Back in Black

by Rhys Ford

  With Arthur out of reach, Adele Brinkerhoff’s motives for being out that night were going to be hard to ascertain unless Marlena was cognizant of their day-to-day life. I didn’t have the best of relationships with my own parents. Okay, my father would sooner see me dead than cross the street to put me out if I was on fire, but I also knew not everybody had that kind of family. For all I knew, Marlena was the apple of her grandparents’ eyes and she knew everything about them.

  Except maybe perhaps for the whip-cracking, adulterous-lesbian-sex-with-secret-lovers thing Adele had going. I wasn’t sure if I’d want any of my grandchildren knowing that about me, much less have calendar updates on when and where I was going to go to have some fun, leaving Grandpa at home to watch Jeopardy! in his leather recliner.

  “How well did you know your grandparents?” I asked as gently as I could. “Your grandfather and I were going to go over everything yesterday, but he was seriously injured, and getting him medical help was more important than asking any questions.”

  “They raised me. My mother was their only child and got pregnant pretty late in life. I’d like to tell you she was someone to be proud of, but she was wild and out of control. They didn’t even know she was pregnant until she showed up on their doorstep and dumped me on them.” Marlena sank back down into the chair, motioning toward the empty one next to her. “Please. Sit down. Maybe talking about it will wake Poppa up or at least comfort him in knowing you’re working on the case. The detective I spoke to said they didn’t have a lot of leads for either the murder or the attack.”

  “Was her name O’Byrne?” I dug out the small notebook I’d shoved into my back pocket, ready to take down everything she said.

  “No, it was Bishop. She was nice, but there didn’t seem to be a lot she could do about Poppa’s attacker. She had a lot of questions about what Grandma was doing and what they found on her. There was some question about whether or not there were more gems at the house and that’s what that man was after.” She wrung her hands together, leaning forward as she spoke. “I don’t like the cops. None of us in the family do.”

  “A lot of people have problems with authority,” I conceded. “I sure as hell do sometimes. Were your grandparents suspicious of the police? I’d spoken to them before this. I got the feeling they came over from somewhere else. Both of them had an accent I couldn’t place.”

  “Bavarian. Which technically is German, but Poppa was always very proud of where he’d come from.” Her hand drifted again to the old man, resting on his arm. “They’d both come from a very rough neighborhood there. Life wasn’t easy.”

  “They’re at an age where World War II would leave a pretty heavy mark.” The chair wasn’t uncomfortable, but my ass had been in more than a few of them, and I knew from experience it would do a number on my back if I sat there for very long. “Lots of conflicted authority figures there. I could see where that would shape their opinions.”

  “Oh no. That’s not it at all.” Marlena let out a short, tinkling laugh. “It’s because Grandma was a thief and Poppa used to be an art forger. They only gave it up to raise me, so I know there’s no way in hell she would have gone back to doing that. If she were caught, I would have to leave my job in San Francisco to take care of Poppa.”

  Reeling from Marlena’s words, I barely had the presence of mind to ask, “And what exactly do you do in San Francisco?”

  “I’m an assistant district attorney for the city.” This time her smile was as deadly as the bombshell she dropped. “Grandma and Poppa would never risk me—my career—for a handful of diamonds. Especially since they were fake.”

  Eight

  “A DISTRICT attorney?” Bobby repeated for what might have been the third time. “Okay, this case is getting complicated.”

  “It was already complicated. It was complicated the moment I stepped on Adele Brinkerhoff’s body.” After throwing the Rover into Park, I scrubbed at my face, trying to make sense of the whole situation. “Let’s see what O’Byrne has to say first, and we can all compare notes. Somebody killed her, and so far we’ve got no one on the board who looks like a suspect.”

  I’d been kicked out of the hospital room a few seconds after Marlena Brinkerhoff finished adding another layer of either bullshit or cloudy motive on top of her grandmother’s death. Arthur chose that particular moment to wake up and begin shouting incoherently. His hoarse, raspy voice chased me down the hall, surprisingly strong for a man who’d been given the diagnosis of brain damage and potential continued unconsciousness. Marlena shot me a textbook puppy-dog-eyes look, beseeching me to let things go for the time being while she attended her grandfather.

  Beating a hasty retreat, I nearly ran down Bobby, who’d finally returned with a couple of Trenta cold brews from what had to be the longest Starbucks trip ever.

  “Did you ever notice that it’s always puppy-dog eyes? Like, what other kind of puppy is it?” Seizing on the ridiculousness floating about in my thoughts, I lobbed the question over at Bobby. “It’s like that whole tuna fish conversation. Just tuna fish. It’s never salmon fish patty. Just like puppy dog. Although maybe it’s like kitty cat?”

  “Princess, there is something seriously fucked up with the way you think,” Bobby grumbled at me. “Seriously fucked up.”

  O’Byrne rang me up as we were leaving the hospital. The crime-scene squad was done with the Brinkerhoff household, going over it as much as they could. But considering how thoroughly it’d been tossed, there was a good chance something had been missed. Agreeing to meet her down there, we fought traffic back across Wilshire and through the neighborhood where movie stars living on shoestring finances and tethered to major studios once resided. An unmarked police car was parked in front of the house, a sleek sedan O’Byrne probably conned the motor pool into giving her because of her rank. It sure as hell wasn’t because of her social graces and pleasant personality, but she was a good cop and got the job done with little bullshit and game-playing. While I could admire that, having wrestled with the LAPD motor pool myself, they preferred to be bribed with donuts and cupcakes with a healthy dose of ass-kissing to chase down all the sugar.

  Neither Ben nor I were much for that kind of thing, so it stood to reason that all of the cars we’d been given were usually missing air-conditioning, smelled of puke or piss, and sometimes—alarmingly—didn’t have working brakes.

  “Neighborhood’s quiet,” Bobby observed, scanning the empty street. “Most of these places are big enough for a family, but there’s a couple of small houses here and there, just enough for someone who’s retired. Did O’Byrne send people out to knock on doors?”

  “The day Dell O’Byrne doesn’t send a cop or two out to see what the neighbors heard or saw will be the day she turns in her badge,” I replied with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “She didn’t say they came up with anything, but you’d think, in this kind of neighborhood, someone would come forward. It’s not like anyone’s going to worry about gang retaliation or their landlord kicking them out because they talked to the cops.”

  “Yeah, this is the kind of place where when you move in, if you don’t take around a plate of cookies to every neighbor, you’re not invited to the block barbecue on the Fourth of July.” Bobby ducked his head and stared up at the house through the windshield. “That granddaughter of theirs is probably going to inherit this place. If she were smart, she’d begin laying tracks down to migrate to Los Angeles. Hell of a lot cheaper than SF.”

  “She just seemed too good to be true,” I confessed, mentally scratching at the itch Marlena Brinkerhoff left along my spine. “Something’s off there, and I don’t know what it is.”

  “Probably because she’s a lawyer, and deep down inside, you’re always going to be a cop. Cops and lawyers don’t mix, Princess. They’re like mortal enemies—Road Runner and Coyote, sheepdogs named Sam and whatever the fuck Ralph was.” He took one last look at the house, then nodded toward the shot-up porch. “Get out of the damn car and let’s go see what O’Byrn
e found in old Arthur’s house.”

  Bobby wasn’t wrong. The neighborhood was an idyllic slice of Americana sat down in a gritty urban fold in Los Angeles’s diverse economic landscape. In a lot of ways, the City of Angels was an oddly constructed, sometimes badly made burrito. You could take a bite at one end and get a mouthful of rich carnitas spiced with a chipotle sauce and then a few inches over, discover the guy who made it also added cold french fries and a bit of gravel. If you knew where to bite in, Los Angeles was rich and fulfilling, but there were also bits of broken glass and shrapnel hidden in its delectable, aromatic plumpness.

  And sometimes, even as careful as you are, you get a mouthful potent enough to kill you.

  The front door was boarded up, sealing off the shot-through glass window, but it was still functional. Surprisingly, the gunman missed the doorknob and the deadbolt. The sash windows along the front also sported a new plywood coat, and ribbons of crime scene warnings fluttered in the light breeze, anchored with pieces of duct tape to the columns framing the stoop. Bobby walked straight through. I had to battle the yellow-and-black kraken before I was allowed entrance into the crime scene. After unwrapping my face for the third time, I tied off the end to the post while Bobby bitched at me for fucking around.

  “I swear to God, you can’t even walk up a flight of stairs without something happening to you,” he groused. “How have you even survived this long? I’m surprised you didn’t stab yourself to death the first time you used a fork. Or did they only give you spoons until you turned eighteen, and then after that they figured, fuck it, he’s on his own?”

  “And you’re my best friend,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder as I went by. It stung my hand. Probably not his shoulder, but I did my best. “O’Byrne’s inside. She said I could look around if I wanted to. Mostly I want to find out what she’s dug up. Maybe she’s got some piece of information that will give us somewhere to start.”

  “You know you’re not a cop, right?” Bobby walked in behind me, enveloped in the cool shadows draped through the front foyer. “It’s O’Byrne’s job to find the murderer. Not yours.”

  “He’s a paid consultant,” O’Byrne interjected dryly from the living room. “I’ve got a lean budget for payroll but a slush fund for private investigators I can use to hunt down bits and pieces of the case. Mac here does a little digging for me, maybe helps close a file or two, and I cut him a check off of LAPD’s treasure chest. That’s how it works, Dawson.”

  “I get paid?” I stopped short, mired in a stack of throw pillows and hardback novels missing their dust jackets. “Really?”

  “If somebody doesn’t shoot you in the next week, Princess, I’m going to,” Bobby promised with a snarl. “Why don’t we all catch each other up on how much we haven’t found. Then we can go digging through the house to find jack shit.”

  “Is he always this pleasant?” O’Byrne jerked a thumb toward Bobby, who’d settled down on the thick arm of a plaid-covered couch.

  “Oh, this is him happy,” I informed her, ignoring the bird Bobby flipped me behind her back. “Did they find anything? I’m guessing nobody tripped over a box of priceless gems and pearls while they were taking fingerprints.”

  “We should be so lucky. The diamonds found on Brinkerhoff were man-made—flawless, but they do something to distinguish them from natural diamonds. The expert we brought in spotted that within seconds of looking at them.” She extracted a wooden chair from a pile of papers, straddling it after setting it down on the living room floor. “Dawson’s right. Let’s go over what we know and see if we can make a game plan. I assume you met the granddaughter?”

  “The assistant district attorney?” Bobby piped up. “Did you have somebody validate that? I mean, anybody can say they’re something. This asshole over here introduces himself as a private investigator, and that’s only because he hopes to get free coffee.”

  “Once again, my best friend,” I said with a shake of my head. There was another wooden chair, but it creaked when I picked it up, so I opted for a velvet wing chair instead. “How much have you learned about the Brinkerhoffs? Marlena was pretty forthcoming up until the moment her grandfather woke up. I didn’t get a lot out of her except that Grandma and Grandpa apparently were pretty hard-core criminals until she came along, and she knew those diamonds were fake. Did someone on the LAPD tell her that? Or did she already know?”

  “I’ll have to check with Bishop.” A thunderstorm briefly rolled over O’Byrne’s face, and I didn’t envy Bishop when the lieutenant caught up with her. “That’s not something we’d tell her.”

  “Rook Stevens brought that up too. Asked if the LAPD brought in an expert to look them over.” I began picking at a pile of papers on the floor, arranging the sheets into neat stacks on a long table next to me. “If she’s a district attorney up in SF, she might have contacts down here. Someone could be feeding her information.”

  “Because that’s what this case needs, an out-of-town DA raised by crooks and an information pipeline O’Byrne here won’t be able to throttle.” My stacks of paper weren’t meeting Bobby’s strict organizational guidelines because he picked up the whole mess from the floor and plopped the papers on the couch next to him. “You’re making me crazy. You’re not even looking at them. How do you know what goes with what?”

  “I was looking to see if any of it was connected to a storage unit,” I informed him with a smirk. “They may not have anything in the house, but they could have stuff hidden elsewhere. Stevens told me he has a couple warehouses where he keeps his high-end merchandise. Maybe that’s something they teach them in cat-burglar school.”

  “If Marlena Brinkerhoff has somebody talking to her, I’m going to have to put a stopper on it. And good call on the storage unit. We went over this place as best we could, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary—a small safe with important papers and a few bits of jewelry but nothing worth killing over.” O’Byrne pursed her lips, lost in thought. “And you said Stevens didn’t know her. Think he was lying?”

  “He was harder to read than a comic book written in Enochian Pig Latin.” I handed over the stacks of paper I’d pulled together when Bobby held his hand out for them. “He seemed pretty blasé about the whole burglary thing. I don’t know him well enough to tell you if he was lying or not. I don’t even know Montoya that well, but Bobby here says he wouldn’t be with someone pulling jobs.”

  “He wouldn’t,” she agreed. The room was stuffy, and O’Byrne shrugged off her jacket, her shoulder holster squeaking when she twisted about. She favored Glocks, just like me, carrying two along her rig. Sighing, she blew a strand of dark hair out of her face and looked around the room. “I’m going to guess our shooter didn’t find what they were looking for. He spent some time beating up the old man, then spent even more of it tearing the house apart. Either Brinkerhoff didn’t tell him anything or the guy didn’t like the answers he was given.”

  “I’m guessing Brinkerhoff said shit,” Bobby interjected. Putting another stack of papers down on the table, he began to sift through a handful. “Our shooter didn’t know we were coming, but Brinkerhoff did. I think the old man kept his mouth shut because he knew he couldn’t fight back and was gambling on us—or at least Cole here—to show up.”

  “That’s a big risk,” O’Byrne pointed out. “He would’ve been gambling on Mac here coming into the house and not assuming Brinkerhoff blew him off.”

  “If you didn’t know in the first five minutes meeting Cole that he would scale a castle wall and fight off the dragon if he thought something was hinky inside of your house, then you would have to be the stupidest motherfucker on earth.” Bobby grinned at me when I flipped him off. “Brinkerhoff knows him. Hell, he called Cole to hire him to dig into his wife’s death, the same wife Cole investigated before when Brinkerhoff suspected she was skipping around in somebody else’s garden. He knows this idiot. What’s more important, he knew our gunman wasn’t going to shoot him.”

  “He beat him ha
lf to death,” I reminded them. “The doctors weren’t even sure he was going to wake up. You can’t get information out of a dead man, so maybe the guy figured he would go through the house, see what he could find, and if he came up empty, he could do Brinkerhoff in. We just got here before he could get to that point on his to-do list.”

  “Well, right now I’ve got a dead woman, useless diamonds, and an assistant district attorney who probably has political connections that are going to be chewing on my neck in a couple of days,” O’Byrne said with a sigh, pushing off of her chair to stand up. “Consider yourself assigned to the case, McGinnis. Dig in as deep as you can, but try not to get yourself killed. At least I know you’re not going to be talking to the lawyer. I’m going to have to see if I can find out who’s leaking information, but at least Ms. Brinkerhoff gave us permission to go through the house. I figured I would have to come at her with a warrant or call the whole thing off.”

  “That tells me there’s nothing here,” I said, taking in the mess. “I mean, let’s think about it. Marlena Brinkerhoff knew her grandparents were criminals. She says they stopped when they took her in, but we only have her word on it.”

  “So what? Marlena sat at home doing her schoolwork at the kitchen table while Grandma was out knocking over banks?” Bobby snorted. “You think she’s covering for them?”

  “The Brinkerhoffs were never on the LAPD’s radar. Not like Rook Stevens,” O’Byrne said, pacing off the floor in long strides, avoiding the piles of debris. “But Stevens hit big and usually worked with a team. Or at least that’s what they think. They never caught him, and most of what they suspect he did came from other thieves looking to cut deals. If Adele Brinkerhoff did smaller jobs by herself, no one would know what she pulled.”