Unpaid Dues

by Barbara Seranella

  "More pictures?" She chuckled. "Sure, why not? I'm not going anywhere."

  St. John returned to the police station to assemble a six-pack. Two, actually One of Jane Ferrar and five additional women, the other would be of old mug shots of Cyrill McCarthy and five different similar-looking white guys. If Donzetta could pick Cyrill McCarthy and Jane Ferrar out of those two photo lineups, he was well on his way to establishing motive for Jane's murder, not to mention solving the triple.

  He didn't know yet which event triggered which. Did the reopening of the investigation of the old homicide prompt Jane's murder or was it the other way around?

  * * *

  The last block manufacturing company on Cassiletti's list was the Cascade Block Company It was located in Santa Fe Springs in between a junkyard specializing in Cadillacs and a piano manufacturer. He parked beside a pink mock piano tagged with black spray paint. Its condition advertised more than the company probably meant to reveal.

  Cassiletti removed a large white handkerchief from his pocket and draped it loosely over his left hand. Keys in his right hand, he opened the trunk of his Oldsmobile and removed the block with his protected left. He had repeated this gesture fifteen times already since last Monday Lifting the thirty-two-pound block in and out of his trunk had given him new respect for construction workers. But he was no nearer to finding the block's source.

  His left eye watered, as it always did when he came to the eastern industrial section of Los Angeles. The sky overhead had the consistency of dishwater. Grit darkened the green leaves of the dandelions growing between the chain-link fences and turned the normally bright yellow flowers a poisonous shade of mustard.

  He entered the yard. Beige dust covered everything, including a seemingly deaf rottweiler that trotted across the open ground. Steel racks held rows of drying brick. A large water hose was tapped into a fire hydrant. Mexicans wearing red ear plugs and working the silos and stamping equipment eyed him warily He heard the word "migra" spread across the work platform.

  The trailer office was next to a pair of Porta Potties and a dust-covered Coca-Cola vending machine that was out of all six choices. He tried the dark screen door at the top of the corrugated steel stairs but found it locked. There was no bell to ring.

  "Hello?" Cassiletti called out. He checked his notes. "Fred Wood?"

  "That's me." A squat man with a cigar clamped between his teeth emerged from the trailer and blocked the doorway

  Cassiletti handed the man one of his coveted business cards. Wood looked at the card and yelled over Cassiletti's shoulder, "He's all right. Get back to work." He extended a stubby hand to Cassiletti. "Call me Woody"

  Cassiletti had to duck his head as he entered the small trailer. The cigar smoke made him long for smog.

  "Let's see what you got. Set her up here."

  Cassiletti lifted the block to the top of Fred Wood's desk next to the photograph of two big-toothed blond children. The drawers were open and sagging with the weight of invoices. Woody peered at the block under his desk lamp.

  "Yep, that's one of mine."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yeah, custom job, had to mix the color special. They were getting the block from a company in Yuma, but the company folded and the contractor needed a match."

  "Can you give me the name of the contractor?"

  "Sure, I even have the address of the job site."

  "That would be even better, Woody"

  The address for Cascade Block had a Brentwood zip code. The street was called Pinehurst. Cassiletti had to get out a Thomas Guide map to find it. It was only a block long and off Mandeville Canyon.

  He contacted dispatch and asked them to locate St. John.

  * * *

  Cassiletti drove, while St. John wrote his notes about the Donzetta Williams interview. They shot across Sepulveda to Sunset, and then turned toward Brentwood. Both men craned their necks as they passed Munch's gas station. lf she was there, she wasn't in sight.

  The large home on Pinehurst was getting a new swimming pool and cabana. A backhoe had turned the backyard into a crater. Pallets stamped CASCADE BLOCK were piled high with distinctively hued concrete blocks. Next to the pallets were piles of rebar, sacks of concrete protected by blue tarp, and white PVC pipe.

  They parked behind a white Ford truck with a utility bed. There was an overturned wheelbarrow in the back, loose shovels lying beside it, and a stack of two-by-fours. Ladders were tied to the top rack. A bumper sticker read HIGHER POWER.

  Cassiletti hung back to study the white rope binding the ladders to the steel hooks welded to the bed, while St. John looked for the foreman.

  A crew of five men was laying rebar in the pit.

  Tattoos rippled on straining biceps. Another four men, with tool belts strapped to their waists, were assembling the framing of the pool house. St. John studied the faces, then the arms, looking for Viking horns. A white guy in a hard hat approached St. John.

  "Can I help you?"

  "Are you the boss?"

  "I'm the contractor." He extended a hand. "Mike Peyovich, Big Mike."

  St. John shook hands. "Detective St. John, and this is my partner, Detective Cassiletti. We're investigating the homicide of a woman whose body was found about a mile from here."

  "I think I read about that. In the storm drain?"

  "Yes, sir. "

  "That was wrong."

  "Yes, sir," St. John said, having nothing to add to that brilliant assessment. "Her body was weighted with a concrete block. We believe it came from this site."

  "No."

  "No, it didn't?"

  "Huh?" Big Mike looked at St. John. "No, I mean no as in 'you don't say'. "

  "Have these blocks been sitting here all week?"

  Cassiletti asked.

  "Yeah, they were delivered on the tenth."

  "Do you have any security on the site?" St. John asked.

  "You mean like a guard?"

  St. John blinked but kept his face calm. It was obvious that he needed to keep his wording simple and I precise with Big Mike.

  A black kid with a T-shirt wrapped around his head I interrupted. "Mike? We're done with the south wall."

  "All right, I want to take a look before the inspector comes." Big Mike turned back to St. John and Cassiletti. "Anything else you need from me?"

  "A list of your employees and their shifts for the last two weeks," St. John said.

  "You got a warrant?"

  "Do I need one?" This guy really was a Class-A idiot.

  "Only if you expect access to my records. I don't mean to be a hard-ass here, but I have to look after my crew."

  St. John spread his hands in a let's-be-reasonable gesture and relaxed his face into a grin. "You're going to make us drive all the way back to the courthouse and bother some judge?"

  The contractor looked at his watch. "We're wrapping up here in another hour. So it looks like you're out of luck today"

  St. John took a step closer, planting himself in Big Mike's path. Now he was going to have to be a prick.

  "A lot of things can hold up a job like this. Additional inspections, license checking. I'll start by running warrant checks on all your workers, then we'll make traffic stops on deliveries. That should cut into your deadlines, kill any bonuses."

  "And if we did need to go get a warrant," Cassiletti added, "we'd be well within our powers to put a freeze on this work site until we return. It's called probable cause."

  "Jesus, what the fuck do you want from me?"

  "Just your cooperation. I believe I asked nicely the first time."

  "All right. Let's go into my office."

  The detectives left fifteen minutes later with a list of employees and, at Cassiletti's request, a sample of the rope from the work trucks.

  When Cassiletti got behind the wheel of their Buick, he said, "There's one thing I don't understand."

  "What's that?"

  "The killer marked the body right?"

  "Yeah. There w
as a V scratched into her torso, postmortem."

  "But then he went to some lengths to conceal the body So who did he mark the body for?"

  "I've always said it was personal."

  Chapter 19

  Munch hit the Monday night meeting at the clubhouse on Ohio Street. Nathan had offered to stay in with Asia.

  The first speaker was a middle-aged woman who talked about living in New York and drinking all the time. She took a business trip to California, rented a car, drank through her business meeting, and then flew home. A month later the bill came for the rental car that she had forgotten to return. She had left it parked on the street and the rental company had charged thirty days of rental against her credit card.

  Munch knew people forgot all kinds of things when they were on a binge: the job they were supposed to be at, the husband at home, the kid in the car.

  Years ago, her friend Ellen once went to Tijuana as some rich guy's date, failing to remember that she was on probation and not supposed to leave the state, never mind the country. It always seemed to slip Deb's mind that she was in love with somebody else when she was out drinking. Munch tended to forget she wasn't six feet tall after three shots of Jack Daniel's.

  There were all sorts of cute sayings about substance abusers and the murky swamps of their judgment facilities. "Last to remember and first to forget," was one of Munch's favorites. It also helped to have scars, lingering medical conditions, and unadjudicated felonies to keep a person humble and on course.

  Before the coffee break, birthday cakes and plastic chips for varying lengths of sobriety were handed out, beginning with the people who had reached the milestone of thirty days without a drink or a drug.

  A guy who seemed vaguely familiar stepped up to the podium. Munch often had feelings of recognition at these meetings. Cons tended to carry themselves in a way that was universally identifiable. When they walked, their arms rolled forward from their shoulders, held akimbo by muscle mass forged in prison. There was the way they held their heads, their chins slightly up, mouths slack, dead eyes that expected nothing—not fairness, nor forgiveness, nor brand-new worlds. Their hands tended to cross over their genitals when they stood. Cops, she noticed, did that too.

  This guy at the podium was nothing new. He was about six feet tall, his hair was cut short, and he was clean-shaven, though his face seemed to beg for a stubble to fill in the mottle caused by years of self-induced, slow-acting poison and repeated contact with hard surfaces. He would never be mistaken for a white-collar worker or a well-toned Yuppie, not with a mug like that.

  Yuppies also didn't have spiderwebs tattooed on their elbows, or walk around at night with speckles of dried house paint still clinging to their hair.

  "My name's Cyrill," the guy said, accepting the white poker chip with 30 Days drawn in gold script across the face, "and I'm a grateful drunk."

  Now the voice was familiar too. Munch leaned forward for a closer look at his arms. She saw the Viking horns tattooed on his biceps, but they only confirmed what she knew as soon as she heard him speak. It was Thor, sans the ZZ Top beard and older, especially in the eyes.

  Her heart seemed to freeze within her chest. She couldn't hear what he said. The words were lost below the roar in her ears. Someone sitting behind her had to nudge her when her own name was called to take a cake for eight years of sobriety Thor's eyes widened when Munch stood and never left her as she blew out the candles.

  "I'm a miracle," she said. "Nine years ago in 1976 I hadn't been arrested enough." This announcement was greeted with appreciative chuckles. "My last year of using was the worst. I hit bottom and just kept on going. " Out of the corner of her eye she saw Thor nodding.

  "The ninth step has been coming up a lot lately in my life. For all you newcomers, that's the one where we make direct amends to all the people we have harmed." She noticed now that Thor was sitting very still and listening intently

  "I've been given the opportunity to make amends to the kid of another alcoholic who I used to drink with. I can't undo the bad years, but I can set an example.

  "Today I am blessed. My life changed completely once I surrendered to the disease and turned my will and my life over to God. A little over eight years ago, I was arrested for that final time." She knocked on the wood podium and the audience laughed. "When I was in jail, God sent me an Eskimo. You know the joke, right? Guy's sitting in a bar in Alaska. He tells the man sitting next to him how it's a miracle he's there.

  " 'Why?' the first man asks.

  " 'Well,' the guy says, 'I was out there in this god-forsaken country I'd lost my sled dogs, my bearings, and I'm in the middle of a terrible storm when the iceberg I'm on starts to break loose. I knew I was gonna die, so I pray to God to save me.'

  " 'He obviously answered your prayer,' the second man says, 'because here you are—sitting in this bar, safe and sound.'

  " 'Oh, it wasn't God,' the first guy says. 'A god-damned Eskimo came out of nowhere, over the iceberg, in the middle of the storm, and took me back to his filthy igloo.' "

  Munch waited for the laughter to subside, then continued.

  "I was a bad-ass biker chick eight years ago. I hated cops, I hated women, and I wasn't overly fond of black people. So you know who God sent me, don't you?" Munch nodded. "That's right. A black female police officer. She listened to me, heard that I had really surrendered, and brought me a piece of scripture that got me through many long nights: 'When God is with me, who can be against me?' On that note, I'll shut up and sit down."

  Thor applauded with everyone else. Munch was aware that she hadn't mentioned Asia in her litany of what she had to be grateful for. Common street sense wamed her to keep the existence of that which was most precious to her hidden.

  The leader of the meeting announced the coffee break. Thor was waiting for her as she stepped down from the podium.

  "Eight years," he said. "That's fucking amazing."

  "No more than thirty days," she said, taking a step back so she wouldn't have to crane her neck so far to look at his face.

  He nodded in understanding.

  "Why haven't I seen you before this?" she asked.

  "At a meeting, I mean."

  "We've been hitting mostly men's stags in the Valley "

  "We?"

  "I'm in a halfway house. New Start. It's in Sun Valley"

  "Is Danny T. still the director?"

  "Yeah, he's here tonight. We drove over in his car."

  She scanned the crowd, finding Danny near the literature in earnest discussion with a teenage boy. Hispanic and not tall, Danny T. was a charismatic speaker with his Fu Manchu mustache, collar-length black hair, and multiple tattoos. He could easily work as a stand-up comedian. He had a hilarious story about stealing power lawn mowers when he was a junkie. In fact, hearing him speak at one of her first meetings had made her feel as if Narcotics Anonymous was a cool enough place for her.

  She also saw a group of six cons holding up the back wall whom she immediately pegged as New Start residents. They were predominantly Chicano and dressed in dazzling white T·shirts and crisply pressed khaki pants. Their faces bore I'm-here-but-that's-a1l-I'm-copping-to expressions, barely flickering to life even for the brazenly dressed newcomer women who swished past them on their way for coffee and cake.

  She knew the type well, in trouble since they were juvies and well on their way to being permanently institutionalized. Letting that bullshit pride thing get in the way of anything good or new in their lives. Hip, slick, and terminal. Even now, they were in doing-time mode. They weren't in prison, but they weren't on the street either. One in thirty might eventually be able to see that he was his own worst enemy

  "How long have you been there?" she asked.

  "Thirty days," Thor said, holding up his chip.

  "Of course."

  "You still working on those cars?"

  "Sure am. " She held up a hand so he could see the grease stains. "You painting?"

  He reared back slightly his c
hest expanded, and his hands rose waist-high. If he were a dog, the hair along his back would be bristling.

  "How'd you know that?" he asked, eyes dark.

  For an instant she saw the old Thor and had to remind herself that he couldn't hurt her here and now When God is with me . . . "The paint on your arm was a big clue."

  He smiled and shook his head. "Of course."

  "Nice to wear short sleeves again, huh?"

  "Nice to be doing a lot of things again," he said. He took a step closer so that his chest was in her face.

  "You seeing anyone?"

  "Yeah, I am." She heard her apologetic tone and wondered if part of her would always be emotionally stuck at fourteen, when—in a pathetic bid to be wanted and needed and accepted—she would screw anyone who asked her. Or maybe it was the glimmer of hope she saw on Thor's face that she responded to, his glimpse of possible redemption and a life free from crime and punishment, violence and jail. At thirty days—had he been drug-free for thirty days?—he had no business thinking about dating. It was much too soon.

  "Can I have your number?" he asked.

  "You got it already It's eight"

  "And your sign is stop, right?"

  She smiled in spite of herself, still trying to come to grips with seeing him again, and at her home meeting of all places.

  "l heard about Sleaze," Thor said. "There but for the grace of God, huh?"

  She wanted to laugh out loud, hearing those words from his lips. Life was too bizarre.

  "And now New York Jane," she said.

  "Oh yeah? When?"

  "A week and a half ago."

  A woman in a see-through top walked by and Thor was momentarily distracted. He turned to watch her with his whole body. When she disappeared out the back door for some of that "parking lot sobriety" Thor brought his eyes back to Munch. "She OD?"

  "Yeah, on a tire iron."

  His expression was genuinely puzzled. "What do you mean?"

  "You don't read the papers?"

  "No." He paused then, and looked at her with deeper understanding. "I didn't have anything to do with it. I haven't seen Jane in years. Whose kid?"

  "What?"

  "You said you were helping someone's kid from the old days. Anyone I know?"