Green-Eyed Lady: A Mystery (A Jack MacTaggart Mystery) - Hardcover

Greaves, Chuck

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250005248 ISBN 13: 9781250005243

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2013

Synopsis

"A legal thriller with the delicious intricacy of a well-plotted mystery, Green-Eyed Lady proves again why he is among the front-rank of legal thriller authors . . . the verdict is a unanimous 'must read.'"

―Kelli Stanley, award-winning author of City of Secrets

Author Chuck Greaves's returns with the rollicking sequel to his acclaimed and Shamus Award-nominated debut novel, Hush Money.

U.S. Senate candidate Warren Burkett has a history of marital infidelity. Three weeks before Election Day, Burkett comes to the aid of a beautiful green-eyed lady, only to find himself alone and naked in a stranger's home from which a priceless painting is missing. As the resulting scandal threatens to tilt the election, the painting turns up in a most unexpected place . . . and so does a dead body.

Hired to defend Burkett and unravel the deepening mystery, attorney Jack MacTaggart must traverse a minefield of ruthless politicians, felonious art dealers, swarming paparazzi, the amorous wife of Burkett's billionaire opponent, her mobbed-up brother, and a district attorney with an old score to settle.
With the electoral clock ticking and the press following his every move, Jack's investigation leads him on a roller-coaster ride through the lofty heights and gritty depths of Los Angeles and Southern California, lending new meaning to the adage that all's fair in love and politics.

About this title

About the Author

CHUCK GREAVES was born in Levittown, New York. He is an honors graduate of both the University of Southern California and Boston College Law School, and spent twenty-five years as a trial lawyer in Los Angeles. Hush Money, his debut novel, won the SouthWest Writers International Writing Contest and was named a finalist for several national honors, including the Rocky Award from Left Coast Crime, the Reviewers' Choice Award from RT Book Reviews, and the Audie Award from the Audio Publishers Association. He lives in Colorado, where he also writes literary fiction as C. Joseph Greaves.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1


 

“There’s no fool like an old fool.”
So concluded Warren Burkett, the former mayor of Los Angeles and, of more immediate significance, the Democratic Party’s nominee for a U.S. Senate seat whose occupant would be determined in three short weeks, on the first Tuesday in November.
Burkett stood at the window with his back to my law partner, Marta “Mayday” Suarez, who’d been typing on her laptop as our silver-haired visitor spun his remarkable tale. Now he pinched the blinds to scan the street below, where a trio of TV news vans hugged the curb and where paparazzi on foot and on sleek Japanese motorbikes flanked a black Lincoln Town Car on whose fender a driver leaned, arms folded, the vulturous shadow of a circling news helicopter darkening the whole chaotic scene.
“The Times said that your car was recovered in Pasadena.” I lifted the newspaper from my desk for his inspection. The banner headline read: BURKETT HELD IN THEFT PROBE.
He returned to his chair and sat. When he resumed his story, Mayday resumed her typing.
“It was parked at my house, on South San Rafael. Inside the gates. The keys were in the ignition. No fingerprints, apparently, and no clue as to how it got there. And no missing painting, of course.”
Mayday and I shared a glance. “Was there a remote controller for the gate?”
He nodded. “On the visor.”
I rescanned the Times article. “Who else knew your schedule that day? If she was waiting for you outside the restaurant, then she had to have known you’d be there, and that you’d probably be alone.”
He considered this. “That’s a hell of a good question. Harwood, of course. A few others in the campaign. Plus Kaneta, and some of his people. We were drinking sake. You ever drink sake?”
“Not on purpose.”
“It’s like warm cat piss.” He shook his head sadly. “The things you put up with in a campaign, you don’t want to know.”
There was a knock at the door, and the aforementioned Harwood, Burkett’s body man, leaned his crew cut into my office, tapping his wristwatch with a finger. Burkett nodded and waved him off.
“Where was I?”
“Back at the restaurant.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s called the Geisha House, which doesn’t help any. Sounds like a goddamn brothel.”
“Geisha House,” Mayday read from her laptop. “‘Sushi and sashimi with a contemporary spin.’”
“That’s the place.” Burkett, who’d been nervously jiggling his foot, stood again and crossed to the window, again pinching the blinds. He was silent for a moment, seemingly lost in thought.
“It’s like keeping pet rats,” he finally said. “The press, I mean. They’re kind of cute, and you can play with ’em when you want to, but God forbid you stumble and can’t get up. Because the next thing you know, they’re eating your entrails for breakfast.”
“What about the Mercedes?” I asked him. “In the parking lot?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I suppose they’re checking. Do you know these detectives?”
I nodded. “Madden is smart, and a straight shooter. Alvarez is something of a cowboy.”
“Something of an asshole,” Burkett corrected. He moved again toward the desk, but then he stopped and pivoted, pacing now like a caged animal. “That article say anything about the house on Green Oak?”
I laid the paper flat. There were four Times reporters covering the story. Not to mention stringers from every daily newspaper, broadcast station, cable channel, radio outlet, Internet site, and political bathrobe blog in America.
“The house belongs to a cardiac surgeon and his wife. The Bloomfields. Seems they’re on vacation in Europe.”
Burkett grunted. “Here’s what I don’t get. Was this a honey trap or was it a robbery?”
“Sex,” Mayday said. “The robbery makes no sense, and if you’ll pardon my saying so, you do have something of a reputation.”
He stiffened slightly, looking from me to Mayday and back again. Then he resumed his pacing. “All right. So the painting was what? An impulse? Her fee?”
I refolded the paper. “What was the name she gave you? Rose something?”
“Bridget Rose.”
“Mean anything to you?”
Burkett shook his head. Mayday, still fingering her keyboard, sat up straight.
“‘Bridget Rose Dugdale,’ she read. “She was an Irish debutante turned IRA soldier. She has her own Wikipedia page. Millionaire’s daughter. Oxford educated. In 1974 she and an accomplice hijacked a helicopter and used it to bomb a police station in Northern Ireland. Uh-oh.”
“What?”
Mayday looked up from her screen. “It says here that she also took part in a major art heist. Home-invasion style. The thieves made off with nineteen Old Masters paintings, including a Gainsborough, a Goya, and a Vermeer. Also in 1974.”
“How old is this person?”
“She’d be around seventy-five now. Not our green-eyed lady.”
Another knock. This time Harwood came all the way in, with my secretary, Bernadette, trailing behind him.
“We have NBC at noon,” the big man said. “I’m sorry, but you made me promise.”
Burkett nodded, checking his watch. “Okay, Bill. Thirty seconds more.”
After the door had closed again, Burkett got down to cases. He wanted to hire the law firm of MacTaggart and Suarez to defend him in the criminal case. He’d pay our standard hourly rates, which he’d double if we could get the charges kicked by Election Day. He’d pay a bonus if we could find the woman and have her indicted. A double bonus if we accomplished that before Election Day. And if we proved that Larry Archer was behind it all, he’d make me the next attorney general.
I think he was kidding about the attorney general.
I stood as he offered his hand. “I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake, MacTaggart. Nothing less than the integrity of our political process. If that hoodlum uses a stunt like this to win the election…” He shook his head ominously, leaving the thought unfinished.
“One last question,” I said to his back as he reached for the door handle. He stopped and turned to face us.
“Why me? You must know dozens of downtown lawyers, all with bigger reputations than mine.”
For the first time that morning, Warren Burkett smiled.
“Hell, I know more lawyers than O. J Simpson. But Russ Dinsmoor told me once that if he were ever in trouble, you’re the guy he’d hire, and that’s all I needed to know.”
*   *   *
The first election that I could personally recall was the presidential contest of 1988, when Ronald Reagan’s vice president faced off against Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts. I was twelve years old at the time, and I can still remember sitting in a topless bar in Boyle Heights with my uncle Louis, watching the debate on television. This was instead of sitting in Dodger Stadium watching Orel Hershiser face down the Giants, since Uncle Louis, my mother’s cheerfully dissolute older brother, had been to babysitting what Bernie Madoff was to retirement planning. This was September, still two months from Election Day, and I’d asked Uncle Louis which candidate he thought would win.
He’d lit another cigarette and considered the proposition.
“Kid,” he’d finally told me, “the only way Bush loses this election is if they catch him in bed with a dead girl. Or a live boy.”
The same could have been said of Warren Burkett the day before yesterday. Larry Archer, his Republican opponent, had been trailing anywhere from eight to ten points in all the major polls, which meant that, on the list of people with a motive to implicate Burkett in a lurid sex scandal, the billionaire developer’s name stood out like a black swan in winter.
“It’s just too obvious. Even for a blunt instrument like Archer.”
Mayday looked up from her Cobb salad, hold the bacon, hold the turkey, and olive oil and balsamic on the side. We were sitting in our usual booth at the Only Place in Town, a homey neighborhood eatery in the sleepy suburban village of Sierra Madre, California.
The Only Place was not, as its name suggested, Sierra Madre’s only restaurant. There was Lucky Baldwin’s Pub for draft beer and finger food, and Corfu for Mediterranean fine dining, and the Buccaneer Bar for tequila shots and a knife fight. It was, however, the only spot from which we could keep an eye on the front door to the office while Bernie performed her midday shopping ritual.
Our booth looked onto the street, which, thronged with press and gawkers just an hour earlier, had returned to its somnolent normalcy. Only a few reporters had lingered in the wake of Burkett’s departure—to snap photos of us and elicit our “no comments” as we’d emerged from the office for lunch—and now they, too, were gone.
The restaurant’s player piano segued to “A Bicycle Built for Two,” and I realized that, amid the burble of voices and the clinking of silverware and the ring of the cash register, I was feeling the old adrenaline again.
It was only three months before that I’d salvaged both Mayday and our secretary, the inimitable Bernadette Catalano, from the smoldering wreckage of my old law firm, Pasadena’s storied Henley and Hargrove, which had imploded following an ethics scandal and the deaths of its two senior partners, one of whom, the aforementioned Russell H. Dinsmoor...

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250005248
• ISBN 13: 9781250005243
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288