Back in 1991, a charming, good-looking Austrian writer named Jack Unterweger came to L.A. on a magazine assignment about international law enforcement and got chauffeured around the downtown red-light district by veteran detectives. Unterweger turned out to be a sexual sadist who’d strangled seven women in Europe and he used what he’d been shown to savage three additional victims.
Despite that, no change in policy resulted, because L.A. is Improv City: Reinvent yourself, make up the rules as you go along, all the while inhaling whatever whiff of fame you can suck from your aspirational bong.
I’m fully at ease tossing victims’ residences, not so much standing around and doing nothing as Milo pulled a peeved solo.
No problem, it would pass.
* * *
—
I walked around the parking garage until I snagged some bars on my phone, checked my mail and my messages, wrote a few replies. Then I looked up Academo, Inc.
Closely held corporation in Columbus, Ohio. Scant info beyond a couple of articles in business magazines that specialized in financial porn.
The forty-five-year-old brainchild of an Ohio State alum and benefactor named Anthony Nobach, the company was presented as a model of entrepreneurial spirit. Born to humble beginnings, Nobach had earned spending cash as a freshman by charging fellow students modest fees for locating cheap housing. The following year he created a moving company named Cheap Tony’s with rates tailored for students.
By the time Nobach graduated, he’d amassed several parcels of depressed real estate near campus and was converting slums and tear-downs to low-rent student rentals. His next step was rehabbing a failed government housing project bought on the cheap and creating a private student dorm, with much of the cost absorbed by the university and a federal housing grant.
Academo now owned and operated mega-structures in Boston, Cleveland, Syracuse, Rochester, Bloomington, Salt Lake City, Tucson, L.A., and San Diego. Anthony Nobach, described as “religious and a model of mid-Western probity,” remained as CEO. A younger brother, Marden, was the chief operational officer.
Online consumer ratings were the predictably meaningless mix of adoration and excoriation. Overall grade: 3.5 stars.
Keywording academo inc and death produced nothing. So did substituting suicide and murder for death. An image search pulled up shots of other properties. The company favored characterless structures with the same unbroken fa?ade as the building we were in.
I called Maxine Driver and asked her if the students in the DIY program knew one another.
She said, “No idea. What’s cooking?”
“Nothing yet.”
“When dinner’s ready you’ll ring the bell?”
“Your reservation has been duly noted.”
With Milo already cranky, I figured an overstep wouldn’t make much difference and phoned Basia Lopatinski at the coroner. Away from her desk, voicemail. I asked her to look up Cassy Booker’s file.
Heading back to Michael Lotz’s room, I entered the utility area and came face-to-face with Milo, flush-faced, waving a piece of paper.
“Where’d you go? Look at this!”
CHAPTER
21
Memo paper torn from an ACADEMO, INC., pad.
The logo a Greek Revival building fit for the Ivy League, below that: We house the leaders of tomorrow.
Below that, clumsy block lettering in red ballpoint.
An address on Corner Avenue.
Then: aura 8–10 Sat pm.
I said, “Lotz’s handwriting?”
Milo said, “Matches his DMV signature and the ink’s the same as an Academo pen in one of his drawers.”
He shook the paper, green eyes incandescent. “You still feeling cautious? What this look like to you?”
“A game plan.”
He crossed himself. “Hell, yeah. Unless Lotz was on the invite list, he was a very bad boy. And he doesn’t sound like some homicidal mastermind. More like the type who could be bought. Maybe by a resident who does have a high IQ.”
“Amanda commissioned a hit on Red Dress?”
“She’d have the opportunity to know Lotz. Yeah, she’s young, but she’s also a brain with abnormal emotions, so why not? It makes other stuff fall into place. Like Garrett’s squirrelly look when we mentioned Poland. That coulda been him knowing something nasty about baby sis. Or he’s involved more directly. As in Red Dress is a girl from his past who threatened to embarrass him on his big day. For all his Joe Nerd thing, maybe he’s got some bigger secrets than his wife’s Vegas fling.”
He took the paper back. “I got sidetracked to the Rapfogels because Denny’s a dog and Corinne pointed me toward him. But looks like it’s the wholesome Burdettes I need to focus on. As in back to Pa Walton and his farm animals. Because vets use fentanyl, easy enough for Amanda to waltz into a barn, lift what she needs, and pass it along to Lotz. Maybe he kept some for himself and that’s how he ended up dead. Or she hot-shotted him to clear her tracks.”
He took a breath, flapped the paper against his thigh. “I’m not making sense?”
“You’re making a lot of sense.”
“But?”
“No buts.”
“This is a game changer, Alex. I find out any of the Burdettes visited Warsaw—hell, if they like to polka I’m on them.”
“Anything else come up in Lotz’s room?”
“His wallet had an expired Discover card and I found five fifties behind a bunch of underwear.”
“Lots of cash for a junkie to keep around.”
“Exactly, money’s like water to them. So it had to be a recent cash infusion. Everything else I found is: stash of baggies, two dozen disposable hypos, another scorched spoon, collection of disposable lighters, more candy and cookies, also with his skivvies. All I’ve got left is pawing under the bed, then looking at the bathroom. I find a guitar string, I’m Nirvana-bound.”
“Good luck.”
“You’re not coming?”
“For what?”
“You don’t mind getting dusty, you can do the bed. Bathroom’s too gross, I’ll do that.”
“All is forgiven?”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Slip of the tongue.” As we returned to Lotz’s hole, I told him about calling Lopatinski.
He said, “Great idea!”
That level of glee, I kept one thought to myself: Still no I.D. on the victim.
I followed his lope back to the room. In the doorway, he said, “I’m having second thoughts about you getting under the bed, amigo. Those are nice pants.”
“Protect and serve. As in you,” I said. “Give me gloves.”
* * *
—
Everything he’d found was tagged and bagged and arrayed neatly in a corner of the cramped room.
I said, “Have you flipped the mattress?”
“Yeah, but not the spring. Sure you want to do it?”
The “nice pants” were black jeans. My shirt was ash-colored chambray. Both would dust off.
“No prob.”
He went into the bathroom and I pushed the mattress half off the box spring. Lifting one side revealed a partial view of dust motes and a trio of dead roaches, maybe cousins of the tribe in the stairwell.
From the bathroom, Milo said, “Gimme a break. Old junkie and his cabinet’s got nothing but aspirin and shaving stuff and a stick of Mennen…okay, here we go, conveniently behind the stick. Ciprofloxacin, prescribed last year at a clinic in Venice. What’s that, Alex? Like methadone?”
I said, “Antibiotic.”
“What do the pills look like?”
“Round, white, a number on one side.”
“Hmm…maybe they’re real, I’ll have the lab verify…looks like Lotz was old-school, didn’t get into the prescription game.”
I said, “Heroin’s relatively cheap nowadays. If he’s got a reliable supplier, why mess with anything new?”
“A stodgy type, huh? Okay, time to check the toilet tank…nothing. You finished?”
“Halfway there.” I walked around to the other side of the bed, lifted the mattress on a notably more generous supply of motes, along with woolly swirls of dirt, six dead roaches, three dehydrated M&M’s—orange, blue, brown—and an errant baggie.
Right half of the bed, if you were lying down. If Lotz was right-handed like ninety percent of the population, the side he’d favor.
I began probing the dirt, found nothing in the first couple of piles. But as I nudged the third, a sharp white corner asserted itself like a tiny shark fin.
I tweezed it out, setting off a tiny dust storm.