Strip (26 page)

J
ERRY GAFFNEY WAS
only half asleep, because his mind couldn’t quite shut down. He was thinking about too many things, or rather, passing over each of them in a repetitive cycle. Words, phrases, images had to be revisited. He slowly rose toward consciousness. He was lying on the clean, crisp white sheet on the big California-king bed in an apartment in Manhattan Beach. He looked at the digital clock on his right side and it said 4:15
A.M.
He looked to his left and in the dim light he saw the creamy back of Sandy Belknap.

It was a short, abruptly tapering back that started with lean but square shoulders that looked as though she did some kind of workout, and then narrowed quickly. The ridge of backbone near the top became a recess at mid-back until it flattened just above the dimple that announced the start of her perfect bottom.

Jerry felt reverence for the beauty he could see at this moment in the dim predawn light. He had no right to be with her, certainly no right to be naked with her in her bed. It was one of those sudden phenomena, rare and unexpected like hailstorms.

He had spent much of the day after his brother, Jimmy, left driving her around in a new sedan with dealer plates that she had borrowed from the car lot. They had gone from restaurant to bar to office building to apartment, talking to her friends. At each stop she’d introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis. Her girlfriends were all temptingly attractive.

But Sandy Belknap was not somebody who suffered from competition. She had been a cheerleader at the University of Missouri and had held some kind of national sorority office. She was not a genius, but she could speak fluently and confidently, and that probably was about as useful as high intelligence. She was beautiful in a blond, blue-eyed, Midwestern kind of way, but maybe not clever or single-minded enough to be what she so obviously must have wanted to be, an actress. All good-looking young women from other states wanted that, even if they didn’t do anything to accomplish it except present themselves in Los Angeles.

He lay in the bed feeling the subtle circulation of cool air from the grate over the bed and back into the intake in the hall ceiling at the other end of the room. The day had been one of those Los Angeles high-pressure summer days when the sky was a perfectly unvarying light blue bowl of infinity. The heat was the sort that radiated upward from the pavement to mid-thigh while the sun scorched the shoulders and back. Movement in the city was toward the ocean, like a tide that only began to subside around dusk as people moved inland to cool, dark bars.

When Sandy had introduced him as her cousin from St. Louis, the girls she was talking to seemed to take it for granted that she was lying. He would find an excuse to leave them alone for a few minutes at each stop, and she would confide to the other girl that she had an uncontrollable crush on Joe Carver and wanted him to have her address and cell phone number. She was even planning a party so he could show up without bothering to call or ask for a date.

But something else happened during the day, a kind of slow current that was always working on them and changing their course just a bit. As they went from place to place in the searing heat, they would get thirsty. He would buy them a drink. Twice they got into traffic jams, sat motionless in the skin-cooling conditioned air blowing over them, and talked. The alcohol made them imagine they’d known each other longer than they had.

In the evening they stopped for dinner at the Water Grill because the name sounded cool, and the fact that only fish seemed light enough to eat. They were already in a state of habituation from mere proximity, so many stops, so much talk, so many times when they had brushed against each other, breathed each other’s air. The dinner revived them, disguised the effect of all the alcohol, but it added to the talk and the familiarity.

They made it into three clubs afterward—Wash, Stable, and The Room. The experience began to blur into one long trek past turning faces in a long, dark tunnel with music so loud he could remember feeling it rather than hearing it. Lights sputtered, wavered, and swept, and the young faces appeared for a moment and then drifted away.

During the evening the talk that went on was between Sandy and her women friends in ladies’ rooms. At 1:00
A.M.,
Sandy got tired and he drove her to her apartment in Manhattan Beach. She warned him that she hadn’t been there in almost a week, and when they got there he had to help her carry a huge stack of unopened mail. A few letters slipped off her pile, and she bent to pick it up off the carpet and lost her balance. He steadied her, picked her up, carried her to her bed, and set her down gently. He assumed she would close her eyes and fall asleep instantly, but she didn’t. Instead she popped up on the bed, pressed her lips against his, and put her arms around him.

He had the thought that he didn’t belong there with her, but it was only a passing sensation and not the most powerful at the time. It was like the acknowledgment he had made a few times that this or that money didn’t belong to him: it didn’t affect his behavior. He had been wishing for this moment since he had met her, without allowing himself to think about it in specific terms, and now he knew that something similar must have been in her mind too. It was different for her because she had known, of course, that all she had to do was signify willingness and it would happen. Now it had.

It was 4:15. As he thought back on what they had done, he was pleased. To the extent that he could interpret her sounds and movements, he believed that she had fallen asleep happy and satisfied. But it had left him in a state of pleasant agitation, not capable of real sleep. She was a daylight creature, somebody who got up early in the morning and went to work. He had worked nights since the day after he had liberated himself from tenth grade fifteen years ago.

He could feel that the night was reaching its most silent, the bluish half-light that would allow him to sleep. He drifted off.

Ding-dong DONG dong. Dong-dong DING dong.
There was a pause in the chime sequence, but it made the mind alert and disturbed, because it was waiting for the rest of the tune to complete itself.

Sandy sat up suddenly in the bed, her eyes wide. She leaned over him, her right breast brushing his shoulder as she squinted to see the clock on his side. She saw it, jumped off the bed, and had her feet on the floor. Jerry was startled by her athleticism. She’d had no more than an hour of sleep, and she must still be feeling the drinks, but she was moving fast.

She was at the window looking down at the doorstep just as the ring began again. She turned to Gaffney and spoke as though she were resuming an ongoing conversation. “It’s Paul. He’s here.”

“Paul, your boyfriend?”

“Yes. Paul Herrenberg. I knew I should have told him I was helping you.”

“Give me a second.” Jerry Gaffney sat up, snatched the pile of his clothes beside the bed, and pulled them on at high speed. He was dressed just as the next dreadful ring began and the man outside started to pound on the door. Gaffney stepped into his shoes, pinned the badge to his belt beside the buckle, and slipped the gun holster onto his belt where it would show. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“You’ve got choices to make. If you want me to hide, I’ll hide, and you can say you were too drunk to drive to his apartment. If you want me to tell him about the case, I’ll do that. If you want me to throw him out, I’ll do that.”

“Get in the closet.” She went to the dresser, plucked a folded flannel nightgown out of a drawer, and pulled it over her head while she walked toward the apartment door. She opened it and then went down two more steps across the tiny foyer to open the outer door.

Jerry Gaffney wasn’t happy about being trapped in a closet, but there was little choice in the one-bedroom apartment. He slipped inside and closed the sliding door most of the way, leaving only a small space open at the end.

He could hear her in a stage whisper. “Paul! What in the world are you doing here at this hour? It’s four-thirty.”

“Where the hell have you been?” the man’s voice said, much louder.

“Be quiet,” she whispered. “People are asleep.”

“You didn’t answer me. Where were you tonight?”

“Here, mostly. I was exhausted. It was so hot yesterday.”

“Bullshit!” he bellowed. “I called you over and over, like a dozen times. I left messages on your cell and on your regular phone. You obviously weren’t around to hear them.”

“When I go to sleep, I turn off my phones. That means I don’t want to be bothered.”

“That’s great, Sandy. That’s just fucking great. I wait most of the night for you to show up, and you don’t even have the decency to call me.”

“I never said I was going to your apartment last night. There was no reason to call to tell you I wasn’t coming, because there was no reason to think I was.”

“Look, Sandy.” He spoke with a quiet fury, slowly and plainly. “I was worried, so I started calling your friends.”

“You called my friends in the middle of the night?”

“People said they saw you in clubs at midnight, quarter to one, one-thirty. It sounded like everybody in town saw you at one club or another, so stop lying about it. You were out with a guy.”

She laughed, but it was a difficult thing to do well. “If you only knew.”

“I do. You told half the city his name. Joe Carver.”

“That is just so completely wrong. I can’t believe you called everybody and embarrassed me like that. I can’t believe anybody told you anything, and that you got it all wrong and put the most sickening interpretation on it. I’m so shocked. Just go home.”

From his closet, Jerry Gaffney heard her begin to close the door, but then there was a thump like the heel of a hand striking the door and the wood vibrating. “Don’t you shut the door in my face. Too much has happened for that.” As Paul talked, Jerry could hear that the voice was coming nearer, up the steps and into the apartment. When he spoke again, Paul was in the small living room just ten feet from the bedroom door. “Why didn’t you invite me in, Sandy? What’s different that you’d stand in the doorway to try to keep me out?”

“Nothing is different. I never would have wanted anybody to come banging on my door at this hour. I asked you to go, so do it.”

“Not yet.”

“I’m asking you to leave.” Jerry Gaffney could tell from the way her voice sounded that she had stepped in his way, blocking his entry into the bedroom. Jerry could have told her that it was the wrong way to keep him out.

Paul Herrenberg’s voice became a tortured bellow. “He’s here, isn’t he? You’ve got the guy in the bedroom with you. Carver! Come on out! Joe Carver!” His footsteps were heavy as he brushed past Sandy.

“What do you think you’re doing? You have no right to barge into my bedroom.”

“I want to meet Joe Carver, the guy who’s so much better than I am.” Herrenberg was pacing around in the bedroom now. Jerry could hear him walk to the bathroom and look in.

Jerry Gaffney was not a man who was reluctant to deliver a cheap, surprise punch, which was one reason he was listening intently to Paul Herrenberg’s location at every moment. But he had been in enough fights to know that he would be foolish to throw away any opportunity to avoid fighting, so he was listening even more intently for reassurance that Herrenberg wasn’t about to open the closet. So what he heard next was both unwelcome and welcome at once. Paul Herrenberg had been staring at Sandy Belknap’s sheets like a detective, and then he dropped to his hands and knees to look under the bed. If he was doing that, he would certainly get to Sandy’s closet next, but meanwhile, he could hardly be more vulnerable.

Jerry Gaffney slid the closet door open, delivered a top-of-the-foot kick to Paul Herrenberg’s face, belly-flopped onto his limp body, and dragged his arms behind him to close the handcuffs on his wrists.

“What the—”

“Don’t talk,” said Gaffney gruffly. Herrenberg was much bigger than Gaffney had anticipated, and he was already thinking that if the cuffs didn’t close in time, he was going to have to go for the gun. “I’m a police officer, and I’m going to—”

“You son of a—”

Jerry dazed him with a punch to the side of his head. “I asked you not to interrupt. You’re going to have two choices. You can cooperate completely, or you can act like an angry asshole. If you do that, you’re going to jail, and the trip will not be easy or pleasant. There are enough charges already to hold you.”

“You can’t just hit me like that. I’ve got a witness.”

“Yes, I can.” Gaffney punched the other side of his head, then grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up as though he might slam Herrenberg’s face on the floor. He held it there for a long, tense moment, then released it. “Now. Do you want to get through this without anything turning ugly?”

Herrenberg seemed to think for a minute, then went limp. “Yes.”

“You just pushed your way into a lady’s apartment after she told you that you weren’t going to be allowed inside. That’s forcible entry. You pushed her aside to get in. That’s battery at least, and maybe even assault. Given the hour and the fact that you saw she isn’t wearing much, you might draw some class-one felony charges.”

“So what are you doing in her apartment?”

He grasped Herrenberg’s hair again and hissed into his ear, “I don’t have to tell you anything.” He released him. “But I will. I’m attempting to apprehend an armed robbery suspect named Joe Carver, who seems to be interested in Miss Belknap. That means that any single stupid thing you do or say is interfering with a felony investigation. It’s also harassing and threatening a brave citizen who has agreed to place herself in danger to act as bait.”

“Oh, shit,” Paul mumbled. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Now I want you to listen carefully, because what you say and do next is going to pretty much determine what the rest of your life will be like. If you’re going to be a hard guy, you might get off with ten years, which is only five served if you’re lucky. But you don’t strike me as lucky.”

“What do I have to do?”

“First, apologize to the lady.”