Deception: An Alex Delaware Novel (3 page)

"Remember his shirt?"

"Um, let's see... T-shirt, like too big for him... um--oh, yeah, white, from a college, UC something... had a weird-looking animal on it, like a big rat with a long tongue."

"Oversized," said Milo. "Like a gangbanger might wear?"

"Dude was no gangbanger. No tats, no attitude, just a confused little dude in painter's pants. I figured he wanted the D.I. for a job. Killing ants or something."

"Wearing a college shirt but not a college guy."

The kid laughed. "Dude's waiting for day labor he probably didn't even get a GED."

As we left, I said, "The UC Irvine mascot is an anteater."

"And here I was thinking skunks were finally getting some respect."

We walked the two blocks to the paint store. Lots of boarded-up businesses punctuated the journey, with others on the brink. Five day laborers idled by the curb, looking bored and defeated. When times are bad, the trickle-down switches to misery.

All five men wore baggy white painter's pants, two had on white tees. One shirt was printed with the Disneyland logo, the other was paint-specked but blank. The first man who spotted us tried to walk away. Milo bellowed: "Stop."

When that didn't work:
"Policia, no La Migra."

He talked to each worker, using LAPD Spanish and a relatively soft, detached approach. No one admitted to buying dry ice. Most of the men claimed not to know what it was.

One guy's eyes moved a lot and Milo asked for his I.D. first. Close to fifty, tall, thin, balding, droopy mustache. A California driver's license was handed over with shaking hands. Milo's request for backup paper brought a shrug. Handing the man his business card, he said, "Amigo, you help me, I help you."

Downcast eyes.

"Anything you wanna tell me now about a guy wears a UC Irvine shirt?"

"No, boss."

Milo pointed to the card. "See that? Lieutenant. That means big boss
--gran patron. Muy importante.
"

"Okay."

"Okay what?"

"You
gran patron.
"

Elise Freeman's DMV picture elicited a blank stare. Same for the other men. Milo handed out five cards, told the men cooperating would bring good luck. Five blank faces stared back.

Heading back to the car, Milo re-read the jumpy guy's stats. "Hector Ruiz, lives in Beverly Hills north of the boulevard where the estates are. Some forger's got a sense of humor."

"Maybe he was a live-in employee."

"Oh, sure, they dress him in livery and call him Jeeves. So... you see any obvious reason for a day laborer to need thirty pounds of ice? And the quantity's damn close to the techies' estimate."

"Unless Anteater picked his shirt with significance, my bet's on a paid buy to muddy the trail."

"Or nervous little dude's our killer." Laughing. "Like I believe that."

His cell played Beethoven's "Fur Elise." Dark joke? No sense asking.

A twenty-second conversation ensued. Milo's part consisted of several "yessirs." Each one lowered his posture.

He pocketed the phone. "Summoned to the mount, A-sap."

"Have fun."

"We, not me."

"I'm invited?"

"You're demanded."

CHAPTER
4

In dream traffic, the police chief's office at Parker Center is a twenty-minute eastbound glide from Van Nuys.

Change of venue and bad traffic turned the drive into a seventy-minute, westbound stop-and-fume.

The Stagecoach Bistro abutted the ninth hole of a Calabasas country club built to look exclusive but open to anyone who could come up with the monthly.

As we drove toward the restaurant's gravel lot, perfect lawns and barbered pepper trees ill suited for the climate gave way to dust and rustic fencing. The sprinkle of cars out front included a navy Lincoln Town Car that Milo identified as the chief's civilian ride. No bodyguard, no auxiliary vehicle in sight.

The building was logs and shingles. A posted menu listed a French chef and described the fare as "nouveau-Tex-Mex-Thai comfort cuisine."

A perky ponytailed hostess guided us to a redwood picnic table tucked in a corner of a patio shaded by vegetation that fit: ancient California oaks, twisted by centuries of Santa Ana winds. The chief had concealed himself behind the rhino-thick trunk of the granddaddy tree.

He continued chopsticking as we sat, pointed to two menus.

Comfort cuisine translated to heroic portions and headache-inducing prose.

The chief's rectangular platter was two feet wide.

"What're you having, sir?"

"Number Six."

Thirty-two spicy Mekong shrimp swimming in asparagus coulis and tinctured by a lemongrass-oregano reduction nestled in a terroir of goat-cheese livened by refried black beans and guarded by palace walls of home-cured porkbelly.

The chief said, "Seeing as you're a gourmet, Sturgis."

"Appreciate that, sir."

The chief lowered the brim of a gray suede baseball cap. Instead of the usual black suit and five-hundred-dollar tie, he wore jeans and a brown leather bomber jacket. The hat and mirrored aviator shades obscured a healthy portion of his mercilessly pitted, oddly triangular face. Additional tortured flesh was shielded by a bushy white mustache.

He's one of the few people who make Milo looked unscathed.

Another ponytailed girl came over, lofting a handheld computer. "What're you guys having today?"

Milo said, "Number Six."

I scanned the menu and ordered an elk burger with bison bacon.

The chief said, "Watching your cholesterol, Dr. Delaware?"

"I like bison."

"You and Buffalo Bill. And the Plains Indians. You have Native American in your background, right?"

"Along with a lot of other stuff."

"Mongrel, just like me."

I'd never heard he was anything but Irish.

He said, "Got some Seneca in there. Or so my paternal grandmother claimed. Can't be sure of that, though. Woman was a serious drinker." Twirling his chopstick. "Just like your father."

I didn't respond.

He removed the sunglasses. Small black eyes scanned my face like a dermatologist probing for lesions. "Clouds the judgment, serious drinking."

I said, "It's a problem in some families."

He turned to Milo. "What the hell were you thinking taking him along to the Freeman scene without authorization, then bullshitting Creighton about it? Didn't you figure he'd check with me?"

"I assumed he would, sir."

Down went the chopstick. "It was a
Fuck you
?"

"No, sir. It was a
Doing my job as best I can given the constraints.
"

"You can't do your job without him? We're talking some kind of psychological dependency here?"

"We're talking preference based on past experience, sir."

"You need a shrink on board to function?"

"When cases are unusual and Dr. Delaware has time, I find his input helpful. I thought you agreed, so I didn't foresee any objection."

"And Creighton?"

"Creighton's a bureaucrat."

The chief retrieved the stick, rolled it impressively from finger to finger. The black eyes divided their time between Milo and me. "You didn't foresee any objection."

"Based on--"

"I get it. But it's still bullshit. Amazing the doctor still puts up with you."

Twice, the chief had offered me important-sounding jobs with the department that I'd turned down.

"I can see the value of shrinkery for weird cases, Sturgis, but I'm not sensing any psychosexual horror on this one."

Milo said, "A body packed in dry ice, no obvious cause of death, and a total disregard for proper procedure made it unusual to me."

"You think it's unusual, Doctor?"

"It's different."

"Sturgis explain to you why discretion is paramount?"

"He did."

"What exactly did he tell you?"

"That your son attends Windsor Tech and has applied to Yale."

"What do you think about Yale?"

"Top school."

"Great reputation," he said. "Just like the hedge-fund wizards and the cretins at Fannie Mae had until they got their britches yanked and guess what was underneath? Empty space."

"You don't like Yale?"

"I don't care enough about the place to like or dislike, Doctor. They're all the same, holding pens for spoiled rich brats and kids who aspire to be spoiled richer brats. A few years ago, the geniuses on Yale's admissions committee rejected thousands of smart, qualified American kids but accepted some Afghan who'd served as the Taliban's spokesman. Want to take odds the guy ever took AP calculus and served as captain of his Model U.N. debate team? Then those same geniuses let in an alleged art student, her idea of creativity is getting knocked up, aborting the fetus, and videotaping the mess. After which she repeated the freak show over and over or maybe she was faking. We're living in Bizarro World, Rembrandt's writhing in his grave."

"No doubt," I said.

"I have nothing against Yale more than any other Ivy League resort. What I can't figure out is why Charlie wants to go there when my wife went to Columbia and Penn law school and I got that ridiculous master's degree at Harvard--two years commuting to Boston every week, my reward was listening to puffed-up fools yakking about nothing. I made the mistake of attending graduation, brought my wife and my mother, Charlie wasn't born yet. They do the ceremony in Harvard Yard, which was fine back in the seventeen hundreds when it was a little divinity school for rich twits. Now there's space for maybe a quarter of the people who show up, they give you a predetermined seat number with preferences for rich assholes who endow buildings. My wife and my eighty-seven-year-old mother stood for two hours in ninety-degree weather, finally they get to their seats and end up not seeing a damn thing because inconsiderate twits stood in front of them the whole time. A bunch of nice black ladies from the Bronx were in the row behind, their niece was the first person in the family to attend college, they had no clue what the hell was going on. My wife turned around and said, 'These are the geniuses who ran the Vietnam War.' They're all the same, Doctor. Arrogant, thoughtless, impractical."

"Ivy League schools."

"Any elite institution. It's like junior high: Insecure assholes can't feel popular unless everyone else is an outcast." Head shake. "My kid's got legacy status at Columbia, Penn, and Harvard, he obsesses on Yale."

"Kids will do that," I said.

"Be stupid and obnoxious?"

"Try to differentiate themselves."

"Psych-talk," he said. "Yeah, yeah, that's what my wife says. Supposedly Charlie's got a tough row to hoe being under the alleged shadow of his father so he needs to find himself as an
individual.
Which is ridiculous, you see me as intimidating? Not to him, trust me. He's twice as smart as me and plays the fucking cello."

Milo's smile was fleeting but the chief saw it.

"You're just loving this, aren't you? I'm in a spot where I can't kick your ass with my customary aim and fervor." To me: "I told Charlie apply to Harvard for early acceptance, it's nonbinding, he'll have a fallback. No, he said, that wouldn't be fair to kids who really want to go to Harvard. Guess what the average acceptance rate was last year at the big three--H, Y, and Princeton? Six fucking percent and this year's going to be worse because of the baby boom. Charlie's got over a 4.0 when you factor in APs and honors courses and he scored 1540 on the SAT, only took it once. Sounds like a shoo-in, right? Forget
that
fairy tale."

I said, "Sounds like he's a strong applicant on his own and being your kid--and your wife's--should help him."

"Why?"

"You're famous."

He jabbed his chest. "If I was a brain-dead actor with a brain-dead kid, I'd be famous. To those twits I'm a right-wing social climber--and don't think politics doesn't play into it. Yeah, Charlie's brilliant but I'm not booking advance flights to New Haven under the best of circumstances. Now I've got
this.
That stupid DVD, then she actually goes and gets herself killed. Give the twits an excuse to pass over my kid for some some Hamas engineering whiz from Gaza who they can teach to build better fucking bombs and they'll jump at it."

I said, "So you don't see it as a suicide?"

"Body's packed in ice but no bags on the scene, vic's computer's missing, she's already given advance warning people are out to get her? Why the hell would I see it as a suicide--oh, Jesus." Sharp laughter. "You geniuses actually thought I was gonna push suicide on you? Turn this into some fucking Ice-Gate? Give me a break, I went to fucking Harvard."

He resumed eating. When Milo said, "Sir," he was waved into silence.

Milo tried again, two bites later: "So I'll be able to do my job as I see fit?"

"Now," said the chief, "you're sounding paranoid. Maybe you're the wrong guy for this case, seeing as it has psychological overtones."

"Even paranoiacs have enemies," said Milo.

"If they're assholes, they have a whole bunch." The chief's face flushed but a tirade was cut short by the arrival of our food.

My burger was dry and I put it aside.

Milo feasted.

When he'd cleared half his platter, he inhaled and put his fork down. "Sir, apologies for any offense, but I'm still not clear what's expected of me."

"Close the damn
case
is what's expected of you, but do it with discretion. What does that mean? Fine, I'll tell you: Do not go public on anything prior to my approval. No unnecessary ruffling of feathers, no loose talk about Windsor Prep being a den of iniquity, no stomping into the place like a storm trooper, no intimidation of administration, faculty, students, janitors, the squirrels that scurry up their damn trees, the birds that fly in their damn airspace."

"What about the three teachers Freeman named?"

"They will be made available to you. Have you checked out Freeman's boyfriend yet, the Italian guy?"

"All I've done so far is visit the scene and read the file, sir. What there is of it."