My Detective

by Jeffrey Fleishman

  “Crime lab says they pulled some stuff from one of Jamieson’s computers.”

  “Call me,” Ortiz says, and we go our separate ways.

  The lab’s probably at lunch, so I walk down Spring for a coffee. A TV reporter approaches, but I wave him off and head past a dog park. A pit bull chases a tennis ball, and a guy off his meds—or on too many meds—is twirling on the grass and screaming about aliens. He’s bearded, lean, and schizophrenic, two voices roaring inside, bursting out in different sounds. He claws at his skin and bangs his head. He wants them to stop, but they won’t. They follow him, like the aliens, wherever he goes, and one voice screams at the other and no one goes to him, no one takes him by the hand. He is part of the scenery, someone’s crazy unwashed cousin wandering the neighborhood, in the evening finding his way back to skid row, where other voices join his chorus, and eyes peek from tents, cardboard, and shopping carts. I get called to skid row for the occasional murder, a body under papers on a sidewalk or curled beneath an underpass. No Renaissance there. That word is becoming more annoying.

  Ortiz was right, though. I was rich once—not grandly so, but enough. My mother took the million dollars my grandfather left to my father and put it in a bank. Suspicious of markets, she never invested, but interest rates were good back then, and the money grew for a while. After my father died, we lived on it and my mother’s teaching salary, draining it little by little, paying for my college, trips, and unexpected things. There’s a bit of it left, more than enough for my mother and Maggie. I send them money too. The rich days, whatever “rich days” means, ended when my father, boxer and family black sheep, received a much smaller inheritance than his siblings. “I knew the bastard hated me,” my mother once quoted my father as saying of my grandfather, “but I thought he’d leave more. I guess they never do.”

  My mother used to take me by the old mansion. It had been sold and we’d stand outside in the dark and see people moving in lighted windows. “That was your father’s room,” she’d say. “It had eaves and angles. It was like a garret, but big. Everyone had a big room. I wonder who’s in there now.” She wondered too, about the initials my father had carved in the windowsill as a boy, and the picture of a face he drew in charcoal behind the hanging coats in his closet. She had hoped they were still there, but suspected they weren’t, yet she believed that those old houses held past lives that slipped into the present and moved among the living.

  A man appears beside me and keeps pace.

  “You Detective Carver?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you on TV. You live downtown, don’t you?”

  “What can I help you with?”

  He’s fat and sweaty, dressed in a snug blazer with too-long pants, worn loafers, and mirrored aviator sunglasses—the cheap kind from Rite Aid. He’s smoking a cigarillo. He’s swift, with a slight whistle in his sentences.

  “I’m a barber.”

  “I don’t need a haircut. I do, but I haven’t got time.”

  I pick up the pace.

  “I saw you with the mayor,” he says. “He’s a twerp. Good hair, but a twerp. You think you’re going to catch the killer?”

  “We’ll get him.”

  “I think it’s a her.”

  He pulls down his aviators and flashes a set of blue eyes that don’t go with the rest of him.

  “You’ve got my attention.”

  “Good, ’cause you walk too fast. Let’s stop. Get a coffee and a sandwich and we’ll talk.”

  “No time. I have to be somewhere. Let’s talk here in the shade. What’s your name?”

  “Earle-with-an-e-at-the-end Reed. People often forget the last e.” He takes a breath. “Everyone’s in a rush—you notice that? Technology. All these screens. It’s exasperating. The pleasantries of life have vanished. Rush, rush. We’ve become uncivilized, if I may say. These young guys wanting haircuts today. The skinny ones with the tight pants, beards, and those droopy earlobes. Who would do that to an ear? They want a haircut, but fast. They don’t want to enjoy it, to sit back and feel it. A haircut is social. A ritual, like church. You don’t rush church.” He pauses and catches his breath. “Amazing how Spring Street has changed.”

  Why do they always drone on so? I need to hurry this guy along, grab a coffee, and get to the crime lab. I can’t tell if he’s one of those avid newspaper and crime blog readers, an interventionist with a police scanner and a vivid imagination. I open my notebook.

  “Why a her?”

  He takes off his aviators and cleans them with a handkerchief he’s pulled from his breast pocket with all the flair of a Vegas magician. Job done, he slips it back in with the same flourish. He takes a breath and leans against a tree. Relights his cigarillo and exhales.

  “The architect, the one up on Grand in that nice tower by the Broad. Paul Jamieson.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was up there—don’t want to say why exactly, if you don’t mind. Nothing unseemly, of course. I’m certainly not connected to the murder. Nooo. I run a side business; let’s leave it at that.” I shoot him a hard glance. “Okay, okay, I’m a bookie. I was up there seeing a guy—rich older guy. He wanted to lay some money on a few games. We had a drink. Now, there’s a guy who can slow down and enjoy the pleasantries. A gentleman. Tailored, if you know what I mean. Good hair. Not good-looking, but suave. We sit and talk, let the night run. No harm, right? Two guys whiling a couple of hours away. Anyway, I take his money—always puts it in a crisp envelope, very old-school. So I ride the elevator down and step outside for a smoke. I love to light up in the dark and watch the smoke curl in the night. It’s special, you know. A little bit of special. So I’m standing there a while, enjoying the stars. It was a cool night. A clean night.”

  He takes a drag on his cigarillo, exhales, enjoying his own voice.

  “That’s when, you know, I see her.”

  “Okay. What’d she look like?”

  “That’s the thing,” he says. “She was wearing a hat, sort of in the Indiana Jones style, and a coat like a raincoat but not—a flimsy, pretty thing with a slit in the back. Blue, I think. A dark shade. She was tall too. Long legs. I turned toward her. She tilted her head and pulled the brim down. She turned right and went down the hill and around the corner.”

  “Why would you think she was a killer?”

  “Can’t say precisely. It was the way she moved, like something that was there and shouldn’t have been. She was wanting to get away fast but not show she was getting away fast. Like a shoplifter. It’s complicated, but you know what I mean. The next day, the old guy, my client, calls and tells me about a murder in an apartment two floors above. I turn on the news later that day. And I figure …”

  “You figure you were standing next to a killer.”

  “Gave me chills. You think it could have been her?”

  “Any other description? Distinguishing features?”

  “Just a hat and a chin. I didn’t see her face. The collar on the coat was up so I couldn’t see her hair. What color it was. I would have noticed the hair. A quick glimpse is all I had of her. Like I said, she was tall. Trim and tall. She looked like an actress. That’s what I figured at first. She’s up there making a movie. Nothing unusual, right? Shoot movies up on Grand all the time. That’s what immediately came to mind. There was a thing about her, you know? I mean, it was just a second, but she had style. Isn’t that funny how you can see something like that in a split second, not even see a face or anything else, but just know?”

  I write down his name and number and hand him my card and tell him to stop by the station later to give a more detailed statement.

  “We’ll keep the bookie stuff between us, right? Harmless little side business.”

  “Only interested in what you saw.”

  “So you think she could be …”

  “We follow every lead.”


  “Yes, every lead. Whatever I can do to help.”

  He puffs his cigarillo, brushes ash from his blazer.

  “You should stop by for a haircut. I’m down on Eighth. Earle’s. You could use a trim.”

  Earle-with-an-e-at-the-end nods and strolls away.

  He was right, she did have style. I saw it on the video. A quick grace. I call Stephen Jensen again. No answer. I phone Wanita. She hasn’t heard from him. “But as I told you,” she says, “this is not unusual. Stephen likes his solitude—how do you say in this country? To ‘go off the grid,’ yes?” Her voice is worried, though. Really worried. A face can trick you, but not a voice. Cracks in consonants, a broken vowel. They give you away even when you’re thinking your face is the perfect mask. Suspects will keep talking in the interrogation box, go on for hours and hours, thinking they’re playing us, thinking their mask can’t be broken, not knowing that their voice is betraying them, and when the mask shatters, they look at you as if to say, Why? I had this beat. Self-delusion is the magic of survival. How does she survive? I can’t stop seeing the surveillance video in my head. She was there but not there. The coat, the way she moved. Earle sensed it too. He exhaled to the stars, and she was gone.

  I get a coffee at another new café on Spring. Organic. Four bucks. Christ. The Renaissance is getting expensive. I head toward the crime lab and think of that morning with Susan. Two people eating eggs, drinking coffee. Normal. Talking. Teasing. You can forget how it all can be, the good things, having an extra voice in your home, the scent of another. Susan had style, the way she spun down the hall in her half-buttoned shirt and stood naked in the bedroom, her arms reaching out for me.

  I walk down the hall to room 502. Crime lab. Wires, tools, circuits, vials, tubes, and the insides of things spread out on tables. A guy with tweezers is pulling something from a DVD player, and a woman in a hairnet is peeking into the back of an iPhone. Fingerprints and faces of perps float across computer screens, and two guys are watching surveillance video of a clerk in a market—must be Boyle Heights—getting whacked with two pops from a nine-millimeter. The thief’s hand reaches into the cash drawer, pulls out a fistful, and disappears through the front door. But he doesn’t really disappear. The outside camera catches him throwing the gun into a dumpster.

  “What a dumb fuck,” says Doug Watkins, holding up the gun with gloved hands. “Prints all over it. You ever wonder about the criminal mind, Carver? I mean, how fucked up it is, how unaware? Not thinking. Just doesn’t think who’s watching. Serious lack of planning. I mean, you whack a guy, right, you wear gloves, and you don’t dump the gun at the scene. What do you figure he grabbed? That time of day. Afternoon. Maybe a few hundred bucks, tops. Now he’s done. Life over. In jail eating up taxpayer money, playing checkers, watching Judge Judy, and getting it up the ass. You gotta wonder if we’re all the same species.”

  “So you’re having a good day.”

  “An amazing day. Who you looking for?”

  “Whoever’s got the laptops from the Jamieson house.”

  “Jamieson. Jamieson. Oh, the place up off Sunset. The architect with his pecker out and his finger gone.”

  “That’s him.”

  Doug points.

  “Tommy?” I say.

  “Yup.”

  Doug smiles and returns his attention to the dumb fuck’s gun. Tommy Yan is the lab’s mad scientist, a scattered, wiry, jumpy-eyed strange syntax of a man. Thorough and unnervingly precise, he loves theories, the why and how of things, which is to be expected in forensics, but Yan bores down to the last molecule of dust, the millionth fiber. His nickname is “Mr. Airtight.” Never loses a case. But it takes a while for him to get out a report. He is what Doug calls “one easily distractible motherfucker. Working on something like a monk and then, boom, something new comes through the door and Mr. Airtight comes peeking.”

  I knock. Yan looks up, his eyes floating like two Jupiters behind his magnifying goggles. He pulls the goggles off and slips on his regular glasses, holds up a finger, writes on a pad, whispers into an audio recorder, swivels in his chair, and looks at me as if I’m a cat that’s wandered over from a neighbor’s house.

  “Ahhhhh, Carver, sorry. In the moment, you know. Odd case here. Guy kills his wife, doesn’t know what to do with the body. Then, I guess, he gets the idea to make a puzzle out of her. Chops her up. Buries her in different parts of the yard. This is out near Beverly Hills, so, you know, the lawn is landscaped and big, so she’s all over the place. Got all of her but the head. And the weapon. Can’t find it. Trying to figure out what it was. The cuts are odd. Not a Walmart knife. I’m thinking it must be a sword or machete. Something foreign. Ancient, maybe. I’m matching metal fragments.”

  He catches himself, takes off his regular glasses, and puts on another pair.

  “Sorry, man. They changed my prescription. Everything’s blurry. They gave me the wrong glasses. Now I gotta go back. It’s an imprecise world. Imprecise.” He sighs like someone who has just lost a week’s pay on a long-shot horse at Santa Anita. “Sorry, Carver, what can I do for you?”

  “Jamieson. Paul Jamieson.”

  “You’re working the Jamieson thing. Oh, yeah, it was downtown, your turf.”

  “Killed up on Grand.”

  Yan nods toward two laptops.

  “These were pulled from his place off Sunset.”

  “That was his main house. He kept a small apartment on Grand.”

  Yan laughs. He swivels, rolls toward the laptops, pops open the screens.

  “We swept them. Building designs, bank statements, investment stuff. Guy had some serious cash. Wasn’t much of an internet surfer, though. Not many cookies. But he did like the Italian period from the late medieval through Caravaggio. Downloaded a lot of art and architecture from that era. Research papers. Was obsessed with that time. Lots of travel stories too.” Tommy takes off his glasses, holds them to the light, puts them back on. “It’s funny, you know, but you go through a guy’s laptop and there he is, staring back at you. The whole of him. This guy was from another era. Didn’t live in our world. The things he loved were gone, in the past.”

  “So you’re a shrink now?”

  “No. Just saying. This laptop tells me.”

  “What about this one?”

  “New. Not much there. A few three-D diagrams of buildings he’d been working on. You look at them and then you look at the stuff on that computer and you see. He was trying to connect that old world with this one. In buildings. Pretty cool. But they don’t seem right, you know. They don’t really exist together.” Yan runs his fingers over the keyboard. “Oh, yeah, I forgot. Once a month or so, he did visit a website for an escort service. Anna Bella. That’s the name. Kind of chic sounding. You probably definitely want to check that out.”

  Yan swivels and rolls back toward me. He’s got that look I know from past cases. I cross my arms and wait. He likes to draw out the drama, make a little play of it. He looks at me. I look at him. He holds up a flash drive.

  “Now, this baby,” he says, “is something you’re going to want to see.”

  He plugs the drive into the second laptop, hits a key, leans back, and points to the screen.

  Chapter 19

  So now you know.

  My secret.

  What’s it like to watch? I wonder. To come at it cold, see it pop up like that? Maybe you’re used to it, but I think, knowing you, Sam, it hurts. I hope so. I hope it makes you understand. Do you like the mask they put on me? It’s Venetian. From the Carnevale, fifteenth century. When I see it, I think of whispers on a floating city. That’s me. The naked girl in the mask. Don’t Gallagher and Jamieson look much younger? The pale creature off to the side, by the way, is Jensen, the reluctant one. What a strange sliver of a man. I don’t know what they gave me. That still bothers me. They must have slipped a potion—a dark fairy-tale word—into my d
rink. We’d been in Los Angeles only a few months, new architects among the angels. We were introduced by a man I don’t remember. An older man, I think. Quiet, tailored. He left shortly after, and Jamieson, Gallagher, and I went barhopping along Sunset. So cool that night. You know the kind: hard and black and ancient beyond the lights. Then, at some point, we ended up at Jamieson’s. I should mention now that Jensen was not with us at the beginning of the night. He joined us later at Jamieson’s, but by that time my mask was on. Jensen never saw my face. How curious for him, don’t you think? I didn’t know exactly what happened in the hours after. I woke up on the couch in my underpants and a T-shirt not mine. I assumed I had made the mistake of the young: too much drinking and fumbling sex with a handsome man. Jamieson is (was) handsome, as you can see. I won’t deny him that.

  I went into the kitchen, where Jamieson, shirtless and in pajama bottoms, was drinking coffee and thumbing through a picture book of gargoyles. Black-and-white and taken up close, teeth and wings and savage eyes, the demons of architecture. He closed the book and looked at me. I told him I was a bit blurry and, with a sheepish smile, asked him what had happened. He said we all partied and came to his place. Gallagher and Jensen stayed for a while, drinking martinis and eating prosciutto, and left a little before dawn. Jamieson blushed and gave me a look that said, Well, you know what happened next. He said we tried to make love, but it wasn’t good. We were too drunk. He didn’t say it with venom or judgment, or even insecurity about, maybe, his performance. It just didn’t go well, like a bad day on the Nasdaq. That was the look in his eyes. But then, ever so briefly, he smiled—not a happy smile, but one of a boy caught in a bit of mischief. He didn’t comfort me, didn’t pull me to his lap and have a bashful laugh about us being half-dressed strangers in the uncomfortable light of morning. No. None of that. The whole time he was talking, I kept thinking that more had happened. Gallagher and Jensen appeared at the edges of my mind, foggy, like men underwater floating around me. Voices and laughter. Weight pressing against flesh. Bodies at different angles, slanted and straight, contorted, grabbing. I remembered music that may have been opera. I couldn’t be sure. I felt a soreness down there. A faint bloom of blood in my underpants. But nothing else. I asked Jamieson again what had happened. He said, “Nothing. Honestly, we were way wasted. We undressed, fooled around. You put my T-shirt on and went to the couch.” He looked as though he wanted to get on with his day, as if I was keeping him from a great burst of architecture. He didn’t seem like a rapist. An insufferable egotist, yes—I do remember, the night before, how he talked about his aesthetic, his concept of beauty—but not a rapist. I had, over the years, slept with one or two relative strangers after a night of drinking. It’s human, is it not, to make mistakes and spot the soul with tiny infractions? No harm in a little after-hours sex. This is how I thought. Take a shower, towel dry, and be gone. It was different that night, though. Something more had happened. I felt it.