She told me that she and her husband were visiting his family in the Philippines when they got the news. Someone from the LAPD telephoned in the middle of the night, a lady police officer — she didn’t catch the name — who apologized for calling so late and said it was her sad duty to inform Janice that her former spouse had met with apparent foul play. She told Janice she was sorry for her loss, to which Janice said she replied, “What loss?”
“She asked me if I had any idea of who might’ve shot him,” Janice said, licking chocolate from her little finger. “I told her I didn’t know and I didn’t care. Arlo was already dead to me, a long time before that.”
The officer asked as a matter of routine if Janice could vouch for her whereabouts in the days leading up to Echevarria’s death. She said she provided the names of each of her chauffeurs, cooks, gardeners, maids, corporate pilots and masseuse. All of them, she said, confirmed that she’d been abroad when Echevarria was gunned down. She even volunteered to take a polygraph some weeks later, which she said she aced. The same, she acknowledged, could not be said for their son, Micah.
“They gave him a lie-detector test and it came back ‘inconclusive.’ He was just nervous. The police knew that. Micah would never hurt anybody.”
“Not even the father he despised?”
“He had no use for his father, just like his father had no use for him. Quite frankly, Micah has no interest in how Arlo died, and neither do I.”
“Then why’d you agree to see me?”
She set her cup down on the coffee table and smoothed her skirt. “My husband’s away on a business trip for three weeks. I’m fucking bored.” The come-hither quality of her smile was the very definition of transparent.
“Where’d he go, your husband, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Kazakhstan. Looking at oil properties.”
“It’s all the rage,” I said. “Everybody used to go to Disneyworld. Now they go to Kazakhstan.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I should be going.” I stood.
Disappointed by my apparent lack of carnal interest in her, she turned with sagged shoulders and watched a freighter heading out to sea under the Golden Gate, its deck stacked five deep with multicolored cargo containers.
“I’d like to talk to your son,” I said.
“What for?”
“To see what, if anything, he might know about the circumstances of Arlo’s death.”
“I don’t know his current address. He was living somewhere in the East Bay last I heard. He moves around a lot.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have his cell phone number?”
She sighed, jotted the number on a slip of paper and handed it to me.
“I don’t approve of my son’s lifestyle,” Janice said, “but if you do see him, tell him I still love him.”
I called Micah Echevarria later that morning. Before hanging up on me, he said he didn’t want to talk to me about his father or anything else. When I called him back to say I thought we’d been cut off, he told me to kiss off and hung up again. Whatever happened to telephone etiquette?
I drove across the Bay Bridge into Oakland and stopped for a late breakfast at the Full House Café on MacArthur Boulevard. I’d discovered the Full House years before while tailing an agent from a Middle Eastern country who’d gone there to meet with two Hezbollah operatives interested in acquiring stolen Army antitank missiles. I’d grabbed a seat at the counter — an electro-acoustic listening bud planted in my ear — and feasted on red hash made from beets and pork sausage while the Arabs negotiated a price for the missiles at a table near the window. After breakfast, I followed them to a self-storage yard across from the San Mateo County Fairgrounds where the rockets were stashed, then on toward Reno, where they intended to celebrate their deal by touring the local whorehouses. They never made it to Nevada. All three died when their rental car spun off an icy Donner Pass. The CHP called it brake failure. My supervisors called it a job well done.
The Full House had changed little over the years since I’d been there. I ordered my eggs over easy, called Buzz and asked for another favor.
“I’m still waiting on that gift certificate,” he said.
“It’s in the mail.”
“Like I’ve never heard that before.”
I gave him Micah Echevarria’s cell phone number. I needed a corresponding address, I said, and any other readily available information that might offer me relevant insights as to what made the kid tick. I also wanted to know if there was anything in any intelligence files implicating Harry Ramos, Janice Echevarria’s second husband, whose interests in Kazakhstan oil seemed to coincide with those of my former father-in-law and his prospective Russian business partner, Pavel Tarasov. Buzz said he’d have to call me back.
I was finished with breakfast and working on my third cup of coffee when he did.
There were abundant references to Ramos on file, Buzz said, mostly having to do with his many overseas investments, but nothing to suggest that he, either personally or by corporate DBA, had ever been associated with any known intelligence operations, foreign or domestic. Nor had he ever been implicated in any criminal investigations. Computerized link analysis failed to connect him even remotely to Tarasov or, for the matter, Gil Carlisle.
Echevarria’s son came out clean, too, Buzz said, at least as far as intelligence activities were concerned. The kid’s arrest record was another matter. Buzz had run his name through the FBI’s NCIC database. Micah Echevarria and California’s penal codes were hardly strangers: two citations for a minor in possession of alcohol, one misdemeanor shoplifting charge reduced to an infraction, and one third-degree assault charge as a result of a street fight for which he’d spent a month in the San Jose County Jail. In the three years since being issued a driver’s license, he’d chalked up three moving violations, all for speeding. He rode a Harley.
I thanked Buzz yet again for his help, and told him I owed him big-time.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “the check’s in the mail. Spare me.”
Some say the West Oakland neighborhood known as Ghost Town derived its moniker from the two casket companies that once competed for business there. Others say it’s because of the killings that have plagued the area for decades. One thing beyond debate is that Ghost Town is the kind of place where even the police don’t go at night unless they’re obligated to — and only then with overwhelming backup. Just my luck that Arlo Echevarria’s son resided in the heart of Ghost Town.
The address Buzz provided was off of 30th and Union streets in the shadow of the 580 Freeway, a bedraggled duplex sandwiched between two small warehouses. There were steel burglar bars bolted to the windows and gang graffiti splashed on the clapboard walls. A Chevy Caprice Classic, its hood and trunk open to the sky, sat rusting on the dirt amid a sea of calcified dog poop that passed for a front yard.
I observed no motorcycle as I cruised past. I drove around the block, parked my rental subcompact four houses up the street, and waited for Micah Echevarria to come home.
The first gangster, a lookout, showed up within five minutes of my arrival. He was pedaling a tricked-out bicycle absurdly small for his lanky, sixteen-year-old frame, checking me out as he rolled past — ridiculously oversized blue jeans bagging, boxer shorts showing, wearing a black, oversized Raiders hoodie with the hood up, and sucking on a Tootsie Pop. He coasted down the street, glanced at me over his shoulder once more and veered around the corner, out of sight.
Another ten minutes passed and there he was again, still on his bike, this time escorted by five other homeboys on foot. They strode all big and bad toward my car with their hands shoved menacingly in their pockets. I rolled down the window.