The Dead Do Not Improve (13 page)

218A
39th Avenue was a flat-topped two-story stucco building whose color could best be described as moldy orange. A rusted-out Dodge Ram was parked diagonally across the driveway, blocking in two identical black Mercedes S-Class sedans. A modest scooter, the sort that looks natural only with twelve plastic bags of Chinese delivery saddled out to the sides, stood abandoned on the sidewalk.

Finch parked his car a few blocks away on Fulton. The dislodged, happy bird was still bumping around. He kept catching himself grinning. With one of these random grins on his face, he called the number the girl had provided.

She picked up before the phone had a chance to ring. “You’re here?” She was whispering. In the background, Finch heard a TV.

“A few blocks away, as promised.”

“Is your car easily accessible?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I’ll be out in front of the house.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have your gun?”

“I can bring one, but you have to explain why.”

“Can’t now. Just bring one, please. It’s not a big deal.”

From the trunk of his car, stashed below the tub that held his wet suit, Finch pulled out his double-action 96D Beretta and its blond leather holster. He hadn’t brought a jacket, so he unlatched the weapon and shoved it down the front of his pants. The sight of the butt of the gun sticking up out of the waist of his jeans struck him as incredibly funny, as if he had woken up from a deep slumber and found himself on the other side of the law. It occurred to him, vaguely, that he should call for backup, but in his state of spasmodic joy, he couldn’t bring himself to pick up his radio.

He strutted up to the moldy orange house. With each step, the gun slid farther down his pants leg. He wondered how the black kids did it. Then, thinking of what Kim’s explanation would be, he laughed out loud.

Lionface was standing on the stoop, huddled in a midnight blue kimono. She looked cold. Her hair, which Finch could have sworn had been brown and straight, was actually deep red, curly, and tied up in a bun atop her head.

Finch tried to summon up his memory of any part of her other than her two swinging breasts, but all he could muster up was a mole, although
he couldn’t possibly tell you which body part it had punctuated, and an abstracted face, which, had he been a bit more lucid, he would have recognized as that of the actress who played Juliet in the sixties film version of
Romeo and Juliet
they used to show in schools, despite the quick flash of nipples and an arty, anatomically impossible sex scene.

And had the circumstances not made it nearly impossible that the redhead waving on the stoop was, in fact, an incidental half-naked woman, Finch would have kept walking down the street. But when he nodded, she nodded back. He recognized the reassuring breadth of her cheekbones. She waved him inside.

Even from the sidewalk, Finch had picked up the heavy smell of skunk. By the time he walked into the house, the smell was so thick that he was forced to breathe through his mouth. Lionface was standing in the corner of a bare foyer, huddled forward with her hands gripped tightly on the sash of her kimono, as if anticipating some gusty, denuding wind.

Finch whispered, “I brought the gun. But you’re going to have to tell me why.”

Lionface put her finger to her lips and motioned her head at a flight of carpeted stairs.

Hand on gun, Finch followed her up to an unlit hallway. He counted three doors on either side, each one framed in a fluorescent glow. He could now feel the skunk down in his lungs. Lionface once again put a finger to her lips. Then, with those two hands trained in tenderness, she opened the first door on the right.

Finch’s suspicions were confirmed. Inside, in what had presumably once been a bedroom, forty marijuana plants reached greedily up to their parent grow lights. Finch heard the opening bars to the Dead
Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” In the back corner of the room he saw a couch wrapped in black plastic where two men sat, both propped up and unconscious.

The first was a thin, bearded man, who, at first glance, appeared to have vomited all over the front of his black hoodie. All he could see of the other man was a round bald head. The rest of his face was obscured by an airplane sleep mask and a gag, loosely tied.

Finch started to move toward the men, but Lionface stepped in front of him. Her eyes bulged. Finch arched his eyebrows and stuck his thumb out in the general direction of the street. She nodded and led him outside.

She kept walking once she hit fresh air, across the yard, down the block, across Fulton, and into Golden Gate Park. In a foggy clearing in the trees, she stopped, spun around, dug into one of the pockets of her kimono, and handed him a California driver’s license.

She said, “Heather.”

Finch looked at the driver’s license: Heather Alejandra LeBlanc from San Clemente, CA. Born 10/2/1984.

“Okay, Heather, can you explain what that was back there?”

“Is it not obvious?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I thought … Well, I thought showing you would be enough.”

The grinding condescension of the pop star acne medication hack had been replaced with a breathy, anachronistic tremolo. Finch didn’t know what to make of this change, but it occurred to him that he should suspect something was up.

“Is anyone dead?”

“No.”

“Who were those men?”

“You didn’t recognize him?”

“Recognize who?”

“Mister Hofspaur.”

“That was Hofspaur?”

“Bald head?”

“I’m going to have to go back there and look more closely.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re going to come soon. I’m sure they’ve already noticed that the video cameras are down. Please, you have to help me.”

“Who is they?”

“The same people who drugged you.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Well, for you … It was a mistake. They thought you were some other cop. But for the other guy, the pornographer”—she looked down, demurely, while pronouncing that word—“they’ve been planning this for a while. They want to scare him.”

“They thought I was some other cop?”

“Bar Davis.”

“Bar Davis is a woman.”

“Well, they know that now. But they just assumed, you know, ’cause you were with the other guy.”

“They thought I was Bar Davis.”

“Yes. But they knew they fucked up when they checked your ID when you were passed out.”

“And the other man back there?”

“The closest thing you could call him would be my boyfriend.”

“What happened to him?”

“Once I knew you were coming, I drugged him.”

“With what?”

“Lots of stuff.”

“Well, I have to assess whether or not somebody is going to die.”

There was a snap to their exchange that struck Finch as odd. It was as if they had already had this talk and were simply rehearsing it again, quickly, so each could head back home. For some reason unknown to him, maybe the residual effect of the drug, he licked his palm and slicked back his salty, stiff hair.

“So the other man is your boyfriend.”

“You have to help me here. Please.”

“Is there anyone else in the house?”

“I can’t tell you right now. Please, can you take me down to the station or something?”

A distant look of reverie fell over Heather LeBlanc’s face, as if she were trying to remember something from a happier past. Her eyes began to fill with tears. Her lip trembled. With a restored tremolo, she wailed, “I know why you’re suspicious. You’re right to be suspicious. Listen, I know why you don’t trust me. I was back there in the café when they drugged you, and you can probably tell, just from your detective’s eye, that I haven’t lived a good life.”

“What?”

“I’ve been bad.”

“That doesn’t matter, Heather. Why are you in danger?”

“I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you right now. You have to trust me. Be generous, Inspector. I know I have no right to ask you, but you need to help me.”

“Well, I am a police officer, and therefore am bound by my—”

“Please!”

“We’ll take you down to the station. You’ll be safe there. We can sort things out. But first, I have to tend to those two guys in that house. You understand, right?”

Something buzzed. She nodded. They left the park. On the corner of 39th and Fulton, Finch’s gun got dislodged from his waist and fell, barrel-first, down his left pants leg. Finch laughed again, but then wondered what might have happened to his brain.

When they got to the house, both of the Mercedeses, the old Dodge Ram truck, the boyfriend, and Hofspaur were all gone. Of course they were.