“Plausible. But I just can’t see Bozwell killing his meal ticket.”
“What if St. Claire went bughouse and attacked him?”
“Plausible,” Martin Welborn said. “If we ever catch the Vietnamese partner, he might verify that theory.”
“He’s about our last hope. Because when Bozwell shows up for his preliminary hearing on the goldbug robbery he’s not going to give us the time of day.”
“Not the time of day,” Martin Welborn said.
“Who came up with the snuff film idea? You or Ad Vice?”
“I did. It has to be that. I was sure of it after spending the afternoon at Ad Vice. I saw kiddy porn. I saw S and M films. It has to be that.”
“How do you feel after a day at the sewer cinema?”
“I feel like seeing Deedra tonight and talking about retirement.”
“Whose?”
“Mine. Hers.”
“You’ve only known this woman for a few days!”
“She hates the movie business. She’s getting out of it. Not because of me, of course.”
“Marty, don’t depend too much on this new … friendship.”
“Sometimes you have to take a chance, Al,” Martin Welborn said, and his long brown eyes had dropped at the corners and Al Mackey got nervous because they were starting to drift in and out of focus again.
One of the children in the kiddy porn looked exactly like Danny Meadows. Of course he knew it wasn’t, but he looked like Danny Meadows. Perhaps it was the glazed look in the child’s eyes when the man was sexually abusing him for the camera. The child was drugged and his mouth made the word, “Daddy?” Maybe that’s what made him think of Danny Meadows.
“Marty, I’m talking to you,” Al Mackey said.
“Huh?”
“Marty, you had that look again.”
“What look?”
“Were you thinking about Elliott Robles?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Marty. Elliott’s death wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes,” he said, ambiguously.
“What’re you gonna do tonight?”
Martin Welborn stared past Al Mackey and said, “I’m going to see Deedra. We’ll talk about painting. She’s a wonderful painter and she wants to teach me to skate. Think I’m too old?”
“You’re not too old, Marty,” Al Mackey said, hoping that Martin Welborn could see Deedra Briggs tonight. And that they’d talk about painting and roller skates.
At 7:30 that night, Deedra Briggs was home and answered the phone.
“Sergeant Elbowpatches!” she exclaimed. “I was hoping you’d call last night!”
“I wanted to, Deedra, but we were …”
“I’m so excited! I was busting to tell somebody! Do you remember the tall man with the silver hair who was talking to Herman’s mogul group?”
“Yes.”
“He called my agent yesterday. Personally! I’m getting the third lead in that South African picture I told you about!”
“He’s one of the men you despise,” Martin Welborn said.
“And third billing, Martin! Do you know what that means?”
“A lot of money.”
“The hell with the money! I’d pay them! Do you know what it means to my career at this point? Martin, I’m no kid. I thought it was over. The South African picture. God, I don’t even know the working title. Everyone’s talking about it!”
“The other producer who owns the rights,” Martin Welborn said, “is the one with the world’s largest porn collection.”
“They’ve become partners. God, I’m so excited I can’t come down off the ceiling. I have to tell people!”
“When will you be leaving?”
“They start shooting at the end of the summer if the script’s in shape.”
“I was wondering if you’d like some dinner tonight.”
“Oh, I can’t, Martin. I’ve been invited to discuss the project with them. Over dinner. I’m so sorry. Maybe tomorrow or the next day?”
“Sure. I’ll call.”
“I’m so excited!”
“Good-bye, Deedra.”
“Let’s get together for lunch, Sergeant Elbowpatches!” she said merrily.
When Martin Welborn hung up the phone he went to the kitchen and poured himself a tumbler of vodka. His lower back had begun hurting during the conversation with Deedra Briggs. Now the pain was getting unbearable. He gulped down the vodka like water, and it burned so much he gagged. Still, he poured another. He drank it the same way. The pain of the vodka didn’t dull the other. He was hammered with bolts of pain. He limped into the bedroom and stripped off all his clothes. He was in too much agony to satisfy his compulsion for neatness and order. He stepped out of his clothes where they lay and limped to the device in the corner of the bedroom. He groaned as he strapped himself into position. Then he let himself down until he was suspended upside down with his spine perfectly straight and his head three inches from the floor.
But the pain was not subsiding. He moaned again. It was hurting so much he started to weep. The tears were running the wrong way, into his eyebrows and hair instead of into his mouth. He wept like the little boy in the film he had seen today. The little boy was drugged, but still the pain had made him weep. When he wept he looked just like Danny Meadows.
It wasn’t as though it was a big deal homicide, Captain Woofer had said. It wasn’t any kind of homicide.
And it wasn’t often that veteran homicide detectives rolled on an all-units call unless it was code three. This was only a code two broadcast. The next-door neighbor who heard the boy whimpering on the service porch had been too hysterical to respond hysterically. She had simply told the communications operator that someone had been cut and to send the police and an ambulance. Then she hung up and couldn’t stop screaming even after the police arrived.
Martin Welborn remembered exactly what he and Al had been talking about when they heard the radio call. They had been discussing Paula’s agreement not to seek a divorce, thus remaining his spouse and heir as far as the Department was concerned. He was willing to pay her far more than she could have gotten in spousal support. A marriage was not dead without an official seal. Not in the eyes of man. God no longer mattered. But a bitter call from Paula for more money had precipitated a night of haunting loneliness.
Perhaps if Paula hadn’t called the night before. It had exhausted him physically as well as spiritually. He was in no condition to accommodate the meeting with Danny Meadows.
Perhaps if the radio call hadn’t been broadcast at that precise moment. Two minutes later they’d have been back at the station. Martin Welborn distinctly remembered what he had said when Al Mackey asked if he wanted to respond to the call since they were so close. He’d said, “I’m tired, Al. Do what you like.” The words were etched like a steel engraving. He remembered precisely.
If he hadn’t said the last part. If they’d been two blocks closer to the station. If the neighbor had responded more predictably, the call would have been code three, and a radio car would have arrived first.
Is that finally it? It’s all an accident? Coincidence? A series of tiny vagaries?
Mr. and Mrs. Meadows were clearly not evil people, the public defender had said. And he was clearly right. They hadn’t the dignity for evil. Wouldn’t that be the last laugh on all failed seminarians? There’s no evil. No good. No choices. Only accidents.
They arrived long before the first radio car. The screaming woman stood in front of Danny Meadows’ house. She never said a word. She didn’t even point. She looked at the house and screamed. Al Mackey took hold of her and she tried to talk. They couldn’t make sense of it. Martin Welborn drew his revolver and walked toward the house. He remembered distinctly what Al Mackey said: “Be careful, Marty.”
Al was coming up the steps when Martin Welborn stepped very cautiously into the ominous wood-frame house. There were three mottled puppies in the house. Urine and defecation from the puppi
es was everywhere. The house was rank with it. And with the smell of spilled beer and port wine. Martin Welborn was proceeding very carefully through the stink and debris when Al came through the door, gun in hand. They didn’t know what they were looking for.
Al Mackey nudged open a bedroom door and they both ducked back on either side. Al went into the bedroom first. The mattress was without sheets and stained with menstrual blood and urine and semen. The slipless pillows were as mottled as the puppies. As far as unfit homes go, this one wasn’t bad enough, not by legal definition. There was no broken and jagged window glass. No cans of toxic paint or chemicals, no vials of sedatives or other deadly substances.
The radio broadcast had called it an ambulance cutting. But who was cut? And where? Then they heard the whimpering from the service porch.
Martin Welborn walked through the befouled living room as the fat puppies squealed happily and bit at his pants cuffs. At first he thought the sound was from another puppy. Then he knew better. It was human whimpering. Then Martin Welborn met Danny Meadows.
He was lying on the service porch, huddling like a ragbag beneath the free-standing washtub. There was a pool of blood on the grimy linoleum in front of the washtub. One of the prancing puppies pattered through the puddle and hopped on Martin Welborn’s leg with bloody little paws when the detective knelt to peer at Danny Meadows.
Danny Meadows was eight years old. His face was ghostly. He was in shock. He stared with enormous blue eyes and said “Daddy?” to Martin Welborn.
Danny Meadows wore a filthy green T-shirt, socks, sneakers. He held his blue jeans in front of him as though he was ashamed. The jeans were blood-soaked. He looked Martin Welborn in the eyes and said, “Daddy?” The fat puppy splashed through the blood and scampered around Martin Welborn, trying to play with him.
Martin Welborn reached and gently took the bloody jeans away from Danny Meadows. The boy whimpered, but released his hold. Martin Welborn gasped and dropped his gun into the blood. It struck the puppy’s toe and the puppy yapped and ran crying into the living room. Danny Meadows looked at Martin Welborn and said, “Daddy?”
There was a yawning hole where the penis should have been. Most of the bleeding had coagulated and the gaping vertical wound oozed and drained, but was not pumping.
Al Mackey heard the siren first. His voice was unrecognizable. He said something to Martin Welborn about the ambulance.
“Who … hurt you?” Martin Welborn asked.
Danny Meadows said, “Daddy?”
Then through the storm of horror, it struck Martin Welborn! Where? Where?
“Son!” he said. “Where … where did … where …”
Martin Welborn started crying. The ambulance was pulling up in front of the house. Martin Welborn leaped up and began searching frantically. He tore at piles of dirty clothes. He ran to the sink. He stuck his hand in the garbage disposal. Martin Welborn slipped in the blood and fell down when he lunged into the living room.
He didn’t see the paramedics enter the house. He didn’t hear Al Mackey’s frantic instructions to them. He had to find it! He ran into the bedroom and looked first for the knife. He looked for more blood. He never heard Al Mackey yelling at him. The toilet!
He ran to the bathroom. He plunged his hand into the yellow water. Al Mackey was yelling at him.
Martin Welborn pushed his partner out of the doorway and surged back into the living room while the paramedics were running down the sidewalk with Danny Meadows wrapped in a blanket.
Martin Welborn found it in the living room. It was in an ashtray covered with cigarette butts. It had been burned. He was crying brokenly when he took it out of the ashtray. He went reeling into the bathroom and washed it in the sink. Al Mackey was shuddering and screaming in his ear.
“For God’s sake, Martin! Stop! For God’s sake!”
Martin Welborn wrapped it in a handkerchief and took it to Children’s Hospital. A surgical team worked for five hours reattaching it. They weren’t certain for ten days. Then they admitted that the operation was a failure. A second amputation was finally performed to save Danny Meadows’ life.
It was determined that both parents had played important roles in the six-month ordeal of their middle child, Danny Meadows, a chronic bed-wetter. Their other children had been neglected but never abused. The final act was in response to his final warning for bed-wetting. It was never precisely determined which one actually wielded the knife. They blamed each other.
And their son, Danny Meadows, met Martin Welborn and became an unrelenting little specter, among a host of other specters, who rose up to torment Martin Welborn in the night.
At last the blinding pain had begun to ease. He stopped weeping from the agony of it. He released the buckle and fell onto the floor of his bedroom. His naked body was drenched with sweat. He tried to sit up but had to lie down again. He tried a second time. He felt that all the blood in his body was surging and sloshing in his skull. He was too nauseous to get up. He pulled the blanket off the foot of the bed. The hardness of the floor offered some relief from the pain. He drew the blanket over him and fell asleep on the floor. He was terrified that the pain would return, but it didn’t.
18
The Crimson Slippers
The next afternoon they would get the biggest break in the Nigel St. Claire murder case that they could possibly get. The break was so sudden and so dramatic it virtually assured Al Mackey that he would never have to make an arrest in the Nigel St. Claire case. And that was the biggest break of all.
In the morning, Al Mackey arrived as usual at Martin Welborn’s apartment. Martin Welborn was not waiting out front so Al Mackey went to the door and knocked. He waited only a few seconds before reaching for the laminated police identification card. He thought of Marty hanging like a dead marlin, and started to panic as he struggled to slip the lock.
Then the door opened. Martin Welborn said, “You taking up housebreaking, Aloysius, my boy?”
He was showered and shaved and brushed and tailored. As neat as ever. But he was exceedingly pale, and dark under the eyes, and there was a wisp of a tremor in his voice when he said, “Well, my son, do you like my new suit? Do I glitter when I walk?”
Al Mackey didn’t like the way Martin Welborn glittered in the eyes. And he didn’t like the way Marty walked, or talked, or did anything else that day. Marty was out of focus most of the morning, which was devoted to playing catch-up on the mountain of paper work. They both shuffled paper until noon. Al Mackey was a wreck, and looked at Marty’s work for telltale lapses of coherence or continuity.
During his twenty-two years Al Mackey had known too many who succumbed to the Ultimate Policeman’s Disease. He had had a radio car partner in 1968 who, during a roll-call harangue on firearms safety which warned that twenty percent of the nation’s policemen shot on duty had been accidentally shot by other cops, had startled the assembly by crying out: “But what percentage shoot themselves?” He had that glittering, thousand-yard stare. Two weeks later, in the station parking lot, he shot himself and became part of the fearful statistic which the Department didn’t keep.
Just after noon Schultz and Simon invited the other team of homicide detectives to go for a bout of dysentery at their favorite burrito stand.
“Come on, Marty, let’s go. I haven’t done the chili cha-cha since yesterday,” Al Mackey said.
“You go, Al. I’m not hungry.”
“Come on, Marty. Get a bite to eat.”
“I’m not hungry, Al. You go ahead.”
Al Mackey reluctantly accompanied the behemoths, and got sick watching them consume four burritos each.
It was after one o’clock when they got back. Martin Welborn was not in the squadroom. Al Mackey checked the sign-out sheet and saw that Marty had listed his destination as personnel division. What would Marty be doing at personnel? But before he had time to give it much thought, The Big Break came.
The Ferret received a call from robbery downtown. When he hung up the
telephone he screamed “SON OF A BITCH!” so thunderously that Gladys Bruckmeyer came up out of her typing chair, ripping the knees of her pantyhose clear off her varicosed old wheels.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Ferret?” Schultz demanded.
“They shot the gook! And Just Plain Bill! They shot them both!”
There was no time to wait for Marty to return. There was no time for anything but for Al Mackey and the Ferret to drive code-three in a black-and-white radio car out the San Bernardino Freeway to the county hospital, where two robbery detectives met them at the elevator. On the way to the intensive care unit they learned that Bill Bozwell and his Vietnamese companion, whose California driver’s license showed his name to be Loc Nguyen, had experienced an even worse run of luck than usual when, at ten minutes past noon, they had held up a diamond merchant in a parking lot on Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. After slugging the merchant, who fought for his goods, they ran smack into three detectives from bunco-forgery who were screwing off in a department store looking for a sale on golf balls. In a one-sided gun battle the detectives put seven .38 rounds into Bill Bozwell and Loc Nguyen. Just Plain Bill Bozwell was D.O.A., and Loc Nguyen was not expected to survive the afternoon.
The robbery dicks said that there was a wise-ass young doctor in I.C.U. who knew that if a suspect doesn’t truly believe he’s going to die, and if he doesn’t in fact die, then a dying declaration is no good, legally speaking. Hence, he felt that detectives hovering over deathbeds giving a patient the Final Word was very bad for the prognosis of survival, however slim.
Al Mackey was nearly bonzo when they arrived at I.C.U. He was ready to throttle any young croaker who tried to prevent him from getting them out of this case so that they might go on a goddamn fishing trip or something, and get Marty some rest.
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