Chuckling, the man returned to his truck.
Goodman got back into the sedan. Morales made a U-turn, kicked up some dust, and went back the way they’d come.
It didn’t take them long to find the small brick building with the sign out front that read “Jail and Police Station.” A light glowed over the door. Parked in front was a five-year-old, brown and white Ford Taurus with a gold star on the door and the words “Carver Police Dept.” hand-lettered in the center of the star.
Parnell Jefferson was a small, wiry black man with a mustache who apparently slept in his uniform shirt and trousers when he was on duty. He opened the door of the jail and police station in his sock feet, yawning. He seemed unimpressed by the two detectives, but when he saw Nikki, he tried unsuccessfully to tuck his shirt into his trousers.
“What can I do for you folks?” he asked.
Goodman showed him his badge and said, “We’re looking for information about some people who used to live in Carver. The Willins family?”
Chief Jefferson shrugged. “Name’s kinda familiar. But I don’t recall—”
“Burned in a fire, twenty years ago?”
Jefferson smiled. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “I was fourteen and living very happy with my mama and daddy on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois.”
“Anybody been around long enough to have known the Willinses?” Nikki asked.
“Reverend Wilmot’s been here a while. Roosevelt Styles, who owns the peanut plant. I suppose somebody’ll remember the name. Old Emory Moten, of course. The oldest citizen in these parts. He surely knows everybody who’s dead.”
“Why’s that, chief?” Nikki asked, recalling Emory’s name from Sandoval’s notes.
“He’s the caretaker at Eternal Light. Cranky old man, except when he’s drunk, which is most of the time. Then he’s just stiff.”
“Eternal Light would be... ?”
“Carver’s only cemetery,” the chief said. “Of course, we’ve got a boot hill for people can’t afford Eternal Light. If these folks are worth your coming all the way here from L.A., they probably wouldn’t be buried in Boot Hill, now would they?”
EIGHTY-FIVE
Eternal Light Cemetery, at the southern tip of Carver, just a few miles from the start of the Mojave Desert, covered the equivalent of several city blocks, enclosed by a high whitewashed wall that had been structurally altered by earthquakes in the area.
Possibly because of the sudden drop in temperature in the desert, a fog was settling in. Seeing its wisps float in front of the sedan’s headlights, Nikki said, “That’s an over-the-top touch, isn’t it? Graveyard’s not going to be spooky enough, we’ve got to have fog, too?”
Morales parked the sedan near a wrought-iron gate.
In just the short drive from the police station, the air had turned cold. Nikki was freezing in her cocktail dress. To her surprise, Morales put his coat around her.
Goodman tried the gate and it creaked open.
Inside the wall, the area was nearly pitch black. The absence of moon or stars and the presence of fog made it almost impossible to see anything clearly past a foot away. They much in the fog. At least they provided enough illumination to keep them from stepping into an open grave.
It was no place to be wearing high heels, Nikki decided as she stumbled beside Morales, sharing the light from his flash. Goodman wandered off to their right in search of the caretaker. It wasn’t long before he called them to join him.
Emory Moten’s cottage was a rustic affair with a smooth stucco base and what appeared to be a Spanish tile roof. A faint light shone behind a circular window built into the front door.
Goodman knocked a few times. When that didn’t work, Morales took his turn pounding on the wood.
No response from inside the cottage.
“What now?” Nikki asked.
Morales tried the doorknob. Locked. “Old dude’s sleeping it off inside, probably.”
“Try again,” Goodman said.
Morales banged even louder, yelling, “Hey, open up in there!”
Nothing.
“I sure didn’t drive all this way to spend the night in a motel,” Goodman said. He handed his flashlight to his partner and slipped a small leather case from his pocket. He unzipped it and removed two thin metal picks. “Shine some light over here,” he said to Morales.
Nikki turned away as Goodman worked the picks into Emory Moten’s lock. She could barely make out the shape of tombstones in the fog. She shivered inside Morales’s coat.
The sound of the door creaking open drew her attention back to the detectives as they entered the cottage. “Yo, Mr. Moten,” Goodman called. “Anybody here?”
No reply.
She walked to the door and looked in on a cluttered, rough-hewn room dimly lit by a brass lamp on a desk against the wall. Everything was old and worn—the heavy desk, the wooden chair with its tattered cushion, a faded and stained maroon couch. There was a filing cabinet with rust poking through its dark green paint, an ancient floor-model TV with an antenna enhanced by a ball of tinfoil stuck on one rabbit ear, and a deep blue plastic container near the door almost filled with empty beer and whiskey bottles and tin cans.
“Guy really knows how to live,” Nikki said.
“I’ll see if he’s in the back,” Morales said.
Goodman strolled to a grimy framed map that decorated the wall above the desk. “This looks like the ticket,” he said.
As Nikki moved closer she could see that it was a schematic drawing of the cemetery, broken down into rows of lots numbered consecutively from 1 to 2050. The lots were of different sizes, which meant there was no consistency in the number per row. “According to Sandoval’s notes, we want 1232,” she said.
The detective ran a finger along the map, from the spot marked “Office” to Lot 1232. It was in roughly the center of the graveyard. “Twenty-two rows up,” he said. “Even knowing that, it could be a bear finding it in the fog.”
“Nobody home but us chickens,” Morales announced, joining them.
“Where would he go?” Nikki asked.
“Hangin’ with relatives, prob’ly,” Morales said, looking at the map. “Can’t blame him. This place is a rat’s nest. Bedroom smelled like bad cabbage.”
“Let’s get our business done,” Goodman suggested.
As they walked out into the cold, foggy night, Nikki said, “The visiting gangsta should be included on the headstone. What was Lee-O’s real name?”
“Leonardo Broches,” Goodman said.
“If it’s there, it’ll definitely tie Willins to the Crazy Eights and to Maddie Gray’s murder.”
Nikki’s heels kept sinking into the ground as they made their way through the fog, counting rows. At the twenty-second, they began concentrating on the tombstones. They moved slowly and carefully but they didn’t find the final resting place of the Willins family.
“What now?” Morales asked.
“It was an old map,” Goodman said. “Maybe they’ve added rows. Or maybe Sandoval got it wrong.”
“As long as we’re here, let’s check a few rows up and back,” Nikki said.
They split up, Goodman taking the lower rows, Nikki and Morales the ones above.
“Fog’s getting thicker,” Morales grumbled, as his partner disappeared from sight.
Colder, too, Nikki thought. She hoped Morales wasn’t freezing in just his shirt. “Let’s get this over with,” she said.
They began checking the names on the tombstones. They were almost at the end of the row when they heard the shot.
Morales clicked off the flash. Nikki was almost overwhelmed by the fog and the darkness. “You okay?” he whispered. She could barely make out his white shirt.
“Uh huh,” she said. “It’s Willins, isn’t it?”
“That’d be my guess,” he said. “I doan think he was shooting at us.”
She didn’t either. The noise had come from the other side of the cemetery.
“Stay here,” Morales said. “I gotta go check on Eddie.”
The vague image of his white shirt disappeared in the fog.
She hunkered beside a headstone, staring off into the dark cemetery and straining to see something that would offer a clue as to what was going on.
Another two shots, in quick succession.
Who was shooting and who was being shot at, she couldn’t tell.
She saw a flash of light. Then another. Then, nothing but darkness.
She thought she heard a footstep.
The detectives should be calling out to her any second. Telling her not to worry, everything was all right.
All was silent, the fog masking even the ordinary sounds of night.
She began edging back, keeping the headstones between her and the pathway. Her high heel sunk deep into a mound of loose dirt. Before the implication of that could make its way to her brain, she took another step backward. Into emptiness.
She tried to shift her weight, but she was too far gone. She fell awkwardly into a deep gravesite, smashing her head against a wall of packed earth. Her foot was twisted beneath her.
She lay on her back, dazed, staring up at the sky filtered by fog. Pain shot up her leg from her ankle. She rolled onto her side so that she could straighten the leg. The pain coming from her ankle was excruciating. It was broken. She’d just have to endure it. She forced herself not to cry or moan as she sat up, though the raw pain radiated along her leg like a fireball coursing under her skin.
Maybe Willins hadn’t seen her fall. Maybe he’d pass her by. Then she could somehow climb out of the grave. Those hours spent struggling up the sand dune should count for something. Maybe she could make it to the car and the gun and cellular phone in her purse.
That pleasant scenario was abruptly canceled by the sensation of something slimy crawling on her hand. She shook it away. Worms. Oh, God.
A beam of light swept the top of the grave.
It was bright enough to give her a sense of the deep hole she was in. It also showed her a weapon. A pickax rested within reach. She blessed the careless gravedigger. Of course, because of her ankle and her position, it seemed impossible for her to take advantage of her discovery.
The light shined directly down into the grave. Into her eyes.
Practically blinded, she could make out very little of the features of the man standing above her at the edge of the grave. She was able to tell that he was big and, judging by his pant legs and shoes, still in his tux. Hadn’t taken the time to change, of course. Too anxious to find out what they were up to in Carver.
“So there you are,” he said. “I was worried over nothing. You don’t have a gun, do you?”
He chuckled.
“The headstone you were looking for is right over there,” he told her. “Auntie and uncle and my dear little cousin, crispy critters all. Just a few plots over. Of course the family name on the stone isn’t the one you were expecting.”
She knew that now, just as surely as she knew that the man standing beside the grave was her boss, District Attorney Joseph Walden.
EIGHTY-SIX
I’d rather not shoot you just yet,” he said, sitting on a high mound of dirt beside the open grave. He clicked off the flash and assumed a ghostly image in the fog. “It’ll be a while before the gang arrives to do the cleanup. I don’t like spending time alone. I’ve always been a people person.”
He was squatting up there, sounding so smug and satisfied with himself. He’d assumed she’d given up. He always had underestimated her.
“Are the detectives dead?” she asked, her left hand feeling for the handle of the pickax. She didn’t think she could even lift the thing, much less swing it in an upward arc faster than he could aim and pull a trigger. But she wasn’t about to just lie there and let the bastard kill her at his leisure.
“Dead or dying,” he said.
“My God, Joe, how many people have you killed?”
“Quite a few. My aunt and uncle and cousin. Maddie, of course. We could count Dimitra. I didn’t actually do that one myself, but I ordered it done.”
“Why? I thought you and she—”
“Oh, she was a great piece of ass, just too curious for her own good. Anyway, back to the list. The old caretaker here—”
“He’s dead?”
“Certainly. I’d just choked the life out of him when you people started knocking on his door. I didn’t think that you, an officer of the court, would let them break in like that. I barely had time to drag the old buzzard’s body into a closet before Morales came snooping into the bedroom.”
“Sorry we inconvenienced you.”
“No problem. I just roll with the punches. I’ve always had a knack for murder. Especially close work. My marksmanship is only so-so; though, as tonight proves, it gets the job done. I imagine I’d have made a damn good hired assassin, if Tom Gleason hadn’t shown me my true calling.”
The tips of her fingers touched the ax handle. “What’s Gleason got to do with it?”
“Tom was a genius. He created the Crazy Eights, you know? We were just a bunch of punks. Eight of us. Petty thieves, barely in our teens. Tom was head deputy D.A. under Pendleton. He knew our juvie records and he handpicked us. Brought us to his place in Pasadena, fed us steak and ale, told us his plan for our future. We were to become the new gang in town. Gang? Two of us couldn’t stay in a room together for more than ten minutes without fighting. Tom was patient. He spent a year shaping us up, making sure we stayed out of jail.”
“What was his point?” She grasped the ax handle.
“His point? His point was he needed distributors for his product.”
“Drugs?”
“He’d cut a deal with a local bigwig whose son had been arrested for running a penny-ante import operation. Tom told me it was one of the old California families, going back several generations, but he never uttered the name in my presence. It’d been a snap for him to find enough mistakes the cops had made to dirty the evidence and let the kid roam. The boy was sent to a school in Switzerland as punishment for his crime. Tom and the boy’s father took over the operation and expanded it.
“Tom had vision. He saw a vast market that their white-bread pushers weren’t able to penetrate. The gangs in the hood were nickel-and-diming, but there was no organized distribution. That’s where we came in. Eight tough kids who knew the territory and who were a little smarter than the other gangstas. Plus we had a head deputy D.A. on our side.”
“Tom Gleason,” Nikki said, “the black man’s friend.”
“He was. His dedication to inner-city youths is one of the main things that helped him get elected over that jive-ass racist Pendleton.”
Nikki tried to lift the ax. It was too heavy. She dragged it closer to her body. Maybe with both hands...
“Tom was sincere about helping black kids.”
“Sure,” Nikki said, “he helped ’em by turning ’em into crackheads.”
“You don’t understand. Some kids are born to self-destruct. If it’s not drugs, it’s booze or guns. They’re weak and worthless and they give up. What’s wrong with using these losers to allow ambitious young people to do something with their lives?”
“In other words, what’s wrong with a couple hundred kids, including babies not even born, dying of crack and smack so you can get your law degree? Right?”
“Of course,” he said without irony. “The things I’m capable of achieving are worth the lives of a hundred drug burnouts. Tom saw that. He handpicked me. He saw your potential, too.”
“Mine?”
“Sure. He thought you had the stuff to be a great prosecutor.”
“He told you that?”
“He told me everything. I was his protégé. Dick Grayson to his Bruce Wayne. He was grooming me to be him. He thought you were bright and ambitious and tough. You let him down with Mason Durant.”
Of course Walden knew about Durant. How foolish she’d been to think Virgil might have betrayed he
r confidence. How sad she might never see him again to make it up to him. She had both hands on the ax handle now. She’d have to stand to reach Walden with the weapon. She wasn’t sure she could move.
While he droned on, recalling time spent in the company of the great Tom Gleason, she tried sliding her body up the wall of packed earth. Each little movement sent a searing bolt of pain from her damaged ankle. She positioned the top of the ax blade against the grave floor and used the upright handle as a cane.
“. . . when you sent me your letter asking to be reinstated, I suddenly realized, of course, I had to have you back downtown. I needed prosecutors I could control. I was sleeping with Dimitra. And thanks to the Mason Durant screwup, I had something to hang over both your head and Ray’s.”
She was several inches off the ground now. The wall of earth was pitted with rocks and she was glad poor Carlos Morales’s coat was blunting some of their sharper edges. She halted her progress because he’d stopped talking. “So how did a smart guy like you do something so stupid,” she asked, “killing a high-profile celebrity?”
“It’s my one failing. My bloody temper. I’d handled it pretty well for more than twenty years, but that night Mad-die was an unholy bitch. She was drunk when I got to her place. Drunk and insulting. I’d brought her a present that she threw back in my face.”
“The charm bracelet,” Nikki said.
“It was ...a sentimental gift. She was wearing an expensive ring I assumed had been given her by some bastard she was fucking. She hadn’t thrown that back in anybody’s face. We shouted a bit. I may have slapped her a couple of times. Then, she went through one of her mood swings and began to act like a loving woman should. She told me she’d arranged for us to go out. This was surprising. Until then, she’d insisted our romance be kept a secret.”
“She didn’t want her fans to know she was seeing a black man?” Nikki asked.
“Nothing like that. Whatever else she was, Maddie was certainly not a racist. She’d sewn some wild oats in the past and almost lost her show because of it, so she was determined to keep her private life private. And I think secrecy turned her on. Anyway, what she’d planned that night wasn’t any public declaration of our relationship. She’d booked an overnight at one of the Sanctum’s more secluded cabanas. She even made me hide in the bathroom when they delivered our dinner, the dinner that we never go to eat.”
The Trials of Nikki Hill Page 37
