LA Requiem ec-8

by Robert Crais

  I was arraigned that afternoon, a trial date was set in Superior Court, and I was released without bail. I wasn't really thinking about the proceedings; I was thinking about Joe.

  Paulette Renfro and Evelyn Wozniak drove in from Palm Springs for the arraignment. After, they sat with Charlie and me to discuss what had occurred between me and Krantz. Paulette and Evelyn both offered to lie on my behalf, but I declined. I wanted them to tell the truth. Charlie listened to their version of events, which matched with mine. When they were done, Charlie leaned back and said, "bu're fucked."

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  "That's what I like about you, Charlie. You're inspirational."

  "You want my legal advice, take them up on their offer to lie. We can cook up a good story, then it's the three of you against Krantz in court, and you'll skate."

  "Charlie, I don't want to play it that way."

  "Why not?"

  That Charlie is something.

  Later, Charlie spoke with the prosecutor handling the case, a young woman named Gilstrap out of USC Law who wanted to be governor. He came back and told me that I could plead guilty to the one felony charge of interfering with a police officer, and they would drop the obstruction of justice charge. If I took the plea, I would receive probation with no jail time served. I said, "It's copping to a felony, Charlie. It means I lose my license."

  "You fight this, you're gonna lose your license anyway. You'll also do eighteen months."

  I took the plea, and became a convicted felon.

  The next day I went into the hospital to have my shoulder rebuilt. It took three hours, not four, but left me in a cast that held my arm up from my body as if my shoulder were dislocated. I told the doctor that it made me look like a waiter. The doctor said another centimeter to the left, and Sobek's bullet would've severed the nerve that controlled the small muscle groups in my hand and forearm. Then I would've looked like overcooked macaroni.

  Thinking about that made me feel better about the cast.

  That evening, Lucy brought flowers. She let her ringers drift along the cast, then kissed my shoulder, and didn't look so mad anymore. A kindness came into her eyes that frightened me more than Laurence Sobek or getting shot or losing my license. I said, "Are we over?"

  She stared at me fora long time before she shook her head. "I don't know. It feels different." "Okay."

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  "Let's be honest: This job was an excuse to come here. I came to Los Angeles because I love you. I changed my life to be with you, but also because I wanted to change. I had no promises or expectations about where we would go with this, or when, or even if any of it would work out. I knew what you were and what it meant the first time we met."

  "I love you." I didn't know what else to say.

  "I know, but I don't trust that love as much as I used to. Do you see?"

  "I understand."

  "Don't just say that."

  "I get it, Lucy, but I couldn't have done anything else. Joe needed me. If he's not dead, he still needs me, and I will help him."

  "You're angry."

  "Yeah. I'm angry."

  Neither of us said very much more, and after a while she left. I wondered if I would see her again, or ever feel the same about her, or she about me, and couldn't believe that I was even having such thoughts.

  Some days really suck.

  The next morning, Abbot Montoya wheeled Frank Garcia into my room. Frank looked withered and old in the chair, but he gripped my leg in greeting, and his grip was strong. He asked about my arm, and about Joe, but after a while he seemed to drift, and his eyes filled with tears.

  "You got that sonofabitch."

  "Joe got him."

  "You and Joe, and the woman who came to my house."

  "Her name was Samantha Dolan."

  His face screwed up, concerned. "They haven't heard anything about Joe?"

  "Not yet, Frank."

  "Anything you need, you let me know. Lawyers, doctors, I don't care what. Legal, illegal, it doesn't matter. My heart belongs to you now. If I can do it for you, I'll do it."

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  ROBERT CRAIS

  He started to sob, and I felt embarrassed.

  "You don't owe me anything, Frank."

  He squeezed my leg harder, so hard I thought the bone might break. "Everything I have is yours. You don't have to understand that, or me. Just know that it's so."

  I thought about Rusty Swetaggen, and understood.

  When they were leaving, Abbot Montoya stepped back through the door.

  "Frank means it."

  "I know."

  "No. You don't know, but you will. I mean it, too. You are ours now, Mr. Cole. Forever and always. That is a blood oath. Perhaps we are not so far from the White Fence, even after all these years."

  When he left I stared at the ceiling.

  "Latins."

  Later that afternoon, Charlie Bauman was filling my room with cigarette smoke when Branford, Krantz, and Stan Watts dropped by.

  Krantz stood at the end of my bed with his hands in his pockets, saying, "A couple of kids found Pike's car outside Twentynine Palms." Twentynine Palms is a barren, rugged place northeast of Palm Springs where the Marines have their Ground Combat Center. They do live-fire exercises out there, bringing in the fast movers to napalm the sand.

  Charlie sat up.

  I said, "Was Pike in it?"

  Branford glanced at my cast. "Nope. Just a lot of his blood. The whole front seat was soaked. We've got the States out there doing a sweep."

  They were staring at me like I had helped him park the car.

  Bauman said, "You're not still going to prosecute Pike for this Dersh thing, are you, Branford?"

  Branford just looked at him.

  "Oh, for chrissake."

  I said, "Krantz, you know better. You saw how Sobek was dressed, just like Pike. He's who the old lady saw."

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  Krantz met my eyes. "I don't know anything like that, Cole. Mrs. Kimmel saw arrow tattoos. Sobek didn't have tattoos."

  "So he painted them on, then washed them off."

  "I heard you ask Sobek if he did Dersh. I heard Sobek deny it."

  Charlie waved his cigarette, annoyed. "You want a signed confession? What are we talking about here?"

  "I want facts. We haven't been sitting on our asses with this, Bauman. We ran everything Pike said about his alibi through the system, and it came back just the way I thought it would: bullshit. No hits on a black minivan, Trudy, or Matt. We flashed Sobek's picture in a six-pack for Amanda Kimmel, but she still puts the finger on Pike."

  Branford said, "We've got the murder weapon, the GSR, and the motive; that gives us Pike."

  Charlie said, "Pike's statement wasn't a secret. Sobek could've tossed the gun off the pier to match with Pike's story. If Sobek didn't kill Dersh, why was Jesus Lorenzo killed just a few hours later? You writing that off as a coincidence?"

  "I'm writing it off as something I can't ask Sobek because Sobek is dead. Look, Pike saved Krantz's life, and those two women's, but I can't just forget about Dersh because we owe him one. You give me some proof that he didn't do it, or that Sobek did, I'll think it over."

  Charlie Bauman waved his cigarette like he didn't believe Branford for a second, then considered Krantz. "Tell me something, Lieutenant? You really draw down on Pike after Pike saved you?"

  "Yes, I really did that."

  "Even after he saved your life?"

  "He murdered Eugene Dersh, and he's going to answer for it. What I feel doesn't matter."

  "Well, at least you feel something."

  No one said much after that, and pretty soon everybody left but Watts.

  He said, "We buried Samantha this morning. Had over a thousand officers in the ranks. It was nice."

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  "I'll bet it was."

  "We get any word on Pike, I'll let you know."

  "Thanks, Stan. I appreciate it."

 
; Thinking back, I'm sure the only reason Stan Watts tagged along withKrantz and Branford that day was to share Samantha Dolan's final moment with me, and to tell me that a thousand officers had seen her off.

  I don't think he would've come for any other reason.

  I wish I could have been there to see her off with them.

  I left the hospital the next day.

  The doctors raised hell, but I couldn't take lying in bed with Joe still missing. I hoped that Joe was alive, and thought that if anyone could survive it would be him, but I also knew that if Pike had found his way into the ravines and arroyos of the desert, his body might not be discovered for years.

  I took too many painkillers, but still couldn't drive with the

  cast, so I hired a cab to take me out to the desert. I went back

  to Paulette's house, then up to Twentynine Palms, and tried to

  imagine what Joe might've been thinking, and where he

  might 've gone, but couldn 't.

  I checked all the nearby motels and service stations, and ate so many Percocet that I threw up twice.

  I went back to the desert the next day, and the next, but never found a trace. The cab fares totaled eight hundred dollars.

  Perhaps if I were a better detective I could have gotten a line on him, or found his body, though not if Joe was alive and covering his tracks.

  Telling myself that was better than thinking him dead.

  When I wasn't at the desert I haunted Santa Monica, walking Joe's route both during the day and at night, talking to clerks and surfers and gang-bangers and bodybuilders and maintenance people and food vendors and the limitless armies of street people. I walked the night route so often that the hookers who worked Ocean Avenue brought home-baked pie

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  for me and Starbucks coffee. Maybe it was the cast. They all wanted to sign it.

  My friends at the FBI and the DMV ran still more searches for black minivans, and people named Trudy and Matt, and I even got them to badger their friends in other states to do the same. Nothing turned up, and after a while my friends stopped returning my calls. I guess our friendship had its limits.

  Eight days after I left the hospital I phoned Stan Watts. "Is there anything on Joe?"

  "Not yet."

  "Has SID finished with Sobek's garage?"

  He sighed. "Man, you don't give up, do you?"

  "Not even after I'm dead."

  "They finished, but you're not going to like it much. They got this sharp kid over there named Chen. He tied Sobek to all of the vies except Dersh. I'm sorry."

  "Maybe he missed something."

  "This kid is sharp, Cole. He lasered Dersh's place looking for fibers that could've come from Sobek's, but found nothing. He lasered Sobek's, looking for something that might've come from Dersh, but that was a bust, too. He doped both places, and ran gas chromes, but struck out all the way around. 1 was hoping he'd find something that put Sobek with Dersh, too, but there's nothing."

  Chen was the guy who'd done the work up at Lake Hollywood. I remember being impressed when I'd read it. "Think you could send over these new reports?"

  "Shit, there's gotta be two hundred pages here."

  "Just the work he did on Dersh's place, and Sobek's garage. I don't need the others."

  "You got a fax there?"

  "Yeah." I gave him the number.

  He said, "You really been taking a cab out to the desert?"

  "How'd you hear about that?"

  "You know something, Cole? You and Dolan were of the same stripe. I can see why she liked you."

  Then he hung up.

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  While I waited for the fax, I reread Chen's Lake Hollywood report, and was again impressed with its detail. By the time I finished, the new reports had arrived, and I found them exhaustive. Chen had collected over one hundred separate fiber and soil samples from Dersh's home and property, and compared them with samples taken from Sobek's apartment, clothing, shoes, and vehicle, but found nothing that would tie the two together. No physical evidence tied Dersh to Joe Pike, either, but that didn't seem to bother Krantz.

  I read the new report twice, but by the end of the second reading felt as if I was wasting my time—no matter how often I turned the pages, no new evidence appeared, and Chen's evidentiary conclusions remained unchanged. I was thinking that my time would be better spent looking for Trudy, or going back to the desert, when I realized that something was different between the work that Chen had done at Lake Hollywood and the work he'd done at Dersh's house.

  I had read these reports hoping to find something exculpatory for Pike, but maybe what I was looking for wasn't something that was in the report. Maybe it had been left out.

  I phoned the SID office, and asked for John Chen.

  The woman who answered the phone said, "May I tell him what it's regarding?"

  I was still thinking about what the report didn't say when I answered her.

  "Tell him it's about Joe Pike."

  41

  The New, Improved John Chen

  John Chen had leased the Porsche Boxster—also known as the 'tang-mobile—on the very day he was promoted for his exemplary performance in the Karen Garcia homicide. He couldn't afford it, but John had decided that one could either accept one's miserable place in life (even if, like John, one was born to it) or defy it, and you could defy it if you just had the balls to take action. This was the new, improved John Chen, redefining himself with the motto: If I can take it, it s mine.

  First comes the 'tang-mobile, then comes the 'tang.

  Just as John Chen had had his eye on the Boxster, so had he been head over heels in heat for Teresa Wu, a microbiology graduate student at UCLA and part-time assistant at SID. Teresa Wu had lustrous black hair, skin the color of warm butter, and professorial red glasses that John thought were the sexiest thing going.

  Still flush with the accolades he'd garnered for his work at Lake Hollywood, John drove back to the office, made sure everyone there knew about the Boxster, then asked Teresa Wu for a date.

  It was the first time he had asked her out, and only the second time he'd spoken to her. It was only the third time he'd been brave enough to ask out anyone.

  Teresa Wu peered at him over the top of the red glasses, rolled her eyes as if he'd just asked her to share a snot sandwich, and said, "Oh, please, John. No way."

  Bitch.

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  ROBERT CRAIS

  That was a week ago, but part of John's newfound philosophy was a second motto: No guts, no nookie. John had spent the next seven days working up his nut to ask her out again, and was just about to do so when some guy named Elvis Cole called, wanting to speak with him.

  Now Teresa had left for school, and John put down the phone with a feeling of annoyance. Not only had the incoming call blown today's chance at Teresa Wu, but Chen didn't like it that Cole implied he had missed something at the crime scene. Chen liked it even less that he'd allowed the guy to badger him into meeting back at the Dersh house. Still, Chen was curious to hear what Cole had to offer; after all, if Chen could make a headline breakthrough on the Dersh case, Teresa Wu might change her mind about going out with him. How could she turn down a guy with a Boxster and his name on the front page of the L.A. Times?

  Forty minutes later, John Chen tooled his 'tang-mobile into Dersh's drive beside a green-and-white cab. The police tape had been removed from Dersh's door, and the house long released as a crime scene. Now it was nothing more than bait for the morbid.

  As Chen shut down the Boxster, a man whose arm stuck from his body in a shoulder cast climbed out of the cab. He looked like a waiter.

  The man said, "Mr. Chen. I'm Elvis Cole."

  There's a dorky name for you. Elvis.

  Chen eyed Cole sourly, thinking that Cole probably wanted him to falsify or plant evidence. "You're Pike's partner?"

  "That's right. Thanks for coming out."

&n
bsp; Cole offered his good hand. He wasn't as big as Pike, but his grip was uncomfortably hard—like Pike, he was probably another gym rat with too many Y chromosomes who played private eye so he could bully people. Chen shook hands quickly and stepped away, wondering if Cole was dangerous.