I backed from the microphone that was being held in front of my face as a signal for the talent do his thing. He was good, stayed with the dramatic tone. As the camera pulled in close to him, I slipped away.
Mike was standing near Jack Riley watching me, grinning sardonically as I walked up to him.
“So?” I said to Jack.
He seemed pleased. “The station is already re-running your special report.”
“When did I get upgraded from sixty-second bit to special report? Does the pay go up, too?”
Mike said, “I thought I told you to stay out of trouble.”
“I thought I told you not to tell me what to do.” I leaned against him. “Did I leave out anything?”
“My name,” Mike said.
“Must have slipped my mind,” I said.
Mike was called away by the coroner. I stayed and had a long talk with Jack before I walked back to the car to make some calls. I wanted to find Jennifer.
I had no home number for Jennifer. No one answered at her office. Not knowing anywhere else to try, I called Baron Marovich’s office and left a message, and then called his campaign headquarters out in the Valley and left another message for Roddy O’Leary. I gave them both Mike’s mobile number. Then I called James Shabazz, to fill him in.
Jack had been right. As soon as the petroleum-fire crew appeared, the party was just about over. Street traffic had caused some delay for the foam tankers, but when they came, they moved right in with their big hoses. At the same time, an aerial tanker dove in overhead and dropped its red slime on the flaming oil barrels. The blaze disappeared, but the stench of burning petroleum and rubber lingered.
The helicopters, one by one, turned off their spots and swooped away, leaving us in an eerie darkness. The flashing lights of the official vehicles, the floods set up by the news people, the streetlights, could not penetrate the dense black smoke beyond a few yards. Nonessential personnel began to go, each one leaving the scene darker, quieter. I watched them all, waiting for Mike to come back.
We were among the last to leave. The coroner wouldn’t be able to get to the corpse until daylight. Official identification and cause of death could take weeks. There was nothing left for us to do.
I felt a tremendous adrenaline letdown, exhausted and excited all at once. We stopped by my office to pick up the mail on the way home. Back on the freeway, Mike was quiet, lost in thought or reluctant to restart the argument. The ringing of the car telephone startled us both.
Roddy O’Leary was angry. “What do you have against Baron? He’s a decent guy, he’s done a good job for the county. Why are you crucifying him?”
“We both know the answer to that, Roddy.”
“What’s it going to take to make you stop?”
I said, “The truth.”
“Whose truth? Dang, Maggie, you know as well as anyone does that truth is a slimy bastard—keeps changing its shape. You have a version, Baron has a version, that fucking con has a version. You’ve taken some pretty dirty shots at Baron. You’re killing him in the polls.”
And killing you, I thought. A campaign director’s price is set by his last campaign. Lose one, move back two spaces. For Roddy, a loss in the D.A.‘s race would probably eliminate any chance of getting a governor-race gig, even state assembly would be reaching.
I want a debate,” he said. “I want you on TV, give Baron a chance to answer.”
“Sorry,” I said, “debate isn’t my format.”
“You owe him.”
“I don’t owe him a goddamn thing. And I’m not going to debate him.”
Roddy was persistent. “Ralph Faust says he’ll give us air time. Thirty minutes tomorrow afternoon, replayed at eleven.”
“If I do it,” I said, “the format is discussion, not a debate. And I bring a friend or two with me.”
“Who?”
“I’ll let you know, if I decide to go ahead.”
Mike thought it was a bad idea to have a face-off. After he let me know that, he had nothing more to say. All the rest of the way home, and while we got ready for bed, he was like a mute. Very unusual for Mike.
I didn’t get to the office mail until I sat down on the bed. In the middle of the stack, there was a plain envelope with my name hand-printed on the front. There was no note inside. Nothing except copies of the affidavits dated the week before and signed by Hanna Rhodes and LaShonda DeBevis. I passed them to Mike.
All he said when he read them was, “Hmm.” Then he rolled over and went to sleep. Or pretended to.
Chapter 27
Sometime in the middle of the night, Mike turned on the light beside the bed and sat up.
“Why not?” he asked.
I hadn’t been sleeping, but the light still hurt my eyes. I rolled over against him, buried my face in the pillow behind his shoulder. When the fire interrupted our first go-round on the topic of marriage, I had hoped against logic that it wouldn’t come up again. I said the only thing I could think of, “I love you too much.”
He gave this some consideration before rejecting it. His tone was sharp. “Try again.”
“I don’t ever want to go through a divorce again.”
“I didn’t ask you for a divorce.”
“Aren’t we happy, Mike?”
“I know I am.”
“Why mess things up?”
“How is getting married going to mess up our happiness?” I sat up then, pulled the sheet up under my chin, wrapped my arms around my raised knees. I said, “How did you feel about getting called to the fire?”
He looked at me askance. “After twenty-two years on the job, I have seen my fill. The only thing that gets me through it anymore is knowing that in two more years, five months, there won’t be any more roll-outs. No more nothing but peace.”
“The problem is,” I said, “I haven’t seen my fill. I love the roll-outs.” I put my arm through his. “We’re great together now, baby, because we are still in the thick of things. But what will happen in two years? You’ll be off walking on your deserted beach, and I’ll be in the trenches in Mogadishu or somewhere. I’ve been in a sort of holding pattern as long as Casey is still at home. My plan has always been that as soon as she’s on her own, I’m out of here. I won’t have to accept pissy domestic-themed projects anymore to pay the bills. I can do, I can go anywhere.”
All he said was, “But…”
When there was no follow-up, I asked, “Will you come with me?”
“To Mogadishu?”
“To anywhere.”
“If I came with you, what would I be doing?”
“Guess you have to figure that out. Then, you have to decide whether that’s anything you want to do for the next God knows how many years.”
He put an arm around me and pulled me close. “What’s wrong with walking on the beach?”
“Nothing. There are beaches all over the world. I hear Mogadishu has a great one.”
He said, “Hmm.”
“We’re in different places in our lives right now, Mike. In two years, five months, who knows? Can’t we just be happy being happy?”
“I don’t know.” He reached over and turned off the light, turned his back to me. “I don’t know.”
In the morning, early, Mike took me up to the hills above the Griffith Park zoo for a run. Mike has both greater speed and better endurance than I have. I run to keep everything from falling apart, he runs as a challenge, always pushing his limits. I should have known better than to stand my five miles three times a week up against his eleven miles a day, even for an easy Sunday morning outing.
For my benefit, Mike set us on a nice, slow pace. At first, it was fun. There was a dense, gray marine layer overhead that kept us cool. We ran through a rugged canyon filled with dusty scrub, withered sycamore trees, and poison oak flaming red and orange to mark the coming of fall. Now and then, little brown squirrels or packs of stray cats would dart across the pavement in front of us.
For such an out-of-the-
way spot, there was unusually heavy vehicle traffic—the canyon is a major pick-up spot for gay men—so we had to hug the roadside. All the way up, the sides of the narrow, two-lane road were lined with parked cars, young men hoping to make a connection. Some got out to pose on the hoods of their cars, others sunbathed in bikinis in the pull-outs—like statues in a wooded garden.
Most stayed inside their cars and made eye contact with the men slowly cruising by. No one gave Mike or me more than a nod. Not that Mike would have seen a nod; his eyes never left the center line.
I enjoyed the run for a while, but the operative word for the course he set was up. The slope was steep, and it was all uphill. After the first few miles, I was straining to keep up, he was straining to hold back. As long as I could, I tried to cover the effort it took to hang in. But by the time we came out on top, I was breathing hard and the long muscles in my thighs were beginning to cramp.
Mike slowed, ostensibly to admire the magnificent view of the city laid out below us. “Beautiful, huh?”
I managed to nod; my chest burned.
Mike was breathing easily, running like a machine. He said, laughing, “There are three million stories in the big city. Rape, murder, mayhem. But I’m off, so let them go to it.”
When we hit the down slope, another set of muscles took over so I wasn’t in as much pain. After a while, I began to get my wind back. Just when I thought I would be able to make it back to the lot where we had left the car, he said, “Want to do some sprints?”
I knew he knew how tired I was. I managed to say, “Go ahead.”
Grinning, teasing, he said, “You can do it.”
“Beast,” I gasped, and dropped back to a walk. He ran in big circles around me until I thought I would have to shoot him. Finally, wounded ego overcame pain, and I began to run again.
As soon as we left the path along the hill crest, we dropped down into heavy shade, and the air felt sweeter, moister. It was blessedly peaceful. There were small animals and birds. I saw occasional lover-pairs walking off together deeper into the undergrowth, for privacy. Now and then a mountain cyclist came by.
Mike said, “Ever see a better place to run?”
I said, “No ocean view.” And that ended the conversation. All in all, it had been a punishing run.
Mike needed to put in a painting shift at the house, and I thought maybe we both needed some time off from each other. I made other plans.
Ralph Faust wanted my answer, now, about whether or not I would appear with Baron Marovich that afternoon. For a number of good reasons, I didn’t want to do it. Certainly, I wanted to talk with the D.A., but I preferred a little private one-on-one with him, hash things out with no audience to pander to. With the fire at Kelsey’s and being tailed by George Schwartz as recent history, I had to think carefully about where that private meeting would take place.
I made one call, to Hector, before I called Marovich and told him where I would be if he wanted to talk.
I folded a load of clothes, put a new load in the washer, did a few other chores to give Hector some time. When I pulled into the lot at the LAPD Hollywood Division an hour later, he was waiting for me on the covered ramp that leads into the back of the old brick station house. He walked down to meet me.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
He chuckled. “It was either meet you or work on the sprinkler system with Mike’s dad. Believe me, you’re a whole lot better company than Oscar.”
“I won’t tell Oscar you said that,” I said. “The message you left yesterday, you said you had some reports for me?”
He opened the back door. “I’m not sure what you’re looking for. Be a whole lot easier for me if I did.”
“Be easier if I knew, too.”
We walked down a long, narrow hallway lined with framed, autographed movie posters—this was Hollywood Division.
Generally, the detective room looked like every other detective room I had seen: overcrowded with mismatched, scarred desks and chairs, ranks of no-color file cabinets, boxes and stacks of papers on every available surface.
Two things gave the big, open room some character. The first was the movie/TV presence in the form of signed cheesecake black and white glossies taped on nearly every desk and cabinet. The second was the big wooden, hand-carved, “somebody’s father-in-law got a router for Christmas” signs suspended by chains over each section. Very rustic. I wondered what old Dad must have thought as he carved “Rape,” “Robbery,” “Homicide” for the boys and girls down at the office.
Hector’s desk was in a back corner under the homicide sign. He pulled up a chair for me, cleared a space on his blotter, and opened a thin file. He handed me five computer print-out sheets, each with a line or two of type.
He said, “AFIS reports from the prints Mike lifted in your office. Tell you anything?”
“Plenty.” The computer had identified Ralph Faust, Jennifer Miller, Eusebio Kino, who was the building’s night janitor, Guido Patrini, and an unknown as sometime visitors of mine. I pulled out Jennifer’s print-out. “Mike lifted the prints Wednesday. As far as I know, the only time Jennifer Miller was in my office was Friday night.”
“Interesting.” Hector set her print-out aside. “I can’t do anything about it. I can’t bring Miller in if this is all I have. I can’t even show for a certainty there was a break in.”
“I wish you could bring her in,” I said. “But not for jimmying my lock. Has anyone spoken to Jennifer since last night?”
“No. Friday morning, she asked her ex to take their little boy for the weekend—said she had to work through. Security at her office building signed her in at eleven Friday night, signed her out twenty minutes later. The guard at your building ID’ed her as the woman who dropped off an envelope for you at midnight. From there, cold trail. She’s scheduled to pick up the kid around six tonight. If she doesn’t show… Well, I guess that will tell us something. Kelsey hasn’t been located, either.”
“Any word on the corpse in the fire?”
He shook his head. “Nada. It takes time.”
I caught myself before I let loose with something sarcastic. What I really wanted was a TV detective with sixty minutes, minus commercials, to bring everything together. The real-world delays were aggravating in the extreme. I said, “Show me what else you found.”
“Property dispo card,” he said, pulling out a photocopied evidence log. “You wanted me to dig out the prints from the Johnson murder scene and run them through the system.”
“Right.” I pulled my chair closer.
“There are no prints anymore. All of the hard evidence was tossed out years ago.”
“Say it ain’t so,” I said.
He smiled. “Think about it. We don’t have room to store all the crap from every case forever. Every six months to a year, the property room does a routine audit and asks the detective in charge of a case what he wants to do with his evidence. Look at the card: Fingerprints, shoe prints, some clothes—all consigned to the incinerator.” He ran his finger down a column. “See, property disposed per whoever’s signature that is, that badge number, that date.”
I said, “Jerry Kelsey’s badge number, the date is the same as Conklin’s sentencing date. Jerry sure was in a hurry to clean house, wasn’t he? Could he do that?”
“Absolutely. The assigned detective is the one responsible for the evidence. It was stupid to act so fast, though. Kelsey’s lucky there was no appeal on the conviction.”
I looked up at Hector. “I believe people make their own luck.”
“Yeah?” He laughed softly. “Guess I do, too.”
“There are no spent shells listed in the log.”
“Don’t see any.”
“Inside a tiny room, Johnson took six slugs at point-blank range. No slugs recovered from the body. No shells found. Where are they?”
“Who knows?” He said this with a worldly sort of disdain. “Souvenir hunters, maybe. Maybe the killer picked them up, or whoever cleane
d up after swept them out. Bigger things than shells get overlooked all the time.”
“Oh,” I said. “Have anything else for me?”
“Not really. Mike had questions about a couple of the vehicles at the Hanna Rhodes scene. But I think I’ve cleared them all. I talked to Mike yesterday. Want to go over them?”
As I leaned over the list, Hector suddenly slid it back into the file and quickly slid the file into his top desk drawer, locked the drawer. Eyes down, he muttered, “Your man’s here.”
Baron Marovich was wending his way toward us through the ranks of desks. Wearing soiled tennis garb, and looking wary, he said, “Good morning.”
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “You know Detective Melendez, I’m sure.”
Hector offered his hand, “Mr. District Attorney.”
Marovich was only marginally courteous in this exchange. He said, “I should have recognized the address you gave me, MacGowen. What are you doing in a police station?”
“It seemed like neutral territory,” I said.
“Hardly neutral,” he said. “Can we go somewhere else?”
I said, “No. I feel safe here. If you would be more comfortable in an interrogation room with a tape running, maybe Detective Melendez can set it up.”
Marovich seemed stretched, pushed near the point of ignition. “Give me a break. Let you have a tape? Use it for fucking voice-over material. Just tell me, what’s the score here? Are you coming with me to SNN? You going to play fair for once?”
I left some space for the air to settle. He had been noisy enough to attract the attention of a couple of plainclothes officers who were walking through. In a low voice, I said, “I think it’s time for the two of us to talk, alone. Plain talk, no campaign manager, no video camera.”
“That’s unresponsive.”
“Off the record talk,” I said.
Marovich turned to Hector. “Can we get some coffee?”
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