Floaters

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “Don’t you know anything?” Letch said. “A knife is the most phallic of killing tools. When you wanna fuck your babe to death, you use a knife. You stick it in all the way!”

  Letch Boggs would recall those very words when he took a telephone call the next day from a detective who worked the Homicide Unit.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was silly, she finally decided, to let the problems of someone like Dawn Coyote affect her life in any way. The Dawn Coyotes of this world were viruses, and the best way to escape infection was avoidance. Yet from back when they’d trained together in the massage parlor, she’d always pitied the little junkie—back when Dawn was a teenage runaway and Blaze had just bolted from a miserable marriage to a construction worker.

  Her mother had had no right to bitch about Matt. Her mother had lived with construction workers, and a career marine, and a dishwasher before she turned into a really sick drunk. Her mother had had no right bitching about any of her three daughters who had lived for the day they could escape the tiny apartment in Escondido paid for by welfare checks and the kindness of virtual (but not virtuous) strangers.

  Blaze was the oldest and the brightest, and had always wanted to learn a skill, maybe even go to college. But waitress jobs had kept a roof over her head for two years and then she had met Matt and got talked into marriage by a pipe fitter who had plenty of pipe but lacked thirty IQ points. After the divorce she’d seen the ad in a throwaway about applicants wanted at Fingers Divine, a massage parlor on El Cajon Boulevard.

  Tomorrow she’d be rid of Dawn Coyote forever and there’d never be another Dawn in her life. Blaze wasn’t sentimental, had never been burdened with emotional baggage. In a dog-eat-dog world—or a man-eat-woman world—she was not going to be devoured. No man was ever going to control her, and nobody of either gender was ever going to manipulate her again as Dawn had done.

  Dawn. A pathetic loser with cornflower-blue eyes like those of Blaze’s youngest sister, Rosie, who’d died in a flaming pickup truck driven by a Pine Valley cowboy whose blood alcohol level, the coroner had said, was .31. Or too drunk to be walking, let alone driving. Dawn had always reminded Blaze of Rosie, that dead little sister.

  There was no sound on the balcony.

  And here she was standing next to the door like a fool with a revolver in her hand and beads of sweat running down her face, stewing over a junkie and a dead sister. She was a fool. There was nobody out there. Nobody.

  Dawn and her creepy lifestyle were diminishing Blaze’s self-control, that was it. And Blaze, much like Ambrose Lutterworth, had to be in control or suffer grave consequences. She understood that, but unlike Ambrose, whose control was exercised by a choice of clothes or by meticulous housekeeping, hers extended further and deeper. That made her ponder the cassette.

  It was her insurance policy. You never knew when insurance might pay off. Someday, when she had real money and a decent life, she was going to purchase all kinds of insurance. But for now that cassette was her policy. An annuity, if she needed it.

  Blaze decided to put the gun away and go to bed. For all she knew, Dawn wouldn’t even come back tonight. If she was lucky, Dawn would never come back.

  She got into bed again and punched the button on the clock-radio, wanting to hear soft hits, sleepy music. She closed her eyes.

  Then, of course, the phone rang.

  Reaching out in the darkness: “Hello.”

  “It’s me, Dawn.”

  “Goddamn it, Dawn!”

  “I lost the code to your garage. Can you buzz me in the walk-in gate?”

  Blaze didn’t say anything. She pushed number eight on her telephone and heard the buzz. Then she sat up and turned on the bedside lamp.

  Control yourself, she thought. Scream? Lecture? Complain? That would be silly. It had never worked on Rosie, had it? Dawn was a street whore and a junkie and she’d be dead within a few years of an OD or AIDS. So just maintain, Blaze Duvall told herself.

  —

  It was so dark. She wondered why there weren’t more walk lights. You could fall and break your ankle, and hers hurt like hell already. Where was the moon?

  With every step Dawn Coyote could feel the thick roll of bills she’d stuffed inside her panties. It was a good feeling. She knew Blaze would really be pissed off when Rudolph showed up at the gate later. Dawn worried about what she’d say to Blaze then, but she didn’t worry all that much. She couldn’t think about anything but slamming that speedball. Dawn closed her eyes, the better to imagine it.

  Her eyes were open when she passed a large banana tree by the darkened stairwell that led up to the second floor. But her attention was caught by a tiny pale object on the ground. A white flower had pushed through a pavement crack, struggling for life out of the darkness. It was so touching and sweet that she closed her eyes again, imagining the smell of white roses.

  And before she opened them, a powerful hand was on her mouth.

  —

  This time Blaze definitely heard a sound on the balcony or on the steps. A thump. She figured that Dawn had been doing speedballs and staggered against the wall. Or maybe she’d fallen down like Blaze’s drunken neighbor, Charlie.

  Fuck it! She got out of bed and put on the blue terry robe, then headed for the front door.

  When she opened it, she heard what sounded like a far-off cry of a gull. They didn’t fly into her part of Mission Valley all that much, unless they were scavenging around Jack Murphy Stadium. A gull was crying in the distance.

  She saw that the stairwell light was out. That was unusual. Maybe Dawn had fallen down. It was very dark and very quiet. Then she heard the gull again.

  It wasn’t a gull. And it wasn’t far away. It was down there. Down in the stairwell. She never sensed danger, not for an instant. All she could think was that Dawn had fallen down the stairs and was hurt. Moaning in agony, maybe from a broken…

  She rounds the corner of the stairwell, eight feet above a looming silhouette with its arm upraised. Oliver Mantleberry doesn’t even see Blaze as he plunges the buck knife into the pale, sunken belly of Dawn Coyote for the last time.

  Blaze screams! Oliver Mantleberry rises up, raging. Blaze turns to run but hears him coming. Coming for her.

  She reaches the balcony level and rounds the corner. But she can’t move.

  As in a nightmare, she tries to run but can’t. Blaze falls to her knees. She realizes that he’s clutching the hem of her robe.

  She scrambles and crawls, crawls out of her robe. Then Blaze runs naked to the open door of her apartment. She hears his footsteps. His panting!

  She reaches the apartment and slams the door just as he crashes into it.

  He howls one word: “Bitch!”

  Blaze ran to the telephone and dialed 911. She heard heavy footsteps running away, down the stairwell.

  Blaze screamed the address of the apartment building at the 911 operator, along with the word “Murder!”

  Then she hung up without giving her name or any further details, while the operator yelled, “Wait! Don’t hang up!”

  Blaze dashed into the bathroom and locked the door without knowing why she did it. She was surprised to feel sobs deep in her chest. She never heard herself cry but she felt the sobs. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and was shocked to see that her face was contorted and tear-streaked.

  She opened the door and ran to her closet, taking down the nickel-plated revolver. Then, realizing that her telephone number had been automatically recorded and that soon the police would come knocking at her door, she pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and waited for them.

  —

  They called her “Anne of a Thousand Names.” That’s the moniker her fellow detectives hung on her because during her police-department career she’d been Anne Zorn, Anne Bartlett, Anne Sullivan, Anne Minsky, and now Anne Zorn again. Which was her maiden name (and forever name!) because no way, under any circumstances—even if he looked like Kevin Costner—was she going to marry again.
>
  The bad marriages had occurred because of her mother’s religious background, Anne believed. Her mother should have been a nun. She made her children go to church three, four times a week: mass, confession, novenas, you name it. And her mother was still alive—was she ever! Every time Anne had even discussed living with a man not her husband, the old lady had threatened to die from a coronary, yet Anne Zorn did not doubt that her mother would survive her.

  So, because of her mom and the way she’d raised her eldest daughter, Anne felt the need to marry every goddamn one of them, even though divorce and remarriage were also forbidden by the church unless you were rich and famous or a Kennedy.

  You couldn’t tell her mother that. Her mother would just say that being married the second and third times in civil ceremonies was better than “living in sin.” Yet, at least in the eyes of the church, after each divorce Anne was living in sin with subsequent husbands. But you couldn’t tell her mother anything, not then, not now.

  So here she was, forty-six years old, with one grown daughter and three half-grown ex-husbands and a freaking moniker: Anne of a Thousand Names.

  When the telephone rang, she was having a very sweet Bridges of Madison County–ish sort of fantasy, with herself as the country wife and Harrison Ford as the stranger. Clint Eastwood was just a little too old.

  “Hello,” she mumbled.

  “We shagged one,” the voice said. “Get those big brown peepers open, grab a pencil, and pay attention.”

  “Dope, gangs, robbery, or domestic?”

  “None of the above. Somebody did an O.J. on a babe. Wear fishing boots. They say there’s enough blood to overfeed every vampire in Romania.”

  “How delightful,” Anne said.

  —

  When the uniformed cop knocked at her door, Blaze peeked through the viewer and was surprised to see that he looked so young, much younger than herself. She was glad somehow, even though she couldn’t pinpoint why his age made a difference.

  He was no taller than Blaze, and slender. His tan San Diego PD uniform was too large for him and the nine-millimeter riding high on his hip looked oversize, as did the big flashlight he carried. He was blond like Dawn Coyote.

  “You the one who called nine-one-one?”

  “I’m sorry I hung up,” Blaze said. “I was shocked.”

  “Understandable,” the cop said, looking around the apartment. “Anybody else here when it happened?”

  “No, I live alone.”

  “You Ms. Singleton?” he asked, having gotten the name from the gate directory.

  “Yes, Mary Ellen Singleton,” Blaze said, giving her true name.

  “What’d you see? What’d you hear?” The cop sat down on the chair by the door, his notebook ready.

  “I just heard a cry,” Blaze said. “Like…like a gull.”

  “A sea gull?”

  “Yes,” Blaze said. “I thought it was a sea gull.”

  “You said ‘murder’ to the nine-one-one operator. Did you see the woman being stabbed?”

  “Not really,” Blaze said. “I just heard something and went to the stairwell and saw…saw all the blood. So much blood.”

  “Did you look at the victim?” the cop asked.

  “Not really,” Blaze said. “Does she live here?”

  “We don’t know yet,” the young cop said. “We’re waiting for the detectives to arrive. I just wanna get a few facts.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear anything? Somebody running away? Any voices?”

  “No,” Blaze said. “Only the gull. What I thought was a gull crying.”

  —

  Somebody said at the morning briefing that they’d handled 2.3 homicides a week all last year, down from the year before. Anne asked, How do you kill .3 of a human being? She was one of four women of detective rank working the Homicide Unit, along with one female sergeant. A homicide team consisted of four detectives plus a working sergeant, and there were four teams on call, meaning on twenty-four-hour availability. Anne figured that she’d pulled about one on-call case a week since coming to Homicide four years earlier.

  It took her twenty-five minutes to get her face presentable, one of the extra burdens for a female detective on a call-out. Her chestnut perm was hopeless given the time she had, so she’d have to go looking at slaughter wearing a boink-me hairdo.

  Her favorite “blood suit” was at the cleaner’s and all she had that was passable was a one-button gray blazer and a winter-white wool skirt. Not what she wanted to wear at the scene of a bloody homicide, where she might have to root around in bushes or in closets or even in an attic crawlspace. Once, when her flashlight failed, she’d accidentally knelt in a gooey blood puddle while helping an evidence tech look under a bed for blood evidence.

  Anne wondered if the Indian pathologist would roll on this one. She was a canoemaker with a sense of humor, and Anne enjoyed her accent. It reminded her of TV shows about the days of the British Raj. The Jewel in the Crown was her favorite.

  On one call-out Anne had told the pathologist that she wouldn’t have had any problem at all with a first-date boinking of the actor who’d played Hari. What a memsahib she’d have been, Anne said to the Indian.

  She often recalled the first postmortem she’d ever attended. A Mexican kid was Uzi-riddled in a drive-by. They’d used a dozen forceps on him, and it seemed like the pathologist would never stop pulling out the bandage-packing that paramedics had futilely stuffed inside to stem leakage.

  She’d always found “posts” interesting, even though she hadn’t been into biology in school. Morgue humor helped sometimes: “Okay, Anne, this is where babies come from!” as the croaker sliced a sliver from a dead guy’s balls. But gallows humor didn’t work when the corpse was a little kid. The jokes pretty much stopped during those postmortems.

  Anne Zorn had always believed, and many of her male colleagues concurred, that people were often more apt to talk to a female detective. People were less intimidated by a female and were encouraged by a woman’s ability to communicate emotion. But that was not the case when guys murdered hookers or wives. Using a female detective with those guys just didn’t work.

  While doing final touches with an eyebrow pencil, she recalled how it had been with her last husband, Phil. She’d get a call-out, work half the night on a homicide—or all night sometimes—then she’d have to go home, change, clean the house, wash clothes, go to the store, and pick up his kids at school. Kids who’d always mistakenly thought that Anne had broken up Daddy’s perfect marriage to Mom.

  Phil was history now, and so were his darling children, who’d never had a decent meal before their old man’s brief marriage to Anne. Well, those kinds of mistakes were over.

  She gave herself a quick appraisal. Not too bad, considering. At least her eyes weren’t bagged since she hadn’t been asleep long enough. One thing for sure, the client wouldn’t care.

  Anne figured that her sergeant and lieutenant would already be at the scene, and the civilian evidence tech would already be collecting. Detective Sal Maldonado was up for the job of “scene man.” Since coming to Homicide he’d food-inflated, and if he started floor-crawling to help the tech, Anne might have to help raise up that buffalo.

  The crime-scene man would have to go to the morgue in the morning along with the evidence tech to attend the post. Anne and the other two team members would be responsible for witness checks, victim’s background, neighborhood canvass, and so forth.

  But a call-out wasn’t all bad: They got paid time-and-a-half. The average homicide dick and dickette earned an extra seven to ten grand a year, so there was definitely an upside.

  Her company car was hard to start and flooded twice. It was a four-year-old Ford Crown Victoria, and according to the guys on her homicide team, it badly needed an overhaul. “That makes two of us,” Anne had informed them.

  And she wasn’t kidding. At age forty-six she was due, overdue, for her first face-lift. Maybe if enough San Diego citizens
kept shooting, stabbing, bashing, and strangling one another she could get enough time-and-a-half to afford one. At least an eye job, if not the whole cut-and-snip.

  The Ford sputtered and almost stalled when she pulled off Friars Road, up toward the anthill of apartment buildings overlooking Mission Valley. Anne had her map book open on the seat and used her flashlight to check the streets. At least she could still read a map at night. A lot of her detective contemporaries couldn’t even read a newspaper in broad daylight without bifocals, and the men were more vain about it than the women. She was always having to check the fine print for somebody.

  Maybe her eyes were still young, but not the tissue around them. Anne glanced into the rearview mirror at sleepy brown eyes badly lit by the dashboard light. The lids were definitely starting to sag, and there was too much going on underneath the eyes. She wondered what an eye-lift would cost. But if they’re going to do an eye-lift how much extra would it be for the goddamn chin? She could reach under there with her fingers and feel excess.

  It was all so depressing. Boomers weren’t supposed to get old. It sucked. There was nothing good about aging except what the years had taught her about men. What she’d learned is, you don’t need them for much because they’re not good for much. And her sainted mother could get rope burns from rosary beads, but Anne was never, never going to marry another guy no matter how good a squeeze he was. And if her mom told her she liked a guy Anne was dating, it was adios, Bunky. That meant he was a sure loser.

  She figured that she’d never have trouble getting laid even if she couldn’t afford the complete face-lift and ended up looking like Buster the bloodhound. She was proportioned like an athlete, and she literally worked her ass off keeping it that way. Four days a week at the aerobics studio, and not just so she could have a kiss and a cuddle when she wanted it. No, it was because of what she’d accomplished with that body as a young police officer.

  She loved to recall the proudest achievement of her life. Anne Bartlett (her name in 1978) wanted to be the first San Diego PD female to make it on SWAT. She’d made her bones back in the days when there were still a lot of dinosaurs left on the job, guys who wanted women to fail. Back before sexual harassment and the fear those words now instilled. Back when a woman might be teamed on patrol with a male training officer who’d stop their patrol car in an alley and piss on a bush, just to see how she’d handle it.