by David Freed
“I told you. I had an early meeting in Los Angeles, that I’d probably be gone before you woke up.”
“No, you didn’t. You said no such thing.”
Crissy stared at him in disbelief. “Hub, we were sitting at the table, in there, having dinner. I said, ‘I have meetings tomorrow with the Animal Planet people on The Cat Communicator. Unless traffic’s bad, I’ll be home in time to make dinner. Defrost some chicken. Make sure Ryder takes her medicine.’ Do you not remember me telling you that?”
“All I remember is waking up and you were gone.”
“Baby, I’m worried about you. You’re starting to forget things.”
“You could’ve at least called to check in.”
“I turned my phone off for the meeting and forgot to turn it back on. I’m sorry, Hub.”
Walker was little appeased. Angrily, he snatched Ryder from his wife—“C’mon, baby girl, let’s get you dried off”—and marched into the house.
Crissy handed me a thick, plum-colored bath towel from among several stacked in a fancy basket near the patio door. I dried off my cast first. It seemed no worse for the dunking.
“A little partying down in Tijuana?” she said with a smirk, nodding toward my arm.
“How’d you guess?”
“What happened with Ryder?”
“One minute she was wearing her flotation devices, and the next minute, she wasn’t.”
“What was Hub doing?”
“Worrying about you.”
Crissy folded her arms and gazed toward the house. Her acrylic nails were crimson. “He’s been acting strange. Not his usual self. Ever since Dorian Munz died. I keep telling him he needs to go to the doctor, but you know how pilots can be. Need another towel?”
I shook my head no and asked her to tell me about Ray Sheen.
“I understand you know him pretty well.”
She looked at me hard. “Who told you that?”
“Your husband.”
Crissy calmly lowered herself onto the mauve cushion of a chaise lounge. If she was caught off-guard by my question, she covered it well.
“We’ve socialized a few times. Dinner, banquets, that sort of thing. Ray works for Greg Castle, and Hub and Greg are good friends, obviously. Beyond that . . . Why do you ask?”
“Ray tried to kill me last night.”
“Ray Sheen tried to kill you?” She scoffed like she didn’t believe me. “Why in the world would he do that?”
“I’ll let you know when I find out.”
I slipped inside the house and headed for the front door. Ryder was wrapped in a towel, sitting on the living room couch, absorbed in a laptop computer game with her grandfather. Hub was still drinking.
“I need to turn in my rental car.”
“Send me the bill,” Walker said. “We’ll call it even.”
I said I would and mentioned nothing about the bullet holes in the Escalade’s roof. I was just glad I wasn’t paying.
“Take care, Colonel.”
“You do the same, Mr. Logan.”
Across the street, a red Marine Corps flag flapped in the breeze from a flagpole in Major Kilgore’s front yard. The major was rocking in his porch swing, eyeballing Hub Walker’s elegant home with clear malice.
HAVING BEEN abducted and stripped of various personal possessions, including a cell phone, afforded me an excellent opportunity to visit my friendly cellular service provider. My personal communications “advisor,” an earnest young man named Seth, explained megabytes and the differences between central processing units as if we shared a like-minded fascination with telecommunications minutiae, then tried to sell me a $600 smartphone. I explained to him as diplomatically as I could that unless the phone could beam me up and came equipped with a death ray to kill Klingons, I wasn’t interested in blowing nearly that much on any phone. I walked out fifteen minutes later with a bare-bones, seventy-five-dollar unit that was anything but smart. At least I didn’t have to enroll in grad school to figure out how the damn thing worked. Plus, they let me keep my old number.
Sitting in the parking lot, I plugged my new phone into the Escalade’s USB power port, called the central switchboard at Mercy Hospital in Rancho Bonita, and asked to be patched through to the intensive care unit. I told the woman who answered, who I assumed was a nurse, that I was calling to see how Mrs. Schmulowitz was doing.
“Are you family?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. Unless you’re a spouse, domestic partner, or immediate family member, we’re prohibited by hospital policy from divulging any patient information.”
“Actually,” I said, “we’re married. In a technical sense.”
“Huh?”
I explained that Mrs. Schmulowitz and I shared the same address. As such, any good lawyer (an oxymoron if there ever was one) would argue that we lived together. And that made her my common-law wife. Which made it perfectly permissible, I told the nurse, to be briefed on her condition.
“Sir, I really don’t have time to play games.”
“OK, look, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m just her tenant. But Mrs. Schmulowitz is more than my landlady. She’s my inspiration. Hell, she may be the best person I’ve ever known. All I need is a word. Just one word. Critical? Stable? What? I don’t think that’s too much to ask, do you?”
The nurse sighed, tired of my badgering. “Mrs. Schmulowitz is in serious condition. We’d upgrade her to stable, but she insists on getting out of bed every hour to do leg-lifts.”
I thanked her and signed off, feeling as if one large rock had been lifted from me. Whatever lightness of being I felt lasted about as long as it took for my new, less-than-smart phone to ring. It was Savannah.
“You said you were going to call me.”
“True.”
“I waited, Logan, all night. Then I tried calling you. Because I was worried. Any idea how many times I tried calling? Go on, take a shot at it.”
“Many?”
“I stopped counting.”
“My phone died, Savannah. I had to get a new one.”
Was it the whole truth? No. But being a Buddhist is all about not hurting others. Telling Savannah all I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours would’ve only inflicted pain.
“I’m sorry you were scared, Savannah. I’m fine. I promise.”
She exhaled. “OK, apology accepted.” There was a pause, then she said, “I just miss you, that’s all.”
“I miss you, too, babe.”
There was a pause.
“You haven’t called me that in a long time,” Savannah said.
“What?”
“Babe.”
“It just sort of slipped out. Again, my apologies.”
“Don’t apologize. I like it.”
So much I wanted to tell her. That I ached for her. That I could do a better job, be a more thoughtful human being next time around. But I held back. The next step toward reconciliation was unconditional forgiveness. I was still working on that one.
“I talked to the hospital. Looks like Mrs. Schmulowitz is gonna make it.”
“That’s wonderful, Logan. She’s one of a kind. I hope your cat comes home, too. I know how much he means to you.”
“Why he does is beyond me.”
“I think it’s because you admire his sense of independence.”
“It’s not because of his selflessness, that’s for sure. It’s Kiddiot’s world. We just live in it.”
Savannah laughed. What I needed, she said, was a visit from The Cat Communicator, the reality television show Crissy Walker was hoping to produce at Animal Planet.
“My new client actually works at Animal Planet,” she said. “He’s having panic attacks over picking which shows to produce. He gets pitched hundreds of ideas every week.”
“I can see it now: the guy sits in climate-controlled comfort all day, sipping lattes and having people beg him to make their shows, then wigs out because he can’t decide between Monkeys
Gone Wild and The Real Rodents of Orange County? I’m glad he’s not taking flying lessons. I don’t think he’d do very well.”
“Just because you’ve never had a panic attack, Logan, doesn’t mean they’re not real. They can be terribly debilitating.”
Only a minute earlier, I’d vowed to be a more empathetic human being. Now here I was, the same old insensitive me. Bad habits die hard.
“I’m sure your counseling will help him immeasurably.”
“You’re just saying that to placate me.”
“You know me better than that, Savannah.”
She blew air through her lips, flapping them. “What am I going to do with you, Logan?”
“I can think of a few things.”
The phone made a funny beep in my ear. I ignored it. Savannah didn’t.
“You have another call coming in,” she said.
“I don’t have call waiting.”
“Yes, Logan, you do, because that beep’s definitely call waiting. Could be important. I’ll let you go.”
I reluctantly admitted that I was “unfamiliar” with how call waiting worked on my new phone—or any phone, for that matter.
“You can fly the wings off anything ever built but you can’t figure out call waiting?”
“If I were dyslexic, Savannah, would you make fun of that?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why belittle a man who’s cellularly challenged?”
“You’re right. That was incredibly insensitive. You’ll have to forgive me.”
“I’m working on it.”
She told me which buttons to push on my new phone to toggle between calls. I pressed a button, promptly disconnecting her along with whoever else was trying to reach me. The phone rang almost immediately. It was Detective Rosario.
“One of our patrol units located that pickup truck you were looking for,” she said, “the one registered to C.W. Lazarus. We also located Mr. Lazarus.”
I’d fantasized about finding the son of a bitch myself, forcing a confession from him, then enacting with my fists the damage he’d done to the Ruptured Duck. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Life, I reminded myself, is full of disappointments.
“Did you ask him about my airplane? I’m hoping he spilled his guts.”
“That he did,” Rosario said. “But he won’t be talking about your airplane anytime soon, or anything else. C.W. Lazarus is dead.”
Twenty-three
Turkey vultures orbited high above Lazarus’s remains as Detective Rosario and I ascended the hill where his corpse lay under a broiling, late afternoon sun.
Mountain bikers had discovered the body a few hours earlier about a quarter-mile from a trailhead in the Cleveland National Forest where Lazarus’s Nissan pickup with its PCAFLR vanity license plates had also been found. The truck had been broken into and its radio stolen—not an uncommon occurrence these days among vehicles left unattended overnight in America’s majestic outback. Authorities surmised that garden variety vandals were likely responsible for the ransacking of Lazarus’s truck. As for the apparent murder of Lazarus himself, blame and explanation had not yet been apportioned.
“Ever wonder why vultures are bald?”
“Can’t say I have.” Rosario was breathing hard, trudging uphill. “But I don’t think it’s because Mother Nature decided that rockin’ a bald look would necessarily enhance their appearance.”
“No feathers means the gunk that clings to their heads dries faster and falls off quicker after they go Dumpster diving inside the body cavities of dead animals.”
“I could’ve gone the rest of my life without knowing that.”
Rosario stopped and bent at the waist, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. I paused and waited for her. She was wearing lace-up hiking boots, faded Levis with her badge and pistol clipped to the waist, and a pink tank top that, without her shoulder rig obscuring it, revealed ample cleavage I hadn’t noticed before.
“You doing OK, Detective?”
She nodded. Sweat beads dripped from her short black hair onto the dirt. “I gotta start hitting the club more.”
The club. Before the days of computerized incline stair-steppers and cardio monitors, they were called “gyms,” unvarnished houses of pain where jocks and those who aspired to be jocks sweated, not preened. You went there to pump iron until your hands bled and your arms burned like magnesium. Nobody went looking to check out the local talent. I’d had my fill of gym workouts after four years of playing wide receiver for the Air Force Academy. Exercise for me these days consisted of a few tortured minutes every morning of stomach crunches and push-ups, followed by coffee and three ibuprofens. Call them whatever you wanted, health clubs or fitness centers, I’d no sooner join one than I would the Communist Party.
Rosario dug an inhaler out of her shoulder bag and sucked deeply. “Better now,” she said after a minute, standing erect and finger-combing her sopping hair. “Adult asthma. This getting older thing blows.”
“After the age of thirty, the body has a mind of its own.”
“You just make that up?”
I shook my head. “Bette Midler.”
“You don’t exactly strike me as the Divine Miss M type, Logan.”
“Are you kidding? I’m huge into musicals. Nothing finer in my opinion than a big Broadway production number.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“You’re right. I’m not. Musicals make my butt hurt after about ten minutes. I just remember random stuff. Pointless facts to know and tell.”
“Like why buzzards are bald.”
I smiled.
Rosario drew a deep breath and continued walking uphill while I fell in behind her. A half-mile or so below us, I could see the winding dirt road where I’d been arrested after escaping the clutches of Ray Sheen who, according to Rosario, was still on the lam.
I had persuaded her to let me look at Lazarus’s body, to stare down at the face of the man who’d caused me to crash my airplane. She’d turned me down at first, saying department policy prohibited unauthorized civilians from entering designated crime scenes. I countered by pointing out that the guy hadn’t tried to kill me; he’d tried to kill us.
“We survived a life-and-death experience,” I said. “That makes us brothers—or sisters—depending on how politically correct you want to get about it. I just want to look down at the dirt bag for a few seconds and gloat. Call it a catharsis.”
“What’s a catharsis?”
“It’s an arrangement. You let me have my little moment of satisfaction, I’ll spring for dinner afterward.”
The detective mulled my proposal, then said, “If anybody asks who you are or what you’re doing, you let me do the talking. You touch nothing, stand where I tell you, do what I tell you. Understood?”
“Roger.”
We made arrangements to meet in the parking lot of a church one block from the sheriff’s department’s Pine Valley substation, about forty highway miles east of downtown San Diego, just off Interstate 8. Rosario would then drive us to the scene, which was less than two miles from the substation. Her partner, she said, would not be coming along. Lawless’s wife was in labor. They were expecting twins.
No way was it a date with Rosario. Of that I convinced myself. My having asked the detective out to dinner was nothing more than reimbursement for a favor asked and granted. And even if it was a date, what Savannah didn’t know would never hurt her. Still, as I hiked up the trail, staring at Rosario’s bottom, I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow cheating on Savannah. A tart taste rose up behind my tongue and stayed there.
THE BODY was draped with a yellow tarp and surrounded by yellow crime scene tape looped in a loose circle around creosote bushes on either side of the trail. A pair of uniformed deputies, one African-American, the other white, guarded the scene, wiping sweat from their faces and sipping from plastic water bottles. They both looked bored and overheated. On the slope twenty meters above them, a ponyta
iled civilian in a green windbreaker with “SDSD Crime Lab” printed on the back was sweeping over the mountainous terrain with a metal detector, searching for what I assumed were spent bullets.
“What’s the story on the ME, Alicia?” the African-American deputy asked Rosario as we approached. “We’ve been here since before lunch.”
“Medical examiner’s swamped,” Rosario said. “Murder-suicide in Carlsbad, and the trolley splattered some transient down in Chula Vista. They said they’ll get somebody up here as soon as they can. Shouldn’t be much longer, fellas.”
Per protocol, the body was to remain untouched until a representative from the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office arrived to declare the victim officially dead. They would then determine the approximate time of death by making a small cut with a pocket knife and jabbing a meat thermometer into the deceased’s liver.
Human beings begin losing heat at a rate of about one and one-half degrees Fahrenheit per hour as soon as they die. The warmer the weather, the slower they cool. Count down from 98.6, factor in ambient air temperatures, and you can get a reasonably accurate idea as to time of death. Rosario didn’t have to explain that part of it to me; I’d learned all about meat thermometers when I was with Alpha. More than once, we determined how many hours behind our intended targets we were by measuring the core temperatures of their dead compatriots, whom they often left behind to lighten their loads, in the vain hope of outrunning us.
“Who’s your friend?” the black deputy asked Rosario, dipping his chin in my direction.
“DA’s office,” Rosario said.
“Never seen him before.”
“He’s new.”
“He got a name?”
“He’s working undercover,” Rosario said.
“Gotta log him in, Alicia,” the white deputy said, pulling out a small spiral notebook from his back pocket. “You know the drill. Anybody who comes in or out of a crime scene—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rosario said dismissively, “they gotta get logged in.” She looked over at me, drawing a blank. “What’s your name again?”
“Jake Gittes.”
The deputy wrote it down. I spelled it for him.