Page 30 of Nightshade
STILWELL HAD HIS head down, eyes on the text he was writing to Tash, when Monika Juarez approached him in the small lobby of the Zane Grey.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.
He looked up. He had been sitting here waiting for her, knowing her weekly routine of coming out to the island the night before court.
“Monika, hey, did you check in?” he asked.
“About to,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you about a case. A deal, actually. Why don’t you check in and I’ll finish this. Get into your room and come down when you’re ready.”
“You sure? We can do it now.”
“It might take a while to walk you through everything. Go ahead, check in, and I’ll be down here.”
“All right, give me twenty minutes.”
“Perfect.”
She went to the front desk and Stilwell went back to his phone. He sent the text to Tash telling her he would probably be working later than usual. A few moments later he got a return from her.
So who is she?
She did this often, a humorous way to hide her insecurity about their relationship. He played along.
A tough-as-nails prosecutor named Monika .
In response to this he received a green-faced emoji symbolizing jealousy, and then:
Invite her to dinner?
At least once a month they invited Juarez out to dinner. She was one of the first people they had revealed their relationship to.
I’ll ask.
He put the phone away and opened his laptop, which he had brought with him in case the wait for Juarez went long. He connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, went to the California Secretary of State website, and searched for Wheelmen LLC, the company mentioned in the Catalina Call story on the proposal to build the giant Ferris wheel on the Avalon harbor.
A listing of incorporation documents filed on behalf of the company appeared on-screen. He opened Wheelmen’s application to incorporate, filed on February 7 of that year. This showed that the company had initially formed as a Delaware corporation two months earlier and then applied to California. The corporate address listed was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, with a registered corporate agent named Ellen Sparks. Stilwell opened a Word document and typed in both pieces of information. The application listed the company as a public-entertainment enterprise.
Stilwell started going through the other documents on the state site, identifying the company officers. He typed these into the Word document as well.
President and CEO: Marcus Rifkin
Vice president: Stanley Banks
Secretary: Nathan Cabot
Chief operating officer: Susan St. Jacques
The attorney who filed the documents was named Bryson Long. Stilwell recognized none of the names except Marcus Rifkin, who had been mentioned in the Call story. It was Rifkin who had submitted, with Mayor Allen’s endorsement, the design and other documents pertaining to the Big Wheel project to the Avalon planning board for initial review.
After closing out of the California Secretary of State site, Stilwell started googling the names one by one to see if anything else came up. Several references to Rifkin appeared, most concerning other cities where his company had proposed building either giant Ferris wheels or zip line systems. Some had been turned down, but most were still in play or had been initially approved and were in the designing stages. As far as Stilwell could tell, none had become operational yet. These projects were in towns in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana that depended heavily on tourism.
He plugged the Wheelmen corporate address in Los Angeles into the search engine and soon was looking at a photo of an office building in Koreatown.
“What’s that?”
Stilwell looked up from the screen to see Juarez, who had changed out of her DA clothes into blue jeans and a white blouse.
“What I want to talk to you about,” he answered. “You okay to talk here? Or we could go to the sub, if that’s better.”
Juarez glanced around. There was no one else in the small lobby, and the clerk who had checked her in had left the desk.
“We can talk here,” she said. “What’s up?”
“What’s up is that I have a guy in my jail who admits he cut up the buffalo on the preserve a couple weeks ago,” Stilwell said. “He wants to make a deal where he skates on the buffalo but gives us the man who put him up to it, and for good measure, he’ll throw in what he knows about the mayor being a silent partner with that same guy in a multimillion-dollar project that he’s pushing through the public-approval process.”
Juarez nodded eagerly, as any prosecutor with a public-corruption case dropped in her lap would do.
“Well, tell me more,” she said.
“You want to start with the buffalo or the city project?” Stilwell asked.
“Let’s go with the buffalo.”
“Okay, I know this made news on the mainland and you might have seen it, but two weeks ago somebody killed one of the buffaloes up on the conservancy preserve. He decapitated it and took the head. They’re protected animals, and that makes it a felony. The guy in jail is named Henry Gaston. I’m holding him there in protective custody because I’ve got nowhere else to put him. He’s a mechanic who takes care of the carts used by Island Mystery Tours, which got a franchise license from the town about five years ago. I wasn’t out here then but I’m told it was controversial.”
“How so?”
“The franchise owner is a guy named Oscar Terranova. The locals call him Baby Head.”
“What?”
“He’s got a shaved head and I guess people think it looks like a newborn baby’s.”
Juarez laughed and shook her own head.
“At least it’s original,” she said.
“Anyway, the license was opposed by other tour operators, who said there were already too many franchises in town,” Stilwell said. “They claimed it would hurt all of their businesses. But Mayor Allen supported the application, saying the competition would grow the market. The town council voted, and Baby Head got the license.”
“And did it grow things like the mayor said?”
“Not so much. Two of the other companies went bankrupt, but the mayor conveniently blamed the COVID epidemic for that. Tourism did tank out here back then. But Gaston said that he and Baby Head sabotaged those businesses. He said they did all kinds of stuff, from slashing tires on the competitors’ carts to outright stealing them and dumping them off cliffs on the back side of the island.”
“And he’ll testify to all of this?”
“If he gets a deal. But that’s minor stuff compared to what else he says he’s got, starting with the dead buffalo. He said Baby Head ordered him to kill the buffalo so it would make news and would get blamed on aliens.”
Juarez laughed again. “And of course that would bring more customers to his magical mystery tours,” she said.
“Exactly,” Stilwell said.
“What evidence do you have for all of this?”
“Well, last week I got a search warrant signed by Judge Harrell and went to Terranova’s cart barn. This is when I first met Gaston. I seized a saw handle that tested positive for blood. I have it locked up but haven’t submitted it to the lab yet for comparison to blood from the buffalo.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve been busy with a murder investigation, and the buffalo case will be such a low priority at the lab that it’ll be six months before I get a report back. Unless I have a prosecutor pushing it through. That’s what I was sort of waiting for.”
Juarez shook her head.
“That’s a catch-twenty-two,” she said. “I don’t think I could press charges without results. And I couldn’t push for results without charges in place.”
“But now Gaston wants to cooperate.”
“To save his own neck. It’s not a good look if he’s the one who killed and cut up that poor animal.”
The desk clerk reappeared behind the check-in counter. Stilwell saw that it was Fred Nettles, the night manager he had dealt with during the eviction dustup. He had apparently just come on duty. Stilwell lowered his voice so that he would not be overheard.
“Gaston says he was also working in the cart barn when Terranova met with Allen about this proposal to build a giant Ferris wheel out on the point past the Casino. Publicly, the mayor’s already supporting it as a big boost to tourism. But Gaston says Allen and Terranova are shadow partners in it. The mayor gets a piece of the action for supporting the project, and he chips off a piece for Terranova.”
Juarez’s body language changed. She leaned in toward Stilwell, and her face lost the mirth it had displayed earlier at the mention of Baby Head.
“Can we trust this guy Gaston?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Stilwell said. “He’s desperate. I leaned on him last week when I was at the barn conducting the search. A couple days later his wife reported him missing. I thought maybe he had lammed it, but then he walks into the sub today and says he’s been hiding because Terranova is going to kill him to keep him quiet.”
“Over a dead buffalo?”
“He says Baby Head’s afraid he’ll bow to the pressure I put on him and talk. About everything. The buffalo, the Ferris wheel, and everything else he knows. And that’s exactly what he’s willing to do if we cut him a deal.”
“Does this Baby Head have any record that supports this kind of reaction?”
“None.”
“Is he from the island?”
“I heard he came here about the time he applied for the tour license.”
“From where?”
“The mainland. He’s got a tattoo on his arm. Six-six-one. That’s the area code for Bakersfield.”
Juarez was quiet as she thought about how to handle the situation. Stilwell looked at his watch. It was getting late and he wanted to go back to the sub to check on Gaston before he went home for dinner.
“What do you think?” he prompted. “You want to talk to Gaston? I have to pick up some food to take him and another guy I have in lockup. That other one you’ll deal with tomorrow. Assault on a law enforcement officer with GBI.”
“Well…” Juarez began. “Sure, we can go talk to him, but this is really something I should bring to the public integrity unit. All corruption-of-government-officials cases go there. They would have to make the call.”
Stilwell nodded. He knew this but was disappointed because taking the case to the PIU would slow things down considerably. An investigation of an elected official was always fraught with consequences for any misstep by prosecutors or their investigators.
“Why don’t we go talk to him so you can get a sense of him and the situation,” he said. “If you want to kick it over to the public corruption team after that, that’s your call. We can meet up with Tash afterward and grab dinner.”
“Okay,” Juarez said. “Sounds like a plan.”