L.A. Heat

by P. A. Brown

  All three youths bent over the pictures, as though they could fathom what had happened to their friend by studying them. Digger was first to shake his head.

  “Never seen any of them.”

  “Ever see Daniel talking to anyone you didn’t know? Probably an older guy.”

  “How old?” Ant wanted to know.

  “At least late twenties. Probably thirties.”

  “Wow, old, then,” the girl murmured. “Sometimes they come in. Usually trying to hit on us.” She made a face. “It’s so lame. They’re like, ancient. I might as well date my father.”

  “But not these guys?” David indicated the pictures. Trying not to think how ancient he was at thirty-seven.

  “Sorry, no,” Digger said.

  “Except for his uncle,” Ant muttered. He rubbed one chewed up finger along his fuzz-covered face. “That time he got sick, remember?”

  David felt a stir of excitement. “Who was sick? Daniel’s uncle?”

  “Nah,” Ant said. “DJ was here playing as usual. This guy comes in, hell, none of us pay any attention, and DJ never said who he was, but then DJ got real sick. And that’s when this guy said he was DJ’s uncle and he was gonna take him home.” Ant glared at Digger. “You don’t remember that?”

  “Don’t remember no uncle,” Digger said. “I thought DJ was stoned.”

  “He was sick.”

  “The uncle tell you that?” David kept the excitement out of his voice. “What did his uncle look like?”

  Ant shrugged. “Old.” He glanced at the pictures. “Like that, maybe older.”

  “White?”

  The look Ant gave him said “Of course” as though David was stupid.

  “What about hair color? You remember that?”

  “I don’t know. Light, I guess. Blond.”

  In frustration, though he knew if a defense attorney like Weiss ever heard of it, he’d be raked over the hottest legal coals, David tapped the sheet of pictures on the counter.

  “You’re sure it wasn’t one of these guys?”

  Ant studied the pictures again, even going so far as to pick up Chris’s, but he was firmly shaking his head when he dropped it back down.

  “No. None of them is DJ’s uncle.”

  Then David did something he knew would get him nailed good. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the rest of the pictures he had taken of Chris that morning.

  “Here,” he said. “Look these over.”

  Again Ant peered down at the three new pictures, his face screwed up in a scowl. He eventually tossed the three images on top of the old ones.

  “Nope. Ain’t him.”

  *****

  “Could we have the wrong guy?” David threw the photos down on the hood of Martinez’s car. Martinez stood blinking down at them. They had met up in the parking lot of the building across the street from DataTEK shortly after three o’clock.

  “They’re kids,” Martinez said. “They make a wrong ID based on one picture.”

  David considered a second, then sighed and dropped the other three pictures on top of the first six. “Except I also showed them these. They were still adamant.”

  “Shit, even a first-year police detective could get a lineup like that tossed, even if your wits had copped to knowing him.” Martinez frowned. “This ain’t like you, Davey.”

  David ignored that. “We have nothing else on this guy.”

  “He knew the last victim,” Martinez said with some exasperation. “He admits to fucking him, cops to having him in his truck. We got the victim’s glasses in his truck.”

  “Glasses ID’d from a photo. You know how many glasses of that type there are in this city? Your first-year P.D. would love us to walk into court with that one.”

  “Get the prescription—”

  “I’ve requested that from the brother.”

  “So we’ll still get him.”

  David ticked off the problems he was having with the whole “Bellamere as doer”

  scenario. “We got the bartender’s testimony of the last guy the victim hustled. If it went down like Chris said and the victim stormed off in a huff, he could just as easily have been picked up by someone else.” He scooped up the useless images. “We don’t even know for sure he was picked up that night. For all we know it was the next night.”

  “Except we got no wits who saw this Bobby character again, right? After he was seen with Bellamere he vanished, until he turns up dead. We know he worked porno. Probably hustled, too.”

  “No record.”

  Martinez’s irritation grew. “Do we have anyone else?”

  “No,” David conceded. “Then let’s do like we planned. If we can’t find anything from his employment, we put him on the back burner. I still think he’s good for it and something’s going to show up.”

  “You got the warrant then?”

  “Ever know me to fail?”

  David dropped the photos into his briefcase, clicked it shut, and stepped away from Martinez’s unmarked.

  “Let’s do it then.”

  Return to Contents

  CHAPTER 17

  Tuesday, 1:15 pm, Western Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles FROM THE PERFUMED corridors of Beverly Hills to the piss-drenched streets of a low-rent apartment on Western took less than forty minutes. Chris felt like he’d traveled to another planet. Was this why Bobby hadn’t wanted to bring him home the night they connected up?

  He made his way along the dimly lit corridor on the first floor, easing by a pile of filthy blankets and trying to keep his Dockers from touching anything. When the blankets moved, he nearly jumped out of his nerve-mangled skin.

  A gaunt, dirt-blackened face peered up at him hopefully.

  “Dollar, mister?” A cracked, wheezing voice asked. “Spare a dollar?”

  A life spent in L.A. had inured Chris to the multitude of panhandlers and street people who lived out shadow lives on the fringes of his world. He sometimes dropped careless coins into the battered guitar cases of street musicians, or the hands of old women who followed their steel shopping carts like faithful dogs as they wended their way along the cracked sidewalks of East Hollywood. They always seemed to him to be searching for memories that had fled them long ago.

  Was this what Bobby would have come to? Once his looks had faded with age and abuse, would he have moved from this shabby apartment to the streets, just one more failed dreamer?

  He felt sick as he fumbled in his back pocket for a handful of coins and dropped them into the outstretched hand, refusing to meet the man’s rheumy eyes.

  On the second floor the muffled screams of Eminem came from farther up. When a baby’s screams joined Eminem, Chris winced.

  Bobby’s roommate turned out to be a skinny teenager with a vague Midwestern accent and a head full of dreadlocks, which Chris figured had less to do with the Rastafarian cult than a refusal to brush her hair. Her lemon bright T-shirt bared one shoulder and most of her midriff, showing off a skull tattoo and belly-button ring.

  Chris held out his hand.

  “Chris Bellamere.”

  She stared at his hand for several heartbeats, then touched his fingertips. “Skull. You another cop?”

  When she grinned she displayed tobacco stained teeth. Chris stared—she had filed her incisors down into pale spikes. She proudly fingered the skull tattoo on her hip, then stared pointedly at his crotch. He felt himself shrivel up inside his boxers. A horrible thought occurred to him. Bobby hadn’t been bi, had he? Had he slept with this creature?

  “The cops were here?” he asked.

  She disappeared into the apartment, forcing him to follow. She patted a yellow and brown flowered sofa. When she sat, her sagging belly flowed out around her too-tight jeans. Her pierced navel looked inflamed. She grinned again and bounced on the sofa.

  “They were here, asking all kinds of questions. You a friend of Bobby’s?”

  She seemed pretty jazzed about being questioned by the police. Like it was all a gam
e.

  “If you ain’t a cop who are you? One of his tricks?” She smiled slyly.

  “Do you know the names of the cops who were here?”

  “Nah. They left me a card; it’s around here someplace. Who reads that shit, right?”

  “What did they look like?”

  “One of them was this fat Mex, the other guy was big, had stuff all over his face.

  Can’t say either one of them turned my crank. Why can’t I get a cop looks like Brad Pitt?

  This is Hollywood, ain’t it? Oughtta be a law.”

  “What did they want to know?”

  “Who Bobby was seeing.” She giggled. “Like he dated the guys he was porking. I told them Bobby never brought his tricks home with him.”

  “I was hoping to find something that would tell me what Bobby had been up to the last weeks of his life.”

  “You and the cops both. Say, you one of his tricks?” She looked him up and down and licked her lips. “Bobby could get ’em, that’s for sure.”

  “So he didn’t keep an address book or anything?”

  She scratched at a festering pimple on the side of her nose. “What’s in it for me if he did?”

  Before he could ask her what she meant, she vanished into a back room. She returned several minutes later with the last thing Chris would have expected.

  A Palm Pilot.

  She held it out. “I didn’t tell the cops about it. They would have just taken it from me.

  Now what good’s that to me? I gotta survive too, y’know.”

  Chris took the device from her. He fumbled in his wallet and found two twenties and a ten. He offered them to her.

  She looked up at him. “You wanna buy it?”

  “If you got the power adapter to go with it.”

  She eyed the money, then hugged the PDA to her chest. “That’s all? Maybe I should just give it to the cops.”

  He pulled another twenty out, showing her his wallet was now empty. She scurried out of the room and came back with the AC adapter. She snatched the bills from him.

  He left before she could change her mind.

  Tuesday, 2:40 pm, DataTEK, Studio City

  “What exactly was it you wanted, officers?”

  The officious CIO of DataTEK, Peter McGill, had been joined by a fox-faced woman who glared at everyone in Peter’s outer office as if they were personally responsible for her extra workload.

  David handed the warrant to McGill.

  “Specifically we want to see any records that relate to Mr. Christopher Bellamere’s employment with you in the last ninety days. We need to see records of where he worked when he was off-site and who he worked for.”

  McGill nodded brusquely at the fox-faced woman. “Mildred can provide that for you.

  She’s our director of human resources. Was there anything else?”

  “We also have a list of items we are to secure from Mr. Bellamere’s work cubicle, including any computer equipment he may have worked on.”

  McGill frowned. “That equipment is company property. Will it be returned?”

  “The equipment in question will be held for the duration of our investigation; then it will be returned to you.”

  McGill glared at Mildred. “I want him off our payroll,” he snapped. “Can you start the ball rolling on that?”

  “You might want to reconsider, Mr. McGill.” The woman glanced at David, then murmured something in a low voice to her boss.

  McGill’s glare was transferred to David. Then he reluctantly nodded at her. “I’ll consult with our legal department, then. Mildred, can I count on you to get the documents these gentlemen require?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll leave that in your capable hands, then. Gentlemen.” McGill nodded at David and Martinez, then retreated to his office and closed the door.

  David and Martinez followed the woman into the hallway.

  “Not a happy camper,” Martinez said. He eyed the HR director uneasily. She led them down the hallway to a second office, where she asked them to wait.

  They did as she directed, and after they had cooled their heels for twenty minutes she returned, producing a sheaf of papers that she handed to David. He glanced at them and saw Chris’s name on top.

  “Mr. Bellamere’s hours and work locations for the last three months. Will you need a list of contacts at those businesses?”

  “Yes, we will,” David said. “We’d like to start at Mr. Bellamere’s desk. Can you have someone show us the way?”

  She nodded. “I’ll bring that contact list by there later.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  He and Martinez retreated to the hall, where they waited for their escort. Eventually another woman showed up to lead them to Chris’s cubicle. Like the last time, his phone was blinking and several handwritten notes littered the desk.

  An outraged Becky Chapman planted herself in front of David. “What are you doing?”

  “Police business,” Martinez said, all but shoving the warrant under her nose. Becky backed up a step, but continued to glower.

  “We only need this black box, right?” David muttered after crouching to determine how many computers Chris had at his desk. He found only one under the monitor.

  Still kneeling, he opened his cell and dialed the station, and asked to be put through to a computer-forensics technician. Soon the whiny voice of someone who sounded as though he was barely out of grade school came on the line.

  When the tech found out what they were doing he sighed and said, “Okay, is the computer still on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Unhook the colored network cable at the back.”

  David found a blue cable that plugged into what looked like a telephone jack. He described it to the tech. “That’s it. Unplug it, then unplug the power. Once it’s off, unhook everything else and bring it back here.”

  “This is related to a murder investigation,” David said, trying to keep his voice low, aware of eavesdroppers. “How soon can you get to it.”

  “As soon as I can get to it,” the bored-sounding tech said before hanging up.

  David did as he was told. He hefted the black box onto the top of Chris’s desk and found Becky still there, glaring at him.

  “What are you doing?” Her contempt was open. “Where are you taking that?”

  “Computer-forensics lab.” She turned away in disgust. The disgust deepened when Tom Clarke appeared beside her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Peter is concerned about the corporate image,” Tom said. “He wanted me to help these gentlemen get what they needed as quickly as possible.”

  Translation: get what they came for and get out. David took advantage of Tom’s arrival. He pointed to Chris’s workstation.

  “Are there any other machines that Mr. Bellamere would use?”

  “Nah, that’s his only workstation,” Tom said. “So, did you finally get around to arresting Bellamere?”

  “Are you aware of something he should be arrested for?”

  “His lifestyle, for one. The guy’s clearly up to something. Late all the time. Out on so-called service calls. No one really knows what he’s doing when he leaves here.”

  David thumbed through a couple of the files Martinez had pulled from Chris’s file cabinet. They all bore company names and clear dates.

  “He appears to keep meticulous records.”

  “He might have been telling DataTEK one thing, but I’ll bet you find he wasn’t doing half the work he claimed.”

  “You are so full of shit,” Becky said. “If Chris didn’t do his work, why was he always called back? When half of those companies put in requests for our services, they ask for Chris. They don’t want anyone else touching their systems. Wonder why that is, eh, Tommy?”

  Tom’s lip curled at her. “He’s snowed you all, hasn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s snowed us all by doing the best work anyone in this company can produce.” Her brown eyes turned tow
ard David. “You believe who you want, but Chris isn’t cheating anyone. And he hasn’t done anything illegal, either.”

  She turned and stalked off. Tom lingered, then sauntered after her a couple of minutes later. Once in the elevator David shifted the weight of the computer in his arms.

  “You were right, that guy has it in for Chris,” David said. “You get the impression he thinks he should have Chris’s status in the company?”

  “That girl doesn’t think so,” Martinez said. “If he wasn’t a faggot I’d think something was going on between them.”

  “It doesn’t always come down to sex, you know.”

  “Since when?”

  David stared at the elevator door the rest of the trip.

  Tuesday, 3:10 pm, Western Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles Chris’s BlackBerry vibrated as he escaped Bobby’s building.

  “Yeah?” he murmured.

  “What the hell kind of trouble you getting yourself into now?”

  Chris recognized Becky’s voice instantly. “Hi to you, too, Chapman. To tell the truth, I figured my life was getting way too tame, so I thought I’d liven it up a bit.”

  “Right.” Her normally husky voice dropped several octaves and he could almost imagine her looking around, searching for eavesdroppers. “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “Gee, Chapman, thanks for sharing that.”

  “The cops just came in here with a big story about having a warrant to search your workspace. They’ve taken your PC.”

  Chris nearly slammed the car door on his fingers. He stared sightlessly out the tinted window at the traffic on Western. A black-and-white crawled by and he felt like shrinking down in his seat, away from the watchful eyes.

  “What?” he finally managed.

  “They’re after you hard, man. I don’t know what they think you did, but that little shit is right there in the middle of it, spinning all kinds of stories for them.”

  “Little shi—you mean Clarke, don’t you.”

  “What are they doing, Chris? What do they want?”

  “Damned if I know. I mean that, Becky. They got some crazy idea I’m involved in something I’m not and they aren’t listening to anybody, least of all me.”