by Alan Russell
“No,” said Lisbet, reaching for me. “This comes first.”
Suddenly I didn’t feel so frozen out.
The centerpiece of the LAPD police badge is the Los Angeles City Hall Building. I am biased, but I think no police force has a more attractive badge. The art deco look works well as a building and as a badge. The tower was based on the Mausoleum of Mausolus, which was said to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. While plenty of figurative bodies were buried at City Hall, I wasn’t aware of any actual ones.
In the past I’d visited City Hall for purposes of both business and pleasure. If you want one of the best views in LA., you need go no further than the observation deck on the building’s twenty-seventh floor. Best of all, there’s no charge, unless you include the extortionate price for nearby parking.
Normally, I’m leery of spending too much time in one of L.A.’s skyscrapers. Just because earthquakes are a part of life for Angelenos doesn’t mean I am comfortable with shaking buildings, but politicians being the survivalists they are, there is probably no safer place to be in L.A. during an earthquake than in the thirty-two-story City Hall building. A huge amount of money had been spent retrofitting the 1928 edifice so that it exceeded all earthquake standards. It wasn’t an expenditure put before the citizenry, because protecting politicians has never been high on anyone’s list of priorities except the lists of politicians themselves.
Partly to stretch my legs, and partly because I didn’t want to be bothered putting in for validated parking, I parked a few blocks away in Little Tokyo and walked over. Sirius was lucky; he got snooze time in the car. The mayor’s office was housed in City Hall, and the Reluctant Hero press conference was taking place in one of its meeting rooms.
When I entered the building, security was tight. I thought it ironic that once I was inside City Hall I had to show my badge displaying City Hall. One of the guards scrutinized it for what seemed overly long.
“Look familiar?” I asked.
He grunted, and I was allowed to bypass the metal detectors. I took the elevator up to the twenty-second floor, and then had to switch to a second elevator in order to continue my ascent.
When Pullman saw me enter the meeting room, he untangled himself from Sergeant Maureen Kinsman of LAPD Media Relations and made a beeline for my side. I felt a bit of déjà vu. Maureen had been my handler when the Chief had presented me with a Medal of Valor, and Sirius had received a Liberty Award. At the time I felt as uncomfortable as Pullman now looked.
“I thought you told me this was going to take no more than fifteen minutes,” he said.
“Once it starts, it will be short and sweet,” I promised.
Pullman was wearing his dress Ranger uniform, complete with beret, which he kept twisting and turning on his head.
“Where’s your better half?” he asked.
“Sirius begged off. He said to send you his regards and hopes you don’t mind his not being here, but there’s something about politicians that brings out the rabid dog in him.”
“Me too,” said Pullman. “You should have brought him. Even if he put the bite on a politician, there’s not a jury in the land that would convict him.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of doing the same.”
“Don’t tempt me. After this ceremony is over, I’m flying out of L.A., and a few days after that I’ll be deploying. It’s going to be a relief to return to fighting.”
He meant every word he was saying.
“This time I’m the one who’s got your six,” I said.
“Your PR lady said my name won’t be released, and my face won’t be shown.”
“All the media has agreed to that and more.”
He gave a nervous glance at all the news cameras, and looked back at me.
“After I heard the news this morning, I was afraid you weren’t going to be here,” said Pullman. “It sounds like the shit hit the fan with your case.”
“That pretty much describes it.”
“I hate to say this, but I’m glad of the timing. With all that shitstorm going on, I’m just yesterday’s news.”
“If you hadn’t been there,” I said, “no matter what the circumstances for your being there, I hate to think what might have happened. You deserve the thanks of this city.”
He shrugged, uncomfortable hearing what I felt necessary to say. Pullman’s eyes scanned the room again.
“Will she be here?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They don’t know anything about the ceremony. And I’m pretty sure they won’t be tuning into the news today, which means they won’t be able to make a connection between me and the Reluctant Hero.”
“And why won’t they be watching the news?”
“Kelley was having contractions yesterday. Today her water broke. I think she and D.C. are going to be preoccupied.”
“You’re not going to stay for the birth?”
“I’m going to get the hell out of Dodge,” he said. “I told my brother that I’d been recalled early.”
“You won’t be able to avoid them the rest of your life.”
He shrugged. The way he did it seemed far too fatalistic for my comfort.
“And I might need you for more backup.”
That got a little smile out of him.
“You got a good woman, Gideon?”
“I do.”
“So you got a good woman and a war dog. A man can’t ask for more than that, can he?”
“No, he can’t.”
Maureen was signaling to Pullman. The mayor and Chief Ehrlich were both moving toward the stage. The ceremony was about to begin.
“It’s time for you to go and get your key to the city,” I said.
Pullman took a deep breath, once more looked for a face that wasn’t there and never would be, and then went to join Maureen.
CHAPTER 26:
A BRISKET, A BASKET
There was something about the notion of Caine Pullman’s forbidden love that kept playing in my head like the refrain of an unwanted song. From experience I knew that trying to ignore the thought would just increase its percolation, and the only way to damper the jack-in-the-box was to acknowledge it. I took out a notebook and on a clean page of paper wrote the words “Forbidden love.” That sufficiently silenced the “Pop Goes the Weasel” music and allowed me to get on with my work.
On another fresh piece of paper I wrote, “Drew Corde.” I had read the media reports, but I needed more than that. I called Dave Holt’s cell number and was pleasantly surprised when he picked up.
“I’m surprised a celebrity like you would talk to a nobody like me,” I said.
Holt and the other Robbery-Homicide detectives working Corde’s death had been featured on the news plenty, even if it was only to say, “No comment.”
“Call me a glutton for punishment,” he said.
“The media still camped out there?”
There had been any number of news reports from in front of the Police Administration Building.
“They were around earlier,” Holt said. “We can’t open the windows and that means we can’t use the media as target practice.”
RHD was located on the seventh floor. Maybe the suits had been worried about water balloons.
“I am trying to close the Wrong Pauley case,” I said. “As you know, it had a potential tie-in with Corde.”
It wouldn’t do for Holt to know I was investigating his own case.
“And I was wondering what kind of weapons you found at Corde’s house,” I said.
“There was nothing exotic if that’s what you mean,” Holt said. “There were three handguns, including the popgun that killed him, the Beretta Tomcat .32.”
“Did he have a California Concealed Carry Permit?”
“All the guns were registered. Friends say he often
carried the Beretta in an ankle holster.”
“I’m not buying those reports about his drinking heavily that night. He sure didn’t sound lit when he called me. He struck me as a guy who always liked being in control.”
“You call a blood alcohol level of 1.7 in control?”
That information wasn’t public knowledge. “That high?” I said.
“He and Brownie were having themselves quite a party.”
There was a prurient note to his words.
“I heard they had sex,” I said. Actually I hadn’t heard that, as it hadn’t been in the news.
“It looked like he went out riding a bucking bronco,” Holt said.
“But why would anyone kill himself after having sex with Elle Barrett Browning?”
Holt felt the need to educate the masses. “A shrink we consulted with said that kind of depression is common, especially when combined with alcohol. She said lots of men have PCT, which stands for post-coital something or other. The doc even quoted some Latin phrase she said has been around for thousands of years. It was something like ‘All animals are sad after sex.’ ”
“That sounds like psychobabble,” I said, trying to keep him talking. “Singing the blues is one thing; shooting yourself is another.”
“According to Brownie and others, he was despondent about the fallout from Novak and blamed himself for the hit his company had taken by letting bad things happen on his watch.”
“If he was so despondent, how was he able to party like a rock star and have sex?”
“He got all maudlin afterward. Brownie said he got into this bad funk. She tried to talk him out of it, but she’d also been hitting the sauce and ended up falling asleep. When she woke up, it was to him holding a gun to his head. She tried to pull it away from him, but he fought her off.”
“And you’re attributing that to PCT?”
“Among ourselves we got another name for it,” said Holt. “We’re calling it ‘bangst.’ ”
Holt pretty much clammed up after that. He must have figured out that I wasn’t only calling up about my case. As much as I didn’t like being frozen out, working from Siberia had its advantages. I worked the case mostly from my home, filling notebooks with my questions and observations and putting my case notes in order. I called other detectives in RHD and found out what I could. I referenced Holt’s “bucking bronco” remark and heard about the scratches on Corde’s arms and hands. It wasn’t clear if those scratches had been sustained during lovemaking or the struggle for his gun. Although it hadn’t been released to the public, I was told traces of Corde’s skin and DNA had been found under Elle’s nails.
There was nothing in the evidence—not in the blood splatter, the angle of bullet entry, ballistics, or the preliminary forensic pathology results—that contradicted Elle’s story. After giving her statement, Elle had submitted to a physical examination, which corroborated that she and Corde had engaged in sex shortly before his death.
After cooperating with the initial investigation, Elle Barrett Browning had gone into seclusion. Her manager said she was “grief-stricken.” In the three days since Corde’s death, the tragic love story of Elle Barrett Browning and Drew Corde had begun taking on epic proportions. The story being spun was that they were the ultimate power couple said to have an equally powerful love. Around the world there was an outpouring of support for Elle.
I was too busy to send her flowers, but hundreds of others did.
A Porsche Boxster can go from zero to sixty miles an hour in a little more than five seconds, but despite the inequity of our respective automobile engines it wasn’t hard tailing Neal Bass. The El Segundo traffic reined him in, and the fire-engine red color of his car allowed me to easily keep him in sight. His driving hadn’t improved since I had last talked to him, and I watched him not yield to a pedestrian stepping into the crosswalk. What he did stop for was lunch at Britt’s BBQ, a hole in the wall on Main Street.
It took me a minute to find a parking space; by then Bass had already put in his order. He didn’t notice me enter the restaurant or place my own order. I waited until my food was ready before joining him. He was already halfway through his brisket and mac and cheese. I found room at his table for my barbecue tacos and iced tea.
His face fell at the sight of me. I guess he thought Corde’s death meant he would never see me again. Bass had been eating his lunch with apparent pleasure, but at my appearance he dropped his fork and looked like he had lost his appetite.
“I brought you a DMV handbook,” I said, waving the booklet before finding a place for it next to his tray. “You’re going to need to study the part about pedestrians in a crosswalk. Five minutes ago you neglected to yield. I’m afraid you’re looking at another moving violation.”
“This is harassment,” he said. “You’re violating my rights. It’s clear you are trying to blackmail me. As such, there’s no way any ticket you might give me would stand up in court.”
Country music was playing in the background. I took a bite of one of my tacos. It was a fusion combination I hadn’t tried before and was as tasty as I had hoped it might be.
“You have a great way of sounding aggrieved,” I said, “but facts are ugly things when you’re on the wrong side of them. It’s your smokescreen that wouldn’t stand up in court, but I do think your lament has potential as a country song.”
I tried on some lyrics for him: “A tisket, a tasket, brisket in my basket.”
Ella Fitzgerald had made similar lyrics work, but I was no Ella Fitzgerald.
“What do you want?” asked Bass.
I reached for Bass’s side order of sweet potato fries and took a handful. At least he had picked out a winning dining spot. Bass put a protective hand over his beignet.
“We need to talk about the one who didn’t get away,” I said. “And now that Corde is dead, I’d like to revisit the subject of angels.”
CHAPTER 27:
PHILADELPHIA STORY
When you want to clear your mind, few things work better than a walk. Sirius and I were on our second walk of the day at the Van Nuys Sherman Oaks Park. It was quieter than usual; normally, kids are running around the baseball and soccer fields, but for the moment those fields were empty. There were some people playing tennis, and one older man was shooting hoops. The most popular area in the complex is usually the pool, but even that seemed unusually quiet.
Sirius and I stayed on the outskirts of the park, traveling along a trail that goes around it. We practiced drills as we walked; the handler probably needed the work more than his charge.
As we went through our exercises, I spoke to Sirius about the case. Luckily he knows the difference between my command voice and conversational chatter.
“Let’s say Corde didn’t kill himself,” I said. “That means Elle was complicit in his murder. But why would she wait until now to be involved in his murder? And what would make her do something as drastic as that?”
With my hand I motioned for Sirius to stop and wait.
“You know what W.C. Fields once said? ‘Show me a great actress and you’ve seen the devil.’ We’ve been looking for an angel, but maybe we should have been hunting down a devil.”
I gestured for Sirius to come to me and then motioned for him to sit. He was flawless; I couldn’t say the same thing about me.
“Elle knows about choreography. She knows about staging. She could have given a lot of thought to how to murder Corde. She could have encouraged him to get drunk, and seduced him, and made sure the sex was rough so that she could claim they later struggled. She could have practiced her lines to the police and known just what to say.
“Is she a great actress?” I asked aloud.
“Is she the devil?” I whispered.
Sirius sat and waited.
I wondered what had prompted Fields to make his observation that great actresses were the
devil. Certainly he had worked with some great actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt, Mae West, and Dorothy Lamour.
“Fields was probably just being funny,” I said.
I gestured for Sirius to circle around me, had him do it a second time, and then motioned for him to lie down. With a little grunt he did.
“Fields was known for his one-liners. That’s reason enough for anyone not to read into them. When he was asked what he wanted for his epitaph on his tombstone, Fields said, ‘On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’ ”
There are a lot of crazy people who talk to themselves. That’s why it’s good I have a dog. Most people don’t think you’re crazy if you talk to your dog. I’m not sure if that speaks more to those judging your mental state or to the person talking to a dog. In my case, it helps when I say things aloud. It’s the “open sesame” effect that doesn’t always happen with the written word. Sometimes doors unexpectedly open. Sometimes logjams clear.
“Philadelphia,” I said.
I took off at a run, Sirius at my side.
Elle Barrett Browning agreed to meet with me without legal representation. Through her intermediaries I had advised her that an “off-the-record meeting” would be in her best interests. As I specified, she met me without her lawyer, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t well coached.
I wanted her to be comfortable, so we met at a place of her choosing, the office of her business manager. I was the first to arrive there and was shown to a meeting room. While I waited for Elle to arrive, I emptied my briefcase and arranged the items I had brought on a table.
She arrived almost half an hour late and came into the meeting room without fanfare or apology. Elle was wearing black, her color of choice since Corde’s death. She had come out of mourning to finish the shoot of her movie but had remained out of the public’s eye. Despite that, or because of it, her so-called tragedy had added extra juice to her star power.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” I said.
