“This isn’t your first police interview, is it, Mr. Noland?”
“Black men talk to cops all the time, Detective. I don’t know what it’s like in the country you come from, but here in America there’s a great intimacy between black men and officers of the law, not much friendliness but close, still and all.”
Tourneau raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide for a moment. The possibility for normal-size eyes was a surprise to Ecks.
“You haven’t asked about the crime committed at Landcombe’s home,” the Frenchman noted.
“I don’t care. I’m finished with that woman.”
“Did you see a young woman there? White, blond?”
“No. Must have been somebody, though, because I was lookin’ at Sedra when the baseball bat hit me.”
“How did you know it was a bat?”
“I grabbed the suckah and pulled it away from my attacker. You know I got a hard head, man. I ran for the door with the bat in my hand and dropped it before goin’ outside, or maybe I let it go on the lawn—I really don’t remember. Either way, I didn’t get a good look at who hit me. And if I did I forgot. But you could understand that.”
The policeman smiled. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He sat back and laced his hands together, elbows placed at a wide angle on the table. After assuming this pose he pursed his lips.
“You have no verifiable explanation for your visit to Landcombe’s home,” he said. “This Albert Timmerman is dead. So is Sedra Landcombe.”
“Oh? How’d she die?”
“Bludgeon, maybe a baseball bat. It was quite gruesome.”
“Got my fingerprints on it? Is that why you’re here?”
The detective smiled again, enjoying the back-and-forth.
“Are you busy right now, Mr. Noland?”
“Just talkin’ to you and your friends.”
“Would you like to accompany us to a place where we can settle this issue?”
“What issue?”
“We know you were at the Landcombe residence once,” he said. “Some of my associates think you may have been there at yet another time.”
“What kind of place?” Xavier asked.
“A place of goodwill.” Tourneau smiled again. Ecks liked this smile.
“Sure. Why not?”
He rose from the chair and the two business-suited cops, one black and the other Asian, who were standing at the inside of the door came up quickly, each grabbing an arm.
Ecks held his arms down straight and stiff so that the men had great difficulty trying to get his wrists close enough together for the handcuffs. After a moment of strain Tourneau’s smile broadened.
“Release your arms,” the black cop warned.
“Let him alone, Mr. Jason,” Tourneau said. “After all, he’s not under arrest. Not yet.”
Elfin Incorporated was a medium-size medical building on Robertson Boulevard, a few blocks north of Wilshire. The five policemen and Xavier Rule walked in near four in the afternoon. The small elderly woman behind the round, clear plastic reception desk was disturbed by men so many and so big.
“C-can I help you?” she asked.
“Dr. Topaz, if you please,” Tourneau said.
“Can I tell him what it’s about?”
“Police business.”
“And you are?” she asked.
This last question caught Rule’s attention. The woman was bothered by the men but had more connection to her job than to her fears. She was what was now called African-American, with skin the color of faded ten-carat gold.
“Detective Andre Tourneau,” the cop said, unperturbed.
The receptionist hesitated a moment and then picked up the phone. She cupped a hand around the receiver, mumbled something, listened, mumbled a bit more, and then looked up.
“Room four-oh-four, fourth floor,” she said.
Xavier wondered if she could say that four times fast.
The hallway was pink and gray, with no ornament, and lined with closed doors. The floor was carpeted. There was no chemical smell on the air. This was a livable domicile not designed for serious illness or big brutal men in pretend civilized wear. If the doors could speak, Xavier mused, they would have politely asked the mob to leave.
But there they were, walking toward room number four-oh-four.
This door was ajar.
The Hispanic cop pushed it open.
It was a nice large room with one bed and a window looking out into the western sky. A buxom nurse in her forties was seated in a chair where she could personally monitor the IV drip and the various electronic screens gauging the patient’s biological functions. The nurse was white with handsome features that once must have been beautiful.
A tall East Indian man in a white smock was standing next to the bed. He smiled at the police. Tourneau smiled back.
“Dr. Topaz,” the detective said.
“Sir.”
“How is the patient today?”
At that moment Xavier noticed the purple iris in the tube-shaped vase on the patient’s nightstand.
The man in the hospital bed was the one he’d impaled with the crowbar. His eyes were partly open.
“I just wanted Mr. Mathers to see if he recognized my friend Mr. Noland.”
Ecks felt a hand on his shoulder moving him forward into the bright swath of sunlight coming in through the window.
Mathers looked up with some difficulty.
Xavier was still looking at the flower.
“Who’s this?” the wounded man whispered.
“You don’t recognize this man?” Tourneau asked.
Mathers shook his head no.
“Are you sure?”
“He’s still very weak,” the nurse said. She had risen from her chair and migrated to the bedside.
“You don’t have to worry about this man,” Tourneau went on, ignoring the nurse. “We have him in our custody.”
Xavier smiled. Dr. Topaz frowned, looking into the semiretired criminal’s eyes.
“I don’t know him,” Mathers said. He took a deep breath through his mouth and exhaled through his nostrils.
“Doctor,” the nurse complained.
“Is that all, Detective?” Topaz said.
“Has anyone inquired about the patient?” Tourneau replied.
“A friend of his sister came. She left this flower.”
“What was her name?”
“She called herself Constance Ravell,” the Indian doctor said, “but she was from my part of the world—at least her ancestors were.”
“Did you hear what they said?” the policeman asked the nurse.
“He asked for a few moments alone.”
“I understood that he would have someone with him at all times.”
“This is a hospital, Detective,” the nurse said. “Not a prison.”
Xavier glanced at Mathers. The crook looked him straight in the eye.
He wasn’t one of Father Frank’s though. Ecks wondered what Iridia had said to the man.
Tourneau watched the men as they silently agreed upon mutual silence.
“Who was she?” Tourneau asked Xavier.
“Obviously a sophisticated woman with refined tastes,” Ecks said softly. “Somebody who will come when she’s needed by the sick and the needy.”
The look on the policeman’s face was one of wonder. He had embarked on one kind of journey but suddenly found himself facing a detour sign.
“Thank you, Doctor,” the policeman said. “I guess I was wrong about Mr. Noland.”
Outside on Robertson the cops stood around Xavier. He wondered whether they would beat him right out there in public.
“We don’t have the time to take you home, Mr. Noland,” Tourneau said. “We have multiple murders to solve.”
“Hey,” Ecks said easily, “I understand. You got an important job to do. I know how to take the bus to any stop in the city. I got one’a those transit maps in my wallet.”
The cop smiled and then
grinned.
“But you could tell me something,” Ecks added.
“What is that, Mr. Noland?”
“How did a Frenchman ever become an LA cop?”
“My father was French,” he said. “My mother American. When my father died my mother left Nice to come home to California. I was sixteen and I was crazy about girls and police movies. The girls liked my French accent and the police liked my test scores.”
“Takes all kinds, I guess,” Ecks said.
The plum-colored Pontiac pulled up to the curb about half an hour after that. Winter Johnson was behind the wheel. There were bags under his eyes and the weight of deep thought hanging around him like black curtains over an old-time horse-drawn hearse.
“I didn’t ask the company to send you, Win,” Xavier said as he climbed into the seat next to his friend.
“No. But the dispatcher knows I drive you. He called me at home. I was takin’ me a sick day—to think.”
“You didn’t have to come, man. You look like you really are sick.”
Johnson forced a smile and said, “Looks can be deceiving.”
“There’s not a bone of deceit in your entire body,” Ecks said.
The car had not moved.
“No,” Winter agreed, “but you know I got this phone call.”
“From who?” Ecks asked. He wasn’t worried, but if the call had come from the police he might never see his apartment or run his paper route again. He might even have to go into self-imposed exile from Father Frank’s church.
He wouldn’t be the first.
“Cindy,” Win said.
“The girl that dropped you?”
“Uh-huh. Where you wanna go?”
“Home.”
Winter glanced over his left shoulder and eased out into the street, headed south. Approaching Wilshire he put on the left blinker.
They had made it all the way to La Brea before Ecks asked, “So what does Cindy have to do with you coming to pick me up?”
“She said that Braxton was a dog and he was still seein’ that Laurel chick on the side.”
“Okay.”
“She said that she realized that she shouldn’t have left me, that I was good to her and she was a fool.”
“Then why aren’t you with her instead of me?” Ecks asked. He appreciated Winter’s gesture of friendship and more—he was happy for the distraction from the murder investigation and the sudden turmoil in his life.
“Did I tell you what Cindy looked like?”
“Just about her kisses and wiggles and how you could talk all night.” This gave Ecks a notion. “With all that it didn’t seem to matter too much how she looked.”
“When I was in high school the girls didn’t like me too much,” Winter said. “I never was too big and I got tongue-tied real easy. Even today if a girl smiles at me I’m liable to blush.
“So when Cindy come up I didn’t know what to do. Her face is gorgeous and she got the body of a Playboy model. You know—high breasted and a tight butt like a ripe apple. I know I’m not supposed to look at women like that but it’s hard, you know.”
“I certainly do,” Ecks said.
“Anyway … Cindy said that she wanted me to forgive her and get together tonight.”
“And?”
“I said no.”
“You said which?”
“No.”
“Wow. No?”
Winter smiled, and Ecks wondered why his parents hadn’t named him for a warmer season, or maybe a summer month.
“I just said no. She asked me why and I said that I had some things on my mind. I was sorry about her boyfriend but that didn’t have anything to do with me. She asked if maybe I’d call her sometime. I said maybe. And you know what, Ecks?”
“What’s that, Win?”
“I actually didn’t care about that girl no more. And that was a real change for me. There had not been one solitary moment in my life up until that moment that I wouldn’t have given my left nut just to be seen on the street with a girl like that. I could’a had cancer and I’d still be at her door with chocolates and condoms. Shit. You know I hung up that phone and said to myself, ‘Winter Johnson, something has changed in you.’ ”
They were still headed east, getting closer to Flower Street.
“So?” Ecks said to continue the conversation.
“So what?”
“What does any of that have to do with you coming to get me when the last time we were together I killed one man, almost killed another, and brought you down into a graveyard of dead children, men, and women?”
Winter winced and then said, “You from back east, right, Ecks?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m a California boy, born and raised. We all New Age and cuttin’-edge around here. I know that if I wake one day and the world is different I got to pay attention. If I could say no to Cindy Simpson and not even care—well, that’s better than a PhD from UCLA. You put me through hell, Ecks, but I come out the other side. You had to fight them men, and it’s obvious you didn’t put them people in that vault. That was truly horrible down there, but I saw it and I survived. And when Cindy called me I told her, ‘No, baby, I’m a man now.’ ”
Winter grinned and Xavier Rule laughed.
“You a fool. That’s what you are,” Ecks said.
“Prob’ly so. I can’t deny that, brother. But you know, every day I woke up for the last seventeen years I was the same man lookin’ at me from the other side of the glass. And if you ain’t changed then you ain’t lived. That’s all there is to it.”
The laugh dried up and died in Xavier’s chest. His friend’s silly words seemed to anchor themselves somewhere between his former life and the carrot of salvation that Father Frank and his congregation offered.
“What’s wrong, Ecks?”
“What you mean, Win?”
“You look like somebody just kicked you in the teeth.”
“I was just thinking about what you said.”
“And we parked out in front of your place,” Winter added to underscore his meaning.
“Oh.”
On the way up the stairs Xavier thought about the broad arc of his life, though he might not have put it in those words. He thought about how he had always been angry just below the surface, about wanting to change when confronted by Frank in that dark bar on Skid Row.
He had tried his best to become a new man. It took Frank and an entire congregation to put him on the path he now followed. But he had never done anything as brave and as singular as what Winter Johnson had accomplished almost solely on his own.
Up until then Xavier had still thought that his strength and single-mindedness were what made him special. Now he wondered whether it was these same qualities holding him back.
She was leaning against his front door doing nothing—not reading or looking at her smartphone—she didn’t even seem to be thinking. She wasn’t doing a thing, just standing there staring at the blank wall opposite her.
“Ms. Richards,” Ecks said.
“Elizabeth,” she said.
“Say what?”
“That’s what my father wanted to call me. My mother said that he lost the privilege when he abandoned us.”
“Why?” Ecks asked.
“Why what?”
“Why did he leave?”
“That’s a cruel question.”
“Maybe,” he said, taking the front door key from his pocket, “maybe not.”
“She died before I could think to ask her.”
Ecks pushed the door open and said, “Come on in.”
They sat across from each other at the yellow table. She had declined a drink. He’d poured himself a Mexican beer. She wore a pink dress festooned with big black outlines of squares. There were spaghetti straps up over her shoulders, pretending to be holding the dress up. Her pumps were white and sleek.
Benol Richards had dressed for this encounter. She was sexy and vulnerable, looking younger than her years and wi
se beyond Ecks’s ken.
“What can I do for you?” Ecks was saying.
She pursed her lips, considering a different meaning to the same words.
She smiled.
“Come on now, girl,” he said. “We way beyond all that.”
“Never,” she said.
He felt a flutter in his chest. It was part enchantment, part fear. This sudden feeling put him back in the stairwell, where he was climbing, climbing, and at the same time, with similar strain, questioning the value of his vaunted manhood.
He felt his nostrils flare.
Benol’s smile broadened.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Richards?”
“I said you could call me Bennie.”
Xavier laced his fingers and put his elbows on the table as Detective Tourneau had before him. He perched his chin in the soft web of skin between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand and looked hard at his guest.
“You know you don’t have to be so serious all the time, Mr. Noland,” she said lightly. “A woman sits across from you in a summer dress and smiles. That’s nice, right?”
“You and me,” Xavier said, “we been through the back door of the shit house enough times to know what it’s like.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She was still smiling.
“That air freshener don’t take the place of good plumbing.”
Her smile vanished and was replaced with something like controlled anger. She considered things. In her eyes and shoulders Xavier could see her standing up and walking out, slapping his face, spitting on the pitted linoleum floor.
Her left nostril raised in a sneer.
“I got a lead on Brayton,” she said.
“You did?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Twenty-three years is a long time. How’d you even know where to look?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You asked me all those questions and I told you about Beatrix Darvonia, Brayton’s old girlfriend. After thinking about it for a while I realized that she wasn’t really all that old. I mean, I was a kid and she was maybe thirty-five, forty. So I looked her up and found her number. She was still living in the same house.”
“And you went there?”
“Of course not. I couldn’t be sure that the police hadn’t interviewed her after what happened.”
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