by Sam Powers
‘It was a police station and he was a cop. I think that was pretty much his call from the get-go. Besides, you were going to get us arrested.’
‘We need another plan,’ Valentyna said. ‘If I had his card or something, we could just call him, but if we dial the station, we’re just going to get the same run around.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do. What? You figure we go over there, break in and wait for him?’
Zoey peered at her new friend quizzically. ‘No. No that’s definitely not what I was thinking. It’s late afternoon...’
‘So?’
‘So he has to go home at some point. There must be some place nearby we can wait until then.’
L.A. Vice Detective Norman Drabek was curious; the two women had followed him for half a block, from outside his condo building to the nearby Horseshoe Tavern, where they were sitting at the far end of the bar, occasionally whispering things to each other.
He thought he recognized one of them, the black girl. But at fifty-eight, his eyes were going, and he’d taken off his glasses. He put them back on again and squinted. Yeah... a prostitute who worked the train station downtown and the subways in North Hollywood and Burbank. What was her name again? Vesper? Vixen? Valentine. That was it. No... Valentyna, with the ‘a’ at the end. He’d helped her with that piece of shit Denny Thorn, the Iranian pimp who’d changed his name and had his hands into half of the city’s pies. Drabek’s fingers twitched subconsciously for a cigarette as he reminisced. He’d quit two months earlier, but the habit was still there, still picking away at him.
A short man with brown hair, a pinched rat face and beady brown eyes, Drabek had grown up in Burbank. When she wasn’t trying to get jobs on movies, his mother owned a salon near the airport and her rates were good. She had quite a few working girls come through and he’d known all about their harsh lives long before he had any other interest in them. Drabek’s mother had believed in toughening her son, exposing him to the realities of the world early enough to dispel any childhood delusions he might have had about the world being a sweet place. Becoming a cop had just seemed a natural extension of her desire to see him grow up giving a damn.
He hadn’t wanted to move to Vice after twenty-two years in Homicide. But it hadn’t really been up to him. A DEA informant named German Rojas had been holed up in a safe house awaiting his testimony in a case against Sergio Rincon, a Peruvian drug smuggler, people smuggler and generally all-around bad dude. But someone had dropped a dime on Rojas, likely someone in the department, and they’d been ambushed. Drabek was the first responder, and that was all it took to make him the scapegoat. He’d eventually been cleared, but he’d been told the ‘optics were bad’ for him staying in Homicide, where he had one of the best closure rates in the city but was seen as having an insubordinate attitude, and general authority issues.
Drabek would’ve explained it differently. Saddled with back-to-back captains from the politically expedient side of the promotion track, he’d pissed off one too many sticklers from political correctness, one too many old-school guys who judged him a disrespectful troublemaker without so much as a conversation first. But he got things done, and usually by the book, even if he wasn’t always polite about it. That was what they didn’t seem to get.
He drained the last of his eight-ounce glass of draft and held it up to Micki behind the bar. ‘Hey Mick! Another one over here!’
Micki was thirty going on two hundred. Her father had owned the place going back to the fifties, when it was mostly a restaurant for blue-collar guys, meat-and-potato types. Over the years it had slowly morphed from Ralph’s to Ralph’s Bar, and then -- during a phase throughout the city of Irish pubs springing up -- the Horseshoe Tavern. Drabek had been on the same stool every other night or so since the late eighties. Early on, there had been a bunch of beat cops who lived in the neighborhood and also made it their haunt. But they’d mostly moved upward and onward, and now it was just the same regulars, people knocking back boilermakers, shooting the shit about work and maybe watching the pony races on the flat screens.
Micki came over with the draft. It was weak as horse piss, Drabek knew, but he’d developed a taste for it, and it was still only a buck for each eight-ounce glass. Technically.
‘On the house, as always,’ Micki said.
‘Not acceptable, put it on my tab, as usual,’ he said. They went through the same routine every time. The compromise was that she hadn’t asked him about the tab in at least five years.
Two stools over, a young dockhand Drabek barely knew -- Dan? Don? Something like that -- watched the exchange with bemusement. ‘Hey Norm,’ he said, because everyone there knew Drabek, whether he remembered them or not, ‘how come Micki won’t ever let you pay?’
Drabek took a healthy swallow of his draft and savored the bitter, tinny taste. ‘Some nonsense from way back. Nothing interesting.’
From behind the taps, half a bar away, Micki yelled back to be heard, ‘He always says some humble bullshit like that because he knows it forces me to explain. Then everyone gets to hear what a hero he is and all. Because he’s Mr. Humble.’
Drabek cringed a little. ‘It was genuinely nothing, a kid with a sawed-off.’
‘And Drabek ‘heroically’ dove in front of my father and saved his life,’ Micki said. ‘Although it turned out it was just rock salt in the gun and Drabek took it in the butt. Didn’t you, Drabek? Take it in the butt?’
The dockhand giggled at that.
Laugh all you want kid, Drabek thought, but I get the free draft. He drained the rest of the glass in glacial silence.
‘Det. Drabek?’
The two working girls. He’d gotten thinking about the old day and gone and forgotten all about them. ‘Valentyna, right?’
‘And this my friend Zoey. We just met today but she needs your help.’
Drabek fished a business card from his pocket. He avoided eye contact. He didn’t want them getting any ideas about his level of interest. ‘This has my cell on it. Call me during the workday and I can probably help.’
Zoey took the card. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’ He kept staring ahead, waiting for them to leave. He slugged back most of the remaining draft in his glass.
‘This is sort of urgent.’
Drabek put the glass down. Of course it was. When wasn’t everyone’s problem urgent? ‘Okay, shoot: what’s troubling you?’
‘My boyfriend has disappeared.’
Drabek cringed internally. ‘When?’
‘Yesterday. From our condo. I mean, I was there when he left...’
‘Then, he left, he didn’t disappear.’
‘Yeah, but...’
‘It’s not the same thing.’
‘Yeah, but he wasn’t himself. I mean, I know that sounds lame, but he was acting like a different person. He was violent; he had a gun and a big suitcase full of money.’
Drabek turned his head slightly to look her over. Miniskirt, tattoos, piercings, black streaks in the suicide platinum hairstyle. He got the feeling that maybe the boyfriend had a history. ‘He ever hit you, this guy?’
‘What?! No! Ben is a plastic surgeon. He belongs to service clubs. He likes Bonsai...’
‘Bon-what?’ Valentyna asked.
‘Japanese ornamental tree trimming,’ Drabek said. He had to admit she was starting to catch his attention. ‘Service clubs?’
‘You know: Rotary, Knights of Columbus...’ Zoey proffered.
‘Yeah, yeah... I know what a service club is.’ It just didn’t gel with the women standing next to ... Or, maybe it did. ‘Is ‘Ben’ also married?’
Zoey’s expression turned sour. ‘No, and I’m not like that,’ she said.
‘Apologies.’ His eyes shifted to Valentyna. ‘I just sort of assumed...’
‘Assumed what?’ Valentyna snorted. ‘You assumed because she was with a hooker that she must be a hooker too? You think I don’t got no norma
l friends, Det. Drabek?’
He held up both hands in a show of mock surrender.
Zoey came to his rescue. ‘I think maybe he was drugged or hypnotized or something,’ she said. ‘One second he was eating dinner at our place, the next, he was storming off into the bedroom to start packing. When I tried to interfere, he took a shot at me with a gun I didn’t even know he owned.’
‘A shot you say? While inside the condo?’ That was something verifiable.
‘Then he just took off. I’ve tried everywhere...’
‘Does he have family in the city?’
‘It gets stranger...’ She told him about their fruitless search for the Levitt family in Ohio.
Drabek’s intuition suggested Ben Levitt may be a double-family type and that this was the girlfriend, the one who didn’t know about his wife and kids. He might even have been using a cover story with her the whole time. It wasn’t unheard of, although he’d never run into one before personally.
Zoey could see the fatigue in the man’s eyes, how he kept trying to look away, how he was fighting to retain interest. ‘Look... detective: I know what people seem to think of me. I’ve always looked or behaved different and now that I’m older not much has changed, I suppose. And maybe when I was younger, some of what they said was true. But I’ve been trying real hard to change my life. And Ben is the only person who has believed in me the whole time. I need him, and right now he needs me. And I need your help, because this is serious. Ben’s the only person who had faith in me, but I need you to have faith too, detective.’ She felt like she was going to sob, and instead held it in. ‘Because I don’t even know where to start.’
Drabek knew fear when he heard it, and she was genuinely afraid, and that wasn’t okay. He turned on his bar stool to face her properly. Then he softly nodded his head. ‘Okay then,’ he said. He nodded toward the street. ‘Let’s go back to my precinct and I’ll get a file started. We’ll get started on this tonight, and tomorrow we’ll see where it takes us.’
Zoey smiled broadly and felt a tear well up in the corner of her eye. She pursed her lips to avoid chewing on them. ‘Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.’
‘Yeah... well, don’t thank me yet. We haven’t done anything, and you haven’t met my partner yet. Compared to him, I’m the charmer.’
LOS ANGELES
Det. Jeff Pace felt his frustration building. He sat at his desk at the Fifteenth Precinct with his phone cradled between his cheek and shoulder. His left shoelace had a knot and he’d been trying to use the wait to pull it apart. He’d been on hold twice, talked to three different attendants and still hadn’t received an answer.
The precinct was busy, and the vice detectives’ bullpen looked like a steno pool, with a series of burly policeman in cheap suits taking typed statements from women in hip-high mini skirts, and from bookies with varying degrees of male-pattern baldness, as well as witnesses ranging from shrieky ginger-haired hipsters to silent, nervous victims.
It was always a madhouse, and Pace had learned to let it all fall into a uniform background din of noise. It was the only way to get anything done.
‘Hello?’ A woman picked up the on-hold line.
‘Yes!’ Pace said too enthusiastically. ‘Yeah, hi! It’s Det. Pace from the LAPD Detective Support and Vice Division. I was put on hold?’
‘Regarding?’
He inhaled sharply and held it, then counted to five silently. ‘As I mentioned to three of your colleagues, I need a credit card trace and recent use report on a client named ‘Paul Joseph’.’
‘Ah. The time-waster,’ she replied. ‘I’m their supervisor. They had a concern that this might be another waste of our time. You know... what with the other three times you called being about someone who isn’t a client. And wasted our time.’
They’d tried to check Ben Levitt’s recent credit history and purchases only to discover that his accounts had been paid out in full and closed a week before his disappearance. ‘Ma’am, have you ever handled a missing persons credit request before?’ Pace asked. ‘Is there someone...’
‘I’m the someone,’ the woman said. ‘So you’re going to have to deal with me on this issue, sir. There is no other someone. And I shall ask again: is this another time-wasting matter?’
From across a few desks, Det. Norman Drabek watched his partner’s slow boil with amusement and sympathy. The public had the impression it was easy for police to get co-operation on minor issues like a credit check, or a security tape. Instead, it was a continual debate about inconvenience, or privacy, or both, usually with someone who had no idea what the laws and rules were around gathering that sort of evidence.
He’d been told clearly by his captain that the case wasn’t a priority, and that any time spent on it better not come out of other investigations. Which was fine. It wasn’t that uncommon a request, either, sort of a form of time management by threat. He called over to Pace as the latter got off the line, still looking aggravated.
‘How’s it going there, partner? You still with us?’
‘I tell ya, Normie, there better be something to this. Because the lovely ladies at the credit bureau and the credit card company are stitching together little Detective Pace voodoo dolls as we speak.’
‘You’re doing good work, remember that. If you hadn’t gotten on them three times, we wouldn’t have found out he closed that account. We’d have been left with a denial that he even had one.’
‘Not that that’s helping us figure out where the guy has been for the last three days,’ Pace said. ‘You sure this girl’s not just kidding herself? I mean, maybe he took off back east or something.’
‘Nah, nah... like I told you, there is no ‘back east’. That’s the weird part of it. I checked what she told us and it’s true: his family doesn’t exist. I mean, other than that and shooting at her, this guy has the cleanest record I ever saw. When he pulls up at parking meters, they must spit quarters at him, he’s so clean.’
Pace went back to his call: ‘Hello? Yes. Paul Joseph, in the area of North Hollywood or Burbank. Then maybe outward from there... no, I understand. I understand, but this isn’t a fishing trip...’
He began scribbling notes, which got Drabek’s attention. A moment later he hung up the phone. ‘We’ve got a hit, potentially. There are a dozen Paul Josephs living in LA right now with the same type of credit card. But one of them set off a suspicious purchase hit yesterday at an electronics store near Burbank and Lankershim, and we have a home address on the genuine card holder. Chances are he bumped into this guy at some point...’
‘You up for a quick ride over there?’
Pace nodded. ‘Sure. Sure, let’s go see what we can find.’
Paul Joseph lived in a small wood a-frame house just a few blocks from the store on Burbank Boulevard. It wasn’t exactly fancy; the paint was peeling, and the front lawn had died. Like most of its neighboring homes, the place was small, perhaps eight hundred square feet.
They knocked twice on the fading red wooden door, then tried the bell without luck. But there was a car parked in the driveway. Drabek leaned around the front edge of the building to see if there was a gate to the backyard.
Along the wall was a large air-conditioning unit, humming away at full tilt. A rear window was wide open.
‘Hey partner, check this out.’
Pace looked around the corner as well. ‘Either someone’s home or someone’s been visiting.
‘You don’t usually open the window when you’re cranking the AC,’ Drabek said. ‘Let’s see if there’s a back door to this place.’
They followed the whitewashed wall to the back fence. Both men hopped it, Drabek taking his time. He tried to stay fit but recognized his middle-aged limitations. The backyard was also dead. A barbecue sat on the stone back patio, which ran up to the screen door.
The inside door was ajar. Drabek drew his service weapon, then knocked on the door and stood away from it.
There was no response. Pa
ce held the screen while Drabek pushed the door open gently. ‘Hello? LAPD, is there anyone home?’
As soon as the door was fully open, the smell hit them, a sweetly noxious, gassy concentration of decay and death. Both men covered their mouths and noses with their handkerchiefs. The backdoor opened into a kitchen; the sink was full of dishes and the tap dripping slightly, the monotonous sound their only accompaniment. At the back of the kitchen a doorway led to a short corridor past a bedroom and bathroom. Drabek leaned into the bathroom and took a look.
The corpse in the tub hadn’t been dissolving for long, but the lye had done a job. The man’s head and neck had yet to sink below the reddish-brown surface. There was a bullet hole through the middle of his forehead.
In movies, police officers who find a body nearly always make a wise-crack, gallows humor to diffuse the shock of the moment. But both men were too experienced to be shocked, and too smart to remove their handkerchiefs. Soon, the medical examiner’s office would be there, and the real work would begin.
12/
MACAU
Brennan sat silently in the stark white interrogation room and watched the one-way mirror for signs of life he knew were there, just out of reach. On the other side of the room, a Macau policeman in a short-sleeved pale-blue dress shirt and black ballcap sat right by the door, his arms crossed. He looked bored and hadn’t said a word in an hour. To him, Brennan figured, shifts like this were just an exercise in figuring out what he’d missed on TV that night.
He wondered what Carolyn and the kids were doing. Probably perforating my voodoo doll with large needles.
The door swung open and Captain Peter Chen entered. He was middle-aged with white flecks in his hair and he appeared less than pleased.
‘Mr. Arthur,’ he said. He walked over to the interview table and sat down then placed a small file folder upon the tabletop and rested his hand on it. ‘Or should I call you Mr. Joseph Brennan, late of the Central Intelligence Agency?’
