Red Light (2 page)

Merci
knelt down and placed two of her right fingers on the woman's jugular vein. She
believed that she owed hope to the dead, even if the dead were beyond it.

She
pulled a little flashlight from her pocket and found the hole in the dress,
below the left breast but close to center, straight over the heart. She looked
for another but found none. The neighbor said nothing about hearing a gunshot.
Merci retraced her steps to the front door and pushed it closed with her boot.
The paramedics who looked like actors watched her, a fade-out.

She
stood between the body and the dining room. No signs of forced entry or
struggle, so far. She noted that the table had been set for two. A pair of
seductive high heels stood near the couch, facing her, like a ghost was
standing in them, watching. The apartment was still, the slider closed against
the cool December night. Good for scent. She closed her eyes. Salt air. Baked
fowl. Coffee. Goddamn rubber gloves, of course. A whiff of burned gunpowder?
Leather.

Maybe a trace of perfume,
or the flowers on the table—gardenia, rose, lavender? And, of course, the
obscenity of spilled blood—intimate, meaty, shameful.

She
listened to the waves. To the traffic. To the little kitchen TV turned low: an
evangelist bleating for money. To the clunk of someone on the old walkway. To
her heart, fast and heavy in her chest. Merci felt most alive when working for
the dead. She'd always loved an underdog.

In
the bedroom she found a purse with a wallet. There was a thick pinch of
hundreds in the wallet, some twenties, several credit cards and a driver's
license. Aubrey Whittaker. Nineteen.

The
woman was a girl and the girl was only a little over half her own age. The year
Aubrey Whittaker was born, Merci was a junior in high school. The year Aubrey
Whittaker was murdered, Merci was an Orange County Sheriff Department sergeant,
Homicide Detail, age 36. A single mother. A once proud woman recovering from a
broken heart, and from what police psychologists like to call critical incident
stress. She'd painted up her exterior, but inside she was still a wreck.

Aubrey's
slaughtered youth made Merci sad and angry, but many things about her career
made her feel that way. She looked out the bedroom window toward Coast Highway.
The building next door already had its Christmas lights up, a neat outline of
tiny white bulbs blinking at random. On the big dresser across from the bed
Merci found a jewelry box filled with expensive-looking rings and necklaces.
Under the lamp there was a greeting card propped up, this one with a soft-focus photograph of a tree on a hillside. She bent and read it without touching
it.

In
the muted blue sky were the words:
In
God's World...
The quip was completed inside:
There's a special place for Friendship.
It was signed:
Sincerely, Your D.C.

She
could hear the footsteps on the walkway, louder now. She listened as they came
toward the door and stopped. Voices.

She
went to the door and looked through the peephole. She saw Paul Zamorra in the
elliptical foreground, and the two Coroner's Autopsy Team techs behind him.
When she opened the door her partner met her with his joyless black eyes, then
stepped inside. The techs followed him.

They
all looked at Aubrey Whittaker. Zamorra walked to her side, knelt down and
looked at her some more. He brought gloves from the pocket of his sport coat,
worked them on. "Get to it, guys," he said. "We've got about
twenty minutes before the hordes thunder in."

The hordes thundered
in: three more patrol units bearing six deputies; the paramedic supervisors;
the Coroner's Investigation Team; the rest of the Coroner's Autopsy Team; the
county pathologist; the crime-scene scientists; the crime-scene technicians;
the criminalists; the assistant district attorney and two of his investigators,
all trudging down the wooden walkway to Aubrey Whittaker's place under the
drone of two Sheriff Department choppers that circled overhead and beamed
unhopeful shafts of light into the city below. The police reporters came next. And, as always, concerned citizens multiplied as
the minutes wore on, drawn from the darkness by the flashing lights of the
prowl cars.

Close
neighbors compared notes on the apparently deceased girl who came and went from
23 Wave Street at late hours: very attractive, well dressed, very tall, quiet.
There was firm disagreement on what color, style or length of hair she had.

Outsiders gathered what
they could, speculated. Most everyone was bundled up in something, arms around
themselves or each other, blowing on their hands, puffs of breath coming out
when they spoke. Surfers in hooded Mexican ponchos leaned against their little
trucks drinking tall beers, slurring their vowels.

Merci
Rayborn at first admitted only five people into number 23. Two were the best
crime-scene people she'd ever worked with—Criminalist Lynda Coiner and
Crime-Scene Investigator Evan O'Brien. They were standing near the door when
she finally opened it, knowing she'd need them first

Then,
the assistant DA and his man. The People. They were the ones she'd bring her
case to, the ones for whom she was really gathering evidence. It didn't hurt
that they were smart, quiet and knew the drill. Last, the coroner's investigator,
mainly for the body temp, which would help them with rime of death, and the
body cavities, which can leak evidentiary fluids into the transport bags,
complicating the job of the lab pathologists.

And
everyone else, thought Merci, can stay the hell out for half an hour. Let my
people work.

While
they worked, Merci and Zamorra toured the apartment. It was an upscale interior
in a downscale building: good carpet, leather furniture, recessed lighting
aimed to dramatize good prints of Kahlo and O'Keeffe, Hockney and Basquiat.
Over the expansive black leather sofa in the living room hung a painting she'd
never seen before. It was ghostly but vibrant at the same time, a little too
crime-lab for an ocean-view room, in her opinion. It was a Rembrandt of someone
raising somebody else from the dead.

Good
luck, she thought. She had tried it herself, twice.

Zamorra
spoke occasionally into a tiny tape recorder. Merci, as always, wrote her
observations into a small notebook with a blue cover.

She
wrote:
Aubrey Whittaker, what did you do?

But
between the contents of Aubrey's closet—provocative clothes and lots of
them—and the contents of a leather-bound calendar in her purse—a blizzard of
dates with a blizzard of people listed only by initials, coded notes in the
margins, phone numbers all over it—Merci came to suspect that Aubrey's
profession was one of the oldest. The 240-count box of condoms Zamorra found
beside a pair of thigh-high leather boots in the bottom of the closet seemed to
confirm it.

Nineteen
and a real pro.

The
bed was neatly made. There was a Bible open on the stand beside it. A crucifix
hung on one of the bedroom walls. And the damned evangelist on TV. Zamorra
stared at Merci. It hurt. Zamorra's newlywed bride had been diagnosed with a
brain tumor just two months ago; since that day his sharp face, once sly and
charming, had taken on an expression of increasingly resigned menace. She was
worried about him but didn't think she knew him well enough to question or
intrude. Good fences made good neighbors and Zamorra's fence seemed excellent:
He said almost nothing about anything. She was going to talk to a doctor about
him.

"I
saw her yesterday," Zamorra said.

Merci
felt her heart rise, settle. "Yesterday. Where?"

"Some
of the vices were huddling with her at Pedro's. I took it she was a call girl
they were going to chum with. I sat at the counter, got a number four and
didn't ask."

"Who
in vice?"

"Kathy
Hulet and your tall blond friend."

"Mike?"

"Yeah.
Mike McNally."

“I’Il
be damned."

"We
all are."

"It's
a matter of timing. Let's go see the neighbor."

On her way out of
number 23 Merci asked Lynda Coiner if they'd found any brass. "None
yet," she said. "But if it's here, we will."

The
neighbor was Alexander Coates. He lived downstairs, three units over, in
number 2. He wore baggy black nylon pants with elastic at the ankles, a
scoop-neck T-shirt and a red silk robe. Athletic shoes, new. Short gray hair in
a widow's peak, neat gray beard, wide gray eyes. He asked them to sit. In the
fireplace, gas flames huffed over ceramic logs. Wooden letters on the mantle
spelled NOEL. Merci smelled a familiar green aroma, masked by a floral spray.

"I'm
devastated by this," he said. "Aubrey was such a sweet girl. So young
and good
and ...
oh, I guess you
could say mixed-up."

"Let's
start with what you saw and heard," Merci suggested.

Coates
looked at Zamorra. "Can I get you coffee, cocoa, anything?"

"No."

Coates
exhaled, looked into the fire, began. He was home alone tonight. Around
eight-thirty he heard footsteps on the wooden walkway above. He heard a knock
upstairs— Aubrey Whittaker's place, number 23. A moment later he heard the door
shut. Nothing of consequence, then, until a little after ten o'clock, when he
heard Aubrey Whittaker's door shut again, and footsteps going back down the
upper walkway in the direction from which they had come earlier.

"How
could you tell her door from number twenty-four or twenty-two?" asked
Merci.

"From
living here eighteen years. I've listened to lots of people come and go. You
know."

Yes,
she did know. Because she could imagine Alexander Coates. You've waited for
lots of dates, she thought. You've waited and listened to their footsteps and
wondered how they'd turn out. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he
walks.

"All
right. Next."

"Next,
at approximately ten-fifteen, I heard footsteps coming down the walkway again,
in the same direction. I heard them stop at Aubrey's. I heard the door open.
Then, immediately after the door opened, or almost immediately, I heard a loud
thump, like something heavy hitting the floor. Then the door closed. Not a
slam,
but...
forcefully. Nothing for
a minute or two. Then, thumping on the floor again. It was like the first
thump, but continuous, like moving furniture or a fight or a struggle of some
kind. It lasted for maybe a minute. Then quiet again. Then footsteps going back
down the walkway toward the stairs."

"Did
you look?" asked Merci.

"No.
I was in the bath."

"Did
you hear a gunshot, a car backfiring?"

"Nothing
like that."

"Did
you think of calling the police ?" asked Zamorra.

Coates
looked at Zamorra with his wide gray eyes, then back into the fire. "No.
None of the noises I heard were alarming. None were loud or seemed to indicate
trouble. They were just noises. My policy, Detectives, my personal belief on
such matters is that privacy should be honored. Unless disaster
is...
well, you know, happening right in
front of you."

"But
when you got out of the bath, you decided to go to her door?"

"Correct.
When I got there—this would have been around ten forty-five, I saw her door was
open."

Coates
sat forward, set his elbows on his knees, rested his head in his hands. "I
thought it was blood on the door. The door was open
maybe ...
six inches. I did not touch it or look past it. I
literally raced back to my home and dialed nine-one-one immediately. I didn't
know what to do with myself. I went back upstairs and looked at the door again.
I said her name, foolishly perhaps. I came back down here. I paced the floor
for what seemed like hours. The young officers arrived at exactly ten
fifty-six."

Merci
watched Alexander Coates weep into his hands. Experience had taught her to keep
a witness talking and thinking instead of crying. Tears cleanse the memory as
well as the eyes.

"You
did all right, Mr. Coates."

"Did
I really?"

"Absolutely.
Now, when you went up to number twenty-three the first time, was Aubrey
Whittaker's porch light on or off?"

The
sniffling stopped. "On."

"And
the second time?"

"On
as well."

"Did you hear
cars coming or going from the parking lot during this time?"

"Yes. But
there's the Coast Highway traffic, so the sounds get mixed up. I can't really
help you there. You learn not to hear cars, after eighteen years on Coast
Highway."

Half an hour later
they were almost finished with Alexander Coates. He said that Aubrey Whittaker
rarely had visitors that he noticed. He said that he and Aubrey sometimes
talked in the laundry room by the office, because neither worked days, so they
washed their clothes in the slow hours. She had gorgeous sad eyes and a sharp
sense of humor. She never mentioned irate boyfriends, stalking ex-husbands or
enemies of any kind. She was not, in his opinion, hard or mean-spirited.
However, in his opinion, she was alone and on a journey, searching for
something in her life she had not found yet. It was Coates's impression that
Aubrey was an escort of some kind. She drove a dark red, late-model Cadillac.