A King of Infinite Space

by Tyler Dilts

  Before everyone came back, I decided to go get lunch. I walked across Broadway to a Mexican place that, despite the fact that not a single sign in the restaurant was written in English, was constantly filled with white cops sucking down tacos and tamales and marveling at how “authentic” the food was. I ordered my usual carne asada burrito and wondered what everyone back in the squad was doing. I knew they’d be angry that I flaked out on the conference. Too bad. There was no way I was going to stand up for Baxter and even pretend to support him in closing the case. Not when I knew that Beth’s killer was still walking and talking. And I did know that. I kept muttering it to myself under my breath. I wanted a reckoning. And I didn’t care what it cost.

  Ruiz didn’t waste any time. As soon I walked back into the squad, he yelled, “Beckett!” Jen looked at me the way an embarrassed mother watches her child caught in an inappropriate act.

  I stood in front of the desk in Ruiz’s office and crossed my arms over my chest. “Hey, Boss,” I said. I made a point of speaking so softly that no one outside would be able to hear. I knew without turning my head that at least six eyes were locked on us.

  He leaned back in his chair, trying to hold his anger in check. “Danny, you’re crossing lines here that can’t be uncrossed.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I really am. But I can’t let this one go. Not like this. I don’t believe the colonel killed Beth. I’m still working it.”

  “No, you’re not. Marty and Dave are going to stay on it. I told Baxter they’d be ‘tying up loose ends,’ and he seemed all right with that.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. There are a lot more than loose ends here. But we’re getting close. I’m almost there.” I looked in his eyes. If there was any forgiveness in them, I couldn’t see it.

  “Look,” he said, leaning forward, running a finger between his collar and his neck. “I understand what you’re going through. You’re connected to this. Nobody’s trying to edge you out. We’ll keep you in the loop. You’ve put a lot into this. We won’t forget.”

  “You think I’m worried about who gets the collar?”

  “Sit down, Danny.”

  “Look, you just—”

  “Sit down,” he said, his voice almost a whisper, “or I’ll come over there and sit you down.” I sat.

  “You feel bad about Baxter exploiting this,” Ruiz said. “So do I. As far as the media is concerned, this case is closed. We know different, though, don’t we, Danny?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “We do. You know what hurts me, though? What really hurts me? You believed I’d let him bury this. Hang it on the old man and forget all about it. You actually believed that, didn’t you?”

  I told him the truth. “Yes.”

  “That’s why I put Dave and Marty on it. I brownnosed Baxter and let him put on his show because I knew that if I did, then we’d still be able to work the case, as long as we did it quietly. No more task force. No more politics getting in our way. Did you think of that?”

  “No.”

  “The reason I’m putting Marty and Dave on it is because they’ve been able to maintain their perspective. You haven’t.”

  “Give it to me and Jen.”

  “No.”

  “Please,” I said, lowering my head. There would be no turning back now. “I need this.”

  He leaned back in his chair, watched me, and then picked up a pencil and began rolling it between his fingers. “You sure you can handle it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, if you drop the ball on this one, you’re going to hurt Jen too.

  “I understand.”

  He watched me to make sure I did. “Only if everyone’s okay with it.”

  I turned around and looked at them through the window. Marty and Dave both shrugged their shoulders. I looked at Jen. She nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “Don’t screw up.”

  Too late for that, I thought.

  Jen and I went to the hospital to check on the colonel. On the way up Long Beach Boulevard, she asked me, “You okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  After a long silence, she said, “I know you’re having a hard time with this one.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You’re coming unglued, Danny. We’re all worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said again, trying as much to convince myself as her. “It’s just…” My voice trailed off, and I let the silence hang in the air.

  She cut off a UPS van and pulled over to the curb. “I know,” she said, turning in her seat to face me. “It keeps you thinking about Megan.” I was taken aback that she found this fact so obvious. “But I have to say this—it’s not about her, Danny. It’s not. And no matter how many cases you crack, no matter how many Tropovs you beat the shit out of, no matter how many skells you take down, it’s not going to change what happened.”

  I just kept looking out the passenger window, not wanting to acknowledge the fact that she knew me so much better than I knew myself.

  At the hospital, we learned nothing new. I watched the colonel for a while. He was reclined in the hospital bed, intubated, a respirator doing his breathing for him. He looked gaunt and haggard, a thousand years old. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel some small measure of satisfaction in his complete loss of dignity and in knowing how humiliated he’d be if he were able to understand his situation. I hoped that somewhere deep inside his withered carcass, some part of him did understand, some part of him felt his degradation and shrank from it.

  Maybe his wife had felt the same emotions I was feeling. She’d stayed only long enough to see that he was stabilized, and then she went back to the hotel. No one had seen or heard from her since. She didn’t even leave a number to call with any news.

  “I hope he wakes up,” Jen said to me in a soft voice. “He doesn’t deserve to get off this easy.”

  “No,” I said. “He doesn’t. But how many of us get what we deserve?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “What’s this shit about the case being closed?” Pat asked as I walked into his office.

  “Exactly that,” I said. “Shit.”

  “But the task force is over, right?”

  “Yeah. As far as the brass is concerned, we’re done. Jen and I are just mopping up.”

  “Until you figure out who really killed her,” he said. “Then Baxter’s gonna be eating a big-ass plate of crow.”

  “Yeah. Assuming we do manage to figure it out.”

  “You’ll manage.” He spun half a rotation on his ergonomic chair and dug through a pile of papers on his desk. “Speaking of which,” he said, “I have a list of all the Cutting Edge sales invoices for LA and Orange counties, going back a year. I found seventy-eight direct sales of the kukri we’re looking for. Another fifty-odd units to retail outlets. I’m running backgrounds on all the buyers we can track.”

  “Don’t suppose Tropov or Waxler bought one, did they?” I asked.

  “Not directly from the company, but maybe from one of the stores. I’m going to start making the rounds this afternoon. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Uh, Pat,” I said, “you know you’re not technically on the case anymore, right?”

  “Who’ll know the difference? You think anybody upstairs has the slightest idea what I do down here?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him. “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t we split up that list? We’ll get through them faster that way.”

  “Sure. How should we divide them?”

  “Geographically.”

  “Okay,” he said, working his keyboard. “We’ll split them at the county line.” He punched a few more keys. “Hang on,” he said as the printer behind him hummed to life. He handed me a sheet of paper that listed dozens of sporting goods, gun, surplus, and specialty stores sorted into two groups: twenty-six locations in LA County and another twenty-nine in Orange. “You guys want to go north or south?”
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  “You live in Huntington, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why don’t Jen and I take LA? Keep you closer to home.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks, Pat,” I said.

  “No sweat.” He opened his desk drawer and took out a long, thin, red and yellow cellophane package. “You want some turkey jerky?”

  “So,” I said, looking up from the list to look at Jen behind the wheel of her Explorer. We were still parked outside the station. “If you were Tropov or Waxler, where would you go to buy a big-ass knife?”

  “We triangulate with the address closest to both of them and work outward in concentric circles,” she said. She unfolded the LA map that the Thomas Brothers had graciously pasted inside the cover of their once-popular street guide. Online services like MapQuest and in-car navigation systems were eroding the book’s market, but for our needs, the good old-fashioned paper version beat the new technology hands down.

  Jen slipped a stubby pencil out of a slot on the sun visor and began drawing on the map. “Okay,” she said, making an X on Rancho Palos Verdes and another on the edge of Long Beach Harbor. “The midpoint’s here—San Pedro.” She made another mark. “Where do we start?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, running my finger down the list of addresses. “There’s Union Surplus in Pedro and Quartermaster and Turner’s Outdoorsman in Long Beach.” We decided to hit them in reverse order, starting at the closest point and working east to west and, if necessary, north. Turned out it was necessary.

  We came up empty at the first three places, and we weren’t holding out much hope for number four on the list, J&J Paintball and Martial Arts Supply. The store was in an old converted warehouse that was snuggled in the crook of the interchange between the Harbor and San Diego freeways in Carson. The merchandise, along with the clientele, fell somewhere between the full-bore fantasy of Jackie Chan movies and first-person shooter games and the all-too-visceral reality of Glock and Beretta 9s and 40s.

  Inside, a mulleted twentysomething clerk almost choked on his Subway sandwich when Jen leaned against the counter, let her coat slip open to show off her weapon, and said, “Do you think you might be able to help me?”

  He still had a mouthful of bread and meat, so he nodded and mumbled “uh-huh” into her chest. She’d undone an extra button on her silk blouse while she was walking from the car to the front door. The day’s experience dealing with knife-selling clerks hadn’t been lost on her.

  While Jen was busy engaging him in the interview, I let my eyes wander up and down the aisles, which were filled with martial arts uniforms, pads, dummies, and weapons. On the far side of the large store was a glass case. The wall behind it held rack after rack of paintball guns and accessories. In the far corner, a multicolored rainbow of paintball bursts covered two sheets of plywood that had been mounted on the wall as a makeshift firing range.

  “I’m investigating a murder,” Jen said, flashing her shield. She introduced herself and went on. “What’s your name?”

  “Bill.”

  “Bill, I need to know about a knife.”

  “What…” His voice came out at a higher pitch than he’d expected, so he cleared his throat before he continued, but it didn’t seem to help. “What kind of knife?”

  “Oh, what is it?” she asked casually, pretending to consult her notes. “A kukri. Made by a company called Cutting Edge.”

  “Oh yeah,” Bill said. “We have those. Right over here.” He walked three yards down the long glass counter, inside of which, on three mirrored shelves, was arranged the largest display of cutlery I’d ever seen—folding hunters, Swiss Armys, butterflies, stilettos, daggers, KA-BARs, bayonets, tantos, bowies, and just about everything else imaginable. At the far end of the display, easily recognizable, were half a dozen variations of the blade in question. Three of the six kukris were obviously cheap, low-quality numbers, the polished gleam of their blades and hardware not quite covering up the tool marks and the rough fit of the dull wood handles. In contrast, the satin-finished brass and stainless steel of the Cutting Edge models seemed almost to warrant the exponentially higher prices.

  “The Cutting Edge ones are the best,” he said. “Nolo contendere.”

  Even though half a dozen came to mind, I didn’t make a wisecrack. As far as I could tell, he still hadn’t even noticed I was there. Just in case, I thought it wise not to give up the element of surprise.

  The clerk took the knife out of the case and handed it, handle first, to Jen. “The other ones,” he continued, “are pretty much just import crap, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” Jen said, holding the big knife in her hand, managing to sound genuinely impressed.

  “Well, I’ve been here almost two years now.”

  “So you’re pretty much an expert?” Jen asked.

  “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said.

  “How far would you go?” she asked.

  I looked down into the case and pretended to study a folding Spyderco clip point.

  “Uh, pretty far I guess.” His voice cracked and rose another octave halfway through the sentence, reminding me of those classic “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” commercials of my youth. I wondered if he’d be able to shatter a wineglass with his falsetto too.

  “I need you to do something for me,” Jen said.

  “Yeah, of course. Anything. Sure—” He would have gone on, perhaps indefinitely, but Jen stopped him.

  “Take a look at these pictures,” she said, pulling three five-by-sevens out of her bag. She put them down on the counter, and the clerk looked down at the faces of Waxler, Tropov, and the colonel. “Does any one of these men look familiar?” she asked.

  He studied the photos, one at time, giving each several seconds of his full attention. “You’re looking for someone who bought a Cutting Edge kukri?”

  “Yes,” Jen said, “we are.”

  “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t think any one of these guys has ever come in here.”

  “You sound pretty sure,” Jen said.

  “Well, I couldn’t say I’m positive, of course. But I’m here most of the time that the store is open, and I think I would remember if they did.”

  “Why?”

  “Most of our customers fall into a certain demographic.” There was a newfound authority in his voice, a confidence that hadn’t been there before, and it dropped down into a lower register. “Primarily, the guys who come in here are young, mostly teenagers. It’s the paintball and martial arts crowd, playing with the fantasy. They usually outgrow it before they hit twenty-five. So it’s rare we get anybody as old as any of those guys. Maybe once in a while somebody’s buying something for their kid, but that doesn’t happen too often. Kind of spoils the fun if your mom has to buy your ninja equipment for you, you know?”

  Jen laughed, and her laugh sounded genuine. Inexplicably, I felt good for him. Maybe I couldn’t help rooting for the underdog.

  “But these three guys, I really don’t think so.”

  She questioned him for another five minutes about sales records. Turned out we probably wouldn’t need a court order for the records because Bill really wanted to help out and “do his part,” and he was pretty sure the store’s owner would too. I doubted that, but I didn’t say anything. We left with Bill’s assurance that he’d have the sales records ready for us in a day or two.

  South of the San Diego Freeway in Carson, just across the interstate from the landing field of the Goodyear Blimp, is the Dominguez Golf Course. For as long as I can remember, they’ve had a piece of statuary so impressive that it’s been featured in at least two books on Southern California roadside kitsch.

  It’s a twenty-foot-tall fiberglass golfer, who stands, smiling, putter in hand, to greet the southbound motorist with glad tidings and an unspoken reminder about the wholesome goodness of golf. A few years ago, in an inexplicable fit of political correctness, the owners of the course g
ave the golfer a paint job to make him more closely resemble the predominantly African-American residents of the surrounding community. Unfortunately, the resulting figure resembled nothing so much as the world’s largest lawn jockey. After numerous complaints from the local citizenry, the statue underwent another race change and became white again. Out of a habit rooted deeply in my childhood, I waved at him as we passed.

  “Think we’ll get anywhere with this?” Jen asked.

  “No, but what else do we have?”

  At a quarter past six, we decided to hang it up for the day. We’d covered most of the stores on the list and come up with nothing of any apparent usefulness. We stopped for dinner at the Belmont Brewing Company, a beachfront restaurant with its own line of brewed beers and ales.

  The sun had set, and a chilly winter wind blew along the coast, but still we chose to sit on the patio. With its six-foot Plexiglas walls and the space heaters, it was downright cozy. I had a pale ale and a jerk chicken pizza. Jen surprised me by ordering both a lager and a platter of fish and chips. I worried that I was becoming a bad influence. She laughed when I told her that.

  “Danny,” she said, brushing a dark strand of hair behind her ear, “if my biggest vice is fish and chips, I think I’m in pretty good shape.”

  “But you know what they say about cod.”

  “No, what do they say?”

  “It’s a gateway fish.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh-huh. Next thing you know, it’s chicken fingers, and then you’re only a hair’s breadth away from mozzarella sticks.”

  She laughed again. That was the happiest I’d felt in days.

  It was after eight when I finished the day’s paperwork, made copies, three-hole-punched the handful of pages, and inserted them into the back of the three-ring binder that held the record of our investigation. More than a hundred pages in, and we still didn’t know the story. Not the whole story, anyway. We were missing the most important part.

  I was about to pack it in for the evening when the phone rang. “Homicide,” I said. “Beckett speaking.”