Floaters

by Joseph Wambaugh

  When they got safely back into Fiesta Bay, they saw an extraordinary sight. A rented motorboat had turtled and its sole occupant was clinging to the hull while two lifeguards struggled to get her into their rescue boat. She wore a white swimsuit with a purple orchid pattern—the largest swimsuit either cop had ever seen in the aquatic park. The woman, about Fortney’s age, weighed 350 pounds minimum. She was doing everything she could to help, but it was no use.

  Fortney saw that it was the two surfer-dude lifeguards who’d dissed him after the sheik dumped him into Mission Bay. He turned about and motored away before the lifeguards spotted them.

  The cops watched through binoculars at a safe distance while the lifeguards sweated and strained. One of them fell down in the boat, and Fortney snickered. The other pulled off his jacket and got in the cold water, trying to boost her up, and Leeds chortled.

  Both cops grabbed for the binoculars when the swimming lifeguard actually got the woman’s enormous bottom an inch or two out of the water. But when she dropped back in and floundered, the cops became hysterical, almost rolling on the deck. Fortney was holding his stomach, tears streaming down his face. Leeds could hardly catch his breath.

  Finally the lifeguards decided to tow her. They put a surfboard in the water, rolled her onto it, and towed the half-submerged woman toward shore.

  Fortney throttled forward, heading in the direction of the home dock they shared with the lifeguards. The cops had to loiter in the channel for ten minutes until the rescue boat arrived, apparently having put the woman safely ashore. Both lifeguards were standing by the wheel, exhausted.

  Leeds drove up to the rescue boat while Fortney stood on the bow, doing his best imitation of his least-favorite evening-news anchor. Fortney held his waterproof flashlight like a microphone and in his most booming TV anchor voice yelled across the water: “Stalwart lifeguards rescue stranded whale in Mission Bay! Film at eleven!”

  The older lifeguard cupped his hand over his ear and said, “What’s that, dude? What’d you say?”

  Fortney was only too happy to oblige. He superboomed the encore: “Courageous Mission Bay lifeguards rescue stranded whale in—”

  He stopped when she rose up over the gunnels of the rescue boat from where she had been lying on the deck. The whale!

  “Oh, shit,” Leeds muttered.

  She glared at the cops, hanging onto the gunnels, spitting up bay water.

  Fortney said to her, “Oh. I didn’t see…Oh. Well, hell, I got room to talk? Look at this load I’m carrying.” And he patted his tummy, a frozen smile pasted to his crimson kisser.

  While the lifeguards grinned their evil surfer grins, the younger one said, “Dudes, you are the most un-harmonious news anchors I’ve seen since Connie Chung worked with Dan Rather!”

  “We just got a call!” Leeds cried. “Gotta go!”

  He roared away so fast, their wake almost swamped the rescue boat. But the fat woman lying on the deck was too sick to care.

  —

  Ordinarily, with a dangerous murder suspect, they’d have asked SWAT to enter the little clapboard house in City Heights, a house occupied by a welfare recipient named Tamara Taylor. She was a former hooker who’d worked for Oliver Mantleberry one hundred pounds ago when she was young and childless but who now lived off the taxpayers of San Diego. Sometimes she received a bit of financial support from Oliver Mantleberry, who, in a burst of paternal sentimentality, had decided to take one of the two bedrooms in the little house, claiming he wanted to be with the three children he’d given her.

  But actually he wanted to be closer to his girls on the boulevard and “consolidate business.” Which to him meant whipping the living shit out of any girl he caught holding out on him. One of those who’d been whupped-on one too many times had told Letch Boggs about the pimp’s living arrangements. That was how Letch knew where to find Oliver Mantleberry.

  In that it was Easter Sunday and the cops didn’t want to waste any more time than they already had, SWAT was not included. Instead there were Anne Zorn, Sal Maldonado, the other two team members, Randy Bulstrom and Zeke Calhoun, their sergeant, Bill Bowden, two patrol units, and a K-9 unit.

  Letch asked for a shotgun of his own, but the homicide sergeant said he preferred that patrol officers handle the shotguns whenever possible. Letch then requested that they turn the dog loose on Oliver Mantleberry for, oh, no more than twenty minutes before they bothered with handcuffs. The dog, Reggie, was a 100-pound German shepherd with a bite pressure that could shred training sleeves. The sergeant said he preferred to take prisoners with attached limbs whenever possible.

  The moment they drove down the street the cops could hear kids playing. It was broad daylight on a pleasant Easter Sunday, so there were lots of cars and people around in this neighborhood of single-family residences. The only way to play it was to charge.

  They caravaned in and quickly unloaded in the street. One patrol unit and three detectives ran down each side of the house to the rear. The sergeant, Letch Boggs, Anne Zorn, and the K-9 unit went to the front.

  Sergeant Bowden knocked and said, “Police officers! Open the door! Now!”

  Ninety seconds later the little house was full of cops as well as a dog whose rumbling sounded like the Simba exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. Three kids under the age of six were crying their eyes out, and their momma sat on a kitchen chair not looking like she could ever have made much money on El Cajon Boulevard.

  “This is my house!” she yelled. “You ain’t got no warrant!”

  “But we do,” Letch informed her. “A felony warrant for pimping and pandering.” He failed to mention that the complainant would not be appearing in court.

  When she heard about the warrant for pimping, she stopped hollering. As an ex-hooker, she vaguely understood that pimping was a nonreducible felony that requires prison time. In the big joint, not the county jail. That quieted her down.

  She also recognized Letch Boggs from the old days, that smelly, funky vice cop who made everybody’s life miserable. She was afraid of him and said, “I ain’t his momma. I don’t know where he went to.”

  The homicide detectives were content to let Letch run the show and do the talking since his specialty was whores and pimps. Everybody knew he was good at what he did.

  Letch said, “Tamara, I think you better not fuck with old Letch over this one. We wanna talk about something much bigger than a pimping case.”

  She looked at him suspiciously and said, “What is it you wanna talk about?”

  “Murder,” Letch said. “We wanna talk to him about murder.”

  She showed genuine astonishment. “What? Who?”

  “A human being, that’s what,” Letch said. “Named Dawn Coyote, that’s who.”

  “Don’t know anyone with that name,” Tamara Taylor said.

  “I don’t care if you do or don’t,” Letch said, “but you lie to us and you better get the kids all packed up for a ride. And you can forget about the chocolate bunnies and jelly beans.”

  “I ain’t done nothin’!” she cried. “You can’t hassle me on no humbug murder charge!”

  “Watch us,” he said. “You’re lying to us now so that puts you in it.”

  Tamara Taylor’s youngest came crawling over just then. His diaper was soaked and he started bawling, reaching up to his mother. She picked up the child and tried to hush him.

  “This ain’t right!” Tamara said. “You know I don’t know nothin’ about no murder! This ain’t right, what you’re doin’.”

  “Life jist ain’t fair,” Letch said. “Ask Dawn Coyote.”

  As if on cue, the dog started rumbling louder, and the K-9 cop jerked the choker and took the beast outside.

  Then Tamara said, “He came home and packed up some of his things and left.”

  “What time did he come home?” Anne asked.

  “ ‘Bout five o’clock this mornin’. I wasn’t really awake very much.”

  “Where’d he go?” Sal Maldonado aske
d.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe L.A.”

  “Why’s everybody in San Diego leaving town to run to L.A.?” Letch asked rhetorically.

  “Can’t go south,” Tamara pointed out. “Bunch a fuckin’ Mexicans down that way.” Then she looked at Sal Maldonado and said, “But I ain’t got nothin’ against ’em, you unnerstand.”

  “Where in L.A.?” Anne asked.

  “You think that man tells me where he goes?” Tamara asked. “All he ever give me is these three kids and enough money to pay the light bill once in a while. You think he tells me what he does in his life? Shit, you don’t know Oliver Mantleberry, you think that.”

  When Sal Maldonado pulled open the drawer of the bedroom dresser, Tamara said, “He’s taller than that.”

  “Where’s his clothes?” Anne Zorn asked. “The clothes he wore when he came home this morning?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I heard him change. But he didn’t leave the soiled ones for me like he usually do. Musta took ’em with him. Maybe he found some other woman stupid enough to do his washin’ and ironin’.”

  “Where’d he change clothes? In your bedroom?” Anne asked.

  “In the bathroom,” she said.

  “You don’t mind if I have a look in there, do you?”

  “Anythin’ you find in that bathroom you kin have,” Tamara said.

  Anne disappeared into the bathroom for a moment and returned grinning at Sal Maldonado. She said to Tamara, “Have you had an accident lately? Where you bled?”

  “No.”

  “You having your period?”

  “No.”

  “Any of the kids have an accident?”

  “No.”

  “How’d your washcloth get like this?” Anne held up a damp grayish washcloth by the corner. There were wine-dark stains on it.

  “Where’d that come from?” Tamara asked.

  “The bathtub,” Anne said. “Somebody dropped it in the tub.”

  “Not me,” Tamara said. “That’s my washrag, but I didn’t use it.”

  “I believe you,” Anne Zorn said.

  “What’s on that washrag?” Tamara Taylor wanted to know.

  “The genetic signature,” Letch Boggs said, “of a girl named lane Kelly. The story of her whole life is written right there on that old washcloth.”

  CHAPTER 10

  For two days after the terror on Easter Sunday, Blaze Duvall left her Shelter Island hotel room only to visit one of the fast-food joints on Rosecrans. She avoided the hotel dining room, never used the hotel’s gym equipment, and didn’t go jogging on the island even though she needed a workout. She settled for a daily swim in the hotel pool but only after dark.

  On the second night she awoke screaming. In her dream she’d seen a dark shape rising. A mask of indefinable menace leaped at her, howling, teeth bared. In the dream she was trapped in a sinister web of gold chain, like the terrible chains Dawn had worn.

  On Wednesday morning, Blaze got up refreshed, having had her first dreamless sleep since checking in. The isolation had enabled her to examine every detail of her plans, and her fear was subsiding. If everything went the way it should, she’d soon have the fifteen thousand plus the five hundred finder’s fee from Simon Cooke. The thought forced a smile, her first in three days.

  If it didn’t go according to plan, if anything went wrong, she had other ideas. She needed money, and soon, to reestablish herself away from cops and away from Oliver Mantleberry. Blaze had important phone calls to make.

  She called Simon Cooke at the boatyard, telling his boss that she was Simon’s sister and could he please come to the phone for an important message?

  When Simon picked up, she said, “Simon, this is your sister, Blaze. Don’t say my name if you’re not alone.”

  “Hi!” he said. “I been calling your number for two days.”

  “Don’t say any more than you have to. I’m calling to make sure you’re ready to go tomorrow.”

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “I’m just checking to make sure nothing’s changed.”

  “Okay. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Be ready to go to work tomorrow with whatever you think you’ll need in the way of…tools. Tonight I’ll be doing my job. Tomorrow you’ll do yours.”

  “Where’ll you be tonight?”

  “Wherever our friend is.”

  “Kin I see you later maybe?”

  “After tomorrow we’ll have plenty of time to see each other, okay?”

  “Okay,” Simon said.

  Blaze hung up, pleasantly surprised that he hadn’t slipped and blabbed her name. Maybe he wasn’t quite as stupid as she thought.

  She dialed the home number of Ambrose Lutterworth, and when he answered she said, “My lucky day. I was afraid you’d be at work.”

  “I thought you’d be checking in with me every day,” he said. “I’ve called your number, but I just keep getting that damned machine.”

  “I’ve been out of town. Family emergency. I’m back now.”

  “Is everything…”

  “From my end it’s a go. All I’ll need from you is the medication.”

  “Where shall we meet?”

  “I’ll drop by your house at seven o’clock. And, Ambrose, I hope you understand that all payments must be made at the close of business tomorrow. By then you’ll have proof that all parties have performed.”

  “Of course, I expected that. Cash, as agreed. I’ve already moved the funds. I’ll withdraw them this afternoon.”

  “Fine,” Blaze said.

  “And then we’re going to have that romantic dinner, aren’t we?”

  “Why not?” Blaze said. “There’ll be a lot to celebrate.”

  After she hung up, Blaze put on her swimsuit and went down to the hotel pool for a workout. She thought she might learn to enjoy swimming as an alternative to aerobics. Maybe soon she’d buy a little house with a swimming pool. This was the first day she felt secure enough to swim laps in broad daylight.

  When Blaze got back to her room, she dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers and drove away from the hotel to make another call, this one from a pay phone on Rosecrans. Anne Zorn was not in her office, but she reached Detective Sal Maldonado.

  “This is Mary Ellen Singleton and I’d like to speak to Detective Zorn sometime today.”

  “Give me your number, Ms. Singleton,” he said. “I’ll have her call you as soon as she gets back.”

  “Just take down my name and tell her I’ll call later. If she wants to talk to me, she’ll have to be there.”

  “Just a minute,” he said, “can’t I have your—”

  He was still talking when she hung up.

  Blaze was ravenous now that she was settling down. She drove back to the hotel and headed straight for the dining room for a proper lunch: spinach salad, grilled swordfish, baked potato, asparagus, and iced tea. She permitted herself a glass of wine even though she seldom drank alcohol before the dinner hour.

  When she was finished, she started back up to her room to nap but changed her mind and drove to a pay phone. A different phone, just in case.

  Blaze wished she had a lawyer. She needed answers, wondering if she was a material witness in the eyes of the law, and if so, could she be compelled by subpoena to appear at a criminal trial? Assuming they ever arrested the guy.

  Well, they couldn’t compel anything if she hadn’t seen anything. She took the card from her purse and dropped a quarter into the phone.

  This time Anne was there.

  “Detective Zorn.”

  “It’s Mary Ellen Singleton.”

  “Thank you for calling!” Anne said. “I have to see you.”

  “Look,” Blaze said. “You know my real name and you know my work name. I’m sure you’ve discovered that I was arrested with Dawn in a vice raid a long time ago. Okay, I stayed friends with her over the years, but I didn’t see her much. There’s nothing I can tell you that’d help.”
r />   “I think you saw her killer,” Anne said. “I think you know who it was.”

  “Listen, Detective, I saw nothing!”

  “Dawn was coming to visit you or she was leaving your apartment. One or the other.”

  “She might’ve been coming to see me,” Blaze said. “I don’t know. I was in bed sleeping.”

  “How’d she get in the gate?”

  Cops! “Okay, she called me and I buzzed her in, but she didn’t make it to my door. Whoever it was got her on the stairs where you found her. I don’t know who it was!”

  “How well do you know Oliver Mantleberry?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I’m gonna hang up.”

  “Okay, wait! Maybe you don’t know him. But Dawn must’ve mentioned him at some time or another.”

  “I don’t know what she did in her life. Her miserable life. She was a prostitute, I’m not. Okay, I worked in a massage parlor when I was younger, but I don’t live like Dawn lived.”

  “How do you make a living now, Blaze?”

  “Fuck this! I am gonna hang up!”

  “I’m not a vice cop!” Anne said quickly. “I don’t give a damn about your private life or your business life. But we’re gonna stop this guy before he butchers another Dawn Coyote. I don’t think you’re the kind of person who wants that to happen.”

  “I didn’t see him! I heard her cry. Now I know it was her, not a gull. I went out. I looked down. I ran to the phone—”

  “Whose bathrobe did we find?”

  “I told you it—”

  “With blood on it? Dawn’s blood on it?”

  “You think it’s mine.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Okay, so it’s mine! She borrowed it from me. She was returning it.”

  “At that hour of the night?”

  “She was a hooker! And a junkie! Her whole fucking life was topsy-turvy! I don’t know why she was returning my robe at that time of night! I don’t know why she did any of the things she did! I just felt sorry for her and now I wish I’d never laid eyes on the dumb little—”

  “If I guaranteed we’d protect you, wouldn’t you consider doing what’s right?”