by P. A. Brown
Trevor worked for one of the fringe production companies as a script supervisor, a tedious job he once explained meant watching out that if an actress wore pink slippers in one scene, she had on the same footwear when the next scene was shot two weeks later.
Trevor had a hundred catty stories about the newest Hollywood talent. Especially the cute little gay hotties who tried so hard to play it straight.
“Too bad. I was thinking of heading down to the Pit for a drink later,” Chris said.
Trevor was the only man Chris had ever met who could actually purr when he spoke. So many men tried for the effect, but no one did it better than Trevor. A shiver of lust raced along Chris’s nerve endings. Trevor was just what he needed to take the sting out of David’s rejection. He tried for some purr of his own. “How about you leave in the morning? I’ll serve breakfast in bed.”
“No can do, babe. Got business to attend to,” he said, sounding distracted. “But you and me, we got some unfinished business of our own to take care of, don’t we?”
“When will you be back?”
“That’s what I like to hear. Enthusiasm. I’ll only be gone a few days. Keep next weekend open for me, okay?”
“Consider it yours.”
Tuesday, 5:25 pm, Piedmont Avenue, Glendale
David unlocked his car. His cell chirped.
“Davey,” Martinez said. “Got something you might want to see. How soon can you get back here?”
It was nearly five-thirty. “Why don’t you grab something from the deli?” David said.
“I’ll meet you in twenty.”
Thirty minutes later David found a pastrami on rye on his cluttered desk. Martinez was nowhere to be seen. Half a dozen folders lay beside the sandwich, plus one manila envelope with his name on a computer-addressed label. There was no postmark. He picked up the envelope after unwrapping his pastrami. Martinez had remembered to get extra mustard.
Martinez appeared at his elbow, nearly knocking the other half of the sandwich off the desk as he planted his butt.
David rescued his dinner and waved the envelope at him. “When did this come in?”
“Front desk called just after four.”
David slit it open with a fingernail and peered uneasily inside. What he saw made him glance up at Martinez. “Got a pair of gloves handy?”
Martinez handed him a pair. David slipped them on, and Martinez leaned forward as David reached in and pulled out a California driver’s license and a photograph.
Daniel Anstrom. Nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Southern California. North Hollywood address. Both of them stared at the young face. David felt despair tighten the muscles of his stomach as he studied the photo, which had been printed out on flimsy paper from a digital file. It showed a dumpster, this one with a backdrop of mountains. Somewhere north of Los Angeles proper. He flipped to the next image, recognizing it easily: Angeles Crest Highway.
“Think anyone filed on him?” Martinez asked, but even his voice sounded strained.
It took less than ten minutes to find the report, taken three weeks earlier. Anstrom’s parents had called it in, waiting the requisite forty-eight hours after their son disappeared, though they insisted he wasn’t the type to just vanish.
David called the California Highway Patrol and told them what to look for. Then he sent the envelope and all its contents down to the lab for analysis.
The rest of the day was spent trying to locate Anstrom’s parents, who weren’t answering their phone. David spent the next day catching up on paperwork, which was never in short supply.
Thursday night he ate a hastily prepared supper of frozen stir-fry tossed with soy sauce on some left-over rice while catching the tail end of a Dodgers home game. When they lost seven to two he knew it was time to call it a night.
He almost made it to sleep before the bedside phone shrilled.
“Better get down here,” Martinez said.
David sat up. “Highway Patrol found something?”
“No. Looks like our boy delivered a fresh one to our doorstep.”
Thursday, 7:45 pm, County Coroner’s Office,
North Mission Road, East Los Angeles
The morgue assistant brought out the sealed body bag, and David signed off on it.
No confirmation yet it was their killer’s work, but David’s gut told him it was. The fact the body’s temperature was still 95.2 degrees when discovered proved to be the only definite piece of evidence. A patrolling officer had spotted something suspicious on her rounds and left her car to investigate. Rigor hadn’t even set in.
“Our boy’s got brass balls.” Martinez casually appraised the body on the table.
“Getting bigger every day, too. Brazen, dumping a body like that.”
David frowned. The latest John Doe had been dumped on the front steps of a house undergoing renovations less than five hundred yards from the Northeast station. So far no one inside or outside the station had reported seeing anything. Brazen wasn’t even the word.
Lopez used sterile water and the first of many clean swabs to wipe the blood off the damaged face. The morgue assistant captured the results of her work on film. David knew he’d be heading back to the Nosh Pit with those pictures. His stomach rolled over at the idea.
“Interesting,” Lopez muttered. “What do we have here?”
She used a pair of forceps to tease something out of the bloody folds of skin around the victim’s throat. From where David stood it looked like dark strands of gore-covered linguine.
“What is that? Film?” David leaned in to get a closer look.
“VHS stock, if I’m not mistaken.” She continued to work the material out one inch at a time, taking care not to break it.
“He wasn’t strangled with it, was he?” Martinez asked.
“Not strong enough,” Lopez said. “I suspect the ligature strangulation was performed by something else, and this was wound around before the actual strangulation occurred.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The material’s all but embedded in the skin. That could only occur if the force of the ligature material acted to drive the tape under the skin.”
David leaned forward. “Can it be cleaned?”
“We’ll isolate any latents, and test for DNA, but sure, I think it can be cleaned up.”
“Haven’t been to a good movie in ages,” Martinez said. “Think this is a blockbuster?”
“I think it’s a message.”
“Original,” Martinez muttered. “Why can’t he be like everyone else and send badly composed poems?”
Lopez slid the bloodstained film into a steel bowl and handed it to the morgue assistant. “Check into cleaning this. Carefully, we don’t want it damaged.”
The morgue assistant nodded and carried the bowl toward the sink where racks of chemicals were stored.
Lopez patiently continued to clean the corpse, exposing a face that had probably been handsome, though it now bore the unmistakable marks of someone else’s rage.
“Does this one seem more personal to you?” David moved around to study the body from another angle. He kept rubbing his temple, where a headache lurked. “Another question: Was he drugged?”
“Something eating you?” Martinez asked.
“He’s decompensating fast.” Psychiatric jargon for falling apart. Their killer was losing it. “Getting sloppy.”
“Sloppy is good. We can use sloppy.”
David thought of Chris. Psychopaths were cool, until they decompensated, but as cool as Chris was? If he was guilty, then he was a veritable iceberg and his lies were Oscar quality.
He stared down at the ruined body on the slab. Who was he to the killer? Had Chris known him?
As soon as possible David got them to roll the body’s prints and run them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but no hits came back.
Returning to the station, David and Martinez went over what they knew. Not much. It was back to legwork. David already
had a pair of newly assigned D’s canvassing the area where the body had been dumped. He couldn’t find out anymore here; it was time to hit the Nosh Pit again.
He told Martinez as much.
After several minutes Martinez picked up the nearly empty murder book that had been started for the latest victim and flipped through it. He met David’s gaze.
“You want me along?”
Technically David knew they should go together. It was a solid lead he had developed on his own, but now it should be worked by both partners. Only, he didn’t want his partner around for this one.
“It’s a no-brainer, so if you got something you want to work on your own...” he murmured.
Martinez kept worrying the murder book as though he wished he could produce answers out of it. “I’m thinking that film angle should be addressed,” he said.
“Go for it, then,” David said.
Martinez looked grateful. “You want me there, I’m beside you, man, but I gotta confess those places give my cojones the willies.”
Which pretty well summed it up, David thought sadly. “Just make sure you let me know if you find anything, eh, compadre?”
“How about we report back with our findings, say, around one?” He flipped his sleeve back to look at this watch. Nine-thirty. “That ought to give us both time to do our thing.”
“I’ll bring the pizza.”
“Forget the anchovies this time, okay?”
“And you call yourself a cop.” Martinez was still shaking his head as he strode away from his desk. He spun around and glared back at his partner. “Don’t tell me you want me to forget the hot peppers, too?”
David grinned. “Nah, those I can handle.” He kept a bottle of Rolaids in his upper drawer just for that situation.
David watched him go, then clipped his cell to his belt, slid his sunglasses into his jacket pocket—though he wouldn’t be needing them where he was going—and with briefcase firmly in hand, headed out to sign a car out.
Only when he slid onto the sun-baked seat did he think of the other guy who had been with Chris that night. Des. Des what? He pulled his notebook out and skimmed until he found it. Desmond Hayward. He stared down at the phone number he had taken down, remembering all too clearly how Des had come down the stairs, catching him in the act of kissing Chris, knowing what Des must be thinking.
But first the Nosh Pit.
Return to Contents
CHAPTER 13
Thursday, 10:45 pm, The Nosh Pit, Hyperion Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles
DAVID KNEW THE bartender made him the minute he entered the Nosh Pit. The man eyed him coldly while David made his way through the press of bodies. David flashed his shield and watched the crush melt away. He was left facing the angry bartender.
“Do something for you, officer?” The bartender lifted a beer mug out of the draining rack and rubbed it dry with a towel. Muscled arms bulged out of his sleeveless shirt. A tattoo on his left arm said SEMPER FI. A snake coiled around his other arm, the head peering out from under his armpit.
David passed over a business card. “Got a name?”
“William Ramsey. But everyone just calls me Ramsey.”
“Well, Mr. Ramsey, we might want to find someplace private for this conversation.”
Ramsey hesitated, but David knew he was all too aware of the bar patrons watching them. “This way.”
David followed him into a backroom filled with cases of beer and alcohol. The room smelled faintly of smoke.
“This won’t take long.” David hoisted his briefcase onto a case of Smirnoff. He popped the latches and made a show of dragging out his pictures. He indicated Ramsey’s tattoo. “Where were you stationed?”
Ramsey looked bemused. He folded his arms over his broad chest. “Pendleton.”
“See any action?”
“Spent some time looking for weapons of mass destruction. Never did find anything but sand.”
“Heard Iraq was nasty.”
“It had its moments.”
“Know this guy?” David watched Ramsey’s stony face when he dumped the half dozen pictures of the dead John Doe in front of him.
Ramsey jerked away from the images. “What the fuck you doing?”
“Asking if you know this guy.”
“Who the hell is he?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t—”
“Look at it!” David slammed the nearest picture with his index finger. Sick of the games. Sick of the secrets that kept his stomach tied in knots. Somebody was going to talk and they were going to talk now. “I want to know when he came in here. Who he was with. Where he lives. His name.”
“I don’t know his name,” Ramsey said.
“But you recognize him, right? Did he come in alone or with someone?”
Ramsey shrugged. “Alone.”
“He leave the same way?”
“What happened to him? Who did that?”
“He leave here alone?”
Ramsey dragged his gaze away from the photos. “He came in a lot. He left with whoever he wanted.”
“Anyone in particular?”
A shrewd look entered Ramsey’s eyes. “Different guys,” he said.
“Who?”
David sighed and pulled out his cell phone. He tapped in a series of numbers, then met the quizzical bartender’s eyes. “You sure you don’t want to talk to me?”
“What are you doing?”
“Putting a call in to the station—they can send a couple of uniforms down here to help me question everyone in the place,” David said. “If we keep at it long enough someone’s bound to remember something, especially if the guy was as good-looking as you say.”
“No call for that. I told you I don’t know anything.”
“Doesn’t mean no one else does.” David depressed the send button. “This is a homicide investigation and I’m tired of being jerked around.”
Ramsey held his hand up, almost touching David’s. “Don’t. We can talk.”
David hit END and set the cell down on the counter. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“Few days ago...Monday night.”
David was startled. That was the night he had broken up the gay bashers.
“What time Monday?”
“He was here till last call.” Ramsey’s intense green eyes wandered uneasily around the small room.
David leaned forward. “He alone?”
“He spent the night chatting guys up. Talked to a lot of people. Said he was an actor.”
“Any reason to think he was?”
“He was full of the usual Hollywood bullshit, if that’s what you mean.” Again the wary look. “Never saw him in anything.”
“Anybody in particular he talk to?”
“Few people.”
“Give me some names.”
Ramsey frowned, tugged on his bristling mustache. Ice glinted in his eyes. David thought he was going to play hardball and refuse to answer.
“I need names.”
“Chris. Guy’s name was Chris,” Ramsey said. “But if you think he had anything to do with that, you’re crazy. I know the guy. He’d never hurt a fly.”
Usually when David scored a major hit, he felt a surge of adrenaline that made the catch all the sweeter. This time his stomach roiled and he swallowed past the sudden taste of bile.
“Bellamere? Christopher Bellamere? That the one you mean?”
“Could be. Don’t get into last names much here.”
“Good-looking guy, maybe six feet. Blond. Blue eyes. Expensive dresser? Works with computers.”
Ramsey raised one eyebrow and looked him up and down as though he was seeing him for the first time. David was annoyed to feel himself flush, hoping the darkened room kept it from being obvious.
“Sounds like him,” Ramsey said.
“That the first time you ever saw them together?”
Ramsey curled his hand into a fist. “No.”
“When did
they meet before?”
“You’re wrong about Chris. He couldn’t have done what you think.”
“He’s not a suspect at this point,” David lied. “I just need to talk to him. Clear some things up.”
“Sure.”
“I want to thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Ramsey.” David scooped his pictures up and slid them back into the briefcase, forcing it closed with a solid thump. “I’d like to think this conversation won’t go beyond our ears. Got a problem with that?”
“No.”
“I’ll be on my way then. Try to have a good one.”
“Like that’s going to happen now.”
David had barely cleared the door before he had his cell out, launching a DMV check on both Christopher Bellamere and Desmond Hayward. He checked his notes from Monday and added Kyle Paige to his search list. While he waited for his requests to be processed and displayed on his MDT, he ran over the notes he had taken that night.
Des and Chris had been friends since their college days. At least ten years. Just how well did Mr. Hayward know his long-time pal? David put the car in gear. Time to find out.
Kyle answered his knock, scowling when he saw who it was. The bruises on his face had congealed into a rainbow of mauves and sickly yellows and his already full lips remained puffed up.
“Mr. Hayward available?”
“Yeah, he’s here.” Kyle remained standing in the doorway, effectively blocking the way. “What do you want?”
David crowded in on the much smaller man. He filled the suddenly narrow doorway.
“To talk to him.”
“I’ll see if he’s up.”
David glanced at his watch. It was past midnight. But the kid was fully dressed when he answered the door. Maybe he’d interrupted something. Which at least would explain the kid’s hostility.
Des appeared less than five minutes later, dressed in faded jeans and a gold turtle neck sweater that showed off his dusky skin. His head was freshly shaved. Des was one of those men who looked sexy as hell with his head shaved.
Not that he came anywhere close to Chris in terms of physical beauty.
David shoved the dangerous thought aside. He had to stop thinking that way.