I stopped at the In N’ Out at Sunset and Orange for lunch. I called the number he gave me on my cell and got an answering machine with a woman’s voice. I left a message and mowed my way through a burger and fries while I studied the piece of paper.
The kid’s name was David Daniels. His address was on Huntington Drive, which I vaguely recognized as an address in East LA. It was a part of town I never had any need or desire to visit, but I suspected I might have to if the kid didn’t return my call.
Ellen was playing solitaire on the computer when I got back to the office. She didn’t try to hide it or anything. There would have been no point. Jendrek and I were both well aware that we didn’t have enough work. She looked me over without interest when I came in.
I asked, “Where’s Mark?”
She shrugged. “Said he had a meeting out of the office. He left a couple hours ago.”
“Any calls?”
She laughed at me. “Are you kidding?”
Ellen was a funny one, sarcastic and clever. She had to be to survive so long with Jendrek. In her mid-forties, she was still single, had no children, and seemed to prefer it that way.
I handed her the file I’d gotten from Ed Vargas and she flipped through it quickly. “Yeah?”
“Can you order background checks on her? The social security number and everything else is in there.”
“Is this the woman who was in here this morning?”
I smiled at her. “Piece of work, huh?”
“The Vargas kid doesn’t want her to inherit the family fortune?”
“He’s got a little problem with the fact that he’s older than his mother.” We both laughed.
Then the door opened and Jendrek came in and looked us over. He eyed me in particular and said, “You’re looking a lot better than you did this morning. What did Ed have to say?”
I followed him into his office and gave him the highlights. The background checks would give us some addresses and maybe some prior employment information. In the meantime, I’d drop in on Vargas’s mother tomorrow and see what she had to say about her replacement.
I intentionally saved the best for last. “And there’s one more thing I learned up there,” I said. Jendrek raised his eyebrows, waiting. “It looks like that red haired kid that worked for Pete Stick, you remember him?” He nodded at me.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like he might have been the guy who called in the noise disturbance.”
I watched his face stumble through a half-dozen perplexed expressions as he put together exactly what that might mean. “How do you know that?” he asked in a voice loaded with caution.
“I don’t, for sure. But here’s what I do know.” I ran him through it. How I’d gone to the party, parked the car there, taken a taxi, and talked to the guard again this afternoon.
“And he described the kid?”
“The description matched.”
Jendrek thought about it some more. He combed his fingers through his silver hair and scratched at his chin. Finally, he just stated the obvious. “So you think there’s some kind of setup?”
“I don’t know what I think. It sure seems that way. But a setup for what?”
“To kill Vargas.”
“But why? The kid didn’t have anything to gain.”
“That we know of.”
“Well, let’s assume he didn’t. Let’s assume he and Pete planned something. Pete didn’t gain anything either.”
Jendrek thought about that. Then he said, “Maybe the shooting really was an accident. Maybe there was something else going on and the cops just got in the middle of it and fucked it all up.”
I said, “But if the kid called the cops …”
“Maybe they wanted some cops there for some reason. Something else they had in mind, and then the cop did what he did and screwed it all up.” Jendrek shook his head and shrugged. “Besides, the alternative is too hard to put together. The alternative requires the cop to be in on it. If the cops were in on it, they’d have to be in on the whole thing. It would be hard to get a cop to commit a murder for you.”
I said, “And Pete wasn’t exactly friendly with the cops. So it would be even more unlikely.”
Then Jendrek smiled and said, “Yeah, but the police chief hates pornography so who knows? Maybe it’s all a giant conspiracy.” He leaned forward with a shiver in his voice, drumming his fingers in the