Three Shirt Deal (2008) (20 page)

"Right." I was scribbling, and furrowing my brow in tortured thought, giving this arrogant asshole a ride.

"Okay. So we're now saying there are a thousand people who would buy Bud Light in a mini-market in the West Valley," he said. "Of that one thousand people, how many do you think would choose to buy a six-pack of beer in that exact store on that exact day?"

"Not very many."

"Ten?"

"Uh ... I don't see how ..."

"Stick with me," he interrupted. "You think ten people might conceivably buy a six-pack of Bud Light in that market on that day?"

"Maybe."

"So now we're at ten to one." He smiled at me. "Or the real odds on Tito Morales, who worked just up the street, buying that prize package of beer. Not such a big stretch anymore, is it?"

It was complete gobbledy-gook. He must have thought I learned my math from primates.

"Except, how do we know he'd buy beer in that market on that day?" I asked stupidly. "I don't think you can do it that way."

"Sure you can, because that's empirical evidence."

"It is?"

"Absolutely, Detective Scully. It's empirical evidence because we know that Tito Morales did, in fact, buy beer in that market on that day, witnessed and signed-off on by Promo Safe. Therefore, that fact stands as incontrovertible."

I looked up at him and let a slow smile break. The dull child finally gets it.

"See?" He smiled back.

"Okay, okay. Now I think I may see what you're driving at."

"Good."

"Except we still have the other end of it," I argued. "The coincidence that Tito Morales was also handling the murder case against Tru Hickman, who's a longtime associate of Mike Church who, it turns out, you've known since junior high."

"Same deal. In a statistical sample, it's called the Rule of Parallel Correlations. So stick with me here, we'll take those one at a time."

"Okay."

"Tito Morales is the head D
. A
. in Van Nuys, right?"

"Yes."

"How many murders does the Van Nuys D
. A
.'s office get, say, in a week?"

"Four, maybe five."

"And isn't the head D
. A
. the guy who, in the end, signs off on all plea bargains?"

"Yes."

"Right, so he handles one hundred percent of them when they occur, so it follows he had a one-hundred-percent chance of doing Hickman's plea bargain. So now let's put those two percentages together. We got a one-in-ten chance Morales would buy the contest six-pack of beer, and a one-hundred-percent chance he'd handle the Hickman plea bargain. Same odds. As far as my knowing Church who knows this Hickman dude, that's just the six-degrees-of-separation thing. See what I'm saying?"

I was writing all of this down. Of course, the odds against all of this were so high they were off the charts. Incomputable. But to keep Wade in play, I nodded studiously. Then I closed the notebook and tapped the pen on the cover as if a great truth had just been revealed.

"That's fucking amazing," I said, letting my mouth gape open in wonder.

"They probably don't teach statistics at City College." He grinned, trying to sound like he was commiserating, but instead, just coming off like an elitist dick.

"How'd you know I went to City College?"

"Lucky guess," he smiled.

"As a matter of fact, they did teach it, but I only went there three semesters."

"You should've stayed in school, dude. Education is life's greatest tool."

"And here, all this time, I always thought it was a good erection." I gave him my front sixteen. He didn't return the smile. "So you think then that all this isn't too big a coincidence?" I said.

"We're just talking hypothetically here. But no, Detective, I don't."

I snuck a look at my watch. I had to suffer through this B
. S
. for at least thirty more seconds.

"Man, I probably should've taken that stat course," I told him. "You're a pretty smart guy."

"I've got some intellectual gifts," he allowed modestly. "My mind parses problems well. I graduated top of my class at Harvard Law. It's why I was selected to clerk for a U
. S
. Supreme Court justice last summer. She said my briefs were the most thoroughly annotated she'd ever seen."

"My briefs are usually thoroughly defecated," I said, grinning stupidly. I was probably overdoing the bit, and decided maybe I should dial it back a notch.

"Don't do the brief joke thing, okay? That's first-year law school stuff."

"Sorry." I was just stalling now, fooling around with him while I waited.

Then I saw Secada making her way hurriedly across the restaurant.

"Shane," she said urgently as she approached our table. "We need to go now! We just got a fresh one-eighty-seven in the Heights."

Now Wade's smile became a dazzler as he took in the beautiful Ms. Llevar.

"Sorry. Gotta go," I said, "you can buy my lunch and send the balance of our hundred dollar bet to me later." I stood and picked up a BlackBerry off the table. His, not mine. He didn't notice the switch because his eyes were busy undressing Secada.

"Shane, you simply must introduce me to this enchanting creature.

"Secada Llevar, meet Wade Wyatt."

"Nice to meet you," she said. Then, before he could respond, turned abruptly and almost dragged me out of the restaurant.

Once outside I got into her SUV, turned on Wade's BlackBerry, and scrolled through his archived text messages. I quickly went back to August 10, the night of Olivia Hickman's murder. There were three IMs back and forth between WW and MC--all of them shortly after midnight.

"What're you doing?" Secada said.

"Checking my IMs," I lied.

I had just finished scanning Wade's messages from that date when I saw him explode into the lot in his tennis whites, holding my BlackBerry in front of him like shit in a black sock. He looked around frantically.

"Over here," I called.

He turned and spotted us in the front seat of the SUV, then ran to the passenger window. He was out of breath by the time he got there. "I think we accidentally switched BlackBerries," he said.

"Yeah, I just realized it, too." I handed his back while he returned mine. A relieved look passed across his face.

"You got nothing on yours," he told me. "You should set up your features."

"Yeah. Maybe you could help me do that sometime," I said.

"Not too fucking likely, Detective. I'm not your personal electronics geek. I got a bar exam to study for." Then he smiled at Secada. "You, I intend to see again," he said, and started to walk away.

All the evidence I'd just gotten off Wyatt's BlackBerry was in
-
admissable because it was an illegal search. But if he complained, I could still claim it was just an accident and hope the rest of the case would survive a fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree defense. After all, it was his word against mine. As a police maneuver, it was definitely borderline. But I had to take the shot if I wanted to shake up Wade. I needed him to make a bad move that I could capitalize on. He was still heading back to his car when I called out to him, "Hey, Wade?"

He turned.

"Just one question."

"Sure." He still had a smile on his face. He was back in control, but I was about to change that.

"What the hell is a three shirt deal?" I asked innocently.

"A what?" His face went blank.

"I accidentally hit your archived messages." His face fell. "One of Mike Church's messages to you was on August tenth, which coincidentally is the night Olivia Hickman was murdered. Wonder if that's part of the Law of Parallel Correlations." He looked a little sick, so I went on, "MC text-messaged: This just turned into a three shirt deal.'" I gave him my best stupid cop look. "I been sitting here wondering what on earth that could mean. I just remembered, when the mob shot a guy they used to call it buying him a suit because the bullets ruined the clothing. When you stab someone, plunge a knife into them twenty times like in Olivia Hickman's homicide, it would certainly ruin their shirt."

He stood there, frozen.

"I sure hope we aren't talking about murders here. I hope there aren't two more dead bodies in this case that I don't know anything about."

His face paled, his complexion got shiny.

"It's nothing," he said. "It's just bullshit."

"So what's it mean?"

More rapid eye work, some jerky body movements. Then he said, "Vomit. Mike Church used to get drunk and throw up on my Harvard sweatshirts. He used to borrow them all the time. It was the third one he did it to ... a three shirt deal."

I furrowed my brow in confusion. "That doesn't sound quite right to me, Wade. He threw up three times on three of your shirts? God, what d'ya suppose the odds of that are? Of course, you're the man when it comes to probability curves." I looked over at Secada. "Let's go."

She put the Suburban in gear and we powered away, leaving him in sheer panic.

"You know you can't use any of that. You didn't have P
. C
. or a search warrant for that BlackBerry."

"It was a mistake, an accident. I couldn't help what I saw."

"You're really full of it," she said. But when I looked over, she was smiling.

Chapter
26.

I HAD WRITTEN DOWN THE TEXT MESSAGES FROM MEMORY IN A

spiral notebook and was reading from my notes. " 'Where R U? R U at Hickman's yet?'" I looked up at Secada. "That was from WW at twelve-oh-three a
. M
. Then MC said: 'Parked out front. Dark. Ready to roll.' Then at twelve-seventeen, WW's IM: 'Get in there. Get it.' No answer from Church. Then at twelve thirty-five, Church wrote: 'It went bad. Meet you at my place. This just turned into a three shirt deal.' End of transmissions."

"You shouldn't have given the damn thing back to him," she said. "You know he's gonna destroy it, dump it in the river."

"It doesn't matter. We're better off if he ditches it. That way it won't contaminate the case. Without a warrant, as evidence it was dust anyway."

She sat for a moment frowning at that. Then she said, "Here's something else. While you were in the restaurant, the deep check I ran on Devine and Morales came back. There's a big connection between those guys." She looked at me to make sure she had my full attention. "Back in ninety-one, Brian Devine and Tito Morales were cops together. Partners. It was just before Brian Devine went to SIS. For almost a year, these two jamokes shared the front seat of an X-car."

We rode in silence, both thinking about it.

"Pull over for a minute. Let's see if we can at least get the timeline surrounding Olivia's murder to lay out right."

"Okay," she said, and pulled her SUV up to the curb. We were only two blocks from Cartco. She set the brake and looked over.

"Let's start with the givens," I began. "We know Tito Morales ended up as the winner of the million-dollar Bud Light rare. We also know Mike Church had knife cuts on his hand the day after Olivia was murdered, and that Brian Devine got to the crime scene six minutes after the nine-one-one call and became the primary investigator, even though he was a supervisor and shouldn't have personally worked the case. Then he and Deputy D
. A
. Morales, his old LAPD patrol partner, tag-teamed Tru Hickman in the Van Nuys Division I-room, telling him he flunked a lie test and walked in his mom's blood leaving a footprint. The kid panics and cops a plea. Anything else?"

"This isn't exactly a given, but I agree with you that Tru probably wasn't in on it," she said. "He was such a meth head I can't see them taking a chance on letting him in on the scam. It's more likely their original plan was to get him to buy the beer, make sure he found the scrape-off, let him win the money, then just roll up and take it away from him later."

"I agree. That was undoubtedly the plan 'til Church lost it and killed Olivia Hickman. Then Tru became more valuable to them as the murderer."

She thought about it, then nodded.

"Okay, so let's see how much of this we can arrange into some kind of reasonable order," I suggested. "Then when we're done we'll deal with what's left over."

"Sounds good," she said. "Keep going, you're on a roll here."

"Let's say the sequence of events begins that Saturday afternoon with Tru buying the beer and taking it home. Mike Church showed up an hour later to pick up the rare, but Olivia wouldn'
t g
ive them the six-pack because Tru was on Antibuse. Big fight in the front yard witnessed by neighbors. Olivia calls the cops. Remind me to get Communication to time date that call." She nodded, scribbling in her own notebook. "Tru and Mike Church split from the Hickman house so they won't get arrested. Next Mike and Wade take Tru out and get him so tweaked on crystal he passes out. Church comes back to the Hickman house at Wade's instruction and, according to Wade's BlackBerry, at twelve-oh
-
three he tells Church to break in. Church breaks into the house at around twelve-thirty to get the beer."