Chalk Man

by Tony Faggioli

  He wanted to know where Napoleon was, and then again, he didn’t. Nap usually had answers, but surprisingly not always. There was still mystery on the other side of the mystery, it seemed. And, truth be told, Parker was still getting used to the whole . . . dynamic . . . of having him around.

  Napoleon was proof of a whole different kind of life: the afterlife. And this was on one hand comforting and on the other hand agitating. Parker knew little of God, but he imagined that this feeling inside of him that churned in his chest every time that Nap showed up was why most people went through life without the proof that they so desperately wanted. Because if they got it, it would only make things harder. You’d maybe want to leave before your time. To get the lessons this life was meant to teach you done and over with as soon as possible, thereby rushing whatever process was at work in the greater scheme of things. Or, as with Parker, it’d make you look at your life in extreme contrast; harshly, meanly. So that you didn’t want to run towards God. Instead, you wanted to run away from Him.

  Because, well . . . God could forgive you all He wanted to, but learning how to forgive yourself? That was a trickier matter entirely.

  The screen saver on his monitor came on, startling him from his thoughts. He smiled. It was a photo of him and Trudy on Myrtos Beach in Greece while on their honeymoon a few months earlier. They were sitting on a yellow and white beach towel, their faces sun-soaked and their hair wet, Trudy’s red locks spread in loose strands along her jawline. He was seated cross-legged, his knees raised to support his elbows, one hand hanging loosely, the other cradling a bottle of beer. Trudy was sitting on one hip, her legs folded to the side, her left arm around him and her head resting on his shoulder. The picture had been taken by a funny German man named Holger who loved talking about the Audubon and the difference between German and Austrian schnitzel. The trip had been fantastic. No work. No therapy. No Napoleon, who had disappeared right after they’d exchanged their vows at Trudy’s parent’s vineyard in Napa, a kind of sad smile on his face that people get when they’re genuinely happy for you and equally sad for themselves. Parker didn’t have to ask. It was obvious: Napoleon had either never had such a day in his life or had it and lost it, which was probably worse.

  He focused on the picture again. On Trudy again. Her eyes. Her lip gloss. The layers of sunscreen she’d caked on before leaving the hotel room because, well, the sun being the mortal enemy of redheads and all that. Later that night, they’d eaten Chilean sea bass on a bed of mixed grain rice and drank a chilled bottle of white wine. Afterwards, he’d given her a card with a poem from W. B. Yeats, “When You Are Old,” that Parker had written out in his own hand. Tears welled up in Trudy’s eyes before she asked him with a smile, “Your friend Maggie told you about this poem, didn’t she?” And Parker had blushed, because she was right, but then immediately countered with, “Yeah. But every word of it is true, so I thought it was perfect.” After dinner and a long walk along the coast beneath a starry sky, they’d made love in their cabana beneath the glow of a full moon that shone so brightly through the canvas roof that it cast them and everything in their room in a white-blue glow.

  “Hey, tough guy! No jerking off on the job!” It was Detective Duncan, from the late shift, slapping Parker’s shoulder as he walked by and reminding him of the other side of having this particular screen saver in a mostly testosterone-ridden detectives unit. He’d been teased mercilessly about the photo since the day he’d uploaded it, Murillo leaving a rose on his keyboard one day, Campos singing him a sappy mariachi song another, Klink dramatically quoting “As you wish!” from The Princess Bride whenever he saw it. But that was okay. Parker didn’t care if they teased him forever. He’d never take it down.

  But Sparks had shaken him out of his twilight state of mind, too, and he was back to shuffling details of the Henson case around in his head. Murillo was still trying to track down details on Ms. Henson’s possibly abusive boyfriend. Campos, feeling useless as a desk jockey, was gone for the night but due back in at 7:00 a.m. to meet with Charlie’s dad, who’d agreed to come into the station for an interview.

  The tech guys were still working over both Charlie and Ava’s Xboxes, and the folks at Microsoft, once hearing that they were dealing with a missing child situation, were being more than helpful in providing information on their servers, at first only focusing on a few users attached directly to Charlie’s history, then widening the scope a bit.

  All of this stuff was beyond Parker’s pay grade. All that he really wanted was someone, anyone, to get a break in this case that could get him back out on the street to help Charlie.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait long.

  “Parker! Klink!” the cap yelled from his office, making Parker jump and startling Klink awake. “Get in here. Now!”

  They rushed to his office and he informed them that he’d just gotten off the phone with CSI Acosta—Parker had forgotten about her, which was why, of course, she was the one who brought the next bit of news on the case. They’d taken prints off the beer can in the field by the wash, and thanks to new digital fingerprinting technology and a desire by everyone in the department from the top down to get everything fast-tracked on this case, they already had a match. It was easy, Acosta said, because the guy was in the system nationwide.

  As was the case with all members of the military, both past and present.

  The prints belonged to a man named Alex Roland.

  He had served in the Afghanistan war for two tours.

  As a sniper.

  Chapter 12

  They were just scrambling to dig up information on Alex Roland when Murillo called in from the Henson house.

  Parker took the call. “What’ve we got?”

  “I had to wait until Charlie’s mom came around—one of the neighbors gave her a couple of Xanaxes.”

  “Great.”

  “Yeah, she was bit foggy but I got some coffee in her and was finally able to get some answers out of her,” he said, his voice sounding tired but intense. “Boyfriend was an on-again, off-again sort of thing. She met him at work. He was in shipping. Thirty-five. A vet.”

  Shit. Parker knew what was coming next.

  “His name’s Alex Roland,” Murillo said.

  Parker sat down. Hard.

  Covering the receiver with his hand, he shouted, “Cap!” It took a few seconds for the cap to come out of his office and Parker made a motion for him and Klink to come over to his desk.

  “News?” the cap said, his brows furrowed.

  “Murillo’s on the line. Talked to the mother and the boyfriend’s name matches our prints at the scene.”

  “You’re shitting me?” Klink said with more surprise than might have been expected. And Parker knew why. He was on the rollercoaster now, too.

  Parker hit the speaker button on his phone so everyone could be in the conversation. After they updated Murillo on Acosta’s fingerprint info, he continued.

  “Okay, well . . . Roland’s originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was married once before and divorced. Did his military time with the army, two tours, both in in Afghanistan. Charlie’s mom says he was bitter about his time in the military. They met at work. Things happened. She realized he had ‘issues’ . . .”

  “Issues?” the cap interrupted.

  “Yeah. Was kind of an asshole. He and Charlie’s mom had a falling out about a month ago when he lost his job. He evidently had a drinking problem, so he had no savings or anything. Wanted to live with Charlie and his mom, but she wasn’t down with that.”

  “Any reason why?” the cap asked.

  “She didn’t want to say at first, but I got it out of her. He was handsy and a bit on the dark side.”

  Parker tilted his head to the side and parroted Murillo’s words back at him. “Handsy and a bit on the dark side?”

  “Yeah. He slapped her around, but only once or twice—”

  “Sure. They always say that,” Klink said.

  “And as f
or the dark side? Well. Dude has a pentagram tattoo on his chest that always made her uncomfortable. He told her he got it in the war when he was young and stupid, that it meant nothing. But she’s a hard-core Midwest Christian type—”

  Klink rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Who cheated on her husband and then divorced him, right?”

  Murillo hesitated before he continued. “Judgmental a bit there, partner? Shit. Anyway . . . it wigged her out. That and one other thing.”

  There was a pregnant pause that the cap evidently could not handle. “What!” he snapped.

  “She said Charlie had this thing . . . this nighttime prayer that his grandmother had taught him. Now I go to sleep, or something—”

  “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep?” Parker replied, dredging up a memory of the prayer he had totally forgotten he knew. His grandmother had taught it to him, too. Grandmothers. What would the world do without them?

  “Yeah. That one. Anyway . . . our boy Alex didn’t like it. Caught Charlie praying a few times at bedtime, told him to shut up and not pray, which wigged the mother out even more.”

  “Great. So . . . what? We have a sadist-Satanist on our hands?” Klink said, shaking his head as he rubbed at his eyes.

  “I dunno,” Murillo said. “But he’s down on his luck, scratching out a living doing odds-and-ends jobs, and according to the mother . . . he’s living over at the Clarke.”

  It was the cap’s turn to sound unhappy. “Oh, no. The Hotel Clarke?” And just the way he said it made Parker feel like something was already very wrong. The way that Klink then looked at the cap only made the feeling in him grow.

  “What? Why’s that such a big deal?” Parker asked.

  Their looks of surprise at Parker matched Murillo’s tone of surprise over the phone. “What? You’ve never heard about The Hotel Clarke, Parker?”

  “No.”

  They peppered him instantly with details in the round.

  “Place is haunted as hell,” Klink said.

  “I dunno about that,” the cap said, “but it’s been home to more than a few well-known serial killers in Los Angeles.”

  “Manson and The Lingerie Killer, to be exact,” Murillo said.

  Parker shot his sentinel friend a message in his head. “Napoleon, what have we just walked into here?” No reply. Great.

  “We also have the case of the Vanishing Lobby Girl . . .”

  “Later found in the trash—” Klink interjected.

  “Give it to him straight, Klink. She was found in three separate trash dumpsters,” Murillo finished.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Parker asked, incredulous now.

  The cap chased an itch across his face with his thumb. “Look it up on YouTube. It’s a thing. And it will give you the heebie-jeebies for sure. And I can’t believe you worked in South Central that long and never heard about it.”

  Klink crossed his arms. “Well, it’s on Broadway, between Fourth and Fifth, in the heart of Downtown, so not likely it would’ve come up in conversation out there. And it’s not really a hotel. More like a pay-by-the-week-or-month apartment complex.”

  “Yeah, right,” Murillo interjected. “Many of their so-called tenants pay by the hour.”

  “Regardless,” the cap said, “we’ve got our prime suspect now and we know where to find him.”

  “How do you want to handle this, Cap?” Murillo asked over the speaker.

  “We have something, but not enough to merit a tactical unit right now.”

  Klink nodded. “Yeah. Eyes.”

  “Yep. We need eyes on him first. Otherwise, we maybe raid the hotel and rile all the groovy ghoulies for nothing.”

  “And no one there is likely to be a friend of the police. If we go in and he’s not there, someone might tip him off.”

  The squad room grew quiet as the captain rubbed his chin and stared at a spot on the wall, his face sketched in concentration. In the breakroom just down the hall, the refrigerator hummed and dropped a batch of ice cubes inside one of its doors. The speaker phone scratched with the sound of Murillo shuffling his phone around and Klink ran his fingers over his nearly bald head.

  Parker glanced around quickly; Napoleon was still nowhere to be found. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling, spaced apart evenly the way they were, cast tunnels of light down over the work areas below them, which were mostly empty at this hour, giving the squad room a vacant feeling.

  The cap finally looked up. “Okay. Downtown is Hollenbeck Station’s gig. I’ll call over there and get a few guys from their Vice and Narcotics Unit, who are most likely to know the Clarke inside and out, to lead the charge. Murillo, head over there and park off-site. Wait for us at Fourth and Broadway. I’ll be coming with Klink and Parker. You have his room number?”

  “Yeah. Charlie’s mom says it’s 842.”

  “Do you think he’ll be home?”

  “I dunno. Charlie’s mother said he’s been out of touch the past week or so. Even his cell phone is out most of the time since he lost his job, so he’s hard to reach.”

  “So, for all we know, he’s gotten a graveyard shift at 7-Eleven or could be gunning a Shlitz Malt Liquor over in Koreatown.”

  Parker gave a half-chuckle. “Or he could be sound asleep in his skivvies in his room, just waiting for us to pay him a visit.”

  “Well,” the cap said, “let me go call Hollenbeck Station real quick and then we’ll head over.”

  “Got it,” Murillo said, and hung up.

  “I gotta take a piss,” Klink said, walking off.

  This left Parker alone. Again, he looked around. “Hey!” he whispered. But there was no reply. Wherever Nap had gone off to, he was far away. With nothing else to do, Parker went to his computer, pulled up Google and looked up The Hotel Clarke. He immediately wished he hadn’t. There was just a . . . look . . . to the building that would have thrown him off even if the guys hadn’t already colored his thinking.

  It was worn, shoddy and dirty with years. Built in 1938, it had two hundred and twenty-nine rooms and eighteen floors. But those weren’t the stats that haunted it. Instead, it was the fifteen different murders, suicides and unexplained paranormal events that did. In 1942, an army sergeant slashed his own throat with a box cutter. In 1948, a woman named Jeanette Bray awoke with severe stomach pains, went to the bathroom and immediately gave birth to a baby girl. She later told police that she didn’t even know she was pregnant and that a man in her closet told her to smother the baby with her fur coat. She did. She was arrested, tried and found not guilty for reason of insanity and sent to a psychiatric hospital. In 1951, a drunken Corporal Lance Billings hanged himself with an electrical cord in the main elevator. No one knew why.

  Parker leaned back from the screen, feeling queasy for a second, before he scrolled on.

  In the mid-eighties a notorious serial killer, Reginald Lee, aka The Lingerie Killer, stayed there for eleven dollars a night while he was busy killing five other guests, all women, in their sleep, after sneaking into their rooms with a stolen set of housekeeping keys, where he beat them unconscious and then strangled them to death with their own bras.

  And there were more—too many more—cold cases. Unsolved deaths due to beatings, stabbings and shootings, many of them women who were raped first, some who were tied up and held hostage before being suffocated to death. All of this in one hotel. Across decades of horror.

  When Klink came back, he stood over Parker’s shoulder. “Crazy, huh?”

  “Man,” Parker answered with a shake of his head, “how has this place not been razed to the ground?”

  The refrigerator kept humming and down the hall the cap was talking on his phone, but beyond that the squad room was still mostly quiet.

  Klink grunted. “Good question.”

  Chapter 13

  An hour later, at just before midnight, they were all huddled at the corner of Fourth and Broadway. The street was dirty with darkness, and with practically every other streetlight
blown out, only the moon could offer any help in assessing their surroundings. Pockets of litter were jammed into the gutters and along the buildings. Cars were staggered in the streets and in a nearby parking lot. A homeless man stumbled his way down the street and around the corner as he crooned an old song that Parker couldn’t quite remember the name of.

  Before long, Detectives Ruiz and Solomon from Hollenbeck Station’s Vice and Narcotics Unit arrived, both obviously irritated at being pulled off active cases to meet them.

  After being caught up to speed on things, Ruiz was the first to speak up. He was short and stocky, with thick eyebrows and a week-old beard. “So, what’s it you guys wanna know?” he asked gruffly.

  “Well, first off, we’d like a rundown on the Clarke if you have one,” the cap replied.

  Ruiz shrugged. “It’s still bad, but not like it was in the seventies and eighties. From what I hear, back then, it was damn near like the psych ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, what with people doing coke and overdosing in the lobby or walking naked through the halls. The nineties weren’t much better and since then a line of different investors have come in to try and clean it up. Rents are up across Downtown, but the place is still one step over the line of shady. We’ve caught a few pimps running brothels using some of the rooms, rotating girls in four-hour shifts and things like that. Crack and heroin are for sale there daily. It’s all a little more on the down low now but . . .”

  Detective Solomon finished his partner’s sentence. “It’s still no place you want to visit much less stay in, which some foreign tourists who don’t know any better still make the mistake of doing.” He was tall and thin, with a square jaw and narrow eyes.