The Murder Book (13 page)

“I never saw that.” Was the bastard emphasizing
anus
because… ?

“Did Tonya Stumpf engage in physical intimacy of any sort with Detective Schwinn?”

“I never saw that,” Milo repeated, wondering if they’d used some sort of night scope, had everything on film and he was burnt toast—

“Mouth on penis,” said Poulsenn. “Yes or no?”

“No.”

“Penis on or in vagina.”

“No.”

“Penis on or in
anus
.”

Same emphasis. Definitely not coincidence. “No,” said Milo, “and I think I’d better talk to a Protective League representative.”

“Do you?” said Broussard.

“Yes, this is obviously—”

“You could do that, Detective Sturgis. If you think you really need representation. But why would you think that?”

Milo didn’t answer.

“Do you have something to worry about, Detective?” said Broussard.

“I didn’t until you guys hauled me in—”

“We didn’t haul you, we invited you.”

“Oh,” said Milo. “My mistake.”

Broussard touched the tape recorder, as if threatening to switch it on again. Leaned in so close Milo could count the stitches on his lapel. No pores. Not a single damn pore, the bastard was carved of ebony. “Detective Sturgis, you’re not implying coercion, are you?”

“No—”

“Tell us about your relationship with Detective Schwinn.”

Milo said, “We’re partners, not buddies. Our time together is spent on work. We’ve cleared seven homicides in three months — one hundred percent of our calls. Recently, we picked up an eighth one, a serious whodunit that’s gonna require—”

“Detective,” said Broussard. Louder. Cutting off that avenue of conversation. “Have you ever witnessed Detective Schwinn receiving money from anyone during work hours?”

No desire to talk about Janie Ingalls.

Caught up in his headhunter ritual, one that wouldn’t — couldn’t be stopped — until it played itself out. Or something else: an
active
disinterest in Janie Ingalls?

Milo said, “No.”

“Not with Tonya Stumpf?”

“No.”

“Or anyone else?” barked Broussard.

“No,” said Milo. “Never, not once.”

Broussard lowered his face and stared into Milo’s eyes. Milo felt his breath, warm, steady, minty — now suddenly sour, as if bile had surged up his gullet. So the guy had body processes after all.

“Not once,” he repeated.

They let him go as abruptly as they’d hauled him in, no parting words, both IA men turning their backs on him. He left the station directly, didn’t go upstairs to his desk or bother to check his messages.

The next morning a departmental notice appeared in his home mailbox. Plain white envelope, no postmark, hand-delivered.

Immediate transfer to the West L.A. station, some gobbledygook about manpower allocation. A typed addendum said he’d already been assigned a locker there and listed the number. The contents of his desk and his personal effects had been moved from Central.

His outstanding cases had been transferred to other detectives.

He phoned Central, tried to find out who’d caught Janie Ingalls’s murder, got a lot of runaround, finally learned that the case had left the station and gone to Metro Homicide — Parker Center’s high-profile boys.

Kicked upstairs.

Metro loved publicity, and Milo figured finally Janie would hit the news.

But she didn’t.

He phoned Metro, left half a dozen messages, wanting to give them the information he hadn’t had time to chart in the Ingalls murder book. The Cossack party, Melinda Waters’s disappearance, Dr. Schwartzman’s suspicions about Caroline Cossack.

No one returned his calls.

At West L.A., his new lieutenant was piggish and hostile, and Milo’s assignment to a partner was delayed — more department gibberish. A huge pile of stale 187s and a few new ones — idiot cases, luckily — landed on his desk. He rode alone, walked through the job like a robot, disoriented by his new surroundings. West L.A. had the lowest crime stats in the city, and he found himself missing the rhythm of the bloody streets.

He made no effort to make friends, avoided socializing after hours. Not that invitations came his way. The Westside’s D’s were even colder than his Central colleagues, and he wondered how much of it could be blamed on his pairing with Schwinn, maybe picking up a snitch jacket. Or had the rumors followed him here, too?

Fag cop. Fag
snitch
cop? A few weeks in, a cop named Wes Baker tried to be social — telling Milo he’d heard Milo had a master’s, it was about time someone with brains went into police work. Baker figured himself for an intellectual, played chess, lived in an apartment full of books and used big words when small ones would’ve sufficed. Milo saw him as a pretentious jerk, but allowed Baker to rope him in on double dates with his girlfriend and her stewardess pals. Then one night Baker drove by and spotted him standing on a West Hollywood street corner, waiting for the light to change. The only men out walking were seeking other men, and Baker’s silent stare told Milo plenty.

Shortly after, someone broke into Milo’s locker and left a stash of sadomasochistic gay porn.

A week after that, Delano Hardy — the station’s only black D — was assigned to be his partner. The first few weeks of their rides were tight-lipped, worse than with Schwinn, almost unbearably tense. Del was a religious Baptist who’d run afoul of the brass by criticizing the department’s racial policies, but he had no use for sexual nonconformity. News of the porn stash had gotten round; ice-eyes seemed to follow Milo around.

Then things eased. Del turned out to be psychologically flexible — a meticulous, straight-arrow with good instincts and an obsession with doing the job. The two of them began working as a team, solved case after case, forged a bond based on success and the avoidance of certain topics. Within six months, they were in the groove, putting away bad guys with no sweat.
Neither
of them invited to station house barbecues, bar crawls. Cop-groupie gang bangs.

When the work day was over, Del returned to a Leimert Park tract home and his upright, uptight wife who still didn’t know about Milo, and Milo skulked back to his lonely-guy pad. But for the Ingalls case, he had a near-perfect solve rate.

But for the Ingalls case…

He never saw Pierce Schwinn again, heard a rumor the guy had taken early retirement. A few months later he called Parker Center Personnel, lied, managed to learn that Schwinn had left with no record of disciplinary action.

So maybe it had nothing to do with Schwinn, after all, and everything to do with Janie Ingalls. Emboldened, he phoned Metro again, fishing for news on the case. Again, no callback. He tried Records, just in case someone had closed it, was informed they had no listing of the case as solved, no sighting of Melinda Waters.

One hot July morning, he woke up dreaming about Janie’s corpse, drove over to Hollywood, and cruised by Bowie Ingalls’s flop on Edgemont. The pink building was gone, razed to the dirt, the soil chewed out for a subterranean parking lot, the beginnings of framework set in place. The skeleton of a much larger apartment building.

He drove to Gower and headed a mile north. Eileen Waters’s shabby little house was still standing but Waters was gone and two slender, effeminate young men — antiques dealers — were living there. Within moments, both were flirting outrageously with Milo, and that scared him. He’d put on all the cop macho, and still they could tell…

The pretty-boys were renting, the house had been vacant when they’d moved in, neither had any idea where the previous tenant had gone.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said one of the lads. “She was a smoker. The place reeked.”

“Disgusting,” agreed his roomie. “We cleaned up everything, went neo-Biedermeir. You wouldn’t recognize it.” Grinning conspiratorially. “So tell us. What did she
do
?”

M
ilo finished the story and walked into my kitchen.

The beeline to the fridge, finally.

I watched him open the freezer compartment where the bottle of Stolichnaya sat. The vodka had been a gift from him to Robin and me, though I rarely touched anything other than Scotch or beer and Robin drank wine.

Robin…

I watched him fill half a glass, splash in some grapefruit juice for color. He drained the glass, poured a refill, returned to the dining room table.

“That’s it,” he said.

I said, “A black detective named Broussard. As in…”

“Yup.”

“Ah.”

Tossing back the second vodka, he returned to the kitchen, fixed a third glass, more booze, no juice. I thought of saying something — sometimes he wants me to play that role. Remembered how much Chivas I’d downed since Robin’s departure and held my tongue.

This time when he returned, he sat down heavily, wrapped thick hands around the glass, and swirled, creating a tiny vodka whirlpool.

“John G. Broussard,” I said.

“None other.”

“The way he and the other guy leaned on you. Sounds Kafkaesque.”

He smiled. “Today I woke up as a cockroach? Yeah, good old John G. had a knack for that kind of thing from way back. Served the lad well, hasn’t it?”

John Gerald Broussard had been L.A.’s chief of police for a little over two years. Handpicked by the outgoing mayor, in what many claimed was an obvious pander aimed at neutralizing critics of LAPD’s racial problems, Broussard had a military bearing and a staggeringly imperi-ous personality. The City Council distrusted him, and most of his own officers — even black cops — despised him because of his headhunter background. Broussard’s open disdain for anyone who questioned his decisions, his apparent disinterest in the details of street policing, and his obsession with interdepartmental discipline helped complete the picture. Broussard seemed to revel in his lack of popularity. At his swearing-in ceremony, decked out as usual in full dress uniform and a chestful of ribbon candy, the new chief laid out his number one priority: zero tolerance for any infractions by police officers. The following day, Broussard dissolved a beloved system of community-police liaison outposts in high-crime neighborhoods, claiming they did nothing to reduce felonies and that excessive fraternization with citizens “deprofessionalized” the department.

“Spotless John Broussard,” I said. “And maybe he helped bury the Ingalls case. Any idea why?”

He didn’t answer, drank some more, glanced again at the murder book.

“Looks like it was really sent to you,” I said.

Still no reply. I let a few more moments pass. “Did anything ever develop on Ingalls?”

He shook his head.

“Melinda Waters never showed up?”

“I wouldn’t know if she did,” he said. “Once I got to West L.A., I didn’t pursue it. For all I know, she got married, had kids, is living in a nice little house with a big-screen TV.”

Talking too fast, too loud. I knew confession when I heard it.

He ran a finger under his collar. His forehead was shiny, and the stress cracks around his mouth and eyes had deepened.

He finished the third vodka, stood, and aimed his bulk back at the kitchen.

“Thirsty,” I said.

He froze, wheeled. Glared. “Look who’s talking. Your eyes. You gonna tell me you’ve been dry?”

“This morning I have been,” I said.

“Congratulations. Where’s Robin?” he demanded. “What the hell’s going on with you two?”

“Well,” I said, “my mail’s been interesting.”

“Yeah, yeah. Where is she, Alex?”

Words filled my head but logjammed somewhere in my throat. My breath got short. We stared at each other.

He laughed first. “Show you mine if you show me yours?”

I told him the basics.

“So it was an opportunity for her,” he said. “She’ll get it out of her system, and come back.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“It happened before, Alex.”

Thanks for the memory, pal.
I said, “This time I can’t help thinking it’s more. She kept the offer from me for two weeks.”

“You were busy,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s it. The way she looked at me in Paris. The way she left. The fault line might have shifted too much.”

“C’mon,” he said, “how about some optimism? You’re always preaching to me about that.”

“I don’t preach. I suggest.”

“Then I
suggest
you shave and scrape the crud from your eyes and get into clean clothes, stop ignoring her calls, and try to work things out, for God’s sake. You guys are like…”

“Like what?”

“I was gonna say an old married couple.”

“But we’re not,” I said. “Married. All these years together and neither of us took the initiative to make it legal. What does that say?”

“You didn’t need the paperwork. Believe me, I know all about that.”

He and Rick had been together even longer than Robin and I.

“Would you if you could?” I said.

“Probably,” he said. “Maybe. What’s the big issue between you guys, anyway?”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “And I haven’t been avoiding her. We just keep missing each other.”

“Try harder.”

“She’s on the road, Milo.”

“Try harder, anyway, goddammit.”

“What’s
with
you?” I said.

“Acute
disillusionment
. On top of all the chronic disillusionment the job deals me.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I need some things in my life to be constant, pal. As in you guys. I want Robin and you to be okay for
my
peace of mind, okay? Is that too much to ask? Yeah, yeah, it’s self-centered, but tough shit.”

What can you say to that?

I sat there, and he swiped at his brow. More sweat leaked through. He looked thoroughly miserable. Crazily enough, I felt guilty.

“We’ll work it out,” I heard myself saying. “Now tell me why you looked like death when you saw Janie Ingalls’s photo?”

“Low blood sugar,” he said. “No time for breakfast.”

“Ah,” I said. “Hence the vodka.”

He shrugged. “I thought it was out of my head, but maybe I figure I should’ve pursued it.”