by Robert Ellis
“Someone came out this morning to fix that.”
McKensie let go of the key. “Someone came out to fix what?”
The man let out a faint smile. “The lock.”
“Was he wearing a uniform?” Matt asked.
“No, sir. Slacks and a tie, and he had a helper. Looks like the helper wasn’t much help.”
Matt didn’t need to ask the next question but did. “Do you remember what they looked like?”
“You bet I do. They looked like a cartoon, only they weren’t that funny. One was big and round with dark hair and a goatee. His helper was a short, skinny guy with gray hair. There was something wrong with his skin. His cheeks. They were working on the lock when I went out for breakfast. They didn’t seem very happy to see me, or maybe they were just in a hurry.”
Matt traded a hard look with McKensie, wondering if Orlando and Plank were still inside the apartment. Wondering if McKensie really was in on it. Wondering whether he had swallowed the bait and just walked into a trap. He gave McKensie another look but couldn’t get a read on him. Handing over the files, Matt fished a pair of vinyl gloves out of his pocket and started turning the key back and forth on his own. Nothing worked until he pulled the door closer and gave the handle a hard lift. When he felt the deadbolt finally release, he tossed the key over to McKensie and told the man standing in the harsh light to get back inside his apartment and lock the door. Then he drew his .45, ripped back the slide, and gritted his teeth.
CHAPTER 39
Matt eased the door open with his foot, his pistol up and ready. It was an open floor plan, the living room giving way to a kitchen and an elevated dining area. On the right he could see a powder room, the door open, the room clear. He noted the hallway, saw another off the dining area to his left, and guessed that they met somewhere behind the kitchen.
He closed the front door as quietly as he could. Then, with his eyes rocking back and forth between McKensie and both hallways, he took a moment to listen. The apartment was exceedingly still. Just the sound of light traffic on Riverside Drive bleeding through the windows.
He turned back to McKensie and couldn’t help noticing the lieutenant’s gun. It was a .38 revolver that looked particularly old and menacing. From the intense, even bruising expression on McKensie’s face, Matt guessed that both the man and the gun had killed—
He pushed the thought away. “What’s back there?” he whispered.
“A bedroom and a den,” the lieutenant said. “Two bathrooms, attached.”
Matt nodded, pointing McKensie toward the hallway entrance on the other side of the dining area. He watched him head off, then crossed the living room and started down the hallway on the right. He moved quickly, silently, until he reached the corner and saw McKensie entering the master bedroom. Matt hustled down to the den, peeking inside and finally entering the room. He checked behind the door, glanced at the corners, still pushing forward, still eyeing everything in big gulps. He slid open the closet door and found a small filing cabinet and some clothing. Nothing he saw seemed out of place. When he checked the bath, the room was clear.
He stepped back into the hall. McKensie was just exiting Frankie’s bedroom and turned his way.
“Nobody’s here except for the ghosts, Jones.”
Matt nodded but stepped into the bedroom for a look on his own. When he was satisfied that they were alone, when McKensie finally holstered his .38, he did the same.
Ghosts.
He had noticed them as well. That odd feeling of emptiness that overwhelms a space when someone dies and everyone knows that they’re never coming back. The hollowness was so pervasive that he could almost taste it.
But then he thought about his partner. He thought about Cabrera, and all the ghosts flew away.
He reached inside his pocket for his phone and charger. As he stepped into the kitchen, he spotted an outlet by the stove. Once he had power, he switched on the ringer and turned up the volume so that he could hear it from anywhere in the apartment. When the face lit up and he saw that he had two voice messages, he felt an instant wave of relief.
But the relief lasted no more than a few seconds. Then the dread was back. That churning in his gut.
Both messages had been left by Lieutenant Grace.
He paused a moment to check on McKensie. He could see him over by the window, talking to someone on his cell. It sounded like he was on the line with SID and that he wanted Frankie’s apartment to be treated as a crime scene.
Matt looked back at his phone, wondering if the two calls from Grace had anything to do with why Cabrera couldn’t be reached. He clicked Play and listened to the first message. Grace wanted to know where he was. He claimed to have good news, but the tone of his voice sounded way too friendly to be righteous. The second message mirrored the first, with Grace’s voice even more silky and smooth.
Where are you, Matt? You need to come in. Same with Denny. We need to talk. There’s a joint press conference between us and the Sheriff’s Department. It’s set for 5:00 p.m., downtown at police headquarters. It’s your case, and I expect you and your partner to be there. Both you guys need to come in.
Then what? Matt thought. A ride in the trunk of your car? If Grace knew that the three-piece bandit had been gunned down last night by a deputy sheriff, why didn’t he just say it? Why the lure?
Matt opened his recent call list, found Cabrera’s number, and hit Call. After three rings he could feel his chest tightening. After the next four, he was listening to Cabrera’s outgoing message and shaking his head. He left another short message and laid the phone down on the counter to charge. Then he took a closer look at Frankie’s apartment.
There were no visible signs that anyone had been here, and he wondered if Orlando and Plank had managed to get past what appeared to be a door that was out of alignment. He thought about the earthquake that rolled through LA this past summer. He knew that picking a dead bolt could be done in less than five minutes. But picking a lock with the dead bolt jammed into a doorframe would have taken time and patience. Even more, Orlando and Plank had been seen by Frankie’s neighbor. Their physical appearance stood out to the point where the neighbor even made fun of them. They looked like characters in a cartoon, he’d said. Both of them could be identified, and they were smart enough to know it.
Matt took a last look at the living room—the muted green paint with white trim, the art on the walls, the carpets laid over hardwood floors, the furnishings. The apartment didn’t match the building’s bland exterior. Frankie’s personality was everywhere.
He let a moment pass before checking on McKensie again. The lieutenant was still staring out the window with his back turned. Still talking to someone on the phone, and everything about it sounded legitimate.
Matt gave his vinyl gloves a tug, snapping them over his wrists as he walked down the hall into the den. The walls were the same color as the living room, only five shades darker and five times more soothing. The room had a certain feel about it. The writing table and laptop computer, a reading chair by the window, a couch and a coffee table, the extra-wide venetian blinds concealing a pool and spa one floor below, the built-in bookshelves. From the titles, it looked like Frankie was a history buff.
Lincoln and Kennedy, Kennedy and King—four assassinations, four murders, and a homicide detective with skill and talent on his own time. There must have been seventy-five books here.
Matt turned and noticed a poster framed behind glass and hanging beside the doorway. It was from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and it had been signed by both Polanski and Jack Nicholson, but also by the screenwriter, Robert Towne.
He glanced at the writing table, noted only two top drawers, then opened the closet and began searching through the filing cabinet. After a few minutes he realized that Frankie didn’t bring his work home with him. Every file Matt opened was personal: bank statements, tech manuals, insurance policies, but nothing about Faith Novakoff’s murder or any other murder he had investigated. And the drawers were
packed full. There wouldn’t have been room for any additional files.
He moved to the desk and opened the first drawer. Pens, a stapler, a couple of notepads. He opened the second. Bills, a checkbook, and a calculator—the same things he would have found in his own desk drawers.
Matt switched on the laptop. While he waited for it to boot, he stepped into the bathroom for a look around. Something had caught his eye when he cleared the room, but he hadn’t lingered on it. Now, as his eyes swept across the counter, he spotted it by the sink. It was a hair curler, lying beside a tube of lipstick and an electric toothbrush. Several moisturizers were on a small shelf beside the mirror. Inside the shower he found a body wash made for women, along with shampoos, rinses, shaving cream, and a razor blade. Behind the door a sheer robe hung from the hook, along with a negligee.
He hadn’t been aware that Frankie had a girlfriend and was surprised that Hughes had never mentioned it. Of course, Hughes had never mentioned that he and Frankie were working the Faith Novakoff murder case either.
His eyes moved back to the tube of lipstick on the counter. He wondered if the Sheriff’s Department had notified her about Frankie’s death. He wondered how she’d taken the news.
Matt pushed the thought aside and returned to the laptop computer on the writing table. Opening the root directory, he sifted through Frankie’s data files: letters, photographs, an accounting program, and what looked like thousands of music files. Like the folders he’d found in the closet, every document Matt opened on the laptop was personal. He checked the trash folder, sorting through it by date. There were hundreds of files here—so many in fact that Matt guessed they dated back to the day Frankie bought the computer. Matt paged down to the most recent files, chewing it over and realizing that it didn’t make any sense.
Orlando and Plank had come here for a reason, just as someone, presumably Orlando, had broken into Hughes’s house for a reason. So why hadn’t they emptied the trash folder and deleted Frankie’s data files? On Hughes’s computer, the deletions had been more than obvious. How could they be sure something wouldn’t be found on Frankie’s computer that didn’t point to them? The more Matt tossed it over, the less sense it made.
He picked up the house phone and noticed that the caller ID list hadn’t been deleted either. Even more surprising, Orlando’s name popped up from a call made the day before Frankie died.
Matt looked up and watched McKensie enter the room and sit on the arm of the couch.
“SID will be here within the hour, Jones. Two patrol units are on their way now. I’ve got a meeting in twenty-five minutes that I can’t get out of. What do you want to do?”
“Who’s Frankie’s girlfriend, Lieutenant?”
He shrugged. “We think that her name is Jenna Marconi, but she hasn’t returned our phone calls. When we drove out to her house this morning, her neighbor told us that she’s been in Seattle the last couple of days, visiting her parents. They spoke yesterday and she said she’d be home tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, you think she’s his girlfriend?”
“Frankie never told anybody that he was seeing someone. He died less than twenty-four hours ago. I know what you saw in the bathroom when you cleared it. We went through the place last night, and we’re still trying to figure it out. All we have are these.”
McKensie opened one of the files he’d been carrying and placed it on the writing table. He flipped through several sheets of paper until he came to a list of telephone calls made from Frankie’s cell. Then he pointed to a number that had been highlighted with a yellow marker.
“Frankie called her six times,” he said. “Six times over the past week. The number’s registered to Marconi. Last Thursday night, Frankie followed it up with a call to this number. Rosalita’s Garden Café. We checked. It was a takeout order for two delivered to Marconi’s address.”
“So she hasn’t been told that he’s dead.”
“We won’t release his name until we’ve cleared this up—if that’s what you’re asking, Jones.”
“Any idea what she looks like?”
McKensie nodded. A blowup of the photo from her driver’s license was underneath the list of phone numbers. She had light brown hair and dark brown eyes, and even though it seemed like the photo had been snapped at a bad moment, she looked more than just attractive. According to her license, she had just celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday.
Matt turned back to the list of phone numbers, sliding the sheet of paper closer. McKensie had jotted down the woman’s address in Echo Park beside her telephone number, and Matt committed both to memory. As he continued skimming through the list, his eyes stopped on another entry highlighted in yellow. He didn’t recognize the area code but remembered seeing the same number as he went through Frankie’s caller ID on the house line.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“The reason Frankie was driving to Mint Canyon. It’s a Ford dealership.”
Matt became very still. “A what?”
“A Ford dealership. Frankie made an appointment with the manager.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what did he say?”
McKensie shook his head as he thought it over. “Nothing,” he said finally. “Frankie made the appointment but never identified himself as a police officer. I talked to the manager myself last night. He told me that he thought Frankie wanted to buy a car.”
“Why would Frankie drive up to Mint Canyon to buy a car? It doesn’t make any sense. He left me a message and said that he was working a couple of decent leads.”
“Maybe he was, Jones. Maybe he was working a couple of decent leads. But Frankie didn’t tell the guy what he wanted, and then he stopped for gas. Frankie never made it to the meeting.”
Matt met McKensie’s hard gaze and thought that his eyes looked glassy.
CHAPTER 40
A Ford dealership in Mint Canyon . . .
The idea that Frankie made an appointment with the manager because he wanted to buy a new car was so ludicrous that it made Matt angry. He wanted to hit something. Kick it. Smash it. Break it open with his bare hands. It didn’t help that he had spent the last three hours with a pair of criminalists from SID scouring Frankie’s apartment for fingerprints and still hadn’t heard from Cabrera.
It was after seven, and he’d skipped out on the press conference without another call from Grace. Just as odd, after a week of cold weather, the sun had gone down and the air remained hot and dusty and dead. He wiped the sweat from his brow as he tossed it over. Should he drive back to Playa del Rey? Or should he head north for Mint Canyon and interview the manager on his own? He had only one choice, because at this time of night either trip would mean spending hours in stop-and-go traffic.
He popped open the lid on another cup of coffee from the 7-Eleven beside the North Hollywood station. After a couple of sips, he lit a cigarette and climbed into his car. Frankie’s apartment had offered them a vast array of fingerprints. Although it would take a while before the lab could process them all, the samples they’d lifted from the apartment, particularly the front door and den, were ultraclean. Both criminalists had told Matt that there was no evidence the place had been wiped down or disturbed in any way.
No evidence, other than Frankie’s neighbor, that Orlando and Plank had been there. No evidence at all that they had made it inside.
He grabbed the murder book off the backseat and leafed through the pages until he found Leah Reynolds’s phone number at the beach. He entered it into his cell and waited. After seven rings her voice mail picked up. He left a brief message, then pulled out of the lot onto Burbank Boulevard. An entrance ramp to the Hollywood Freeway was just down the street.
Mint Canyon could wait until morning. But Jenna Marconi’s place in Echo Park was on the way to Playa del Rey. He thought he should stop by and talk to her neighbor. He wanted to see if she knew why Marconi wasn’t returning McKensie’s phone calls. Because Fr
ankie was a cop, news of his death would have spread through the Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD before his charred body made it to the morgue. Keeping his name on ice for another day seemed like a long shot, and there was no way Matt would let the woman hear about Frankie’s death on her own. He’d seen how Laura had taken the news. He couldn’t let it happen to Jenna Marconi, no matter how long they might have been together or how close or far apart they were. If she kept a negligee at Frankie’s place, she deserved to hear about his fate from a friend.
Traffic heading into town wasn’t as heavy as he expected, and he made the fifteen-mile drive to Echo Park in thirty-five minutes. Once he exited the freeway onto surface streets, he headed north on Alvarado just west of the lake, made a right on Sunset, and then a left on Quintero. Marconi’s home was at the end of the street on the corner.
Matt pulled over and gazed at the house for a moment. The lights were on. While they may have been on timers, he thought that he could see the shadow of someone thrown against the drawn curtains. He looked up and down the street, wondering if he had the right address. From the variety of homes, their condition, and their size, it appeared to be a neighborhood in transition a stone’s throw from Dodger Stadium. But under the cover of darkness, he couldn’t tell if the people who lived here were on their way up or falling down.
He dug his phone out of his pocket, found Laura’s number, and hit Call. When she picked up, he lit a cigarette, switched off the air conditioner, and lowered the window.
“It’s me, Laura. It’s Matt.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s good, but I’m gonna be late.”
“I thought you might be,” she said. “Did you see the press conference? Were you there?”
Matt remained quiet, thinking it over and wondering how Grace, Orlando, and Plank were going to explain Kevin’s murder after the Sheriff’s Department found the three-piece bandit’s Glock 20 and determined that it had never been fired. As of today they no longer had a reasonable theory for the robbery and killing. As of today they’d lost their fall guy, their scapegoat, their chump, their dupe, or anyone else who could’ve taken the ride for their murder spree.
