Tropical Depression (24 page)

I was having one of those vivid, backlit dreams that make you yell, but there was no one to wake me up and tell me. The ghosts had come back. This time I stood in the center of a ring of their cloaked and hooded faces. They were all dead and they hated me. They were moving in on me so slowly I couldn’t see them move, but every time I turned, they were closer.

I turned one last time just as one of them was reaching to touch my face. Its claw came out of the robe, part machine and part skeleton. One terrifying digit stretched out for my eye.

The sound of the phone ringing jerked me up out of sleep just before the thing touched me.

I sat up. I was sweating heavily. My back felt like someone had been pounding on it with brickbats. I rubbed my eyes, trying to get enough blood flowing into my head to figure out what to do. The dream was so disorienting that I wasn’t sure how to answer the telephone. Suddenly all the normal, everyday things we take for granted were no longer clear and certain but instead had turned into slippery, sinewy, evil possibilities. The world was a snake basket, and I had pried the lid off and seen its writhing contents.

But the phone was still ringing. I was sure it had to be Ed. I was sure that if I just picked it up and said something, reality would click back into place and I would be me again, sitting in a cheesy hotel room in solid reality.

I reached for the telephone. Just in time I remembered what to say. “Hello?”

“Well,” said the honey-and-rum voice on the other end. Then she paused.

It wasn’t Ed. It was one of the shapes from my dream. The snakes wriggled as solid reality tilted sideways.

I guess I didn’t say anything for a little bit too long, because when the voice spoke again it sounded a little irritated.

“Well, don’t knock me over with sweet nothings, Billy,” she said, and I recognized the voice. It belonged to somebody alive.

“Uh, Nancy?”

“Very good. May I ask how many women you might expect to call you this early?”

“I don’t—I was having a bad dream.”

“Good,” she said, and I could hear the satisfaction in her voice.

“That’s what you get for running out on me. You might have been enjoying an eye-opener right now instead of a nightmare.”

“What time is it?” The disorientation was fading, but it was being replaced by a sense of impossibility. The idea that I had been making love with her just a few hours ago was absurd.

“It’s just about seven A.M. and I have to be at the clinic in half an hour. I just wanted to talk to you first.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say about that, so I didn’t. I heard her sigh heavily on the other end. “Oh, shit, what have I gotten into now? You sure had plenty to say last night.”

I felt a panicked sense of my own worthlessness rising up in my throat. I was still stupid from sleep, but I didn’t want to hurt Nancy—it wasn’t her fault.

“Look, uh, I’m sorry. I’m not real sharp yet. I was asleep.”

“Sounds like you still are, Billy. I have to get going. Why don’t you call me at work later?”

“Yes. Okay, if I can.”

“I think you
better
can, baby. ’Bye.”

And she hung up. I was left with a clear sense that she was peeved with me. Maybe that was for the best. Maybe she should realize right away that it wasn’t going to work, could never work. And that she deserved better.

I fell asleep again almost instantly. I woke up an hour later thinking about Nancy. What a jerk I was. This was an incredible person, and she liked me. I had a real chance at something here, and I was about to blow it for—for what? A sense of duty or honor? Low self-esteem?

I thought about the last look I’d had of her as I snuck out, that taut, sleek back. I thought about the other side, too. I wanted her again, right now.

How could that be wrong? What did it have to do with what I was doing? Didn’t Lancelot go home at the end of the day, home to a hot bath, Guinevere, and a few hours of sleep?

I sat on the side of the bed and looked at my feet. I wiggled my toes at myself:
Hello, head.
I nodded my head at my toes:
Hey, how’s it going? Things are getting a little rocky on this end, toes. Would you guys like to do some of the thinking for a while? We’re not doing so great up here.

Sure: dialogue between self and toes. Why not?

I stumbled into the shower and started to feel a little more like part of the world again. As I climbed out, the telephone was ringing again. I leaned out the bathroom door and looked at it for a few seconds before deciding it couldn’t possibly be Nancy. I took the three steps over and picked it up.

“Hello?” I said.

There was a long breath blown out on the other end, the sound of amused exasperation expressed as cigarette smoke. “It’s my day off, you know,” Ed said.

“You won’t make Lieutenant sitting around on your ass, Ed,” I told him.

“I won’t make it at all, they find out I’m talking to you.”

That didn’t sound good. “What does that mean?”

Another long exhale. It was so loud and clear I could almost see the smoke trickle out of the receiver. “Means you not doing so good making friends, Billy. Means from now on you best leave any messages you got on my answering machine at home. And try to disguise your voice, all right? You Typhoid Billy now, and I sure don’t want to catch nothing from you.”

“When did this happen?”

“Happened yesterday. Suddenly they don’t want nobody having nothing to do with you. I’m in deep shit and officially told to mind my own fuckin’ business and stay ’way from you. Came down last night, while you out muff-diving.”

I let that go. “Who is
they,
Ed?”

I heard him fire up another Kool, blow out the smoke. “Hard to say for sure. Situation like this, pressure works kind of sideways. You know, somebody suggest something at the water cooler, then they walk it down the hall to somebody who mention it to their buddy while they trading memos. Hard to say where it started.”

“Uh-huh. Would it be too corny to ask if the pressure’s coming from upstairs?”

“Oh, my, no,” said Ed. “That ain’t corny at all, son. Upstairs is just exactly where the pressure is coming from, Billy.” He had never sounded more sardonic.

“What did you find out about Doyle’s neighborhood?”

“Funny you should ask. I checked those five houses. One of ’em been empty for six months. Probate thing. Another one got the dean of arts at USC.”

“It could happen.”

“I don’t think so, Billy. Not really.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t really think so either. What else?”

“One of ’em belong to Eddie Jackson.”

“I think we can rule that one out,” I said. Eddie Jackson had a record in the Billboard Top Forty at least two times a year. He was black. “What else?”

Another hiss of smoke. “Real estate man. Wife’s a teacher. Three kids.”

“Possible?”

“Anything’s possible, Billy. But this the guy that sold Eddie Jackson the house, so it don’t seem too likely.”

“Which leaves Doyle.”

“Which leaves Doyle,” he agreed.

I heard another hiss of breath. But this one was mine.

“Something else kind of interesting,” Ed said. “I took a couple of pictures over and showed ’em to McAuley’s maid. Asked her if the nice man with the badge that picked up Roscoe’s papers was one of them. Guess who she picked out?”

My stomach flip-flopped. “Doyle,” I said, sure that it was.

Ed laughed. “Nope. Phillip Moss.”

I didn’t say anything for a long moment. My head was spinning. “You think Moss is the killer? Maybe protecting Doyle from something, even without Doyle’s knowledge?”

He laughed again. “I don’t think so, Billy. Remember that BOLO I put out on Moss? Well, we got him.”

“Where is he?”

The laughter gurgled out of control into a cough. I waited, not very patiently. When Ed had calmed down again I asked him again. “Where’s Moss, Ed?”

“He’s in the morgue, Billy. Broken neck.”

“Doyle is covering his tracks,” I said. “Making sure nobody can connect him.”

“Uh-huh. Guy that shot Hector could have been Moss.”

“It wasn’t Moss.”

“No, but all you got is one gangbanger witness, and his description could be Moss easy as Doyle.”

“What do we do now?”

Ed laughed one last time. “What you mean
we,
white man?” he said, and hung up.

I listened to the dial tone for a good twenty seconds before I could convince myself that he meant it. Then I put the receiver back in the cradle and stood up.

Okay. Maybe he was kidding, but if Ed had to choose between his career and saving my ass, I wasn’t sure what he’d do. I’d just have to try not to push him into a corner where he had to decide. I was on my own. No big deal—I had expected to be.

Now I had one good question Ed couldn’t answer: what had I done in the last twenty-four hours that had pushed somebody one step further than they could go without pushing back?

I thought about it for a half-hour. I kept thinking of Nancy, too, but I tried to be tough and spend at least half my thinking on the real problem.

After half an hour I realized two things. The first was that I was still naked. The second, as I pulled on my shorts, was that whatever this hypothetical last straw was, it had to be accidental, if it had happened while I was with Nancy.

I had gone to see Sergeant Whitt, and nobody had cared—not even Sergeant Whitt. I had taken some documents from Parker Center, and nobody had even written me a parking ticket.

So what had I done since then that was more threatening? Talked to Detective Braun. Requested a rap sheet for Phillip Moss. Gone to Marina del Rey with Nancy for dinner. Looked at some boats. Admired one of them until we got chased off. Kissed some. Gone to her place, made love all night…nothing threatening there, not one single thing that might—

Whoa, son, as my Uncle Mack used to say. Slow down here. Back up half a step. What if it wasn’t
one
thing? What if it was a combination, something somebody perceived as a pattern?

Except there still had to be something final, some last piece that had fallen into place while I was with Nancy, and I had no idea what it could possibly be.

I thought about what I knew. It didn’t seem like much: the hunting rifle, the brummel hook. A white supremacist staking out Doyle’s house.

Maybe the visits to Sergeant Whitt and Sergeant Brandon or the little chat with Moss had triggered small alarms. Had Doyle started to feel the hounds sniffing at the edge of his grove? Would something else make him feel like they were at the foot of his tree? He would feel the noose getting tighter around his neck. So the one thing that would tip him over would be—

What? Something that happened while I was with Nancy, which didn’t make any sense. Not at all.

Unless—

I called Ed at home.

“You just can’t take a hint, can you, boy?”

“One quick question, Ed.”

“It have to be quick, I’m in the middle of cooking my famous Arkansas flannel cakes.”

“Does Doyle keep a boat at Marina del Rey?”

He chuckled around a mouthful of smoke. “Oh, yass. He got a boat all right. Big sleek motherfucker. He’s one of them old-timey ocean racers, they all go out every year and try to kill themselves going to Hawaii or some damn thing. That’s a big thing with him, have to
prove
himself with all kinds of wild shit. He keep another boat in Texas just so he can get a shot at dying in either ocean.”

“You know the name of the boat he keeps here, Ed? Is it the
Warrior?”

“That’s two questions, Billy. But I think that’s the name. The
Warrior.”
He chuckled, a throaty, smoke-filled sound. “Only a honky would name a boat something like that.”

“You’re probably right,” I told him. “Thanks.”

It was one more small, circumstantial link to Doyle. I had stood on the dock by his boat. The two goons had taken my picture. And sometime that night Doyle had seen the picture, figured out who I was, and put out the word. It all added up; there was not the slightest doubt in the world, and there was even less proof that a prosecutor would buy.

It’s a classic cop dilemma. I thought I had left it behind when I turned in my badge, but here it was again. I knew exactly who was guilty and where they were; and I couldn’t prove anything. All I had was circumstantial soup.

I could show a really flimsy connection from Doyle to one deranged neo-Nazi. I could extend that connection to ownership of a sailboat. They might provide motive and means, and they might be nothing.
Might
didn’t seem like enough.

I needed more, and that’s part of the cop dilemma, too. But Doyle was a very public figure, and I couldn’t dig around him without tripping on roots.

My choices were limited. Anything I did was going to alert Doyle, one way or another. And then he would take action of another sort. If he wasn’t afraid to kill a well-connected, serving police officer like Roscoe, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me either.

And that thought brought me up short, too. Roscoe had been an administrator. He had no street-smarts at all, and even less idea of how to investigate something as tricky as this. Yet Roscoe had found something, and it must have been something solid, because Roscoe had died.

What could Roscoe have found that I couldn’t?

The idea chewed at me. I was a competent investigator; Roscoe was a chair-warmer. I was at a dead end, and Roscoe had found something important enough to get him killed.

What had he found?

The answer didn’t come in one big, bright lump. In fact, I pushed away pieces of it a couple of times, irritated at the shape it took. Finally, when I had been grinding my teeth for a half-hour and had nothing else to think about, I sat down with it, looked it over.

Roscoe was good at only one thing. So whatever he had found to implicate Hector’s killer had to be political or administrative. Somewhere there were faint vapor-trail markings in the upper echelon of command that only an expert like Roscoe could read. I would never have been able to find it. But he had followed the trail, found the trail-maker, and wound up headless in the gutter.