Bloodthirsty

by Marshall Karp

  “I’m at Diana’s and I don’t have my car, so yeah, come and get me.”

  “My pleasure. But first, ask me what this guy died of.”

  With Terry anytime is comedy time. “I give up, Terry. What killed the poor fellow?”

  “He got a Viagra stuck in his throat. Died of a stiff neck.”

  “I’m hitting the shower. Pick me up in twenty minutes.”

  Diana grabbed the phone. “Make it thirty minutes. I’m hitting the shower with him.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Diana’s apartment building has a semi-circular driveway, and Terry’s five-year-old silver Lexus ES 250 was already parked at the far end when I got downstairs.

  “Morning,” I said, getting in. “How late did you party last night?”

  “Some time around midnight Marilyn realized she wasn’t going to live out her fantasies with Damian Hedge, so she decided to settle for me.”

  “At least you got laid,” I said.

  “One would think.” He turned left out of the driveway onto Wilshire. “But on the ride home she brought up a sore subject.”

  “Your lackluster past performance in the sack?”

  “My dick is fine. It’s my bank account that’s all shriveled up. Rebecca and Sarah will be in college any minute now, and Emily is only two years behind them. I think Marilyn was expecting Barry Gerber to show up last night and start writing tuition checks. So after four glasses of champagne, Marilyn decides to rehash the shortcomings of the Biggs family budget.”

  “Definitely not conducive to romance.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Ruth. You want to solve the world’s overpopulation problem? Mandatory husband and wife financial discussions. It’s the ultimate form of sex prevention.”

  “Fortunately, Diana and I file separate returns, so we had fantastic sex.”

  “Swell. I’ll make a note of it on the official Lomax and Biggs scorecard.”

  “Oh, well, if you’re keeping score, as of 7 a.m., it’s Lomax 2, Biggs, nothing.”

  Terry looked at his watch. “And as of 7:35, we’re both getting fucked. Do you believe this crapola?”

  “I’m not sure which particular crapola you’re complaining about this morning.”

  “A body in a trash can? That’s the case we catch? And before that, we get a junkie in an alley, a Jane Doe under a pier, a night clerk at a flophouse, a pimp. Do you see a pattern here?”

  “Dead people.”

  “Boring dead people. Ever since we signed the movie deal with Halsey, Division is sending us out on the lowest of the low profile cases.”

  “Obviously, somebody is determined to teach you some humility,” I said. “And as your partner, I’m forced to suffer the consequences. But look on the bright side. We work out of Hollywood. We’re bound to catch a superstar sooner or later.”

  The good news is, it was sooner. The bad news is, it was the guy who was supposed to write Terry’s tuition checks. The body in the trash can turned out to be Barry Gerber.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hollywood Hills is one of the more prosperous neighborhoods Terry and I cover. But we don’t get to spend much time there. People who live in the Hills have better things to do with their lives than kill each other.

  It’s also the easiest part of our turf to get lost in. Most of our jurisdiction is laid out in neat little grids. Wide streets. Straight lines. La Brea is parallel to Fairfax. Hollywood intersects with Vine. But there’s no such pattern to the Hills. The narrow, winding roads have as much logic as a bowl of linguini. It’s so confusing that LAPD issues us area maps with turn-by-turn directions.

  “We’re going to the 2400 block of El Contento Drive,” Terry said. “Get out the cheat sheet.”

  “Don’t need it,” I said. “When I was ten, Frankie was born. Mom was busy, so I spent most of my summer vacation driving around with Big Jim. That’s the year they shot Chinatown. Every Tuesday after they wrapped we would drive Jack Nicholson to an all-night poker game at a buddy’s house on El Contento. We’d pick him up the next morning.”

  “Nicholson? It was probably an all-night fuckfest. How contento did he look in the morning?”

  “Actually, he was always pretty chipper. I just figured he was a good poker player.”

  I navigated Terry through the quiet streets. “Zero traffic headed south,” he said as we turned onto Ivarene. The roads were wide enough for two cars, but nothing passed us coming down. No Moms in Volvos driving the kids to school. No Dads in Beemers heading for the office. It was just pure suburban serenity. Until we turned onto El Contento.

  It was a total logjam. Six squad cars were parked at six different angles. There were two County Coroner vehicles, a gaggle of media vans, and, from the Sanitation Department, a supervisor’s car and a green top-loader garbage truck.

  “Looks a little discontento,” Terry said, adding our car to the tail end of the chaos. “Like New Year’s Eve in Tijuana, only without the gunfire.”

  Cop car lights were strobing, police radios were crackling with static, and clueless reporters were sticking microphones in the faces of equally clueless gawkers, one of whom ducked under the crime scene tape, pissing off one of the uniforms, who yelled, “Hey, shit-for-brains, this is the last time I’m gonna tell you nice. Get your dumb ass behind the tape.”

  We headed for the cluster of people who were at the eye of the storm, wielding cameras, calipers, cotton swabs, and other weapons of modern forensics.

  There in the middle of it all was Jessica Keating. She was partially hidden behind a black garbage can, but I could see the blonde curls and hear the flat, nasal Chicago twang butchering all words that contained the letter A.

  Jess is the best crime scene investigator in LA County. If you’re going to spend your day trying to figure out how dead people got dead, you need what Terry calls the Forensics Trifecta. Brains, heart, and a twisted sense of humor.

  We waited quietly behind her while she held a pair of tweezers up to the sunlight and squinted at it. Whatever she had plucked from the garbage can or the dead guy was imperceptible from where I was standing. She dropped the invisible clue into an evidence pouch and marked it. “Good morning, Detective Lomax. Good morning, Detective Biggs,” she said.

  “Nice police work,” Terry said. “You didn’t even turn around.”

  “Terry, if you keep wearing that Eau de Road Kill, even a blind man could pick you out of a lineup.” She sealed the pouch and stood up tall. Very tall. I’m six-one, and we were eyeball to eyeball. She was a little rounder than the last time I saw her. She was five months pregnant, and you didn’t need to be a detective to figure it out.

  “I love what you’ve done with your boobs,” Terry said. “And that motherly glow. Any day now, some bureaucrat will pick up on it and tell you no more field work.”

  “Well, I’m glad I caught this one. Looks like we got ourselves another headline homicide.”

  “That’s Hollywood for you,” Terry said. “Throwing out the rich and famous with the trash. Who you got?”

  “You ever hear of Barry Gerber, the movie producer?”

  “Oh, shit,” Terry said.

  “You a fan?”

  “Mike and I were supposed to meet him last night, but he never showed.”

  “That’s because he was already dead. Would you like to meet him now?”

  Terry and I put on rubber gloves and knelt beside the garbage can, which was lying on its side. Gerber’s head and bare shoulders were visible, but the rest of him was still wedged inside the plastic coffin.

  “Can you get him out of there?” I asked.

  “Not without a crowbar and a gallon of KY. This boy is in full-blown rigor. I put the TOD somewhere between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. yesterday. They can cut him out of the can at the morgue, but he’ll need another twenty-four hours to limber up.”

  “Damn,” Terry said. “This sucks.”

  “My professional opinion is that it sucks for him too,” Jessica said. “So, was he going to produce the
movie on the Lamaar Familyland case?”

  “We never got that far,” I said. “Last night was supposed to be our first meeting.”

  “Does this mean you guys have a conflict of interest handling this case?”

  I shook my head. “No, it just means Terry and I have to find some other rich guy to make our movie.”

  “Our movie,” Jessica said. “Don’t forget I was CSI on that case. My husband thinks Nicole Kidman should play me, but I’m leaning toward Uma.”

  “Uma doesn’t do supporting roles,” Terry said, studying the dead man’s face. “Are you sure this is Gerber? A lot of these Hollywood fat cats have the same look.”

  “This one’s also got a wallet with a driver’s license and six credit cards that say Barry Gerber. The killer left it in a plastic bag inside the can.”

  “Any cash?” I said.

  “A little over two thousand bucks.”

  “Not enough to make a movie,” I said, standing up, “but it does rule out robbery.”

  Terry stood up too. “This totally blows,” he said.

  “Sorry for your loss, Detective,” Jessica said. “I’ll do everything I can in my supporting role to help you find your benefactor’s killer.”

  “For starters, you could tell us how Mr. Gerber met his demise.”

  She shrugged. “Honey, I can’t see most of this guy’s torso. The best I can give you right now is loss of blood.”

  Loss of blood is often the official cause of death. But it’s a catchall that covers a lot of possibilities. The critical question is what made the hole from which the blood got lost.

  “So he bled out,” I said, “but you don’t know if it’s from a bullet, a machete, or a hat pin.”

  “He’s got to have a hole in him somewhere,” she said. “But I can’t find it without destroying the evidence. Once the turkey carvers at the morgue get him on the table, they’ll find the wound and give you the weapon. But I’ll go out on a limb now and rule out hat pin.”

  I took a flashlight and crouched down again, shining the light into the can so I could get a better look. I got back up, fast. Barry stunk.

  “No blood on the can or the body,” I said.

  “Not as far as I can see,” Jessica said. “They must have cleaned him up before they tossed him out.”

  “Alright,” I said. “Let’s canvass. Who’s the first responder?”

  Jessica pointed to the beefy cop who had cursed out the civilian for sneaking under the yellow tape. “Sauer,” she said, puckering her mouth like she just sucked a lemon. “Good luck.”

  Ed Sauer. More than two hundred uniforms work out of the Hollywood station with us, and if they gave an Asshole of the Month Award, Sauer would keep winning it till they retired his badge number. He’s a forty-something beat cop whose foot slips every time he tries to climb a rung on the ladder.

  “Good morning, detectives,” he said. He didn’t like us. He didn’t like anyone who made grade.

  “I hear they’re giving a remedial course in Courteous Crowd Control at the Academy,” Terry said. “It’s never too late.”

  “That guy who tried to cross the tape?” Sauer said. “He wanted to touch the body. He said touching famous dead people is his hobby. Like an autograph hound who chases movie stars, only he waits till they’re dead. The sick bastard. If he wants to file a civilian complaint, let him. It won’t be my first.”

  “What went down here?” I said.

  “Garbageman, the black guy over there, found the body.”

  “Did you question him?”

  “Yeah, for what it’s worth. Let’s face it. None of them are too bright.”

  I didn’t want to know if Sauer meant garbagemen or black guys. “What did he say?”

  “Basically nothing. He’s picking up garbage, finds a body. End of story.”

  “Who lives here?”

  “A couple of Arabs. But it looks like they took off.”

  There are more than a hundred thousand Muslim Americans living in LA. Sauer made these two sound like a terrorist cell. “Anything else?” I said.

  “Hey, what do I know? I’m not a detective. I’m just here to charm the crowd. That’s what us beat cops do.”

  “Well, why don’t you use some of that charm and help us find a murder weapon,” Terry said. “Get a few more uniforms and rifle through all the garbage cans in a six-block radius.”

  “You want me doing garbage cans?”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “That’s what you beat cops do.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The garbageman Sauer had labeled as not too bright turned out to be the smartest, best-looking sanitation worker I’d ever met. Otis Hairston was a light-skinned African American with dark intelligent eyes, a jaw that a team of plastic surgeons couldn’t improve on, and a ready-for-my-close-up-Mr.-Spielberg smile.

  “Jesus,” Terry said. “If Barry Gerber had discovered that guy instead of the other way around, he’d be starring in our movie.”

  I reminded Terry that we didn’t have a movie. And now we didn’t have Barry Gerber.

  “Just as well,” he said. “Gives us more time to solve this damn murder.”

  Hairston handed me his city ID before I even asked for it. “I discovered the body,” he said. “This is my supervisor, Javier Ortiz. I radioed him right after I called 911.”

  Ortiz was short, chunky, and not happy that a dead movie mogul had screwed up garbage collection in his little corner of California.

  Los Angeles County is anal retentive about garbage. They issue every residence three types of plastic receptacles. Black for household garbage, blue for recycling, and green for grass clippings. On pickup day, cans have to be set out at the curb and lined up perfectly so the trucks can drive up alongside them. Without ever leaving his vehicle, the driver lowers a pair of pincers, which lifts the can and dumps it into the belly of the truck. Hairston had been collecting the nastiest of the three. The putrid stuff in the black cans.

  “How long before we get this cleared up?” Ortiz asked. “I got two more trucks coming for recycling and yard waste.”

  “Tell them to take the rest of the day off,” I said. “We have to canvass the neighborhood to see if any weapons were trashed.”

  “What about the stuff I already picked up?” Hairston said. He smiled as if he already knew the answer, but he didn’t want to be the one to break the bad news to his boss.

  “Your truck will be impounded,” I said, “and some lucky cops will get to wade through it looking for evidence.”

  “Can I help?” Hairston said. “I took the LAPD exam last month. I’m almost a cop.”

  “Thanks, but no,” Terry said. “Almost a cop doesn’t count.”

  “You shoulda took the exam sooner,” Ortiz said. “Then instead of driving a garbage truck, you could be one of the cops crawling around inside.”

  Terry pulled out his notebook and a pen. “Otis,” he said, “tell us how you found the body.”

  “This is my regular run. I know the homes, I know the people, I know the cans. This house belongs to Dr. and Mrs. Hammoud. They’ve got the standard three cans, a black, a blue, and a green. First thing I notice is they have a second black can. And it’s backwards. Instead of the wheels of the can being up against the curb, they’re the other way around. So when the pincers grab it and dump it, the garbage could wind up on the street instead of in the hopper.”

  “He’s supposed to pass ’em by,” Ortiz said. “If they put their garbage out wrong, we let it sit there. That’s the only way people are going to learn.”

  “It’s a dumb rule,” Hairston said. “I wasn’t gonna stick them with a full can, so I get out of the truck and go to turn the can around. Besides, I’m suspicious. Where did the second black can come from? I go to move it, but it weighs a ton. I open the lid. There’s a dead guy inside, so I call the cops.”

  “Did you see anything out of the ordinary from the time you started collecting this morning?” I asked.

  “No. T
otally normal day. But you realize I don’t actually look at the garbage. The truck does all the work. It lifts the can, flips it, dumps it, and puts it back. If that can wasn’t backwards, I might have pitched that guy right into the belly of this beast and been on my way. For all I know, I could have already tossed in a dozen more dead passengers.”

  “Did you ever see the victim before?”

  “On TV,” Hairston said. “He’s a movie producer. But he doesn’t live around here. And the can isn’t from around here either. It was stolen from an apartment building in Westwood.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “It was probably a question on the cop exam,” Ortiz said.

  Hairston ignored him. “Every can in the county is coded. While I was waiting for you guys, I called our dispatcher and gave him the barcode number on the can that had the body. It was issued to a sixteen-unit building on Weyburn. I got the address and the super’s phone number for you.” He handed me a piece of paper with the information neatly printed on it. “I bet when you talk to him, he’ll know when the can was stolen.”

  “Otis,” Terry said, “if you tell us who murdered this dude, you’ll be wearing a badge and a uniform by tomorrow.”

  Hairston flashed a smile that would make Denzel’s career counselors nervous. “At least you guys listened to me. That first cop, Sauer, he pulls his patrol car in front of the garbage cans. I tell him he should move it, because maybe whoever dropped off the body left tire marks or footprints. He tells me he’s the one who gives the orders, and I should keep my mouth shut and pick up the garbage.”

  “Officer Sauer is a critical part of LA’s finest,” Terry said. “His job is to contaminate evidence and piss off witnesses. You pass that exam, and he’ll be your brother in blue.”

  “How does the department manage to turn out idiots like him and heroes like you?” Hairston said.

  “He was an idiot before the department got him,” Terry said, “and who told you we were heroes?”