Flea Flicker

by David Chill

  “This isn’t a pleasure call,” said the grim voice of Juan Saavedra.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Plenty. Why don’t you drop whatever important business you’re conducting and swing by. We’re on Venice Boulevard, just under the 405.”

  “Sure. What’s going on?”

  “Your pal Tyler Briggs. We found his body. Initial reports were that he shot himself in the gut and bled out. Right here under the freeway. But maybe not. Our forensics guy is thinking it’s a homicide.”

  Chapter 11

  When the police have swarmed into an area and labeled it a crime scene, a carnival atmosphere takes shape. The yellow tape, the dozen police cruisers, the forensics team in their dark blue windbreakers all call attention to an event for which every driver had to slow down and gawk. To make matters worse, the police cordoned off all but one lane, which guaranteed traffic would be backed up for blocks. As I approached, I noticed a series of lighting cranes erected and boom poles being situated, signifying local news stations were already on the scene. Indeed, a number of crews were setting up for a shoot, and clusters of people were milling about. I didn’t know why these shoots needed this many people, but they invariably did.

  I drove slowly past the scene and finally found parking about two blocks away; I jogged over quickly. The police and the media had set up operations on the south side of the street, the north side being occupied by a homeless encampment.

  Venice Boulevard along this stretch was the dividing line between two communities, Los Angeles and Culver City. The north side had long been used as shelter by about fifty people living in tents, sleeping bags, and in a few cases, cardboard boxes. They congregated under the 405 Freeway because it gave them protection against the sun during summer days, and against the rain on winter nights. But they stayed on the Los Angeles side of the street for the simple reason that the LAPD only rousted them occasionally. The south side was the jurisdiction of Culver City, and any homeless person daring to set up housekeeping there would get a visit from the CCPD within a day, and be ordered to remove themselves from the vicinity. The homeless solved that problem by simply moving their belongings across the street. At some point they would have to uproot again, to where was a mystery. These people had no home, so they would simply migrate to the next locale that didn’t kick them out right away.

  I found Juan Saavedra barking orders to a few uniforms as a number of reporters stood by patiently, waiting to interview him. A few yards away lay a body covered by a white sheet. Juan noticed me and held up an index finger as he finished his directives. He motioned for me to follow him away from the reporters, and we walked toward a Shell station on Sepulveda.

  “When did you find the body?” I asked.

  “Passerby called it in around noon. Said he was walking to work this morning and saw someone sleeping on the sidewalk. Had a blanket over his torso. Nothing unusual about that these days. But when he was walking home for lunch he saw the same guy and he hadn’t moved. Took a closer look and saw a pool of blood.”

  I glanced back at the underpass. “I didn’t notice a whole lot of blood spatter. You indicated this might not be a suicide.”

  “It’s staged,” Juan said. “It was made to look like he took his own life. Make us think Briggs shoved a gun into his stomach and pulled the trigger. Facing life imprisonment, maybe worse, decides to end it all. Another story that fits nicely. But you’re right, it’s not a suicide. Whoever did this, shot him somewhere else and dumped the body. If Briggs had ended it all here, there’d be a lot more of him lining the sidewalk. And there might also be a gun nearby, although someone walking by could have pocketed it.”

  “How many times was he shot?” I asked.

  “That’s another issue. Initial indications are that he was shot multiple times. Maybe three or four.”

  “Not a suicide then,” I said. Suicide victims typically fire a single shot because once they’ve pulled the trigger, the injury is severe enough to prevent them from firing again.

  “Very unlikely. And whoever did this is an amateur. If they wanted it to be credible, the entry point would have been in the mouth or the side of the head.”

  “There’s also the question of why he would do it here,” I said. “Guys like Briggs don’t live on the street. If he didn’t want his family to find him this way, he’d have driven somewhere and done it in his car. Or on a beach. Or gone somewhere other than across the street from a homeless encampment under a freeway.”

  “Yeah, I don’t like this one bit.”

  “Any sense of when this happened?” I asked.

  “Middle of the night,” Juan answered. “We interviewed a bunch of those homeless across the street. No one knows anything except he wasn’t there last night and he was there this morning.”

  I shook my head. “No one saw a car stop and watched someone dragging a body onto the sidewalk?”

  “We’re not dealing with the most upstanding citizenry here. We did find one guy who thought he saw a light blue Mercedes pull up for a minute.”

  I looked at him. “That’s Tyler’s car.”

  “We’re checking it out. Look, I need to know a few things. When we brought Briggs in, he lawyered up quick. Yammered a bit in the beginning about how it wasn’t him, but he clammed up once we began asking some pointed questions.”

  I thought about this. What Briggs did was actually fairly astute. There was nothing to be gained by cooperating with the police, even if he were innocent. Words could get twisted, evidence misplaced, and the interrogators would convince him that if he had the slightest connection to the homicide, he’d be looking at twenty to life for simply knowing about the crime. The police have forced confessions out of innocent people before, and it took more fortitude than one might imagine to stand one’s ground. Detectives were good at wearing people down, and not everyone was able to withstand the pressure. Invoking their right to remain silent and requesting an attorney puts the onus on the police and the prosecutors to prove the charges, something they couldn’t always do, even if they did have some evidence.

  “I take it you didn’t get Briggs’s side of things when you talked with him.”

  “Nope. But when Forensics came back and said the fingerprints on the Glock were a match, and the DNA on that baseball cap matched his, the brass didn’t think we needed to do more. Like I told you the other day, things didn’t exactly fit together and something smelled off. But I wasn’t going up against the Deputy Chief with just a hunch.”

  “By the way, did your guys stop by that Snuggle Inn I told you about?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I sent Orlando yesterday. He picked up that syringe you found, got it from the manager. Sounded like the maid’s disappeared. We had it tested, matched the blood type to Briggs, but it didn’t have his fingerprints on it.”

  “Your lab guys worked quick.”

  “This is top priority,” Juan said. “Drop everything stuff. When you push people, they can turn things around fast.”

  “What else was in the syringe?”

  “Traces of a drug called Rohypnols,” he said.

  “The date rape drug,” I said.

  “One and the same. Odd, huh?”

  “Very,” I said. Rohypnols was sometimes called Roofies and was primarily a sedative, part of a family of drugs called Benzodiazepines. It was a tranquilizer, about ten times stronger than Valium, and typically men drop it into a woman’s drink and then proceed to sexually assault her. It immobilizes the victim, knocks them out, and they normally can’t remember what happened or who did what. Occasionally it was deployed by women, who would lure a man into a hotel room, slip it into his drink, rob him and leave. A few addicts used roofies for their own high, but that was unusual.

  “Did you know if Briggs had a drug problem?” Juan asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of. But to go from alcohol abuse to drug abuse isn’t that big a leap.”

  Juan looked at me. “No, it’s not. And it did sound as if Briggs had a b
ad drinking problem. It’s not a stretch to imagine him using drugs, too. And sometimes drug users do strange things to get off. This drug mostly knocks you out. Once in a while we see it used by addicts who also use coke or meth. Wards off depression, supposedly. Who knows.”

  “That might explain his blackout,” I said, thinking Briggs had failed to recall what had happened from Friday night all the way through Monday morning.

  “For some guys, getting high is all they want.”

  “True,” I said, not entirely sure that this described Tyler Briggs. I didn’t know him well enough to draw conclusions. But what Juan said was not unreasonable.

  “Look, I need you to dig here,” he said.

  “Sure. But what about Orlando?”

  He shook his head. “I sent Orlando back to the motel this afternoon to try and find that maid, Teresa, but he said she’s disappeared. Didn’t show up for work the past couple of days. The manager wouldn’t give an address where we could find her.”

  “And you think I can do better.”

  Juan smiled. “She may be the key to this and I’d like to find out just how much more she knows. Let’s just say Detective Brown is just punching the clock. He does the basics and not much more. I need someone who isn’t going to take no for an answer so easily.”

  “And you’ll be willing to spring me from the brig again. If need be, of course,” I said slowly, not exactly wanting to spend any more time in a cell. I thought of Gail and Marcus and briefly shuddered.

  “See if you can keep your activities within the gray area.”

  “So, you want me to find Teresa and see if she can shed some light on who Tyler Briggs was with last Friday night.”

  “You think you can do that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ve been trying to do that for almost a week. Look how far I’ve gotten.”

  *

  I drove back to the Snuggle Inn, and as I walked into the office, I came upon the same surly manager. He did not look pleased with my arrival, in fact, he looked like rather exasperated. He threw up his hands and let out a big sigh of annoyance. I politely waited for him to finish going through his act.

  “You again?” he demanded. “I already told last officer everything.”

  “Funny, I heard you didn’t tell him very much.”

  “I do not know where that puta Teresa is.”

  “Puta?” I asked, knowing it was Spanish for whore. “You sure have a good working knowledge of Spanish.”

  He shrugged. “This is L.A.”

  “Tell me what happened with Teresa. You two have a little tiff?”

  “What? You are talking shit to me.”

  “No, I’m talking English to you, and I think you ought to learn some. And when an officer of the law asks you for the whereabouts of an employee, you tell them.”

  “Listen,” he said, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, which was odd given that it was barely sixty degrees outside, downright cold for Los Angeles. “Teresa, she no longer works here. She no show up this week. I can’t have that. I had to make up the rooms. So I fire her. I hire someone else. That’s how it goes.”

  “Let me have her home address,” I ordered, and placed a fifty dollar bill on the counter.

  “I don’t have her home address,” he responded, eyeing the bill with more than a passing glance. “It’s probably a fake anyway.”

  “So you do have her address.”

  “Listen. I just have copy of her driver’s license. Like I said, it’s probably a fake.”

  “Get it,” I said, keeping my fingers on the bill until he returned. It took him a little while, but he came back with a hazy photocopy of a drivers license that looked like it had been copied three or four times. The photo was blurry, but it could have been her. I made out the name and it was indeed Teresa Ortiz, and she lived at an address in South Central.

  “Here. This is all I have.”

  “Looks reasonable. Why don’t you think it’s real?”

  “Most employees are illegals. Most employees lie. No trust them. That’s why.”

  “And how come you didn’t give this to the detective earlier?” I asked, pushing the fifty toward him.

  The big man shook his head. “He was very rude. I don’t like rude people.”

  “You don’t think I’m rude?”

  “You’re rude, too,” he said, picking up the bill. “But I can deal with your kind of rude.”

  I folded the copy of the drivers license and put it in my pocket. It was after 5:00 pm and a trip to South Central would take an hour and a half there, and an hour and a half back. And I might or might not find Teresa. I wasn’t technically working for Juan Saavedra, but I owed him plenty of favors, and I didn’t mind helping him, even though he couldn’t reimburse me. With her husband now dead, I was pretty sure I wasn’t working for Hannah Briggs any longer, and I was also having doubts as to whether she would pay me, given that our last encounter did not go well. My only paying client right now was Cliff Roper and I hadn’t returned his last two phone calls. I made a mental note to stop by USC tomorrow after I looked up Teresa.

  I drove home, and was disappointed when I walked in the door. The best part of my day was Marcus announcing my arrival in a big, excited voice, smile on his face, running to give me a hug. But he sat on the couch and just looked glum. I walked over and sat down next to him.

  “You don’t look like a happy camper.”

  “Mom said I had to have chicken tenders tonight,” he said in a sulky voice.

  “I thought you liked those.”

  “I like them from McDonald’s. She’s using the frozen kind.”

  “Ah,” I said, getting up and taking his hand. “Let’s go talk to Mom and see what’s what.”

  He jumped up and we walked into the kitchen. Chewy, who had been busy scratching at the fleas behind her ears, got up to join us. Gail had the refrigerator door open and was scanning through it carefully. She was still dressed in her business clothes, a gray suit with a white top. Her chestnut brown hair was loose and hung partway down her back. I gave her a quick hug from behind.

  “See anything interesting?” I asked.

  “Feels like you bought a lot of things at Costco the other day. But it was mostly fruits and vegetables, and nuts and candy. And frozen food. Lots of frozen food.”

  “We’re getting prepared for a long winter,” I said.

  She turned to me and gave a half-smile. I gave her a kiss. Her smile broadened a little. Marcus took that as a sign to jump in.

  “Mom, why can’t we have McDonald’s? I hate those frozen things.”

  “You don’t hate them, Marcus. You may be a little tired of them, though,” she said and turned to me. How do you feel about frozen lasagna tonight? Or frozen chicken parmigiana?”

  “Well, I had Italian food for lunch. Maybe another night?”

  “Hmmm. How do chicken tenders sound?”

  I thought about this for a very brief moment. “How does going out to dinner sound? My treat.”

  “Yay!” Marcus yelled.

  “Works for me,” Gail said. “Where to?”

  “McDonald’s!” Marcus offered.

  “Hmmm,” I said, looking at Gail frown. “I think Mom might want something a little nicer, don’t you think?”

  “What about sushi?” Marcus said. Last year I had taken Marcus to his first sushi bar, and I had assumed he’d be fine with just Miso soup and maybe Tamago, which is little more than sweetened scrambled eggs on top of a bed of rice. But when he saw they had eel and octopus on the menu, he insisted on trying them, and to our amazement, and maybe for shock value, he declared they were the best things he had ever eaten. It was a little pricey, but sushi became a part of our meal outings.

  I looked at Gail, who was not a sushi eater. “You think you can find something on U-Zen’s menu?”

  “Sure. As long as it’s cooked, I’m fine with that.”

  Marcus began to celebrate, and I went upstairs to change my clothes and stow m
y .357 in the safe. Gail didn’t like me carrying it when I was going out with the family; the odds of ever needing it were remote, and I always kept a firearm hidden in my Pathfinder, so one was not too far from reach. If we came upon trouble, I’d need to rely upon my razor wit.

  U-Zen was located on Santa Monica Boulevard, near Bundy. It was a Japanese restaurant that had been around for decades, long before sushi turned into a phenomenon. Once, sushi was more of a curiosity. But when the trend started, it hit L.A. hard, and soon there were sushi bars everywhere. We liked U-Zen because it was relatively cheap, and they had a full menu so Gail could have teriyaki, tempura or short ribs. And Marcus and I could indulge in raw fish, something in which he was beginning to take delight.

  The chefs welcomed us with their usual roar as we walked inside, the traditional greeting to make guests feel welcome. We sat at the sushi bar with Marcus in between Gail and I, and we combed through the menu. I didn’t see octopus, but I saw plenty of other things Marcus liked to sample.

  “You want eel?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. I love eel.”

  “And sweet shrimp?”

  “Yup.”

  “Want to try salmon eggs?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “What’s that?”

  “They’re like tiny little orange pellets filled with liquid. They burst open in your mouth.”

  “Yes!” he exclaimed.

  I smiled and ordered the same, along with a few more things for myself. Gail had the short ribs, and in an odd twist, her food, cooked as it were, came out a few minutes before our sushi. I tried to show Marcus how to use chopsticks again, but it was in vain, and I finally told him we’d try again another time. No sense in having him drop a piece of sushi on the floor because he couldn’t work the utensils. I told him using his fingers would be fine, but then decided to take him to the men’s room so he could wash his hands with soap. When we retuned, our food was waiting for us. Marcus picked up a few salmon eggs ladled over some rice and began eating them one by one.

  “Good,” I asked.