his father, mother, and brother marched to a corner of the camp. His father panicked at leaving his oldest son and ran toward him. He was shot in the back. My father never saw his mother and brother again.
I leaned over, kissed Ariel’s cheek, and thought of my father’s little brother. Asher. My namesake.
“Why aren’t you married anymore?” Ariel said.
“That’s a long story.”
“You miss Aunt Robin?”
“I guess so.”
“I miss my dad.”
“He’ll be home soon.”
“Maybe Aunt Robin will too?”
“I don’t think so.”
After Robin left me, investigating murders became a much more dismal, onerous task. The interviews with grieving relatives, the autopsies, the crime scenes with walls splashed with blood and imbedded with bone and tissue, all weighed more heavily on me. Whenever I picked up a new case, I could feel a tightness in the pit of my stomach, as if the spirit of the newly departed had remained to pressure me, to insure I did not forget my duty. Robin had always been a countervailing force; spending time with her had helped alleviate the strain of the job, ease that pressure in my gut.
After the cruise, Ariel was hungry so we ate fish ’n’ chips at the harbor, and then bought ice cream cones and walked along the docks. I helped Ariel with his spelling by having him read the names on the fishing boats-many of them the first daughters of the skippers. At dusk, as Ariel snoozed in the backseat, I drove back to the city, thinking about Relovich’s broken hyoid bone and the smashed bedroom window.
When I returned home, I removed from my briefcase the envelopes containing Relovich’s cancelled checks and phone records, and spread them out on my dining room table. Most of the cancelled checks covered routine expenses and none of them piqued my interest. I examined his phone bills from the last few months. His cell bills didn’t list any numbers called, just the amount owed; but his home phone bills recorded all the toll calls, which I highlighted with a yellow marker. Relovich had not made many repeat toll calls, but one phone number with a 213 area code stood out because during the past two months he’d called the number more than a dozen times.
After clicking on my computer, accessing an LAPD site, and checking a reverse directory for the address, I discovered that it was a business listing a few miles west of downtown: L.A. Elegant Escorts. A woman by the name of Ann Licata was registered as the owner. I decided to see what she had to say.
CHAPTER 5
I cruised down a side street a few blocks north of Olympic lined with small, shabby apartment buildings. The night was damp and columns of mist glowed a sickly yellow under the streetlights. When I double-checked the address, I realized that the establishment with the genteel name of L.A. Elegant Escorts was located in a rundown dingbat-Los Angeles’s grim contribution to urban blight. I was particularly incensed about dingbats because the street where I grew up was once composed of gracious Spanish-style duplexes. But when I was in grammar school, developers began tearing them down-the story of L.A.-and throwing up hastily constructed dingbats: stripped down two-story stucco boxes with rows of parking spaces in front, the exteriors adorned with flimsy metal lamps and cheesy decorative starbursts. Dingbats are the residential analogues of strip malls.
I walked along the side of the dingbat, up a dank staircase, the steps dotted with specks of stucco that had fallen from the walls, and stood on a landing flanked by two front doors. I rang the bell of apartment number four. I waited about thirty seconds and rang the bell again. I heard rattling in the back of the apartment and then a sleepy voice call out, “Who is it?”
“LAPD. Open up.”
“Do you have a search warrant?”
“I’m not interested in searching your place. I just want to talk to you. I’m investigating a murder.”
An obese woman with stringy hair, wearing a ratty yellow bathrobe, opened the door a few inches. “ID,” she barked.
I showed her my badge. “You Ann Licata?”
“Yeah. But I want you to understand something right off the bat. First of all, any money that changes hands between my girls and the gentlemen who contract for their services is simply for companionship,” she said, as if she was delivering a memorized speech. “Anything that might occur during their time together is a matter of personal choice between two consenting adults over the age of eighteen. There is never, at any time, any written or verbal guarantee involving the exchange of sex for money. Is that clear, officer?”
“I don’t care if you’re a hooker booker. That’s not why I’m here. I’m investigating a homicide. I don’t plan to inform vice of our conversation. If you’re honest with me now and help me with my case, I promise you I’ll leave you alone to run your business.”
“All right then,” she said, turning around, taking a few steps, and flopping on a threadbare sofa. I followed her into the small living room and sat across from her. Her robe inched up, revealing two enormous blotchy thighs that enveloped an entire sofa cushion.
“Do you know Pete Relovich?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Again, let me give you the ground rules. Be honest with me, and I’ll walk out the door and let you run your business. Bullshit me, and I’ll call vice right now, and they’ll shut down your operation and haul you out of here in handcuffs. What’ll it be?”
She squirmed on the sofa for a moment. “Yeah, yeah,” she said wearily. “I knew Pete. He was a driver for one my girls. What’s going on with him?”
“He was killed.”
She pulled her robe tight and muttered, “Jesus.”
“Which girl did he drive for?”
“Her name’s Brittany.”
“What’s her real name?”
“Jane.”
“Last name?”
“Granger.”
“Address?”
She reached into an end table, riffled through a spiral notebook, scrawled down the address on a page, ripped it out, and handed it to me.
“What’s a driver?”
“He takes the escort to her appointment, checks out the place to see if it seems safe, waits in the car for her to finish her date, and then either drives her home or to her next date.”
“How long’s he been doing that?”
“About a year.”
“How did he end up working for you?”
“You’ll have to ask Jane. She brought him in.”
“Is it possible he made some enemies? Maybe crossed the wrong customer?”
“We call them clients.”
“Crossed the wrong client?”
“Again, you’ll have to ask Jane. But I really doubt it. We run a very professional operation.”
“I looked around the dingy apartment, strewn with empty Coke cans, greasy McDonald’s wrappers, and National Enquirers, and said, “I can see that.” I pulled a card out of my wallet and handed it to her. “If you hear anything that you think I might find useful, give me a call.”
I walked to the door as Licata struggled to her feet. “A deal’s a deal,” she said. “You’re not calling vice on me, right?”
“As long as you continue to cooperate with me-no.”
