away from it. This was abusive, outrageous; it had to be stopped.
“Liz, it’s not that simple. There’s no way to be sure he’ll go away. He thinks I know something. What’s to stop him from coming back in six months or a year and making good on his threats, just to be safe?”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she said.
“And just live in fear?”
“It’s better than not living at all,” she was getting angry. I told myself she was just mad at the situation, not me. But I really wasn’t sure. “Ollie,” she went on, “it’s not about you. He threatened both of us. I just don’t care enough about Vargas and whoever the hell else is involved to risk my life for them.”
“Is that what you tell your clients?” I said, and regretted it as soon as it was out. But I’d said it so I had to stick with it. “Do you tell them not to worry about their abusive landlord, about the credit company that’s going to take their home? Do you tell them it’s just not worth the fight?”
“Fuck you, Ollie. That’s completely different and you know it. No one is threatening to kill these people, and most important, no one is threatening to ruin my life. I’m not out there trying to change the world, Ollie. I’m just trying to help people. You don’t have to prove to everyone that you’re not afraid, that you can outsmart whoever the hell this is. What’s the point?”
“That’s not what this is about.” I was insistent, but I knew she didn’t believe me. I wondered for an instant if I believed it myself.
She said, “You’ve had a chip on your shoulder your whole life, Ollie.” Now she was angry. Now she was attacking me. I could hear her restraining her voice. “You can’t stand letting someone get the better of you. You’ve been pissed at yourself ever since you left Kolhberg & Crowley. Don’t give me that shit. You want to get even with the world because you were born into a family of—”
I dropped the phone because I damned near hit the car in front of me when it locked up its brakes. I didn’t hear the rest of what she was saying. I didn’t need to or want to. I knew it all anyway. When I finally managed to pick up the phone again, she was saying: “Hello? Hello?”
“I almost killed myself on the fucking freeway.”
“Are you on your way home?”
“No,” I said, although I wasn’t sure where I was going.
“Where are you?” Her voice was calmer, more controlled. The interruption had caused her to restrain her attack.
“I’m on the ten. Traffic is shit. I need to see if I can catch Jendrek. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
There was silence on the line. I listened to it for a few seconds and then added, “Okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I’ll see you there.”
I got off the freeway and inched my way north through West LA to the office on Santa Monica Boulevard. But Jendrek was nowhere to be found. Ellen’s desk sat empty. I checked my watch and realized it was nearly six. I wondered what I’d been thinking trying to find Jendrek there. Perhaps it was merely that I wanted to decompress, regardless of whether Jendrek was there or not. I needed to lock myself in a dim room and think about things. Or not think about things. Either way. I needed quiet. Dim light. Stillness.
I sat in my dark office with nothing but the glow of the computer screen for light. I went through my usual websites—CNN, the New York Times, the LA Weekly, a few other things—nothing new had happened in the world, it seemed, other than the events of my own life. The lack of distractions only intensified my anxiety and stress.
I started running through the connections. Started following the chains of people. Who stood out? Who didn’t make sense? It had been tempting all along to conclude that Tiffany Vargas, the only person who stood to gain in any real way by Don Vargas’s death, was somehow behind it. But there was no evidence to conclude that she even knew Don was going to transfer the companies to his son. And now that her own brother had been murdered, she seemed to be off the list.
But what about David Daniels? Had her younger brother and Pete Stick hatched some kind of plan? Pete was a known fraudster and scam