The big man shook Floyd’s hand, then reached for mine. “Is everything okay?”
“We’d like to ask her some questions,” Floyd said, “about Shane.”
“Shane Wright?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Something wrong?”
Floyd looking through the shades, keeping it cool, low key. “Just need to talk to her is all.”
“Hold on,” he said, and disappeared into the living room. The smell of smoke and barbecue escaped through the door as it closed.
I glanced at my watch. “Dinner time.”
“So much for the gym today,” Floyd said.
“Yep.”
“Damn, my gym bag was in the trunk too.”
“Sucks to be you,” I said.
After a few moments of waiting, Floyd said, “You suppose he went to get a bat, gonna come back out here and whip our asses?”
I thought about it for a second. “No, I don’t think he’d need a bat.”
Floyd grunted. “Hmpf.”
The large man reappeared in the doorway. “Here’s Donna’s address and phone number. She’s living over there in Downey, far as I know.”
“Thank you, sir,” Floyd said.
“Are you her father?” I asked.
“I married her mama, raised her up like m’own.”
“You know Shane very well?”
He nodded, grinning just enough to show some silver in his teeth and a dimple on one side of his mouth. “Confused little boy, he was. Good kid though. He in some kind of trouble?”
“He’s been killed.”
The big man’s smile instantly turned to a frown as he studied me for a moment and then looked over at Floyd. His gaze came back to me, all business, his brows crowding together just over the bridge of his nose. He said, “He didn’t deserve it, no matter what happened. That boy didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”
“No, sir,” I said, “he didn’t deserve to be killed.”
“That Italian joint’s right over there near the address pops gave us for Donna,” I said as I turned into traffic, messing with the air-conditioner. “How’s eye-talian sound to you?”
“Did you forget our wallets were torched, along with my six-hundred dollar suit jacket?”
“I thought it was two bills.”
“Yeah, at the Rack. You buy it at Nordstrom, it costs you six, easy. At least four.”
“I’ve got a fifty stashed in my badge wallet,” I said, leaning to the side just enough to check, making sure it hadn’t been lost during the rodeo we had in Inglewood. “What about you?”
“My informant stash? I can’t ever just leave it alone. The last fifty I had got spent at the Outback.”
“When was that?” I asked. “I don’t remember an invite.”
“One day last week. You had left early or something, I think. Tommy and I went over after work, had a steak and a few beers.”
“You and Tommy Foster, huh?”
“Yeah, he’s a good dude. You remember back in the day, back when we were working patrol and he was working gangs? He was doing that body-building bullshit, tanning and shaving his body and all that other homo shit.”
“Yeah.”
“I thought the guy was a bit strange, but, I didn’t know him.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“But you know, that dude is solid, man. I mean, you get to know him, he’s just a damn good guy. Loves to lift weights, chase tail, and drink beer, not necessarily in that order.”
“Yep.”
“Guy’s been through about a half dozen divorces and he don’t give a shit. As long as he has enough money to buy a steak and beer once in a while, nothing seems to bother him.”
I had to agree. Tommy had grown to be one of my favorites over the years as well. We had picked up a couple cases together and not only did we work hard to solve them, we had a lot of fun doing so.
I said to Floyd: “Yeah, he’s a good dude.”
“That’s for sure. Turn here.”
I slowed for the corner, peering up through the windshield at the street sign. “Now where?”
Floyd studied a map with a penlight. “Hang on . . . two blocks up, turn left.”
“Two blocks up, got it.”
“It’ll be on the right.”
“Got it,” I said. “Right here.”
Donna’s house appeared vacant, no lights inside or out and no cars in the driveway or on the street in front of her residence.
We knocked a couple times and rang the bell, but there had been no response. Then we had a quick look through the front windows, peeking inside with flashlights to make sure nothing seemed suspicious. Before leaving, Floyd stuck a business card in the screen door, a gold star and Matt Tyler, Detective, Los Angeles County Sheriff on the front. On the back he had written a note, asking her to call.
We settled for a little Mexican joint not too far from Donna’s house, thinking we’d be nearby if she called. Plus a good meal and a couple margaritas sounded good, and we could probably get both with my emergency fifty, maybe have enough change for a tip.
After dinner was cleared, Floyd checked his watch, then ordered another round. “We’ll give her a few more minutes, see if she calls.”
“Probably a waste of time,” I said.
“We’ve got booze, Dickie, it’s not a waste of time.”
“No, I mean Donna. What’s she going to tell us? Shane was confused . . . Shane was abused . . . Shane stole her favorite blouse?”
“Maybe they stayed in touch,” Floyd said, “girls do that.”
“She’s not a girl.”
“She’s not?”
“No.”
Floyd had a tendency to overcorrect his posture when he’d had a few. Maybe just a defense mechanism, kept him from falling forward. I followed him across the parking lot wondering if I leaned one way or the other, looking at the back of his wrinkled white dress shirt. It made me think about our suit jackets lost to the fire.
“Hey, where’d you keep that fancy pen and pencil set, anyway?”
He stopped, did a quarter turn with his body, and looked across his right shoulder at me. “You have got to be shitting me.”
“That set you bought in New York.”
“Mont Blancs, son-of-a-bitch. See, that’s another three bills there, Dickie. You suppose the county’s going to reimburse me for all this shit?”
“I lost a Bic and a mechanical pencil,” I said, brushing past him, continuing to the car.
“Do you see why I hate you?”
“Not sure of the brand,” I said without looking back, the grin on my face unseen by Floyd.
“You really are a dickhead.”
I held my hand up, working my thumb up and down. “It had one of those clicky things on the end there, the thingy gets the lead to come out?”
“This is why you have no friends.”
“About a buck-fifty at Walmart, so yeah, make sure you let me know if they’re going to reimburse us for this stuff.”
We drove back to Donna’s figuring she might be home, maybe missed the card on the door. It was a little past eight now.
The headlights of the Crown Vic washed across the front of the house as I turned into the driveway. Nothing had changed, no lights, no cars, and Floyd’s card remained where he had placed it.
“You got any other bright ideas?” Floyd asked.
“Yeah, one. Drop your ass off and head home.”
A man appeared in my blind spot, startling me as I glanced over my shoulder to back out of Donna Edwards’s driveway. The unshaven man stood silent, dressed in gray sweatpants and a stretched out, soiled, white t-shirt with a V-shaped neck. He scratched his head, a thick mass of black and gray hair going every which way, as he stood watching us, his mouth partly open as if he had something to say.
I rolled my window down. “Good evening.”
“Howdy.”
He stepped closer to the car, leaned over, and looked toward Floyd with one eyebrow lifted.
Then he rested his hands on the door. “Y’all looking for something?”
“The young lady that lives here,” I said and nodded, leaning toward the center of the car in an attempt to put a little distance between us and escape his stench.
“The li’l nigger girl?”
“A young black lady,” I said, and glanced over at Floyd. Then back to the stranger: “Name’s Donna.”
Floyd leaned forward to look past me, have a better look at the man. Floyd’s right hand was to his side, out of my view and no doubt resting on his pistol.
“Yeah that’s her. She’s usually got a couple of them greasy Mexicans there with her,” he said, sending stale beer and cigarette breath through the opened window. “Whole neighborhood’s gone to hell.”
“Okay, sir,” I said, “you’ve been a big help. We’ll see ya later, huh?”
“I oughta get out and kick his ass,” Floyd said, “see if he’s any tougher than Charlie.”
“Except you don’t like violence,” I reminded him, as I dropped the shifter back into reverse.
The stranger still at the window: “You boys FBI?”
“No sir,” I said, “Sheriff’s department. Hey, we’ve really gotta run, see ya later, man.”
“They ain’t been here for a couple days, none of ‘em.”
I stopped. “Who’s that? . . . Who hasn’t been here?”
“Probably selling drugs, what I always figured. The bunch of ‘em always here, none of ‘em work nowadays, not even the goddamn Mexicans. You’d think at least them beaners would work, nothin’ else, down there at the car wash, or maybe mowing lawns.”
“You haven’t seen anyone here for a couple days, you say?”
He leaned into the window. “Been a couple days now, yes sir. They was all here, like usual, and then poof!, they just disappeared.”
Floyd and I exchanged one of those glances, the kind that says neither of us liked what we heard.
The stranger straightened, placed his hands on his hips, and stood gazing toward the house, or maybe beyond it. He shook his head and said, “Just like that,”—and snapped his fingers—“gone!”
7
MONDAY MORNING I awoke to silence, a welcome change from the turbulent weekend of death, destruction, and sleep deprivation. I rolled out of bed just after eight, feeling refreshed and energized. The priority at this point would be fresh coffee, so I ambled to the kitchen where a note waited beneath a clean mug. My wife would be gone all morning, it read, and she hoped I had been able to get some rest.
What I had actually hoped for was some time together before starting another fourteen-hour day. I tossed the note in the trash and reached for the pot.
As I poured a cup of coffee, I heard my pager beeping from the bedroom, the faint sound carrying down the hall. It amazed me I’d heard it at all, my hearing not what it used to be. I grunted and said to a steaming cup, “My idiot, no doubt.”
The pager display read 10-21 007.
Floyd, as predicted. A modern-day James Bond, sending a message to call him. I wondered if it would be work-related or was he just wondering what suit or hat I planned to wear today, our relationship not unlike that of a couple school girls at times.
I retrieved my phone from the county car. “What do you want?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m home, just got up a few minutes ago.”
“I wish I had your hours,” he said. “You plan on working today?”
“What the hell do you want?”
“Coroner’s office called on the Malibu case—”
“Yeah?”
“—the old man had terminal cancer.”
“He knew about it?”
“According to the coroner’s office, yeah. They’ve got his medical records.”
My chuckle was not one of amusement, more of astonishment. “So he decided to do the wife a favor, take her with him.”
“Looks that way, Dickie. Anyway, we’ll have the report in a couple weeks, be able to close that one out.”
“What about your transsexual murder?”
“My transsexual murder?” he asked.
“Yeah, did you solve it yet?”
“Yeah, dickhead, I solved it; Elmer Fudd did it.”
“The Elmer Fudd? Elmer J. Fudd, the chubby little guy in the overalls who’s always trying to whack the bunny?”
“No, dipshit, the fat dude across the street from Donna Edwards.”
I laughed. “Your buddy.”
“Yeah, my buddy. He’s your cousin, more like it.”
“I guess you never know, huh? Could’ve been that web-toed asshole. Maybe he figured he’d clean up the neighborhood, get rid of some of the colored trash.”
“We find the burning crosses, we’ll know where he buried the bodies.”
I grimaced at the thought. “You think Donna’s dead?”
“I don’t know what to think, Dickie. She’s gone, I know that. And I know you better get your ass moving, get to work at some point today, or you might discover I’ll be gone too.”
“I should be so lucky.”
“Hey,” he said, “which hat are you wearing today?”
Maybe Floyd stumbled onto something, I thought, with his flippant allegation that the creepy guy across the street had whacked Donna Edwards and her Mexican friends. I slowed in front of Donna’s house, flipping my notebook open to copy the license plates of three vehicles near the property across the street, the place I attributed to Elmer Fudd, as my partner had named him. I figured it was the house with the dead lawn and a serial killer’s van sitting in the driveway over a puddle of motor oil. We had watched him walk that direction after our memorable encounter.
My mind flashed a scene of the disheveled man dragging a dead woman from the side door of the deathtrap on wheels, rolling her down a steep embankment. Seeing an attractive black woman in her twenties, the image I had of Donna Edwards, tumbling through the weeds.
I turned the Crown Vic around, parked on the street one house west of Donna’s, and sat with the air-conditioner running as I jotted a few notes. I wrote down Fudd’s address and a description of his house in the event we would need it for a search warrant later. Ditto for Donna Edwards’s house. I noted the time, 0922 hours, and the fact it still appeared vacant: there were no cars in the driveway and Floyd’s business card remained on the front door.
It seemed a good time to stretch my legs, so I figured I’d have a look around. I walked the perimeter, working my way through a wooden gate at the side of the garage, a piece of rope coming through a small hole to release the latch. All the doors and windows were intact, nothing broken or unsecured. The small back yard held a patch of grass that butted up against a concrete patio with a Jacuzzi tub, the smell of chlorine hovering over it. An eight-foot, dog-eared redwood fence enclosed the rear property, affording privacy from the neighbors.
Except one, I thought, looking at the two-story house two properties west and one street over, the back of that house facing this way. I watched the upstairs windows for a couple minutes but saw no movement.
The sliding glass door of Donna’s patio accessed a bedroom, I noticed while peeking through the partially open vertical blinds. A queen-sized bed with a floral-print comforter and pillows holding stuffed animals took up most of the floor space. Assuming it would be Donna’s room, I twisted my head, looking one way and then the other, taking in what I could from the outside. Everything appeared to be in order with no signs of suspicious activity, other than the absence of life.
As I approached my vehicle, Elmer Fudd stood in his driveway, his arms folded across his chest as he stared in my direction.
I nodded as I reached the street and angled away from him, headed toward my car. “Good morning.”
He stood silent, wearing what appeared to be the same soiled sweatpants and t-shirt he wore the day before. His gaze went beyond me, absent of emotion; he didn’t smile, nod, or even blink. Nothing.
I felt uneasy continuing toward m
y car, my back now to the strange man. I saw the scene again in my head, random girls rolling from his van, down an embankment. Elmer spitting the words, See ya later, bitches.
I glanced over my shoulder while working my key into the driver’s door and was surprised to see he had disappeared. Poof!
The two-story house with a view of the Jacuzzi that sat in the middle of the adjacent block, was easy to spot as it towered over the others. Unfortunately, nobody answered the door. Probably a working couple in this middle-class neighborhood; I’d have to come back in the evening.
I walked into the office twenty minutes later to find Floyd reading his Horoscope in the L.A. Times.
“What’s the forecast?”
“Forecast?”
“Yeah, what’s it telling you about your future? Or maybe I should say, our future?”
Floyd folded the paper and set it on his desk. “It says that people think I have all the answers, or at least, a viable plan. See, Dickie, you always have to have a plan.”
“What about me?”
“What about you, Dickie?”
“What’s it say?”
“You don’t believe in this shit, so why would you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“Well let’s have a look,” he said. He picked the paper up and scanned through it. “Let’s see here . . . Cancer . . . ‘Get your chores done early, Cancer, so you can have time to play tonight. Plan a romantic getaway with a loved one.’ Go figure, Dickie getting his chores done early to spend time with the little woman. We’ll see about that.”
“It could happen.”
“They write these things for normal people, Dickie, not lunatics. They should have a warning on the bottom of the page, or maybe on the top, Not Intended for Dickies.”
“Well speaking of me finishing my chores, and since the stars say you have all the answers, or at least a viable plan, what are you going to do about your buddy, Elmer Fudd?”
“What about him?”
“Dude gives me the creeps. I think we better dig into his background, see what he’s about. But I’m not the guy who has all the answers, or a plan.”
A Good Bunch of Men Page 7
