‘The department has a phone number for citizen complaints. It’s in the book.’
‘The coke on his body was planted.’
‘Oh, a conspiracy.’ His arched eyebrow told me what he thought of that.
‘He was working on a story that pissed off some people.’
‘What’s the story, who’s the people?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
I felt stupid. That was how he wanted me to feel. ‘I think somebody hired a private detective to get him deported.’
‘And that’s why he married you, isn’t it? To get a green card. So he couldn’t be deported.’
I couldn’t say anything because he was right, even if he was right about the wrong thing. But to him, being right about one thing made him right about the other. He jabbed a forefinger into my shoulder. ‘You haven’t even thought about what you’re gonna do with the body, have you?’
I didn’t get what he meant. ‘The body?’
‘The body of your dead husband. Remember him? Most relatives like to claim the body. But you haven’t asked me a single question about that. Did you forget about him?’
I hadn’t thought I was responsible for his body and the expression on my face told him as much. I didn’t even know how to get in contact with his family.
He jabbed my shoulder again. ‘You still want to tell me this wasn’t a green card marriage?’
The partner came up to Harker’s side, wiping his hands on a white handkerchief. ‘Your keys are in the trunk.’
‘On the trunk?’ I repeated, not quite catching him.
‘I heard him say in the trunk.’
He strode toward the hood end of the curb.
I went after him.
‘I need to get into my husband’s apartment. As his widow, it’s my right.’
He stopped dead still. His eyes looked hard and clear enough to stare into the sun. ‘Convicted felons have no rights. The apartment is sealed. You can get access next week, in the unlikely event you’re not back in stir.’
Harker stepped into the street.
I went after him again.
‘Haven’t you ever lost anyone you cared about?’
He turned on me so fast I didn’t get my hands up in time to keep him from slapping me to the ground. I tried to get my feet under me but he grabbed the back of my head and rode my face into the gutter. ‘Don’t you ever talk to me about loss! You don’t know a fucking thing about loss!’
Out of the corner of my eye a tan shape flitted between Harker and the night sky. The weight on my neck lifted. I twisted on to my back and coughed. The partner pinned Harker against the door of the cruiser. ‘It’s not worth it!’ He shouted, again and again, his voice dropping with each repetition until his lips moved with a sound less than a whisper. When Harker nodded, twice and emphatically, his partner let him go. Not once did he look at me. He straightened his sport coat with great shrugs of his shoulder and jerked open the door.
The partner stared down at me like trash. He offered advice but no hand. ‘You should watch your ass.’
I dragged myself out of the gutter. The partner may have locked my keys in the trunk but he hadn’t locked the passenger door, either out of kindness or lack of imagination. I crawled on to the back seat and lay there, counting my heartbeat down, beat by beat, until it dropped below the speed of a frightened rabbit. Then I made a call. One good thing about spending time in prison, it gives you a lot of connections. It’s like college in that way. You meet people you’ll know for the rest of your very short life.
17
The headlights of a Jeep Cherokee woke me about an hour later, the time it had taken Brenda to drive into Los Angeles from Sierra Madre in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Though I was born and raised in California, Brenda was the only Native Californian I’d met, with three Chumash grandparents and one Mexican grandfather. She wasn’t sure where she got her size and strength, but at 200 pounds she had enough of both nearly to break my ribs when she hugged me. There was always a lot of warmth between us. Though I was not a professional criminal like herself, the magnitude of my crimes commanded her respect. She’d been released two years earlier than I after serving eighteen months on a B and E – breaking and entering – charge. I’d heard she’d done well. Brenda was among the top lock-picks in Los Angeles.
‘You’re one ‘a the few people I’d drive more than two minutes to see, cariño, but how could you be so dumb you lock your keys in the trunk?’ She knelt to eyeball the lock.
‘I was being hassled by the cops. It was their idea of a joke.’
Brenda unsnapped a leather case, clicked on a mini-flashlight and selected from a couple dozen picks, rakes and tension wrenches the sizes she figured would do the job the fastest. ‘I thought you were gonna be a regular citizen when you got out. Why you being hassled by the cops?’
‘Just the usual ex-con bullshit.’
Though a big woman, Brenda had delicate hands. She worked the lock quickly, thinking with her fingers. In another society she would have been a surgeon. She once told me that her great-great grandmothers had been medicine women and folk-healers. Born to poverty in an East LA neighbourhood with more convicted felons than San Quentin, she had learned early to operate on locks instead of people. She flipped the trunk lock in less than ten seconds.
Her flash spotlit the keys above the left wheel well. She picked them off the carpet and dangled the key ring from her forefinger. ‘Any garage monkey could ‘a popped the trunk for you, so you gonna tell me what you drag me out here for?’
‘I’d like to buy a set of picks.’
Big Brenda had a face like her native land, wide and generous and browned by generations of sun; her earth-brown eyes carried timelessness in their gaze and her bone-white teeth flashes of mortality. ‘So you have joined the life,’ she mused.
‘I’m still a citizen, at least trying to be.’
‘Citizens don’t need a set of picks.’
When I told her my husband had been murdered and the law wouldn’t let me into his apartment she opened her arms and buried me in a hug. I accepted it long enough to be polite and broke free. I didn’t want to be comforted. ‘I’ll pay you the going rate.’
‘What you think you’re gonna do with a set of picks?’ She rocked back on her heels, looking at me in a critical way I didn’t like.
‘You gave me a few lessons, remember?’
In jail she had cut a set of picks from the baling steel that had wrapped a crate of foodstuffs. She had kept the picks hidden in her cell, not to use in any escape attempt, but to stay sharp for her return to the outside.
‘A couple jail house lessons don’t make you a pro, cariño. I’m not gonna give you a set of picks so you can go get yourself arrested.’
That was it. I’d never known Big Brenda to change her decision on anything once she stated it. I figured I’d break in through one of the windows.
‘But tell you what I am gonna give you,’ she added.
‘What?’
‘Me.’
The one good thing about California bars closing at two in the morning is that by three you can be pretty sure some drunk isn’t going to stumble on to whatever illegal enterprise you got going. Los Angeles is such an early night town that we could have hit the apartment before midnight and not run much risk of getting caught but Brenda insisted on waiting until three, the safest hour for nobody-at-home break-ins. The Spanish fourplex in which Gabe had lived was dimly lit by a distant street light. Not a window on the entire street was lit from the inside. We didn’t talk while climbing the stairs but neither did we take extra effort to be quiet. She knelt at the lock with a mini-flashlight gripped between her teeth. I stood behind, shielding her from the street, and after first unsticking the yellow police tape sealing the door rummaged through my duffel bag like I was drunk and looking for my keys.
The trunk was a toy compared to the serious metal on Gabe’s door, a seven-p
in dead bolt and key entry knob. She needed two picks, a tension wrench and a hook to work the dead bolt. Sweat began to break out on her forehead after the first minute. At two minutes she began to hum, very softly in the back of her throat. She cracked the dead bolt at three minutes and moved quickly to the knob-lock. Not a single car passed on the street below. The citizens were safe in their beds, those who had one. A homeless man pushed his shopping cart toward Melrose. He looked up at us once and moved on. Brenda took down the knob-lock in thirty seconds, pushed the door open and pulled me inside.
‘Cell phone on and volume down?’
I double checked.
‘One ring is a warning. Stop and listen. Don’t answer, don’t leave a record of the call. A second means get the hell out. Remember that?’ She squeezed my arm. ‘Wait for a third ring in case somebody else is calling you. I’ll hang up on the second ring if algo va mal.’ Algo va mal. If something goes wrong. She slipped out the door before I could thank her and I could no more hear her footsteps down the stairs than I could a cat’s.
I breathed deeply the air of the enclosed room, wanting to smell Gabe, that special scent he had, but couldn’t through the rancidness and dust. I clicked on the flashlight. Motes danced in the beam as it played over a rug torn to the corner floorboards, a scatter of books ripped from their bindings, a sofa gutted of stuffing like a burst pussy-willow. I trod carefully through the ruin to the kitchen, stopped at the threshold by the debris. Flour and sugar dusted the counters. Honey pooled from a broken jar on to the stove, narrowing to a congealed stream on its descent to the floor. Every box in the kitchen had been ripped open, emptied and tossed aside, every bag slit, every pot, pan and container pulled from its cupboard. The door to the refrigerator hung open like a wound, spilling soured entrails to the floor.
My first thoughts were of Harker. Rage and desperation had visited the apartment. Whoever had sacked the place had been confident of finding something which, eluding them, provoked a barbarian fury. Harker was the only person I knew carrying that much anger. I stepped over broken glass in the hallway and pushed on the door to the bedroom. The bed lay twisted upside down, mattress slit, cloth covering torn away from the bed springs. Pens, broken glass, rubber bands, lens cleaner and tissue lay scattered among the rubble beneath the night stand. I nudged open the door to the closet with my foot, ran my free hand over the shirt he’d worn our last night together. The objects of the dead are weighted with a living past. I took it off the rack and stuffed it in my duffel bag.
Gabe’s pillow lay crushed under the bed. I pulled it out, leaned against the wall and held it to my face. His scent rose faintly from the cloth. I hadn’t found an address book or letters from his family, nor a single canister of film or set of negatives. I still didn’t know what he’d been working on before he died or how to contact his family. If Harker was investigating Gabe’s death as drug related, confiscation of the photographs didn’t make any sense. But then cops aren’t scrupulously truthful to scum like me. He could have been lying. Or the apartment could have been searched for something else by someone who got here before the cops, just before or after murdering Gabe. The search seemed too violent and rushed to be carried out by homicide detectives, even raging ones. Cops empty the cereal boxes in the trash or sink, not on the floor.
A picture frame leaned against the wall. I propped it against my knee to study the image. The glass had splintered. It was the photograph taken at our marriage in Las Vegas, the one that had hung above his bed. Two glass shards had been thrust into the image, one through Gabe’s heart and the other spearing mine. I set the photograph back against the wall.
At the sound of the cell phone I bounded across the wreckage to the sliding glass door in the back, flipped the latch and stepped out on to a balcony that overlooked a garden of orange trees, rose bushes and a postage-stamp lawn. I climbed the railing and at the second ring let go of the bottom rung. The third ring sounded on the flight down. I rolled to the side when I hit the grass and came up holding Gabe’s pillow, not so stunned by the blow of earth that I didn’t curse my stupidity; I’d jumped one ring too soon. The phone rang again. I reached into my bag and silenced it. A light clicked on behind the curtained window at ground level. I crawled behind a rose bush. A groggy face appeared in the pane of glass. With the light on behind, he wouldn’t see far into the darkness. I crouched low and used the bush as cover to skirt around the side of the house. A couple of fences over, a slow-to-wake dog began to bark. The side gate was locked so I vaulted it. The phone began to ring again. I shackled my legs to a citizen’s stroll, kept my head down and fumbled through the bag. Brenda’s face jutted out the window of her Jeep Cherokee. I pulled the phone out of the bag and found the switch to turn it off. She dipped her head once and accelerated slowly away from the curb, her lights dimmed until well down the block.
On Brenda’s instructions I’d left the Caddy open and the key in the ignition hidden by a towel thrown over the steering wheel. The engine turned first try. The front porch light ignited as I dropped the transmission into drive. In the rear-view mirror I watched a figure stumble toward the sidewalk. The distance made a reading of my plates impossible but Cadillacs are not anonymous vehicles. I didn’t flick on the headlights until I reached Melrose. I glanced over at the cell phone and almost threw it out the window. Instead, I turned it back on. Immediately it began to ring.
‘Payback time.’ A voice, rough with smoke. Frank. ‘You up for a little night shoot?’
I’d called him first with the Death Row story. He thought he owed me. ‘This isn’t a good time.’
‘I heard about the Englishman. Sorry.’
‘Whatever. I’m not really working now.’
‘This is news, not work. You know Dave Schuman?’
I scanned the rear-view mirror for bubble gum lights or fast-moving police cruisers. It took me a moment to match the name with a face. ‘The scalp collector,’ I said. ‘The guy who walks around with photographs of celebrities taped to his camera strap.’
‘The scalp collector, right.’ He barked a laugh. ‘Only this time somebody collected his scalp. A half-hour ago they found his body in the trunk of a car parked on Ledgewood, just beneath the Hollywood Hills sign.’
18
A hundred yards from the crime scene my headlights picked up the white door and black city seal of a police car turned broadside in the street. A young patrolman slouched against the hood and sipped at a paper cup of coffee. Even a harmless cop like that, drinking coffee to stay warm and awake at the end of a long shift, unnerved me. I backed into a driveway to turn around. A thump on the rear fender put my foot to the brake. I thought I’d hit something. Frank put his face against the side window and his lips moved ‘Ha-ha’. I powered the window down. He pointed to a red Civic down the block and said he found a couple of witnesses to interview.
As I angled to park on the street, the faces of two teenagers in the back seat flashed in my headlights. I set the Nikon for night shooting, loaded a fresh roll of Kodak and walked over. The roof light kicked in when Frank opened the door. Both boys were well-barbered whites with bloodshot eyes and flushed cheeks. They looked about seventeen, wore Patagonia windbreakers, Gap jeans and hundred-dollar Timberland hiking boots. When I introduced myself the blond one said, ‘I’m Sean an’ this is Randy.’
‘What brought you guys up to the Hills tonight?’
‘I’ve got an agent,’ Randy claimed. ‘We were up here looking at houses to buy if I get cast in this pilot I –’
‘Bullshit,’ Sean objected. ‘We were just up at the Hollywood sign, you know, just, like, you know –’
‘Partying,’ Frank prompted.
‘Right,’ Sean nodded.
‘Wanna tell us what happened?’
‘Right. Well, ahhhh – ’bout two in the morning we come down the hill, you know, an’ it’s like real late so nobody else is around, an’ we’re tired because we’ve been, you know, like really, really partying.’
Rand
y framed the air with his hands. ‘Cut to this beat-to-shit Plymouth Fury, ugliest car in the known universe.’
‘Right,’ Sean nodded. ‘An’ we both look at each other like –’
‘What’s this car doing here?’
‘We mean, like, this is celebrity turf –’
‘Keanu Reeves lives just down the street.’
‘Right, a million a house minimum, an’ smack in the middle is the ugliest car you’ve ever seen. We’re thinking –’
‘It can’t belong to someone in the neighbourhood.’
‘It has to belong to somebody partying up in the hills.’
Randy framed the air with his hands. ‘Cut to close up. The trunk.’
‘It’s open.’
‘Not a lot, not like wide open.’
‘But you could see it hadn’t closed right.’
‘We started thinking…’
‘What if they left something in the trunk?’
‘Like a case of beer.’
‘We weren’t going to, you know, rip them off,’ Sean protested, waving his hands.
‘We were just curious.’
‘So Randy here –’
‘Sean didn’t want to touch it.’
‘He looks around to see if anybody is watching an’ –’
‘I open the trunk.’
‘An’ he screams, I mean, like, really screams.’
‘Wouldn’t you? Expect a case of beer and you come face to face with some dead guy?’
‘So I come up to look at what he’s screaming about –’
‘Sean here threw up in the curb.’
‘I had the spins. I told you I had the spins before.’
‘Those dead eyeballs gave you the spins real fast.’
‘Tell him about the weird part,’ Sean nudged.
‘Right, the weird part. Once I got over the shock, I leaned in for a closer look – the guy was covered in blood and had these gashes all over his body like he’d been stabbed –’
‘It was really gross.’
‘Totally gross. And I see this stuff coming out of his mouth.’
Killing Paparazzi Page 9