by Tami Hoag
“They call no names, only codes,” the clerk said. “Codes and the address.”
He repeated the address aloud. Jace’s mouth moved along like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s, the words and numbers forming but no sound coming from him.
Lenny Lowell’s address. There was no one in Lenny’s office to kill except Lenny.
Jace wondered if the attorney had been murdered before or after Predator had tried to turn him into roadkill. Could have gone either way, he thought, if what the killer was after was the package tucked inside the waistband of Jace’s pants. Or maybe Lenny had blown away Predator. That could have happened. Except that the attorney had been too drunk to walk a straight line, let alone shoot a gun and actually hit somebody.
An LAPD black-and-white crawled up the street and turned in at the gas station. Jace quelled the urge to run. His hands were shaking as he removed his junk-food dinner from the pay tray. He stuffed the candy bar in his pocket, opened the soda, and gulped down half of it.
The cops pulled up maybe ten feet in front of the building. The cop riding shotgun opened the door and got out. A doughy-faced guy on the heavy side, all of him draped in a rain slicker.
“Hey, Habib,” the cop called in a voice too jovial for the weather. “Hell of a night, huh?”
“Jimmy Chew!” Habib exclaimed, a wide grin splitting his face. One of his upper front teeth was discolored gray and rimmed with gold. “It’s raining! I swear I should never have bothered to leave London!”
The cop laughed. “It’s fucking raining! Can you believe it?
“I need my usual, Habib,” he said. He produced a wallet from somewhere under his rain gear. Head bent, water running in a stream off his hood, the cop dug out a couple of bills. He flicked a glance at Jace. “Hell of a night,” he said again.
“Yeah,” Jace answered. “Fucking rain.”
“Your car break down, kid?”
“Something like that.” Jace raised the soda can to his lips again, trying to be nonchalant, but his hand was shaking and he knew the cop saw it.
“What happened to your face?”
“What about it?”
Chew pointed to his chin and jawline. “That’s some case of razor burn.”
Jace lifted a hand to his face and winced as he touched the part of his chin he had skinned falling on the gravel as he was running for his life. His knuckles were scrubbed and torn too.
“I fell,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Nothing. Minding my own business.”
“You got a place to stay, kid? Father Mike at the Midnight Mission can give you a hot meal and a dry bed.”
The cop had taken him for homeless, a street kid with nowhere to go. He probably figured Jace was either turning tricks or selling dope to stay alive, and that some lowlife pimp or dealer had smacked him around. Jace supposed that was what he appeared to be as he stood there wet and ragged and pathetic.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“You got a name?”
“John Jameson.” The lie tripped off his tongue without hesitation.
“You got ID?”
“Not on me. You gonna card me for buying a Mountain Dew?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
He knew the cop didn’t believe him, that he figured Jace was trying to pass for a legal adult. Compact and wiry, he had always looked young for his age. Wet and beat-up, standing there like a stray dog, he probably looked even younger.
“What are you doing out on a night like this?” the cop asked. “No hat, no coat.”
“I was hungry. I didn’t think it was raining that hard.”
“You live around here?”
“Yeah.” He gave an address two blocks away and waited for the cop to call his bluff.
“Are you come for the murder, Jimmy Chew?” Habib asked in the same kind of pleasant tone he might use to ask if his friend had come for a party. “I heard on the scanner.”
Chew answered the question with another question. “You see anything going on around here earlier tonight, Habib? Around six-thirty, seven?”
Habib pursed his lips and shook his head. He put a king-size Baby Ruth candy bar and two cans of Diet Coke in the drawer and shoved it out to the cop. “Cars go by. No fast getaways. Some poor bastard went past on a bicycle earlier. Can you imagine?”
“What time was that?”
“About when you said. I didn’t look at the clock. I’m working on my screenplay,” he said, gesturing to a mess of printed pages on the counter. He had slipped his gun out of sight.
“What direction did he come from?” Chew asked.
“The way you came. He went past and turned to the right at the corner.”
Jace felt like his heart had lodged at the base of his throat, the beating of it interrupting his ability to swallow.
“What’d he look like?”
Habib shrugged. “Like a miserable bastard riding a bicycle in the rain. I wasn’t really paying attention. For heaven’s sake, who would ride a bicycle to go commit a murder?”
“We’re just looking for anyone who might have been around, maybe saw something go down. You know how it is,” the cop said casually, including the gas station clerk in the cop process, as if Habib was some kind of auxiliary officer. He flicked another glance at Jace. “How about you? You hanging around this street six-thirty, seven o’clock?”
“I don’t own a watch,” Jace lied. “And I didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t see a guy on a bike?”
“Who’s stupid enough to ride a bike in the rain?”
“A bike messenger, for one. You know any of those guys?”
“Why would I?”
“They hang out under the bridge at Fourth and Flower,” Chew said. “I just thought maybe you might have run into them.”
“I mind my own business,” Jace said, fronting attitude over the fear. “Can I go now? Am I under arrest?”
“Any reason you should be?”
“Yeah. I robbed the Mint,” he lipped off. “I’m just hanging around here for old times’ sake. Can I go? It’s fucking raining.”
The cop considered for a moment that seemed like half an hour. Jace kept his perturbed, defiant gaze steady and right on Jimmy Chew’s eyes.
“In a minute,” the cop said.
Jace watched Chew go back to the car, and wondered if running wasn’t his best option. The cops would probably just think he was a homeless kid who didn’t want a hassle. Or maybe Chew had taken Jace’s trembling hand as a sign he was on something, maybe had some rock cocaine in his pocket to smoke or to peddle.
If the cop decided to shake him down, looking for drugs, he would find a package with the return address of a murder victim.
The muscles in Jace’s calves and thighs tightened. He centered his weight over the balls of his feet, hoped the bum ankle would be able to support him in a sprint.
The cop stuck his head inside the car, said a few words to his partner, and came back out with something in his hand.
Jace lowered his center of gravity a couple of inches, so he could dodge either way, wheel, and run.
“Here, kid.”
Chew tossed what he held in his hand. Jace caught it on reflex. When he looked at what it was, he almost wanted to laugh. A blue disposable rain poncho from the 99 Cent Store.
“Better late than never,” the cop said. “You can get dry clothes at the mission, if you need them.”
“Sure. Thanks,” Jace mumbled.
“Sure you don’t want a ride? We can drop you—”
“No. That’s okay. Thanks anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” the cop said, shrugging him off. Jace knew Chew hadn’t bought any of his crap but had just deemed him not important enough to bother with. “Habib, you’ll call if you hear something?”
“You’ll be the first to know, Officer,” the clerk’s delighted voice crackled over the speaker.
Maybe he thought he would hear
something that could break the case. Maybe the killer would confess as he prepaid for his gas. Then Habib could write a screenplay about that and maybe star in the movie, or at least see his name roll in the credits. LA. Everybody wanted to be in show business.
The patrol car rolled back out onto the street and took a right at the corner. Jace watched them go as he chugged his Mountain Dew. Then he tossed the can in the trash, threw a casual “See you” to Habib, and walked away as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Five blocks later, his knees were still shaking.
7
“What a creep.”
Parker walked into the bedroom naked with a glass of wine in each hand. A nice, full-bodied Cab from Peru. He had hardly touched the hard stuff since about two months after he had gotten sent down from Robbery-Homicide. In those two months he had downed enough booze to float a boat. Then he woke up one day, said enough was enough, and took up tai chi instead.
“Was it something I said?”
The woman in bed didn’t take her eyes off the television. Her face was sour with disgust. “Rob Cole, that piece of dirt. I hope he gets the needle. And after he’s dead, I hope we can dig him up and kill him all over again.”
“That’s what I like about you, Diane. Overflowing with the milk of human kindness.”
He handed her a glass, set his on the night table, and slipped between the covers.
He and Diane Nicholson had what they both considered to be the perfect relationship. They liked and respected each other, were a pair of animals in bed, and neither of them had any interest in being anything other than friends.
Parker because he didn’t see the point in marriage. He’d never seen one that worked. His parents had been engaged in a cold war for forty-five years. Most of the cops he knew had been divorced at least once. He himself had never had a romantic relationship that hadn’t crashed and burned, primarily because of his job.
Diane had her own reasons, none of which she had ever confided in him. He knew she had been married to a Crowne Enterprises executive who had died of a heart attack a few years past. But when she spoke of him, which was hardly ever, she talked about him without emotion, as if he were a mere acquaintance, or a shoe. Not the great love of her life.
Whoever had put her off the idea of everlasting love had come after the marriage. Curious by nature and by vocation, Parker had nosed around for an answer to that question when they had first gotten involved, almost a year before. He hadn’t found out a thing. Absolutely no one knew who Diane had been seeing after her husband’s death, only they believed she had been seeing someone and that things had ended badly.
Parker figured the guy was married or a muckety-muck in the coroner’s office or both. But he dropped the unsolved mystery, figuring that if Diane had been so careful, so discreet that not even her friends knew, then it was none of his business. She was entitled to her secrets.
He liked having his secrets too. He had always figured the less anyone knew about him, the better. Knowledge was power, and could be used against him. He had learned that lesson the hard way. Now he kept his personal life personal. No one at LAPD needed to know who he saw or what he did with his time off the job.
She scoffed at his milk-of-human-kindness line. “This guy deserves an acid bath.”
They were watching CNN Headline News. Diane had televisions all over the house and sometimes had them all on at once so she could go from room to room without missing anything.
It was late, but it always took a while to wind down after a murder. Uniforms had knocked on doors within viewing distance of Lowell’s office, but the shops were empty for the night and there wasn’t a soul to speak to. If there had been, Parker would’ve worked through the night. Instead, he had locked down the scene, gone to the station to start his paperwork, making Ruiz go with him instead of chasing after Bradley Kyle like a cat in heat. From there he had gone to Diane’s Craftsman bungalow on the Westside.
“Fifty-five-gallon drum, and forty gallons of acid,” he said matter-of-factly. “Keep the drum in your basement, leave it for the next homeowner, who leaves it for the next one after that.”
Most women would probably have been appalled that he had that kind of stuff in his head. Diane just nodded absently.
The story running was about jury selection for Cole’s upcoming trial, and a recap of the whole sickening mess—from the discovery of Tricia Crowne-Cole’s body; the funeral with Norman Crowne sobbing on his daughter’s closed casket, his son leaning over his shoulder, trying to comfort him; all the way back to her wedding to Rob Cole. An incongruous photograph: Cole posing like an Armani tuxedo model, Tricia looking like maybe she was his older, dowdy sister who had been left at the altar. She would have been better off.
“Look at this clown,” Diane said as they ran file footage of Cole starring in his short-lived TV drama, the aptly named B.S.: Bomb Squad. “Looking like he thinks he’s somebody.”
“He used to be.”
“In his own mind. That guy is all about one thing: himself.”
There was never any gray area with Diane. Rob Cole was an instant ON button for her opinions. She had worked the murder scene more than a year ago now. She and Parker had had numerous variations of this conversation since. Every time some new phase of jurisprudence kicked Cole’s name into the headlines again, she resurrected her ire and outrage.
“I met him at a party once, you know,” she said.
“The memory is as vivid as if I had been there myself,” Parker remarked dryly. She must have told him a hundred and ten times since the murder. Somehow the mere mention of Cole’s name shut down her short-term memory.
“He hit on you.”
“He told me he was trying to put together a new series and maybe I could help him out with the research. The main character was going to be a coroner’s-investigator-slash-private-eye. What crap.”
“He just wanted to get in your pants,” Parker said.
“With his wife standing not ten feet away,” she said with disgust. “He’s only got eyes for me. He’s the bad boy. He’s all charm. He’s the big white grin.”
“He’s the guy all the guys want to be and all the women want to go home with,” Parker said.
“He’s a jerk.”
“I guess you still haven’t signed on to the ‘Free Rob Cole’ Web site,” Parker said, bringing his hand up to massage the back of her neck. The muscles were as taut as guy wires.
She scowled. “People are idiots.”
Parker slid his arm around her. She sighed softly as she let her head fall against his shoulder.
“No argument there,” he murmured. “No matter how rotten, how guilty a criminal may be, there are always people who don’t want to hear it.”
“Like I said. And these are the same people who can’t get out of jury duty. Cole will end up being the new millennium’s Ted Bundy and have some dumb-as-dirt woman marry him from the witness box in the middle of his murder trial.”
Parker didn’t give a shit about Rob Cole. LA was a “what have you done for me lately” kind of town, and aside from being accused of murder, Cole hadn’t done anything noteworthy in a decade. One production deal after another had gone down the drain. Starring roles had tapered off to guest roles of diminishing importance on episodic television, and a slew of forgettable movies of the week for those powerhouse networks: Lifetime and USA.
Parker’s attention was on the file footage of Cole being brought into Parker Center by a posse of Robbery-Homicide hotshots, Bradley Kyle and his pal Moose among the pack. Cole, red-faced and bug-eyed with anger, a drastic contrast in mood to his corny trademark fifties vintage bowling shirt; the Robbery-Homicide boys stone-faced in sharp suits and ties, mirrored shades hiding their eyes. Everyone costumed and playing their parts to the hilt.
“Why were Kyle and the Hulk there tonight?” Diane asked.
Parker shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him. “I don’t know. I didn’t invite them.”
“Yo
u think the dead guy was connected to something big and juicy?”
“The Lenny Lowells of the world are the Lenny Lowells of the world because they can’t hook on to something big and juicy even if they trip and fall in it.”
“He tripped and fell in something. And it killed him. Something smelly enough for the Parker Center boys to come sniffing.”
“It’s my case until my captain tells me it’s not,” Parker said. “Then I’ll walk away.”
Diane laughed, a throaty, sexy sound that moved her shoulders on its way out. “You liar. You wanted to run Bradley out of there like a tiger protecting its kill.”
“Well, I do hate the guy.”
“You’re entitled. He’s a prick. I hate the guy too. Everybody hates the guy. I’ll bet his mother hated him in utero,” she said. “But that’s all beside the point. I just don’t get what RHD would want with the murder of a bottom-feeder like that lawyer.”
“I don’t know,” Parker said as the Headline News anchor jumped from the Cole story to a story about the sudden surge in sales of vintage bowling shirts in Los Angeles. “But I’ll find out. Crack of dawn, I’m finding that bike messenger.”
8
The Chinatown of LA is not the Chinatown of San Francisco. There are no pretty cable cars. Shops selling cheap souvenirs and knockoff designer handbags are fewer, and far from being the largest part of the economy.
The Chinatown of LA was the first modern American Chinatown owned and planned by the Chinese themselves, home now to more than fifteen thousand people of Asian heritage. In recent years it has begun to attract artists and young professionals of all races, and has become a hip place to live.
The Chinatown of LA is about the thriving avant-garde mix of people who make it their home, who live and work there. The streets are lined with meat markets with duck carcasses hanging in the front window, fish markets where the fishmongers wield razor-sharp knives, and places to buy herbs and medicinal cures that the Chinese have been using for thousands of years. Signs in windows are written in Chinese. The primary language spoken is Chinese in a multitude of dialects. But alongside the traditional Chinese shops are contemporary art galleries, and boutiques, and yoga schools.