“Those are the first four names on the wanted suspects list for homicide.”
“Okay.” Neutral.
“You notice anything about them?” She already knows the answer but isn’t going to take a quiz so she waits for Hard to connect the dots. He gives her a look—didn’t she want to answer him? She keeps quiet. “Cali, I’m not saying this to be racist, which I’m not. But nearly all the homicides in the county are committed by people of Hispanic descent.”
“What of it?”
“If you catch my drift.”
“Not sure I do.”
“I don’t believe their race is predisposed to killing folks, but that’s the way it is in the desert. Statistically, I’m talking about. You could look it up.”
“Your point?”
“Do you hablo Espagnol?”
“Do all the detectives on the force speak Spanish?”
“That’s not what I’m asking. They were hired before that skill became a necessity. What with the shifting demographics and all.”
“Chief, all due respect, but I don’t think that’s the reason. I’m the only female detective, which isn’t something I should have to point out. I’m saying, respectfully, if a homicide occurs, I want a shot. I’m not asking to be the lead detective.” Hard bores into her with eyes that want to turn her to stone. Only thing Cali’s wondering is why she didn’t do this before. The boys club is on the run these days, pressure, lawsuits—the whole P.C. approach that she is not above exploiting. This bringer of morning donuts can also bring the pain of legal recourse. The sex incident rumbles like distant thunder so when he exhales through his nose it occurs to her that she has his big shoulders pinned to the floor. But she doesn’t want to press the point in a too obvious way. “I’ve been listening to language tapes,” she says, like a good girl. Allowing the man some dignity. No need to lord over him when she already has his balls in a vice.
“It’s good to have hobbies.”
“What I’m telling you, sir,”—the word sir served with a little vinegar—“is I’m learning how.”
“There’s never been a woman work a homicide on this force before.”
It sticks in Cali’s craw when people state a fact when they’re implying that the fact will continue to exist as a fact because it always has existed as a fact. She isn’t in the mood for Hard Marvin’s lack of imagination. “So you’re telling me if I spoke Spanish and had a penis I’d be in like Flynn?”
He had once again removed the golf tee from between his teeth and was halfway through swallowing another mouthful of Buck Rhino. Now he pulls out a pocket-handkerchief and wipes the dribble off his chin. Then he stares at her. “Put in a request and I’ll take it under advisement.”
“I’ve been on the force almost eight years.”
“And a detective for two goddamn months.”
“My evaluations have always been good.”
“I know that, too.”
A buzzer on Hard’s desk sounds. It’s his secretary letting him know the veterinarian is on the phone. Hard dismisses Cali with a curt wave of his hand. She grabs the donuts and retreats from the office. Cali knows this battle will be won and Hard doesn’t deserve any more of her donuts.
Dr. Foyle reports that while Bane’s heart and lungs appear perfectly normal the dog has apparently ingested some kind of sedative. The final results from the lab will be available later today. Before he places the phone back on the cradle he feels a murderous rage welling within his breast, impelling him to the door of his office and out of the building, on a mission to avenge the death of his dog. Hard longs for payback, short and brutal. But he remains in his seat. With the election coming up, he will need to act in a circumspect manner.
It is one thing to strike at him—that is something he can understand. It speaks to his warrior instinct. But to attack an innocent animal, albeit one that would have ripped you to bloody shreds should you have so much as arched an eyebrow the wrong way? That is entirely beyond the realm of acceptable human behavior and someone will be made to pay.
When Hard’s rage descends from homicidal heights to a more manageable level of distress he picks up the phone and calls Nadine. After one ring it goes to the answering message. Her cheery voice raises his aggravation level several notches, but he controls himself long enough to tell her to contact him immediately.
For the remainder of the day fury runs through Hard Marvin like a flash flood down a desert culvert, waxing and waning but never straying far from a base level of deep and abiding rancor. He reads reports, gives assignments, and eats a steak burrito at his desk but its impossible for him to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes on any task. Hard plots the kind of elaborate revenge fantasies that would land him in prison for decades. He agonizes and cogitates and doesn’t say a word to anyone. Not to Captain Delgado, Hard’s punctilious second in command, ten years his junior and with an eye on the chief’s job, or to Detective Sergeant Spooner, the man in charge of assignments and a protégé. Their daily meeting goes without a hitch and the two men leave Hard’s office with no sense anything is amiss. But its all Hard can do to keep from punching the wall when Dr. Foyle calls to tell him the toxology report she ran on Bane reveals that he probably died of a Valium overdose.
Hard is seated at his desk staring out over the parking lot to the arid hills in the distance and mumbling, almost chanting Crazy bitch murdered Bane, crazy bitch murdered Bane as if the words had the power to bestow shape and form on the incomprehensible. Crazy bitch murdered Bane . . .
“Chief?” Detective Arnaldo Escovedo is trying to get Hard’s attention. Says his name again. This time Hard whirls around in his swivel chair.
“I need you to sign some paperwork.”
Hard stares at Arnaldo with as black a look as the veteran detective has seen, and in a tone that sounds as if it is emanating from a crypt says, “And I need you to not stand there looking like a dumb fuckin worthless piece of shit Mexican and get the fuck out of my office.”
When Arnaldo retreats, Hard turns to face the portrait of General George S. Patton on the wall behind him. This is something he will do in moments of consternation, in the hope that he will be able to draw strength from beholding the visage of the war hero. The town of Desert Hot Springs is not where Hard wants to end up. Lost in the foothills of the Little San Bernardino Mountains, no one outside the desert has ever heard of it. Why couldn’t Hard have become the Police Chief of Palm Springs, a glamorous place known the world over? Why is he stuck in this sun-baked ordinariness surrounded by trailer parks stuffed with retirees? Why must he work with idiots? He is usually able to keep these feelings repressed, but when someone kills your dog, they can start to seep out.
Before returning to his work, Hard takes a last look at General Patton and shakes his head in dismay. He’s glad the General is unable to see Harding Marvin. He knows the great warrior would not be impressed. It is Hard’s urgent intention to change that.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Fake ‘n’ Bake is a clean, well-lighted place. Wheat-colored industrial carpet covers the floor and the walls are painted lavender. Toward the back of the room are five tanning booths, two vertical and three horizontal. Shelves are lined with moisteners, tanning creams, and exfoliation unguents. Canned ukulele music embroiders the room.
Nadine hates the ukulele. She would have preferred something more aggressive but Krystle, the owner, refuses to play anything else. The woman recently returned from a Hawaiian cruise to celebrate her third divorce and in the last week has installed several potted palms and hung a large framed map of the Hawaiian Islands behind the reception desk. As she and Nadine were vacuuming out the tanning beds, she announced that Fake ‘n’ Bake would be rebranded with a tropical motif to make it stand out from the local competition. A sign with the words Hawaiian Heaven is on order.
In a Hawaiian shirt and baggy flowered shorts, Nadine sits alone behind the glass counter. Her flip-flops are on the floor next to her. She can’t decide which is more annoying: t
he ukulele music or the outfit her job requires. Earlier she had put on a CD by a goddess of hip-hop. There is a woman: an African-American-Amazon songstress who takes no shit from men. Nadine admires that, wants to channel some of that hip-hop deity attitude and use it in her own life. Would the goddess have approved of how she had attacked Hard? Tough to say. In the light of day Nadine worries that drugging the dog was a little overboard, but she believes the singer would have loved the way she stuck Hard with the salad fork.
Unfortunately, Nadine had to rein in the musical mojo an hour ago when Krystle, a large, extremely tan woman in a tropical print muu-muu, stopped by and heard the gynocentric hip-hop. She had said not only do I hate that shit but the next time I walk in here and don’t hear a ukulele playing you’re fired. Nadine would have liked to quit on the spot and is still in a bad mood about not being in a financial position to walk away.
Other than Krystle’s unscheduled drop-in, it has been a quiet morning at Fake ‘n’ Bake. A local podiatrist stopped by for his weekly bronzing, and a single woman who had moved to the desert from Kansas has just begun a twenty-minute session in booth #2. Nadine has straightened up, finished her coffee, and is on the Internet researching the city of Seattle. She has to get away from the desert, from Hard Marvin. If she stays here things will only get worse.
The bells on the door announce a visitor and Nadine looks up from a photograph of Puget Sound. A thin, blonde man dressed in a dark suit glances around. She forces herself to smile.
“Are you interested in tanning?” She hates to ask this question. If he was interested in fruits and vegetables or shoes would he be in Fake ‘n’ Bake? But Krystle insists on it and for all Nadine knows she sent this guy to check on whether her employee is sticking to the script. “We have two intense UVB beds and three browning UVB beds. Would you be interested in an individual session or a membership?”
He walks silently across the carpet, peers around the place.
“We offer a starter session for five dollars,” she recites. “One week is twenty-five, two weeks is thirty, one month is forty. Payable cash, check, or credit card.”
Now he is standing directly across the counter from her. Whoever this person is, Nadine doesn’t like him. Why won’t he say anything? She notices that he is squeezing a tennis ball in his left hand.
“How are you, Nadine?”
His voice is quiet, sinuous, almost a purr. How does he know her name? She hopes he doesn’t work for the bank that owns the mortgage on her house. What’s the punishment for squatting?
“I’m good.” Suspicious. Has be been here before? No, she would have remembered. “Are you here for tanning?”
This guy is giving her the creeps. It’s a bright day outside and they’re in a mini-mall just off Route 111. It’s not like anything can happen. Still, she wishes Krystle had installed some kind of panic button. The man gives her a look—is that sympathy?—and puts his hands on the counter. Nadine notices a ring with a blue stone on his left hand. He leans toward her. “You need to play within your game, Nadine.”
“Sir, are you here for tanning?”
“A good player doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks.”
She ceases to notice the ukulele music wafting through the room. Out of a pale face now devoid of expression—where has the sympathy gone?—his intense blue eyes stare through her.
“You can serve and volley, but if you underestimate your opponent, if you make the slightest tactical error . . . ” and here he pauses, as if he is daring her to say something. When she remains silent, he continues, “Your opponent will hit a winner.”
Nadine isn’t sure what he is talking about but senses it’s some kind of threat. Did Hard send this guy? He doesn’t seem like a cop, but how can you tell? She doesn’t like to be threatened. Hard had provoked her and look what she’d done to him. It was only a matter of time before she and Krystle crossed swords. But this guy? This pale, thin, weak-looking reed? Who is he to come in here and try to intimidate her? Rising from her stool, she places her hands on her hips.
“Know what I did yesterday? I jammed a fork into my boyfriend’s neck and he’s a way scarier dude than you.”
“Really?” Flat. Giving her nothing.
“Yeah, really,” she says, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “Now, if you don’t get your ass out of here, I’m gonna call the police.”
“You were always an amateur, weren’t you?” he asks, apparently unmoved by her bluster. His steely affect is starting to unnerve her. “The game is different on the amateur level,” he says. “You never played professionally.”
The slight man with the thinning blond hair regards Nadine dispassionately. The slender vein that runs along his right temple appears to quiver slightly. She tries to stare him down. The space they share seems to shrink to nothing more than the distance between them. She is conscious only of his presence. Suddenly, she has the urge to urinate. That her mouth is dry and her breath shallow is something of which she is not aware. Then he reaches into his pocket and Nadine realizes she’s about to be shot. Her mind flashes to her father and a trip they took to an ocean pier when she was six. At sunset they rode a Ferris wheel and Nadine remembers the way the indigo horizon seemed to elongate as if toward infinity. When the Ferris wheel reached it apex for the first time, her hands flew into the air. Which is where they are right now. The man sees this and his thin lips twist upward. He’s holding a tennis ball. A yellow tennis ball. Nadine exhales. She lowers her hands. He tosses the ball toward her and she reflexively grabs it. If a raptor could smile it would look like the man in front of her. He says: “Next time you won’t see it coming.”
She has no idea what makes her say this but the words “Try me!” come flying out of her mouth. Instantly, she would like to bring them back, to snatch them out of the ether, deposit them once again on her tongue and from there transport the two words back to their place of origin in the dark recesses of her brain but of course this is something she is unable to do. The man’s laugh is dry and brittle.
When he turns and strides toward the door, his oxblood loafers are silent on the carpet. She watches as he walks past the plate glass window and disappears. The tropical music is playing again. Traffic glides past on the road. Life, which had stopped moving, resumes. Should she report this? After what she had done, would Hard even allow the police to help her?
A perfectly restored burgundy 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado is parked outside an empty storefront. Maxon sits in the driver’s seat watching the door of the tanning salon. After a moment, he opens the glove compartment, removes his Smith and Wesson .38 and checks the load. The gun was purchased from an unlicensed dealer at a gun show in Riverside and is untraceable. Right now, he regrets not showing it to Nadine. Perhaps that might have had the desired effect. This woman was impossible to get a read on. That she was nervous he was certain. But there was something in the way they had interacted that makes him believe she might be a little unstable. Stabbing her boyfriend with a fork was obviously a lie, but the story itself concerned him. If this was how her mind worked, she could be a problem. Actually, she already is a problem, which is why Maxon is here. His task in going to see her was to determine the degree to which this problem could metastasize. The prognosis: not good.
He takes a last look at Fake ‘n’ Bake. Nadine is still inside. Maxon thinks about his father, who lives outside of Washington, D.C. with a woman who is not Maxon’s mother. He knows the man to be ruthless, someone who never lets sentiment get in the way of achieving what he wants. Maxon has often wondered whether he possesses his father’s gene for ruthlessness, to leave no wounded on the battlefield. He thinks perhaps he does. But now he places the gun back in the glove compartment, starts the engine, pulls out of the parking lot and calculates the wisdom of doing nothing.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The District Attorney’s Indio branch office is on the top floor of the four-story glass and sandstone County of Riverside Administrative Center on Highway 111
a few miles south of where the road becomes the Deputy Bruce Lee Memorial Highway. The Investigators’ office is in the basement of the building. An entire subterranean hallway is lined floor to ceiling with boxes of case files, crimes, tragedies, lives rendered in ink and slowly decomposing paper, stacked, filed, crammed, forgotten. Jimmy is standing with Senior Investigator Oz Spengler who is showing him around. Around forty, and gym-toned, his dark hair is buzz cut. He holds ceramic coffee cup advertising a local casino. Oz gestures toward the mountains of legal records.
“We’re putting the files into digital format. There must be a million.” Jimmy nods, trying to look interested. It’s his first day on the new job and he wants to make a good impression, figures if they like him they’re more inclined to leave him to his own devices. “There were this many when I got here. Pile’s no smaller now. What you need to understand is it’s not gonna be any smaller when you leave. So don’t drive yourself nuts over anything.”
Jimmy assures him that he won’t.
Oz moves down the hallway. Jimmy is now one of ten investigators working out of this office. Oz is his immediate boss, the man he will be reporting to and Jimmy likes him well enough. They push through the double doors leading to the investigators’ bullpen. The room is about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. There are ten cubicles, several of which are occupied by investigators talking on the phone, doing paperwork, writing checks to their divorce lawyers. The offices of the higher-ups in the Investigations Department, the guys who would rate windows and doors if they weren’t in a basement, surround the room.
“Every Monday morning,” Oz tells him, “Five new felony files land on your desk. So what you need to do is allocate your time.” Pointing to an empty cubicle in the middle of the room where a desktop computer sits on a work surface bare but for several manila files, Oz says, “That’s your space. Do with it what you want but keep it neat.”
Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) Page 12
