“Maybe that discrepancy occurred to Gavin.”
“Brain-damaged ace reporter ferrets out fraud,” he said. He drank juice, put the carton down, wiped his lips with his sleeve. “All you need is a room and some chairs to make a million. Yeah, it’s a fat scam, but Sonny gives away a million a year. Why would he mess with this? The game?”
“Maybe something else,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Making Mary Lou happy.”
“She didn’t end up too happy,” he said.
“Maybe something went wrong.”
“So they were cleaning the carpet. The day after we spoke to Sonny. Who was doing it, scuzzbags like Roland Kristof?”
“Didn’t appear to be,” I said. I gave him the name of the company, and he copied it down.
“A rehab scam,” he said. “But we’re back to the same question: Where does Jerry Quick fit in?”
“That office of his,” I said. “Not much business goes on there.”
“A front.”
“Maybe his real job’s working for Sonny.”
He frowned. “This whole scenario, it makes Quick more than just a sleazy bastard. It means he knows why his son was killed and instead of telling us, he cleans out the room.”
“That could’ve been fear,” I said. “First Gavin, then Mary Lou Koppel. That’s why Quick left town. When you called the office, no one answered. Maybe Quick told Angie to take some time off.”
“He splits… leaves his wife behind… because they don’t get along anyway. He doesn’t give a damn about her.”
“That would also explain the daughter- Kelly- not coming home after Gavin’s death. Quick wants her out of the way.”
“The scam crumbling… if it really exists.”
“A scam would explain Flora Newsome, too. While she was working in the parole office, she learned something she shouldn’t have. Maybe Mary Lou got greedy and wanted a bigger cut. Or Gavin’s getting killed changed her perspective.”
“What, she suddenly developed moral fiber?”
“Money games are one thing, murder’s another. Perhaps Koppel panicked and wanted out. Or she tried to lean on Sonny.”
He got up again, circled the room a couple of times. “There’s another possible angle on Flora, Alex. She could’ve been in on the scam, flagging files of incoming parolees, passing along names.”
“Could be,” I said, thinking about Evelyn Newsome, living on memories, trying to put her life together.
He stared out the kitchen window for a long time. “Career criminal, parole officer, shady metals dealer. And Professor Larsen, the human rights dude. We’ve been focusing on Gull, haven’t paid much attention to Larsen.”
He drained the juice carton, let out a long, windy sigh. “I’ve got an appointment with Jerry Quick’s CPA in Brentwood. Then I’d better start doing detail work on Degussa and Hacker, find out, among other things, if either of them interfaced with Flora’s satellite office.”
He snapped the case shut and saluted. “All this still leaves Crystal, the mystery blonde.”
“Gavin’s girl,” I said. “He confided in her. Or he didn’t, and she just happened to be in the wrong place.”
“So you’ve changed your mind, she wasn’t the primary target.”
“Flexibility is the hallmark of maturity.”
He grinned. “Seeing as your schedule’s open, should you choose to accept the mission…”
“What?”
“Scholarly research. Excavate every goddamn thing you can about Albin Larsen and the others. Look for the kind of easy government money we’re guessing about. State, local, Fed, private. Something with poor oversight that would be easy to pad.”
“Sounds like a typical grant,” I said.
“So young, yet so cynical. So, do we have a deal?”
“A deal implies reciprocity,” I said.
“Virtue, m’lad, is its own reward.”
CHAPTER 32
Virtue took its sweet time paying off.
Jerome Quick’s name pulled up no hits. Neither did Raymond Degussa’s or Bennett A. Hacker’s.
Edward “Sonny” Koppel was a man of means, but his public profile was low: twenty references in all, sixteen noting Koppel’s charitable contributions. Most of those consisted of Koppel’s name on donor lists. When he was identified at all it was as an “investor and philanthropist.” No photos accompanied any of the citations.
Albin Larsen was a good deal more cybervisible. For the last decade, he’d balanced the practice of psychology with delivering lectures on the role of psychology in social activism in his native Sweden as well as in France, Holland, Belgium, Canada, and Kenya. His name popped up sixty-three times.
That kind of travel conflicted with doing long-term therapy; then again, it was easier to maintain a patient load when you weren’t actually seeing your patients.
I began slogging through the hits. Larsen’s connections to Africa went beyond giving speeches; he’d been a U.N. observer in Rwanda during the genocide that had seen eight hundred thousand Tutsis exterminated and had consulted to the subsequent war crimes tribunal.
Some of the citations were repetitive, but the thirty I examined were all more of the same: Larsen doing good works.
Not the profile of a swindler or a murderer. Before reaching the end, I shifted gears and started searching for psychotherapy programs for parolees and other ex-cons, found surprisingly few. No government projects in California, other than a state-funded truck-driving school for recently released felons. That one had earned a bit of scrutiny when one of its graduates, tanked up on meth, had crashed his big rig into a restaurant in Lodi. But I found no sign the grant had been terminated.
Everything else I came up with was academic- a smattering of social scientists espousing theories and playing with numbers. When treatments for criminals did exist they tended to be outside the therapy mainstream. A group in Baldwin Park promoted meditation and “attitudinal healing” for ex-cons, and one in Laguna trumpeted the power of arts and crafts. Martial arts, tai chi specifically, was the treatment of choice for an organization in San Diego, and there was no shortage of religious groups touting techniques of moral change.
I phoned the State Department of Health, endured nearly an hour of voice mail and on-hold stupor before speaking to a jaded woman who informed me that she hadn’t heard of any treatment groups for parolees but that if one existed, they wouldn’t know about it, the Department of Corrections would. Another forty minutes of telephonic torment by the Corrections switchboard, as I was shunted from menu to menu. I started pressing “ 0” like a man possessed, finally reached an operator and was told that the office was closed.
Four-fifteen. My tax dollars working overtime.
I returned to the last dozen citations on Albin Larsen. A few more speeches, then a joint statement issued by Larsen and a U.N. commissioner named Alphonse Almogardi, in Lagos, Nigeria, promising that the United Nations would do everything in its power to bring the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to justice.
Links attached to that one connected me to an African public affairs website. The big story took place in Kigali, the Rwandan capital: a June 2002 march by thirty-five hundred genocide survivors branding the International Criminal Tribunal a farce. During the eight years since the tribunal’s establishment, only seven war crimes trials had been convened, all of low-level military officers. As the years ground on, witnesses died or disappeared. Those who persisted had endured threats and harassment. Accused butchers grew wealthy as their defense attorneys kicked back shares of tribunal-financed legal fees.
More damaging was the accusation that the tribunal judges were actively conspiring to delay the trials of big- ticket mass murderers because of fears that hearings in open court would reveal the complicity of U.N. personnel in
