Beautiful, Naked & Dead (Moses McGuire) (4 page)

I rode out with her smiling face peeking out of my jacket, ears flapping in the wind. It was ungodly early, another strong point against me as pet owner. The only time I got up before noon was when I was in the Marines or the joint, and both places it sure as hell wasn’t willingly. But I had a plan, a way to duck my new best friend, so we hit the dog park. To enter we had to clear a small chain-link sally port. I closed the first gate behind me before opening the gate into the park. Chino Prison had one just like it, only this one had no razor wire or guards with high powered rifles sighted down on me. Across the dying lawn, a group of dog owners sat and stood around a cement picnic table drinking from travel mugs and laughing at some joke I couldn’t hear. They were all young, good-looking squares. Some had tats and piercings, the kind they got to impress the world with how edgy they were. All looked up when I cleared the second gate, smiles faded as if I had farted in church. A cute little blonde gal with spiked hair and army boots looked down, afraid that meeting my eyes might be an invitation for trouble. I was used to this reaction from the straight world. Their style came from ghettos and jails, but God forbid they actually had to meet one of us face to face. Maybe it was fear, maybe I called their street cred into question, or maybe I was an ugly motherfucker who nobody wants around unless they need him. Fuck them and the bitch they rode in on.

I set Angel down, and she immediately ran past a pile of dogs fighting over a stick and over to a huge Rottweiler. Leaping up, she latched her needle teeth onto his upper lip. The big dog tried to shake her off, but she would tumble in the mud, get up and charge again. She made up for her lack of poundage with pure guts and tenacity.

“Bruiser!” A large lady in a faded denim jumpsuit called out to the Rottweiler. “Play nice, or when she gets her size, you’ll wish you had.”

I turned and started to walk away. Angel was cute enough, one of these dog lovers would take her in and I could get on with whatever the fuck I was going to do.

“Are you friends with Kelly?” The big woman called out to me, “Well, I mean you must be, you’re walking her dog.”

“You know Kelly?” I asked, startled to hear her name spoken here.

“Yeah, I know that beautiful girl.” She was smiling openly as she came over to me. “Angel loves my Bruiser. She attacks him like this every morning. Luckily he’s so not alpha.” She talked to me in a comfortable way I wasn’t used to. Like Angel was my ticket into her secret society. “Every morning for the last month Kelly’s brought Angel down to play with my Bruiser. Sometimes we go get a cup of coffee at an outdoor café down the street. Tell you the truth when I first met Kelly I was hot for her. She told me she didn’t swing that way but I though I might convert her. Men can be such pricks… I mean not you, well maybe you I mean the jury is still out on that one, but you know what I mean.” She was speaking a mile a minute, like a speed freak on the end of an all night jag. But, it turned out Helen was a TV crime writer who drank too much coffee and spent way too much time alone, just her, her keyboard and Bruiser. After it was clear she wasn’t getting into Kelly’s shorts, they had struck up a true friendship. Kell was like that, easy to like, and I don’t ever remember her judging anyone. Once I asked her what she thought about the men who came into the club, the men who got lap dances. She said, “Like my grandma used to say, just people doing people things.”

“Look, I don’t know you from nobody, but do you think you could take Angel. I’m just not up to being, whatever.”

“Where’s Kelly?” Helen’s face dropped, she braced herself for bad news, as if she knew it was coming.

“I don’t know, she’s gone, ok. Can you take the dog or not?”

“Where is Kelly?”

“Fuck, I’ll keep the damn mutt.” Picking up Angel I walked out of the dog park. I could feel Helen’s eyes following me all the way to the street.

After depositing Angel back at my crib I went into Club Xtasy. Parking my bike I noticed the unmarked LAPD car out in front of the bar. I thought about rolling on, but they would want to talk to me sooner or later so it might as well be now. I slipped my .38 into a specially built hidey-hole under the seat of the Norton, the last thing I needed was to have them find an unregistered piece on a registered felon.

Inside the club, Piper came rushing over to me, “It’s Kelly, Mo. Did you hear?” Before I could answer her, a thick-necked, short-haired, butch detective moved in on me. She had on jeans, running shoes and a nylon windbreaker. She was six feet if she was an inch. Big but not soft, she looked as though she lifted weights and hated men, me most of all.

“You Moses McGuire?” she asked, daring me to deny it.

“Yes.” I said in a dead tone. I’d spent enough time with cops to know smiling and saluting them only bought you contempt. The moment she saw me she knew we stood on opposite sides of that thin blue line that most straights don’t even know exists. She could smell the time I’d done.

“Would you mind coming with me?” She asked, but it wasn’t a question so I followed her into the back office. Turaj was there, looking less bold than usual. An older White detective was sitting behind the desk; he had a crew cut, graying hair and sad tired eyes. “Take a seat,” the female detective told me. So I sat facing the White detective, with his partner towering behind me.

“Moses McGuire?” The older detective asked. I nodded yes and he continued in a calm, even voice, “I’m detective Lowrie, that’s Sanchez, would you mind telling us where you were yesterday afternoon?”

“If you tell me what’s going on,” I said. Sanchez smacked the back of my head, not as hard as she wanted, but hard enough to get my attention.

“We ask, you answer. Is that simple enough for you?” Sanchez said, resting her hand on my shoulder. I looked at her hand then coldly up into her eyes.

“Unless your next move is to bust my ass, you better take your hand off me.”

“Or what? I’m not one of your bikini bimbos. I’m not your punch of the week. I’m Detective First-Class Sanchez. You want a dance, then we’ll step out back. No? Afraid a girl might kick your ass?”

“Mary Cruz. I’m sure Mr. McGuire wants to help us out.” Lowrie’s eyes flicked to her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sure he does, Stan,” she said, clamping her vice grip before removing her hand in a show of mock politeness. Rodney King, the LA uprising, the descent decree and two new Chiefs might have made the LAPD more citizen-sensitive but it hadn’t changed their hearts. Sanchez was a bully who would love nothing better than to play racquetball with my head while her partner held a gun on me. Lowrie looked up at her, shaking his head slowly.

“My partner doesn’t like you. I keep telling her to switch to decaf, but she doesn’t listen,” Lowrie said in friendly tone.

“You the good cop?”

“No, I’m just a tired civil servant who’s been up all night staring at a girl’s brains on a wall and I would like some straight answers.”

“Ok, I was here ‘til after four, then I went for a ride, ate a Tommy’s burger around ten then hit the rack,” I said, trying to keep my voice even and calm. Lowrie let out a long sigh. Rubbing his temples he stared at me with his tired eyes.

“We know you went to see Kelly Lovelace after you left the club,” he said. My eyes flicked over to Turaj who looked down, the spineless prick had sold me out.

“What happened to Kelly?” My question was answered with another smack to the head, this one harder.

“Not real good at following directions are you?” Sanchez said. “We got you. Your life is a turd circling the toilet bowl right now and you don’t even know it.”

“What happened to Kelly?” I said, looking Sanchez square in the eyes.

“Here’s a hint, I’m a homicide detective. Help any smart guy?” she said. I looked from her to Lowrie, who simply nodded.

“Should I lawyer up?” I asked him.

“Only if you want to go down to the cop shop, make me fill out a bunch of unnecessary paperwork.” Lowrie said. I liked him. He was just another guy doing a job.

“Ok, straight deal,” I leaned in close to Lowrie, making it clear I was talking to him, not Sanchez. “Kelly called me yesterday from the club. She sounded scared so I told her I’d come get her. When I got here, she was gone. So I went by her crib, but she wasn’t there either. Truth is, I figured it was just stripper drama.”

“What was your relationship to Miss Lovelace?”

“We were friends. Just friends.”

“That’s not what we heard.” Lowrie said with no judgment.

“Yeah, but it’s the truth.”

“Did you wish it was more?” Again no judgment.

“No, in this business chicks are easy, but friends are few and far between… I’ve dealt straight, now will you tell me straight, do you have any idea who did this, or am I the best you got?”

“You’re it, sweetheart,” Sanchez interjected with a smile. “Can you hear those bars closing around you?”

“I’ve been inside, it ain’t no big.” I said, keeping my eyes on Lowrie. “What scares me, is that the asshole who did her is walking around free, and you’ve got nothing to stop him.” And that was it, my interrogation was over. They wrote down my address and phone number and told me not to leave town. Lowrie gave me his card and asked me to call if I thought of anything else. As I was walking out, Sanchez stepped in front of me, she just had to get one more shot in.

“Pack your bags, and get ready for the cell. I know you did it, can’t prove it, yet. But you did it,” she hissed. I didn’t have any snappy comebacks, and I was all out of tough bravado, so I just moved past her and walked out.

The girls were sitting around the club, some on the leopard print couches, some on bar stools, they all looked stunned. Their sadness surprised me. It wasn’t like this was the first time someone they knew had died ugly. Maybe they knew Kelly was different, or maybe it never got any easier no matter how many soldiers you lost. Piper came up to me. Wiping away a tear, she hugged me. “Sorry big man, I know…” Her words drifted off.

“It’s all going to be alright, baby girl.” I said, patting her back. But that was a lie, a whore’s promise. Nothing would be ok, not for me, not for Piper, not for any of us.

CHAPTER 3

W
hen the cops finally left we opened the club. I went through the motions of working my shift. Luckily Tuesdays are dead nights in the flesh game. When I got home I was greeted by the odd feeling that it had snowed in my living room. A thin dusting of white feathers covered every surface. In the center of it all Angel was sleeping, curled in what was left of my down comforter. I didn’t know if I should laugh, cry or boot the pup across the room. I settled on cleaning up the feathers and being thankful she hadn’t crapped on my floor, me being stupid enough to leave her alone for eight hours. From a taco truck I bought a box of carne asada tacos. The spicy meat didn’t seem to dull Angel’s appetite any. Maybe she could stay. Maybe.

The dog farts started around four in the morning, eye watering silent stink bombs. How such a small creature could contain so much foul odor was beyond me. I moved to the living room and left her to sleep happily in the stench. I was miles from sleep long before she smoked me out.

Dry blistering air rattled the leaves on the magnolia tree outside my window. Earthquake weather. Suddenly all the night’s chill was gone. The crickets went silent, their sound replaced by the slapping of tree branches and the rush of air. I knew there would be no more sleep tonight. It’s earthquake weather in the city of angels and no one is at peace.

Three fingers of single malt did little to quiet the choir of condemning voices in my head. My ex-wife had called me a hopeless drunk. But that was bullshit, a little whiskey was all I had some days to keep from dropping into a dark hole I might never climb out of.

I put The Pogues into the stereo. Shane McGowan was rumbling drunkenly about a dirty old town and the axe he was going to make to chop it down. I raised my glass to the speaker, I knew just how he felt.

The winds brought no trembling earth this time, Angelenos had been spared for one more day. By six most of the toxic gasses had escaped the bedroom. I crawled back in next to my pup and drifted off stroking her soft coat. Wednesday started about as bad as possible.

“Hands on the wall, assume the position.” Sanchez wasn’t taking any chances. The detectives had woken me by pounding on the door. She had her gun out and me against the wall before I could say word one. A high-pitched growl came from the bedroom as the puppy charged out. She stopped a few feet from the detective, her hackles up. She looked ready to attack regardless of their gross weight advantage or the gun I was sure Sanchez wouldn’t mind discharging. “Angel!” I snapped, and to my surprise she backed down. Sitting on her rump, she watched us warily but the growling stopped.

“Cute dog,” Sanchez spat.

“Real cute,” her older partner said.

“Strange, we found a dog bowl and puppy chow at Kelly’s apartment, no dog. And here this skell who never went into her place has a new dog.”

“She makes a good point,” Lowrie said to me.

“Owning a dog illegal now?” I said and wished I hadn’t.

“No, but rape murder is.” Sanchez wrenched my arm down and slapped the cuffs on.

At Parker Center they hooked me to a bench next to a Black banger with a swollen eye and crusted blood rimming his left ear. On the ride down they hadn’t told me I was under arrest. They had given me the big silent treatment, hoping to rattle my cage, it was working. For all my tough bullshit, I didn’t think I had another jolt in me.

My pulse was starting to climb when a young uniform took me into a long shallow room and had me line up with six other men, all roughly my size. Facing the mirror I racked my mind, who was was their witness. The old curtain watcher from Kelly’s apartment? Had to be. If she I.D.’d me I was fucked, add that to the fucking mutt and they might have enough to nail me. And that would be it. Judge and jury would take one look at me and my rap sheet and I would take a lifelong fall.

After the line up, I was placed in an interview room with muddy smudged walls that possibly had been white once.

“This could go a lot easier if you’d confess,” Lowrie was sitting across the steel table from me. Sanchez had been left out of the interrogation. My bet was she would bust in if Lowrie’s nice guy act failed.

“I want a lawyer.” I stared coldly at the old cop.

“No, you don’t. Get the lawyers involved and we lose any wiggle room. Why don’t we get our story straight before we go there.”

“I got my story straight.”

“Only problem son, it’s bullshit. We have you at the scene, we know from your record that you have violent tendencies. That’s two out of the big three, all we need is motive. What happened, if let’s say she was stringing you on, showing you a little piece then slapping your hand for touching. I think you may have a shot at a crime of passion defense. Is that what happened?”

“I didn’t kill Kelly. She was my friend.”

“You’re a broken record Moses. You were there, and you lied about it. It doesn’t look good.” He looked at me with as much fatherly concern as he could muster. I gave him stone in return.

“I want a lawyer.”

Lowrie twiddled a pen in his fingers for a moment, then picked a file off the table and walked out. After a while the young uniform came and led me out.

“You are one lucky piece of puke,” Sanchez said as she unlocked my cuffs. The banger kid was still on the bench, only now he was passed out. It had taken an hour after the interview for them to get me. “This is far from over, you did that girl and I’ll prove it, end of story.”

All I could figure was that the old lady must have been either too old or too blind to make a positive I.D. Rubbing the blood back into my wrists I started to walk out. I was almost to the street when Lowrie caught up to me.

“Hold up McGuire.”

“What you want to do a quick cavity search, make my morning complete?”

“No. Believe it or not, I’m not half the hard ass you think I am. My partner hates you though, that’s a fact.”

“This leading someplace, I got shit to do.”

“I know you were in her apartment.”

“Then prove it.” Turning I gave him my back and walked out to find a cab.

After a quick stop at Petco for chew toys, a dog door and what I hoped would be flatulence-free puppy chow, I went home and puppy proofed the house. Angel took the large stuffed green arachnid in her jaw and shook it to death, looking up at me for praise.

“Oh yeah, girl, you’re a stone cold killer,” I told the pup, sending her tail into a wild flurry of wags. I was bolting the flap over the hole I’d cut into the back door when it occurred to me that this was the first home improvement I’d made to the place. In the years that I had lived there I hadn’t even driven a nail in to hang a single picture. Kelly had only been in LA for six months and yet she had decorated her door, hung art, made her house a home. Where had she come from? She grew up in a small town in the Midwest, was the only detail she had offered. Thinking I had plenty of time I hadn’t pushed her for more.

After finishing the dog door, I poured a short drink, yes it was early but fuck it, it had already been a long day. Lack of movement was making me crazy.

The pain of the ink filled needle felt honest and real. For a moment, it pierced the dull numbness that had settled over me. I was in Cardo’s kitchen in his small Hollywood apartment. He was a soft faced ex-banger who I’d helped out with some AB boys when they jumped in his shit down in county lock-up. After his last jolt he had left the life, moved from Pico Rivera to Hollywood, crawled out of the closet and reinvented his brown ass. Now he made the bills painting storefront windows and when he was lucky he was hired for a mural or sold a painting from one of the small galleries that carried his art. His soft electric colored view of the world hung on his walls. All dreamy paintings of women, most of whom I knew. He’d come down to Xtasy to sketch the girls. At first he pissed them off by not buying laps. But, when they saw themselves in his work, how beautifully perfect he saw them, they learned to forgive his lack of cash.

“She was a rose in a garden of thorns, Loco,” he said wiping away the blood and ink off my shoulder, so he could see the art he was drilling into my flesh. “Sweet and gentle in a world grown hard.”

“She was something all right.”

“Women are like gem stones, no? They sparkle to get your attention but if you look in a loop, see close up, every one is different and totally unique. It’s the flaws and inclusions that make them special.” With a homemade tattoo gun he was drawing Kelly’s face freehand. Doing it all from memory and capturing her just right. I got my first tat in the joint. In a cage, they take all that is yours, all that is personal. The first ink was there to remind myself I was still alive, still had some control over my body. This was how we marked our time, writing our history in ink and blood.

“Explain something to me,” I started, looking with awe at how perfectly he was capturing all that was beautiful in Kelly.

“If I love women so, why am I gay?” he said, guessing the question.

“Something like that.”

“You breeders get it all wrong. I love roses, no? But I don’t want to fuck them. You can’t imagine love without penetration. I can’t imagine life without beauty. The form it takes is so much less interesting than the beauty itself,” he said, reminding me once again why I hung with him. Like him or don’t what you heard was who he was. He finished the work giving me his usual admonition, not to get in any fights or fall off my bike until the skin had healed. I’m not sure what he cared about more, me or the canvas he painted on.

The next week passed slowly. Every morning I took Angel to the dog park for her daily romp. The fear in the locals’ eyes faded bit by bit every day, but it was never replaced with warmth. If our eyes met they still looked down or away. At some level I would always be the boogie man under their beds. Helen, Bruiser’s owner, and I would chat about the weather and life and dogs. Some mornings we went down the street for coffee. She was a link to Kelly, she kept her alive for me. I shared her deep grief but I was done crying. I stuffed that pain down deep inside and let it work on my ulcer.

I called Lowrie to see if he had made any progress in finding Kelly’s killer. He told me I was still the best suspect they had. The next day I called him again and this time I took a shot and told him the truth. I told him I had been in Kelly’s apartment, what I had seen and again restated that I hadn’t, couldn’t have killed her. By my fourth phone call we slowly began to build trust, if not friendship. My initial feelings proved right. He was a straight shooter. He told me they hadn’t been able to locate any next of kin. The name she’d been living under didn’t show up on any record search, the social security number she’d given to the club was bogus. It was strange he said, he had been through her apartment three times and hadn’t found as much as an address book or a letter from home. I told him I thought she was from Indiana, but it didn’t help much.

“They’re going to cremate her on Friday,” he told me. “You’re the closest thing to family we can find… If you want to claim the ashes, I’ll back you up.”

“What do you want as payback, I don’t snitch. You have to know that straight up.”

“Son, you don’t have anything I want… You’re alright Moses, I just don’t think you know it yet.”

“How many days ‘til they put you on another case, and she becomes a dead file?” I asked.

“Two days ago. But that hasn’t stopped me. You may not believe me, but I’ll keep looking,” he said, and I did believe him, but also knew how little he had to go on. After I hung up, I filled a tumbler with ice and poured in my Scottish Prozac. I had no idea what Kelly would want me to do with her ashes. It wasn’t the kind of subject that came up much in strip club dressing rooms.

“You committing suicide on the installment plan?” Piper asked. I was sitting at the bar knocking back my third scotch of the shift.

“Just trying to slide through the night,” I told her, motioning for Turaj to fill it up again. It took the drinks to quiet my head down enough to go to work wrangling the straights, it dulled my building rage to the point where I might not tear any heads off. Truth was I did very little bouncing, I was just the big scary guy there for show. My experience has been that naked ladies turn most men into drooling pussycats. I watched a tattooed Mexican kid get a lap dance, Ginger told him to keep his hands at his sides and he obeyed like a kid in school.

“So what are you going to do with her ashes?” Piper asked, leaning against the bar.

“I don’t know, I really don’t,” I told her.

“If it was me, I’d want to have my ashes spread into the waves, up by Malibu. Up where the livin’ is easy and the greenbacks grow tall. Get stuck on some matron’s feet and stain her white shag.”

“I don’t really think Kelly was a Malibu kinda girl,” I told her.

“No she wasn’t, not enough irony in her… You’ll know what to do when the time is right. You always do,” she said resting her hand on my shoulder.

“You have a lot of faith in this old man.”

“Yes I do… And you’re not that old,” she said with a wink. Looking past her I saw Sasha, that chestnut haired little Czech vixen, fixing to haul off and hit a dread locked customer. I caught her cocked arm just before she swung. She spun on me, eyes flaring.

“Jesus Christ Mo, this cheap bastard says he give me one hundred. Like I don’t know what a twenty looks like. Am I blind? Am I stupid? “