the lines, Adrian had likely been one of those geniuses who would have been able to converse easily with Newton and Sagan-and hard-pressed to make small talk with real people at a cocktail party or a university mixer. Adrian had probably spent his weekend nights in the company of ideas, not women. Maybe, as his colleagues wanted to think, he had been satisfied with that. And then he got cancer, and his whole life became about the survival rate.
But Adrian had had just a little time, time he’d spent with a very lovely nineteen-year-old living in his house, a girl who had the same otherworldliness about her. He’d denied himself simple human warmth and pleasure for too long; she was recovering from a terrible loss. Put two people like that in close proximity alone for too long, and anyone could tell you the result.
What if that little potbelly she’d had, the one I’d assumed was puppy fat, wasn’t? What if it had been a baby, and Nidia had been going to Mexico to have her child away from the eyes of anyone who knew her?
It was a theory that made sense until the entrance of the seven armed men. That changed things. It said that Nidia hadn’t run to Mexico to escape gossip and character assassination. She’d foreseen the approach of the men in the tunnel, whoever they were. And she’d warned her family, who’d effectively disappeared into the migrant worker community, for once using poverty and anonymity to their benefit. Nidia could have gone with them, except that if these guys were determined to find her, that wouldn’t have been enough. A beautiful green-eyed redhead, and, if my theory was correct, increasingly pregnant? Anywhere she went, people would have remembered her.
So Nidia had 911’d cousin Lara, and Lara had called Serena, playing the card of loyal dead soldier Teaser. And Serena had called me, and that was how the only person without a stake in the matter nearly bled out in the mountains of Mexico.
I walked out into the midday sunlight. It wasn’t going to help me to talk to people who’d known Adrian in the math department. Whatever there had been in Adrian’s life that had involved him with men like the guys in the tunnel, his colleagues weren’t going to know about it. I needed the story behind the obituary, the whispers that had never made it to print.
I sat down on the steps like a student, minus the latte. I dug my cell from my backpack and made a phone call.
“AP, Foreman.”
“Jack? It’s Hailey.”
“Hailey?” he said, mildly surprised. “I thought I’d said something to piss you off. I called you and you never returned my message.”
“My phone was stolen,” I said.
“Really? That’s too bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Listen, I need a favor and I don’t have a lot to exchange for it. Maybe I could buy you a lunch or something.”
“Depends what the favor is,” he said.
“For you, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said. “I need some background information, the kind of things reporters talk about but can’t or don’t print.”
“About what?”
“A man named Adrian Skouras. He was a mathematician at UC Berkeley and died of cancer three months ago. His obit was glowing, but I need to know if there were things about him that were, I don’t know, unsavory.”
“Mmmm,” Jack said thoughtfully. “Right off, can I ask you if this guy grew up locally?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“Do you remember if he’s related to a guy named Anton Skouras?”
“That was his father. You’ve heard of him?”
“Sure, he’s probably the biggest unindicted racketeer in San Francisco.”
“He is?”
“Unofficially, yeah. Officially, he’s a ‘prominent businessman.’ I haven’t had the opportunity to write about him that often. Someone who writes for the business pages over at the
“Could you ask someone over there?”
“It depends: Where are we going to lunch?”
“Anywhere,” I said, guessing that his innate decency wouldn’t let him hold me up for anyplace expensive.
“You know where Lefty O’Doul’s is?” he said.
“I know it,” I told him. Dim and comfortable, with old-style cafeteria-line food.
Before we hung up, Jack said, “Why are you interested in Skouras, anyway?”
I said, “I think he stole my cell phone.”
twenty-three
When he saw me, he tossed the cigarette down on the sidewalk and stepped on it, looking at me appraisingly. “You’ve lost weight,” he said. “Come inside, we need to get some calories into you.”
We went in and moved through the cafeteria line, then settled in at a booth. Lefty’s was never empty, but it wasn’t packed, either, and quiet enough for us to talk. We sat under the photographs of Tinker and Evers and Chance, and I looked at Jack and said, “So tell me about this Skouras guy.”
“Well,” Jack began, “he came from a big family in Greece. Before World War Two, they had money and landholdings, all that. But then came the German occupation, then the civil war, and it all went away. Tony Skouras talks about this in interviews, how he came here as a teenager with nothing, determined to rebuild. It’s his bootstraps story.
“What he doesn’t talk about,” Jack said, “is that his first business venture in his twenties was to buy a pair of X-rated movie houses. He built those into a chain, and added a line of adult DVD-rental stores. They were so profitable that he was able to sell by the age of thirty and buy a shipping line, which was, on the surface, a more respectable trade.”
“Why ‘on the surface’? That sounds a lot more respectable than pornography.”
“Well, he’s using the shipping line and his import business to bring stolen art and antiquities into the country,” Jack said, “but that’s not the big deal. The bigger problem is he’s bringing in illegal immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He’s got contacts in the Balkan states, where a lot of people’s lives have been ripped up by the civil wars there, and they’ll do anything to get out. If it were just undocumented young men looking for work that Skouras was bringing in, that’d be one thing, but a big part of the trade is young women. Skouras supplies prostitution rings. Essentially, the guy’s a human trafficker, and he’s said to dip into the rings he supplies quite a bit, like a private dating pool.”
I nodded.
“None of that’s been proven. The feds have sniffed around him; the SEC has subpoenaed papers, but he’s got good accounting and good lawyering and nothing’s stuck. In the past few years he’s branched out further into legitimate enterprises. He owns a minority stake in a film studio in L.A., and he opened a seafood restaurant on the Embarcadero, Rosemary’s, named for his wife. As far as I’ve heard, there’s nothing dirty about those operations.”
I nodded.
“But then there’s this. About ten years ago, Skouras got interested in horse racing. He went in big, bought a costly colt from Dubai and had it brought here and stabled at Golden Gate Fields. Then it didn’t live up to its potential. After it finished out of the money in several races, its heart just exploded during a routine exercise gallop.”
“Drugged?”
“That was never proven,” Jack said. “Which probably wasn’t much of a consolation to the exercise groom who
