"That's kinda shitty advice, Roger. Especially since I'm working a front-page serial murder, and I got half the deputy chiefs in this building walking around in my asshole with flashlights." I tapped a picture of the coffin. "So in the spirit of interdivisional cooperation, why don't you start by putting a hat on this guy for me?"
"He ain't Mike Eisner," Broadway said, holding my gaze. "And he also ain't one of your Fingertip murders. He's an international intelligence asset. Beyond that, you don't have to know."
I reached into the envelope and pulled out the rest of the pictures and dropped them onto the desk. "This was a very eclectic turnout."
He picked up the pictures of the lumbering Russian in the brown tweed, and the bald man in the blue blazer from the Israeli embassy. He studied them for a second before he shrugged and handed them back to me.
"I want some answers," I said. "Why were you there, and why did all these embassy people show up?"
"Leave it be," he said softly.
Yeah, right. . I thought. Pushing on then. .
"I think my John Doe victim is a foreign national, possibly Russian. Maybe even Odessa Mafia. I agree, he's not one of the Fingertip murders, but my bosses want me to keep him in the mix. If I stumbled into a CTB covert op, I can walk softly, but this is still my one-eighty-seven, and the sixth floor wants it put down. So if you hardball me, I'll be forced to take it to Deputy Chief Ramsey and we can do this hair-pulling thing in his office."
"Great White Mike can't cover you," he said, but there was worry flickering in his coal-black eyes.
"Help me and I'll help you. I have no desire to bitch up your investigation, but I'm not going away, especially after throwing this funeral and watching half the spooks in L. A. show up."
"I hope that ain't no racial epithet." A smile found the corner of his mouth. "Hate to have to one-eighty-one your Gumby white-slice ass." Talking about an Internal Affairs complaint.
"Your best bet of containing me is to trade with me, Roger."
"Right. And once that happens and you share our covert information with that buncha literary hopefuls downstairs, how long till it's on sale at Amazon?"
"I'll keep what you tell me strictly between us."
A bald-faced lie, because I knew I probably couldn't do that. I had to report this meeting to Underwood, and he could do anything he pleased with the information. My last line of defense was Alexa, but right now my beautiful wife wasn't all that happy with me. However, now wasn't the time to hesitate.
I pulled out the picture of the attractive blonde who had been sitting in the back of the church and showed it to him. "Teammate?" I asked.
He didn't take the picture out of my hand, but I saw another flicker of something in his black eyes.
Then a shadow fell over me. I looked up. Standing in the doorway was his partner-pencil-thin, bad haircut, hips like a wasp, chewing a soggy toothpick.
"You're in my chair, pard." His Southern accent was thick as pork gravy. All that was missing was the banjo solo from Deliverance.
I stood up and handed him the packet of pictures. He sorted through them quickly.
"That puts some hair in the biscuits, don't it, Rog?" He glanced over at Broadway.
"I'm Scully, Homicide Special."
"We know who you are, Joe Bob," he drawled around his toothpick. "You're the dummy running that mess down on three."
"Not running it anymore. We have a cool new FBI leader. Lunar calendars, party hats. Come on down and get a shit cupcake."
Broadway said, "This is my partner, Emdee Perry. Emdee is a name, not initials. This cracker's from the hills a South Carolina, so he ain't above burnin' a cross on your lawn. But the motherfucker sure knows how to kick up a shed."
"This cracker-bashin' Oreo finally got somethin' right," Emdee deadpanned.
I knew they were just stalling, putting up smoke, doing the dozens.
Broadway said, "Detective Scully's wondering who he was getting set to bury. That's how far off the pace the boy is."
Perry studied me, rolling the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "We ain't actually getting set t'deal with this fool, are we, Snitch?"
Then I knew who they were. They had flashy nicknames-Rowdy and Snitch. Two colorful characters who were fast becoming LAPD legends.
"Don't make me take this to Deputy Chief Ramsey," I said. "He has big pressure coming down from the super chief. He won't like me being stonewalled."
"Great White Mike can shit in his hat," Broadway said. "We report to Deputy Chief Talmadge Burke in Support Services, and he doesn't like us to stand around and yap about secure cases with people who ain't been baptized."
"I can't believe you two humps want to start a turf war over a little deal like who my dead guy is. I'm gonna find out anyway."
Broadway and Perry exchanged some kind of subliminal look. The trick for them was to only give me info I would eventually discover on my own, and keep the rest hidden. My job was to run a good bluff and get things they shouldn't reveal.
Finally, Roger Broadway leaned back in his chair. "Your stiff is named Davide Andrazack. He's an Israeli black ops agent working for the Mossad. End of story."
"Except the guy had a contact lens for an eye condition called Keracotonus. According to our lab he was damn near blind. Are you two trying to tell me that a world-class black ops service like the Mossad is down to hiring blind guys?"
Emdee Perry cleared his throat, then threw the chewed toothpick into the wastebasket. "Since his eyes went bad, Andrazack don't work black ops no more," he said. "These days he's more of what you'd call an electronic plumber. Fixes computer leaks."
"Before he caught the big bus, he was their best guy for E-ops," Broadway said. "A master cracker." He glanced at Emdee. "A term of endearment." Emdee bowed his head magnanimously.
"Our file on him says he once penetrated Level Four Pentagon security. We think he was in the U. S. scoping the Israeli computers looking for a leak at their embassy."
"I'm still not buying this," I said. "A foreign intelligence agent with a record of hacking Pentagon data gets a visa from our State Department to come over and hack embassy computers? Not in the post nine-eleven world I live in."
"You're over cookin' the grits here, Joe Bob. Just accept what we're tellin' ya and move along," Emdee said.
"You guys haven't heard the last of me. See ya up on six."
I started to leave, but Emdee grabbed my arm.
"He was over here off the books. When they can't get a visa, the Israelis have been known to drop one a these hog callers in a rubber boat from a mother ship three or four miles offshore and run the man in. Not just the Mossad. Everybody does it. Any given day we got enough unidentified illegal spooks in this town to haunt a house. Idea is, they only stay here long enough to do one quick job, then it's back to the beach and adios."
"INS never knows they were here," Broadway said. "Only this time, looks like Davide didn't move quite fast enough and somebody skagged him. Whoever did that piece a work knew it was gonna stir up trouble, so they dressed Davide in homeless clothes and tried to ditch him in your Fingertip case."
"End of story," Emdee said firmly, and glanced at his partner. Neither of them wanted this to progress any further.
I didn't mention that we had held back the symbol carved on the chest and that there was no way the espionage community could have dumped Andrazack into our serial murder without knowing about that. Instead, I asked, "If Andrazack's dead, why are you guys still involved?"
They looked at each other, and I could see they were through with me.
"I guess you can just take it up with Great White Mike then," I said.
"Tell you what," Broadway replied. "Why don't you leave all these pictures with us? We'll run it past Lieutenant Cubio and if he signs off on you, we'll give you a call." Lt. Armando Cubio ran CTB.
"Make it happen, guys," I warned. "'Cause there's big trouble hiding behind Door Number Two."
"Man, I think I just shit my
drawers," Perry drawled.
Chapter 23
Are you with the family?" the county psychiatric evaluator asked, looking down at a clipboard with all of Zack's pertinent information. We were standing in the lobby just outside the secure psychiatric wing of the Queen of Angels Hospital. The doctor was tall and bald, peering at me through rose-colored lenses, which seemed to me like a bad visual metaphor in the sensitive field of mental health. His name tag identified him as Leonard M. Pepper, M. D., but he was pure vanilla.
"I'm Don Farrell. Zack's brother," I lied.
He found Zack's brother's name on the clipboard. "Okay." He had that kind of spacey, nonconfrontational manner usually found in westside head shops.
"I'm just wondering how he's doing."
"How he's doing is a subjective measure of what he's willing to accept minus what he's willing to admit to." Oh, brother.
"Is he suicidal, for instance?"
"I'm not sure. He's very depressed."
I tried the direct approach. "Is it possible for me to see him?"
After a long moment, he nodded and punched a code into the electric door we were standing next to. Once it kicked open he motioned for me to follow him down a narrow corridor that had rooms every thirty feet or so on both sides. The doors were solid metal. Each had an eight-by-ten, green tinted, wire and glass window. As we walked, he droned on.
"Has your brother ever undergone psychiatric analysis before?" he asked.
"No, I don't think so."
"He said he went through it once in the army."
I didn't know Zack was ever in the army. He'd never mentioned it. I wondered why. But of course I couldn't say any of that. I was supposed to be his brother. "He never mentioned undergoing analysis in the service," I dodged.
Dr. Pepper turned to face me, taking a gold pen out of his pocket. "Was he truant a lot when he was in lower school?"
"Once or twice, maybe."
I was flying blind here. I didn't want to contribute to an incorrect diagnosis, but a brother couldn't be completely ignorant, either. I decided to just vague this guy out.
"Was he often engaged in fights as a child?" "No more than anyone."
"What kind of answer is that?" The doctor peered over his rose lenses at me.
"It's my answer, Doctor." Now he was pissing me off.
"He indicated he had problems with bed-wetting into middle school," Pepper said. "Do you recall when it stopped happening?"
"What is this?"
"Just answer me."
"I don' t remember. . I don' t think so. . I don' t know. I had my own problems. I wasn't paying attention." The asshole actually noted that down. "Why don't you just tell me what the hell you're getting at?" I demanded.
He clicked his pen closed. "This is still very preliminary. He's only been here six or seven hours, but your brother exhibits signs of cognitive disassociative disorder, along with what might be described as massive clinical depression. The depression is so strong I'm wondering if it might be a calendar reaction stemming from some event in his childhood. Often our subconscious stores dates and revisits them annually through bouts of depression, even though the event itself may be blocked in our memory. Do you remember something severe in his youth that might have caused that?"
"No," I said. "All I know is, right now he's under a lot of stress with his upcoming divorce. He's having money problems. He's also afraid he's losing his relationship with his sons."
"If my diagnosis is right, I would doubt any of that is responsible for the depression. Cognitive disassociates don't treasure emotional relationships. It's what that behavior is all about. But it's hard to tell, because right now, he's just trying to bullshit his way out of here."
"But you're not going to let go of him, are you?" I said, getting this guy's drift. He was bored with the endless drug overdoses and soccer moms who felt trapped by the monotony of carpools and Saturday sex. He wanted to hang some high-drama diagnosis on Zack, add some excitement to the revolving door litany of petty complaints he was forced to deal with daily.
"Your brother also may be a narcissistic personality," he added, really piling it on. "It's characterized by a predominate focus on self and a lack of remorse or empathy. This is only a preliminary diagnosis, and mind you, I could be wrong, but I want to keep him here for a while to sort it out."
He turned and led me further down the hall, stopping in front of a locked door. "Tell your brother he needs to cooperate with me if he wants to go home."
Then he took out a keycard and zapped the door open, letting me pass inside alone. I heard the door close and lock behind me.
Zack was slumped in a white plastic chair next to the window. The cell-like room was a concrete box painted dull white. In a salute to insanity, the bed and dresser were both bolted to the floor. Zack turned his swollen face to look at me. Without saying anything, he returned his gaze to the window and the distant traffic on the 101 freeway half a mile down the gentle slope from the hospital.
I motioned to the room. "This seems pleasant and clean," sounding like a friendly realtor instead of the traitorous bastard who put him here.
He wouldn't look at me.
"I just talked to your psychiatric evaluator," I continued. "He says you can work your way out of this, but he wants you to open up to him more."
Nothing from Zack.
"He also said you gotta come to grips with the divorce. Once that happens things are gonna get better, the depression will go away."
He hadn't mentioned any of that, but I was on a roll, here. I waited for Zack to say something like, 'Gee, that's swell, Shane,' or 'I don't blame you for ratting me out and ruining my life.' But he just sat there. Over three hundred pounds of Irish anger stuffed in a too-small hospital gown.
"It's hard," I monologued. "I know how much this is ripping you up. . but the thing you gotta know, Zack, is I'm in your corner. A lot of people are."
He scooted his plastic chair further away from me, giving me almost his whole back now.
"Listen, Zack, I know you think I sold you out, but I was only trying to. ." His shoulders slumped so I stopped.
I grabbed a chair and brought it closer. I sat next to him but I couldn't engage his eyes. I was talking to the side of his head. "Zack. . listen to me, Zack. I'm really worried about you. I know it's hard for you to understand, but this is the best course. You can get help here."
He turned his chair even further away.
"I've got a plan, Zack. Will you listen to me?" I was starting to sweat, but I kept going. "This doesn't have to be as bad as it seems. We've got Alexa on our side and I'm about to split Forrest out of the Fingertip case. I think I can fix it so we can work on that murder and get off the task force. I'm pretty sure now that Forrest is a copycat. He was a Mossad agent named Andrazack, in this country illegally. I think he was killed by some foreign agent, not the Fingertip unsub. You're gonna be getting a clean bill in a few days, but in the meantime, I wanta come by and run some of this stuff by you, get your take on it. That sound like a plan?"
He just sat there.
"Zack, don't give up here, buddy. Zack? Hey, come on man, look at me."
Nothing.
I wondered if I was getting a look at cognitive disassociative disorder.
Chapter 24
When I got home my head ached and my eyes felt grainy. All I wanted was a glass of scotch to wash my treachery away. But getting wasted was my old solution. I'd moved past that now. In a gesture of determined sobriety, I settled for a Coke and a bag of chips and walked out into the backyard where I sat in one of my rusting patio chairs and looked out at the wind-ruffled water on Venice's narrow canals, thinking you really did need a sense of humor to appreciate its corny charm.
Every time I have problems I find myself sitting here, drawn to Abbot Kinney's faded dream, as if some part of my soul will be reborn in the stagnant water of these shallow canals. Sometimes, I feel as if he had designed this strange place with me in mind. I fit right in, a roma
ntic in a fast-food world, lodged hopelessly in a moral cul-de-sac just like the McDonald's wrappers that collected under the fake Venetian bridges. But there was a sense of past and future here. The throwback architecture, the scaled-down plot plan from the 1400s, all managed to coexist in some kind of insane proximity to the strip malls two blocks away and the Led Zeppelin music that drifted across the narrow canals from my hippie neighbors windows. If only I could find such an easy truce with my disparate emotions.
Half an hour later I heard the back door open, and then Alexa dropped into the chair beside me and heaved a deep sign. She had a beer in her hand, and I listened while she pulled the tab, the chirp mixing neatly with the sounds of a hundred keening insects.
She grabbed a handful of chips and said, "I'm fucked with these crime stats. The chief is gonna redeploy at least twenty of my detectives. It's gonna foul up my whole grid plan."
Tony Filosiani was famous for his constant shuffling of manpower after COMSTAT meetings. He had installed a big, electronic map board of the city in the sixth-floor conference room. It was a complex son-ofa-bitch, which almost required a Cal Tech graduate to operate. Different colored lights represented different categories of crime that had occurred in the previous two weeks. One little light for every criminal incident. Murders and Crimes Against People were red; Burglaries-blue; Armed Robberies-green. While car-jacking was technically a CAP, it was also such a growing category it had acquired its own color-yellow.
The division commanders would walk into the darkened COMSTAT meeting and see the board twinkling like a desert sky at midnight. Then Chief Filosiani would flip a switch and white lights would appear all over the map in clusters. The white lights indicated our deployed police presence. In one glance you could see if you had your troops in the right place. If a street gang like the Rolling Sixties went hot and started jacking cars and houses, you could see if there were enough cops at Sixtieth Street and MLK Boulevard to handle it. If there were too many white lights where nothing was happening Tony would move people around. Just like that, cops got transferred to new divisions.
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