Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  Damn. He'd invoked. And we'd obligingly recorded it from three different views and in high definition sound. The interview had to stop. We couldn't interview him without his attorney present, which meant there wouldn't be an interview. Anybody with a pulse and a legal degree wouldn't agree to have their client interviewed by the cops.

  I watched as Mandy gathered up her stuff and left the room silently. Marshall sat there quietly, still unmoving as a patrol officer came in and collected him. He would go to the Multnomah County jail on the hourly shuttle we ran out there.

  Mandy came back in, slammed her stuff down on the table before sitting down and crossing her arms. "Damn. I knew it."

  "Listen," I said. "That wasn't your fault. It couldn't be. You never had a chance to even start the interview for crying out loud. The guy had his response planned before you even went in the door."

  "I know," she said, putting her feet up on the desk. "But it would have been nice to wind up with a confession on my first case out of the chute."

  That was her ego talking, but I would be the last person in the world who could give her a hard time about ego. I had wanted a confession on my first murder case too. I'd gotten one, but my suspect had been the product of fetal alcohol syndrome and had probably grown up chewing the lead paint off windowsills.

  "I don't think we need it. We've got the victim’s stuff in his dumpster, pictures of her in his studio right before she died, and the fact that he obviously likes to choke people." I rubbed my throat. "And that's just for starters. Who the hell knows what Casey is going to find on those hard drives. I'm betting we'll get hair and fiber matches, DNA, stuff like that. We've got this guy nailed down."

  She frowned then nodded. "Yeah. But it would still be nice to have a confession."

  She had a point. Even though everybody watched forensic police shows on TV these days and loved to hear about fingerprints and DNA and Ninhydrin steaming and god knows what else, there was still nothing quite like watching the guy confess to the crime on video, preferably while he shared some details only the murderer would know.

  "Well," I said. "We aren't going to get one. So let's put it aside and move on. It's easy to get sidetracked and bang your head against the wall over something you don't have, instead of working what you've got. So what's left to do?"

  Ever organized, she pulled out her phone and started going down the list. "Casey has the computer servers at her office. The crime scene team is finished out at the studio. Jeannie and Roger stripped the place down to the bare walls. We pulled hairs and a saliva sample from Marshall down in booking, so we're good to go there. It will be a while before all the forensics stuff comes back. I've got the probable cause affidavit ready to go with Marshall to jail, so we don't have to worry about him going anywhere until Monday at the earliest. We have a meeting with the DA on Monday morning to review the case."

  She wasn't missing anything.

  "So where does that leave us?" I asked.

  She went back over the list again. "I think that leaves us with nothing else to do until we get some forensics back and have a chance to talk to the DA. Which means it’s time to get some sleep." She put her phone away and stood.

  Sleep sounded like an excellent idea. My chest hurt. My throat hurt. My back hurt. The burnt adrenaline from the fight earlier in the day left me feeling cranky and rough around the edges. I followed Mandy out to the parking lot. We were both tired and didn't say much. But there was one last thing I had to take care of before we both went home.

  "Hey," I said as she slipped her key into the ignition. She turned to look at me.

  "Thanks for pulling Marshall off my ass. I would have been done if you hadn't tuned him up."

  She shrugged. "You would have done the same for me."

  "Yeah, but what's important is that you did it for me today." I shuffled my feet. I was never very good at this kind of stuff. "Look, I'm a difficult partner sometimes. I don't do things the way most people do. I'm not the most diplomatic person in the world. But good police work is important to me. Most of the cops in this Bureau aren't worth a damn, but you've got what it takes. You've done a great job on this case. You haven't missed a trick and you've actually taught me a thing or two. I'm glad you're my partner."

  That got me a real smile and I was glad to see it. The Bureau needed kids like her. Somebody had to catch the criminals when I retired to go sit on a couch and watch Matlock all day.

  "Thanks, Dent. You are a jerk sometimes, but I've learned a bunch from you too."

  "Thanks. I think. Look, we've had our little emotional moment here, so now let's go home and get some sleep."

  She laughed and nodded. She laid twenty feet of rubber peeling out of the parking lot in front of me. I was tempted to chase her and teach her a thing or two about handling a car, but I was just too tired.

  Chapter Twelve

  I drove home, too tired to even listen to the radio. The sun went down as I drove, and it started raining, which did nothing to improve my mood. By the time I got home, I was in a funk. I didn't even feel like calling Audrey.

  I couldn't talk to Audrey about certain things. That was an uncomfortable realization, considering I'd more than once asked her to move in with me, was constantly on the verge of asking her to marry me. My job was like a foreign language to her. She had been brought up in a loving, middle-class home. She'd never been in a fight. Hell, she'd never even seen a fight except on television. When we talked about the uglier parts of my job, she treated me almost as if I had some kind of disease. I don't think it was intentional on her part. I think there was a side of me that she had no frame of reference for dealing with. When we tried to talk about it, we more often than not just wound up arguing. So I just didn't talk about it much anymore.

  I couldn't sleep, so I drank. I sat there in my chair, my phone on my lap and a tumbler full of Bushmills in my hand. I wanted to talk to Audrey, wanted to talk to somebody. But I knew that if I tried to explain how my day went, how I'd almost been choked out, somehow we'd wind up in an argument. Her questions always seemed to imply that if I'd tried hard enough, if I had just tried things a different way, the violence wouldn't have been necessary. I don't think she meant to do it. I certainly don't think she meant to attack me personally. I just think she wanted to live in a world where stuff like that didn't happen.

  Audrey might as well have been from a different planet, as far as I was concerned. She'd come from this gentle, bright existence where her mom and dad loved her, loved each other. I'd grown up in a single wide trailer with fist-shaped holes in the walls. Instead of wading through blood and shit, she made her way through life creating music and teaching people. She was like the promised land to me, someplace I could visit, but I wondered if I was fooling myself when I thought I could live there.

  The whiskey didn't even burn on the way down. It had a rich, almost caramel flavor. It was still early. Saturday night. I wondered what Alex was up to.

  Dangerous ground. I took my tumbler with me and wandered around the house, feeling antsy and restless, all thoughts of sleep somehow gone.

  I opened up a closet and pulled out my favorite guitar, a 1965 Fender Stratocaster, made right before CBS bought, and ruined, the company. The body was Candy Apple Red. The maple neck had that broken in feel that only comes from decades of playing. The wood on the edges was just slightly rolled over like it had molded itself to my hand over the years. I sat down on my stool and struck a g-chord. The damn thing sounded like magic and sex and thunder, all rolled into one. It was louder than any un-amplified electric guitar had any right to be. The tone was bell-like on top, woody on the bottom. The strings were brand new, but the tuners and other hardware were all original, fifty some years old, yet they still held perfect tune.

  I shuffled my way through some blues licks, then made a pass at the first solo to Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower." I'd been working on that one for a couple of years now. Sooner or later I'd get it down, all the way through.


  I looked at my watch and realized I'd been sitting there for almost twenty minutes. I had no musical talent at all, but a fine guitar could transport me just by its sound and looks alone. I stopped playing and looked at the Strat. Most of the designs that originally dated from the Fifties hadn't aged well,unless your tastes ran to kitsch, but that Strat still looked as fresh and sleek as it had back then. The shape somehow made me think of rocket ships and women both at once.

  The paint was a little checked and crazed from the years, but it still looked cool. There was no other word for it. It wasn't "beautiful," it didn't have a "good aesthetic." It was cool. Cool in the way that hot rods, Harleys, and fighter planes were cool. To my blue-collar eye, it was so cool it was art.

  I'd spent whole summers in my teens, reading Rolling Stone and Guitar Player magazines over and over again, looking at pictures of Strats. The magazines came from money I scrounged mowing lawns, hauling scrap. I kept them hidden from my dad the way other kids hid their porn. He hated all those long-haired, dope smoking hippies.

  He'd thrown my Hendrix albums out twice when he was drunk, and I always scraped the scratch together to buy them again. The only guitar I'd had back then was a no-name Taiwan import. I'd left it in the trailer when I left for basic training, and since I never went back, I had no idea what happened to it.

  Months later, I walked out the gates of Fort Benning, right after graduating airborne school, my wallet flush with payday cash. I was passing the row of bars, and tattoo parlors, intent on getting a little drunk, when I saw my Strat, sitting in the window of a pawn shop. I looked at the price tag, on a card woven between the strings, and turned to go. I got halfway down the block before it occurred to me that I had enough money in my pocket to just walk in and buy it. That was a new thought for me. I had never spent that much money on any single thing before, had, in all honesty, gotten used to my dreams being just that: dreams that would probably never come true.

  I walked out fifteen minutes later with a guitar case in my hand and a nagging suspicion that I might be hallucinating. Despite having graduated basic, having gotten my airborne wings after jumping out of an airplane, buying that guitar made me finally feel like a man. This was something I'd dreamed about, lusted after, and I finally had it in my hands. It was a new idea, one I definitely hadn't learned from my old man. As I walked back to the base with my Strat, it occurred to me that I didn't know if my father had any dreams, or if any of them had ever come true. It was the first time I ever felt sorry for him, and the start of maybe learning to forgive him.

  I didn't get drunk that weekend, didn't get laid. I also didn't get a bad tattoo or a case of the clap. What I got was a bad set of blistered fingers. By Sunday night, the night before I'd leave for Ranger school, I could play "Sunshine of Your Love" all the way through, and most of "Hey Joe."

  Sixty-eight days later, I had a handful of brand new Ranger tabs to sew on my uniforms, and a little more swagger, but secretly my biggest relief was that I could get that Strat out of storage. I'd reconciled myself to the fact that I would always be better by far at shooting a rifle than playing guitar, that I was probably never going to make it big in a rock band, but the guitar was mine. It took me away from the oppressiveness of the Army, the sad desperation of the kids around me who needed to prove that they were men.

  Many nights during Ranger school, as I sat up to my neck in swamp water, or froze my ass off on the side of a mountain, I dreamed about having that Strat in my hands, the way other guys dreamed about their girlfriends. I knew it would probably never take me anywhere except in my own mind, but that was enough.

  I sat in my living room twenty years later, with the guitar in my hands, trying to remember the kid who had bought it. That was a long time ago: a handful of girlfriends, a combat tour, at least two dead men at my hands. That kid from Tennessee didn't even seem real to me anymore. I hadn't been back to Tennessee since the day I got on the bus to join the Army.

  My eyelids fluttered and I realized I was in danger of falling asleep right there on the stool. I cased up the guitar and locked the closet, shoving my reverie to the back of my mind.

  I finally wound up sitting on my ratty old easy chair with my whiskey glass in one hand and a book in the other. I had hundreds of books. I'd been collecting them ever since I was a kid when my secret vice was reading. They were stacked haphazardly on shelves all around the house. But there was a handful that I never bothered to shelve. They always sat on the end table next to my chair.

  I jerked awake at the sound of a phone ringing. "Yeah," I croaked.

  "Dent. How’re tricks?" That gravelly voice brought back some memories, some of them good, some of them bad. It was Al Pace. My former boss at Major Crimes, and Alex's father.

  "Jesus, Al. How are you?"

  "I've got enough money to keep me in scotch and cigars and I'm married to a woman half my age. What more could I want? I need to see you, Dent."

  "What for?" I felt like I was several seconds behind the curve, I was still half asleep and trying to remember that Al wasn't my boss anymore, wasn't even a cop anymore.

  "I think you're about to stick your dick in a hornet's nest if you haven't already. We can't talk about it on the phone. We need to talk face to face. Tonight."

  I was quiet for a minute, processing. If I couldn't trust Al, I had nothing left. "Ok. Your place?"

  "Yeah. My place. Gina's having one of her parties, but I'm barricaded upstairs in the study, so you'll have to run the gauntlet."

  Great.

  "I'll be there in a few."

  Al grunted in reply and hung up. I took a few minutes to drag a toothbrush around in my mouth and headed for the door.

  I wondered if Alex would be there, and shoved the thought out of my mind.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The gray November drizzle had set in. I threw on my raincoat, but still got a good pelting on the way to the car.

  I crossed the river and wound my way up into the west hills. Al had one of those modern looking houses perched on the side of the hill. If we ever had that big earthquake they were predicting, he was screwed. The streets here were narrow and choked with cars. His neighbors were doctors, lawyers, software developers, that sort of thing.

  There were cars parked all along the street on Al’s block. All the cars were expensive, BMWs, Audis, Mercedes, that sort of thing. I squeezed my plebeian Crown Vic into a spot.

  The rain had stopped by the time I got out of the car, but it was still damp and cold. I started walking towards Al's house when I felt that little tickle at the back of my neck. Over the years, I'd learned to pay attention to that feeling. It was hard to explain, but sometimes I could feel it when somebody was watching me.

  I looked up and down the rows of cars, still walking nonchalantly, my fingers curling around the grip of my little Smith and Wesson in my coat pocket.

  Finally, I saw him.

  There was a gray Mercedes parked at the curb directly across from Al's house. The rear windows were blacked out with heavy tint, but the windshield was clear, letting the light from a streetlight shine inside. The guy in the driver's seat was massive. His shoulders took up half the front seat and strained the seams of his suit coat. Meat hook hands rested on the steering wheel. The guy looked Samoan, maybe Hawaiian and he was easily 350, maybe even 400 pounds.

  He was no chauffeur. I took in the flat, affect-free stare and recognized the type: a thug in a suit. I'd learned to recognize other cops, soldiers, really professional security people, types like that. We all had a certain look that was hard to describe and even harder to disguise. He was a thug, just like me. I could practically smell it on him.

  He inclined his head slightly. A little nod to say, I see you, you see me, we know what we are and it doesn't have to be a big deal. At least not tonight. I nodded back. No reason to be rude. He was probably some socialite’s idea of a pet bodyguard, one step up from a Rottweiler. Some of them were titillated by that sort of thing.

  I felt his
eyes on me as I walked up onto the porch and rang the bell. It was all I could do not to turn around and stare back.

  A college kid in a tuxedo that didn't quite fit him opened the door. At first, I had no idea who he was, then I realized Gina must have rented a doorman for a party. Jesus. How the hell did Al wind up like this? I remember when he shared an apartment with four other cops and I had to help him haul his couch to the dump because one of the other guys had come back from a trip to Tijuana infested with crabs.

  The kid in the monkey suit looked at me top to bottom, took in the scuffed boots, jeans and raincoat.

  I pushed my way past him. "I'm expected." He didn't offer any resistance. I hadn't really expected him to.

  A babble of voices came from my right. I peeked into the living room and saw a gaggle of tan, fit women with collagen and silicon in all the right places, but no sign of Al. None of them noticed me so I scooted right past, towards the stairs. The kid in the suit eyed me suspiciously.

  “Dent?" The voice came from deeper in the house. I craned my neck around the corner and saw Alex looking at me from the kitchen. She was sitting on a counter, her honey hair loose and spilling around her. She wore a strapless dress that showed off several square feet of perfect skin and held a wine glass in one hand.

  "Dent!" she said, almost squealing. "Cool! Come on back here."

  I told myself I didn't have any choice and headed back to the kitchen. The expensive-looking stainless steel counters were covered with chafing dishes and appetizer trays, undoubtedly the product of one caterer or another. I doubted that Gina actually cooked anything.

  Alex grabbed my hand and pulled me into the kitchen, pausing to give me a peck on the cheek that felt electric. God, she smelled good.

  "Dent! Please tell me you've come to rescue me from this vapid party! If it wasn't for Manuel and Regan here, I'd already be out of my mind."