Tropical Depression

by Jeff Lindsay

  The alley was dark, but that was no surprise. The only surprise was that I started to feel the old cop adrenaline starting up again, just walking down a dark alley late at night. Suddenly I really wanted this guy. I wanted to find whoever had killed Roscoe and put him in a small cell with a couple of very friendly body-builders.

  The night air started to feel charged. It felt good to be doing cop work again, and that made me a little mad, but I nosed around for a minute anyway. I wasn’t expecting to find anything, and I didn’t. By getting down on one knee and squinting I did find the spot where the rusty stains started. There was a large splat, and then a trickle leading back out of the alley to the stain on the sidewalk.

  I followed the trickle back to the big stain and stood over it, looking down.

  Blood is hard to wash out. But sooner or later the rain, the sun, and the passing feet wear away the stains. This stain was just about all that was left of Roscoe McAuley and when it was gone there would be nothing left of him at all except a piece of rock with his name on it and a couple of loose memories. What he was, what he did, what he thought and cared about—that was already gone. All that was hosed away a lot easier than blood stains—a lot quicker, too.

  “I’m sorry, Roscoe,” I said to the stain. It didn’t answer. I walked back up the hill and climbed into a bed that was too soft and smelled of mothballs and cigarettes.

  Chapter Ten

  I woke up early the next morning and didn’t know where I was. In the pre-dawn darkness I had a moment of terrible panic that took me over, drenched me with sweat, left me gasping, sucking in air that tasted wrong. I was breathing air-conditioned disinfectant instead of the salty-citrus taste of Key West. In a moment of complete disorientation I reached across the bed for Jennifer’s hand. There was nobody there.

  When I woke up enough to remember where I was and why, it wasn’t much better, but at least I could find my feet. I did, and swung them over the side of the bed and onto the floor. I sat on the bed for a minute collecting myself. With my weight on it, the mattress sagged a good three inches in the middle.

  All the demons came back at me as I sat there in the dark. It was stupid to come back to L.A. I didn’t owe Roscoe a thing. This wasn’t my problem at all. But my problem could find me here. It had found me, as I lay there in my rented bed. It had found me and hammered at me and whispered low, horrible things. It was cold in the room but the sheets were soaking wet from the sweat the dreams had squeezed out of me.

  I shivered, only partly from the cold of the room. I knew only one way to get rid of night demons. I pulled on a pair of shorts, and a T-shirt that said CONCH REPUBLIC. I got out a pair of Turntec Road Warriors and tied my room key between my shoelace and the tongue of the shoe, and went out.

  I ran up Beechwood Canyon to the small and strange community of Hollywoodland, and then up the hillside to the west. As I pounded back down the hill, with the jam-packed Hollywood Freeway below me on the right, the sun was coming up.

  Back in my room I showered, shaved, and dressed, feeling a little bit more like a threat to someone who had killed at least twice. I went down to the coffee shop for breakfast.

  The trick to a strange coffee shop is to start simple and work your way up. Charlie Shea, my last partner, once went into a place for the first time and ordered a ham and cheese omelette. That was a big mistake; there are too many chances for something to go wrong.

  Charlie hit the jackpot. A new cook, on his first shift, panicked when they ran out of ham and eggs at the same time. So he thickened the remaining eggs with pancake mix, and chopped up some bologna for ham. Charlie took one bite and got the strangest look on his face. All the flavors were familiar, but they were wrong. He’d ordered a ham and cheese omelet and ended up with a bologna pancake.

  I was feeling fragile enough without any vicious surprises, so I had scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and bacon. I stayed away from the orange juice; it’s surprisingly easy to screw up. I stuck with coffee and a glass of water. I’ve had worse breakfasts.

  By the time I was done it was just after seven-thirty. I climbed into my tiny rental car and drove down to the Hollywood substation on Wilcox.

  Ed Beasley was already at his desk. Ed was forty-two, black, good-looking in a sinister way, with thick eyebrows and mustache. He had one of those male-pattern baldness hairlines that receded in two fjords on top, leaving a kind of widow’s peak running down onto the forehead. It usually made him look rakish.

  This morning he didn’t look rakish at all. He looked like he’d just pulled a string of all-nighters. He had a Kool smoldering in his ashtray and an enormous Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. His eyes were closed and his forehead was wrinkled in deep vees. He was talking on the telephone, the receiver wedged between his shoulder and ear. He looked up at me as I walked over, raising his eyebrows in mild surprise.

  “All right,” he said into the telephone. “I’ll see what I can do. Okay,” he said and hung up.

  He looked me over. I just stood and let him look. “Well, Billy,” he said finally. “Fish not biting?”

  There was an edge to his voice that I’d never heard before and I guessed I was right about the all-nighters. I didn’t answer, and after a minute Ed just nodded at a chair to the left of his desk. “Took you almost twenty-three hours, Billy. You slowing down.”

  I sat. Ed slurped his coffee. He half-raised the cup. “Get you some?”

  “No thanks. I ate already.” He nodded and slurped some more.

  “Doctor say this shit’ll kill me.”

  “But he won’t say when?” I asked him, completing the ancient joke.

  “Something like that,” Ed said. A young white guy with rolled-up sleeves, a shoulder holster, and suspenders stopped and put a pair of files on Ed’s desk. He looked at me, looked at Ed, shrugged, and walked off. Ed watched him go and shook his head. “He wears suspenders,” Ed told me, disgusted. “Thinks they make him look like Kevin Costner.”

  “Why would he want to?”

  Ed snorted and slurped coffee. “These new guys, man, I don’t know. Half of ’em even think Madonna’s sexy.”

  “That’s better than thinking she’s talented,” I said. “I need to know what you’ve got on Hector and Roscoe McAuley, Ed.”

  He gave me the biggest, brightest, toothiest smile he had. It didn’t hide the fact that he was mad as hell, and tired almost to the point of no return. “What I got is shit,” he said. “And what’s more, that’s all I’m gonna get.”

  He slurped more coffee. “Word came down from on high. Community relations is paramount. So we can’t poke at nothing that might disturb the current delicate balance of racial tensions.”

  He slurped some more and took a long hard pull on his Kool. Through a cloud of smoke, he said, “Which means if a cop dies in the course of investigating a death unofficially, on his own time, and it can be made to look kinda like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, we got to leave it alone, ’cause we can’t look like we’re putting more energy into a cop-killing than into securing a crack dealer’s civil rights. And it means that anybody dumb enough to get killed during the riots, meaning Hector, it’s like it never happened. ’Cause we don’t want nobody having no bad dreams about the riots, I guess.”

  He rolled his eyes back for a moment and chanted, “Love to see them niggers sing and dance, but they get killed—don’t wet your pants. We gave the mother one good chance, he’s blown away by circumstance.”

  I stared at Ed in astonishment. “Sorry,” he finally said. He pulled hard on his Kool. It was down to the filter now. “It’s a rap number. Kind of an underground hit in the hip-hop clubs since the riots.” He swiveled away from the desk and looked off to his left. “It’s supposed to be about Hector. And of course it has a lot to say about the current delicate balance of racial tensions. ’Specially on the Force.”

  There was more of that edge in his voice, a whole lot more. Ed was one of those cops who believe God brought him through hell in h
is early life so he could be a better L.A. cop. To hear that much bitterness in his voice would have been unthinkable two years ago.

  I was sorry for Ed. I knew what it meant to lose your faith in something pure and important. But I hadn’t come all this way to pat anybody on the head, not even myself. I pushed on.

  “Do you think Hector’s murder was racially motivated, Ed?”

  He gave me a long hard look. I thought I knew Ed. I’d spent a lot of time with him under tough circumstances. But I’d never seen a look like that.

  “Racially motivated. That’s real pretty. You getting your cop talk back again, Billy?”

  “Looks like I need to. How about it? Was it racially motivated?”

  He lit another cigarette off the butt of his current smoke. “Roscoe thought so.”

  “Roscoe wasn’t exactly an expert on murder, or on racism,” I said. “So why did he think that?”

  Ed gave me a slight variation of the look. “Shit,” he said. “Every black man in America is an expert on racism.” He shrugged. “Why he thought it, I don’t know. But it’s maybe worth you thinking about.”

  “Anything in the investigation lead that way?”

  “Billy, you just don’t get it. Ain’t nothin’ in either investigation can even confirm somebody’s dead.”

  “So there’s nobody investigating either death right now?”

  He hissed out smoke through the meanest smile I had ever seen. For a moment he really looked like the devil, the classical one who enjoys your agony only because it hides his own. “Hector was just another black kid who walked into a bullet. We got the paperwork going on Roscoe. There’s a team on it, but—” He shrugged and his smile faded into a cold look I’d never seen on him before. “Officially, we are making progress and expect an arrest momentarily.”

  I nodded. We all know what that means: no progress, no leads, no investigation. “I’d like to see the files, Ed.”

  Ed knew I’d come here to ask him for the files. Any file on a dead case is public record. Anybody can look at it. But the files of a case that’s still open are another thing. They’re not supposed to be passed around, even within the department.

  These killings were still technically open. If I knew Ed, since I’d walked in he had been balancing the political implications of giving me the files against the possible good that might come of it. He had to decide if he still trusted me, because he could be putting himself in a world of trouble. If he made the wrong choice he’d never be a lieutenant.

  He looked at me for a long moment. I looked back. Then he gave a half-shrug and a nod. “Don’t see how it can get any worse. I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Call you tonight?”

  I stood up. “I’m staying at the Franklin,” I told him.

  “Elegant as shit,” he said. His telephone rang and as he turned to stare at it, I left.

  It was still just a few minutes after eight in the morning and I wouldn’t get to see the files until tonight, if at all. I thought I’d like to see the spot where Hector was killed, on the same goofy theory that looking at the spot where somebody died somehow attunes you to the killing.

  I know it’s dumb, but cops and fishermen are more superstitious than most. I wasn’t sure which I was at the moment—maybe an ex-cop. At this point, maybe an ex-fisherman. Or half-cop, half-fisherman, some strange, mythical hybrid beast that lurches up out of the flats to solve crimes, like Aquaman. Whatever: I figured it couldn’t hurt to look at some scenery.

  The only problem was, I didn’t know where Hector had died. At this hour it was going to be tough to find out.

  I left my car at the police station and walked to Ivar Street, where the public library sits next to a strip joint. There were twin ramps crossing in front and leading down from street level to the glass doorway. Taped to the window beside the door was a sign with the library’s hours. It opened at ten o’clock today. I glanced at my watch. I had ninety minutes to kill.

  I found a newspaper box up on Hollywood Boulevard, and a bus bench with almost six square inches of seat that had somehow been overlooked; there was no gum on it, no vomit, no bird droppings, no spilled chili or melted ice cream. I sat and read the paper.

  A battered-looking woman in a greasy green plaid coat was standing at the far end of the bench. As I opened the front page she drifted down to my end and read over my shoulder.

  The news wasn’t good anywhere. The comics weren’t funny, either. The sports reporters hadn’t learned to write yet. And the Dodgers were so far in the cellar they had a lock on last place for the next four years. For a saving second I saw my sour mood from outside and found it briefly funny. “Bah, humbug,” I muttered at the paper.

  “Amen,” said the battered-looking woman.

  By the time I was done with the paper it was a quarter of ten. I left the paper on the bench for the woman and walked back down to the library.

  A fat security guard sat on a stool a few feet inside, chatting to a young woman with a large butt. I stood and waited. At exactly one minute after ten the guard stretched, glanced up at the clock, and sauntered slowly over to the door. It took him a full minute to cross the twelve feet of tiled floor.

  He unlocked the door and held it open for me. “Morning,” he said. I nodded and headed up the half-circle of stairs to the stacks.

  The Los Angeles Times for May 2 had what I wanted. On page fourteen of the A section was a small story, three paragraphs long, headed: POLICEMAN’S SON SLAIN. The first paragraph was mostly heavy-handed irony about how even a cop’s kid wasn’t safe from murder. The final paragraph was a quote from a community leader calling the death tragic and senseless. They made it sound generic.

  Sandwiched in between were the two or three facts the reporter had thought might be interesting enough to sneak in. Included was an address near Pearl Street where the killing had happened. I wrote the address on an index card provided by the library for writing down reference numbers.

  On an impulse, I pulled out the telephone directory. The free clinic where Nancy worked was only a few blocks away from the spot where Hector was killed. I wrote that address down, too, and stuck it in my breast pocket. Maybe she’d want to have lunch.

  Everybody has to have lunch, right?

  Chapter Eleven

  I drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard, then south on Vermont. L.A. was not a melting pot, no matter how many different ethnic groups settled here. The melting-pot idea was dead. It had been swept away as unfair, and as a result L.A. was now a centrifuge. Every new group that arrived was rapidly whirled off to its own area, separated from any cultural contamination like the need to learn English. The new arrivals were all able to preserve the way of life they had fled from when they came to America, and avoid all the dangers and stupidities of this awful place. They could be Americans without ever seeing more of America than the corner store run by someone from their hometown, and whatever they saw on the local TV channel broadcasting in their own language by people from their homeland.

  The new immigrants didn’t assimilate. They stayed in tight clusters, and there was little interaction. In fifty years America will be made up of a million small neighborhoods that can’t even speak to each other.

  The area on Vermont I was driving into had become solidly Korean over the last ten years. The Koreans tended to be more insular than most, and they didn’t usually care for outsiders, especially anybody that smelled like police. If I needed to talk to someone in this area I would need some leverage, or some luck, or both.

  Soon after making my turn on Washington I found the spot I was looking for and pulled off into a small mini-mall parking lot across the street. I stood beside the curb and looked over at it.

  Down the block to the left was a row of stores that had been burned. The black smudges of smoke had half-covered most of the graffiti. Fallen beams twisted up at crazy angles.

  In the other direction was a large Thrifty drugstore. It was still boarded up. Ads for specials on aspirin, motor oil, and dia
pers were tacked up on the plywood that covered over whatever might be left of the plate glass.

  Directly across from me, in the street, was where Hector McAuley had died. There was a modest four-story building there, with a small grocery store on the ground floor. A sign in the window said PARK HONEST GOOD FOOD GROCERY. Underneath was a neon Schlitz sign.

  Next door on the west side was a Pasadena National Bank branch office. It sat in a square six-story building with small windows. The bottom windows closest to the front door were new and still had stickers on them. On the east was a vacant lot with half a car sticking up out of the weeds.

  I crossed the street. There were no bloodstains in the road or on the sidewalk in front of Park Honest Good Food Grocery. Either it was already washed away by sun and rain or Hector hadn’t bled as much as his father.

  There were a couple of young black men lounging outside the store. They looked about seventeen. Both wore clothes that were much too big. One of them wore a porkpie hat and sat on a blue plastic milk crate. The other leaned against the building. He had a Raiders cap on, turned backwards. He said something to the guy sitting as I approached, and they both laughed, looking sideways at me.

  I passed them and entered the store. A soft electronic chime sounded in the back of the store as I opened the door and stepped in. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside. When I could see, I blinked again.

  Somebody had crammed an entire full-sized supermarket into a room that wasn’t more than thirty-five feet deep and twenty feet wide. Things were hanging off every inch of wall. The shelves went all the way to the ceiling, a good ten feet up, and in the narrow aisles between the shelves more things hung down from hooks screwed into the ceiling.