The Night Detectives (5 page)

“What about a brother? Big guy? My size with close-cropped hair and a prosthesis on his lower leg?”

“She was an only child.”

I looked at the skinny kid with the cat crawling up his leg: I thought,
dear old dad
. I said, “Who is this Edward that the pimp was talking about?”

“I have no idea. I swear!”

So I told him she was dead and waited as he cried. It was a long wait. He said over and over that Grace would never kill herself, especially after the baby came.

Finally, I asked if he had any place he could go.

“My parents live up in Riverside. It's a boring hellhole.”

“My advice is to go there. Right now. And stay awhile.”

He nodded, but it was obvious he was descending into a fog of grief, in addition to being beaten up. I made him repeat what he would do.

Go.

Now.

I handed him my business card.

“Private investigator,” he said quietly. “Are you trying to find out who killed Grace?”

“Yes.”

“I want to hire you.”

“We already have a client.”

He repeated his request. “I've got to know what happened to Grace. And I want the bastard who killed her to burn.” Misery shone in his watery, pale eyes.

“Okay.”

He reached under the cushions of the sofa and I tensed.

“Here's five hundred.” He handed me a wad of cash. “Is that enough for a start?”

“Sure. But I'll do this pro-bono.”

“No,” he said. “I don't want your charity. I want you to work for me, and cash talks. Grace taught me that.”

I realized it might be good to have a living client, especially because the man who had hired us yesterday was dead and Peralta had lied to the Phoenix Police, saying he had never even come into our office. I took the cash and wrote out a receipt for it on a blank sheet of paper.

He rooted around in the kitchen and returned with a flash drive. “This has her client list. The regulars.”

“Have you seen it?”

He shook his head. I could understand why he wouldn't want to look.

I took it and told him we'd be in touch, but that he should call me when he got to Riverside.

His voice stopped me as I was halfway out the door.

“Thank you again for changing the baby. Do you have kids?”

I didn't answer.

“They totally change the way you look at life.”

9

Personal history: the day I arrived in San Diego to take an Assistant Professor of History position at the same university that Grace Hunter would later attend, I drove all the way to the end of Interstate 8. It put me in Ocean Beach. I had never been there before. Unlike today, when I was growing up Phoenicians didn't go to San Diego every summer by the tens of thousands. I had visited the city a total of one time before, staying at Hotel Circle in Mission Valley. I had no idea of this magical enclave called Ocean Beach.

But that day I had taken the freeway as far as it would go. After growing up in the desert and then spending several years completing my Ph.D. and teaching in the Midwest, it was as if I had landed in my own little paradise. Ocean Beach immediately felt like home. That evening I walked the 1,971 feet to the end of the municipal pier, turned around, and looked at the neighborhood as it rose up to the spine of the Point Loma Peninsula. The lights in the houses looked like Japanese lanterns and I made a vow out loud:

“I'll never leave.”

A few hours before, I had rented my apartment a block-and-a-half from the ocean. I was neither a surfer nor much of a beach person. As a native Phoenician, the idea of tanning went along with the promise of ruined skin soon and melanoma later. But I loved O.B. The only thing that could pry me out was that I loved Patty more.

Patty.

I met her at the ugly main San Diego State University library. We both reached for the same book at the same time, Paul Fussell's
The Great War and Modern Memory
. She was an English professor and, with the Sharon Stone jaw line, classic Wayfarers, and lush wheat-yellow hair, you might mistake her for another shallow Southern California beauty. With the millionaire developer father and house in La Jolla, you might assume she was spoiled, too.

I never made that mistake. I judge a woman by the books she reaches for.

My life was so unfurnished when we met. I had a fairly new doctorate in history, boxes of books, and the old house in Phoenix that had belonged to my grandparents, now rented out. I happily let her help make me the man I became, in all good ways. She taught me how to open a Champagne bottle like a man of the world. Opened my ears to jazz.

Patty appreciated my love of history, ability to dress well, being “debonair,” as she put it, for turning out well-balanced and kind, despite having lost my parents before I could even remember them. She called me a
mensch
, one of the best compliments I ever received.

It pleased her that I loved ethnic food and had a very dry sense of humor and possessed an eclectic past that included working for five years as a deputy sheriff trained by a tough older cop named Peralta. I had published my first book,
Rocky Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Intermountain West,
and it had been favorably reviewed. This also pleased her. We made a sophisticated, good-looking couple. But I knew I was marrying up.

She spoke French well. Not well enough to satisfy the most obnoxious waiter in Paris, but her French was better than my Spanish. Thanks to Patty, I learned fun and useful phrases:
cherchez la femme
, which proved to be true in cracking one cold case.
Dragueur
, a skirt chaser.
Terribles simplificateurs
: the world was full of those, Arizona especially.
Billets-doux
: love letters, the writing of which she excelled.
La petit mort
: orgasm. The vocabulary she had taught me was coming back now with the sea breeze.

It was things like this that made me cluelessly happy being with her.

I was one of the few who were allowed to call her Patty. To the rest of the world, she was Patricia. She teased me about spray-painting her name on a wall of I-5. For a long time, I wondered if we would have stayed together if I had committed that simple act of vandalism, decorating the concrete spaghetti with eight letters, leaving drivers to wonder what passion had stirred a man to do such a thing?

A man who would have done that could have kept up when she got on tenure track at the University of California at San Diego, an infinitely more prestigious appointment. He would not have been content being a good teacher, nor would he have bridled at the intentionally dull and social-science-y conventions of academic historiography.

He would have realized that even if
I
didn't feel in competition with her,
she
expected me to overachieve, as her father had demanded of her. The impetuous one with the spray paint would have done more than appreciate, support, and learn from her seemingly infinite avocations, from cooking to film history and painting. He would have tried harder to match her imaginative gift giving even though it couldn't be done.

That man sure as hell would have focused on publishing more so as to ensure tenure at second-rate San Diego State.

Who knows? I can argue this history one way and then the other. Participants don't usually make good historians. Even Churchill had his flaws. As for Patty, she was needy and broken, too. She was as insecure as I was. Our insecurities together acted as an accelerant to burn up our marriage. I taught her things of the world, too, made her happy for a time. The collapse of our marriage wasn't all my fault. Just mostly my fault.

I am too close to the events to recount them dispassionately.

I do know two things. One is that we married too soon. We weren't the people we would become. And I know a simple, transcendent fact…

10

She was the Glory Fuck of My Young Life.

11

Now I stood at the end of the same pier, the longest on the West Coast if I remembered correctly. A man fished off the south side and pairs of lovers strolled out toward me. My chest was tight and I could feel my heart trying to make its escape, my throat tightening. It was merely a panic attack. I knew that now. They never came in situations where a normal person would panic, only when I was quiet and alone. If I couldn't stop them, at least I could get away from other people so the attacks wouldn't cause me to do something inappropriate. Like tell the truth. Whatever.

I thought again about Patty. Contrary to Peralta's baiting, I wasn't afraid of seeing her. It would be nice, actually, to know she was happy.

As for my native prudence, that had gone away in the preceding months. Now I had barged into a stranger's apartment and assaulted a man with a move that could kill, and I wasn't even a cop anymore. Get me a can of spray paint.

I wondered if she remarried and had children.

Now it was hard to imagine that lost love as even real, especially after Lindsey.

I remembered the Fussell book Patty and I had both been reaching for. Writing about World War I, he meditated about how our age couldn't understand why hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had gone “over the top” to certain death from German machine gunners for something as abstract as
honor
. But for them, that sense of honor and obligation was as real as our age, drowning in illegitimacy and irony, is for us.

What a pity.
Quel dommage
.

I had brought Lindsey to O.B. exactly once, when we had first become a couple and I worried that I was falling for her too fast, this magical younger woman with the fair skin and nearly black hair. She had browsed the postcards and made fun of the tourists. The memories caused me to pull out my iPhone and text her:

“I'm in San Diego with Peralta, on a case.”

It was a fool's errand. She wouldn't respond. I didn't say I loved her, even though I did. Why set myself up for the disappointment of her silence? She wasn't wearing her wedding ring now. I still wore mine, even though I operated heavy equipment: large-caliber firearms. I studied my ring and my hands that had changed the baby. I didn't even know the baby's name, but I remembered his tiny hands and arms struggling against me, struggling against a world of trouble.

This little soul who hadn't asked to be brought into that world. I didn't even know his name.

That tattooed kid who was his father had better be on his way to Riverside.

Lindsey had worried whether she would make a good mother.

Now this child's mother was dead. After meeting America's Finest Pimp and learning about Grace's venture as Scarlett, I wondered if the man in our office yesterday had been right to question the circumstances of her death. He hadn't said a word about Grace being a call girl. Had he not known? Hell, I didn't even know who he really was.

The pimp had mentioned a big man, an enforcer, someone he was afraid of enough to clear out and leave us alone. Was that the big man from yesterday, assassinated on Grand Avenue? And who was Edward, someone else the pimp feared?

Too damned many questions and barely twenty-four hours into our first case. I felt only my lack of ability. This was not what I had done as the Sheriff's Office Historian. It was no cold case but was uncomfortably warm. Maybe I should have chucked Robin's fancy that I be Peralta's partner and found some community college where I could teach.

The idea of coming to San Diego wasn't unpleasant because of Patty. It was bitter because San Diego represented my spectacular failures.

Looking up the hill at O.B., I remembered that I had broken my vow. I had left my little paradise.

The phone buzzed in my hand. The screen read: “Peralta.”

I gave him an abbreviated report over the comforting noise of the surf. The beach wasn't crowded and the onshore flow was still keeping things soothingly cool.

“I went to Balboa Park,” he said. “Really beautiful.”

I agreed. It was a very un-Peralta like thing to do.

“It was where they held the 1915 Panama-California Exposition,” he went on.

Yes, I knew that, but quietly noticed his uncharacteristic interest in something that didn't involve law enforcement.

“We're checked in to the Marriott on K Street. Know it?”

It was in the Gaslamp Quarter which had been built long after I had left, but I knew how to get there.

“Your key is at the front desk.”

My own room. I wouldn't have to listen to him snore. He hung up before I could ask how his end of the investigation had gone.

“Mister?”

The small voice behind me went with a small, slender girl with long brown hair that looked as if it hadn't been washed in a week.

“Do you want a date?”

I told her I didn't.

“I'll suck your cock for twenty bucks.”

She was jonesing from whatever she was addicted to, visibly shaking, looking like a drowned kitten. I asked her how old she was.

“Eighteen,” she said. “I'll suck your cock for twenty bucks. I need to get something to eat. I know a place we can go.”

She looked sixteen at the most, probably younger. I asked her if I could call a shelter for her, told her she didn't have to live on the streets. She asked if I was a cop.

“Not anymore.”

“I'll suck you for fifteen.”

I left her there and walked off the pier and up Newport Avenue to catch the bus back downtown. My heart decided to stay inside me, at least for a while.

The phone buzzed again. Lindsey had actually answered me.

Her text read, “Be careful, Dave.”

12

San Diego had changed extensively since I had lived there, and, unlike Phoenix, mostly for the good. It was a major high-tech center now, not merely a tourist-and-Navy town. It had less population than Phoenix but surpassed it in almost any measure of quality. About the only thing that seemed the same was the mediocrity of the newspaper, formerly the
San Diego Union-Tribune
, now under new ownership with its name contracted to U-T. It sounded like a far campus of the University of Texas, but I'm sure a consultant charged big bucks for a new “brand.”

Downtown, thrown away in the 1960s and 1970s, had made a stunning comeback, including the Gaslamp Quarter with its lovingly restored historic buildings and Horton Plaza urban mall. Nobody would know it used to be skid row. Walking to the Marriott, I was struck for the gazillionth time how Anglo the city seemed, even though it sat right on the Mexican border. The barrios south and east of downtown had been carefully tucked away and so it remained.

I showed my driver's license at the front desk and got my key card to a room on the eighth floor. Before going up, I went into the business center and booted up the computer. I am a lifelong Mac user and couldn't understand why anyone would use Windows. So I waited, and waited.

Then I plugged in the flash drive and clicked on the icon.

A window popped up and the screen went blank. Then Grace Hunter was talking to me.

“Hi, babe. I bet you'd like to know what's on this drive. But if you don't have the code, too bad.”

A white box appeared and I had nothing to enter. The screen went dark again. But for a few seconds she had been alive. I could see her allure with her wide smile, the elegant movement to push her hair out of her face, the sexy taunt in her voice. I popped out the drive and stuck it in my pocket.

When I stepped out of the elevator, a woman was walking toward me: black, shoulder-length hair, attractive if older, elegantly dressed. As she came closer, I was sure I was wrong. I saw plenty of ghosts in my dreams.

But, no…

“Sharon?”

“David!”

She ran to me and gave me a long hug.

Her face was flushed and, up close, her usually perfect hair was mussed.

All I could do was sputter words. “What? Why?”

She grinned at my discomfort.

“What's wrong?”

Where to begin? She was Peralta's ex-wife. She had moved away to San Francisco in as final a breakup as I could imagine. I had known both of them for most of my adult life. And here she was, having obviously been in his room. But it was none of those things. I felt the embarrassment of nearly coming across my parents having sex.

“It's all right, David.” She laughed that full-out laugh that always put me at ease. She studied me. “You've lost weight.”

Her eyes held concern rather than a compliment. I knew the suit was now almost hanging on me.

I said, “So you're why he went to Balboa Park. I thought something was odd.”

“Maybe he can grow a little after all,” she said. “I was down here for a conference, so…”

So, indeed.

She hugged me again, made me promise we would get together for drinks or coffee before we left, and disappeared into the elevator.

After a minute to collect myself, I knocked on his door. He greeted me in a bathrobe.

“Why are you blushing?” he demanded.

“I got too much sun at the beach.”

“Why is your shirt and tie a mess?”

“A baby peed on me, okay? You change and I'll come back.”

“I'm fine,” he said and walked inside, leaving the door open. I reluctantly followed him.

He plopped down on the unmade bed. I sat on a sofa and filled him in on Tim Lewis, the baby, and Grace Hunter's small business. He closed his eyes and grunted after every few sentences, taking it in as he always did. He offered no more reaction when I showed him the flash drive. We would have to find someone to break the code.

The room was too warm for my suit.

I wrapped it up. “Tim Lewis has parents in Riverside. I told him to take the baby and go there today.”

“Did you get their address?”

“Yes.” I said it a bit too testily.

“What's wrong?” His Mister Innocent voice. Then, “Look next to you, on the desk. It's the entire case file on the girl's suicide.”

I swiveled to see several thick folders bound with a large red rubber band.

“Man, you have the pull,” I said. “How is Kimbrough doing?”

“He's happy.” He slurped on a Diet Coke. “I'd like to say it was my pull, but remember that suicide in Coronado? The girlfriend of the millionaire from north Scottsdale who allegedly hanged herself?”

I remembered. It had happened at the Spreckles Mansion in the rich, idyllic town that sat on a spit across from San Diego. The rich guy had purchased the iconic house. As I recalled, he made his money from acne products and cosmetics. The girlfriend, young enough to be his daughter of course, had been alone when his young son had tripped and fallen over a balustrade in the mansion. The child had died.

The next day the girlfriend had been found hanging from a second-story balcony, naked, a cloth in her mouth, and her hands bound with rope. As with Grace, the authorities had pronounced it a suicide.

Peralta shook his head. “I can see your mind making connections, Mapstone. They're not there. It has nothing to do with our case. Bill Gross is a good friend of mine.” That would be the San Diego County Sheriff. “His department was called in because Coronado PD doesn't have the expertise for a complex death investigation. The media put Bill through hell on this one. News choppers overhead got pictures of the body and pretty soon it was on the Internet. Everybody became an amateur sleuth. They even got Dr. Phil involved.”

He shook his head. “But the woman in Coronado really did kill herself based on the evidence. Hell, the sheriff's department even put up a special page with the information on their Web site. Kimbrough said his chief didn't want Grace Hunter to turn into another media circus. So we lucked out and have copies of everything.”

“So what about our young woman?” I asked. “Suicide?”

“You'll have time for light reading.” He pointed at the stack of case files, in case I had forgotten. “The short answer is they believe it was a suicide.”

“What do you believe?”

He shrugged the big shoulders. “I'll wait for your report. Kimbrough brought along the night detective who was the first to respond to the call.”

“Night detective?”

A quarter of one side of his mouth attempted a smile. “I'm showing my age, Mapstone.”

I looked at the rumpled sheets and doubted that.

He continued, “Departments used to have night detective bureaus to cover the late shift, so the investigation into a major crime could begin immediately. Now it's almost all in-house with each unit, so, for instance, homicide has its own people on call. That's the case here. I was using old-time cop talk. Did I ever tell you about the night detective I met when Miranda bought it?”

He was being so uncharacteristically loquacious, and actually talking about himself, that I stifled my impatience.

“It was 1976, and Miranda was out of prison. He actually went around signing Miranda warning cards. Somewhere I have one he signed for me. Anyway, I was a green deputy and was serving a warrant down in the Deuce. The old La Amapola bar. Means ‘little poppy.' I must have gotten there the second after Miranda got in a fight and was stabbed. People were scattering. The first PPD unit was a night detective. This tall guy named Cal. They called him the Red Dude on account of his hair. He marched my ass out in a hurry. We became friends later. Never did find the suspect I was trying to arrest.”

If I had my geography right, the bar where Ernesto Miranda died was located where the Phoenix Suns arena now stood. Mike Peralta, historian. It made me wish he would talk more about his past, but we had business and he moved right along. I tried to imagine a time when he had ever been a rookie and uncertain of himself.

Night detective. It had a nice ring.

“Anyway, I talked to the detective. You would have liked her. First name Isabel. Cute little chica. Make you forget about Patty.”

“Will you stop that shit!” I pulled off my suit jacket and threw it on the floor. It would have to go to the cleaners anyway.

His eyes followed the garment's flight, then fixed his gaze on me again. “Grace's body was found on the concrete by the pool. It was a straight fall and she landed on her head. Massive trauma, loads of blood. She was handcuffed from the back, nude, and no real note was left, like our guy said in the office yesterday.”

“What do you mean ‘real note.' ”

“I want you to read the reports. Hang with me and I'll give you the overall run-down. So the uniforms that initially respond go upstairs and the door to the condo was locked. The manager lets them inside.”

He folded one brawny brown calf over the other and told me the cops found no sign of a break-in. The lock was a deadbolt, so nobody could simply close the door behind them and cause it to automatically lock. It had to be secured from the inside, as if Grace had done it, or from the outside with a key. The only ones with keys were Zisman and his wife. She wasn't in San Diego on the twenty-second. There were no signs of struggle. Grace's purse was there with a hundred dollars in it, her keys, and a brand-new cell phone.

I said, “The handcuffs didn't arouse suspicion?”

“Sure. But sometimes people who want to kill themselves bind their hands so they can't change their minds. I've seen those calls in Phoenix. That was the case with that girl in Coronado, although she used rope and not cuffs. SDPD thinks the same was true here. Kimbrough had Isabel demonstrate how a person could do it. Then walk to a balcony and go over.”

“Where'd Grace get the cuffs?”

“Apparently the former quarterback likes bondage. They used them during their playtime.”

I tried to ignore his bulk in a bathrobe lying in a bed where he had had some “playtime” of his own. This was something I did not want to visualize or even contemplate.

“Does he own this condo?” I asked.

“He did. It's for sale now. He was away at his boat when Grace killed herself and the alibi's good. The owner at the slip next door saw him there during the time of the suicide. Zisman told the cops she was his girlfriend and she'd been feeling depressed, but he had no idea she might do something like this, yada-yada-yada.”

“And they believed him?”

“Zisman is a reserve police officer in Phoenix,” Peralta continued. “He showed his badge and identification. That might have bought him a little professional courtesy the night Grace died. He cooperated fully. I'm sure he was scared shitless this would make the papers or television and the missus back in Arizona would find out.”

I told him newspapers usually didn't report suicides out of concern that there might be copycats. Grace had died at night, with no television news choppers in the air.

“So Zisman walked?”

He nodded. “There was no evidence of his involvement. No probable cause to hold him, much less get an indictment. If they arrested every Arizonan who had a mistress stashed in San Diego, they'd have to build a new jail.”