Fatal Care

by Leonard Goldberg

  “Beavis and Butthead.”

  Mikey nodded quickly. “I like them a lot, too.”

  “Now, when my boy watches TV,” Farelli went on, “I can’t pull him away from the set. Do you think there could have been more people in that house and you just missed them because you were watching TV?”

  Mikey shook his head firmly. “If anybody comes, Sparky starts barking and jumping around. We see everybody who comes and goes.”

  “I’ll bet you do.”

  Jake glanced over at Joanna. “You got any questions for Mikey?”

  “Just one or two.”

  Joanna sat on the bed next to the little boy and scratched the beagle’s ear. “Do you know that a dog once saved my life?”

  Mikey was immediately interested. “How?”

  “Once I got caught in a mudslide and got all covered up. They couldn’t find me, so they brought in a bloodhound and he started digging into the ground at the exact place I was buried.”

  “Wow!”

  “I didn’t like dogs so much before that, but I like them a lot now.”

  Mikey picked up his dog and allowed it to lick his face. “I love Sparky.”

  “I know,” Joanna said, hearing Mikey’s wheezes and thinking what a cruel fate it was for a little boy to have severe asthma. “Can I ask you a few quick questions?”

  “Sure.”

  “How can you be so sure that the blond lady was on the side of the house?” Joanna asked. “Maybe she just walked across your lawn to get to the Mirren house.”

  Mikey shook his head. “I saw her come up Dr. Mirren’s lawn and go to the side of the house. That’s when Sparky really started barking.”

  “Was she carrying anything with her?”

  Mikey shook his head again.

  “And you’re sure her hair was blond, huh?”

  “Just like mine.”

  “Was it pulled back?” Joanna asked. “Like mine is?”

  “No. It was straight down.” Mikey pointed over to his mother. “It kind of looked like Mom’s.”

  Jake nodded to himself. Blond hair, shoulder length. Maybe she left some of it behind for the crime scene unit to find.

  “Mikey, you really helped us a lot,” Joanna said, getting to her feet. “I know your mom is very proud of you.”

  Mrs. Sellman walked them down the stairs to the front door. As Joanna and the detectives stepped out, reporters began yelling out questions from across the street.

  Jake turned to Mrs. Sellman. “Ma’am, I’m going to leave a police officer at your door for a while to make sure the press doesn’t bother you.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  The detectives and Joanna walked across the lawn, heading for Alex Mirren’s house. They ignored the reporters who continued to shout questions. Three television trucks with antennas were parked at the curb.

  “A zoo,” Farelli commented as they approached the Mirren driveway. “A big, damn zoo.”

  Jake signaled to a member of the crime scene unit and quickly walked over. “Did you find any blond hairs?”

  “Not yet,” the investigator replied. “Why?”

  “Because a blond woman was seen on this side of the victim’s house last night,” Jake told him. “Check around, particularly by the window looking into the victim’s bedroom. You’re searching for long blond hair and maybe fingerprints on the window or windowsill.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  Jake watched the investigator leave, thinking about other places the blonde might have left her fingerprints. The front doorknob, the Kleenex box, maybe the night table. He made a mental note of the places and then turned to Joanna and Farelli. “Are you two thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Regarding what?” Joanna asked.

  “I’m thinking Los Angeles may be a big city, but I’ll bet we’ve got only one young, blond, female hitter running around.”

  “The blond hitter,” Joanna said, nodding to herself. “A pro who tries to cover up her hits.”

  “It’s almost got to be,” Jake agreed. “She carefully set up the hit on the Russian and did the same with Alex Mirren.”

  “And I’ll bet she had him staked out,” Farelli picked up the story. “And she just waited. Then the bondage hooker comes along and gives the hitter a golden opportunity.”

  Jake nodded. “That’s why the ligature around Mirren’s neck was all wrong. Our hitter doesn’t have much experience in bondage games.” Jake looked toward the rear window of Mirren’s house. The hitter could have been in and out in under five minutes. It doesn’t take long to strangle a tied-down man. “And the timing was perfect. According to Mikey, the hooker left the house at ten-fifteen or so, and we know she went to the drugstore to buy the mentholated cream. She made the buy at ten-twenty. While the hooker was away, the blond hitter moved in for the kill.”

  Joanna stared out into space, thinking aloud. “What in the world does Alex Mirren have to do with a Russian carrying around dead fetuses?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “But they were both killed by the same blond hitter and that connects them to one another.” He glanced over at Farelli. “Anything new on the Russian?”

  “Nothing so far,” Farelli answered. “The cable company in that area isn’t doing such a good job. They’ve had hundreds of complaints. We’re running them down one by one.”

  “You check their workbooks for Russian- or Middle European–sounding names?”

  “Nada. A big blank.”

  They crossed the lawn to Alex Mirren’s house and entered. The crime scene unit was finishing up in the living room and starting to pack away their equipment. Jake led the way into the kitchen, where he turned on the water and took a swig from the faucet.

  “We’ve got to find that hooker,” Jake said, wiping his lips with a finger.

  “You figure she’s involved?” Farelli asked.

  “Probably not,” Jake said. “But she might have seen something we can track. She and that blond hitter might have crossed paths, if only for an instant.”

  “Shit,” Farelli grumbled. “We’ll have to interview a million hookers. And chances are, we’ll still come up empty.”

  “There might be an easier way,” Joanna suggested.

  “We’re listening,” Jake said.

  Joanna pointed at a messy countertop that was covered with empty boxes and containers for pizza and take-out Chinese food. Receipts from the food deliveries were still attached to the empty boxes. “This guy called out to have his food delivered. He might have done the same thing for the hooker. There must be a dozen escort services listed in the yellow pages.”

  Farelli smiled at her and then at Jake. “She’s getting pretty good at this, isn’t she?”

  Jake looked at Joanna admiringly. “And he probably called from home.”

  “Or on his way home,” Farelli added and pointed out the window at Mirren’s car in the driveway.

  Atop its rear window was a car-phone antenna.

  18

  Jake and Farelli trudged up the stairs to the third floor of the old office building. The wooden steps creaked loudly under their weight.

  “And of course, the prick has got to have his office on the third floor,” Farelli grumbled.

  “Of course,” Jake said.

  “And of course, the elevator in this piece-of-shit place ain’t working.”

  “I wouldn’t use it if it was.”

  “You got a point.”

  Everything about the building in North Hollywood was old and run-down. The exterior was covered with pink paint that was cracked and peeling. Inside, the floors were scuffed and worn, the ceiling spotted with watermarks. And its elevator looked like an antique. It was a brass cage with its door chained shut. An OUT OF ORDER sign was attached to it.

  At the third-floor landing, Farelli stopped and leaned down to massage his thigh. It felt as if there were a hot poker inside it.

  “Is your leg still bothering you?” Jake asked.

 
Farelli downplayed it. “Some.”

  “Maybe you ought to go back and see the doc about it.”

  “I did. He said to keep exercising it.”

  Farelli straightened up and pushed the pain aside. Reaching for his notepad, he said, “Let me tell you about the guy who runs this escort service. He’s a hustler named Frankie White. According to Vice, he’s a small-time operator who runs a string of five or six girls. He does his business out of this office and contacts the hookers by beeper.”

  “Any rough stuff?”

  “None recently.” Farelli turned to a page in his notepad and referred to it briefly. “He once did five years in the slammer for armed robbery. But that was in the early seventies.”

  “And since then he’s gone on to bigger and better things.”

  “Yeah,” Farelli said, closing his notepad. “Now he runs a stable.”

  They walked down a narrow, stale-smelling corridor to Suite 302. ECSTASY ESCORTS was painted on the glass panel in the door. Inside, someone was coughing loudly. Jake knocked and entered, Farelli a step behind him.

  A middle-aged man talking on the phone behind the desk looked up. He had a cigar clenched between his teeth. “Yeah? What?”

  Jake flashed his shield. “You Frankie White?”

  The man spoke quickly into the phone. “I’ll get back to you,” he said, and hung up. His gaze went back to the detectives. “Yeah. I’m White.”

  “We need to talk to you about your girls,” Jake said.

  “I guess I’d better call a lawyer,” White said unhappily.

  “Why? Have you done something wrong?”

  White glanced back and forth between the two detectives. “What do you want?”

  “We want to look at the list of girls you sent out last night, and we want to know where you sent them,” Jake said.

  “I don’t keep records.” White was a short, wiry man, totally bald except for a fringe of hair just above his ears. His eyes were dark and lifeless, his teeth stained brown from tobacco. He tilted back in his straight wooden chair and puffed on his cigar. “I got no records. So it looks like I can’t help you.”

  Farelli moved in next to White. “No record book, huh?”

  “How many times I got to say it?”

  Farelli kicked the chair out from under White. The cigar went flying into the air as Frankie White landed flat on his back with a loud thud. His head bounced off the wooden floor. “Oww! Goddamn it!”

  “You’ve got to watch those chairs,” Farelli said coldly. “Sometimes they slip.”

  “I ain’t got no damn books.” White picked himself and his chair off the floor. Then he searched around for his cigar. “If you don’t want to believe me, too fucking bad.”

  “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Jake said, and waited for White to relight his cigar.

  “I’ve had my balls busted plenty of times before,” White spat. “One more time ain’t going to matter.”

  “That’s the easy way,” Jake went on. “The tough way would be for me to have to round up your girls and question them individually. And after I’ve questioned them, I’ll have a cop tag along with them wherever they go. That won’t be so good for business.”

  White shrugged, unmoved.

  “And then I’ll have the girls talk to the people over at the IRS. I’ll bet those girls have been paying you a cut, and I’ll bet you haven’t been reporting that to the IRS as income.”

  White’s eyes slowly widened.

  “Then the girls will give evidence against you for tax evasion, and they’ll be let off. But not you, Frankie.” Jake lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “And let me remind you, those IRS guys are real bastards. They’ll send you away for ten years if you try to fuck them out of a nickel.”

  White reached inside his coat pocket and took out a black book, his eyes still on Jake. “No IRS, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And no tags on my girls.”

  “No tags.”

  White opened the black book. “What do you want to know?”

  “You sent somebody to two-five-two Royal Drive last night,” Jake said. “We want her name.”

  White carefully flipped through pages. “She calls herself Princess.”

  “You know where she lives?”

  “Close by,” White answered. “But I got no address.”

  “Does she turn tricks during the day, too?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then beep her and get her ass up here.”

  Jake and Farelli waited for Princess in the corridor outside Frankie White’s one-room office. White continued to conduct business over the phone even though the door was open and the detectives could hear. He tried to speak in code, but it sounded like he did some bookmaking on the side in addition to running whores.

  “That guy has got balls the size of an elephant’s,” Farelli said, listening to White talk about a horse named Sunrise. “We’re standing here and he’s taking bets.”

  Jake shrugged. “He knows we’re not interested in him.”

  “His code is so simple an idiot could understand it.” Farelli glanced into the small office, studied White briefly, and then looked back at Jake. “You think he might have passed a code word to Princess and she split on us?”

  “He’s not that stupid,” Jake said, taking out his notepad and turning pages. “Did you get anything from Alex Mirren’s neighbors?”

  “Not much,” Farelli reported, reaching for his own notepad. “A surgeon who lives down the street was driving by about ten o’clock last night. He saw a car parked across from the Mirren house. The doc doesn’t remember seeing anybody in it.”

  “Was the car old or new?” Jake asked at once, recalling that Mikey Sellman said the hooker’s car was old.

  “Pretty new,” Farelli replied. “Maybe a Chevrolet or Buick. And all of Mirren’s neighbors own foreign cars.”

  “It could have belonged to the blond hitter.”

  Farelli nodded. “It’s the place I would have picked for a stakeout.” He paused and scratched the side of his head. “You know, Jake, we’re taking for granted that the blonde who whacked the Russian is the same one who whacked the doc. There are a hell of a lot of blondes in this city.”

  “Yeah, but damn few of them are professional hitters.”

  “I guess,” Farelli said, still not convinced. He went back to his notepad. “Anyhow, the blonde covered her tracks pretty good in Santa Monica. Nobody remembers selling her gas, and we checked out all the women who bought gas with credit cards in the immediate area. A shitload of work that turned up a big nothing.”

  “What about the motels and bars?”

  “Again a big nothing,” Farelli went on, quickly flipping pages. “But I might have turned up something at the bar where the Russian was last seen. Do you remember the old female boozer at the end of the bar?”

  Jake nodded. “The one with caked-on makeup?”

  “Yeah. Well, I questioned her again, and she starts talking about the blonde who walked out with the Russian. The boozer called the blonde a real phony.”

  “Why a phony?”

  “Because the boozer believes the blonde was wearing a wig.” Farelli held his hand up to his head and demonstrated. “The blonde kept doing this to her hair, like she was adjusting a wig.”

  “Smart,” Jake said. “So damn smart. The hitter knows that everybody notices blond hair. So if anybody makes her, all she has to do is throw away her blond wig, and she loses her identity.”

  “So now we’re looking for a sometimes blonde.”

  Jake lit another cigarette and inhaled a lungful of blue smoke. “Life isn’t easy, is it?”

  “And we’re batting zero on the Russian.”

  “Did you check the Russian Orthodox church?”

  “Two of them,” Farelli said. “They don’t know him.”

  “We’ve got to track down that Russian,” Jake said. “He could be the key to everything.”

  Farelli looked a
t Jake oddly. “I figure the Russian to be a bit player here. You know, like the delivery man who gets caught carrying the wrong goods.”

  “Oh, he’s a bit player, all right,” Jake agreed. “But he’s also the link between the blond hitter and the dead babies.”

  Farelli nodded to himself as he put his notepad away. “And since the blonde also whacked Dr. Mirren, you figure the Russian is somehow connected to that, too?”

  “He’s got to be.” Jake puffed at his cigarette, wondering why the Russian was proving so difficult to track down. The immigrant had to live in the neighborhood. He just had to. “You say the Russian was married?”

  “That’s what the guy at the hardware store told me.”

  “And his wife hasn’t reported him missing, huh?”

  “Not to the Santa Monica police or to the Bureau of Missing Persons,” Farelli said. “And we double-check every day.”

  Jake shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  They heard the click of high heels coming up the stairs.

  Jake crushed his cigarette out in a standing ashtray and hurried back into Frankie White’s office. Lou Farelli closed the door behind them and motioned for White to stay seated.

  A moment later the door opened, and Princess entered. She glanced at Jake and Farelli and immediately recognized them as cops. Her face suddenly lost color. “Oh, shit!” she said hopelessly.

  Frankie White grabbed some papers from his desk and quickly headed for the door. “Lock up when you leave.”

  Princess glared at him. “You could have warned me, you prick!”

  “I ain’t in the warning business,” White said, and closed the door behind him.

  “Sit,” Jake told her, pointing at the soiled director’s chair in front of the desk.

  “I guess I’m going to need a lawyer,” Princess said, sitting and crossing her long legs in a single motion.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Jake studied the hooker at length. She looked exactly as the little boy had described her. Tall and thin with bushy red hair. But her face was not what Jake had expected. Her features were soft with a small nose and perfectly contoured lips.

  “I think I’m going to need a lawyer,” she said again.