Chapter 6
I WALKED McEVOY back to the cage to leave him with Lorna. He looked at the stacks on the tables, all of them at least six inches high.
“Anyplace in particular you want me to start?” he asked.
“Lorna, which one is training and testing?” I asked.
“That one,” Lorna said. She pointed to the shortest stack.
“Start there,” I said. “Take notes. Look for flaws, look for shortcuts. Figure out what they’re hiding.”
“Sure,” McEvoy said. “Easy enough.”
I noted the sarcasm. McEvoy moved toward the table.
“Cisco, you’re with me,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Where we going?” Cisco asked.
“To see Rikki Patel.”
“You sure you need me?”
“Yes, Cisco, let’s go.”
I went through the copper curtain and headed toward the warehouse door. I registered Cisco’s reluctance as concern about leaving Lorna with McEvoy. I didn’t address it until we were outside and at my car. I looked at him across the roof.
“You vetted him yourself and he came up clean,” I said. “So what’s the problem?”
“With McEvoy?” Cisco said. “No problem.”
“You don’t have to worry about Lorna. She can handle herself.”
“I know she can. But I still have to worry about her. That’s my job.”
“Your other job. Right now, I need you on this job.”
“Fine. I’m here. What’s the rush with Patel if the judge okayed him as a witness?”
“He hasn’t returned my calls all weekend or today. We’re going to see him and get him on tape before the Mason boys file a motion to stay the judge’s ruling while they appeal.”
I unlocked the car and we got in.
“Did you leave him a message about the ruling this morning?” Cisco asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But he hasn’t called me back. I hope the twins didn’t get to him and pay him off.”
“Mason and Mason? No, no way. He hates those guys and the company, says Tidalwaiv ruined his life. Said they blackballed him. He definitely wants payback. Wants his day in court. After you win this case, he wants to hire you to sue Victor Wendt personally as well as the company.”
“If he likes me so much, then why isn’t he calling me back?”
“I don’t know, man. Last time we spoke, he was talking about moving back up north to try the job market up there again. But he promised to let me know if he made the move.”
“So what was his last known address down here?”
“Venice Beach.”
Cisco was too big for the car, and we were looking at a minimum thirty-minute drive out to the beach.
He was an ex-biker and didn’t bother to disguise it—thick shoulders and biceps on a six-four frame.
These days I was driving a Chevy Bolt. It was small and cozy, and the top of Cisco’s head brushed the ceiling.
The car was a comedown in space and comfort from a chauffeured Lincoln Navigator, but on the other side of the ledger, I hadn’t been at a gas station in fifteen months.
We took the 10 out west. Every time I glanced over at Cisco, he was looking at the camera feeds from the warehouse on his phone.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” I finally said. “What is your problem with the writer?”
“My problem is the guy has a track record of involvement with women he works with, okay?” Cisco replied.
“So what, man? You don’t trust Lorna?”
“I trust her. It’s him I don’t trust.”
“Lorna makes good choices. You don’t have to worry. Besides, you have six inches and about a hundred pounds on the guy—he’s not going to try something. You gotta let it go so your mind is focused on the case. I’m serious. We can’t fuck this up.”
“All right, all right. I’m focused. You don’t have to worry about me, Mick. I’m fucking focused.”
“Good. Where in Venice are we going?”
“He’s at twenty-five Breeze. It’s one of the walk streets off Pacific. Good luck finding a parking space.”
“At least we’re not in a Navigator. That boat was hard to park anywhere.”
“I wish we were in the Navigator. I’d at least be able to fit.”
It took almost forty minutes in traffic to get there, and true to Cisco’s concern, there was no parking to be had anywhere near Breeze Avenue.
I finally gave up and parked in a beach lot off Speedway.
We legged it five blocks back to Patel’s bungalow, which was in a neighborhood where the houses faced each other across a paved walkway and no vehicles were allowed.
As we walked down Breeze, I got a text from Lorna.
“Shit,” I said when I’d read it.
“What is it?” Cisco said.
“The Masons already filed an appeal and Ruhlin wants to hear arguments at three this afternoon on their request for a stay.”
“So we can’t talk to Patel?”
“Technically, no. But I’d turned my phone off and didn’t get the text from Lorna.”
I did just that as we approached 25 Breeze.
The house was behind a line of unkempt jasmine bushes that spilled over a short perimeter fence.
Past an unlocked half gate were the steps of a small bungalow with a full covered porch.
The wood decking, long exposed to sea air, creaked and sagged under our combined weight of four hundred–plus pounds.
Before we even knocked on the door, Cisco made an eerie observation.
“Somebody’s dead.”
“What?”
“You smell that?”
“Yeah, that’s the jasmine.”
“That ain’t jasmine, Mick. We open this door and you’ll get it.”
He looked over at the porch’s furnishings. There was a cushioned couch, two chairs, and a low table. It was set up like an outdoor living room. There were decorative pillows on the couch, and Cisco grabbed two of them and tossed one to me.
“Use that.”
“For what?”
“The smell.”
He approached the front door. There was a glass inset in the upper half. He cupped his hands over his eyes and leaned toward the glass, looking past the reflection of outside light. It was dark inside.
“There’s a note,” he said. “On the floor.”
I stepped up next to him and looked through the glass. There was a loose piece of paper on the floor, waiting for whoever entered.
“Can you make out what it says?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Cisco said. “Says ‘rear bedroom.’ It came from a printer.”
“That’s it? Just ‘rear bedroom’?”
“That’s it.”
I knocked on the glass.
“Nobody’s going to answer, Mick,” Cisco said.
He seemed sure. I knocked again anyway. Cisco didn’t wait for a response. He tried the door handle, a brass loop with a thumb lever below a dead bolt. It was unlocked, and he pushed the door open. It swept the note on the entry rug to the side.
Then the odor hit us fully. I was immediately revolted by the smell of death. I almost gagged. In unison, we held our pillows up to our mouths and noses.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Told you,” Cisco said.
Our voices were muffled. I stepped into the house.
“Wait,” Cisco said. “What are we doing?”
“We’re going in,” I said. “We’re going to find out who’s dead.”
“You sure? Maybe we should just call the cops?”
“Don’t worry, we will.”
I stepped farther in and he followed. There was a dining room to the left with a table holding a desktop computer and a small printer. Documents in unkempt stacks surrounded it.
On the right was a small living room with a fireplace.
A darkened hallway led to the back of the house, and Cisco went first, using his elbow to hit a wall switch that turned on the ceiling lights.
He passed an archway on the left that led into the kitchen, and an open door on the right that led to a small bedroom.
At the end of the hall was a doorway to a bathroom and an open door to a large bedroom.
The primary. We entered, and it was dark because blackout curtains had been pulled across the windows.
I could see the shape of someone sitting up in the bed, silhouetted against a blond-wood headboard.
“Hello?” I said.
No reply.
Cisco used his elbow again to turn on a ceiling light, this one above the bed.
We then saw the body clearly. A man of about thirty with dark hair sitting up, lower body under the covers.
He was obviously dead, eyes slitted. A dark liquid, now dried, had flowed from his nose and mouth onto a green T-shirt.
The hands were above the covers and on his lap. His left hand held a cell phone.
I had never met Rikki Patel. He’d called me following the filing of the Tidalwaiv suit, and I sent Cisco to do the preliminary interview and judge whether he could be a credible witness.
Once that was confirmed, I’d had one or two calls with him but kept my distance because of discovery concerns.
I didn’t want to give Tidalwaiv a heads-up that I was recruiting him to testify until I had to submit my first list of witnesses.
“Is that Rikki Patel?” I asked.
“It’s him,” Cisco said.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
Cisco stepped up to the bed table next to the body. He pulled out his phone, turned on the light, and focused it on the table, where there was an open amber-colored prescription bottle. He bent down close to it to try to read the label without touching it.
“OxyContin,” he said. “Prescribed by a Dr. Patel, DDS. A dentist. It’s empty.”
“His father?” I asked.
“Who knows? Patel is like the Indian version of Smith.”
Cisco turned off his light and pocketed his phone. He turned away from the body to me.
“I guess we call the cops now,” he said.
“Not yet,” I said. “You see any note?”
My mind was racing with thoughts about what Patel’s death meant to my case. I knew that his death was a tragedy for him and his loved ones, but I couldn’t help considering the impact on the upcoming trial.
“Uh, no note,” Cisco said. “Other than the one at the door. But he might’ve been texting somebody.”
I looked at the phone in the dead man’s hand. The screen was up in a position that suggested he’d been looking down at the device at the end.
“We have to look at that phone,” I said.
“Mick, you don’t want to fuck around with a possible crime scene,” Cisco said. “It’s pretty obvious what happened here, but you don’t want this to come back at you. We need to call the cops.”
“I told you, we will.”
“Don’t do this, Mick. Let’s just back the fuck out of here and call the cops.”
I didn’t answer him. I looked around and saw a box of tissues on the bed within reach of Patel. I pulled out two.
“What are you doing?” Cisco asked.
“I just want to see what he was doing,” I said.
I came back around the bed, passed Cisco, and went to the dead man’s side. Using a tissue to guard my fingers, I pulled the phone from Patel’s grasp.
“Jesus, Mick,” Cisco said.
I ignored him and used a finger wrapped in tissue to depress the button on the side of the phone. Nothing happened. The screen remained black. The battery was dead.
“Damn.”
“Just put it back, Mick. We go out and call the cops like the good citizens we are.”
I carefully put the phone back where it had been.
“Let’s look around,” I said.
I headed down the hallway to the front of the house.
Cisco followed but cut through the kitchen while I went to the dining room.
Using the tissue, I pushed around the stacks of documents on either side of the computer.
They were all unpaid bills, final notices, and letters from collection agencies for power, cable, Wi-Fi, car payments, insurance, and rent.
At the bottom of one stack was an eviction notice that had been served by the L.A.
County Sheriff’s Office just before Christmas.
It gave Patel thirty days to vacate the property.
I knew from handling evictions in the past that you could go nearly a year without paying rent before a landlord finally had you physically evicted.
Patel was obviously at the end of the line.
“The side door is locked with a dead bolt. Nobody went out that way.”
I turned. Cisco had come from the kitchen.
He was holding the pillow from the porch at his side, as the odor of death seemed far less intrusive at the front of the house.
I had kept my pillow in place, hoping it would help me avoid retching.
I turned back to the table and used a tissue-clad finger to touch the space bar on the computer keyboard.
The screen lit up, but there was an empty password window guarding entry.
I was not going to be able to see what Rikki Patel’s last work and messages were.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Call the cops, right?” Cisco said.
“Outside.”
“I guess you can cancel that court hearing today.”
“No way. I’m going to be there. On the day the judge rules Patel can be a witness, he ends up dead? I’m going to have something to say about that.”
“Mick, the guy’s been dead for days. You saw the body, you smelled it. That’s why you couldn’t reach him over the weekend. Besides, it’s an obvious suicide. The side door is locked from the inside and nobody could have left that note on the floor and then gone out the front.”
I nodded, but not in agreement.
“So?” I said. “The judge won’t know that. And neither will the media.”