Strange Bedfellows

4

Then Engalla Popped Up

The CHP have any leads on where Nilo Engalla’s been for the past eight months?” I asked.

After a brief conversation with my captain and Lieutenant Stobaugh, I had joined Billie and the legendary Thor at his desk in a section of the Homicide I bullpen where he held court. And although the three of us spoke in hushed tones, I could feel the attention of every detective at our end of the big room, straining to glean some little tidbit of information, not the least of which was how the hell did I get returned to duty so soon.

Thor answered my question with a shrug. “The Chippies are trying to reconstruct his movements, but it’s difficult to get information from someone in a coma.”

“They think he’ll come around?”

“He’s not showing any signs yet, but the hospital and the CHP know to call us as soon as there’s any change.”

“Maybe we ought to head up there, see what we can find out on our own.”

Thor raised his hand. “Hold your water, Justice. How seriously were you looking at him?”

“Not at all in the beginning. We first thought the shooting was part of a busy gangbanging weekend. But there were no wits who could definitively ID the car or its occupants, and we could never trace the M.O. to any of the usual suspects in our gang databases. So then we started looking at each of the vics, see if anyone wanted them dead.”

“Zuccari’s an Italian name. Any chance he’s mobbed up?”

“The name is Italian, but the family is German, came to the States in the thirties. Interestingly enough, there was some background noise about the family being tied to the Nazis prior to immigrating.”

“What ‘background noise’?” Thor asked.

“A letter was sent to Zuccari about six months prior to the shooting, containing a German magazine article about his father making uniforms for the Hitler Youth Brigade-”

Thor raised a craggy eyebrow. “The Hitlerjugend?”

“Yeah. Zuccari’s assistant said the letter shook up her boss pretty badly, convinced him someone was out to get him. So much so he hired an outside PR firm and additional security, too. The company’s attorneys thought it was either extortion or maybe had something to do with the venture with the Shareefs, but there were never any follow-up letters or leaks to the press, so they blew it off.”

“You got the letter?” Thor asked.

“The assistant saw Zuccari put it in his desk, but she couldn’t find it among his papers after the shooting.”

“I know why,” Billie said. “Imagine the fallout in the stock market if the public got wind that the founder of CZ Toys was a Nazi! It’d be as bad as Procter & Gamble and the Satanism rumors in the eighties!”

“Was there any truth to the Nazi accusation?” Thor asked.

“About as much as Procter & Gamble and the devil.” I spoke easily from memory. “Of course, we spent some time on it, but we couldn’t confirm the Nazi connection. What we did learn was that Claus Zuckerman, the father’s real name, was a down-on-his-luck dollmaker who became very successful supplying uniforms for the Hitlerjugend. But Zuckerman lost the contract and ended up changing the family name and fleeing to the U.S. when Hitler made membership in his youth brigade mandatory, and his son was coming up on that age. As Carlo Zuccari, Zuckerman reestablished his doll-making business in New Jersey. His son Chuck moved it to California in ’sixty-eight, took the company public ten years later, and has never looked back.”

Billie grunted. “With a family history like that, I wouldn’t either.”

“How’s the company doing today?” Thor asked.

“Still publicly traded, although eighty percent of the stock’s still held by the family. And they’re fairly successful, in that second tier of toy companies behind Mattel and Hasbro, growing from increased sales and aquisitions like the Shareefs.

“Anything else?” Thor asked.

“The company’s a huge corporate supporter of the arts in Orange County, several hospitals, too. And from all accounts, Zuccari himself is a pillar of society down there, a big deal in some ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party.”

Next to me, I heard Billie mutter something under her breath about the berry not falling too far from the bush, which I chose to ignore, adding: “His net worth’s about one hundred fifty million, depending on the value of the company’s stock.”

Thor whistled while Billie said: “Not too shabby. What about the wife? She piss off anybody at the country club who carried a grudge?”

“Which wife are we talking?”

Billie’s eyebrow shot up. “How many are there?”

“The one who got shot, Alma Zuccari, is number three.”

“What’s her story?”

“Born Alma Gordone, from some little berg in New Jersey, only child of a physician dad and a socialite mom, both deceased.”

“So we can assume no mob connections with her, either,” Billie stated more than asked, sneaking a glance in Thor’s direction. “What about the other wives?”

The first wife died when their son Mario was two. Zuccari remarried in the late fifties but divorced Number Two three years before the shooting. She landed on her feet, though, and remarried a venture capitalist even richer than Zuccari.”

“So Number Two’s got no motive to have him shot,” Billie said, ignoring the exasperated glare Thor cast her way.

“She’s got a personal net worth of about sixteen million herself, mostly in the company’s stock, as do his son Mario and a daughter, Gabriella.”

Thor asked for a rundown on the Zuccari siblings. “Both of them work in the business. The son, Mario, should be forty now. He’s the CFO, unmarried as I recall, upstanding citizen, a lay leader in one of those born-again megachurches in Orange County that his father supports. The daughter, Gabriella, is about ten years younger and does something for the company over in Europe, I can’t recall. We never met her.”

“This third wife,” Billie asked, referring to the notes she was taking, “Alma-she a trophy wife, gold digger, or both?”

“She was working as a trade show model when they met. Thirty-seven to Zuccari’s sixty-six at the time of the shooting, so you do the math.”

“Pretty?” Thor asked.

“Reasonably so, if you’re into blondes.”

Billie raised her hand. “Then I vote trophy wife. Anything else on her?”

“They’d been married a little over a year at the time of the shooting, and she was pregnant with their first child.”

Thor made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “She didn’t waste any time.”

“The scuttlebutt we picked up around the company was that Zuccari wasn’t too thrilled about having a baby so late in life, but what could he do? As my father would say: ‘the fish was caught in his net.’ ”

Thor chuckled while Billie asked: “What do we know about the couple they were having dinner with?”

“The Shareefs? Both Harvard grads, the husband Malik had a Ph.D. in psychology, his wife Habiba an MBA. He was from Oakland, she from L.A. They were squeaky-clean, no enemies, no bad habits, not even an outstanding parking ticket. All they were trying to do was get their toy company off the ground.”

“What was the name of their company?” Billie asked.

“Beautiful You Dollworks.”

“That’s not the same black toy company in L.A. that went out of business a few years ago?”

“You’re thinking of Shindana, which started in the aftermath of the Watts riots and closed in the mid-eighties. And that was despite some funding from Mattel.”

“Which has gone on to dominate the black doll market. How did the Shareefs think they could compete with that?”

“Habiba Shareef told me they weren’t initially planning on selling their ethnic dolls to the general public like Mattel, just special-edition collectibles until they could build their reputation. She and her husband believed they had a good shot at it, if they could raise enough capital. Sad thing was their dream was just about to come true-they had just signed a multimillion-dollar joint venture deal between Beautiful You and CZ Toys. They were celebrating with the Zuccaris when Malik got shot along with Zuccari and his family. He died a month later from complications related to the open-heart surgery they had to perform on him.”

“What about their deal with CZ Toys?” Thor asked.

“In limbo, along with Chuck Zuccari. He’s been in a coma since the shooting.”

I fell silent, painfully aware of how a bullet can end a life, or worse.

“A black toymaker like Shareef’s not a high-profiler,” Billie noted after a moment. “How’d we end up with the case instead of it being assigned to Central Bureau?”

“We were catching it from two sides. With Zuccari’s Republican connections, the governor’s office was on our tails from the get-go. And the head of the L.A. Tourism Bureau sits on the Police Commission, so he put a lot of pressure on the chief to get the case wrapped up before it affected what little convention business the city’s had since the riots.”

“And I’m assuming Zuccari’s family had alibis for the night of the shooting?” Billie said.

“Every last one of them. Checked and rechecked.”

Thor squinted into the distance. “What about the Black Muslim angle? I remember Steve running that by me last summer.”

In response to Billie’s questioning look, I explained: “There was a theory floating around the office that the shooting was connected to the Nation of Islam.”

“Like I said, Black Muslims,” Thor added.

“Not all black Muslims are in the Nation of Islam,” Billie broke in. “The majority of African-American Muslims adhere to the more traditional forms of Islam, ever since Elijah Muhammad’s son Wallace D. split from the Nation in the seventies.”

“Thank you for the world religion lesson, Detective,” Thor said. “How do you know so much about these whatever-you-call-them Muslims?”

“There are a number of Islamic centers in the Southwest Division,” Billie replied, her tone equally scornful. “You should visit one sometime. It might open your eyes.”

Shaking his head, Thor said, “You seen one, you seen ’em all, I say,” clearly playing to the peanut gallery.

Billie rolled her eyes heavenward, then asked me if there was any truth to the rumors.

“Malik had grown up in the Nation, up in Oakland, his wife down here. But by her own admission, they’d been away from the Nation since grad school.”

“Did he convert to one of the other branches of Islam?” Billie asked. “A number of former Nation members did.”

“I think they’re Sunnis. Is that important?”

“Maybe. It would certainly create some serious ethical considerations in the way he’d approach a business deal with CZ Toys. And I have no idea what kind of prohibitions there’d be for Shareef doing business with a company with Nazi connections. Talk about your strange bedfellows!”

“Just remember, we could find no evidence that the Nazi rumor has ever surfaced in this country.”

“Still, if someone sent Zuccari that article,” Thor argued, “one of these Muslim groups could have known about it, too.”

“And what?” Billie interrupted. “Shot Shareef and Zuccari to teach them the errors of their ways? Wouldn’t that be a little extreme?”

“Don’t dismiss it so quickly,” Thor warned. “That Nation of Islam tip was highly credible!”

“No one said it wasn’t, Thor,” I replied carefully. “It just turned out to be a dead end. Then Engalla popped up.”

The phone on Thor’s desk jangled. “Continue.”

“A few weeks after the shooting, Engalla quit CZ Toys, just before his internship ended. The company’s V.P. of Human Resources called to say it was the first time that’d ever happened with one of the kids from the UC Irvine program.”

Thor’s phone stopped ringing and then started up again. “Go on,” he insisted, waving his hand at the phone as if shooing away a bothersome pigeon.

“And when the HR Department called the following week to say Engalla hadn’t picked up his last paycheck, we decided we’d better interview the boy. That’s when we discovered he’d moved out of his apartment and left no forwarding address.”

Thor’s phone kept ringing. “I’d better take this.” Thor listened to the voice on the other end, his face softening as he turned away and called the name of a favorite daughter. “Sweetheart, I’m in a meeting.”

“Maybe Engalla took his last paycheck with him,” Billie whispered. “That twenty-seven thousand the Highway Patrol found in his car would be an awfully big payday for a kid working a summer internship. What department was he in?”

“Finance.”

“So he could have had access.”

Something his daughter said seemed to upset Thor, who, his face turning ashen, cursed softly and assured her he’d be there as soon as he could.

“And Engalla never returned to campus?” Billie asked.

“Never did.”

Thor hung up and apologized for the interruption. “Are you okay?” I asked, noting that the color was still drained from his face.

“I’m fine. Engalla’s a Filipino name, right?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You look for him in the Flip community over near Temple?”

Hearing what sounded like a slur come from Thor’s lips reminded me of some of the more racist and sexist comments that had been circulating around the department. “We put out BOLOs with all our divisions to be on the lookout for him and put him on all the interstate and national databases, in case he showed up in another jurisdiction. His parents live up north, in Daly City, so the local PD even surveilled their house for a couple of months as a courtesy, but he never surfaced.”

“Maybe his parents are migrant workers,” Thor suggested. “That might account for him turning up in the Central Valley. They got a bunch of ’em there.”

I didn’t remember that coming up in our investigation, but I said I’d check the file. “Gena conducted those interviews.”

Billie’s spine stiffened. “Did you only look in Filipino neighborhoods? Isn’t it a big assumption to think he’d only go there?”

Thor sighed heavily and rolled his eyes. “Spare me the PC lecture, Truesdale!”

“I know what Billie means, Thor,” I broke in. “I raised that question myself when we heard Engalla had disappeared. But we found out the kid hadn’t made many friends down in Orange County, spent his time in that last year either working or volunteering at a Filipino cultural center up here, so it was a logical conclusion.”

“What was he doing at the cultural center?” Billie asked.

“Tutoring neighborhood kids in math is what I remember, but you should verify that against the first sixty-dayer in the case file.” Sixty-dayers were reports on ongoing cases that one of the investigating detectives completed every two months to recap the investigation and demonstrate to the higher-ups we were doing our jobs. Gena Cortez had completed the first two on the Smiley Face shootings, and I had written the last one after she went out on medical leave.

Thor threw a pen on his desk. “Whaddya wanna bet the boy embezzled that cash they found in his car? If Chuck Zuccari found out about it, it would provide a motive for Engalla shooting him.”

“But if Zuccari knew, wouldn’t someone else in the company have had to tell him?” Billie asked. “I mean CEOs don’t go around checking the books themselves, do they?”

“No one at the company reported any money missing, either when Engalla first disappeared or afterward. And it’s not like they didn’t know how to contact us if something came up-we interviewed all of Engalla’s supervisors, plus Zuccari’s son and Alma.”

“How many supervisors did he have?”

“Three. He was on some kind of financial internship, as I recall, that rotated through Internal Auditing, Accounts Payable, and maybe the controller’s office.”

Thor raised a bushy eyebrow. “You would think, among that group, that someone would have discovered any missing funds by now.”

“Yeah, but we haven’t heard anything from the company or the Zuccari family in months.”

“Bet you will now,” he predicted, sighing as he ran a hand over his gray hair. Although Thor had been threatening for years to retire to Oregon to be closer to his daughter and her family, he always seemed to stick around for one more notch in his famed belt of killers apprehended and called to account. In fact, he’d parlayed that fame into more than one consulting gig, the first of which had earned him the Norse god nickname, bestowed by a television producer who’d used Thor’s old case files to create an Emmy-winning detective series in the early eighties. Presiding over the successful resurrection and closing of a case that had stopped people from frequenting downtown restaurants and nightspots for almost a year would be particularly sweet nectar for this god.

Maybe even lead to another television series.

“I’m calling the Zuccari family as soon as we finish this meeting, just to bring them up to speed,” Thor was saying. He asked me for their home numbers.

“I can look through my old notebook. But it might be faster to call Firestone. He was lead-”

“I’m not bothering Steve at home for some numbers you should have at your fingertips! Where’s the goddamn case file?”

“Lieutenant Stobaugh had me send the files over to Central Records after I filled that last sixty-dayer,” I snapped back, not sure whether Thor was annoyed that I didn’t know the family’s numbers by heart or still pissed that I’d helped set Steve Firestone up on a sexual harassment beef that had gotten him suspended.

“Who rode the paper?”

“Gena Cortez, who’s-”

“Still on medical leave.” His face contorted at the mention of the name of my former partner-and the principal accuser of his passing-for-white protégé Firestone.

“I can call her, if you want.”

Thor’s look was withering. “Not with both of you scheduled to give testimony at Steve’s hearing in a couple of weeks.”

The rustling of my colleagues in the bullpen ceased, letting me know they were still eavesdropping. My mouth went dry, and I had to remind myself to breathe. “Where’d you hear that? No one’s given me a date.”

Thor reached for one of his LAPD coffee mugs, this one commemorating the department’s one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary. “I have my sources.”

In that moment, if I could have dropped through the floor, I would have.

Billie shot me a sympathetic look. She knew how much I dreaded testifying against my former supervisor, even if the asshole deserved every punishment the Board of Rights could impose. “Why don’t I retrieve the files from Central Records and debrief with Detective Cortez? It’ll be a good way for me to get up to speed.”

“Fine. Justice, call CZ Toys’ headquarters, see if Zuccari’s family is available to talk.” Thor gave me another smug look. “Unless you’ve got a problem doing a little spadework.”

Billie and I stared at each other, aware of the emphasis he’d put on the word “spade.” What possessed me to think Thor was turning a deaf ear to the outrageous comments of his colleagues? He was probably as much a part of generating them as everyone else.

“What is it, Justice?” he prodded. “You got a problem working under a male supervisor?”

Thor’s inflection told me he was clearly playing to the peanut gallery, letting them know that he was still one of them and he wasn’t going to let me off easy about Firestone. “Not at all,” I replied, loud enough for them to hear me, too. “Besides, I’m the one who knows the case best.”

“And I’m the one running it now.” Thor took another sip of his coffee. “Lieutenant Stobaugh put me on this case because he thought we needed some fresh eyes. If that’s a problem for you, maybe it would be better if you stayed here and rode the paper.”

I heard a couple of guys at the nearby desks snicker. Billie sucked in her cheeks and studied her notes. While given to bluntness in his working relationships, I thought Thor and I had made peace after the Park case.

Guess you thought wrong, my little voice mocked.

“No problem. When do you want to go down there?”

“Soon as Detective Truesdale gets back with the file.”

Billie checked her watch. “I can be back with it at one.”

“How’s three?” Thor said to me. “That’ll give us a couple of hours to review it.”

I shook my head. “We should leave here by two, avoid the traffic heading south.”

“Fine,” Thor agreed, sipping his coffee, “if being there later conflicts with your busy schedule.”

Was I imagining it, or had he intentionally mangled the pronunciation of the word busy, making it sound like the initials for Behavioral Sciences Services? Did he know I had been ordered in to see a BSS shrink, and would that knowledge make my life on the job more miserable than usual?

“Not at all.” You asshole. “Not at all.”