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“Miss Reese’s friend’s information.”
“What if he has lawyers good enough to throw all this testimony out of court?”
“By then he’ll have been denied bail, and we will have had time to investigate enough to get him put away for good.”
“I like that,” Glad approved with pursed lips and a stingy nod.
“What if they don’t go to the Hollywood bungalow?” I wanted to know. My years with the aftershocks of what the NYPD did to me made me realistic in the extreme.
“Why you worried about that?” Carlton asked.
“Because Greta might not press charges and somebody might have to get together with the man, to set him up.”
“If it comes to that we can tail him,” Van Arc promised. “I got a guy who could follow the devil into hell.”
“And what if your guy loses him?” I needed to know.
“We’ll have his license plate and the entire LAPD on the lookout.”
“I figure that to be around an eighty-nine to ninety percent chance at success.”
“That and the interstate lotto will make you a billionaire.”
I was thinking hard. There was no way that Lamming could have planted Caledonia to fool me into taking her in. But maybe, just maybe, after I found her scoping out her uncle, she saw a way to make a profit and decided to loop him into the scheme I had offered to bring him down.
For the next few minutes, I went over and over all the scenarios in which I could end up dead. But, in the end, I knew that there was no one-hundred-percent-foolproof plan.
“Joe,” Gladstone said.
“What?” With elbows on my knees and hands laced together, I had backed my chair away from the table and was looking at the floor.
“You good?”
“Feel a little better if I was on Coney Island just about now.”
“Well, you’re not at the beach,” Carlton Van Arc said. “So what do you wanna do?”
I turned to the special investigations detective and took a beat before saying, “All I need from you is to be ready to follow me when, and if, I make a meeting with Malto. Follow us and make sure you’re aware of where I am.”
“What will you be planning to do?” he asked.
“Trying to get a hold of what he’s doing, maybe figure out how you can get at him.”
“I’ve already said how we can do that.”
“Okay then, Carlton,” I said, finality in my words. “Why don’t you leave us alone for a while so we can talk out what we need to do.”
When the policeman hesitated, Gladstone spoke up.
“Don’t worry, Carl,” he said. “I’m comin’ right over to you when we finish here.”
The special detective nodded and then got to his feet.
“Okay. Just don’t start breakin’ laws,” he said, and then he left.
After Carlton was good and gone, we sat quietly for five minutes.
Then Gladstone spoke up again.
