He parked the Land Cruiser in front of a driveway filled with vehicles—Lawrence’s old Isuzu Trooper, Trudy’s leased Ford Contour, Lawrence’s Ford Econoline surveillance van with its tinted windows, two race cars—one on a trailer and the other in the three-car garage, sitting next to a tarp-covered ’67 Mustang convertible—and two Gold Wing motorcycles.
“These all theirs?” asked Syd as they walked up the drive through the pantheon of vehicles.
“Sure,” said Dar. “They used to have a couple of later-model Mustangs, but sold them when they got the race cars.”
“What kind of racing?”
“A special class using old Mazda RX-7s,” said Dar. “Larry races in California, Arizona, Mexico…wherever they can get to in a weekend.”
“Trudy always goes along?”
“Lawrence and Trudy do everything together,” said Dar.
Dar rang a buzzer under an intercom. While they waited, Syd looked at the surrounding houses on the hill.
“No sidewalks,” she said flatly.
Dar raised an eyebrow. “You new to California, Investigator?”
“Three years,” said Syd. “But I still hate the idea of no sidewalks.”
Dar gestured toward the seven vehicles in the driveway and open garage. “Why the hell would anyone in California need a sidewalk?”
“Come on in,” said Trudy’s voice over the intercom. “We’re in the kitchen.”
When Syd and Dar trekked through the acres of unused living room, scarcely used dining room, and overused work areas to the kitchen, Stewart Investigations was taking a coffee break. Lawrence was on a stool, hunched over the counter with his elbows on the Formica and his face red with concentration. Trudy was standing behind the counter but leaning toward her massive husband as if they were involved in a fierce but friendly contest of wills.
“Olds Rocket Eighty-eight,” said Trudy in a bass growl.
“Toyota Rav Four,” answered Lawrence in a mincing falsetto. He waved Dar and Syd toward two empty stools at the counter and gestured toward the coffeepot and clean mugs. As the two guests poured some coffee for themselves, Lawrence growled, “Pontiac Grand Prix.”
“Mitsubishi Galant,” said Trudy, now using the falsetto voice. “Mercury Cougar,” she growled back, as if slamming a ball over the net.
Lawrence hesitated.
“Ford Contour,” said Syd in a tone several octaves higher than her usual pleasant speaking voice.
“Ah, Jesus,” said Dar.
“Shhh!” said Trudy. “You’ll break the rhythm. Go ahead, Investigator Olson. Your serve.”
“Ah, same letter,” mused Syd. In a lumberjack’s growl she said, “Dodge Charger!”
“Honda Civic,” replied Lawrence in an exaggerated sissy voice. Then he roared, “Chevy Impala!”
“Infinity!” said Trudy.
“Isuzu Impulse,” minced Syd.
Trudy pointed. “Your point. ‘Impulse’ is wimpier and more stupid than ‘Infinity.’ You can serve any letter.”
“Ford Thunderbird,” yelled Syd.
“Ford Taurus,” cried Lawrence.
“Toyota Tercel,” said Trudy triumphantly. She banged her coffee cup down and frowned at her husband. “Taurus means bull, Larry. A bull has balls. What’s a Tercel, anyway? Some kind of bird? It means nothing.”
“Lawrence,” said Lawrence.
“Are you guys finished with the testosterone-estrogen game?” asked Dar.
“Nope,” said Trudy. “It’s forty-love. My serve.” She paused only a second. “American Motors Eagle!”
“It’s not produced anymore,” said Dar.
Everyone ignored him. Obviously he did not understand the rules.
“Escort,” lisped Lawrence.
“Hyundai Elantra!” said Trudy as if slapping down a trump card.
“Suzuki Esteem,” said Syd.
Both Lawrence and Trudy nodded, giving Syd the point.
“What’s wimpier than calling a car an ‘Esteem’?” said Trudy. “Especially a piece of Suzuki junk. It’s like naming a car, ‘My Pride.’”
“When I was a teenager,” said Dar, “I drove a big-finned 1960 Chrysler New Yorker that my girlfriend named ‘Beat-rice.’”
The other three looked at him as if he had passed wind.
“Where were we?” said Lawrence.
“Two points from match point,” said Trudy. “Syd or me. I’ll serve.” She paused only a second. “Pontiac Firebird…”
“Ford Fiasco,” snapped back Lawrence. “Nothing wimpier than a Fiasco.”
“Ford Fiestas aren’t being produced anymore,” said Syd. “Now they’re Festivas.”
“Your point, your serve,” said Trudy.
“Buick Roadmaster,” growled Syd, drawing out the syllables in “master.”
“Rav Four,” said Lawrence.
“Foul,” said Trudy. “You already used that one.” She paused. “R’s a tough one… Plymouth Reliant?”
“Too tough,” said Lawrence.
“All I can think of is the Buick Reatta,” said Syd. “And that’s not sissy enough, even if it doesn’t mean anything.”
“RX-7 is sort of wimpy,” said Trudy.
“Hey!” said Lawrence, sounding sincerely hurt. He raced rebuilt RX-7s.
“Why don’t I serve?” suggested Dar. “Whoever wins this one, wins.”
“Agreed,” said the other three.
“Q45,” said Dar.
“That’s a new car,” protested Trudy. “And there’s nothing especially sexy about…”
“Q45,” repeated Dar. “It’s in play. Go.”
There were several seconds of silence.
“VW Quantum,” said Syd.
“Wow,” said Trudy. “Winner.”
“Not so fast,” said Dar. “Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio.”
The others squinted at him suspiciously.
“It’s real,” said Lawrence at last. “I worked a wreck of one on the 410 three years ago…”
“We know it’s real,” said Trudy. “We’re just trying to decide if it’s…”
“I win,” said Dar.
“Who made you judge and jury?” said Lawrence pleasantly enough.
Dar smiled tightly. “I’m not judge and jury,” he said. “I’m just the foreperson.” He looked meaningfully at the boxes of files that were stacked in the other room. “Can we go to work now on finding out which case might have made the Russian mafia want to kill me?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“G IS FOR WHIZ”
THREE HOURS AND eighty files later, Lawrence sat back in his chair and said, “I give up. What the hell are we looking for?”
“Fraudulent claims,” said Syd, gesturing toward the stack of files they had separated under just that heading.
“That’s sixty-some percent of what we deal with,” said Trudy. “None of these in which Dar did the accident reconstruction seem important enough to warrant killing him.”
The chief investigator nodded. Her eyes looked tired. Dar noticed that she wore rimless glasses when she read.
“Well,” said Dar, “you can’t say it’s dull reading.”
Syd nodded. “These accident victim reports are masterpieces, all right. Listen to this one—‘The telephone pole was approaching fast. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my front end.’”
Trudy opened a file. “Here’s one of my favorites—‘I had been driving my car for forty years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident.’”
Dar pulled an old file out. “This fellow’s never heard of the Fifth Amendment—‘The guy was all over the road. I had to swerve several times before I hit him.’”
Lawrence grunted and flipped through the file he had been skimming. “My claimant’s been watching too many X-Files episodes—‘An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my vehicle, and vanished.’”
“I had an X-File one,” said Syd, flipping through the thick blue folders. “Here—‘The accident happene
d when the right front door of a car came around the corner without giving any signal.’”
“I hate it when that happens,” said Dar.
“Notice how accident victims love passive voice in their depositions?” said Trudy. “Here’s a typical one—‘A pedestrian I did not see hit me, then went sliding under my car.’”
“But they’re honest, in a stupid way,” said Lawrence. “I remember taking this bozo’s statement—‘Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don’t have.’”
Trudy was giggling as she read. “‘I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law in the other seat and headed over the embankment.’”
“I understand that one well enough,” rumbled Lawrence.
Trudy quit giggling and gave him a look.
Syd suddenly laughed aloud. “Here’s a possible case of overkill,” she said, flipping to a statement transcript. “‘In an attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole.’”
“We’re getting silly, people,” said Dar, glancing at his watch.
“We started silly,” said Trudy. She looked at the stack of fraudulent claims. “Do we have anything that looks at all likely?”
“Two, I think,” said Dar, pulling dossiers from the teetering pile. “Remember the rebar case on the I-5 in May?”
“What’s that?” said Syd.
“Rebar is steel rods used to reinforce concrete,” intoned Lawrence.
“I know what rebar is,” said the investigator. “What’s the case?”
“May twenty-third,” said Dar, skimming through the file. “I-5 twenty-nine miles north of San Diego.”
“Oh, God,” said Lawrence. “You did the reconstruction video graphics for that, but I was one of the first on the scene. Jesus.”
Syd waited.
“Asian guy, Vietnamese, just arrived in the States with his family—eight kids—three months earlier, working as a delivery driver for a florist, has one of those cab-forward Isuzu delivery vans with the engine under the seat, nothing in front of him except Plexiglas and a thin sheet of tin,” said Lawrence, grimacing as he remembered. “He was tailgating an open truck owned by a little construction firm out of La Jolla—Burnette Construction, strictly a family business—Bill Burnette, the owner, driving a load of rebar.”
“Sticking out behind the trailer bed?” asked Syd.
“By eight feet,” said Lawrence. “It was red-flagged, but…” The insurance investigator took a breath. “The poor Vietnamese guy was tailgating, doing about fifty-five, when someone swerved in front of Burnette’s truck and Burnette hit the brakes…hard.”
“And the Vietnamese guy didn’t,” said Syd.
Dar shook his head. “No, he did, but the brakes didn’t work. No fluid.”
Syd exchanged glances with the others; this type of accident was rare.
“Bound bundles of rebar came through the windshield and front of the van and speared the delivery guy in four or five places,” said Lawrence. “Dragged him right out through the shattered windshield. Burnette’s truck hadn’t stopped—was still doing thirty or so when the collision happened—and he told me he could see this poor son of a bitch hanging back there from the rebar…impaled in the face, throat, chest, left arm…”
“But still alive,” said Dar.
Lawrence nodded. “For the time being. Burnette didn’t know what to do, but he had the presence of mind not to hit the brakes again. That would have impaled the poor guy, Mr. Phong, even worse. So he pulled to the side of the road and gently slowed down with this poor devil dangling back there.”
“That couldn’t possibly be a swoop-and-squat,” said Syd. “Not with the squatter behind the rebar truck. Plus there’s no place for the squatter to squat and hide…”
“That’s what we thought,” said Trudy. “But when Dar did the reconstruction, it sure looked like a deliberate swoop. Very light traffic. A white pickup crossed two lanes, swooped in front of the Burnette vehicle, slammed on his brakes, and then accelerated away down an off ramp.”
“Was he trying to get to the off ramp?” said Syd.
Trudy shook her head. “Ramp was on the right. The accident happened in the far left lane of five lanes. And the traffic was so light that there seemed to be no reason for the victim, Mr. Phong, to be tailgating the way he was. Several lanes were open. It looks like a swoop-and-squat set-up…”
“But the idea isn’t to kill or permanently maim the ‘victim’ in a swoop-and-squat,” Syd said. “They’re supposed to be rear-ended in some sort of reinforced car and then claim whiplash or something, not be impaled from the front by rebar. Did Mr. Phong die?”
“Yeah,” said Lawrence. “Three days later, without regaining consciousness.”
“What was the settlement?” asked the chief investigator.
“Two point six million,” said Trudy.
Lawrence sighed. “Burnette was running his construction company on a shoestring and took the lightest coverage he could afford. The settlement drove him into bankruptcy.”
Syd looked at the other file.
“This is also one of your red pins,” said Dar. “The one on the I-5 that I mentioned. This is definitely a swoop-and-squat—the rear-car driver, Mr. Hernandez, had three disability and eight personal injury claims pending.”
“But also a fatality,” said Syd.
“Yeah,” said Dar. “Everything went according to script up to the impact. Again, a pickup swooped in front of the squat car—a big old Buick—and hit its brakes. The target car, a new Cadillac, slammed into the rear of Hernandez’s Buick just as planned. But then Hernandez’s Buick exploded…”
“I thought that only happened in the movies,” said Syd.
“Just about,” said Dar. “But my investigation found remnants of a crude battery-driven spark igniter in the gas tank of Mr. Hernandez’s Buick. It was rigged to ignite after any sharp contact with the rear bumper.”
“Murder,” said Syd.
Dar nodded. “But in each case, the lawyer—who was the same lawyer, by the way—had lawsuits against both the other driver and the car maker, so the evidence of brake tampering and sabotage of the Hernandez car was dismissed in exchange for dropping the lawsuits against the manufacturers.”
“I’ve been curious,” said Syd, “about how they pick the target vehicle for these swoop-and-squats.”
Trudy spoke. “Several factors. Expensive car, of course…”
“Especially one with a State Farm or other big insurance sticker on the bumper,” said Lawrence.
“Usually older drivers,” said Trudy. “Someone who doesn’t react too quickly and will brake when they shouldn’t.”
“They don’t want to hurt the people in the target vehicle, of course,” said Dar. “The idea is for the accomplice in the squat vehicle to claim the disability—usually invisible injuries such as whiplash or lower back, although insurance companies are getting tougher about that.”
“But the classic swoop-and-squat here—Hernandez—ended in the death of the driver,” said Syd. “And the Phong accident doesn’t fit the swoop-and-squat profile…”
“It’s true,” said Dar, shaking his head. “It seems inconceivable that he would volunteer to collide with a load of overhanging rebar.”
“Unless it was his first time,” said Syd. “Unless he was set up. And Mr. Hernandez…”
“Found in the typical squat position,” said Trudy. “Hunkered down under the wheel. The trunk of the old Buick was filled with sandbags and tires, typical reinforcement for a squat car to buffer the impact. But it all burned—including Mr. Hernandez—when the gas tank exploded.”
“Settlement?”
“Six hundred thousand,” said Lawrence.
“So now we come to the lawyer for both cases, Mr. Jorgé Murphy Esposito,” said Syd. “We’ve known for a long time that he’s a pure ambulance chaser…”
Trudy laughed. “Esposito could dispatch ambulances,” she said. “He knows where the acc
idents are going to happen before they happen.”
Syd nodded. “Dar, do you think Esposito’s the one siccing the Russians on you?”
Dar sighed. “My gut instinct says no. Esposito’s small time. He works with the usual underclass of fraud claimants. I just don’t see him branching out and playing the game on the level high enough to justify using Russian mafia hitmen.”
“But this is a lead,” said Sydney. “Who are the other lawyers and doctors high on your list?”
“Our fraudulent-claims list?” asked Trudy.
“Yeah.”
“Besides Esposito, there’s Roget Velliers, Bobby James Tucker, Nicholas van Dervan, Abraham Willis—” began Trudy.
“Uh-uh,” interrupted Lawrence. “Willis is dead.”
Dar raised an eyebrow. “Since when? I testified in a case against his plaintiff just a month ago.”
“Since last Thursday,” said Lawrence. “The good counselor died in a single-car wreck up near Carmel.”
“Well, live by the sword…” said Syd.
“Esposito’s handling the family’s lawsuit,” said Lawrence.
Trudy grunted softly. “Professional courtesy.”
Syd got up from the table and stretched. “Well, we’ll cross-check Dar’s files with these and try to see which of these ambulance chasers is most involved.”
Trudy looked at the two of them. “Are you headed back to San Diego?”
Dar only shook his head.
Syd said, “We’re hiding out from the press up at Dar’s cabin for the weekend.”
Lawrence did not exactly waggle his eyebrows, but the look he gave Dar might as well have been a leer and a wink. “Been a long time since you had anyone up there, isn’t it, Darwin? Besides us, I mean.”
“I’ve never had anyone up there besides you,” said Dar, with a warning look. “It seems that I’m in protective custody.”
There was a silence. Then Trudy said brightly, “Oh…before you go… Investigator Olson…”
“Syd,” said Syd.
“Syd,” continued Trudy. “Could you give us your professional opinion on a piece of surveillance tape?”