LA Requiem ec-8

by Robert Crais

  "Besides that, we're not dealing with the most stable personality here, are we? Look at this guy's record. You see all the shootings he's been involved in? You see how many people he's killed? Here's a guy, he thinks nothing of using deadly force to solve his problems."

  I was watching Krantz. Krantz nodded every time Bran-ford made a point, but so far the points didn't add up to much.

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  Yet here was Krantz, looking assured and confident, and not at all bothered by the pissant nature of things like "prior history." Even Branford seemed amused, like he knew he was giving us nothing.

  I said, "I don't get how you put it on Joe."

  They looked at me.

  Branford said, "The old lady."

  "She knows Joe by sight? She called 911 and said she saw Joe Pike sneaking down the alley?"

  Krantz uncrossed his arms and leaned forward. "Figure it out, Sherlock. How many guys run around at night with the no sleeves and the tattoos and the sunglasses?"

  "Somebody who was trying to look like Joe Pike, Sherlock."

  Krantz laughed. "Oh, please, Cole. You don't have to be Einstein to figure this out."

  Charlie put the papers Branford had given him into his briefcase, then stood. "You guys are light. Way light. Here I was, thinking you were going to lay out real evidence like Pike's fingerprints on Dersh's doorknob, and all I'm getting is that you don't like that he's in the NRA. This is lame, Robby. I'll have the old lady saying she saw Santa Claus, and the judge is going to laugh you out."

  Robby Branford suddenly looked smug. "Well, there is another thing. You wanna see it now?"

  He didn't wait for us to answer. He went to the VCR and pressed the play button.

  The flat blue screen filled with a soundless color surveillance video of the back of a house. It took me a moment to realize that it was Dersh's house. I had only seen it from the front.

  Krantz said, "This is a surveillance tape of Dersh's house. See the date down here?"

  The time and date were in the lower left corner of the screen. The date showed it to be three days before Karen Garcia's burial. That would be the day I had learned the truth about the five victims. It was the day Pike had gone to see Dersh.

  We could see a large picture window off Dersh's studio,

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  and inside, two blurred figures I took to be Eugene Dersh and another man.

  I said, "That's not Pike."

  "No, it's not. Watch here, past the edge of the house where you can see the street."

  Krantz tapped the upper left side of the screen. Part of Dersh's drive was visible, and, beyond it, the street.

  Krantz hit a button, and the image slowed. A few seconds later, the nose of a red Jeep Cherokee eased into the frame. When the cab was visible, Krantz hit the freeze frame.

  Krantz said, "That's Pike."

  Charlie's face drained, and his mouth formed a thin, dark line.

  The picture advanced frame by frame. Joe's head turned. Joe looked at the house. Joe disappeared.

  "When a jury sees this, they're going to put it together with everything else we have and think just what we think. Pike was doing a drive-by to case the area, working up his nut to pull the trigger."

  Robby Branford put his hands in his pockets, pleased with himself and his evidence. "Looks pretty good now, doesn't it, Charlie? I'd say your boy's going to jail."

  Charlie Bauman took my arm and said, "Come on. Let's go outside and talk about this."

  Charlie kept hold of my arm until I shook him off in the booking area. "It's not what it seems. That was three days before Karen Garcia's funeral. Pike only went over there to see Dersh."

  "Don't talk so loud. Why'd he go see Dersh?"

  "I'd just found out about the other victims, and that Krantz suspected Dersh for the killer."

  "So Pike wanted to go check out the suspect?"

  "Yeah. That's pretty much it."

  Charlie led me to the elevators, making sure no one was close enough to hear. "He go over there to talk to Dersh? Ask him if he did it?"

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  "No. He just wanted to look at him."

  "He just looked at him?"

  "He wanted to see if he thought Dersh could do it."

  Charlie sighed and shook his head, "I can see me trying to explain that to a jury. 'You gotta understand, ladies and gentlemen, my client is a goddamned swami and he was just trying to vibe whether or not the victim was a killer.' " Charlie sighed again. "This really, really is gonna look bad for us."

  "Will it come up in the arraignment?"

  "Sure, it's gonna come up. Look, I can tell you right now that Joe is gonna get bound over for trial. He's going to stand for this one. Our problem isn't with the arraignment judge anymore, it'll be with the jury."

  "What about bail?"

  "I don't know." Charlie took a' pack of cigarettes from his jacket, and stuck one in his mouth. Nervous.

  A passing cop said, "They don't want you smoking in here. City building."

  Charlie fired up the cigarette. "So arrest me."

  The cop laughed and went on.

  "Look, Elvis, I'm not going to tell a jury that Pike just wanted to see the guy. I'll make up a better story than that, but it still looks bad." He checked his watch. "They're gonna transfer him to the Criminal Court Building in a few minutes. I'll go over there to talk with him again before the arraignment."

  "I'll meet you there."

  "No, you won't. You're going to look for the girl Pike saw at the beach. There's nothing you can do sitting in a room with me."

  The elevator doors opened and we went in. Two women and an overweight man were inside. The shorter of the women sniffed at Charlie's cigarette. "There's no smoking in here."

  Charlie blew out a cloud of smoke, and waved his hand. "Sorry. I'll put it right out."

  He didn't.

  "How bad is it, Charlie?"

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  Bauman drew deep on the cigarette, then blew a huge cloud of smoke toward the woman. "Can you spell plea bargain?"

  24

  As I walked out through Parker Center, the voices of the people around me were distant and tinny. The world had changed. Karen Garcia and Frank Garcia and Eugene Dersh were gone. The police thought their assassin killer was gone, but even if he wasn't, it didn't matter.

  There was only Joe in jail, and the need to save him.

  I spent the afternoon retracing the six-mile route that Pike had run, listing every business along the way that might employ twenty-four-hour help. When I reached the part of Ocean Avenue where Pike had met the girl, I left my car and walked. Small groups of homeless people were dotted through the park, some sleeping on blankets in the hot sun, others clustered in small groups or busy searching through trash containers. I woke them if they were sleeping or interrupted them if they were talking to ask if anyone knew Trudy or Matt, or if, last night, they had seen a jogging man who wore sunglasses even after dark. Almost everyone said yes, and almost everyone lied. Trudy was tall and skinny, or short and fat, or had only one eye. The jogging man was a black guy looking to harvest the organs of unwilling donors, or a government operative bent on mind control. The schizophrenics were particularly cooperative. I didn't stop for lunch.

  I worked my way through every Ocean Avenue hotel, asking for the names of nighttime staff, and vhen I finished I

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  drove home hard to begin calling. Completing my iirst pass along Joe's route had taken almost five hours, and left me with a sense that I was falling behind.

  Dersh's murder was the headline story on every four o'clock newscast in town. LAPD had released Joe's name as the suspect, and one station supered a picture of Joe with the legend VIGILANTE KILLER. Everyone reported that Dersh was the main suspect in the recent string of killings, with sources "among the upper echelons of LAPD" saying that that investigation would remain open, though no other suspect was expected to be identified. The cat
came in during the newscast, and watched with me.

  At ten minutes before five, my phone rang, and Charlie Bauman said, "The arraignment just ended. He's bound over."

  Charlie sounded hollow.

  "What about bail?"

  "No bail."

  I felt dull and weary, as if my frantic pace had taken its toll.

  "We'll have another arraignment in Superior Court in about a month. I can argue for bail again there, and maybe that judge will swing in our favor. This one didn't."

  "So what happens now?"

  "They'll let him sit in Parker for another couple of days, then transfer him to Men's Central. They'll keep him over in the safe wing because he used to be a cop, so we don't have to worry about that. All we have to worry about is building his defense. You find anyone who saw him?"

  "Not yet." I told him how I'd spent the day.

  "Christ, how many names you got?"

  "Between hotel people and businesses, two hundred fourteen."

  "Man. You work fast."

  It didn't seem like very much to me.

  "Listen. Fax your list to my office. I'll have my secretary get on it tomorrow. That way you can keep pounding the pavement."

  "I'll make the calls."

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  Charlie hesitated. When he spoke again his voice was calm. "Don't freak out on me, Elvis."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "It's after six. Businesses are closing, and the night shifts aren't on yet. Who're you going to call?"

  I didn't know.

  "Joe's okay for now. We've got time. Let's just do a good job, all right?" Like I was a little boy who'd lost his best friend, and he was my dad telling me everything would be okay if I just stayed calm.

  "I'll fax the list, Charlie."

  "Good. We'll talk tomorrow."

  After we hung up, I sent the list, then got a beer and brought it out onto the deck. The air was hot, but the canyon was clear. Two red-tailed hawks floated in lazy circles overhead. They hung on nothing, patient, tiny heads cocking from side to side as they searched for field mice and gophers. I have seen them float like that for hours. Patient hunters are successful hunters. Charlie was right. When I was in Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, they taught us that panic kills. Men who had lived through three wars taught us that if you panicked you would stop thinking, and if you stopped thinking you would die. A sergeant named Zim ran us for five miles every day carrying sixty-pound field packs, a full issue of ammunition, and our Ml6s. Between each cadence he made us shout, "My mind is my deadliest weapon. Sergeant Zim says so, and Sergeant Zim is never wrong. Sergeant Zim is God. Thank you, God."

  When you're eighteen, that leaves an impression.

  I said, "Okay, moron. Think."

  If Amanda Kimmel had seen a man dressed like Joe, wearing sunglasses like Joe, and sporting tattoos like Joe, then someone was pretending to be Joe. Finding that person would be an even better way of clearing Joe than finding Trudy or Matt, but so far, all I had was something that no one else seemed to have: An absolute and complete belief that Joe Pike was telling the truth. I did not doubt him. I would not. They could have videotape of Joe walking into that house, and if Joe

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  pointed at the television and said, "That's not me," I would believe him.

  You work with what you have, and all I had was faith. An awful lot of people have found that to be enough.

  You look for connections.

  Krantz came at this by looking for people with a motive to kill Dersh. He thought Pike's motive was Karen. Frank Garcia had the same motive, and had the money to have Dersh killed, but he wouldn't put it on Joe. That meant someone else, and I wondered if that someone had some true connection to Dersh, or had only used Dersh as a means to an end. Getting Pike. Maybe this wasn't about Dersh at all, but was about Pike.

  I went inside for a yellow legal pad, came back out again, and made a timeline. From Karen's murder until the story broke that Dersh was the suspect took six days. From the story breaking about Dersh until his murder was only three days. I tried to imagine some guy with a grudge against Pike watching his TV He's out there hating Pike, and he's never before in his life heard about Karen Garcia or Eugene Dersh, but he sees all this, and the world's biggest lightbulb blinks on over his head. Hey, lean cap this guy Dersh to get Pike! All in the span of three days.

  Uh-uh.

  That meant he knew of Dersh prior to the story breaking, and had time to think about it. Also, all of L.A. knew that the police had been surveilling Dersh around the clock. Yet this guy had picked a time after the surveillance had been scaled back. I wondered about that.

  I brought my beer inside, poured it out, then went back onto the deck. The hawks were still up there. I had thought they were hunting, but maybe they were just enjoying the air. I had thought they were looking for prey, but maybe they were looking at each other instead, and finding joy in each other's company there above the earth. Love hawks.

  Relationships are often different than they appear at first glance.

  I decided that the killer was someone connected both to Joe and to Dersh. Joe was connected to Dersh the same way Frank

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  was connected to Dersh: Through Karen. Maybe the killer was connected to Joe through Karen, also.

  I went inside, dug around for Samantha Dolan's home number, and called her.

  She said, "Hey, it's the World's Greatest Everything. Callin' little ol' me."

  She sounded drunk.

  "Are you okay, Dolan?"

  "Jesus. Would you call me Samantha?"

  "Samantha."

  "This has got to be about your buddy, right? I mean, you're not just calling to flirt?"

  "It's Joe."

  "I'm out of that, remember? I'm off the Task Force, I don't know what Krantz is doing, and I don't care. Hey, from what I heard, Pike sounds good for it."

  "I know that Branford has a case against him, but I'm telling you that Pike didn't do this."

  "Oh, puh-lease. You weren't there, were you? You didn't see it."

  "I know him, is all. Pike wouldn't go into Dersh's house in the middle of the night and shoot him like that. It isn't Pike's style."

  "What style murder would he use, you know him so well?"

  "The kind that can't be seen. Pike could do it and you would never know and would never even think that it might be him. They would disappear, one day here, the next day gone, and you'd be left wondering what happened, Dolan. That's the way Pike would do it, and, believe me, you would never find the body. Pike is the most dangerous man I know, and I've known more than a few. He is without peer."

  Dolan didn't say anything.

  "Dolan? You still there?"

  "Something tells me you could be pretty dangerous, too."

  I didn't answer. Let her think what she wanted.

  Dolan sighed. "Okay, World's Greatest. What do you want?"

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  "Whoever killed Dersh might be connected to Joe through Karen Garcia, and that goes back to the days Joe rode a black-and-white. Joe's partner was a guy named Abel Wozniak."

  "Sure. The cop Pike killed."

  "You don't have to say it like that, Dolan."

  "There's only one way to say it."

  "I want to find out who was around back then who might hate Pike enough to kill Dersh and frame Pike for it. I'm going to need files and records, and I can't get them without help."

  She didn't answer again.

  "Dolan?"

  "You got a fucking set on you, you know that? The trouble I'm in."

  She hung up.

  I called her back, but she had the phone off the hook. Busy. I called every five minutes for the next half hour. Busy.

  "Shit."

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting at the dining-room table and thinking about calling Dolan again when Lucy let herself in. She took off her suit coat and shoes, and went to the fridge wit
hout looking at me.

  I said, "I guess you heard about Joe."

  "I followed the story at work. We had people at the arraignment."

  "Uh-huh."

  She hadn't come out to give me a kiss, and she hadn't yet looked at me.