Ummm goood LOL
Wahy to end the year with a bang!
So whats up
“Call me when ur alone.” I read that text message aloud twice.
Luke nodded. “Again, sent to Mr. Green Ink, at one thirty on Tuesday afternoon, right before that hour-long phone call to the same number.”
“We need a name, Luke,” I said, still scanning the entries. “Tick tock, my friend.”
“I’m working on it,” Luke said, “but don’t plan a banquet around it.”
There were fewer Tuesday evening text messages.
One from Macie at 5:33. Stuck in traffic Tell mom not to wait for me.
Macie sent another text a little after seven. Just gonna stay with max CU tomorwo
And then Monique sent a series of texts to Mr. Green Ink at 10:32 P.M.
U ready for me?
He texted back. Always
She returned his text. Good
Where r u?
With Renata
Can you handle this dick tonite?
Ya U think Ill give it up 4 nothin? LOL
Its like that?
U know it
U crazy, What this time?
Surprise me LOL
Ltes meet
Same place?
Ya at 11
At 11:18 P.M., Angie Darson had left that final voice mail.
At 11:20 P.M., Monique had texted Mr. Green Ink one last time.
Im here where u at? LOL
A final text message had been sent from Monique’s phone to Angie Darson’s phone.
I am ok
But it had been sent at 2:51 A.M. on Wednesday morning—Monique had been far from okay.
24
Colin asked me to take him to choir practice.
In other words, he wanted to hit a bar where off-duty cops hung out, got drunk, talked about hunting, women, and sex. A bar like the Short Stop over on Sunset, a spot now ruined by hipsters wearing ironic T-shirts.
I shook my head. “Sorry, no. Don’t do that anymore.”
“Aw, Lou,” he said, as he put his feet on his desk. “Don’t be so damn granola.”
“I’m not—I just don’t enjoy hanging out with assholes after my shift ends. Maybe Pepe or Luke will take you.”
He rubbed his neck and glanced over to Luke at the coffeepot, who was now telling Lieutenant Rodriguez a foul-mouthed story about chasing a one-legged pimp down the Los Angeles River.
“Not that they would,” I said, shouldering my purse. “You haven’t been here long enough—no one trusts you.”
“Is that a joke?” he asked, his ears and neck crimson.
“Nope.”
“What are you about to do?”
“Eat,” I said, and headed to the door.
“Mind if I come along?”
I minded—it had taken me almost my entire career to move from being alone all the time to being kinda accepted into the fraternity. I had combated sexism, racism, classism, and jerkwadism, and had finally earned my stripes. So, I had no sympathy for a new fish who had an up on me in three of those four categories.
“I’ll buy you a beer.” Then, he added, “Hell, I’ll buy you dinner. You deserve it.”
“Well, thanks.” Payday was fourteen hours away and I had just paid car insurance. “Fine. I hate beer, though. A margarita and Jerry’s Deli up the street from my condo.”
Twenty minutes later, we had parked our cars in the shopping center’s lot. The glow of the mai tai–colored sun had tinted fast-moving fog rolling off the Pacific. The sunset made you think life was one big Hallmark store. If you ignored the bereavement, divorce, and “get well” sections, then, yeah, it was.
The air inside the restaurant smelled of pickles, French fries, and fresh-brewed coffee, and almost every table was occupied by customers. The hostess led us to our very own red Naugahyde booth and both Colin and I darted for the east-facing side. We both wanted the view of the entrance, but I won because this was my city.
“I’ve heard about this place,” Colin said, taking in the movie posters, black-and-white-tiled floors, and that drunken sunset beyond the windows. “Movie stars come here, right?”
I said, “Sure,” and focused on the television monitor and the closed caption text scrolling at the bottom of the screen—Greta Glick was “live on location” in Baldwin Hills. Breaking news. Police have found evidence that suggests that seventeen-year-old Monique Darson was murdered here, in this trailer … The camera zoomed in on the construction trailer still wrapped in yellow tape.
Colin said, “Lieutenant Rodriguez told me—”
“I’m off the clock, and I leave work at work,” I muttered, even though my attention was turned to my work now being featured on the news.
Colin grunted, then said, “My ex-fiancée—”
“A woman actually agreed to marry you?”
“Best thing that ever happened to her.”
“Who was this lady?”
He flipped through the pages of the menu. “Police chief’s daughter. We’d been together for a while—I’d break up with her, screw around some, make up again, break up again, that kinda thing. Dakota was all right—her teeth kinda drove me crazy.”
“Why? They kept scraping against your ego?”
He winked at me. “You think my ego’s big, I got somethin’ bigger than that.” He grinned, pleased with his massive … wit. “Anyway, it ended when I got caught with my pants down.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Literally? Or…”
“So there was this girl I’d been seein’ on the side, just talkin’ to, really. She was hot. I mean…” He flung his hand as though it had caught fire. “And so, you know, she wanted me, I wanted her, one thing led to the next, and we went to Cheyenne State Park. And we’re there, on the hood of my Crown Vic, going at it, and man … Security cameras caught it all.”
I was gawking at him now.
“Technically I didn’t break any laws, but I needed to get the hell out of Colorado before the chief drop-kicked my ass off the side of Pikes Peak.”
I laughed. “And then you came here? Neptune is more like Colorado than South Los Angeles.”
The ancient waitress—her name tag read ALMA—tore my attention away from Colin’s tale with glasses of iced water. Great timing, since I had started to shake from hunger and from that boxed-in feeling that everyone in the restaurant was watching me, judging me for stopping for the day, laughing, and having dinner.
“So what’ll you have, sweetie?” Alma asked.
I ordered a pastrami sandwich and a pomegranate margarita.
Colin ordered corn beef and a Sam Adams. After Alma left us, he said, “You look lovely tonight.”
I snorted. “You’re an idiot.”
He flushed. “I’m … I’m a little nervous, believe it or not.”
“This isn’t a date.”
His flush deepened. “People don’t know that. I mean, I’m attractive and you’re—”
“And you’re an idiot. Just shut up, Colin. Drink your water. Chew some ice.”
“Not that you’re my type.”
I faked a sad face. “Color me disappointed.”
He broke into a wide grin. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re cute and everything. You just wouldn’t give a damn about pleasing me.”
“Wow,” I said, eyes back on the television, “it’s like you’ve known me my entire life.”
He leaned forward. “Has Greg—?”
“Change the subject.”
“Why so serious?”
“Why is Greg any of your business?” I asked, the indifference now evaporating.
He rolled up his shirtsleeves—there was a tattoo of the Cracker Jack sailor boy and his dog on the inside of his left arm. “We can’t talk about work. We can’t talk about your husband. What’s on Elouise’s approved topics list?”
I twisted my lips as I thought, then said, “American Idol and … that’s about it.”
Alma brought over a bowl of pickles
and green tomatoes.
“These are good.” I speared a pickle, bit into it, and shivered as my mouth tingled from brine and cold vinegar. “Add pickles to my approved topics list.”
“So your old partner?” Colin asked.
“He was a good guy.”
“Yeah?”
“Took me in when nobody wanted to partner with me cuz I was a girl.”
“Cuz girls be fuckin’ up,” he said.
I flipped him the bird and continued. “He was funny. An Italian-American Southerner. Bruno Abbiati. Dude was a hard-ass and he pushed me when all I wanted was to take the bar exam again. He’d say”—I dropped my voice an octave—“‘Lou, you need to embrace bein’ a gal. Perps think with their dicks and most men could fuck up a one-car funeral because of that, so you better take advantage of that stupidity.’”
“Ha,” Colin said. “A one-car funeral.”
I stabbed another pickle and bit off a chunk. “Bruno was a dinosaur, but he was a good guy.”
“He die?”
“Nope. Parkinson’s. The shakes made him turn in his badge.”
“Back in the Springs,” Colin said, “my partner was ultrareligious. I mean, when we weren’t talking about the case he was tryin’ to baptize me or read me these fuckin’ pamphlets and…” He shook his head as he remembered. “I don’t miss that guy. He creeped me out. You, though. I don’t know what you believe, and I’m sure with us workin’ together, I’ll find out, but you seem…”
“Godless?” I asked.
He snickered, then plucked a tomato wedge from the bowl. “How does it feel? With your sister’s case being similar to Monique’s? With the Crase connection, I mean.”
I sang, “‘I don’t think I can take it, cuz it took so long to bake it’…”
“So … you feel sad?” he said.
Someone somewhere aimed a remote control at the television and switched to TMZ.
“I love this show,” Colin said. “I’m thinking of taking that bus tour. You know, to get my bearings.”
I held my chin in my hand. “That’s a different Los Angeles. Lindsay Lohan and Justin Bieber don’t drive south of Pico. But don’t let me stop you: take the tour. Just don’t try to expense it as education.”
“Your friend,” he said, “the reporter. What’s her name again?”
I smirked. “You really forgot her name?”
He did his squinty-eye flirty thing, thought about it, and added work-the-jaw-this-way-and-that.
“Just ask the question, Colin,” I said.
“She go out with white boys?”
“Why? Know any cute ones?”
“Can you put in a good word for me?”
“Sure. When I have something good to say.”
He laughed, then speared a pickle. “So was your sister like Monique?”
“You mean, living the double-life thing?” I nodded. “Except Tori didn’t really hide it toward the end. Didn’t have to since my mother worked all the time and was never home. By then, my father had been gone for a few years.”
“The similarities are kinda spooky,” he said. “Same age, same race, found in the same spot of town, the scent of Napoleon Crase’s cologne in both scenarios.”
Tori’s bloody Nike sat in the evidence room at the Forensic Science Center, Number 13 in a queue of thousands, each ancient item needing DNA testing. The city council had given the LAPD several million dollars—from federal grants, private donations, recycled cans, change from everyone’s car ashtrays—to process backlogged DNA evidence. Sometimes the results came too late, and the victim had already died or the bad guy had already died. Sometimes the results came but not soon enough, and innocent men were freed from prison, finally exonerated by proteins that never belonged to them.
I nodded, then said, “Yep. Damn spooky. And if I had been named after a tiny French general, I’d be worried right now.”
“You like him for both, then?”
“Yes,” I said, flat and final.
“Then I’ll help you. I’ll do whatever you need to take the son-of-a-bitch down.”
I didn’t know if I would take Mr. Shoot First, Ask Questions Later up on his offer—discretion was not his strongest quality. Still, I nodded as my eyes found the silent monitor: TMZ cameras were now following Kanye West up Rodeo Drive.
Alma slipped our sandwiches before us. Glistening slices of meat were piled high on kaiser rolls next to steak fries as thick as bamboo poles.
“Is Tori the reason you became a cop?” Colin asked.
“Yep. Typical, right?”
I had not intentionally planned a career with the LAPD—growing up in my neighborhood, you didn’t trust the police. They stopped you for no reason. They harassed you in Westwood and Venice and anywhere blacks weren’t supposed to be. And they had never found my sister.
I had earned degrees from UC Santa Cruz and then UCLA Law, doing well at both schools. But then I had flunked the bar exam. Twice. I didn’t want to leave Los Angeles and take the bar in Nebraska just to pass, so I enrolled in the police academy.
Mom had not been thrilled with my decision and days passed before she started talking to me again. “Why am I supposed to be happy about this? Because now my other daughter will be taken away from me?”
But I wasn’t “taken” anywhere. I had kept my wits about me as a patrol cop, working downtown and then the neighborhood that I knew, busting people who had sat next to me in algebra and metal shop. When I made detective five years ago, I had never seen such relief in my mother’s eyes.
“You think your sister’s alive?” Colin asked as he squirted yellow mustard on his corned beef.
I smeared spicy brown mustard on my bun. “The cop in me says she’s dead, but the little sister in me won’t believe that. The little sister tells herself to keep hope alive, that hope springs eternal, and umm … God willing and the creek don’t rise.”
Colin hoisted his beer and said, “To optimism, a disease worse than herpes.”
We toasted.
After two large gulps of margarita, I said, “My mother’s more conflicted than I am. She just wants closure. If she found out Tori’s dead, then that would be awful, but at least she’d know for sure. Unfortunately, that makes her feel like she’s a bad person for wanting closure.” I took another gulp, and felt the tequila loosen strings that kept me as tight as a girdle. “At least Monique’s mother gets to bury her.”
“What does your husband think?”
I nibbled on a piece of pastrami. “He thinks I should let it go, but…” Another gulp of margarita. “We don’t talk about it anymore. Talking always ends in an argument. To him, I’m ‘emotionally unavailable’ because Tori takes up the space in my heart that should belong to him, blah-blah-fuckin’-blah.”
The meat tasted rubbery now. Freakin’ Greg. Ruining my meal even though he was thousands of miles away.
I reached over and jabbed the tattoo on Colin’s arm. “Never seen a tribute to snack food mascots on a cop’s arm. What’s the deal?”
He said nothing for several moments. “You know my father is in the Air Force. That means he goes away for long stretches of time. Being a kid, that was tough, not seeing your dad for months … But every time he’d come home, we would sit on the porch, just us two. And he’d pull out a box of Cracker Jack from his rucksack and we’d sit there on the porch, eatin’ and talkin’. I’d tell him about baseball or girls I liked or…”
His eyes twinkled as he stared at his arm. “Those were some of the best times of my life.” He waggled his head and sighed. “So I got a tattoo.” He took a long pull from his beer.
“Why did you come to LA, though?”
“Wanted the beach,” he said. “Wanted to get away from…” He studied his beer bottle, his thoughts lost in the suds there.
“Homesick yet?”
He smiled. “I miss the lightnin’, the hikin’, mountains…” He laughed, adding, “That’s about it.”
I said nothing as I stirred the sl
ush in my glass. I envied Colin—he had a dad who came back every time he went away. What was that like?
“Homicide Special Section,” Colin said, sensing that he should change the subject. “That’s bad-ass. When should you hear back?”
“Don’t know.” And I didn’t know. It had been a month since I’d completed the final interviews, and there had only been silence.
Colin bit into his corned beef and his eyes rolled to the back of his head. “This is good.” He took another bite, and then another.
I watched him eat. Greg gobbled his food the same way, then whined about the meat sitting in his gut like a ball of dark matter.
Colin’s cell phone chimed. He wiped his fingers on a napkin, pulled the phone from his jacket pocket, then glanced at the display. He frowned and muttered, “Shit.”
“Lieutenant?”
“I wish.” He sat the phone facedown beside his plate and stared at the last quarter of his sandwich. “Dakota, my ex. She’s been calling all day.”
“She wants you back?”
He drummed the table with his fingers and chewed his bottom lip. “Who knows what she wants. She says she’s forgiven me. That I should come home.”
I forked a piece of corned beef off his plate. “End of relationship haiku.”
He counted on his fingers—five-seven-five—and that perfect smile of his peeked from the gloom. “I’m a poet and didn’t even know it.” He took some of my pastrami.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked.
“The girl in the park?” Beer bottle to his lips, he smirked. “Why is it any of your business?”
“It’s not.” I raised my glass for another toast. “May you be in heaven a full half hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.”
25
Tori, Golden, Kesha, and I arrived at Crase Liquor Emporium smelling of sweat, tobacco, and synthetic strawberries. Tori wandered the candy aisle while I grabbed packages of Twinkies and a grape soda. Golden and Kesha quickly purchased packs of Sno Balls and cans of Cactus Cooler, and left the store to talk to three shady-looking guys in the parking lot.
I found Tori still wandering the candy aisle. “You gonna get something?” I asked her. “We have seven minutes left.”
Her eyes shifted to the front of the store. “No. I changed my mind. We should go.”
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