The Night Crew (5 page)

‘‘Aw, God,’’ Anna said, turning away. She felt like she ought to spit. ‘‘That’s him.’’

‘‘All right,’’ Wyatt said. Frank dropped the blanket.

‘‘When did you find him?’’

‘‘He washed up about, mmm, two hours ago. People saw his body in the surf, thought he was drowning. One of the lifeguards went in after him, pulled him out.’’

As he spoke, a tear rolled down Anna’s cheek, and she frowned, and brushed it away. No tears. She didn’t cry. Then another one started.

‘‘He involved with any gangs? Buying dope, causing them trouble?’’

‘‘No . . . I don’t think so. But I don’t know him well enough to say for sure. Why?’’

Wyatt shrugged: ‘‘Those cuts on his face. They looked like they might be gang signs. They look the same on both sides, both cheeks.’’

‘‘I don’t know,’’ Anna said.

‘‘Okay. Listen, we’re gonna need a complete statement from you,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘When you last saw him, where he lives, who he knows, any troubles he might have had.

Family. That kind of stuff. The address on his ID isn’t any good.’’

Anna nodded. ‘‘He moved around a lot—he was living down in Inglewood, I think, an apartment. I’ve never been
to his place, but I’ve got a phone number. We’d usually pick him up at the pier, he worked at the ShotShop photo place.’’

Glass looked down at the pier, a mile south. ‘‘Right here?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’ They all turned to look down at the Santa Monica pier, a gray line of buildings thrusting into the water a mile to the south.

‘‘Has he been having trouble with anyone? Buying the crank or anything?’’ Wyatt asked.

‘‘He was pretty cheerful last night: he was riding with us because he heard about the raid, and set up our contact—he only rides with us once or twice a month, when we’ve got something complicated going on. He just seemed like . . . Jason. Nothing special.’’

‘‘And you don’t know about the crank. Who his supplier might have been.’’

‘‘No. I don’t,’’ Anna said.

‘‘You don’t know much about anything, do you?’’ Glass said.

‘‘Get off my case,’’ Anna snapped. ‘‘I got a goddamned friend dead on the beach and I don’t need any bullshit from cops.’’

Glass took a step toward her, Anna stood her ground, but Wyatt took a half-step himself, between them. ‘‘Pam, take it easy.’’ And to Anna: ‘‘You too.’’

Anna spent another ten minutes with them, picking up their weird body-dance again, and agreed to drive herself back to the station to make a statement. Wyatt walked part of the way back to her car with her.

‘‘Sorry about Pam,’’ he said. ‘‘She hasn’t been doing homicide all that long. She’s still kind of
street.
’’

‘‘She like to fight?’’ Anna asked.

‘‘She’s not afraid of it,’’ Wyatt said, glancing back at the woman, who was peering down at the body.

‘‘Listen, last night,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Jason might have been high. I don’t know, I can’t always tell, because he was so hyper. But when we got up to the hotel, for the jumper, he was shaking like a leaf. He was okay when he was shooting, but when we were riding up, he was . . . shaking. Jerking, almost, like spasms in his arms.’’

‘‘All right, we’ll tell the doc. You’re gonna be around, right?’’

‘‘Yeah. Wait.’’ Anna dug in a pocket, took out a business card, borrowed a pen from Wyatt and said, ‘‘Turn around, let me use your back.’’ Using his back as a writing surface— he seemed to like it—she scribbled two phone numbers on her card, and handed it to him. ‘‘The first number is my home phone, it’s unlisted with an answering machine. The next one is the cell phone I carry around with me. And on the front is the phone in the truck. I’m always around one or two of them.’’

‘‘Thanks. Make the statement.’’ He looked back at his partner, sighed and started that way.

‘‘Makes your teeth hurt, doesn’t it?’’ Anna said after him.

He stopped and half-turned. ‘‘What does?’’

‘‘Wanting to sleep with her so bad.’’

Wyatt regarded her gloomily, then broke down in a selfconscious grin. ‘‘I don’t think a woman could ever know how bad it gets,’’ he said. He started walking back, then turned, and in a tone that said
this is important
, he added: ‘‘And it’s not just that I want to sleep with her, you know. That’s only . . . the start of it.’’

five

Anna made the statement, and headed south. Creek lived in a town house in Marina Del Rey with two Egyptian Mau cats, seven hundred sailing books and a billiards table he claimed had been stolen from the set of a James Cagney movie. He still wasn’t answering the phone, and Anna suspected that he’d be on his boat.

Lost Dog
was a centerboard S-2/7.9 with a little Honda outboard hanging off the stern, and Creek had sailed it to Honolulu and back. On his return, Anna had presented him with a Certificate of Stupidity, which hung proudly in the main cabin, over the only berth big enough for Creek to sleep on.

Anna dumped her car in a parking lot, walked across the tarmac to the basin, down the long white ramp, through the clutching, pleasant odors of algae and gasoline. She spotted the
Lost Dog
’s kelly-green sail covers, so at least he wasn’t out sailing.

He was, in fact, down below, installing a marine head where he’d once carried a Porta Potti.

‘‘Creek,’’ she called, ‘‘come out of there.’’

Creek poked his head up the companionway. He was shirtless, had a hacksaw in his hand, and his hair was sodden with sweat. He read Anna’s face and said, ‘‘What happened?’’

‘‘Jason’s dead,’’ Anna said bluntly.

Creek stared at her for a moment, then shook his head wearily, said, ‘‘Aw, shit.’’ He ducked down the companionway and the hacksaw clanged into a toolbox. A moment later, he emerged again, wearing gym shorts, his body as hairy as a seventies shag carpet. ‘‘Fuckin’ crank, I bet,’’ he said.

‘‘He was shot,’’ Anna said.

‘‘Shot?’’ Creek thought about it for a moment, then shrugged, an Italian shrug with hands. ‘‘Still, probably dope.’’

‘‘Yeah, maybe,’’ Anna said.

‘‘What else would it be?’’

‘‘I don’t know,’’ Anna said. She filled him in on the details: where the body was found, how. ‘‘I was afraid it was you.’’

‘‘Naw; I won’t float.’’

She let some of it out, now: ‘‘His face looked like notebook paper: it was white, it was like . . .’’ She happened to look into the harbor water, where a small dead fish floated belly-up. ‘‘. . . Like that fish. He didn’t look like he’d ever been alive.’’

‘‘You know who he hung out with,’’ Creek said. ‘‘You give those kids enough time, they’ll kill you. Fuckin’ crazy Hollywood junkie crackheads.’’

Anna looked up at him, nibbled her lip. She didn’t want to tell him that she’d given his name to the cops, but she had to. He had to be ready. ‘‘Listen, I had to make a statement to the cops. We might have been the last people who saw Jason alive, except for the killer. I told them about Jason
using the crank and the other stuff, ’cause it might be relevant.’’

Creek exhaled, threw his head back and looked at the Windex at the top of the mast. ‘‘Wind is shit today,’’ he said. And: ‘‘They’ll be coming to see me.’’

Anna nodded. ‘‘That’s why I stopped by. They wanted the names of everybody on the crew with Jason,’’ she said. ‘‘I think we ought to bag it tonight, maybe for a couple of days.’’

‘‘Fine with me. I’ve got work to do on the boat,’’ Creek said. He flopped his arms, a gesture of resignation. In the bad old days, Creek had run boatloads of grass up from Mexico. He’d never been caught with a load, but at the end, the cops had known all about him, and when he’d been tripped up with a dime bag, they’d used it to put him in Chino for three hard years. He considered himself lucky.

‘‘If this was Alabama, I’d still be inside,’’ he said. He hadn’t smuggled or used drugs in a decade, but if the cops ran his name as a member of the night crew, they’d get a hit when his name came up: and they’d be around. ‘‘You better get in touch with Louis.’’

‘‘Already did, on the phone,’’ Anna said. ‘‘But I wanted you to know they’ll probably be coming around. I woulda lied to them . . .’’

‘‘Nah, they would of caught you, and then they woulda wondered why you were lying.’’ He grinned at her: ‘‘You want to go out and sit in the sun?’’

On the afternoons when Creek wasn’t working, he’d crank up the Honda outboard, motor out of the marina into the Pacific, raise just enough sail to carry him out a bit further, then back the jib, ease the main, lash the tiller to leeward and drift, sometimes all night, listening to the ocean.

Anna shook her head at the invitation: ‘‘I don’t think so,’’
she said. ‘‘I want to get back home, take a bath. I smell like a . . . dead guy. I’ve got it in my nose.’’
Jason had worked with them on and off for two years— they’d probably been out with him once a month, perhaps a little more often. Say, thirty times, Anna thought, a few hours each time. He was good at it: he had an artistic eye, knew how to frame a shot and wasn’t afraid to stick his face into trouble.

His main shortcoming was a lack of focus: he would get caught by something that interested him—might be a face, or visually tricky shot, and lose track of the story.

Anna cleaned up the house for a half-hour, bored, on edge and depressed all at once, and finally dragged two old Mission chairs into the back and began sanding the paint off. She’d found them in a yard sale, in reasonable condition, and figured she’d make about nine million percent profit on them, if she could ever get the turquoise paint off them.

The work was fiddly, dull, but let her think about Jason: not puzzling out the murder, not looking for connections, just remembering the nights he’d spent in the back of the truck— the decapitated woman on Olympic; the crazy Navajo with the baseball bat in the sex-toy joint, the pink plastic penisshaped dildos hurtling through the videotape like Babylonian arrows coming down on Jerusalem.

She grinned at that memory: stopped grinning when she remembered the fight at the Black Tulip, when the horseplayers had gone after the TV lights. Or the time they taped the two young runaways, sisters, looking for protection on Sunset, the fifty-year-old wolves already closing in . . .

At seven o’clock, with the daylight fading, she quit on the sanding, went inside, made a gin and tonic. The TV was running in the background, as it always was, and as she turned to go back outdoors, she saw the tape of the guy being
hit by the pig. He was getting more than his money’s worth, she thought, and grinned at the sight. Then:
Jason got that shot
. She stopped smiling and, still smelling of the paintstripper, carried the drink out to the canal-side deck and dropped into a canvas chair.
‘‘Anna.’’ Her name came out of the sky.

She looked up, and saw Hobart Page looking down from his second-story sundeck next door. ‘‘We’re having
margaritas. Come on up.’’

‘‘Thanks, Hobie, but, uh, I had a friend die. I just want to sit and think for a while.’’

Another voice: Jim McMillan, Hobie’s live-in. She could see his outline against the eastern sky. ‘‘Jeez. You okay?’’

‘‘Yeah, yeah. Bums me out, though,’’ she said.

‘‘Well, come over if you need company.’’
She’d just finished the drink when the phone rang—the home phone, the unlisted number. Creek or Louis, maybe her father, or one of a half-dozen other people, she thought.

But it was the cops: ‘‘Ms. Batory . . . Lieutenant Wyatt.’’

‘‘You’re working late,’’ Anna said.

‘‘We’re just wrapping up here,’’ he said.

‘‘Wrapping up? Did you find out who did it?’’

‘‘Afraid not. We did locate his apartment, not much there. Unless we get a break, we’re not gonna be able to do much with it . . . it looks like dope, or just random.’’

‘‘So you’re giving up?’’

‘‘No—but right now, we’ve got nothing,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘We checked out the ShotShop and I think he might have been killed there. He could’ve been dropped right out the back window into the water, and the window was unlocked, which it wasn’t supposed to be.’’

‘‘Was there any blood? He was pretty beat up . . .’’

‘‘Not visible blood, but there was a roll of photo paper in the back—you know, one of those printed scene things?’’

‘‘Yeah . . .’’

‘‘Anyway, the owner said it was back there, half unrolled, and now it’s gone. Maybe he was killed on the paper, and the paper was thrown out the window. It would’ve sunk . . . So we’ve got crime scene guys looking for blood, and checking around to see if the paper’s under the pier, but even if we find it, it won’t be much. We’re looking for anyone who saw anything, but we haven’t found anyone so far.’’

‘‘Did you talk to the fishermen out there? There are always a few . . .’’

‘‘Yeah, yeah, and we’ll talk to more of them tonight. But listen—I didn’t call to update you. We found O’Brien’s next of kin, an aunt and uncle out in Peru, Indiana. I don’t think they’re too well off, but, uh . . . They’d like to talk to you.’’

‘‘Me? What for?’’

‘‘I think they’d like you to make the arrangements for a funeral and so on . . .’’

She rubbed the back of her neck: ‘‘Aw, jeez . . .’’

‘‘Well, you’re the only friend we can find,’’ Wyatt said. ‘‘There was nothing of value in his apartment—some electronic gear and an old bike, clothes. Anyway, I didn’t want to give them your unlisted phone number, but told them I’d ask you to call back.’’

‘‘All right, give me the number.’’
Nancy Odum answered the phone in Peru and passed it off to her husband, Martin. Martin Odum said, ‘‘We don’t fly, and it’s a long way to come to get a stereo set. If you could handle the arrangements, we’d be happy to pay you somethin’ for your time.’’

‘‘No, that’s okay,’’ Anna said, thinking,
No it’s not
. She’d never arranged a funeral, and hoped she’d never have to.

Martin Odum continued in the same glum tone: ‘‘His mother and father are buried here in Peru, we thought maybe . . . cremation? We could sprinkle the ashes on their graves. If that’d be okay with you.’’

‘‘I’ll take care of it,’’ Anna said. ‘‘He had a few hundred dollars coming from my company, I’ll use that for the cremation and to ship the remains. Uh, his stuff, do you want me to sell it? I don’t know how much I’d get, but I could send you whatever it is.’’

‘‘That’d be nice of you, ma’am.’’

They worked out the rest of the melancholy details, the phones making funny satellite sounds; and the Odums sounded as morose as Anna felt. When they were done, she hung up, mixed another drink, thought about making it a double and did.
Back outside, sitting in the canvas chair, she let her mind drift: and it drifted, under the influence of the alcohol, to the last funeral she’d been to, so long ago . . .

Anna had grown up on a farm in south-central Wisconsin, a 480-acre corn operation that lay in the crook of the Whitewater River, not far from Madison.

Her mother was a piano teacher, and she’d died in an automobile accident when Anna was six. She could still remember the melancholy, almost gothic circumstances of the funeral at the small Baptist church, and the slow procession to the tiny graveyard down the dusty gravel road: how bright and warm the day had been, the red-winged blackbirds just beginning to flock, one particular bird perched on a cattail, looking her in the eye as the procession passed . . .

Death and music . . .

Anna was the best pianist at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, the year she graduated. She moved to UCLA, and the year she took her MFA, she was one of the best two
or three in the graduate school. Not good enough. To make it as a concert pianist, she would have had to have been the best in the world, in her year and a year or two before and after. As it was—one of the best at UCLA—she got session gigs; movie music.

She still played the hard stuff, out of habit, and, really, out of a kind of trained-in love. But in her one last semiregular gig, Sunday nights at the Kingsborough Hotel, she played a dusty, romantic, out-of-date jazz.

Her mother’s music: they’d played a piece of it at her funeral, and all those Wisconsin farm folks had thought it was a wonderful thing.
Too early, half-drunk, Anna went to bed.

Alcohol never brought sleep.

Instead, it released unhappy images from some mental cage, and they prowled through her dreams, kicking old memories back to life. From time to time, half-awake, she’d imagine that she’d just groaned or moaned. At three in the morning, she woke up, looked at the clock, felt herself sweating into the sheets.

At three-fifteen, she heard a noise, and was instantly awake. The noise had a solid reality to it.

Not a dream noise.

Anna slept in a pair of Jockey underpants. She slipped out of bed, groped around for a t-shirt that she’d tossed at a chair, but hadn’t found it when she heard the noise again. She moved silently to the head of the stairs, listened.

Tik-tik . . . scrape.

Back door
, she thought. Definitely real. She was getting oriented now, stepped to the nightstand, found the phone. When she picked up the receiver, the dial lighted and she pushed a speed-dial button. Two rings and a man answered
on the other end: Jim McMillan, from next door, groggy with sleep. ‘‘What?’’

‘‘Jim, this is Anna. We got one: he’s right outside my back door.’’

‘‘Holy cow.’’ Then she heard him speak to Hobie: ‘‘It’s Anna, she’s got one outside her back door,’’ and Hobie: ‘‘Okay.’’