Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 28

Back at the station we headed for the evidence room, where Milo filled out forms, registered the computer and the passport as evidence but didn’t deposit them.

The evidence clerk said, “You’re not leaving them here?”

“This you can have.” Handing her the passport.

She said, “Swiss? Kind of pretty.”

He said, “Be sure to ask for priority boarding.”

We climbed upstairs to the hallway leading to his office. A man walked a few yards ahead of us, past the interview rooms, carrying something blue. Nowhere to go except Milo’s office and a utility closet.

The man stopped at Milo’s door and knocked.

“Over here, friend.”

The visitor turned.

Early thirties, tall, dark wavy hair, a few days of beard stubble. He wore a long-sleeved black tee, blue jeans, and brown ventilated shoes with crepe soles, scuffed at the toes.

Good-looking despite old eyes. The vaguely dissolute air of one of those bruised artiste types you see hunching over laptops in coffee joints, pretending to write screenplays.

The badge and the holster on his belt said otherwise.

Detective badge, Level II.

He smiled but the effort seemed painful. “Lieutenant Sturgis?”

“That’s me.”

“Jacob Lev. I brought you the copy of the file you requested.”

“Door-to-door service?” said Milo, taking the blue binder. “Thought you were gonna fax it.”

“Fax machine broke down,” said Lev. Soft voice, boyish yet deep.

“Appreciate the effort, Detective.” Milo shook his hand.

Lev said, “Sorry I couldn’t come up with more. You know how it is.”

“Bad record keeping at the archives.”

“General attitude,” said Lev. “Contempt for the past.”

Forcing his smile a millimeter wider, he turned and left.

Milo said, “There’s a guy could use your services. D II landing in a crap job like that must’ve done something serious.”

He unlocked his office, sat down, inspected the binder.

Blue, hardback cloth boards blemished with mold spots and rodent nips. Despite the sturdy exterior, only two sheets of paper inside, each protected by a plastic sleeve that looked brand-new.

Jacob Lev going the extra mile. When stuck in a crap job, pleasing a superior isn’t a bad idea.

Milo removed both sheets and laid them on his desk. He never minds me reading over his shoulder so I hovered.

Legal-sized paper, once-white, had aged to caramel and grown shaggy at the edges. The uneven pressure points of a manual typewriter produced letters that protruded like Braille. Lots of typos, each one X’d out by the author.

His name at the top: LAPD Commander R. G. Demarest, no division cited.

The date: May 1939.

The title, off center:

What followed were paragraphs of excessively worded cop prose. It’s a language of its own, taught by no one and serving no function, but enduring across generations.

The choice of topic puzzled me. Why had a Beverly Hills crime been documented by LAPD? As I read on, the reason became clear.

Commander R. G. Demarest’s concern wasn’t the year-old burglary, itself. The department was interested in “prime suspect Hoke in a general and optimally probative manner regarding, in particular, a prior and pending SI investigation undertaken in cooperation with and with implications for communication with Federal Entities.”

The tax evasion case had been set in motion well before the theft of the Oscar bling from Frederick LaPlante’s safe.

Demarest repeated himself a few times, let’s hear it for Roget and synonyms, but eventually, his emphasis became clear.

Theorizing about “what effect, positive or negative, would Prm. Susp. Hoke’s ultimately proven suspected complicity in this high-level jewelry covert burglarly [sic] replete with allegations of nocturnal tunneling and safe-cracking of a serious ‘yegg-type’ level, pertain to the aforementioned investigation?”

His conclusion at the bottom of page one: “A definitive answer is unavailable, thus risks are both high, serious, and unpredictable.”

His advice: “Minimize engagement in the collaboration and intelligence data requested by Beverly Hills Police Department in re: LaPlante, Hoke, etc, so as to avoid adding undue overt prosecutorial emphasis to the LaPlante case so that Prm. Susp. Hoke will not be unduly alarmed and flee to jurisdictions unknown id est Tia Juana where he has been known to frequent or parts south below.”

Milo looked up. “The department screwed B.H. in order to continue working with the feds on the tax case.”

I said, “Politics as usual and it succeeded. Who got the credit for putting Hoke away? Not B.H.”

He flipped the paper, found nothing on the back, turned to the second page.

A list, also poorly centered.

No phone numbers or addresses on anyone. Listing the college’s street address was an odd divergence and I said so.

Milo said, “Pencil pushers are addicted to extraneous details, Demarest couldn’t go cold turkey.”

“Maybe, but I think this was more. By tossing in one bit of specifics, he’s saying the department has the facts but is choosing not to divulge most of them.”

“Saying it to who?”

“Anyone who might come across the report.”

“Ass Covering One-Oh-One.”

“Why would it be different back then?” I said.

I took another slog through Demarest’s verbiage. “The message is clear: Don’t mess with the robbery. In fact do what you can to retard the investigation. The goal had been set well before the robbery: Nab Hoke for tax evasion because that had worked with Capone and other mobsters and allowed confiscation of illegally obtained assets. Recovered jewels wouldn’t fit that strategy. They could be identified and open to claims by the consignors. But once the jewels were converted to cash, no way they could be accounted for. That’s why the department waited until the goods had been sold. That’s why the IRS let Drancy move to New York even though they knew he was dirty. He got his freedom and the government got its money. And maybe they knew Drancy was dirty because he was their informant.”

“They turned him and he ratted out Hoke,” he said.

“He and/or one of the unnamed associates in item five. The IRS fills its coffers with a nice bunch of cash, the department rids itself of an annoyingly elusive major criminal; who cares if an incorrigible con man becomes New York’s problem?”

He flipped the second page over. Another blank.

I’d turned away when he said, “Hold on.”

Lowering his head close to the paper, he pointed to the bottom right-hand corner.

A swirl of faint cursive in pencil, barely visible.

He squinted, shook his head, held the sheet directly under a desk light. The writing clarified a bit, the barest gray suggesting itself on old paper.

He read it out loud. “Ring any bells?”

“Maybe a scheduled raid?” I said. “A winter night, someplace with fifty-seven in the address?”

“I guess — hell, it could be Chinese takeout. Okay, back to the Drancy-as-rat scenario. You realized what that means: Official agencies fenced stolen goods and robbed legal owners of serious money.”

“It’s called eminent domain.”

He laughed, turned serious. “Dangerous game for Drancy.”

I said, “The alternative was going to prison and ending up even more vulnerable. Be interesting to know if he was convicted of the art swindle.” I punched a preset on my phone.

Maxine Driver said, “Oh, hi. I was planning to call you but not with good news, I’m afraid. Janet couldn’t find anything about Hoke and all she got on Drancy was an obituary.”

“When did he die?”

“Hold on... February 1942, but there are no details.”

“Could you email it to me?”

“It’s important?”

“Who knows?”

“How’s the case going?”

“Getting closer.”

“And...”

I said nothing.

“That’s all you can tell me.”

“The promise remains, Maxine.”

“Right, I’ll be the first to know... okay, here it is.”

The attachment came through seconds later.

A single, small-print, paid-for line in the Daily News.

Milo said, “Daddy’s a gem? Family had a sense of humor? If they’d ponied up for a second line, he’d be multifaceted?”

I smiled but wondered if a joke had been in play. Something else about a gem...

Nothing came to me and I sat there as Milo phoned the New York City medical examiner, learned that death records from 1918 through 1950 were maintained by the city’s Municipal Archives. A clerk there informed him even law enforcement sources were required to fill out an application, though the ten-dollar fee might be waived. Or maybe not.

“How long will it take to process the application, ma’am?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“All kinds of things.”

“Please put your supervisor on.”

A woman named Leticia was willing to pull the file and read the summary over the phone because “my husband and both brothers are cops. But if you want a Xerox, Lieutenant, you do need to do it officially.”

“Let’s see what it says, first.”

She was back in a moment. “You know, this one’s kind of interesting.” She recited the summary. Milo told her he’d definitely want a copy, would get back to her.

He hung up, wide-eyed.

Fred Bullard Drancy had suffered massive internal bleeding and blunt-force trauma due to a fall from the tenth floor of a vacant building on East 65th Street near Second Avenue. The structure had been undergoing remodeling for months, was deemed unsafe to enter except by authorized personnel. What Drancy had been doing there at night had never been ascertained. Seventy years later, manner of death remained undetermined.

Milo said, “I’m gonna go out on a limb and determine he got pushed. Jesus.”

I said, “Ratting out Hoke was a risky move. And maybe being a gem wasn’t family puffery, more like a bitter in-joke. They knew he was murdered.”

I pointed to the date of the obit. “Not long after Hoke began his sentence. Behind bars but far from impotent.”

“Long arm of the lawless,” he said.

“The boss was incarcerated but his minions were free. Including his true love, living comfortably at the Aventura, working a legitimate accounting job and managing to evade law enforcement attention. I’ve been assuming Thalia’s concerns about criminal behavior were related to someone else. But what if she was talking about herself? Not just because of her money laundering for Hoke. What if she’d helped set up the hit on Drancy? Or knew about the contract and did nothing to stop it?”

“All this time later, she gets an attack of the guilts?”

“End-of-life introspection,” I said. “It’s pretty common. And her needing to atone would explain leaving everything to charity.”

“Then why was she killed?”

“Because someone else judged her guilty.”

He frowned. “Drancy spawn.”

“The push from the tenth floor could’ve become enshrined as family lore. The kind of thing that can harden over time into outrage. The right spawn comes along, a decision’s made to set things right and profit in the process.”

He wheeled back from his desk, swerved sharply to avoid colliding with my knee. It happens all the time when we’re coexisting in a space meant for a lapdog. No injuries to date; he’s a master of the near-miss.

“I don’t know about the introspection bit,” he said. “If Thalia was visited by Drancy kin, I can see her wanting to discuss felony genetics with an expert. Especially one with police contacts.”

“You could be right,” I said. “But looking back to her mood when we spoke, there was no extreme fear. At the most, curiosity with an edge, and maybe not even that.”

“It was enough of an edge to make you wonder what she was really after, amigo. Let’s say this particular bit of Drancy DNA came across nonthreatening. Like a good-looking chick claiming to just wanna learn more about Grandpa Fred. But Thalia was no dummy, she knew what had happened to Grandpa Fred and it put her guard up. So she thought a bit, decided to groom you as a chat-buddy. Bide her time, if things got scarier, you’d connect her with me. Problem was, everything moved too fast and she was caught off guard.”

He stood, stretched, sat back down. “Whatever the case, there’s still the big question: Why wait so long to get even? Unless the D-clan learned something new.”

“Confirmation of Thalia’s involvement in the hit.”

“Or a heavily sweetened pot, Alex. I can’t let go of the profit motive, nine times out of ten a case like this revolves around money. What if Cutie showed up at Thalia’s bungalow after learning about — or just suspecting — a serious cash stash?”

He re-read Demarest’s report, placed the two sheets back in the blue folder, looked up the archive online application form, and printed it.

Muttering, “Waste of time but dot the t’s. Let’s get some coffee.”

We were ten steps closer to the stairs when his phone rang. Still on speaker.

“Milo? Len Gottlieb.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Something actually,” said Gottlieb. “Sometimes a guy gets lucky. And I’m such a saint, I’m gonna share.”