by Alan Russell
“What did ballistics say?”
“Ballistics said nothing,” said Bud. “The bullets were dug out of the dogs, but because there was no gun at the crime scene, they never went to San Bernardino’s Firearms and Toolmark Identification Unit. Instead, those bullets have been in storage in the Property Division Unit.”
“Whisper sweet nothings in my ear and tell me tests are now being run.”
“How about I forgo the sweet nothings and just tell you the bullets have been moved out of Property and are now in the possession of Firearms and Toolmark ID. I was promised that they’ll soon be conducting the tests.”
“What’s ‘soon’?”
“Three or four weeks.”
“I think all evidence techs get trained to say that their work will take three or four weeks.”
“You sound like a suspicious cop.”
“You can only be told ‘the check is in the mail’ so many times before getting a mite suspicious.”
“When I used to work traffic,” he said, “We had this sign posted in our locker room that said, Drinking? Why, no, Officer.”
“You hear about the traffic court judge who summed up his career by saying that in most instances he had to make his rulings between two parties, each of whom swore they were driving the speed limit and on their side of the road when the accident occurred?”
“It’s hard to tell if people know they’re lying,” said Bud, “or if they’ve successfully lied to themselves. When my first two wives served me with divorce papers, both of them said the same thing: ‘We can still be friends.’”
“‘I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn’t a nightmare.’”
“I like that.”
“Credit Charles Bukowski,” I said, “LA’s unofficial poet laureate.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was a character. Mickey Rourke played him in the movie Barfly.”
“Never heard of it.”
I probably wouldn’t have heard of him, I thought, if not for my playing with fire. While I was recovering from my burns, a cop friend gave me a volume of poetry by Bukowski titled What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire. I’m pretty sure the cop only gave me the book because of its title. There is no profession that appreciates gallows humor more than law enforcement officers.
“Someone once asked Bukowski if he hated people, and he said, ‘I don’t hate them . . . I just feel better when they’re not around.’”
That got a little laugh out of Bud. “There’s a reason we wanted to work with dogs, Gideon,” he said. “There’s a reason.”
I remained in the parking lot. There was information to process, and Bukowski to think about. He’d once offered up words that I imagined were his own litmus test, saying, “If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul to lose.” I believed, and hoped, some of my soul was still intact. It was something I was trying to cling to.
The Peter Gunn theme started playing on my phone. In an old-school moment, I’d returned to that ringtone. The display told me Vincente Calderon was calling. I knew not to hope that he’d be getting back to me with information so quickly.
But if he is, God, I thought, I am going to take this as a sign I should no longer be as cynical about my fellow man.
“If you’re getting back to me on the gun video this quickly,” I said, “I just made a promise to God that I’d be a better person.”
“I should probably hang up right now, then,” said Vincente, “so that you don’t break your promise to God.”
“You’ll invoke divine retribution if you do. What do you have?”
“Unofficially,” Vincente said, “and given the disclaimer that my analysis lasted less than a minute, per your begging email, I’m pretty sure the weapon is a Heckler and Koch USP Tactical forty-five caliber. The sound suppressor attached to it is definitely a Brugger and Thomet Impuls-IIA.”
“Was the gun modified for the silencer?”
“Hardly,” said Vincente. “The barrel is designed for the suppressor to thread right into it.”
“That kind of barrel is illegal, right?”
“Yes and no,” he said. “In California you can have a threaded pistol barrel, but it can’t have a normal magazine release, because then it would be considered an automatic weapon. If you have a fixed-magazine gun of ten rounds or fewer, it can have a threaded barrel. However, it’s easy to switch out an unthreaded barrel with one that’s threaded. And you don’t have to drive far to get either a threaded barrel or a suppressor. They’re sold in Nevada and Arizona.”
His words made me feel that I was missing some obvious connections, and that only increased my frustration that I couldn’t get those thoughts to surface into my conscious mind. Still, there was something there, even if I couldn’t put my finger on it. For now, I would have to take comfort in that.
“I owe you big time, Vincente,” I said.
“Don’t expect to hear from me officially for another five weeks,” he said.
“Five weeks? I thought you said three or four.”
“That was before this call to you. I can’t have you thinking you can get what you want, when you want it. The extra week is your penalty.”
It was more than fair, so I didn’t complain. Instead, I asked, “You didn’t happen to isolate a frame with the suspect’s picture, did you?”
For the second time that day, Vincente hung up on me.
The feeling of having this logjam in my head continued to plague me. I had the sensation of all these thoughts wanting to come out, but being obstructed in such a way that nothing was passing through.
My mind kept replaying my interactions at Best Scrap. For some reason, though, this time I wasn’t thinking about Tito but Fausto. Maybe it was his eye patch that caused me to fixate on him. In our culture, the eye patch was once thought to have sinister connotations. What’s a pirate without an eye patch? But popular culture has somehow made the eye patch heroic, as seen in such movie characters as Nick Fury, Rooster Cogburn, and Mad-Eye Moody.
Fausto and I had said very little to one another. Now that I thought about that, I realized that Tito had intervened, explaining that Fausto spoke little English. Because of that, I had curtailed the questions I might have asked. In fact, Tito had cut me off just as I was about to ask Fausto something. But what had it been? I thought back to our conversation. We had been talking about guns. I had never gotten around to asking Fausto if he owned a licensed firearm. That would have been my next logical question, and Tito had to have known that. I wondered if there was any reason for his hijacking the conversation. After all, those with green cards could legally buy a gun in California.
I pulled up my notes from my visits to Best Scrap and looked at what I had entered on Fausto Alvarez. It was a long shot, but I decided to do a firearms inquiry through the National Crime Information Center. I entered Fausto’s name and ran a search on any firearms registered to him. Moments later I got a bingo. Six years before, Fausto had purchased a Heckler & Koch USP Tactical .45.
The same kind of gun had been waved around by an intruder at Angie’s Rescues. Although it’s a commonly sold gun, I didn’t think it was a coincidence that Fausto Alvarez owned an HK Tactical. Still, I didn’t think it was Fausto on the tape I’d seen. The hoodie had prevented facial identification, but based on his stature it seemed unlikely he’d been the intruder. Fausto couldn’t be any taller than five foot four. On the CCTV footage the trespasser looked taller and thinner than Fausto. There was also the matter of Fausto’s eye patch. Even the hoodie wouldn’t have been able to hide that.
The obvious suspect was Humberto “Tito” Rivera. Based on his height and weight, he could easily be the shrouded figure in the video. But why would he break into Angie’s Rescues with a silenced gun?
There didn’t seem to be a logical answer. I thought about the two cages where the intruder had stopped to shine his light. Neither Heather nor I could figure out what had
interested him, but now I thought I knew. One dog had been a big boxer, and the other had been part pit bull. That suggested the intruder had been looking for a pit bull.
Had he been targeting Emily? And if so, why?
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
Emily raised her head, thinking I was talking to her. I reached out a reassuring hand and started scratching under her cone.
“Why would Tito be looking for you?” I asked. My tone was friendly and high pitched.
“It’s not as if you could testify against him,” I said, continuing to work my fingers under the lampshade she was wearing. Emily responded almost joyously, making sure I kept scratching under the cone.
“I can’t imagine your survival would matter to him one way or another. You escaped death. Is it a matter of some sick pride that he’d want to kill you for having done that? He’s definitely twisted, but there’s no profit in trying to kill you a second time, and that’s what he’s all about.”
Emily was a sympathetic listener. I could speculate on grisly matters for hours at a time and she would happily commiserate as long I scratched away.
“I’m tempted to pay another call to Best Scrap,” I said, “but the potential risk might not be worth the reward. Right now Tito doesn’t know about the videotape, or that I’m aware Fausto owns an HK Tactical. He also doesn’t know about the remains of the three dogs shot near the Nevada border. It’s possible we’ll get lucky with those ballistics. Maybe they’ll match up with Fausto’s gun. If that happens, then I’ll regret spooking Tito. What I don’t want is for that gun to suddenly go missing.”
I wondered if Emily would still be alive if I hadn’t listened to my gut and adopted her.
“I want you to be a happily-ever-after story,” I told her. “You have the makings of a classic fairy tale. The good girl prevails over the villain. Is that too much to ask?”
Emily didn’t think so, but Sirius decided he should be consulted. He intercepted my hand with his muzzle, making sure he got his fair share of affection while we deliberated.
“Did I neglect to mention the hero of this story?” I asked. “Mea culpa, mea culpa. It’s time to talk about Sirius the Noble. You see, a wise queen named him after a star, and not just any star, but the brightest star in the sky. And when she bestowed that name, a little bit of that stardust entered his being and made him special. It is Sirius who has to guide his plodding and pedestrian partner. In fact, Sirius telepathically communicated what needed to be done to the rather slow detective, and because of that, Emily was adopted.”
It was a plot twist that Sirius approved of, especially as it came with scratching. Emily also became enamored with the story when a second hand was brought into play and took to scratching her as well.
“And it really was happily ever after for Sirius and Emily,” I said, “especially after their servant Gideon was recast in his bodily form so that he had six arms like an octopus, which was all the better with which to scratch them.”
The dogs thought it was a great story.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Never Been to Spain
I left another message with Brad Steinberg, although I wasn’t expecting a call back. He hadn’t responded to my previous messages, making me believe that he was now officially ducking me. That meant I was now officially getting annoyed. If you want to get on a cop’s bad side, attempt a disappearing act.
My next call was to another fledgling director, Jason Cunningham. I didn’t want Jason to think I’d forgotten him. I wasn’t surprised when my call went directly to his voice mail. My message was simple: I provided my name and my telephone number and said, “Call me.”
Since no one was willing to talk to me, I decided to call Lisbet. At least she took my call. “I’m glad you’re not avoiding me,” I said.
“That happen often?”
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
“In that case,” she said, “to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
I appreciated her emphasis and decided to offer tit for tat. “I’m just confirming the pleasure of your company tonight, and wondering when I might expect you.”
“I still have a lot of work to do,” she said. “Is seven too late?”
“That’s perfect,” I said.
“Do you need me to bring anything?”
“Just you,” I said.
“Is that all?”
“That’s more than I ever could have hoped for.”
As much as recent events had made me glad at the timing of Emily’s adoption, I still felt bad that Lisbet hadn’t been more involved in the decision. The two of us spend most nights together. Common sense, not to mention courtesy, suggested that I should have consulted with her before bringing another dog into our lives.
Even though she hadn’t voiced any explicit disapproval, I wanted Lisbet to know I didn’t take her for granted. To try and show that, I decided to serve her favorite meal in the world. Although I’m a pretty fair cook, I know better than to try and make certain meals on my own, especially when such an endeavor would require utensils, ingredients, and expertise I don’t have.
In the words of Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Mine are many and sundry.
A man’s also got to be able to gauge LA traffic. That’s what prompted my decision to drive to Lisbet’s and my favorite Spanish restaurant in West Hollywood before doing anything else.
When I called in my to-go order for paella marinara, I was warned by the order taker that the food wouldn’t be ready for forty minutes.
“Perfect,” I said, knowing it would take me about that long to drive to the restaurant.
“Sir?” she said, surprised by how amenable I was to the wait.
“Forty minutes is fine,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”
Some of Lisbet’s favorite dishes, I think, have to do with her unrequited wanderlust. In lieu of traveling, she loves to watch travel shows, especially those that highlight a country’s cuisine. Neither one of us has traveled outside North America, so when we dine on certain dishes we let ourselves be magically transported to that country. For Lisbet, paella is Spain, as are sangria, vibrant colors, landmark basilicas, Salvador Dali, flamenco, and Antoni Gaudí.
“Never been to Spain,” I mused to the dogs, and without thinking about it, started humming the Three Dog Night song of the same name.
“I just figured out our playlist for our drive,” I told them.
We started with “Never Been to Spain,” went to “Easy to Be Hard,” segued to the loneliness of “One,” picked up the pace with “Eli’s Coming” and “Mama Told Me (Not to Come),” and ended up in the mythical kingdom of “Shambala.”
I saved one particular song for the homestretch to the restaurant: “This one is for Lisbet,” I said, and called out for “An Old Fashioned Love Song.”
“Dogs,” I said, getting used to saying the plural, “this should be your favorite musical group. The band was named for how to deal with the cold. On a cold night you need one dog to snuggle up with and stay warm; on a really cold night you need two dogs. And when it’s a freezing night, you need three dogs. Since we live in Southern California, and since it rarely freezes here, our household need only consist of two dogs. Do I hear a second on that motion?”
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw Sirius raise an ear.
“The motion has been seconded,” I said, “and passed with unanimous consent.”
I found a parking space closer to the restaurant than I dared hope. Even though it was a temperate day and I didn’t expect to be gone for long, I knew just cracking open the windows wasn’t enough. My latest gadget is a portable, battery-operated air conditioner, and before leaving the car I turned it on.
My order was all ready for me, and as it was being rung up, I took a deep breath and tried to inhale all the packaged offerings. I could smell the toasted rice and how it was just on the verge of being burned, as it should be, seasoned by the saffron and paprik
a. Notes from the sea combined with tomatoes, artichokes, and fava beans.
“Good?” asked the dark-haired woman taking care of my order.
“Muy bien,” I said.
As good as the Spain of my imagination.
I thought about ending my workday early. Brad Steinberg hadn’t returned my call, and I wasn’t hopeful that I’d find him sitting at his favorite Starbucks at 4:30. However, my stubbornness won out over the certainty of bad return traffic. The only good thing I could envision in regards to my homeward commute was that Lisbet wasn’t going to be over until seven, which would give me plenty of time to get ready for her.
I thought about playing some more Three Dog Night, but decided I’d had enough of a good thing. Still, their instrumental song “Fire Eater” made me think about a recent conversation I’d had with Seth. We’d been discussing how my life seemed to be divided into before the fire and after the fire. For short, Seth suggested we refer to it as BF or AF. Or, as he added, “From the time you became a fire-eater.”
“‘Fire-eater’?” I’d asked.
“I don’t mean fire-eater like a street performer,” he’d said, “but more as the opposite. Like the archangel of your name, you went up against the dragon and you vanquished it. You took on the fire and absorbed it; that makes you a fire-eater. In some ways, it’s like being a sin-eater.”
I had never heard of a sin-eater either. Seth told me about the tradition of the sin-eater eating food and supposedly absorbing the sins of those recently deceased. There were traditions very similar to this, he told me, in some of the South American tribes he had worked with.
“Not that we need to go very far afield to see it in our own culture,” Seth had said. “Think about Jesus. Is he not purported to be the ultimate sin-eater?”
