Strange Bedfellows

15

Water, Wealth, Contentment, Health

Early the next morning, I had rented a car and was on the road, bleary-eyed, heading east and south to Modesto, through the north end of California’s Central Valley. Just like in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, this settlement of the Central Valley had started out as a dream, this one born in the minds of speculators who saw in row after row of cypress trees visions of the countryside surrounding Milan or Naples-or could at least promote it that way to winter-weary Easterners. And although in college I’d read the early writers who rhapsodized about the region, my memory of the Central Valley consisted more of boringly flat farmland than majestic cypress groves and unending fields of asparagus and almonds and strawberries, bisected by a highway that was little more than a conduit for Justice Family trips to Yosemite or San Francisco in the days before that monster of an interstate, I-5, was built.

But we always approached the valley from the south, not the north as I was this morning, in a reverse commute from the East Bay. Seeing it this way was like watching a time-lapse movie in reverse, the more recently erected windmills and strip malls on the road to Tracy morphing into a slew of Christian schools built some ten years before, giving way to signs that proclaimed FOR SALE-DEVELOPER’S DREAM SITE on the farmland that started it all.

Thor had arranged for me to get a quick briefing from the Modesto area office of the California Highway Patrol before I interviewed Nilo Engalla. CHP officers had been the first on the scene at last Friday’s tule fog collision, Detective Dale Philbrick told me. Barrel-chested and in his forties, he looked like a cross between a professional weight lifter and Chippie, the bobble-head chipmunk dressed as a CHP officer that sat on his desk.

Philbrick plucked a file from a vertical rack on his desk and reached for a notepad. MODESTO CHAMBER OF COMMERCE was printed across the top, and at the bottom a slogan: WATER, WEALTH, CONTENTMENT, HEALTH. He drew several lines to represent Highway 99, and a number of Xs crowded inside them, and proceeded to describe the fog-induced accident that had killed nine and put Engalla in the hospital. “Your guy’s car was near the back of the grinder, in the median, bounced off a vehicle in the number one lane. He ended up with a collapsed lung, multiple fractures to his right leg and foot, and internal bleeding.”

“No wonder he’s been out of it.” I made a few notes. “Where’s his vehicle now?”

“At one of our evidence tows a few miles from here.”

“Find anything else in his car when you inventoried it besides the money?”

Philbrick held up several pieces of paper, each encased in a plastic evidence bag. “Just a bunch of receipts, mixed in with the cash we found in a backpack.”

I turned them over to examine both sides. They were for motels from the Central Valley to the far north end of the state, with one exception. “What about this paperwork from Pinoy Mailbox Services in Stockton?”

“Yeah. It appears your guy rented a box from them last September.”

Two months after he quit his job at CZ Toys. “You call them yet?”

He nodded. “It’s a small mom-and-pop outfit up in the Little Manila section of Stockton, ’bout thirty miles north of here. The clerk couldn’t tell me much about Engalla, though. Said the owner”-he frowned, consulted his file-“woman by the name of Chona Martinez, could, but she hasn’t called me back.”

As I took down the owner’s name and number I could hear Thor’s voice, chastising: Guess no one thought to look for him there. “I didn’t know there was a Little Manila in Stockton.”

“Everybody thinks L.A. or the Bay Area when it comes to Filipinos, but we’ve got over thirty thousand of ’em in the Central Valley. Some of their communities, like the one in Stockton, go back some seventy years.”

I reached for my Altoids tin to quell the embarrassing rumbling of my stomach. “What do you know about the vehicle Engalla was driving?”

Philbrick went back to his notes. “A five-year-old Toyota Corolla, purchased in Stockton last September and registered in the name of Rhea Carvajal, to the same address as the mail drop.”

“The boy’s mother is named Rhea. She must’ve gone down there and bought the car in her maiden name as soon as the surveillance was called off.”

“Maybe she had him stashed with some relatives in the area until things cooled off.”

Thor’s comments about migrant workers in the Central Valley and Nilo’s dad’s work as a union organizer mocked me. “What do you know about the Filipino population here in Modesto?”

“We only got a couple of thousand in Stanislaus County. But that includes everyone from retired migrant workers to their gangbanging grandkids. We got three sets of Asian Crips in Modesto alone, imported mostly from L.A. Engalla coulda been hiding out with one of them.”

“The migrant worker angle is more likely, given his father’s background in union organizing. From everything I’ve heard, this kid’s definitely not gang material. More like your standard advanced-placement dean’s-list kind of kid.”

“Dean’s list or no, him popping up with all that cash got some of the folks here worried,” Philbrick argued. “Especially once we realized he was wanted for the shootings down there.”

“Wanted for questioning at this point,” I reminded him.

“Even so, Detective, the public’s on edge,” he insisted. “Has been since we had those cult homicides up here three years ago.”

I’d heard about the homicides in question, which the media had tried to turn into Manson Family redux. “Those doers were part of some kind of second-string Satanic cult, weren’t they?”

Philbrick chuckled. “‘The Kmart of cults,’ the experts called it at the trial. The ringleader and four of his cronies were convicted right about the time your Smiley Face shooting went down.”

“And you think there’s a connection between our guy and a case from three years ago?” I made a quick calculation to confirm my thinking. “It doesn’t figure that a kid Engalla’s age would’ve been involved. He would’ve been in high school up in Daly City then.”

“One of the killers was in his early twenties,” Philbrick pointed out.

“But surely you don’t-”

“Not me,” Philbrick corrected. “A couple of the local boys are the ones interested.”

Just what we didn’t need. “Looks like I’d better pay Modesto’s finest a visit after I see Mr. Engalla.”

Gathering up a green nylon jacket, Philbrick said: “I’ll drive you over there.”

“Don’t trouble yourself. Just give me their address. I’ll head over there after the hospital.”

“Um… they probably won’t be there,” Philbrick said as he busied himself with the zipper on his jacket.

“Where are they?”

“Over at Memorial Hospital, interviewing your guy.”

“They’re interviewing my suspect? For what? The accident occurred in CHP’s jurisdiction, not Modesto’s. How long have they been over there?”

“They called from the hospital about a half hour before you showed up.”

“Didn’t anyone tell them I was on my way to interview Engalla myself?”

Philbrick couldn’t look me in the eye. “I might have mentioned it to them.”

I scrambled to my feet and checked my watch. It was shortly after ten now, twenty minutes since I’d arrived at the CHP’s offices. Almost an hour in which the locals could screw us up with Engalla six ways from Sunday.

“What’s the problem?” Philbrick asked, trying to keep up with my quickened pace.

“We’re burning daylight.”

Aubrey has seen so many hospitals in his career that he’s developed a theory that cities tell you who they are and what they think of themselves by the hospitals they build. Manhattan has its sprawling New York-Presbyterian complex, Chicago has its upscale Northwestern Medical Center on the Gold Coast, and L.A. has its Beverly Hills-adjacent Cedars-Sinai, all of which Aubrey argues serve not only the complex health needs of their populations but the ego needs of their medical staffs and donors. As Detective Philbrick escorted me over to the big nonprofit hospital in town I couldn’t help thinking it fit Aubrey’s model. Smaller than its big-city counterparts but no less bustling, this hospital was in the midst of a building project that seemed to have the support of the entire Central Valley, if the list of donors on the construction signage was to be believed.

The hospital’s lobby was crowded with several newscasters and reporters, who were hastily setting up for what looked like a press conference. When they saw Philbrick, they scrambled to turn on their lights and get their microphones in place. “Coming through!” Philbrick shouted, shepherding me toward the elevator lobby, where we squeezed into a car filled with hospital staff and patients in wheelchairs or on gurneys.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Engalla the miracle survivor was a pretty big deal with the media up here,” was all the CHP detective would say.

A big deal, too, with the nursing staff, who had tended to the young man with all the deference usually accorded to celebrities. Other than his pain, which the nurses told me was being controlled by morphine, Engalla’s other complaint since regaining consciousness was a persistent loss of memory of the last few days before the accident, which the doctors were calling amnesia secondary to traumatic head injury. “It’s a miracle he survived,” one of the younger nurses said.

I flipped open my notebook and made a note. “He have any visitors?”

“Only the reporters,” an older nurse replied, “but the Modesto police have been pretty good at heading them off at the pass.”

I flipped the notebook shut and followed Philbrick down the corridor to Engalla’s room, which was easy to identify with the local uniform and two plainclothes cops lingering outside the door. The uniform excused himself, and Philbrick made the introductions to Detective Art Suarez, a lanky, sport-coat-clad Latino with salt-and-pepper hair, and Detective Tom Huth, a much younger and shorter white male wearing a vintage polyester suit and heeled, pointy-toed boots, the kind my father calls cockroach killers.

Leading him a few steps away from Engalla’s door, Philbrick asked Suarez: “You get anything from the kid about the money?”

“Told me he didn’t know how he got it.”

“That because of the amnesia?”

“That’s because he’s bullshitting us!” Huth whispered fiercely. “He’s running drug money for one of the Asian gangs.”

“Well, if he can’t produce a receipt,” Philbrick said, “that twenty-seven thousand and change is going into the CHP’s coffers.”

“Don’t start spending it too soon,” I warned. “It might be embezzled from the company where Engalla worked. So, I’ll be taking it into custody before I leave town. Don’t worry, the CHP will get a receipt.”

Philbrick sighed in resignation, then straightened his tie. “We ready to do this?” he asked Huth.

“Do what?” I asked.

“The reporters downstairs are getting antsy,” Suarez explained as he headed for the elevator. “Want to join us?”

“I’m going to let you all deal with the press while I concentrate on Mr. Engalla.” What I didn’t say was that my name or the LAPD’s in the papers was about the last thing we needed at this point in the investigation.

They had put Nilo Engalla in a private room with powder-blue striped wallpaper and one of those hospital beds that takes up half the floor space. Except for one leg, which was elevated in a cast, the patient was barely visible among the IV poles, monitors, and white pillows that cushioned his broken body. Seeing him now and knowing what he’d been through made me understand why the nurses and the reporters downstairs considered his recovery a miracle, just as it was a miracle that Chuck and Alma’s baby girl had survived thus far. But was there a closer connection between the two? Was Nilo Engalla responsible for that drive-by shooting last summer, and for the pain and death left in its wake?

As I approached the bed I could see he was staring out the window. “How are you feeling, Nilo?”

Engalla’s attention slowly shifted toward the sound of my voice. The handsome face I’d seen in the BOLOs looked as if it had been dragged over five miles of bad road, and his eyes couldn’t quite focus. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

I showed him my ID and pressed a card into his hand. He blinked at the card slowly. “What do you want?”

Was this kid really that out of it, or was he trying to play me? “I think you know, Nilo.”

I glanced about the room. There were no flowers, no cards, no sign that anyone cared or even knew Nilo was there. “I see you haven’t contacted your parents yet.” When he flinched, I walked over to the window and looked down at the wisps of fog still clinging to the trees. “Jose and Rhea will be worried if they don’t hear from you. And you should be worried about them, too.”

“You know my parents?” he croaked.

“We know your mother bought that car you were driving in the accident,” I said, keeping my voice low and steady.

He tried his best to look innocent. “I don’t know what you mean…”

“She bought it last September, Nilo, in her maiden name right after the surveillance of your parents’ house was called off. She’d sworn to one of our detectives that she hadn’t spoken to you since you left CZ Toys and promised to call us if you contacted her. But your mother was lying to us, wasn’t she? She knew where you were all along. She was just waiting until she could meet you down in Stockton without being followed.”

“That’s not why-”

“If your mother tried to help you hide from the police, or gave you that car to help you try and escape-that’s called obstruction of justice. She could go to jail for that.”

Engalla shook his head, his eyes glistening. “She wasn’t helping me hide from the police!”

Was that an out-and-out denial, or did I detect an inflection in his voice? “Then from whom, Nilo?”

The boy’s lips hardened into a thin line, and he closed his eyes against the tears. “Why won’t everybody just leave us alone?”

I was afraid that if I pressed him any harder he’d ask for an attorney, so I decided on another tack. “Believe me, Nilo, I’d like nothing better than to head back to L.A. and let you get some rest. But I’m afraid the Modesto police aren’t going to leave you alone until they get something they can use.”

“Use?”

“Think about it, son-a potential suspect wanted by the LAPD for questioning in a major shooting is found hundreds of miles from L.A., with twenty-seven thousand dollars in cash in his car. What would you think if you were the local police? Either, one, the kid stole the money from a local business and is on the run or, two, he’s dealing drugs for one of the local gangs.”

Worry creased Engalla’s brow, and his bottom lip began to quiver. “No way! I would never embarrass my family by doing something like that.”

“From what your parents have told us, I believe you, Nilo. But those Modesto cops are on their way downstairs to hold a press conference right now, and that’s what they’re going to tell all those reporters unless you tell me something different.”

“No!” Engalla began to twist about in the bed, as if he were trying to get away, but his traction-bound leg and other injuries held him in place and made him wince. “I don’t want my parents finding out where I am and coming here. It’s not safe!”

“Safe for whom?”

Engalla glanced nervously toward the door, then shook his head firmly. “I can’t!”

Obviously, he was afraid of something, or someone. I moved closer to the bed. “You know, Nilo, if you’re in trouble, I can help you. But you’ve got to help me.” I gently touched his arm. “Tell me how you got that money. Did you steal it from CZ Toys?”

He shook his head, tears spilling from his eyes. “I’d never do anything like that!”

“Do you have a receipt for it?”

“A receipt?”

“That’s the law-if you can’t produce a receipt for cash over twenty-five thousand dollars, we have to impound it.”

I could see Engalla’s mind working as if he were trying to remember or trying to decide what to tell me. Finally he whispered: “The money was sent to me at Tia Chona’s place.”

“Your aunt is the Chona Martinez who owns Pinoy Mailbox Services?” I flipped to her name and number in the notes I’d taken while talking to Philbrick. If Nilo had conveyed his fears to his aunt, no wonder she hadn’t called Philbrick back. “And she can verify all of this?”

He nodded, said, “Talk to her. She saw me open the package. But I don’t want to get her into trouble!”

“Just tell me the truth about what happened, and I’ll try to keep her, and your parents, from getting arrested.”

He nodded eagerly and wiped at his eyes with one bandaged hand. “It was the second package I got,” he began. “I let it sit for a couple of weeks, then went in with Tia Chona late one night to pick it up.”

“Why all the precautions?”

“I was scared,” he insisted. “Before the package came with the fifty thousand-”

“Wait a minute? You were originally sent fifty thousand dollars? Where’s the rest of it?”

“I bought the car, then there were the hotels and other stuff for the last six months.”

“And this was the second package you received?”

He nodded. “The first was just a note, saying I should disappear, that it wasn’t safe for me at the company, but that I would be receiving enough money to help me get away. That’s why I didn’t go to the box to check on the money right away, and why my mother helped me buy the car, and why I’ve been moving around ever since-”

“Slow down, Nilo!”

“I was afraid they’d-my mother thought that they’d try and-”

“Kill you?”

Nilo looked at me, his chest heaving, but his lips were compressed tightly, as if he feared he’d said too much already.

I studied the boy, wondering if he could be lying. But Nilo Engalla was looking me in the eye, even though the effort, and our conversation, seemed to have drained what little energy he had. I had to get the rest of it out of him, and quickly, before I lost him to fatigue-or before whoever had threatened him tried to pay him a visit. “If you can’t be completely honest with me, Nilo, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m here to investigate who killed Mr. Shareef and shot Mr. Zuccari and his family.”

Nilo’s eyes ballooned, and he seemed to have trouble speaking. “I-I didn’t know anyone died!”

“So you see, you quitting CZ Toys right after the shooting and no one seeing you since makes us think you may have been involved.”

He made a weak protest, which I held off by gently pressing his arm. “Stop shaking your head and listen to me, Nilo. Seven months after you disappear, you show up here with a car and enough money to take you anywhere in America, spouting some cock-and-bull story about you and your family being threatened. Tell me why I shouldn’t suspect you in the shooting of Chuck Zuccari and the others.”

“Because Mr. Zuccari was the one who told me to leave!”

As I headed north I called Thor to fill him in on what I’d learned. “Engalla had independently discovered the bogus invoice, three months after Christopher Deinhart had brought it to the attention of Mario Zuccari and his audit partner at Shuttleworth and Bezney. Nilo was working on an assignment with Accounts Payable to calculate how much extra cash the company could generate if it changed its payment policy from thirty days to something longer. That’s when he stumbled across a company called Sonrisa Safety and Security in the Philippines, which was being paid well into six figures each month, always within five days of submittal of its invoices. But, like Deinhart, Engalla couldn’t find a contract or IRS paperwork filed at the company’s headquarters in Irvine, nor could the divisional headquarters in Hong Kong produce any documentation.”

Engalla had summarized his findings in a memo to Natalie Johnson, the manager of Accounts Payable, who’d promised to send it “upstairs for investigation.” But when Engalla rotated to Internal Audit as part of his internship, neither Howard Hebson, his supervisor, nor any of his staff had seen or heard of his memo. “Engalla didn’t know if the memo had been buried by Johnson or her boss, Felton Carruthers, in the controller’s office, so he came in early one morning to talk to Mario Zuccari and ran into Chuck instead.”

“When was this?” Thor asked.

“May of last year, two months before the shooting.”

“That was three months after Deinhart confronted Mario about the same thing. What did Zuccari do?”

“Told him he wanted him to try and get more information on the vendor, reporting exclusively to him. And gave him five thousand dollars for expenses.”

“So Chuck Zuccari hadn’t heard any of this from Natalie Johnson or his son?”

“Apparently not.”

Using his parents’ business and family connections in the Philippines, Engalla had discovered that Sonrisa Safety & Security’s corporate headquarters was merely a mail drop some three miles from where CZ Toys had a plant in the Laguna province. “Remember our meeting with Gabriella and Mario? They left us to take a call from some guy in Laguna. I assumed they were talking about Laguna Beach, but they were probably talking to someone at the company’s plant in the Philippines.”

“How’d Chuck Zuccari react to what the kid found?” Thor asked.

“He was livid, told Engalla to keep digging. Gave him another ten thousand to pay for private investigators if he needed them.”

“There’s something suspect about Zuccari giving an inexperienced kid that much money,” Thor said. “How’d he expect Engalla to find P.I.s in the Philippines?”

“You remember Pete Collins, the surfer dude security chief? Zuccari had him source P.I. firms over there. Zuccari gave the names to Engalla, who contracted with them through an uncle and gave them their assignment. They sent their report to the uncle, who forwarded it to Nilo’s box at Pinoy Mailbox Services, and his aunt forwarded them to Nilo, who then shared the results with Zuccari. That way the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing.”

“Engalla and Zuccari went to a lot of trouble to cover their tracks. Was keeping Collins out of the loop Engalla’s or Zuccari’s idea?”

“Engalla says Zuccari, which I figure had to have been motivated by either Zuccari not wanting anyone in the company to know because he was behind the embezzlement, or because he had a good idea of who was.”

“Too bad we can’t ask the poor bastard,” Thor murmured. “Why the hell didn’t Collins say anything about these Filipino P.I. firms in the initial investigation?”

“Probably didn’t put two and two together. Collins may be pretty, but he’s not exactly the brightest bulb in the pack. Think about those goons he hired to watch over the Zuccaris-Leykis and Ybarra. Are they the type you’d hire to protect a corporate mover and shaker like Zuccari?”

“Thanks for reminding me. I wanted to check those two out.” He was silent for a moment, writing something down. “This note that Zuccari was supposed to have sent Engalla-when did he receive it?”

“A couple of weeks after he left the company, at his box in Stockton.”

“But Zuccari was in a coma by that time.”

“But Nilo didn’t know that. Someone must’ve got hold of Zuccari’s files, realized what he and the kid were up to, and decided to impersonate Zuccari and pull the kid off the trail.”

“Did Engalla hold onto the alleged note from Zuccari?”

“It’s in an envelope at the box in Stockton, along with the private investigator’s reports. Engalla put them there for safekeeping in case someone robbed his car or one of the motels where he’s been hiding out. I’m headed up to Stockton to get them from the aunt now. And I’ve got the cash that the CHP found in Nilo’s car, too, although the Chippie didn’t want to turn it loose.”

“Who’s watching the kid?”

“The Modesto police agreed to provide added protection for him until his folks can get him transferred to a hospital in the Bay Area.”

“You think someone’s out to harm him?”

“Maybe not, but the news down there widely reported him being hospitalized in Modesto, and there aren’t enough of them to provide him with any anonymity. Plus, there’ve been reporters milling around in the hospital lobby since Saturday. Keeping him in Modesto is just asking for trouble.”

“Good thinking, Justice,” Thor agreed. “You gotta go with your gut on these things.”

The genuine warmth in Thor’s voice made me smile for the first time in what seemed like days. “Thanks.”

I then gave him an update on my conversation with Rashaan Muhammad and the meaning behind Aycox’s blue-eyed devil comment. Thor asked if I thought Rashaan Muhammad or Habiba Shareef should be considered as suspects.

“Him no, but you’ve sensitized me about these wives. So I’d like to reinterview Mrs. Shareef, see if she corroborates Muhammad’s version of the facts, and see what else shakes loose.”

“Take Truesdale with you. This Shareef woman may respond more positively to someone who knows about the Muslim community.”

“I will.” I reached for my marble and reminded myself that Thor’s suggestion was a good call, not a sign that I’d messed up the first time I’d interviewed the victim’s widow. “But you should still move ahead on Mario Zuccari.”

“Absolutely! In fact, given what you’ve learned from Engalla, I’m going back to the judge for a separate search warrant to cover the company’s accounts payable and internal auditing records as well as Natalie Johnson’s and Felton Carruther’s homes.”

“It makes sense to cast the net as wide as possible. If other people in the company are involved, once they hear we hit Mario’s offices, they’re gonna start shredding documents right and left.”

“This feels right to me, Justice.” I could hear Thor making a few notes. “I think we’re making some real progress here.”

“At least we know the Black Muslim bill of goods Taft was selling was just that.”

“I hate to admit it, but the Feds suckered us big-time on that one. Between the months you all wasted pursuing Taft’s bogus Muslim lead and the Nazi rumors, you could’ve had this case solved by now.”

Given how gung-ho he’d been on the Muslim lead, it was an amazing admission of error on the part of one of the department’s legends. I wondered what it cost his pride to make it. “Has Taft surfaced yet?”

“He’s gone underground. Hasn’t checked into the FBI’s office here in L.A. or up in San Francisco. Wunderlich prevailed on the L.A. bureau chief to send a car to his house, but other than his SUV missing, it doesn’t look like he’s been there either. And, what’s worse, the Bureau’s closed ranks. Agent in charge said they weren’t going to move against a sworn agent of the Bureau based on an interpersonal beef with local law enforcement.”

“They talk like they think I’m sleeping with the man!”

“It pissed me off,” Thor admitted. “But I’m afraid that puts us no closer to knowing why Taft’s gone off the rails, or what his next move will be.”

I didn’t know either, but I had a couple of ideas on how to find out.