Cliff was actually kind of a cabbage-head. But they had that con edge.
They were lucky, too. One good I.D. and they mighta gone down-at least probation.”
He laughed again. “Lucky bastards. The excuse they gave was the stupidest thing of all: big misunderstanding, die old folk were too mentally disturbed to know the difference between reality and fantasy, the land thing was never supposed to be taken seriously. It was all part of some movie they were doing on con games. They even showed us the outline of a script. One page of bullshit-scam games and hot cars- something like The Sringmeets CannonballRun. They claimed they were gonna sell it to Hollywood.” He laughed again. “So they actually got out there, huh?”
“Derrick made it,” said Milo. “Cliff died a few years after Daddy and Stepmom.
Motocross accident near Reno.”
“Oh boy,” said Castro. “Interesting.”
“Very.”
“Like I told you, cold. I always saw Derrick as the idea guy. Cliff was a party dude. Better-looking than Derrick, nice tan, expert water-skiier, pussy hound. And, yeah, motorcycles, too. He had a bunch of them. A collection. They both did. So
Derrick might very well know how to rig one…. I figured if anyone cracked, it’d be
Cliff, my plan was to split them apart, see if I could play one against the other.
But the lawyer wouldn’t let me get close. I’ll never forget the last time I talked to them. I’m asking questions, faking being civil, and those two are looking at their lawyer and he’s telling me they don’t have to answer and they’re smirking.
Finally, I leave, and Derrick makes a point of walking me to the door. Big old house, tons of furniture, and he and his brother are gonna get it all. Then he smiles at me, again. Like,’I know, you know, fuck you, Charlie.’ The only comfort I got out of it was they didn’t get as rich as they thought they would.”
“How much they get?” said Milo.
“Eighty grand each, mostly from the sale of the house. The place was heavily mortgaged, and by the time they paid estate taxes, commission, all that good stuff, there wasn’t much left. They were figuring the old man was sitting on big-time cash, but turns out he’d made some bad investments-land deals, as a matter of fact-which is funny, don’t you think? Leveraged up the Y.Y. He’d even cashed in his insurance policies as collateral for some loans. The only other assets were the furniture, pair of three-year-old Caddies, golf clubs and a golf cart, and the stepmom’s jewelry, half of which turned out to be costume and the rest new stuff, which doesn’t maintain its value once you take it out of the store. The other funny thing was, the boat hadn ‘t been borrowed on. Apparently the old man loved it, kept up with his slip fees and maintenance. Nice-looking thing, from the pictures. The old man had stuffed fish all over the house.” He laughed louder. “Fifty grand worth of boat, minimum, free and clear, and that they blew up. So tell me more about what
Derrick did out there.”
Milo kept it sketchy.
“Whoa,” said Castro. “Creepy murder, that’s a whole new level…. Makes sense, I guess. Keep getting away with it, you start thinking you’re God.”
“The thing that interests me,” said Milo, “is from what we can tell, Derrick isn’t living well. No car registrations, no address in any swank neighborhood that we can find, and he may have taken a low-paying job under an alias. So he must not have invested that eighty grand.”
“He wouldn’t. He’d plow right through it, just like any other sociopath.”
“I can’t find any Social Security for him except when he lived in Miami,” said Milo.
“So no jobs under his own name. Any idea what he’s been doing all these years?”
“Nah,” said Castro. “He left town nine or ten months after the murder, they both did, left no trail. The case was officially open, but no one was really working on it. In my spare time, I kept following the money, drove by some clubs they hung out at. Then one day a source at County Records called me-I’d asked to be told when the