by Rhys Ford
“You made some big bucks investing in real estate when you were a baby cop, and I almost got my head blown off by my partner, who’d been tagged by his police-assigned therapist as a danger to society, and they hushed it up,” I reminded him, nudging Bobby in the shoulder to keep moving. “Neither one of us is hurting for money here, Dawson. For all we know, he invented a new type of air in his garage during his off time. Maybe managed a boy band or two.”
“Yeah, there’s that. How do you want to play this?” Bobby fell into step next to me, bumping me aside after we reached the door. “What are we hoping to get out of this guy?”
“Should have had this conversation out in the car,” I grumbled. “Okay, here’s the thing. Watson’s their friend, so he probably socialized with them, maybe even met a few of their other friends. Adele was out there to meet someone that night. She was probably killed where I found her, and O’Byrne hasn’t found a connection to put Adele there. No one around the area she knew, but maybe it’s just someone we haven’t found yet. Watson might have some answers. He might not know it, though.”
“Our boy Ivan isn’t talking, but he seems to be more killer than criminal mastermind. So we’re looking for someone the old man and his wife hooked up with recently. Maybe even someone who made them uncomfortable,” he mulled, nudging me again. “Knock on the door, Princess. We can play this by ear and see where it goes.”
“Do you know him?” I searched for a doorbell, but it seemed like the building was more old-school, depending on a brass knocker hanging from the middle of the door. “Watson, I mean. Did you ever run into him?”
“Do you know how many tens of thousands of cops have worn the uniform?” Bobby scoffed. “It isn’t like retired LAPD cops all get together at the beach and sing ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ around the bonfire. And if we did, don’t you think you would’ve gotten an invitation?”
“Wouldn’t do you any good to invite me,” I snarked back. “I don’t even know the words to that damn song.”
The man who opened the door couldn’t have been more of a stereotype if he tried.
I guess I was too used to Bobby. When I thought of retired cops, I thought of him working to keep himself fit and on top of his game. Truth be told, there’s tons of cops who push the limits of their waistbands while on the job, and they were a dime a dozen after desk-sitting for years. George Watson was definitely one of those cops.
He was old-school LAPD, dragged up through the days of bloodied batons and race riots quelled with gunfire and sharp elbows to young kids’ faces. His face was square, held up by a thick neck and embellished by a thinning silvery crew cut, the sides shorn down nearly to his skull, leaving a glittery fur wrap around the base of his head. His eyes were sharp, steely, and mean, and they flicked back and forth between us. It was easy to see the wheels turning behind them, shuffling through scenarios where Watson would gain control of any situation that might erupt.
Dressed in navy chinos and a tucked-in dark blue polo shirt, Watson gave us a pretty good idea of how he looked in the final years of his career. His chest was broad, jutted out over a spreading belly, but his hips were lean and his legs bordered on skinny. The only way I knew he had pencils for limbs was because a small white dog poked out from between the yards of fabric swaddling his legs, pulling them tight against his knees. The chinos were worn big to accommodate his belly, their pearly button straining against the heft pushing behind it. The dog barked once, then slipped back away, leaving its master to deal with the two men standing in the hallway.
He was not the kind of cop I would ever want to pull me over. Maybe I was prejudiced based on the tightening feeling in my gut when I looked at him, but he seemed like the kind of guy who would break a taillight just to say he had a reason to search the trunk.
“Well if it isn’t the faggot Dawson.” Watsons’s high-pitched voice didn’t match his barrel-chested body. He sounded like he’d sucked on a helium balloon before he opened the door, but the menace in his eyes didn’t subside, despite the light, teasing tone he affected. Glancing over at me, he nodded and asked, “Who’s the gook?”
Wow. It’d been a long time since I’d heard that name.
I forget I’m half Japanese. It sounds stupid, but I was raised by a fairly stereotypical military man and the corn-fed, blond-haired woman he married after my mother left. While I pulled more of my father’s Irish features, the shape of my eyes was definitely my mother’s. I knew I looked a little Asian—definitely not as much as my older brother, Mike—but for the most part, I was pretty ethnically ambiguous. My eyes are greenish—or at least I was assuming they were, because that’s what people told me, and apparently I was iffy on that color—and my hair was dark brown, lightening if I spent time in the sun.
But I’d grown up in the Midwest, and there were places we’d gone to live where how Mike looked got him into trouble. Or rather, trouble found him. He and I made frequent trips down to principals’ offices, our knuckles bloodied and our faces bruised because somebody called Mike a name.
I’d learned to deflect a lot of that, and moving out to California definitely pushed much of that back into the far distant past because we were no longer different.
Watson brought that all back.
There were a lot of things I could say to him, a lot of things my mind actively reached for, sharpening the words so I could fling them into his face and maybe cut him down to the bone. At another time I might have even wanted to punch his face. Okay, I still wanted to punch his face, but the need wasn’t as strong as it would’ve been when I was in my twenties.
Instead I said to Bobby, with a sarcastic grin plastered across my face, “So I guess he does know you.”
“Shit, I do know him,” Bobby muttered under his breath, ducking his head to give me a hard look, then glancing back up at the man chuckling at us. “You were out of Rampart, right, Watson?”
Bobby was in the same headspace I was, caught between wanting to turn Watson’s nose into a squished meatball and us needing to get any information we could out of him. People tended to not want to answer questions after getting their faces punched in, so both of us silently agreed to swallow our pride and outraged decency to push forward.
I stepped back, mostly to take Watson out of punching range and also to let Bobby lead. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know Watson wasn’t going to appreciate me asking him any questions, and his resistance to O’Byrne made a hell of a lot more sense now that we added racist bigot to the equation on top of old-school cop. I stood there pondering if racist bigot was actually redundant when I heard Watson offering us a couple of beers.
That’s when I also noticed I’d been left standing outside in the hall while the two of them had gone into the condo. The tiny furry scarf masquerading as a dog stared up at me from its place at my feet, its face comically screwed up with a mixture of concern and apprehension, probably wondering why the door was open and I hadn’t sought the safety of its home. Dogs get like that. Or at least some do. Honey didn’t like to go outside unless one of us was within line of sight. It could have been because she’d been on the street for several years and wanted to make sure she always had access to a place with food and air-conditioning, but I liked to think she just wanted to make sure she could always see the people who loved her.
Mind you, she had an unrequited love affair with Neko, so Jae and I were quite aware where we stood in the rankings of her affections—right below bacon and the cat.
“Close the door behind you,” Watson called out. “Muncie doesn’t like the people next door on the other side. If he catches one whiff of that shit they call food when their door opens, he’ll be inside of their house before you could even blink.”
“Got it,” I replied, stepping over the dog I assumed was Muncie. I thought to myself perhaps Muncie didn’t hate them as much as Watson thought he did and was possibly looking for a new place to live. This assumption was partially validated when I closed the door and Muncie sighed with a res
ignation only previously heard by Chicago Cubs fans for decades before their epic win; then the dog toddled off toward the living room.
I followed the dog.
The beer Bobby handed me was cold and in a can, its sides announcing it’d been made by the pure waters of the Rocky Mountains. I’d been to Denver. I hadn’t noticed its tap water as being something especially drinkable, but perhaps the beer factory faucet they used had a filter on. Knowing Watson would notice if I didn’t at least drink half of it, I popped the tab and took a sip.
Whoever was in charge of cleaning the water filter on that faucet hadn’t done his job in about seven years, and I forced myself to swallow the mouthful of septic tank overflow I’d forced past my lips.
Watson was playing catch-up with Bobby, going over stories about how things were in the late ’80s and early ’90s down at Central and Rampart. Mostly Watson did the talking, with Bobby nodding and grunting every so often. Those decades were a dark time for Los Angeles, especially if a man or woman wore a blue uniform and a badge. A lot of good cops retired out early, fatigued by fighting the good fight and most of the time battling their fellow officers, who were as corrupt and demoralizing as the chief of police during that time. Law enforcement back then was geared toward oppression and suppression, with different response times and courtesy given to a person mostly based on their race and ZIP code. There were still a lot of cops out there who would’ve been very much at home during that time in LAPD’s history, and from the sounds of it, Watson seemed to really miss his late-night excursions through the dark streets, armed with his baton and shielded by a badge he never should’ve worn.
Not wanting to join in on their trip down a memory lane Bobby and I both never wanted to visit, I began to wander around the room, Muncie trotting behind me with his tongue sticking out and never coming closer than a yard.
The condo itself was a nice one, elegantly furnished in a style that had gone out of vogue about a decade ago. The view was spectacular, overlooking Downtown Los Angeles and the mountains beyond. Whoever designed the building knew what they were about, making the most of the main space by keeping it open, leaving a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the left of the front door over to the living room on the right. A hallway leading off the kitchen probably led to a bedroom or two, guessing by the spacing between the doors in the main hall.
But what really defined the space was that view. The condo’s outside wall was pure glass, broken up only by the black lines of heavy-duty girders and framing, with the rest of the walls being a standard gypsum board painted Navajo white—the cheapest and most common color used by developers. Its faint tobacco-yellow tint actually went well with the brown leather sectional and recliners in the living room, their arrangement centered on the nearly movie-screen-sized television mounted on the wall the condo shared with the outer hallway.
Judging by the pictures scattered about a set of thinly populated bookshelves, I gathered someone actually not only married Watson but also bred with him. There was evidence of a second wife, a small Filipina woman with a broad face and a thin smile, squished up against Watson’s massive frame in a variety of vacation shots, including what looked like a hunting trip where he brought down a small wild boar. Since the progression of children going from babies to adulthood were tall, freckled, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, I was guessing at the second wife, but I could be totally wrong about the whole thing and Watson’s genetics simply stomped hers down into a whimpering pile of thready DNA.
A niche in the wall possibly held the most interesting thing in Watson’s place—a painting I’d never seen before. It wasn’t like I was up on classical paintings. Sure, I knew how to recognize a Warhol, mostly by the presence of the tomato soup can, and while my exposure to the arts had increased over the years of being with Jae, to the consternation of my beloved husband, I was one of those people who didn’t really know art but knew what he liked when he saw it.
The painting didn’t seem to fit my perception of Watson. For all I knew, the man had depths of character I know nothing about, but since he was currently regaling Bobby with a story about how he and his partner jumped a bunch of Mexican teens coming out of a convenience store, mistakenly thinking they had robbed the place instead of just having finished doing inventory for their father, who owned the market, I was going to stick by my judgment of the man.
One thing about being with Jae and having Ichi around was that I knew more about art and how various media looked. I’d learned that lesson while following the two of them through Santee Alley and flea markets. There’d been a few times when I stopped to look at a painting that drew my eye, only to have one of them yank me away from the booth once the artist started talking to me about buying it.
Jae often chided me about how an artist would never display their paintings out in the sun, and more importantly, purchasing an original piece of art was sometimes extremely pricey. I’d been to his gallery shows, and the price tags on his photos—placed there by the gallery owner—made me blink so much my eyes were dried out by the time I finished walking the floor. I was as proud as hell of his work, but it boggled my mind that somebody would pay thousands of dollars for a black-and-white picture of my torso he’d taken while I was standing in the shower.
But one of the most important things Jae and Ichi taught me was that I shouldn’t be able to see the uninterrupted pattern of canvas in an oil painting. Thankfully, Ichi was there to catch me before I spent eight hundred dollars on a reproduction printed on a piece of canvas. There should have been paint, swoops of brushstrokes and passes of a palette knife, the surface uneven and marked by the artist’s efforts. It was something I wouldn’t have looked for, and I was thankful for the education.
As well as not spending that eight hundred dollars.
So that’s how I knew—or at least based on what little I knew—that the woman with one breast out, swaddled in red cloth and holding what looked like a dead bird while surrounded by oddly happy people wasn’t a reproduction. To one side of her was a trio of men, one particularly demonic-looking one in the forefront holding a basket of produce, with another two slightly behind him, seemingly caressing his arm with loving touches.
“Bet he got distracted by the booby and didn’t notice the two gay guys on the side,” I muttered to myself, and Muncie grunted, agreeing with me as he plopped his butt down to begin a rigorous investigation of his privates.
The painting looked old, aged in a way I’d seen in museums and not with the bright splashes of colors I’d seen in Ichi’s and Jae’s pieces once I began paying attention to what they were doing. It could’ve just been the different style of art, especially since I was pretty ignorant about historical pieces, but it still wasn’t something I’d have thought Watson would hang in his living room. I could’ve been wrong, and his wife—the smiling woman in the photos—insisted on having it up to compete with the television taking up most of her living room, but still, it was at odds with practically everything in the room, including the man sitting in a recliner, gesturing with his beer can as he talked.
“You like that?” Watson’s voice boomed through the living room, startling both me and Muncie. The dog yelped and scrambled off, his toenails doing a frenetic salsa on the wood floor. “Arty gave it to me after I fixed his dishwasher. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was one of you guys, but he’s okay. Fruity as hell what with painting all the time, but from what he said, most of the classical painters back then were men, so it is what it is. Told me to pick one out, so I grabbed that one. Had a naked woman on black velvet when I married Marie, but she made me take it down, so I figured I could at least get one tit out with this one, and she couldn’t say a thing because it’s all foo-foo and shit.”
Bobby rolled his eyes, and I silently congratulated myself for correctly guessing why Watson liked the painting.
Taking another look at the painting, I spotted Brinkerhoff’s signature, a bold yellow scrawl over a black rectangle on the lower corner. Despite
his small stature and unassuming personality, it seemed like he was proud of his work, at least based on the size of his autograph. Something bugged me about it, but I couldn’t figure out why.
“Did he tell you anything about it?” I looked over my shoulder at Watson, who’d gone back to his conversation with Bobby. There was little hope of steering the man toward any other topic besides himself, but I really needed Bobby to pump him for as much information as he could get about the Brinkerhoffs’ social circle. “Like who he was copying?”
“Copying?” Watson laughed, sending a spray of spittle over the coffee table in front of him. “He wasn’t copying anything. Arthur just sits down and begins painting. Not like my little girl, who would try to draw stuff out of one of those Japanese comic books she likes. There’d be some pencil marks on the canvas, but he would just go to town. I used to tease him about doing paint by numbers, because he’d be finished with the thing in about a week and someone would come by and pick up the painting after it was dry enough. I guess that’s how they pay the rent, because they never talked about working. He had a bunch of them he said weren’t good enough to sell, so I picked out that one. Painted down the black line so he had a good place to sign, and I took it down to the framing shop. You finished with that beer? Want another one?”
“Nah, I’m good.” I held up my can of fermented Denver tap water, sloshing it about so Watson could hear it was still mostly full. “But why don’t you tell us about the guy who’d come pick up the paintings? He’s probably wondering what the hell happened to Arthur and Adele, especially since no one’s been around to tell him anything. Maybe we can reach out and let him know what’s going on so he doesn’t get too worried.”
Seventeen
THE SIZZLE of cheese hitting the hot pan was loud enough to bring Honey in from the living room. She lived in the eternal hope of getting food directly from the skillet, but Jae’s hard-and-fast rule of no dogs in the cooking area meant she was bound by the invisible wall keeping her from getting too close to the stove. So she set up shop as a floppy blond beggar by the dining room table. If there was one thing the dog enjoyed about the walls we’d taken down between the bundle of small rooms at the back of the house, it was that she could have a clear line of sight whenever the possibility of food popped up.
