The Murder Book

the Larners. He and his wife socialized very little and lived an understated life- for billionaires. A single, albeit baronial, residence in Hancock Park, no live-in help, off-the-rack clothing, no expensive hobbies. Barbara drove a Volvo and volunteered at her church. If the press could be believed, both Obeys were as wholesome as milk.

One item, a year-old Wall Street Journal piece, did catch my eye: One of Obey's development companies, a privately held corporation named Advent Builders, had invested in a huge parcel of land south of the L.A. city limits- an unincorporated county area where the developer planned to build an entire community, complete with ethnically diverse, low-to-middle-income housing, public schools, well-landscaped commercial districts and industrial parks, 'comprehensive recreational facilities.'

Obey had taken ten years to accumulate fifteen thousand acres of contiguous lots and had spent millions to rid the earth of toxic waste left behind by a long-defunct county power depot. Unlike other empire-builders, he'd considered the environmental impact of his projects from the beginning, was out to crown his career with something culturally significant.

The new city was to be named Esperanza- Spanish for 'hope.'

I combined 'Esperanza' with each of the Cossack brothers' names and the Larners but came up with nothing. Tossing John G. Broussard into the mix proved no more fruitful. I tried 'Advent Properties' and 'Advent.' Still nothing on the Cossacks and the Larners, but a back-page construction journal article informed me that L.A.'s police chief had been hired as a security consultant to the Esperanza project. Broussard, hamstrung by city regulations, was working for free, but private shares in Advent had been gifted to the chief's wife and his only child, daughter, Joelle, a corporate attorney with a white-shoe downtown firm.

Broussard hadn't shown up at the private dinner but Milo's hunch was right on: The chief's hand was in everything.

The bitter aftertaste of my bad behavior with Robin kept rising like vomitus as I worked hard at concentrating on Obey and Broussard and the others and wondering what it could possibly mean.

'Comprehensive recreational facilities,' could mean playgrounds for kids, or it was a buzzword for bringing pro football back to the L.A. environs.

Billionaire with a big dream- I could see that being the crowning glory of Obey's long career. And it made good sense to place the top cop on your masthead.

But if the PR about Obey's righteous mien and the size of his personal fortune was accurate, why would he waste time with the Cossacks, who alienated their neighbors and couldn't seem to get any projects off the ground? And in the case of the Larners, the association would be even more hazardous- they were outright hustlers tainted by the Playa del Sol debacle.

Unless Obey's balance sheets weren't as glowing as the press believed, and he needed financial backup for his dream. Even billionaires could lose sight of assets and debits, and Obey had spent a decade buying up land and financing and detoxifying his holdings without a single spadeful of Esperanza dirt dug.

Big dreams often meant cataclysmic problems.

I switched to several financial databases and probed for thorns in Obey's numerous gardens. At least seven separate corporations were listed under his leadership, including Advent. But only one outfit was publicly traded, a commercial leasing company named BWO Financing.

BWO. Probably stood for Barbara and Walt Obey. Homey. From everything I could tell, the company was doing great, with common stock trading at 95 percent of its high, preferred units paying consistent dividends, and solid ratings from Standard & Poor.

Still, Wall Street's top analysts had been known to be caught with their pin-striped trousers around their ankles, because, at root, they were dependent upon what companies told them. And because their interests lay in selling stock.

Was Obey's empire teetering and had he sought out the Cossacks and the Larners for support? Did the Cossacks and the Larners have enough to offer Obey?

Bacilla and Horne's involvement was puzzling. Obey's planned city was located outside city limits, so what use could a pair of councilmen be?

Unless plans had changed and the focus had shifted back to downtown.

Nothing really sat right. Then I thought of the cement that held it all together:

John G. Broussard's aid in covering up the Ingalls murder implied he'd had connections to the Cossacks and maybe the Larners. Walt Obey was one of the chief's major patrons. Maybe Broussard had put them all together, earned himself a big fat finder's fee in addition to the private stock assigned to his wife and daughter.

Had the chief concealed a substantial lump sum payment from public scrutiny? With Obey's multiple corporations as shield, concealing cash would've been easy enough.

Payoff. Payback. For all his power and status, John G. Broussard remained a civil servant whose salary and pension by themselves would relegate him to upper-middle-class status, at best. Playing with the big boys could mean so much more.

I imagined the deal: Walt Obey salvaging his dream, the Cossacks and the Larners offered a big-time social and economic leap upward, from strip malls and parking lots to the grandest of monuments.

For Chief Broussard and the councilmen, good old cash.

So much at stake.

And now Milo had the opportunity to blow it all to smithereens.

CHAPTER 27

'Interesting theory,' said Milo. 'I was wondering along the same lines, except that night Obey's body language was more grantor than grantee. Bacilla and Horne were kissing up to him big-time.'

I said, 'Bacilla and Horne would be supplicants any way you look at it because their political life depends on fat cats. And Obey's been alpha-dog with politicians for a long time. But you never had a chance to watch him interact with the Cossacks.'

'No,' he admitted.

We were at his kitchen table. I'd spent a miserable hour mulling how to mend things with Robin, had made another attempt to reach her at the hotel. Out. When I reached Milo he was on the way home from the Hall of Records with a briefcase full of photocopies. He'd combed through the property tax files and found fourteen fleabag hotels operating near Skid Row twenty years ago, but no ownership by the Cossacks or any of the other players.

'So much for that.' I scanned the tax roster he'd spread out between us. Then a name jumped out at me. A trio of Central Avenue hotels- the Excelsior, the Grande Royale, the Crossley- owned by Vance Coury and Associates.

'A kid by the name of Coury hung out with the Cossacks and Brad Larner back in high school,' I said. 'They all belonged to some club called the King's Men.'

'Coury,' he said. 'Never heard of him.'

He brought his laptop over from the laundry room office. A search yielded three hits on two men named Vance Coury. An eleven-year-old Times piece described a Vance Coury, sixty-one, of Westwood, as having been brought up by the city attorney on slumlord charges. Coury was described as 'the owner of several buildings in the downtown and Westlake districts who had failed repeatedly to correct numerous building and safety violations.' One year prior to his indictment, Coury had been convicted of similar charges and sentenced, by a creative judge, to live in one of his own buildings for two weeks. He'd rehabbed a single unit in two days and set up housekeeping under protection by an armed guard. But Coury's empathy quotient hadn't risen a notch: He'd done nothing to improve his tenants' living conditions, and the judge lost patience. A follow-up article three weeks later reported that Coury had avoided a felony trial by collapsing in his attorney's office and dying of a stroke. An accompanying headshot showed a rail-thin, silver-haired, silver-bearded man with the defiant/frightened eyes of one scrambling to remember his latest tall tale.

Vance Coury, Jr. appeared in a two-year-old Sunday Daily News item, having contributed the custom paint job to the winning entry in a California hot rod contest. Coury, forty-two, owned an auto body shop in Van Nuys specializing in 'ground-up restoration of classic and specialty vehicles,' and his outfit