Genesys X

by B. J. Graf

  “Women just fall at your feet, don’t they?” Shin said. “I saw Bogardus hit on you back there. Must be nice.”

  Cars packed the streets as we headed south towards Sunset. I dodged the ever-present potholes and cracked tarmac. Stuck in gridlock a little further along, Shin put in a call to Vice for background on the Sandy Beaches Gentlemen’s Club.

  “Randy Bitches Strip Joint?” Detective Petra Miller’s face appeared on the car’s screen as we inched along in traffic.

  “Call girl set up?” I asked.

  “Allegedly.” Miller’s hands framed the word with air quotes. When she smiled, Miller’s eyes almost disappeared in her chubby face like raisins in rising dough. “Sandy was an aspiring actress back in the day. Now she caters to big time clients with gutter type tastes – actors, studio executives, businessmen.”

  “Why no rap sheet?”

  “Good lawyers, bad evidence.” Miller winked.

  “This girl Britney who worked for her wasn’t so lucky,” Shin said. “She had a prior from 2039 – for soliciting and possession.”

  “Probably another ingenue who didn’t make it,” Det. Miller said. “Most of Sandy’s girls get hauled in eventually. For hooking or holding. But none of ‘em have turned on her–yet.”

  Shin and I turned east on Sunset Boulevard. Traffic started to flow more smoothly. Overhead, white pod-cars shaped like Tylenol capsules hummed along their monorails, ferrying tourists from posh hotels to Rodeo Drive. The interlinked LV Louis Vuitton logo glittered on the side of the white cars: more corporate tagging.

  Shin and I thanked Det. Miller and finished the drive to the club. Located on the east side of Sunset, Sandy Beaches Gentlemen’s Club was conveniently sandwiched between a drive-through spray tan boutique and a Dr. Tatt-Off ink removal. The club’s façade was relatively low key and up-market. No flashing neon signs hawked naked girls inside. We parked in the underground lot.

  A bouncer with twenty-inch biceps and the hint of a Santa Muerte tattoo peeking over his shirt collar checked i.d. at the door. At his side sat a black pit bull with a spiked collar that flashed the club’s logo.

  The club’s less threatening beach motif immediately manifested itself in the central sand box where the girls danced, the inverted beach umbrellas hanging from the ceiling, and the patio loungers, scattered around the club on which clients reclined. Blue light, endemic to all strip clubs because it hid flaws on the skin, gave the feel here of being underwater or surfing in the tube of a perfect wave. Sandy Beaches even pumped surf music with a heightened drumbeat pounding underneath. The thumping bass gave an erotic twist to the otherwise vanilla music. Judging by the clientele, they made a mean umbrella drink too.

  The dancers weren’t unattractive, but the best earners wouldn’t be working for hours yet. The Latina with waist-length blue-black hair currently working the pole looked to be nearer forty than thirty.

  I glanced round at the clients. A few drunk and cocky college boys, yelling and whistling, were peppered in amongst the silent, bleary-eyed middle-aged guys.

  Most of the girls had that hard edge exotic dancers get once coke lines on the mirror start to carve lines on the face. But Britney had been in her late twenties. She’d have had a few years yet before reaching the sell-past age. It made me wonder again why she’d been fired.

  The bartender was a burly black guy in his late 20’s, dressed in swim trunks, polo shirt and flip flops. Shin and I approached him, badges out.

  The muscles told me he lifted weights religiously. His tats told me where and why. Blue ink from the earliest, amateur, work had been placed too deep in the skin, giving the tattoo a raised texture like a brand. A pro had re-inked over part of the design, turning it into an armlet of barbed wire. But I could just make out the five-digit number buried under that newer layer of ink–94974. San Quentin has its own zip code.

  “We’d like to talk to Sandy Rose,” Shin said as we both reached for our lapels and flicked on the body-cams.

  The bartender’s eyes did a slow-motion ricochet back and forth between our faces and the badges, as he continued to wipe down the smooth surface of the bar. Peeking out from under the right sleeve of his polo shirt was the tattoo of a gun. Its barrel pointed straight out at me. Next to the gun was printed the initials “BGF.” Unless this Q alum was declaring himself Sandy’s best girlfriend forever, he was a shooter for the Black Guerilla Family. He hadn’t tried to re-ink this little memento. Either Sandy Rose was a charitable citizen looking to help rehabilitate the city’s felons, or she had some pretty serious security.

  After a moment, the bartender reached out and flashed a hand signal to the wall sensor on his right.

  “Yes, Deshawn?” responded a disembodied female voice. “What is it?”

  His eyes darted from the security cams overhead back to us.

  In no time at all the owner of the Sandy Beaches Gentlemen’s Club made her appearance, slipping in from a previously hidden doorway in the back wall before the door was once again swallowed up by the seamless wall.

  Sandy Rose looked like her name, tanned and delicate as a flower pressed in a heavy family Bible - except for the porn size implants standing at attention beneath her tasteful suit jacket. Her smooth face was flawlessly made-up to look dewy and make-up-free, her dark blonde hair perfectly cut to frame her face. I put her age at an early forty-something.

  Sandy’s head barely crested my shoulder, but she moved with authority. She didn’t ask to see our badges.

  “Detectives,” she said immediately, smiling as she held out her hand to shake Shin’s and mine in turn. “I’m Sandy Rose. Is there a problem? Our permits are up to date.”

  Her hands made me revise my earlier age estimate. Thin-skinned and riddled with thick ropey veins, they vibed a good thirty years older than the perfect, polished face and perky implants.

  “It’s about your employee,” Shin said. “Britney Devonshire.”

  Sandy’s sherry-colored eyes flickered. At the mention of Britney’s name, those amber orbs glanced up from our body-cams to the security camera overhead. “Former employee,” Sandy said. “I’m afraid we had to let her go.”

  “When was that?” Shin asked.

  “A week ago, give or take.” Sandy’s upper-forehead puckered while her brows stayed immobile – the botox frown. “Has she gotten into trouble?”

  “Why’d you fire her?” Shin smiled his easy-going smile and tapped his fingers to the beat of the music.

  “We have a strict no-drug rule, Detective. Enforced by random drug tests.” Sandy fiddled with the bracelets on her arm. The golden charms tinkled with an agreeable music of their own. “Britney tested positive for green ice. I was sorry, but she left me no choice.”

  “So, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear she’d died of an overdose,” Shin said.

  “My god.” The news shattered the hard glint of those red-gold eyes. If she was acting, Sandy Rose was more talented than her critics let on.

  “I’m sorry,” Shin said, reflexively pulling up a barstool for her. He signaled to the bartender for some water.

  “I’m fine,” Sandy said, waving Deshawn away. But her hand trembled a little as she fidgeted with those bracelets again. “We weren’t especially close, Detective. It’s just a–shock. I knew she used of course, on account of her test results. But still-she was so young.”

  “You said she tested positive for green ice?”

  “That’s right,” Sandy replied.

  “And that was a week ago?” Shin smiled gently. “When you tested her I mean?”

  “Yes.” Her voice maintained a steady calm, except for the wariness which crept around the edges.

  “Had you tested her before that?”

  “When we first hired her a few years ago. Of course, at that time she tested negative.”

  “Of course,” Shin said. His glance told me Shin was ready to wind things up.

  “When you fired her,” I said, “did Britney seem unusually upset or depressed?�
� The cat lady neighbor had said Britney wasn’t – which seemed odd.

  “No one likes to be fired, Detective.” Sandy shifted her gaze to me.

  I nodded. “Did she mention anybody who was bothering her? Maybe a customer? You’ve got some pretty heavy-duty security working here.”

  “My security team is here to discourage bothersome customers proactively,” Sandy said. Britney certainly never filed a complaint or raised an issue.”

  “Was she causing trouble with the customers or the other girls?” I glanced at the glassy-eyed girl. “Is that why you tested her?”

  The Latina with the blue-black hair was watching us with interest as she gyrated round that pole.

  Sandy’s chin lifted a millimeter. Then she smiled thinly and shook her head. “Like I said, drug tests are random.”

  “Of course,” Shin said in his affable baritone. “We won’t keep you any longer, Ms. Rose.” He turned to leave.

  “I didn’t catch your names, detectives,” Sandy said, looking directly at me. “And here I thought I knew everyone from Vice.”

  “Detectives Piedmont and Miyaguchi.” I made sure to pronounce every syllable clearly. Sandy Rose wasn’t wearing a glove phone I could tap for contact transfer, so I handed her my card. “Robbery-Homicide.”

  The word ‘homicide’ hit home. Sandy’s eyes narrowed to a squint as she stared at the card. Her lips seemed to pale under the neutral lipstick. For the first time, her face looked almost as old as her hands.

  “So, the overdose,” she said, “wasn’t accidental? You think Britney was depressed because of - her job - and she…” Sandy Rose’s words trailed off into silence.

  “Can’t say,” I replied. “The case is ongoing.”

  She nodded. “Poor girl. If I’d known she was that close to the edge...” Sandy was sitting now, her eyes were even a little moist. But I felt them burning holes on my back as Shin and I left.

  “We’ll probably never know for sure,” Shin said as soon as we stepped outside the club and headed for the underground parking lot. “Accident or suicide, it’s not always clear-cut.”

  I didn’t say anything as we flicked off our body cameras. From one hundred feet away the car sensors read our barcodes and unlocked the doors with a chirp.

  “You’re not convinced,” Shin said, getting in. “Why? You don’t buy the boss’s story?”

  I raised and dropped my shoulders in a shrug. “I buy that Sandy Rose canned Britney and isn’t happy Homicide turned up on her door.”

  “But?”

  “A strict no drug policy? In a strip club? Half my salary and all of yours says a third of the girls there were high. Why no drug tests for them?”

  “Everybody lies,” Shin said. “Sandy probably only tests employees she already wants to can, but makes it just random enough to seem plausible. That way management avoids any potential discrimination charges. You saw the way she eyeballed our cameras and hers.”

  “Except, if the Devonshire girl had been using prior to getting fired,” I said, punching the ignition and backing out of the parking space, “where were the fresh tracks on the body? And if she wasn’t using, or causing trouble, why fire a hot young earner when you keep older users on the payroll?”

  Shin paused. His chin dipped to his chest in a slow-motion nod. “When’s that autopsy scheduled?”

  “Monday.” I drove us back out onto the street.

  “Let’s worry about it Monday then,” Shin replied with a heavy sigh. “Log us out. I’m ready for a drink.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thirty minutes later, I’d parked the car on the street a little way down from the Code Seven VR-Bar. Perched on the border between Hollywood and NOHO, the cop bar was an easy half-block walk down Cahuenga Boulevard.

  As we strolled toward the entrance, Shin undid the top two buttons of his turquoise and ebony shirt.

  “So, how’re you gonna pop the question to Jo?” Shin said. “Drone ring drop, stadium marquee, or your basic grovel on the knees at an overpriced restaurant?”

  He pulled his shirttail free, letting it hang loose over the belt of his 501 jeans. The weave of his shirt’s solar-block fabric tightened in the heat of the sun’s rays, making the palm trees on the Hawaiian shirt seem to sway in a breeze.

  “Jo’s not into big public displays.” I pulled the ring box out of my suit pocket and held it open for him to see. “Will she like it, you think?”

  Shin squinched his face against the glare and glanced appreciatively at the two carat emerald-cut diamond. “Set you back ten grand?”

  “More.”

  Shin’s low whistle was appreciative.

  The ring did more than sparkle in that light. Sun, so hot it shimmered off the pavement, pooled in the air. Everything looked solarized – colors the bleached tones of Navaho blankets left too long in the sun.

  “Jo’d say yes to zirconium,” Shin said. “But even Ahn would approve of that.”

  Ahn, Shin’s wife of twenty-six years, was almost as devoted to the finer things in life as she was to him. My partner pulled a Hanshin Tigers baseball cap out of his back pocket and jammed it on his shaved head without breaking stride.

  I eye-balled his outfit and smiled. Shin habitually morphed to a casual-Friday look as soon as his shift was over, but I liked the grey suit and fedora of the RHD. A personal rebellion against the casual everyday world our fathers left us. Today the streets were a sea of hats. What started as another hipster fad had taken hold as necessary protection from the sun five years back.

  “I gotta see that,” Shin yelled, pointing up at the digital billboards for “Batman vs. Dracula Three.” Digital bats chased each other up and around the sides of adjacent skyscrapers.

  The billboards made my eyes burn. “You already have,” I yelled back over the noise of the ads. “They just made it faster.”

  “Give in to the dark side of the force,” Shin intoned in a mock-serious voice. “Everybody else has.”

  Advertainment was everywhere. An eighty-ish woman with a parasol flashing a promo for Sun Salute solar panels passed us by. Faded sleeve tattoos blanketed her withered arms. I couldn’t make out the design. Any red or green had long ago bled back into the body, leaving only the blue-black smudge. At least the deceased Britney Devonshire’s rice paper skin was spared that degradation.

  Once inside the Code Seven the bar’s sensors muffled the street racket. With its dark wood and crimson leather booths, the Code Seven was a high tech replicant of a 1940’s cop bar. There were virtual reality booths along the wall where the occasional tourist could role play a crime scene with Bogart’s Sam Spade, minus the half-open milky white eyes and stink of real death.

  Cops just came for the whisky and beer.

  Shin accepted a frosty mug of Moon Harvest Kirin 2040 from the bartender.

  I signaled him to put Shin’s beer on my tab and ordered a double shot of twelve-year-old Hakushu single malt for myself. There was a heavy satisfying weight to the glass tumbler in my hand. I took off my hat and set it on the bar next to a vintage bowl of fresh peanuts.

  Shin tapped my glass with his frosty mug and gulped down a mouthful of beer.

  The whisky burned my throat and left a warm happy glow.

  “Piedmont, you drinkin’ whisky?” a familiar voice boomed from the entrance to the bar. “I thought you only sucked down wheatgrass lattes so you can keep that girlish figure camera-ready.” The voice belonged to Detective Timberman from NOHO Homicide.

  Timberman was a study in beige. His light brown hair, eyes, trucker tan, beige shirt, polyester jacket and Dockers all blended into a mash-up of bland on bland.

  I shot a glance at his gut, spilling over his belt. “Looks like you could use a couple wheatgrass lattes.” I signaled to the bartender, who set a glass of Johnny Walker Red on the polished oak for Timbo.

  He smiled. Timberman had unusually small teeth of grayish yellow. “So, ladies,” he continued as he ambled over to us and lowered his bulk onto the barstool like
an elephant settling in at a watering hole. “What brings you to sit with us peasants in the 8-1-8?” He tossed back the whisky.

  “Your lieutenant called us in to cover your ass.” I grinned and filled him in on the dead stripper case.

  “And here I thought RHD finally kicked out the Boy Wonder.” Timbo belched.

  Boy Wonder. Three years ago, I’d brought down a serial killer who’d terrorized the city. The department had promoted me and plastered my face all over L.A. in order to take advantage of the rare good publicity. So, at the age of twenty-six I’d moved from NOHO to Homicide Special, one of the youngest D-2’s ever to make the unit. Timberman wasn’t the only cop who had never stopped giving me grief.

  “Have some peanuts, Timberman.” Shin slid the bowl towards him. “They’ll take away that taste of sour grapes.”

  Timbo smirked.

  “You working the Zeta war?” I said.

  North Hollywood was ground zero for the ongoing turf battle between the Zetas and AzteKas, two rival gangs tied to Mexican drug cartels. With profits from the marijuana market down since pot went legal, they’d flooded the city with Green Ice and other illicit drugs. As they fought for territory, the gangs were tearing big bloody chunks out of each other and leaving the chum for the police to mop up. Three of those bodies left behind were corpses the Medical Examiner had to finish before the Britney Devonshire autopsy.

  An old song floated over the soft light of the dingy bar. Cigar smoke circled heavily around the guys’ heads like a spectral cat, mocking the ‘no smoking’ signs.

  More cops migrated into the Code Seven, celebrating a birthday. Timberman joined them. Shin and I stayed at the bar for another round, chatting about his daughter Yasuko’s second year at UCLA and the hit his bank account was taking. The small talk got smaller, and we stood to go.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while, Eddie.” Jack the bartender handed me a Redbull for Shin and a ChillWater for myself before picking up glasses and wiping down the polished oak.

  I nodded and held out my wrist–exposing the standard identification barcode tattooed there. Flashing his diamond studded teeth in an answering grin, Jack waved the sensor over the chip embedded under the skin of the tattoo, recording my purchase. I handed Shin the Redbull as we headed out the door.