Tropical Depression

by Jeff Lindsay

  “I’d still like to talk to him, Lin. It might be important.”

  She shook her head again, but it didn’t mean no this time. It was just something to do while she was thinking about it. So I pushed. “Can you get him here?”

  She smiled, a very old and very feminine smile. “Oh, I can get him to come here. If I ask him, Spider will come. That’s not the problem.”

  “What is the problem?”

  She bit her lip and looked away.

  “What do you think Hector would want you to do?” It was shameless and probably wouldn’t have worked on anybody but a sixteen-year-old. But it worked on her, or something did.

  She looked carefully up and down the street. “I’ll call him,” she said. “But be real careful, okay? Meet me on the roof in like ten minutes?” And she was gone into the store.

  I looked up and down the street and didn’t see anything. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. But at least I didn’t see it.

  Lin was acting more like somebody stuck in a moral dilemma than somebody afraid. I thought she might be tough to scare. So I guessed she wanted to make sure nobody saw her talking with the enemy.

  I walked down the alley between the bank and the grocery store. Park’s dumpster was there. It stank, but it was neat. Enigmatic, too.

  Around back I pulled on the tattered rope and climbed the stairs to the roof. I walked across the gravel and tar and stood looking down into the street.

  What had Spider seen? If he had been on the roof at the same time Hector was shot, I was willing to bet my boat he had seen something. There was even a chance he could identify the killer.

  But he hadn’t come forward and said anything at the time—why? It smelled like guilt to me. Guilt about what, I couldn’t say.

  But the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I was right. Spider had been one of the good kids, helping to cool down violence with Hector’s posse. Now he had gone bad. It could be simple bitterness, but he was young for that. Guilt would be a lot stronger as a motivation.

  There was a clatter and Lin came up the ladder, followed moments later by Spider, the kid with the porkpie hat.

  He stopped dead when he saw me and then turned with a sour look and said something to Lin. She shook her head. Her hair whirled around her face like shredded silk. She spoke passionately for a moment, her face serious, animated, heartbreakingly lovely.

  That was not lost on Spider. He watched her, licked his lips, and shrugged. When she placed a hand on his shoulder he stiffened, then slowly nodded.

  He turned to face me, then strutted across the roof to where I stood.

  “Hey, ghost, sorry about your face, man.”

  “Shit happens,” I said.

  “Yeah, but whoa. Look like shit happen to your face a lot, man.” He shook his head, reached a finger toward the knot on my face. “You get beat up a lot, ghost?”

  I snatched at his hand. He tried to yank it back, but I caught his wrist. I didn’t pull or squeeze or anything dramatic. I was trying to get him off balance mentally, not physically. I just held his arm motionless while he struggled to retrieve it, giving him a friendly smile the whole time.

  After a few moments he gave it up. “Damn, man, okay, you can hold my hand, that what you want?”

  “No. That’s not what I want.”

  “Then what is what you want, motherfucker?”

  “I want to know something only you can tell me, Spider.”

  “Goddamn, you let go my arm I’ll tell you anything.”

  “Okay. How does it feel to kill your best friend?”

  For a long moment he didn’t breathe. All the blood left him. He sagged and if I had let go of his arm he would have fallen to the tarpaper.

  When he finally gathered enough air to speak, it sounded like a small boy talking from the bottom of a well.

  “Didn’t kill nobody,” he whined.

  I kept smiling. “Sure you did, Spider. Have you forgotten him already? His name was Hector McAuley. He thought you were his friend. I guess he was wrong about that, huh? Because you set him up.”

  “I—I didn’t think—don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “Of course not. You just keep thinking that,” I said. “Because if Lin finds out—”

  He twisted so violently to look at her that he almost managed to pull away from my grip. She still stood near the ladder. She smiled encouragement at Spider.

  He turned back to me. If possible, he looked even more scared, but not quite so young now. “What you want from me?” he husked.

  I let go of his wrist. “The truth, Spider.”

  He licked his lips, rubbed his wrist. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I know that. But you know who did.”

  Nothing. He looked at the roof, moved a pebble around with his toe.

  “He was your friend, Spider. That ought to mean something.”

  He switched feet. The pebble rolled out of reach. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

  I was pretty sure I knew what that meant. “She doesn’t have to know. That’s up to you. But I have to know. And you might have to tell the cops. Maybe identify a picture.”

  He shook his head and looked for another pebble.

  “He’s dead, Spider. You can’t bring him back. But you can help get the guy that killed him.”

  A tear rolled off his face and slapped the roof. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.” Another tear landed by the first one. “I didn’t mean for him to die like that.”

  “What happened?”

  He shook his head. “White guy,” he said, still looking down.

  “A white guy killed Hector?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Dunno.” The new pebble rolled over beside the old one.

  It took some work and a lot of patience, but I finally got the whole thing from him.

  A white guy had approached him the morning of the shooting. He said he was a reporter and had seen Spider with Hector when the posse was facing down a mob. Spider remembered seeing a car, heavily tinted windows, white face inside. It was the reporter.

  Did Spider want to be on TV? Spider did. Spider was in love with Lin Park, but she couldn’t see anyone but Hector. Spider was just one of the posse. But if this reporter put him on TV, explaining what was going on, making it sound like Spider was maybe a little more important…

  Anyway, Spider had agreed to get Hector to show up. He had even suggested Park’s store as the place. The plan was for Spider to stay on the roof with the cameraman and talk about what was happening. He’d be the star.

  The reporter was already there when Spider climbed up onto the roof. But that was not a camera he was holding.

  It was a gun.

  Spider ran to stop him. The white guy just smiled and picked him up like a rag doll and threw him off the roof. Just threw him like he didn’t weigh anything at all, with one hand.

  The guy hadn’t even looked. Spider landed in Park’s dumpster on top of some spoiled produce. He’d broken a leg and an arm, two ribs, like that, instead of getting killed. Been in the hospital for a week.

  But the last thing he saw before he crawled away down the alley was that white guy. He was going hand-over-hand up a rope to the roof of the bank next door. Hand-over-hand, like on a jungle gym. Fast, smooth, making it look as easy as walking.

  Spider sniffled like a scared kid, and maybe that’s all he was. “I close my eyes I still see that,” he said. “That great big white motherfucker zooming across that rope like Spiderman. And I’m just lying in the goddamn garbage.”

  At least that explained the brummel hook. The killer had retreated across the rooftops and got away.

  I looked at Spider. He had collapsed into himself. All the swagger and toughness were gone. He looked like a small, lost kid.

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

  The look he gave me was haunted, pure misery. “What’s that make me look like? I’
m either a punk or a chump. Ain’t no choice.”

  His face was old, ravaged, but the kid he was showed in the eyes. Just a scared, miserable, guilty kid with no idea how to do what was right, and it was eating him up.

  He looked down again, not even bothering to kick at pebbles.

  “You didn’t kill him, Spider. This other guy killed him. And you’re going to help me catch him.”

  He said nothing. He was crying again.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” I said.

  “Fuck you, ghost.”

  He was still standing there like that when I walked back to the ladder and followed Lin off the roof.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Parker Center is a big modern building with plenty of parking. It sits on the corner of First and Los Angeles streets, in an area they keep trying to clean up—I think revitalize is the word the mayor’s office is using.

  It’s only a few short blocks from the Nickel, but worlds apart. It’s close to a few major corporate offices and banks, and close to the Japanese area, too, so you’re more likely to see a dark blue business suit than a bottle of Mad Dog.

  When you walk in the front door, you almost always walk in with a crowd. I was surrounded by two three-piece suits, both navy blue, a woman in a dark green power suit, and two uniforms. We all moved in together. The others showed some ID and moved on past the reception area.

  They stopped me at the reception desk. There were a couple of uniforms sitting behind a raised desk. With a cold politeness that only a cop can really master, they gave me a can-I-help-you-sir that really means who the hell are you.

  I told them they could help me. That didn’t make them burst into song, but they did say I could see the information officer. I had to turn over my driver’s license before they would let me past the desk.

  Then I had to fill out a couple of forms describing the documents I wanted to see. I sat in a small room on a hard chair and filled out the forms with a pen on the end of a chain.

  I still wasn’t quite sure how I’d ended up here. Somehow the whole idea of somebody in the command structure killing the McAuleys was still too dumb to take seriously.

  And somehow that made me take it seriously. At least my subconscious did. I really had thought I was driving back to the hotel; instead I found myself standing in the street in front of this building.

  The talk with Spider had left a bad taste in my mouth. At first I thought it came from pushing the kid the way I had, breaking him down to get what I wanted.

  But then I realized I hadn’t had to push that hard. Like Nicky’s front door, he was ready to collapse under the lightest touch.

  No, the bad taste was coming from the killer. He had used the kid up and tossed him in the garbage—literally into the dumpster, from the roof. It hadn’t mattered to him whether Spider lived or died.

  What kind of person was I looking for? A white guy. A white guy who had been cruising the worst area of the city during a riot, apparently unafraid. That could easily be a cop.

  But then he had picked up about one hundred sixty pounds of kid with one hand and flung him through the air. Then he had shot Hector perfectly, casually, gone hand-over-hand up a rope and disappeared—

  What the hell kind of person was this?

  My thoughts had started steering the car. While I wondered who could do all that and still put pressure on an investigation, my thoughts continued to drive without me. I was lost inside them, and all the time moving down the freeway and out into Spring Street.

  And I came to standing in the street in front of Parker Center.

  I had just stood there for a while, looking up at the building and feeling stupid. This didn’t make any sense. I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be home, on my boat, poling across the flats towards a tailing permit. I didn’t want to be in Los Angeles, trying to find out if a killer kept office hours in Parker Center.

  But it had started to make sense. All the complaints I’d heard about the high command during the riots—there could only be a few people in a position to do any real damage. What if one of them had?

  Astronomers have a theory. If planets don’t act the way they’re supposed to, then maybe there’s a dark planet, an unknown source of gravity.

  If the high command didn’t act the way it should have in the riots, and if there was somebody in high command leaning on the investigations—two very unlikely events—then it could have been the same somebody.

  So suppose for a minute that there was a racist in the high command. Not just somebody with an attitude problem about black people, but somebody with an active, secret agenda.

  A big if, but let that go. What would somebody like that do? Stir the pot a little to keep the riots going, make them a little worse. Intercept orders, delay them or fail to send them. Issue contradictory instructions and sit back and watch things get worse.

  And then, when rumors about Hector and what he was doing had come out, this hypothetical ranking cop had gone in, tracked down the posse, and eliminated the threat to all that disorder. Then he’d come back and leaned on the investigation, and that was that.

  Did that make sense?

  No, it didn’t. It was stupid. The LAPD was not perfect, but it didn’t promote people who did those things.

  Still, what did make sense?

  I finally decided that no matter how stupid the idea made me feel, I’d feel a lot more stupid if I was right and never checked it out. I went in.

  The quickest way I could think of to check on the idea of a guilty insider was to look at the duty roster for the day the riot broke out. If somebody in the command structure on that day was even remotely suspicious or out of the ordinary, I had a starting place.

  The documents were supposed to be a matter of public record. I just had to ask. So here I was filling out the forms.

  When I was done I handed them to a young man in a small cubicle. He looked me over suspiciously, glanced at the forms, and disappeared.

  I waited. There were no magazines to look at—not even a copy of True Crime.

  After about ten minutes the suspicious young man came back and pointed back the way he came. “Sergeant Brandon will see you,” he said. I started down the hall. I looked back once, halfway. The young man was still watching me. Probably afraid I was going to steal a slab of linoleum from the floor.

  The law says the department has to let the public see any documents they ask for, within reason. There’s no law that says it has to make it easy. That was lucky for Sergeant Brandon. If it was illegal to be a pain in the ass, Sergeant Brandon would be doing hard time at San Quentin.

  Apparently the suspicious young man and Brandon had figured out I was an ex-cop. Easy enough: a quick glance at my driver’s license, then a check with computerized records. Out pops the file of Billy Knight, formerly of the LAPD.

  And unless there was always spittle foaming on his lips and his face was always bright red, I’d have to say that something about ex-cops requesting documents made Sergeant Brandon especially mad.

  He started right off with a snarl. “Didn’t they teach you at the Academy it’s illegal to investigate without proper credentials?”

  “You should cut down on salt,” I told him. “Maybe lose a few pounds. Otherwise you’re looking at a stroke.”

  I think the color he turned is called vermilion. Until now I had only seen it in crayon boxes.

  I thought he was going to pop or at least stand on his chair and call my mother names. But he surprised me.

  Sergeant Brandon got up and left.

  I waited half an hour before I decided he wasn’t coming back. I was really making a lot of new friends on my trip.

  I stood up and looked around the cubicle. There was a file cabinet. It was locked. There was a desk with three drawers. They were locked, too. There was no lock on the telephone, but I couldn’t think of anybody I wanted to call.

  He’d have to come back someday, unless I had driven him into early retirement. I couldn’t wait
too long—I was already getting hungry.

  I had just decided to come back tomorrow—and tomorrow and tomorrow—when there was a slight, delicate throat-clearing sound behind me. I turned.

  A very proper-looking young woman in uniform stood in the doorway. Her light-brown hair was in a bun and she held a manila envelope in her hand. “Mr. Knight?”

  I don’t know where these impulses come from, but I very badly wanted to say, “That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” I fought the urge down and settled for, “That’s me.”

  She gave me a very proper one-eighth inch of smile and slapped the envelope into my hand.

  “Sergeant Brandon said to give this to you.” She turned and tick-tacked off down the hall in her regulation shoes.

  For a moment I worried that it might have been too easy, but when I gave myself credit for waiting patiently for half an hour I felt better. I got my driver’s license from the receptionist and headed out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I really was hungry, and in a way that only seems to happen in L.A., I was hungry for something very specific. Nothing else would do, no matter how delicious. If somebody had waved filet mignon and lobster under my nose I would have pushed past on the run. It wasn’t a great treat, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  I’m not proud of it, but all I could think of was a chili-cheese dog from Pink’s. Maybe it was the force of Sergeant Whitt’s personality.

  As I drove I thought about what I might have in the envelope, and what I might do with it. Every time I got hold of a really good thought, my stomach growled.

  But it came down to this: the duty roster would tell me who in the high command had been in a position to act—or refrain from acting—when the riot broke out. After that, I could check on who actually had, or hadn’t.

  Of course, I would have to eat first. A chili-cheese dog. Maybe two. Two sounded about right—man-sized, but not greedy.

  I drove west on Olympic to La Brea and turned north. Pink’s was on the left-hand side, and crowded. It was always crowded.