The Shadow Hunter

didn’t interrupt or challenge him. He began to think this really was a routine interview. By the time he narrated the climax of the story—the moment when, standing on his beachfront deck, he’d heard gunshots—he was relaxed and confident. He didn’t need Martin to hold his hand. He could take care of himself. “So that’s the way it happened,” he finished.
    “Great, Mr. Barwood.” Giacomo spoke in the tone of a man adjourning a meeting. “I guess you drove that Lexus of yours here today, didn’t you?”
    “I drive it everywhere. I love that car.”
    “Maybe when we’re done here, Kevin and I could take a look at the odometer.”
    This froze Howard. “The odometer?”
    “Just to note the number for our records. If you’ve been driving up to Santa Barbara on a regular basis, you must have logged some serious miles.”
    “Well…I may have exaggerated the number of trips I took. And it’s a new car, quite new. There aren’t a lot of miles on it yet.” He was starting to babble. He shut up.
    Heller wrote something in his pad.
    “Okay, well, we’ll talk about that later,” Giacomo said blandly. “Now I wonder if you could tell us anything about this company of yours, Western Regional Resources.”
    Western Regional. How the hell could they know about that? How was it possible? Why would it even come up? “I don’t think my business holdings are relevant,” he said stiffly, playing for time.
    “Oh, you’re probably right, Mr. Barwood.” Giacomo would not stop smiling. “It’s another of those loose ends we told you about. You do own a company called Western Regional Resources, don’t you? Or are we wrong about that?”
    By all logic Howard knew he should stop the interview and get Martin Greenfeld on the phone, but stubbornly he still believed he could talk his way out. He was a good talker. He had developed parcel after parcel of prime Westside real estate on the strength of his facility with words, his charm, his self-possession. He called on those faculties to rescue him now.
    “I own it,” he said slowly, punctuating the admission with an insouciant shrug. “Western Regional Resources is a corporation I established in the Netherlands Antilles. All perfectly legal. There are sound reasons—tax-liability reasons—for setting up such an entity. As I say, it’s all within the bounds of the law.”
    Giacomo said he was sure it was. “And in the course of setting up this offshore, uh, entity, you presumably set up a few other things? Like a bank account?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you arranged for someone to oversee the account and handle any legal issues for the company, right?”
    “A bank officer in the Antilles does that for me, yes.”
    “And I suppose you might have acquired, say, a residence in the Antilles for business purposes.”
    “No residence. I used a hotel the one time I went there.”
    “How about other acquisitions? A car, a phone, a club membership?”
    “Nothing like that. Western Regional Resources is—well, it’s a legitimate corporation—I mean, it’s legal in every way, but—but it has no tangible assets, it’s not a going concern, it’s—”
    “A dummy corporation?” Giacomo asked.
    Heller was writing in his pad again.
    “It could be described that way,” Howard said.
    “A tax haven?”
    “It’s all legal,” he repeated for what felt like the fiftieth time. The hell of it was, the goddamned arrangement really was legal. But he wouldn’t expect these two ruffians to understand that. They could hardly relate to his problems, his priorities. If he claimed he was hiding money from the IRS, they wouldn’t sympathize. And if he admitted the truth—that he was executing an end run around California’s community property laws to smooth his way through an upcoming divorce—well, they would think he had a motive for getting rid of Kris…
    And in fact, he did have such a motive, didn’t he?
    Didn’t he?
    “Do you have any other business entities offshore, Mr. Barwood?” Giacomo asked. He put a slight, disdainful emphasis on the word
entities
.
    “I don’t think I’m under any obligation to discuss the details of my financial situation with you,” Howard said.
    Heller’s pen scratched again.
    “Okay, that’s fine.” Giacomo was still smiling. He must smile in his sleep. “We’re trying to tidy things up here, that’s all. I guess you were over at KPTI the other night.”
    The change of subject startled Howard, but he was happy to