The Night Detectives

by Jon Talton

  “Did you fuck her there?”

  She nodded toward the bed.

  Before I could answer—the answer was no—she strode quickly over and slapped me. The blow was so hard it brought little lighted planets and asteroids to the edge of my vision.

  “Did you fuck my sister in that bed?” The smile was gone and her eyes were burning violet with emotion.

  She was about to deliver another blow but I caught it. She was strong as hell. With her other hand, she shoved me against the wall and mashed her mouth roughly against mine. You could call it a kiss if you called knuckle-breaking a handshake. I twirled her around and slammed her back into the plaster and our tongues fought. She was making sounds that were half whimpers, half snarls. We were both sweating. Buttons were popping off my shirt. I was jerking her jeans and panties down despite the fact that not a millimeter of space separated our half-wrestling, half-embracing bodies.

  We both fell on the floor and the rest of the clothes came off. What happened next was the angriest lovemaking I could ever imagine. The hardness of the floor was apt. A bed would have been out of place. Her hair fell into my mouth.

  Usually there was a part of me standing outside every interaction observing. That me fluttered on the perimeter for only a few seconds, managing to remember Chrissie Hynde lyrics about love and hate and the thin line, wondering if I was taking my woman back or she was taking her man back, noticing that my formerly inhibited Lindsey had been practicing moves and not with me, or if any of this even mattered beyond these minutes and that rough floor, and then the observer was sucked back inside our primal bout and lost. She moaned “fuck me” among many untranslatable sounds.

  Her orgasm was more intense and longer lasting than any I ever remembered, and finally she collapsed on top of me. The only familiar gesture was her tucking her feet under my legs.

  In the silence, I could only hear the fronds of a palm tree brushing against the window. Spasms ripped through my back as my San Diego dive caught up with me, and my face was still stinging from her slap. All other thoughts had been torn away like our clothes.

  My shoulder was suddenly wet. And then she started sobbing, in heaving, loud convulsions that seemed too big to be coming out of her slender body. All I could do was hold her and stroke her hair. She initially resisted even as she mashed herself against me, until she finally gave in and held me too. Her arm wrapped so tightly around my neck that I almost passed out. It was a long time before she was simply crying.

  Afterwards, we lay side by side, one of her long legs over mine. The room was finally cooling down. Somebody could have come in and killed us right then and it would have been okay.

  She retrieved a pack of Gauloises out of her wadded up jeans and lit one, then exhaled a long, blue vapor trail. Tobacco mingled with the pervasive scent of sex.

  I followed the smoke out into the room, down her lovely body, past our reddened knees, and noticed the tattoo on the top of her right foot. The word “Emma” was surrounded by brambles.

  It made me smoke one of her French cigarettes, too, even though it would probably make me slightly ill. I am an old guy, so in my mental world body art is confined to Melville’s whalers, real sailors and enlisted Marines, and trailer trash. It is elitism out of step with the age, but I find tattoos barbarous. And here was one on the perfect fair foot of my wife. True, she had worn a small stud in her nose when we had first dated, but that was years ago and Lindsey was no longer twenty-eight. This made her feel more alien and distant from me.

  The tattoo’s provenance was no mystery: Emma, at least for Lindsey, was our lost daughter. Emma wasn’t a name I would have chosen. We didn’t even know the gender of the baby.

  It was better to make light conversation as she lay against me, both of us staring at the ceiling.

  “How was the Apple Store?”

  “I got a new laptop,” she said. “And other stuff.”

  I had never seen Lindsey travel without a computer. “What happened to yours?”

  She blew a smoke ring, then a second.

  “They confiscated it after they took away my security clearance and fired me.”

  23

  Lindsey dropped me at the office the next morning. Even though it was ten, I had beaten Peralta there again. I was so sore from the various explosions in my life that my first few steps were like an old man’s. I wasn’t complaining about the ones that involved Lindsey but I was out of practice. The night before, I went to bed while Lindsey worked on her new computer. She had claimed a space on the landing above the living room and sat cross-legged with her back against the wall. When I was a child, the stairs and landing had seemed exceptionally high. Now, having grown to six-feet-two, I could touch the landing with my hand. Such was perspective and context.

  Sleep hadn’t come easily, so I was still awake when Lindsey had slipped in bed and curled up against me. It was so much like what Robin had done that first night that it kept me awake even longer. At first I thought my dreams had turned into a hallucination. But, no, it was Lindsey. Robin was taller and bustier. We fit together beautifully. Robin was dead.

  Lindsey woke me from two nightmares, but when she wanted to know what I was dreaming, I said I couldn’t remember. Hearing about other people’s dreams was as tedious as watching their vacation videos and Lindsey sure didn’t want to know about my dreams lately.

  Around five, we had sex again, this time without the anger, but she was as loud as her half-sister, something new about my wife.

  We used to play a game over cocktails. Lindsey had been endlessly entertained about my adventures before we got together, but she had drawn the line at knowing about my former girlfriends. It was better for her mental health not to know, or so she had said. As we had enjoyed martinis, I would tease her: “I’ll tell you anything, all you have to do is ask.”

  “No thanks,” she would say.

  When I had asked about her life, she would say, “I lived a boring life before you, Dave. There’s nothing to tell.” I had never believed that, even though I was older than she and had lived perhaps more adventures, but she didn’t talk easily about herself. I knew she had grown up in chaos, run away to join the Air Force where she had learned computers, and had claimed one boyfriend before me. Perhaps this was even the truth.

  Now I wondered how much I wanted to know about the past months of her life. I imagined her boyfriend in D.C. as wealthy, handsome, and definitely better endowed than me. Maybe he was a black guy. Maybe her lover was a woman. And now I knew this person had mined a deeper lode of sexual passion from her than I had ever been able to reach. For that to happen, a woman had to be willing to really let her lover in, really open herself. She had not done that for me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the past twenty-four hours had shown me different. Did I really want to know about those past months?

  After we lost the baby, Lindsey could barely endure being touched. That changed yesterday as we bounced the historic floorboards in the garage apartment. My wife, who had never even used the word “ass” before, was now talking dirty during sex.

  I supposed I should thank the son of a bitch.

  Now I was slipping my report on Grace Hunter into a file folder when the office phone rang and the readout was a San Diego area code.

  “This is Detective Sanchez with the San Diego Police,” came a pleasant voice on the other end. So Isabel Sanchez was going to talk to me after all.

  “How may I help you?”

  “How about opening your gate so I can come in.”

  This was not good. I wished Peralta were here but pressed the button to open the gate.

  The night detective was about five-four with a size two figure, dark eyes with long lashes, and long, black hair that looked as if it had caught a gust off the Pacific at that exact second. Her pregnancy was also beginning to show. The man with her was a few inches shorter than me but very buff
with yellow surfer-boy hair. San Diego had the best-looking cops in the country.

  “This is my partner, Detective Jones,” she said. I invited them to sit down, thinking: sure, Jones—he probably had multiple IDs and aliases, too.

  “Deputy Chief Kimbrough speaks highly of you,” she said.

  “That’s nice. He’s a great cop.”

  “That’s why we’re not filing a charge to ask our friends in Phoenix to arrest you on,” said the pleasant voice.

  So it was going to be like this.

  Several charges came to mind, but she wouldn’t know about those.

  I said quietly, “I was a victim of a crime in your city.”

  “I can understand how you might still feel badge-heavy, Mapstone,” said Jones, who, with his mean little eyes, looked exactly like a badge-heavy cop. “But you’re not a deputy sheriff anymore.”

  We went through this small talk, all designed to get a rise out of me, for about ten minutes. None of it worked. Jones gave me the cop stare. I returned it with the amiable look of a concerned civilian. I didn’t even feel the need to bring up their rushed and shoddy investigation into Grace’s death. From their attitude, it seemed clear that Kimbrough had already done that, based on my report that Peralta had emailed to him yesterday.

  Sanchez said, “Grace Hunter phoned your office the day she died.”

  I looked at her evenly, which probably made her more suspicious. But this was the way I always reacted to shocking news. It took me a moment to deny it, but then she produced a copy of the LUDs—local usage details—from Grace’s phone.

  She handed me the sheet. Sure enough, our 602 area code number stood out, call placed at four-ten p.m. on the day she died. The call lasted two minutes. I memorized Grace’s phone number to write down once they had left.

  “Care to explain?” Sanchez looked at me sweetly.

  I cared a great deal and had no explanation. I turned on my laptop and opened up the office calendar. It showed that Peralta had given a speech that afternoon at a law-enforcement conference. We hadn’t been in the office when the call came in. No one had left a message. Sanchez walked around, looked over my shoulder, and examined the listing.

  “How long did you know Grace Hunter?” Jones asked unsweetly.

  “I didn’t know her when she was alive. There was no message left here. You can see from the LUD that it was a quick call. It probably rang to the answering machine and the caller hung up.”

  Jones leaned forward in his chair. “Want to try again?”

  “No.”

  We sat for a good five minutes with only the sound of the air conditioner to keep us company. I struggled to maintain my agreeable, relaxed look, but the reality was that it sucked being on the other side of an interrogation. I wasn’t used to it. This would be a good time for Peralta to arrive.

  “It seems too coincidental,” Sanchez said, walking in a circle around the office, studying the large, framed maps of Arizona and Phoenix that I had bought at Wide World of Maps to decorate the place. “You go to San Diego and find her husband, Tim Lewis, murdered. His apartment blows up. Now we know that Grace Hunter called you before she died.”

  “If she did, we didn’t know that,” I said. So they were married. “And Tim was a client. He asked us to look into her suspicious death…”

  “We know all that.” Detective Jones dismissed me with a chop of his hand. “We found your receipt in the blast debris. Hand written on blank paper and signed by you. Real professional operation you have going here, Mapstone. No answering service. Hand-written records.”

  It was my turn to lean toward him. “We all have our shortcomings, Jones. Like when Tim filed a missing person’s report on Grace with your department and nobody made the connection that she was already dead and misclassified as a suicide.”

  Jones’ ears started turning red.

  “Wait for me in the car, Brent,” Sanchez said. He noisily pushed back the chair and slammed the door behind him.

  She leaned against Peralta’s desk and watched her partner leave, then turned her head toward me.

  “Are you the good cop?” I asked.

  “Dream on. So no call from Grace Hunter?”

  “We never talked to her.”

  “But she called you.”

  “Somebody called here with her phone. She was found dead with a new phone that didn’t have any called numbers on it. That was in your report.”

  Sanchez persisted. “Why would this somebody call here?”

  I told her the truth: I didn’t know. Maybe it was Tim, using her phone. Considering he didn’t know she was dead when I first met him, that seemed unlikely, but no need to tell her that.

  I didn’t say how this call to our office indicated that whoever killed Grace, set off the Claymore mine, and took the baby had made that call to frame us, or at least slow us down, knowing the police would track the LUDs. This had been planned well ahead of the moment Felix walked in that door.

  The only alternative was that Grace herself had actually tried to call us. But why? She didn’t even know us.

  “I can make your life miserable.” Sanchez sat in the chair in front of my desk, crossed her legs, and placed long fingers protectively across her belly. “Losing your license will only be the start of the hurt I can put on you.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But Kimbrough and Peralta go back a long way, and you’ve got a bungled investigation on your hands. Let me ask you a question, if you don’t mind: you pulled Grace’s LUDs. Do they match with the phone found in her purse that night?”

  Sanchez deflated by degrees. Even her hair deflated.

  “No. They don’t match. The phone she was carrying that night was scrubbed clean of recent calls. We traced it to a seventy-year-old woman who lives on Clairemont Mesa. It was stolen from her in a purse snatching at Fashion Valley mall.”

  “So whoever pushed her off that balcony took her real phone.”

  She nodded.

  “How is the hunt for the baby progressing?”

  She forced her expression to harden. “That’s confidential law-enforcement information and you’re only a private dick.”

  Robin’s words again. I stifled a smile.

  “Come on, Isabel. You don’t have to mimic your jerk colleague.”

  Two beats, three.

  Then: “We don’t have anything. Not a damned thing. If I had known she was married or had a kid…” She shook her head. “The vic didn’t have any of that information in her purse. Her parents didn’t tell us, either.”

  “I understand.” I thought about the wall with our names painted in blood, information I had held back for our protection, and asked about fingerprints.

  “The apartment was destroyed. It could take ATF weeks to sort through things and see if there are any usable prints.” She cleared her throat. “What do you make of Larry Zisman?”

  I laid out the backgrounding I had done. Among a certain group, people who had lived here a long time, Zisman was still beloved for his college-football days. He was a razzle-dazzle quarterback in the glory years of Sun Devil football. He left less of a mark in the NFL, playing for five teams before being forced to retire early.

  Zisman was a native Arizonan, attended the old East High School, and came back here to live after he retired from the NFL. Not only that, but to live year-round, not only keep a casita at one of the resorts for the winter months. He had started a non-profit to fund athletics for inner-city schools. He was in demand to give speeches at Kiwanis and Rotary, but removed enough from celebrity to be under the radar in a city with so many comings and goings.

  “Did it surprise you that he had a lover on the side?”

  I held out empty hands. “Who ever knows? But, yes, a little. From what I picked up, Larry Zip was so full of clean living that he might have been mistaken for a Mormon.”


  “Do you think he killed Grace Hunter?”

  “He’s physically capable of it. Former athlete. As a reserve officer, he would have gone through police academy training.”

  She made a few notes.

  I said, “It would be pretty stupid, though, to push her off his own condo balcony. He’d know that he would be the prime suspect. Better to strangle her and dump her body in the East County.”

  “Unless,” she said, “it was an act of passion and he did it in the moment.”

  “Right. But then you have the problem of the alibi, of him being on his boat.”

  I was only trying to be convivial enough to get Detective Sanchez out of the office. This couldn’t be a mutually beneficial relationship because Peralta and I were concealing critical information. We had dug this hole a little scoop at a time, for good reasons at the moment, and now we were in deep. Too deep.

  She thought about what I had said regarding Zisman, twirling a strand of her hair.

  “I think he could have done it.”

  “You interviewed him that night and cleared him,” I said.

  “I read your report,” she said. “After our ass-chewing from Kimbrough and before we got on the plane, I dug a little more. The man at the next boat is a good friend with Zisman, you know. He’s from Arizona, too. You people really need to find another summer escape. The man is a developer who used Zisman as a spokesman for some of his properties. He might be lying for him.”

  Zisman hadn’t figured in any of my theories about the case—not that I had formed many yet. I had been focused on getting out of that apartment before my body was turned into an aerosol state, and then on examining whether Grace had actually committed suicide.

  “What about Tim?”

  I cocked my head.

  She went on. “Maybe he followed her to Zisman’s condo and found out she was cheating on him. Oldest motive in the world.”

  To me, he barely had the guts to change a baby’s diaper, much less kill his wife or have the strength to do it in such a physical manner. Sure, people would surprise you, especially if money or sex were concerned. If so, he would have had to do a good job feigning surprise and sorrow when I told him Grace was dead. And been tough enough to slit his own throat and wire his apartment to explode.