“I’m all right.” Mary Helen had frown lines between her eyes when she slipped her hand through my elbow. “You two know each other?”
“We met yesterday,” I said. “I’m going to interview Barry.”
She thought about that, looking hard at his brand-new blazer. “I’d like to be there when you do. There are a few questions I’d like you to answer. You wouldn’t mind if I came along, would you Ridgeway?”
He paled so suddenly I thought he might pass right out. But he managed to smile when he said, “I don’t mind a bit.”
When he walked down the hill toward the road, he never looked back.
I said to Mary Helen, “You’re a devil. I have a feeling that you were a match for your devil-boy husband.”
She nodded proud acknowledgment of a compliment. “You’ve started me thinking,” she said. “There are so many questions I have about Roy that no one would ever answer for me. Before I get any older, I want some truth out of guys like Ridgeway. I know they never told half of what they know.”
She took me around, then, introducing me to the old-timers, pressing each one of them to schedule an interview with me. I had only one card left in my bag when she marched me up to Gloria Marcuse, Hector’s last girlfriend.
“Lieutenant,” Mary Helen said, “the press wants your reaction to Detective Melendez’s untimely death.” Then she walked away and left me.
“Hello, Maggie.” Gloria was tall, hard-bodied, her face lined from the sun—the mask of an athlete. I had never seen her before in her midnight blue uniform. With a sleeve full of hash marks, she was intimidating. The few times I had met her, we got along all right. Mike described her as one-way, looked out for herself only. That’s about the nicest thing I ever heard anyone say about her, except that she made Hector happy in bed. I was not ready to write her off; her eyes were puffy from crying, and she seemed genuinely grief-stricken.
With apparent distaste, she said, “What did she mean, ‘the press’?”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” I said. “My condolences on your loss.”
She said, “Thanks.”
“How are you doing?”
“You’re the first person to ask. I appreciate it. Some of the people here seem to think I shouldn’t have come. When Hec died, I was in the process of moving out, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. God, what a shock this has been.”
In the process? I thought about that.
Guido walked up with a Steadycam on his shoulder and aimed it at the two of us.
“You don’t want to talk to me.” Gloria touched the back of her hair and looked away from the camera. “I never met Roy Frady. Sorry I can’t help you there.”
I said, “Hector has a big part in my Frady film. He did a lot of on-camera interviews. Talk to me about Hector. For background, tell me about living with a cop.”
“I am a cop. The question, can two cops live together? The answer, not easily. For one thing, I outrank Hector. For another, why is it that what’s okay for him somehow isn’t okay for me?”
“For instance?”
“He goes end of watch, goes out and gets loaded, screws around, and I’m supposed to understand because his job is so fucking stressful.” She started to cry, chin quivering, nose running. “But when I go end of watch, if I don’t come straight home, he loses it. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I understand you have a new relationship, with another cop.”
“Well.” Her shoulders went back, she wiped her eyes and nose on the back of her hand. “We don’t work together; he’s County Sheriff. And he doesn’t screw around.”
I said, “Mazel tov.”
“Yeah.” She sniffled, laughed gently, wistfully. “I’m too old for this shit. Time to hang it up.”
I wanted to ask exactly which shit she was too old for, but didn’t. Without saying good-bye, she turned and quickly walked down the hill toward the cars. She was openly sobbing when she got there.
Mike and I rode with Mary Helen to Hector’s mother’s house in Van Nuys. They talked about the old days and family picnics, first houses, first babies, and first divorces. Mike was more reticent than Mary Helen. She talked openly about smelling other women’s perfume on Roy’s clothing when she did the laundry, about demanding sex with him when he came in late as a sort of check on his activities, about him not coming home for days at a time. Mike laughed now and then, but he kept his part of the conversation on softball games and camping trips, as if reinforcing some ideal of Roy Frady, family man. Or reinforcing the image of Mike Flint, family man. I just listened.
The crowd at Mrs. Melendez’s was enormous, barely containable in the big backyard of her Valley tract house. Mike was concerned about fights breaking out: too much family history on a collision course around a tub full of beer. The various factions seemed to lay different territorial claims and, once their plates were served from the buffet, they avoided one another.
Mike walked me around, introducing me to people. After a while he attached himself to a group of old-timers from Seventy-seventh Street and swapped stories with them.
Doug came over with a beer in each hand. He drank one in a long gulp and handed Mike the empty. “Hey, Mike, this remind you of my wedding?”
“Which wedding, Senecal? You had four.”
“The last one. He ever tell you about it, Maggie?”
I said, “Why, no.” And settled in for the duration.
“Got married in the backyard of my in-laws’ house up in Whittier. Real nice place, big rose garden. My wife’s father is a sheriff. He didn’t want any problems, so he only served wine and beer—no hard stuff. That wasn’t good enough for Hector, so he goes down to the store and buys some Cuervo Gold, and sets up shooters. The guys get loaded, go out front and start shooting off their guns, knocking out streetlights—can’t do that shit anymore without taking a beef. My wife’s brother doesn’t want trouble with the neighbors, so he goes out to stop them—he’s a sheriff, too—gets in this brawl with Hector, gives him a black eye. Hector knocks him cold.”
Doug opened his second beer. “Quite a party, huh, Flint?”
“Quite a party.” Mike crushed the beer can. “Hector could be a mean drunk. I had to drive him home before he took out the whole neighborhood.”
“Hec drank all the time.” Doug opened his second beer. “Till a couple years ago, he even drank on the job. You wouldn’t know, though, unless you smelled it on him. He was a functioning alky. After work he’d hit the bars and get really loaded and really ugly. Mike was the only one who could control him.”
Doug sipped his beer. “like that time in Ensenada. Remember, Mike? Jeez, Hec was so gone, he was crazy. Had his two-inch out, trying to fight everyone in the bar. We were afraid they’d call the policia, and we didn’t want to mess with the Mexican police.”
Mike scowled. “I didn’t want anything to do with him. I was having a good time. Hell, it was Easter week and the place was full of horny female schoolteachers from San Diego. I didn’t want to get in a fight. But they kept coming to get me, telling me Hec was in trouble. I just told them to leave me out of it. Then they said the police were coming, and I didn’t want him to have to deal with that.
“So, I go into the bar and Hec can hardly stand up, he’s waving his gun, acting like a goddamn lunatic, threatening everyone. So, I just walk over to him and say, ‘What’s up?’ The damn fool hands me his gun, he says, ‘Hiya Mike,’ happy as can be. Kisses me right on the mouth. I took him up to bed and had to stay with him till he fell asleep.”
I said, “He kissed you and took you to bed? What else did he do?”
“Snored,” Mike said, eyes narrowed. “He just snored.”
“Makes me think of that sergeant with Gardena PD, gave us such a hard time.” Senecal was off on another tale, egging on Mike, as usual. “What was the deal you and Hector pulled?”
“Sergeant Lukash? That was me and Frady.”
“Yeah, you and Frady.” Doug looked at me. �
��Lukash was such a by-the-book hardnose, Gardena PD could hardly function during his watch. He was weird, too. His people didn’t want to be in the shower when he was around; lot of soap dropping.”
I said, “He was gay?”
Doug said, “He was repressed.”
Mike said, “Spell that, Senecal.”
“P-E-R-V-E-R-T,” Doug said. “So, what was the deal with the drive-in?”
“So,” Mike said, again, to me, but for everyone’s enlightenment. I was probably the only one who hadn’t heard the story five times already. “We were working the harbor strip, morning watch. Usually it was pretty quiet down there, mostly industrial, no one around at oh-dark-thirty. Just one car deployed per watch. We were maybe twenty minutes or more from LAPD backup if anything went down. So, if we needed help, we’d call in Gardena PD or Inglewood PD, whoever was closer. I liked calling in Gardena. Those guys were fun, always ready for a fight. If I had a choice, that’s who I’d call.
“There was this drive-in there on Vermont, about Vermont and One hundred and third, right on the L.A.-Gardena city line. The theater was in Gardena, out of our territory, and we weren’t supposed to go in there unless we got a help call. But one night, around midwatch, me and Frady got bored—I told you it was quiet down there. So we drove through the drive-in, watched the bouncing cars, drove out. No big deal, but the manager didn’t like it. He called Lukash. Lukash filed a formal beef—he didn’t have our shop number, so the whole watch took heat. Our sergeant knew it was probably us who did it, but he wasn’t about to give that to Lukash.
“The next night, end of watch, sun isn’t up yet, colder than hell, me and Frady and these two guys from Gardena who hated Lukash’s guts, we all meet up over at the drive-in. Four, five o’clock in the morning, no one’s around.
“There’s this big marquee over the ticket booths, and when they take down the letters to change the movies, they just leave them lying up there on the roof. So we climb up, change the marquee to read, ‘Sgt. Lukash Is a Cocksucker.’ Sign it Gardena PD.
“Lukash goes ballistic. Calls in SID to dust for prints. Tries to isolate tire marks. He’s so hot to find us, he blows a bigtime bookie sting out at Hollywood Park because all his backup is at the drive-in. Couple of his undercover people nearly got hit.”
I was the only one not finding the story hilarious. “Did he find your prints?”
“Hell no.” Mike gave me a superior leer. “It was cold. We all had gloves on. The thing is, Lukash got a thirty-day suspension, got reassigned to day patrol. Couldn’t take the razzing when he got back, went out on stress disability.”
“When?” I asked.
Mike shrugged, Doug shrugged, a couple of the others did, too.
I asked, “How long before Frady died did this happen?”
“Frady died in May?” Mike thought for a moment. “I’m thinking this was after Christmas. January, February of that year.”
I said, “Hmm.”
“Lukash?” Mike frowned, thought about it, looked at Doug. “Where is the son of a bitch now?”
“I would know?” Senecal took a third beer out of his pocket, popped it open, and took a long drink. Then he handed the can to Mike. “Hold this for me. If Rebecca comes by and sees me drinking, I’m back in the doghouse for sure.”
Hector’s old gray-haired mother was smashed. She came stumbling across the lawn in stocking feet wailing, “My boy, my boy.” She either tripped or she flung herself, but somehow she ended up draped all over Mike. Tears and snot running down her lined face, she appealed to him. “Mikey, what am I gonna do? It was murder, Mikey. Plain old murder. And now my boy’s gone. What’s gonna happen to me?”
“You’ll be okay, Mrs. Melendez. Let’s go in and sit down.” Mike gestured for Doug, and the two of them carted her back into the house between them. I followed, straightened her dress for her when they deposited her on a living room sofa.
When Mike stood back, I said, “I think it’s time to leave.”
“Me, too. Some of the guys used to work Seventy-seventh thought we’d go up to the academy, raise a glass to Hec. Want to come?”
“Sounds like a private wake. I’ll come by for one drink, but I won’t stay,” I said. “Do you mind if I send Guido to the academy to shoot a few frames?”
“Sure. We’ll show him how real men drink. Maybe we’ll introduce him to some sweet young thing.”
“Fine. Just promise me you won’t drive yourself home shit-faced.”
He kissed the side of my neck. “I’ll get a ride from some sweetie.”
“As long as she isn’t drunk.”
He frowned. “That’s it? As long as she isn’t drunk?”
“What do you want? A lecture on monogamy?”
“Now and then.”
I patted his abdomen, felt him pull it in. “Did you have fun last night, Mike?”
“Definitely. Both the premier and the rerun.”
“Weigh last night against what Sweetie has to offer you, then decide which you want. Remember that you can’t have both.”
CHAPTER
10
The bartender at the academy started pouring Bacardi and Coke, Hector’s drink, as soon as the crowd walked in the door. Tall glasses, twenty deep, covered the bar. Within half an hour, there were a hundred officers in the Embers Room drinking rum and Coke. Within an hour, there were a hundred officers well on their way to oblivion.
I came back from the ladies’ room at one point to hear Mike telling a crowd of about eight old-timers, “He’d given up booze. When we went into his apartment after he died, Hec’s dinner was still on the table. All he had to drink was a glass of water.”
“He had dinner on the table?” I asked. “I thought he was out running.”
Mike looked aside at me. “Maybe it was his lunch. The point is, he was drinking water.”
I took a Bacardi and Coke off the bar and drank it to Hector, who was finally straight when he died.
Doug put an empty glass on the bar and reached for a full one. He reached for me, too, pulled me against him, smooched my ear and went on with the story he had been telling his knot of listeners before I walked over. “So the case gets to court. Mike’s on the stand explaining to the public defender why we went down in there. He says, ‘My partner and I saw a light coming from the vacant building, we know no one should be over there, so we went to investigate. We saw the defendant on top of the girl and observed that they were engaged in sexual intercourse. She asked for our help, so my partner and I then arrested the man and booked him for rape.’
“So the PD asks were we aware the girl’s a deaf-mute? Mike says we found that out later. The PD says, if the girl can’t speak, how did Mike and I decide this wasn’t consensual sex between adults? Mike says, ‘I trained my flashlight on her and she mouthed, Help me.’ The PD says, ‘Are you trained in lip-reading, Officer Flint?’ Mike says, ‘No. But I can read help me.’ The PD says, ‘How did you acquire this skill? Did you watch Ingmar Bergman movies without subtitles or something to practice lipreading?’ And Mike, swear to God, doesn’t miss a beat, doesn’t crack a smile. He says, ‘No sir, I don’t read Swedish.’”
To the sounds of general laughter, I walked over to Mike and put my arm through his. “It’s time for me to go.”
His lips were icy against mine, smelled of rum. “You can stay,” he said.
“I know. But I have a lot of work to do, and I’ll just be in the way after one more drink. Take care of yourself.” I nuzzled the soft place at the side of his neck that belongs to me, and we walked toward the door together hand in hand. “Call a taxi, or call me.”
Doug followed us, draped an arm around me, and held me back. “You can’t go, sweet thing. Olga heard Mike’ll be here and she’s on her way. If you go, who knows what will happen.”
Olga was a “police regular” I found bouncing on Mike’s lap one night, a year or so ago. It had been her idea, not his. He just neglected to dump her off. And someone, thinking he was awfully d
amn funny, gave her Mike’s home number.
I said, “Mike’s a grown-up. He can choose for himself, me or Olga.”
“Ooo, hooh,” Doug sang. “Sounds like the three-strike rule hangs over our boy.”
“Got that right,” I said, grabbing a handful of Mike’s shirtfront. “One more strike and he’s a free agent.”
The afternoon was hot and smoggy. I burned off the rum by walking down to Chinatown, maybe a mile away, and all downhill. On North Broadway, I picked up the Wilshire bus and rode out to where I had left my car. I paid the parking lot attendant a fee roughly equivalent to a night’s stay in a pretty good midwestern hotel, turned west out of the lot, and kept driving until I reached the ocean in Santa Monica.
Hector had lived in a high-rise across from the beach, in an apartment he had rented with Gloria. When I parked in front, I had no plan. I didn’t know the area very well, and couldn’t think of anywhere else to go at the moment except back to work. The truth is, something Gloria Marcuse had said bothered me.
I was able to get through the secured front door of Hector’s building by catching it before it latched shut after a UPS man. I went to the manager’s first-floor apartment and knocked on the door.
“Do you remember me?” I asked.
The manager’s name was either Sarah or Sandra, I couldn’t remember. Hector had introduced us a couple of times when we had been over barbecuing around the pool. I had never seen her in a dress before, or in anything except a bikini or a unitard. Sarah or Sandra was a professional bodybuilder and all the time we stood in the hall outside her apartment, even though she wore a silk dress with lace at the neck, she was doing arm curls with five-pound weights.
“Maggie?” She tested my name. “I saw you at the funeral.”
“Sorry I missed you. It was a big crowd.”
“No shit.” Even her jaws were muscular. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m not sure. Gloria was at the funeral, too.”
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