A photocopy of the check signed by Bao Tran, given to Dung to pay for his car wreck in March 1989. Kait filled in her name and deposited it in her account.
19
THE INTERROGATION RAISED QUESTIONS we found impossible to answer. For one thing, why did Gallegos conduct the interview by himself? Where was the man on the force who was fluent in Vietnamese? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable to have had him there as interpreter? Around us Dung’s English had been awkward, but adequate for everyday conversation, yet in this interview he sounded as if he were fresh off the boat.
And why had obviously inconsistent statements gone unchallenged? In a previous interview Dung had identified Khanh Pham as the person who had put through the call to California. He seemed now to have spaced out the fact that he had made that statement and this time had insisted the call was made by An Le, despite Gallegos’s attempt to steer him back on track. Why hadn’t Gallegos confronted him with the fact that he could not have overheard anybody make the call because he was at the hospital at the time that it was made?
And what about Dung’s statement that he had been paid for the wreck with a personal check? Wasn’t that significant enough to follow up on? We hadn’t considered the possibility of payment by check, because we’d been told that the car wreck participants received $2,000. If the payment was $1,500, it was a wholly different story; in that case the $1,490 deposit in Kait’s checking account might have been part of a $1,500 check, with $10 cash withheld for spending money.
I called Kait’s bank and asked the form of the deposit. They said it had been a check, and I asked them to mail me a photocopy.
When the check arrived, we found it was signed by Bao Tran.
Betty Muench had told Robin, “There is … evidence of something which was not done right and in which there will have been the instigating energy in all this.” Tran had made a miscalculation. When he’d written the check he had left the space for the name of the recipient blank, so that Dung, who didn’t have a bank account, could have it cashed by a friend. What he couldn’t have expected was that Kait would fill in her own name and deposit the check in her account. Could this piece of concrete evidence against the financier of the car wrecks have put the seal on her death warrant?
If so, we had that death warrant in our hands now, but we didn’t know what to do with it. The police could easily get it themselves if they wanted it, but obviously they didn’t, for Gallegos hadn’t even bothered to ask Dung where Kait’s account was. I did mail a copy of the check to the FBI, along with the interview in which Dung confessed to the wrecks and identified Tran as the person who arranged them. I hoped this evidence of a felony crossing state lines would cause the federal authorities to start taking us seriously.
They didn’t respond.
Since Dung had said that An Le had also staged wrecks, we checked back through the police file to see if An’s accident reports were in it.
The file contained two of them.
An’s first recorded “accident” was in Westminster at ten forty-four A.M. on January 11, 1989. His driver’s license number was A4437875. He was driving a silver Dodge Colt with a New Mexico license plate and told the investigating officer he lived at Bao Tran’s address. Nam Pham, a friend from Albuquerque—(I went to Nam house to retune there books)—was a passenger in the car when it rear-ended a vehicle driven by a man named Delmar Bardsley. Bardsley was covered by insurance from National General.
An’s second “accident,” in June 1989, was bizarre. In this case his car was struck by a stolen vehicle that was fleeing the scene of a robbery. An’s driver’s license number was listed this time as C5410018; his address was 8081 21st #8, Westminister; and he gave police new phone numbers for both a home and a business. He was covered by Farmers Insurance, and all six occupants of his vehicle were taken by ambulance to Humana Hospital, complaining of leg, neck, and head pain.
By now we knew a few things about Bao Tran. A friend who worked for a credit bureau had pulled up his file on the computer, and from this we had obtained his Social Security number; two addresses for him in Santa Ana, one on South Townsend and one on South Fairview; his credit background; and what make car he was making payments on. We also had a copy of his new business card showing that he was currently vice-president of Japan Life Sleeping Systems at 14541 Brookhurst Ave. in Westminster. The address of a branch office, also known as San Diego Dream Life Corporation, was given as 7520 Mesa College Drive in San Diego.
But Tran’s previous business card showed that at the time of Kait’s death he had been working at the law office of Minh Nguyen Duy at 10240 Westminster Ave. in Garden Grove. Since Tran had changed his phone numbers after Kait’s murder, I wondered if Duy had done so also, so I dialed the number on the card to see if it was still in service.
The woman who answered said, “Law offices,” in a voice without an accent, but I could hear male voices speaking Vietnamese in the background.
“I’m sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number,” I said hastily.
The fact that the number could have served more than one law office was interesting. In an effort to find out who practiced there, I spent most of one day at the library checking the number on Tran’s business card against the numbers of all the lawyers in the Orange County phone book. The result was not what I had expected. Not only were there no other attorneys with that phone number, but Minh Duy himself wasn’t listed. The address and phone number on the card that read “Law Offices of Minh Nguyen Duy” were those of a firm called “Business Management Services.”
I didn’t want to alert the receptionist by calling twice, so I asked Kerry to see what she could find out about this company.
She phoned them and called me back.
“A man with a Vietnamese accent answered,” she said. “It didn’t sound like a business, because he just said, ‘Hello.’ I told him I was trying to locate an attorney I had done business with, but I couldn’t remember his name. I said, ‘He gave me this number. This is Business Management Services, isn’t it?’ The man didn’t answer. So I asked him, ‘Which lawyers are in practice there? I’m sure I’ll recognize his name if I hear it.’ The silence went on so long I was starting to wonder if he’d walked away from the phone. Finally he said, ‘Lawyers?’ There was another long pause, and then he said, ‘I need to talk to somebody,’ and put me on hold. I sat there holding the receiver for what seemed like hours, and finally I got so jittery, I hung up.”
When our frustration over our inability to obtain information became unbearable, Don and I had occasionally discussed the possibility of hiring a private investigator. Our problem was that we didn’t know how to go about it. Anybody could put an ad in the yellow pages, and I’d heard some frightening stories about unethical investigators. A private detective that we picked at random out of the phone book might sell our names to the people we wanted to have investigated.
The idea now occurred to me that we might be able to work through an intermediary, and I opened the Albuquerque phone book to the listings for attorneys.
“Paul!” I exclaimed. “I’d forgotten that he’s in private practice now!”
Paul Becht and I had dated for two of the four years between my marriages, when he was a purchasing agent for Sandia Laboratories. Since then he’d graduated from law school, established a practice in business law, and served three terms in the New Mexico State Senate.
I made an appointment for a consultation.
It had been twenty-five years since we’d seen each other, but Paul was amazingly unchanged, except that he now wore glasses and his thick brown hair had turned a distinguished silver.
“This is the information we need,” I told him, as I handed him a list of questions about people in California. “And this is the reason we need it,” and I gave him a typed synopsis of everything we’d learned since the time of Kait’s murder.
“Bao Tran, Van Hong Phuc, Minh Nguyen Duy—all Vietnamese names?” He laid aside the list and reviewed the case hi
story, frowning as he did so, and running his fingers through his hair in a way that brought back memories. When he had finished he lowered the sheaf of papers and gave a long, low whistle.
“My God!” he exclaimed. “Was your little girl involved in all that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And the police aren’t following up on it?”
“They don’t think it’s applicable.”
“Not applicable!” Paul exploded. “With a copy of that check, she was a threat to everybody involved in this, including, in all probability, a lot of doctors and pharmacists. What you need is a private investigator in the L.A. area.”
“We’re afraid we might get one who would sell us out,” I said.
“I’ll act as the middleman,” Paul said. “The person we hire won’t even know what your name is. I think the best tactic is not to reveal this is a murder case, since most PI’s don’t want to dirty their hands with murders. Instead, I’ll say I’m looking at potential litigation on a civil RICO action.”
“A RICO action?” I repeated blankly.
“RICO—Racketeer - Influenced Corrupt Organizations. There’s a federal statute that permits individuals to file suit and get triple damages from organizations and companies that may be controlled by the Mafia or involved in organized crime. The federal government has been using it to shut down and take the assets away from front organizations, money-laundering companies, and so on, but they also allow civil action, so it will make a good cover story for us.”
“How much of a retainer do you want?” I asked, reaching for my checkbook
“First let me find a good guy, and then we’ll see what his rates are.”
“I mean, for yourself—”
“Don’t worry about that, we go back a long way,” Paul said. “I’ve been keeping track of your family over the years. Your oldest daughter was the cocktail-hour singer at the Hilton.”
“She’s produced her own series of recordings for children,” I told him.
“And the other daughter had a television show.”
“That was Kerry.”
“She interviewed me once when I was running for office. She was gorgeous! I couldn’t get over it, she was all grown up! The last time I saw her, she couldn’t have been more than seven.”
“She’s married now and has two little girls,” I said.
“I kept looking at her and thinking, Boy, what a knockout!” He paused and then added gently, “I could see a lot of you in her.”
I got up from my seat and went around the desk to hug him.
“I can’t believe you have so little gray in your hair,” he commented, gazing down at the top of my head. I was grateful he was wearing bifocals and couldn’t see the roots.
As I exited through the reception area, the woman at the desk said, “Ms. Duncan, I just want you to know you’re my very favorite author!”
All in all it was a better-than-average day.
Paul moved ahead quickly. In less than a week he called to say he’d found an investigator based in San Diego.
“He’s with an attorney services outfit,” he said. “He does a lot of ‘skip tracing’—that’s finding people who don’t want to be found—and he’s very familiar with the Vietnamese and their automobile scams.”
I suddenly found myself panic-stricken.
“You do think this is safe?”
“There’s no way this man will know who he’s working for,” Paul assured me. “I’ll need to sign a security agreement, so when he goes to the state authorities to get secured information, there’s an affidavit that shows that he’s doing it for a reasonable purpose, but only my name will be on that And I’m setting up a trust fund, so I can make payments for you and you won’t have to sign the checks.”
“Do you know what this is going to cost?”
“He wants to start off with a two-hundred-dollar retainer. After that he’ll send regular billings for whatever he’s doing. My feeling is that the first thing we ought to have him check out is R & J Car Leasing. Who were the principals in it? Who owned the limited partnerships? Have any of those people been sued in any civil fraud claims? If so, we’ll get the names of the plaintiffs’ attorneys and see if they’re willing to make their research available to us.”
“I want information about the lawyer, Minh Nguyen Duy,” I said. “Duy may or may not have been involved in the insurance scam, but we know that Tran was employed by him. I want to know what Duy’s connection is with Business Management Services, and I want the names of the other attorneys who are in practice there. Once we have those, we can ask the insurance companies which, if any, of those lawyers were involved in lawsuits against them.”
I told Robin I had hired a PI, expecting her to be pleased, but instead she was discouraging.
“You’re wasting your money,” she said. “You know APD won’t accept information from us, no matter how we get it.”
“We’ll go over their heads and take it to the district attorney.”
“She won’t take it either,” Robin said.
“We can’t know that. I’ve been told that Susan Riedel is ethical.”
“I don’t care how ethical she is, she’s bound by the rules. I had a date with a criminal defense lawyer the other night, and I asked him what our rights are. He told me we have no rights unless it’s a civil suit. This is the state’s case, not ours. The way this lawyer explained it, there are two factions involved in prosecution—there’s the information-gathering team, who are the police, and the go-to-court-trial team, who are the district attorneys. The two are totally separate. The police are the sole information-gathering group and the prosecuting attorneys are only allowed to use information the police hand over to them.”
“You mean even if we handed them concrete evidence against the people in Orange County, they wouldn’t be able to use it?”
“Not unless they could get the police to follow up on it and present it as part of their own investigation. What this boils down to, Mother, is that this pitiful stab at investigative work APD did is the only representation we have. When this guy told me that, I was just horrified. I went home and cried all night. We have no rights at all, absolutely none! Do you know that in some states they won’t even allow the family of the victim to attend the trial, because the sight of their grief might influence the jury?”
“That’s not how it is in New Mexico,” I said. “We’re going to be allowed in the courtroom.”
“Don’t count on it,” Robin said. “All either side has to do to keep you out is to put your names on their witness list. They don’t even have to use you. Just putting your name on the list will get you banned from the courtroom.”
“Then I’ll wear a disguise,” I said. “I’m going to be there.”
“Somebody is sure to spot you, and you’ll cause a mistrial. Then we won’t get the Vietnamese or the hitmen either.”
I had been concentrating so hard on the activities in California that, Betty’s reading to the contrary, I was starting to wonder if Mike might be right in his belief that one of the Vietnamese was the triggerman and the Hispanic suspects were innocent. When I went back through the police file, however, I did find several entries that seemed to support the case against Miguel Garcia and Juve Escobedo.
These entries centered upon Marty Martinez, the alleged third occupant of the Camaro, the one Betty Muench had said was “not part of the R & J symbol.” Statements made to the police by people who knew Marty portrayed him as a young man with multiple problems. Not only had he grown up with a physical deformity—a harelip that had only recently been improved by cosmetic surgery—but, according to neighbors, he also had a severe drinking problem.
According to the police file, after his arrest, Marty had talked a lot about the shooting to both inmates and employees at the Juvenile Detention Center and had even told one fellow inmate that “his friend [Miguel Garcia] had killed somebody [in addition to Kait] and didn’t get caught for it.”
The most
convincing of these statements came from Chris Mares, an employee at the center, who had been working there during the time that Marty was incarcerated. Mares came across as a kind and caring man of the type that troubled boys might turn to with their problems, and apparently Marty had felt the need to confide in him.
Marty’s statements to Mares constituted an unsolicited confession.
What follows are selected statements from a lengthy transcript:
GALLEGOS: During the time Martinez was incarcerated and you were working, how many separate times do you remember talking to him?
MARES: I’d say maybe three or four conversations.
GALLEGOS: So, basically what [Marty] was saying was that he didn’t do the shooting, he was just a passenger in the vehicle?
MARES: He definitely said he didn’t do the shooting.
GALLEGOS: Mike Garcia did the shooting?
MARES: That’s correct.
GALLEGOS: But he was in the vehicle at the time of the shooting?
MARES: On one occasion he indicated that he was asleep in the vehicle at the time of the shooting, and another occasion, he seemed to have firsthand information as to what was going on during the shooting.
GALLEGOS: What were his exact words at that time?
MARES: Basically, they were gonna drop him off at his house and right about the time they were approaching the area to drop him off, they spotted the Arquette vehicle, at which time, I guess they began to pursue the Arquette vehicle.
GALLEGOS: Did they say where they were pursuing her?
MARES: Not specifically, but if I remember correctly, it was into that Lomas area off of the Edith area, and apparently [when they were] catching up with the vehicle [it] accelerated, trying to get away from them. Michael Garcia had … a .22 caliber revolver, and rolled down the window, taking aim and shooting at Ms. Arquette.
GALLEGOS: Did he describe the vehicle they were in?
MARES: He mentioned it was a Camaro.