Lost Dog (A Gideon and Sirius Novel Book 3)

by Alan Russell

  “I wish it wasn’t as needed as it is, especially in the black community. I knew when Isaiah was murdered that I had to do something or go crazy.”

  “Was his killer caught?”

  He nodded. “There were three of them in a car. Gangbangers who thought they were evening some score. In their defense they said it was a case of mistaken identity. They thought Isaiah was someone else, as if that should make any difference. Seeing them put away didn’t make me feel any better. It was just three more black lives that were lost.”

  Leticia came up with a tray. She handed Walker his glass of Hennessey and then gave me my Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. A basket of cornbread was dropped off between us.

  “Would you like a refill, sir?” she asked Sirius.

  “Better not,” I said. “He’s driving.”

  The two of us started in on the cornbread. I could feel eyes boring into me, and I tore off a piece and tossed it in the air. Sirius made the catch and swallowed it down. Mine disappeared almost as fast. It was delicious.

  “Where do you live, Gideon?”

  “Sherman Oaks,” I said.

  “Nice neighborhood for a cop.”

  “My wife was smart enough to have us buy what was supposed to be our starter home there.”

  Walker nodded. “We didn’t give you a chance to talk much about your work tonight. I hear you and your pooch are pretty much your own bosses.”

  “Don’t tell the COP that,” I said, referring to the Chief of Police. “It was his idea to form the Special Cases Unit. I think he did it partly because of need, and partly because he wanted Sirius and me on retainer for the occasional PR appearance. By the way, I’ll be counting tonight as one of those PR efforts.”

  “In that case we’ll split the bill.”

  I wasn’t sure whether Walker was kidding. His face was deadpan, his demeanor serious.

  “Three ways,” he added, with a head bob aimed at Sirius.

  I opened my mouth to object, which is when he showed his smile. “Taking the hook was bad enough,” he said, “without your also swallowing the line and sinker.”

  “Now you know why I don’t play cards.”

  “That shows uncommon good sense for a cop. The old rule of thumb is that if you sit down at a poker table and can’t identify the sucker in the first half hour, then you are the sucker.”

  We stopped talking when Leticia appeared with our entrees. “The chef had a ham hock he’d finished with,” she said. “I had him cut it up, thinking your dog might like that.”

  “Him?” I said. “What about me?”

  Our table quickly filled with the side orders, along with Walker’s catfish and my ribs. I started with the mac and cheese; it was love at first bite.

  “This ought to be against the law,” I said. “It’s that good.”

  “You should bring your girlfriend here.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. Lisbet might not let me order the mac and cheese. But I know she’d love the food.”

  “You know the food has to be good to get white people to come to a black part of L.A.”

  Walker made his observation with a smile, but it was clear he wasn’t joking.

  “I don’t have to tell you that cops eat at notorious holes-in-the-wall,” I said.

  He nodded, but qualified it. “Then again, cops aren’t your average people.”

  “True,” I agreed, “but you can’t blame people for not wanting to eat where they feel scared.”

  Walker nodded. “That’s not only a white thing. I live in the middle of Ladera Heights. Do you know it?”

  I shrugged and said, “Not really.”

  “The residents of Ladera Heights like to keep our three square miles a secret,” said Walker. “We’re afraid if white people find out about it, they’ll start moving in.”

  “I won’t tell any white people about it. I promise.”

  “The neighborhood’s nickname is ‘Black Beverly Hills.’ I always thought that sounded silly. Ladera Heights doesn’t have nearly the wealth, the mansions, or the pretense of Beverly Hills.”

  “I tried to call the Beverly Hills Police Department last week,” I said, “but then I found out they had an unlisted phone number.”

  Walker laughed. Hearing his deep, throaty amusement made it feel like I was being rewarded.

  It was an unhurried dinner, something that I needed to have more of in my life. Walker and I told old cop stories, and I got to hear about the goings-on at the 187 Club. He mentioned his imminent walk and elaborated on the “cactus to clouds” aspect.

  “Isaiah and I had talked about doing it,” Walker said. “When he was gone, that was one of my regrets. I wished I had just spent more time enjoying his company. To be honest, I don’t know if we ever would have done the walk had he lived. I’m no daredevil, and when I see people climbing mountains, running a marathon, or doing extreme sports, I wonder what the hell is motivating them. Let’s face it, they always look like they’re in agony, which they probably are.

  “If I had known what I do now about the walk, I probably would have told Isaiah ‘no way.’ I just remember him saying, ‘Dad, what do you think about the two of us doing the Cactus to Clouds walk?’ When you hear it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Isaiah didn’t tell me the details. He just said something about how we’d start in Palm Springs and end up near Idyllwild.

  “I didn’t know it meant climbing up more than eight Empire State Buildings. I didn’t know I’d be looking at having to walk more than ten miles. I didn’t know about all the people who’d died during the hike. And we’re not just talking about weekend warriors who keeled over from heatstroke and dehydration. There was one professional outdoor guide who bought the farm when he slipped down an ice chute.

  “Isaiah had the cactus part right and the cloud part right, but he didn’t tell me about what came between them. In order to beat the heat, you need to start before dawn. No water fountains along the way, so you better be hauling lots of liquids. In fact, you better start hydrating the day before the hike, like I’ll be doing all of tomorrow. And I’m not sure whether it’s harder to deal with the heat or the cold. When you start off in the heat of the valley, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll be fighting ice by the afternoon. You might even need crampons to keep your footing.”

  “All of that sounds pretty awful,” I said.

  “And it feels pretty awful. I’m no spring chicken. And I’m carrying at least twenty-five, hell, thirty-five more pounds than I should be.”

  “But you’ve still done it for the last three years?”

  “I’ve made an anniversary of it. At the 187 Club we like to stress the importance of setting aside time for special remembrances of the dead. Isaiah and I make that walk together every year on the anniversary of his death. It’s my way of spending time with my son and putting a positive spin on a terrible day. Crazy, right?”

  “Not so crazy,” I said. “I assume you take the tram back down?”

  “You’re damn right I do. I’m only half-crazy. The worst thing about that ride is that it only takes about ten minutes to go from Mountain Station to Base Station. It goes too fast.”

  “My wife and I took that tram years ago,” I said. “We swore the next time we did it, we’d dine at that restaurant they’ve got up at the top.”

  “Peaks Restaurant,” said Walker. “It’s supposed to be pretty good, but everyone goes there for the view more than the food. Every year Isaiah and I have a long drink there before I take the tram back down. You can’t imagine the view. You feel like you’re on top of the world. I suppose I remember that more than all the aches and pains that come with the hike.”

  “Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.”

  Walker wrinkled his brow. “Say what?”

  “My shaman next-door neighbor is fond of quoting that.”

  “One more time,” said Walker.

  “The shaman part or the quote?”

&n
bsp; “The quote.”

  “Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.” Then I remembered the name of the writer. Seth was fond of several of his sayings: “Austin O’Malley.”

  “I like that. Instead of remembering the real substance, we’re more likely to remember the pretty trappings.”

  “It certainly puts a perspective on what we choose to remember and what we don’t.”

  “And you say your neighbor is a shaman?”

  “He is.”

  “Only in L.A.,” said Walker.

  I qualified my head-nodding with an explanation: “I actually have a lot of respect for Seth. That’s his name. He doesn’t go by Soaring Cloud or Deep Waters or anything like that. Seth is one of those people who seem to know just about everything. When Jenny died, he helped guide me through some very difficult times. He did it because I’m a friend, but it’s also one of the things he does professionally.”

  “And he’s really an honest-to-goodness shaman?”

  “I don’t know if you need a license to practice being a shaman in California, but that’s his job.”

  “So he’s like a medicine man?”

  “I’ve heard him describe his work as ‘spirit healing.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “He offers healing tools to those who are sick in spirit. Seth is often a featured speaker in grief workshops.”

  “If that’s the case, why don’t you ask him if he’d like to be next month’s speaker?”

  “I’ll do that,” I promised.

  “I like to get a mix of speakers. Most of the club members are still actively grieving, and they need to hear from someone other than a detective from Robbery-Homicide.”

  I nodded. “There was a time when I wanted nothing more than working RHD, but working Special Cases meant I could keep Sirius as my partner.”

  “It took me a lot of years in the field before I finally got to Robbery-Homicide,” said Walker. “I’m not sure it was the best match for me. You know that Peter Principle thing about rising to the level of your incompetence? Now I’m not saying I was a bad detective. And I know no one outworked me. But some detectives seem to have this sixth sense. They intuit what’s happened. I was always more plodding. I would work the evidence like a dog chewing his bone. I’d work it every which way, but the problem is sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time to do that. You get assigned another case, and then another. When I look back at my years in Robbery-Homicide, it’s the unsolved cases that gnaw at me.”

  “All of us have cases we haven’t made.”

  “There’s a difference between haven’t made and should have made.”

  “You don’t sound very retired to me.”

  “There’s a ghost that’s been haunting me,” he said. “I’m working to put it to bed.”

  His affable expression hardened, as did his tone. The cold case was clearly important to him. Before I had a chance to ask him about it, Leticia approached our table, and his scowl turned to a smile.

  “I heard your sweet tooth calling,” she said, and we never did get back around to the ghost.

  CHAPTER 3

  A LONG WAY FROM HOME

  Despite Walker’s threat about splitting the check, he must have slipped Leticia his credit card when I wasn’t looking, thwarting any chance for me to pay.

  “Let’s not be strangers,” he said, and then he bent down and scratched Sirius’s ear and told him, “Give my best to Little Red Riding Hood.”

  Walker stayed behind to give his regards to several of the staff while Sirius and I made our way out to the car. Because Sirius hadn’t gotten enough in the way of handouts, I pulled out a dog protein bar from the food stock I keep for him. According to the ingredients on the label, his protein bar contained beef, bison, peas, flaxseed, carrots, broccoli, and blueberries.

  “Good, huh?” I asked.

  Sirius gave a few weak wags of his tail and began eating his bar, although it was clear he was a lot less interested in it than he had been in the pecan praline sweet potato pie Leticia had dropped off for dessert. I really couldn’t blame him.

  Our Sherman Oaks home is about a twenty-mile drive from the restaurant, but in its own way it could have been another world. I was going from a black and urban neighborhood to one that was white and suburban. As ethnically diverse as L.A. is by the numbers, neighborhoods still tend to divide along racial and ethnic lines. Within L.A.’s borders are Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Little Salvador, Little Osaka, and Little Armenia. The Fairfax District is sometimes called Little Israel. Much of Westwood has a large Persian population and is referred to as Tehrangeles.

  Before we began our drive home, I lined up the musical selections. Peter Gabriel and Biko would lead off, followed by Joan Baez’s dulcet tones singing about a terrible bombing in “Birmingham Sunday.” Bob Marley’s “War” seemed like a good choice, as did Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” My personal concert would conclude with the gospel singing of Odetta and “Motherless Child.” Her version was a favorite of mine, although I had three or four covers of it.

  The musical selections combined to give off the feeling of a long, thoughtful aperitif. Odetta started singing just as we entered the borders of Sherman Oaks. Even though I like to pretend that being abandoned as a baby doesn’t play on my psyche, because I was adopted there’s a part of me that feels like a motherless child. Of course when the song was written more than a century ago, it spoke to slave children being sold and taken away from their parents. Modern listeners take away their own notions of being a long way from home. Some of us measure it by the absence of a mother’s arms; others look at it as separation from a place; many think about a bygone time. The universal pull and pall is an absence and a yearning.

  “Such a long, long way from home,” I sang.

  Sirius nudged me. I think it was more a case of my sounding sad than my butchering a song, or at least that’s what I wanted to believe. My partner doesn’t like it when I sing the blues, even when I do a passable job.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Home is where the dog is.”

  After we parked in our driveway, I took Sirius for a long walk. Dogs have a nose for news, because they have 220 million olfactory receptors, compared to humans’ five million. With a good sniff, Sirius knew who and what had passed by that day.

  There are dogs trained to detect medical conditions, bedbugs, termites, explosives, and drugs. Rescue dogs find the living under piles of snow; cadaver dogs locate the dead.

  No wonder we humans put our nose to the grindstone. It’s not good for much else.

  “I’m still waiting for you to find me a truffle,” I said.

  Sirius wagged his tail and did a little more sniffing. No truffle was forthcoming.

  It was a pleasant night. The temperature was in the low sixties, and there wasn’t any wind. Sirius was transfixed by a scent he’d picked up. I didn’t hurry him along even though I was ready to hit the sack.

  If I was lucky, I would sleep without interruption. My fire dreams are more infrequent now, although they still occur more than I like. I hope one day they’ll disappear altogether, but that’s wishful thinking, which I know is no way to overcome my PTSD. I’ve known too many guys like me. We behave like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We lose an arm and insist, “It’s only a scratch.” We’re bleeding out and proclaim, “It’s just a flesh wound.”

  “It’s just a dream,” I tell Lisbet and Seth.

  Of course when I tell that to Sirius, he knows what a liar I am.

  CHAPTER 4

  A SHAGGY DOG STORY

  In police work you’re never between cases. There’s always overdue paperwork to catch up with, witnesses to interview, and depositions that need to be scheduled. All detectives have unsolved cases. There are crime scenes that need to be recanvassed and subpoenas that need to be served.

  With all that said, though, there are periods of feast and famine, times when there
aren’t enough hours in the day, and times when you can catch your breath and even smell the roses. I was in one of those not-so-pressing periods. While I had plenty of work to catch up on, at the moment it didn’t feel as if I was being squeezed by a vise. That was a good thing, because it was April 14, and like most red-blooded procrastinating Americans, I hadn’t turned in my taxes. Still, I was rather proud of myself; there have been years when I haven’t gotten around to doing my taxes until April 15.

  “You’d think I could write off all the Frisbees and balls you’ve chewed up,” I told Sirius, “not to mention your flea medication.”

  Maybe because I wasn’t overly preoccupied, I found myself thinking about the talk I’d given the night before to the 187 Club and my evening with Langston Walker. The night had been much less difficult than I’d expected. Walker had put me at ease, and for the most part the club members had been respectful, especially given their circumstances. Only those who’ve experienced the homicide of a loved one can understand its engulfing anguish. Often it’s a pain that keeps on giving.

  Later in the week I’d call up Walker and thank him for dinner. I knew that today he was hydrating and preparing for his hike, and that tomorrow he’d be on the trail before the sun was up. He’d travel from the cacti to the clouds, walking with the memory of his son Isaiah.

  “Death and taxes,” I told Sirius, “death and taxes.”

  We made it to the post office before it closed. As a reward, I went to bed at ten thirty. Sirius settled on the carpet right next to the bed. When I have my fire dreams, Sirius is always there to wake me up.

  “I suppose you didn’t brush your teeth or say your prayers,” I said.

  The pot was calling the kettle black, but that wasn’t something I mentioned.

  “How about I offer up a short poem to the universe?”

  I cleared my throat and quoted from Anna Hempstead Branch: “If there is no God for thee, then there is no God for me.”

  It was easy to remember Branch’s poem because of its brevity. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a poem for her dog Flush that goes on for about a hundred lines. That’s why I don’t remember any of it. Of course I’m not convinced Browning’s Sonnet 43 wasn’t written for Flush as well.