Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,16
believe it, either. It was Diana who saw it on the news first and called me, and I said, ‘No way, that can’t be right.’ ”
Then she said, “The other thing, the big thing, is that one of the two vics was a policeman. Prima, they think you’re a cop killer.”
to the limits of fate
6
Cop killer. I didn’t need Serena to explain the implications of that for my safety.
“What the hell is going on?” she said.
“You’re asking me?”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“At the Slaughterhouse,” I said. “I was about to go home, but now I’m not so sure I should.”
It was true that my Crenshaw apartment wasn’t traceable to me through any kind of bill or rental contract, but my neighbors had seen me coming and going, and I’d introduced myself to several of them by name. More than that, I stood out in Crenshaw. I’d known that before, but it hadn’t bothered me. Now I had to worry about it.
“I’ll come get you,” Serena said.
“No,” I said. “Hold that thought. There’s someone else I want to call.”
After we’d hung up, I scrolled through my list of old calls, finding a number I didn’t use enough to know by heart. Tess answered on the third ring, her voice, as always, slightly British-inflected.
“It’s Hailey,” I said. “Have you seen the news?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you believe it?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t.”
“Then I need your help.”
Tess D’Agostino, the biological daughter of San Francisco organized-crime figure Tony Skouras, had already saved my life once. Last winter she’d called off her father’s henchmen and brought to an end the torture session that otherwise probably would have ended with me floating facedown in the bay; more than that, she’d brought me back to her hotel and overseen my recuperation herself. At first I hadn’t known how far to trust her—she was a Skouras, after all—and I’d been brusque to the point of rudeness, but Tess had been serenely polite in response.
A few days later, she’d called me to suggest that if I stayed in San Francisco and if she in fact took the reins of the Skouras syndicate—which officially was a shipping line and several related import businesses and unofficially brought Asian heroin, stolen artworks, and illegal Eastern European and Central Asian immigrants into the ports of San Francisco and Oakland—she would have use for me. In other words, she wanted what I’d gone on to provide for Serena: a right hand, protector and sounding board.
When she’d called me, I’d been walking on the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been a bright and promising morning, I still wasn’t quite used to being alive when I was supposed to be dead, and despite the rough treatment I’d just suffered, my life at that moment had an anything-goes character, and I’d agreed to meet with Tess that evening to discuss her offer further.
That night she’d bought me dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf. In the intervening hours, my mood had shifted a bit. The bright hour on the bridge was over, and the ghost of my newly severed finger had ached increasingly throughout the day. Over dinner, made more frank than I might have been by a martini and pain meds I’d taken for my hand, I not only turned down any potential job, I discouraged Tess from taking over the Skouras empire altogether.
“You seem to look at me as some kind of hero because I took it on myself to protect a baby whose parents I hardly knew,” I’d told her, “but I didn’t volunteer for that—it chose me. I’m not a hero. Me, my closest friend, most of the people I know—we’re like an evolutionary chart of morally compromised people. I might be a little farther to the right on that chart than most of them, but you, you’re not one of us at all, and I can’t think why you’d want to be. And you will be if you take over your father’s businesses. You won’t change them. They’ll change you. It’s inevitable.”
I don’t kid myself that my advice could have had any effect on someone as self-assured as Tess D’Agostino, but she’d apparently come to the same conclusion. She sold nearly everything, keeping only her father’s minority share in a film and television studio here in Los Angeles. Then she’d used the proceeds of the sale of the other Skouras businesses to buy a majority share. In short, Tess had become a studio head, and she lived locally.