Tropical Depression (27 page)

“Drunk and disorderly,” I said. “But I was innocent.”

“This just gets better,” she said.

“I know how that sounds.”

“Uh-huh.”

I could feel it going against me. It was the same feeling I used to get in court, trying to explain how the good-looking, clean-cut guy in the well-tailored suit did all those awful things I had arrested him for, and seeing the jury eat up his innocent expression and admire his tailored elegance. No sale.

“Nancy, just give me a chance to lay this all out for you. None of this is what it seems.”

“It never is,” she said.

“Please,” I said.

She gave it one more long pause, for effect or for real, I couldn’t tell. I felt my greasy jail breakfast knot in my gut while I waited. “All right,” she said at last. “Meet me after work. Six o’clock at my place.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“You better be,” she said, and hung up.

I lay back on the bed and thought about what to do with Doyle. My first thought was to take the whole thing to Captain Spaulding. He would figure he owed me, and he was the ultimate stand-up guy.

The problem was, there was really nothing he could do. He would have to turn it over to Internal Affairs, and then it was back in Doyle’s court and Doyle had enough muscle to squash it. If Spaulding investigated it himself, he would hit the same blind alleys Roscoe had hit.

I needed somebody with even more clout than Doyle. I could think of only one person. I didn’t exactly have a warm relationship with him, but I was pretty sure he’d let me in the door.

I put on clean clothes, the best I’d brought with me, and headed out.

A police cruiser blocked the entrance to the small parking lot outside the hotel. The lights were flashing, and two officers stood beside my car, looking into it.

They looked up as I approached. “This your car?” asked the first one. He was maybe twenty-eight, white and baby-faced with a small, fuzzy mustache.

“It’s mine,” I told him. “Is there a problem?”

“Could I see some identification, please?” He asked it politely, but his partner had moved into the Academy-approved position to cover his partner in case I had a bazooka in my wallet.

I took my driver’s license from my wallet and handed it to Babyface. He glanced at it. “It’s him,” he told his partner, and they drew their guns.

“Against the car. Move!” Babyface said. I leaned against the car.

“Am I allowed to ask what this is about?”

He kicked my feet apart, frisked me, and put his cuffs on my wrists without answering. “In the car,” he said, and he walked me to the cruiser.

Three and a half hours later I was still wearing the handcuffs. I was sitting in an interrogation room at the Hollywood bureau where Babyface had dumped me while he filled out paperwork.

I had one anxious eye on the clock. I wasn’t worried about spending another night in jail, but I didn’t want to miss my appointment with Nancy.

The door swung open and a potbellied guy about forty came in. He wore a cheap suit, a vague expression, and several gallons of cologne that smelled like he’d found it in the rest room of a disco.

“You Knight?” he asked, turning a chair around and leaning thick forearms on its back.

“That’s right.”

He put a grimy toothpick in the corner of his mouth and started chewing. “Detective Mancks. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”

“Too bad,” I said. “Because I don’t have any answers at all.”

He cocked his head to the side. “That so?”

“Yup. I’m afraid my lawyer has all my answers. He’ll be happy to talk to you.”

“I’m investigating a capital crime, Knight.”

“And I bet you’re doing a bang-up job, too.” I held up my wrists with the cuffs on them. “This one of your investigative techniques?”

He licked his lips and shifted his eyes to the wall behind me. “I told them I had some questions for you. I guess they went overboard. I can get the key.”

“Good to know. But I have some questions for you, too.”

He looked cautious. “Like what?”

“Are you the Detective Mancks who’s investigating Roscoe McAuley’s murder?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So who’s leaning on you not to find anything?”

He looked at me for a full two minutes. I looked back. It wasn’t easy. Mancks had bad skin and bad teeth and couldn’t decide if he should play hostile or dumb.

He finally got up. “I’ll see if I can find that key,” he said, and walked out.

Ninety minutes later a cop in uniform came in, a big, middle-aged guy with a red nose. “There you are!” he bellowed at me. “Nobody knew where you went.”

He unlocked the cuffs and threw them on the table. “You can go,” he said.

I rubbed my wrists and stood. “Anybody feel like telling me what it was all about?”

He gave me a big smile. “You got me, buddy. All I know is, you beat the rap, whatever it is. You can go.”

I walked back to the hotel. If I hurried I could still make it to Nancy’s by six. But as I came up Franklin in front of the hotel, another police cruiser went by. The cop in the passenger seat looked hard at me and turned to speak to his partner.

The car slowed and swung into a gas station at the corner and turned around.

I sighed. I knew what was coming and I knew why, but that didn’t make it any easier.

Before the cops got back to me I ducked into the liquor store attached to the hotel and found a telephone.

“It’s me,” I told Nancy. “I’m having some problems.”

“Really,” she said, sounding unsurprised.

“Nancy, this is out of my hands. I’m about to get hauled off to jail again.”

“My tax dollars at work.”

“Can we make it tomorrow night at six instead?”

There was a long silence on the other end. I could see the two cops swaggering up to the glass door, adjusting their hats and nightsticks. “Please, Nancy. I don’t have much time, but this is important.

“All right, Billy. Tomorrow night at six.” She hung up.

There was a tap on my shoulder. My ride was here.

This time I was in a holding cell. It wasn’t as nice as the interrogation room, but at least I didn’t have cuffs. Life is a series of trade-offs.

They kept me until ten o’clock at night, and then they let me go again, still with no explanation.

I didn’t really need an explanation. I was getting the message loud and clear.

I needed to be able to move around to get Doyle. Doyle was not going to let me move around.

He had played it cautious, leaving me alive. He didn’t know who else might know what I knew. But he could make damn sure I didn’t learn anything else.

I made it all the way back to my hotel room this time. I called Ed at home and told him what was going on.

“Figured something like that might happen,” he said. “What you gonna do about it?”

“I only have one move. I don’t like it much, but it’s all there is. Tomorrow morning I’m going to see a high-powered lawyer and lay out the whole thing for him.”

Smoke hissed out into the telephone. “What’s chances Doyle can get to this lawyer?”

“Pretty good, I’d say. You got a better idea?”

“Nope.”

“Well then, wish me luck and watch my back.”

“I’ll do that, Billy.”

Century City sticks up from a surrounding area of low, expensive homes. You can see it from ten miles away on a good day. But there are damned few good days in L.A., especially in August.

I took Olympic Boulevard west. It’s usually faster. For twenty minutes I watched the dim fingers of the high-rises growing gradually cleaner in outline. I also watched my rearview mirror, but there were no cops following me this morning.

I pulled into the underground parking lot of one of the buildings just about ten. The sign told me that if I wasn’t making about two and a half times minimum wage, I’d be losing money to park here while I worked. L.A. is the only place I know where you can have a job that you can’t afford to go to.

Eli Woodstock had an office near the top of the building. It was behind a very plain door that said
FINKLE WOODSTOCK & KLEIN
. That was it; I guess anyone passing by would know that they had to be lawyers with a name like that. Or maybe anybody who didn’t already know wasn’t welcome.

I waited about twenty minutes in a small waiting room. For what they had spent decorating it, you could buy a three-bedroom waterfront house in Key West.

Eventually the receptionist, with a cool British accent, informed me that Mr. Woodstock might see me now. She said it like it surprised her—a man like Mr. Woodstock actually seeing something like
me.
She watched me go inside like she was afraid I would stop and pee in the corner.

A woman I knew at one of the big record companies once told me a secret. If you know the system, a person’s office tells you exactly, down to the small change, how much they make and how important they are.

The way it works is this: score so many points for a corner office, so many more for each window. A couch with a coffee table gets more points than a chair with an end table. A picture on the wall scores, if it’s big and not too modern, and a potted plant counts according to its size.

Eli Woodstock’s office was the grand prize jackpot. It was a corner room. Two entire walls were glass. On the other two walls hung four paintings. If they weren’t fakes, I had to assume that museum directors would be very polite to this man.

There was a kid leather sofa with a marble coffee table that matched it, and three citrus trees bearing fruit in huge pots.

A short person would get lost in his carpet. Eli Woodstock was tall, even behind his massive slate desk. He still looked like an Episcopalian bishop.

The last time I had seen him, he had been smiling gently, gravely, trying to get my signature on a release for the city. He was not smiling today.

“Mr. Knight,” he said, and there was a lot of disapproval in his voice. “Sit down, please.”

It was not a request. It was closer to the tone a bailiff uses on a prisoner in court.

I sat in a chair that cost more than my car. He looked at me without blinking for three minutes, his hands steepled in front of him. Then he shook his head.

“Well,” he said. “What can I do for you?” He said it in a dry, distant voice, a voice that doubted there was anything I might want him to do that his morals would let him do.

I took a deep breath and told him. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle and that didn’t matter. I was used to that.

I laid it all out for him: from Roscoe calling on me in Key West, all the way through my visit to Doyle and my stay in the drunk tank, the visits to the Hollywood bureau. I told it carefully, objectively, without getting emotional or speculating too much. I made one hell of a case.

He let me finish. He made sure I’d told it all to him. He even waited another three minutes when I was done, looking at me over his bridged hands, just in case something else occurred to me.

Then he let me have it.

He shook his head at me for a good half-minute, slowly, elegantly, the gesture filled with upper-class contempt. “Mr. Knight,” he said at last, “what is it you expect of me?”

“Aside from the fact that the City might have a problem here, I was hoping you might want to see justice done,” I said.

Eli Woodstock laughed. It was a rich, beautiful theatrical laugh. It was a laugh that was all about affecting other people and not at all about enjoyment or happiness. It was supposed to make me feel two inches tall, but it didn’t work. I was still well over a foot and a half.

“Justice,” he said, with one of those little twists to the word that juries eat up. Now it was a naive dream. “
Justice.
” Now it was a curse, a beautiful absolute that I had violated. He shook his head again, a little faster this time.

“What would you consider to be
justice,
Mr. Knight?” He didn’t leave any room for me to answer. “Is it your idea of justice to see a dedicated police officer dragged through the mud and possibly damage his career because of your half-baked, groundless, baseless slander? Is it justice to sacrifice Mr. Doyle on the altar of your greed for vengeance? Is that what justice means to you, Mr. Knight?”

I didn’t know whether to applaud or throw myself out the window. “What greed for vengeance are we talking about here?” I said politely. “Just so we’re all on the same wavelength.”

He gave me a knowing smile, almost a smirk. “I think you know what I mean. I think we offered you a more than fair settlement, and you turned it down. For someone in your position to turn down that kind of money? A
fisherman?
” He shook his head, a wise smile on his lips. “I don’t think so. I think you must have had something else in mind, even then.”

“And this is it?”

“This is it.”

I had to think that my hearing was bad. Either that or somebody had slipped me some LSD. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

He let the smile widen a little. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t believe it?”

“You? No, I guess
you
would have to believe something like that. I guess being what you are, that’s all that makes sense.”

He held up a hand to cut me off. “Don’t think I believe you’re a bad person, Mr. Knight. Grief does funny things to some people.” He said it in a way that meant, little, mean, dirty, and grubby types who couldn’t play tennis. “Nonetheless we can’t allow this to go any further.”

“You think Doyle killed the McAuleys because of my grief?” I asked him.

“I think you’ve decided to make a little trouble for the City out of grief. Understandable, in a way. Which is why I am again authorized to offer you a settlement for your original problem.” He gave me a new smile, an understanding one this time. “Not quite the original terms, of course.”

“And you really think I’ll take the money and disappear?”

“You’re going to disappear in any case, Mr. Knight. Either back where you came from or into jail. And yes, I think that if you can make a little money off all this, you’ll be a happy man.”

I stood up. “Nothing you can say or do would make me a happy man, Mr. Woodstock. Just being in the same room with you makes me want to wash my hands.” I turned to go.