L a Requiem (1999) (22 page)

He had to hurt. He had to be feeling loss, and anger, and shame.

"You want to come up to the house and talk about this?"

"Nothing to talk about. We're off, Krantz is on."

Pike took his gun from the glove box and clothes from behind the seats, got out, and drove away.

I guess I would feel those things for both of us.

Chapter 18

The woman who lives in the next house was standing on her slope, watering bright red ice plants. The Santa Anas were gone, but the stillness made me think that they would return. The air is never more still in Los Angeles than in those moments before the wind screams down on us again, once more torching the world into flame. Maybe the stillness is a warning.

The woman called, so far away I could barely hear her, "How are you doing over there?"

"Hot. How're those boys?"

"They're boys. I saw you on TV"

I didn't know what she was talking about.

"On the midday news. At that funeral. Oh, there's my phone."

She turned off her hose and ran inside.

I let myself in through the kitchen and turned on the television, but it was soap operas. Guess my fifteen minutes had come and gone, and I had missed it.

I changed into jeans and a tee shirt, then made scrambled eggs. I ate at the sink, staring out the window while I drank milk from the carton. The floor in my kitchen is Mexican paver tiles, some of which were still loose from the '94 earthquake. When you're unemployed you have time to think about fixing things like that, only I didn't know how. I thought I could learn. It would give me something to do, and there might even be a measure of satisfaction in it. Unlike private detecting.

I stepped from tile to tile until I had stood' on every tile, rocking a bit to see if the tiles were sound. Six of them were loose.

The cat came in and sat by his bowl, watching me. He was holding something in his mouth.

"What you got there?"

The something moved.

"I think I'm going to fix these tiles. You want to help?"

The cat took the something back out again. He'd seen me attempt repairs before.

By twenty minutes before five I had chipped up four of the tiles, covering the floor with little bits of cement. I turned on the TV again, figuring to let the news play while I worked on the tile, but Eugene Dersh was standing outside his house while a dozen cops carried evidence boxes past the camera. He looked scared. I switched channels and found a taped report of Dersh being interviewed at his front door, peeking out through a two-inch crack, saying, "I don't understand any of this. All I did was find that poor girl's body. I didn't kill anyone." I switched channels again, and found Krantz surrounded by reporters. Every time a reporter asked a question, Krantz answered, "No comment."

I turned off the set. "Krantz. You prick."

At six-twenty, I was back to fixing the tiles when Lucy let herself in carrying a large white bag filled with Chinese food. "I tried calling to warn you that the story was breaking."

"I know. I was at Forest Lawn."

She put the bag on the counter. "What's all this on the floor?"

"I'm fixing the tiles."

"Oh."

She sounded as impressed as that cat.

"Elvis, do you think it's him?" Dersh was already "him."

"I don't know, Luce. I don't think so. Krantz wants to believe it's Dersh, and he thinks the way to prove it is to put on so much pressure that Dersh breaks. Everything we're seeing now is being fed by Krantz. He was already planning it when I left Parker Center. These reporters are saying just what Krantz wants them to say, that Dersh is guilty because it says so in the profile."

"Wait a minute. They don't have anything specific that ties Dersh to these crimes?"

"Nothing."

I sat in the cement dust on my floor and told her everything I knew, starting with Jerry Swetaggen but not naming him. I went through the forensics reports and the autopsy results, and every detail of the case that I remembered from Dolan's brief. As I talked, she took off her shoes and her jacket, and sat with me in the dust. Wearing a six-hundred-dollar pants suit, and she sat with me in the dust. Love.

When I finished, Lucy said, "Did I wake up in Nazi Germany?"

"It gets better."

"What?"

"Frank fired us."

She gave me a look of infinite care, and touched my head. "It's been a rotten day, hasn't it?"

"The pits."

"Would you like a hug?"

"What are my other choices?"

"Whatever you want."

Even when I'm feeling bad, she can make me smile.

After I vacuumed the kitchen, Lucy put Jim Brickman on the stereo as I made drinks, the two of us setting the containers of food in the oven to warm. We were doing that when the doorbell rang.

Samantha Dolan was standing there.

"Hope you don't mind my coming by like this."

"Not at all."

She was wearing jeans and a man's white shirt with the tail out. Her eyes glistened, but not from crying. She didn't look too steady.

When Dolan walked in, she saw Lucy, still in the kitchen, and plucked at my arm. "I guess that's the girlfriend."

She'd had a couple, all right.

Dolan followed me into the kitchen, where I introduced them. "Lucy, this is Samantha Dolan. Dolan, this is Lucy Chenier."

"You don't have to call me Dolan, for Christ's sake." She put out her hand and Lucy took it.

Lucy said, "Pleasure to meet you. I understand you're with the police."

Dolan held on to her hand. "So far." Then Dolan saw our drinks. "Oh, you're drinking. Don't mind if I do."

She'd had more than a couple.

I said, "Gin and tonic okay?"

"You got any tequila?" Call it three or four.

As I made Dolan a drink, she squinted at the tiles. "What's up with the floor?"

"Home repairs."

"First time, huh?"

Everyone has something to say.

Lucy said, "We were just about to eat Chinese food. Would you like to stay?"

Dolan smiled at Lucy. "That's some accent. Where you from?"

Lucy smiled back nicely. "Louisiana. And you?"

"Bakersfield."

"They raise cows there, don't they?"

I handed Dolan the tequila. "So what's up, Dolan?"

"Krantz busted me off the Task Force."

"I'm sorry."

"Not your fault. I didn't have to play it the way I did, and I don't believe it was you who ratted to the press." She tipped her drink toward Lucy. "Not even with your friend here being one of them. Anyway, I don't blame you, and I wanted you to know."

"So what're you going to do?"

She laughed, but it's the kind of laugh you give when your only other choice is to cry. "Nothing I can do. Bishop put me back on the table, but he won't let it go. He says he's going to take a few days to cool off, then he's going to talk it over with the assistant chiefs and figure out the appropriate action. He's thinking about transferring me out."

Lucy said, "Just because you confirmed what Elvis already knew?"

"They're serious about their secrets downtown, Counselor. It's called compromising an investigation, and that's what they think I did. If I'm a good enough girl and kiss Bishop's ass, maybe he'll keep me around."

Lucy frowned. "If this becomes a gender-bias issue, you could have legal recourse."

Dolan laughed. "Honey, gender bias is the only reason I'm still there. Look, that's not why I came." She glanced back at me. "I agree with you about Dersh. That poor bastard is getting railroaded, but there isn't much I can do about it right now without tanking what little career I have left."

"Okay."

"Krantz is right about one thing in all this. Dersh and Ward are lying about something. I was behind the two-way glass when Watts interviewed them. You can see it a little bit in the transcript, but you could see it for sure in the room. That's why Krantz is so convinced."

"I'm listening. What are they lying about?"

"I don't have a clue, but I'm sure Ward is scared. He knows something that he doesn't want to talk about. I'm not in a position to do anything about it, World's Greatest, but you could."

I nodded. "Yeah. Maybe I could."

Dolan finished the drink, and put it down. It hadn't lasted long. "I'd better go. Sorry to barge in."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to stay for dinner?"

Dolan went to the door, then gazed back at Lucy.

"Thanks, anyway, but there probably wouldn't be enough for both of us."

Lucy smiled the nice smile again. "No. There isn't."

When I got back to the kitchen, Lucy had the containers out of the oven and was opening them. ;

"She likes you."

"What are you talking about?"

"You don't think she came here just to talk about Eugene Dersh, do you? She likes you."

I didn't say anything.

"Bitch."

"Are you jealous?"

Lucy turned the sweet smile on me.

"If I were jealous, she'd be getting stitches."

There isn't much you can say to that.

When Lucy spoke again, her voice was soft. "So, are you going to do it?"

"What?"

"Try to help Dersh."

I thought about it, and then I nodded. "I don't think he's the shooter, Lucille. And if he isn't, then he's just some guy out there all alone with the weight of a city on him."

Lucy came close and put her arms around me.

"I guess that's you, lover boy. The last white knight."

That's me.

Chapter 19

Lake Hollywood was quiet the next morning, the air cool in the early hour. I went up just after sunrise, hoping to get the jump on news people and the morbidly curious, and I had. Walkers and joggers once more looped the four-mile circumference of the lake, but none of them gawked at the murder site, or even seemed aware of it.

Having opened the crime scene, the police had taken down their yellow tape and withdrawn the guards. I left my car by the chain-link gate, and followed the trail down through the brush to the place where Karen Garcia's body had been found. The ripped footprints where the coroner's people had carried her out were still there, cut into the soil. Blood marks the color of dead roses flagged her resting place.

I stared at that spot for a moment, then went north along the shore, counting paces. Twice the bank dropped away so quickly, and was so overgrown with brush, that I had to take off my shoes and step in the water, but most of the shoreline was flat and bare enough to make good time.

Fifty-two paces from the blood marks, I found a six-inch piece of orange tape tied to a tree where Dersh and Riley reached the water. The slope was steep; their long, skidding footprints still visible, winding down through a clutter of small trees. I backtracked their footprints up, and pretty soon I was pushing my way through a dense overgrowth before popping out onto the trail. Another piece of the orange tape was tied here, too, marking where Dersh had told the investigator they had left the trail.

I walked up the trail a hundred yards, then turned back past the tape for about the same distance. I could see the lake from farther up the trail, but not from the orange tape, and I wondered why they had picked this spot to find their way down. The brush was thick, the tree canopy dense, and the light poor. Any kid with a couple of years in the Scouts would know better, and so would just about anyone else. Of course, maybe neither Dersh nor Ward had been a Scout, or maybe they just had to take a leak. Maybe they just figured what the hell, here was as good a place as any, even though it wasn't.

I went back to my car, drove down the hill to the Jungle Juice, and used their phone book to look up Riley Ward & Associates. I copied the phone number and address, then drove to West Hollywood.

Ward had his offices hi a converted Craftsman house on what was once a residential street south of Sunset Boulevard. The Craftsman house had a lovely front porch, and elaborate woodwork that had been painted hi bright shades of peach and turquoise, neither of which went with the two television news vans that were parked out front.

I parked in a little lot belonging to a dentist's office, and waited. Two people went into Ward's building, one of them being an on-air reporter I recognized because he looked like a surfer dude. They were inside maybe three minutes, then came out and stood by then: van, disappointed. Ward was still refusing interviews. Or maybe he wasn't there.

A third van arrived. Two young guys got out, one Asian-American with black horned-rim glasses and the other blond with very short hair. The Asian-American guy had white streaks in his hair, going for that Euro-trash look. The new guys joined the surfer and his friend, the four of them laughing about something as a young woman got out of the other van and went over. She was wearing a bright yellow spring dress and thick-soled shoes that had to be damned near impossible to walk in, and cat's-eye glasses. Fashion slaves.