The Crooked Street

by Brian Freeman

  “Speaking of the city council, you said you were going to approach some of your contacts at city hall. Did you?”

  Herb nodded. “I did, but I’m not sure what I found will help you. Most of the younger people in the building said they know nothing about it, and the original Lombard story was long before their time.”

  “But?”

  “But I did talk to one old codger like me. He goes back to my time, and he remembered the story. He’s been a true believer all these years. He described Lombard the way Inspector Gorham did, as a problem solver for the rich and powerful. As far as this man is concerned, it’s not clear whether the people who run the city are using Lombard to stay in power—or whether Lombard is using them for his own ends.”

  “Do you trust this man?” Frost asked.

  Herb’s eyes twinkled behind his black glasses. “Well, I recall an impassioned conversation with him in the 1970s about the authenticity of the moon landings. He was dubious.”

  Frost shook his head. “Great.”

  Herb chuckled as he finished his chai. “So what’s your next step?”

  “I need to find out more about Alan Detlowe’s murder,” Frost said. “Even after three years, there’s something about that case that seems to make Lombard nervous. As soon as I found out that Fawn had met with Detlowe, they came after us and made sure Coyle’s surveillance notes disappeared. Plus, Fawn was in contact with Denny, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s some kind of link between these cases.”

  “If you don’t have Coyle’s notes, how do you proceed?” Herb asked.

  “I’m going to talk to Detlowe’s wife. She hired Coyle, so maybe she has copies of what he found.”

  Herb began to reply, but then he stopped in midsentence. Across the street, there was activity in the Victorian house he’d been watching. A woman came through the door with a young boy in tow, and she unlocked the gate at the bottom of the steps and headed for a blue Volkswagen parked up the street. Herb’s eyes followed mother and son until they got in the car and did a U-turn. Even after they were gone, Herb sat in silence, lost in another world, as if Frost weren’t there at all.

  “Friends of yours?” Frost asked.

  “What?” Herb looked startled by the question.

  “You seemed very interested in that woman and her son.”

  “Oh no, no,” Herb went on. “I don’t know who they are at all.”

  “Well, you’ve hardly taken your eyes off their house since we got here,” Frost said.

  Herb studied the house again. It was nothing special, just one of thousands of Victorian row homes dotting the city. Pea-green paint, beige trim, white columns on either side of the steps. And yet every time Herb looked at the house, something about it seemed to draw him into a tunnel where the opposite end was far away.

  “Once upon a time, I lived there,” Herb murmured. “The upstairs apartment was mine.”

  “When was this?” Frost asked.

  “From 1967 to 1969.”

  “That was your Summer of Love pad? Right there?”

  Herb nodded. “Yes.”

  “How come I didn’t know that?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember a lot of that time,” Herb replied, “and much of what I do remember, I’d like to forget.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Frost had heard many stories over the years of Herb’s youth in the drug-crazed, free-love world of San Francisco in the 1960s. Herb had known everyone back then. The rockers. The politicians. The protesters. However, there was always a shadow surrounding Herb when he talked about those days. A reluctance, a sadness, a regret.

  “So why are we here?” Frost asked.

  Herb took off his black glasses. He wiped his eyes, which seemed to be tearing up. “I’ve told you about Silvia, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, you have.”

  Silvia had been Herb’s girlfriend for a sex-soaked summer of music, LSD, and protest in 1968. He’d described her as his one true love. She was the reason he’d never married anyone else. They’d been together for two months, but then she’d vanished without a word, a note, or an apology. He’d never seen her again.

  “You remember the circumstances of her departure?”

  “She disappeared,” Frost said.

  “That’s right.” Herb was wearing a rust-colored button-down wool sweater, and he reached into one of the pockets and drew out a folded letter on heavy watermarked stationery. “This was delivered to me by courier yesterday. It’s from a lawyer in Houston. Apparently, Silvia’s brother hired him to look into the circumstances of her disappearance. The brother has cancer, you see, and is looking for some kind of closure about his sister before he dies. The lawyer wants to meet with me to talk about what happened to her. We lived together, and as far as I know, I was the last person to see her alive.”

  Frost frowned. “Okay. That makes sense.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “I assume you talked to the police back then.”

  “Naturally,” Herb said, “but in those days, it wasn’t unusual for young people to pick up and disappear. If you wanted to vanish, it wasn’t particularly hard. There was no Internet watching our every breath. The police thought Silvia had gotten bored and moved on, but I never could bring myself to believe that she’d done that. We were in love.”

  “What do you think happened to her?” Frost asked.

  Herb’s eyes were dark and hooded. “I think someone killed her.”

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “No, but this lawyer obviously does.”

  Frost took the letter from Herb’s hand and read it. He was a lawyer himself, although he’d graduated from law school with no interest in working as an attorney. However, his legal background meant that he knew exactly how lawyers layered their true meaning behind the bland words of their correspondence. Herb was right. The backstory to the letter practically screamed from the page. Silvia’s brother and his lawyer were both convinced that Herb had murdered Silvia.

  “This is what you meant the other day, isn’t it?” Frost asked. “You were concerned about rumors. You thought they were leading up to some kind of specific accusation.”

  Herb nodded. “The rumors soften people up to believe the worst about me. They’ll say I killed Silvia and hid her body.”

  “But you’re innocent,” Frost said.

  “Of murder? Yes, of course. But I already told you that I was a different man back then. After so much time, innocence becomes a slippery thing. Mark my words, Frost. They’re coming for me.”

  Frost’s fingers tightened around the coffee mug. He took a sip, but it had turned cold in the morning air. “It can’t be a coincidence that this is happening right now.”

  “Oh no. This had to have been planned for some time, but for them to pull the trigger now? In the midst of your investigation? That’s not an accident. It’s a shot across the bow. Someone is painting a target on me, Frost. Which also suggests they’re painting a target on you.”

  “They want me to stop going after Lombard,” Frost said.

  “Yes, I suspect that’s the message.”

  “I walk away, and the lawyer goes away, too. The rumors about you stop.”

  “Precisely.”

  Frost studied the ordinary little Victorian house on the other side of the street. In his eyes, fifty years washed away. He could imagine it painted in wild colors, windows open in the summer, scratchy vinyl records playing Jefferson Airplane. He could see the young people on the hot streets, long haired, topless. And in the midst of it was Herb, when his hair wasn’t gray and his knees were good and there were no lines of wisdom and age on his skin.

  “Do you want me to stop?” Frost asked. “Say the word, and I will. Headquarters thinks Diego Casal killed Denny. No one wants me to dig further. Lombard can stay a myth for all I care.”

  Herb reached across the small table and took hold of Frost’s wrist. His grip was fiercely strong, and his gravelly voice was like a needle getting to
the end of an old LP. “Absolutely, unequivocally, no.”

  “You’re my best friend, Herb,” Frost told him. “I will not let these people destroy you.”

  “Oh, I’m an old man. There’s very little they can do to me now. If I know one thing about you, Frost, it’s that you have a moral code. Remember what your old boss, Ms. Salceda, used to say? You’re a Boy Scout. You won’t compromise yourself. I certainly won’t have you do it for me.”

  “If I talk to Detlowe’s wife,” Frost said, “they’ll know I haven’t given up. At that point, there’s no going back.”

  “Then talk to her. Find the truth. We both know Lombard is real. You need to expose him.”

  They sat in silence as the day brightened, and more people arrived at the café, and traffic began to fill the streets. Frost finished his cold coffee. He knew further argument was wasted with Herb, and in the end, his friend was right. Frost couldn’t stop. That wasn’t who he was.

  He began to get up from the table, but as he did, Herb motioned him back.

  “One more thing,” Herb murmured so that only the two of them could hear. “If Lombard is everything we suspect, then he’s a resourceful and violent enemy. You need to be extremely careful. He’s your Moriarty, Frost. Taking him down will be the most dangerous thing you’ve ever done.”

  27

  Marjorie Detlowe lived in a small row house south of the fog-swept trails of Lincoln Park. The rocky overlook at the Pacific coast was only two blocks away, and the damp chill of the ocean was always in the air. It was an old neighborhood, but the house looked new, with fresh blue paint, bright-white Tudor crossbeams, and a single steep gable. A red MINI Cooper was parked in the driveway.

  The forty-something woman who answered the door had fluffy hair that was more silver than blond. She wore a white crocheted sweater and pleated slacks that were loose enough to hide a couple of extra pounds on her frame. At her feet, a gray terrier barked excitedly until she bent down and scooped him into her arms.

  “Ms. Detlowe?” Frost said. “I’m Inspector Frost Easton. I was hoping to ask you a few questions about Alan.”

  Her smile was friendly, but her head cocked in surprise. “I’m sorry, isn’t Trent Gorham still with the police? I thought he was in charge of Alan’s investigation.”

  “He is, but Alan’s name came up in the context of a different case. I’m following up.”

  “Oh, all right. You better come in.”

  She waved him through the doorway and put down the dog, which scampered ahead of them to the living room. Frost took a seat on the sofa, and the dog jumped up and sniffed around him, as if immediately suspicious that Frost was a cat person. Marjorie sat on the adjacent love seat and patted the cushion beside her, and the dog quickly relocated to her lap.

  “Let me say first how sorry I am for your loss,” Frost said.

  “Thank you. Three years probably seems like a long time, but it may as well have been yesterday. You learn to live with it, but you never get over it. And please, call me Marjorie. I’m a police widow. We’re all part of the same team. You said your name was Frost?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What an unusual name. I like it. Well, what can I tell you, Frost?”

  He hesitated because he wasn’t sure if the cordial rapport between them would evaporate with his first question. “This is actually a little awkward.”

  “Oh, please don’t worry about that. Charge ahead. What do you want to know?”

  “I believe you’re familiar with a private detective named Richard Coyle,” Frost said.

  Marjorie turned her eyes down to her lap. She stroked her fingers idly through her dog’s curly fur. “Ah. Now I see.”

  “Mr. Coyle told me that you hired him to follow your husband not long before he was murdered.”

  “Yes, I did. I feel stupid about it now. I hope Alan never found out. I would feel awful to think that he knew I didn’t trust him, given what happened.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking—why didn’t you trust him?”

  Marjorie shook her head and looked embarrassed. “Oh, it was as much me as him. It was a time of my life where I wasn’t feeling good about myself. I’d gone through cancer treatment and had major surgery done. It took an emotional toll, not just a physical toll. I had trouble seeing myself as an attractive woman after that. I became obsessed with the idea that Alan was going to look elsewhere, that he would never be satisfied with me again. Part of it was his job, of course. He dealt with all these women whose lives revolved around sex. It had never bothered me before, but at that particular juncture, I questioned everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frost said.

  “That was the worst year of my life. First the cancer, then Alan’s murder. Afterward, I felt guilty about having him followed, because Mr. Coyle never found any evidence that he was unfaithful. You’d think that would have made me feel better, but it only made me feel worse about what I’d done. I was caught up in this awful cycle of jealousy and self-hatred. Of course, it didn’t help that Alan was such a handsome man. Have you seen pictures of him?”

  Frost shook his head. “I haven’t.”

  Marjorie reached into a pocket for her phone. “All I have left of him are a few digital photos.”

  She handed him the phone, and Frost saw a picture of Alan Detlowe with his wife at what was obviously a Christmas party. He could see mistletoe above them, and Alan wore a big smile as his wife kissed his cheek. Alan was tall and broad shouldered, with trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and a discreet mustache. His chin was chiseled and square. Marjorie was right. He was a good-looking man.

  Frost swiped to the next photograph, which showed two men mugging for the camera at the same party, with their hands wrapped playfully around each other’s necks.

  One was Alan Detlowe. The other was Trent Gorham.

  “Were Alan and Trent good friends?” Frost asked.

  “Oh, best friends. Alan was about ten years older than Trent, but the two of them were practically brothers. They worked together for years at vice, you know. Trent was devastated by Alan’s death.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Trent was very sweet to me afterward. He was always checking in on me to make sure I had everything I needed. I know he feels bad that he hasn’t been able to bring Alan’s killer to justice, but I understand how hard it is. The badge on your shirt makes you a target. If you’re good at your job, you make a lot of enemies.”

  “Did Trent know that you’d hired Coyle?” Frost asked.

  “Yes, eventually, I admitted it to him. I was ashamed of myself, but I realized he needed to know everything. Trent and Coyle talked, but unfortunately, Trent told me there was nothing helpful in what Coyle had discovered. That made me sad. At least if hiring Coyle had helped identify Alan’s killer, I would have felt better about losing faith. I suppose that sounds foolish.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Frost said. “In fact, I’m hoping that there might still be useful information in what Coyle found.”

  “I don’t see how,” Marjorie replied.

  “As I mentioned, another case has come up, and it’s possible Alan was looking into it in the days before he disappeared. Unfortunately, Coyle’s surveillance notes aren’t available. I was hoping you might have copies of the reports he sent to you about Alan.”

  Marjorie shook her head. “No, I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Did you destroy them?” Frost asked.

  “I intended to, but honestly, I couldn’t bear to take them out of my desk and look at them. They were a bad reminder to me. However, as it happens, the reports were destroyed anyway. God works in mysterious ways.”

  Frost looked at her, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “About six months after Alan’s death, this house burned down. I lost everything. All of the memorabilia from our marriage was gone. It was like losing Alan all over again. And of course, the reports Coyle had given me were destroyed, too.”

  “You rebuilt in the s
ame spot?”

  “Yes, I did. I didn’t want to move anywhere else.”

  Frost leaned forward with curiosity. “How did the fire start?”

  “The fire department says I left an old electric space heater plugged in, and it must have been sparked by a power surge. I don’t remember doing it, but I wasn’t exactly myself that year. It’s just lucky that I was away with my sister that weekend.”

  Frost didn’t think that luck had anything to do with it.

  He also didn’t think that Marjorie Detlowe had left her space heater plugged in. The fire was Lombard’s doing, making sure there was no evidence left behind of what Alan Detlowe had been investigating in his final days.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more help,” Marjorie added. “Did you talk to Mr. Coyle? He may have kept his notes.”

  Frost looked at her. “Dick Coyle was murdered two nights ago.”

  “Oh, how awful! He was such a nice young man.” Marjorie’s face flushed with concern. “You don’t think there’s a connection to Alan, do you? After all this time?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s why I’m trying to trace Alan’s movements before he was killed.” Frost pulled out his own phone and showed her a photograph of Fawn. “Do you recognize this woman?”

  Marjorie studied it. “She’s lovely, but no, I don’t know her.”

  “Did Alan ever mention the name Fawn to you? Or the name Zara Anand?”

  “Not that I recall,” Marjorie said.

  He showed her another photograph. This one was of LaHonda Duke, who went by the street name Naomi. “What about this woman?”

  Marjorie shook her head. “No. I’m sorry. Who are these women?”

  “They’re professional escorts,” Frost said.

  “Ah. Well, Alan was certainly familiar with that world. It’s possible he knew them, but I can’t tell you for sure.”