The Operative (13 page)

Stratton nodded. ‘Thanks.’

Vicky was suddenly filled with sympathy for him. He was in a strange town, knowing no one and uncertain how long he was going to have to go through all this. A little boy he clearly loved was in terrible emotional pain and Stratton was unable to help the child as soon as he’d like. But her heart was already pretty much filled with the woes of so many other children: she warned herself that there was little room there for a grown-up who could look after himself.

Stratton walked away. A second later Vicky heard the front door close. She looked through a gap in the window blinds and watched as he walked out through the gate and away down the street. Then she sat back for a moment, dismissed him from her thoughts, and got back to her pile of work.

Twenty minutes after Stratton arrived at the Santa Monica Police Department, Sergeant Draper elected to grace him with his presence. The policeman was wearing the same suit as he had the day before.

‘How’s it going?’ Draper asked, his tone uncaring.

‘Fine,’ Stratton replied, remaining polite despite his annoyance with the man. On the drive over he had considered calling his boss back in Poole to see what could be done at that end to move things along. But he doubted that such a move would be effective at this early stage. The British Consulate in LA would be worth a visit and he could probably engineer a useful introduction there by using his contacts in military intelligence. That would be his next move, he decided, as soon as he had gathered a little more information to provide a baseline of knowledge to work from.

‘You shoulda called me, like I said, before you came down here. You’d’ve saved yourself a trip. I don’t have any more to tell you than I did yesterday.’

‘You don’t have a single thread of information?’ Stratton asked, unable to hide completely the contempt that he was beginning to feel for the man.

‘Like I said, it was gang-bangers. They ain’t exactly gonna hand themselves over. We have people who work the streets but it’s gonna take time for word to get back to us. We may eventually get a name we can start on, a witness if we’re lucky. People in
that neighbour-hood are always wanting to make deals with us for one thing or another.’

‘That’s it? That’s how you work?’

‘That’s how
it
works, pal,’ Draper said, not liking Stratton’s tone.

Stratton couldn’t guess at the number of unsolved crimes in LA but he imagined it must be high. ‘Can you tell me where it happened, at least?’

‘Venice. In back of Gold’s Gym. That area is getting cleaned up, big money moving to the beach, but there’s still a lot of lowlifes there. Hey, twenty years ago even
we
wouldn’t go in there at night. Sorry, pal. Check in before you come down, okay? Save us both a hassle.’

Draper’s mobile phone rang.

‘What about Sally’s body?’ Stratton asked.

‘See the desk officer and he’ll give you the paperwork,’ Draper said as he checked the screen of his phone. ‘I gotta take this,’ he said, raising it to his ear and walking away.

Half an hour later, having lined up to see the desk officer, Stratton stepped onto the street outside the police department, folding several sheets of a form into his pocket. He looked at a map of the city that he had bought the night before. Venice was less than a mile from the Police Department and he decided to walk.

He took Main Street south. It paralleled the beach a couple of blocks east of it and was lined with restaurants, bars and various clothes, art and antique shops. A window cleaner washing a shopfront gave Stratton directions to Gold’s Gym. It was tucked into the backstreets a couple of blocks past the last of the shops and after finding it he headed around the back into a more decayed residential part of the city. The multicultural atmosphere of Main Street gave way to a predominantly black and Hispanic one: graffiti was everywhere and each house and apartment block, new and old, had some kind of visible security, usually heavy-duty bars over windows and entranceways.

Stratton saw a group of Latino kids sitting on the front steps of a house and crossed the road towards them. They stopped talking as they watched him approach and remained seated as he stopped in front of them.

‘You lookin’ for drugs, man?’ one of them asked. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.

‘No – I’m looking for something else,’ Stratton said, deciding that the drug pusher was not the leader.

‘What would that be, man?’ another boy asked, getting to his feet and circling behind Stratton, an expression of contempt on his face that looked more forced than natural. The others got to their feet to look at Stratton in a similar fashion.

Stratton didn’t sense that the move was entirely hostile. He reckoned that they were simply fluffing their feathers. He concentrated on the boy, probably the leader, who was circling him, and when the youngster eventually stopped in front of him Stratton looked him straight in the eyes. There was not a great deal of intelligence behind them, the lids drooping halfway across the eyeballs, but there was a maturity beyond the boy’s years in his posture and also confidence.

Stratton went for the direct approach. ‘A woman was killed here two days ago,’ he said.

‘You a cop?’ the boy asked, dryly.

‘No. I’m not American so I couldn’t be a cop. She was my sister.’

‘That was your sister?’ one of the other boys asked. ‘Man, she took a bitchen’.’

The other boys agreed, some of them grinning.

‘You see it?’ Stratton asked the boy who appeared to be the youngest. His age was probably in single digits.

‘Never said I saw nothin’,’ the boy said, already developing his street wisdom.

One of the others uttered some Latino phrase and the whole group laughed.

Stratton studied them for a moment and had a rethink. Dealing with near-morons required a certain approach. ‘I’ll give you fifty dollars if you show me where it happened,’ Stratton said.

‘Fifty dollars?’ the leader asked, appearing unimpressed. But Stratton knew that he was undoubtedly interested.

‘Just to show me where,’ Stratton said, reaching into his pocket and plucking out a note. It was a hundred-dollar bill.

‘We ain’t got no change, mister,’ one of them laughed.

‘Then I’ll give you a hundred,’ Stratton said. ‘If you tell me more than just where it happened.’

The leader looked around the street, instinctively cautious. Then his slow eyes came back to focus on Stratton’s face and he blinked. ‘Maybe we’ll just beat you and take your money,’ he said.

‘You can try,’ Stratton said, rolling up the bill into a ball. ‘But I’ll eat it before you can get it. Or you can just give me what I want and you can have it without any trouble.’

The leader looked into Stratton’s eyes and saw no trace of fear and, if anything, amusement. ‘We can’t tell you nothin’. That’s the way it’s gotta be,
pinchi
,’ he said, unsure about this gringo.

‘So, you can show me where it happened?’ Stratton asked.

‘Down there.’ The boy indicated with his chin.

‘Show me,’ Stratton said.

The leader did another check around, then looked at the smallest kid in the group. ‘Show him. And be cool.’

‘Why do I gotta take him?’

‘’Cause I said. Walk down there in front of him, then pick up the money and come back here.’

The kid reluctantly obeyed his master, walked down the steps and stopped in front of Stratton, his head no higher than Stratton’s waist. ‘Come on,’ he said and set off.

Stratton followed the kid for a block and a half until the boy broke into a short run, stopped, made a point of turning on the spot and walked back towards Stratton. Stratton opened the hand
with the wadded-up note in it. The kid took it as he passed and jogged back up the street towards his pack. The leader checked the note and then they all walked away around a corner.

Stratton looked down at his feet. They were surrounded by bits of car-window glass and he imagined Sally lying on the car’s bonnet, dead, with Josh watching her. The broken glass was spread over the street as if her vehicle had been in the centre of the road and not parked against the kerb. Whatever had happened had taken place while she was in transit. He doubted that she would have stopped in a place like this for anything less than a breakdown.

He scanned the sidewalks and houses on either side but the place was deserted, as if everyone knew his purpose and wanted nothing to do with him. Then his gaze fell on a corner shop further up the street where an oriental man was standing in the doorway, looking directly at him. As soon as their stares made contact the man went inside. Stratton wanted to talk to someone and since banging on doors didn’t seem like a good idea round here he decided to start with the only living person in sight.

Stratton stepped onto the sidewalk and headed for the shop that was very much in keeping with its surroundings: grubby, grille-covered windows and in desperate need of a paint job.

He paused in the doorway to look inside. Every bit of space was packed with product apart from a narrow path from the entrance that led around an island of shelving in the centre. The counter was near the front door and two convex mirrors in the opposite corners covered the blind spots at the back of the store. The oriental man was stacking cigarette packets onto shelves behind the counter while a fat white woman at the far end sorted through some vegetable racks.

Stratton stopped in front of the counter and took a packet of gum from a box, all the while staring at the shopkeeper to catch his eye. But the man appeared determined not to look at him.

‘How much is the gum?’ Stratton asked.

‘Fifty cents,’ the shopkeeper replied in a thick Korean accent.

Stratton held out a dollar bill and as the man reached for it Stratton drew it back a little. The man’s eyes flashed at Stratton and held his unblinking gaze for a moment, a hint of anger in them. Then he stretched for the bill and took it.

‘A woman was killed two days ago in front of your shop,’ Stratton said in a low voice so that the woman in the back could not hear.

The man did not reply, avoiding Stratton’s stare again, and put the fifty cents change on the counter.

The overweight woman shuffled from the back of the shop, stopped beside Stratton and plonked a bag of vegetables down on the counter. ‘This produce is crap,’ she announced, a fearsome look on her face.

‘That why they half-price,’ the shopkeeper replied dryly, as if the complaint was a normal occurrence. ‘Two dollar, please.’

‘If they’re half-price then they’re twice the fucking price they are at the market.’

‘This isn’t the market.’

‘Fucking Chinks,’ she said to Stratton as she tossed two dollar bills on the counter, grabbed her bag, and walked out of the store, muttering to herself.

The shopkeeper walked around the counter and looked out of his door to watch the woman walk away and see if there was anyone about. When he turned back to face Stratton he was glaring angrily. ‘Why you people come here again? I tell you everything last night.’

The man was obviously confusing Stratton with someone else and for the time being Stratton wasn’t about to let him think otherwise. ‘Are you sure you didn’t miss anything?’ he asked, grabbing at the first thing he could think of that might induce the man to talk.

‘Go ask your friends,’ the shopkeeper spat, glancing out the door again. ‘I tell them all I know!’

He was not threatening Stratton but he was clearly nervous about something as he went back behind his counter to continue stacking the shelves.

‘I need to double-check,’ Stratton said, wondering who the man could be referring to.

‘You promise you leave me alone when I tell you. I dead if they know I talk to you. I told you I not go to court or go downtown with you. I tell you the man who kill the woman and now you come for more. What more you need? I not talk to you any more. Fucking FBI. Get out of my shop!’ He paused to glare at Stratton long enough to reinforce his demand. Then he turned his back on him.

The Korean man was determined to end the conversation, out of fear or anger. Whichever it was, Stratton was up against a wall: short of physical violence there was no other way through as far as he could see at that moment. He picked up the fifty cents, deposited the coins in a children’s-charity box and walked out of the store.

Contemplating the shopkeeper’s revelation, Stratton walked back to the spot where Sally had been killed. The FBI had apparently interviewed the man the night before whereupon he had revealed the name of a suspect. Yet this morning Sergeant Draper had said he knew nothing. The police had responded to the incident within a few hours and the FBI had interviewed the shopkeeper a day later. The question was why the FBI had become involved in what looked like a local police matter. It might explain why Draper knew nothing or wouldn’t tell what he did know.

Stratton’s first thought was that he should go to the FBI, not that he expected any more joy from them than he’d had from the police – unless, of course, there was someone he could get help from. He walked down the road, racking his brains for anyone
he knew or had known in the past who might be useful. By the time he arrived back on the bustling Main Street a name had struck him. There was one person who might be able to help although Stratton did not know him well enough to assume that he would. However, he was, in a very tangential way, connected with this and perhaps a favour could be coerced from him. It was worth a try.