Magnolia Moon

by JoAnn Ross

  “Ouch. I never realized he was such a silver-tongued devil.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked out anyway. If guys aren’t intimidated by a woman who wears a pistol to work, they just want to hear gory war stories about dead bodies.”

  “Which kind was Dr. Bill?”

  “The first. We were out on the dance floor for about two minutes when he admitted he couldn’t handle getting that close to a woman who was wearing a Beretta beneath her jacket.”

  Van shot her a disbelieving look. “Tell me you didn’t actually wear your sidearm on a date?”

  “I got a call while I was in court to testify on the Sanchez case, saying one of the Front Street Crips had some info on that Diamond Street gangbanger who was killed while collecting drug taxes for the Mexican Mafia. Would you go into that neighborhood unarmed?”

  “I’ll have to give you that one.”

  “Besides, I looked pretty damn good. I was wearing that suit you talked me into buying last week.”

  Van had unearthed the designer knockoff at Second Hand Rose, a trendy consignment boutique on Melrose. The label read “Armini,” the simple change in vowels keeping the counterfeit police from declaring the suit illegal. It was also several hundred dollars less expensive than the original.

  “Couldn’t you have left the gun in the trunk of your car?” her partner asked.

  “And have it stolen like Malloy’s? Boy, wouldn’t that be a career booster.”

  Just last month Devon Malloy, a rookie B&E detective, had left his pistol in the trunk of his car to keep it away from his kids. Unfortunately, his car had been stolen, and the gun ended up being used in an armed robbery that had left a liquor store clerk wounded. By the time IAD eventually got through dragging Malloy over the coals, he might still be a cop, but any chances of advancement were nil; if he stayed on the force, he could look forward to spending all his days on pawnshop detail.

  “Actually, it was kind of funny,” Regan said. “We were slow-dancing, and every time he’d pull me close and try to cop a feel, his fingers would hit cold steel. After the third time, he suggested we call it a night. Not only was I crushing his libido—apparently it’s a little disconcerting to go out with a woman who can shoot your balls off—but the metal in my Beretta was screwing up his qi. Whatever that is.”

  “It’s feng shui. In Taoist thought, everything is made up of qi—or energy. It’s the essence of existence.”

  “And here I thought that was DNA.”

  The rain was picking up. Regan turned on the wipers, which dragged across the glass with a rubbery squeal like fingernails on a chalkboard. LAPD never retired their crap cars; they just assigned them to her. The heater hadn’t worked for six weeks. By the time it got repaired, the weather would have warmed up, and she wouldn’t need it. Which, she thought darkly, was probably exactly the department’s reasoning.

  “Hey, there are a lot of things in this world we can’t understand,” Van said. “If it wasn’t for feng shui, I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant.”

  Regan shot her a look. “You got pregnant because when you and Rhasheed were off cavorting in the tropics, you had one too many mai tais and forgot to use birth control.”

  “True. But before we went to Kauai, between the stress of his job and mine, we were having some sex problems—which is why we made the reservations at the Crouching Dragon Inn in the first place.”

  “Ah yes, the sex palace.”

  “You make it sound like someplace with mystery stains on the sheets and porno movies playing on a TV bolted to the dresser. The Crouching Dragon Inn was designed on the feng shui principle that we should live with nature rather than against it, so it was constructed for all the bed and beach qi to flow properly. As soon as we got there, all our problems just flew out the window. Except for going to that luau, we made love all week.”

  “So you said.” From the play-by-play her partner had shared, she was amazed Van had still been able to walk when they got back from Hawaii.

  “All that positive loving energy sent out a special frequency that allowed Rhasheed’s essential elements to come together with mine and create Denzel’s life force.”

  “It’s called a sperm swimming up to fertilize an egg.”

  With the exception of certain truisms such as full moons make the crazies come out, and you always get a floater the day you’re wearing new shoes, Regan didn’t believe in feng shui, voodoo, fate, or anything else that she couldn’t see with her own eyes or touch with her own hands.

  After she’d been set up to be killed by a gang who was tired of her hauling in their dealers, the psychologist the department had forced her to see had blamed her skepticism on all those childhood years waiting for her father to return home from Vietnam. In her child’s mind he would walk in, declare her the most beautiful, lovable little girl in the world, get down on one knee just like the prince did in Cinderella, beg her mother to remarry him, and they’d all live happily ever after.

  None of which had ever happened. Unfortunately, Lieutenant John Hart, U.S. Marines, had never returned from Vietnam. Her mother, who’d filed for divorce before Regan was born, had returned to her law practice when Regan was a week old, leaving her in the hands of a continuously changing series of nannies and housekeepers who never quite lived up to Karen Hart’s standards. When her father never showed up in a suit of shining armor to sweep his daughter onto the back of a prancing white steed and take her away to his palace, Regan had decided fairy tales belonged in the gilt-edged pages of books, not in real life.

  In a way, she’d always thought that youthful disappointment had served her well. The very same realism and skepticism the department shrink had advised her to overcome was what made her a good cop.

  “Birth’s a miracle.” Van repeated what she’d been saying since the day the little pink cross had shown up on the test strip. “Rhasheed said he knew I was pregnant that morning when I began glowing from the inside.”

  “You sure you didn’t get confused about what you were putting in your mouth, and swallow your mag light?”

  “Very funny. The glow was the red lightwave from baby Denzel’s heart.” She patted her rounded stomach, which had been showing her pregnancy for the past two months.

  Regan shook her head. “Only in L.A. would cops be into New Age.”

  As happy as she was for Van, Regan wasn’t looking forward to losing her as a partner. But Van and her husband had decided a homicide detective’s twenty-four/seven lifestyle wasn’t exactly family friendly and she’d decided to leave the force in another six weeks.

  “Feng shui isn’t new. The concept goes back eight thousand years.” Van turned in the passenger seat toward Regan. “Maybe you should have a master check out your apartment. You’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “I’m a murder cop. Stress comes with the territory.”

  “Which is why you need to find something that helps.”

  “What would help would be for the good citizens of Los Angeles to take a forty-eight-hour ceasefire.”

  “Russell Crowe’s going to show up in the squad room in full breastplate and sandals before that happens,” Vanessa said dryly. “You know, I took a class last month with the guy who advised Donald Trump to change a set of French doors at Mar-a-Lago to the other wall. If you weren’t so hard-minded, you might actually like him.”

  “I don’t need an architectural adviser. I just need to close the Lancaster case. And the fact that Donald Trump wants to pay some so-called building wizard big bucks to tell him to tear out some doors is just proof that some people have more money than sense.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell Dr. Bill all this. He lives by feng shui.”

  “I know. We had to wait an hour for a dinner table that faced the right direction.” An hour she’d spent nursing a glass of wine and eating bar mix. “Give me some credit. I merely told him that the mental vision of scalpels cutting into my breasts had the same negative effect on me that guns seemed to have on him. So, sin
ce cold steel seems to be destined to come between us, we might as well give both our qi s a break and make it an early night.”

  “I was really hoping you two would work out. What about the Century City investment banker? Mike something? He was good looking.”

  “His name was Mark Mitchell.” Regan had met him after a real estate developer got shot execution style in a parking garage. Since Mark had discovered the body, Regan had interviewed him, then given him her card in case he thought of anything that might prove useful to the investigation. He’d called that night to ask her out. She’d declined, not wanting to cross the professional/personal line she’d always firmly maintained.

  It hadn’t taken long to apprehend the shooter, a bumbling first-time hit-for-hire guy. The day the jury found him guilty, she’d received another call from Mark Mitchell. This time she’d made the mistake of taking him up on his offer of a late dinner.

  “He kept an iguana named Gordon Gekko in his bedroom.” And revealed he’d always viewed the “Greed is good” character Michael Douglas played in Wall Street as a role model.

  “That is a little weird,” Van allowed. “You could always go out with someone on the force.”

  “I’d rather shoot myself than date a cop.” She’d no sooner spoken when she wished she could take the words back. Rhasheed was an L.A. county sheriff’s department deputy. “Hell, I’m sorry. Rhasheed’s an exception.”

  “He’s special, all right.” Van’s smile showed she hadn’t taken offense. “We were supposed to go out tonight to celebrate the fifth anniversary of when we met.”

  Then they’d gotten called out on what could well prove a wild-goose chase. It was tough enough to have a normal life when you were a street cop. Homicide detectives might as well forget about relationships, romance, or any type of social life, especially on weekends, when the majority of murders occurred.

  On the rare occasion she stopped to think about it, Regan found it ironic that she could have grown up to be so different from her mother, but still end up in a career that discouraged marriage and a family.

  She checked out the block-long white limousine gliding past. When she’d worked in Vice, she’d busted a prostitution ring doing a bang-up business using limos as rolling motel rooms. Since this one had a Just Married sign in the back window, she let it pass.

  It was turning out to be a quiet night in the City of Angels, almost as if the city had done an aerial spraying of Valium, but neither Regan nor Van commented on it, since another Murphy’s Law of police work declared that unspeakable evils would befall anyone who said, “Sure is a quiet night.”

  The rain streaking down the windshield of the black-and-white patrol car had driven most of the drunks, batterers, and robbers indoors, leaving only the neighborhood’s homeless sleeping beneath soaked newspapers and plastic garbage bags. The souvenir shops selling Marilyn Monroe posters, movie clapboards, and maps to stars’ homes were closed, their heavy metal shutters drawn down.

  There’d been a time, before Regan was born, when the area that made up her precinct had been the glittering home of the motion picture industry. Glamorous movie stars had dined at the Brown Derby, drank champagne from crystal flutes, and attended premieres at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in limousines. But T-shirt shops, check-cashing joints, and pornographic bookstores had invaded the once elite neighborhood, and addicts, prostitutes, and homeless men and women were as common a sight as Japanese tourists.

  Hollywood was beginning to make a comeback, but Regan knew that even if the area did succeed in becoming Los Angeles’ version of New York’s Time Square, the dispossessed would simply pack up and drift somewhere else.

  “This tip had better pan out,” she muttered as they cruised by the Rock & Roll Denny’s. “Even the working girls have enough sense to come in out of this lousy weather.”

  Inside the bright, twenty-four-hour restaurant, forlorn prostitutes seeking relief from the rain hunkered in the booths, drinking pots of coffee, smoking packs of cigarettes, and rubbing feet sore from pounding the pavement in ankle-breaking five-inch platform heels, all the time keeping an eye on the street outside the restaurant window in the unlikely event a silver Lotus might happen to cruise by.

  Unfortunately, the average john who frequented these blocks was no Richard Gere, and the Pretty Woman Cinderella story about the tycoon falling in love with the heart-of-gold hooker was so far removed from these mean streets it could have been filmed on Mars.

  “Word is, Double D’s back from Fresno to hit some guy from the Eighth Street Regulars who’s been poaching on his territory.” Van repeated the phone tip that had gotten Regan to leave the warmth of the station. The seventeen-year-old with the yellow sheet as long as a Russian novel was as elusive as smoke. “He’s got a new girlfriend and is laying low at her grandmother’s place. The old lady got busted two years ago for running a crack house with her son and grandkids.”

  “And they say the American family’s in decline. How come Granny isn’t in prison?”

  “Because she looks like she should be baking cookies rather than cooking dope. The DA couldn’t get the grand jury to indict.”

  Regan shook her head in disgust. She’d become a cop because she’d wanted to make a difference, to help make people’s lives better. But lately she’d begun to feel like a sand castle at high tide. It seemed that more and more of the idealist she’d been when she’d first put on that blue LAPD uniform was getting washed away each day.

  “You’re doing it again,” Van said.

  “What?”

  “Humming that damn song.”

  “Sorry. Sometimes it gets stuck in my head.” Some people’s minds grasped onto jingles; whenever her mind drifted, it tended to break into “You Are My Sunshine.” She’d stopped noticing it years ago; others, who found it understandably annoying, weren’t so fortunate.

  A gleaming black Lexus with muddy license plates caught Regan’s attention as it passed in the opposite direction.

  The passenger was looking straight ahead. The driver turned his face, but not before she caught a glimpse of him. Adrenaline sparked like a hot electrical wire hitting wet pavement. “I’ll bet my next pay grade that’s our boy.”

  “Sure looked like him.”

  Regan made a U-turn, then cursed as a grizzled, bearded man clad in camouflage with an American flag sticking out of his backpack began marching across the street with the determination of the soldier he’d once been.

  “Come on, come on.” Her fingers tapped an impatient drumbeat on the top of the steering wheel. Having suffered from post-traumatic stress herself, she resisted hitting the siren.

  Mad Max was a fixture on the street. Since he claimed to have served in Vietnam, Regan had once, in a rash moment, asked him if he’d ever served with her father. He’d taken a look at the photograph she always carried with her, shook his head, and rattled off a string of gibberish from a mind burned by drugs, alcohol, and God only knew what kind of flashbacks.

  It had, admittedly, been a long shot. But Regan could never stop herself from asking.

  She took off the second Mad Max cleared the lane. That the vet didn’t even glance back when the siren began screeching said a lot about both the neighborhood and his life.

  Regan caught up with the Lexus at a red light just past Hollywood High. Van tapped the car’s description, license number, and tag into her computer. The light turned green.

  The vehicle started out slowly, testing the waters. Testing Regan.

  Every instinct she possessed told Regan this was the murder suspect who’d managed to elude her for the past forty-five days. If she didn’t nab the kid in another two weeks, she’d be forced to write up a sixty-day report, the closest thing in the murder business to conceding defeat.

  The Lexus picked up speed.

  “Come on, dammit.” The computer, ancient and as cranky as she herself was feeling, seemed to take forever.

  “It’s him.” Van’s voice was edged with excitement. “He and anoth
er gangbanger carjacked the vehicle after committing an armed robbery at the Hollywood Stars Motel.”

  “Guess the son of a bitch ran through the five bucks he stole from that old lady,” she muttered.

  Last month’s beating death of the eighty-five-year-old woman had been the most heinous thing she’d witnessed during her twelve years working Los Angeles’ meanest streets: five in a patrol car, a year lost to hospitals and office duty, a year in robbery, another in vice, and the past four in homicide. Regan was thirty-three years old, but there were times lately she felt a hundred. And counting.

  She flipped on the lights, unsurprised when the driver rabbited. Regan took off after it, Code 3, blue lights flashing, siren whooping.

  3

  Blue Bayou, Louisiana

  So,” Jack Callahan asked his brother, “how’s the search for a new sheriff going?”

  “Lousy.” Nate frowned as he tackled another stack of evidence bags from the police property room. Since they’d been collecting dust for decades, he figured they should be properly dealt with before he could begin remodeling the office. Opening the bags was like unearthing an ancient city; the deeper he dug, the older the evidence.

  “I wasted Monday morning interviewing yet another Dirty Harry wannabe from Shreveport, who opted for early retirement to save himself from being suspended for excess brutality on a prisoner. There’s a lawsuit pending on that case, no surprise.”

  The envelope held a slug that, according to the accompanying papers, had been dug out of a wall.

  “Do you remember when Henri Dubois and Julian Breaux fought that duel at Lafitte’s Landing?”

  “Sure.” Jack dug into his brown paper bag and pulled out one of the thick muffulettas he’d brought along for lunch with his brother. “It was Mardi Gras,” he said around a mouthful of deli meats and cheese. “They got the fool idea firearms were the best way to settle who’d get the first dance with Christy Marchand.” He frowned thoughtfully. “I recall them both being too drunk to hit their targets, but I don’t remember what happened next.”