by David Bishop
“Bail?”
“Eddie Whittaker had a clean record so his attorney argued he posed no threat to the community. The issue of special circumstances was questionable and the D.A. decided not to pursue that. The bail was set at one million. The general posted the bond. Eddie Whittaker walked.”
Fidge offered another beer but I waved him off, then he said, “Have another, there’s something I wanna kick around.” I nodded and he pulled us two more, twisted the cap off mine, and passed it over. “You heard Salt ate his gun last weekend?”
“I read the piece in the paper. Did any of you pick up on him getting … I don’t know, funny, depressed, like that?”
“No. His partner, Washington, the black guy they call Pepper, had no idea, and if a guy’s partner doesn’t know”—Fidge interrupted himself with a shrug.
“Salt was divorced wasn’t he?” Fidge nodded. “Been a few years, right?”
He nodded again. “About as long as you and Helen. Why?”
“Just trying to get a handle on it.”
“Why is it us cops lead the league in divorce, alcoholism, and suicide?”
“Long hours,” I said, “lots of stress.”
“Hell, hedge fund managers deal with that. Course they make big bucks to salve the shit they handle.”
“I think it’s that cops deal with the crud all the time,” I said. “Lose perspective. Begin to think everybody’s a lowlife. Truth is only a couple percent of folks are rotten, but cops deal almost totally within that couple percentage. It starts to look like the whole world’s that way. You never get ahead of the cases, hell you never even catch up. You keep locking up the bad guys and the world keeps sending more.”
“But I don’t feel that way, Matt.”
“Course not. You lead the league in happiness.”
“Brenda. You know. It’s her. Her and the kids, they keep me rooted.”
“I don’t know why she puts up with you, but I sure hope she stays on the job.”
“Everyone said Salt’s wife always nagged him to can the job. She hated him being a cop. Wanted him to, I don’t know, drive a hack. Be a Wal-Mart greeter. Whatever. He couldn’t do it. He loved being a cop. So do I. Why do we love it? It’s a crummy job. The scum don’t like us. The citizens think we’re all on the take or hassling them for no reason. Every time we get into it with some piece of shit, the folks yell police brutality. The attorneys treat us like we’re idiots. The rules are tilted in favor of the crooks. Why in the hell do we love the job?”
“For all those reasons,” I offered as if I really knew. “Cops like to buck the system. Fight the odds. The thin blue line and all that shit. You hang onto Brenda, she’s aces.”
“Yeah,” Fidge said. Then he shook his head and raised his bottle. “To Salt. Rest in peace.”
“To Salt,” I repeated. “Let’s hope he went somewhere the scum can’t get in.”
“So, how’s the writing business? You got something new coming out soon?”
“In a couple of months. My publisher’s bugging me to get through the proof. I shouldn’t have taken the job from General Whittaker. I went there planning to turn him down.”
“What happened?”
“The old man’s a master strategist. He left me standing in the corner holding a wet paintbrush. I don’t know. In the end, as a soldier he did a lot for us. It could also be because I’m a dumb fuck. I guess that tells it best.”
“Why’s your publisher pressing you?”
“The way it works, the publisher pressures my agent. My agent pressures me. Everyone with a piece wants me to get the next book out.”
“Deadlines,” Fidge says while shaking his head. “Just like at the department, the suits upstairs keep pushing.”
“This is the last book I’m doing for him or any of the big name publishers. They’re not bad people, it’s just the publishing business has left them clinging to a leaky boat. Today’s book buyers are asked to pay too much because of all the layers that stand between the author and the reader. I’m going to start self-publishing. I’ll use a work-for-hire publisher so I can control the rights to my own books. That way I can set lower prices, make a good living and protect my readers from getting ripped off.”
“And you can work at a pace you choose without the suits putting the screws to you. So, how’s Helen?”
“How the hell would I know? We’re divorced.”
“Okay. How’s the divorce going?”
“Divorce is … it stinks. Hell. It’s shit.”
“If it’s shit, it would stink,” Fidge said. We looked at each other. Then he laughed. I laughed. “Fuck it, Matthew.”
We touched bottles. I nodded, and then picked up the pictures from the Corrigan scene. Fidge had made me copies of all the file docs but not the pictures. Other than showing Ileana dead, the photos revealed nothing.
“The place doesn’t look tossed. Anything stolen?” I asked.
“Not so’s we could tell. And I doubt it. Her jewelry box had some rather expensive pieces. Things I doubt a secretary could afford. Her folks were struggling middle class so the diamonds weren’t family presents.”
“Where’d she get them?”
“The neighbors spoke of a couple of luxury cars that would be there from time to time. They never saw the drivers. A good guess she had a couple of part-timers besides Eddie Whittaker. The landlord said the rent always came from her. On her salary, the rent would have been a stretch, the diamonds impossible.”
“Was she hooking?”
“No arrests. My guess, she did it for the rent and diamonds. She had a straight job and her boss and coworkers spoke well of her.”
“What did Eddie Whittaker have to say about all that?”
Fidge took a moment to glance at his case notes in the file. “He said he didn’t know of any other men in her life. As for the expensive stuff, he not only claimed he didn’t buy it, he said he never saw any of it. I sure remember his jaws being tight when I showed him. A check of his bank account and credit cards didn’t show any purchases or cash withdrawals that could cover even one piece of that jewelry.”
“Stacks up like a straight gal with at least one sugar daddy?”
“That’s how I added it, but I never got no names. Her gal pals at work only knew about Eddie Whittaker. We had some unidentified prints at the scene we could never connect up. They could’ve been left by Mr. Jewelry Buyer, or the cable guy, or somebody who came to some party she threw.”
Fidge and I talked about the case for a while longer, but nothing more worthy of mention. The precise facts were plain and clear, a quick arrest of Eddie followed by his quicker release. Since then, eleven years of wind pudding.
I went out Fidge’s back door. My stomach had processed enough of the burger and fries that my bloat had shrunk from the size of a garage to the size of a golf cart. The beers had tasted good, but I expected a coming clash with the banana milk shake I drank with my burger.
I stopped at the supermarket and then gassed up the car. When I got home, Axel was not there. My guess he was still down at Mackie’s with his buds. Some nights he went over to Clara Birnbaum’s to watch an old movie. After putting the groceries away, I went down the hall to see Clarice Talmadge. Clarice was the widow I had helped when she had been arrested for murdering her husband, Garson, about a year ago. Clarice had been innocent of anything more than an overactive sex life, with the kind of body you see featured on television helping to sell Cadillacs and cosmetics.
Since her husband’s murder, I periodically made myself available to Clarice. I also liked her. She’s smart, and has a great sense of humor, nearly as bawdy as Fidge’s wife. When her husband, Garson, died, with what he left her, she became wealthy. Clarice and I had close to a divorced man’s perfect relationship. No strings. No pressure. She enjoyed that and she had no desire to marry again. She also liked to sleep alone so there was no awkwardness about getting up and going home afterwards. Like I said, Clarice is the perfect set up for a divor
ced guy, particularly one still stirring hot ashes for his ex-wife. But keep that to yourself.
Around one in the morning, I drifted back down the hall to my place. Axel had returned and was waiting up like Dr. Watson always did for Sherlock Holmes. I spent the next hour bringing my loyal staff man up on what Fidge had told me. The cop’s file was cold with no real leads. The file did have the names and addresses for all the witnesses. Those who got Eddie Whittaker arrested, as well as those who got him released. That gave me some places to begin poking around. Hopefully some of the addresses would still be good.
*
At six a.m. Fidge woke me. He was at the beach and it was raining, a drizzle more than a rain, but the gusts off the ocean were hearty with a wind chill number he said I wouldn’t want to know. He told me to come down. He’d explain then.
When I got there, I saw Fidge wearing a black stocking cap. From the back he looked like a chest of drawers balancing a bowling ball.
The main attraction turned out to be a soggy homicide lying in the surf. The ID pulled from the dead guy’s wet wallet identified him as Cory Jackson. After a minute, the name came to me and I knew why Fidge had called me to share the event. People always say, the name rang a bell, but I always thought that was silly. Cory Jackson had been the eyewitness who had seen Eddie Whittaker’s fiancée, Ileana Corrigan, murdered in her beach house. Mr. Jackson worked at a restaurant up the beach from where we stood over his body. At least he worked there back on the day he pointed his finger at Eddie Whittaker. The restaurant didn’t serve the fishing trade so it would be closed this early. Later in the day, Fidge would check to see if Jackson still worked there. The important point being that while both Jackson and the restaurant had been closed only the restaurant would reopen. The hole in Cory Jackson’s forehead was bigger and rougher around the edges than the hole in the back of his head. He had been shot from behind.
There were no tracks, not even Jackson’s. The tide had come and gone, smoothing the sand on its way out. This suggested he had been shot sometime last night before the high tide came fully in. His wet clothes seconded that motion. There were no powder burns around the entry wound so the shooter had not been especially close. Neither Fidge nor I mentioned the old Whittaker case, but we were both thinking the same thing. Someone involved in that eleven-year-old case may have chosen to remove the only supposed eyewitness to the killing of Ileana Corrigan. That, or Cory Jackson getting rubbed out the day after I started messing in the case was pure coincidence. In my view, such coincidences were rarely coincidences.
Chapter 6
At seven, with the morning sun tussling with the hang-around fog, Fidge called to say the department had reached the manager of the restaurant at his home. Surprisingly, Cory Jackson still worked there after eleven years. The manager told Fidge the address we had for Jackson was no longer good. The manager had not known the new address by memory but he had it in his office in the back of the restaurant. Fidge would meet the manager there in an hour. He also told him to hang out his help wanted sign. I couldn’t tag along, official police business and all. At this point, there was nothing that clearly drew a line between the old Corrigan case and last night’s murder of Cory Jackson. My hanging around while Fidge worked this case would do nothing but suggest that line existed.
I decided I’d beat it over to the address the Whittaker case file carried for Cory Jackson and sniff around before the cops shagged the old address, if they ever did. The murder of Cory Jackson would not be a high profile case. Well, not unless it got tied back to the Corrigan murder and by extension to General Whittaker, one of Long Beach’s most storied residents.
Jackson’s old address was a tired building on the sand along an old road near Seal Beach, south of Long Beach. From the street I could see an opening for a double carport with one vehicle inside. As I approached on foot, a lamp shining through an upstairs window revealed living quarters over the carport which appeared to be that same size. A set of stairs went up the side of the building past a rusty metal mailbox that hung crooked just below a porch light filled with cobwebs, but no bulb. The stairs were gloomy, but the morning sun from the east had already cracked open the new day. The air still felt cold. The fog wet. A gull screeched as I put my foot on the first stair.
According to the restaurant manager, Cory Jackson didn’t live here any longer. Of course we knew that to be true. In point of fact, Cory now bunked in the County Coroner’s office. But someone was inside. I decided to proceed cautiously and avoid provoking someone who might be an innocent citizen. At least until I knew more.
The door bell didn’t work. I flipped on the tape recorder in my jacket pocket and knocked, loudly, which wasn’t hard. The screen door, warped from the damp air, and dried by the wind and salt, no longer fit the doorway, so it rattled and banged from a normal knock. My knock exceeded normal.
The upper third of the door was a filthy glass panel shrouded with what had once been a white curtain. After a moment, the silhouette of a man’s head blocked some of the faint light that made its way through the smeary coating on the glass.
“Who is it?” the blurry figure said through the door.
“Cory Jackson?”
“He’s not here. I don’t know the guy. Go away.”
For starters, this guy wasn’t too bright. He had begun talking before he finished thinking about what he didn’t want to say. “I’m not going away,” I hollered back. “And your door won’t keep me out.”
He pulled the door open. I didn’t hear any metal, so it had not been locked. He stood on the other side of the screen door wearing a pair of black drawstring sweatpants and a yellow v-neck t-shirt. I couldn’t tell if the color was how it came when he bought it, or had yellowed through a devoted avoidance of laundering. He wore dirty white athletic socks and no shoes. The way the sock fabric twisted in front of his toes told me he was right handed. People make hard turns with greater pressure on the more coordinated leg, thus the sock on that foot bunches up and twists more. He looked close to thirty, but beyond it. His left sleeve, rolled up on top of his shoulder, held a pack of smokes.
“Who am I talking to?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter—”
“It does to me,” I said interrupting him. “You know Jackson and we’re going to talk so don’t make this harder on yourself than you need to.”
“You the cops?”
“No. And that’s the good and bad parts.”
“What’s good about it?”
“The good part’s to my advantage. I don’t have to waste time doing things by the book or respecting your rights or any of that crap. That’s also the bad part. That part’s yours.”
I grabbed the little handle on the screen door and rattled it until he slapped the hook out of the eye screw and pushed it out toward me. I walked right at him until he gave ground and backed up into the clearing in the center of the main room. A sort of brown contemporary couch, liberally stained, stood against the far wall, fronted by an early American coffee table. A blue Naugahyde chair sat to the side. The light that had filtered through the window came from a milk glass up-lamp that sat in the corner behind the blue chair. His decorator favored the style of mix-and-match-nothing.
“How do you know Cory Jackson and where is he?”
“I don’t know where he is. He don’t live here no more. Lives alone in a studio unit a couple blocks from the restaurant he works at.”
“You were rooming with Cory back when he testified about seeing Eddie Whittaker kill his fiancée. Let’s start with why he lied about that.” In fact, I didn’t know if they roomed together then or not. I made it a presumptive statement. He didn’t disagree so it was true.
“Hey. He saw the dude. Least he said he did. No reason to lie.”
“What’s your name?”
“Quirt. Quirt Brown.”
I walked over to the table and picked up his wallet. His driver’s license confirmed his name, Quirt Brown. “Quirt?” I said, with an inflection t
hat asked, where had that come from.
“My parents were John Wayne fans. Quirt was the name of one of his characters.”
“Hey,” I said while still looking in his wallet. “Look at the bright side. No one gets you confused with anyone else and it’s easy to pronounce and spell, well, pronounce anyway.” When I turned back he had moved closer and his right hand held a gun.
“Okay, pal. Who the hell are you and why are you here asking about Cory?”
Quirt wasn’t a big man but he had big hands with longish fingers, webbed together the way hands come, like linked sausages with transplanted fingernails.
I stuck my thumbs in my waistband. “Now why did ya wanna go and do that? We were having a friendly little chat. No reason to go hostile.”
“Now I ask the questions,” he said.
“Quirt, a man’s got to learn his limits, and when he knows them he’s got to live within them.”
“I don’t wanna hear that shit. Who are you and why are you here?”
“My name’s Carson. Kit Carson. I’m working my way through college selling magazine subscriptions. We got whatever you want. Mysteries, sci-fi, erotica, handyman mags, you name a hankering, I got a subscription fer ya.”
“Okay, wise guy. Let me see your wallet.”
I pulled my left thumb out of my waistband and reached around to the left side of my rump, my right thumb staying cinched in behind my belt. As I brought my wallet around slowly, I dropped it. When he reflectively glanced down, I thrust my right hand out from my waistband with maximum force and jammed the flat of my palm against the finger side of his gun. I also slammed my left hand against the outside of the wrist. The timing resulted in nearly simultaneous blows, each driving against the force of the other. He involuntarily straightened his fingers. The move also drove his hand away from me, which was good in the event he somehow got the trigger pulled. He didn’t. His gun was now in my hand.
“Okay. I’ve got the gun and everything you thought you controlled is now gone, or dripping down your leg.”
