CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR #2
The investigator turned his hand from side to side as if he had good news on the one hand, but bad news on the other hand. Then he looked at Tabby.
“This is Miss Morgan. Tabby, this is Lou Fenson.”
“How are you, ma’am?” Lou said as he tipped a hat he didn’t have on his head.
Which seemed old-fashioned to Tabby, but in a good way. “I’m good. And you?”
“My old ass tired, but other than that I’m great.”
Tabby laughed. “I hear you.”
“Were you able to find that asshole?” Stuart asked him.
But Lou shook his head. “Not at all, sir. And we searched everywhere humanly possible. He packed up his house and left without a trace.”
“Which could only mean whomever paid him to lie on me paid him handsomely.”
“Oh it had to be major bucks,” Lou agreed. “Every one of his friends insisted he loved his job. To a man they said he wouldn’t walk away from that job unless he was forced to, or somebody paid him big time to leave.”
“Which means whomever tried to kill Alan,” Stuart said, “was behind that takeover.”
Tabby couldn’t connect those dots. “Why would you say that?” she asked Stuart.
“The mastermind behind the takeover of my corporation handed out tens of millions of dollars to get Alan to the finish line. That kind of money doesn’t flow around every day. The money connects it,” Stuart added.
Tabby nodded, but it still seemed like a weak connection to her.
“We don’t have that asshole,” Lou said, “but we got the tape.”
Stuart sat upright, his arm across Tabby’s stomach. “What do you mean you’ve got the tape? What tape?”
Tabby was intrigued, too, as Lou pulled out an iPad, turned it on, and scrolled to the appropriate folder.
“That ticket taker turned off all cameras at 9:42pm. And he wiped clean all video from ten minutes before that. But unlike those sorry-ass cameras in Larkin, where they didn’t even both with getting a service, these cameras were the real deal.
Just because you wiped something clean with these cameras doesn’t make it clean.
Those ten minutes he wiped were already in the cloud. ” He handed the iPad to Stuart.
Stuart anxiously took the tablet and sat it on Tabby’s lap.
Then he pressed Play. They watched intensely as a red and gray BMW drove into the parking garage at the condominium building where Alan lived.
When the driver stopped at the booth, the ticket taker, an overweight Hispanic male, reached for the driver’s ID since only residents could enter the garage.
The heavily-tinted window pressed down, but no ID came out. A thick envelope was passed to the ticket taker. The ticket taker looked at the envelope like he was confused. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Look and see.” It was the voice of a man inside the BMW, whose face was obscured because of the camera angle.
“Damn we can’t see him,” Stuart said irritably as they continued watching.
The ticket taker was on camera as he opened the envelope and found what looked like a massive wad of big bills. His eyes stretched. He looked at the driver.
“This is what’s going to happen,” the driver said.
“You’re going to turn off all cameras inside this garage immediately.
Then you’re going to erase this conversation, me driving up to this booth, and everything else that happened in this garage from right now to ten minutes back.
“You feel me?” A gun was suddenly pointed at the ticket taker.
“Yes sir,” he responded.
“Then, I’m going to go in, take care of my business, and leave. After I leave, you can call the police. And when they show up, you’d better tell them that the man you saw was driving a white Porsche, and he looked exactly like Stuart Jacobs. You understand me?”
Stuart and Tabby were inwardly elated, but they wanted to see the whole video as the ticket taker was nodding to everything the driver said. “Yes sir.”
“You do all of that,” the driver said, “then I won’t hunt you down like a mangy dog. After you do what I told you to do, then you’ll have five hundred thousand dollars, in addition to what I’ve just given you, waiting underneath that lawn mower cover, in a briefcase, in your backyard. You feel me?”
The ticket taker nodded even more vigorously. “Yes sir. I sure do.”
“Now get busy. Turn off every camera and then get to erasing everything I told you to erase.”
It didn’t take but seconds for that ticket taker to do what he was told. If larceny was in your blood, Stuart knew, it didn’t take much at all to turn you. That ticket taker turned to the dark side almost faster than the speed of light. And that was when the entire recording went to black.
But it was enough. Stuart and Lou knew it too. “Whoever was in that BMW didn’t say what he planned to do,” Stuart said, “but he was right in the timeframe that they said Alan was shot.”
“It’s perfect proof that that ticket taker was paid to lie on you,” said Lou. “Even that idiotic DA can’t argue with this kind of evidence.”
Stuart smiled. “Not even her,” he said happily.
But Tabby still looked concerned. “Rewind that tape,” she said.
Stuart and Lou looked at her. “Tab, you okay?” Stuart asked her.
“Rewind that tape.”
Stuart and Lou glanced at each other. Then Stuart did as Tabby asked and rewound the tape.
“Stop right there,” she said quickly when the driver started talking. Then she leaned back. “It’s him.”
Stuart was confused. “It’s who?”
“You know him?” Lou asked.
“I know him.”
“Who is it?”
“Stuart, it’s Darius.”
Stuart frowned. “Who’s Darius?”
“My ex-boyfriend. The one I told you about that owned that clothing store on Grant Street. The one that white girl was fighting me about. It’s him. I’m telling you it’s him.”
“What kind of car does he drive?” Lou asked her.
She looked at him. “A red and gray BMW. That car,” she said, pointing at the car on the tablet. “That’s his car. I declare it is!”
Stuart could hardly believe it. “But why would your ex want to shoot down my son?”
“I have no idea. But that’s Darius’s voice, and that’s definitely his car. Fast-forward it to the very end. But stop before you get there.”
Stuart pressed fast-forward on the video. And then stopped just before the tape went to black.
“You see it there?” Tabby asked, pointing to the screen. “You see that blue strip around the rim of that front driver side tire?”
They saw it. “What about it?” Stuart asked.
“He added that two months ago. To make his car stand out from the crowd. That’s his car. And that’s his voice.”
“But why would he want to harm my son, and pin it on me?”
Tabby couldn’t answer neither of those questions. They all were floored.
“What do we do, Boss?” Lou asked. “Take her and that tape to the DA?”
“So the DA can sit on this evidence for another week? Hell no. We’ve got to handle this ourselves. We’ve got to check out that car, and then have a conversation with this Darius.”
He looked at Tabby. “Looks like you’re going back to Larkin after all,” he said.
She was pleased that she could check on her home. But Darius was involved in a murder plot? Darius? She was alarmed too.