Because the Night (11 page)

He let it ring ten times before answering—only Penny pursued a phone call that persistently.

“Speak, it's your dime.”

Penny's giggle came over the wire. “No, it's
not,
Daddy! It's my dollar-forty.”

Lloyd laughed. “Excuse me. I forgot inflation. What's the scoop, Penguin?”

“The same old same old. What about you? Are you getting any?”

Lloyd feigned shock. “Penny Hopkins, I'm surprised at you!”

“No, you're not. You told me I was jaded in my crib. You didn't answer my question, Daddy.”

“Very well, in answer to your question, I am
not
getting any.”

Penny's giggle went up an octave. “Good. Mom read me that first letter of yours, you know. We were talking about it the other night. She said it was excessive, that
you
were excessive, and even when you were admitting to be being a sleazy womanizer your admissions were excessive. But I could tell she was impressed.”

“I'm glad. Is Roger still staying with you?”

“Yes. Mom sleeps with Roger, but she talks about you. One of these nights I'm going to get her stoned and get her to admit you're her main love. I'll report her words to you verbatim.”

Lloyd felt a little piece of his heart work itself loose and drift up to San Francisco. “I want all of you back, Penguin.”

“I know. I want to come back, and so does Anne. That's two votes for you. Mom and Caroline want to stay in Frisco. Dead heat.”

“Annie and Caroline are okay?”

“Anne is big into vegetarianism and Eastern thought and Caroline is in love with this punk rock fool next door. He's a high school dropout. Gross.”

Lloyd laughed. “Par for the teen age course. Let me hit you with something. Doctor John the Night Tripper. Ring any bells?”

“Ancient ones, Daddy. The ‘sixties. He was this wild rock and roller. Caroline has one of his records—‘Bad Boogaloo.'”

“That's it?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“A case I'm on. Dutch is on it, too. It's probably nothing.”

Penny's voice went low and shrewd. “Daddy, when are you going to tell me about what happened right after the breakup? I'm no dummy, I know you were shot. Uncle Dutch practically admitted it to Mom.

Lloyd sighed as their conversation came to its usual conclusion. “Give it another couple of years, babe. When you're a world-weary fifteen I'll spill my guts. Right now all it means is that I owe a lot of people.”

“Owe what, Daddy?”

“I don't know, babe. That's the tricky part.”

“Will you tell me when you figure it out?”

“You'll be the first to know. I love you, Penny.”

“I love you, too.”

“I've got to go.”

“So do I. Love love love.”

“Likewise.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

With “Owe what, Daddy?” trailing in his mind, Lloyd drove downtown to Parker Center. His memo to the Chief of Detectives rested like a hot coal in his jacket pocket. Deciding to check his incoming basket before dropping it with the Chief's secretary, he took the elevator to the sixth floor and strode down the hall to his cubicle, seeing the note affixed to his door immediately: “Hopkins—call Det. Dentinger, B.H.P.D., re: gun query.”

Lloyd grabbed his phone and dialed the seven familiar digits of the Beverly Hills Police Department, saying, “Detective Dentinger,” when the switchboard operator came on the line. There was the sound of the call being transferred, then a man's perfunctory voice: “Dentinger. Talk.”

Lloyd was brusque. “Detective Sergeant Hopkins, L.A.P.D. What have you got on my gun query?”

Dentinger muttered “shit” to himself, then said into the mouthpiece, “We got a burglary from two weeks ago. Unsolved, no prints. A forty-one-caliber revolver was listed on the report of missing items. The reason you didn't get a quicker response on this is because the burglary dicks who originally investigated think that the report was padded, you know, for insurance purposes. A bunch of shit was reported stolen, but the burglar's access was this little basement window. He couldn't have hauled all the shit out—it wouldn't have fit. I've been assigned to investigate the deal, see if we should file on this joker for submitting a false crime report. I'll give you the sp—”

Lloyd cut in. “Do you think there
was
a burglary?”

Dentinger sighed. “I'll give you my scenario. Yes, there was a burglary. Small items were stolen, like the jewelry on the report, the gun, and probably some shit the victim didn't report, like cocaine—I've got him figured for a stone snowbird, really whacked out. You know the clincher? The guy owns two of these antique guns, mounted in presentation cases, with original ammo from the Civil War, but he only reports
one
stolen. I don't doubt that the fucker
was
stolen, but any intelligent insurance padder would stash the other gun and report it stolen too, am I right?”

Lloyd said, “Right. Give me the information on the victim.”

“Okay,” Dentinger said. “Morris Epstein, age forty-four, eight-one-six-seven Elevado. He calls himself a literary agent, but he's got that Hollywood big bucks fly-by-night-look. You know, live high on credit and bullshit, never know where your next buck is coming from. Personally, I think these—”

Lloyd didn't wait for Dentinger to finish his spiel. He hung up the phone and ran for the elevator.

8167 Elevado was a salmon pink Spanish-style house in the Beverly Hills residential district. Lloyd sat in his car at the curb and saw Dentinger's “big bucks fly-by-night” label confirmed: The lawn needed mowing, the hedges needed trimming, and the chocolate brown Mercedes in the driveway needed a bath.

He walked up and knocked on the door. Moments later a small middle-aged man with finely sculpted salt-and-pepper hair threw the door open. When he saw Lloyd, he reached for the zipper at the front of his jumpsuit and zipped up his chest. “You're not from Roll Your Own Productions, are you?” he asked.

Lloyd flashed his badge and I.D. card. “I'm from the L.A.P.D. Are you Morris Epstein?”

The man shuffled back into his entrance foyer. Lloyd followed him. “Isn't this out of your jurisdiction?” the man said.

Lloyd closed the door behind them. “I'll make it easy on you, Epstein. I have reason to believe that the forty-one revolver you reported stolen might have been used in a triple homicide. I want to borrow your other forty-one for comparison tests. Cooperate, and I'll tell the Beverly Hills cops that your insurance report was exaggerated, not padded. You dig?”

Morris Epstein went livid. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. He flung an angry arm in the direction of the door and hissed, “Leave this house before I have you sued for police harassment. I have friends in the A.C.L.U. They'll fix your wagon for real, flatfoot.”

Lloyd pushed past Epstein's arm into an art-deco living room festooned with framed movie posters and outsized gilt-edged mirrors. A glass coffee table held a single-edged razor blade and traces of white powder. There was a large cabinet against the wall by the fireplace. Lloyd opened and shut drawers until he found the glassine bag filled with powder. He turned to see Epstein standing beside him with the telephone in his hand. When he held the bag in front of Epstein's eyes, the little man said, “You can't bluff me. This is illegal search and seizure. I'm personal friends with Jerry Brown. I've got clout. One phone call and you are adios, motherfucker.”

Lloyd grabbed the telephone from Epstein's hand, jerked the cord out of the wall and tossed it on the coffee table. The table shattered, sending glass shards exploding up to the ceiling. Epstein backed into the wall and whispered, “Now look, pal, we can bargain this out. We can—”

Lloyd said, “We're past the bargaining stage. Bring me the gun. Do it now.”

Epstein unzipped the top of his jumpsuit and kneaded his chest. “I still say this is illegal search and seizure.”

“This is a legal search and seizure coincident to the course of a felony investigation. Bring me the gun—in its case. Don't touch the gun itself.”

Morris Epstein capitulated with an angry upward tug of his zipper. When he left the room, Lloyd gave it a quick toss, searching the remaining drawers, wondering whether or not he should go to the Beverly Hills Station and check out the burglary report. Dentinger had said that no prints were found, but maybe there were F.I.'s on yellow Jap imports or other indicators to jog his brain.

He went through the last drawer, then turned his attention to the mantel above the fireplace. He could hear Epstein's returning footsteps as his eyes caught a cut-glass bowl filled with match books. He grabbed a handful. They were all from First Avenue West—one of the two bars that Jungle Jack Herzog was working.

“Here's your gun, shamus.”

Lloyd turned around and saw Epstein holding a highly varnished rosewood box. He walked to him and took the box from his hands. Opening the lid, he saw a large blue steel revolver with mother-of-pearl grips mounted on red velvet. Arranged in a circle around it were copper-jacketed soft-nosed bullets. Taking a pen from his pocket, he inserted it into the barrel and raised the gun upward. Clearly etched on the barrel's underside were the numbers 9471.

“Satisfied?” Epstein said.

Lloyd lowered the barrel and closed the lid of the box. “I'm satisfied. Where did you get the guns?”

“I bought them cheap from the producer of this Civil War mini-series I packaged last year.”

“Do you know the serial number of the other gun?”

“No, but I know the two guns had consecutive numbers. Listen, do the Beverly Hills fuzz really think I padded that burglary report?”

“Yes, but I'll slip them the word about how you cooperated. I saw some matches here from First Avenue West. Do you go there a lot?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Lloyd took a photograph of Jack Herzog from his billfold. “Ever see this man?”

Epstein shook his head. “No.”

Withdrawing a photocopy of his Identikit portrait of the man seen with Herzog, Lloyd said, “What about him?”

Epstein looked at the picture, then flinched. “Man, this is fucking weird. I did some blow with this guy outside Bruno's Serendipity one night. This is a great fucking likeness.”

Lloyd felt two divergent evidential lines intersect in an incredible revelation. “Did this man tell you his name?” he asked.

“No, we just did the blow and split company. But it was funny. He was a weird, persistent kind of guy. He kept asking me these questions about my family and if I was into meeting this really incredibly smart dude he knew. What's the matter, shamus? You look pale.”

Lloyd gripped the gun box so hard that he could hear his finger tendons cracking. “Did you tell him your name?”

“No, but I gave him my card.”

“Did you tell him about your guns?”

Epstein swallowed. “Yeah.”

“When did you talk to the man?”

“Maybe two, three months ago.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“No, I haven't been back to Bruno's. It sucks.”

“Did you see the man get into a car?”

“Yeah, a little yellow job.”

“Make and model?”

“It was foreign. That's all I know. Listen, what's this all about? You come in here and hassle me, break my coffee table—” Epstein stopped when he saw Lloyd run for the door. He called out, “Hey, shamus, come back and shmooze sometime! I could package a bad-ass fuzz like you into a series!”

Running roof lights and siren, Lloyd made it back to Parker Center in a record twenty-five minutes. Cradling the gun box in the crook of his arm, he ran the three flights of stairs up to the offices of the Scientific Identification Division, then pushed through a series of doors until he was face to face with Officer Artie Cranfield, who put down his copy of
Penthouse
and said, “Man, do you look jazzed.”

Lloyd caught his breath and said “I
am
jazzed,
and
I need some favors. This box contains a gun. Can you dust it for latents real quick? After you do that, we need a ballistics comparison.”

“This is a suspected murder weapon?”

“No, but it's a consecutive serial number to the gun I think is the liquor store murder weapon. Since the ammo in this box and the murder ammo is antique, probably from the same casting, I'm hoping that the rifling marks will be so similar that we can assume th—”

“We can't make those kind of assumptions,” Artie interjected. “That kind of theorizing won't hold up in court.”

Lloyd handed Artie the gun box. “Artie, I'll lay you twenty to one that this one gets settled on the street. Now will you please dust this baby for me?”

Artie took a pencil from his desk and propped open the lid of the box, then stuck another pencil in the barrel of the revolver, the end affixed to the upper hinge of the box, forming a wedge that held the gun steady. When the box and gun were secure, he took out a small brush and a vial of fingerprint powder and spread it over every blue steel, mother of pearl, and rosewood surface. Finishing, he shook his head and said, “Smooth glove prints on the grip, streak prints on the barrel. I dusted the box for kicks. Smudged latents that are probably you, glove prints that indicate that the box was carefully opened. You're dealing with a pro, Lloyd.”

Lloyd shook his head. “I really didn't think we'd find anything good. He stole the companion gun, but I figured he might have touched this one, too.”

“He did, with surgical rubber gloves.” Artie started to laugh.

Lloyd said, “Fuck you. Let's take this monster down to the tank and see how it kicks.”

Artie led Lloyd through the Crime Lab to a small room where water and tufted-cotton-layered ballistics tanks were sunk into the floor. Lloyd slipped three slugs into the .41's chamber and fired into the top layer of water. There was the sound of muffled ricocheting, then Artie squatted and opened up a vent on the tank's side. Withdrawing the “catcher” layer of cotton, he pulled out the three expended rounds and said, “Perfect. I've got a comparison microscope in my office. We'll sign for the liquor store shells and run them.”