Elvis Cole 04 – Free Fall – Crais, Robert

*

Chapter 1

Jennifer Sheridan stood in the door to my office as if she were Fay Wray and I was King Kong and a bunch of black guys in sagebrush tutus were going to tie her down so that I could have my way. If s a look I’ve seen before, on men as well as women. “I’m a detective, Ms. Sheridan. I’m not going to hurt you. You may even find that you like me.” I gave her my best Dudley Do-Right smile. The one with the twinkle. Jennifer Sheridan said, “Is what we say privileged, Mr. Cole?”

“As in attorney-client?” I was holding the door, but Jennifer Sheridan couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether to come in or leave.

“Yes.”

I shook my head. “No. My records and my testimony can be subpoenaed, and under California law, I must provide them.”

“Oh.” She didn’t like that.

“But there is latitude. I sometimes forget things.”

“Oh.” She liked that better, but she still wasn’t convinced. I guess there’s only so much you can do with the Dudley.

Jennifer Sheridan said, ‘This isn’t easy for me, Mr. Cole. I’m not sure I should be here and I don’t have much time. I’m on my lunch hour.”

“We could talk over sandwiches, downstairs.” There was a turkey and Swiss on a French baguette waiting for me in the deli on the ground floor. I had been thinking about it for most of the morning.

“Thank you, no. I’m engaged.”

“That wasn’t a sexual proposition, Ms. Sheridan. It was a simple offer to share lunch and perhaps more efficiently use both our times.”

“Oh.” Jennifer Sheridan turned as red as a beating heart.

“Also, Ms. Sheridan, I’m getting tired of holding the door.”

Jennifer Sheridan made up her mind and stepped past me into the office. She walked quickly and went to one of the two director’s chairs across from my desk. There’s a couch, but she didn’t even consider it.

Jennifer Sheridan had sounded young on the phone, but in person she looked younger, with a fresh-scrubbed face and clear healthy skin and dark auburn hair. Pretty. The kind of happy, innocent pretty that starts deep inside, and doesn’t stop on the way out. That kind of pretty. She was wearing a light blue cotton skirt with a white blouse and a matching light blue bolero jacket and low-heeled navy pumps. The clothes were neat and fit well, and the cuts were stylish but not expensive. She would have to shop and she would have to look for bargains, but she had found them. I liked that. She carried a black imitation leather purse the size of a Buick, and when she sat, she sat with her knees and her feet together, and her hands clutching the purse on her lap. Proper. I liked that, too. I made her for twenty-three but she looked eighteen and she’d still be carded in bars when she was thirty. I wondered if I looked old to her. Nah. Thirty-nine isn’t old.

I closed the door, went to my desk, sat, and smiled at her. “What do you do, Ms. Sheridan?”

“I’m a secretary for the law firm of Watkins, Okum, Beale. We’re in Beverly Hills.”

“Is that how you found me?” I work for Marty Beale, time to time. A little skip-tracing, a little missing persons. That kind of thing.

“I peeked in Mr. Beale’s reference file. He thinks highly of you.”

“You don’t say.”

“They don’t know that I’m here and I would appreciate it if you didn’t say anything.”

I nodded. “On the phone you said something about your boyfriend.”

“My fianc+!. I think that he’s mixed up in some kind of criminal thing. I’ve asked him, and he denies it, but I know that something’s going on. I think he’s scared, and that worries me. My fianc+! is not scared of very much.”

I nodded again and tucked that away. Fearless Fianc+!. “Okay. What kind of crime are we talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he stealing cars?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is he embezzling?”

“No. It wouldn’t be that.”

“How about fraud?”

She shook her head.

“We’re running out of choices, Ms. Sheridan.”

She glanced into the big purse as if there were something inside it that she was hoping she wouldn’t have to show me, as if the purse were somehow a point of no return, and if she opened it and let out whatever was inside, she would never be able to close it again or return the elements of her life to a comfortable or familiar order. Pandora’s Purse. Maybe if I had a purse like that, I’d be careful of it, too.

I said, “I know if s hard, Ms. Sheridan. If it was easy, you wouldn’t need me. But if you don’t tell me about him, or what you think he is up to, I can’t help you. Do you see that?”

She nodded and held the purse tighter.

I took out a yellow legal pad, a black SenseMatic pencil, and made as if I were poised to copy the rush of information she was about to provide. I drew a couple of practice marks on the page. Subliminal prompting. “I’m ready. Fire away.”

She swallowed.

“Anytime.”

She stared at the floor.

I put the pad on the desk and the pencil on the pad. I put my fingertips together and looked at Jennifer Sheridan through the steeple, and then I looked at the Pinocchio clock that I’ve got on my wall. It has eyes that swing from side to side as it tocks, and if s always smiling. Happiness is contagious. It was twelve twenty-two, and if I could get down to the deli fast enough, the turkey would still be moist and the baguette would still be edible. I said, “Maybe you should go to the police, Ms. Sheridan. I don’t think I can help you.”

She clutched the purse even tighter and gave miserable. “I can’t do that.”

I spread my hands and stood up. “If your fianc+! is in danger, it is better to get in trouble with the police than it is to be hurt or killed.” Twelve twenty-three. “Try the police, Ms. Sheridan. The police can help you.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Cole.” The misery turned into fear. “My fianc+! is the police.”

“Oh.” Now it was my turn. I sat down.

Jennifer Sheridan opened the purse and took out a 3×5 color snapshot of herself and a tall good-looking kid in a navy blue LAPD summer-weight uniform leaning against a squad car. They were smiling. “His name is Mark Thurman. He doesn’t work uniform anymore. Last year he was chosen for a plainclothes position at the Seventy-seventh Division in South Central Los Angeles.”

“What kind of plainclothes?”

“They call it a REACT team. They monitor career criminals and try to stop them before they hurt people. If s an elite unit, and he was the youngest man chosen. He was very proud of that.” She seemed proud of it, too. “Everything was fine for the first few months, but then he changed. It happened almost overnight.”

“What kind of change?” I was thinking Kevin McCarthy. Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

“He became anxious and scared and secretive. We never keep secrets from each other and now there are things that he won’t talk about with me.”

I looked closer at the picture. Thurman had long forearms and a ropey neck and a country boy’s smile. He must’ve been fourteen inches taller than Jennifer Sheridan. I said, “I know a lot of police officers, Ms. Sheridan. Some of them are even my friends. It can be a hard job with unusual hours and you see too much of what’s wrong with people. You don’t want to go home and chat about it.”

She shook her head, telling me that I didn’t get it. “It isn’t just him not talking about the job. He was in uniform for three years and I know to expect that. It’s the way he acts. We used to talk about getting married, and having children, but we don’t anymore. I ask him what’s wrong, he says nothing. I say tell me about your day, he says that there’s nothing to say. He was never like that before. He’s become irritable and snappish.”

“Irritable.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s irritable, and that’s why you think he’s involved in crime?”

She gave me exasperated. “Well, it isn’t just that.”

“Have you seen him perform a criminal act, or heard him speak of it, or seen the results of it?”

“No.”

“Has he exhibited signs of an income other than his police salary?”

“No.”

I tapped the desk. “Sounds like you think he’s up to something because he’s irritable.”

She gave me more of the impatience. “You don’t understand. Mark and I have known each other since the seventh grade. We fell in love in the ninth grade. That’s how long we’ve been going together. I love him and he loves me and I know him better than anyone else in all the world.”

“All right,” I said. “Do you have any dues?”

She frowned at me.

“Clues,” I said. “An overheard snatch of conversation. A subrosa glimpse of a secret bank account. Something that I can use in ascertaining the nature of the crime.” I hadn’t used ascertaining in three or four weeks.

She said, “Are you making fun of me?”

I was getting one of those headaches that you get when your blood sugar starts to drop. “No, I’m trying to make you consider what you want and why you want it. You claim that Mark Thurman is involved in criminal activity, but you have no direction in which to point me. That means that you’re asking me to surveil an active-duty police officer. Police officers are paranoid by nature and they move around a lot. This will be expensive.”

She looked uncertain. “How expensive?”

“Two thousand dollars. In advance.”

You could see her swallow. “Do you take Visa?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She swallowed a second time. “That seems an awful lot.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

She put the photograph of Mark Thurman back in her purse and took out a red doeskin wallet. She dug in the wallet and got a faraway look like she was working with numbers. Then she pulled out two twenties and put them on my desk. “I can pay you forty dollars now, and forty dollars per month for forty-nine months.”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Ms. Sheridan.”

She clenched her jaw and brought out another ten. “All right. Fifty dollars.”

I raised my hands, got up, and went to the glass doors that lead out to the little balcony. The doors that came with the office were aluminum sliders, but a couple of years ago I had them changed to a nice set of double-glazed French doors with brass handles. I opened the doors, set them so that the breeze wouldn’t blow them closed, and that’s when I saw two guys sitting across the street in a brown unmarked sedan four stories below. A tall guy with shaggy, thick-cut hair sat behind the steering wheel and a shorter guy with a ragged face slouched in the passenger’s side. The tall guy had long forearms and a ropey neck and looked a lot like Mark Thurman. Sonofagun. I turned away from the doors and looked at Jennifer Sheridan. Nope. She didn’t know that they were out there. “Mark work today?”

She looked surprised that I’d ask “That’s right. He works Monday through Friday, from eleven until six.”

“He let his hair grow since he went to REACT?”

Jennifer Sheridan smiled, trying to figure me. “Why, yes. He had to, for the undercover work”

Thurman, all right.

I walked back to the desk and looked at her. You could see how much she loved him. You could see that she trusted him, and that she’d never think that maybe he was following her. I said, “Do you and Mark live together?”

She made a tiny headshake and a bit of the red again touched her cheeks. “We’ve talked about it, but we decided to wait.”

“Uh-huh. So you believe that he’s hiding something, and you want me to find out what.”

“Yes.”

“What if I find out that Mark Thurman isn’t who you think he is? What if I look, and I find something that changes the way that you feel about him, and the way that he feels about you?”

Jennifer Sheridan made a little move with her mouth, and then she cleared her throat. “Mark is a good man, Mr. Cole. If he’s involved in something, I know it’s not because he wants to be. I trust him in that, and I love him. If we find out that he is in trouble, we will help him.” She had thought about these things. Probably lay awake with them.

I went back to the doors and pretended to adjust them. Thurman and the other guy were still in the sedan. Thurman had been looking up, but ducked back when he realized that I had come back onto the balcony. Fast moves are bad. Another couple of years on the job and he’d know better. You just sort of casually look away. Shift the eyes without moving the head. Eye contact can kill you.

I went back into the office and sat, and Jennifer Sheridan said, “Will you help me, Mr. Cole?”

I said, “Why don’t we do this? I’ll nose around and see if there is anything worth pursuing. If there is, I will work for you and pursue it. If there isn’t, I will return your money, and you won’t owe me anything.”

Jennifer Sheridan said, “That will be fine,” and then she smiled. Her tanned skin dimpled and her white teeth gleamed and there came a quality of warmth to the room as if a small sun had risen from beneath my desk. I found myself returning the smile. I wrote a receipt in her name for the amount of forty dollars, and noted that it was paid against a due balance of one thousand, nine hundred sixty dollars, payable in monthly installments. I gave back the extra ten with her receipt, then put the forty dollars into my wallet. My wallet didn’t feel any fatter than it had without the forty. Maybe if I went down to the bank and had the forty changed to ones, it would feel like more.

Jennifer Sheridan took a folded sheet of paper from the huge purse and handed it to me. “This is where Mark lives, and his home phone number, and his license plate, and his badge number. His partner’s name is Floyd Riggens. I’ve met Floyd several times, but I don’t like him. He’s a mean-spirited man.”

“Okay.” Riggens would be the other guy in the car.

She took back the paper and scribbled something on the back. “This is where I live and this is my work number. It’s a direct line to Mr. Beale’s office, and I answer his phone, so I’ll be the one who picks up when you call.”

“Fine.”

She stood, and I stood with her. She put out her hand. I took it. I think we were in a contest to see who could smile the most. She said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Cole. This is very important to me.”

“Elvis.”

“Elvis.” She smiled even wider, and then she gathered her things and left. It was twelve forty-six, and I stopped smiling. I sat at my desk and looked at the paper that she had given me with the information about Mark Thurman and herself, and then I put it into the desk’s top right-hand drawer along with my copy of the receipt.

I leaned back and I put my feet up, and I wondered why Mark Thurman and his mean-spirited partner Floyd Riggens were following Jennifer Sheridan while they were on duty. I didn’t like the following, but I didn’t have very long to wonder about it.

At twelve fifty-two, Mark Thurman and Floyd Riggens came in.

Chapter 2

T hey didn’t kick the door off its hinges and they didn’t roll into the office with their guns out like Crockett and Tubbs used to do on Miami Vice, but they didn’t bother to knock, either. The guy I figured for Floyd Riggens came in first. He was ten years older than Thurman and maybe six inches shorter, with a hard, squared-off build and weathered skin. He flashed his badge without looking at me and crossed to Joe Pike’s office. I said, “It’s empty.” He didn’t pay attention.

Mark Thurman came in after him and went out onto the balcony, like maybe a couple of Colombian drug lords had ducked out only seconds ago and were hanging off the side of the building with grappling hooks and Thurman wanted to find them. He looked bigger in person than he had in the pictures, and he was wearing faded khaki fatigue pants and a red jersey that said LANCASTER HIGH VARSITY. Number 34. He looked younger, too, with a kind of rural innocence that you rarely find in cops, sort of like Dragnet as played by Ronnie Howard. He didn’t look like a guy who’d be into crime, but then, what does a criminal look like? Boris Badenov?

Riggens came out of Pike’s office and scowled at me. His eyes were red and swollen and I could smell the scotch on his breath even though he was standing on the other side of the chairs. Hmm. Maybe he didn’t have the weathered look, after all. Maybe he had the drunk look. Riggens said, “We need to talk about the girl.”

I gave him innocent. “Girl?”

Riggens squinted like I’d spit on his shirt and grinned out the corner of his mouth. Mean-spirited. “Oh, I like it when jerks like you get stupid. It’s why I stay on the job.”

“What are you drinking to get eyes like that – Aqua Velva?”

Riggens was wearing a baggy beachcomber’s shirt with the tail out, but you could still make out the butt of his piece riding high on his right hip. He reached up under the shirt and came out with a Sig 9-mil and said, “Get your ass against the goddamned wall.”

I said, “Come on.”

Mark Thurman came in off the balcony and pushed the gun down. “Jesus Christ, Floyd, take it easy. He doesn’t know what this is about.”

“He keeps dicking with me, he won’t make it long enough to find out.”

I said, “Let me guess. You guys work for Ed McMahon and you’ve come to tell me that I’ve won the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes for a million bucks.”

Riggens tried to lift his gun but Thurman kept the pressure on. Riggens’s face went red to match his eyes and the veins swelled in his forehead, but Thurman was a lot stronger, and sober, so it wasn’t much of a problem. I wondered if Riggens acted like this on the street, and if he did, how long he had been getting away with it.

Stuff like this will get you killed. Thurman said, “Stop it, Floyd. That’s not why we’re here.”

Riggens fought it a little longer, then gave it up, and when he did Thurman let go. Riggens put the Sig away and made a big deal with the hand moves and the body language to let everyone know he was disgusted. “You want to do it, then do it, and let’s get out of here. This asshole says she wasn’t even here.” He went to the couch and sat down. Petulant.

Thurman sort of shook his head, like he couldn’t figure Riggens out, like he had tried for a long time and was maybe getting tired of trying. He turned back to me. “My name is Mark Thurman. This is my partner, Floyd Riggens. We know she was up here because Floyd followed her up.”

I glanced at Floyd again. He was staring at the Pinocchio dock. “Maybe Floyd got confused. There’s an insurance office across the hall. Maybe she went there.”

Floyd said, “Okay, she wasn’t here. We’re not here, either, you want to play it that way. You fell asleep and you’re dreaming all this.” He got up and went to the clock for a closer look “Hurry up, Mark. I don’t wanna spend the day.” Like a little kid.

Thurman looked nervous, but maybe he was just uncomfortable. His partner was looking bad and that made him look bad. He said, “We called in about you and the word is that you’re a straight shooter, so I thought we should talk.”

“Okay.”

“Jennifer and I are having some trouble.”

“You mean, this isn’t official police business?”

Riggens went back to the couch and sat down. “It could be, you want. We could have information that you been up to something. We could even find a snitch to back it up. That would look real good for your license.”

Thurman’s face went dark and he said, “Shut up, Floyd.”

Riggens spread his hands. What?

Thurman came to the front of my desk and sat in the right-side director’s chair. He leaned forward when he sat and stared at me the way you stare at someone when you’re trying to figure out how to say something you don’t want to say. “I’m here for personal reasons, and they have to do with me and Jennifer. You want to pretend she wasn’t here, that’s fine. I understand that. But we still have to talk. See?”

“Okay.”

Riggens went, “Jesus Christ, get on with it.”

Thurman’s face clouded again and he once more looked at Riggens and said, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to clock you, Floyd.” Enough’s enough.

Riggens frowned and crossed his arms and drew himself into kind of a knot. Drunk enough to be pissed, but sober enough to know that he’d stepped over the line. These guys were something.

Thurman turned back to me and sat there, his mouth working. He was having trouble with it, and he didn’t strike me as a guy who’d have trouble with a lot. He made a little blowing move with his lips, then laced his fingers and leaned forward. “We followed her because she’s been pressing me pretty hard about some stuff, and I knew she’d try something like this. She’s pretty strong-willed, and she gets a head on about things, if you know what I mean.”

Riggens made a snorting sound, then recrossed his arms and put his feet up on the little coffee table I have in front of the couch. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t say anything.

Thurman said, “Jennifer and I have been going together since we were kids. I’ve been acting kind of distant with her for the past couple of months and I haven’t told her why, and Jennifer has it figured that I’m mixed up in something. I know that’s what she talked to you about, because that’s what she talks to me about. Only, that isn’t it at all.”

“No?”

“No.” Mark Thurman looked down at his feet and worked his jaw harder and then he looked up at me. “I’ve got another girlfriend.”

I stared at him.

“I knew that if she hired someone, they’d find out and tell her, and I don’t want that. Do you see?”

I said, “Another woman.”

He nodded.

“You’ve been seeing another woman and Jennifer knows something is up, but she doesn’t know what. And you’re trying to head me off so I won’t blow the whistle.”

He nodded again.

Riggens uncurled his arms and pushed up from the couch. “You don’t need to know anything else. The word is that you’re a straight shooter and we’re looking for a break. It was me I’d slap the bitch down and move on, but he doesn’t want to play it that way. Why don’t you give the kid a hand?”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Riggens, why’d you come along? Moral support?”

Riggens said, “No one’s trying to muscle you, smart guy. Everyone’s playing straight up.” Riggens jerked his head toward Thurman. “Tell him we’re playing straight up.”

Mark Thurman looked back at me, only now there was a lost quality to his eyes. “I didn’t want you telling Jennifer. When it comes, it’s got to come from me.” He was leaning forward so far I thought he’d fall out of the chair. “Do you see?”

“Sure. I see.”

“It’s personal. That’s how it should stay.”

“Sure.”

Riggens said, “No one’s asking you to turn down the fee. Just play it smart. Do us the favor and someday you’ll get a payback”

“But I can keep the fee.”

“No problem.”

I looked at Thurman. “Some right guy you’ve got as a partner, Thurman, saying it’s okay for me to stiff your girlfriend.”

Riggens said, “Fuck you,” and banged out. Thurman sat in the director’s chair, not saying anything, and then he pushed himself up. He was twenty-four years old and he looked like a baby. When I was twenty-four I looked a million years old. Vietnam. He said, “You do what you want, Cole. No one’s telling you what to do. But I’m asking you not to tell her what I said. I get ready, I should be the one tells her. Shouldn’t I?”

“Sure.”

“I just got to work this out, that’s all I’m saying.” Like he was in the principal’s office, like he had been caught throwing eggs at the class geek’s house, and now he was ashamed of it. He went to the door. Riggens was already down the hall.

I said, “Thurman.”

He stopped and looked back at me with his right hand on the handle.

“Why don’t you just tell her?”

He didn’t answer. He stood there, sort of staring, like he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he didn’t.

I said, “She didn’t say anything to me about crime. She said that she thought you were seeing another woman. She said that she always knew you were that way.”

Mark Thurman went as red as Jennifer Sheridan when I told her that I hadn’t been making a pass. He stared at me with the sort of look you’d have if you were in a hurry one day and backed out your drive without looking and ran over a child. Like someone had pushed an ice spike through your heart. He stared at me like that, and then he went out. He didn’t close the door.

I went to the little balcony and stood back from the rail and watched the street. Mark Thurman and Floyd Riggens came out of my building, climbed back into the brown sedan, and drove away. Neither of them spoke, as far as I could tell, and neither of them looked particularly happy. It was six minutes after one, and it looked as if my case was solved.

I closed the glass doors, sat on my couch, and thought about what I might say when I was inducted into the Detective’s Hall of Fame. Perhaps they would bill me as Elvis Cole, World’s Fastest Detective. Wouldn’t Jennifer Sheridan be pleased. She could say I knew him when. At six minutes after one, Jennifer Sheridan would be sitting in Marty Beale’s outer office, not expecting a phone call in which the detective that she had hired only moments before would crush her heart with one fell blow, service with a smile, thank you, ma’am, and the bill is in the mail. Of course, since I had made such a big deal to Jennifer Sheridan about her lack of proof, she might inquire as to mine, and I had none. I had only Mark Thurman’s word, and maybe he had lied. People do.

I put aside my thoughts of the Hall of Fame and called a guy I know named Rusty Swetaggen. For twenty-four years he drove a black-and-white in and around the city of Los Angeles, then his wife’s father died and he inherited a pretty nice restaurant in Venice, about four blocks from the beach. He likes it better than being a cop. He said, “Rusty’s.”

I made hissing and cracking noises into the phone. “I’m calling from the new car phone. Pretty good, huh?”

Rusty Swetaggen said, “Bullshit, you got a car phone.” Then he yelled at someone in the background. “It’s the big-time op, making like he’s got a car phone.” Someone said something and then he came back on the line. “Emma says hey.”

“Hey back. I need to find out about an officer and I don’t want him to know.”

“This guy active duty?”

“Yeah. His name is Mark Thurman. He works a REACT team out of the Seventy-seventh.”

Rusty didn’t say anything. I guess he was writing. Then he said, “Is this guy dirty?” He didn’t like asking. You could hear it in his voice. You ride the black-and-white for twenty-four years and you don’t like asking.

“I want to find out. Can you do this for me?”

“Sure, Elvis. I’d do anything for you. You know that.”

“I know. I’ll be by in a couple of hours. That okay?”

“Fine.”

Rusty Swetaggen hung up, and then I hung up.

I took the shoulder holster out of my bottom left drawer and put it on. It’s a nice brushed-leather Bianchi rig that cost a fortune, but it’s comfortable, and it’s made for the Dan Wesson .38 revolver that I carry. Stylish detectives often carry automatics, but I have never been a slave to fashion.

I took the Dan Wesson out of its drawer and seated it into the shoulder holster and then I covered the works with a light gray cotton sport coat. It looks great over my black-and-maroon Hawaiian beach shirt, and is ideal for hiding firearms in L. A.’s summer weather. I took the Watkins, Okum, Beale stationery out of my desk, put it in the inside pocket of the sport coat, then called the deli and asked them if they still had my turkey and Swiss on baguette. They did.

I walked the four flights down to the deli, ate my sandwich at a little table that they have by the door, then left to find out whether or not LAPD Officer Mark Thurman was telling the truth, or telling a lie.

Either way, Jennifer Sheridan wouldn’t like it.

Chapter 3

D riving along Santa Monica Boulevard through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills is a fine thing to be doing in late March, just at the end of the rainy season. It was warmer than it should have been, with highs in the mid-eighties and mare’s-tail cirrus streaking the sky with feathery bands, and there were plenty of men in jogging shorts and women in biking pants and Day-Glo headbands. Most of the men weren’t jogging and most of the women weren’t biking, but everyone looked the part. That’s L. A. At a traffic light in Westwood I pulled up next to a woman in pristine white biking pants and a white halter workout top sitting astride a white Japanese racing bike. I made her for Jennifer Sheridan’s age, but maybe she was older. The line of her back was clean and straight, and she leaned to the right, her right toe extended down to kiss the street, her left toe poised on its pedal. Her skin was smooth and tanned, and her legs and body were lovely. She wore a ponytail and bronze-tinted sunglasses. I gave her the big smile. A little Dennis Quaid. A little Kevin Costner. She stared at me through the bronze lenses and said, “No.” Then she pedaled away. Hmm. Maybe thirty-nine is older than I thought.

At the western edge of UCLA, I climbed the ramp onto the 405 freeway and headed north into the San Fernando Valley. In another week the smog and haze would build and the sky would be bleached and obscured, but for now the weather was just right for boyfriends tailing girlfriends and girlfriends hiring private eyes to check up on boyfriends and private eyes spending their afternoons on long drives into the valley where they would risk life and limb snooping around police officers’ apartments. If Randy Newman were here, he’d probably be singing I Love L. A.

I edged off the 405 at Nordhoff and turned west, cruising past the southern edge of Cal State, North-ridge, with its broad open grounds and water-conscious landscaping and remnants of once-great orange groves. In the prewar years before freeways and superhighways the valley was mostly orange trees, but after the war the orange groves began to vanish and the valley became a bedroom community of low-cost family housing tracts. When I came to L. A. in the early seventies, there were still small bits of orchard dotted around Encino and Tarzana and Northridge, the trees laid out in geometric patterns, their trunks black with age but their fruit still sweet and brilliant with color. Little by little they have melted away into single-family homes and minimalls with high vacancy rates and high-density apartment complexes, also with high vacancy rates. I miss them. Minimalls are not as attractive as orange trees, but maybe that’s just me.

Mark Thurman lived in a converted garage apartment in the northwestern part of the San Fernando Valley, about a mile west of Cal State, Northridge, in an older area with stucco bungalows and clapboard duplexes and mature landscaping. Though the structures are old, the residents are not, and most of the apartments are rented to college students or junior faculty from the university or kids out on their own for the first time. Lots of bikes around. Lots of small foreign cars. Lots of music.

I parked across the street from a flat-topped duplex and looked down the drive. The sheet of Watkins, Okum stationery said that Thurman drove a 1983 blue Ford Mustang as his personal car, but the Mustang wasn’t around, and neither was the dark brown cop-mobile. Still out fighting crime, no doubt. Or tailing Jennifer Sheridan. A chain-link fence ran parallel to the drive along a row of eight-foot hedges. About halfway back, a little wrought-iron gate ran from the fence to the duplex, cutting the drive in half. Thurman’s converted garage was in the rear yard behind the gate, snuggled against the hedges A set of sliding glass doors had been installed where the garage door used to hang and someone had built a little sidewalk out of stepping-stones that ran around the side of the place by the hedges. A curtain of vertical blinds was drawn across the glass doors and pulled closed. It was a nice, neat, well-kept place, but it didn’t look like the kind of place a cop taking down heavy graft would keep. Of course, maybe Mark Thurman was smart, and the outward appearance of his home was just a dodge to throw off unsuspecting PI’s. Maybe the inside of the place looked like Uncle Scrooge’s money bin and the walls were lined with cash and bricks of gold. Only one way to find out.

I got out of the Corvette, strolled up the drive, and let myself through the little wrought-iron gate. A young German shepherd was lying by the gate beneath the hedges next door. He watched me come and when I let myself through the gate he lifted his head. I said, “Woof.” He got up and walked with me. Police dog. If Thurman came home I’d have to go over the fence. Hope he didn’t bite.

There were three young women lying on towels in the little yard that separated the duplex from the guest house. One was on her belly, the other two were on their backs, and the one nearest to me was up on an elbow, adjusting a radio. U-2. Nobody was wearing very much in the way of clothes, and you could smell the suntan oil. The one with the radio saw me first and made a little gasping noise. I said, “Hi, ladies. Is Mark around?” Elvis Cole, the Smooth Detective.

The one with the radio relaxed and the other two looked over. The one without the radio was wearing little round sunglasses and the one on her belly smiled. The two on their backs were brunette, the one on her belly a blonde.

The one with the radio said, “He’s at work.”

I glanced at my watch and made a big deal out of looking disappointed. “He said he’d meet me here. I guess he got hung up.”

The one on her belly said, “Are you a cop, too?”

I said, “Do I look like a cop?”

The three of them nodded.

I spread my hands. “I’d do great undercover, hunh?”

The one on her belly said, “I don’t know. You might.”

The other two laughed.

The one with the little round glasses covered her mouth and said, “Ohmygod, do you know who he looks like? He looks like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. Don’t you think so?”

I was liking the one with the glasses just fine. Maybe thirty-nine wasn’t so old after all.

The one with the radio said, “If Mark told you he’d be here, he’s probably on his way. He’s pretty good about that kind of stuff.”

I said, “I’ve just got to drop something off. You think he’d mind?”

Radio said, “You could leave it with us.”

“Couldn’t do that. It’s business-related. And it’s sort of a surprise.”

The one on her belly looked interested. “Evidence.”

The one with the little round sunglasses said, “Allie likes cops. She wants to see your gun.”

Allie slugged Sunglasses in the leg, and all three of them laughed.

The one with the radio said, “Go ahead. Mark’s cool. He keeps a spare key in a little Sucrets box to the left of the landing behind a plant pot.”

“Thanks.”

The German shepherd was waiting for me when I went around the side of the guest house, and followed me to the door. The Sucrets box and the key were exactly where Radio said they’d be. Some neighbors, hunh? I took out the key and let myself in. The German shepherd sat on his haunches and stared after me and whined. Helluva police dog, too.

Mark Thurman’s garage had been converted into a pretty nice apartment. The side door opened into a living room, and from the door you could see the kitchen and another door that led to a bedroom and a bath. A brown cloth couch rested against the west wall and a shelving unit stood against the north. The east wall was the glass doors. A CD player and a Sony TV and a VCR and about a zillion CDs were in the wall unit, but the CD player and the VCR were low-end Pioneer and neither was a bank breaker, even on a police officer’s take-home. There was an overstuffed chair at either end of the couch, and a coffee table of bright white pine that matched the wall unit. He would’ve bought the set from one of those discount places. Imported, they would have told hum. Danish. There wasn’t a sea of gold coins that you could dive into, or mounds of money bags scattered around, but I hadn’t yet seen the bedroom. One shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

I glanced through the kitchen, then went into the bedroom. It was small, with a single window and a door that led into the bath, and it wasn’t any more lavishly appointed than the living room. I went into the bath first, then came back into the bedroom. There was a king-sized bed without a headboard, a nightstand, and a dresser with a large curved mirror that didn’t match any of the other furniture. Garage sale. The bed was made and neat, and the spread was pulled tight across its surface. I went through the dresser drawers and then I looked under the bed. Under the bed there was a red Lily of France brassiere. Thirty-six C. I pulled it out and looked at it, but there was nothing to suggest the owner. Jennifer Sheridan might be a thirty-six C, but I hadn’t asked and I hadn’t thought about it. I put the brassiere back where I had found it, and then I looked in the nightstand. There was a New Balance shoe box in the large cabinet at the bottom of the nightstand with Mark Thurman’s diploma from the police academy, a couple of letters from someone named Todd, and Thurman’s credit card and banking receipts. Thurman held a checking account and savings account with Cal Fed, one MasterCard, one Visa card, plus gas cards from both Chevron and Mobil. He kept the billing statements from the Visa and MasterCard in a legal-sized envelope marked VISA. Neither card showed recent purchases for anything out of the ordinary, but the most recent bill was three weeks old. His savings account held $3,416.28. I copied the account numbers for the Visa and the MasterCard and then I put the box back as I had found it and went to the closet.

A summer-weight LAPD uniform and a set of navy winters hung with the sport shirts and the jeans and the slacks. They hadn’t been worn in a while. A single blue suit looked like it didn’t get worn much, either. There were shoes and a spinning rod and a set of golf clubs that looked so old they had probably been handed down from father to son. Above the clothes, a high shelf ran around the perimeter of the closet, weighted down with old issues of Sports Illustrated, a motorcycle helmet that looked like it had never been used, and a cardboard box containing an outsized scrapbook with yellowed clippings of Mark Thurman playing football and baseball and basketball and track for the Lancaster Wildcats. Four letter man. Mark had played fullback and strong side linebacker, going both ways for sixty minutes a game. There were newspaper photos of Mark in action, and Mark celebrating with teammates, but there were also snapshots of Mark alone and Mark with Jennifer and Jennifer alone, here Mark eating ice cream at the Tastee Freeze, here Jennifer posing shyly in the empty bleachers, here the two of them at the Sophomore Prom and the Junior-Senior and at graduation. I don’t know how old they were in the earliest photographs, but they looked like babies. You got the feeling that Jennifer had taken the photos of Mark and Mark had taken the photos of Jennifer, and that there had never been anyone else in their lives, that they had been complete and whole since that moment when they’d fallen in love in the ninth grade, and, in some wonderful way, always would be. But maybe not. The clippings and the photographs began in ninth grade and ended with graduation. Maybe all those years of oneness had become oppressive to Mark and he had decided that there had to be more and, like the photos in the scrapbook, the oneness had to end. Maybe he had told me the truth. Maybe, after all those years, it was finally over.

I put the scrapbook back as I had found it and finished going through his things, but there were no keys to a newly purchased Porsche, no hastily scrawled map to bags of money buried in the high desert, and no unexplained series of numbers for the Swiss accounts. There was only the thirty-six C. That’s the way it goes, sometimes.

I made sure the rooms were like I had found them, then I let myself out, locked the door, and went around to the drive. The German shepherd was gone. So was Allie. The other two were still on their backs. I said, “Allie get bored?”

The one with the radio said, “She said she was hot. She went in to cool off.”

The one with the little round glasses said, “What took you so long?”

“Pit stop.” Elvis Cole, Man of a Thousand Lies. “You guys know Mark’s friend, Jennifer?”

“Sure.”

“She come around lately?”

“Not for a couple of weeks, but she used to.”

The one with the glasses said, “She’s so flat. I don’t know what he sees in her.”

The one with the radio said, “Puh-lease, Brittany.” Brittany. Whatever happened to the women’s movement?

I said, “Mark said he’s got another friend. Have you met her?”

The one with the radio said, “We haven’t seen her.”

Brittany sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You mean he’s available?”

I shrugged.

Michael Bolton started singing about how much being in love hurt and the one with the radio turned it up. Brittany lay back and stretched, making a thing out of lifting her ribs and showing her body. She looked thoughtful. Making plans, no doubt. Devising strategies.

The one with the radio said, “Let me get Allie. She wanted to say good-bye.” Then she got up and went into the house. Brittany was mumbling to herself and Allie was probably mumbling, too. I left before they got back.

Women in heat are frightening to behold.

Chapter 4

I let myself out through the little gate, walked back to my car, and drove two blocks to a 7-Eleven where I used their pay phone to call a friend of mine who works in the credit department of Bank of America. I gave her Mark Thurman’s name, social security number, and account numbers from both his Visa and MasterCard. I told her that I wanted to know if the charge totals for the month exceeded two thousand dollars and, if they did, how many separate purchases exceeded five hundred dollars and where and when they had been made. I also told her that I wanted to know if Thurman had applied for or received any additional credit cards during the past year. She asked me who the hell did I think I was, calling up out of the blue and asking for all of that? I told her that I was the guy who was going to take her to see Sting at the Greek Theater, then take her to dinner at Chinois on Main afterwards. She asked if tomorrow was okay, or did I want the information later tonight? She called me Chickie when she said it. I drove back to the 405, then went south, back across the floor of the valley, then through the Sepulveda Pass and into the basin, heading toward Venice and Rusty Swetaggen’s place. I left the freeway at Wilshire and turned west to San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. It would’ve been faster to stay on the 405, but San Vicente was nicer, with interesting shops and elegant cafes and palatial homes that somehow seemed attainable, as if the people within them got there by working hard, and were still the type of folks who would give you a smile if you passed them on the sidewalk. Sort of like the Cleavers or the Ricardos.

Bike paths bordered the east- and westbound lanes, and an expansive center island with a row of mature coral trees divided the traffic. Bicyclists and joggers and power walkers flock to San Vicente for its pleasant surroundings and two-mile straightaway from Brentwood to the ocean. Even at midday, the bike paths were crowded and runners pounded along the center island. A man who might’ve been Pakistani ran with a dust mask, and a red-haired woman with a Rottweiler stopped to let the dog piddle on a coral tree. The woman kept her legs pumping as she waited for the dog. Both of them looked impatient.

Brentwood became Santa Monica and the nice homes became nice apartment buildings, and pretty soon you could smell the ocean and pretty soon after that you could see it. Santa Monica has rent control, and many of the apartment buildings had little signs fastened to their walls that said PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF SANTA MONICA. Protest by the apartment owners.

San Vicente ended at Ocean, which runs along a sixty-foot bluff separating Santa Monica proper from the sand and the water and Pacific Coast Highway. Most of the joggers turned back at Ocean, but most of the riders turned left to continue on the bike paths that run along the top of the bluff. I turned with the riders. The top of the bluff sports green lawns and roses and a comfortable parklike setting. There are benches, and some of the time you can sit and watch the ocean and the volleyball games down below on the beach. The rest of the time the benches are used by the thousands of homeless who flock to Santa Monica because of its mild climate. Santa Monica encourages this. The People’s Republic.

A block and a half up from the Venice boardwalk I aced out a flower delivery van for a parking spot, fed the meter, and walked two blocks inland to Rusty Swetaggen’s place between a real estate office and an architectural firm where they specialized in building houses on unbuildable building sites. You could eat at Rusty’s during the day, and people did, but mostly they went there to drink. The real estate salespeople were all politically correct women who believed in Liz Claiborne and the architects were all young guys in their thirties who dressed in black and wore little round spectacles. Everyone was thin and everyone looked good. That’s the way it is in Venice. Rusty Swetaggen is a short, wide guy with a body like a bulldog and a head like a pumpkin. If you didn’t know that he owned the place, you’d think he was there to rob it. Venice is like that, too.

Six years ago, Rusty and Emma’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Katy, took up with a guy from the Bay Area who introduced her to the joys of professional loop production and crack-inspired public sex performance. Katy ran away and Rusty asked me to help. I found her in the basement of a three-bedroom house in the San Francisco hills, sucking on a crack bong to kill the pain of the beating that her Bay Area hero had just given her because she wasn’t quite enthusiastic enough in the multiple-partner sex she’d just been forced to have in front of a Hitachi 3000 Super-Pro video camera. I got Katy and all copies of the fourteen sex loops she’d made in the previous three days. None of her performances had as yet been distributed. I destroyed the tapes and brought Katy to a halfway house I know in Hollywood.

After eight months of hard family therapy, Katy moved back home, returned to high school, and began to put her life on track. She met a guy named Kevin in a support group during her second year of college, and fourteen months later they were married. That was seven months ago, and now she was finishing a business degree at Cal State, Long Beach. Rusty Swetaggen cried for a week after I brought her back, said he’d never be able to repay me, and refused to let me or anyone who was with me pay for a drink or for anything else that he might provide. I stopped going to Rusty’s because all the free drinks were embarrassing.

Rusty was sitting at the bar, reading a copy of Newsweek, when I walked in. It was twenty-six minutes past two, but the place was still crowded with the lunch-hour rush. The real estate salespeople and the architects were vying for bar space with a lot of businessmen sporting bow ties and very short hair. The real estate people were getting the best of it. More practice, I guess. I pushed in beside Rusty and said, “I can’t believe a guy with your money hangs around the job. I had your bucks, I’d be on the beach in Maui.”

Rusty squinted at the kid who worked the bar and said, “It’s a cash business, Hound Dog. You don’t watch’m, they’ll rob you blind.”

The kid showed Rusty his middle finger without looking up. “I don’t have to steal it. I’m going to own it one day.” The kid’s name was Kevin. Rusty’s son-in-law.

Rusty shook his head and looked back at me. “The day I get any respect around here I’ll drop dead and be buried.”

I said, “Eat the food around here and it’ll happen sooner rather than later.”

Rusty Swetaggen laughed so hard that an architect looked over and frowned.

Kevin said, “You want a Falstaff, Elvis?”

“Sure.”

Rusty told him to bring it to the table and led me to an empty window booth where someone had put a little Reserved sign. People were waiting by the maitre d’, but Rusty had saved the booth.

After Kevin had brought the beer, I said, “You get anything on my guy?”

Rusty hunkered over the table. “This guy I talked to, he says the people from the Seventy-seventh like to hang at a bar called Cody’s over by LAX. It’s a shitkicker place. They got dancers in little chicken-wire cages. They got secretaries go in to get picked up. Like that.”

“Is Thurman a regular?”

“He didn’t give it to me as a fact, but a REACT unit is a tight unit, sort of like SWAT or Metro. They do everything together, and that’s where they’ve been hanging.”

“You got the address?”

He told me and I wrote it down.

“Your guy know if Thurman is mixed up in anything dirty?”

Rusty looked pained, like he was letting me down. “I couldn’t push it, Hound Dog. Maybe I could’ve gotten more, but you want Mr. Tact. The rest is going to take a couple days.”

“Thanks, Rusty. That’s enough for now.”

I finished the Falstaff and took out my wallet. Rusty covered my hand with his. “Forget it.”

I said, “Come on, Rusty.”

Rusty’s hand squeezed. “No.” The squeeze got harder and Rusty’s jagged teeth showed and suddenly the pumpkin head looked like a jack-o’-lantern from hell and you could see what had kept Rusty Swetaggen alive and safe for twenty-four years in a black-and-white. It was there for only a second and then it was gone, and he gently pushed my wallet toward me. “You don’t owe me anything, Elvis. I’m glad to help you, and I will always help you in any way I can. You know that.” There was something in his voice and his eyes and the way he held his hand that said that my not paying was profoundly important, as profound as anything had been or ever would be in his life.

I put the wallet away and stood. “Okay, Rusty. Sure.”

He looked apologetic. “I’ve got a couple more calls to make, and I’m waiting to hear from a guy. You want tact.”

“Sure.”

“You hungry? We got a pretty good halibut today.” Like nothing would make him happier than to feed me, to give to me.

“I’ll see you around, Rusty. Thanks.”

One hour and forty minutes later I parked in a McDonald’s lot about three-quarters of a mile from LAX and walked across the street to Cody’s Saloon. Mid-afternoon was late for lunch and early for quitting time, but a dozen men were lining the bar and sipping cold beer out of plain glasses. There weren’t any female real estate agents and none of the guys at the bar looked like architects, but you never know. Maybe they were politically incorrect and wanted to keep it a secret. There was a big sign on the roof of a neon cowgirl riding a bucking horse. The cowgirl looked sort of like a cheerleader from Dallas. Maybe she was politically incorrect, too.

A young guy with a lot of muscles was behind the bar, talking with a couple of women in skimpy cheerleader outfits who were hanging around at the waitress station. A red-haired woman in an even skimpier outfit danced without enthusiasm in a chicken-wire cage behind the bar. Neither the bartender nor the waitresses were looking at the dancer, and neither were most of the guys lining the bar. Guess it’s tough to get motivated with the chicken wire. They were playing Dwight Yoakam.

I went to a little table across from the dancer’s cage and one of the waitresses came over with her little pad. I ordered another Falstaff. When you’ve got a forty-dollar retainer, the sky’s the limit.

When she came back with it, I said, “What time do things pick up?” I gave her the nice smile. The Kevin Costner.

She smiled back and I saw her eyes flick to my hands. Nope. No wedding ring. I made the smile wider. She said, “Mostly after dinner. We get a lot of cops in here and they don’t get off until later.”

I nodded. “You know an officer named Mark Thurman?”

She tried to remember. “What’s he look like?”

“Big. Like a jock. He probably comes around with a guy named Floyd Riggens. They work together.”

Now she remembered and her face grew hard. “I know Floyd.” Floyd must be a real pip all the way around.

I grinned like it was an old joke. “That Floyd is something, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t seeing much humor in it.

“What time do they usually get here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe eight. Something like that.” Like she was getting tired of talking about it. Maybe even pissed. Floyd must be something, all right. “Look, I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Sure.”

She went back to the bar and I sipped the beer and pretty soon I ordered another. There didn’t seem to be a lot to do until eight o’clock, so sipping Falstaff seemed like a good way to pass the time.

Dwight Yoakam stopped and Hank Williams, Jr., came on and pretty soon the day-shift waitresses left and the night shift cranked up the Garth Brooks and the Kentucky Headhunters. The night-shift dancers were younger and moved better in the cage, but maybe that was because of the music. Or maybe it just seemed that way because of the Falstaff. Maybe if you drank enough Falstaff your personal time scale would grind to a stop and everyone around you would move faster and faster until they looked like a Chip ‘n Dale cartoon running at fast forward and you looked like a still picture frozen in time. Maybe they would continue to age but you would stay young and pretty soon they’d be dead and you’d have the last laugh. That Falstaff is something, isn’t it? Maybe I was just drunk. Occupational hazard.

By seven o’clock the crowd had grown and I didn’t want to be there if Riggens or Thurman walked in early, so I paid for the beer, went back to the McDonald’s, and bought a couple of cheeseburgers to eat in the car.

At fourteen minutes after eight, Mark Thurman’s blue Ford Mustang turned into Cody’s parking lot. There were three other people in the car. A brown-haired woman was sitting in the front passenger seat beside Thurman. Riggens and an overweight blonde were shoehorned into the back. The overweight blonde was loud and laughing and pulling at Riggens’s pants as they got out of the car. The brown-haired woman was tall and slender and looked like a thirty-six C. They walked across the parking lot, Riggens and the blonde together, Thurman and the brunette together, and then the four of them went into the bar.

I sat in my car for a long time after they disappeared, smelling the McDonald’s and tasting the beer and watching the neon cowgirl blink. My head hurt and I was tired from all the sitting, but I wasn’t anxious to get home. Getting home meant going to bed and sleep wouldn’t come easy tonight. Tomorrow I would have to speak with Jennifer Sheridan and tell her what I had found.

Sleep never comes easy when you’re going to break someone’s heart.

Chapter 5

I woke the next morning with a dull ache behind my right eye and the sound of finches on my deck I have a little A-frame off Woodrow Wilson Drive in Laurel Canyon, in the hills above Hollywood. I don’t have a yard because the A-frame is perched on a hillside, but I’ve got a deck, and a nice view of the canyon. A woman I know gave me a build-it-yourself bird-feeder kit for Christmas, so I built it, and hung it from the eve of my roof high enough to keep the birds safe from my cat. But the birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck to eat the seed. They know there’s a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When you think about it, people are often like this, too. I rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, then went downstairs and out onto the deck. The finches flew away in a gray, fluttery cloud.

I did twelve sun salutes from the hatha-yoga to loosen my muscles, then moved to the tai chi, and then to the tae kwon do, first the Tiger and Crane katas, and then the Dragon and Eagle. As I worked, the finches returned to eat and watch as if I were now elemental to their world and no longer a threat. I worked for the better part of an hour, driving through the katas faster and faster, breathing deep to well my energy, then unloading that energy with long explosive moves until my muscles burned and the sweat spotted the deck as if there had been a passing rain shower. I finished with another twelve sun salutes, and then I went in. Penance for the Falstaff. Or maybe just client avoidance.

My cat was staring at the finches. He’s large and he’s black and he carries his head sort of cocked to the side from when he was head-shot by a .22. He said, “Naow?”

I shook my head. “Not now. Got a call to make.”

He followed me into the kitchen and watched while I called my friend at B of A. You know you’re serious when you call after an hour’s worth of katas before you shower. Good thing we don’t have smell-o-phones.

I said, “You get anything out of the ordinary on Mark Thurman?” The detective makes a desperate last-ditch attempt at linking Mark Thurman to Criminal Activity.

“Doesn’t look like it. Thurman’s outstanding credit charges on both Visa and MasterCard appear typical. Also, he has not applied for higher credit limits nor additional credit cards through any facility in the state of California.” The desperate attempt fails.

“That’s it, huh?”

“You sound disappointed.”

“What’s disappointment to a hard guy like me?”

“Tell me about it. Are these good seats for Sting, or are we going to camp in the back of the house like last time?”

“Did I mention that you’re not aging well?”

She hung up. So did I. These dames.

I took a deep breath, let it out, and then I called Jennifer Sheridan at Marty Beale’s office. She answered on the second ring. “Watkins, Okum, Beale. Mr. Beale’s office.”

“This is Elvis Cole. I have uncovered some things, and we should speak.” The cat came over and head-bumped me.

“Well. All right.” She didn’t sound happy about it, like maybe she could hear something in my voice. “Can you tell me now?”

“It’s better if we meet for lunch. Kate Mantilini’s is very nice.”

More of the pause. “Is it expensive?”

“I’ll pay, Ms. Sheridan.”

“Well, I only have the hour.” Nervous.

“I could pick up a couple of cheeseburgers and we could sit on the curb.”

“Maybe the restaurant would be all right. It’s only a few blocks from here, isn’t it?”

“Three blocks. I’ll make a reservation. I will pick you up in front of your building or we can meet at the restaurant.”

“Oh, I don’t mind walking.”

“Fine.”

I put the receiver down and the cat looked up at me. He said it again. “Naow?”

I picked him up and held him close. He was warm against me and his fur was soft and I could feel his heart beat. It was good to hold him. He often doesn’t like it, but sometimes he does, and I have found, over the years, that when I most need to hold him, he most often allows it. I like him for that. I think it’s mutual.

I scrambled two eggs, put them in his bowl, then went upstairs to shower and dress. At seven minutes after twelve, I walked into Kate Mantilini’s and found Jennifer Sheridan already seated. The waiters were smiling at her and an older woman at the next table was talking to her and all the lights of the restaurant seemed focused on her. Some people just have lives like that, I guess. She was wearing a bright blue pant suit with a large ruffled tie and black pumps with little bows on them, and she looked even younger than the first time I’d seen her. Maybe she wasn’t twenty-three. Maybe she was seventeen and the people around us would think I was her father. If she looked seventeen and I looked thirty-eight, that would work out. Bummer.

She said, “I hope this won’t take long.”

“It won’t.”

I motioned to the waiter and told him that we were in a hurry and would like to order. He said fine and produced a little pad. I ordered the ni+ooise salad with sesame dressing and an Evian water. Jennifer Sheridan had a hamburger and french fries and a diet Coke. The waiter smiled at me when she ordered. Probably thought I was a lecher. When the waiter had gone, Jennifer Sheridan said, “What have you found out, Mr. Cole?” The mister.

“What I have to tell you will not be pleasant, and I want you to prepare yourself for it. If you’d rather leave the restaurant so that we might go someplace private, we can do that.”

She shook her head.

I said, “Typically, when an officer is profiting from crime, it shows up in his lifestyle. He’ll buy a boat or a time-share or maybe a high-end sound system. Something like that.”

She nodded.

“Mark hasn’t. In fact, I checked his bank balances and his credit card expenses and there is no indication that he has received any undue or inordinate sums of money.”

She looked confused. “What does that mean?”

“It means that he has not been acting strangely because he’s involved in crime. There’s a different reason. He’s seeing another woman.”

Jennifer Sheridan made a little smile and shook her head as if I’d said three plus one is five and she was going to correct me. “No. That’s not possible.”

“I’m afraid that it is.”

“Where’s your proof?” Angry now. The older woman at the next table looked over. She frowned when she did. She had a lot of hair and the frown made her look like one of those lizards with the big frill.

I said, “Five minutes after you left my office yesterday, Mark came to see me. He had been following you. He explained to me that he was seeing someone else, and that he had not been able to bring himself to tell you. He asked me not to tell you this, but my obligation and my loyalty are to you. I’m sorry.” The detective delivers the death blow.

Jennifer Sheridan didn’t look particularly devastated, but maybe that was just me.

The waiter brought our food and asked Jennifer Sheridan if she’d like catsup for her french fries. She said yes and we waited as he went to the counter, found a bottle, and brought it back. Neither of us said anything and Jennifer Sheridan didn’t look at me until he had gone away. He seemed to know that something was wrong and frowned at me, too. The woman with the big hair was keeping a careful eye on our table.

When the waiter was gone, Jennifer Sheridan ate two french fries, then said, “For Mark to come to you and make up a story like this, he must be in bigger trouble than I thought.”

I stared at her. “You think he’s making it up?”

“Of course.”

I put down my fork and I looked at the ni+ooise. It was a good-looking salad with freshly grilled ahi tuna, and I think I would’ve enjoyed eating it. Jennifer Sheridan had asked me for proof and I told her about my visit from Mark Thurman, but I hadn’t told her the rest of it and I hadn’t wanted to. I said, “He’s not making this up.”

“Yes, he is. If you knew Mark, you’d know that, too.” Confident.

I nodded, and then I looked at the salad again. Then I said, “What size bra do you wear?”

She turned a deep shade of crimson. “Now you’re being ugly.”

“I put you at a thirty-four B. I went into Mark’s apartment to look through his bank papers and I found a thirty-six C-cup brassiere.”

She looked shocked. “You broke into his apartment? You went through his things?”

“That’s what private detectives do, Ms. Sheridan.”

She put her hands in her lap. “It isn’t real.”

“It was a red Lily of France brassiere. I held it. It was real.”

She shook her head. ‘That’s not what I mean. They knew you would look so they planted it there to make you think he was seeing another woman. What do they call it? A false lead?”

“Later that evening, I staked out a country-and-western bar called Cody’s. It’s a place where the police officers who work with Mark tend to gather. At a little bit after eight last night, Mark and his partner Floyd Riggens arrived. Mark was with a tall woman with dark brown hair.” I felt bad telling her and the bad feeling was oily and close, but there didn’t seem to be any other way.

“And?”

“I wish I had better news, but there it is. I have looked into the matter and this is what I have found. I think my work here is done.”

“You mean you’re quitting?”

“The case is solved. There’s nothing left to do.”

Jennifer Sheridan’s eyes welled and her mouth opened and she let out a long loud wail and began to cry. The woman with the big hair gasped and looked our way and so did most of the other people in the restaurant.

I said, “Maybe we should leave.”

“I’m all right.” She made loud whooping sounds like she couldn’t catch her breath and the tears rolled down her cheeks, making dark tracks from the mascara. The waiter stormed over to the maitre d’ and made an angry gesture. The woman with the big hair said something to an elderly man at an adjoining table and the elderly man glared at me. I felt two inches tall.

“Try to see it this way, Jennifer. Mark being involved with another woman is better than Mark being involved in crime. Crime gets you in jail. Another woman is a problem you can work out together.”

Jennifer Sheridan wailed louder. “I’m not crying because of that.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m crying because Mark’s in trouble and he needs our help and you’re quitting. What kind of crummy detective are you?”

I spread my hands. The maitre d’ said something to the waiter and the waiter came over.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

“Everything is fine, thank you.”

He looked at Jennifer Sheridan.

She shook her head. “He’s a quitter.”

The waiter frowned and went away. The woman with the big hair made a tsking sound like she thought they should’ve done something.

Jennifer said, “I want to be sure, that’s all. If he’s seeing this other woman, then who is she? Do they work together? Does he love her? Did you follow them home?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know, do you? You don’t know if they slept together. You don’t know if he kissed her good night. You don’t even know if they left the bar together.”

I rubbed my brow. “No.”

The woman with the big hair whispered again to the elderly man, then stood and went to three women sitting in a window booth. One of the women stood to meet her.

Jennifer Sheridan was crying freely and her voice was choking. “He needs us, Mr. Cole. We can’t leave him like this, we can’t. You’ve got to help me.”

The woman with the big hair shouted, “Help her, for God’s sake.”

The three women at the window booth shouted, “Yeah!”

I looked at them and then I looked back at Jennifer Sheridan. She didn’t look seventeen anymore. She looked fifteen. And homeless. I dropped my napkin into the nicoise. I’d had maybe three bites. “You win.”

Jennifer Sheridan brightened. “You’ll stay with it?”

I nodded.

“You see how it’s possible, don’t you? You see that I’m right about this?”

I spread my hands. The Defeated Detective.

She said, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Cole. Thank you. I knew I could depend on you.” She was bubbling now, just like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. She used her napkin to dry her eyes, but all she did was smear the mascara. It made her look like a raccoon.

The woman with the big hair smiled and the elderly man looked relieved. The waiter and the maitre d’ nodded at each other. The three women in the window booth resumed their meal. The restaurant returned to its normal course of lunchtime events, and Jennifer Sheridan finished her hamburger. Everybody was happy.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

The waiter appeared at my elbow. “Is something wrong with the ni+ooise, sir?”

I looked at him carefully. “Get away from me before I shoot you.”

He said, “Very good, sir,” and he got.

Chapter 6

A t twelve fifty-five, I gave Jennifer Sheridan a lift the three blocks back to her office and then I headed back toward mine, but I wasn’t particularly happy about it. I felt the way you feel after you’ve given money to a panhandler because the panhandler has just dealt you a sob story that both of you knew was a lie but you went for it anyway. I frowned a lot and stared down a guy driving an ice cream truck just so I could feel tough. If a dog had run out in front of me I probably would’ve swerved to hit it. Well, maybe not. There’s only so much sulking you can do. The problem was that Jennifer Sheridan wasn’t a panhandler and she wasn’t running a number on me. She was a young woman in pain and she believed what she believed, only believing something doesn’t make it so. Maybe I should spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out a way to convince her. Maybe I could rent one of those high-end, see-in-the-dark video cameras and tape Mark Thurman in the act with the brown-haired woman. Then we could go back to Kate Mantilini’s and I could show everyone and what would the woman with the big hair think then? Hmm. Maybe there are no limits to sulking, after all.

I stopped at a Lucky market, bought two large bottles of Evian water, put one in my trunk, then continued on toward my office. Half a block later two guys in a light blue four-door sedan pulled up behind me and I thought I was being followed. A Hispanic guy in a dark blue Dodgers cap was driving and a younger guy with a light blond butch cut was riding shotgun. His was the kind of blond that was so blond it was almost white. I looked at them, but they weren’t looking at me, and a block and a half later they turned into a Midas Muffler shop. So much for being followed.

When I got up to my office I opened the French doors off the little balcony, then turned on the radio, and lay down on my couch. KLSX on the airwaves. Howard Stern all morning, classic rock all afternoon. We were well into classic rock and I liked it just fine. Lynyrd Skynyrd. What could be better than that?

It was a cool, clear afternoon and I could be at the beach but instead I was here. Portrait of a detective in a detective’s office. When a detective is in a detective’s office, shouldn’t he be detecting? One of life’s imponderables. The problem was that I didn’t suspect Mark Thurman of a crime, and crime still didn’t look good to me as the answer to Jennifer Sheridan’s problems. If you’re talking cops and crime, you’re talking motive, and I didn’t see it. I had been in Thurman’s home and I had talked to his fianc+!e and his neighbors, and the crime part just didn’t fit. When you’re talking cops and crime, you’re talking conspicuous consumption. Cops like to buy cars and they like to buy boats and they like to buy vacation homes and they explain it all by saying that the wife came into a little money. Only Thurman didn’t have a wife and, as near as I could tell, he didn’t have any of the other things, either. Of course, there could always be something else. Debt and dope are popular motives, but Thurman didn’t seem to fit the profile on those, either. I had witnessed events and gathered evidence, and an examination of same had led to certain conclusions which seemed fair to me but not to the client. Maybe the client was crazy. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe the client was just confused and maybe I should have done more to alleviate her confusion, but I had not. Why? Maybe she should be the detective and I should be the client. We couldn’t be any more confused than we were now.

Sometime later the phone rang. I got up, went to my desk, and answered it. “Elvis Cole Detective Agency. We never lie down on the job.”

“Caught you sleeping, huh?” It was Rusty Swetaggen.

“Ha. We never sleep.”

Rusty said, “I talked to a guy who knows about REACT.”

“Yeah?” I sat in the chair and leaned back and put my feet up. It was quiet in the office. I looked at the water cooler and the couch and the two chairs opposite my desk and the file cabinet and the Pinocchio clock and the closed door to Joe Pike’s office. The water machine hummed and little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse stared back at me and the coffee machine smelled of old coffee, but something was missing.

Rusty said, “Maybe I shouldn’t even mention this.”

“You’ve rethought our friendship and you want me to pay for lunch?”

“Nothing that important. This guy I talked with, he said something that’s maybe a little funny about the REACT guys down at Seven-seven.”

“Funny.” I have seen these things in my office ten thousand times, and today something was different.

“Yeah. It’s like he wouldn’t’ve even mentioned it if I hadn’t pushed him, like it’s one of those things that doesn’t matter unless you’re looking, and it probably doesn’t matter even then.”

“Okay.” I was only half listening. I picked up the phone and carried it around to the file cabinet and looked back at my desk. Nope. Nothing was off with the desk.

“He says their arrest pattern is maybe a little hinky for the past few months, like maybe these guys aren’t making the arrests that they should be, and are making a lot of arrests that they shouldn’t.”

“Like what?” I looked at the file cabinet. I looked at the Pinocchio clock.

“REACT was always big on dope and stolen property, and they’ve always posted high arrest rates, but the past couple of months they haven’t been making the big numbers. They’ve mostly been booking gang-bangers and stickup geeks. It’s a different level of crime.”

“We’re not just talking Thurman? We’re talking the team?”

“Yeah. It’s a team thing. What I hear, Thurman’s got a great record. That’s why he got the early promotion.” I looked at the French doors. I looked at the little refrigerator. Nope.

Rusty said, “Hell, Elvis, maybe it’s just the off-season. I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”

“Sure, Rusty. Thanks.” I looked back at the Pinocchio clock.

Rusty Swetaggen hung up and then I hung up and that’s when I saw it. The Pinocchio dock was still. Its eyes weren’t moving. It wasn’t making the tocking sound. The hands were stopped at eleven-nineteen.

I followed the cord to where it plugs into the wall behind the file cabinet. The plug was in the socket, but not all the way, as if someone had brushed the cord and pulled it partway out of the wall and hadn’t noticed. I stood very still and looked around the office and, in the looking, the office now felt strange, as if an alien presence were a part of it. I went back to my desk, opened each drawer and looked at it without touching it. Everything appeared normal and as I had left it. Ditto the things on the desk top. I got up again and opened the file cabinet and looked at the files without touching them and tried to recall if they were positioned as I had last seen them, but I couldn’t be sure. I keep all active files in the office cabinet as well as all cases in the current quarter. At the end of every quarter I box the closed files and put them in storage. There were twenty-seven files in the cabinet drawer. Not much if you’re the Pinkertons but plenty if you’re me. Each file contains a client sheet and day book entries where I’ve made notes along the way, as well as any photographs or paperwork I accumulate, and a conclusion sheet, which is usually just a copy of the letter I write to the client when the job is over. I hadn’t yet made a file for Jennifer Sheridan. I fingered through the twenty-seven files that were there, but nothing seemed to be missing. I closed the cabinet and looked at the little figurines of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio on my desk and on top of the file cabinet. Jiminy doffing his top hat had been moved, but Mickey and Minnie riding in a Hupmobile had not. Sonofagun. Someone had searched my office.

I put Jiminy in his proper place, plugged in the Pinocchio dock and set it to the correct time, then went back to my desk and thought about Mark Thurman. The odds were large that whoever had come into my office wasn’t Mark Thurman or anyone who knew Thurman, and that the timing had just been coincidental, but the timing still bothered me. I had thought the case was over, but apparently it wasn’t. I wasn’t exactly sure that the case was still on, but maybe that’s what I had to prove. Hmm. Maybe I should ask Jennifer Sheridan to be a partner in the firm. Maybe she gave detective lessons.

I called this reporter I know who works for the Examiner named Eddie Ditko. He’s about a million years old and he loves me like a son. He said, “Jesus Christ, I’m up to my ass in work. What the fuck do you want?” You see?

“I need to find out about the REACT unit deployed out of the Seventy-seventh Division down in South Central L. A.”

Eddie said, “You think I know this shit off the top of my head?” Isn’t Eddie grand?

“Nope. I was thinking maybe you could conjure it in your crystal ball.”

“You got crystal balls, always imposing like this.” Eddie went into a coughing fit and made a wet hacking noise that sounded like he was passing a sinus.

“You want I should call 911?”

“That’s it. Be cute.” I could hear keys tapping on his VDT. “This’ll take some time. Why don’tchu swing around in a little while. I might have something by then.”

“Sure.”

I put on my jacket, looked around my office, then went to the door and locked up. I had once seen a James Bond movie where James Bond pasted a hair across the seam in the doorjamb so he could tell if anyone opened the door while he was gone. I thought about doing it, but figured that someone in the insurance office across the hall would come out while I was rigging the hair and then I’d have to explain and they’d probably think it was stupid. I’d probably have to agree with them.

I forgot about the hair and went to see Eddie Ditko.

Chapter 7

T he Los Angeles Examiner is published out of a large, weathered red-brick building midway between downtown L. A. and Chinatown, in a part of the city that looks more like it belongs in Boston or Cincinnati than in Southern California. There are sidewalks and taxis and tall buildings of cement and glass and nary a palm tree in sight. Years ago, enterprising developers built a nest of low-rise condominiums, foolishly believing that Angelenos wanted to live near their work and would snap the places up to avoid the commute. What they didn’t count on is that people were willing to work downtown but no one wanted to live there. If you’re going to live in Southern California, why live in a place that looks like Chicago?I put my car in the lot across the street, crossed at the light, then took the elevator up to the third floor and the pretty black receptionist who sits there. “Elvis Cole to see Eddie Ditko. He’s expecting me.”

She looked through her pass list and asked me to sign in. “He’s in the city room. Do you know where that is?”

“Yep.”

She gave me a peel-and-stick guest badge and went back to talking into the phone. I looked at the badge and felt like I was at a PTA meeting. Hello! My name is Elvis! I affixed the badge to my shirt and tried not to look embarrassed. Why risk the hall police?

I went through a pair of leather upholstered swinging doors, then along a short hall that opened into the city room. Twenty desks were jammed together in the center of the room, and maybe a dozen people were hanging around the desks, most of them typing as fast as they could and the rest of them talking on the phone. Eddie Ditko had the desk on the far left corner, about as close to the editors’ offices as you could get without being one of the editors. A woman in her late twenties was working at a terminal next to him. She was wearing huge round glasses and a loud purple dress with very wide shoulders and a little purple pillbox hat. It was the kind of clothes you wore when you were establishing your identity as a retro-hip urban intellectual. Or maybe she was just odd. She glanced up once as I approached, then went on typing. Eddie was chewing on an unlit Grenadiers cigar and scowling at his VDT when I got there. He had to be forty years older than her. He didn’t bother glancing up. “Hey, Eddie, when are they going to make you an editor around here and get you off the floor?”

Eddie jerked the cigar out of his mouth and spit a load of brown juice at his wastebasket. He never lit them. He chewed them. “Soon’s I stop saying what I think and start kissing the right ass, like everybody else around here.” He said it loud enough for most of the room to hear. The purple woman glanced over, then went on with her typing. Tolerant. Eddie grimaced and rubbed at his chest. “Jeez, I got chest pains. I’m a goddamned walking thrombo.”

“Lay off the fats and exercise a little.”

“What’re you, my fuckin’ mother?” Eddie leaned to the side and broke wind. Classy.

I pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, hooking my arms over its back. “What’d you find on the REACT guys?”

Eddie clamped the wet cigar in his teeth, leaned toward the VDT, and slapped buttons. The little VDT screen filled with printing. “I put together some stuff from our morgue files, but that’s about it. REACT is an elite surveillance unit, and that means the cops block their files. They can’t do their jobs if everybody knows who they’re surveilling.”

“How many guys we talking about?”

“Five. You want the names?”

“Yeah.”

He hit a couple of buttons and a little printer beside his VDT chattered and spit out a page. He handed it to me. Five names were listed in a neat column in the center of the page.

LT. ERIC DEES

SGT. PETER GARCIA

OFF. FLOYD RIGGENS

OFF. WARREN PINKWORTH

OFF. MARK THURMAN

I looked over the names. They meant nothing. ‘They any good?”

Eddie grinned like a shark with his eye on a fat boy in baggy shorts. “They wouldn’t be a REACT team if they weren’t any good. They target felons and they’ve got a ninety-nine-point-seven percent conviction rate. Dees has been down there almost six years, along with Garcia and Riggens. Pinkworth joined a couple of years back and they picked up Thurman a year ago. He’s the baby.”

“How’d Thurman make the squad?”

Eddie hit more buttons and the printing on the screen changed. “Same as everybody else. Top ten of his academy class, a string of outstandings in his quarterly evaluations, Officer of the Month four times. You remember that nut pulled a gun on the RTD bus and threatened to start killing people unless Madonna gave him a blow job?”

“Sort of.”

The purple woman looked over. Interested.

“Hell, I wrote about that one. Guy stops the bus in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, and Thurman and a guy named Palmetta were the first cops on the scene. Thurman was, what, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old?”

The purple woman shrugged.

“Yeah, he was just a kid. That was part of the story. Anyway, the nut shoots this fat guy in the leg to make his point, then grabs this nine-year-old girl and starts screaming he’s going to do her next. He wants Madonna, right? Palmetta puts the call in for a hostage negotiator and the SWAT team but Thurman figures there ain’t time. He takes off his gun and goes into the bus to talk to the guy. The nut tries to shoot him twice but he’s shaking so bad both shots miss, so he puts the gun to the girl’s head. You know what happened then?”

The purple lady was leaning forward, frowning because she wanted to know.

Eddie said, ‘Thurman tells the guy he’s had Madonna and Madonna’s a lousy lay, but he knows Rosanna Arquette and Rosanna Arquette is the best blow job in town. Thurman tells the guy if he puts down the gun, as soon as he’s out on bail, he’ll set it up with Rosanna Arquette ’cause she owes him a couple of favors.”

The purple woman said, “And he went for that?”

Eddie spread his hands “Here’s a nut believes he’s gonna get Madonna, why not? The guy says only if she blows him twice. Thurman says, okay, she’ll do it twice, but not on the same day, she’s got a thing about that. The nut says that’s okay with him ’cause he’s only good for once a week anyway, and puts down the gun.”

The purple lady laughed, and she didn’t look so odd anymore.

Eddie was smiling, too. “That was, what, a couple years ago? Thurman gets the Medal of Valor and six months later he wins the early promotion to plain-clothes and the REACT team. They’re top cops, pal. Every one of those guys has a story like that in his file else he wouldn’t be on the team.”

“Eddie, what if I didn’t want the good stuff? What if I was a reporter and I was looking for something that maybe had a smell to it?”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe I’m looking to see if they’ve crossed over.”

Eddie shook his head and patted the VDT. “If it’s in here, it’s already public record. Someone would’ve had to lodge the complaint, and it would’ve had to come out through LAPD PR or one of the news agencies or the courts. It wouldn’t be a secret and no one would be trying to hide it.”

“Okay. Could you check for allegations?”

“Substantiated or otherwise?”

I looked at him.

“Reporter humor. It’s probably over your head.” Eddie hit more keys and watched the screen, and then did it again. When he had filled and wiped the screen three times, he nodded and leaned back. “I had it search through the files keying on the officers’ names for every news release during the past year, then I threw out the junk about them saving babies and arresting the Incredible Hulk and just kept the bad stuff. This is pretty neat.”

I leaned forward and looked at the screen. “What’s it found?”

“Excessive-force complaints. ‘Suspect injured while resisting arrest.’ ‘Suspect filed brutality charges.’ Like that. ‘Course, these guys are busting felons and felons tend to get nasty, but check it out, you’ve got twenty-six complaints in the past ten months, and eleven of them are against this guy Riggens.”

“Any charges brought?”

“Nada. IAD issued letters of reprimand twice, and dealt a two-week suspension, but that’s it.”

I read the list. Twenty-six names ran down the left side of the page, and next to each name there was a booking number and the arresting charge and the claims levied by the defendants and the accused officer or officers. Riggens had all or part of eleven of the charges, and the remainder were divided pretty evenly between Pinkworth and Dees and Garcia and Thurman. Thurman had part of three.

Eddie said, “You’ve got to understand, cops on these special tac squads get charges filed all the time, so most of these really are garbage, but if I’m looking for tuna I’m looking for losers, and that’s Riggens.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

Eddie stuck the cigar in his mouth and rolled it around and looked at me. “What you got going here, kid? It any good?”

“I don’t know. I’m still just running down the leads.”

He nodded and sucked on the cigar, and then he gazed at the editors’ offices. He wasn’t getting any younger. “If there’s a story here, I want it.”

“You bet, Eddie.”

Eddie Ditko spread his hands, then hacked up something phlegmy and spit it into the basket. No one looked and no one paid any mind. I guess seniority has its privileges.

I went back the way I came, took the elevator down to the lobby, then used the pay phone there to call Jennifer Sheridan in Marty Beale’s office. I asked her for Floyd Riggens’s address. She said, “Which one?”

“What do you mean, which one?”

“He’s divorced. He used to live in La Ca+|ada, but now he’s got a little apartment somewhere.”

I told her that if she had them both, I’d take them both. She did. She also told me that Riggens’s ex-wife was named Margaret, and that they had three children.

When I had the information that I needed, I said, “Jennifer?”

“Yes?”

“Did Mark ever complain to you about Floyd?”

There was a little pause. “Mark said he didn’t like having Floyd as a partner. He said Floyd scared him.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said Floyd drank a lot. Do you think Floyd is involved in this?”

“I don’t know, Jennifer. I’m going to try to find out.”

We hung up and I went out of the building and across the street to my car.

Chapter 8

F loyd Riggens was living in a small, six-unit stucco apartment building on a side street in Burbank , just about ten blocks from the Walt Disney Studio. There were three units on the bottom and three on top, and an L-shaped stair at the far end of the building. It was a cramped, working-class neighborhood, but working class was good. Working class means that people go to work. When people go to work, it makes things easier for private eyes and other snoopers who skulk around where they shouldn’t. I parked three houses down, then walked back. Riggens had the front apartment, on top. Number four. None of the units seemed to belong to a manager, which was good, but the front door was open on the bottom center unit, which was bad. Light mariachi music came from the center unit and the wonderful smells of simmering menudo and fresh-cut cilantro and, when I drew closer, the sound of a woman singing with the music. I walked past her door as if I belonged, then took the stairs to the second level. Upstairs, the drapes were drawn on all three units. Everybody at work. I went to number four, opened the screen, and stood in Riggens’s door with my back to the street. It takes longer to pick a lock than to use a key, but if a neighbor saw me, maybe they’d think I was fumbling with the key.

Floyd Riggens’s apartment was a single large studio with a kitchenette and a closet and the bath along the side wall. A sleeping bag and a blanket and an ashtray were lined against the opposite wall and a tiny Hitachi portable television sat on a cardboard box in the corner. A carton of Camel Wides was on the floor by the sleeping bag. You could smell the space, and it wasn’t the sweet, earthy smells of menudo. It smelled of mildew and smoke and BO. If Floyd Riggens was pulling down graft, he sure as hell wasn’t spending it here.

I walked through the bathroom and the closet and the kitchenette and each was dirty and empty of the items of life, as if Riggens didn’t truly live here, or expect to, any more than a tourist expects to live in a motel. There was a razor and a toothbrush and deodorant and soap in the bathroom, but nothing else. The sink and the tub and the toilet were filmed with the sort of built-up grime that comes of long-term inattention, as if Riggens used these things and left, expecting that someone else would clean them, only the someone never showed and never cleaned.

There were four shirts and three pants hanging in the closet, along with a single navy dress uniform. Underwear and socks and two pair of shoes were laid out neatly on the floor of the closet, and an empty gym bag was thrown in the far back comer. The underwear and the socks were the only neat thing in the apartment.

An open bottle of JB scotch sat on the counter in the kitchenette, and three empties were in a trash bag on the floor. The smell of scotch was strong. A couple of Domino’s pizza boxes were parked in the refrigerator along with four Styrofoam Chicken McNuggets boxes and half a quart of lowfat milk. An open box of plastic forks and a package of paper plates sat on the counter beside the sink. The sink was empty, but that’s probably because there were no pots or pans or dishes. I guess Riggens had made the choice to go disposable. Why clutter your life with the needless hassle of washing and cleaning when you can use it and throw it away?

It had taken me all of four minutes to look through Riggens’s apartment. I went back into the main studio and stood in the center of the floor and felt oily and somehow unclean. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this, and it left me feeling vaguely depressed, as if this wasn’t a place where someone lived, but more a place where someone died. I went to the sleeping bag and squatted. A photograph had been pushpinned to the wall. It was an older picture and showed Riggens with a plain woman about his age and three kids. A boy and two girls. The boy looked maybe fourteen and sullen. The oldest girl was maybe twelve, and the youngest girl was a lot younger. Maybe four. She was tiny compared to the others, with a cute round face and a mop of curly hair and she was holding up a single bluegill on a nylon cord. She looked confused. Riggens was smiling and so was his wife. Margaret. They were standing in front of the bait shop at Castaic Lake, maybe twenty miles north of L. A. in the Santa Susana Mountains. The picture looked worn around the edges, as if it had been handled often. Maybe it had. Maybe Riggens lived here but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he brought his body here, and drank, and slept, but while the body was here he looked at the picture a lot and let his mind go somewhere else. Castaic, maybe. Where people were smiling.

I closed the apartment as I had found it, went down the stairs, and picked up the Ventura Freeway east through the Glendale Pass and into La Ca+|ada in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains .

It was mid-afternoon when I got there, and knots of junior high school kids were walking along the sidewalks with books and gym bags, but no one looked very interested in going home or doing homework.

Margaret Riggens lived in a modest ranch-style home with a poplar tree in the front yard in the flats at the base of the foothills. It was one of those stucco-and-clapboard numbers that had been built in the mid-fifties when a developer had come in with one set of house plans and an army of bulldozers and turned an orange grove into a housing tract to sell “affordable housing” to veterans come to L. A. to work in the aerospace business. The floor plan of every house on the block would be the same as every other house. The only differences would be the colors and the landscaping and the people within the houses. I guess there is affordability in sameness.

I parked at the curb across the street as a girl maybe thirteen with limp blonde hair walked across the Riggenses’ front lawn and let herself into their home without knocking. That would be the oldest daughter. A white Oldsmobile Delta 88 was parked in the drive. It needed a wash. The house looked like it needed a wash, too. The stucco was dusty and the clapboard part was peeling and needed to be scraped and painted. I crossed the street, then went up the drive to the front door and rang the bell. It would have been shorter to cut across the lawn, but there you go.

A tired woman in a sleeveless sun shirt and baggy shorts opened the door. She was smoking a Marlboro. I said, “Hello, Ms. Riggens. Pete Simmons, Internal Affairs, LAPD.” I took out my license and held it up. It would work, or it wouldn’t. She would read the ID, or she wouldn’t.

Margaret Riggens said, “What’ d that sonofabitch do now?” Guess she didn’t bother to read it.

I put the license away. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. It won’t take long.”

“Ain’t that what they all say.” She took a final pull on the Marlboro, then flipped it into the front yard and stepped out of the door to let me in. I guess visits by guys like Pete Simmons were an inevitable and expected part of her life.

We went through the living room into an adjoining dining area off the kitchen. The girl who had come in before me was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watching Geraldo and reading a copy of Sassy magazine. There was a hard pack of Marlboros beside her and a green Bic lighter and a big clay ashtray that looked like she’d made it in pottery class. She was smoking. Loud music came from the back of the house, but there was a muffled quality to it as if a door was closed. The music suddenly got louder, and a boy’s voice screamed, “I told you to stay out of my room, you little shit! I don’t want you here!” Then the boy came out of the back hall, pulling the younger girl by the upper arm. He was maybe sixteen now, with most of his father’s growth, and she was maybe six. The little girl’s face was screwed up and she was crying. The boy shouted, “Mom, make her stay out of my room! I don’t want her back there!”

Margaret Riggens said, “Jesus Christ, Alan.” I said, “You’re holding her too tight. Let go.” Alan said, “Who in the hell are you?” The little girl was staring at me. “You’re hurting her,” I said. “Let go.”

Margaret Riggens said, “Hey, I don’t need any help with my kids.”

I was looking at Alan and Alan was looking at me, and then he suddenly let go and bent over the little girl and screamed, “I hate you!” He stomped back down the hall and the music went soft as the door closed. The little girl didn’t seem too upset by what had happened. Guess it happened so often she was used to it. Probably even a game by now. She rubbed at her arm and ran back down the hall. The music didn’t change pitch, so I guess she went into her own room.

Margaret Riggens said, ‘These kids,” then stooped down, took a cigarette from her older daughter’s pack, and turned away to sit at the dining room table.

I said, “Maybe it’d be better if we had a little privacy.”

Margaret Riggens used a book of paper matches to light the Marlboro, and put the spent match in a little beanbag ashtray she had on the table. “Is Floyd going to get fired?” Guess the privacy didn’t matter.

“No, ma’am. This is just follow-up on a couple of things.”

“That alimony is all I have. He pays it on time. Every month.”

I took out the little pad I keep in my jacket and made a big deal out of taking that down. “That’s good to hear. The Department frowns on a man if he ducks his responsibility.”

She nodded and sucked on the cigarette. Out in the living room, the oldest girl was sucking on a cigarette, too.

I tried to look sly. “We hear enough good things like that, and it makes it easy to overlook a bad thing. Do you see?”

She squinted at me through the smoke. “I don’t understand.”

I made a little shrugging move. Conversational. “Everybody thinks we’re looking to chop heads, but that’s not true. We hear a guy does right by his family, we don’t want to throw him out in the streets. We find out he’s gotten himself into trouble, we’ll try to counsel him and keep him on the payroll. Maybe suspend him for a while, maybe demote him, but keep him employed. So he can take care of his family.”

She drew so hard on the Marlboro that the coal glowed like a flare. “What kind of trouble?”

I smiled. “That’s what I want you to tell me, Ms. Riggens.”

Margaret Riggens turned toward her older daughter. “Sandi. Shut off the TV and go to your room for a little while, okay?”

Sandi gathered up her things, then went down the same hall the other kids had used. Margaret turned back to me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You and Floyd talk?”

“Maybe once a week. There’s always something with one of the kids.”

“He’s supporting two households, Ms. Riggens. Kids need things. So do adults.”

“Jesus Christ, have you seen where he lives?”

I spread my hands. “Has money seemed a little easier to come by?”

“Ha.”

“Has Floyd maybe hinted around that he has something going?”

“Absolutely not.”

I leaned forward and I lowered my voice. “If an officer crosses the line and someone aids and abets in that crossing, they can be charged. Did you know that, Ms. Riggens?”

She drew on the cigarette and now her hands were trembling. “Are you telling me that Floyd has stepped over the line?”

I stared at her.

She stood up, dribbling cigarette ash. “I’ve had enough with that sonofabitch. I really have. I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Sit down, Ms. Riggens.”

She sat. Breathing hard.

“I’m making no accusations. I’m just curious. Floyd has a problem with the drinking. Floyd has a problem with the excessive-force complaints. Floyd has money problems. Pretty soon problems become a way of life. You see how these things add up?”

She crushed out the cigarette in the little beanbag ashtray and lit another. The first continued to smolder.

“I’m not accusing Floyd, and I’m not accusing you. I’m just wondering if maybe you’ve heard anything, or noticed a change in Floyd’s behavior, that’s all.”

She nodded. Calmer, now, but with eyes that were still frightened and weak. The look in her eyes made me feel small and greasy, and I wanted to tell her it had all been a mistake and leave, but you don’t learn things by leaving. Even when the staying smells bad.

She said, “He’s been out of his mind ever since that guy died. The past couple of years have been tough, but since then has been the worst. That’s when he went back to the bottle.”

I nodded like I knew what she was saying.

“He was in AA before that, and he was getting better, too. He’d come over sometimes, we’d have dinner, like that.”

“But then the guy died?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, everyone’s still thinking about Rodney King and this black guy dies when they’re trying to arrest him and then the family files a lawsuit and it was awful. Floyd started drinking worse than ever. He was angry all the time, and he’d blow up over the tiniest thing. They told me it was a stress reaction.”

“About how long ago was that?”

She gestured with the cigarette. “What was it? Three or four months?”

I nodded. “Did Floyd feel responsible?”

She laughed. “Floyd doesn’t feel responsible for hitting the bowl in the morning. I thought he was worried about the suit, but then the suit went away and I thought he’d relax. You know those suits cost a fortune. But he still stayed drunk all the time. Eric would call and check on him to make sure he was holding it together. Things like that. Eric was a godsend.” Eric Dees.

I nodded.

“Floyd hasn’t been acting right since then. If he’s gotten himself mixed up in something, I’ll bet that’s why. I’ll bet it’s all part of the stress reaction.”

“Maybe so.”

“That should qualify for disability, shouldn’t it?”

There were about ten million questions I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t ask them without tipping her that I wasn’t from LAPD. I patted her hand and tried to look reassuring. “That’ll be fine, Ms. Riggens. You’ve been a big help, and that will be in the record.”

“Why don’t you people make him go back to AA? When he was in AA he was doing a lot better.”

“Let’s just keep this our little secret, all right, Ms. Riggens? That way it looks better for you all the way around.”

She crushed out the cigarette into the over-full ashtray and pushed ashes out onto the table. “Look, I don’t know what Floyd’s mixed up with, and I don’t want to know. I’m not aiding and abetting anything. I got enough to worry about.”

“Sure. Thank you for your time.”

I got up and went to the door. Margaret Riggens stayed at the table and lit another Marlboro and drew the smoke deep off the match and stared out through the windows into her shabby backyard. You could hear the kids screaming over the loud bass throbbing of the music and I imagined that it went on without end, and that her living hell wasn’t a whole lot different from Floyd’s.

Out in the living room there was an upright Yamaha piano that looked like it hadn’t been played in a long time. A schoolbag was sitting on one end of it, and half a dozen wilting yellow roses were floating in a glass jar on the other end. Between the two was a framed picture of Floyd and Margaret Riggens standing together at his police academy graduation. They were fifteen years younger, and they were smiling. It was a photograph very much like the one that Jennifer Sheridan had, only Jennifer and Mark still looked like the people in their picture, and Floyd and Margaret didn’t.

I guess romance isn’t for everyone.

Chapter 9

W hen I pulled away from the house that Floyd Riggens once shared with his wife and children, the sun was low in the west and the ridgeline along the Verdugo Mountains was touched with orange and pink. I worked my way across the valley, letting the rush hour traffic push me along, and enjoyed the darkening sky. I wondered if Margaret Riggens found much in the mountains or the sky to enjoy, but perhaps those things were too far away for her to see. When you’re hurting, you tend to fix your eyes closer to home. I cut across the northern edge of Burbank and Pacoima, and then dropped down Coldwater to a little place I know called Mazzarino’s that makes the very best pizza in Los Angeles. I got a vegetarian with a side of anchovies to go and, when I pulled into my carport fifteen minutes later, the pizza was still warm.

I opened a Falstaff and put out the pizza for me and the anchovies for the cat, only the cat wasn’t around. I called him, and waited, but he still didn’t come. Off doing cat things, no doubt.

I ate the pizza and I drank the beer and I tried watching the TV, but I kept thinking about Margaret Riggens and that maybe I had come at all of this from the wrong direction. You think crime, and then you think money, but maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe Mark Thurman had gotten himself involved in another type of crime. And maybe it wasn’t Mark alone. Maybe it was Mark and Floyd. Maybe it was the entire REACT team. For all I knew, it was the full and complete population of the state of California, and I was the only guy left out of the loop. Me and Jennifer Sheridan. I was still thinking about that when I fell asleep.

At ten oh-six the next morning I called this cop I know who works in North Hollywood. A voice answered the phone with, “Detectives.”

“Is that you, Griggs?” It was this other cop I know, Charlie Griggs.

“Who’s this?”

“Guess.”

Griggs hung up. Some sense of humor, huh?

I called back and Griggs answered again. I said, “Okay, I’ll give you a hint. I’m known as the King of Rockin’ Detectives, but I wasn’t born in Tupelo, Mississippi.”

“I knew it was you. I just wanted to see if you’d call back. Heh-heh-heh.” That’s the way Griggs laughs. Heh-heh-heh.

“Lemme speak to Lou.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“C’mon, Charlie.”

“What do you say, wiseass? You wanna speak to Lou, tell me what you say? Heh-heh-heh.” This guy’s an adult.

“I’m going to get you, Griggs.”

“Heh-heh-heh.” Griggs was killing himself.

“I’m going to give your address to Joe.”

The laughing stopped and Griggs put me on hold. Maybe forty seconds later Lou Poitras picked up. “I don’t pay these guys to goose around with you.”

“Griggs hasn’t done a full day’s work in fifteen years.”

“We don’t pay him to work. We keep’m around because he’s such a scream. Sort of like you.” Another comedian.

I said, “Four months ago, a guy died during a REACT arrest down in South Central. You know anyone I can talk to about it?”

“Hold on.” Poitras put me on hold again and left me there for maybe eight minutes. When he came back he said, “Suspect’s name was Charles Lewis Washington.”

“Okay.” I wrote it down.

“There’s a guy working Hollywood named Andy Malone used to be a partner of mine. He’s a uniform supervisor on the day shift. He just came out of the Seventy-seventh. You wanna go down there now?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call him and set it up.”

“Thanks, Lou.”

“You got that twelve bucks you owe me?”

I made a staticky noise and pretended we had been cut off. Works every time.

Forty minutes later I parked in a diagonal parking place outside the glass front door of the Hollywood Police Division, and went past three black women who were standing on the sidewalk into a trapezoidal public room with a high ceiling and a white tile floor. There was a pay phone on the wall up by the front glass and padded chairs around the perimeter of the wall for your waiting comfort. The walls were aqua, the glass was bulletproof. A Formica counter cut off the back third of the room, and three uniformed officers sat on stools behind the counter. Two women and a man. One of the women and the man were talking on telephones, and the other woman was writing in a small black notebook A Hispanic man and woman sat in the chairs under the pay phone. The Hispanic man sat with his elbows on his thighs and rocked steadily. He looked worried. The Hispanic woman rubbed his back as he rocked and spoke softly. She looked worried, too.

I went past them to the officer writing in the little black notebook and said, “Elvis Cole to see Sergeant Malone.”

“He expecting you?”

“Yes.”

“Have a seat.”

She left the counter and went back through a door into the bowels of the station house. There was another door on the customer side of the counter. It was heavy and dense and if no one buzzed you through it’d probably take a rocket launcher to get past it. I sat opposite the door and waited. In a couple of minutes the female officer reappeared behind the counter and said, “He’s finishing up a couple of things. He’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Sure.”

I waited some more.

A well-dressed black woman came in and asked the people behind the counter if Officer Hobbs was in. The same officer who had gone to see Malone said something into a phone, and a couple of minutes later a tall muscular black officer came through the heavy door. He smiled when he saw the woman and she smiled when she saw him. He offered his hand and she took it and they went out through the glass door to hold hands in the privacy of the sidewalk. Love at the station house. Two Pakistani men came in past the lovers. One of them was maybe in his fifties and the other was maybe in his forties. The older one looked nervous and the younger one wore a loud pink shirt and leather sandals. The younger one went to the counter and said, “We would like to speak with the chief of police.” He said it so loud the Hispanic man stopped rocking. The two desk officers glanced at each other and smiled. The desk officer on the phone kept talking like it was nothing. Guess you work the desk at Hollywood, nothing surprises you. The male desk officer leaned back on his stool and looked through the doorway behind the counter and yelled, “We got a citizen out here wants to see the chief.” A uniformed lieutenant with silver hair came out and stared at the Pakistanis, then frowned at the desk officer. “Knock off the shit and take care of these people.”

The younger Pakistani said, “Are you the chief?”

The lieutenant said, “The chief’s busy with the city council. How can I help you?”

Just as he said it the heavy door opened and a hard-shouldered uniformed sergeant looked out at me. “You Cole?”

“Yeah.” He had sandy hair and thick, blocky hands and a deep tan because most of his time would be spent on the street. He wore a little red and green and gold Vietnam service ribbon beneath the badge on his left breast and a marksmanship pin beside the ribbon.

“Andy Malone,” he said. “We can talk back here.” He put out his hand and I stood and took it, and then I followed him through the door.

We went down a long hall past three candy machines and a soft-drink machine and a couple of rest rooms for people who weren’t cops to use. At the far end of the hall there was a booking desk where a couple of cops were processing a tall skinny black kid. The kid’s hands were cuffed. One of the cops was white and the other was black, and they both were thick across the chest and back and arms, like they spent a lot of time in the gym. Guess you work in a war zone, you want to be as threatening as possible. The white cop was trying to unlock the cuffs and the black cop was shaking his finger about two inches from the kid’s nose, saying, “Are you listening to me?” The kid was giving with attitude and you knew he wasn’t listening and wasn’t going to. Your bad guys are often like that.

There were a couple of varnished wood benches in the hall opposite a door that said SERGEANT’S OFFICE. We went into the office and Malone closed the door. “You want coffee?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

Malone filled a couple of paper cups, handed one to me, then went behind a cluttered desk and sat. He didn’t offer cream or sugar. Maybe they didn’t have any.

I sat across from him in a hard chair, and we looked at each other and sipped our coffee. He said, “My buddy Lou Poitras says you want to know about Charles Lewis Washington.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re a private investigator.”

“That’s it.” The coffee was hot and bitter and had probably been made early this morning.

“Make any money at it?”

“No one’s getting rich.”

He took more of the coffee and made a little smile. ‘The wife’s been after me to leave the force since the riots. All this time, she’s still after me.” He made a shrugging move with his head, then set the cup on his desk. “So tell me why you’re digging around Charles Lewis.”

“His name came up in something I’m working on and I want to run it down.”

Malone nodded and had more of his coffee. He didn’t seem to mind the taste, but then, he was used to it. “How do you know Poitras?”

“Met on the job. Got to know each other.”

He nodded again and leaned back. When he did, the old swivel squealed. “Lou says you pulled time in Vietnam.”

“Yep.”

He put down his coffee and crossed his arms. “I was there in sixty-eight.”

“Seventy-one.”

The chair squealed again. The nod. “People think the Nam they think the sixties. Lot of people forget we still had guys there till March twenty-nine, 1973.”

“Lot of people don’t care.”

He made a little smile. “Yeah. We kicked ass in Saudi. That sort of makes up for things.”

“Don’t forget Panama and Grenada.”

The smile got wider. “Kick enough ass, and pretty soon you forget the losers. Who wants to remember losers when you got so many winners running around?”

I said, “Hell, Malone, we’re not that damned old, are we?”

Malone laughed, uncrossed his arms, and said, “What do you want to know about Washington?”

I told him.

Malone went to a battered gray cabinet, took out a manila folder, and brought it back to the desk. He skimmed through it for a couple of minutes, then he closed it. He didn’t offer to let me see. “Washington worked in a pawnshop over on Broadway, down in South Central. We had information that the shop was being used as a fence drop for some of the guns looted during the riots, so REACT put eyes on the place, then went in with a sting.”

“And it went bad.”

“That’s a way to say it. Washington thinks he’s making a buy on ten thousand rounds of stolen ammo, the officers think it’s under control, but when they flash the badges he goes a little nuts and decides to resist. Washington dives behind a counter, and comes up with a piece, but our guys are thinking Rodney King, so they don’t shoot him. There’s a scuffle and Washington hits his head and that’s it.”

“I hear it was controversial.”

“They’re all controversial. This one less than most.”

“What do you have on Washington?”

Malone checked the report again. “Twenty-eight. A longtime Double-Seven Hoover Crip with multiple priors.”

“He there alone in the store?”

“Sure. The family went nuts. We had the pickets, the wrongful-death suit, all of that, but they backed off.”

“Did the city settle?”

“Nope. They dropped it. Hell, Cole, it was a righteous shooting. Even the goddamned TV people said so, and you know how those bastards are. Conflict is news, and they’ll do anything to encourage conflict.”

“Can I read the report?”

Malone stared at me for a while and you could tell he didn’t like it, then he shrugged and shoved it across the desk at me. “Here in my presence. I can’t let you copy it and I can’t let you take it.”

“Sure.”

I read the report. It told me what Malone had told me, only with more words. Lieutenant Eric Dees, the REACT team leader, had written the report. Garcia and Pinkworth and Riggens had gone in to front the sale, and Thurman and Dees were the outside men. When it was clear that the transaction would be consummated, Garcia identified himself as a police officer, told Washington that he was being placed under arrest, and Dees and Thurman entered the premises. As the cuffs were being applied, Washington broke free from Pinkworth and Riggens and lunged for a weapon. The officers attempted to subdue the suspect without the use of deadly force, and Pinkworth and Riggens received substantial injuries. Washington was struck repeatedly by all officers involved, but refused to succumb, and died when team leader Eric Dees tackled him, causing his head to strike the corner of a metal display case. Dees assumed full responsibility. There were copies of the IAD investigation report and a letter of final disposition of the case. The letter of disposition released the officers involved from any wrongdoing. Copies of the death report, the coroner’s findings, and Charles Lewis Washington’s arrest record were appended to the finding.

“What about Riggens?”

“What can I say? Riggens has his problems, but you read the report. It was a team effort.”

I said, “Does it seem odd to you that five officers couldn’t apprehend this guy without letting him kill himself?”

“Hell, Cole, you know what it’s like out there. Shit happens. This kid was a felon gangbanger and he picked the wrong time to pull a gun. Our guys tried to do the right thing, but it went wrong. That’s all there is to it. Nobody wants another Rodney King.”

I nodded. “Mind if I copy down Washington’s address?”

“No problem.”

“Any idea why they dropped the suit?”

Malone shrugged. “People down there are tired. I spent four years in South Central. God knows I can tell you we are.” He made the shrug again. “Nobody ever drops a wrongful death against LAPD. Too many shysters are willing to take the case on a contingency, and the city council’s always ready to settle out, but who can tell.”

“Yeah. Who can tell. Thanks, Malone. I appreciate it.”

I handed back the file and went to the door. He said, “Cole.”

“Yeah?”

“I know the kind of press South Central gets, but the people down there, most of the people down there are good people. That’s why I stayed the four years.”

“Most folks everywhere are good people.”

He nodded. “I don’t know what you’re doing, or where you’re going, but watch yourself around the gangs. LAPD owns the streets, but the gangs keep trying to take’m away. You understand?”

“More than I want.”

I showed myself out, picked up my car, and took the long drive down to South Central Los Angeles.

Home of the body bag.

Chapter 10

I dropped down through West Hollywood and the southwest corner of Beverly Hills through La Cienega Park to the I-10 freeway, then picked up the 10 east to the Harbor, then went south on the Harbor past USC and Exposition Park, and into South Central. Even on the freeway, the world begins to change. The cinderblock sound walls and ramp signs show more graffiti, and, if you know how to read it, you can tell that it isn’t just young Hispanic taggers out to get famous all over town, it’s gangbangers marking turf and making challenges and telling you who they’ve killed and who they’re going to kill. Just the thing you want to see when you’re looking for an exit ramp.

I left the freeway at Florence, looped under to Hoover, then turned south to Eighty-second Street. Broadway and Florence show liquor stores and neighborhood groceries and gas stations and other businesses, but Hoover and the cross streets are residential. Up by the businesses you get out-of-work men hanging around and a lot of graffiti and it looks sort of crummy, but the residential streets will surprise you. Most of the houses are stucco or clapboard bungalows, freshly painted and well maintained, with front yards as neat and pretty as anything you’d find anywhere.

Elderly people sat on porches or worked in yards trimming roses and, here and there, small children played on tricycles. Satellite dishes sprouted from poles like black aluminum mums and clean American cars sat in the drives. There were a lot of the dishes, and they looked identical, as if a satellite-dish salesman had gone door-to-door and found many takers.

There was no graffiti on the houses and there was no litter in the streets or the yards, but every house had heavy metal bars over windows and door fronts and sometimes the bars encircled a porch. That’s how you knew there was a war on. If there wasn’t a war, you wouldn’t need the protection.

According to the police report, Charles Lewis Washington had lived with his mother in a rose-colored bungalow on Eighty-second Street, just west of Hoover. His mother, Ida Leigh Washington, still lived there. It was a nice-looking place, with a satellite dish on a tower in their backyard and a well-kept Buick LeSabre in the drive. An open-air front porch was boxed in by a redwood trellis and bright yellow vine roses. The vine roses were healthy and vibrant.

I parked at the curb in front of their home, went up the narrow walk, and onto the porch. The roses threw off a heavy scent and smelled wonderful. The front door opened before I got there, and a slender young black man looked out at me. I could hear music, but it was coming from another house, not this one. He said, “May I help you?”

I gave him the card. “My name is Elvis Cole. I’m a private investigator, and I was hoping to speak with Mrs. Ida Leigh Washington.” He was wearing a plain white crewneck tee shirt and blue Navy work pants and white sneakers and an imitation gold watchband. The band was bright against his dark skin. He read the card and then he looked back at me.