Lilah broke into wicked laughter—a mixture of irony and bitterness.
“She was a dumb-ass,” she said, starting to cry. “And you’re a dumb-ass, also…I mean, don’t you get it?”
Decker waited for her to explain.
“She was fucking in love with you, for Chrissakes! She didn’t want to go to that halfway house because she knew she’d never see you again. I mean, you told her on the phone you wouldn’t visit her! She figured at least on the streets she could be your stoolie, and then she could be with you.”
She clicked the compact closed and stuffed it in her purse. “You men are real stupid shits. I don’t care who the hell you are—john, cop, asshole father of five fucking kids—you’re all shit for brains.”
She spat at him and walked away.
19
He trudged into the station house and was greeted by Marge’s smiling face.
“Cheer up, Rabbi,” she said. “The warrants for Cecil Pode just came through.”
“It’s a little after the fact,” he said, gulping down some aspirin.
“You look horrible, Pete.”
“Not as horrible as I feel. Look, I’ll meet you out at Pode’s place in about an hour.”
She wrinkled her forehead.
“Hey, isn’t this your day off?” she asked.
Decker just laughed.
Cindy approached the principal’s office with trepidation. The receptionist in the outer office told her to go inside immediately.
The young girl’s face was anxious as she opened the door.
“Hi, Cindy,” Decker said.
“What is this, Daddy? Where’s Mr. Richardson?”
“He’s off campus. His secretary was kind enough to let me use his office—with a little prodding from my badge.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to say hi. I haven’t been able to get hold of you for a while.”
The girl was confused.
“Why did you pull me out of class?”
“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, sheepishly.
Cindy sat next to her father.
“You look terrible, Daddy. What happened?”
“I’m fine, Beautiful.” He kissed his daughter’s forehead, then hugged her fiercely. “I love you, Baby. Take good care of yourself for Papa, huh?”
She hugged him back.
“You want to talk about it?” she asked.
He laid his hand against her cheek.
“Cynthia, parents are supposed to console kids, not the other way around.”
“But we’re both adults now, Daddy.”
He laughed.
“Never. You’ll always be my baby whether you like it or not. When you’re seventy and I’m ninety-three you’ll still be my princess. I shouldn’t have dragged you out of class. I’ve been doing a lot of impulsive things lately…This time, it turned out nice.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too, Cynthia. Go back.”
“Are you sure—”
“I’m fine, honey. Go back to class.”
He watched her leave. Dear God, he thought. It was hard to let go.
“For a photographer, he sure didn’t have many personal snapshots,” Marge said to Decker as they finished combing Pode’s bedroom. “No baby or graduation pictures of Dustin, no hidden pictures of his wife. You’d think a widower would have one honored picture of his dead wife.”
“Maybe he wasn’t a sentimentalist,” Decker said, closing the last bureau drawer.
“But it’s weird.” Marge scanned the room then said, “Look at the walls. Those square white patches. Pete, there were pictures hanging up there.”
“So someone cleared them away. Maybe they were valuable. Besides, we’re not interested in family photos, and I don’t think Pode hung his porn on his bedroom walls.”
Marge thought about that and said nothing. She sat down on an empty double bed. “We’ve been through this place twice and haven’t come up with anything,” she said. “Want to move on to the studio?”
“Yeah,” Decker said, resigning himself to finding nothing.
“Hungry, Pete?”
“A little. We’ll stop by McDonalds on the way over.”
“Hey, I know you by now, Rabbi. I brought my lunch. Just stop by a 7-Eleven and let me pick up something to drink.”
“I didn’t bring my lunch, Marge,” he said quickly. “Let’s pick me up a Big Mac.”
She gave him a funny look.
“You’ve been bringing kosher lunches for the last four months and now it’s McDonalds?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Marge,” he said brusquely. “Let’s just do the job so we can go home.”
The back room of Pode’s studio was a mess—cramped and packed with props. In the center was a professional camera perched atop a tripod. On the north side was the sitting area—a bench, a few chairs, and boxes of photographic accoutrements. Strewn on the floor were parasols, fake flower bouquets, neckties, jackets, false collars, and yards of velvet. The dressing stalls were open, the curtains crumpled heaps on the floor. He didn’t see any file cabinet. Not here, not at the house.
“Either someone tossed the place or Cecil was an unbelievable slob,” Decker said.
“Move the tripod over to the side,” Marge said as she began kicking junk into a corner. “We need a little elbow room.”
Decker hefted the tripod, folded the legs, then leaned the apparatus against the wall. He turned around and walked across the room. He pivoted and retraced his steps. Did it a third time.
“Getting some exercise?” Marge asked, bemused. She knew he was up to something.
Decker stood at the room’s center and bounced on the balls of his feet. The flooring underneath was springy. He bent down and felt the linoleum tiles.
“We’ve got a trapdoor here,” he said. “Get me something to pry it open with.”
After a minute of searching Marge found a screwdriver.
“This isn’t heavy enough,” Decker complained. “I can’t get any leverage. The damn thing’s not budging.”
“Maybe it’s locked,” Marge said.
“I knew there was a reason for having you here.”
Marge slugged him. Hard.
“Spring lock,” he said. “Where the hell is the release button?”
Marge searched the walls. Nothing except light switches, and that wouldn’t make sense. Accidentally flip the wrong switch and up flies the tripod. But she tried all of them anyway. Nothing.
“Try the ceiling fan,” she suggested.
Decker pulled the cord. The fan turned on. Another pull, the fan turned off.
“Leave it on,” Marge said. “Get some air in the place.”
He tugged on the cord and walked inside the dressing rooms. The walls were bare.
“We could saw the door open,” he suggested.
“Where’s your spirit of detection?” she said.
“I’m tired.”
“Let’s be logical,” she said. “If that’s Pode’s hiding place, he’d have to be able to get into it quickly. It wouldn’t make sense to move the camera, run out to the waiting room, push a button and run back into this room. His enemies would get him by then. The button has to be close by. It also has to be wired through the floor and maybe through the wall and ceiling. So the button has to be on the floor, wall, or ceiling. We’ve scoured the walls and ceiling. That leaves us to crawl around on our hands and knees, big fellah.”
The button was under a loose corner tile. Marge pressed it and the trap door sprung open. The area underneath was pitch black.
“Got a flashlight?” he asked.
“Wait a sec. I’ll get one from the trunk.”
Decker stuck his hand inside the dark hole. He shouted hello, and from the sound of the echo, knew the space was deep. Marge came back a minute later, bent down next to him and shined the light into the darkness.
“How the hell do we get down there?” she wondered out loud
. “I don’t see any sort of ladder.”
“How many feet to the bottom?” Decker asked, squinting over the edge, trying to make out the dimensions.
“It looks too deep to jump,” Marge said. “Wonder how he got down here.”
Decker stuck his head in the hole and felt under the edge. “There are hooks screwed in here. Bet he had a rope ladder and it latched onto the hardware. Get the rope out of the trunk of the car.”
“Now you’re Tarzan?”
“Got any better ideas?”
“I’ll fetch the rope,” she said, laughing.
She returned and handed him a hemp cord. Tying it securely onto the hooks, he slid down, hands burning against the coarse fiber.
The drop was about fifteen feet and the hole was cool and dank. He turned on the high beam and looked around.
The room was a six-by-eight cell of almost-empty metal shelving. Scattered film canisters and video cassettes had been dumped onto the ground. Several yards of loose celluloid streamed across the floor.
Bingo. Cecil’s warehouse.
Two empty nylon bags fell from above.
“I’m coming down,” Marge said. A moment later she dropped onto the floor.
“The good news is this was his gold mine,” Decker said. “The bad news is he’s already stripped it of any real evidence.”
“Here’s a filing cabinet,” Marge said, opening the top drawer.
“Empty?”
“Scraps,” Marge said, scanning them. “A few memos, his water and gas bills, a magazine subscription offer.” She began to stuff an empty tote. “I’ll take ’em, but I don’t suspect we’ll find much.”
“Get a load of this, Marge,” Decker said, pointing to a typewriter-sized machine in the corner. “A humidifier. The fucker had the place humidified to protect his films from burning and cracking when the weather got hot and dry. Like it was some archive.”
“The shelves are categorized, Pete. Look at the labels. This one is BD 1000-1789. This one’s SM 1000-1124. SN 1000-1006, GaySM 1000-1122, BE 1000-1148, Kiddie 1000-1219—”
“They’re inventory numbers of the films.”
“God, this is sickening, Pete. Amputee SM 1000-1021. Here’s another abbreviation. RET? And SCHIZO?”
“Porno with a nutcase?” Decker tried. “The night of the shootout, Pode’s confiscated bag contained ten films—six sado-masochisms, and four bondage-and-disciplines. We know he dealt in at least one snuff—”
“That’s what SN probably stands for—snuff,” Marge said.
“Yeah,” Decker nodded. “The numbers only go up to six, indicating he didn’t have too many of ’em floating around, and that would make sense…Goddam, if only we could find his books.”
“Maybe Dustin has ’em.”
“How the hell are we going to get to Dustin?” Decker said. “If the guy’s in on it, he’s going to be careful to the point of paranoia.”
“Then forget about Dustin. Concentrate on the other one. The broker’s son.”
Decker nodded. “Cameron Smithson.”
“After all,” Marge went on, “the father said they do their ventures together. Besides, he impressed you as a weirdo.”
“I’ve got an appointment with the two of them next week,” Decker said. “Jack Cohen is going to learn about film limited partnerships.”
“Ignore Dustin,” Marge said. “Zero in on Cameron. It’ll throw Pode off the track just in case he’s suspicious.”
“Okay.” Decker thought for a moment. “You want to poke around a little for me?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Armand Arlington.”
“Peter…”
“Don’t tell me you’re intimidated.”
“I like my job,” she said.
“One of my ears was beaten to death by an old rich guy she used to service,” Decker said. “She died today.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am, too. And I’m very pissed. A hooker I talked to said there’s a bunch of them out there who trawl the area looking for young streetwalkers to pounce on. You want to hear something funny? Cecil Pode said the same thing. And so did Hollywood PD. I called up a Vice dick named Beauchamps. He said there’s a group of men who called themselves the Loving Grandpas—”
“That’s sick.”
“They have stooges in Jeeps who do the soliciting so they can’t get busted. Hollywood has tried using undercover women, but they never take the bait. Beauchamps thinks someone is tipping them off.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“Talk to the ladies of the night. They’ll open up more to a woman than a man. I know one of the pervs goes by the name Maurice. I think Arlington’s involved. I know it’s a long shot, but I’d love to stick him with the death of my ears, Kiki. A murder would be too big for protection. If he wasn’t the actual murderer, try to find out who it was. And try to get someone to implicate Arlington in this group.”
“You’re not hot for job security, are you?”
“My ex used to say I was self-destructive.”
“That’s a good adjective.”
“Will you do it?”
She sighed. “All right.”
“Thanks.”
They collected flotsam and jetsam, filling a bag and a half. Marge zipped up the sack and said:
“You go up first. I’ll tie the bags and you pull them up. Then drop the rope back and reel me in.”
Decker looked upward at the dangling cord and rubbed his hands together, grateful for the calluses, for the years of ranch work that had kept his body trim and muscular. But his arms, though strong and well defined, weren’t used to hoisting his own bulk. He felt his deltoids tighten, his pectorals strain, as he stretched toward the top. Man, he was hot. Goddam stupid to forget to take off his jacket before going down. He reached the top drenched in perspiration and knew his chest would be sore tomorrow.
“How we doing up there?” Marge shouted.
“Piece of cake,” he answered as he rolled his shoulders in their sockets. Again, he rubbed his hands together. Up came the bags, then Marge. The reeling in left him winded. The woman was no lightweight.
They picked up the canvas bags, locked the door, and left the studio. They had gone a block when the explosion occurred. Decker immediately hit the ground, but Marge turned around and stared in disbelief, mouth agape. The front window of Pode’s studio had blown away. Glass shards had turned the sidewalk into a deadly obstacle course, eddies of ripped photographs flying through the air like a snowstorm. The front door had burst into a pile of splinters. They heard screams. Someone could be hurt.
“You believe in God, Rabbi?” Marge asked.
Decker rose quickly and brushed off his clothes. “We’d better call an ambulance,” he replied, shaking.
He entered the study and took the chair opposite the Rosh Yeshiva. Schulman closed the tractate of Talmud he was studying and opened the Bible without uttering a word, then noticed Decker was empty handed.
“Where’s your chumash?” the old man asked.
“I didn’t bring it.”
The rabbi closed the leatherbound book and waited.
“I ate traif today,” Decker said.
“What did you eat?” Schulman asked.
“A Big Mac.”
“Was it good?”
Decker broke into a smile.
“Actually, it was terrible. The meat wasn’t tainted or anything like that, but it didn’t go down well.”
“Hmmm,” said Schulman. “If you were going to eat traif, why didn’t you splurge on delicacies—lobster, shrimp, filet mignon?”
Decker shrugged.
“I could never figure it out,” Schulman said, pondering. “When bochrim go astray, they sin in the most mundane ways. Instead of committing adultry with a beautiful woman, they have sex with the ugliest zonah around. Instead of dining in the finest restaurant in L.A., they go to Taco Bell. Such lack of imagination. It defies logic. Why did you aim so low, Pe
ter?”
“I don’t know. I guess if you want to debase yourself, you don’t do it in high style.”
The old man smiled.
“So, my friend, I enjoy talking to you, but this is not a confessional. I am a teacher. If you want to learn, I will teach you. If you want to ruminate upon the meaning of life,” Schulman pointed upward, “talk to Him.”
“I nearly got blown up today, Rabbi. A bomb went off and I was saved by seconds. I thought it might be a good time to pause for reflection. I sat for two hours tonight and prayed, Rabbi. I prayed and meditated and contemplated and came up with this. Today notwithstanding, there are times when I feel God is omnipresent. I feel Him everywhere I go, in everything I do. And there are times I think there’s nothing in the skies but an ozone layer. I’m not an agnostic. I’m not waiting for God to come down and prove His existence to me, because sometimes I just know He’s out there. I can’t explain why I feel so strongly one minute and like a total atheist the next. In short, sometimes I have doubts.”
The old man looked at him impassively and extended his hand across the desktop.
“Join the club, Peter.”
20
“I know it’s late,” Decker said. “I won’t stay long.”
Rina stood at the threshold of the open door, then stepped aside and let him in.
“Did you learn with Rav Schulman tonight?”
“A little.”
She stood with her arms folded across her chest with that look in her eyes. Decker had seen it umpteen times in Jan. What was it? Hostility? Contempt? Injury? Probably a little of all three.
“Do you have any coffee handy?” he asked.
“I’ll make some.”
“Don’t bother.”
Defiance suddenly vanished from her face. Replacing it was sadness. His heart sank. He could deal with her anger, but not with her melancholy. He felt like a total ass.
“It’s no bother,” she said softly. “Would you like something to eat?”
The muscles in his throat tightened. He answered her with a shake of the head. As she started to the kitchen, he called out her name. His voice cracked.
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