‘I’m thinking of trading professions, getting into something with a little more dignity.’
Vulch thought that was funny enough to smile at. ‘Madame Alex, now that Jody “Baby Doll” Gibson got busted. But if you’re thinking of trying to recruit one of her girls as a source, good luck. When not practising their trade they have the tightest lips in town.’
He opened the aluminium case in the trunk of my Caddy, rested his palm on a black box big enough to fit a couple pair of shoes. ‘You’re lucky I have a spare – Barry Scanlon asked for it this morning and I had to tell him I promised you first.’
‘The head of Crash Foto? Why would he want one?’
‘Nothing works better than a tracking system if you want to follow somebody. The receiver runs on a high speed Intel processor. The signalling is digital, virtually untraceable, good up to three miles with a Mag Mount – the transmitter of choice if the person you want to follow isn’t cooperative. Each transmitter has its own ID code so you can monitor up to ten targets.’
‘Overkill,’ I said. ‘I just need one.’
‘If it will do ten, it will do one.’
I got the message: shut up and listen.
He flicked the unit on and pointed to a backlit LCD display. ‘This tells the distance to your target in feet, its position relative to the receiver and the direction it’s travelling. If we were following somebody right now, this readout would tell you the target is, just for example, twenty thousand feet away and these directionals would show the target is due west and moving south.’ He lifted a black metal cube from the case and let me heft it. ‘That’s a Mag Mount.’ The thing was heavy enough to double as a paperweight. He knelt in front of the rear wheel and guided my hand beneath the car. ‘It’s magnetic, of course. If you put it on the frame here, away from the wheel and the rear axle, it can’t be seen and if the target scrapes bottom coming out a driveway it won’t be knocked off.’
‘This all comes with an instruction book?’
‘In the case. But the instruction book won’t tell you one important point: If you’re trying to conduct rolling surveillance, use an assistant either to –’ His glance jumped past my shoulder and his body followed a moment later. ‘Hey! Hey!’ he shouted, and sprinted toward a bearded truck of a guy opening the driver door to his Mercedes. I thought the guy had slipped the key from the parking attendant’s box and was trying to steal himself an auto. The tyre iron was right there in the trunk. I grabbed it and took off, thinking I’d slip around to whack the guy on the back of his skull but he slid behind the wheel before I got to the bumper. The locks clicked first, then the engine caught.
‘Call the cops!’ I shouted. The parking attendant rolled his eyes and kept his arms folded across his chest. I thought maybe I’d crowbar the thief’s skull through the driver window but Vulch braked me with a palm to my chest.
He hunched over eye-level with the guy behind the wheel and motioned him to roll down the window. It slid down a crack to a pair of eyes you’d find on a hyena. Vulch said, ‘Be a sport and at least let me get my camera equipment out of the car.’
‘You want your shit, sport, you can come get it at Cox Repossession Agency. We’re in the book.’
The radial tread screamed and the Mercedes streaked out of the lot. A Ford Ranger pulled away from the curb and followed at high speed. The repo man’s backup, I figured. I felt pretty stupid standing there with a tyre iron in my fist. But not as stupid as Vulch.
‘Need a lift?’ I asked.
24
Past ten o’clock at night there isn’t a better city to drive in than Los Angeles. The freeways clear of traffic and will take you within ten minutes of anywhere in the city you want to go. The surface is smooth, the turns are easy and the signs well lit. You have to be drunk to get into any trouble. The occasional testosterone carboy will cut you up but most everybody just wants to get from point to point without making enemies. After I dropped Vulch at the repo agency I tuned to late-night college radio coming out of Long Beach and hit the Santa Monica Freeway. The dealership that leased out the Mercedes had really screwed him, Vulch had complained. You’d think a Mercedes would be trouble-free wheels but a half-dozen things had gone wrong with the car and the dealer wouldn’t fix anything without trying to pin the costs on him. So he stopped paying the monthlies, right? Told the dealer when the car ran like it should he’d pay like he should. Never suspected the son-of-a-bitch would call a repo agency on him.
Debt is just another aspect of the Los Angeles lifestyle. Half the people on the Westside tried to look like they had more money than they really did. If you couldn’t buy the clothes and drive the car, you were a nobody. You didn’t belong. If you wanted to belong, you bought the big house, the car, the clothes – even if you could afford them only on credit. The culture valued appearance more than substance and it didn’t matter how you got it as long as you had it. Vulch could have been telling me the truth or a tale but the distinction mattered little to me. I didn’t judge him by his bank balance any more than I’d want him to judge me by mine.
I parked the Caddy downtown and crossed Figueroa to meet Detective Douglas at a twenty-four-hour eggs, sandwich and steak joint called the Pantry. Owned by the mayor, it was a popular place for cops to see and be seen, like a Polo Lounge for the law. Harker sat alone at a table by the bathrooms, his head tipped against the funky wooden partition that divided the regular tables from a row of stainless steel stools and counter service. A sign by the entrance said the place hadn’t closed one minute since its founding in 1924 and by the look of the grease-stained ceiling the place should have shut its doors long ago for a good hosing out. Being the mayor means not having to worry about health inspectors. I strode down the walkway between tables, sure that half the eyes in the joint had me marked for a snitch. When I crossed into Harker’s eye line I said, ‘Where’s Douglas?’
Harker wiped the hair on his upper lip with a paper napkin, smoothed the growth straight with a comb-like forefinger, pointed that same finger to the hard-backed chair across the table. ‘Show me what you got.’
‘Douglas said he’d be here,’ I insisted.
Harker looked over his shoulder and inside the breast pocket of his checked blue sport coat. ‘I don’t see him. That must mean he’s not here. If you don’t have anything to show me you’re just spoiling the view.’
I was a good citizen. The disk was evidence. For all my problems with the law I still believed in its essential integrity. I sat down, slid the disk across the white formica tabletop, said, ‘I found this hidden in something my husband gave me.’
Harker didn’t pick it off the table, didn’t look at it, didn’t look at me, just watched a spot on the wall above the entrance. ‘What’s on it?’
‘A couple of suspects and a motive for murder.’
Harker snorted and without moving his eyes from the spot behind my head slipped the disk into the side pocket of his sport coat. ‘Sure, we’ll look at it.’
By that he meant he’d glance at the plastic casing as he tossed the disk to the bottom of the case file. I took a chance I’d end up face-first again. I’d thought about that incident many times since it happened. Either he was crazy or something specific had set him off. I braced my hands against the table and set my feet at an angle clear of the chair. If I had to move quickly, I could. ‘I’ve been widowed, betrayed and robbed, my PO officer is threatening to punch my ticket back to the Institute, you want to arrest me, and some freak out there aims to give me a dirt nap. But still, I’m a hell of a lot luckier than you.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I only knew my husband for a week and you knew whoever you’re grieving a lot longer than that.’
The ripple started with a flutter of eyelids, cracked down his neck and through his torso like a shock wave. His hands shot from his cuffs to death lock the edge of the tabletop. I couldn’t tell if he was about to leap the table and throttle me or just cry. The air burst from his lungs. He shifted hi
s weight, relaxed his grip, stared again at empty space. ‘You want your husband’s body, it’s yours. The coroner signed it over for release this afternoon. Any mortuary will take care of the details for you.’
I thanked him and after that we didn’t have anything to say to each other. He didn’t particularly trust me and I feared he’d still bust my butt back to jail at the first opportunity. Even if his attitude toward me softened to a grudging apathy he wasn’t going to act on the information in the disk any time soon and he might not act at all. If he wouldn’t, I would. I had no idea how I was going to get close enough to slip a Mag Mount under Damian Burke’s Ferrari, Mercedes, or whatever six-figure chariot he drove but maybe the call girl Piña Noir could tell me that.
Once your apartment has been broken into it’s hard to tell the difference between paranoia and honest fear. No one would be waiting in my darkened apartment while I climbed the steps but still I felt genuine dread as I keyed the door and swung it open. I flicked on the light switch, noticed white on my fingers. Fingerprint powder. It coated every surface that might reasonably be touched. I didn’t think they’d caught any set of prints except mine. The person doing this might have the heart of a jackal but not the brain of one.
I picked through the clothes scattered on the carpet, searching for black jeans and a black long-sleeve cotton jersey to replace the gold bowling shirt and lime green plaid slacks I’d worn since the morning after Gabe’s body had been found. I didn’t mind the stink so much as the visibility, figured night work called for black. While I cleaned myself up I listened to messages. The only one that mattered went, ‘Ah, Mary? Wait a minute, where is that – do I have the right number?’ The mysteries of tape recording must have proved too complex because that was all my mom said before hanging up. She’d left countless messages just like that back when we still talked. The first nine digits of her phone number beeped beneath my fingertips. Mom was a devoted fan of trash television. The moment she got home from work she turned the television set to the talk shows and the set didn’t go off until she fell asleep in front of it. She’d probably seen me on the box earlier that night, hadn’t even known I’d been married let alone widowed. When I realized I didn’t have anything to say to her I hung up.
Parked beneath a flickering streetlight, the Caddy was still warm enough to send shimmers of heat into the night air. I got behind the wheel, put on my seat belt and sent some spark to the engine. Many nights in prison I’d dreamed about the simple act of sitting with my mom over coffee. I had planned to tell her how beautiful I’d thought her when I was a child and how I’d lived for those moments when we might shut out the world and do something together, without my brothers, without my dad, just us two. Somehow those moments never happened. I dropped the transmission into drive and released the brake. When the tread grooved asphalt I flicked a glance at a shadow crossing my rear-view mirror. I thought it was a truck until a steel tube pressed against the skull bone at the base of my neck and a grim voice instructed me to take the 4th Street onramp to the Santa Monica Freeway. I had the wits to nod but little else until a mile down the road I worked up the courage to glance his way.
He sat hunched over the back of the passenger seat, left arm wedged under his chest for support, right arm crossed on top of his left, gun wrist resting on his left biceps. The more scared I seemed and the further we drove the more relaxed that gun hand got. I saw what could happen.
I was wearing a seat belt.
He wasn’t.
25
The Caddy hit the rear end of the parked Beamer inside the right headlight. No dramatic jerk of the wheel, no warning, just a silent drift and a kamikaze stop of crunched metal from thirty miles an hour. He didn’t have a chance to shoot. His body catapulted over the seat and drove his skull into the windshield before a scream reached his throat.
Even though braced and belted, the impact knocked the wits out of me. My brain believed we were still cruising along at thirty. Gradually, I became aware that the ringing in my ears was not from my own bell having been rung but from a car alarm. I threw the transmission into reverse and rocked the Caddy off the Beamer’s trunk. The engine revved up fine and the wheel still turned in my hands. Once a felon, always a felon. I jammed the accelerator in a hit and run and didn’t stop running until the scrape of metal on rubber forced me to the curb of a quiet residential street.
A moan from the floorboard told me the guy wasn’t dead. His gun kicked at my feet – a Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special with a blue carbon steel finish and two-inch barrel, simple enough for any idiot to shoot. I jammed it under my belt and pulled my duffel bag out from under his deadweight arm. For a moment I considered doing something for him but decided instead to make sure he hadn’t damaged my camera. I grabbed him by the hair, twisted his face toward me and tested out the Nikon with a flash exposure. The crack of light made him blink and moan. He wore blue jeans and a Golds’ Gym sweatshirt layered under an unzipped Dodger windbreaker. By the hay-coloured hair and bushy moustache I recognized him as the jogger who had attacked us in Vegas. Blood puddled on the floor mat from a cut above his left eye, where his skull had spidered the windshield. In another minute it was going to ruin the carpet. I needed to do something about that.
The guy wasn’t in any shape to walk so I had to drag him by his collar to the trunk of the Caddy. He didn’t want to move and I wasn’t strong enough to lift him solo but after a couple of whacks with the tyre iron he rolled on to his stomach and tried to get up. I grabbed him by the back of his belt, helped him into the trunk and slammed it shut. He didn’t utter a word of complaint. I think he was happy to get away from me.
The Caddy’s right front fender looked like a bicyclist signalling for a turn and the hood came up skewed on a bent hinge. The engine compartment had absorbed the impact without much visible damage. The radiator felt solidly mounted and none of the hoses had busted loose. The scraping noise I’d heard came from the front right tyre, where the wheel well had crumpled back and gouged the tread. Had I any decency I’d take the guy to the nearest emergency room, call Detective Douglas and tell him what had happened. I crowbarred the sheet metal away from the tyre and disconnected the headlight so I didn’t spotlight cars on the right as I drove past. The Caddy was a tank. When I sped away from the curb it handled no worse than it ever did.
At the first stoplight I flipped open the jogger’s wallet. The California driver licence listed his name as Richard Grimes. The Culver City address probably wasn’t any good but I took it down with the licence number. The next sleeve contained another licence, this one authorizing the bearer to conduct private investigations in the State of California. I’d worked with a couple private investigators once. The big time operators did legal legwork for law firms and worked the other side of the law as fixers for wealthy clients. Small-timers did whatever they had to short of murder to make a living. Maybe this one hadn’t even stopped at that. No reason a private detective can’t be a hired killer. If I took him to the emergency room, Douglas might pull another no-show. I couldn’t afford decency.
You didn’t have to be a killer to know the desert around Los Angeles was a fifty-thousand-square-mile body dump. Seemed like some hiker found a new set of bones every month or so. The desert sand is soft and you can get down a couple of feet without much trouble. After the first wind nobody can tell the ground has been disturbed except maybe the animals and if they find the body nothing will be left to identify. In the middle of the desert Grimes could scream all he wanted and the only answer would be the howl of a coyote that might soon gnaw his bones. I wasn’t sure if I could kill Grimes in cold blood but I was ready to give my ethics the test. I drove east on the Antelope Valley Freeway, found a side road on the fringe of the Mojave Desert, then a dirt road after that.
He didn’t move when I opened the trunk. I whacked him a good one on the shins with the tyre iron and that brought him out of his death sham quick enough. ‘Get out,’ I said.
‘I can’t move, lady,’
he moaned. ‘I think my neck might be broke.’
I swung the tyre iron like a hand axe, chopped his knee hard enough to hear a crack. I hadn’t intended to break anything but it wasn’t a bad idea to hobble his wheels. He screamed out a few things about my character which he should have left unsaid but I didn’t hold it against him. I said, ‘Get out.’
‘I can’t get out, you broke my leg.’ He rolled around in the trunk, his hands on his knee. His neck must have felt much better.
‘If you don’t get out now, I’ll break your arms, then I’ll drag you out by your neck.’ I didn’t sound angry. I said it like I was going to cross the street to buy a carton of milk.
He swung his legs over the rim of the trunk and steadied himself on the bumper. I had no doubt the windshield had messed up his equilibrium but not half as bad as he pretended. When he straightened and looked at where I’d brought him, he was more scared than when I’d hit him. I’d chosen the spot well, a ravine set up against the mountains, shielded by gully walls. No way anybody was going to see us. He had nowhere to run except into the sights of his own gun.
‘Come around this side of the car.’ I stepped back with the gun aimed at his chest, pointed the crowbar to the spot at the rear tyre where I wanted him.
He gimped around, tried to crouch on his heels, but the pain in his knee wouldn’t let him. He settled his butt on to the dirt and straightened his legs. Blood had streamed from the cut above his right eye to stain his windbreaker. During the ride he’d stopped the bleeding with a white handkerchief that he’d half-tucked into the front pocket of his jeans. He didn’t look too good and probably felt worse.
‘I’m going to tell you a story. You want to hear a story?’
He looked at me like I was nuts and he didn’t like it. Crazy people can do crazy things.
‘Once upon a time, I had this boyfriend, and this boyfriend, he gave me something to deliver, and this something he gave me blew up. Killed the man I handed it to. My boyfriend was trying to rip off the people he was doing business with, you see?’
Killing Paparazzi Page 13