A Passing Curse (2011) (4 page)

Curiously enough, the detective had also drowned, but in his own blood, rather than the salt water that had reportedly taken Pavoni.

The photograph looked much better than he did now. He still possessed the deep black hair and the profile that had rivaled Barrymore’s. But he was deteriorating. His time had come. Even immortality was finite.

The call came, as expected. “It’s Harbinger, Sir,” the young man said to Ajax, as if he weren’t quite sure of it himself and then added for clarity, “Bucharest.”

“And you are what?” Ajax asked. “Your rank.”

“Aide to Ambassador Harrington?” the man said, again as if he were not sure of it himself, but now as if the original reason for calling had been lost to him.

“Harrington can’t make the important calls, young man?”

“Too busy working on the problem, sir,” the young man said, regaining his composure. “He wanted me to call as soon as I could. He wanted me to convey to you, to tell you it’s going to be tough, but he thinks he can swing it.”

“Swing it?” Ajax did not like the newfound ease in the man’s voice. “Is Miss Webber safe? Is Miss Webber being looked after? All her needs?”

“Basically, yes. She’s safe, but still in the hospital, and, as you know, under arrest for murder. But don’t worry. Everything possible is being done. The situation is being monitored with the highest priority.”

“Miss Webber is very important to me. She is not to be harmed. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. We’re working on it.” Harbinger sounded a bit more respectful, now. “Her safety and health are of the highest concerns.”

Ajax said slowly, “Heads will roll, young man.”

“Yes, sir.” The answer was quick, this time, and respectful. The voice, now, of a believer. “I understand that very well, the implications, sir.”

“Tell Harrington I want him to personally see Miss Webber out of the country. No aides. No delegating responsibility. Harrington, I hold responsible. He will know what that means, I hope.”

Downtown at Parker Center, Reese and his six detectives checked Bulow’s sketch against thousands of area sex offenders’ mug shots but came up with nothing. He sent copies to area police agencies. He faxed the sketch farther north to San Francisco, Portland, even Seattle.

The next day he hit the streets and got lucky.

Because of all the blood taken and the ridiculous notion that the suspect might be a vampire, he’d already checked every vampire shop in Los Angeles, a five day job. In the dark city of angels there were fifty-three, beginning with Andover’s Vampire Literary Store and ending with Vampire Rags - Stag or Drag?

Now, with a sketch to work with, he made a hit in a shop selling certified tufts of Bela Lugosi’s hair. The clerk matched the sketch to a man who had purchased red contact lenses and a pound Transylvanian dirt, guaranteed, the clerk added, by the Romanian government. Better yet, the man had actually used a credit card, which bore the name of Richard Augustus Lamb.

The computer showed Lamb had no prior arrests, no wants, no warrants. No driver’s license. Further checks on further data bases, including the indexes to both the LA and New York Times, national morgue and Social Security records, revealed plenty of Richard Lambs about, living and dead, but the only one with the middle name of Augustus had died of Hong Kong flu in 1983. Not surprisingly, his social security number also matched the credit card. A trick he’d seen before - copy a dead man’s birth certificate and steal the identity. Why go to all that trouble to buy thirty bucks worth of dirt and tinted glass?

He ran the sketch and name in the LA Times. The next day he got three hundred and fifteen calls. The computer flagged one hundred and fifteen callers as verified hot-tip junkies. The rest, among them a man from Chula Vista who said the killer could certainly be his ex-lover who spent his nights reading gun magazines and practicing his quick-draw, and an old lady in Santa Marina who claimed the sketch resembled her paperboy Homer Wermels, would have to be triaged in order of plausibility and re-checked.

For Richard Augustus Lamb, the credit card company listed the address of a mail service on Fifth Street, the Nickel, heart of LA’s skid row. He posted two members of his six-man team to watch the mail service around the clock. Thirteen girls dead and all they gave him was six men. It was pathetic. He couldn’t waste time whining. He had a week.

Two men he sent to area dives, flops, and wine sheds. The last two men he stuck in front of the computers checking Lamb’s name against the victims’ names to see if their paths had crossed before. These two also handled phones and coordinated information with the Sheriff’s Office which was working on the first three women slaughtered in Anaheim before Lamb opened shop in LA.

Reese worked Fifth alone, asking questions, handing out sketches. In all thirteen killings Richard Lamb had left no forensic clues: no hair, no fingerprints, no fiber, no blood, no semen, no saliva, no sweat. No tire tracks. No footprints. No one, not even a nosy neighbor, had seen the killer except for Melissa Cunningham and she was dead. All he had was a sketch of a man with a phony ID. In a court of law it was nothing, less than nothing.

He needed a confession.

After several fifteen-hour days of rousting piss-bums and various derelicts, up and down skid row streets, in and out of rescue missions and three Salvation Army centers, Reese found his signpost sitting against the corroded-brick front of a long vacant garment factory, cradling a jug of Mogen David wine, minus the paper bag.

The man’s legs lay straight in front of him, the pants brown corduroy, shiny with dirt. One shoe was missing, the bare foot swollen and turning purple, white fungus on the toenails. The other foot sported a cordovan penny loafer. Gracing the penny slot was the crumbling remains of a cigarette. Before drying, a puddle between the man’s legs had sent rivulets nearly to the gutter.

The man picked Lamb’s sketch out of three others. “Saw him walk by yesterday.”

“Where?” Reese asked. The man gestured with the half-bottle of Mad Dog, indicating the gloomy buildings three blocks away. “Fifth and Alvarez more’n likely. He stared right through me. I know those eyes,” he said and took a long drink. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and offered the bottle to Reese.

Reese pointed to the flies floating in the wine, not that he was overly hygienic when it came to drinking, but still.

The man sucked through clenched teeth and cackled. “Just strain’em.” Reese gave the man twenty dollars and told him to get some food in him which caused them both to laugh.

He’d been parked for two hours when Richard Lamb walked around the corner of Fifth and Alvarez, dodged across moderately heavy traffic, and stepped through the grim portal of a residential flophouse. Reese rubbed his eyes. Half the neon letters of the California Hotel’s sign were out. A few blinked a sad tattoo, the rest dimly orange in late afternoon streets.

He grabbed the steering wheel and sat up. Lamb looked to be a sweetheart, a bland psycho, a gentle killer. The sketch had been dead on.

Police work was 90 percent luck, he reflected, resisting the urge to run after Lamb and tackle him. It would do him no good to collar Lamb in public. He waited five minutes for Lamb to get settled into his room. He scribbled in his notebook that he was going into the hotel after the suspect Richard Lamb and put the notebook into the glove compartment. If his luck ran out, the cops would find his car and note. And then again, the car might not even be searched. Might go straight to the impound yard. Hernandez might take the call, with some glee no doubt.

He left the car without putting on his bulletproof vest or calling for backup. The vest was an easy call: at seven and one half pounds it was too damn heavy. No backup made even more sense. No witnesses to Lamb’s interrogation was a no-brainer.

The hotel lobby was dark, the sun a memory behind water-stained drapes. Several men sank into armchairs. They watched a flickering television and drank from paper cups. The smell of cooking onions in the air, below that the sharpness of disinfectant. Lysol alley.

Behind the linoleum-topped counter, the young clerk lounged in an easy chair, his hair combed across his forehead, plastered by sweat and hair wax. He read a detective magazine, a young lady with a knife at her throat posed strikingly on the cover.

Reese cleared his throat twice before the clerk took notice.

“Three bucks an hour, ten a night, fifty a week,” the clerk chanted without raising his head. “Sign in if you want.”

Reese said quietly, “That gentleman that just walked in, What room?”

The clerk adjusted his glasses, and put down his magazine. He looked at the badge case. “Six-three-seven would be the room,” he said slowly. “Sixth floor. Stairs would be the quickest way. The elevator’s slow….”

“His name Lamb?”

“No,” the clerk said. “Homer Wermels. Funny name, ain’t it?”

He handed the clerk his business card. He recalled the name, Wermels, from somewhere but could not place it. “Call them if you don’t see me in thirty minutes.”

“Sure,” the clerk said, “You can trust me. I was in the Marines.”

Reese leaned close to the door. Inside room 637 of the California Hotel, the bedsprings thumped like a threshing machine. Richard Lamb sounded very busy.

He took his ear from the door and drew his two-inch Smith&Wesson. He kicked the door open and swept the room pistol point. Lamb, his eyes two red slits, was jerking off furiously. A yellow lamp lit the bed. Vaseline-smeared pictures, raven-haired bimbos with white stockings and gigantic breasts, littered the floor. Graphic centerfolds were tacked to the wall. A sink and mirror to the right. A stack of pure white towels on a leaning shelf.

Lamb, wearing black boxers and a yellow t-shirt, finally looked up, more angry than surprised, but never lost the stroke. “You want some of this, bitch?” he said in a calm voice that skipped from his exertions.

Reese thumbed back the hammer.

Despite a man holding a cocked pistol on him, Lamb tried to finish, but slowly wilted, a look of sly consternation on his face. He tucked himself inside his shorts and frowned. “I paid the rent yesterday,” he said.

“This isn’t about the rent, Mr. Lamb.” Reese kept the sights an inch below the hairline. Lamb’s eyes were wide open, brilliantly red from contact lenses. “Any weapons?”

Lamb opened his left hand as proof. The right hand dragged back and forth across gray sheets. “I haven’t broken any laws, you know.”

“Hands on the wall,” Reese said.

Lamb, full of compliance, rolled off the bed, slipped his feet into a pair of grimy, furlined moccasins and shuffled to the wall.

Reese came closer and let the pistol dip slightly. He reached for his cuffs.

With the quickness of a cat, Lamb whirled and grabbed the pistol. Reese lost a second from surprise, but clubbed Lamb’s forehead with the heel of his free hand and pulled the pistol loose. Reese slipped on one of the greasy pictures and they were suddenly on the floor rolling and rolling, the dog-shit smelling carpet, Lamb growling and baring his teeth.

A goddamned rookie’s mistake, he kept thinking and trying to bring the pistol around to shoot Lamb without shooting himself. When they stopped rolling, he was flat on his back, Lamb on top of him, incredibly, biting his chest, growling and ripping. He banged Lamb’s head with the gun barrel but Lamb’s teeth were latched in tight and he did not have the leverage to hit him good.

Lamb wouldn’t let go, shaking his head like a schnauzer with a rat. Reese felt his chest muscles tearing and kept swinging the gun against Lamb’s skull, the gun bouncing off bone with little effect.

He finally stuck the barrel in Lamb’s right ear and twisted violently, feeling the front sight dig in. Lamb slowed. Reese shoved his thumb in Lamb’s left ear and stiff-armed the head back.

He bulldogged Lamb to his back and grabbed his throat one-handed to cut off the air. For good measure, he smacked Lamb’s head twice more with the pistol, this time with enough force to stun him. He pushed the muzzle under Lamb’s eye. Lamb screamed, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” He wrestled Lamb onto his belly and cuffed him.

Doors opened in the hall. Shouts echoed, “Hey! Keep the noise down! We’ll call the law!” He threw Lamb on the bed, staggered to the sink. He pointed the pistol at Lamb, grabbed a towel, held it to his chest.

Blood soaked his shirt. He could feel it running down his leg. His socks wet. He fought to stay conscious. He felt like lying down. A goddamned rookie’s mistake. Any doubts about Lamb being the killer were gone.

Lamb rolled on his back, hands cuffed beneath him, his voice strangely flat. He sneered from the bed. “The killer left nothing.”

Reese shook his head to clear it. Make that a fucking rookie’s mistake.

Lamb kept talking, blood dropping freely from his ear, “That’s how you convict isn’t it? The killer either leaves something or takes something with him? Or you have an eyewitness. Tear this place apart. You won’t find shit.”

He heard sirens now. Probably the clerk. Not much time. He pushed the towel into his chest. He felt lightheaded, vague. He’d shoot Lamb dead if he started to pass out.

Lamb was enjoying himself. “You need a confession. We both know you need a confession. You have nothing.”

“It would help you.” The sirens were closing in. Reese wondered what he would tell them after he killed Lamb. He wondered if anyone would even care.

“Help me?”

“Tell me why you killed thirteen women, or ….” He wasn’t sure what he would do. “You have a minute. That seems fair to me.”

“Then?” Lamb said. In the struggle, Lamb had lost one of the contact lenses and looked malevolently schizo. The dull brown good eye - the bright red evil eye.

He would later recall stepping over a fuck picture before the bullet and a fair amount of gas entered the middle of Lamb’s forehead. The eyes bulging half an inch. Skull and a matting of hair slapping the wall. He fired twice more. An ounce of Lamb’s temporal lobe breaking through the nasal membrane and out his nose with a packed cough. The muzzle flash had started the grease in Lamb’s hair to flame slowly like a candle wick.