Hard-Boiled- Box Set

by Danny R. Smith

  Their last year together had gone by too quickly. Leonard was released knowing Whitey would never see freedom again, having been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for the double murder. Though freedom awaited him, Leonard shed tears when he told Whitey goodbye.

  Whitey had taken care of things for Leonard though. From prison, he had arranged for Leonard to be introduced to upper management of the family, and that had led to a sit-down with the boss. The interview was brief. The boss knew of Leonard’s accomplishments. He knew of the killing that had landed Leonard in Raiford, and he knew of the unsolved cases as well. Leonard had divulged certain details of each to Whitey, who in turn had fed them to management. Once they were verified through an FBI agent who was on their payroll, Leonard was in. The dirty cop confirmed there were cases just as Leonard described that remained unsolved. The Irish mafia boss admired his work.

  No longer confined, he was now a contract killer, a pro. Neat and efficient.

  But never had he been as bold as Whitey. He often thought of the story he had heard many times about the hit in the diner. To prove himself, someday Leonard would do something similar. He’d have to learn to shoot a gun though. How difficult could it be? He had always admired Whitey for his courage in walking up to two killers and doing them in front of an audience. That was a different kind of killing than Leonard knew, and because of it, he saw his friend Whitey as the bigger man. Maybe one day Whitey would read about him in the paper and be proud of his friend.

  A woman stopped directly in front of Leonard, startling him out of his reverie. She never looked his way. In a moment, she moved on. Leonard let out a breath he had not realized he had been holding. She would have been the one, he thought, as he watched her walk away. If only he were allowed. But he would no longer choose his victims; that was part of the agreement. Leonard had agreed to kill exclusively for the family, though he knew that impulses might dictate otherwise.

  He refocused on the target and continued to watch, hoping tonight would bring opportunity. He had been supplied with everything he needed to know, which did not include the why. That was the agreement: a name, a location, and a death warrant issued by the family. It was all he would need, and all he would receive. This one was to have no sexual component, and efforts to conceal the victim’s identity would be made. Simple enough. Killing is killing. You needn’t hear trumpets to bask in its glory.

  2

  FLOYD SAID, “LOOK it there, he’s back.”

  Mongo looked up from his work.

  I stepped through the back door into the squad room, a sea of desks beneath fluorescent lighting where men and women sat or stood or walked about in business attire. They were speaking into their cell phones or landlines or staring at computer screens or visiting with other detectives. It was a typical Wednesday morning at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau. No different from the way it had been the last time I darkened that doorway, though there were several new faces. The turnover rate rivaled that of a combat post in the middle east.

  But for me, this was no ordinary Wednesday in the office. Not just another week, another bureau meeting. It was the return from a year’s absence. The return from a traumatic injury, two gunshot wounds that resulted in the loss of a kidney and a lengthy rehab. Physical and mental.

  At times I had silently questioned if I was ready to return. Ready for the cheerful greetings and welcome backs and handshakes and high fives. Ready for the questions: How was I doing? How’s the wife? What’s it like being shot? Cops were direct like that, at least with one another.

  How would I answer?

  Great.

  Wife’s gone. Strike two.

  Being shot sucks.

  I had concealed my concerns about coming back from those in my inner circle, which had been reduced to my partner Floyd, my doctor, and my shrink. I assured each of them I was fit for duty.

  It felt different, all of it. As if I were a stranger in this place I once called home. A place in which I’d spent much of my life over the past decade. Much more of it here, with Floyd, than at home.

  Everyone seemed to look up at once from their work or conversations, some still holding phones but not speaking, maybe on hold or listening to the party on the other end. For a moment, the room stood completely silent; everything had come to a stop. It was awkward. Almost embarrassing.

  My heart beat rapidly and sweat beaded under my hat. Then, suddenly, as if on cue from a director, the characters resumed their activities. They were back to speaking into phones, typing on computers, and talking to one another. The greetings began. Colleagues were welcoming me back. Some from afar, but others approached and gave me hugs or pats on the back. There were genuine smiles and friendly greetings, and I began to feel comfortable again in this place I called home.

  My attention was drawn across the room and I locked eyes with those of a friend. My old partner. An ex-wife, I would often call him. Detective Matt “Pretty Boy Floyd” Tyler sat across the room, behind his desk, watching. Studying. Waiting patiently, a burgeoning grin on his face.

  Floyd’s partner, Mongo, as Floyd called him, Detective Manny Diaz according to the name plate on his desk, looked up over reading glasses that hung on the end of his nose. He was editing a report that Floyd told him needed to be finished by the end of the day. They had a meeting with the district attorney the next morning and it was the new guy’s job to have the case prepared for filing. Mongo had never met his partner’s former partner, though he had heard much about him. Maybe too much. Floyd never stopped talking about him, about their cases, about how well they worked together and how everything seemed balanced and cohesive. Floyd often spoke of the night that had become legendary around the bureau, a dark and rainy night in East Los Angeles that resulted in Dickie being shot. Floyd would recount the night, sometimes with a distant stare, and tell Mongo about finding his partner in a pool of blood. He told how Dickie had shot and killed the man who shot him, a convict who had murdered several prostitutes, a big case they had solved. Floyd would recount how he had charged through the back door after hearing the shots, searching frantically for his partner. How he had gone bat-shit crazy and damn near killed the two assholes he encountered on the way in. One of whom was twice Mongo’s size, Floyd would say, in both directions.

  Mongo had often felt like the new wife who couldn’t match up to the former, and he already hated the other woman. He leaned back in his chair, all two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of his five-foot-seven frame, and watched as the man in the fedora walked slowly through the bureau, greeting at least every other detective along the way. Mongo heard the various greetings: “Welcome back,” “Great to see you,” blah, blah, blah. He watched as some stood and approached the veteran detective, embracing him with a hug or a handshake. Others, mostly the newer guys, sat and watched. It seemed overdone, maybe a bit of a spectacle.

  Mongo had dreaded the arrival of this day.

  He glanced over to see his partner, Floyd, leaned back in his chair, chewing on a pen and smiling with his hazel eyes, watching as his former partner made his way through the sea of detectives.

  Mongo looked back at Detective Richard Jones and saw that through all the greetings and short conversations and distractions along his way, he continually looked in their direction. Back and forth, but regularly, as if he were homed in on Floyd. The two watched each other in the way only best friends or mortal enemies would, as if nothing around them had any significance compared to that which awaited them each.

  Soon the man in the hat, Dickie Jones, stood near their desks. He was tall, probably six feet or better, and of average build for a man in his mid-forties. He had a thick mustache that was mostly gray, but hints of red were still there. The room had fallen silent as the two old partners held their gazes. Finally, Dickie smiled at his old partner. Or maybe it was more of a grin.

  He let out a breath and looked at Mongo. “You’re in my seat.”

  Captain Stover walked through the squad room looking d
own at a clipboard he carried in his hand. He was headed toward the podium to start the weekly briefing when he glanced up and saw me watching him. “You’re back, uh?”

  “Yes sir, and it’s good to be here.”

  He nodded, but appeared skeptical.

  I smiled sincerely. We had had our differences at times—that was well known—but I had come back with a new attitude. A new lease on life, so to speak.

  Being out on an injury for a year, or as working cops called it, having been on the sick, lame, and lazy list, could definitely change your attitude about work. I had nearly gone crazy from the boredom. You can only read so many books. With Elmore Leonard dead, Wambaugh slowed down, and Connelly doing the best he could but not keeping up with my demand, entertainment had failed me. There was TV, but I could only do so much Judge Judy. COPS was entertaining, but it also made me miss the action. I had avoided the news all together.

  I needed to get back to working cases. I needed a fresh kill, a crime scene, a case complete with a suspect on the run and a twisted motive to decipher. A challenge. I always needed to be challenged.

  But sometimes you had to be careful what you wished for.

  Before he walked away, Stover said, “After the meeting, come see me in my office.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Floyd watched the captain walk away and then looked at me. “He loves us.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Oh, he does . . . he just has a funny way of showing it. So, how’s it feel to be back? You ready to get at it?”

  I looked around the room, and then at the back of his partner’s head. Mongo. He seemed to be focused on a report in front of him on his desk. Staying out of the conversation, the way a new guy naturally would, or should.

  “It’s a little weird, I’m not going to lie. But it felt good to get up and shave, put on a suit. Chances are, by the end of the day, I’ll wish I’d stayed home watching the golf channel.”

  “You watch that?”

  “No, but I turn it on to drown out the silence. Helps with the naps.”

  Floyd watched me for a moment. “Yeah, I imagine that sucks. You talk to her at all, since she split?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you need a dog.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair to the dog. I thought about it, but then I realized once I came back to work, it would be a stay-at-home dog with no kids to raise or work to do. She’d probably start seeing the neighbor dogs behind my back.”

  He chuckled. “Sluts.”

  “Exactly.”

  The captain began speaking from the podium and the chatter throughout the room softened. Floyd lowered his voice and said, “We’ll get lunch later, get caught up on shit. You can get to know my partner, Mongo, the madman. Guy’s a fucking mule.”

  His partner.

  I forced a smile. “Sure, buddy.”

  Captain Stover finished his part of the meeting which included department and bureau announcements and briefing the troops on administrative bullshit. I hadn’t heard any of it; I was too lost in my thoughts as I looked around the room at new and old faces.

  Most of the bureau hadn’t paid attention; nobody ever did. The cases are what we wanted to know about. New murders.

  “Cases?” the captain queried as he looked around the room.

  Raymond Cortez stood up from his desk and, with a blue notebook in his hand, made his way to the podium. There were a few jeers and someone whistled and another said, “Oh look, Cortez actually caught a case.”

  He looked over the podium and smiled at his peers. Like the rest of us, he knew it was a tough crowd, and nobody ever got a pass.

  “My partner and I picked up an interesting one in Santa Clarita over the weekend. It started as a missing persons case, but before Missings could do much with it, the body turned up in a parked car in the industrial area near Magic Mountain.

  “We believe the victim to be Marilynn Chaney, a forty-two-year-old white woman—”

  “Caucasian, you asshole,” someone yelled from the back.

  He peered over his glasses and smiled, then, returning to his notebook, he continued speaking. “—who was last seen at about nineteen hundred hours leaving a grocery store near her work. She was a real estate agent, and her office was next to a Vons market, off Valencia Boulevard, not far from the interstate. She had apparently walked over to the grocery before leaving work, picked up a few items, and then walked out to her car. The manager knows her and remembered seeing her leave. There was nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary for her stop, what she bought, or how she acted, according to the manager. He was the last to see her alive, as far as we know. Other than her killer, of course.”

  “Does the store have video?” someone asked.

  “Yes, the store has video cameras that cover most of the interior and part of the parking lot. The hard drives were seized as evidence and are with the tech crew now. So far, no word on that.

  “I haven’t heard of any similar cases, but if you have anything close, please let me or my partner, Jerry White, know. We’re checking with LAPD and other agencies in the San Fernando Valley—Burbank, Glendale, and San Fernando—to see if they’ve had anything like this lately.”

  “White still works here?” someone asked.

  He smiled again. “I’m without a partner, currently, so I pulled White out of retirement for one case. Unsolveds won’t miss him.”

  There was more chatter, a few chuckles, and as another detective made his way to the front with a blue notebook in hand, Ray stood looking across the room. He seemed to have more to say, but hesitated. He appeared to focus on the wall to the south side of the room where the secretaries routinely gathered to listen in on the briefings. I wasn’t the only one to notice his reluctance to continue. There was an awkward silence. The detective who would brief the next case stood to the side, waiting. The captain watched, and he too looked around, as if trying to see what Raymond was looking at or for.

  Floyd glanced over at me and frowned. I shrugged.

  Ray finally said, “There’s something else, but this is holdback information, so it doesn’t leave this room . . .”

  Someone said, “Jesus Christ, he’s coming out.”

  Ray seemed to not notice the comment and began speaking over the chuckles that ensued. He said, “Our victim was decapitated, and her hands were removed—cut off somehow, cleanly. None of the missing body parts have been recovered.”

  Floyd looked back at me.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, mostly under my breath.

  He frowned. “Santa Clarita.”

  I nodded.

  Floyd said, “I don’t like that one bit.”

  I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly as I shook my head. I knew what he was thinking. We had always been that way, able to read one another easily. He put two and two together—real estate agent and Santa Clarita—and thought about Valerie, my soon-to-be ex-wife. He knew I’d be on the same track and equally troubled. Neither of us ever took anything for granted. We were both quick to see the worst-case possibility of any situation, and brace against it. Many cops were this way. When normal people called home and the wife didn’t answer because she had the baby in the bath or had stepped outside with the trash, they made a mental note to call back in a bit. Cops, however, saw their wives tied and bound or worse, and began orchestrating a plan to rescue them.

  “You need to call her.”

  I nodded.

  “How’d you ID her?” someone asked Ray.

  “Well, I guess technically we don’t have a positive ID. We’re going off of the Missing Person report. The vehicle our victim was recovered in belongs to the missing person. Our victim matches the general description of the missing person, so we have to assume it’s her at this point, unless something causes us to believe otherwise.”

  “Sexual assault?”

  “There doesn’t appear to have been any sexual assault. She was wearing pants and a blouse, panties and a bra underneath,
and she didn’t appear to have been re-dressed. The autopsy didn’t come up with any evidence of recent sexual intercourse.”

  “Where is this industrial center?”

  “The recovery site is in the industrial area near Magic Mountain, just off of Magic Mountain Parkway, if you’re familiar with that area. Not too far from the interstate. It’s fairly isolated at night, with few businesses having any after-hours activity.

  I pictured the scene. I wondered if she had kids. How was her marriage? Any affairs? What’s the story on the old man? How did the killer get there? How did he leave? Why was she there? Was she forced to drive there, and then she was murdered? Where did the killer stand or sit? Was he in the car, or outside of the car? Was he next to her, or in the back seat? I had all of these questions but wasn’t comfortable asking. I felt like a guest in my own home. It would take a while, maybe, for me to feel confident again. Maybe a couple of cases. Maybe a couple of months.

  Ray was a good guy, and a damn good cop. This was an interesting case, a real distraction from my return, my loneliness, my impending divorce . . . I’d ask him more about it later. Hit him up with a cup of coffee and get more details from him. Not that I had an investment in the case, but hearing it briefed had stirred me and made me excited about being back and doing the job.