The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin

by Michael Craven

  I handed the ring to Peter. “Didn’t look hard enough.”

  On the way out, we walked by the den, Muriel’s room. I poked my head in. She was in her chair, sitting just like she had been when I was talking to her, only now she was asleep. Her magnified eyes were closed behind glass.

  Even asleep, she looked . . . mean.

  Outside, as I was getting into the Focus, Peter said, “Mrs. Dreen’s not going to believe this story.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s the story. Okay? I’m going to go home, write up an invoice, print it out, and mail it to you.”

  Snail mail. Better than e-mail. For invoices in my line, anyway.

  Peter looked at me for a long time with those nervous but kind eyes and said, “Okay.”

  “Want to give me your card so I know where to send the invoice?”

  Peter reached for his wallet.

  Back in the Focus, back on the road. It was a terrible time to be driving in Los Angeles. Five bells. If you’re on the road at this time in L.A. you’re either a rookie or an idiot.

  I thought, I have three choices. One, fight traffic and go to my office in Culver City. Two, fight traffic and go to my house in Mar Vista, which was a bit farther away. Three, go park somewhere and just sit in my Focus and wait. And fume. Fume in the Focus.

  I chose option one, but with an asterisk. I’d take some pro-level side streets and try to beat the system. Which I did, sort of. By taking Beverly Drive into Beverlywood and winding through that perfectly nice, but a tad random, neighborhood sitting just south of Beverly Hills. I popped out the back of it onto Venice Boulevard, then stuck out a few depressing, stifling sections of traffic until I was free and clear in the warehouse district of Culver City.

  Back at my desk, highly proud of myself for getting there reasonably unscathed, I wrote up my invoice, printed it out, envelope-d it, addressed it, stamped it, and put it on my desk to send out tomorrow. I still hadn’t burned enough time to drive home in peace, not really even close, so I just sat there. Put my feet up on my desk and sat there.

  As I mentioned, I work out of a warehouse, a pretty nice-sized one. Before it was mine, a movie producer used it to store a couple of midlife-crisis cars, thus the aforementioned cinder-block walls, slick concrete floor, and big sliding door. Late afternoon is one of my favorite times to have it open. Cool air coming in; slanting, fading sunlight reflecting off the floor; the lot out in front of me that people use to access the other warehouses going from a sparse few folks to almost none.

  Inside my space, I’ve got my desk, two chairs in front of it, two filing cabinets behind it, a sink, a bathroom, a little fridge, a coffeemaker, and, most important, an electric-blue Stiga indoor-only Ping-Pong table.

  And before you ask: yes, there’s enough room around the table to actually play. One of the things you see all the time, drives me crazy, is a Ping-Pong table stuck in a space without enough room around it. To properly play Ping-Pong, you have to be able to back up, away from the table, significantly. To properly defend shots. To properly position yourself for certain swings. And if you can’t do that, if that’s not an option, then it’s not really Ping-Pong. It would be like having no room behind the baseline of a tennis court. That wouldn’t be tennis. It would be some other form of cramped bullshit. Which would be a good name for what so many people end up playing when they think they are playing Ping-Pong: Cramped Bullshit Ping-Pong.

  The other thing you should know about my Ping-Pong table is that I never use it as a table-table. I never empty my pockets and put the contents on it. I never put beverages on it, unless I’m playing beer pong, of course. Which I actually play later on in this story. But anyway, I never sit and eat at it, either. When I see any of this behavior, you know, when I walk into a house and see a bunch of shit on top of someone’s table—bills, keys, a cookie, clothes, I swear, clothes—and I see this a lot—I always think: That is a fucking crime. And I often say to the perpetrators of that crime: Have a little goddamn respect.

  Moving on. Like I said, I was back at my office, sitting there at my desk, waiting for traffic to die down, feet up, kind of scanning my space, just thinking a bit about the little case I’d been on.

  When my phone rang.

  I looked at the caller ID: the Los Angeles Police Department. For a split second I thought, Did Muriel Dreen call the cops because she doubted my story? Did Heather Press call the cops because I told her that if she didn’t give me the ring I’d use some unorthodox tactics to find out whether she had it? Nah, highly doubtful on both counts.

  Far more likely they just wanted something. I work with the police department from time to time. And I know quite a few of the cops around town, as I’d explained to Heather Press. And I think that some of them are good at their jobs. Quite good. Certainly not all of them, not even close, but some of them. And I’m even moderately friendly with a few of them. All that being said, I like to give all of them, every last one of them, a little shit from time to time.

  Which is why I answered the phone. “Yes?”

  “Darvelle, this you?”

  “It is.”

  “It’s Ott. You got a second?”

  Homicide detective Mike Ott. One of the ones who are good at their jobs. And one of the ones who I like, in a we’ll-never-hang-out-socially kind of way. Ott and I have crossed paths quite a few times over the years, most recently on a murder case involving a famous movie director and a high-concept crime ring.

  I said, with over-the-top glee, “For you? Of course!”

  “Listen. I have some business for you. You interested in taking a case?”

  “Yep,” I said. “I am.”

  “All right, you want to come down tomorrow? I’ll tell you about it. Give you the case file.”

  “You want to tell me anything about it now?”

  “No. I’m busy. And it’s not a rush. It’s cold. Been cold for a while. Unsolved murder. Family wants it investigated further and we don’t have the men.”

  Notice how he left out the part where they’d looked into it and come up empty? I did. But I wasn’t going to mention that. Not this time. The guy was throwing me business. Sometimes I know when to shut up.

  Sometimes.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow when?”

  “Let me think. You live in Mar Vista. So if I were to ask you to come at 8 a.m., it would be almost impossible for you to avoid sitting in the worst kind of fucking traffic. Which I know you don’t like.”

  Did I mention that some of the cops like to throw shit back at me as well? You give it, you got to take it.

  I said, “I’m assuming you’re about to say 8 a.m.?”

  “That’s why I’m giving you this business, Darvelle. You’re a pretty good detective. Eight a.m. My desk.”

  “Great,” I said. “Thank you, Mike. I’ll see you at eleven.”

  And I hung up.

  And then I thought about the old lady, the plant lady, and the ring again. Maybe taking a case that I wasn’t all that interested in had somehow led to me getting this one. Because sometimes getting going, even in the smallest way, opens up a cosmic window for something bigger to happen. Interesting how that occurs. You know? Whatever field you’re in, when you just do something, anything, when you just get started, you are pushing a big inert rock, the big invisible wheel of momentum.

  The two things don’t even need to be tightly connected. You start organizing your office and the phone rings. You’re on a case and you can’t think of a theory to explain what’s happening, so you throw out a first-thought idea, maybe even a terrible, nonsensical one. And then a decent idea pops into your head. You don’t have an interesting case on your desk, so you take a not-so-interesting one. And then you get a call from Mike Ott about a murder the cops couldn’t crack.

  Yeah, you’re giving the big rock a little nudge, a little push, and before you know it, it starts to roll down the hill. I wondered, if you looked at specific examples, whether the second things, the better things, act
ually only appeared if you engaged with the first things. Do you always have to somehow, even if just with an obscure action, press start on the Cosmic Momentum Wheel? Sitting there, I just didn’t know the answer to that one. Might need to think about it a little more. What I did know was that I probably wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it right then and there. I also knew that I could probably drive home now in relative peace.

  So I got up, cut the lights, and cut out of there.

  I got in the Focus and headed off the lot. Right at the point where you leave the lot proper but are still technically on the lot, there’s a streetlight that kicks on automatically at dusk. It was on now, but because there was still some light in the sky, the beam coming out of it was weaker than it would be later. Sitting underneath it, and glowing just a bit because of the weak light, was a new gray Mercedes S-Class, one of the big-dog Benzes. It sat with its grille pointing conspicuously at the lot’s exit. Under a spotlight of sorts, nothing covert about it. I drove—slowly—right in front of it. I looked through its windshield. There was a man sitting behind the wheel. An older man. Mid-, or maybe even late, fifties. He had dark hair slicked back, a trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee, and glasses. Big gold frames, with maybe just the slightest tint of bronze to them.

  I looked right at him. I could only just see his eyes behind not one but two walls of glass. He looked right at me. Stared right at me. Expressionless.

  I wondered, driving home, Was that guy there for me? Again I had one of the thoughts I’d considered when I’d seen “LAPD” on my phone: Muriel Dreen. Sitting there with her ring but not happy with the story that came with it. So she sends someone to look into me. Possible. More likely than her calling the cops about it . . . Or was it something to do with an old case? Somebody sent back to fuck with me? Wouldn’t be the first time. Or did this guy in the Mercedes have something to do with my new case, the one I hadn’t even gotten yet, the one I’d just talked to Mike Ott about? Stranger things have happened. Information travels fast.

  Or was it just nothing? Just a guy sitting on a lot full of warehouses, minding his own business?

  Somehow I doubted that.

  5

  The next morning after a nice, mostly traffic-free drive, I got to the downtown Los Angeles police station around 10:45. I went up to the detectives’ floor and told a tired, cynical female police officer who I was and that I was there to see Mike Ott.

  “You have an appointment?”

  “Yep. It’s for eleven.”

  She picked up a phone, got Ott on the line, told him that a man named John Darvelle was here for his eleven o’clock.

  I mouthed to the officer, “Tell him I’m early.”

  She ignored me. Then hung up. “Ott says you’re three hours late. He’s not available now. You’re going to have to wait. Sit over there.”

  She pointed me to an area in front of her desk but also off in a corner that could only be described as cripplingly depressing. Two little blue grammar-school-style chairs, both with cracks in them, and that’s it. No coffeemaker. No coffee table. No out-of-date magazines. Nothing.

  But I’d known that Ott would make me wait. I was prepared for it. So I went over and sat down in one of the little blue chairs, then pulled out a book I had brought, a book I had already read, a book I like to reread from time to time. It’s called Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins. It’s a book about Ping-Pong and how to get better at it. I read it for about fifteen minutes, then peered over the top of it and said meekly to the officer, “Can I get some water in a small paper cup?”

  She glared at me.

  Thirty-seven minutes after that, the officer said to me, “Ott’s ready. You can go on back. You know where he sits?”

  “I’ll just look for the perfect hair.”

  Truth is, I did know where he sat. I’d been there lots of times. I walked behind the officer’s desk, then back through the detectives’ floor until I found him. He was on the phone, but he motioned for me to sit down.

  Detective Mike Ott was fifty-three. And he did, in fact, have one of those heads of hair that just defy logic. Gray now, but thick, literally as thick as the hair on the head of a teenager. It pissed me off. I looked at the sharp part running down his head, a plethora of hair going one way, a plethora of hair going the other way. I thought, He’s probably one of those guys who has a comb at his house. I’ve literally never used a comb. These days, I zip my hair down with a head shaver to about a half inch all over. Keeps my receding hairline looking tight, as opposed to the other option: sickly and sad. But even before my Oster head shaver became one of my closest friends, I still never used a comb. A brush, maybe, or my hands, but never a comb. Not once.

  I watched Ott finish up his call. Below the hair was a face carved out of stone, a face made up of right angles, with smallish gray eyes and bone-dry skin made even drier and older-looking by years of stress and smoking.

  He hung up the phone. “You’re late.”

  “I was early. Got here at 10:45.”

  “You know, I know I asked you to be here early, which was inconvenient for you. But, bottom line, I’m giving you business and you’re still a pain in the ass.”

  Ott looked at me for a long time with that strong but tired stone face. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t defend myself against his accusation. I just sat there. Eventually he picked up a big file on his desk. “Here’s the situation.”

  He didn’t open the file. He put it back on his desk and continued. “Case is over a year old. Well over. Fifteen, sixteen months. You may remember it. It got a little press. Short version is this: Rich guy walks out of his house in Hollywood one morning, about to get into his car, takes a bullet to the chest. Bullet came out of a pistol from seventy-five, eighty yards away. Guy drops dead. Now, that kind of kill shot isn’t a heat-of-the-moment thing, some kind of goddamn blowup argument, or anything random. You know that. One shot with a pistol, from a stakeout point pretty darn far away. Premeditated murder. And not easy to pull off.

  “Anyway, we looked into it carefully. Turns out, this guy was the worst kind of little shit. A rich asshole who spent his life letting people down and shitting all over everyone. So initially, we thought we’d have plenty of possibilities right off the bat. Thing is, though, everyone in his world, all the people you talk to when somebody gets it, had alibis. Interestingly, and maybe because they had alibis, none of the people in his world was particularly shy about being truthful about the dead man’s character. His family barely liked him. Nobody seemed to be hiding anything with respect to their feelings. Well, his parents didn’t outright say he was a shit. But most of the people we talked to said what I just said. Guy was a shit. So, again, you have all these people who openly didn’t like the guy, who had been wronged by him, whatever, so you’d think we’d find a suspect, right? But no. Everybody’s story was airtight. Airtight. We never named a suspect. Case went cold.”

  “I remember this,” I said. “He had a pretentious name. Keagon. Keaton.”

  “Yeah. That’s it. Keaton. Keaton Fuller.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “As I mentioned on the phone, family wants the investigation to continue. But I got to tell you, Darvelle—”

  I interrupted, “You’ve got about three hundred more murders to look into now, and those have a chance of being solved.”

  He gave me his stone face. “Yeah. That’s right.” He picked up the file again. “You still want it? Family’s open to a private guy. And believe me, they’ve got the money to pay you.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He slid the file over toward me. “The parents’ names and number are in there. Call them and tell them I referred you.”

  He stood up. I stood up.

  “All right,” he said.

  We shook hands. I said, “Your niece is an actress, right?”

  “Off-fucking-limits, Darvelle.”

  “No, no. She having any luck?”

  “Not really.”

  “Think I c
an help. Can probably get her a speaking role on a network show. Buddy of mine’s a big TV director. You got a number for her?”

  He looked at me. For a brief moment I pictured myself with a hammer and a chisel, chipping away at his concrete face like a sculptor, eyeing my work, chunks of slatelike concrete falling off his face and crashing to the floor. I have no idea why.

  Ott plucked a gold Cross pen from the pocket of his suit jacket. He then produced his little spiral notebook from the same pocket, wrote down his niece’s name and number, and ripped out the page. He handed it to me.

  “Done,” I said.

  I thought he was going to smile. But I was wrong.

  6

  I took the case file back to my office. I sat at my desk, slider open, the sun slanting in and popping off the slick blue surface of my Ping-Pong table.

  Keaton Albert Fuller, thirty-five, had been shot once in the chest by a Smith & Wesson M&P nine-millimeter handgun. From seventy-five yards away, as Ott had mentioned. The “M&P” stands for “military and police.” And a lot of military and police use the weapon. In fact, it’s the pistol issued to the LAPD. That being said, it’s also available to the general public, and the part of the general public that buys guns seems to like it. A lot. It’s one of the best-selling guns on the market.

  At 6 a.m. Keaton Fuller had been walking to his car, when he was shot. His clothing suggested that he had been on his way to the gym.

  Keaton’s house was in the Hollywood Hills, just a few blocks above the Sunset Plaza section of Sunset Boulevard. An expensive part of town. A lot of celebs live there. And a lot of celebs, wannabe celebs, and people who want to soak in the Hollywood scene in a somewhat obvious, somewhat bridge-and-tunnel way kick around the coffee shops, bars, and restaurants in the area.

  The two lead detectives on the case, Rick Harrier and Michelle Martinez, determined that the shooter had been positioned just slightly higher up in the Hills than Keaton’s place, in a little clearing off the side of Rising Glen Road, which starts at Sunset Boulevard and twists up the minimountain. Crime-scene pictures showed a clear shot right down to Keaton Fuller’s driveway.