by Jan Burke
I pulled my hand away.
“Oh,” she said, in the darkness, “so he’s a saint, just like St. Anthony?” She kept moving forward; I was forced to follow at a faster pace. “The saint who never took a dump,” she went on. “What a fantastic miracle to have to one’s credit!”
I felt my fists clench. “Stop it.”
“Maybe the pope will make him patron saint of the asshole. St. Bum of the bum.”
“Goddamn it, Rachel,” I shouted, “shut the fuck up!”
The words echoed in the hallway. She stopped, and flashed the light on the door just ahead of us. EXIT was painted on it. She turned back to look at me, bouncing the light off a nearby wall, illuminating both of our faces. She was smiling. “Much better.”
I realized what she had done, why she had done it. I dropped my gaze. “Forgive me if I don’t say ‘thank you’ right away.”
She laughed and opened the door.
There was light in the stairwell, and more air, a combination which helped me to calm down. I raced past her, up the stairs to the first broken window. I put my face up to the opening, took deep, gulping breaths of cold, fresh air. The knots went out of my stomach, I stopped shaking. Then, on that wave of relief, for the next few moments, I felt as if I might start crying.
At one time, an emotional reaction like that would have made me ashamed of myself. Now, I was growing used to it, and perhaps because I knew it would pass, it passed more quickly. I looked over at Rachel, who was waiting behind me on the landing, pretending to be studying her cellular phone. Her long hair cloaked her face, hiding her expression.
“Are my nose and cheeks as red as yours?” I asked.
She looked up. “Yes, and your orecchi — your ears, too.”
I reached up and rubbed a hand through my hair. “I can’t wait for this to grow out again.”
“It will, it will. That stubbornness of yours will push it right out of your head. Your hair will be longer than mine by summer.”
I laughed.
She smiled. “A good sound, that laugh of yours,” she said, putting the phone away. She began to lead the way upstairs again. “I figure we should start at the top. That okay with you?”
“We’re thinking the same thing. Corky said Lucas liked to go to the upper floors in a building.”
“Right.”
There was little conversation after that. The task of climbing fourteen flights of stairs kept us both warm and quiet. Rachel was in terrific shape; Frank, Mr. Really Great You-Know-What, once told me that Rachel had shamed him into a more rigorous work-out. I was still making a comeback from having been laid up for a while; for the last few floors, I had to put real effort into it.
At the top floor, we stepped out into a dark area near a set of elevators. We rounded a corner into a dimly lit hallway. The light was coming from two large glass doors, long plates of frosted green glass. Deco-style woodwork of mahogany and chrome framed the doors. Twin angels, as solemn as their counterparts on the exterior of the building, faced us. Draped in heavy robes, each held a sword. “The angels on this building are the saddest heavenly creatures I’ve ever seen in my life,” Rachel said, pushing one of the doors open. “Maybe I won’t feel too bad if I go the other way.”
The doors opened on to one large room. Light streamed in from three directions, from long windows that must have once offered a fantastic view of the city and the water. Now, taller buildings blocked much of that view. Behind us, a long bar carved with smiling cherubs stood before a big mirror that had lost a lot of its silvering.
“The happier angels are here at the bar,” I said, my voice echoing in the empty room.
“I guess those serious types at the door are the bouncers,” she said.
“Guardian angels. Must be — if my guess about the age of the building is right, that glass and the rest of this place survived the big quake of 1933.”
Rachel shivered and made an Italian gesture to ward off evil. “Don’t say the word ‘earthquake,’” she said. A hardwood floor, scarred and buckling, remained in place, although I doubted that anything other than dust motes had danced in this room in the last few decades. I squatted down closer to the floor to look at it from another angle.
“Doesn’t look like anyone has been staying up here,” Rachel was saying.
“No, but look at the floor. Someone sat up here and admired the view.”
There were places here and there that might have been old footprints, but a set that was clearly newer led across the floor to a place along the south-facing windows, and back again to the doors. Whatever tables and chairs had been in the room had long ago been removed, but an overturned crate was propped up near the windows where the footprints ended.
“Let’s take a look,” she said.
“These windows face south, toward the ocean.”
“Do you think he was trying to look at the water?”
“Couldn’t see much of it from here.”
Near the crate, the view from the windows took in a narrow glimpse of the sea. The buildings directly across the street didn’t block the view, but several blocks away, especially along Broadway, a long cluster of skyscrapers stood between the Angelus and the Pacific Ocean. One in particular caught my attention — a black glass monolith, one of the tallest buildings downtown. Three letters crowned the giant: BLP. The Bank of Las Piernas. Ben Watterson’s bank.
“Let’s try the next floor down,” I said.
THERE WAS NO LIGHT in the hallway on the fourteenth floor of the Angelus Hotel, but there was still plenty of cold air. It didn’t stink like the first-floor hallway, making me wonder if that was one reason Lucas took the trouble to climb all of those stairs in the buildings he slept in.
Rachel grew cautious again, listening carefully before opening the first door we came to. As it creaked open, she waited a moment in the hallway before stepping into the room. I crept in after her.
Only when a hotel room is absolutely empty do you realize how small it is. No carpet, no drapes, no bed. A radiator against the wall beneath the window. Only the window trim and wainscoting kept the room from being utterly plain. I could see our breath as we looked around.
No sound.
Rachel glanced in the small bathroom and closet.
“Nobody has been in here for ages. Let’s keep looking.”
As we left the room, I started to pull the door shut.
“No, leave it open,” she said. “More light in the hallway.” She paused, then added, “Would you like me to open one of those windows?”
I shook my head. “I’m okay now. Thanks — for offering, and for what you did earlier.”
“You know I didn’t mean it, right? It’s just that you were looking like you might pass out down there, and that was the first thing I could think of to distract you.”
“You were successful. And yes, I know you didn’t mean it. But next time, let’s just argue politics or religion.”
“Wouldn’t have worked as fast,” she said, then leaned an ear to the next door. We opened six doors on six small rooms on the fourteenth floor of the Angelus, and found nothing.
On the seventh try, we found Lucas.
14
HE LOOKED DIFFERENT from when I had met him on the bus bench. Cleaner, for the most part. He had cut his hair and shaved since then. He wore the same jacket, but it had been washed. Beneath it, he was casually dressed — in worn jeans, a flannel shirt, running shoes.
Near him, in an open duffel bag, was a neatly folded suit. A pair of dress shoes next to the bag looked as if they had just been polished. If he had been wearing those clothes, he would have looked even more like the man I knew in college.
It’s strange, the things that will haunt you. In many later moments, I would think about the care he took with the suit and the shoes, and I would waste wishes.
He lay face-up on a sleeping bag. His breath wasn’t chilled like Rachel’s or mine — he wasn’t breathing at all. There was a small amount of dried blood on hi
s face, as there was on the floor and the radiator. A thermos bottle lay on its side near his feet; on the floor beneath its gaping mirror mouth, a pool of liquid had congealed into a pancake-sized stain.
And someone had placed dull pennies on his eyes.
That much I saw.
Rachel had seen him first, and quickly turned and tried to block my way, but I looked over her shoulder. She held on to me, pushing against me as I tried hard to push past her. I learned that I’m no match for her — but I put up a decent struggle before I stumbled backward out into the hall. She followed, somehow keeping me from falling. When I had regained my balance, she quickly reached back and closed the door behind her.
“No — stay back,” she said, seeing I was willing to go at it again.
“It’s Lucas,” I said.
“Not anymore.”
“Yes—”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “Come on, you don’t want to march your big feet all over the evidence now, do you?”
Evidence.
There’s something of a blank in my recollections from the point that she asked that question until a little later, when we were sitting on the floor of the room next to Lucas’s. I was too numb, I suppose, to register most of it. I heard and didn’t hear Rachel talking to me. Felt and didn’t feel her arm around my shoulder.
I suddenly realized she was swearing like crazy in Italian. It startled me out of my detachment. She was holding her cellular phone in her free hand.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting up straighter.
“Can’t get a signal in here. Wait right here, okay?”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said firmly, “just over to the window.”
I watched as she struggled to get the window open. “Dammit. Fricking thingamajiggy won’t work. Probably hasn’t been opened in fifty years.” To my amazement, she pulled out her flashlight and used the grip end to bust out the window. “Destroying private property,” she muttered, clearing the last fragments from the frame. “Pete will really be thrilled.”
With phone in hand, she leaned out the window, then pushed some buttons. “This will only take a minute,” she said to me.
“Caro?” she said into the phone. “Listen, we’ve got a situation here… No, just a… no, will you listen? Si calmi! Christ. Stà zitto! Put Frank on… No, I’m not going to say another word to you… oh, really? Well, va f’an culo, Mr. Big Shit Detective. I’m hanging up. And if this phone rings, it had better be your partner calling!”
She pressed a button. “Excuse me,” she said to me — very calmly, as if she hadn’t just been insulting her husband bilingually and with enough gestures to make a mime envious.
I just looked at her. I felt as if I were watching an experimental theater production from a front row seat. Up close, and it still didn’t make sense. I put my head down on my knees.
“Irene,” she started to say, but the phone chirped. She pushed a button and leaned out the window again.
“Frank? What do you know — he’s catching on. Listen, we found Irene’s friend. Possible 187… Yeah. Well, exactly. I’ll tell you in a minute — we’re in an old hotel, and it’s a little hard to describe how to get here. You out of earshot of your boss? Good. Now, what I want to say is, I think the situation could use a little TLC, you know what I mean? Yeah, I’ll let you talk to her. She’s right here. But about the, er, business aspects of all of this… exactly. Good… And can you talk Carlos Hernandez into handling this one himself?” There was a long pause, then she said, “No. Not from the looks of things.” She glanced over at me. “Coins on the eyes, for one thing. Also some sort of head injury, although — no, of course not. Stepped right back out of there… Yeah. We’re at the Angelus Hotel. Fourteenth floor.” She gave him the address, and when she started to describe the entry, I interrupted her.
“Tell them about the footprints near the drive.”
She passed the message along, gave him a few more details, then gestured for me to come near the window. I took the phone, and leaned out as she had done.
“Irene?” I heard him say.
“Tell Pete not to blame Rachel.”
“They’ll be all right. How are you doing?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
“Irene?”
“I know it won’t be your case,” I said. “But do you think you could come over here, maybe take me home afterward?”
“Of course. We’ll be there soon.”
“Thanks. Here’s Rachel.” I handed the phone back to her and sat against a wall, the one facing the wall which adjoined Lucas’s room.
Questions and guilt and disbelief took turns somersaulting through my mind. Rachel talked for a while to Frank and somebody else in the homicide division, then hung up the phone and sat down next to me.
She didn’t try to force any conversation out of me. I was grateful.
A few minutes passed before I said, “Nothing went the way it should have gone for Lucas.”
She just listened.
“I don’t know how he ended up on the bus bench that day I saw him there,” I went on. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he was trying to make something of his life. He was trying to come back from that. I believe that with all my heart.”
“Sure he was,” she said gently. “Everybody who knew him said so.”
“I want to look around in there.”
“You hired the wrong PI, then. I spent too many years as a cop to go in there and fuck with a crime scene. We’ll end up pissing off a bunch of people whose cooperation we’re going to need.”
I sighed. “I suppose you won’t let me go back in by myself.”
“No. Frank’s going to do what he can to make sure we don’t get locked out of this. My guess is they’re going to want to talk to us, because otherwise, they probably won’t have jack.”
“Don’t try to convince me that this is going to be investigated with much enthusiasm. Lucas wasn’t exactly the biggest mover and shaker in Las Piernas.”
“You’re wrong, Irene. All kinds of people end up as homicide victims. The press may treat them differently, but that doesn’t mean the cops will.”
“Forgive me if I’m a little slow to buy that.”
She shrugged. “Believe what you want to. Me, when I was working homicide, I didn’t care if the victim was a prince or a pauper. I wanted to nail the killer. I didn’t want that son of a bitch walking around thinking he was too smart to get caught, thinking he beat me.
“Besides, if you don’t think the police are doing the job they should be doing on this case, you’ve got a powerful way to put pressure on them.”
“Which reminds me of something, Rachel. Can I borrow your phone?”
I dialed John Walters’s home phone number.
John listened patiently as I told him about finding Lucas.
“Well,” he said, “sorry about your friend. Sounds like you’ve had a tough day. Tell you what. Tomorrow, come in a couple of hours late if you like. But before the end of the day, I want you to do some serious work on Moffett’s resignation.”
“What?”
“Yeah, take a couple of hours off. I do have a heart — no matter what you tell the interns.”
“Serious work on Moffett? Is that what I heard you say?”
“Exactly. You tell me some cock-and-bull story about some bum causing everything from Watterson’s suicide to Moffett’s resignation. You’ve pulled this kind of shit on me before, so I know to let you have a little time to spend the morning trying to find out what happened to your friend, or you’re not going to have your mind on your work.”
“This wasn’t some ruse, John,” I said, trying to hold on to my temper. “I’ll admit, there have been times when I wasn’t exactly working on a story in the way you asked me to—”
“ — Oh, yes, Ms. Kelly. It has been known to happen. Like the time you spent the day sailing when you were supposedly doing an investigat
ive piece on the harbor?”
“That harbor piece won a CNPA!”
“And the Express is proud of that award. But the California Newspaper Publishers Association didn’t give it to you for anything that skipper taught you on the way to Catalina.”
Not for the first time, I cursed the storm that came up that day, trapping me in Avalon with a guy who turned out to be a bigger drip than anything that fell from the sky.
“Look, John, I don’t have time to dredge up old history. This is different. Lucas Monroe is the key to all of this. You should have Mark down here on this.”
“Mr. Baker is busy with other assignments.”
“If not Mark, then—”
“Then nobody.”
“Nobody!”
“Nobody. Irene, think like a reporter, will you? The death of your friend is not newsworthy.”
“Why? Because he’s black? Because he’s homeless? Because he died in a part of town that everyone wishes would just sink into the core of the earth?”
“You know what Wrigley’s going to say if I start printing stories about druggies OD-ing and bums croaking in abandoned hotels?”
“This is not about—”
“You’ve heard his speech. Right after he tells me that our subscribers do not want to open the morning paper and read about dirtbags dying — good riddance, etc. — he’ll ask me if I’d like to try another line of work.”
“It’s a bullshit policy and you know it. If we aren’t going to print anything about ‘dirtbags,’ then pull Wrigley’s name off the masthead.”
“I’ll tell him you suggested it. I’m certain it will cause him to reconsider his position.”
“I hate this crap,” I said, my anger not lessened by defeat. “I absolutely hate it. The policy’s wrong. And you’re wrong, too, John. You’re wrong about Lucas. He wasn’t—” Something caught in my throat, and I couldn’t speak. I was thinking of the man who had patiently taught me one of the most difficult subjects I’d ever studied. A man who had given me a great gift, the ability to tell at least a few of the lies from a few of the truths — a man I respected, no matter what had become of him since those student days. That man, reduced to this.