Jonathan Kellerman - Alex 16 - The Murder Book

by The Murder Book(Lit)

  'Random blather,' I said.

  'Are you saying that even when we were together you felt abandoned? That I neglected you? Because I-'

  'No,' I said. 'You've always been there for me.' Except for the other time you left.

  Except for finding another man and- 'It really was blather, Rob. Put it down to missing you.'

  'Alex, if this is really bad for you, I'll come home!

  'No,' I said. 'I'm a big boy. It wouldn't be good for you. For either of us.'

  And I've got things on my plate. Little odd jobs, the kind you hate.

  'That's true. she said. 'But just say the word.'

  'The word is I love you.'

  'That's three words.'

  'Picky picky.'

  She laughed. Finally. I uttered a few pleasantries, and she did the same. When we hung up she sounded okay, and I figured I faked it pretty well.

  Milo claimed to want 'alone time,' but I figured he'd be nosing around on the fringes of the LAPD bureaucracy.

  If the call from Personnel and/or the encounter with the toothy Paris Bartlett did have something to do with his raking up the Ingalls case, that meant he - we - had been tagged, were being watched.

  Marlene Baldassar as the source didn't sit right with me, and I thought about the trail we might've left.

  My solo activities had consisted of the call to Larry Daschoff, dinner with Allison Gwynn, computer work at the Research Library. None of that was likely to attract attention.

  Together, Milo and I had interviewed Marge Schwinn and Baldassar and Georgie Nemerov. I supposed either woman could've reported the conversation, but neither had been hostile, and I couldn't see why they'd have bothered.

  Nemerov, on the other hand, had grown antsy when talking about his father's murder and Willie Burns's skip. Nemerov's bail bond business gave him close ties to the department. If John G. Broussard had been part of a fix, the department would care.

  A third possibility was Milo's solo work on Janie Ingalls had attracted attention. As far as I knew that had been limited to phone work and unearthing old files. But he'd worked at the West L.A. station, sneaked around Parker Center.

  Thinking he'd been discreet but he could've invited scrutiny -from clerks, other cops, anyone in a position to witness him nosing. John G. Broussard had sent a clear directive to tighten up discipline among the rank and file. The new chief had also waged war on the blue code of silence - talk about irony. Maybe cops informing on cops was the new LAPD Zeitgeist.

  The more I thought about that, the more it made sense: Milo was a pro, but he'd taken too much for granted.

  Procedurally, he'd been outed.

  That made me think about his continuing vulnerability. Twenty years in the department with one of the highest solve rates in Homicide, but that wasn't enough, would never be enough.

  For two decades he'd functioned as a gay man in a paramilitary organization that would never be free of gut-level bias and still hadn't acknowledged the existence of homosexual cops. I knew -everyone knew - that scores of gay officers patrolled the streets, but not a single one had gone public. Neither had Milo, in a strict sense, but after those first brutal years of self-torment he had stopped hiding.

  Department statisticians were happy to file his solves in the Assets column but the brass continued to retard his progress and made periodic attempts to get rid of him. Milo had collected secrets of his own along the way, finally managed to leverage his way to relative job security and seniority. He'd turned down the offer to take the lieutenant's exam twice because he knew the department's real intention was to shunt him to some desk job where they could pretend he didn't exist, while boring him to the point of voluntary retirement. Instead, he'd stayed on the detective track, had taken it as far as it would go: to Detective-III.

  Maybe Pierce Schwinn had followed all that, come to respect Milo for holding his own. Offered Milo a perverse gift.

  Normally, nothing heated Milo's blood like a good cold case. But this was a rethaw from his own past, and perhaps he'd gotten careless and turned himself into prey.

  I thought of how Paris Bartlett had targeted Milo, ignored me.

  Meaning I had room to move.

  The timing was perfect, the logic exquisite: what were friends for?

  Alone, at his crappy little piss-colored desk, the washer churning the clothes he'd just loaded for background noise, Milo felt better.

  Free of Alex, he felt better.

  Because Alex's mind could be a scary thing - cerebral flypaper; stuff flew in but never left. His friend was capable of sitting quietly for long stretches when you'd think he was listening - actively listening the way they'd taught him in shrink school - then he'd let loose a burst of associations and hypotheses and apparently unrelated trivialities that turned out too often to be right-on.

  Houses of cards that, more often than not, withstood the wind. Milo, on the receiving end of the nonstop volleys, felt like a wobbly sparring partner.

  Not that Alex pushed. He just kept supposing. Suggesting. Another shrink tactic. Try ignoring any of it.

  Milo had never met anyone smarter or more decent than Alex, but hanging with the guy could be draining. How many nights' sleep had he lost because one of his friend's suggestions had hooked a barb in his brain?

  But for all his bloodhound instincts, Alex was a civilian and out of his element. And he'd failed to mature in one regard: had never developed a proper sense of threat.

  In the beginning, Milo had attributed it to the carelessness of an overenthusiastic amateur. It hadn't taken long to learn the truth: Alex got off on danger.

  Robin understood that, and it scared her. Over the years she'd confided her fears to Milo - more nuance than complaint. And when the three of them were together and Alex and Milo lapsed

  into the wrong type of conversation and her face changed, Milo caught it quickly and changed the subject. Strangely enough, Alex, for all his perceptiveness, sometimes missed it.

  Alex had to realize how Robin felt, yet he made no effort to change. And Robin put up with it. Love is blind and deaf and dumb... maybe she'd simply made a commitment and was smart enough to know it was damn near impossible to change anyone.

  But now, she'd gone on that tour. And taken the dog. For some reason that felt wrong - the damn pooch. Alex was claiming to be okay, but that first day Milo'd dropped in, he'd looked really bad, and even now, he was different... distracted.

  Something was off.

  Or maybe not.

  He'd poked a bit at Alex's resistance. Playing shrink to the shrink, and why the hell shouldn't he? How could you have a real friendship when the therapy went only one way? But no luck. Alex talked the talk - openness, communication, blah blah blah, but in his own articulate, empathetic, ever-so-disgustingly civilized way, the guy was pain-in-the-ass, dead-end immovable.

  Now that he thought about it, had Alex ever been deterred? Milo couldn't remember a single instance.

  Alex did exactly what Alex wanted to do.

  And Robin... Milo'd offered his smoothest reassurances. And he supposed he'd done a decent job of keeping Alex out of harm's way. But there were limits.

  Everyone stood alone.

  He got up, poured himself a vodka and pink-grapefruit juice, rationalizing that the vitamin C counteracted the oxidation, but wondering how closely his liver resembled that medical journal photo Rick had shown him last month.

  Erosion of hepatic tissue and replacement with fatty globules due to advanced cirrhosis.

  Rick never pushed either, but Milo knew he wasn't happy with the fresh bottle of Stoli in the freezer.

  Switch channels: back to Alex.

  Other people's problems were so much more engaging.

  He walked half a mile to a Budget Rent-a-Car on La Cienega and got himself a fresh blue Taurus. Driving east on Santa Monica, he crossed into Beverly Hills, then West Hollywood. Not much traffic past Doheny Drive, but at the West Hollywood border the boulevard had been narrowed to one lane in e
ither direction and the few cars in sight were crawling.

  West Hollywood, The City That Never Stopped Decorating, had been digging up the streets for years, plunging businesses into bankruptcy and accomplishing little Milo could see other than a yawning stretch of dirt piles and ditches. Last year, the ribbon had been cut on a spanking new West Hollywood fire station. One of those architectural fancies - peaks and troughs and gimcracks and weird-shaped windows. Cute, except the doors had proved too narrow for the fire engines to squeeze through, and the poles didn't allow the firefighters to slide down. This year, West Hollywood had embarked on a sister-city deal with Havana. Milo doubted Fidel would approve of Boystown nightlife.

  Among the few businesses the roadwork couldn't kill were the all-night markets and the gay bars. A guy had to eat and a guy had to party. Milo and Rick stayed in most nights - how long had it been since he'd cruised? And now, here he was.

  He found himself smiling, but it felt like someone else's mirth. Because what the hell was there to be happy about? Pierce Schwinn and/or a confederate had manipulated him into warming up Ingalls, he'd accomplished nothing but had managed to screw up royally. Attracting attention.

  Playa del Sol. That toothy putz Paris Bartlett. First thing he did after ditching Alex was to check city records for a business registration on Playa. Nothing. Then he ran Bartlett through every database he could think of. Like that could be a real name.

  Taking a giant risk because what he'd told Alex had been true: as a civilian he was forbidden to use departmental resources, he was treading felonious water. He'd put up a firewall by using the ID numbers of other cops for the requests. Half a dozen IDs of cops he didn't care for, jumping around different divisions. His version of identity theft; he'd been collecting data for years, stashing loose bits

  of paper in his home safe because you never knew when your back was gonna be against the wall. But if someone tried hard enough, the calls could be traced back to him.

  Clever boy, but the search had been futile: no such person as Paris Bartlett.

  Which he supposed he'd known right away - apart from the moniker having a phony ring, Bartlett, all hair and teeth and eagerness, had had that actor thing going on. In L.A. that didn't necessarily mean a SAG card and a portfolio full of headshots. LAPD liked guys who were good at pretending, too. Channeled them into undercover work. Nowadays, that meant mostly Narcotics, occasionally Vice when the word came down to run yet another week or two of hooker rousts for public relations.

  Years ago undercover had meant another Vice game, a regularly scheduled weekend production: Friday and Saturday night operations put together with military lust. Staking out targets and delineating the enemy and moving in for the attack.

  Bust the queers.

  Not naked aggression, the way it had been back before Christopher Street, when gay bars were ripe for routine, big-time head-breaking. Most of that ended by the early seventies, but Milo had caught the tail end of the department's fag-bashing fervor: LAPD masked the raids as drug busts, as if hetero clubs weren't fueled by the same dope. During his first month at West L.A. he'd been assigned to a Saturday night bivouac against a private club on Sepulveda near Venice. Out-of-the-way dive in a former auto-painting barn where a hundred or so well-heeled men, believing themselves to be secure, went to talk and dance and smoke grass and gobble Quaaludes and enjoy the bathroom stalls. LAPD had a different notion of security. The way the supervisor - a hypermacho DII named Reisan who Milo was certain was tucked deeply in the closet - laid out the plan, you'da thought it was a swoop on some Cong hamlet. Squinty eyes, military lingo, triangulated diagrams scrawled on the board, give me a break.

  Milo sat through the orientation, struggling not to succumb to a full-body sweat. Reisan going on about coming down hard on resisters, don't be shy about using your batons. Then, leering, and warning the troops not to kiss anyone because you didn't know where those lips had been. Looking straight at Milo when he'd

  cracked wise, Milo laughing along with the others and wondering: Why the hell is he doing that? Fighting to convince himself he'd imagined it.

  The day of the raid, he called in sick with the flu, stayed in bed for three days. Perfectly healthy, but he worked hard at degrading himself by not sleeping or eating, just sucking on gin and vodka and rye and peach brandy and whatever else he found in the cupboard. Figuring if the department checked on him, he'd look like death warmed over.

  VN combat vet, now a real-life working detective, but he was still thinking like a truant high school kid.

  Over the three days, he lost eight pounds, and when he stood his legs shook and his kidneys ached and he wondered if that yellow tinge in his eyes was real or just bad lighting - his place was a dingy hovel, the few windows it offered looked out to airshafts, and no matter how many bulbs he used, he could never get the illumination above tomb-strength.

  The first time in three days that he tried food - a barely warmed can of Hearty Man chili - what he didn't heave whooshed out the other end. He smelled like a goat pen, his hair felt brittle, and his fingernails were getting soft. For a full week later, his ears rang and his back hurt and he drank gallons of water a day just in case he'd damaged something. The day he returned to the station, a transfer slip - Vice to Auto Theft, signed by Reisan - was in his box. That seemed a fine state of affairs. Two days later, someone slipped a note through the door of his locker.

  How's your bunghole, faggot?

  He pulled into the Healthy Foods lot, stayed in the Taurus, scanned the parking lot for anything out of the ordinary. During the drive from his house to the station, then from Budget to the market, he'd been on alert for a tail. Hadn't picked up any, but this wasn't the movies, and the hard truth was, in a city built around the combustion engine, you could never be sure.

  He watched shoppers enter the market, finally satisfied himself that he hadn't been followed, and crossed over to the row of small stores - rehabbed shacks, really - that sat across from Healthy

  Foods. Locksmith, dry cleaners, cobbler, West Hollywood Easy Mail Center.

  He flashed his badge to the Pakistani behind the mail-drop counter - pile up those violations, Sturgis - and inquired about the box number listed on the Jeep's registration. The clerk was sullen, but he thumbed through his circular Rolodex and shook his head.

  'No Playa del Sol.' Behind him was the wall of brass boxes. A sign advertised FedEx, UPS, rubber stamps, While-U-Wait gift-wrapping. Milo spotted no ribbons or happy-face wrapping paper. This was all about secrets.

  'When did they stop renting?' he said.

  'Had to be at least a year ago.'

  'How do you know?'

  'Because the current tenant has been renting for thirteen months.'

  Tenant. Milo pictured some leprechaun setting up house in the mailbox. Tiny stove, refrigerator, Murphy bed, thumbnail-sized cable TV blaring The Pot of Gold Network.

  'Who's the current tenant?' he said.

  'You know I can't tell you that, sirrr.'

  'Aw, shucks,' said Milo, producing a twenty-dollar bill. Keep those felonies coming...

  The Pakistani stared at the bill as Milo placed it on the counter, closed his hand over Andrew Jackson's gaunt visage. Then he turned his back on Milo and began fiddling with one of the empty mailboxes and Milo reached over and took hold of the Rolodex and read the card.

  Mr and Mrs Irwin Block

  Address on Cynthia Street. Just a few blocks away.

  'Know these people?' said Milo.

  'Old people,' said the Pakistani, still showing his back. 'She comes in every week, but they don't get anything.'

  'Nothing?'

  'Once in a while, junk.'

  'Then why do they need a POB?'

  The clerk faced him and smiled. 'Everyone needs one - tell all

  your friends.' He reached for the Rolodex, but Milo held on to it, thumbing back from Bl to Ba. No Bartlett. Then up to P. No Playa del Sol.

  The Pakistani said, 'Stop, please. What if someone
comes in?' Milo released the Rolodex, and the clerk placed it under the counter.

  'How long have you been working here?'

  'Oh,' said the clerk, as if the question was profound. 'Ten months.'

  'So you've never dealt with anyone from Playa del Sol.'

  "That is true.'

  'Who worked here before you?'

  'My cousin.'

  'Where is he?'

  'Kashmir.'

  Milo glared at him.

  'It's true,' said the man. 'He had enough of this place.'

  'West Hollywood?'