77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Yes. I have spoken with her.”

  “She had your card in her possession.”

  “I gave it to her yesterday. We scheduled a taping session with her this morning at nine. She didn’t show.” I studied his face, but he wasn’t giving away anything. “I don’t like the way you used the past tense just now.”

  Rascon sat forward. “Ms. Tarbett was found dead last night. We’re following up any possible leads, and looking for any information that might prove helpful.”

  “Dead how?”

  “Stabbed. Looks like an ice pick.” He pulled out his pocket notebook. “What was this interview you scheduled? She apply for a job?”

  “Hardly. She was going to talk about an old friend—an old boyfriend—on videotape. She had an appointment this morning at the Hot-Cha Club on Florence Avenue. I knew she was nervous about being on camera. When she didn’t show, I thought she was just scared.”

  “Who was the friend?” He had his head down, pen poised to write.

  “Roy Frady.”

  He started to write. Then he stopped, pen held over the notebook. It took him a moment to make the connection, but when he did he seemed almost angry. He let out a noisy “Hmm,” the way men do when they think they’re being played for fools. “Who did you say?”

  “I’m filming a documentary about Roy Frady. He used to stop at the Hot-Cha Club on his way to work, get half in the bag, have sex with Michelle, straighten his tie, report for roll call. I wanted Michelle to talk about him.”

  His smile was crooked, unsure. “Say, what?”

  “I think I stated all that very clearly.” I rewound JoAnn Chin for a few seconds, pushed Play, not knowing what part of the tape was up. “I’ll show you the sort of thing I wanted from Michelle. Here’s another of Frady’s friends.”

  JoAnn’s face emerged from the snow: “Roy had a gift. But, no, I not only don’t mind talking about it, I’m proud of it. Look at me. All my life I was a good girl. I did everything I was supposed to do. Until I met Roy. Every time we fucked, I secretly wished we’d get caught just so everyone would know JoAnn Chin was no Goody Two-shoes. That she could turn on a hot dog like Roy Frady.”

  I was just a little embarrassed: why did it have to be that exact segment that popped up? I stopped the tape. “Answer your questions?”

  “Yeah.” He looked around at the clutter in my small space. “What the hell happened to standards? This is network TV?”

  Fergie hopped in on one foot, slopping coffee over the tops of two mugs. Rascon stood up and took the cups from her. He said, “Thanks.”

  I stood up, gave her my chair, and handed her the coffee she had brought me. “Fergie, Michelle Tarbett was killed last night.”

  “Oh,” was all she could say. She set the cup down, sloshing coffee on my Thursday scheduler. Her freckles stood out against a sudden pallor. “Oh, my God. Does Guido know?”

  “Detective Rascon, my camera guru Guido Patrini was a little late for the scheduled taping with Tarbett this morning because he had to take Miss Ferguson to the emergency room to get her ankle rechecked. But Tarbett never got to the club.”

  “Hmm.” He looked at Fergie’s bandages, and then back at me. He said, “Why Roy Frady?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. He was before my time. But I’ve heard stories. The detectives working that case always hold it pretty close. Won’t give much away.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Not much. Frady’s a sort of legend, worked Seventy-seventh with the best of them. He worked with Hector Melendez, the officer buried today.”

  “Did you know Hector?” I asked.

  “Only by reputation. I know he worked with Frady and this senior detective named Flint. Flint’s the real legend. He’s older than dirt, but he’s still working Major Crimes.”

  “How old do you think Flint is?” I asked. Fergie raised her mug to cover her smirk.

  “Don’t know. His hair is totally white but I still see him running up at the academy. The guys point him out, they say, ‘There goes Hint.’”

  “And then they tell you a story, don’t they?”

  He started to laugh. Rascon covered his mouth with his hand and laughed behind it. He took a “hoo-haw” breath, then said, “Flint was driving down Broadway. There’s a grassy median there, and there’s this guy all dressed in black leather, kind of strutting, walking a dog on a short chain. The guy starts giving Flint and his partner the death stare. So Flint hangs a U, comes back the other way. Gets abreast of the guy with the dog, and he says, ‘What kind of monkey is that?’ And the guy says, ‘This ain’t no monkey. This is an AKC-registered Doberman pinscher.’ Flint says, ‘I know that. I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the Doberman.’”

  I short-stopped his gales of laughter. “The rest of the story goes like this,” I said. “Flint and his partner, Doug Senecal, had three suspects in the backseat of their car, shop eighteen A ninety-seven. Three teenagers, and the charge was possession for sale.

  “Flint hid a running tape recorder under the front seat, read the suspects their rights, told them to sit still and not say a word. Then he and Senecal got out of the car, closed the doors. They’re leaning against the outside of the car, fooling with this guy who’s out walking his dog, while the punks in his backseat are getting their stories straight, spilling their guts, on tape.

  “The point of that story is this: Flint didn’t realize how sensitive the tape was. So while he got three full confessions, he also taped enough of his BS line about the monkey to get himself a three-day suspension if anyone heard it. He threw the cassette out onto the street and ran over it on his way back to the station.”

  Poor Rascon defined dumbfounded. “How do you know that?”

  “I hear things.”

  I hit Play again, and JoAnn Chin said, “Every time we fucked, I secretly wished we’d get caught just so everyone would know …”

  CHAPTER

  11

  Detective Rascon hadn’t found the bottom of his coffee mug before security escorted in Brady. Brady stopped just inside the open doorway like a schoolboy caught sticking a tack on his teacher’s chair.

  I said, “Come on in, Brady. Meet Detective Rascon.”

  “Detective?” Brady froze in the doorway, one leg crossed over the other, the way that schoolboy would if he suddenly needed a bathroom pass in a hurry.

  “Come in. Have a seat,” I said. “Give me your pitch.”

  Rascon never suggested he should leave. I think that the first qualification for promotion to detective is a love for other people’s business. Rascon seemed well qualified. I liked having him there, the kill switch on what could easily become an unpleasant confrontation with Brady.

  Brady sidled in, propped one bun on the edge of my cluttered desk. He appealed to me with Acting lA-level pathos. “You gotta help me, Maggie.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but isn’t that what I asked you to do before you blew the power yesterday, help me?”

  “I didn’t blow it.”

  “Someone did. Maintenance decided the generator was sabotaged. The overload had to be intentional. Most of us wouldn’t know how to rig an overload.”

  “I didn’t do it.” His voice sounded whiny. “I’m telling you. It wasn’t me screwed it up.”

  I turned to Rascon. “You see, we have standards. Union rules disallow use of the F word among the crew.”

  Brady snickered, relaxed his posture.

  “I didn’t fire you, Brady,” I said. “That decision was out of my hands. If you want to appeal, you need to go higher than me. You need to go to the union. I’ll be happy to say, on your behalf, that when you put your mind to it, you’re the best gaffer in the business. But you better hope no one asks me how often you’re inclined to put your mind to it.”

  “I like working for you,” Brady said.

  “That and a nickel …,” I replied.

  “I got a family to support, Maggie. We weren�
�t hardly getting by as it was. I gotta work.” He had slipped from whiny to nearly weepy. He tossed in an appeal: “Will you back me up when I file a grievance?”

  “I’ll back you up as a technician.”

  Brady’s face grew red up into his sparse hairline. He threw Rascon a sidelong glance. “Sometimes the pressure just gets too much.”

  “I know how that can be,” Rascon said.

  Brady, on the edge, turned to me. “Why do you need a detective?”

  “Mishaps need to be looked into,” I said. “Another thing, don’t call my house anymore. If you call again, Mike might have to go over to your house and shoot you.”

  “Shoot him?” Rascon furrowed his thick eyebrows. “Who’s Mike?”

  “Mike Flint.”

  “So you know Flint?”

  “Everyone knows Flint,” I said. I asked Brady, “Do you have anything else you need to get off your chest?”

  He looked from me, to Rascon, to Fergie. It seemed to me that reality finally settled in upon Brady. Maybe he had thought that in a face-off with me he could shout me down, or wear me down, or buy my sympathy. We weren’t alone, so he never had a chance to get fully into his what’ll-my-wife-and-kidsdo routine. Shoulders sagging with the weight of his situation, he turned his watery blue eyes on me. “I want my job back.”

  “My advice is, get yourself a haircut and a new shirt and take yourself over to the union, get down on your knees and ask them how many Hail Marys you need to say to gain forgiveness.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all I have to offer.”

  “Yeah.” He stood up, extended his hand. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “Take care of yourself. Take care of that family.”

  Brady, looking thoroughly dejected, turned on his way out to add, “Monica dumped me for some other guy.”

  “Love is a hurtin’ thing,” I said, quoting Mike.

  Brady slouched out, sandwiched between two security guards. Fergie followed, mumbling about work she had to do. When we were alone, Rascon asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Brady shut down half a day’s shooting, cost us a fortune, because he wanted to get to his kid’s soccer game. A film crew is a team. He’s the kid who stole the game ball at halftime and ran home with it.”

  “Some people don’t have a handle on the limits of their personal entitlements,” Rascon said. “We call those people criminals.”

  “Or cops,” I said. I picked up the VCR remote. “This interview I showed you a piece of is a nurse, JoAnn Chin.” I hit the tape replay: “I secretly wished we’d get caught just so everyone would know JoAnn Chin was no Goody Two-shoes. That she could turn on a hot dog like Roy Frady.”

  Rascon, blushing, said, “You showed me that.”

  I said, watching JoAnn’s smiling face go by in fast-forward, “She said, ‘I secretly wished we’d get caught.’ They did get caught. Listen to her.” I pushed Play.

  JoAnn: “My boyfriend was a jealous man and a nasty drunk. The drinking got bad to the point he was going to lose his job, so he kicked the booze for a while—maybe for a couple of weeks, but no more than that. When he was sober, he needed something to keep him busy. So, he started spying on me. I know he had been hearing things. One night, he caught me leaving work with Roy. After that, I moved out on my own, and things between me and Roy got more regular.”

  I turned the tape off. “She forgot to say that when the boyfriend, a cop named Barry Ridgeway, caught her with Roy, he drew his gun on them. Frady beat the crap out of Ridgeway, but he also protected him—the old code of silence—because he knew that Ridgeway’s wife and kids would lose all their benefits if firearms charges were filed against dear old dad. Besides, Ridgeway was drunk when it happened.”

  “Does that make this Ridgeway a suspect in Frady’s murder?” Rascon asked.

  “A couple of the investigators put him at the top of the list. He went to jail after the killing on a drunk charge. One of his cellmates, looking for a deal, said that Ridgeway copped to it one night after he’d consumed a pint of pruno. But there was never any substantiation.”

  I handed Rascon a list with sixty names on it. “At some point, every person on that list claimed to have shot Roy Frady or heard someone confess to it. Most of them were gang bangers or cons looking for status among their peers or snitches looking for favors. Some of them were drunks or petty criminals who just ran out of conversation and needed something to talk about. Barry Ridgeway is on the list. And so is Michelle Tarbett.”

  “Michelle Tarbett said she killed Frady?” He folded the list to fit his pocket. “When did she do that?”

  It would have been easiest to just show Rascon the police files in my bottom drawer, but I couldn’t do that without getting Mike into trouble, because I wasn’t supposed to have them. So I just told it as I remembered.

  “Michelle was dancing in a topless club over on Florence. After work, she did some moonlighting with customers to pay off her dealer—she had a hundred-dollar-a-day heroin habit. The dealer pimped for her, and he didn’t like her giving it away.” I slipped the list from his hand. “She was giving it to Roy Frady.”

  I walked to the door, handed the list to Fergie, and asked her to run a copy for Detective Rascon.

  “Who’s supposed to have shot Frady, her or the pimp?” Rascon asked.

  “Probably neither one. The story Michelle told her cellmates when she was in Sybil Brand on a possession charge was that her dealer kidnapped Roy and took him to a burned-out house, beat him up, then forced her to shoot him. Nine shots to the groin.”

  Rascon crossed his legs. “Does the story fit?”

  “No. There were legions of stories on the street about Frady’s killing, the shots in the groin was one of them, In fact, he took six shots to the head, and he wasn’t beaten.”

  “If she lied, why did you want to talk to her?”

  “Besides background? There were a couple of elements in her story that hit close enough to the mark that it’s possible she really did know something. She may not have killed Frady, but she had good information from someone who possibly was there.”

  Like a traffic cop, he waved for me to proceed.

  I said, “Frady’s car was abandoned out by Ascot Raceway, and wiped down with an oily rag.”

  “Car thieves do that all the time to obliterate prints.”

  “A couple of facts from the Frady case were deleted from all written reports as veracity checks. The oily rag was one of them.”

  Fergie came in and handed Rascon the copied list. He took it and smiled at her in an absentminded way, as if lost in thought. He said, “When you talked to Michelle, what did she say about her life? Is there a pimp in the picture still? Or a dealer?”

  “I think she’s independent—she made her own appointments. She wouldn’t have told me if I asked, though. She pretends she’s legit,” I said.

  “Who made the initial contact?”

  “Hector Melendez.”

  Rascon seemed bothered. “Can I talk to your sources?”

  “Call Detective Mike Flint and Sergeant Doug Senecal, both of them LAPD. They knew her twenty years ago. I had qualms about including Michelle because her story adds a certain scumminess to Roy Frady that I’m not very comfortable with. It’s one thing to diddle with a nurse, but another to hang out with a part-time call girl. My project is not about his love affairs.”

  He rose. “Cop and the call girl, sounds like a story to me.”

  “You’d get along great around here.” I got up and walked with him to the door. “Maybe you have a future in TV.”

  “Is that sarcasm I hear?”

  I laughed. “Management keeps telling me I’m too academic, too PBS. But I’m learning. By the time I leave here, I may have even learned to love the laugh track.”

  “I hope not,” he said, offering his hand. “Thanks for your time. You have my card. Call me if you hear anything I should know.”

  I caught him glancing at my
chest. He was in no hurry to get out the door. He said, “Mind if I call you? I think we’d have a lot to talk about. Maybe over dinner?”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “If you don’t mind Mike Flint tagging along.”

  He focused higher, gave me a new appraisal. “I wondered about that.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  Fergie waited for Rascon to get into the elevator before she announced, “Guido called. We’re both starving. Did you eat today at all?”

  The clock on the wall said 8:30 and I could not remember whether I had eaten or not. Suddenly I was ravenous. Jack was coming down the hall from the vending machines with a bag of chips and a Dr Pepper with a look of expectation on his face. I had told him we could talk for a while.

  “Call Guido back,” I said to Fergie. “Ask him to meet us.”

  While Fergie talked to Guido, I went over to Jack. “Something’s come up and I have to go now. Tomorrow we’ll be shooting in the studio all day, so just come up any time.”

  Jack did not seem disappointed to be set loose.

  I went inside, cleared up a few things, and locked the tapes away in a cupboard. I was glancing over the next day’s schedule when there was a tap at the door. I looked up to see Thea, her face tear-streaked, her hair wilder than ever, blocking my exit.

  I didn’t want to know, but I asked, “What is it, Thea?”

  “I heard about that woman. It’s just awful. I had her spreadsheet all ready, and then … I can’t believe it.”

  “Yes, it is awful.”

  Thea took a big breath and smiled wanly as I slung my bag over my shoulder. “I’m always catching you on the run, Maggie. Of course, you’re always on the run, so I guess that’s the only way to catch you.”

  I stopped and looked at her. “Was there something else, Thea?”

  “Oh.” A sigh. “No. I just thought maybe I’d start an office collection. We used to do that at my old job when someone died, or got married.”

  “Had you met Michelle?”

  She shook her head. “But I’ll volunteer to be in charge.”