Chapter 18 - Identity Theft

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Friday, June 24. Ten days after the murder.

The day after Suzy and I visited Olivia at the Pentecostal meeting in Little Tokyo, I was scheduled to go back to work. That all changed when a knock came at the front door just as I was stirring a spoonful of sugar into my instant coffee.

            “Cuauhtemoc McCarthy?” The man in the dark suit and sunglasses said as I opened the door. His partner stood quietly in the rear. I knew them both. “It’s nice to see you again, sir. We need to have a word with you about the murder of Roland Shavosian.”

            “I told the police everything I know.”

            “We’re not the police. You know that.” The agent smiled. “C’mon, Temo. It’ll just take a few hours. You can visit the headquarters in Westwood again. Just for old times’ sake.”

            An hour later I was in an interrogation room in the FederalBuilding on Wilshire Boulevard near the 405 freeway. The two agents faced me across the table. Alex Weisbein and his partner, Harvey Chang. I had met them both a few months earlier when Roland and I were on a project.

            Weisbein and Chang were intelligent, powerful men. One was born in Israel, the other Taiwan, but they both grew up on the west side of Los Angeles. The guys from the Westside seemed to be operating at a different level than the people I grew up around, even though we were raised a few freeway exits apart. My people stumbled through life like they’d been shipwrecked on some hostile, jungle island full of snakes, scorpions, and quicksand. They spent their youth getting bitten, trapped, and attacked without any means of protection. Hopefully, they figured out how to survive and learn the lessons of their scars.

Guys from the Westside like Weisbein and Chang might have been on the same island, but they had a map. They knew where the dangers were and how to avoid them. They also knew where the good stuff was: like fruit and fresh water and maybe even a little buried treasure. These guys had it all figured out. By the time they were teenagers, they knew more about how the world worked than most guys from my neighborhood would learn in a lifetime.

            “How you been Temo?” Weisbein asked. I could’ve sworn he looked like some actor on TV, but maybe that was because he was Jewish. “Did you win that company award yet?”

            “No. Not yet.”

“We’re still rooting for you,” Chang said with a wink.

“Thanks. The whole company has sort of been sidetracked by the murder investigation.”

            “I would imagine. We know the police spent a lot of time questioning you,” Weisbein said, shaking his head. “They’re like cats chasing their tails. They have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.”

            “That’s pretty obvious,” I said.

            “We figured we’d let them sputter around for a week, see if they come up with anything,” Chang added with a chuckle. “Now we’re getting restless.”

            “I thought the FBI usually doesn’t get involved in murder cases,” I said.

            “That’s true. We only come in if there is some special angle,” Weisbein said. “Now of course you know from our prior encounter that anything related to Passion Financial has some very special angles.”

            “You’re talking about the identity theft case?”

            “Bingo,” Chang said.

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