The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  He stared past me in thought.

  “Maybe a careless kid. He’s there and safe.”

  “At first he was afraid I was going to kill him,” I said. “I don’t think he would space this.”

  I told him I wanted to go back to O.B. and check.

  “Want me to go with you?”

  I told him no. “Sauve qui peut.” Every man for himself.

  “Why are you speaking French, Mapstone?”

  I smiled. “Memories.” To be a show-off, I added: “Pourquoi pas?” Why not?

  “Bonne chance,” said the simple boy from the barrio.

  With that, I walked out front where I gave the U.S. Grant Hotel doorman five bucks to hail me a cab.

  14

  The cab let me out in front of the apartment building at a quarter of ten. All the street parking was taken, probably all the way down to the business district, if not beyond. Your own parking space was a precious thing in O.B. I stood there as a black Dodge Ram truck slid by on Santa Cruz. The truck had a tag frame that read, “I (heart) Rancho Bernardo.”

  I shook my head. “Good luck finding a parking spot this time of night, suburban boy.”

  Then I was alone. When I lived here, O.B. had been dimly lit by yellow streetlights, a program the city had begun to cut the light pollution and protect the Palomar Observatory. Now the streetlights looked new and were definitely brighter, reflecting off the gray ceiling of the returning clouds. It was probably bad for the astronomers but good for me. I could see that the sidewalks were deserted, a good thing because I felt itchy with anxiety.

  With all the windows open, I could hear televisions, a couple making love, and the subtle resonance of the surf a block and a half west. It brought back memories of the rare nights when there was fog and I would hear the foghorn coming from down by the pier. Tonight, it was so still I could hear my steps on the concrete.

  It was ten degrees cooler than downtown. For a few minutes, I let the temperature help me feel normal again instead of breathless from the Phoenix heat. Then I walked to the gate and stared up at the apartment. The windows were closed, curtains open, and lights off. The tension that had been swelling for hours in my middle relaxed. The kid was gone and had forgotten to call me. He was mourning. He had a baby to take care of.

  I thought about walking down to Newport and taking the bus downtown, but it was better to be sure. The vocal passion coming from the southeast apartment had subsided, so the gate loudly protested against me pulling 1950s metal hinges against each other. It put me on guard, but no curtains parted to see who was coming in. The pool was deserted and the water sat perfectly still and inviting.

  When I looked up this time, I could see Tim’s door was partly ajar.

  The dread wouldn’t let me go. Sure, there was a chance he was sitting inside, enjoying the breeze through the cracked door, playing a video game on headphones while the baby slept.

  But only a fool would believe that.

  I took the stairs two at a time, careful to keep my footfall quiet.

  By the time I reached my old unit, I had the lightweight Smith & Wesson in my right hand. The windows to Tim’s apartment were on the far side of the door so I couldn’t see what was inside the apartment. I tapped lightly on the hollow door and called Tim’s name. The door was open three inches. Beyond was darkness. Now it didn’t seem like such a good idea to have come alone. Second-nature almost got the better of me: I almost called, “Deputy sheriff!” but I pushed the door all the way open and stepped silently into the room.

  I moved to the side, to avoid providing a backlit target.

  The outside light streamed in through the windows. Tim was sitting upright in the dining chair I had used earlier that day. It was directly facing the door. His face was tombstone white and the blood from his slit throat had flooded his T-shirt. There was no point in checking for a pulse. His dead eyes stared at nothing and his hands were in his lap, bound with handcuffs that glinted from the ambient light. Something like a big, curved bar of soap was in his lap. It had probably come from the kitchen.

  Tim was gagged with a dish towel wrapped with duct tape. My eyes were drawn to his hands. Every one of his fingers had been broken. They had tortured him before they slit his throat.

  The killer had also tossed the place. Clothing, food, video games, books, cushions and the flotsam of daily life were strewn around. Every drawer had been pulled all the way out and turned over, in case something had been taped beneath it. The pillows had been slit open and their stuffing pulled out.

  Why didn’t you leave when I told you? I forced back that thought. Right now, I had to secure the scene and observe, even if I wasn’t the law anymore.

  There was enough blood to do finger painting on the south wall of the living room. The red characters were uneven and drippy, but the words were familiar.

  PERALTA AND MAPSTONE, P.C.

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS

  The moron had left his fingerprints in Tim’s blood.

  A closer look would have to wait.

  I hurried into the bedroom and swept it with the barrel of the revolver, fearing what I would find. No bad guys. And no baby in the crib. I quickly checked the bathroom and the closet. No baby. I felt my own pulse slamming against my temples. The bedroom had also been thoroughly gone through. Whoever had done it, and taken the baby, hadn’t bothered with the baby supplies.

  I pulled out my phone to call Peralta and then the police.

  Then something clicked in my brain. I dropped the phone back in my pocket, barely feeling my hand.

  The object in Tim’s lap was not a bar of soap. And it had lettering that suddenly opened a file in my vast memory of trivia.

  The lettering carved into the object said,

  FRONT

  TOWARD ENEMY.

  “Oh, God.”

  I heard a voice say those words. It was my voice, but my mind was desperately processing my options. I don’t know if I made a conscious decision because my next memory is reaching the walkway outside the door and letting adrenaline heft my right foot to the top of the railing, balancing myself with my left hand. Then I was midair headed down for the pool.

  Hoping that I remembered which side was the deep end.

  The smooth surface came up suddenly and next I was underwater, surprised by the liquid cold, my terror-filled muscles acting in concert with only one goal: dive deep. I touched the bottom and started counting but only got to three before feeling a sharp concussion overhead. It popped my ears and pushed me violently against the far wall of the pool. I swear my brain felt about to burst. Something large and heavy missed my head by no more than six inches. It was half of a cinderblock.

  When I came up, gasping for air, Tim’s apartment was gone and the smoke made it difficult to assess the damage to other units. The surface of the water was coated with glass fragments, burning drapes, a can of Pringles, papers, the debris of daily life—and little metal balls. Those had been ejected from the Claymore anti-personnel mine that had detonated. Robin’s cross floated on the surface, glinting under the light, still attached to the chain around my neck. The revolver was still in my hand.

  Something soft bobbed against my arm.

  It was Tim’s head, face up, hair like seaweed, staring at the overcast.

  15

  We started back to Phoenix at dusk the next day, driving through the desert at night the way people used to do, before advanced automobile cooling systems. Back in the days when only a fool would cross the wilderness without an adequate supply of water.

  Before we left, Peralta found a deserted space where he could park and get into the steel storage compartment that sat in the extended cab behind our seats.

  It was a gun case.

  “Time for heavy metal,” he said, and I didn’t think he was about to break out some Black Sabbath CDs.

  Ten mi
nutes later we were speeding east on I-8. I had received a tutorial on a Kel-Tec RFB assault rifle, “a bull pup,” he called it. Barely more than two feet long, it was black and homely. But with the fire-selector capable of semiautomatic and a twenty-round box magazine, it didn’t need to win a beauty contest. I slid it beside me, barrel down, safety on. Peralta slid an assault rifle into the well between his seat and the door. It looked a little like an M-16, but it was matte black with a retracting stock and a rough-edged thing on the barrel that might have been a flash-suppressor or a hand-guard—or not. He didn’t bother to explain besides telling me it was a Colt AR15 Magpul Special.

  “A good truck gun,” he said.

  My world was still a little blurry from the blast. My stupid question: “Why?”

  “I want to have an edge,” he said. “Are you steady enough for this?”

  “Yes.”

  The question irritated me, but I had no time for that. I had no time for sentimental thoughts about departing from my second hometown as we climbed out of Mission Valley into El Cajon and began the long uphill grind—away from Ocean Beach, away from my other life in this beautiful city and its balm of cooler weather. I opened the glove box, pulled out the gun-cleaning kit, unloaded my Airlite, and began cleaning and oiling it to avoid any trouble from its contact with the pool. My hands shook.

  “Sorry you didn’t have any time for fun here,” Peralta said, trying his best to sound sympathetic. “I should have at least set up drinks for you and Isabel, the night detective. To talk over what she found. Anyway, she was cute.”

  “You’re trying to set me up? You’re the one who keeps saying Lindsey will come back.”

  “You need to get laid, Mapstone. It’d do you a world of good.”

  “Like it did you.” I heard my voice, joyless and raw.

  Grace, Isabel the detective, Grace’s friend Addison. Oh, I felt old and in a foreign country. The young women’s names sounded either like they belonged to old ladies or unfeminine and strange. I shouldn’t have been so judgmental.

  But I was particular in my female names. I liked boomer names like Susan, Amy, and Karen. Pamela: three syllables of sexy. Lisa and Linda were nice. And Patty. I had preferences for Generation X names, too. Heather and Melissa. And Lindsey. And Robin. Addison? No. Leave it to me to start categorizing and analyzing even small things. Maybe it was a good sign. Or maybe I was leaking blood inside my brain from effects of the explosion.

  I wanted to take a nap. But then the dreams would come.

  This was the first time we had spent alone together since the blast and I briefed Peralta as much as I could. My head hurt despite nearly overdosing on Advil, everything felt slowed down, and concentration was difficult. My shoes, the only casual pair I brought, were still soggy. The one constant thought I could hold was the missing baby.

  I did my best to brief him.

  He immediately interrupted. “You’re one lucky bastard. The kill zone of a Claymore can be fifty meters. It’s a shaped charge, meant to explode in the direction that it’s pointed. You might have been better off running to the bedroom and getting under the bed. That way you wouldn’t have been directly in front of it.”

  “Trust me, there wasn’t anything left of the bedroom, and there was no bed frame.” I started to zone out a little. “Hell, I don’t know. I reacted with instinct. How did they detonate it?”

  “Could have been anything nowadays: timer, laser, plus the good old fashioned wires.” One big hand was enough to handle the steering wheel. “We used to set up Claymores to ambush NVA columns. They’d come down a jungle trail and we’d let the gooks get well inside the kill zone. Then we’d set off one at the front of the column and they’d naturally run backwards. That’s when we’d set off the Claymores from the back, going forward.” He laughed malignly.

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “You don’t know. You weren’t there.” He said this without irony.

  “Thank you for your service to the country, sir. Now, may I fucking continue?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But how did you realize it was a Claymore?”

  “I read about it in a book.”

  When my eyes were closed, I started to get dizzy. When I opened them, the car lights from the freeway hurt. Looking off to the shoulder, I was overcome by the fear someone would suddenly step in front of us. So I stared into my lap.

  After the explosion, I pulled myself from the pool. My cell phone was ruined, of course. But my gun was fine. It wasn’t needed. No bad guys were there to finish the job. Instead, people were shouting and screaming. I went from apartment to apartment, getting people out, sending them to the street until the fire department could arrive. That seemed to take forever. One man living in my old unit looked badly injured. I found him last, under the remains of a heavy desk that probably saved him, and I stayed with him until the first cop came in the door with a flashlight and a gun.

  It was a miracle that the damage wasn’t worse. One person in critical condition, two more suffered less-serious injuries. It helped that the people directly below Tim’s apartment were gone; the same with the residents of the unit directly to the south. No fire followed the explosion and the emergency crews quickly shut off the gas.

  I remembered choppers overhead and a bright beam from the sky.

  Then, after a cursory checkup by the paramedics, it was all cops, all the time. I never got a chance to have coffee with Sharon. Nor did I have time to order a new cell phone. Instead, I spent the hours telling my story to seven different San Diego cops, including Kimbrough, who was not at all happy to see me. Then ATF showed up and took me downtown to talk more. What sleep I got came from leaning my head against a wall while waiting for the next round of questions.

  I was fortunate for a law passed after 9/11, giving retired police officers in good standing the power to carry a concealed firearm in any state. Otherwise, things could have gotten very disagreeable. Somehow Peralta had pulled some levers before he left office and I was able to “retire” with a combined fifteen years service to the Sheriff’s Office. The pension was shit, so don’t judge me as a greedy public employee. But the conceal-carry benefit probably kept me out of jail.

  The cops and feds didn’t think I did it—“it” being called a “possible act of domestic terrorism” on the television crawler I saw while waiting in one of the fed’s offices. But they didn’t like that I was in San Diego as a private investigator and that my client was dead. I wondered if they’d force us to stay in town for further questions. Instead, it was a wonder that we weren’t escorted to the city limits. I thought momentarily of my unread George Kennan biography and how he had been declared persona non grata by Stalin, his ambassadorship to Moscow cut short. I was persona non grata in San Diego at the moment and for better reason.

  An Amber Alert was issued for the missing baby. Detectives had called Tim’s parents in Riverside and assembled more information: a photograph of the now-orphaned infant and his name.

  His name was David.

  “I should have gone with you,” Peralta said.

  “You couldn’t have moved as fast as I did.”

  “I wouldn’t have mistaken a Claymore for a big bar of soap.”

  He had me there. I went on and tried to tell him everything, step by step.

  “Did you tell them about the pimp?”

  I said yes.

  “Did they believe you?”

  “They did when I gave them the Glock I took off him.”

  I had no doubt that America’s Finest Pimp was now sitting in one of America’s Finest Interrogation Rooms, but I didn’t make him for the killer. He had been too unnerved by my arrival and my assumed connection to the unnerving Edward to return to the apartment. Anyway, the pimp didn’t strike me as the throat-slashing kind and certainly not as a bomb maker. But I didn’t even know his name. The cops told me nothing. There was no pr
ofessional courtesy to give to a private investigator.

  When the de-brief had exhausted me, I asked Peralta a question. Did it pass the smell test? The rich guy leaving a thousand dollars on the nightstand for Grace, and then her setting up a business based on that kind of sum? Not a twenty-five-dollar blowjob from a hooker on Van Buren, but hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

  “Sex is big business,” he said. “Don’t forget Eliot Spitzer. Didn’t he pay four or five grand every time? I’ve seen plenty of investigations into high-end prostitution. We took down a county supervisor while you were away teaching, for putting hookers on his county credit card. The single-girl-on-her-own part of it is unusual, but she eventually got caught by a pimp. That sounds real.”

  I put away the gun-cleaning kit, reloaded my revolver, and slid it back into my pocket.

  “If you’d gotten gun oil on the carpet, I would have killed you,” he said.

  I ignored him. “Why would a man pay for sex, especially when there’s so much free stuff around? Especially why would a rich man do it?”

  “Tiger Woods spent something like four million bucks a year on prostitutes.”

  “Your mind is an amazing thing,” I said, repeating a phrase he usually applied to me. Having my brain rocked like a Jell-O salad had addled my mind at the moment.

  His big shoulders shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a golfer.”

  “Do you spend four million…? Never mind.” I really did not want to know.

  Even in my driest spell, in my twenties when young women weren’t drawn to a guy who read books and talked about history, I didn’t contemplate going to a prostitute.

  “Sharon could tell you the psychology,” he said. “With a young woman and older man, it’s called the Lolita Complex, I think. Some men are drawn specifically to prostitutes. Rich men want the privacy that the right prostitute can provide. Most of these guys are married, remember, and they don’t want their wives to divorce them and take half of their wealth in a community property state. Politicians are willing to take the risk. A prostitute never says no, never has a headache, and she’ll do kinky stuff the missus might not do.”