Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  Joyce laid off me in the story, even though she knew there were already two excessive-force complaints in my personnel jacket. She focused instead on my otherwise sterling record as a patrolman, and while noting that my father was a career thug serving a manslaughter beef in San Quentin, she spun it as a positive thing, the Wunderkind Raised by Wolves. She praised LAPD for giving me the chance, for not visiting the sins of the father upon the son. Together with my record and test scores, her spin had just the right movement with the brass, and my detective application squeaked through after two more interviews than usual—one with the chief himself.

  I touch Joyce’s shoulder and say, “Thanks, Joyce. I owe you.”

  “You better believe you do, baby,” she says, patting my chest and stroking it a time or two before removing her hand with a sigh. “I’ll call you tomorrow to see what you guys turn up on this, all right? I need to run now.”

  “You do?”

  She then leans in to me to speak low. “I do, yes, but you give me a call when you split with that gun-toting psycho you’re dating—which, knowing you, will happen any minute. I’ll let you bring a bottle of wine or two over to my place.”

  “How about tonight, when I’m through with this?”

  She smiles. “You and Liz split?”

  I shrug. “I’ll give her the news on the way over to your place.”

  She shakes her head—same old Crooch. “You are kidding me, right?”

  I nod. “Yeah, I am. Liz and I split about a week ago.”

  A wink. “Still have my cell number?”

  I nod again.

  “I’m busy tonight and out of town tomorrow. Call me the day after.”

  The word shit crosses my mind; the day after tomorrow does nothing for me tonight.

  Smiling, Joyce walks out of the park the way I entered it.

  Zoppoth holds out his hands in a gesture of apology as soon as I get to him. “Sorry, all right? I was just trying to be funny.”

  Zoppoth is shallow, a real bonehead, and beating up on him any more than I already have would be like throwing rocks at a lame dog. There’s a jealousy in him that’s understandable. He came up during a time when it took a guy like me ten, fifteen years to make detective, and I aced a test, got some lucky publicity, and passed him by after six. “I’ve let it go already, Zopp. Just give me a little respect and we’ll get along.”

  Relieved, he lights a smoke, nodding.

  I scan the immediate vicinity of the park and take some deep breaths to clear my head, to get it into the game. After getting the lay of the land and tucking Joyce and the old man as deep into the folds of my brain as possible, I turn to Zopp and tilt my head over my left shoulder. “What do we have back there?”

  He glances to his right, toward the body. “A young Asian girl—tech says she’s probably Cambodian—eighteen, nineteen, give or take, strangled.”

  Strangled, great, I think as a chill runs through me. Might as well finish my day the way I started it.

  Zoppoth continues, thankfully interrupting my thoughts. “She hasn’t been identified yet.”

  “No identification on her?”

  “Nope. We have a witness, though, some crackhead who told Walt”—Walt being George Disney, Zopp’s partner—“that he saw some big black dude take off from inside those bushes there, where the girl is, and run like crazy toward Wilshire. He said the guy had a purse in his hand.”

  “He see the attack?”

  Zopp shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Hear anything that sounded like an attack in progress?”

  “Nope. He said he was just walking along the path and saw the guy bolt.”

  “The wit give a good description of the black dude?”

  Zopp shrugs. “Sounded okay. Said he was a huge black guy, baggy jeans and white football jersey of some sort. Said he looked dirty, homeless.”

  “That’s more or less how the wit who reported the body described him, too,” I say. “Did Walt ask his wit if he’s the same guy who called the station?”

  “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.”

  “I’ll talk to Walt later. Who’s looking for the suspect?”

  “Got three cruisers crawling the area, four more uniforms on foot.”

  “Anyone pulled the sticks from the surveillance cameras?”

  Zopp looks embarrassed by my question. “Walt said he’d check on it.”

  Not that the cameras are likely to do any good. About three years ago, when gangs were driving people who could even remotely be described as “normal” away from MacArthur Park, the chief’s office raised private donations to add to a federal grant and had surveillance cameras installed in the park. It reduced crime, but the chief couldn’t raise enough money to maintain the cameras. Lately they’ve been fucking up a lot, either with the data storage mechs crashing or the cameras themselves just blinking out. Recently the cameras failed to capture the commission of a few high-profile crimes—the most notorious being the shooting death last spring of a two-week-old baby when a gangbanger opened fire on a rival—and the word spread among the predators that feed on park patrons. Now MacArthur Park is even more of a war zone than it was before installation of the cameras.

  I look around. The cameras to our rear, to the west, the ones placed on Park View where I parked, are notoriously unreliable. General Services maintains the ones to our left, to the north, that are placed on Sixth, and usually work better—not perfect, just better.

  “Maybe you should call Walt and see what he found out.”

  He nods.

  I look out toward Park View, noting that bushes and trees completely obscure the scene from anyone looking in from the street or sidewalk. Still, someone could have seen the victim or her assailant before they got to this point. “Zopp,” I say, twisting my body back to him, “anyone thought of canvassing the open businesses around the park?”

  “We got all available manpower on the black dude now, man.”

  “Yeah, but let’s do it as soon as we catch him.”

  “Sure, man, sure.”

  “All right, I’m going to check out the body.”

  When Zopp starts to follow I say, “Didn’t I tell you to call Walt?”

  “I will.”

  “Do it now. Do it from here, and stay here to keep the gawkers out.”

  The body is not far away, just under a bank of bushes about ten feet off a paved path that winds around the park’s perimeter. I stop at the tape, unsure whether the crime scene tech has finished working the ground beneath my feet. The tech is Benny Murata, a tall, lanky kid with a burr haircut who’s fairly new to the job—a little spacey, maybe, but word around the division is he’s shaping up to be pretty good. He’s bent over the corpse, running a flashlight under its short skirt and peeking between its legs.

  “Benny.”

  This startles him. “Crooch,” he says, jerking his head from underneath the corpse’s miniskirt with something approaching embarrassment in his face.

  “Got all the impressions you need?” An implicit request to enter the immediate killing ground; it would be as negligent as it gets to trample any uncollected footprints.

  “Yeah, I got what there is, come on in,” he says, peeking back under the girl’s skirt as if to double-check something. “The soil around the vic was soggy from the storm, which was good and bad.” He looks back at me. “One set’s almost perfect—big as a fuckin’ yeti, man, like, size-fifteen sneakers. Got some others that are smudged and practically useless, anywhere from size eight to ten. The big foot stomped all over the smaller ones.”

  “Any sign of sexual assault?”

  He shakes his head, licks his lips, and casts his eyes down briefly, more clearly embarrassed now. “No labial irritation apparent, no semen leakage. But she, uh, isn’t wearin’ panties, which makes me think, you know?”

  “Zopp says she’s Cambodian?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to tell from just her facial features. Could be Laotian or Thai, but she ha
s a tatt on the back of her right shoulder I’ve seen before—Five Rows, I think it’s called, Cambodian religious script….It’s supposed to protect the wearer from harm.”

  Shaking my head at that, sighing, I duck the tape, step to Benny’s right, and get down on my haunches to examine the body.

  The stench of vacated bowels makes me queasy, which is something that never makes me queasy. Hell, fully ripe corpses, autopsies, maggot-infested kitchens that haven’t been cleaned in years, none of that ever makes me queasy.

  The girl is on her back, turned slightly on her left side with her face away from me. One arm is flung wide, the other curled overhead as if positioned to perform a funky pirouette, and she has plastic baggies over her hands that Benny placed there to preserve trace evidence. The first thing I notice is her figure. A nice figure, full breasts but not what you’d call big, trim yet toned just enough to be described as muscular. Light-brown skin, clear and unmarked except for the tattoo Benny mentioned. The tatt isn’t what you’d describe as slutty, just five rows of neatly drawn script, Khmer script.

  Stamped on her.

  For protection.

  She wears a pink spandex miniskirt and a lime-green halter top of the same material, one pink platform slipper completely on, one almost off, with the ankle strap barely holding it on. Alternating pink- and green-painted toenails, identically painted fingernails. She’s muddy head to toe, which along with the disturbed earth indicates there was a struggle before the killer got the best of her. Shoulder-length black hair streaked chestnut brown, soaked from rain, tangled from the struggle, but the precise, feathery cuts suggest it was professionally styled and colored. Nice makeup—well, you could tell it was nice once; now it’s runny and smudged from the rain and the trauma.

  I lean over to get a close look at her face, flashing it with my penlight, and…almost lose it….What surely would have been beautiful eyes were bulging and shot with ruptured blood vessels, her pupils as black as marbles.

  Another irrepressible flashback: Macky’s eyes, his face.

  I pinch the bridge of my nose, squint.

  “You okay?” Benny asks.

  “Sure,” I say. “Yeah.”

  Benny comments that the welts and swelling around her throat and neck area makes her cause of death easy to call. “No sign of any type of ligature,” he says. “Looks like the perpetrator did it manually.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, yeah.”

  He eyes me again. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I shoot him a warning glance.

  He pauses to soak up my message, keeping one eye trained on me, then goes back to the corpse. “Her makeup’s awful heavy and she’s dressed like a tramp. Makes you think she was hookin’, huh?”

  To the extent that’s a question, I ignore it, noticing the girl’s pink lipstick is smeared and her eyes are pooled in watery eye shadow and mascara. The earlier rain had made both run. As had her tears.

  I switch off my penlight and look away, the expression on the girl’s face staying with me—one of confusion, as if she was trying to remember something that had slipped her mind, or more like one of profound wonderment, as if she just couldn’t believe some lowlife had strangled her and left her dead under a fucking bush.

  And now my whole day—hell, maybe my whole fucked-up life to this point—just clenches itself into a fist as big as an asteroid and crashes between my eyes.

  I stand and walk away, stunned and nauseated, feeling as if I’m suckin’ air through a clogged straw, a rushing sound pounding my ears so hard I only faintly hear Zopp’s cellphone ring in the background, barely hear Benny again ask me if I’m all right…sensing his hand clutch my arm but not really feeling it…hear Zopp say something about somebody finally running down the suspect…and I don’t care one damned bit at this point.

  I shrug Benny’s hand from my arm and step into the park, into a clearing, put my hands on my hips and gulp cool night air, tilt my head back to the sky and gaze at the heavens.

  Babe and Leo

  “Good morning, my son.”

  “I just got home and checked my mailbox. You didn’t drop off my damn money last night.”

  “Yeah I did, along with a new disposable phone— You mean it’s not there?”

  “Sonofabitch, somebody ripped off thirty-five gr— Hey, wait a minute.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re fuckin’ with me, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t drop off the cash.”

  “Right.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Had you going there.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Then why am I smiling?”

  “…”

  “Leo?”

  “I’m calming down before I say something I regret.”

  “A lesson you learned from me, remember?”

  “…”

  “The least you can do is acknowledge the positive influence I had on you.”

  “You’re not going to cough up the cash ’til you see me in person, are you?”

  “That is the plan, yes.”

  “When and where do you want to meet?”

  “You sound desperate. Drop a bundle at the track last night?”

  “When and where do you want to meet?”

  “Today, Dodgers-Giants, four o’clock.”

  “What’s with this ball game jones you have goin’ on? You actually think taking me to a ball game’s going to square everything between us?”

  “We have to start somewhere.”

  “Old man, you got started yesterday, when you used me to get close to our friend.”

  “That was business.”

  “Business that you still owe me a lot of dough for conducting.”

  “You will be paid.”

  “Not if it means meeting you in public. I’m still uncomfortable at the thought of being seen with you. It’s too soon after, well…our friend.”

  “Maybe you will feel better about it tomorrow. The Mets are in town, a night game.”

  “Give it up, old man, damn….Look, I gotta go.”

  “Why the rush?”

  “I, I…Jesus, excuse me.”

  “My son, that was one major-league yawn there. Did a recent event crawl inside your head last night and keep you from sleeping like I said it would?”

  “Not what you think, no. I was up practically all night working a new murder case. That’s, uh, why I have to go. The watch commander just called and the case is heating up.”

  “Somebody got murdered, huh….Anybody I know?”

  Babe

  Sitting on my postage-stamp patio in old khaki shorts and a wifebeater, enjoying the morning sun while nursing a bottle of Miller High Life, I note that my backyard is even more patchy and weed-infested than it was before I went to prison. The soil back here has been infertile for years, and Lorraine always claimed my father’s cremated remains were the cause of it. Knowing she was superstitious to the point of lunacy, I should have known better than to tell her the story that inspired this delusion.

  Just after we married, at the height of a vodka-fueled rage, I removed my father’s urn (a milk carton, actually; I converted the ceramic urn that originally contained his ashes to a flower vase) from its place of honor under the garage workbench and dumped his ashes in the southwest corner of the yard. Then I watered them down with a bladder-full of piss. Lorraine genuflected upon hearing this story, saying my father’s vengeful ghost haunted the soil and would allow no vegetation to thrive here. To say we hotly debated this theory would be to put it mildly. After I basically told her she was a lunatic, she said, “You’re in denial about your father. You’ll never be able to cope with his memory until you make peace with his ghost.”

  This memory bubbles to the surface and I say out loud, “Oh, really, Lorraine?” while rising from the wrought-iron chair on my patio. For what could easily be the thousandth time, I amble over to the southwest corner of the backyard and piss on the bare patch of gro
und that passes for my father’s grave.

  “Ahh,” I say. “Here’s coping with your memory, you cocksucker.”

  I am almost finished urinating when this raspy voice chimes in behind me. “Reel in that hose, man. It’s me.”

  I look over my shoulder to find Chief standing on my patio. He wears the same tired suit of clothes he wore yesterday—black suit, white shirt, black tie—except now they appear completely exhausted. He has two takeout sacks and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s clutched in one hand, and a green, battle-scarred Coleman cooler in the other. He places both sets of goodies on the wrought-iron table beside him and walks over to me, his loping stride reminding me of the so-called Bigfoot depicted in that sketchy home video taken in the wilderness of Northern California.

  He gets close and says, “You been desecratin’ your old man’s grave again?”

  I reel in the hose, zip up, check my watch. “Where have you been?”

  He scrunches his unibrow and stretches out his hands, palms up in a What the fuck? gesture. “You said be here at nine and now it’s nine.”

  “You are always a half hour early, at least.”

  “You’re just gonna hav’ta get used to me bein’ right on time, man, especially in the morning. I’m gettin’ old.”

  “Bullshit,” I say. “You are in your prime, just like me.”

  He shakes his head and pats my shoulder as he leads me back to my chair on the patio, saying, “That’s right, sure, sure,” humoring me as if I am a demented nursing-home patient.

  We get to the patio and he snatches my empty beer bottle from the table, gives it a little shake. “This soldier’s dead,” he says, and pops the top of the cooler, reaches into it, comes up with an icy bottle of Miller High Life and hands it over after twisting off the top. “Here’s one that’s got some real fight in it, been on ice all night….Have a seat and I’ll be right back.” He takes the sack with him through the back door to my kitchen.

  He returns with a plate of food in each hand, placing one on the table before me along with a plastic fork, a folded paper napkin, and two bottles of hot sauce, one green tomatillo and the other Tabasco. Three soft tacos are on my plate, ground beef ones wrapped in grease-spotted paper with the El Matador Taco Truck logo on it, and a baked egg on the side that comes from the Nickel Diner on Main.