Kill the Messenger

2

The television was playing in the overflowing bookcase across the room as Lenny Lowell prepared the packet for pickup. His office was an oasis of amber light in an otherwise dark strip of low-end storefronts—a yoga place, a psychic, a nail salon frequented by hookers. Across the street and down the block, the bail-bonds/check-cashing place was open, and farther down a 76 station lit up the night with more lights than a prison yard.

The gas-station attendant would already be locked in his booth like a veal calf behind a couple of inches of bulletproof Plexiglas. But there wouldn’t be much crime tonight for either the station attendant or the bail bondsman to worry about. It was raining. In LA even the criminals don’t do rain.

On the TV, a hot brunette was reporting on the latest crime of the century. Jury selection continued for the upcoming trial of actor Rob Cole, accused in the brutal murder of his wife, Tricia.

Lenny watched with one eye, listened with one ear. Only his jealousy was fully committed. Cole had retained the services of Martin Gorman, whose client list read like a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s most famous screwups. Lenny’s client list read like a Who’s Who of LAPD’s best-known dirtbags.

Not that he hadn’t done well for himself. The world was full of recidivists too flush for a public defender and too stupid to keep from getting caught. Lenny had a thriving practice. And his extracurricular activities of late had netted him a new Cadillac and a ticket to Tahiti. Still, he had always coveted the spotlight claimed by lawyers like Martin Gorman and Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro. He had just never found a way to get there that didn’t involve talent and social connections.

A photograph of Tricia Crowne-Cole filled the television screen. She wasn’t especially attractive, kind of pudgy and mousy with brown hair too long for a woman her age. (She had to be fifty-something—significantly older than Cole, provided he was the forty-something he claimed to be.) She wore glasses that made her look like a spinster librarian.

You would’ve thought the daughter of a bazillionaire would have used some of that money to jazz herself up a little. Especially in this town, where women kept the numbers of their plastic surgeons and their favorite designers on speed dial. A bazillion dollars could make plain look pretty damn gorgeous.

It was hard for the average person to imagine why anyone would have wanted her dead. She had devoted her life to overseeing her father’s philanthropic trust. There wasn’t a disease Norman Crowne wasn’t trying to cure, a liberal social cause he didn’t champion, a highfalutin art he didn’t support—via Tricia. She was her father’s social conscience.

It was impossible for the average person to imagine how anyone could have killed her so brutally, strangling her, then smashing her face in with a piece of sculpture the size of a bowling ball. Lenny was not the average person. He had heard it all a thousand times and knew full well what people were capable of, what jealousy and hate could drive them to.

Word around town was that Tricia, fed up with Cole’s infidelities and endless dramas, had been about to dump Rob Cole off the gravy train at long last. Cole had tanked his career with sulkiness, stupidity, and a shallow store of talent. He had run through all of his money and plenty of hers. A lot of it had gone up his nose. A lot had gone to rehab clinics—charitable donations, as it turned out. Rob Cole didn’t have the character to pull himself out of the train wreck, or sense enough to keep his weaknesses private.

The tailor-made Leonard Lowell client, Lenny lamented. He could have made a big name for himself getting Rob Cole off the hook—a name that would be recognized even by people who didn’t have rap sheets. But Rob Cole was Martin Gorman’s headache. Lenny had other fish to fry.

The front buzzer sounded, announcing the arrival of the messenger. As he rounded the desk, Lenny glanced at the brochures he had gotten from the redhead at the travel agency on the second floor and wondered if he could sweet-talk her into going with him. The Cayman Islands and a hot broad. Paradise.

Jace leaned on the buzzer a second time, even though he could see Lenny Lowell coming out of the office and into the dark cubicle occupied in daylight hours by Lowell’s secretary—a woman with cotton-candy blond hair and cat-eye glasses, known only as “Doll.” Lenny was like a character out of an old movie where all the men wore hats and baggy suits, and everybody smoked cigarettes and talked fast.

Jace had been to Lowell’s office many times. A lot of a messenger’s runs were to or from lawyers of one kind or another—much to the displeasure of the messengers. Lawyers were notoriously cheap and impossible to please. At the annual Thanksgiving bash—Cranksgiving—the messengers always had a piñata in the image of their least favorite attorney of the year. They made the thing extra tough so everyone could get their chance to beat on it repeatedly.

Jace played along with the game and kept to himself the fact that he intended to join the ranks of the loathed someday. Growing up the way he had, he had seen the law work against a lot of people, especially kids. He meant to turn it in his favor—turn his life around, and hopefully some others’ too. But he was taking only two college courses a semester, so most of his messenger cohorts would be dead or gone by the time he passed the bar. If Jace was ever to be immortalized as a piñata, it would be strangers beating the stuffing out of him.

In the meantime, he always made an effort to chat up any lawyers he could, trying to make a good impression, trying to pick up whatever he could about the profession and the people in it. Networking. Working toward the day when he might be looking for a job, a recommendation, career advice.

Lowell pulled the door open, an unnaturally white smile splitting his long, horsey face.

“Neither rain, nor smog, nor gloom of night,” he boomed. He’d been drinking. Jace could smell the bourbon hanging over the bad cologne.

“Hey, Lenny,” he said, pushing his way inside. “It’s raining, man.”

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, kid.”

“Yeah, right. I’m rolling in it,” Jace said, resisting the urge to shake himself like a wet dog. “I just do this gig for the rush.”

“You got a simple life,” the lawyer said, weaving his way back to his office. “There’s a lot to be said for that.”

“Yeah, like it sucks. Believe me, Lenny, I’d rather be driving your new Cadillac than my bike. Especially tonight. Man, I hate the rain.”

Lowell waved a big bony hand at him. “Nah. It never rains in Southern California. Unless you’re some poor stiff like Rob Cole. Then you get a shitstorm on your head.”

Jace glanced around the office piled with books and papers and file folders. Next to a bowling trophy dated 1974, two framed photographs sat on the desk—one of a racehorse in the winner’s circle with a bunch of flowers around its neck, and one of a pretty young woman with long dark hair and a confident smile—Lenny’s daughter, Abby. A law student, Lenny had told him.

“Gorman will get him off,” Jace said, picking up the bowling trophy to read the inscription: 2ND PLACE TEAM, HOLLYWOOD BOWL, 1974. It wasn’t difficult to picture Lenny in one of those bowling shirts from the fifties, his hair greased back. “Gorman is good. Better than good.”

“It’s better to be lucky than good, kid,” Lowell returned. “Martin’s betting against the house in a rigged game. Money talks. Remember that.”

“I would if I had any.” Jace put the trophy back and scratched his arm under the sleeve of his cheap plastic rain jacket. He had bought half a dozen at the 99 Cent Store because they came folded to the size of a wallet and didn’t take up any space in his messenger bag. One seldom lasted more than a single storm, but the odds were good that six would last him the winter.

“Here,” Lowell said, thrusting a twenty at him. “For your trouble, kid. Don’t let it shoot its mouth off all in one place.”

Jace wanted to hold it up to the light.

Lowell snorted. “It’s real. Jesus. The last paperhanger I defended went to San Quentin in 1987. Counterfeiting is all Russian mob now. I don’t want any part of that. Those bastards make Hannibal Lecter look like a moody guy with an eating disorder.” He raised his glass in a toast to himself. “To long life. Mine. You want a toot, kid?”

“No, thanks, I don’t drink.”

“Designated driver?”

“Something like that.”

Designated adult, as long as he could remember, but he didn’t tell Leonard Lowell that. He never told anyone anything about his life. Below the radar. The less people knew, the less curious they would be, the less apt to want to “help.” An extra twenty bucks was the only kind of help Jace wanted.

“Thanks, Lenny. I appreciate it.”

“I know you do, kid. Tell your mother she raised a good one.”

“I will.”

He wouldn’t. His mother had been dead six years. He had mostly raised himself, and Tyler too.

Lowell handed him a five-by-seven-inch padded manila envelope. He hung a cigarette on his lip and it bobbed up and down as he spoke while he fished in his baggy pants pocket for a lighter. “I appreciate you dropping this off for me, kid. You’ve got the address?”

Jace repeated it from memory.

“Keep it dry,” Lowell said, blowing smoke at the dingy ceiling.

“Like my life depends on it.”