Lost Light (15 page)

“Not if you don’t let it. Relax, Law. Relax and try to forget everything. Like your mind’s a blackboard and you’re erasing it. Think about what Jack said about the call.”

His eyes moved under the thin, pale eyelids but after a few moments they slowed and stopped. I watched his face and waited. It was years since I had tried any hypnotic techniques, and that had been to draw out visual descriptions of events and suspects. What I wanted from Cross now was a memory of a time and place and the dialogue that went with it.

“You see the blackboard, Law?”

“Yeah, I see it.”

“Okay, go to the board and write Jack’s name on it. Write it at the top so you have room underneath it.”

“Harry, this is stupid. I —”

“Just humor me, Law. Write Jack’s name at the top of the board.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, Law, that’s good. Now look at the board and underneath Jack’s name write the words ‘phone call.’ Okay?”

“Okay, did it.”

“Good. Now look at those three words and concentrate on them. Jack. Phone call. Jack. Phone call.”

The silence that followed my words was punctuated by the barely discernible ticking of the new clock.

“Now, Law, I want you to concentrate on the black around those words. Around those letters. Go through the letters, Law, into the black. Go through the letters.”

I waited and watched his eyelids. I saw the retinal movement begin again.

“Jack is talking to you, Law. He’s telling you about the agent. He says she has new information on the movie set heist.”

I waited for a long moment, wondering if I should have mentioned Gessler by name, then deciding it was better that I hadn’t.

“What is he saying to you, Law?”

“There’s something wrong with the numbers. They don’t match.”

“Did she call him?”

“She called him.”

“Where are you when he is telling you this, Law?”

“We’re in the car. We’ve got court.”

“Is it a trial?”

“Yes.”

“Whose trial is it?”

“It’s that little Mexican kid. The little gangbanger who killed the Korean jeweler on Western. Alejandro Penjeda. It’s the verdict.”

“Penjeda is the defendant?”

“That’s right.”

“And Jack got the call from the agent before you went to court to hear the verdict?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, Law.”

I had gotten what I wanted. I tried to think what else I could ask him.

“Law? Did Jack say what the agent’s name was?”

“No, he didn’t say.”

“Did he say he would check out the information she gave him?”

“He said he’d do some checking but that he thought it was a bullshit call. He said he didn’t think it meant anything.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Law, I’m going to tell you to open your eyes in a moment. And when you open them, I want you to feel like you just woke up but I want you to remember what we just talked about. Okay?”

“Okay, yes.”

“And the other thing is I want you to feel better. I want you to be . . . okay about things in your life. I want you to be as happy as you can be, Law. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Law, open your eyes now.”

The eyelids fluttered once and then they were open. They strafed the ceiling and then came to me. They seemed brighter than before.

“Harry . . .”

“How do you feel, Law?”

“Okay.”

“You remember what we were talking about?”

“Yeah, that little Mex. Penjeda. We called him PinHeada. He didn’t take the deal the DA floated. Life with. He took his chances with the jury and got snake eyes. Life without.”

“Live and learn.”

What sounded like what might have been a laugh gurgled from deep in his throat.

“Yeah, that was a good one,” he said. “I remember when we were going over to court that day was when Jack told me about the call from Westwood.”

“Right. You remember when that verdict came in on Penjeda?”

“End of February, beginning of March. My last trial, Harry. A month later I took the bullet in that shithole bar and I was history. I remember watching PinHeada’s face when he heard that verdict and knew he was facing life
without
parole. Fucker got what he deserved.”

The laugh came up again and then I saw the light go out of his eyes.

“What is it, Law?”

“He’s up there at Corcoran playing handball in the yard or getting his ass rented out by the Mexican Mafia on an hourly basis. And I’m here. I got life without, too, I guess.”

His eyes looked into mine. I nodded because it was the only thing I could think of to do.

“It’s not fair, Harry. Life isn’t fair.”

 

T
he downtown library was on Flower and Figueroa. It was one of the oldest buildings in the whole city. Therefore it was dwarfed by the modern glass-and-steel structures that surrounded it. Inside it was a beauty, centered around a domed rotunda with 360-degree mosaics depicting the founding of the city by the
padres
. The place had been twice burned by arsonists and closed for years, then restored to its original beauty. I had come after the restoration was completed, the first time back since I was a child. And I continued to come. It brought me close to the Los Angeles I remembered. Where I felt comfortable. I would take my lunch in the book rooms or the upper-level patios while reading case files and writing notes. I got to know the security guards and a few of the librarians. I had a library card, though I rarely checked out a book.

I went to the library after leaving Lawton Cross because I no longer could call on Keisha Russell to help me with clip searches. Her call to Sacramento to run a check on me when I had asked her to simply run a clip search on Martha Gessler was the warning. Her journalistic curiosity would lead her further than my requests, to places I didn’t want her to go.

The main reference desk was on the second floor. I recognized the woman behind the counter, though I had never spoken to her before. I could tell she recognized me as I approached. I used a library card where a police shield used to do. She read it and recognized the name.

“Do you know that you have the same name as a famous painter?” she asked.

“Yes, I know.”

Her face flushed. She was midthirties with an unattractive hairstyle. She wore a name tag that said Mrs. Molloy.

“Of course you do,” she said. “You must know that. How can I help you?”

“I need to look for stories that were in the
Times
from about three years ago.”

“You want to do a key word search?”

“I guess so. What is that?”

She smiled.

“We have the
Los Angeles Times
on computer going back to nineteen eighty-seven. If what you are looking for was published after that, all you have to do is go online on one of our computers, type in a key word or phrase, like a name, for example, that you think is in the story and it will search for it. There is a five-dollar-per-hour fee for accessing the newspaper archives.”

“Fine, that’s what I want to do.”

She smiled and reached beneath the counter. She handed me a white plastic device that was about a foot long. It looked like no computer I had ever seen.

“How do I use this?”

She almost laughed.

“It’s a pager. All our computers are being used at the moment. I will page you as soon as one becomes available.”

“Oh.”

“The pager doesn’t work outside of the building. It also does not emit an audible page. It vibrates. So keep it on your person.”

“I will. Any idea how long it will be?”

“We set one-hour use limits, which right now would mean one won’t be available for another thirty minutes. However, people often don’t require the full hour.”

“Okay, thank you. I’ll be nearby.”

I found an empty table in one of the reading rooms and decided to work on the case chronology. I got out my notebook and on a fresh page wrote down the three key dates and events I knew.

Angella Benton—murdered—May 16, 1999

Movie set heist—May 19, 1999

Martha Gessler—missing—March 19, 2000

I then began adding the things I was missing.

Gessler/Dorsey—phone call—?????

And after a few moments I thought of something else that might help explain something that bothered me.

Dorsey/Cross—murder/shooting—?????

I looked around to see if anyone was using a cell phone. I wanted to make a call but wasn’t sure it would be allowed in a library. When I turned and looked behind me I saw a man standing by a magazine rack quickly turn away and take a magazine off the display without seeming to look at what it was first. He was dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Nothing about him said FBI but it still seemed to me that he had been looking directly at me until I had looked at him. His reaction had been too quick, almost furtive. There had been no eye contact, nothing that suggested any sort of overture. The man clearly didn’t want me to know he was watching me.

Putting my notebook away, I got up from the table and headed toward the magazine racks. I passed the man and noticed that the magazine he had grabbed was called
Parenting Today.
It was another strike against him. He didn’t look like the parenting type to me. I was pretty sure I was being watched.

Back at the reference desk I put my hands on the counter and leaned over to whisper to Mrs. Molloy.

“Can I ask you a question? Is it okay to use a cell phone in the library?”

“No, it’s not. Is somebody bothering you by using a phone?”

“No, I was just wondering what the rule was. Thank you.”

Before I could turn away she said she was just about to page me because a computer was now available. I gave her back the pager and she led me to a cubicle where the glowing screen of a computer was waiting.

“Good luck,” she said as she headed back to the desk.

“Excuse me,” I said, beckoning her back. “Um, I don’t know how to get to the
Times
stuff on this.”

“There’s an icon on the desktop.”

I turned back around and scanned the desk. There was nothing on it but the computer and the keyboard and the mouse. The librarian started to laugh behind me but then covered her mouth with her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . you don’t know the first thing about how to do this, do you?”

“Or the second or the third. Can you just help get me started?”

“Hold on. Let me just go check the front desk and make sure there is no one waiting for me.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

She was gone thirty seconds and then came back and leaned over me to work the mouse and click through screens until she was inside the
Times
archives and at what she called the key word search template.

“So now you type in the key word for the story you are looking for.”

I nodded that I understood that much and typed in the name “Alejandro Penjeda.” Mrs. Molloy reached across and hit the
ENTER
key and the search began. In about five seconds I had the results on the screen. There were five hits. The first two were from 1991 and 1994 and the final three were all from 2000. I dismissed the first two as being unrelated to the Penjeda I was interested in. The next three were all from March 2000. I moved the mouse to the first one—March 1, 2000—and clicked on the
READ
button. The story filled the top half of the screen. It was a short report on the opening of the trial of Alejandro Penjeda, who was charged with the murder of a Korean jeweler named Kyungwon Park.

The second story was also short and it was the one I wanted. It was the verdict story in the Penjeda case. It was dated March 14 and reported events from the day before. I took the notebook out of my pocket and completed that part of the chronology, putting the new information in the right time slot.

Angella Benton—murdered—May 16, 1999

Movie set heist—May 19, 1999

Gessler/Dorsey—phone call—March 13, 2000

Martha Gessler—missing—March 19, 2000

I looked at what I had. Martha Gessler disappeared and presumably was murdered six days after talking to Jack Dorsey about the currency list anomaly.

“If there isn’t anything else, I’m going to go back up front.”

I had forgotten that Mrs. Molloy was still standing behind me. I stood up and signaled her to the seat.

“Actually, this might be faster if you could do it,” I said. “I need to do a couple more searches.”

“We are not supposed to do the searches. You are supposed to be proficient with the computer if you are going to use it.”

“I understand. I am going to learn but at the moment I’m not that proficient and these searches are very important.”

She seemed to be wavering on whether to continue to help me. I wished I’d had the small wallet-size copy of the private investigator’s license I had gotten from the state. Maybe that would have impressed her. She leaned backwards to look down the row of cubicles to the front desk to see if anyone was waiting for help. The
Parenting Today
guy was milling about, trying to act as though he was either waiting for someone or waiting for help.

“I’ll come back after I ask this gentleman if he needs help,” Mrs. Molloy said.

She walked off without waiting for a response from me. I watched as she asked Parenting Today if he needed something and he shook his head and then glanced back at me before walking off. Mrs. Molloy then came back down the aisle to me. She took the seat in front of the computer.