Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 23

Twenty minutes later, we were in my office. I expected Milo to commandeer the keyboard but he slumped on the old leather couch. “Go for it.”

William P. Wojik was mentioned in several newspaper articles from 1940 and 1941, all to do with Leroy Hoke’s tax evasion trial. As Hoke’s “accountant” he’d been subpoenaed to testify, no record of what he’d said.

Several papers added another label: “reputed mob moneyman.”

“Reputed” in order to avoid a libel suit. I kept scrolling, found no evidence Wojik had ever been charged criminally. Following Hoke’s conviction, he avoided the public eye until 1975, when he, along with other alums, had been honored at a Yale Club of L.A. gala.

New tag: “esteemed financial consultant and philanthropist.”

A photo from the party showed a white-haired man with a toothbrush mustache and an easy smile. A chubby girl clutched his arm and gazed up at him. Eleven or twelve, pigtails, glasses, a frilly pink dress that threatened to consume her.

The round, perplexed face of a young Belinda Wojik.

Milo said, “His dinner companion. Like he told her, common enemy.”

I keyworded jack mccandless.

Even more coverage on him. A “mob lawyer.” “Reputed” not necessary because the facts were clear. Formerly from Chicago, McCandless had defended “Capone soldiers and other organized crime figures” before moving to San Francisco, where he’d served as the “legal mouthpiece of union bosses and political figures accused of corruption.”

Living in L.A. by the midthirties, McCandless had faced a “potential conflict of interest due to his work on behalf of both jewel-theft victim Count Frederick LaPlante and the chief suspect in the case, mobster Leroy Hoke. However, with no one ever charged in the heist, the necessity of making a choice was avoided.”

I kept scrolling.

Similar to William Wojik, public attention on McCandless had faded soon after Leroy Hoke’s imprisonment. I came across a few anniversary trial rehashes then nothing until a twenty-year-old obituary in the American Bar Association Journal.

McCandless was lauded, in memoriam, as a longtime ABA member who’d served on numerous committees, including several that dealt with professional ethics. Another “noted philanthropist.” He’d died at age ninety-six “peacefully, in his sleep.” Interment at Hollywood Legends Memorial Park, in lieu of flowers any sort of charitable donation was appreciated. Predeceased by his wife and son, Mark McCandless. Survived by his granddaughter, Richeline Sylvester, also an ABA member.

Milo said, “Mob moneyman makes ninety-five, mob lawyer goes him one year better, Thalia pushes a hundred. Maybe the good die young because they bore God.”

I laughed, switched to an image search. “Well, what do you know.”

Half a dozen color shots, like Wojik’s, all in formal garb. Planned Parenthood benefit, same for the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, three for the art museum, the zoo.

Even in old age, Jack McCandless had been a forbidding presence, well over six feet tall and three hundred pounds or more, with a hairless bullet head and crushed features. Tiny porcine eyes aimed like handguns intent on demolishing the lens. Or the photographer.

One black-and-white shot, decades older, was familiar: Perino’s, Hoke and a tiny blonde. McCandless the hulk we’d assumed to be a bodyguard. That one traced to an eBay auction featuring “classic L.A. restaurant images,” this one peddled as “Rich folk enjoying the Beverly Hills high life.”

Not quite; Perino’s had occupied a stretch of Wilshire five miles from B.H. No surprise, on any given eBay day, you could bid on a five-hundred-dollar Stradivarius.

Milo said, “Even as a geezer he looked like a gangster.”

I said, “That could’ve worked for him in court, the power of intimidation. In Hoke’s case, there was an added benefit: Compared with the lawyer, the defendant looked harmless.”

“Didn’t do the defendant any good.”

“But obviously Hoke didn’t hold the conviction against McCandless. Continued to employ him, using Thalia as a surrogate the way he did with Wojik. What I find interesting is McCandless working for both Hoke and LaPlante aka Drancy.”

He said, “Backs up the collaboration scenario.”

“Big-time. Drancy and Hoke planned the whole thing together, the jewels got fenced or sold to other buyers with loose standards, the consignors ate the loss. If we’re right about Hoke continuing to operate from behind bars, he could’ve been involved in Drancy’s New York art scheme. The same goes for Thalia. But that one didn’t work out well for Drancy, he got busted. Maybe his descendants believe he was sold out. Or hadn’t gotten a fair share of the take.”

“Criminal genetics,” he said. “Seventy years later, Thalia pays the price.”

I said, “Tying her to any of it would be tough unless you were related to a criminal insider and had heard stories about Hoke’s number one girl. The person he entrusted with his fortune.”

Milo walked over to the computer. “Look for a link between Drancy, Bakstrom, and Waters. That doesn’t work, toss in McCandless and Wojik. Hell, do a goulash.”

I tried every combination. Nothing.

“My luck,” he said, “anonymous Ms. Cutie will turn out to be the killer kin... okay, I’m gonna lean on Lev — the guy at the archive.”

“What about Bakstrom’s and Waters’s visitors list?”

“Still looking.”

“Quentin coughs up Thelma Myers and they can’t give you anything?”

“Data’s ‘in flux.’ They got a federal grant to go completely digital and something screwed up, big surprise.”

He sat back down.

I said, “Waters and Bakstrom have been in L.A. for a while but apart from Bakstrom’s pickup construction job, neither seemed to have stable employment. What if they freelanced? Nothing violent. Fraud, bunco, something to tide them along while they planned the big job. Using the same name they gave the hotel.”

“The Birkenhaar brothers,” he said. “That’s got to come from somewhere — maybe it’s Girlie’s real name.”

“We already searched and came up with zero. But the name of a suspect in an ongoing investigation might not make it to the Web.”

“I’ll ask around about scams.” He glanced at his Timex. “Grampas and the little girls who admire them. Dr. Wojik’s an odd bird, I don’t see her consorting with serious bad guys. Ricki Sylvester, on the other hand, is a lawyer, which in my book is at least one strike against her. Let’s inform her what we’ve learned about ol’ Jack, see what she has to say.”