Omerta Page 8

  Drew thought about calling Lucy Tomlinson to see if she wanted to have dinner and maybe see a movie Friday night when his phone rang. He picked up and was surprised to find it was William Hurst returning his call.

  “Mr. Hurst, thanks for returning my call,” Drew said.

  “Glad to, detective,” Hurst said. “I’ve meant to call you people to see if there has been any progress with the investigation.”

  Drew didn’t want to press Hurst too hard and prompt interference from his high-powered New York attorneys. To keep things low key, he began by asking Hurst how he and Fiona Silverman had met.

  “We met years ago when we were both attending USC,” Hurst said. “Fiona was an undergraduate. I was attending grad school there. We met at a party and hit it off. We became friends and were close ever since.”

  Drew was surprised by how amicable Hurst seemed. His tone on the phone was friendly, almost as if it were only a social call.

  “Did you ever date?” Drew said.

  “Oh, no, we never did,” Hurst said. “It was always a platonic friendship, a close one. You might say we were more like siblings than only friends. I’ve always considered Fiona my best and closest friend, almost from the first day we met.”

  “We understand you helped Fiona through some financial difficulties over the years,” Drew said.

  “Yes, I lent Fiona a lot of money over the past several years,” Hurst said. “But it’s no big deal. I have more money than I can ever spend. And as I said, Fiona and I were very close. I was always happy to help when she needed it.”

  “Do you live in New York full-time?” Drew said.

  “I spend most of my time here, naturally,” Hurst said. “New York City is where my family’s real estate business is located. But, I own a house in Northern California near San Francisco. I used to spend a good bit of time there as well.”

  “But, you don’t get out to California much anymore?” Drew said.

  “No, not anymore,” Hurst said. “As you may or may not be aware, I’ve been in the press recently about a matter here in New York. As a result, reporters are always pestering me. The last time I traveled to California, the moment I got off the plane, reporters mobbed me. So, I stay close to home here in New York now. I have more control over my privacy here.”

  Drew pressed Hurst a little.

  “When was the last time you were in California?” Drew said.

  “Last June,” Hurst said. “Wait a moment, or was it May? Oh yes, I remember now, it was last May. I was in Los Angeles for Fiona’s birthday. Fiona’s birthday was always a special time to her. I always tried to visit her on her birthday whenever I could.”

  “So, that’s the last time you saw her?” Drew said.

  “Yes, though we spoke regularly on the phone.”

  “Did you ever visit Fiona during the Christmas holidays?” Drew said.

  “I have in the past on occasion,” Hurst said. “But, it’s been a long while.”

  “So, you weren’t able to visit her around the holidays this year?” Drew said.

  “No, as I told you, it hasn’t been convenient for me to leave New York lately,” Hurst said.

  “Mr. Hurst, would you mind telling me your whereabouts during the weekend before this past Christmas?”

  Instantaneously, Hurst’s tone changed when he responded to the question. “I can’t talk about that now,” he said. “But I don’t mind speaking with you later, after I’ve consulted with my attorneys.”

  Drew knew the conversation was about to end after Hurst brought up his lawyers.

  “That’s fine, Mr. Hurst,” Drew said. “I’m curious whether you’ve spoken with Rowan Zuckerman about Fiona’s funeral arrangements?”

  “Yes, of course, I have,” Hurst said sharply. “I’m assisting the young man with the arrangements.”

  “I expect you will come to L.A. to attend the memorial service in Beverly Hills?” Drew said.

  “Yes, I will attend the memorial service,” Hurst said. “Why do you ask?”

  “As Fiona’s closest friend, we’re very interested in interviewing you while you’re in L.A., Mr. Hurst,” Drew said. “Since the date of the memorial service hasn’t been set yet, that gives you plenty of time to consult your attorneys. Do you think you could find time to speak with us while you’re here?”

  “What would that entail, detective?” Hurst said. “Coming to a police station?”

  “Whatever is most convenient for you, sir,” Drew said. “You could come to us. We could come to you. The venue doesn’t make much difference to us.”

  “I want to discuss it with my attorneys, but I suppose I could do that,” Hurst said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hurst,” Drew said. “I’m sure you want the person responsible for Fiona’s death caught as much as we do. We appreciate your willingness to cooperate with our investigation.”

  “That’s quite all right, detective,” Hurst said. “But now you must excuse me. I’m late for a business meeting and really must go now.”

  “No problem, sir,” Drew said. “Thanks again for returning my call.”

  Hurst said, “You’re welcome, Detective Drew.” Then he hung up.

  Drew hung his phone and did a fist pump.

  “What are you so excited about, Youngblood?” Ortega asked over Drew’s shoulder. He had walked in without Drew noticing.

  “I just got off the phone with William Hurst,” Drew said. “He told me he is coming to L.A. for Silverman’s memorial service and agreed to an interview while he’s in town.”

  “You think he will show up?” Ortega said doubtfully.

  “He said he would,” Drew said. “And, I expect they will hold the memorial service sometime next week. Surely the coroner is getting close to releasing the body.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Ortega said. “Once Hurst consults his attorneys, I doubt they will allow him anywhere near Los Angeles.”

  “I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic,” Drew said. “But, even if Hurst doesn’t show, I accomplished one thing with the phone conversation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I nailed him down on his story,” Drew said. “He told me the last time he was in California and the last time he saw Silverman was last May. He said he was here in L.A. for her birthday.”

  “That was what, seven months before the murder?”

  “Yes, but now we can start looking to see whether he told the truth,” Drew said. “We can subpoena airline records to see if he was here anytime after last May, particularly the weekend before Christmas. Hurst said he owns a house in Northern California.”

  “Okay, that could be useful circumstantial evidence and prove deception if we could prove he has been here since May. But I still think Welch is our guy. Save yourself some work and hold off on the airline records until after we’ve interviewed him. Did you set that up?”

  “Yes, he is coming in tomorrow morning at ten,” Drew said.

  “Good, I think that’s going to solve the case,” Ortega said. “Two marked units are meeting us at Joan Keller’s house in about ninety minutes to help us serve the warrant. Let’s go grab some lunch on the way.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Drew said.

  The two detectives left the squad room. In his excitement, Drew had forgotten all about calling Lucy Tomlinson.

  Chapter 11

  Ortega and Drew arrived to find two LAPD West L.A. marked units already staged down the street from Joan Keller’s residence. Everyone got out of their cars. Ortega gave the patrol officers a quick briefing. He told them they were searching primarily for a nine-millimeter handgun and to search anywhere a person might conceal such a weapon. He told them Keller was elderly, and he expected she would be at home when they knocked on the front door. Everyone got back in the cars and drove down the block to the house.

  Ortega and Drew hung back while two patrol officers went to the door to make the initial contact. Once Keller opened the door, Ortega stepped forward and tol
d her they had a search warrant for the premises. Keller argued briefly and said she wanted to call her lawyer before admitting the police. Ortega told her it was her right to call her attorney, but that the warrant gave them the authority to search the house. They weren’t waiting for her lawyer to arrive. The police then entered the house and began searching. A female patrol officer remained with Keller in the living room while the rest of the cops spread out and searched the house.

  As soon as Drew first saw Keller, he felt sure she wasn’t the killer. He had known before arriving she was in her seventies but had not expected her to be so frail looking. There was no way Keller had the physical strength to flip over a dead body. Both Ortega and Drew believed the killer had flipped Silverman’s body over onto her back after shooting her.

  About an hour after the cops started searching, Keller’s attorney arrived. Ortega paused long enough to show the lawyer the search warrant while the others continued searching. Satisfied the warrant was valid, the attorney stayed in the living room and tried to calm his client.

  Drew focused on the shoes on the floor in Keller’s bedroom closet, checking the soles for any signs of blood. He found nothing. Ortega concentrated on a home office, looking for writing samples that a handwriting analysis expert could compare to the cadaver note. About two hours into the search, one of the patrol officers found a handgun in a dresser drawer inside a spare bedroom. Ortega and Drew went to the bedroom to examine the weapon.

  The weapon was an ancient-looking Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver with a six-inch barrel Ortega figured was close to a century old. The officer had also found a 25-count box of .38 caliber cartridges in the same drawer.

  Ortega removed the revolver from the drawer with gloved hands. There were six cartridges in the gun’s cylinder. The other nineteen cartridges were still in the box. A smell test showed no one had fired the weapon recently. Ortega saw rust inside the barrel of the poorly maintained weapon.

  “Not the murder weapon for sure,” Ortega said. “It hasn’t been fired recently. Maybe not in years. It’s the wrong caliber, anyway.”

  “Still, it looks like Keller told Silverman the truth when she said she owned a gun,” Drew said.

  After another half-hour, Ortega called off the search. While he felt sure Keller’s handwriting would not be a match to that of the cadaver note, he took a few handwritten documents as samples to be sure. The cops found no other weapons in the house. They found nothing with blood on it.

  Ortega released the uniformed officers back to duty. He and Drew sat down with Keller and her attorney in the living room.

  “We would like to ask your client a few questions,” Ortega told the attorney. “After our search, we believe we can eliminate her as a suspect.”

  “I’ll talk with them if you feel it’s all right,” Keller said to her attorney.

  He nodded to his client. “Ask your questions, detective,” the attorney said. “We’ll take them one by one. I’ll tell my client which questions she can answer.”

  “Fine,” Ortega said. “My partner, Detective Drew, will ask the questions.”

  “Is it true you and Fiona Silverman, your tenant, had frequent arguments?” Drew said.

  “Yes, we had disagreements,” Keller said after her attorney told her she could answer the question.

  “What was the problem?” Drew said.

  “She was always behind on the rent,” Keller said. “I was concerned about it because I live on the rental income from my properties. Naturally, I tried to collect what Fiona owed me.”

  “Did you try to evict Fiona Silverman several times over the non-payment of rent?” Drew said.

  “Yes, but when we went to court, she lied to the judge,” Keller said. “She said she was only withholding the rent because I wasn’t making needed repairs. That wasn’t true.”

  “Did it make you angry that she wasn’t paying the rent and you couldn’t evict her?” Drew said.

  “It was frustrating, yes,” Keller said. “I wanted the rent that was past due. I wanted her out so I could get a tenant into the house who would pay on time.”

  “Did you tell Fiona Silverman you owned a gun and did you threaten to shoot her dogs if she didn’t move out?” Drew said.

  The lawyer interrupted. “Detectives, my client has told you she was frustrated when her tenant would neither pay the rent when due nor vacate my client’s property. My client will stipulate she may have said some things in the heat of the moment she later regretted. But she maintains she never threatened her tenant or her tenant’s dogs.”

  “You ever take your gun with you when you went to see Fiona Silverman while trying to collect the past due rent?” Drew said.

  “Young man, that pistol has never been outside this house,” Keller said. “It was my father’s pistol from when he was in the war. I keep it in the house for protection. But the truth is, I’ve never even fired it or any gun for that matter.”

  “How would you characterize your relationship with Fiona Silverman at the time of her death?” Drew said.

  “We were getting along fine,” Keller said. “Fiona received some money in November. She paid all the past due rent. She even paid her rent in advance through the end of March. Fiona had agreed to move out of the house in June.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Drew said.

  “I had had no contact with Fiona since November,” Keller said. “No need. She had paid her rent in advance.”

  “I think that’s all the questions we have for now,” Ortega said, standing up. “I’ve listed three documents on the inventory attached to the search warrant we’re taking with us. We want to compare the writing with that of another document in our custody. Then we will return the three documents to you, Ms. Keller.”

  “That will be fine, detectives,” the lawyer said.

  Ortega and Drew left the house. Back in the car, Ortega said, “Whether she threatened Silverman’s dogs are not, I don’t think she is a suspect. She’s just a temperamental old lady.”

  “Yes, I agree,” Drew said. “If landlords in L.A. started shooting their tenants for not paying the rent, we’d have a couple of thousand murders a year. And, no way she could have rolled over the dead body.”

  “I’m still going to have an analyst make a comparison between the handwriting samples we collected and the cadaver note,” Ortega said. “But as far as I’m concerned, we can scratch Keller off the suspect list.”

  “Yeah, agreed,” Drew said.

  “Let’s head back to the barn and sign out,” Ortega said. “I like Nelson Welch for it more and more.”

  “I’m keeping an open mind about it,” Drew said. “I still think William Hurst is a viable suspect.”

  “Yeah, I know you do, Youngblood,” Ortega said. “I’m just not seeing it. I’m willing to bet Welch is our guy.”

  Ortega dropped the car in gear and they drove away from Keller’s house.

  Chapter 12

  It had occurred to Drew to call Lucy Tomlinson after arriving home at his apartment the previous evening. But he hadn’t. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in her. He’d truly enjoyed the evening spent with her. He just didn’t know if he had made more of it than was actually there. Maybe Lucy had only wanted to have some fun with someone whose company she enjoyed.

  The morning after that evening, when he thought about it, Drew had acknowledged to himself that spending time with someone like Lucy could be good for him. Having someone to go to dinner with or to see a movie or concert with would be a welcome break from the monotonous work-sleep-work existence he’d led for as long as he cared to remember. But he didn’t want to end up wanting that too much. He worried he might only set himself up for disappointment. Relationships were complicated things. Drew understood that and accepted he had never been very good at them.

  When he arrived at West Bureau at a few minutes before seven, Ortega was already at work updating the murder book’s daily chrono. While they waited for the ten o’clock app
ointment with Nelson Welch, Drew used the time to work on a plan to fact check the truthfulness of William Hurst’s claim that he hadn’t been in California or Los Angeles since the summer before Silverman’s murder. He first called the deputy district attorney he’d met a few days earlier in Lieutenant Walsh’s office, Scott Brooks, for advice.

  When Brooks came on the line, Drew told him he had spoken to William Hurst by phone and had pinned Hurst down on the story he hadn’t been in Los Angeles since the previous summer, seven months before someone had shot Fiona Silverman to death.

  “I’d like to get commercial airline passenger manifests for the week before and the week after the murder of Fiona Silverman for LAX and San Francisco International New York flight arrivals and departures,” Drew told Brooks. “It could help us determine whether Hurst told me the truth. If he did, then we can exclude him as a suspect. If he lied, it would open a new line of inquiry.”

  “Makes sense,” Brooks said. “So, what is your question, Detective?”

  “How is the best way to go about getting those kinds of records?” Drew said.

  “You could use a search warrant,” Brooks said. “But for the information you’re after, subpoenas are a better way to go. The scope of a subpoena is much broader. As an example, say you want passenger manifests or ticketing information from American Airlines. With a search warrant, it would limit you to reaching items that might be found in searches of the particular premises described in the warrant. A subpoena, on the other hand, would reach all relevant items wherever located within American Airlines records.”

  “Okay, so how do I go about getting a subpoena?” Drew said.

  “You don’t, Detective,” Brooks said. “That’s something my office would have to do. Cops get search warrants. Lawyers get subpoenas.”

  “Will you do it?” Drew said. “Subpoena the airline records?”