by David Putnam
Behind her, a voice broke in. “Uh, excuse me.”
I looked over Nicky’s shoulder as Nicky turned around. Olivia came up on the walkway, approaching the apartment from the street. She looked distressed.
Out on the street, a car had come up and stopped right out front. I’d missed it. Street survival goes out the window when you kiss a beautiful woman. I bet a lot of cavemen got eaten by dinosaurs from the same phenomenon. In the car, Dad bumped the horn twice and drove off.
What the hell could Dad be thinking with me kissing a woman on the front walkway when I’d told him I had to work? And with Olivia in such a mess? I’d explain it to him in the morning. I was doing a lot of that lately.
Nicky walked away from me, stopped, and took Olivia’s hand. “If you ever want to talk?”
Olivia looked at her like she didn’t understand. Nicky kept going toward the street. With each step the emptiness inside me grew larger.
Olivia came toward me, her arms out. I took her in a hug. I couldn’t watch Nicky leave and pay close attention to my daughter. I’d hurt Nicky and wanted more time to explain it to her. With a little more time, I could make her understand.
“What’s the matter, kiddo?”
She said nothing and just held on as if I were a life preserver. I’d easily pay a million bucks to be her life preserver, full-time. What a feeling to be needed in such a way. I held on tight, shifted her around, and unlocked the door. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke.
I turned the light on inside and closed and locked the door. She broke away and faced me. “Popi, I … Popi …”
“What is it?”
“I need your help.”
She had her mother’s green eyes and my skin, only not as dark, more of a light mocha. In another few years she’d move from beautiful to absolutely gorgeous. Then what would I do about all the boys? With her brains and good looks, she could go anywhere and do anything.
“What is it, kid? What can I do?”
“I know you’re going to think I’m crazy for asking you of all people, but I know how good you are at your job.”
“What’s the matter? What’s happened?”
“If you do this for me, I’ll never ask anything of you ever again.”
“Tell me.”
“Derek’s gone. I can’t find him anyplace. Can you find Derek for me, please, Popi?”
Her words hit the same as if someone kicked me in the stomach. I should’ve known, should’ve seen it coming. I could only nod. I moved to the kitchen to get some milk to cool my soured stomach. To give me some time to recover, to think of what I’d say. Which truth I would use. An omission was the same as a lie. I’d always told her the truth and insisted that she do the same. To tell her the truth about what I’d done with Derek would wreck our already tenuous relationship. Wreck it for good. I’d made a huge mistake with no way out.
“Popi?”
I took a glass down from the cupboard and went to the refrigerator for the carton of milk. I poured half a glass. I moved over to the table and sat down still at a total loss as to what to do. What to tell her.
Stall.
“Tell me what’s happened.” I took a drink.
She sat in the chair next to mine and took my hand in hers. “He was supposed to meet me after school today. He never showed up. I called his house and no one answered. And when his auntie finally did answer, she said she hasn’t seen him. I’m scared, Popi. He’s never done anything like this.”
I hated the little bastard even more for putting me in such a bind with my daughter, for putting that kind of hurt in her expression.
I looked into her eyes, now filled with tears.
“Popi, please?”
“He’s a seventeen-year-old kid. He’s just out on his own somewhere probably trying to … you know, find himself. If he doesn’t turn up on his own in the next couple days, I’ll go find him.”
“Really? You will? You promise?”
I nodded.
“Why can’t you go find him right now? Please?”
“You have to trust me.” Those words came hard. “He’ll turn up all on his own, I promise.” If she found out, if Derek came back and told her what I’d done, how could she ever trust me again?
She got up and sat in my lap. She put her arm around my neck and hugged me. Her tears mixed with mine, warmed and wet my cheek.
Her outward display of love was something I’d recently missed and yearned for. I wanted to revel in it. Instead I lowered my head in shame like the dirty dog that I had become.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
HOURS LATER AN annoying car horn drew me to the front door with sleep heavy in my eyes. I checked the clock on the wall. Two in the morning. I had tossed and turned and finally fell asleep around midnight. I peeked out the edge of the curtains without disturbing them.
Wicks sat in his black Dodge in the middle of the street. After our confrontation over my violating the unwritten rule, he would’ve sought out the closest bar. He’d have tried to find the answer at the bottom of a whiskey bottle as to why I’d embarrassed him by stepping out with Lau’s wife. He’d be piss-drunk and surly by now, a physical and mental state I did not want to confront.
He laid on the horn again. He wanted me to come outside so he could berate me.
Olivia came from her room rubbing her eyes. “What’s with the noise?” She suddenly came awake. “Is it Derek? Is that Derek out there?”
I stopped her when she rushed toward the front window. “No, baby, go on back to bed. It’s just my boss, Lieutenant Wicks. Go on back to bed. I’ll go out and talk to him.”
“You sure it’s not Derek?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Go on now.” I waited until she’d gone back into her room and closed the door. I unlocked the front door, froze, relocked it, and went for my gun. I’d shucked on a pair of pants and now stuck the gun in my back waistband. Over the years I’d come to subscribe to the main precept in the Robby Wicks School of Violence: You never needed a handgun until you really needed a handgun.
The car horn again tatted out an ugly beat. The black Dodge, with its tinted windows, took on the persona of a hungry beast waiting for a chunk of meat to be tossed to it.
Outside, the heat had come down a little and it was probably close to eighty without a breath of wind. I padded out to the sidewalk in bare feet. Cars packed the street so Wicks had double-parked. The tint on the windows wouldn’t allow me to see inside. I got closer and held my ground at fifteen feet away. I held up my hands and shrugged. I wasn’t going give in and open the passenger door or come around to the driver’s-side window. If he wanted to talk, he could get out and come to me, like a normal human—like a friend.
He honked again. What a horse’s ass.
I didn’t move.
Finally, he leaned over in the seat and struggled to get the window down on the passenger side. “Get in the car, asshole.”
“Why?”
“We gotta roll. Get in the car, now.”
“I can’t leave Olivia by herself.”
“There’s been a killing. The shit’s hit the fan. Get your ass in the car now.”
I turned and ran yelling over my shoulder. “I’ll call my dad and be right out.”
He hit the horn again and held a long blaring bleat. A neighbor opened his door and yelled, “Knock it off or I’ll call the police.”
Wicks yelled back, “I am the police, asshole.”
Inside, I hurried to my room, got dressed and properly armed. I knocked on Olivia’s door. “I have to go out. I’m going to call your grandfather to come over.”
She spoke through the door. “You don’t have to do that. I’m fifteen, Bruno. Quit treating me like a child.”
It went against what I thought best, but I’d been using my dad too often lately. And deep down, I really didn’t want him to know I was going out so late at night. Shamed that I had returned to shirking family obligations. “Okay, but you stay here, and in the morning go right to school and
come right home. You understand?”
She opened her door dressed in the robe I’d bought her last Christmas. She smiled. “Thank you, Popi. You go on now, and make the street safe for white women and children.”
She knew that little statement grated on my nerves. Three years ago, she’d heard Wicks use it at one of his backyard barbecues. I pulled him aside at the time, and yet again, told him I didn’t want my daughter exposed to that kind of talk … that kind of world. He’d waved it off, half-drunk. He controlled his language the rest of the afternoon. I didn’t think Olivia had heard it until she used it a few months later when she was angry over me staying out three days straight while running hard on the violent crimes team, chasing a trigger-happy shooter. Overtired and run-down, I’d yelled at her. She’d cringed and started crying. I had never yelled at my daughter before. The unfortunate event was the one that precipitated my transfer to court services.
“You know I don’t like to hear that kind of talk. If you’re trying to show me you’re old enough to stay home on your own, you just earned a mark against it.”
She put her hand on mine. I don’t know how she did it, but she made her eyes bigger and more vulnerable. “I’m sorry, I was just being funny. I’m tired. I haven’t slept much because Derek’s gone. Really, go on, I’ll be all right.”
She had met Derek when I wasn’t there to oversee her life. This time I wasn’t out chasing the evil that walked the streets but instead working day shift in the courts. I had missed an important window of opportunity to stop the blossoming love at its root. Insidious evil came in many different sizes and packages. Even so, still, my fault.
She said she’d gone to the park to read a book, Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, a pretty heavy read for a fifteen-year-old. A basketball from the nearby court bounced over, rolled, and hit her foot where she sat on a picnic bench. The way she told it, she was enthralled in Ayn’s words and put her foot on the ball to keep it from moving. Someone came over, took the ball out from under her foot, and stood there until she looked up. She said, “And that was it. I knew we were meant to be together.”
As a father, I had the right to suspect that Derek Sams had rolled the ball over on purpose for no other reason than to talk to her.
I kissed her forehead. “Thank you. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
We still hadn’t had the in-depth talk about sex and boyfriends … or the damning truth about what I’d done with Derek. I knew I shouldn’t put it off. It was like taking a tablespoon of bad-tasting medicine that would burn all the way down and never stop burning afterward. I just didn’t want to do it and would subconsciously put it off as long as I could.
I got in the Dodge and closed the door. The reek of bourbon filled the air. Wicks gunned the car. The acceleration shoved me back in the seat.
“You’re gonna pile this thing up, then what are you going to do?”
He finally took his eyes from the road to look at me. In the strobe of the streetlights the skin of his face sagged more than I remembered. Age had not been kind. Why would it? He lived life as if every minute could be his last. Or at least that’s how it seemed.
“What are you saying, that you want to drive?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I don’t have a death wish. I still have a family to think about.”
He yanked hard on the wheel and steered the car almost to the curb. He shoved it in park and bailed out. He came around the front in the white blaze of the headlights. I slid over and took the wheel. He got in and slammed his door.
I put it in drive and pulled away. “Where to?”
He shooed me with his hand. “North, just head north up to the 101.” He put his hand into his suit coat pocket and took out a silver flask. He opened it, put it to his lips, and tilted it back.
I reached over and snatched it out of his hand.
“What the hell?” He grabbed at it.
I tossed it in the back seat. “If you’re watching my back, I need you sober. Well, as sober as possible, anyway.”
“Watch your back? Like you’re watching Lau’s back?”
“We going to do this now?”
“As good a time as any.” He poked my shoulder with a finger. “Lau’s a friend of mine. Just like you used to be, buddy boy.”
“I’m still your friend.”
He shook his head. “No. No, you’re not. Not after doing that. No.”
“What did I do?”
“No, I’m not going to … No.” He turned and looked out the windshield and said nothing. His head swayed a little in his drunken stupor.
We drove on for a couple more miles.
Finally, I said, “You going to tell me what’s going on? Where are we going?”
“Just drive, asshole, I’ll tell you where to turn. Take Alameda up to the 10 freeway to the 101.”
I did as he asked and just drove.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
OFFICIAL POLICE BARRICADES blocked the dark street. A slick-sleeve rookie redirected the idiot drivers who still pulled up expecting to get through. I double-parked alongside a black-and-white LAPD cruiser, and what looked like a plain maroon detective’s car. I got out and tried to keep up with Wicks. He quick-walked toward the upscale apartment complex, his gait steady and unimpaired by the alcohol. I didn’t know how he did it.
“You going to tell me what we’re doing here?”
He said nothing. Kept walking. He took out his flat badge wallet and flashed the crime scene security officer. He told the officer our names. The officer logged in everyone who entered the scene with the date and time. At the door to the apartment, we stopped and put on disposable booties and latex gloves. Inside, lights burned like a noonday sun. I had to squint when I stepped across the threshold. Too much brightness reflected off all the white carpet and chrome.
My eyes adjusted to the light. I brought my arm down. The place smelled of sour throw-up and warm metallic iron juxtaposed with a hint of sweet plumeria.
“Hey,” Wicks said. “Watch where you’re stepping with those size-sixteen Bozo shoes.” He put his hand on my chest to stop me from taking a step that would’ve tainted the crime scene. I froze and looked down at the mess on the carpet. For a second it looked like blood with bits of human tissue, stark against the white fur carpet. Then I realized the source of the foul odor. Some unfortunate soul had lost his dinner.
I scanned the room and stopped at the chrome-framed pictures on the wall. They depicted two women nicely dressed at various events with high-powered city and state government officials. I took a closer look. I knew her, Gloria Bleeker.
“Ah, shit,” I whispered. “This is all about Louis Borkow, isn’t it? That dirty son of a—”
Of course it was. Why else would we be there?
Wicks stopped advancing deeper into the room and looked back. “Yeah, it’s a real pisser, ain’t it? One from the other team got taken off the roster.” He moved on to the kitchen. “Come on, she’s in here.”
I didn’t know if he referred to his homophobia or because she was a defense attorney.
I didn’t need to see another body. I’d seen enough to last ten lifetimes. On lonely nights, even after two years in court services, they continued to parade across my dreams and with nonverbal communication that asked, “Why me, why did I have to die? Why are you still alive and I’m not?” I didn’t have that answer for them and never would.
Unlike Wicks, I considered Gloria a friend. I wanted to remember her the way I’d seen her last.
Wicks had brought me along for a reason, to see the heinous work of Louis Borkow. He wanted to keep me angry, keep the blood spoor in my nose, a coach preparing his player for the game with a visual pep talk. What an inconsiderate ass. I didn’t want to work with him anymore. He’d changed too much.
Or maybe I had.
My feet continued to move and follow him into the kitchen, where forensic techs shifted around to different positions to take photos and measurements.
I stole one q
uick glance at Gloria and looked away. In the past I would examine every part of the victim and try to imagine what they were like while a living, breathing human, what they were like before the violence and mayhem snuffed out their life. In this case I already knew.
Poor Gloria.
I didn’t want that anger Wicks tried to evoke. I got an eyefull anyway.
Borkow had used something heavy and blunt to cave in Gloria’s forehead—right in the center. The depression malformed her face, made her a mere caricature of the Gloria I had once known.
In that quick glance, my mind took a snapshot that would stay with me forever. Her eyelids were tented, revealing only half of her pupils and the whites of her eyes. Her mouth hung open and her purple-pink tongue lolled out. She’d been gagged at one point, and a napkin with a strip of duct tape hung from the side of her cheek. Borkow had wanted her to tell him something important that she’d refused him. He’d used pliers on her as a form of inducement. She sat in the chair half-naked, her breasts exposed and bloodied.
I looked away, shamed at my friend’s naked vulnerability. I tried to remember happier times, the lunches we’d had together at outside restaurants on warm summer days. Her smile, that spark in her eyes, the lilt in her voice, all of that gone now, stolen by a true waste of skin, someone who needed to be escorted off this earth in the most violent manner possible. As Wicks would put it, with a little blood and bone. I agreed with him at least on that point.
No one was going to beat me to it, not this time. Wicks would have to climb over me to get to Borkow first. Wicks had gotten out of me what he came for.
In a semi-daze, I backed out of the kitchen as Wicks’ pager went off. I could still see his back. He pointed to the phone. “You guys already dust this? Is it okay to use?” Someone told him to go ahead.
I moved into the living room and looked at the pictures on the wall, trying hard to replace the image of the Gloria I’d seen in the kitchen strapped to that chair with her waxy pale skin and depressed forehead that dipped in a V down between her eyes.
