“Sir, you have totally motivated us,” I said. “Terry just has a defective comedy gene, and it’s been spinning out of control lately.”
Kilcullen nodded. “Still, it’s my responsibility to motivate all my people properly. Don’t go just yet.”
He opened his top desk drawer and took out his book on how to motivate, captivate, and persuade. He opened it to the table of contents, and ran his finger down the page. He couldn’t find what he wanted, so he turned the page and kept looking. “This will just take a minute,” he said.
I don’t think any of us had ever seen Brendan Kilcullen looking as humble as he did now. Terry was enjoying the moment and turned to give me a big shit-eating grin.
And that’s when the book came flying across the room.
“Fuck!” Terry yelled, as it clipped him hard on the left ear.
“Hey, Biggs,” Kilcullen said.
Terry was rubbing his ear. “What?”
Kilcullen blew him a kiss. “Ciao.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
We tracked Tyler Baker-Broome down at home. He lived in the Hills, a short drive from our office and spitting distance from where Barry had been tossed out with the trash on El Contento.
We rang the bell, and he eyeballed us carefully through the peephole before letting us in. There were three suitcases in the front hallway.
“You going on a field trip?” I said.
“No, I signed up for the witness protection program,” he said. “What the hell would you do if you were me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll know better if you tell us what you know.”
“I know enough to skip town. I hope I’m not a suspect, fellas, because I’m fleeing your jurisdiction.”
“Who are you running from?”
“I wish I knew. Somebody is killing the people I worked with. First Barry, then Damian, and I don’t want to be the next one to donate five pints of blood to the Homicidal Maniac Red Cross.”
“Did you piss off your drug dealer?” I said.
“I don’t have a drug dealer,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But hypothetically, if you did have a dealer, would there be any bad blood between you and the sordid drug underworld that services the entertainment community?”
“No. We’d be on the best of terms,” he said. “And ha ha. Bad blood. Pretty funny, Detective. But then it’s not your dick on the chopping block, is it?”
“Probably because my only involvement with criminals is to catch them and put them behind bars.”
“Well, why don’t you catch the one who killed Barry and put him behind bars? Then I’ll come back to LA and buy you a drink. Or a Mercedes. Or a little house on the prairie. Just find the bastard and lock him up.”
“If you didn’t have any problems with your hypothetical drug suppliers, why did they kill Joy Lee?”
“Joy Lee?” He looked at me like I had just asked about the girl who turned him down for the senior prom. “What does she have to do with it?”
I didn’t answer. I just stared at him. Hard. If there’s anything more intimidating than a cop who’s in your face, it’s a cop who’s silently reading your mind. I picked it up from watching Clint Eastwood movies.
We were still standing in the hallway. Tyler headed toward the kitchen; we followed. He took a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and swigged half of it down. “What are you talking about?” he said. “What does Joy Lee have to do with any of this?”
“You tell us, T.B.,” Terry said, his voice so soft it was ominous. He’s a big Dirty Harry fan too. “Did I ever mention that my initials are also T.B.?”
Baker-Broome downed the rest of the water. “Joy Lee’s death was a total anomaly. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Anomaly?” I said. “Nice way to put it. Especially since you’re the one who paid her ten bucks an hour and sent her to the wrong place.”
“I didn’t tell her to argue with some crazy hophead who had an eight-inch pigsticker. She was a hick. No street smarts. That’s what got her killed.”
“You’re right. It was all her fault,” I said. “You’re absolved.”
“We did what we could to make it up to her. We paid her salary for the entire production schedule. Sent flowers. Had a minute of silence on the set.”
“A whole minute,” I said. “What a tribute. And where did you send the flowers?”
“Some funeral parlor in Texas.”
“How about her paycheck? Where did you send that?”
“We sent it to her parents. Also in Texas.”
“Do you have their address?”
“Probably in the studio somewhere.”
“Get it for us.”
He looked at his watch. “I’ll call. Somebody should be in by…wait. I think I have something here in my office.” He left the kitchen. We followed.
Tyler’s home office reminded me of Big Jim’s. Shit was piled up everywhere, and woe unto He or She who dared cross the threshold with broom or mop. He stopped in the doorway, looked around the room, then made a beeline for a pile of papers in one corner of one shelf of one bookcase. He flipped through them quickly and pulled out an envelope.
“Got it,” he said. Frightening—he was a lot like Big Jim.
“They sent me one of those printed acknowledgement cards. You know, the family of the late Joy Lee thanks you for remembering us in our time of need bullshit. I never got around to throwing it away.”
“It doesn’t look like you’ve gotten around to throwing anything away,” Terry said.
Baker-Broome handed me the envelope.
“They sent it to you here at home?” I said.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “The flowers came from Pita Productions, but her father called the office and said they wanted to send out personal notes to all the senior people. I guess a PA gave him our home addresses.”
Terry coughed. I nodded back. Joy Lee’s parents had everyone’s home address. Seen and noted.
The envelope came from an address in Katy, Texas. I opened it and read the card. “Who are Agnes and Roger Dingle?” I said.
“Her parents,” Tyler said. “She used to be Joy Lee Dingle, but she changed her name when she came out here. I think her drama coach in high school told her you couldn’t be a movie star with a name like Dingle.”
“You finish up in here, Mike,” Terry said. “I’ve got to call the office.”
He left the room, so he could tell the task force to stop sifting through everyone named Lee in the state of Texas and zero in on the Dingle family on Candlewood Park Lane in Katy.
“Where are you headed?” I said to Tyler.
“First stop, JFK in New York,” he said. “After that it’s none of your business.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I’m having lunch with your friend Halsey Bates. We’ve been talking about going into business together, and this is the day we’re supposed to finalize the agreement. After that I’m catching the four o’clock out of LAX.”
“I can’t stop you from going, but I need a way to reach you.”
“You can call me on my cell when everyone who wants to kill me is locked up.” He laughed. “At least the ones who are out there now. Halsey and I are going to be producing movies together, so there will always be people who want to kill me.”
“One last hypothetical question,” I said.
He looked at his watch again. “Sure.”
“If, hypothetically, someone working on the production of I.C.U. was brokering drug sales in order to feed the habits of the heavy hitters, could Halsey have been involved?”
He shook his head. “Halsey hasn’t had a drink or a drug since the night he killed that kid, Kirk Jacoby. He’s clean and sober, and when he’s not making movies, he runs this One Brick At A Time charity that he built single-handedly. He’s like the white man version of Oprah. That’s why I want to go into business with him. I spent the first half of my life working with as
sholes. Meeting Halsey is the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s talked to me about you and your partner. I know you guys like him. And if you’re worried that whoever killed Barry and Damian might think about whacking Halsey…don’t. He hasn’t done anything to piss anyone off. Me, on the other hand, I’m getting the hell out of Dodge.”
“Have a safe flight,” I said. I smiled. It was rather a subtle double entendre. Too bad Terry wasn’t there to appreciate it.
Tyler let me out the front door. The last thing I heard were the locks snapping behind me.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Terry was waiting in the car. He took off as soon as I got in.
“We’re due at the morgue,” he said. “Our boy Damian managed to pull off the same thing in death that he did in life. He went right to the front of the line, just like he did Sunday night at the premiere. The autopsy is scheduled for ten o’clock.”
“But Craig Harvey always tells us it doesn’t matter if you’re a prince or a pauper, you still have to wait your turn to get cut up,” I said.
“I suspect he felt that way right up until the time the Mayor called him this morning. Apparently they’ve found a loophole in the prince-pauper rule.”
“Did anyone think to tell the Mayor that fast-tracking Damian’s autopsy screws us up?” I said.
“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say even if they did, he wouldn’t give a shit.”
Homicide detectives don’t go to autopsies because they enjoy the time away from fresh, breathable air. We go because sooner or later we’re going to catch the killer and make an appearance at his trial. Since evidence that will be used in the trial is invariably uncovered at the autopsy, we’d better have been there to witness the discovery firsthand. Or as sure as God made six-
hundred-dollar-an-hour retainers, some lawyer will use our absence to obfuscate, confuse, and generally create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors.
Eli Hand, Victor Shea, and Damian Hedge were all waiting for us when we got to the morgue.
“So, Victor,” Terry said as we were suiting up, “you sell any screenplays since I saw you yesterday?”
“I might have, but how would I know?” Victor said. “My agent never returns my phone calls.”
“Ah, yes, but at least you’re lucky enough to have an agent,” Terry said. “Do you know how many people would kill to have a real live agent ignore them? Do we have time for a quick agent joke? Show of hands.”
I wasn’t in the mood, but Victor raised his hand. Then with a little help from Terry, Damian’s hand went up.
“And my name is Hand and I showed,” Eli said, “so give us the joke.”
Terry took center stage. “A screenwriter comes home one night and his front door is open. His house is trashed. He sees his wife’s clothes strewn on the steps. He races upstairs and there’s his wife, lying naked in bed, ravaged. He says, ‘Honey, what happened?’ She says, ‘I was raped.’ He says, ‘Who did it?’ She says, ‘Your agent. He broke in and raped me.’ The screenwriter looks at his wife dumbfounded, and he says, ‘Wow…my agent came to my house?’”
Everyone laughed, except Damian.
“This one looks a lot like the last one,” Eli said. “Same strap marks to restrain the victim. He’s white as a sheet, and I bet we find a similar puncture to the femoral vein. Basically, it’s a no-brainer. But just to be on the safe side, I’ll remove the brain.” Eli paused. “Alright, hearing no laughter from the audience, I think I’ll get started.”
“Don’t blame me, Eli,” Terry said. “I warmed up the crowd. You bombed on your own.”
Eli did it by the numbers. Slowly, methodically, professionally. It took the better part of three hours. The bottom line was exactly what we expected. Damian Hedge had been exsanguinated.
“You were pretty quiet in there,” I said to Victor as we were washing up.
“I think Hollywood is getting to me,” he said. “You come here full of hopes and dreams, thinking you’ll be that one guy in ten thousand that makes it big, and then you see two guys who did make it and somebody kills them.”
“But Victor, these two guys were major assholes,” Terry said. “Killing them may just be part of an elaborate public service effort to make Hollywood a better place to live and work.”
“Thanks for trying to make me feel better,” Victor said. “But I’m gonna be twenty-eight in a few months, and I’m thinking about leaving LA, moving to Pittsburgh, and taking a job in my uncle’s debt collection agency.”
“Victor Shea, debt collector,” Terry said. “I can’t picture it. At your current height and weight, you’d be lucky to repo walkers from old ladies.”
“It’s phone work,” Victor said. “What’s important is that it’s a mindless nine-to-five job and I’ll have plenty of time to write a novel. I have a better chance of selling a book than ever selling a movie.”
“And I have a better chance of becoming Rose Bowl Queen than selling a movie, but I’m not giving up.”
“Victor, do us a favor,” I said. “Run upstairs to Craig Harvey’s office. We asked him to pull and xerox two morgue files for us that we need to take back to the station. They should be ready by now. He said if he’s out to lunch, he’ll leave them on his desk.”
“Craig’s desk looks like Kansas during the tornado season,” Victor said. “What are the names on the files?”
“Joy Lee and Diego Garza.”
Victor stood and looked at me.
“Garza,” I repeated. “G-A-R-Z-A. Do you need me to spell Lee?”
“No,” he said. “I got it.”
“Actually, you don’t got it,” Terry said. “Would you mind putting a rush on it? We got murders to solve.”
“Sorry,” Victor said and headed to the elevator.
“Damn,” Terry said. “Judging by how bad that kid is as a file collector, I doubt if he’s got a prayer as a debt collector.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
It was 1:45, and Terry and I were starving. And when you have limited choices and even less time, it helps to be really ravenous.
We opted for McDonald’s. Partly because we had been talking about it ever since we heard about Carjack offering up cocaine along with your Happy Meal. But mainly because it had the shortest line at the drive-through, so we pissed off the least amount of hungry people when we cut in at the front.
“This is the last time we ever do this,” I said, after wolfing down a Number Four, which is McDonald’s tasty but lethal Fat-Sodium-Carb Combo.
“I only regret that I have but one stomach lining to give to my county,” Terry said. He followed it with a long, loud, near-perfect burp.
I applauded. “You have a gift,” I said. “Too bad you only have daughters. A teenage boy could benefit immensely from having you as his burp guru.”
“I don’t want to brag,” he said, “but my gas-passing expertise is not limited to my…oh, damn…how dumb can we be?”
“I didn’t get a book thrown at my head this morning, so I’d say you can be exceptionally dumb.”
“You said ‘daughters,’ and it hit me. My daughters don’t look anything like me.”
“Lucky for them,” I said, “or they wouldn’t have a shot at Rose Bowl Queen either.”
“No, you twit. Sarah, Rebecca, and Emily don’t look like me because they’re not my biological children. They come from Marilyn’s eggs and the idiot sperm donor she married before she got lucky and found me. I adopted them.”
“As your partner these past hundred years, you realize I already knew that.”
“My point is, I’ve been assuming that Joy Lee’s parents are Chinese, but what if she’s adopted?”
“Then Agnes and Roger might not be Asian,” I said. “They could be good old-fashioned white, Texas Methodist Dingles. Of course, since we work for an equal-opportunity police department, if Ma and Pa Dingle are behind these killings, we’ll lock them up regardless of race, religion, or creed. So basically this doesn’t change anything.”
“Well, it makes me feel better that I’m not guilty of linear thinking. Now if Wendy shows us driver’s license photos of Roger and Agnes Dingle, and they’re Caucasian, we won’t say something stupid like, holy shit, they’re not Chinese.”
“I may say it anyway just so Wendy thinks you’re guilty of linear thinking.”
We turned onto Wilcox and were about to park in the lot, when Terry stopped the car.
“This does not bode well,” he said, pointing at a large white van that was parked in front of the station. The logo on the side read The Golden Years Senior Center, Burbank, California.
“It looks like the old folks who called in the tip from the nursing home have arrived just in the nick of time to help us crack the case in person,” I said.
“Charlie’s Geriatric Angels,” Terry said. “Should we go in through the back door?”
“It would be wrong,” I said.
We went through the back door.
“Nice try,” Wendy said when we got to our desks. “They came all the way from Burbank. Go talk to them.”
“We just spent three hours locked in a room with a dead guy,” Terry said. “Do we have to interview the near-dead on the same day? We should be out looking for Joy Lee’s parents. I think they’re in LA.”
“And I think they’re at home in Katy, Texas, where Roger Dingle is recovering from a double hip replacement,” Wendy said.
“And who’s the source on that piece of news?” I said.
“The Texas State Police. I had them track the parents down.”
“The Staties?” I said.
“Just a precaution,” Wendy said. “The Houston area has over a million people. But the town of Katy only has about ten thousand. If I send locals, I take the chance that the Sheriff is on the same bowling team as Roger Dingle. With the State coppers there’s less chance of incest.”
“Y’know, you’re good,” I said. “No wonder you made Detective III.”
“Nice suck-up, Mike, but you still gotta go talk to Grandma and Grandpa.”
“We may as well,” I said. “Our prime suspects are fifteen hundred miles away. What are their names?”
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