by David Freed
Rosario squatted beside the body and looked up at me.
“Ready to do this?”
I nodded.
She peeled back the tarp.
Lazarus was laying on his back, facing uphill, wearing a black dress shirt, untucked, his arms and legs splayed like he was making a snow angel. There was a baseball-size splotch of dried, rust-colored blood just below his diaphragm, and a hole the size of a dime in the center of the splotch. Half a button was missing where the bullet had nicked it before penetrating his torso.
“Entry wound?”
“That would be my guess,” Rosario said.
“So, whoever shot him, shot him more or less from face-on position.”
She nodded.
He was squinting and his jaws were parted. His lips were pulled back like he was grinning—and not one of those half-hearted grins, either, the kind you manage after enduring your father-in-law’s oft-repeated favorite joke about the rabbi who walks into a bar. We’re talking laugh your butt off like it’s 1999. Who knew death could be so funny?
“How do you know this guy’s Lazarus?”
“How do I know?” Rosario stood and pointed. “I know because his truck’s parked a quarter-mile down the trail. I also know because he matches the description of C.W. Lazarus on file at DMV. Hair, eye color, height, weight, and age. Everything. Who else is it gonna be?”
“You check his driver’s license?”
“The wallet’s probably in his back pocket. We can’t get to it. Not until the coroner shows up and signs off.”
“So, you haven’t run his fingerprints?”
“Like I said. Not until after the coroner’s investigator signs off.”
The corpse had dark, well-barbered hair and long flared sideburns. His left cheekbone bore a scar I recognized. It was shaped like the Nike corporate logo. A “swoosh.”
“His name’s not Lazarus,” I said, staring down at the man’s dead, laughing face. “His name’s Ray Sheen.”
Rosario blanched. “Ray Sheen, from Castle Robotics? You sure?”
I was.
From down the trail came the sound of somebody hacking up a lung. He trudged into view, pushing a rolling metal gurney upon which rested a folded green body bag and a brushed aluminum tool chest. He was a heavyset man in his late thirties with a shaved head, black polyester dress pants, and a short-sleeved white shirt, the tails of which refused to stay tucked. His forearms were a miasma of colorful tattoos. A digital camera was slung over his shoulder. His name tag identified him as “E. Schlosser.”
“They don’t pay me enough for this,” he said, wiping his soaking florid face.
“The Medical Examiner,” Rosario said, “has arrived.”
Schlosser’s first move was to de-tarp the body and snap about 200 photos. Then, wheezing, he got down on all fours, reached under the corpse, and extracted a red, eel-skin billfold, which he handed up to Rosario without being asked.
“At least we know it wasn’t a robbery,” Rosario said.
The uniform deputies both nodded.
She opened the wallet, pulled out a California driver’s license, studied it for a second, then held it up for my inspection.
The name on the license read, “Raymond Francis Sheen.” The photo matched the man with the distinctive scar on his left cheekbone who’d tried to murder me.
Swoosh, indeed.
Twenty-four
Rosario and I occupied a corner booth at La Jolla’s Su Casa, an unpretentious, windowless bunker of a restaurant renowned for its verde crab enchiladas and camarones al mojo de ajo—jumbo shrimp sautéed in garlic butter and white wine. I’d ordered my usual chile verde burrito, but after two baskets of homemade tortilla chips, salsa, and multiple refills of spicy pickled carrots, I was about ready to call it a night. Not Rosario. She was still sorting through events of the day, eyes gleaming, eager to ponder the jigsaw puzzle that her homicide investigation had become.
“You know what I’m wondering?” Rosario asked, sipping her second margarita.
“Tell me.”
“How big it’s gonna get.”
“Excuse me?”
“I meant this case.”
“The case. Right.”
Rosario licked the salt from her glass. “Why? What did you think I meant?”
“The case. Obviously.”
Her lips curled in a wry smile. She knew exactly what I meant.
I reached uncomfortably for another pickled carrot.
After hiking back down the trail and dropping me off at my Escalade, Rosario had driven home to change for dinner. I’d done the same, stopping off at the YMCA in La Mesa where I’d paid the ten-dollar day rate to shower and try to look presentable. Now here we were, me in a semi-clean polo shirt and Levis, and her wearing a floor-length, leopard print sundress with spaghetti straps that were made to be slowly untied. The look was decidedly un-detective-like.
“We ran the VIN,” she said. “The truck belonged to Sheen’s cousin, Charles Walter Lazarus. He’s a mechanical engineer. Used to work for Castle Robotics. Sold the vehicle to Sheen three months ago, after he got a job in D.C. Sheen also owns the MINI you went riding in, along with an Audi turbo and a ’65 Mustang. He never filed an ownership change on the truck.”
“Wanted to avoid paying state sales tax, probably.”
“It happens.”
Deputies, she said, had reached Charles Lazarus by phone earlier in the day at his home in suburban Maryland, where he’d just returned from a month-long business trip to Europe and Asia. His alibi, according to Rosario, was solid; Lazarus could account for his whereabouts literally minute-by-minute over the previous week, thus ruling him out as a suspect in the trashing of my airplane or in any recent San Diego County murders.
“So, you’re back to square one,” I said. “You don’t know who shot Sheen. And you don’t know who stabbed Janet Bollinger.”
Rosario sat back, pondering what I said. Her arms were draped across the top of the booth, affording me an excellent view of her impressive superstructure that I tried to ignore as I reached for another carrot. If this was a date, it was among the strangest I’d ever been on.
“I keep coming back to Walker,” she said. “He had ties to both Sheen and Bollinger. Plus, he keeps an airplane out at Montgomery Airport. I checked. He rents a hangar there. He would’ve had easy access to your airplane.”
She theorized that Walker had borrowed Sheen’s pickup and driven it to the airport that night.
“Trucks come and go at airports all the time,” Rosario said. “He figured a truck would draw less attention on the flight line than a car.”
“Walker paid me to fly down here and do some work for him. Why would he want to monkey with my engine?”
“No clue.” Rosario tapped some ice from her drink into her mouth and chewed it. “But I do know he would’ve had ample reason to want to shoot Sheen. Sheen was sleeping with his wife. Men have been killed for a lot less.”
Her dangly silver earrings sparkled seductively in the candlelight.
I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. Hub Walker was the last man I wanted to suspect of anything.
We sat for awhile without speaking.
“It would help if we recover a bullet,” Rosario said finally. “At least a shell casing.”
“It’ll be a relatively small bullet,” I said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I heard it.”
“You heard Sheen get shot?”
“Pretty sure.”
Rosario was incredulous. “And I’m only hearing this now? I thought we . . .” She paused in mid-sentence as our grandmotherly waitress arrived with our meals.
“Muy caliente. Very hot. Please be careful.” She set two platters heaping with steaming Mexican food on the table. “Is there anything else I can get you? Another margarita for the lady? More club soda for the gentleman?”
“No gracias,” Rosario said.
“No, thanks.”
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“Enjoy.”
Rosario watched me ladle an ulcer-inducing amount of salsa while ignoring her food.
“Did I hear you right? You say you heard Sheen get shot?”
“Single discharge, approximately 800 meters down range, approximately ten minutes after we parted company. Definitely sounded smaller than the .45 he was carrying. Nine-millimeter would be my guess.”
The burrito was excellent. I ate probably faster than I should have. It was impossible not to.
“For a flight instructor,” Rosario said, “you seem to know an awful lot about guns.”
“Like I said . . .”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re into TV.” She picked at her enchiladas, eyeing me suspiciously but also intrigued. “Ever used to watch Miami Vice back in the day?”
“Occasionally.”
“Best cop show ever.”
“I beg to differ. Andy Griffith was the best cop show ever.”
“Andy Griffith wasn’t a cop show,” Rosario said.
“Andy played a cop, did he not?”
“A little before my time but, yes, I seem to recall he did.”
“And do you concede that the word ‘show’ in the The Andy Griffith Show connotes that it was, in fact, a show?”
“I’ll concede that.”
“I rest my case.”
She smiled and watched me eat. “Unfortunately, I don’t have Andy Griffith. But I do have all five seasons of Miami Vice on DVD. You interested in maybe grabbing some ice cream at my place after this and checking out a little Crockett and Tubbs action?”
Airplanes rarely crash because of pilot error. They crash because of multiple pilot errors, small mistakes that become larger ones, until the only option left is to bend over and kiss your keester goodbye. The same can be said of monogamy. Drop your guard, surrender yourself to an extracurricular distraction, and before you know it, you’re grocery shopping for one and trolling the listings on Match.com. It was a mistake to say yes to Alicia Rosario’s invitation to dessert in the same way I knew it was wrong to have asked her out to dinner, but I did it anyway. Blame it on her sundress. I was dying to find out where she stashed her off-duty weapon.
SHE LIT candles. We sat with our shoes off, on a buff-colored chenille sofa, in the living room of Rosario’s tastefully contemporary Pacific Beach townhouse, pounding down Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra while watching Miami Vice on a sixty-inch big screen. Armani-clad detectives Tubbs and Crockett were busting their humps trying to stop villainous arms dealer Bruce Willis (when Willis still had hair) from selling a shipment of stolen Stinger missiles.
The episode brought back fond memories of the time I flew into Zagreb with three other Alpha operators posing as Canadian arms dealers to meet with a former Croatian cabinet official who was offering to the highest bidder a batch of U.S.-made, Rockeye cluster bombs. The money exchange was to take place in the luxury suite of an über-stylish hotel built some eighty years earlier as a refuge for passengers from the Orient Express. Our orders were to take the Croat into custody and spirit him out of the country for criminal prosecution, but he had other plans. When he pulled a pistol and broke for the elevators, another go-to guy I’ll call “Barnes” snapped his neck like a chicken. We chucked the guy’s body out a sixth-floor window, left a conveniently pre-typed suicide note on his nightstand, and jetted home business class.
Good times.
I was thinking how fulfilling it felt, my mind drifting, when I realized that Bruce Willis was dead, Miami Vice was over, and Rosario was stroking my right thigh.
“Welcome back.” Her dark eyes gleamed. “Have a nice trip?”
She was exotic-looking and alluring, and I’d be lying if I said my neuronal impulses weren’t sparking with the kind of thinking that got Bill Clinton in big trouble.
“I’ve never been with a cop before,” I said.
“Then that’ll make two firsts tonight.”
She clicked off the TV, set my half-eaten bowl of ice cream on the coffee table, and softly pressed her lips to mine.
Time and reason quickly blurred in a frenzy of hungry mouths, groping hands, and clothing that seemed to shed itself. There was nothing romantic about it. It was foreplay in the same way Olympic wrestling is romantic. The stall warning horn inside my head was blaring and I didn’t care. My big head was on autopilot. And then, just like that, I came to my senses. Maybe it was the firmness of her touch, so different from Savannah’s, or the way Rosario’s skin felt under my own fingers—some nonverbal, subconscious something. All I knew was that I suddenly felt as if I had no business being there, on that couch, with Detective Alicia Rosario.
“I can’t, Alicia. I’m sorry.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
I stood, hiking my jeans back up, and re-buckled my belt.
She sat back, naked from the waist up, and stroked the back of her neck. Her breasts glistened in the candlelight. They belonged in an art gallery. I stooped onto one knee and tied my shoes.
“Was it something I said, or did?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m just dealing with some personal issues right now.”
She clutched a tasseled throw pillow to her chest.
“You mean ex issues.”
I didn’t respond.
Rosario sighed. “Story of my life,” she said.
“Let’s talk tomorrow, OK?”
“Sure. Fine. Whatever.”
I knew it wasn’t fine. I stood, pulled on my shirt, and leaned down to kiss her good night. She raised her chin and offered me her cheek. I could taste the salt of her tears.
“Thanks for dessert.”
“Thanks for dinner.”
The street was quiet, the chill night air a tonic. I sat in my luxury SUV outside Rosario’s place for a long time with the windows down and thought about how far I’d come from nights in my not-so-distant past when I would’ve made any accommodation, told any lie, to maneuver someone like her between the sheets. Chalk it up to maturity? Declining testosterone? Who knows? It dawned on me as I drove away that I never did determine where she stashed her off-duty weapon. I wasn’t sure whether to feel proud of myself or disappointed.
It was too late to call Savannah and too early to turn in the Escalade. I’d do both come morning.
Mission Boulevard was dotted with budget motels, the kind with towels you can see through and walls so thin you can listen to the porn flicks the guests next door are renting. Tired as I was, I would’ve settled for a room in any one of them, but every vacancy sign was preceded by an illuminated neon “No.” I pulled into a sparsely occupied parking lot a block from the beach off of Reed Avenue, behind a sign that said, “The Beach Cottages, Day Week Month.” There was another, smaller sign below it that said, “Tenants Only. No Overnight Parking. Violators Will Be Towed.” I rolled up the windows, leaned my seat all the way back, and dozed off.
I WAS dreaming about machine guns when I was awakened by a loud banging sound. The sun was up. A pudgy San Diego police officer was looking down at me, rapping on the glass with his baton. I raised my seat back and rolled down the window.
“Top of the morning, Constable.”
He was Latino, young, squared away. “Did you not see that sign?”
“What sign would that be?”
“The one that says no overnight parking,” he said, pointing.
“I did.”
“And you parked here anyway?”
“It was late. There was no room at the inn. I just needed somewhere to catch a couple hours of rack time. I’m out of here right now, if that works for you.”
I’m pretty sure it had been awhile since he’d had to roust any scofflaws camped out in $70,000 SUVs.
“Just don’t let me catch you overnight here again.”
“Roger that.”
I watched him walk back to his patrol car.
It was 6:20 A.M. My phone rang. The man on the other end spoke with an impenetrable Indian accent. He said his name was “Khan,” then repe
ated it when I said, “Who?”
“Jahangir Khan. Your student.”
Not merely my student. My only student.
“Jahangir. Of course. How could I forget? What’s shaking, buddy?”
He apologized for calling so early, but said he was anxious to know when I would be returning to Rancho Bonita so he could resume his flight training.
“As you are no doubt remembering, Mr. Cordell, I am keenly interested in obtaining my official pilot’s license certificate because you see, sir, it is of the utmost interest to me that I—”
“—I get it, Jahangir,” I said, cutting him off before he got really cranked up. “I’ll be back this week. I’ll call you. We’ll get it going, OK?”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Cordell, thank you. You are a most kind and generous man—and, might I say, a fine pilot. If I could one day be only half as skilled as you are, sir, I will regard myself as a lucky man. You know, in the city where I am from, very few people will ever know the joy of flight, being in the air, above the teeming masses, and I—”
It was way too early in the morning to be that enthusiastic about anything, including flying.
“You’re breaking up, Jahangir,” I said, running the phone up and down my beard. “I’ll call as soon as I get back. You take care now, buddy. Talk soon. Peace out.”
I rubbed my eyes, yawned and stretched. Almost immediately, my phone rang again.
“I didn’t have much to do last night after you left,” Alicia Rosario said, “so I started reading up on your friend, Hub Walker.” Her tone was all business, tinged with the bitterness of a good woman scorned. “He carried a German Luger pistol in Vietnam.”
“His father fought in World War I. He inherited the pistol from him.”
“The Luger’s not exactly standard U.S. military issue.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Walker, by chance, hasn’t shown you the pistol, has he?”
“What reason would he have had to do that?”
I waited for Rosario to respond. She sneezed.
“Gesundheit.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Must’ve caught a bug from somebody last night.”
