Wambaugh, Joseph - Floaters

by Floaters (lit)

  It took her twenty-five minutes to get her face presentable, one of the extra burdens for a female detective on a call-out. Her chestnut perm was hopeless given the time she had, so she'd have to go looking at slaughter wearing a boink-me hairdo.

  Her favorite "blood suit" was at the cleaner's and all she had that was passable was a one-button gray blazer and a winter-white wool skirt. Not what she wanted to wear at the scene of a bloody homicide, where she might have to root around in bushes or in closets or even in an attic crawlspace. Once, when her flashlight failed, she'd accidentally knelt in a gooey blood puddle while helping an evidence tech look under a bed for Wood evidence.

  Anne wondered if the Indian pathologist would roll on this one. She was a canoe maker with a sense of humor, and Anne enjoyed her accent. It reminded her of TV shows about the days of the British Raj. The Jewel in the Crown was her favorite.

  On one call-out Anne had told the pathologist that she wouldn't have had any problem at all with a first-date boinking of the actor who'd played Hari. What a m em-sahib she'd have been, Anne said to the Indian.

  She often recalled the first postmortem she'd ever attended. A Mexican kid was Uzi-riddled in a drive-by. They'd used a dozen forceps on him, and it seemed like the pathologist would never stop pulling out the bandage-packing that paramedics had futilely stuffed inside to stem leakage.

  She'd always found "posts" interesting, even though she hadn't been into biology in school. Morgue humor helped sometimes: "Okay, Anne, this is where babies come from!" as the croaker sliced a sliver from a dead guy's balls. But gallows humor didn't work when the corpse was a little kid. The jokes pretty much stopped during those postmortems.

  Anne Zorn had always believed, and many of her male colleagues concurred, that people were often more apt to talk to a female detective. People were less intimidated by a female and were encouraged by a woman's ability to communicate emotion. But that was not the case when guys murdered hookers or wives. Using a female detective with those guys just didn't work.

  While doing final touches with an eyebrow pencil, she recalled how it had been with her last husband, Phil. She'd get a call-out, Work half the night on a homicideor all night sometimesthen she'd have to go home, change, clean the house, wash clothes, go to the store, and pick up his kids at school. Kids who'd always mistakenly thought that Anne had broken up Daddy's perfect marriage to Mom.

  Phil was history now, and so were his darling children, who'd never had a decent meal before their old man's brief marriage to Anne. Well those kinds of mistakes were over.

  She gave herself a quick appraisal. Not too bad, considering. At least her eyes weren't bagged since she hadn't been asleep long enough. One thing for sure, the client wouldn't care.

  Anne figured that her sergeant and lieutenant would already be at the scene, and the civilian evidence tech would already be collecting. Detective Sal Maldonado was up for the job of "scene man." Since coming to Homicide he'd food-inflated, and if he started floor-crawling to help the tech, Anne might have to help raise up that buffalo.

  The crime-scene man would have to go to the morgue in the morning along with the evidence tech to attend the post. Anne and the other two team members would be responsible for witness checks, victim's background, neighborhood canvass, and so forth.

  But a call-out wasn't all bad: They got paid time-and-a-half. The average homicide dick and dickette earned an extra seven to ten grand a year, so there was definitely an upside.

  Her company car was hard to start and flooded twice. It was a four-year-old Ford Crown Victoria, and according to the guys on her homicide team, it badly needed an overhaul. "That makes two of us," Anne had informed them.

  And she wasn't kidding. At age forty-six she was due, overdue , for her first face-lift. Maybe if enough San Diego citizens kept shooting, stabbing, bashing, and strangling one another she could get enough time-and-a-half to afford one. At least an eye job, if not the whole cut-and-snip.

  The Ford sputtered and almost stalled when she pulled off Friars Road, up toward the anthill of apartment buildings overlooking Mission Valley. Anne had her map book open on the seat and used her flashlight to check the streets. At least she could still read a map at night. A lot of her detective contemporaries couldn't even read a newspaper in broad daylight without bifocals, and the men were more vain about it than the women. She was always having to check the fine print for somebody.

  Maybe her eyes were still young, but not the tissue around them. Anne glanced into the rearview mirror at sleepy brown eyes badly lit by the dashboard light. The lids were definitely starting to sag, and there was too much going on underneath the eyes. She wondered what an eye-lift would cost. But if they're going to do an eye-lift how much extra would it be for the goddamn chin? She could reach under there with her fingers and feel excess.

  It was all so depressing. Boomers weren't supposed to get old. It sucked. There was nothing good about aging except what the years had taught her about men. What she'd learned is, you don't need them for much because they're not too for much. And her sainted mother could get rope burns from rosary beads, but Anne was never, never going to marry another guy no matter how good a squeeze he was. And if her mom told her she liked a guy Anne was dating, it was adios, Bunky. That meant he was a sure loser.

  She figured that she'd never have trouble getting laid even if she couldn't afford the complete face-lift and ended up looking like Buster the bloodhound. She was proportioned like an athlete, and she literally worked her ass off keeping it that way. Four days a week at the aerobics studio, and not just so she could have a kiss and a cuddle when she wanted it. No, it was because of what she'd accomplished with that body as a young police officer.

  She loved to recall the proudest achievement of her life. Anne Bartlett (her name in 1978) wanted to be the first San Diego PD female to make it on SWAT. She'd made her bones back in the days when there were still a lot of dinosaurs left on the job, guys who wanted women to fail. Back before sexual harassment and the fear those words now instilled. Back when a woman might be teamed on patrol with a male training officer who'd stop their patrol car in an alley and piss on a bush, just to see how she'd handle it.

  And if the female partner later said she also had to pee, the training officer might drive straight back to the bush and say, "Your turn."

  In those days she almost got urinary-tract infections just from holding it in.

  When she was a rookie she could take it with teeth clenched and a tight smile. She remembered one sergeant in particular, who liked to read crimes at lineup and make comments to humiliate the women. He'd read them one about a forced oral copulation where the suspect beat the crap out of his victim because she wouldn't swallow. Then he'd turned to Anne and said, " Do you swallow, Officer?"

  She'd been young and green and shocked. Her heart had started pounding. A dozen uniformed men had turned to look at herand waited.

  Finally she'd replied, "How do you think I got my creamy complexion?"

  Some of the men had accepted her on the spot. But it had been a heavy price to pay. Many times since then she'd fantasized that she had said, "Swallow this ." And thrown her coffee in his face.

  Clever responses like that had later cost plenty in the regrets department. During those years, whenever she'd get teamed with a real harasser, she'd had to figure out ways to discourage the asshole without getting him fired, and it hadn't been easy.

  When Anne had announced to her then husbanda patrol officer in Southern Divisionthat she was going to try for SWAT, he'd smiled condescendingly and said, "Sure you are."

  Then he'd realized that she was dead serious, didn't smile at all, and said, "The fuck you are!"

  But she had applied. During grueling tests she'd competed with men who'd puked their guts out on the dreaded "four-forty run," a quarter of a mile flat-out.

  "And what's your time?" the SWAT trainer had always asked her after the run. Then, "Oh, how nice. Now gimme some pull-ups. All the way up. Dead man
's pull-ups!"

  Having a baby had altered her body for a year, but SWAT training had brought it all back, hard as a lawyer's heartto the point that her upper body even got a bit too well developed.

  She'd beaten out a lot of SWAT applicants, guys who'd refused to train and practice the four-forty and the pull-ups. She'd practiced. Her hands had looked like chopped sirloin from all the training, until at last she could pump out twenty. All the way down. All the way up. Dead man's pull-ups.

  The SWAT trainer, who she thought hadn't liked her, had paid her his ultimate compliment when she'd pulled number twenty. He'd pointed to a dozen men lying exhausted on the ground and said, "You're a better man than they are, Gunga Din."

  By the time Anne arrived at the call-out scene, yellow tape had been strung across the walk-in gate. There were two patrol units and a patrol sergeant, along with an evidence tech, her team sergeant, and one of her team members. A young patrolman approached her car, saw the police badge hanging from the shoulder strap on her purse, and shone his flashlight beam on a vacant parking space behind a media van.

  The media often got to major crime scenes before the detectives by monitoring the police frequency with scanners. Anne hated the sight of that periscope pole and satellite dish, but she preferred cub reporters with video-cams to the prima donnas who'd steal it all away at air time. She called all cub reporters of either sex "Jimmy Olson" after the Superman character.

  Sal Maldonado was standing inside the tape at the bottom of the stairwell and he pointed downward as she approached. A stream of clotting blood ran from the bottom of the steps to the seam in the pool decking and out into a planter full of hydrangeas near the swimming-pool gate.

  Sal nodded his head in the direction of a patrol sergeant, who was knocking on doors at the far side of the swimming pool.

  He said to Anne; "Yupster sergeant. Wants to help but thinks bite marks are things on a computer. I told him to knock on doors and find us a witness. Didn't have the heart to send him home."

  "Where's the woman who called in?" Anne asked.

  "Upstairs, right," he said. "The boss wants you to talk to her. Take the other staircase."

  He shone his light onto the stairwell and lit up the body of Dawn Coyote. She lay halfway up the steps on her back, her little skirt hiked above her red lace panties. A coil of intestine, pink as bubble gum, lay on her thin milky thigh.

  Sal moved the beam to her blue eyes, which were wide open. "Let's get a picture of her eyeballs, Eddie," he called to the evidence tech working gingerly on the stairwell. "The image of the killer's in them."

  "Sure," said Eddie. "Why didn't I think of that?"

  "The motive wasn't robbery," Sal Maldonado told Anne, playing his beam over the crotch of Dawn's panties. "When I first saw that bulge I thought she was a transvestite. Until I saw the face of Alexander Hamilton peeking out at me from inside her panty leg."

  "The girl was a hooker, all right," Anne Zorn said.

  The most pathetic thing about the murder scene was the victim's toenails. She'd lost one shoe and the red enamel on her toenails was chipped and cracked. Anne knew that she'd remember the girl's toenails long after she forgot the rest of it.

  "So fill me in on what we know," she said.

  Blaze had been alone for nearly an hour since the first cop had arrived on the scene and taken the preliminary report. A detective sergeant had appeared next and introduced himself, but he said he'd be sending another detective to talk to her. Since then she'd had three cups of coffee even though a cup and a half with her morning cereal was her daily limit. Well, she wouldn't be sleeping, anyway, not even after they took Dawn away. Not even after the cops were all gone.

  She put a cardigan on over the sweatshirt, but she was still cold. It was after 3:00 A.M. when she heard a soft knock at the door.

  Blaze opened it and was surprised to see a tall woman in a tailored jacket and skirt and low-heeled pumps. She was carrying a clipboard, and a badge was attached to the shoulder strap of her purse. She was rather attractive in a no-nonsense way, and Blaze could see at once that she was very fit for someone who was forty something.

  The woman said, "Ms. Singleton? I'm Detective Anne Zorn. I have a few questions."

  "Come in," Blaze said. "Sit there on the sofa. Can I get you some coffee?"

  "If it's already made," Anne said. "Black, please."

  "It is," Blaze said, going into the kitchenette while Anne did what all cops do. She looked around the room. It was tidy, cheaply decorated but with some taste. There was a California impressionist lithograph hanging over the sofa. The furniture was a mixed bag of contemporary with one antique: a little hall tree so scaled down that it looked feminine. A nice, tidy little apartment.

  When Blaze returned with the coffee, she said, "I can't tell you much."

  "I know," Anne said, "I've already chatted with the patrol officer who responded to your call."

  "Have they determined who the girl is yet?"

  "She had no purse," Anne said. "Do you have any idea?"

  "None at all," Blaze said.

  "You saw her then? The body?"

  "Well, no, but the second police officer said she was a young blond woman. We don't have any young blond women living on this floor."

  "Do you have any young blond friends?"

  "No."

  "Acquaintances?"

  "No."

  "There're six units on this floor, on this side of the building. Ever seen a young blond woman visiting any of them?"

  "No." Blaze said. "How's the coffee?"

  "Fine," Anne said. "It'll keep me awake. If you snooze you lose in my business."

  "I can imagine," Blaze said.

  "The officer told me you thought you heard a bird cry?"

  "A gull," Blaze said.

  "And that was the only sound? No loud scream? No voices at all?"

  "That was all," Blaze said. "How about the neighbors? Did anybody else hear anything?"

  "Two aren't home. The others were dead asleep. Sound asleep, I guess I should say."

  "Does that mean he killed her instantly? Or did he gag her mouth or something?"

  "He?"

  "It must've been a man. She was stabbed, wasn't she?"

  "Oh, yes," Anne said. "She certainly was. Can I just get a little information, Ms. Singleton? You didn't give the other officer a business address or a business phone."

  "No," Blaze said. "I'm between jobs right now."

  "What kind of work do you do?" Anne asked, sipping the coffee.

  "Want some more?" Blaze asked.

  "No, thanks. What do you do when you're working?"

  "I've done lots of things. I've been a cocktail waitress. I've done general office work."

  "Where was your last job?"

  "Oh, I wouldn't want my former boss to be bothered by all this."

  "Bothered by all what?"

  Blaze hesitated and said, "Well, he's an older man and he might be alarmed if the police called him."

  "Why would we call him?"

  "You asked where I last worked. So I thought I thought"

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, I thought you might have to verify what I tell you about myself."

  "No, I was just making conversation until I could think of another relevant question." Anne Zorn stared into Blaze Duvall's anxious green eyes.

  "My last job was in L.A.," Blaze said quickly. "A little plastics business called Brunswick Enterprises. I only worked there for eight months. I don't like L.A."

  "Don't blame you," Anne said, scribbling in her notebook. "Part of our San Diego heritage. L.A. haters, one and all."

  "It's possible," Blaze said, "that the murdered girl took the wrong stairs. The other staircase is just on the other side of the pool. People're always taking the wrong stairs to get to the second floor."

  "We had considered that," Anne said. "It may be what happened. I wonder if it might help us for you to actually look at the girl to be sure you don't know her?"

&n
bsp; "No!" Blaze said. "No. I couldn't do that. I don't know any young blond woman. I don't want to look at someone who's been stabbed. No . I'm sorry."

  "Okay," Anne said. "I guess that's all for now, but I may have to phone you. Is this number good day or night?"

  "Yes, it is," Blaze said. "I'll be looking for a job during the day, but I call my machine for messages."

  "Right," Anne said, standing up.

  Blaze said, "I'd like to be informed if you catch the person. If that's permitted, I'd like to be informed."

  "You will be," Anne said. "You may be called to testify when we catch the person."

  "But I didn't see anything," Blaze said.

  "We're troubled by one detail," Anne said when Blaze opened the door.

  "What's that?"

  "Near the bottom of the steps we found a blue terry-cloth bathrobe."

  "Do you think the girl might've been carrying it? The murdered girl?"

  "Unlikely," Anne said. "It was found thirty feet from her body."

  "The pool," Blaze said. "The pool's very close by, as you can see."

  "Yes?"

  "One of the tenants probably dropped it coming from the pool. Somebody's always dropping something."

  "Even bathrobes?"

  "They drop everything," Blaze said. "Trust me."

  "But this bathrobe had bloodstains on the hem," Anne Zorn said.

  The detective was staring at her again, with unblinking brown eyes, the irises flecked with yellow. Unnerving, like cat's eyes. Blaze was afraid of this woman's unblinking eyes. "Blood?" Blaze said. "I don't understand."

  "It's a pretty fresh stain," Anne said. "I'll bet it's the victim's,blood."

  "I don't understand," Blaze said.

  "Neither do we," Anne Zorn said to Blaze Duvall. "Yet."

  CHAPTER NINE

  ON EASTER SUNDAY THEY WERE OUT THERE ON THE WATER: every sailing-stupid and Jet Ski doofus. Every ski-boat beavis and fishing dweeb. Anyone who wasn't indulging in safer pursuits on Mission Bay's surprisingly extensive twenty-seven miles of coastline. Of course there were plenty of dirtbags, too, with bulgemobiles full of crystal meth, ready for a relaxing Sunday doing the same things on a boat they did on dry land-tweaking or fighting.