Hard-Boiled- Box Set

by Danny R. Smith

  “I was basing that off of a couple neighbors who had told us they didn’t see people coming and going. No parties or gatherings, rarely if ever did they see Ms. Williams. Maybe I had it wrong.”

  “Yeah, maybe it is where she tricks. I mean, if she’s high-dollar, how many clients does she see a day, or a week?”

  “Good question, Dickie. Something to look into, that’s for sure. Looks like a stopover pad, someplace to spend a few hours here and there. Or maybe a few nights. I mean, it’s furnished, the bar is stocked, the dresser and closets have plenty of clothes. But you know what’s missing?”

  “What?”

  “Every day wear: sweats, shorts, flip-flops, a bikini. There’s plenty of evening wear, pumps, designer jeans, silky blouses, and several drawers of lingerie. She has trinket boxes with plenty of nice jewelry—earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings—but nothing to tie a ponytail to go for a run. No earbuds or running shoes or spandex. I’m just saying, if you were a hot chick living at the Marina, you’d have that kind of shit in your apartment.”

  Davey Lopes had walked in and looked at me as Floyd was finishing up. He nodded and sat down at his desk, pulled the chain to turn on a desk lamp, and was now fishing around for his reading glasses in his shirt pocket.

  “That’s interesting,” I said into the phone.

  “Maybe. Or weird. I’d go with weird, since you’re involved.”

  I told Floyd he was beginning to bore me, and I’d see him when he got back to the office. Then I hit the end button. I wanted to ask Davey Lopes about his informants and what, if anything, he had heard.

  “What’s up, Lopes?”

  He glanced over. “Nothing, man. What’s up with you? Did you guys solve the headless bitch case?”

  “Not yet. We did get her identified though. Had you heard that?”

  “Yeah, Ray mentioned it in the meeting this morning.”

  “You were there?” I said, shocked to hear it.

  “Yeah. Where were you?”

  “With the shrink.”

  He snickered. “That’s a good place for you.”

  A few seconds passed. “Hey, when are you going to be talking to some of your gangsters again?”

  He settled back against his chair. “I don’t know, why? What’s up?”

  “Just wondering about this case. It’s been on my mind, what you said about Snoopy up there acting strange when you asked about it.”

  “Spooky.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I don’t know, maybe in the next week or two. Did I tell you about the little cha-cha girl I met up at the Bay?”

  “Pelican Bay?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, my escort. Hot little Latina who walked me in to protect me from the bad guys.”

  I chuckled.

  “She ended up paying me a little visit that evening at my hotel. This, after playing hard to get all day at the prison,” he sneered, seemingly pleased with himself.

  “No, you didn’t tell me, you dirty dawg.”

  “Well, anyway, she’s coming to see me this weekend.”

  “Oh?”

  “Technically, she’s coming to see her family—or so she says. But she wanted to make sure I had time to see her while she’s here. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good. She have a sister?”

  “She’d be too young for you if she did,” Lopes said, grinning. “You guys don’t have any direction on that case?”

  “None. It’s just bizarre.”

  “Well, that’s probably why you’re on it. Don’t you and your little sister over there, Floyd, specialize in bizarre shit?”

  I grinned and nodded and then looked to the door when Ray poked his head in. “Hey, partner, we have to roll.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, as I stood and started gathering my briefcase, coat, and hat.

  “Gentry wants to show us something at the lab. He said we’d need to see it for it to make any sense. Come on, I’ll drive.”

  “Later, buddy.”

  Lopes tossed his chin in the air. “Later, homie.”

  The crime lab, formally called Scientific Services Bureau, is located on Beverly Boulevard just outside of downtown Los Angeles. We parked curbside near the front door. It was not yet five, so we’d be able to walk in through the front doors and sign in. After hours you had to be buzzed in through the back door and sign in on the log. Ray signed us both in, quickly scribbling Cortez/Jones, Homicide, the time, and our destination, Latent Prints. The receptionist knew us by sight the way she knew all the faces of Homicide, frequent visitors of the lab. The Homicide Bureau and Crime Lab should have shared a building or been located next door to one another. Homicide detectives made numerous trips each week to visit the various sections of the lab: Latent Prints, Photography, Firearms, Biology, Narcotics, Polygraph. Those were the most commonly utilized services, but there were many others. She buzzed us through the door not bothering to ask if we knew where we were going.

  Phil Gentry sat at a stool looking at two large computer screens. We walked in and gathered behind him, knowing the images thereon would be the focal point of discussion.

  “What do you have for us, partner?”

  Without looking up, he pointed to one of several images of fingerprints on one of the monitors. “These are prints I lifted today at the apartment of your victim, Ms. Williams. When I got back here, I ran them through right away. Floyd said you had a rush on this case. While waiting for the return, I brought up these,” he said, moving his finger to the other monitor and waving it across the screen, indicating those were the images he referenced. “It only took a glance to see that these prints are all from one person.”

  Ray pointed to the second monitor, “So, what are these images from?”

  “The vehicle.”

  “Which vehicle, Phil?” I asked. “The one you did today, or our Beemer with the dead woman?”

  He glanced over. “The BMW at the scene. We didn’t do Williams’s vehicle yet.”

  The three of us stood staring at the two monitors. I saw that our Jane Doe case number—now corresponding to the name Lisa Renee Williams—labeled each of the images displayed on the two monitors. To me—and likely Ray and anyone else without the training and experience of Phil Gentry and those like him—the images were nothing more than a collection of latent prints.

  “Okay, Phil, you’re going to have to elaborate. We know she was in that car, it’s where she was killed.”

  “Or at least discovered,” I added.

  Ray nodded.

  Phil pointed to the second monitor and specifically directed our attention to the two images at the bottom of that screen. “But I lifted these two prints from the registration papers for that car, which were secured in the glove box.”

  Neither of us spoke. Ray had his thumb on his chin while using his index finger to pet the sparse hair over his lip he referred to as a mustache. My mind was racing with the possibilities: she’d been in the car before, they were friends, maybe both were hookers . . .

  I pictured the headless and handless woman in the BMW and wondered, why? Other than the obvious attempt to conceal her identity, why would someone cut off her head and hands? I couldn’t think of a reason. I pictured Mr. Chaney in his plush library office with his smug face and tried to find a connection there. Nothing. Then I saw the two suits in my mind’s eye again, and this time they looked more like gangsters than feds. Or was I just seeing what I wanted to see?

  Why the hell would Lisa Williams’s fingerprints be on the registration papers of the car she was found murdered in, which happened to belong to a missing person who is still nowhere to be found? The evidence indicated to me that the scene was staged, that she was killed elsewhere and placed in the driver’s seat of the BMW at the secondary crime scene, the location of recovery. But why? And now, the bigger question would be, why would Williams’s fingerprints be found on the registration papers? How would they get there, given she had no hands? Was the killer so clever that he pu
rposely caused that to happen? Or did Lisa Williams ride in that car before she was killed?

  “Was there any blood detected on any items inside that glove box?” I asked.

  Phil shook his head as Ray said, “No.”

  “Not a bloody print, then?”

  “Nope,” Phil said, “there was nothing visible at all. Those prints were developed through iodine fuming. We got lucky.”

  “On the back of a registration.”

  He nodded.

  “Which is only handled by the owner, presumably. I can’t imagine someone other than the owner of a car handling the registration unless they were driving a friend’s car and were stopped for a traffic violation and cited. They would have to hand the cop the registration. Other than that, there’d be no reason for her prints to be there.”

  Ray said, “Well, we know she wasn’t cited in that car. In fact, she didn’t have any traffic citations on her record at all.”

  “Maybe she was stopped driving that car at some point, but not cited,” I said. “Gave the cop her license, registration, and some cleavage, and was sent on her way.”

  “That night?” Ray asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe on another occasion. There’s the problem, how do we connect Lisa Williams and Marilynn Chaney?”

  “Or do we?”

  I didn’t know. There were no answers that made sense. “What are we missing, Ray?”

  “I don’t know, partner . . . I don’t know.”

  A few hours later the conference room was filled with the familiar faces: me and Ray, Floyd and Mongo, and Lt. Joe Black. We were also joined by Davey Lopes who said he had nothing better to do when I asked if he wanted to sit in, see if he had any thoughts. One of the very best practices of a skilled homicide detective is to recognize the skills and experience that surround him. There were eighty investigators in our bureau with an accumulation of tens of thousands of death investigations, and centuries of experience. You didn’t have to be a genius to be a good investigator here, if you were smart enough to learn from all of the talent that surrounded you.

  Ray started the briefing as he always would, recapping the basics of the case, then following up with recent developments. Ray and I had few things to talk about other than the latent print information, which Ray only mentioned briefly and said he would come back to after we heard from everyone. I brought up the license plate search through traffic cameras and broke the bad news: nothing came of it. Floyd asked if we had thought to do the same with the BMW, and I made a note to check. Then he said, “Well, while you’re at it, why not check the victim’s Porsche and the license plate of that asshole who’s been following you around.”

  Joe Black looked over and frowned, but then looked away. I could see in his eyes it had registered, and I expected we would be speaking about it in the near future, probably privately.

  I looked over and glared at Floyd to make certain he was aware of the mistake, and then I made another note in my notebook, jotting down his ideas.

  Ray said, “Mongo, anything?”

  He shook his head.

  “What about your cousin?”

  “She was supposed to get back to me but hasn’t. I called her a couple hours ago and she couldn’t talk, said she was at a murder scene in Hollywood. One of the Russians they were investigating got whacked.”

  “Fucking Russians,” Lopes added.

  “I think Floyd has some interesting thoughts about Williams’s apartment,” I said.

  Everyone listened as Floyd talked about the apartment, its location, the contents which gave him the impression that the tenant was not a full-time resident, that it was more likely used only as a place to do business. He said that they had originally thought otherwise, had misinterpreted the comments from neighbors about it being quiet there and that they rarely saw her. The more he thought about it, he said, the more he was convinced this is where she would bring her clients, probably wealthy businessmen or sheiks and princes or dirty politicians. He concluded by saying that was about it, unless Gentry comes up with anything in the way of prints or something from the Porsche.

  The room grew silent while some jotted notes and others stared across the walnut table, deep in thought.

  Lopes said, “So, let me get this straight, your dead girl, the headless bitch with no hands, is this Lisa Williams bitch, who is a hooker by trade and lives in a fancy apartment in the Marina—”

  “She probably doesn’t live there,” Floyd reminded him.

  “Yeah, I get that, whatever. Anyway, she’s found dead in a BMW in Santa Clarita. The Beemer belongs to that Chaney what’s-her-face, the asshole’s old lady who went missing—” he was pointing his pen around the room as he spoke, addressing each of us at various times. “—and that bitch is never found, but Williams’s fingerprints are on the registration papers in that Beemer.”

  We were all nodding along, everyone other than Joe who watched attentively.

  Ray said, “Yes.”

  He grunted and continued to look around the room. All eyes were on him, and he seemed to engage one person at a time while in deep thought on the topic.

  “Same bitch,” he said.

  “Wait, what?!” I exclaimed. The idea of it stunned me. The DNA had confirmed the dead woman was Lisa Williams. It was Lisa Williams from Marina del Rey who was killed in Marilynn Chaney’s car. But then when Lopes said it, and in the moments that passed quickly after, it occurred to me that one fact did not necessarily exclude the other.

  Lopes said, “Did anyone check DNA from the missing person, this Chaney broad, against that of the dead woman?”

  Ray looked at me.

  “We had talked about getting something from the husband, a toothbrush or something. I think his demeanor threw us off. I never thought of it once we were there.”

  “I didn’t either, partner,” Ray said, “it completely slipped my mind.”

  Lt. Black said, “Well, if anyone cares what I think, I’d say that should be a priority.” He nodded toward Davey Lopes as he said, “David presents a very interesting theory.”

  Silence again fell on the room. After a minute or so of silent brainstorming, Ray announced the meeting would be adjourned, and he suggested we meet again tomorrow night. He said, “We might just want to plan on pow-wowing every evening until we get somewhere solid, or the captain shuts us down.”

  Lt. Black said, “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’ll bring him up to speed when I see him in the morning, and I’ll emphasize the complexity of the case.”

  Before walking out, I had to check. “Hey guys, just to make sure I’m up to speed here—I missed the bureau meeting this morning—but there’s no other noteworthy murders we should know about, right? Nothing else of interest?”

  Ray said, “Just the Asian girl in San Fernando. I think I mentioned it to you, the one Farris and Marchesano are handling. That’s about it, and it doesn’t seem related. There were a handful of gang murders over the weekend, but nothing else was briefed this morning.”

  Mongo said, “And the dead Russians in Hollywood.”

  Floyd said, “Nobody gives a shit about dead Russians.”

  26

  HAVING NOBODY TO go home to caused my indifference to time. No longer did it matter where I was or when I got there, unless a subpoena mandated otherwise.

  I could stay in the office all night trying to solve the only murder case I’d been allowed to touch in a year, and one of the best of my career. It was intriguing, a real mystery, the puzzling disappearance of one woman and the savage murder and decapitation of another. It had my full attention, and it had felt good to hit the ground running on a case like this one.

  There were always a couple of detectives found lingering in the office past the witching hour and into the early morning hours. Usually, they would be working on cases because they had nothing else to do with their lives. They were single—meaning divorced, at this stage—or miserably married. There were exceptions, like the workaholics who had difficu
lty putting down a file at any given time. There was always something else to do on your cases; that was the curse. But at a certain hour of the night, the office would settle as the stragglers filed out and large sections of fluorescent lighting would be dimmed.

  Tonight, the conversations and laughter had died, and the phones had stopped ringing. In the scant light and eery silence, the office fittingly felt like a graveyard. A place where spirits lingered, hovering over files that told their stories through collections of words and photographs, waiting for the day they could peacefully rest. Too often, that day never came.

  For me, there were few options. Stay in the office and work, go home to an empty apartment, or go out for a drink.

  There were cop bars throughout the county, some of which I had been known to visit on occasion. All of which—at times—offered the possibility of companionship for cops. But mostly for the young, fit, handsome cops, those who worked patrol or gangs or maybe SWAT, and told great stories of fights and shootouts and car chases through the housing projects. Any such companionship would be devoid of anything meaningful. For the most part, the ladies were pathetic, discarded women called groupies—or donut dollies, badge bunnies, sucias (which is Spanish for dirty girl), or maybe more to the point, punchboards. There is a radio code, 924, which translates to Station Detail. This code is used over the radio to assign a particular unit some sort of detail that needed to be taken care of but wasn’t directly related to police work. Such as a chow run for the desk crew, or to transport a drunken captain from the local watering hole to his home or back to the bunk room. Somehow, the code 924 became synonymous with the sucias, and it was not uncommon to hear on the car-to-car (Charlie) frequency, that someone’s 924 needed them to call or come by. There had been an occasion when two Spanish-speaking young ladies had driven into the back lot of Firestone Station, an area designated for radio cars and personal vehicles of employees. All others were forbidden access into this area. The two ladies drove in displaying a cardboard sign with the numbers 924 boldly displayed across it. The sign was effective; the two were treated as guests, welcome to park and stay as long as they’d like.