by John Flynn
The redhead moved swiftly through the other club members, and continued walking the length of the mezzanine level.
Miller glanced at his watch. It was 8:56. He followed her up the stairs and through the press of bodies. He watched as she headed towards the men’s room, and walked right in. He followed after her.
Miller quickly realized the men’s room at the Black Rose was not strictly a lounge where men went to rest and relieve their bodily functions. He also saw that it was not restricted just to men. It may have contained urinals, toilet stalls and a washbasin, like most men’s rooms, but it also served as a private area where men and women met to hook up.
As he walked through the dark and shadowy room, the main lights were out and emergency lights flickered on and off, strobing, producing the effect that everyone was moving in slow motion. Almost trance-like, men and women, men and men, and women and women slowly moved through the motions of sadomasochistic play or sexual intercourse. A haze of crack smoke made everything seem surreal, like a Salvador Dali painting. Hands and arms here, feet and legs there, bodies in motion, and yet not moving very fast at all.
The suspect pressed through the sea of bodies, and Miller followed closely behind her.
At the end of the row, she rapped on the door to one of the toilet stalls, and it swung open for her. Two men—one of them a big, burly, black man—had been waiting for her; they were both shirtless, wearing tight leather pants. She pulled out a vial of cocaine and handed it to the one man, while the black guy reached under her trench coat and pulled her into the stall. The redhead caught sight of Miller watching them, and whispered something to her black companion. In turn, he glared at Miller as he slammed the door to the stall shut.
Back on the dance floor, Monroe was fighting for his life, struggling to break free of the three leathermen.
Kate finally reached Monroe and maneuvered herself into their closed circle. She continued dancing opposite him in the midst of the three bullyboys. With an underhanded jab that seemed more like a modern dance move than a punch, she slammed into the crotch of the third man, and he dropped to his knees like a ton of bricks. No one else seemed to notice her play.
As the music continued to pulsate, tormenting the revelers with an electrifying beat that never seemed to end, she slipped between Monroe and Rutherford. Rutherford tried to sandwich her between his body and Monroe’s, but she kept moving, turning, spinning around, eyes always on Monroe, playing to him with her body. He watched, obviously keenly aware of what she was doing.
Then Kate moved away, purposely backing her ass into Rutherford. He continued to thrust his pelvis in and out, forcing her forward into a three-way action with Monroe. All of a sudden, she stopped dancing, and turned around to Rutherford, hands on her hips. On his very next forward thrust, Kate grabbed Rutherford’s crotch and a handful of chest hair, and shoved him with all the force she could muster into the crowd of onlookers. Rutherford tumbled backwards, turning head over heel, until he was well off the dance floor.
She pirouetted like an expert ballerina, and grabbed Monroe by the dog collar, pulling him face-to-face.
“You’re mine, bitch,” she shouted, at the top of her lungs, so that everyone on the floor could hear her.
“Yes, Mistress,” Monroe replied, playing along.
The last of Rutherford’s trio of leathermen looked down with an expression of disbelief. He was suddenly empty-handed as Kate danced away with Monroe.
Near the edge of the dance floor, Kate stopped dancing and faced him, full-on, her eyes boring deeply into his. Monroe reached out for her, gathering her up in his arms. She melted into them, feeling for the first time the warmth of his body against hers. He reached out and guided her head towards him so that their mouths would meet. She opened her lips as he pressed his tongue into her mouth. His kiss sent shock waves of excitement and desire through her body. Monroe’s hands moved to her ass, pulling her against him, their hips thrusting. She pushed his hands away, and grabbed his ass, pulling him tight against her. As her head fell backwards, Monroe licked her neck ever so seductively.
Almost in a trance, Kate and Monroe slow-danced together as one, their arms wrapped tightly around the other, their bodies moving in perfect harmony; one swayed to the right, the other followed. As they moved across the dance floor, totally out of sync with the other dancers, their eyes locked on each other as if they were trying to see deep into the other’s soul. Monroe pulled her mouth hungrily to his, and kissed her intensely, passionately. Then, playing out her role as the dominant, Kate grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head, and forced her tongue down his throat, kissing him deeply, mercilessly.
The music segued into another song, but they kept moving, oblivious to their place in time and space.
In a matter of heartbeats, they were melting into each other, kissing; their bodies pressed into one form, swaying. Monroe whispered sweetly in her ear with his warm, moist breath, and she felt a wave of passion wash completely over her body. He slipped his fingers under her jacket, and his warm hands cupped her breasts. Monroe’s hands seemed to take on a personality of their own, alternating between a soft squeeze around each breast, and his thumb and forefinger lightly kneading her nipples until they were hard. He made concentrating on their dance very difficult as he probed the other erogenous zones of her body with his fingertips.
As they continued to sway back and forth, Kate fought an uncontrollable desire to reach down between his legs. Passion triumphed over reason when she grabbed hold of his crotch and felt an impressive bulge under her hand. She rubbed him through his leather pants, and he grew harder. Kate wanted nothing more than to make love to him right then and there in the club. For the last week, she had been fantasizing about what it would be like, and now she had her chance. But she contented herself with one last kiss, and she kissed him fiercely, forcing herself deeper and deeper . . . What did it matter? She was an adult after all.
Some of the revelers around them had stopped dancing, and were now staring as the two devoured each other. Right there on the dance floor. Barely able to hold back, Kate felt sensations that she never knew existed. She kept moving with the rhythms of his body, her head back, her back almost arching. She and Monroe were on a one-way flight to seventh . . .
“. . . heaven,” she said, almost in dreamland.
“Miller? Dawson? Is there anybody there? I’ve tracked your suspect to a second floor utility closet, and from the readings of the thermal imaging software, she’s taking some pretty heavy mind-altering drugs.”
Abruptly, the reality of her surroundings caught up to her. Kate pushed Monroe away from her body, and looked around the dance floor, her head spinning. She was suddenly aware that some people had been watching them as her features flushed red with humiliation.
“. . . utility closet,” Kate repeated, coming out of it.
“It could be a bathroom,” said Provolone in her ear. “The infrared is not a hundred percent accurate under these atmospheric conditions.”
Kate struggled to right herself, fighting the sensation of dizziness in her head. A couple of women were laughing at her; a few guys snickered. Most of the revelers seemed to be unfazed as they picked up the beat of the music and started pounding the floor again. The excitement was all over. Even Rutherford and the other two leathermen were gone. In a beat or two, everything was back to normal, normal for the Black Rose. Everything except Kate.
“Goddammit,” she shouted.
“No need to use profanity,” Lenny said, admonishing her. “I did warn you that conditions were less than optimal for NEMESIS.”
“Not now, Lenny . . .”
Kate stumbled to the side, and grabbed the back of a stool at the bar. Her head was still spinning. She would have fallen over if it wasn’t for the support of the barstool. She didn’t know whether it was the overwhelming smell of crack smoke in the air
or something in the beer she drank or the rush of endorphins in her head, but she felt faint. She put her left hand to her forehead. As crazy as it sounded, maybe Monroe had used some form of hypnosis on her or slipped ecstasy in her drink.
“What can I get you, lady?” asked the bartender.
“Get me?” she replied, still dopey.
“You wanna drink?”
“Drink?” she repeated.
“Kate . . . Kate, can you hear me?” Lenny shouted in her ear. “Everything just went red! Someone’s been wounded or killed. The readings are off the charts . . .”
A woman screamed in terror. “Murder!”
“. . . and Miller’s not responding . . .”
“Frank,” she whispered, knowing something was wrong.
Panicked, Kate struggled to her feet, sobering up fast.
Glancing to the right and then to the left, she searched for Monroe in the crowd. There was no sign of him at all. What the hell had happened to him? Angry, she looked down at her watch. It was 9:09. In less than a minute, Monroe was supposed to meet their murder suspect.
She started for the stairs, but was a beat too slow as dozens of people came streaming down in a panic. She fought her way up, shoving people out of the way as she climbed the stairs, two at a time. She hit the mezzanine level at full speed, and raced by the screaming woman. She headed towards the men’s room, figuring that was more likely than a utility closet.
Kate crashed through the door, running. The men’s room door flew open, and she stood in the entrance for several heartbeats, with her gun in hand. Through the heavy haze of crack smoke and strobing lights, she scanned the room for some sign of Miller or his assailant. Then she saw Miller crumpled over a toilet. The door to the stall was half-open, and blood was all over the floor.
“Frank!” Kate screamed. She dropped down on her knees next to her fallen partner, placed her gun to the side, and tried to prevent the flow of blood with her bare hands. Like the other victims, his throat had been slashed from ear to ear. Blood flowed in a torrent right through her fingers, and that’s when she realized there was nothing in the world she could do to stop him from dying.
She reached down, and cradled Miller’s head in her arms. “It will be okay, partner,” she tried to reassure him, but he never heard her words. His eyes glazed over, and his body went limp right in her arms.
“Frank, Frank,” moaned Kate. “Oh, please God, not Frank.”
Kate continued to cradle him in her arms, and then a thought flashed through her head: Whoever had killed Miller must still be there at the club. She reached up to her ear and said, “Lenny, call 911, and tell them there’s an officer down at the Black Rose on the second floor. Code ten double-zero.”
“Kate, what’s going on? It looks like pandemonium over there,” Lenny asked.
“Just do it,” she yelled, picking up her service pistol and running out of the men’s room at top speed.
Kate raced up to the third floor, and shouldered her way through the door to the VIP lounge, gun in hand. She pushed past the two large black bouncers, and quickly surveyed the room. Men and women, men and men, and women and women looked up from their private couplings, startled. They looked at her like she was insane. She might well have been. Rage burned in Kate as she proceeded to kick down the door to each private room. But Crystal Rose was nowhere to be found. And neither was Monroe.
LESS THAN TWENTY minutes later, the entire complement of police officers in the San Francisco Police Department descended on the Black Rose. No two words carried more weight or concern in the lexicon of police calls than the words “officer down,” or code 10-00, for they often meant that a policeman had been shot down, possibly killed, in the line of duty. Generally, police officers all throughout the world were a sentimental lot; they loved their wives, their children and their families, and were prepared to offer the fullest measure of devotion with their lives to protect the cities and communities they served. Nothing brought them together faster than the thought one of their own was “down.” And according to scuttlebutt, a forty-year veteran of the force had given his life in pursuit of a suspect.
The Black Rose was a flurry of activity. Plain-clothes detectives took statements from club members, coroners flashed photographs, the scene-of-the-crime boys dusted for evidence, and uniformed policemen kept the crowd in check. At the same time, Kate stood there with members of her team, including Lt. Roberts, Ramirez and Jawara, as Captain Aguilar questioned her. He paced back and forth, his face red, and his head looked like it was going to explode.
“What the hell were you and Miller doing here?”
Kate felt shell-shocked. She trembled, and couldn’t seem to respond.
“Did you not hear me?” demanded Aguilar, louder. “I want to know what the hell you and Miller were doing here.”
Kate remained silent, feeling distant, as if she were floating above the scene, watching it.
Lt. Roberts backed his boss down with a couple of hand gestures. He wrapped his beefy arm around Kate shoulder, and shot her a paternal smile, like Miller. “You and Miller decided to go out for a drink, didn’t you?” he suggested. “Just for old time’s sake.”
“Yeah,” she replied, feeling as though she was in a trance.
“You saw a suspicious looking redhead going into the club,” Roberts added some embellishment to the story, “and decided to follow her.”
“Sure.”
The assistant chief of police exploded. “With no warrant? No back up? Have you forgotten everything you learned about proper police procedure?”
Lt. Roberts shot Aguilar a dirty look.
That brought Kate’s focus back to the here and now. “We never saw her,” she admitted.
“You mean, after you got in the club?” asked Roberts.
“That’s right. She was supposed to be here, but we never saw her,” she replied. “But we did see your boy Rutherford.”
“Impossible,” exclaimed Aguilar.
“I’m telling you he was here,” said Kate, holding her ground. “He and a couple of his bullyboys, and they weren’t practicing safe sex.”
“That’s enough of that. I don’t want to hear another word,” he admonished her, waving his forefinger in the detective’s face. “You’re talking about a close, personal friend of the mayor’s.”
“Well, that close, personal friend of the mayor’s almost raped some guy that got in his way. If I hadn’t stopped him and his buddies, they’d have gang-banged him right there on the dance floor.”
“Dawson, I’m warning you—”
She cut the assistant chief of police off in mid-sentence. “Lieutenant,” she said to Roberts, “I don’t think we should be looking for a woman. I think we should be looking for a man. Strong, violent, psychotic. That’s the only person who could have brought Miller down.”
“Rutherford?” Roberts asked.
“Damn straight.”
Aguilar obviously had something more to say, but failed to get it out before the medical examiner and two of his men approached with a gurney carrying Miller’s body in a body bag. Kate walked over to his side. She had an overwhelming urge to reach for the zipper and free her partner from the body bag, and death. But she pulled her hand back, totally powerless.
Instead, she walked alongside her partner, quietly, as the makeshift funeral dirge crossed the mezzanine floor, wound its way down the stairs, and out the front door of the nightclub.
Chapter Ten
ON FRIDAY, September 24, San Francisco Police Inspector Frank Miller was laid to rest at Woodlawn Memorial Park in a section of the cemetery devoted to police officers who had been killed in the line of duty.
Woodlawn Memorial Park was located at 1000 El Camino Real, along the famous historic route early Spanish conquistadors used to connect the Missions in old California.
Situated on sixty-five acres in San Mateo County, the majestic grounds were adorned with statues, holly, pine and palm trees, a waterfall and a lake, massive stone arches and marble buildings. The well-maintained landscape made a picturesque final resting place. Other than police officers, the most famous gravesites at Woodlawn belonged to Etienne Guittard, founder of Guittard Chocolate, and “Emperor” Norton—Joshua Abraham Norton, the iconic figure from San Francisco history who believed he was the first emperor of America.
Earlier that day, twenty-five hundred people, including law enforcement officials from all around the state, crowded into St. Mary’s Cathedral, while another fifteen hundred stood watching outside, to honor Miller. Tributes from the mayor, the chief of police, Lt. Roberts, and others celebrated the forty-year career of the first African American to rise through the ranks to become a homicide inspector. Kate struggled to keep her composure as she listened to these high-ranking officials talk about her partner as if they had known him personally. With the exception of the lieutenant, most had never heard his name, except perhaps in pejorative terms from Aguilar. She felt nauseated, and wanted to vomit it all out of her system.
When San Francisco’s Roman Catholic Archbishop Phillip H. Townsend read the homily, he reminded mourners that faith in God was the only way to truly understand life and death. He also said police officers rarely receive the recognition they deserve for the job that they do each and every day. “It’s a shame that we have to wait for an occasion like this one to say thank you to the men and women in blue,” Townsend said. “This morning, we give thanks to Frank Miller. This morning, we give thanks to all police officers.”
The unusually cold September day was illuminated by a pale winter sun, and as Kate came out of the cathedral, she marveled at how appropriate the weather conditions were to reflect both the grief and love that had been expressed by family and friends within the sanctuary of the church. She placed a pair of sunglasses over her moist eyes to keep anyone from seeing her cry, and shouldered part of the casket as one of the pallbearers. Behind her were Jawara, Ramirez, and a patrol cop she didn’t know. On the other side, Lt. Roberts was opposite her, followed by Clark, and two other pallbearers. As they carried Miller’s flag-draped coffin down the steps and placed it in the waiting hearse, the officers who were mustered in ranks outside saluted.