White Ghost Ridge Read online

  On arrival, Mendoza had looked around the room but could not see any lone male diners who looked around the right age. There were only about fifteen other tables in the dimly lit restaurant and nine of them were surprisingly unoccupied. Three large parties occupied three of the bigger tables in the middle of the long, narrow restaurant and were mostly businessmen in grey suits and ties.

  One young woman ate alone at the table by the window and two loved-up couples occupied smaller tables at the back to her left but were too busy staring into each other’s eyes to take any notice of the hungover, lone Latina.

  Mendoza ordered a bottle of cold mineral water and watched the door. A few of the men at one of the tables began to glance over and throw smiles in her direction. One stared at her, unsmiling, but when she returned his gaze he flushed and looked away nervously. Mendoza cringed at the idea that any of them thought she was looking for a hook-up. She took her phone out of her bag and texted her mom to check on her grandmother and pretended to scroll through social-media platforms that did not exist on the basic burner phone Locklear had sourced. She felt a slight bump at her table and looked up to find a tall, thin, middle-aged man smiling amiably at her.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” Mendoza said curtly.

  “I know. It’s me. I’m David Horowitz,” the man said, smiling.

  Mendoza stared at the man’s features and decided he did not look typically Jewish. He had a squat button nose and the distinct mid-western features of fair hair and bright-blue eyes common among people of Scandinavian descent.

  “I take it you are Officer Mendoza?” he asked.

  Mendoza nodded and gestured for the man to sit.

  “You look like you were expecting someone else,” he said as he pulled his chair closer to the table.

  Mendoza watched the man’s body language which gave the impression that he was nervous. She made no reply.

  David Horowitz beckoned to the waiter.

  “Would you like some wine?” he asked Mendoza. “We could share a bottle?”

  Something Meara Henschel had said about David Horowitz came back to Mendoza but she decided to keep her thoughts to herself until she heard the man out.

  “I better not.”

  He ordered red wine from the waiter who also took their dinner orders.

  “Pulled one on in a club last night and I’m still feeling shaky,” Mendoza said genially as she tried to lessen the man’s nervousness.

  “Oh, where did you go?”

  “A club by the name of Cobalt.”

  “Oh, I’ve been there. Not since my college days though. It’s a real pick-up place.”

  Mendoza put her head in her hands and blushed as the memories came rushing back.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Mendoza replied. “I’m afraid I drank a little too much and made an ass of myself. Don’t think I’ll ever be showing my face there again.”

  “Been there.” He grinned and waved his hand towards her.

  “Do you mind if I ask you how you met Alec?”

  The waiter arrived with the wine and David immediately took a large gulp and patted his mouth dry.

  “We met in a cocktail bar.”

  Mendoza sighed. The man in front of her had said the second thing that did not fit with the way Henschel had described Horowitz. She folded her napkin on the table and leaned forward.

  “Who are you? Because I know you are not David Horowitz.”

  Mendoza could see the alarm in the man’s face.

  “What do you mean? I am David Horowitz.”

  “The real David Horowitz doesn’t drink and he met Alec Holton at an art exhibition.” She lifted her phone off the table. “Now – I could phone Holton’s neighbour and ask her for a description of David Horowitz. So do you want to keep this charade up or are you going to tell me who you are and where I can find the real David Horowitz?”

  The man caved and looked towards one of the large tables behind him. Mendoza followed his eyes and realised he was looking at the serious man who had been staring at her earlier. The real David Horowitz stood and walked over to her table. His impersonator stood, walked quickly to the packed table and took a seat facing away from Mendoza.

  “I knew the moment you sat down that you wouldn’t be fooled,” the real Horowitz began.

  Mendoza kept her eyes on the large table which was occupied by around eleven people.

  “That’s a lot of back-up,” she said.

  Horowitz sighed. “They’re all colleagues from the newspaper. Ex-colleagues. They don’t know why I’m here. They think this is my goodbye party. I thought it would be safer to come in a group, in case you weren’t who you said you were.”

  “Who else would I be?”

  Horowitz did not answer.

  Mendoza looked him over and decided the man looked like he hadn’t slept in days. David Horowitz had dark loose skin under his brown eyes and his curly greying hair and beard looked like they badly needed a trim.

  “Who’s your stand-in?” Mendoza asked.

  “He’s just a friend of mine. He insisted on meeting you in my place to protect me.”

  “He works at The Post, doesn’t he?” Mendoza asked, as she recalled the voice she had spoken to when she contacted the newspaper looking for Horowitz.

  “Yes.”

  “So were you in contact with Alec after you left?”

  “Not much. A few phone calls to check on him and sort out my mail and bills, that sort of thing.”

  “How did you find out that Alec had died?”

  “Sartre’s girlfriend, Mai Nguyen, phoned me at work the day after Alec died. She’d found me on the internet. Saw articles I had written recently for the Post and phoned the newspaper.”

  “Did you say Nguyen is Sartre’s girlfriend? I thought he was married to Alec’s cousin Amelia Hirsch?”

  The food arrived. The waiter put Mendoza’s plate down in front of her while the real Horowitz directed the waiter to where his friend was now seated.

  “He is. Nguyen is also his secretary. She’s a nice lady. We had a good talk. She asked for my address. I saw no reason not to give it to her at the time.”

  “She’s the woman who witnessed Albert Whitefeather being thrown off the bridge,” Mendoza said, more to herself than her companion.

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she replied as the reason for Nguyen withdrawing her statement about the pale man she saw throwing Albert off the bridge became clear. Sartre’s girlfriend had probably coincidentally driven over the bridge at the same time that the murder took place, a killing Mendoza felt Sartre had something to do with, and he had obviously exerted pressure over his unwitting girlfriend to change her statement.

  “Did you give her your home number or cell number?”

  “Neither. Both are unlisted anyway. She just asked for my address.”

  “And you didn’t think that was strange?”

  “I just thought she wanted to send me a condolence card. The day after Mai phoned, someone came to my apartment block looking for me. He mistook a neighbour for me and tried to force his way into the house. He asked my neighbour what he knew about the ‘missing goods’. There was a struggle. Another neighbour came out of her apartment and the guy ran off.”

  “Was your neighbour able to give a good description of the man?”

  “Yes. He wanted me to go with him to the police and give a statement but, after what happened to Alec, I knew it was better to keep quiet. I begged him to let it go. He said the guy was huge and looked like he needed a blood transfusion.”

  “Meaning he was very pale?” she asked.

  Horowitz nodded.

  Mendoza smiled. The pieces were beginning to come together.

  “What did he mean when he referred to ‘the missing goods’?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I got time,” Mendoza replied.

  “A few months before Alec and I split up, he had been on a dig at a Native
American settlement. He found a lot of important artefacts. It was a real coup for Richmond University. All of the items were photographed and a record taken of their descriptions. A few days after Alec got back to the university, his mother became ill so he flew to London to be with her. While he was on his way to London, Amelia Hirsch was flying in the opposite direction to visit Sartre. When Alec got back to Richmond, three of the items he found on the dig site were missing.”

  “And you think Sartre and Hirsch had something to do with it?”

  Horowitz exhaled. “I don’t know. Like I said, I can’t prove anything but when Alec got back he wanted to phone the police. Sartre tried to talk him out of it but Alec was enraged. He asked Alec to wait until the board met the following morning and Alec agreed to do that. That same day, campus security searched Alec’s briefcase on his way off campus and inside was a priceless Native American necklace.”

  “Which Sartre had had planted on him?”

  Horowitz rested his eyes on his lap. “Sartre said the board was considering Alec’s position at the university and that he was facing police charges and might lose his job. Alec was distraught. He couldn’t eat or sleep. He began to drink heavily. Two days later, he was shocked when he found that $100,000 had been deposited into an account the university used to pay his salary into. It had come from an unknown account. Alec never used that account for anything other than his salary so the only people who knew the account number was the university. The money had been paid in a couple of days after the artefacts had gone missing.”

  “Making it look like Alec had sold them,” Mendoza surmised.

  Horowitz nodded. “Alec phoned his bank and they said the money had been wired through an account on the Cayman Islands. They tried to search back and it had been routed from Paris, through Switzerland first. He wrote to the bank and said the money was not his but they couldn’t give it back. It had legitimately been paid from an account that was subsequently closed.”

  “So what happened with Sartre?”

  “Sartre told Alec he knew about the money that had been paid into his account and that the university would drop all charges ...”

  “In exchange for his silence about the missing artefacts,” Mendoza replied.

  “Yes.”

  Mendoza sighed. Alec Holton was being blackmailed by his employer, his cousin, his shady lover Simon Caird and had an angry Native American threatening to expose him. She wondered how the man had coped under such pressure.

  “What happened between you two?”

  Horowitz slumped back in his chair. “You mean apart from the pressure caused by Sartre? After the necklace incident, Alec was different. There was sadness to him, a desperation. He stopped talking to me about it. He became distant. I got lonely. We started to argue a lot. Eventually, the relationship just fizzled out.”

  “There’s no way my friend who is being blamed for the murder did it,” Mendoza said. “I know him. He couldn’t. But the night Alec was killed, no-one was seen coming in or out of his apartment except him. I can’t explain that. Can you?”

  Horowitz exhaled and thought about this. “Only other way in or out is through the garbage chute. But who on earth would climb up a garbage chute? Plus, they’d need to have had keys to get into the basement.”

  “The janitor never mentioned a garbage chute.”

  “Probably because Alec didn’t use it. He had these fears and annoying quirks. Like smells. He was convinced he could smell garbage wafting up through the shaft. It was nonsense of course. He was also scared stiff of rats. He thought if someone didn’t lock the hatch, they’d get in. He once told me that Amelia left it open for a whole weekend while he was away so he locked it and had the janitor change the key so Amelia could never open it again. He put the kitchen table in front of it. The police probably didn’t even notice it when ... when they found him.”

  “Hirsch lived with him?”

  “A long time ago. She’s a lot younger than Alec and came to USD to do her PhD when Alec was already working there – so she slept on his couch until she found her own place.”

  “Who would have had keys to the apartment?”

  “I didn’t have one for the garbage hatch. Alec didn’t trust me not to take the easy way out of disposing of garbage. I gave him my keys to the lobby door and the apartment door when I was leaving. Meara Henschel had a full set of keys but we can surely discount her. I don’t know if Amelia still has keys. I mean, why would she keep them for all this time?”

  “Did you ever have any more visits from the pale guy?”

  “The day after he came to my apartment, someone phoned the main switch at work three times and asked if I was there, but they wouldn’t leave a message or a number. That evening, I was leaving the office around ten thirty. It was dark but I saw a man matching his description standing across the road. I went back inside and asked the security guard to call a cab for me. When the cab arrived, the security guard walked me to it and when we reached my apartment block I asked the cab driver to wait at the curb until I got inside. About two hours before the guy turned up at my office, the same pale guy had been trying to buzz up into the apartment. My partner could see him on the camera. He went to a neighbour’s apartment and stayed there until I got home.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I resigned from my post with immediate effect and we’ve been staying somewhere else until we find another apartment to rent.”

  Mendoza thought about what Horowitz had just told her. Sartre had no way of knowing if Holton had told his partner about the missing artefacts. Perhaps, she thought, Sartre was just sorting out loose ends but her gut feeling was that there was another reason why Sartre wanted to silence him.

  “So, I take it the Hirsch and Sartre marriage is a sham?”

  “Everything about Hirsch is fake. She’s been using her marriage to Sartre for years to hide her affair with a well-known married politician in London. She claims to be a humanitarian and a political activist and I admit I only met her twice but she came across as very materialistic. She was dripping in expensive jewellery and I’d say the outfits she was wearing cost a half year of my salary.”

  “Hmmm, how did she get along with Alec?”

  “She didn’t. Alec liked her better I think, least he did when they were younger. He tried hard to keep up a relationship with her but she was – may I be blunt?”

  Mendoza nodded.

  “A complete fucking bitch.”

  Mendoza laughed.

  “Hirsch was jealous that Alec was going to come in for the majority of the inheritance from his mother who had been a bigger shareholder than Amelia’s parents. The family had been in banking. A trust was overseeing the company until Mrs Holton died. Neither Alec nor Amelia had any interest in banking. Amelia doesn’t like to work hard. She makes it look like she does, flying all around the world supposedly doing diplomatic work but it’s the jet-set lifestyle she’s after. The old lady made sure Amelia had to do something. She was offered a chair on the board of directors but she refused that, so Alec’s mother gave her a paltry yearly payment which was low enough to ensure Amelia had to earn a living. Alec and Amelia had agreed that as soon as the old lady died they were going to sell their shares.”

  “And if Alec was dead before that happened?” Mendoza asked.

  The smile slowly slipped from Horowitz’s face. “You don’t think?”

  Mendoza shrugged.

  “But she was going to be rich enough to do nothing for the rest of her life even without Alec’s share of the inheritance,” Horowitz said.

  Mendoza could see the genuine upset on his face. “It’s just a thought. I’m probably wrong. But can I ask you – do you know the terms of Alec’s will? Do you think he might have left his inheritance to you in the event of his death?”

  “No. We never discussed it. I doubt it. I mean, I left him.”

  Mendoza tapped the table and ruminated over the new information.

  “He may not have had time
to change the will or he may have wanted you to have the money regardless.”

  “Oh, I hope not. I mean, not that I couldn’t do with it – but I’d feel, I don’t know, guilty. You know, I’m happy with my new partner who is completely different from Alec and it took a while to see that I’ve found the right person for me. I hadn’t been happy for a long time. But ... I feel so guilty that I left Alec. I keep thinking that if I’d been there that night, I might have been able to save him.”

  “You couldn’t have known. And I’m glad you’ve found someone.”

  Horowitz smiled as he thought about the person he had fallen in love with, a love that took him by complete surprise at a time of his life that he thought he knew what he was looking for.

  “Sometimes love comes when we’re not looking for it and maybe not in the shape we expected it to. We don’t get to choose who we love. It’s fate.”

  Mendoza nodded. “I agree,” she said.

  Her phone buzzed. She lifted it and read the text from Locklear updating her on what he knew.

  She stood and lifted her wallet from her purse.

  Horowitz raised his hands in protest. “Please! Let me get the check.”

  Mendoza smiled and thanked him.

  As she left the restaurant, she checked the street to ensure there was no-one watching her and phoned Meara Henschel. Henschel answered the phone after eight rings and appeared to have been sleeping.

  “I know who you are,” she barked as Mendoza reminded the woman of their meeting. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

  “Miss Henschel, do you happen to know the name of the lawyer Alec would have used for his will?”

  “Why?” the old woman barked.

  “It’s a line of enquiry we’re following. It’s important.”

  “He uses the same one as me. Ethan Blank on Ellwood.”

  “Thank you,” Mendoza said.

  She ended the call and got a cab to her hotel, checking all the way that she was not being followed.

  As she entered her room, she dialled Locklear’s number. When he answered, she felt her face flush.

  She stuttered as she tried to speak, unsure what, if anything, to say about her early-morning call to him. “S–sarge?”