To Die in Beverly Hills

by Gerald Petievich

  "What will the burglar do with my things?"

  "With luck, he'll try to pawn some of the items," Bailey said. "I capture a lot of burglars by checking the pawn books. But I must be candid and tell you that burglars are often able to dispose of their stolen property without being detected. I can't guarantee that the crime will be solved. The only thing I can tell you is that I'll be working very hard to find out who did it. You have my word on that."

  Mrs. Wallace shook her head. "I can't believe this has happened to me ... that an intruder has actually been inside this house."

  "Is there anyone you suspect?"

  Mrs. Wallace looked toward the door leading to the kitchen. "The maid has been acting a little strange lately," she whispered. "She told me that her father is ill in Mexico." She touched her fingertips to her cheeks. "Do servants act strangely before they steal things?"

  Bailey nodded. "This is very common. And sometimes help that has been employed the longest are the ones that should he watched the closest."

  A look of dismay crossed the woman's face. She stood up and followed Bailey to the door. He opened it. "I wish I could be more optimistic," Bailey said, "but unfortunately crime is on the increase in this city."

  "I feel so violated," Mrs. Wallace said, her voice trailing behind him as he left.

  ****

  SEVEN

  AS WITH a lot of insurance companies in L.A., California Life and Casualty's main office was situated in a high-rise building on Wilshire Boulevard.

  Travis Bailey stepped off an elevator into a reception area with wall-to-wall orange shag carpeting and brush-flick oil paintings with lots of brown and black. The receptionist, a ginger-haired woman wearing a summer dress that showed off acne scars on her back and chest, gave him a nod of recognition. She pressed a button. The door lock behind her buzzed open. Travis Bailey went through, heading down a hallway to Mark Davidson's office.

  Davidson, a thinnish man in his late thirties, was on the phone. He motioned Bailey to a chair. Davidson's moustache and muttonchop sideburns were carefully trimmed and his teeth were crooked; extraordinarily white, but crooked. He hung up the phone. "And what, pray tell, doth thee bringest me this fine day?" Davidson asked. He smiled and Bailey thought of the talking horse on television: all teeth.

  "I bring gold." Bailey smiled back as he handed Davidson a copy of the burglary report. "The gold of one of your insurees, a Frau Gertrude Wallace of Coventry Circle Road in our fair city. It seems that someone broke into the old lady's castle and stole all of her jewelry. I have an informant that's been offered the load. I thought you might be interested in the recovery."

  Mark Davidson glanced at the report. "Lots of jewelry." He pressed an intercom button and gave Wallace's name, then asked for the file. "When are we going to be able to get together for lunch?" Davidson said. "Every time I call your office they tell me you're out in the field."

  "Been busy as hell lately. The burglars have been working overtime."

  "I read about the shooting."

  "It was a close call, but it's all part of the job. What's new with you?"

  "I've been jogging six miles a day. I'm at the point now where I can't wait to get out and start jogging as soon as I get home from the office. If I miss a day I actually feel guilty about it. I don't sleep well without the exercise. You should try it. Jogging is the greatest tension reliever in the world. A few months ago I was a bundle of nerves. Now I could care less. I just let things sort of happen. I've come to the realization that no one knows what I want better than me. And jogging is something I do for me. When I'm jogging, it's my time, my day, my body."

  "I get my exercise by fucking," Bailey said.

  Mark Davidson horse-smiled at the remark. "I've even got my wife into the jogging program. We get up early in the morning and get in some miles. At first she hated it, but now she's into it as much as I am. We run in a six-mile race every Sunday. We don't have arguments anymore because we're too tired. The feeling one gets during jogging is hard to explain. It's like the whole world begins and ends in your own body. You breathe and sweat and put one foot in front of another and nothing else matters. Your mind is clear. The experience is almost sexual." Horse smile.

  The receptionist brought the file to Mark Davidson and left. He sat quietly reading it for a while. "Mrs. Wallace is a smart lady. She has every piece of jewelry listed in her policy. It looks like we're on the hook for all of it."

  "I have an informant..."

  "You always have an informant," Davidson interrupted, but his tone was good-natured.

  "My informant says he can recover everything that was stolen in the Wallace burglary. He's been approached by some people who are trying to fence the jewelry. They're asking a lot of money for it. These people are professional burglars. They know what the stuff is worth. The thing we have going for us is that most of the items are custom-made. Any pawnshop would recognize them as hot. Therefore, my man has been approached. They want him to smuggle the jewelry to Paris or London and get rid of it there."

  Mark Davidson perused the burglary report. He tapped the keys on a pocket calculator for a while, then jotted some figures. "The insured value is forty-six thousand. This is what we'll have to pay Mrs. Wallace to settle her claim."

  "That's a lot of bucks," Travis Bailey said offhandedly.

  "But they're not my bucks. And the sweet thing about working for an insurance company is that if we pay out a little more this year, we just raise the rates next year and make up for it. Can your informant recover all of the items listed in the burglary report?"

  Bailey nodded. "Everything except the cigarette case. Apparently the burglar already sold it."

  "If your man can recover everything else we'll be willing to pay him three thousand dollars," Davidson said.

  "He'll have to front more money than that just to show good faith. To get his hands on the jewelry, he'll have to put up six thousand. That's the minimum they'll take as a deposit. The plan the informant has worked out goes like this: He puts up the six grand as security. The burglar gives him the jewelry. He gives the jewelry to us. A couple of days later, he calls the burglar and tells him that he got stopped by Customs in London and they seized the jewelry. If they don't believe him, I furnish the informant with a phony Customs seizure form that he can show as evidence that the jewelry was taken away from him. That way my informant is able to recover the goodies for us without compromising his position. The informant wants a four-thousand-dollar reward for himself. The operation will cost you ten grand total, but considering that your company could end up forking out forty-six thou', I'd say it seems like a fairly good deal."

  Mark Davidson opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pair of blue running shoes. He set them on the desk. "Runner's World says these are the best running shoes made. I just bought them this morning and I can't wait to try them out." He stared at the shoes, then at Bailey. He showed his teeth. "Is there any way we can do it for less than ten thousand?"

  "Nope."

  "Then ten it is. See, I'm easy. Do you want the money the same way as last time?"

  Bailey nodded. "Small bills. The informant insists on small bills."

  Mark Davidson broke into nervous laughter. "For all I know your informant may have burglarized the woman's house himself."

  "The informant is not your average churchgoer," Bailey said, "but he isn't a burglar. He's just one of those people who seems to be in the right place at the right time to get in on these things. I've known him for years. Shall we say he's well placed?"

  Travis Bailey stood up to leave.

  "You really should try jogging. Once you get into it it's all you think of. It's a real trip,"

  "I'll have to try it sometime," Bailey said on his way out the door.

  Mark Davidson threaded laces in the new shoes for a while. His phone rang.

  "Is Bailey gone?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "What is this one going to cost us?"

  "He wanted twenty thousand, sir,
but I talked him down to ten. I finally had to put my foot down. It's a forty-six-thousand-dollar claim, so, all in all, I think we did rather well. It was a difficult negotiating session."

  "Good job, Mark."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Charles Carr tiptoed into the hospital room. The curtains were drawn and the sunlight that crept through gave the one-bed cubicle a dusky haze. Carr wondered about the smell; the odor of every hospital he had ever been in. Was it rubbing alcohol? He stepped to the side of Jack Kelly's bed. Kelly's breathing was labored. His barrel chest was pasted with a thick bandage. Carr touched Kelly's arm. He opened his eyes. He licked his lips. "Charlie," he said in a weak voice.

  "Do you have pain?"

  "Hurts like hell. It was like getting hit right square in the chest with a sledgehammer."

  "Do you feel like talking?"

  Kelly licked his lips again, opened and closed his eyes a few times. "When I was a kid I was playing catch on the front lawn with my brother. Burn 'em in we used to call it. Throw a hardball as hard as you can at one another. I got hit in the chest and it knocked me out. That's what flashed through my mind when I got hit. I was on the front lawn and my mother was holding me in her arms. She held a wet towel on my forehead. My brother was crying because he thought he'd killed me. My mother ran out of the house to help me because I couldn't breathe. While they were operating on me, I dreamed that I was riding on the roof of an ambulance made of glass. It was going a hundred miles an hour. I was lying on my stomach on the roof and I watched what was happening inside. I saw myself lying on the gurney inside and the paramedics were working on me. Jack Kelly is dying, I said to myself. Just as if Jack Kelly was a stranger. Jack Kelly is taking a ride in a glass ambulance and he's dying. He's checking out of this world. But it was as if everything was okay. I didn't feel pain right then. I had this urge to say good-bye to everyone, but that if I didn't get to, someone would take care of it for me and everything would somehow be all right. Jack Kelly rolled a deuce. He was being driven out of the world inside a see-through ambulance and everything was okay."

  "Can you remember what happened before the shooting started?"

  "I heard Bailey holler, 'Police,' so I figured he had the suspect roscoed. I stepped into the living room to back him up. That's when I got it ... like getting hit in the ribs with a ten-man battering ram."

  "What did you see when you stepped into the living room, Jack?" Carr said quietly. He noticed yellow antiseptic stains around Kelly's chest bandage. The hair on his chest had been shaved.

  "I sort of slid around the corner with my gun out. The suspect was in the middle of the room with his back to me. He was wearing a leather jacket. Bailey must have let him walk all the way to the middle of the room before he drew down on him. When I stepped into the room from the hallway I was right in the line of fire."

  "What was the suspect doing with his hands?"

  Kelly closed his eyes in thought. "His hands weren't at his sides." He hesitated. "They weren't above his head either."

  "Could he have been holding a gun?"

  Kelly thought for a moment before answering. "No, his back was straight. He wasn't crouching. He wasn't standing the way someone holding a piece does. In fact, I got the impression that he was controlled, that he was afraid, rather than that he was going to fight. That's when the shit hit the fan. It was a damn setup. That no-good son-of-a-bitch Bailey used us as stooges. The caper didn't make sense from the get-go. Like how would Bailey know exactly when a hit was going to be made?"

  "There was a chrome thirty-two found lying in front of the bar," Carr said. "Bailey had himself covered."

  "Did the suspect live?"

  Carr shook his head. "Bailey blasted him again when he was on the deck. He was pronounced dead at the scene."

  "Who was he?"

  "He had a long record as a cat burglar, lots of joint time. I have just one more question and then you can get some sleep. Was anything else said in the living room? You told me Bailey yelled, 'Police,' but was anything said before or after that?"

  Kelly's face contorted in thought. "I don't think so."

  "I'll stop by tomorrow."

  Jack Kelly nodded his head slightly. He winked.

  Carr quietly left the room. The pale green hallway was bustling with doctors and nurses dodging gurneys and strolling in and out of rooms. At the end of the corridor, Carr passed a nurses' station. A black nurse's aide behind a counter said something into an intercom, then looked up at him as he passed. "Mr. Carr?"

  "That's me," Carr said. Behind the woman on a desk was a portable television. Nurses on the TV screen talked in a hospital corridor.

  "Mr. Kelly wants you to come back to the room."

  Carr retraced his steps to Jack Kelly's bed.

  "Someone said, 'No,"' Kelly said.

  "Whatsat?"

  "In the living room at Hartmann's house ... I'm not sure who said it, but I heard someone say the word no. No, like a statement. It was said after Bailey said, 'Police."'

  "Did Bailey say it?"

  Jack Kelly closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them. "I'm not even absolutely sure that's what I heard. I'm pretty sure though. Damn. My mind isn't working full speed yet. I guess they've been giving me lots of shots."

  Carr patted Kelly on the arm. "Get some rest." He left the room and followed corridors to the hospital's main entrance, passed through a set of revolving glass doors into bright sunlight. The blacktop parking lot shimmered with heat. He played out the shooting a couple of times on the way to his sedan, trying to make the pieces fit.

  The L.A. County Sheriff's Department Records Bureau took up an entire floor in the Hall of justice, a pre-World War II brownstone building with a pillared lobby that invariably smelled of cigar smoke.

  Charles Carr peeked around eight-foot-high filing shelves looking for Delia Trane. He found her sitting at a desk in the corner. He thought she looked about as sexy as a woman dressed in a khaki short-sleeved blouse and green uniform skirt could look. Her back was straight as she worked computer keys. As always, her gold deputy's badge was pinned, about two inches lower than regulation, on the very point of her left breast. "Strutting her stuff," as she called it. Della would be Della.

  She stopped tapping keys as he approached. "Hello, stranger," she greeted him.

  Carr had almost forgotten her well-formed nose and mouth, the flawless, though perhaps slightly flushed, complexion. Only the hint of midriff bulge gave any real hint that she was over forty. Years ago she had been the topic of more than one police-bull-pen conversation.

  "How do you like it here?" he asked.

  "Anywhere is better than eight hours a day in the women's jail. I got to the point where I was waking up in the morning depressed as hell. The thought of pulling my shift gave me a headache. Anyway you cut it, it's eight a day in jail."

  "I haven't seen you around any of the spots lately."

  "I stop for a drink now and then," she said as she reached for her purse. She found a pack of cigarettes, lit up and blew out smoke. "Have you missed me? I love it here," she said without giving him a chance to answer. "I'm getting the salary of a deputy sheriff to sit here at this computer rather than shagging prisoners, driving around in a radio car waiting to get my neck broken or flexing my ass on a street corner to set up johns for the vice detectives. Hell, I just spent four weeks in a computer school. I actually liked it ... By the way, I was sorry to hear about your partner."

  "One of those things," Carr said. "Do you have time to run a nickname through your computer for me?"

  "What's in it for me?" she smiled.

  "Drinks?"

  "Keep going."

  "Dinner?"

  "You're on. What's the nickname?"

  "Bones. A male white about forty years old. He has gray-streaked hair and may have a record for burglary."

  "Do you know how many people have the nickname Bones?" she asked smugly.

  Carr nodded. "I have a photo I can compare with the mug
shots." He pulled the nude photograph of Bones from his shirt pocket and showed it to her.

  Della Trane curled her lower lip as she examined the photograph. "I've seen better."

  Carr returned the photograph to his pocket.

  Della Trane's fingers tapped keys. The nickname appeared on the computer screen. In a moment, the following message flashed onto the screen:

  407 records match criteria

  She tapped the printout button and the teleprinter raced as it printed the names of arrestees nicknamed Bones. "What you see is what you get," she said, squirming to point her breasts. "I mean the printout of course." Della Trane laughed with cigarette smoke in her mouth.

  Six hours later Charles Carr still sat at a long wooden table in the musty-smelling Records Bureau. Next to him was a wheeled cart full of manila arrest folders. Who would believe that there were literally boxes of file packages on criminals nicknamed Bones?

  He opened another manila folder, flipped pages until he found the mug shot envelope and opened it. Oddly, the prisoner, a man with greasy hair and beard, was smiling. Carr compared the mug shot to the photograph of the man in Sheboygan's bedroom. They weren't the same. He replaced the mug shot in the envelope and tossed the file back onto the cart. He stood up and stretched. His mind wandered back to the time he and Jack Kelly had sorted through hundreds of photos of red-haired men in order to identify a murderer. Was it three or four years ago?

  Carr sat down and dug into another file. A mug shot, which was stapled to a booking form, was of a man with gray-streaked hair. He wore an open-collared shirt. Carr held the bedroom photograph up to the mug shot. It was the same man. Carr sorted through a stack of hand-printed arrest reports in the file. They showed that Robert Chagra aka Bones had been arrested nine times during the past twelve years. Six arrests were for conspiracy to commit burglary, three for illegal gambling (the arrests took place at private homes during the course of crap games). A note by one sheriff's detective in the file read as follows: