“Sir? Are you all right?” Goode asked.
“I’m okay. Go on,” Tony said, his voice barely audible.
“So far, we don’t have any eyewitnesses. We’ve talked to her neighbors, but most say they didn’t know her because she’d only just moved in to the complex. We’re going to try her classmates next.”
“You’d better find her killer or I’ll do it myself,” Tony muttered.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Nothing,” Tony replied.
“We would have liked for you to come down tonight, but given how late it is, we hope to see you first thing in the morning. You’ll want to ask for Sergeant Stone. He’s my supervisor.”
Tony hung up and pushed the answering machine off the kitchen counter, sending it crashing to the tile floor. Helen stirred on the couch in the next room, but didn’t wake up. She snored like that only when she’d drunk herself into oblivion.
He still loved her, but since she’d stopped wanting to have sex, they’d lived together like roommates. She kept saying she didn’t feel sexy anymore, but he knew it was the alcohol. She was having an affair with the damn bottle and he couldn’t compete with that. When he tried to talk to her about it she blew up, say she didn’t have a problem. And when he gave her The Big Book from Alcoholics Anonymous she refused to read it.
“Maybe I’ll feel more like having sex later,” she told him. “Just give me some time. In the meantime, do whatever you need to do. Just don’t flaunt it in my face.”
He knew some men might enjoy the chance to explore other women, but he wasn’t a player, really. Nothing like his daughter. He’d tried to date a girl recently, and it had helped a little, but then she disappeared on him, which only exacerbated his loneliness. What he really wanted was for Helen to stop drinking so he could have his wife back. He missed her. And now Tania was gone as well.
Tony poured his ice water into the sink and went back to the fridge for some fresh ice so he could have some of the good scotch before it was all gone. The cubes clinked into the glass as he pressed it into the dispenser in the door. The thing kept getting clogged lately. He fought back the urge to pick up the phone and call Tania’s voice mail to listen to her voice. Maybe if he called, she would pick up and say there’d been some bizarre mix-up, a case of mistaken identity.
He walked into the living room and grabbed the neck of the scotch bottle, pouring until the glass was dangerously close to overflowing. He sucked in some of the liquid so as not to spill it. Then he picked up the glass, put the bottle under his arm and started for the back door to the pool. He needed some air.
“Tony?” came Helen’s croaking voice from the sofa.
“You awake?” he said.
“Yeah. C’mere,” she said, her words slurring together. In the dim light from the moon, he saw she was lying naked on the couch. She held a hand out to him and he took it.
“Our baby is gone,” she moaned.
Tony set down the bottle and glass on the table and lay with her on the couch. It was the first real physical or emotional contact they’d had in a long time. He’d missed her even more than he’d realized.
“I know, Helen. I heard all about it on the machine when I got home. Then the police called again. Why didn’t you call me at the club this afternoon?”
Helen rubbed her nose against his chest. “I tried, but you’d already gone. The police called and—” She disintegrated into tears.
“Shhhh,” Tony said.
“What are we going to do?” Helen whispered.
“I’m going down there tonight,” he said, starting to get up.
Helen pulled on his shirt. “No, it’s too late. Let’s get some sleep and go down in the morning.”
“I guess you’re right.”
Tony settled back into her arms. It felt strange at first; it had been so long. Helen pressed her wet face into his neck. He felt her tears creep down his skin, seeking refuge in the deep wrinkles the sun had carved into him during the long hours he spent outside. Although he was touched that she’d turned to him for comfort, it was a bittersweet embrace. He knew it would be a fleeting moment.
The banter of crickets echoed throughout the room. The sound was so loud he thought there must be one under the sofa. He remembered sitting with Tania by the pool the previous Saturday night. Serenaded by the chirping, they discussed her plans to open a designer salon after she graduated from the high-end beauty school he was paying for in La Jolla. He’d promised to loan her all the start-up money she needed as long as she promised to work hard. She would have been a rich woman someday.
He turned his head away from Helen so she wouldn’t feel his tears. Then, he decided, to hell with it, and let them roll where they may.
Chapter 6
Norman
Norman Klein paced around the courtyard as he watched the detectives questioning residents. It was getting close to the point where he would have to leave to meet his deadline and yet the sergeant still hadn’t given him a decent set of facts about what had happened to the dead girl. This was Norman’s first big story since getting promoted from editorial assistant to night cops reporter and he didn’t want to fail as soon as the editors gave him a chance to prove himself.
He’d hoped he would get to see what a dead body looked like, but the police wouldn’t let him near her. After chatting with Detective Goode, Norman spent a while trying to schmooze with the other cops, but he couldn’t get any of them to talk on the record either. He also tried knocking on some doors, hoping to interview a neighbor who knew the girl, but that, too, proved fruitless.
Goode seemed like a pretty good guy, a little intense, but cool. Norman hoped to run into him again. He didn’t even really look like a cop. More like a surfer. Muscular but not overly so, he had the kind of athletic body Norman always wanted but knew he’d never achieve. Not as long as he refused to join a gym and kept drinking beer after work.
Norman was sitting on a bench, going over his thin set of notes one more time when an officer came over, shoved a piece of paper at him, and walked away. It was a news release, if you could call it that, only two paragraphs long. Norman started to panic.
That’s it? That’s all there is?
He needed more on-the-record information. Some good juicy details. He jumped up and made a beeline for the sergeant, who was standing next to a potted palm and talking to two young officers who seemed to be listening politely. The sergeant stopped midsentence and glared at him.
“Everything we know is in the release, son,” he said before Norman could get a word out.
Norman didn’t believe him for a minute. He slapped the notebook against his thigh in frustration as he walked back to his car. It was 6:30 P.M. and his head was pounding. He had two hours until deadline. How was he going to make it as a reporter if he couldn’t get anybody to talk on the record? Maybe he hadn’t pushed hard enough. He wasn’t good at confrontation. It made him uncomfortable. Nobody told him that getting people to answer simple questions could be so damn hard.
Norman tried to prepare himself for the grief the city editor would give him if he came back with nothing. He sped through two yellow lights, hoping he’d made it in time, and if not, that no cops were watching. On his meager salary he couldn’t afford a ticket for going through a red light.
He thought he still had enough time to squeeze in a few phone calls to flesh out the news release and the few notes he’d taken. He had some decent quotes, but no attribution. He might just have to wing it. The other reporters said that if he turned in his story right on deadline Big Ed wouldn’t have much time to mess with it. He felt his stomach eating itself as he turned into the office parking lot.
Big Ed, nicknamed for his large girth and his deep, resonating voice, didn’t help matters by barking at him the minute he was within shouting distance. “Give me something quick for the web, then write me a longer version for the paper tomorrow. And it had better be good ‘cause it’s going A-1,” Big Ed yelled, loud enough for the who
le newsroom to hear.
A-1, Norman said to himself. That means even more pressure than I planned for. At this rate, I’ll lose my job faster than I got it.
He had to come up with a lead and quick. He didn’t have a whole lot of time to make phone calls, but he didn’t even have the victim’s name.
Norman called the county Medical Examiner’s Office and, after waiting on hold for five minutes, asked if the dead woman in PB had been identified. The investigator finally gave him the barest of information: Tania Marcus, twenty-four years old.
Norman managed to charm the woman into also giving him the names and phone number of Tania’s parents, who lived in Beverly Hills. He called and talked to Helen Marcus, who sounded pretty drunk and quite upset, but she gave him a couple of quotes he was able to use. By the sounds of it, she probably wouldn’t even remember talking to him.
Apparently tired of waiting for him, Big Ed sent him an email an hour before the deadline for tomorrow’s paper: “Nevermind the web story, Klein,” he wrote. “I just dashed something off the wires and TV news for now. Just focus on the story for tomorrow.”
That offered him some small relief, but not enough to free his mind. He laid his fingers on the keyboard and stared at the computer screen. His brain was frozen. He typed in his byline, hoping it would loosen him up, but he couldn’t come up with a good lead. He tried a few phrases that sounded good, then he decided they weren’t, so he deleted them and tried again. All he could come up with were sentences that were not only too long, but loaded with cliches.
With only half an hour left, he stopped trying to sound like he knew more than he did and wrote it straight. He put in every detail and quote he had in his notebook, using “sources close to the investigation,” like he’d seen in the stories out of Washington, DC, and hoped it would fly.
The red toenails were so visual he had to mention them too. Despite Goode’s warning to leave him out of it, Norman also credited the detective with finding the body. In the end, he couldn’t believe that Goode would really mind.
Norman busted deadline by ten minutes, trying to ignore the string of email messages that made his heart pound: “Quickly, Klein, quickly.” It was one of the most stressful nights of his life.
Afterward, Norman leaned back in his chair and tried to relax, hoping that Big Ed wouldn’t have a bunch of questions he couldn’t answer. Except for the deadline pressure that had almost melted his brain like candle wax, the whole day had been cool. Very cool. His career officially launched, he felt like he was on his way to fame and glory.
With three and half more hours till the end of his shift at midnight, Norman got a message from Big Ed to keep calling the cops so he could update the web story if necessary. But now that he’d gotten the big scoop under his belt, he felt entitled to leaf through his Rolling Stone magazine. If Big Ed asked what he was doing, he’d say he was brainstorming for a follow-up.
Norman was thirsting for a beer, or something harder, to take the edge off all this stress. He and a few of the editorial assistants and copy editors often headed over to the Tavern after deadline to make last call and watch Lulu’s butt wiggle as she toted cold brews around the bar. He loved that place. It was close to the airport, not far from the downtown jail, only a few blocks from a law school and a couple miles from all the high-rise office and condo buildings. Most nights baggage handlers played pool with off-duty sheriff’s deputies, biker dudes with law students, and secretaries with car rental clerks. There were always a couple of attorneys sitting at the bar, their heads down and ties loosened, finally able to decompress because no one they knew hung out there. And as a nice bonus, baskets of cheese doodles, popcorn and pretzels could be found on every table.
Brooke, the county government reporter, had stopped by the night before with one of her buddies. She greeted him, but spent most of the night talking to one of those guys with the loose ties. Norman hoped to get up the guts to ask her out one day, even though she was a good five years older than him. She could teach him a few things; he was sure of that. Maybe he would take her to that funky club where women with large breasts danced the hula in grass skirts while the patrons ate sweet-and-sour chicken and sticky rice. Just for something different. Other guys talked about Brooke, but no one ever asked her out. Bunch of wusses.
The phone at the city desk kept ringing, but no one was answering it. Norman figured Big Ed had gone to the head, so he walked over to his phone and picked it up.
“Do you know how to get to that new water park?” a tinny woman’s voice said to him over a speakerphone. “My niece and nephew are coming to visit and I want to take them there.”
“What new water park?” Norman replied, trying to be pleasant.
“You know, that new water park, the one they just built.”
Norman wondered why people thought they could call the newsroom to ask any obscure question that occurred to them. “What’s it called?”
“You know, the one near that big freeway.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know what park you’re talking about.”
“So, you’re telling me that no one there knows about this water park? What kind of newspaper are you?” she said, waiting for an answer.
“Have you checked the yellow pages?” he asked.
The woman slammed the phone in his ear.
Norman returned to his desk and reflected on the events of the day. He figured it was a combination of luck, talent and sloth that got him The Big Story. He’d come to work an hour early to clean up his desk and read through the newspapers that had stacked up. As luck would have it, Sully, the regular daytime cops reporter, had to have emergency surgery and Charlie, the back-up daytime cops reporter, was out sick. Then Big Ed came over and said, “This one’s yours, kid. Don’t screw it up.”
Norman was rousted out of his nostalgic reverie by the hovering presence of Big Ed, who had a slightly crazed look in his eyes. Not a good sign.
“Hey, kid. We don’t use anonymous sources at this newspaper unless we absolutely have to. I had to cut most of that shit out, but if I’d cut it all out, there would have been nothing left to run. Next time get this stuff on the record. We’re not part of the White House press corps here. We’re a local newspaper. We need people’s names with their quotes.”
Norman braced himself for the words “You’re fired,” but they didn’t come.
“Anyway,” Big Ed said, “I just heard something on the scanner about a woman decapitated downtown at Fifth and Broadway. Might be related to that PB murder. Maybe it’s the work of a serial killer. Who knows? Drive down there and check it out. If the copy desk has any questions on your PB murder story, we’ll call you.”
Big Ed had some serious coffee breath with an undercurrent of something even nastier. Smelled like one of those hot dogs with the little pouches of raw onions from the cafeteria vending machines upstairs.
“You don’t get off till midnight so you have some time to get down there and call in what you can scrounge up… Don’t look at me like that. You’re only as good as your last story. And that one wasn’t very good.”
Norman had never called in a story before. He needed a computer to formulate his thoughts because they weren’t exactly linear. Two big stories about dead people in one night was asking a lot of a new reporter, but he knew he had to get back out there and do a better job. He didn’t want to be demoted to making copies and sorting mail again, so he gathered up his notebook, pens, and the jumbo cup of soda from the cafeteria, and waited for Big Ed to offer some kind of guidance.
Instead, Big Ed reached for the magazine on Norman’s terminal. “So, uh, Klein,” he said, pausing as he flipped through the pages. “What are you waiting for, a call from the Pulitzer committee?”
Norman turned and walked as briskly as he could without spilling his drink. He was only a few feet from the door to the stairwell when Big Ed shouted, “And don’t stop for food on the way.” He was one to talk. Norman tried to ignore the barb and decided to t
ake it slow this time. Panicking wasn’t going to help anything.
Norman could hardly see out of the windshield in his car. He turned on the wipers, which carved two half arcs out of a layer of grime. That was better. He really needed to stop procrastinating and get the car washed, especially if he wanted a woman like Brooke to get into it. He hoped she wasn’t like the last girl he dated, a clerk named Kathleen who said she was allergic to just about everything and sneezed all the way to the movie theater. Sheba, his German shepherd, was a shedder. He let Kathleen pick Sheba’s hairs off his blue blazer because he thought it might get him somewhere later, but he was wrong. She refused to go out with him again. He didn’t care, though. It was sloth that got him The Big Story.
As Norman drove toward the exit to the employee parking lot, he almost hit the executive editor, who was walking down the middle of the aisle. Norman wondered what he was doing in the parking lot for peons, because managers got their own coveted spaces under the building. Norman waved politely at the balding Mr. Thompson, who tried to shield his eyes from the headlights.
Oh well. I’m just trying to do my job, Mr. Thompson, which is more than I can say for you, with your hand up your secretary’s skirt the other night. It was a pretty disgusting little scene.
Traffic was bad in the Gaslamp downtown and his windshield was still dirty on the inside. While he was waiting at a red light, he tried to clean it with a napkin, but that only made it worse. He didn’t realize until too late that he’d wiped his cheeseburger hands on it after lunch. He could barely see in front of him through the glare of the streetlights on Broadway. Balancing the cup of soda between his legs, he spat on a clean napkin like his mother used to do, and tried to wipe the window again.
Up ahead, he saw the satellite dealie-bob on top of Channel 10’s white van and knew he was in the right place. Rhona Chen was sure to be there, too. She was hot.
Naked Addiction Page 6
