Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  “If it ain’t the cub reporter,” he says.

  Dumphy’s a pretty good cop most of the time, but we busted a crack house one time, and I watched him pocket a couple grand from a pile of confiscated cash. He offered me some but I refused, and that soured our friendship forever. I agonized over what to do, but he was waging a costly, heart-wrenching custody battle for an out-of-wedlock daughter who was dying of Hodgkin’s disease, so I gave him a pass. I rationalized my inaction by calling it a victimless crime. Almost half a million dollars still made it to the evidence locker, so it’s not like Dumphy’s skim undermined the prosecution of the crack dealers. But they might have gotten off if I had exposed him. Another rationalization. I left the force soon after.

  “What’s going on, Dumphy?”

  “Some reason you can’t wait for the press release like everybody else?”

  “I’m a friend of the family.”

  “Brown, I got news. You ain’t got any friends.”

  “I just want to know if Ginger’s okay.”

  “Ginger?”

  “Ginger Strain. She lives here. With her father.”

  “Well I don’t know, bright boy. Lady in there ain’t in any shape to introduce herself.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  He doesn’t like it, but even he understands the advantage of making a positive ID. He nods to the rookie, who lifts the tape for me to duck under. Dumphy leads me up the outer stairs and around the deck to the kitchen door and tells me that’s as far as I go.

  There’s a vestigial odor of natural gas in the air as I peer into the room and let my eyes adjust to the bright light from a stand of floods the forensics guys set up to illuminate the shadows. There are two lab techs in there now with purple gloves, blue paper booties on their shoes, and matching surgical hats on their hair. One of them bags the trash for logging in the lab while the other goes over the kitchen table with a tweezers, collecting and cataloguing any visible hair or fibers. After the body is removed, they’ll vacuum the scene for trace evidence.

  The two oven doors are open.

  A body sits on one of the red vinyl chairs, slumped over the kitchen table, head lying at an awkward angle on a straw placemat, staring lifelessly at an empty yellow teacup with a blue leaf pattern. I feel my stomach pitch. There’s no mistaking those green-gold eyes.

  FIFTEEN

  At seven o’clock I decide to skip dinner and crawl into bed. Ginger’s death is a kick in the head, yet another in a vicious cycle of losses.

  The thought of her committing suicide stirs up sour memories of my father’s death.

  Then there’s my marriage, or lack thereof. Every time I look in the mirror I see myself through Holly’s eyes, a vision of profound disappointment. I hear the woman I loved telling me she can’t live anymore with a man she doesn’t respect. As time passes, the pain changes in nature, but not depth. I carry it with me everywhere, hoping I’ll never need it again but holding it close just in case. Kind of like always packing the gun you used in a failed suicide attempt.

  And of course there’s that dark, empty place where my badge used to be.

  These thoughts lace in and out of dreams as I thrash in and out of sleep. I’m consumed by the vision of Ginger’s face on the table, her eyes dull like Lana’s one eye in that crime-scene photo. I can’t get it out of my mind, but I can’t get it in there either. A square peg in a round hole. Lana: murder. Ginger: suicide. Could the cause be twenty years removed from the effect?

  I try to imagine a teenage Ginger, coming home from school, dropping her backpack by the door, skipping down the stairs to find her mother’s head splattered around the bedroom. It had to redefine her experience of pretty much everything for the rest of her life. A reincarnation without having to die, a retooling of the self, an imagination remodeled. Every thought, every feeling from that moment on must have taken off from a different launch pad, a deeper, bleaker jumping-off point.

  Did she retreat behind a wall of denial? A protective curtain of delusion? Or was she smothered by the harsh carnage, overpowered by the nauseating reality? I can’t begin to fathom, but I obsess about it anyway. I can’t shake the guilty suspicion that my questions led her back to that place, to some black hole from which death seemed a relief. The timing is just too suspicious to be coincidental.

  I replay our conversations in my head. Did I trigger some fatal train of thought? Upend some hidden memory? She seemed fine except for that one moment when my hand brushed her thigh and she closed up like a sea anemone. Could that tiny emotional nudge have triggered an emotional landslide? According to the coroner’s preliminary estimate, Ginger died on Thursday, four days after we’d met. Was that enough time for her to spiral into oblivion?

  Gloria walks in. “Get your ass out of bed, Nob.”

  “How’d you get in?” I ask. I’m still in that Kafkaland between dreams and reality, so it doesn’t occur to me that we traded keys years ago.

  “I blew the butler.”

  “Well, you can leave the same way.”

  I look at the clock. It’s only 9:17. It feels like the middle of the night.

  “You’re either getting out of bed, or I’m hauling your ass down to the station.”

  “On what charge?”

  “No charge. You’re a material witness.”

  “To a suicide?”

  “You were in her datebook, Nob. At the time of death, you were supposed to be with her.”

  “So what?”

  “So were you?”

  Through my mental smog an image starts to form. An image of me doing a perp walk. “Go away,” I say.

  “What happened that afternoon, Nob? Were you with her when she died?”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Get your sagging ass off the sheets. I already brewed up a pot of black.”

  I smell the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe as I roll out of bed naked.

  “Nice cock,” she says, grinning like it’s some kind of joke.

  I throw on some clothes and follow the smell of coffee downstairs. Gloria hands me a cup of joe. After a few sips the smog starts to clear. She has the good sense to keep her mouth shut and just let my atoms reassemble into a reasonable facsimile of a human being.

  “We were supposed to meet at Solley’s,” I say. “She never showed up, so I drove to the house. Your guys were already swarming when I got there.”

  “What were you supposed to meet her about?”

  “What’s with the inquisition?”

  “I figure no one’s going to notice the disappearance of a twenty-year-old case file,” she says, “so I sneak it out for you as a favor. You start poking around, and all of a sudden the vic’s daughter winds up dead. It’s only a matter of time before some homicide dick connects the dots and goes looking for Lana’s murder book. You beginning to get the picture?”

  “You want your file back before it’s discovered missing,” I say.

  “Bingo.”

  “I haven’t copied it yet.”

  “Tough shit,” she says.

  “I want my key back.”

  SIXTEEN

  It’s almost three in the morning when I get home from FedEx Office. For the last four hours I’ve been feverishly flailing at the copy machine like Lucy Ricardo on the chocolate candy assembly line.

  I stumble on my front steps, avoiding the fall with an awkward step that twists my ankle. I’m wondering if I should ice it as I open the door and smell coffee. Somebody’s here. For some reason, Cogswell comes to mind. Then Melody walks out of the kitchen holding a steaming cup.

  “Jesus, Mel. It’s the middle of the night.”

  I should have known. Cogswell wouldn’t make his own coffee.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve been wallowing in misery lately. I thought you might need this.”

  I actually smile, despite my mood. I have Lana’s file and the copy in a box. It weighs a ton. I drop it on the side table by my door and grab the coffee. Tastes great.


  “Where were you?” asks Melody.

  “I needed an industrial-strength Xerox to get this finished tonight. Gloria wants to stash it back in the files before anyone finds it missing.”

  “Why would anyone even look? Ginger committed suicide.”

  “It’s not just a suicide, it’s a celebrity death just dripping with sex and rock ’n’ roll.” I feel my eyes flag.

  “Ginger Strain is a celebrity?”

  “Celebrity spawn. Same thing. Did you get me some background on Lana’s dad?”

  “Yeah. Nathaniel Strain was quite the fallen preppy. Went to expensive private schools, then Yale, on the proceeds from the metal shop his father built from scratch. He was all set to sail into Stanford Law School and finally distance himself from the working class when he got caught up in some scandal and had to drop out as part of a plea bargain. That put an end to his social-climbing ambitions.”

  My eyes pop open, and I realize I’ve nodded off momentarily, though I’m still standing. Melody doesn’t notice.

  “What kind of scandal?” I ask.

  “Not sure. It was a long time ago. Before the web. I’d have to go to New Haven to track it down. But it involved a townie girl. Anyway, he knocked around for a few years, tried wildcatting in Texas, which is where he met Lana’s mom. They got married, had Lana a year later, and divorced when Lana was twelve. The wife took him to the cleaners in the settlement.”

  I put my cup down and pull my copy of the case file out of the box, leaving the original by the door where I’ll see it on my way out in the morning. I’m beginning to feel weak from exhaustion. I don’t know if it’s mental or physical, but I just want to sleep.

  “Domestic violence?”

  I head into my office with Melody on my heels.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Their statements were sealed as part of the settlement.”

  “Probably not,” I say. “After the mother died, the county let Lana move back in with him for her last two years of high school.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I drop Lana’s file on my desk, raising an explosion of dust.

  “It’s what she wrote in ‘Living the Dream.’” I fall into my chair and manage to stay awake just long enough to sing the last verse:

  Livin’ the dream with Daddy,

  Surviving the in-between.

  Livin’ the dream of splittin’

  The second I turn eighteen.

  SEVENTEEN

  Five a.m. Still dark. I pull into the post office parking lot on Beverly Boulevard next to the old Pan-Pacific Auditorium, where Elvis played in 1957. Thirty-eight years later, a year after Lana Strain’s murder, the Streamline Moderne showpiece went up in a blazing inferno. Now it’s a park. Permanence is fleeting in LA.

  I park next to Gloria’s car. She’s leaning against it, bathed in the amber glow of the sodium-vapor security lights that make her hair look gray and disguise the color of the skirt set she’s wearing. It’s appropriately conservative for work, yet fits her like a glove. Even in monochrome, she looks good. I get out, and she gives me a hug and an air kiss. Doesn’t want to smear the fresh lip art.

  I pull Lana’s file out of my backseat and put it in hers.

  “You busy at noon?” she asks with her usual innuendo. How can she even think about sex this early in the morning?

  I beg off. “I’m doing a load of laundry at noon.”

  She laughs. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve got an appointment with your friend Billy Kidd. But if you don’t want to do a ride-along…”

  “And you want me to come?”

  “I could use your observations. No one’s as steeped as you are in the history and personalities of this case.”

  “You mean I’ve read the Lana Strain case file and you haven’t.”

  “You must be psychic.”

  Not to mention dubious. I know she’s not going to allow a potential witness or, God forbid, suspect accompany her without a damn better reason than that.

  “Why are you really letting me tag along?”

  She sighs. “Billy threatened to lawyer up and refuse to talk unless I’d let his official autobiographer sit in. I take it that’s you?”

  I’m shocked. A rock star who remembers his promises.

  Seven hours later, I’m in the passenger seat of a mud-colored Crown Victoria, unmarked but hardly undercover. Gloria drives like she’s got a light bar dancing to a siren, only she doesn’t. I’ve got a death grip on the door pull as she roars up Laurel Canyon and swerves onto Weeping Glen. She finally slows as she snakes up the narrow street and parks in front of Billy’s house.

  “His daughter Sophia is going to be here, too,” says Gloria. “She’s looking after him.”

  “You talk to her yet?”

  “Dumphy did. When she found the stiff.”

  “She tell him why she went over there?” I’m still trying to get a rope around that one. She’s been estranged from her sister for two decades, then she suddenly finds her dead?

  “Thought it was time for a rapprochement.” Gloria strips the word of any hint of French origins by giving her native Brooklyn accent a rare break from its dungeon.

  “That a guess or she say that?”

  “That’s a paraphrase.” Some sixth sense tells Gloria that her hair needs rearranging, so she runs her hand through it. I don’t notice any difference.

  “She tell Dumpy why they stopped talking in the first place?”

  “She said they had a big fight. She couldn’t even remember what it was about, nothing big, just real emotional after their mother’s death and all. Then Ginger just stopped talking to her.”

  “Sounds like a pattern. Ginger cut her grandfather off, too.”

  “One big happy family.”

  I follow Gloria up the redwood steps of the dome. She rings the bell, and a knockout of a woman opens the front door. Sophia Kidd. I’m slugged by a patently inappropriate desire of the sort that torched Bill Clinton’s presidency.

  “I’m Sophia.” She has Lana’s voice, like her sister did. I always thought that voice was the love child of booze and smoke, but apparently it’s genetic. “Come on in,” she says.

  Sophia doesn’t look like a Lana Strain imitator as Ginger did, but she has all of Lana’s best features integrated in different proportions and with darker coloring, making her more beautiful than either Lana or Ginger, a more exotic fusion of the DNA. Her build is slighter than Lana’s, slender, willowy. Her eyes are more widely spaced and almond shaped, while still sharing her mother’s magnificent palette. She’s wearing gym shorts, and her legs come out looking tanned and strong, her muscles well defined. Not the legs of a treadmill jogger, but of a sprinter in training. A thoroughbred.

  It occurs to me that I haven’t been this attracted to a woman since the first time I met Holly, back when I was a rookie cop and she was in law school. In fact, Sophia has Holly’s hairdo—long, straight, and parted on one side—only Sophia’s is darker, like the orange-blossom honey I used to buy Holly at the Original Farmer’s Market on Third.

  We follow Sophia in to find Billy slumped on the living room couch in jeans and a wifebeater, fully revealing the intricate twin dragons tattooed up his sinewy arms, their reptilian heads draped over his shoulders. Grief clouds the red crazing of his eyes like cataracts. There’s a half-empty bottle of Johnny Walker Red on the coffee table. No sign of a glass.

  “I’m so sorry, Billy,” I say.

  He doesn’t seem to hear me, or else he doesn’t care.

  I try again. “I can’t imagine what you must be going through.”

  He finally looks up. “My sweet Lord fucks up in mysterious ways.”

  He nods toward the couch, and Gloria and I sit down.

  “This is Detective Lieutenant Gloria Lopes,” I say.

  “How do you do,” says Gloria.

  “Been better.”

  “I hate to do this right now,” says Gloria, “but there are some questions I need to ask.”
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  “Go the fuck ahead. Cain’t stop thinkin’ about her anyways.”

  Sophia takes a seat beside him and takes her father’s hand. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Do you have any idea why Ginger might have wanted to take her own life?”

  “She weren’t the merriest old soul on the face of the planet.”

  “Anything specific lately?”

  “Any little thing’d set her off. Honey to habanera at the flick of a mare’s tail. Just like her mama.”

  Sophia stiffens at his mention of her mother. Though she stares at Billy’s manicure, I know that’s not what she sees. I wonder what she’s remembering about her mother. Lana singing in the shower? Baking pot-laced brownies? Slumped against the Lichtenstein in a pool of blood?

  “Ginger lived by impulse,” says Sophia. “She wasn’t the type to let rationality get in her way.”

  Billy blanches. “Lord have mercy! What right you got to bad-mouth her, Sofie? You ain’t even seen her, comin’ on twenty years! Least not till you found her stone cold!”

  Tears well in Sophia’s lower lids. “She fucked dildos on the Web! She defiled Mama’s memory! You call that rational?”

  “You ain’t got a God damn clue what she was like.”

  “She was an Internet whore, Daddy! And you let her do it!”

  The dog starts to yap as their voices rise.

  “Don’t you put that on me! Neither one of you is asked me for my goddamn permission since you was ten. That don’t make her no whore. Sweet Baby Jesus, have mercy. She ain’t touched a man in years.”

  “Like she’d tell you,” Sophia says dismissively.

  “For your information, it weren’t no big fuckin’ secret. Touchin’ a man give her the heebie-jeebies. That’s why she started seein’ a psycho-iatrist agin.”