by P. A. Brown
Martinez smiled politely. “Would it be breaking confidence if you were to tell me your full name and current address?”
Chris hesitated then recited both.
“Where do you work, Mr. Bellamere?”
“You ought to know that, you had your men drag me out of there just now.”
“It’s for the record. Don’t worry, your lawyer will get to hear the whole thing once he gets here.”
Chris sighed. “I work for DataTEK Systems, in Studio City, on Moorpark.”
“And how long have you worked there, sir?”
“Six years.”
“And what exactly do you do at DataTEK Systems?”
Something niggled into Chris’s mind. Martinez was being too nice. What was up?
“What is it you people think I did? I’m telling you right now, you’re wrong—”
“Don’t worry about that right now.” As well as recording the conversation, Martinez took notes. “Demanding job?”
“It can be...”
“What sort of hours you keep in a job like that?”
“I’m on call,” Chris said. “Someone wants me, they call.”
“Doesn’t leave much time for a social life.” Martinez’s muddy brown eyes met Chris’s, measuring, weighing. “Or girlfriends.”
Chris cracked a smile. “Sorry, wrong sex. Didn’t we do this already?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m gay, remember? I have boyfriends.”
Without changing expression Martinez scribbled something down. “Got one now?”
“No.”
“Playing the field?”
“You could say that.” Chris thought of David and wondered if this guy even had a clue about his partner. “You didn’t bring me down here to ask about my work habits or my bedroom partners, so what is it, Detective?”
Instead of answering, Martinez fished around in the briefcase and withdrew four eight-by-ten glossy photographs, which he dropped on the table between them.
“Know this man?”
“What the fuck?”
He shoved the pictures back but Martinez held them in place.
“Take another look. You recognize this man?”
“No—” Then Chris realized to his horror he did. It was Bobby. “Oh, my God.”
Martinez leaned forward, his swarthy face flat, his eyes like a shark’s, unmoving, watching, dissecting. “You do recognize him. Who is he? Give me a name.”
Chris looked away. “His name was Bobby.”
“Bobby who?”
“I don’t know.” Chris refused to look at the images. He stared at a stain on the green wall behind Martinez. “He never gave me his last name.”
“What was your relationship to this Bobby?”
“We were... friends.”
“Friends? But you don’t know his last name? How long did you know him?”
“We’d only met a couple of times.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Why all the questions?” Chris tried to glare at the fat cop. “What happened to him?
Who did that?”
“Where did you meet Bobby?”
“A bar.”
“What bar?”
“What difference does it make?”
“What bar?”
“The Nosh Pit.” Chris was beginning to feel afraid. Goose bumps crowded the bare skin of his arms. The knot at the base of his head began to resolve into a pounding headache. “What is going on here?”
“Where is this Nosh Pit?”
“Hyperion. In Silver Lake.”
“Gay bar?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you better answer my questions,” Martinez snapped. “Before things go bad for you.”
“What does that mean? Is that a threat?”
“When did you last see this Bobby?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Try.”
“I don’t—last week, I guess. Monday, I guess.” Chris rubbed the skin of his knuckles.
He found himself staring at his distorted image in the mirrored glass. Who was watching from the other side? “We had a couple of drinks at the Pit. I never saw him again.”
“Did he get into your vehicle?”
“What?”
“Did he enter your vehicle that night?”
“Sure,” Chris said. “He wanted me to take him home... to my place. I didn’t want to.
We argued. He got out and I never saw him again.”
“What did you do while you were in the vehicle?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you solicit him for sex?”
“No, it wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like then, sir?”
Chris rubbed the back of his neck, startled to find it was damp with sweat. Suddenly he’d had enough of this fat, overbearing cop.
“So we fooled around,” he said. “This is the twenty-first century, right? Hell, according to Clinton it isn’t even sex.”
“Are you saying you and Bobby engaged in fellatio?”
God, what a stupid word. “Shit, we were just fooling around. End of story.”
“Except it’s not the end of the story, is it, Mr. Bellamere.” Martinez pulled out a bulging handful of colored eight-by-tens. He threw the pictures down on the table in front of Chris. “Want to have another look at your handiwork, Mr. Bellamere?”
Chris glanced down at the images as they came to rest atop the cigarette burns and knife work that adorned the battered table. He was expecting more images of Bobby for him to ID, but what he saw made his flesh flash ice cold and his stomach roll over.
“What’d he do, Bellamere?” Martinez was over the table, in his face, screaming.
“Look at you wrong? Say the wrong thing to you?”
It was Bobby. No mistaking that. But these images showed a Bobby who had been hideously abused, his skin flayed and ripped off his once gorgeous body. A circlet of blood ringed his neck and in one image it looked like he was on his stomach, and the gaping wound between his legs made Chris lose it.
He threw himself away from the table. Away from the images. His hand went to his mouth, but it was like stemming a flood with straw. Vomit spattered all over his legs.
Distantly he thought he heard Martinez yell, “Hilo de puto. You asshole.” Then the door swung open and he looked up through a blur of tears to see David enter the room.
“Put those away. Shut that tape off.”
Someone else entered the room and there was a whispered conversation that Chris couldn’t make out. The next thing he knew someone was guiding him out of the room, away from his own stink. Almost immediately they turned into another room, a washroom. The door closed and he was guided to the sink.
“Do you want a drink of water? Coffee?”
It was David. He brushed by Chris and turned on the taps.
Chris blinked up at him. He took the damp paper towels that were handed to him.
“Here,” David said. “Clean yourself up.”
Chris forced himself to focus on David. He clutched the towels in one hand. “How could you let him do that to me?”
“I’ll take that to mean you don’t want a drink. Okay, can you answer some more questions?”
“More questions? Are you fucking nuts?”
David perched on the sink and Chris nearly screamed when he pulled out his notepad.
“Tell me what happened after Bobby and you entered your vehicle.”
“You want a blow by blow account?” Chris snarled. “I’m sitting here with fucking puke all over me and you want to know about my sex life? Rent a video like everybody else does.”
“Like the kind Bobby made?”
“How the hell did you know about that—”
“If you had looked closely at those pictures Martinez threw at you, you would have seen a strip of film around the deceased’s neck. It was a porno loop, starring one Bobby Starrz.”
“Bobby Starrz?”
“His stage name. His real name was Robert Allen Dvorak.”
“And what does any of this have to do with me?”
“You are so far the last person to have seen him alive.”
“And you think I had something to do with that?”
“Where were you Tuesday morning?”
“Jesus, if I’d known I was going to need an alibi—”
“Yes?” David leaned forward. “What would you have done, Mr. Bellamere?”
“I’d have done something to be noticed. Maybe dance naked on my front lawn so the neighbors could tell you I was home. Would that have made you happy?”
“What time would you have felt compelled to create this alibi?”
Chris opened his mouth to retort, then closed it. His skin grew clammy. “You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you? Anything I say is going to incriminate me now, isn’t it?”
“Do you feel you’re incriminating yourself, Chris? Is there something you’d like to tell me?” David’s voice was gentle, almost hypnotic. “You can talk to me, you know.”
Chris’s mouth hung open. Finally he pulled away from David, holding his arms wrapped around his chest. “You really think I killed him, don’t you?” he whispered. “My God, what kind of monster do you think I am?”
“Talk to me, Chris. We can work this out.”
“Fuck you, David.” Chris was still whispering. He staggered backward. “I’m not saying another word to you without my lawyer.”
Return to Contents
CHAPTER 15
Monday, 12:20 pm, Northeast Community Police Station, San Fernando Road, Los Angeles
“WELL THAT WENT well,” David said wearily as he rejoined Martinez in the detectives’ squad room.
“Still think we shoulda held him. Let him spend a few hours in lockup. Pansy like him, he’d break like that.” Martinez snapped his thick fingers. “Look how he fell apart when I showed him those pictures.”
“He hardly acted like he was seeing his own handiwork.”
“He’s fucking psychotic, what do you expect? Should have let him have a look at those loonies down in lockup. He’d have been squealing to save his pretty ass.”
David’s hands closed into fists at the thought of Chris being abused by animals like that. But all he said was, “We don’t have enough to make a convincing arrest. You know the D.A.’s demanding we bring her some solid forensics. She’s scared of his lawyer. This Weiss is a cobra, I guess.”
“Then we need to find another way to break him. You know those faggots got no guts.” Martinez slammed his hand down on the desk. “Oh hell. He’d probably like it. Let those damned vatos plow his ass from one end to the other and he’d be begging for more.
Sick fuck.”
David suppressed a wince. “His vehicle been checked out yet?”
A phone call confirmed the SUV was still being processed. They grabbed a quick lunch at a nearby sub shop and met over the freshly delivered report back at David’s desk.
“Fingerprints all over the passenger’s side—some match this Bobby character,”
Martinez said. “No surprise. Miss Swish admits to having the fudge packer in his car.
Nothing to suggest him or anyone else was ever carried in the back.”
“So we have nothing,” David said. God, why did that make him feel relief? What was happening to him?
“We have them together. We have opportunity. Can he alibi the times?”
David shook his head.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me? We already got the two at work telling us he came in late Tuesday and that was unusual enough to be noticed by both of them.” Martinez consulted his notes. “They put him over two hours late for work, which would gibe if he was busy playing with his latest victim in his hidey hole.”
They knew the killer had to have a secure place he could stash his victims. All the evidence so far suggested each had been held for hours before being killed. The killer’s hiding place had to be a location where he felt safe. Probably isolated, too. David thought of Chris’s Silver Lake house. With neighbors crowding in on either side it hardly qualified as isolated. And none of those houses had basements, either. Then again, Jeffrey Dahmer had kidnapped and dismembered over a dozen guys in an apartment building and gone unnoticed for years.
Still, maybe it was time to do a property search on the guy. Maybe he had access to a second location. Someplace he could come and go once his victim was secured.
David picked up the typed list of items found in Chris’s SUV. It included one pair of black frame glasses and a T-shirt bearing unknown stains. The shirt was still in the lab being processed. But it hadn’t tested positive for blood or semen. Traces of semen had been discovered in the vehicle’s front seat, so they were going to have to type Chris and see whom it matched.
David tried to imagine the Chris who had responded so hotly to his kiss being a calculating killer, aroused by another person’s pain. He couldn’t reconcile it.
The glasses, though—that looked bad...
“Jason Blake wore glasses,” David said. “But can we get a match on them?”
“I’m going back to Bellamere’s workplace,” Martinez said. “See if anyone noticed anything else unusual. This guy’s job gave him lots of freedom and with the damned cell phones they all carry he could have called in from anywhere, claiming to be on the job.”
“He’d have to record his time. Maybe even get employers to sign off.” David tapped the top sheet of the report. “Let’s find out what jobs he was supposed to be doing the last six months. Match it up with the job sites to see what he actually was doing.”
“Right.” Martinez grinned. “Nail him with the discrepancies. Still think we should have let him go?”
“He’s got money. You saw his lawyer.”
“Right. We push, the next thing you know we’re all a bunch of antigay bigots persecuting this poor faggot,” Martinez said. He wiped his mouth as though tasting something foul. “Dios, that stinks.”
David pushed his own traitorous thoughts aside. This wasn’t the time or the place.
“So let’s make sure our case is unsinkable. You check out the workplace. I’ll chase down Blake. While I’m at it, I’m going to look at Daniel Anstrom. If I can talk to his parents, figure out Anstrom’s activities before he went missing, maybe we can place Bellamere with him.”
“Let him explain that away.”
Monday, 12:25 pm, Northeast Community Police Station, San Fernando Road, Los Angeles
Chris stumbled out of the station. Only when the sun started baking the vomit into his legs did he remember he had no ride home.
Hailing a cab proved challenging. Two whizzed by without slowing; when a third stopped, the driver took one look at the vomit and hit the accelerator. The fifth demanded a fifty-dollar surcharge up-front.
At home, he threw the ruined jeans into a garbage bag and tossed it outside. Then he crawled into the downstairs shower and turned it up as hot as his skin could handle, emerging in a cloud of steam, pink and tingling from his near scalding. But at least the smell of his own vomit no longer clogged his nose. He reconsidered tossing the jeans—
but at eight hundred a pop he could swallow the shame. He dashed outside and dragged the bag to the back step.
Retreating to the living room he flopped down on the sofa and dialed Des’s number.
Just his luck, Kyle answered.
“What the hell do you want?” Kyle snapped. “We don’t need you bringing your cop troubles here. What did you do, anyway?”
What could Chris tell him? That the cops suspected him of picking up a guy in a bar and butchering him? That the cops thought he was the Carpet Killer?
“I just need to talk to Des. Put him on.”
“He’s not here,” Kyle said. “Leave him alone, asshole.”
When he slammed the phone down, Chris lay back staring at it for several minutes before it started beeping and he reached over to hang it up.
; Monday, 2:24 pm, Offices of Gilbert, Michelson & Gabronni, West La Palmas Avenue, Anaheim
“I’d like you to look at something, Mr. Blake, if you have a few minutes.”
Richard Blake rose from behind his melamine-topped desk. His face paled as though he was expecting David to ask him to look at something gut-wrenching. David flashed back to Chris and how violently he had reacted to the stark, brutal images of the killer’s latest victim.
He hadn’t approved of Martinez’s approach, but had seen it as a way to wring a reaction from the smart-ass younger man. It had gone far beyond that and David couldn’t help but wonder how much damage they had done. Chris hadn’t deserved it. Chris—
“Detective?”
“Your brother wore glasses, is that correct?” Focus on the facts. Bellamere had known the last victim. He had been the last one to see him alive.
“Yes—”
“And they were never recovered?”
“Yes. What—”
David pulled out the pictures he had secured of the glasses found in the back of Chris’s SUV. He laid them on the desk in front of Richard.
“Can you identify these?”
Richard looked down at the images and frowned. He flipped through the pages, spreading them out to show all five pictures. Occasionally he would pick one up to study it more closely.
“You found his glasses? Where?”
“That’s not the issue right now, sir. I need to know if you can identify them. Do they look like the pair Jay wore?”
Richard dropped the last picture back on the desk. He was still frowning and David felt something in him give way.
“Those look like Jay’s. If you found them, you must have found my brother’s killer?”
“We’re still investigating.” David retrieved the pictures and dropped them back in his briefcase. He felt a tightness in his chest that he refused to define. “What about these?”
The T-shirt bore no logo or brand label. The stains on it were inconclusive. But the shirt was a distinctive peach color that might be remembered by someone’s big brother.
This time Richard was shaking his head. “I couldn’t swear to it,” he said. “But Jay usually wore shirts, that designer crap.”
David leaned forward. “How did Jay afford designer clothes?”