there were no wits.”
“Officially, there weren’t,” Mike said. “But I got a guy who saw a little bit.”
Probably a kid messing around with drugs on the beach. Mike was like that. No reason to ruin a kid for smoking a joint where he thought he wouldn’t get caught. But somehow Mike tracked him or her down, promised to keep him out of it if he or she could convey what they saw. It was one of the reasons he was good at his job. He had no taste for the stuff that didn’t matter. His ego didn’t need it.
“Any description?” I asked.
“Generic stuff. Big, but not huge. Athletic.”
“Could he I.D. if he saw them?”
Mike paused. “Maybe. You further along on this than me?”
The crowd groaned at a weak pop fly that ended the inning. “Where are you?”
“All I got is a guy who, off the record, saw two other guys jump your friend,” he said. “That and a handful of nothing.”
I smiled. “I’m not much further. Let me think on it before I pass anything along.”
Mike watched me for a moment, then nodded. He waved at the soda guy and bought one for each of us. He handed me mine.
“Based on what I’m hearing,” he said, taking a long drink from the paper cup. He wiped his upper lip. “You think this is tied to the Jordan girl.”
“You think correctly. Were you in on her report?”
Mike shrugged. “Not much to be in on. I saw the complaint, thought it was a little foggy, didn’t figure there was much to it. Either he hit her or he didn’t.”
“He didn’t.”
He crunched on a piece of ice. “Whatever. Why do you think the two are tied together?”
As we watched the game, I gave him the basics of what I’d learned over the previous couple of days. An entire inning passed before I was done.
Mike set down his now empty paper cup. Something crossed through his expression that I couldn’t read.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“I don’t like to waste time,” I answered. “Learned that from you.”
He grinned. “Makes me feel old when you say shit like that.”
“You are old.”
He laughed. “Doesn’t mean I like to be reminded of it.” He paused. “You realize that if the Jordan girl is hooking, it’s not gonna help your buddy.”
“How’s that?”
Mike frowned as a blast of music thundered through the park for a moment. He waited until it was done. “You said yourself that he was spending a lot of one-on-one time with the girl.”
“So?”
“So the first thing that’s gonna be tossed out there is that he may have been using her…services. Would be the very first thing I’d look at it, if it were me.”
It was typical Mike. Finding things in the cracks before I’d even found the crack. I wondered if I’d stuck around if I ever would’ve been as good of a cop as he was.
“Not saying that was the way it was,” Mike said. “But it’d be one more thing in the column against your friend.”
“I get it,” I said.
We watched the game for awhile. The Padres couldn’t score, loading the bases with no one out, then ending the rally with a pop out and a double play. Some things hadn’t changed in the years I’d been gone.
“The prostitution thing sound real?” I asked.
Mike hesitated, then nodded. “Probably. Rich kids with too much free time and small brains.”
“Anything ever cross your path?”
“Not officially. I’ve heard whispers, but nothing solid.” He started to say something, then stopped. The same look I’d seen before flitted through his eyes.
“What?” I asked.
He glanced at the scoreboard. “Come on. Let’s go. And I’ll tell you something.”
“Tell me what?” I asked, standing.
“Tell you something about the Jordan family that you don’t know.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
“You meet Mrs. Jordan yet?” Mike asked as we walked out of the stadium gates.
“Yeah.”
“What’d you think?”
We walked around a slow-moving family, a toddler dragging a Padre pennant behind him. “Trophy wife. But not dumb. Gave me only what I asked for. And she wasn’t nearly as concerned about her daughter as her husband is.”
Mike nodded, pulling out a Blackberry, scrolling through it, then jamming it back in his pocket. “She’s a big deal around here. Lots of charity work, volunteer shit. The whole I’m-rich-and-sharing-it-with-the-world kind of thing. Does it quietly, not publicly. But everyone knows.”
“Their house on the island is a buy in, isn’t it?” I asked.
Mike raised an eyebrow. “Is it? I don’t know. Hadn’t heard that.”
I told him about the island house I’d driven by and the Rancho Santa Fe compound.
“Sounds about right, I guess,” he said. “Not enough room to show off, probably.” He glanced at me. “Not illegal, though, and not unheard of, right?”
I nodded.
We crossed the street against a red light and a car had to slam on its brakes to avoid hitting us. Mike smiled at their angry faces, waving at them like they were old friends.
“You ever think your buddy was the ringmaster?” he asked.
“What?”
“The one in the hospital,” he said, stepping up on the curb and pointing toward a crowded parking lot off to our right. “You ever think maybe he was this girl’s pimp?”
“No,” I said immediately.
He gave me a small smile. “Think about it, Joe.”
That was what he’d always said to me when I was a cop. He’d show me a file, ask me what I thought and when I’d give him an off the cuff-and inevitably wrong-answer, he’d tell me to think about it, to slow down and to look for what I wasn’t seeing. The more he said it, the more I anticipated it and the better I got at giving him the right answer.
But another thing he’d taught me was to stick to my guns when I thought I was right. “He’s my best friend, Mike. Not possible.”
Our pace slowed, as we worked our way through a maze of cars.
“We’ve got a girl who got knocked around,” he explained. “A girl who you think was hooking. And we’ve got a guy in the hospital who was spending a large amount of time with her. You say he wasn’t using her services.” He clicked his tongue. “All I’m telling you is what it’d look like to me if you weren’t vouching for the guy.”
It was his polite way of telling me he’d be checking out that angle. That was fine. He could look all he wanted. I wasn’t buying it.
“The wife,” I said. “We were talking about Jordan’s wife.”
He nodded. “Right. The wife. You remember a cop I used to know up in Oceanside? Tully?”
I thought for a moment. I recalled the name, but nothing else. “Vaguely.”
“Good cop. Good guy. Little bit older than me, didn’t like being a cop as much as me,” Mike said. “OPD was looking at cutbacks, offered him an early get out and he pulled the pin. Moved out to Vegas and started working
