by Michael Lion
Caz introduced us. “Gene Robinson, this is Bird.” As we shook hands she turned to me and said, “Sorry to keep buggin’ you in the morning. I know it’s not your best time.”
I stretched and said, “Screw you.” Gene’s mouth was full, so I didn’t say anything to him as I shook his hand for fear he would feel obligated to respond and spray me with sandwich. I took a big gulp of hideous coffee, my stomach shuddered, and we stepped into what Gene affectionately referred to as “The Fridge.”
As we walked along walls of stainless steel that looked like the fronts of huge filing cabinets, I asked Caz, “What the hell am I doing here, honey? I already told you I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Have some more coffee,” she said flatly. Her tone quieted me down.
The filing cabinets were, of course, cadaver preservation units. They don’t slip you on a slab anymore like in the old marble motels—now they throw you in a chilled chest-of-drawers. On the front of each three-foot square steel door was a pull handle and a small slot for a card with the name of the body and the date it was brought in. By the time we had passed the third grid, most of the bodies seemed to be members of the Doe family. Caz and Gene stopped suddenly, and I pulled up short enough to keep from plowing into the sergeant, but not enough to keep from sloshing a little coffee on the back of her jacket. She didn’t seem to notice and I didn’t say anything. In any event, the earth-tone plaid pattern hid any damage.
“Got a victim last night,” Caz started. “We’re pretty sure who she is, but we need a positive I.D.” She nodded to Gene.
Before I could decide whether to keep the coffee or not, Gene slid the drawer open so that Song Ti Nguyen and I could stare at each other.
“Oh, fucking Christ,” I muttered, making my way to the trashcan in the corner. I didn’t puke, but I fought off a rising gorge and dumped the rest of the coffee. As I walked back I said to Gene, “You could’ve at least closed her goddamned eyes, couldn’t you?”
He shrugged and took a final bite of the sandwich, then pulled a Milky Way out of his smock for dessert. I almost slapped him.
“Song?” Caz asked.
I nodded, staring into the frozen face. I suddenly found myself caring about her, my feelings for Li flooding over into a concern for her brutalized sister.
Caz sighed and shook her head. “The things people dream up to do each other in.”
Song’s hair was the only thing about her that didn’t look different dead. It still held the quiet blue glow it shared with her sister’s. Each of her eyes had a milky cloud over the dilated pupil, and the whites had gone a pale yellow. Her skin, though darker, had the same waxy, wasted characteristics as Gene’s. Except for one thing, she looked like she had expired quietly in her sleep: jutting out from her left nostril was a long splinter of wood that extended down to just below her chin. It was thick and swollen with dried blood, and most of it was clearly deep inside her brain.
I stood up straight and took a long, deep breath. Nothing makes you want to do that more than the face of the dead. “So. Seventy-two hours ago I saved this girl’s life. I guess I shouldn’t have bothered.”
Caz gave me more than I thought she would. “She was found at two-twenty this morning by a nigger digging for tin cans behind the Greyhound Bus Station. His name’s Eddy, uh, he said it was Valentino, but he didn’t look like much of a ladies’ man to me.” She pulled out a small notepad and flipped through it quickly. “By the time we got there, coroner said she’d been dead thirty minutes, which means she was still wiggling when Eddy found her.” I once again fought off the urge to puke. “You know this Valentino?”
I shook my head. “I’ve heard of him,” I said distractedly. “Just a homeless hophead who orbits around the terminal. He’s nobody.”
Gene finished his Milky Way and slid Song back into cold storage.
“Just checking,” Caz continued. “There’s bits of shit under her nails that we think is pieces of whoever clipped her, but we won’t know that until the man looks at her in an hour or so. From initial signs, she fought like a pitbull before they cocked her. There’s also probably some tissue on the splinter, because of the force it was pushed with.”
I thought of Li curled up in my bed and suddenly had things to do. “You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here, Caz. I told you she’s got parents and...a friend, Li.”
“If she’s got parents, they’re on fuckin’ Mars living under assumed names. I tried every computer search program there is. Got bubkis. Tried this Li chick, too. No answer.”
I didn’t tell Caz that was because she was asleep next to me when she called. I played the obvious card. “All right. This has something to do with that dead hooker you woke me up for on Thursday, doesn’t it?”
Caz exhaled a cloud of pale blue smoke and looked at me through it thoughtfully, like I’d forced her to a decision she wasn’t ready to make. “Fine. Just in case you know something I don’t.” She stepped back and waved her skinny cigarette at Gene.
He stepped back one stall and slid it open. Inside was a redhead who had obviously been dead a little longer than Song. The skin around her eyes was an ashy purple. Alive, she would have been a crippling beauty. Three inches of a similar bloody splinter protruded from her nose, keeping her jaw propped open slightly, as if she were about to say something. I glanced at the I.D. slot. Another cousin in the Doe family.
Gene slid the body out a little further. “Anything?” Caz asked.
She looked familiar, but a redhead always does. “Nope.” I unzipped the body bag a little farther and looked at her hands. They were smooth, cared for, the nails manicured and unblemished. There was a slight tan line around the fourth finger of her left hand. “She have any jewelry on her when you brought her in?” I asked.
Caz motioned to Gene while I zipped her back up. Gene, whose voice I had yet to hear, handed me a plastic Ziploc baggie with a catalog number on it. Inside were some thin gold chains, an ornate gold ring with the letters “CDM” on it surrounding a green stone, and a diamond solitaire that wasn’t quite big enough to use as a paperweight. “Well,” I said, “she’s not from anywhere I hang around. Too young and too soft to earn what she’s wearing. That’s daddy’s money. Where’d you find her, again?”
“Dumpster by the bus station,” Caz reminded me.
“She’s not from anywhere close to there. That’s my playground. Girls like this don’t grow there, trust me.”
It was quiet for a minute. I finally said, “This girl was taken care of. No one’s even reported a missing female redhead?”
Caz lit another of her skinny smokes and shook her head. I held up the baggie. “C’mon, Caz. That’s an engagement ring if I ever saw one. Girls don’t buy themselves solitaires. Someone has to be missing her.”
Caz gave me a condescending glare. “Thanks, Sherlock.”
I shrugged. “No I.D. on either one?”
“Nothing on the Chink,” Caz started. “Red here had the grad ring from Corona del Mar High School. We’re assuming it’s a boyfriend’s.” She stuck the cigarette back in her face with finality.
Gene excused himself with a mumble and asked us to let him know when we left. His voice sounded like a stifled whine. Caz and I both nodded as he shuffled away. After the doors swung shut I yanked both drawers out full length and stared at dead women. Without looking at Caz, I said flatly, “Don’t ever call her a Chink again.”
She nodded without saying anything.
“The ring bothers me,” I said.
“Which one?”
“The gaudy one with the green stone. You really think it’s a high school ring?”
“It kind of matches a design in one of the catalogs used by C.D.M. High. But there’s a custom option. You can blend different styles if you want.”
“Was it on her finger?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because when I was in high school, girls wore their boyfriends’ rings around their neck, not on their fingers.”
&n
bsp; “So it’s hers. So what?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think clearly on Sunday mornings, especially this early.” I stared down at the statuesque faces, vandalized by the splinters. I finally looked up at Caz. “Are you thinking serial killer?”
“You never know,” she said, stepping over to one of the deep stainless steel sinks. She ran water over the ash of her cigarette before tossing the butt in a red can marked BIOHAZARD. “These ritualistic assholes, sometimes they kill once their whole lives. These two were awfully close together. If it is serial, he won’t hit anyone again for a while. But if he fits the standard profile, it’ll drive him nuts not to kill. He’ll hit again eventually. And this is a well-developed MO. As sick as it sounds, I hope I see another splinter.”
I slid the drawers reverently closed. “Well,” I said, motioning to the first drawer, “that’s Song Ti Nguyen. You need it spelled?”
Caz shook her head. “Thanks for coming down, Bird. You’ll let me know if you fall over anything?”
“Sure,” I lied. She didn’t know I had Li curled up asleep in my bed. She didn’t know what I had to tell her. There was no way I could play it until I laid it out for Li.
As the doors to The Fridge swung shut behind us and the slightly less stale air of the hallway helped me stand up straight again, I said, “Where’s the john in this place?”
Caz pointed me down the hall and said goodbye. I plodded slowly away.
I didn’t need to go to the bathroom. I needed a photo.
I stayed in the can until I was sure Caz had left for more important things. I splashed cold water on my face and tried not to think about Song lying in The Fridge—it was getting too easy to picture Li’s face staring up from that steel drawer. I wandered out into the hall and in the direction I had seen Gene turn after he left us. I followed the sound of a typewriter into a large computer room where Gene was processing new tenants. He hadn’t struck me as the kind of guy who’s real concerned with procedure, so I acted like I knew what I was doing.
“Gene?” I rapped lightly on the door.
He spun around. “Yeah?”
“I forgot to ask Cazares something. It’s a little early in the morning for me. I usually work at night, and my brain’s still in park.” I gave him a sheepish grin. He waited, staring. “Anyway, I was wondering if there was any engraving on the rings. From the Jane Doe.”
His eyes narrowed for a second, then he shuffled through the crap on his desk and came up with some sort of form. “Sergeant Cazares told me you might be sniffing around. Yeah. Two initials in a fancy script, inside the grad ring. ‘I.J.’ Nothing inside the solitaire.”
“I gathered. Listen, man, I can contact a class of folks on this thing that Cazares really doesn’t have the juice for, and I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“This is Downtown’s now,” he said, waving his hands in the air and spinning away from me in his chair. “And they don’t like to be interfered with. I just want to graduate and get out of this pit.”
“But—”
“Look, Bird—is that what they call you? I’d help you if I could, but once Robbery/Homicide gets a hold of something, it’s all about request forms and clearances and delays. That’s it. And the sergeant would have my ass if I gave you something that wound up being classified.”
“Like a picture?”
“What do you mean?”
“You take photos of the stiffs, right? For your records?”
“Well, sure.”
“And I know you don’t just take a couple of shots for the family album, man. There’s a whole custom darkroom down the hall. They’re not going to miss one five-by-seven head shot.”
Gene spun back around with his hands up, about to protest, but I caught his chair in mid spin and leaned in. “How many people do you think the sergeant could have called this morning, Gene? A hundred? A thousand? And of all those possibilities, who did she drag down here? Me. I buy and sell information on the street and Caz wanted me here because she knows that sometimes I run across things that matter.” I stood up out of his face. “Now, imagine if you hand me a simple photo, that no one knows about, and then at some later point I give Sergeant Cazares the warm end of the bed about how you exercised a little personal initiative and helped me out. There’s a lot of grease in connections like that.”
Gene slowly drew in his lower lip and chewed on it while he considered my logic. I was about to blink and lose the contest when he said, “OK, but there’s some rules.”
“Hit me.”
“You do not, and I repeat, do not flash the shot to anyone but those completely removed from this place. No cops, no doctors, no city officials at all.” Then he smiled slyly. “And you keep me in fast food for a week.”
“What?”
“C’mon, we med students live on junk and pharmaceuticals practically our whole careers. It gets expensive. If you’re the man on the street you claim to be, then getting a guy lunch delivered to his work shouldn’t be too big a deal.”
I sighed, he gave me his work schedule, and then we went down to the photo lab where Gene pulled a mug shot taken of her only hours after she arrived. I asked him if he had any profile shots. He rooted through files and came up with one that showed her from the right, and the splinter was barely visible. The black-and-white print didn’t make her look any healthier, but it would be easier to show around.
I thanked him, said goodbye, and walked across the street to the Jack In The Box. I slipped a sixteen-year-old Latino kid a hundred bucks and told him what I wanted. He kept nodding and saying “Si.” That was good enough for me.
Not only was Li still dead asleep when I crept back into my place, she had not, so far as I could tell, moved even her pinky finger. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. She gurgled. After what I had seen at the morgue, it was easier not to crawl into bed with her. I went to the refrigerator, poured myself about three shots of Stolichnaya in a glass, mixed in some tomato juice, and started to nurse it. My empty stomach protested, then settled into the task of transporting alcohol to my brain. I closed my eyes as the vodka started to loosen my thoughts. I went backwards.
Three days of interrupted sleep and people asking me funny questions hadn’t netted me enough to even cover my rent, and Caz hadn’t spilled anything worth dick on the street. For some reason I was beginning to feel responsible for Song lying in state downtown, and I resisted the guilt with another sip of vodka. I played the scene in Jay’s apartment over and over again until I started remembering things that didn’t actually happen. There was something clearly wrong with that night, and the booze wasn’t helping me figure it out.
Two women at the morgue with splinters in their brains.
A dead girl’s sister asleep in my bed.
No reason to get involved.
But there was one person who might be able to give me a reason: Lenny “Double F” Dwight.
Chapter 6
I woke up next to Li, not remembering getting into bed with her. It was dark outside. I got dressed while she slept, struggling with what to do and when to do it. I kept coming back to telling her straight, right now. I sat on the edge of the bed and shook her soft, warm shoulder. “Li?”
She stirred, and when she saw the strain on my face her eyes lost their sleepy edge and got instantly sharp and bright.
“Sit up.”
“What’s wrong?” she said, reaching out to touch my face. I intercepted her hand before she touched me and held it in my own.
“There’s never a right way to say this. Your sister is dead. I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m really sorry.”
Her small body started to shake all over. “What...How?”
“I don’t know. Someone killed her. I just got back from the morgue.”
A high, keening sound came out from between her lips and she fell forward onto me. She cried long and hard, her body wracking with sobs. I brought her face up to mine and said, “I’m going to find out who killed her. I
swear.” Her eyes were hollow and helpless.
She was still crying when I left.
If I had known that was the last time I would see her alive, I would have said more. I would have held her longer.
I tooled around nervously for a couple of hours, trying to get my wits about me. A couple of drinks here, some food there, and I was still scrambled. Seeing the Kingfish was an inevitability, and he was the only person who ever knew where Double F was.
One of Kingfish’s lookouts was standing on the corner of 102nd and Olympic. As I made my wide right turn into residential Athens, he put a cell phone to his ear. The man knew I was coming five blocks before I got there.
I stopped the bike next to the burned-out husk of a two bedroom house with plywood over the windows and a strikingly out-of-place brand new screen door. A nervous-looking black guy about four feet tall stepped off the porch, closed his cell phone, and looked at me like I’d lost my mind. He looked at everybody like that. It was his job. “Hello, Freddie.”
“S’up Birdy Birdy,” he said casually, stepping up to the bike. I shut the engine off as another huge man peered at me through the screen. I could barely make out the shape of the shotgun he held in his hands. Freddie wagged a finger at me. “You know da drill, cuz.”
I peeled off the jacket and laid it over the motorcycle’s gas tank. Then I held my arms clear of my sides and walked slowly up to the screen door until I was inches from the giant behind it. I didn’t recognize him. I said, “I need to see Kingfish.”
The large man apparently recognized me. He rotated his head enough to say “Iss jus’ the Bird.”
A gravelly voice charged out of the darkness. “I don’ giva shit if it’s fuckin, Jesus. Clean him.”
The screen door opened and I was pushed inside next to a guard sitting on a stool. He didn’t move except to keep me facing forward by resting the muzzle of his shotgun on my shoulder. I couldn’t see a thing past the three huge crackhouse sentries who settled around me and started feeling every seam in my clothing and every part of my body. I patiently waited while my shirt came off and I was felt up from balls to ankles so thoroughly it hurt. Street dealers are one thing, but suppliers like Kingfish are paranoids and will shoot you for having blue eyes, then sit down and have something to eat while you bleed out. I’d been through it before and let them have their way.
