Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [52]
You want to know who’s having lunch with whom, who’s laying out big bucks for a dinner party to make a deal, who’s banging somebody they shouldn’t be, you stroke the parking valet. You want to stake out someone at a hotel and you don’t want to be seen, you lay off a couple of blocks and let the valet call you when the person rings for his car. You need video of a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend getting in or out of a car in a hotel parking lot, you pay one of the valets to let you park in there. You’re looking for some high-rolling scam artist, you want a parking valet to give you a jingle when your guy checks into his hotel.
Parking valets, concierges, desk clerks, room-service waiters—their base salaries are just that, a base; the smart ones make their real money from tips and tip-offs.
And Mick Penner is one of the smart ones.
Mick is a good-looking guy. Slim but built, about six-one, with black hair, deep blue eyes, and white teeth. He has what you might call movie star good looks.
He’d better have.
Mick parks cars and fucks trophy wives.
This is why he works the day shift. See, you’d think a parking valet would want nights, when the tips are bigger, but Mick does matinees, when he can flash that smile at the ladies who lunch.
It’s a numbers game.
Mick smiles at a lot of ladies who lunch, and enough of them are going to have lunch and then have Mick. And enough of them are going to tell their friends that Mick spends some of his afternoons up in the rooms sharing the unique joy that is Mick.
The ladies don’t give him cash—that would make him a prostitute, and Mick doesn’t see himself that way. They give him gifts—clothes, jewelry, watches—but that’s not where the money is.
The money is in their homes.
When Mick gets tired of banging a woman, or she gets tired of him, or the gifts get thin, Mick cashes out. He’s very careful about which women he picks to give him his severance pay—they have to be married, have to have signed a prenup, have to have a real, rooting interest in keeping their marriages intact.
But if a woman qualifies, then Mick puts in a call to a friend who does high-level house burglaries. Mick has her keys, right? He gets them copied, and he knows for a fact when she’s not going to be in the house. So the woman is snuggled up with Mick in bed in a room overlooking the ocean while Mick’s pal is in her house, taking the jewelry she decided not to wear that day. And maybe her silverware, crystal, artworks, loose cash, anything portable.
Even if the woman figures out that sweet Mick fucked her over, she isn’t going to tell the cops where she was; she’s not going to tell them who might have access and knowledge. She’s going to keep her mouth shut, because, at the end of the day, it’s the insurance company’s problem.
It’s not that Mick does this a lot, just enough to help finance the next big thing.
Mick’s a screenwriter. He hasn’t written a word in about three months, but he has an idea that’s drawn some attention from the assistant to a senior VP at Paramount. It’s a sure thing, just a matter of time, just a matter of sitting down and doing it.
But Mick’s been too busy.
Boone pulls the van up to the valet stand at the Milano, an exclusive, bucks-up hotel in the heart of La Jolla Village.
Calling La Jolla Village a village is like calling the Queen Mary a rowboat.
Boone’s always thought of a village as a place with grass huts and chickens running around, or a quiet row of thatch-roofed cottages in one of those English movies that a girl made him go to.
So he’s always been amused at the folksy pretentiousness of calling some of the most expensive real estate on earth a village. The Village occupies a bluff overlooking the ocean, with a magnificent sweep of a view, a cove that features some of the best diving in California, and a small but tasty reef break. There are no grass huts, running chickens, or thatch-roofed cottages. No, this village features