back under their rocks to let the storm blow over.
I closed the document and scanned down the menu of videos again. One of the available videos caught my eye because it was so short.
JS Live was listed at just eight seconds long.
So I clicked play and rubbed my eyes and sat back.
First a blond woman, fortyish, sat down at what appeared to be a restaurant bar and smiled at the camera. She wore a lacy white blouse under a black blazer and her straight thick hair was cut just above her shoulders.
“Oh, Garrett, what’s this?” she asked brightly. Her smile was generous. Pretty teeth and lips. She fingered her hair behind one ear, revealing an earring the shape of a crescent moon with a small jewel on the inside of the curve.
She was still smiling as her hand left her hair and came toward the camera.
“My window on the world,” said a man, probably Garrett.
“You must think I’m a real idiot.”
Then everything got noisy and the picture went black.
I played it back again.
“Squeaky Clean herself?” I asked.
“That’s her,” said McKenzie. “Jordan Sheehan.”
I played the fragment several more times.
“Didn’t take her long to find the hidden camera,” I said.
“Eight seconds,” said McKenzie. “That was the Onyx Room, by the way.”
“Never been.”
“The tourists haven’t discovered it yet,” said McKenzie. “But you gotta be cool to go there. Not some happily married guy who likes to stay in at night.”
I thought of Gina again, maybe on her lunch break by now. I thought of all the men who’d like to take her out for that lunch. Her boss, Chambers, was boldly homosexual, which made me feel only slightly better. Watching the videos had filled me with a fresh wave of longing for Gina and made her departure even sharper and more punishing. For the first time since she’d left, I believed it was possible — though I believed it only for one terrifying moment — that I’d never see her again.
“Maybe Hollis can drive you there in his red Ferrari,” I said.
“Robbie, I have to confess, that car turned me limp in one block. Luckily, I recovered walking into Dobson’s.”
“He didn’t carry you?”
She smiled. “I don’t think he’s strong enough.”
Her cell phone beeped and she put a hand on my shoulder and stood.
McKenzie and I rarely banter about personal things like this. I think that viewing the lewd material had left us both a little thankful for each other’s unlewd company, as if we’d come through something difficult together.
I heard her writing as she listened, thanked somebody, and rang off. I looked at the picture of the river tacked to the wall under the window. It took me a minute to really see that picture.
“Finally,” she said. “Verizon Security. Those 212 calls made on Garrett’s cell phone the week he died were to Trey Vinson of New York, New York. Never heard of him. But I got his stats from warrants and records.”
While McKenzie made the call, I checked Garrett’s e-mail directory and found Trey Vinson.
Garrett had his e-mail and two phone numbers and the name and address of his company in New York City — Jance Purdew Investment Services. I knew them from my days in Fraud. They were one of the big credit-rating agencies on Wall Street, up there in size with Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. Jance Purdew helped keep investors from getting ripped off by unscrupulous issuers of stocks and bonds.