“Here’s a hint, I’m a homicide detective. Help any smart guy?” she said. I looked from her to Lowrie, who simply nodded.
“Should I lawyer up?” I asked him.
“Only if you want to go down to the cop shop, make me fill out a bunch of unnecessary paperwork.” Lowrie said. I liked him. He was just another guy doing a job.
“Ok, straight deal,” I leaned in close to Lowrie, making it clear I was talking to him, not Sanchez. “Kelly called me yesterday from the club. She sounded scared so I told her I’d come get her. When I got here, she was gone. So I went by her crib, but she wasn’t there either. Truth is, I figured it was just stripper drama.”
“What was your relationship to Miss Lovelace?”
“We were friends. Just friends.”
“That’s not what we heard.” Lowrie said with no judgment.
“Yeah, but it’s the truth.”
“Did you wish it was more?” Again no judgment.
“No, in this business chicks are easy, but friends are few and far between… I’ve dealt straight, now will you tell me straight, do you have any idea who did this, or am I the best you got?”
“You’re it, sweetheart,” Sanchez interjected with a smile. “Can you hear those bars closing around you?”
“I’ve been inside, it ain’t no big.” I said, keeping my eyes on Lowrie. “What scares me, is that the asshole who did her is walking around free, and you’ve got nothing to stop him.” And that was it, my interrogation was over. They wrote down my address and phone number and told me not to leave town. Lowrie gave me his card and asked me to call if I thought of anything else. As I was walking out, Sanchez stepped in front of me, she just had to get one more shot in.
“Pack your bags, and get ready for the cell. I know you did it, can’t prove it, yet. But you did it,” she hissed. I didn’t have any snappy comebacks, and I was all out of tough bravado, so I just moved past her and walked out.
The girls were sitting around the club, some on the leopard print couches, some on bar stools, they all looked stunned. Their sadness surprised me. It wasn’t like this was the first time someone they knew had died ugly. Maybe they knew Kelly was different, or maybe it never got any easier no matter how many soldiers you lost. Piper came up to me. Wiping away a tear, she hugged me. “Sorry big man, I know…” Her words drifted off.
“It’s all going to be alright, baby girl.” I said, patting her back. But that was a lie, a whore’s promise. Nothing would be ok, not for me, not for Piper, not for any of us.
CHAPTER 3
When the cops finally left we opened the club. I went through the motions of working my shift. Luckily Tuesdays are dead nights in the flesh game. When I got home I was greeted by the odd feeling that it had snowed in my living room. A thin dusting of white feathers covered every surface. In the center of it all Angel was sleeping, curled in what was left of my down comforter. I didn’t know if I should laugh, cry or boot the pup across the room. I settled on cleaning up the feathers and being thankful she hadn’t crapped on my floor, me being stupid enough to leave her alone for eight hours. From a taco truck I bought a box of carne asada tacos. The spicy meat didn’t seem to dull Angel’s appetite any. Maybe she could stay. Maybe.
The dog farts started around four in the morning, eye watering silent stink bombs. How such a small creature could contain so much foul odor was beyond me. I moved to the living room and left her to sleep happily in the stench. I was miles from sleep long before she smoked me out.
Dry blistering air rattled the leaves on the magnolia tree outside my window. Earthquake weather. Suddenly all the night’s chill was gone. The crickets went silent, their sound replaced by the slapping of tree branches and the rush of air. I knew there would be no more sleep tonight. It’s earthquake weather in the city of angels and no one is at peace.
Three fingers of single malt did little to quiet the choir of condemning voices in my head. My ex-wife had called me a hopeless drunk. But that was bullshit, a little whiskey was all I had some days to keep from dropping into a dark hole I might never climb out of.
I put The Pogues into the stereo. Shane McGowan was rumbling drunkenly about a dirty old town and the axe he was going to make to chop it down. I raised my glass to the speaker, I knew just how he felt.
The winds brought no trembling earth this time, Angelenos had been spared for one more day. By six most of the toxic gasses had escaped the bedroom. I crawled back in next to my pup and drifted off stroking her soft coat. Wednesday started about as bad as possible.
“Hands on the wall, assume the position.” Sanchez wasn’t taking any chances. The detectives had woken me by pounding on the door. She had her gun out and me against the wall before I could say word one. A high-pitched growl came from the bedroom as the puppy charged out. She stopped a few feet from the detective, her hackles up. She looked ready to attack regardless of their gross weight advantage or the gun I was sure Sanchez wouldn’t mind discharging. “Angel!” I snapped, and to my surprise she backed down. Sitting on her rump, she watched us warily but the growling stopped.
“Cute dog,” Sanchez spat.
“Real cute,” her older partner said.
“Strange, we found a dog bowl and puppy chow at Kelly’s apartment, no dog. And here this skell who never went into her place has a new dog.”
“She makes a good point,” Lowrie said to me.
“Owning a dog illegal now?” I said and wished I hadn’t.
“No, but rape murder is.” Sanchez wrenched my arm down and slapped the cuffs on.
At Parker Center they hooked me to a bench next to a Black banger with a swollen eye and crusted blood rimming his left ear. On the ride down they hadn’t told me I was under arrest. They had given me the big silent treatment, hoping to rattle my cage, it was working. For all my tough bullshit, I didn’t think I had another jolt in me.
My pulse was starting to climb when a young uniform took me into a long shallow room and had me line up with six other men, all roughly my size. Facing the mirror I racked my mind, who was was their witness. The old curtain watcher from Kelly’s apartment? Had to be. If she I.D.’d me I was fucked, add that to the fucking mutt and they might have enough to nail me. And that would be it. Judge and jury would take one look at me and my rap sheet and I would take a lifelong fall.
After the line up, I was placed in an interview room with muddy smudged walls that possibly had been white once.
“This could go a lot easier if you’d confess,” Lowrie was sitting across the steel table from me. Sanchez had been left out of the interrogation. My bet was she would bust in if Lowrie’s nice guy act failed.
“I want a lawyer.” I stared coldly at the old cop.
“No, you don’t. Get the lawyers involved and we lose any wiggle room. Why don’t we get our story straight before we go there.”
“I got my story straight.”
“Only problem son, it’s bullshit. We have you at the scene, we know from your record that you have violent tendencies. That’s two out of the big three, all we need is motive. What happened, if let’s say she was stringing you on, showing you a little piece then slapping your hand for touching. I think you may have a shot at a crime of passion defense. Is that what happened?”
“I didn’t kill Kelly. She was my friend.”
“You’re a broken record Moses. You were there, and you lied about it. It doesn’t look good.” He looked at me with as much fatherly concern as he could muster. I gave him stone in return.
“I want a lawyer.”
Lowrie twiddled a pen in his fingers for a moment, then picked a file off the table and walked out. After a while the young uniform came and led me out.
“You are one lucky piece of puke,” Sanchez said as she unlocked my cuffs. The banger kid was still on the bench, only now he was passed out. It had taken an hour after the interview for them to get me. “This is far from over, you did that girl and I’ll prove it, end of story.”
All I coul
d figure was that the old lady must have been either too old or too blind to make a positive I.D. Rubbing the blood back into my wrists I started to walk out. I was almost to the street when Lowrie caught up to me.
“Hold up McGuire.”
“What you want to do a quick cavity search, make my morning complete?”
“No. Believe it or not, I’m not half the hard ass you think I am. My partner hates you though, that’s a fact.”
“This leading someplace, I got shit to do.”
“I know you were in her apartment.”
“Then prove it.” Turning I gave him my back and walked out to find a cab.
After a quick stop at Petco for chew toys, a dog door and what I hoped would be flatulence-free puppy chow, I went home and puppy proofed the house. Angel took the large stuffed green arachnid in her jaw and shook it to death, looking up at me for praise.
“Oh yeah, girl, you’re a stone cold killer,” I told the pup, sending her tail into a wild flurry of wags. I was bolting the flap over the hole I’d cut into the back door when it occurred to me that this was the first home improvement I’d made to the place. In the years that I had lived there I hadn’t even driven a nail in to hang a single picture. Kelly had only been in LA for six months and yet she had decorated her door, hung art, made her house a home. Where had she come from? She grew up in a small town in the Midwest, was the only detail she had offered. Thinking I had plenty of time I hadn’t pushed her for more.
After finishing the dog door, I poured a short drink, yes it was early but fuck it, it had already been a long day. Lack of movement was making me crazy.
The pain of the ink filled needle felt honest and real. For a moment, it pierced the dull numbness that had settled over me. I was in Cardo’s kitchen in his small Hollywood apartment. He was a soft faced ex-banger who I’d helped out with some AB boys when they jumped in his shit down in county lock-up. After his last jolt he had left the life, moved from Pico Rivera to Hollywood, crawled out of the closet and reinvented his brown ass. Now he made the bills painting storefront windows and when he was lucky he was hired for a mural or sold a painting from one of the small galleries that carried his art. His soft electric colored view of the world hung on his walls. All dreamy paintings of women, most of whom I knew. He’d come down to Xtasy to sketch the girls. At first he pissed them off by not buying laps. But, when they saw themselves in his work, how beautifully perfect he saw them, they learned to forgive his lack of cash.
“She was a rose in a garden of thorns, Loco,” he said wiping away the blood and ink off my shoulder, so he could see the art he was drilling into my flesh. “Sweet and gentle in a world grown hard.”
“She was something all right.”
“Women are like gem stones, no? They sparkle to get your attention but if you look in a loop, see close up, every one is different and totally unique. It’s the flaws and inclusions that make them special.” With a homemade tattoo gun he was drawing Kelly’s face freehand. Doing it all from memory and capturing her just right. I got my first tat in the joint. In a cage, they take all that is yours, all that is personal. The first ink was there to remind myself I was still alive, still had some control over my body. This was how we marked our time, writing our history in ink and blood.
“Explain something to me,” I started, looking with awe at how perfectly he was capturing all that was beautiful in Kelly.
“If I love women so, why am I gay?” he said, guessing the question.
“Something like that.”
“You breeders get it all wrong. I love roses, no? But I don’t want to fuck them. You can’t imagine love without penetration. I can’t imagine life without beauty. The form it takes is so much less interesting than the beauty itself,” he said, reminding me once again why I hung with him. Like him or don’t what you heard was who he was. He finished the work giving me his usual admonition, not to get in any fights or fall off my bike until the skin had healed. I’m not sure what he cared about more, me or the canvas he painted on.
The next week passed slowly. Every morning I took Angel to the dog park for her daily romp. The fear in the locals’ eyes faded bit by bit every day, but it was never replaced with warmth. If our eyes met they still looked down or away. At some level I would always be the boogie man under their beds. Helen, Bruiser’s owner, and I would chat about the weather and life and dogs. Some mornings we went down the street for coffee. She was a link to Kelly, she kept her alive for me. I shared her deep grief but I was done crying. I stuffed that pain down deep inside and let it work on my ulcer.
I called Lowrie to see if he had made any progress in finding Kelly’s killer. He told me I was still the best suspect they had. The next day I called him again and this time I took a shot and told him the truth. I told him I had been in Kelly’s apartment, what I had seen and again restated that I hadn’t, couldn’t have killed her. By my fourth phone call we slowly began to build trust, if not friendship. My initial feelings proved right. He was a straight shooter. He told me they hadn’t been able to locate any next of kin. The name she’d been living under didn’t show up on any record search, the social security number she’d given to the club was bogus. It was strange he said, he had been through her apartment three times and hadn’t found as much as an address book or a letter from home. I told him I thought she was from Indiana, but it didn’t help much.
“They’re going to cremate her on Friday,” he told me. “You’re the closest thing to family we can find… If you want to claim the ashes, I’ll back you up.”
“What do you want as payback, I don’t snitch. You have to know that straight up.”
“Son, you don’t have anything I want… You’re alright Moses, I just don’t think you know it yet.”
“How many days ‘til they put you on another case, and she becomes a dead file?” I asked.
“Two days ago. But that hasn’t stopped me. You may not believe me, but I’ll keep looking,” he said, and I did believe him, but also knew how little he had to go on. After I hung up, I filled a tumbler with ice and poured in my Scottish Prozac. I had no idea what Kelly would want me to do with her ashes. It wasn’t the kind of subject that came up much in strip club dressing rooms.
“You committing suicide on the installment plan?” Piper asked. I was sitting at the bar knocking back my third scotch of the shift.
“Just trying to slide through the night,” I told her, motioning for Turaj to fill it up again. It took the drinks to quiet my head down enough to go to work wrangling the straights, it dulled my building rage to the point where I might not tear any heads off. Truth was I did very little bouncing, I was just the big scary guy there for show. My experience has been that naked ladies turn most men into drooling pussycats. I watched a tattooed Mexican kid get a lap dance, Ginger told him to keep his hands at his sides and he obeyed like a kid in school.
“So what are you going to do with her ashes?” Piper asked, leaning against the bar.
“I don’t know, I really don’t,” I told her.
“If it was me, I’d want to have my ashes spread into the waves, up by Malibu. Up where the livin’ is easy and the greenbacks grow tall. Get stuck on some matron’s feet and stain her white shag.”
“I don’t really think Kelly was a Malibu kinda girl,” I told her.
“No she wasn’t, not enough irony in her… You’ll know what to do when the time is right. You always do,” she said resting her hand on my shoulder.
“You have a lot of faith in this old man.”
“Yes I do… And you’re not that old,” she said with a wink. Looking past her I saw Sasha, that chestnut haired little Czech vixen, fixing to haul off and hit a dread locked customer. I caught her cocked arm just before she swung. She spun on me, eyes flaring.
“Jesus Christ Mo, this cheap bastard says he give me one hundred. Like I don’t know what a twenty looks like. Am I blind? Am I stupid? “
“No baby girl, but you look pissed off.”
“Pi
ssed off?” She let out a long stream of unintelligible Russian curses, her face growing redder as the volume climbed. It would have been funny if it wasn’t my job to keep the room chilled and blood off the carpet.
“Breathe baby girl, breathe. Go in back, do some of that yoga crap you’re always spouting about and let Moses handle this.”
“He’s trying to steal from me!” I put a firm hand on her head, pulling her towards me. I smiled, to anyone else it looked like I was kissing her ear.
“Keep this shit up, and in three seconds you are over my shoulder and out of here.” I whispered. “That how you want it?” I kissed her neck and stepped back, continuing to smile at her. Sasha’s eyes flared then dropped to a low burn, and like a good little girl she started to walk away. But then Dreadlocks had to open his mouth.
“Mon dat bitch is crazy,” he slurred. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sasha flying at him. Catching her around the waist I lifted her off the floor and I let her momentum spin us both around. Dreadlocks jumped up, knocking his chair over. Now the whole club was looking at us. Dreadlocks was angry now, his hand reached up into his jacket. I set Sasha down shoving her into Piper’s waiting arms.
“Take her in back,” I said. Sasha was struggling, but Piper was a gym rat and had no problem marching the smaller girl out of the room. Even the girls on stage had stopped to watch. I could see that Dreadlocks felt his manhood was on the line. His hand was still up under his jacket. I moved in close, speaking softly, forcing him to lean in to hear me. “I don’t even want to know what’s in your jacket. But the last thing you want to do is pull it out. Trust me on that pal.” Blood rushed thumping in my ears. It took real strength to keep myself from clocking the stupid ass muncher.
“Dat bitch stole my money.”
“Right now, at this moment, all you are out is maybe some cash. But you push it, and one of two things will happen. Either you’ll be fast enough to pull whatever is in your jacket, in which case you might kill me and spend the rest of your days in the pen. Or, and it’s a big or so pay attention, you won’t be fast enough and then brother, your ass is mine. I will bitch slap you down in front of all these fine ladies. Honest, odds are I bet you kill me. I also bet you’re smart enough not to want to spend your life in the can over eighty bucks.” I knew I had talked long enough for his pulse to slow and a bit of reason to settle into his booze soaked brain. Slowly his hand dropped out from his jacket.
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