by K. W. Jeter
“I tell ya, I think I’m going nuts.”
“Yeah?” Officer Zepeda watched Sikes spooning grounds—Safeway plain-wrap, the biggest and cheapest can—into the squad room coffee maker. “Why?”
Sikes went on talking, almost as though he were by himself, as he dug the spoon inside the can. “I’m beginning to wonder if I should see a shrink about this.”
“Too late, Sikes.” Zepeda crumpled an empty milk carton—the rows of vending machines stood in the station hallway right behind her—and pitched it into the trash can. “You’re already certifiable.”
“I’m serious, Zep. I think about her—you know, in a, uh, sexual way—three or four times a day.” That was an underestimate, he knew; to everybody here at the station, it probably seemed more like three or four hours a day. There was nothing like sleep loss and a half-ass job of shaving in the morning to give people the inside scoop on your affairs. He kept on spooning out coffee.
Zepeda shrugged. “Cathy’s not a barnyard animal. It’s legal, Sikes.”
“But she’s not human.”
“And you are?” Zepeda nodded toward the coffee maker. “Are we supposed to drink that or eat it?”
“Shit.” A dark brown hill had mounted from the machine’s innards. Sikes set the can down and leaned on his hands against the edge of the table. The top was ringed with brown cup stains and gritty from spilled sugar and diet sweetener. “I mean it . . .” He spoke to his bent reflection in the aluminum. “You work with them every day, and you forget. But try and get close—really close—you realize they’re different. They’re not like us.”
Zepeda reached past him to pull the overflowing basket out of the coffee maker. “You sound like my dad did when I was dating Harris Weinstein.” She dumped most of the grounds back into the can and snapped the plastic lid back on. “He would’ve been happier if I’d hooked up with some cholo low-rider from Pacoima.”
He had met her father once, and a couple of her brothers, big, barrel-chested homeboys who looked like Los Lobos roadies and ran a chrome-plating shop over in El Segundo; Zep herself was about a third their size, a sharp-faced Chicana who’d traded in her functional ponytail for a cropped cut when some coked-up asshole had slung her by her hair against an alley wall and put her in the hospital for a month. Sikes could just imagine her bringing home some ex-rabbinical student to meet the family.
She went on sorting out the mess Sikes had made out of the coffee. “Amazing . . .” She shook her head. “I walk around all day with a nine-millimeter on my hip, and I still wind up making the coffee for you clowns.” She flipped the machine’s power switch on. “Not to mention playing Miss Advice to the Lovelorn.”
“Forget it.” That last crack had snapped the wire holding back Sikes’s temper. “Just forget I said anything at all.”
She caught up with him as he stomped into the squad room, and grabbed his arm.
“Sikes, listen. You’re worried you’re not normal—okay.” She got around in front of him, blocking his path. “This is really a very simple thing. You want my advice? You should date a human. Get your mind off this alien number.”
Sikes’s eyes were little slits.
“Y’know,” said Zepeda, “this reminds me exactly of my cousin Raphael. He was always worried about whether he might be gay. I gave him the same advice—find a nice girl.”
“Raphael . . .” Sikes tilted his head to one side. “That your cousin who was always sitting around reading?”
“No, you’re thinking of my brother Jaime. Raphael’s the jock; in high school, after the game, he’d be in the showers with the other guys and he’d be sweating about where to look.”
“So what happened to him?”
Zepeda shrugged. “He’s living with a guy named Steve.”
“Thanks.” Sikes pushed past her.
“Hey . . .” She shouted at his back. “He’s happy!”
Yeah, right, he’s happy. At his desk, Sikes sat hunched over his Rolodex, flicking through the little cards. That does me a lot of good. The smell of brewing coffee came from the hallway, clenching his empty gut. He’d been in too weird a mood this morning to even think about eating breakfast.
“I hope it didn’t show—I had flies.”
Sikes glanced up and saw his partner, George, in front of the desk. Standing there sweatless, but still radiating nervous tension, as though a fuzzy baby chick were about to peck through the spotted Easter egg of his hairless head. Hands tugging at the bottom of his jacket, smoothing out the white-bread three-button suit he always wore on duty. What George really wanted to do right now—Sikes had known him long enough—was set his twitching hands to unlacing the clumpy Mason brand cop shoes on his feet. When Newcomers got nervous, their feet swelled up, something about the double hearts in their chests pumping overtime to the extremities.
“What?” He thought he’d heard George say “flies.”
“In my stomach.” George fiddled with a button. “I was nervous.”
No shit. “You mean butterflies.” He’d found the number he wanted, pulled the phone toward him, and started dialing. “How come?”
“I just had my oral exam for Detective Two.” George glanced over his shoulder, as though he expected the promotions board to have followed him into the squad room, ready to grill him some more. “I don’t think I did very well. I think I blew on some questions.”
“Blew. Just ‘blew.’ ” Sikes leaned back in the swivel chair, listening to the ringing at the other end of the phone line. He waved George off. “Don’t sweat it. I took that test.” A switchboard operator spoke in his ear. “Lorraine Clark, please.”
“But, Matt . . .” George’s eyes widened. “You failed the test.”
“Like I said—no sweat.” He swiveled away from George. Across the squad room, the slats of the old thick blinds had been tilted just enough to shade the CRT screens on some of the desks; shaggy palm trees nodded outside. City maintenance hadn’t trimmed them in years, and sleek, well-fed rats nested and romped in the dry fronds.
“Jesus H. Christ.” A forty-year vet shook his head over the L.A. Times sports section, held it up to another walrus short-timing toward mandatory retirement. “Skunked by Phoenix, fergawdsakes. If the Dodgers can’t hit at home, against a friggin’ expansion team, what’re they gonna do on the road?”
The other veteran looked disgusted. “They’re gonna wish they had Lasorda back. I swear it.”
Sikes tilted his head back. The ceiling’s acoustic tiles had a brown water spot the shape, and nearly the size, of Australia. “Lorraine, hi. It’s Matt.” It struck him, not for the first time, that somebody could make a map of all the islands in the Pacific, or a chart of his partner’s skull, from all the spots up there. “Look, I was wondering if tomorrow night you might be up for catching a movie. Maybe have dinner.”
From the corner of his eye, he could see George looking over a department memo he’d taken from the desk’s IN basket. The angle of George’s head gave him away, that he was trying to pick up Lorraine’s end of the conversation as well.
“Great.” Sikes glanced over; George’s gaze took a dive back to the memo. “Yeah, someplace greasy and carcinogenic. I’m always up for ribs.” Lorraine mentioned some Westwood place. “Naw, that’s ribs for white people. Who haven’t gotten over it like I have. I meant like ‘You need no teef to eat Mr. Jim’s beef’—that kind of ribs. Okay by you? Wunderbar. I’ll pick you up at seven.”
Eyes looked over the top of the memo. “You made a date with Lorraine? What about Cathy?”
George and his wife, Susan, were tight with Cathy, a friendship going all the way back to the Newcomer relocation camps out in the desert. Plus Cathy’s lab tech job brought her through the station all the time—George had regular opportunities to work his Yenta-the-matchmaker routines, clicking and twanging in Tenctonese to Cathy, out by the vending machines.
“Hey . . .” Sikes set the phone back in its cradle. “Does this concern you?”
Geo
rge perused the memo again, as if the two paragraphs about the department’s sick-leave policy needed further study. “I just thought . . . you cared about Cathy. That’s all.”
At least this had gotten George off of moaning and pissing about taking the Detective Two test.
Sikes shrugged. “Well, yeah, but it’s not like we’ve got some kind of agreement. Besides—” he rubbed the worn-smooth arms of the chair with the heels of his palms “—don’t you think it’s normal for me to wanna go out with a human once in a while?”
There wasn’t time for George to make a reply—and Sikes was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear one, anyway—as Zepeda was heading purposefully down the aisle between desks. Fresh coffee steamed in her personalized ‘Chicana Power’ mug in one hand; in her other hand was the morning’s installment of aggravation, in the form of a shiny new manila folder, just skinny enough for a couple of pieces of paper inside.
The smell of the coffee prodded Sikes’s memory of what he had been trying to accomplish just a few minutes ago. “Hey, Albert . . .” He called over to the station’s janitor. Albert Einstein, the name one of those har-har jokes out of the Bureau of Newcomer Affairs. The round, honest—but not brilliant—face looked up from the trash cans he’d been dumping into the canvas bag on his cart. “Albert, couldja get me a cup of coffee?”
“You bet.” Albert scooted toward the squad-room door. Requests from detectives ranked high on his list of priorities.
“Cream, no sugar,” Sikes called after him. “Hey, Zep . . .” She stood in front of the desk, bumping shoulders with George. “I got a date.”
Zepeda tossed onto his desk the manila folder, flipped open so the pink-copy crime report showed right in front of him. “And a case.”
C H A P T E R 4
THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S crew was still on the scene. George lifted the yellow POLICE INVESTIGATION—DO NOT CROSS tape, and Sikes ducked under it. They stepped from the quiet of the courthouse hallway into the even more permanent silence of the late Judge Kaiser’s private chambers.
ME Lois Allen, in a stained white lab coat, stood over the judge’s body. The corpse’s hands clawed deep into the fibers of the Oriental rug that dominated the room’s furnishings. Two SID detectives stood by the windows, sorting through their small plastic evidence bags. Routine bits and pieces, nothing that looked exciting—George glanced away from them, and nodded at the uniformed cop guarding the door. A Newcomer like himself, wearing the same sober, irreproachable expression that he’d always kept on, before he’d made detective. The first Newcomer detective in the LAPD; he’d had to loosen up a little then, to do his job. Get with the friggin’ program, as his partner, Sikes, would have said.
The cop nodded once, a wordless sign of recognition. He looked like he’d graduated from the academy less than a year ago—George made a mental note to get the kid’s name. Perhaps he could steer a better assignment his way, something with more action, and promotion potential, than standing around at cold investigations.
“Not a happy camper.”
That was Sikes talking. Without turning around, George could picture him standing next to the ME, looking down at the judge’s death rictus, maintaining his easy cynicism. With his faded jeans and scuffed Nikes, the sleeves of his battered brown leather jacket pushed up past his elbows—Sikes always appeared as if he actually were on his way to nothing more than a baseball game, perhaps with the other fellows in the squad room, the ones who ran the football pool later in the year. George always put in a dollar, though he had to be careful not to win too often. Busting—no, beating was the word—the point spread was really just a matter of mathematical analysis. He’d tried to teach the rudiments to his partner, but Sikes had wound up saying that that much math was too much like work . . .
He pulled his thoughts back to the crime scene. It wasn’t professional to let his thoughts go rambling on like that. Still, he had to admit that it had always bothered him to see Sikes acting so flippant, even over some nameless vagrant knifed in an alley. And here, this had been a judge, a leading figure in the community and a bright star in the Newcomers’ assimilation into the human world. He knew this was how Sikes and the others kept from eating their own guts out, armoring their emotions so that these things couldn’t touch them. It still seemed to indicate a lack of respect for the honored dead.
“The judge’s clerk found him this morning.” That was Lois’s voice. “The lividity, the blood settling, is a little slower with Newcomers, but taking that into account, I’d estimate the time of death between ten and twelve last night.”
“What killed him?” Sikes again.
“I’m not sure. The discoloration could indicate asphyxiation or coronary infarctions.”
George turned around and saw the medical examiner leaning over, pointing out the dark, almost black, flush covering the corpse’s throat. She stood back up as George approached.
Sikes took a hand from his jacket pocket and scratched the side of his face. “Could it have been an illness—some kind of natural cause?”
“That’s hardly possible, Matt.” George looked up from the contorted face, and caught his partner’s gaze. “There is nothing ‘natural’ that would do this to a Newcomer.”
Allen shrugged. “You’d probably know better about that than I would.” She looked around at the two detectives. “For right now, we’re considering this a possible homicide. I’ll have a much better idea when I get into the lab and do a toxicological workup.”
“Did you get a chance to talk to the clerk?” Sikes glanced over at him. “Find out anything?”
“There is some information,” said George, “that we’ll need to consider. The clerk told me that Judge Kaiser had received some threatening letters—”
“Most judges get that kind of crap. It comes with the territory.”
“These made specific reference to some recent matters that came before him. He ruled in favor of Newcomers in a number of civil rights cases. There are, of course, those individuals and organizations that take such things amiss.”
“Aw, Christ . . .” Sikes shook his head, a disgusted expression on his face. “Not those putzes again.” He didn’t have to say any more than that; they both knew he meant the Purists. He nodded, looking around the chambers. “Okay, get back to the clerk,” he snapped. “We’ll need those letters.”
“That shouldn’t be any problem.”
“And get a subpoena in the works for his files. We need to get names. Everyone he ruled against in the last coupla years—we should talk to ’em all.” Sikes went back to looking around the area, every small detail of the crime scene falling under his scan.
George headed toward the door, to find the clerk. He almost didn’t hear the sotto voce comment from the uniformed cop as he passed by.
“You’re both detectives—how come he gives the orders?”
So soft a whisper that for a moment he thought it had been inside his own head. He paused, and turned toward the cop’s carefully maintained expression, or lack of same.
It took a moment to come up with a reply. “Oh, I don’t think he was ordering me. It’s just . . .” The words ran out.
“Hey, George . . .”
He looked over his shoulder and saw his partner straightening up from where he had crouched down beside the judge’s body. Sikes had something in his hand that he’d found. Something bright, a flash of color.
“What’s this?”
He stepped back toward Sikes and looked at the sphere made of soft red cloth. “A kaif ball.” Without touching it, he knew how it would feel, the sweet-musky odor it would give off. He pointed to the others, the yellow and blue ones on the desk. “Tencto-nip.”
“Tencto-nip?”
George gestured with his thumb against his fingertips. “We rub them in our hands and inhale the fragrance.”
At the other side of the room, ME Allen glanced over as she snapped her equipment bag shut. “It has a mild endorphinlike effect on Newcomers.”
&
nbsp; “Oh.” His brow creased as Sikes looked at the ball sitting on his palm. “Yeah, sure . . .”
“A soothing effect,” explained George. “Something like your catnip.”
“Not my catnip. Cats get off on catnip.”
“Maybe you should try it. You don’t know what you might be missing.” George rolled the blue ball with his finger. “These designer colors are rather attractive.”
Sikes shrugged, throwing the medical examiner a look that read out You learn something new every day.
He still had to track down the clerk, and start digging through the stack of threat letters. And the subpoena for the files, and everything else that Sikes, in his professional mode, had laid out for the investigation.
The cop in uniform kept his eyes straight ahead, saying nothing as George passed by him.
What was the point of a teacher having a nice butt?
Just something else to drive you nuts, decided Noah Ramsay. Since the whole point of education was to drive you nuts—he’d figured that out all the way back in grade one, long before he’d even gotten into high school—putting a body like Marilyn Houston’s in front of him five days a week, that must be all part of the master plan.
Sitting slouched at his desk, Noah watched her cleaning the blackboard. The hem of her dress rose a fraction of an inch—nice legs—as she reached the eraser up to the top. He glanced from the corner of his eye at Buck Francisco, leaning against the door of the supply cabinets. He knew his buddy was checking her out as well—why else would he have hung around after the bell for the end of the last period had rung, and everybody else in the class had split? Buck had that poker face, though, like all Newcomers. You never really knew what they were thinking.
“I was at the faculty meeting—Mr. Fisher presented the new reading lists.” A swath of chalked words disappeared underneath the eraser. “He’s been getting a lot of pressure from some parent groups recently.”