Pacific Homicide

by Patricia Smiley

  He shuffled along the boardwalk scouting for kindred spirits, moving with caution to avoid detection by government agents who had him under surveillance twenty-four/seven. As an added precaution, he had lined his watch cap with strips of Mylar to scramble the government’s global positioning satellites.

  The cold weather held foot traffic to a minimum, so it took fifteen minutes before he spotted two men huddled against the side of a building. Arnie was a black man he knew from the shelter. His mind was dust from too many drugs and too many days on the street. Cysts covered his face. He scratched at them constantly. It drove Rags crazy. Still, the two remained friendly because Rags saw no evil in Arnie’s eyes.

  The other man was a stranger and white, like Rags. Arnie introduced him as Beau Fischer. When Beau spoke, Rags was sure he heard the whirring of a tape recorder beneath that bulky parka of his, feeding every word he said into a database at the Pentagon. The voices in his head warned him that Beau was bad news, but this time he didn’t listen because Arnie announced he had a little over seventeen dollars. Add that to the five from the lady cop and the three twenty-five from the coin box, they had enough cash to score some H. Beau, though he claimed to have no cash, knew a dealer in the area who could provide the goods.

  They bought the H, but the dealer didn’t have any spare syringes, so Rags let Beau and Arnie use his to inject their share of the heroin. Three hypes on a spike was like playing Russian roulette, but Rags’s need for the drug compelled him to spin that cylinder.

  As soon as Beau and Arnie nodded off, Rags stashed the remaining heroin in his backpack and headed to Pacific Avenue, where, for the past several nights, he had slept in the alley behind an appliance store in a cardboard box that had once housed a Sub-Zero refrigerator.

  It took effort to crawl into the box because of the mountains of scar tissue in the crooks of his arms. Once inside, he took the drug paraphernalia from his backpack: the bottom half of a soda can, a disposable lighter, and the used syringe. He placed the brown rocks of heroin into the can and melted it with the lighter. When the H was cooked he filled the syringe, anticipating the warmth that would flush his skin. His chin would drop to his chest, and his eyelids would flutter and struggle to stay open. A moment later he would be floating, his limbs sagging in surrender. Sweet Jesus, he thought. Take me home.

  It was impossible to find a vein in either arm. He had blown those long ago. He opened the box’s north-facing flap to get some light. He pulled off his shoe and guided the needle toward the skin between his toes, but the point was too dull to penetrate the scar tissue. His hand trembled. The need was gaining strength.

  The muffled roar of a vehicle entering the alley stole his attention. Cars sometimes nosed into the lane, but once they saw the orange LADWP barricades blocking the exit, they usually turned around. This vehicle crept forward. More bad luck, he thought.

  It wasn’t G-men. They couldn’t have found his hideaway—he was too clever for them—but it might be the cops. He wondered if the owner of the appliance store had called to complain about him. Rags had failed several stints in rehab. The judge would send him to jail this time, maybe for a long time. He couldn’t survive that.

  He weighed his need for the drug against another arrest on his rap sheet and knew he had to get rid of the heroin. There was nowhere to hide the syringe and he was too sick to run. He pitched the soda can, needle and lighter into the alley as far as his stiff arm could manage, hoping it would fall shy of the street where a passerby might steal it. Maybe the cops would just roust him from the box and leave so he could get the syringe before the need consumed him. For now, there was nothing to do but wait.

  The vehicle drove past his box and stopped near the barricades at the end of the alley. Rags heard a car door open. He suppressed the urge to cough. Despite the frigid air, sweat formed on his chest, saturating the newspapers under his clothes.

  Rags gathered his courage and peered out of the south-facing flap of the box. An SUV was parked at the end of the alley near the street. It wasn’t a cop car. Even undercover rides were never that new or that clean. His body trembled as he remembered the SUV from a few nights ago and wondered if it were the same one. The driver might have come back to kill him for what he saw.

  He heard a car door close and shoes scrape across the pavement. He focused on those footsteps. Light gait. A clicking sound. A woman’s high heels. Then he saw her. She was wearing a dress and carrying a box toward the back entrance of a shop. Not like the other night.

  Rags agitated the Mylar on his watch cap but it didn’t cleanse his mind of the memories of that other SUV. It had driven into the alley just like this one. A man dressed in blue jeans and a dark hooded sweatshirt struggled with something pale and limp at the rear door of the vehicle. A moment later, the object fell to the ground with a thud. At first glance, the thing had looked like a giant octopus with seaweed tangled around its tentacles, but there were only four appendages. An octopus had eight. The need had made it difficult for him to concentrate.

  Rags remembered squinting until his vision cleared. That’s when he saw a woman lying on the ground at the rear of the SUV. She had long blonde hair tangled around her torso. She was naked. Unconscious. Maybe dead.

  His heart had felt as if it might explode. He wanted to help the woman, but the voices in his head screamed a warning about the powerful forces aligned against him and that he would survive only with constant vigilance. He wanted to tell the voices to shut up, but his parched tongue was too thick to form words. He had retreated into a far corner of the refrigerator box, trying without success to control his trembling. From the alley, he had heard the man grunting from exertion and the scraping of metal against pavement. Then something heavy hit the ground with the force of an aftershock.

  After the SUV had left, Rags made a slow turn to look for the woman but she was gone. He felt bad about not helping her. He didn’t know if the man had taken her away, or if she had left on her own two feet. Even now, he wondered if he had imagined the whole thing.

  The woman with the package was taking her own sweet time in the shop. Rags was beside himself by the time she backed the SUV down the alley and disappeared into traffic. He had to get his heroin back. He crawled out of the box and staggered toward the syringe, only to find that the woman’s SUV had crushed it beneath its wheels. He scooped the heroin residue into his hand and licked it from his palm, knowing it would not be enough to feed his hunger.

  The screaming in his head escalated until the sound was unbearable. He yanked his watch cap over his ears and slumped to the ground, tapping his fingers on the pavement and humming tonelessly, hoping to block spy satellites from reading his thoughts.

  13

  Fifteen minutes after leaving Inky Dink Tattoos, Davie arrived at the station. Vaughn wasn’t at his desk. The books on her shelf had fallen over again. She rearranged them before slipping the Karen Skjelstad interview notes into the Murder Book. She was reaching for her cell phone to text Vaughn when she heard him call her name. She looked up to see him walking toward her with a paper coffee cup in his hand—a latte, she suspected.

  “We can scratch Andre Lucien off the suspect list,” Vaughn said. “I talked to his mommy. She claims little Andy was at her place last weekend from about four on Saturday afternoon until Tuesday at about two. He was never out of her sight and she’ll swear to that in court.”

  Lucien was an obvious suspect, but clearing him meant Davie had to look beyond the obvious and find the loose thread, some piece of minutiae that unraveled the case.

  Vaughn held up a set of cars keys. “Here’s the good news. I found Troy Gallway. You can tell me how brilliant I am on the way to his crib.”

  It took twenty minutes to steer the car from the station to the Wilshire exit of the freeway, past the Westwood Boulevard intersection to Gallway’s condominium. She was relieved when Vaughn asked her to drive so he could answer his emails. Her
partner was easily distracted. She always felt safer when she was behind the wheel.

  Vaughn looked up from his phone. “RACR found a Russian speaker. Since Lucien identified the body, I told the translator to meet us at the station tomorrow to help interview Anya’s father.”

  “The father doesn’t know Anya’s dead.”

  “He will soon enough.”

  The car smelled of cinnamon sprinkled on top of the latte Vaughn had wedged between his knees. His thumbs sped across the keypad of his cell phone, likely texting his latest love interest, a P-3 who worked in the West L.A. Community Relations Office, a unit everybody in the department shortened to its initials and pronounced “crow.”

  “How’d you find Gallway?”

  “Everything you ever wanted to know about him is on his Facebook page.”

  Vaughn rattled off the bullet points of Gallway’s bio: has an MFA from Yale in Graphic Design, works as a graphic artist, specializes in creating corporate identities, designs movie posters for various Hollywood studios. A link on his page led to an art gallery on Melrose that sold his oil paintings. Gallway had accomplished much in his life. Davie wondered if his talents included murder.

  Vaughn hadn’t told Gallway that Anya had been murdered, only that she was missing. Davie wanted to watch his reaction when she broke the news, to study his body language for signs that he already knew she was dead.

  Rays from the winter sun filtered through gauzy clouds, casting muted shadows on the high-rise condominiums that lined Wilshire Boulevard. A flock of crows banked over a row of palm trees and landed on a patch of grass, pecking the soil for brunch—out-of-towners wintering in L.A.

  “I love this part of the boulevard,” Vaughn said. “No parked cars. No telephone lines. No trash. Neat and clean. Back in the eighties I hear you could get a free Rolls Royce if you bought a penthouse in one of these places.”

  “Maybe there’s a unit for sale in Gallway’s building. I could see you living in this hood.”

  “If we nail him for the Nosova caper maybe I can buy his place in the fire sale. You think he’s Anya’s baby daddy?”

  “The Worm said Anya was about two months along. According to John Bell, she’d been living with Andre Lucien for three or four months, but it’s possible she was still seeing Gallway on the side.”

  “Let’s say Anya was doing both of them. She knew about Lucien’s mumps problem, so when she got pregnant she knew the baby wasn’t his. She had to weigh her options—a one-bedroom apartment in Westchester or an upscale condo on Wilshire Boulevard. Even I can figure out that one. Maybe she told Gallway the baby was his and expected a ring, but a wife and baby weren’t part of his game plan so he pressured her to have an abortion. She said nyet. They argued. It got loud. He tried to shut her up and bam! One dead Russian girl.”

  Squelch from her radio interrupted the conversation. The dispatcher was calling for all available units to respond to a 459 in progress in Playa del Rey. She lowered the volume.

  “This morning I would have said Lucien was lying,” she said, “putting a case on the ex to take heat off himself. Now that his mother confirmed his alibi … ”

  “Nobody tells the truth anymore.”

  “Did they ever?”

  There was no parking on Wilshire Boulevard, so Davie maneuvered the car to a side street and tossed the plastic city-parking permit onto the dusty dashboard to avoid a ticket. Vaughn reluctantly abandoned his latte on the passenger-side floor.

  Gallway’s condo was in a twenty-story glass-and-marble monolith with a circular driveway edged with pink and purple pansies. Inside the lobby, the concierge located their names on the list of approved visitors and directed them to the elevator.

  A slim man in his early thirties answered the door of unit 1844, assessing Davie with raised eyebrows. Her red hair and petite figure blindsided some people, but she had learned to use lowered expectations to her advantage.

  They exchanged formal introductions, but Davie already knew it was Troy Gallway from the driver’s license photo she had accessed at the station. He was tanned and toned with the sun-bleached blond hair of a California surfer boy who’d successfully transitioned from the beaches of Malibu to the hair salons of Beverly Hills. She wasn’t a fashionista, but she noted the understated elegance of his clothes and imagined the getup had cost a bundle.

  “I’ve been worried about Anya ever since you called,” he said. “I assume you’ve contacted her family to see if she went back to Ukraine?”

  “We haven’t spoken to her parents yet, but we don’t believe she’s there.”

  “How long has she been missing?”

  “Since last Saturday.”

  “Look, I’m happy to answer your questions, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen her. I don’t think I can be of much help.”

  Gallway opened the door wide in an unspoken invitation. When Davie stepped into the entry hall, she noticed a painting on the wall of a young blonde female whose fragile arms held a cello in a lover’s embrace. The artist had peeled back the façade to expose a complex array of emotions: passion, pain, and perhaps a glimmer of hope. The woman’s true thoughts were unknowable but her identity was not. It was Anya Nosova.

  “Cool picture,” Vaughn said. “Who’s the artist?”

  Gallway paused to study the image. “I am. It turned out rather well, I think.”

  “I thought you made movie posters,” Vaughn said.

  Gallway’s smile confirmed he took no offense. “Movie posters pay the mortgage, but painting is my passion.”

  “How much does that picture go for?” Vaughn asked.

  “That one’s not for sale but something similar might be priced at ten to twenty thousand.”

  Vaughn inspected the brush strokes on the cello. “Maybe I should sign up for art classes. How long does it take to whip up one of these babies?”

  Her partner liked to needle people, push them off balance in hopes they would say something incriminating. It wasn’t her style, but he got results and she couldn’t argue with that.

  Gallway must have considered Vaughn’s question rhetorical, because he didn’t respond. Instead, he led them down the hall and around a corner into the living room. Behind his back, she saw Vaughn pick up a small crystal bowl from an end table and turn it over to read the markings on the bottom. He looked duly impressed as he mouthed the word Lalique. Davie didn’t know a Lalique from a Ball jar but wasn’t surprised that her partner did. He gravitated to the finer things in life. From cell phone conversations she’d overheard, Vaughn seemed to be on a first name basis with the entire sales force of Tiffany & Co.

  A large window commanded a spectacular vista of Santa Monica Bay and the hazy form of Santa Catalina Island thirty odd miles out to sea. Davie glanced around the room but didn’t see the cello Anya had been holding in the painting. Maybe it was just a prop Gallway had borrowed from the philharmonic.

  Vaughn leaned on the wet bar and gazed out the window. “Awesome view,” he said.

  In fact, everything in the condo from the view to the artwork to the furnishings attested to Gallway’s reverence for beauty. Davie compared the childlike construction-paper hearts taped to Anya’s walls to the elegance of Troy Gallway’s world and concluded that the two lovers were an odd match. She wondered what Gallway had seen in Anya beyond her physical beauty. Maybe that had been enough.

  Davie sat facing the window on a couch covered with some sort of knobby fabric that prickled the palms of her hands. Vaughn lingered by the wet bar to inspect a terra cotta sculpture of a nude male.

  “I was about to make espresso,” Gallway said. “Would either of you care to join me?”

  Davie noticed the disappointment on Vaughn’s face when she said, “No thanks. We’re fine.”

  Gallway walked into the kitchen a few feet away, poured beans from a gold bag into a grinder, and flipped a
switch. There was a high-pitched whir followed by the pungent aroma of coffee.

  “I assume you’ve spoken to Andre,” Gallway said. “Doesn’t he know where she is?”

  Davie waited for Gallway’s admission that he and Anya had gotten back together, but his question hung in the air and eventually died.

  “Where did you meet Anya?” she said.

  “At the Westwood farmers’ market. She was sitting on a curb eating a vatrushki she’d brought from one of the vendors. She looked gangly and lost. She was extraordinarily beautiful, but there was also something contradictory about her. She seemed like an old soul in a child’s body. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, so I walked over and asked if she needed help.”

  “What’s vatrushki?” Vaughn asked.

  “It’s a cottage cheese pastry made with raisins and rum. She used to go to the Volga Bakery in Hollywood once a week to buy one and to speak Russian with the owner. She said the place reminded her of home.”

  “Was she alone the day you met her?” Davie said.

  He nodded as he spooned the ground beans into a metal cup and slid it into the espresso machine. “She told me she and her roommate had an argument. She left the apartment to cool down and when she got back, the roommate was gone, along with all of her possessions.”

  “So you took her home with you?” Davie said.

  Gallway pushed a button on the machine and thick espresso streamed into a porcelain cup. “Yes, but the plan was just until she found the roommate. A couple of hours at most.”

  “But it turned into more than a couple of hours.”

  “Anya said the roommate took her cell phone too. I let her use mine, but she couldn’t reach the woman. I invited her to sleep in my guest room that night. She felt guilty for imposing, so she insisted on cooking dinner. The meal was awful. She told me her father was a famous chef at a restaurant in Moscow. He did all the cooking at home so she had never learned how. We enjoyed each other’s company. After a couple of days it was clear she needed money, so I asked if she would pose for a live drawing.”