Tropical Depression

by Jeff Lindsay

  That was a mistake. The air was a thick brown sap that could bring on a headache in a statue. I couldn’t find a phone that wasn’t broken or covered with stuff that smelled like the rest room at Venice Beach. After a few minutes of frustration, my eyes tearing from the smog, I decided I didn’t need a phone anyway. I packed myself into my tiny rental and drove the few blocks over to Hollywood bureau.

  Ed was already at his desk when I got there. He looked even more tired and sour. He was wading through a stack of papers and he glanced up as I sat in the chair by his desk.

  I put the case file on his desk, rewrapped in the Ralph’s bag. The weight of the papers caused smoke to swirl away from the smoldering Kool in the ashtray and into Ed’s eyes. He blinked. He looked at the bag and then at me. “Good morning, Ed,” I said after he had stared at me for a few moments.

  “If you get cheerful at me, I’m gonna have to shoot you,” he said.

  “Farthest thing from my mind,” I told him. “What do you know about this?”

  I flipped a page from the file at him, marked with a paper clip. He glanced at it.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, sounding like he looked, tired and sour. “What about it? You want to file a complaint about police incompetence?” He dropped the sheet on the desk with a weary shrug.

  “I’d rather take a look at that unidentified hardware,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he gave me one short nod. “Yeah. Maybe somebody ought to.” He swiveled away and picked up the telephone on his desk. I couldn’t hear what he said, but in a minute he turned back to me.

  “It’s down at Crenshaw,” he said. “I told them it might be connected to Roscoe, which is on my turf. So I’m sending an expert to take a look. That’s you, you understand.” He gave me his new smile, the mean one.

  “I got that.”

  He scribbled on a pad and tore off the top sheet. “Get on down there. Sergeant Whitt waiting for you.” He handed me the slip of paper. It said SGT. WHITT in Ed’s small, precise handwriting. “Let me know about it, huh, Billy?”

  I said I would. I tried hard not to notice how important it was to him.

  Crenshaw bureau is not the worst in the city. But that might just be because of the competition. The station is not as pretty as the one in Hollywood. It has the look of something blunt and functional, like a hammer. In a way, it is.

  Sergeant Whitt was waiting for me in a room in the basement. There was a cage around the room, and a small window was the only access.

  Whitt was almost a cartoon cop. He must have been close to retirement; his belly looked like it had taken at least twenty-five years of hard work, punishing doughnuts, arresting chili dogs, and sending whole pizzas away for the big fall. If potatoes were bright red, somebody would have baked his nose by mistake a long time ago.

  He sat at a desk about fifteen feet inside the shelf-lined room and glanced up at me when I appeared at the window and leaned on the sill. “What do you want?” he grunted.

  “Detective Beasley sent me,” I said. I managed not to add, “Ho, ho, ho.” After all, the guy didn’t even have a beard.

  He grunted again. “McAuley case,” he said. “Don’t know if I can find it.” He still hadn’t moved. He looked away again, down at his desk, where a hoagie, fries, a Coke, and two jelly doughnuts were sitting in a small cardboard box.

  I straightened up. “Okay,” I said, with a cheerful smile. “Where’s the captain’s office? He’ll want to know you’ve lost some evidence from an open case file.” I very helpfully showed him all my teeth.

  Sergeant Whitt grunted and stared hard at me for a good thirty seconds. He took a huge bite of the hoagie. A normal human being could not fit half of a sandwich that size into his mouth, but Sergeant Whitt did. He chewed twice and swallowed. Then he shoved his chair back explosively from the desk and barreled across the room on his wheeled chair. He must have hit forty-five or fifty miles an hour before sticking out a foot and stopping at a shelf. It was startling to see an old fat curmudgeon move that fast. But at least he didn’t grunt again.

  He grabbed at something and rolled over to the window. He plopped a sealed bag onto the counter, staring at me with mean, hard little eyes. “You’re not a cop, are you?” he said.

  “I’m an expert,” I told him. “Just ask anybody.”

  He nodded without taking his eyes off me. “I didn’t think you were a cop,” he said, and he sat there and watched me as I took the hardware out of its bag.

  It was a flat chunk of stainless steel about the size of a pocket knife. The tag was hanging from a hole in one end of it. The other end had a similar hole, except that there was a small grooved slot in the side of the second hole. I turned it over in my hand a couple of times, but I didn’t really need much of a look. I knew what it was.

  I had seen one only a few weeks ago, back home in Key West. My charter had been for only a half-day, and while I was cleaning up my boat I had heard an impressive amount of swearing coming from a sailboat moored at a dock across the channel from my slip.

  I had walked around and over to the slip where I found Betty Fleming, a leathery forty-five-year-old sailing woman, trying to rerig the spreaders on the mast of her forty-two-foot sloop. She resented needing help, never needed help from anybody, but eventually she let me haul on a rope and send her up the mast on her bosun’s chair. She’d even given me a beer afterwards.

  The piece of metal Sergeant Whitt was guarding so carefully was identical to part of the rig of Betty’s bosun’s chair. Betty, with much amused swearing, had said it was called a brummel hook. “Nobody much uses ’em nowadays,” she had said. “Just old-fashioned assholes like me.”

  So the lump of stainless steel in my hand now was familiar—but it just added to the dream feeling with which I’d started the day. This was a pretty uncommon piece of hardware. Why would somebody have anything nautical on a rooftop in an inner-city neighborhood in L.A.? It was one hell of a place to sail off into the sunset.

  Anyway, it was easier to understand why none of the detectives knew what it was. Of course, that didn’t make it easier to understand why they hadn’t tried to find out.

  I snapped out of thinking about it to see that Sergeant Whitt was still staring at me.

  I stared back. “Do you ever blink? Or do you have one of those inner eyelids like a frog?”

  I don’t believe he thought it was very funny. In fact, I couldn’t tell if he thought anything. He just stared. Finally he grunted. “You all done?”

  I gave up. The man could outstare a rock. Even if the rock was smarter, and better looking. I dropped the brummel hook on the counter. “Yeah, I’m all done. Thanks for your time, Sergeant.”

  He grunted.

  I climbed up the stairs and out of Sergeant Whitt’s dungeon, and as I turned for the door a hand came down on my shoulder from behind. “Billy,” a soft voice said. “Hey, well—Billy Knight.”

  I turned into the big grin of Charlie Shea, the friend who had talked me down that bad morning so many months ago.

  I shook his hand, happy to see him. He looked me over with the interest of a guy who has saved your life and now feels responsible for you.

  “Geez, Billy Knight. Man, you look great. Look at that tan. You look great. You really look great.” He sounded like that made him happy and he held onto my hand a moment too long, peering into my face. “How you doing, Billy?”

  I pulled my hand away. “I’m doing fine, Charlie. Just fine.”

  He didn’t look completely convinced. “Uh-huh. What, you’re doing the, uh, the fishing boat?”

  “That’s right, I’m a fishing guide. You come on down, I’ll give you a discount.”

  He blinked for the half-second it took him to realize it was a joke. “Right, a discount, okay.” He paused for his gentle and vague smile. “Hey, you look great. I mean—really. Geez, lookit you.”

  I was starting to get the idea that I looked great. Before Charlie could enter me in a beauty contest I fi
gured I should say something. “You have time for a cup of coffee, Charlie?”

  He hesitated. Charlie was not the brightest guy alive, and it took him a minute to decide things. But his heart was good. He took some ribbing about his low IQ—cop humor tends to be basic—but he was well-liked. “Coffee, huh? Well—sure. Sure. Sure, I got a few minutes here. Come on.”

  He led me out the front door to a place about a half-block away. A pencil-thin black man with a tiny mustache and a crisp white hat stood behind the counter in the cleanest apron I had ever seen. He nodded to Charlie. “Officer,” he said, very distinctly.

  “Hey, Philbert, how are you today?”

  They chattered for a few moments and I stood waiting. I was used to it. One of the disadvantages of being partnered with a guy like Charlie is that everything takes twice as long. He can’t go anywhere without seeing somebody he knows, and if he knows them he has to talk to them.

  Eventually he got two cups of coffee out of Philbert. Charlie remembered how I liked my coffee, and we sat and sipped at a small round table in the front window.

  There was really not a lot to say, but that was never a problem with Charlie. We spent close to half an hour just gossiping. Charlie told me Putz Pelham never did come down with AIDS, but the thought that he might had scared him badly and he was now Born again in the most self-righteous way possible.

  There was other stuff, little things, mostly about buddies we shared, new things we wanted to mention. It was more like college roommates meeting by chance than two guys who had been cops together in one of the worst urban jungles in the country.

  As I said goodbye and walked back to my car there was really only one thing that stuck in my mind from the whole talk, and I couldn’t even figure out why it was sticking until I was pulling out of the parking lot.

  At one point Charlie had given his head a sad little shake and said something about maybe quitting, maybe going into business with his brother who was a plumbing contractor.

  “You don’t mean that,” I told him. “Not really.”

  He looked away, out the cluttered window. A bus went by. “Ahh. I don’t know,” he finally said. “Hasn’t been much fun lately. Maybe I really shouldn’t be a cop.”

  “It’s not that bad, is it, Charlie? Come on.”

  “Yeah, well. Since the riots. The riots were—you know, it was like nobody knew what to do and we were waiting for orders that just never came.” He crumpled his empty Styrofoam cup. “I really don’t like that feeling. Like the brass either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. I don’t like that.”

  And as I pulled out of the lot into traffic I realized why I was replaying that small chunk of talk.

  This was the third time I’d heard the same message: cops felt like the command structure had let them down during the riots. Roscoe had said it was “almost like deliberate sabotage.” And he had wanted an outsider, somebody he could trust—because he had a suspicion that somebody on the inside was guilty?

  Ed had mentioned having the same feeling of mistrust, like the high command wasn’t quite right. “Like somebody tried to fuck us up on purpose,” he had said. And now Charlie—for Charlie to mention it at all it had to be something everybody was thinking about, even talking about.

  And when I added all that to my notion that somebody with major clout had been leaning on the investigations into Hector’s and Roscoe’s murders, it started to add up to—

  To what? Was the bump on my head making me stupid? Did I really think somebody in the command structure was behind Hector’s murder? And Roscoe’s? If it was bribery or nepotism, sure. No problem. Easy. That happened every day.

  But murder? Cops killing cops? A cop on the roof with a sailboat? That wasn’t even farfetched. It was stupid.

  It was just too whacko. I’d just been away too long. I wasn’t thinking like a cop anymore—I was thinking like Nicky, like one of his New Age conspiracy theories.

  No, cops were still cops, even if they wore suits instead of blues. The idea was totally nuts. I let go of it and headed for the freeway.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Before I could buy into a whacked-out idea like cops killing cops, I had to chase down a few more obvious leads. The first one was the paper trail.

  Roscoe was an administrator. His earliest training and his personal instincts for political survival would guarantee that he had left some kind of hint on paper somewhere. I was as sure of that as I could be. His first commandment was Thou Shalt Cover Thine Ass, and a political cop’s favorite ass-cover would be paper: memos, reports, briefings, summations, anything he could think of.

  There had to be something. Knowing that, what and where were just a matter of poking.

  I went to a sushi place not far away and called Ed. The telephone smelled like Windex, but at least it worked.

  “It’s me,” I said when he answered. “You said you had Roscoe’s datebook. You have any other personal papers?”

  He blew out smoke. “I got the datebook cause I’m checking background. The other stuff, it’s all in a box somewhere, but I can’t get at it without some kind of official reason.”

  “For an official reason, would an anonymous tip do the trick?”

  “Works for me. If it’s from a usually reliable source.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, here’s an anonymous tip for you, from a usually reliable source. Roscoe’s personal papers will reveal something about his background that has a lot to do with his murder.”

  “You sweet-talking devil. Call me later, I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.

  It wasn’t even a hunch. It was just a routine piece of investigative footslogging. Sometimes that stuff pays off—that’s why it’s routine. Maybe we’d get lucky and the papers would turn up something.

  I sat at the bar and thought about what to do next. The bar surface was clean, highly polished dark wood. I ordered a beer and a couple of California rolls, just to have something to do. It was good. When it was gone I had decided.

  I was close to Park’s Honest Good Food Grocery, and I still had some questions. I got in my car and pointed it that way.

  The neighborhood hadn’t changed since my last visit a couple of days ago. The Thrifty had the same specials going. The burned-out car hadn’t moved. I guess once you find a good parking place, you hang onto it.

  I parked across the street again. I looked up at Park’s roof and my head throbbed. I crossed the street.

  An electronic chime sounded as I pushed open the door. It took me a second to get my bearings in that frantic clutter.

  Park didn’t help. He stood in his cage, completely motionless. I stepped over in front of him. “I need to talk to your daughter again,” I said.

  His eyes moved fractionally, up to the knot on my forehead, then down to my eyes. “Black boy do that?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  He looked at me for a long moment. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe that’s just as well. Then his eyes moved away. “Lin not home.”

  “When will she be home?”

  The slight lift of his right shoulder was almost a shrug. “After school,” he said.

  I looked at my watch. It was close to three. “I’ll wait.”

  Park didn’t even shrug. He just went back to motionlessness. He reminded me of an alligator waiting for something to walk into range.

  I stepped back into the street in front of the store. The blue plastic milk crate was still there to one side of the door. I sat on it.

  A few cars went by. Some buses passed, too. A thin black kid, about eight, ran past like a werewolf was after him. A few minutes later a group of kids about the same age came by in more casual style. They laughed and hit each other until they came even with me. Then they got very quiet and filed by, looking at me with gigantic eyes. As soon as they were past they laughed again. Life goes on.

  I watched them until they were almost out of sight. Then I heard a soft swish. I turned into a faint clean smell.

  “Oh,
” Lin Park said. “Mr.—ah, it’s you.” Her eyes flicked to the knot on my forehead and she colored faintly under her flawless skin.

  I stood up. “That’s right. It’s me.”

  “Oh. Well—” She could obviously think of a few people she’d rather talk to.

  “I need to ask you a couple more questions,” I said.

  She bit her lip. “I—don’t know. I just—like—what kind of questions?”

  “I just need to know a few things about Hector’s posse.”

  Lin shook her head hard. “I don’t—that’s not like a very good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  She hesitated and looked around out of the corner of her eyes.

  “Lin, I’d like to try to find out who killed Hector. I can’t do that until I know a couple of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like were any of the posse not there when Hector was shot?”

  She frowned, an incredibly elegant expression on her. “Why would you want to know that?”

  “Because Hector was set up. So somebody had to set him up. So whoever set him up might not be there because they knew it was a setup.” If she looked like Roseanne Arnold I probably wouldn’t have been so patient. But she didn’t look like Roseanne, not by two hundred pounds and a few yards of creamy skin. “So was anybody missing?”

  She shook her head. “Just Spider. The guy that, you know.” She nodded slightly at my forehead. “But that wasn’t—he had to, like, go to the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “He like fell off the roof? And was busted up for a couple of weeks. So it couldn’t have been Spider.”

  “When did he fall from the roof?”

  Lin raised one shoulder in a graceful shrug. The collar of her blouse opened slightly and I fought not to look. “It was like almost the same time. He rode the ambulance they brought for Hector.”

  I nodded. “I need to talk to him.”

  Lin hissed. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  She raised a hand. I watched it flutter for a moment like a small lost bird, then it dropped. “He hasn’t been—you know. Since Hector got shot, Spider has been kind of wild? Like, not a real good person to bother? I mean—” And she nodded at my forehead again.