“Yeah, fine.”
She noted his shortness but wouldn’t mention it. “Is it anything you’d care to talk about?”
“Not really, everything’s fine.”
“How was your first day back at work?”
“It was okay.”
“How did you feel going in?”
“Like everyone was staring at me. Like I was a new kid at school.”
“Were there parts that felt good, maybe seeing old friends, your old partner?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and avoided eye contact. After a moment, he said, “I don’t know. It was a little weird seeing someone else in my desk. Floyd’s new partner, I mean.”
“What do you think of his having a new partner? How does that make you feel?”
“I don’t know, Doc . . . How’s it supposed to make me feel? The wife’s gone, partner’s gone, one of my kidneys is gone . . . There’s been a lot more change than a guy like me is comfortable talking about, really.”
She smiled at him politely. “Richard, I know you find it difficult to talk about your feelings, but you know this is a safe place to do that. You have complete privacy here with me, and complete confidentiality. I know we have talked about that, but it bears repeating.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m trying to be honest about my feelings but I just don’t know what you want me to say.”
He looked up as if that was it. Katherine waited. She wanted him to expound on his feelings and believed he might if allowed the time to gather his thoughts.
“I feel alone, okay? I’m glad to be back at work, back to having something to do. Maybe it will help. Help me keep my mind off . . .”
She waited, but soon it became clear he wasn’t going to finish that thought.
“Keep your mind off what, Richard?”
He looked away, toward the exit door. It seemed he was always ready to leave.
“Everything. Being shot. Ruining my marriage.”
“Why do you think you ruined the marriage?”
“It’s what I do. Twice now. It’s the job. It’s my inability to leave it behind. I can’t even look at my beautiful wife without seeing crime scenes. How messed up is that?” He lowered his voice and muttered, “Ex-wife.”
“Have the two of you spoken?”
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
“All right, Richard, what would you like to talk about then?”
“Getting a release so I can get back into the rotation. I might have a shot with a new partner, Ray, who I’m helping out on a case right now. Yesterday the lieutenant mentioned I might be able to come to his team and partner with Ray permanently. But I have to be released, according to the idiot.”
“Captain Stover.”
“Yes.”
“I can do that, Richard, but I need you to tell me why you believe you’re ready. You seem to have healed physically, but there is much more to being ready to return than that. You’ve just pointed out several drastic changes in your life, all in a relatively short time.”
“I believe I’m ready because it’s what I do, it’s who I am. It’s all I have left, if you get right down to it. I need it.”
Katherine uncrossed her legs, and re-crossed them. She looked at Richard, considering.
“I wonder whether you feel you’re ready to terminate our sessions completely. You do seem to be ready to return to work, but the personal matters you’re dealing with are very complicated and are separate from the stresses of your job. I am concerned that you have not dealt with the feelings of loss in your personal life and at work.”
Katherine knew she was thinking of her patient’s best interests in telling him that, but she was a little surprised at how much she wanted him to say he would still come in for sessions. She wouldn’t push, but she did find herself wishing he would. It’s what is best for him, she told herself. She sympathized with him; she knew how hard it was to go through a divorce, and Richard was now in the process of his second one. She knew how it hurt him, how it felt to be left by a spouse.
“I don’t mind the sessions. I think, maybe—it’s helpful I think. If I were to continue coming in, would you be more comfortable releasing me to full duty?”
“I hope you do continue, Richard. But this is about you, what is comfortable for you. As your psychiatrist, I can advise you to continue with our sessions in order to help you with some issues in your personal life. However, I cannot force you to do that, nor is it a condition of my releasing you to full duty.” Katherine smiled encouragingly at him.
He smiled back. “Okay, yes, I would like to continue our sessions. Wednesdays work well, it gets me out of the bureau meetings.”
She smiled. “Fine, we can book Wednesdays. Now, why don’t you tell me some of the things you are doing to adjust to being single again?”
He chuckled. “Mostly not sleeping and eating horribly. Plus, I have to go to a laundromat now. I haven’t done that since I was twenty. I sit there and watch others come and go and I wonder if they’re happy or sad, lonely or content. I won’t leave, I just sit and wait. Because when I was twenty, I had a pair of jeans stolen out of a washer when I went for a burger. How pathetic is that? I need to start eating better and getting some exercise.”
Katherine wanted to tell him she understood, how very well she understood. If they were just two people talking, she could reveal her own experiences and maybe be of some comfort to him. But.
She smiled at him again. “Well, Richard, it sounds like you’re aware of some things that need to change before they become real health issues. Maybe you can think about that before our next session and we can explore some ways that you can begin making some changes. For now, I will release you to go back to full duty. I’ll call Captain Stover and let him know, and follow it up with a letter for your file.”
She stood, as did Richard. “I will see you next week, Richard. Have a good day.” She smiled again.
He nodded and went to the door. “Thank you, Doc,” and then he was gone.
Katherine inhaled, then sighed. Richard. She stood for a moment, then shook herself and went to her laptop to make some notes about their session. She hoped he would indeed continue returning weekly. He was going to have some things to work out, and she wanted to be there for him.
She looked in the mirror and said to the face smiling back at her. “Well, Doc?”
Her job was to fix me up and make me whole. Gather the demons and drive them into the dark room and slam the door shut. Most times, the demons rested quietly in the recesses of my mind. But then the horrors of the past would burst through the darkness and shatter any peace I may have had. How much of this could I even tell her? I didn’t think I could tell her everything, and also keep my job. Sensory recall was evidence of PTSD, and it struck me often. No shrink would leave a cop on the job once diagnosed with it.
Maybe she knew.
Law enforcement as a profession had come to understand the long-lasting, often irreversible psychological effects of continued exposure. Our department, like many others, maintained a large budget for the prevention or treatment of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. The hope was to instill coping skills in order to prevent, or at least postpone, one from permanently crawling into a bottle or eating his gun.
I was the type to resist counseling. It was one thing to be told by Floyd regularly and often that I was nuts, and another to be officially diagnosed. As such, I had never found the services of our department shrinks to be anything but a nuisance. It did occur to me that if I were willing and able to be truthful without fear of consequences, there might be hope. Though I did not trust I could be completely honest about my emotional state at times.
I found myself thinking about her. Katherine James. Maybe even fondly. I was fooling myself at times to believe I could tell her anything. Maybe not completely, as I still held back to a degree. Could I trust her? I didn’t know. I felt I could. Maybe.
There was something else. Something beyond the counselin
g that I now found myself contemplating, but it didn’t make sense. I shrugged it off; it was my imagination thinking there may be some interest there. Both directions. But it couldn’t be. Katherine was smarter, more sophisticated, and on an entirely different professional and social plane than me. I didn’t see her spending her evenings sitting on a balcony alone, drinking, reflecting on failed relations and professional challenges. No, she would likely go home to an extravagant dwelling and walk out back to see the kids playing in the pool while patting a golden retriever on its head. A refined gentleman for a husband reminding her they had tickets for the opera. Or, if she was single, a sporty lawyer or young executive roaring up in her circular drive, the setting sun silhouetting his broad shoulders as he stepped out of a Corvette or Porsche. Some yuppie asshole I knew I’d hate.
It was absurd to allow my mind to even wander that direction. The truth of it was, she likely found me crass, simple, maybe not too bright. Maybe uncivilized, the type who seemed to find himself entangled in violence more than others. She had likely surmised there was something to that, something more than simple fate or bad luck. As did I at times.
No, the good doctor had no interest in men like me. Men who wore suits and presented confidently before executives, judges, and jurors, yet were more comfortable on a barstool or in a brawl than at the opera.
Never the opera.
Maybe I was nuts.
24
MY TIMING WAS perfect. Investigators were leaving the office in the way Dodgers fans flood the exit rows when their boys are losing by three in the seventh. It signaled the end of the bureau meeting. Most were carrying case files and attaches, though some had empty hands. Many would be headed somewhere to work on a case, their most recent or maybe something they’ve dallied with for years and refused to give up. Others might be headed to court, the coroner’s office, the crime lab, the golf course, or the bar. Few actually partook in the latter two, though it was a stereotype which burdened homicide detectives everywhere. After parking in the shade of the tall building, I went inside, the smile and legs of Doc James weighing heavily on my mind.
“What’d I miss, anything of value?” I asked Ray as I plopped down at Frank Lewandowski’s vacant desk, which would soon be mine.
“Not too much. An interesting case out of San Fernando, other than that, just the usual gang killings and the captain’s weekly sermon on overtime.”
“They cutting it again?”
“Not yet. He was warning that it might be coming, so we needed to be more judicial with our time management.”
I chuckled. We were currently capped at thirty hours per month. At times, they’d knock it to twenty. One callout would cause you to burn through your allotted overtime, and only one callout per month was virtually unheard of. Then, when cases like the Santa Clarita Jane Doe case came along, or when a cop was killed, you’d eat up thirty hours of overtime before the next time you saw a pillow.
“What about the San Fernando case?”
“Little girl was murdered,” Ray said. “Thirteen-year-old who’s home alone after school until her mother picks her up. Mom and dad own a cleaners in Sylmar, and mom breaks away when she has the chance and picks her up, brings her back to work. The other day—I think he said it was Thursday—mom came home to find her daughter in her room, strangled to death.”
“Interesting. Was it a sex crime?”
“They don’t know yet. She wasn’t wearing panties, but as Farris said, it’s the twenty-first century.”
“Rich Farris has it, huh?”
“Him and Lizzy, an assist to San Fernando PD.”
I nodded and pictured Rich Farris and Elizabeth Marchesano as I had often seen them before my year’s medical leave. She was new at the time—brand new—and maybe underqualified. Rich with his easy way about him and a timid Lizzy following behind, afraid to be noticed. Both black. Both attractive and personable and witty. One a tremendous asset to the bureau, respected throughout the department, the other possibly ruined by those trying to make things better under the guise of equal opportunity.
Lizzy had only worked two years in patrol before promoting to sergeant. As a sergeant, she worked in Recruitment. Then she went to Internal Affairs, and from there—with only a couple years of what most would consider questionable investigative experience—she was brought to Homicide. It was the part of equal opportunity that we all tried to ignore, the fact there were often those who were promoted prematurely and ahead of more qualified and deserving applicants. Mostly, it was unfair to them, those who benefited from such action. They were viewed as less qualified when truthfully many were more than qualified, just not yet ready for primetime. Now they would have to work twice as hard to prove themselves worthy.
“How’s she doing anyway, Lizzy?”
“She’s turned out pretty good, partner. Still a little lost at times—I think—but Farris speaks highly of her, seems to be happy working with her.”
“Is that all he’s doing with her?”
Ray shrugged. “Well, you know, partner, you just never know. Although, if he is doing more than working with her, he’s braver than I ever knew. Lizzy’s old man is a swat cop at LAPD, and from what I understand, a bad dude.”
“This girl, the San Fernando murder, is there anything about it that might be of interest to us? Anything at all that might overlap with our Jane Doe—rather, our Lisa Williams case?”
“Not that I know of, partner. Everything looks different to me, age, location, M.O. . . . hell, she even had her head about her.”
We each smiled slightly at the pun. But he was right, the modus operandi differed significantly.
“Did she have a brother, or a boyfriend?”
“I’m not sure, partner.”
“Dad accounted for?”
“Don’t know. Maybe you should hit up Rich. I saw him in the kitchen a few minutes ago, having a cup. I honestly don’t know much about the case, just enough I didn’t feel it was worth looking at, as far as having anything to do with our case.”
“You’re probably right, Ray. I guess I just don’t have enough to think about, having been gone a year. I should just worry about ours for now.”
Ray had his nose down, thumbing through notes. As I watched him, it occurred to me for the first time his hair was like a baby’s, fine and wavy. I wondered if it would be curly if allowed to grow out. I didn’t miss the long, curly red hair I wore as a teenager, and truthfully, the thought of it made me cringe. My parents kept embarrassing photographic evidence of those days prominently displayed in their home. The long-haired little Richard who gave up sports in order to keep a job so there would be money for gas and go-fast parts for his muscle car, a 1965 Ford Mustang fastback. My need for speed had nearly derailed my path to law enforcement on more than one occasion. Apparently, some things are just meant to be.
I interrupted his thoughts. “Ray, I think the watcher was back.”
He turned his head and looked over a pair of cheaters. “Yeah? What happened, partner?”
I told him the story of last night, arriving home to see a vehicle that was out of place, not the same vehicle, but one I felt didn’t belong. I told him it was unoccupied and that there were no cigarette butts, and that the hood was cold to the touch. He watched with an expression that told me he was trying to see how I thought this could be related, given what I had told him so far. I added that the vehicle left as soon as I went inside.
He said, “Well, that could be a coincidence, partner.”
“Yeah, but get this, the plates come back no record on file, same as our two friends in the suits who showed up at the Chaney house.”
His expression changed to one of consideration. “That’s interesting.”
“Yeah, I think so. Maybe it’s way out there, but can all of this be connected? Is that even possible?”
He thought about it before answering. “I don’t know how it would be, partner. I mean, you weren’t even on the case until a few days ago, so that doesn’t rea
lly make sense.”
“Well, maybe, maybe not. We need to see if Mongo came up with anything. Have you seen those two assholes today, Floyd and Mongo?”
He shook his head and then looked around the bureau but didn’t have anything to add.
I looked down the column of desks and saw Lt. Black look up from his mound of paperwork, peering over the glasses that hung on his nose. He smiled at me, and I nodded.
“Okay,” I announced, “I’m going to go see if I can find Farris, or Floyd and Mongo.”
“I’ll be right here, partner.”
Leonard parked at a liquor store across the street from Friendly Auto Sales. He watched as the happy gypsy schmoozed two Hispanic men dressed in double-knit slacks, silk shirts, and gold necklaces, two men who likely had no legitimate means to buy and register a vehicle this side of the border. He was all smiles while patting their backs and shaking their hands. But the two men walked away and departed in the vehicle that they had apparently arrived in, a gold-colored pickup with a Brahma bull sticker on the tailgate. Grigori’s smile faded with their departure, and he turned to walk back to the office.
Leonard moved quickly. He slid out of his Taurus and jogged across the street, darting through traffic. He made his way through the parking lot of cars for sale and paused near the trailer that was the office. He looked around before ascending three grated metal steps and going through the door, his new Buck knife held behind his back.
Grigori stood just inside the door; the bottle blonde sat at her desk smacking gum. Grigori was saying, “Theese fawking Mey-hicanos and der flashy fawking sheeit—”
The Russian was gesturing around his neck, apparently about to describe the Hispanic men’s jewelry to his secretary when Leonard thrust his knife over Grigori’s right shoulder. Grigori instinctively lifted his head up and back to avoid the weapon, which made his throat that much more accessible. Leonard grabbed the Russian’s thick head of hair and pulled his head further back. Grigori grabbed Leonard’s forearm, but he didn’t have the strength to stop the momentum. Leonard plunged his knife into Grigori’s throat and pulled it across his neck from left to right, cutting deep through the tissue and muscle. Blood shot outward in a fine mist of crimson spray. But then—in the way a rotted garden hose bursts under the pressure of water looking to escape—a stream of blood burst through the red mist and shot across the room.
Hard-Boiled- Box Set Page 48