by Paul Bishop
“What are you talking about?”
“You've got it made. Because you're female, you get to live in a coddled little world on this job. Nobody wants to upset you in case you beef them, or pull a Franchon Blake and sue the city because you got passed over for a promotion. You flash your legs or your tits, and up the promotion ladder you go.”
Fey laughed. She couldn't help herself as the guffaws and giggles flooded out of her. The absurdity of Colby's thought process almost doubled her over with hilarity.
She leaned back against the washing machine, wiping away a tear of amusement. “You ought to be onstage at the Comedy Club. You crack me up.”
Colby stood silent, a grim look on his face.
“You are a jealous and confused little boy.” Fey actually reached out and put a hand on Colby's shoulder. “I'm sure the two women lieutenants who were on my detective oral board were real impressed when I flashed my tits at them.” Fey erupted into another fit of laughter.
“You can't deny the only reason you got the detective three spot in this homicide unit is because you're a woman. Everybody knows pressure came down from the chief's office to give the spot to a female.”
“May be true, maybe not,” Fey said, finally calming down enough to catch her breath. “But it's no different than any of the other favoritism-type promotions in this or any other department. There are guys who get promoted because they go to the same church as someone else. There are people who get promoted because they've got themselves a rabbi who has been molding them in their own image for years. Others promote because somebody somewhere says we have to have a certain number of blacks, Hispanics, or Asians at certain levels. And every once in a while, someone will get promoted because they deserve the promotion in the first place.
“The real world is not a redneck, lily white, male-bonding, white-hoods-and-keep-the-blacks-and-women-in-their-place world anymore. I'm sure you think it's a shame, but it's time to grow up. You pulled a lot of your own strings to get assigned to this unit and this case. All your sour grapes and crying-in-your-beer stuff is nothing more than the pot calling the kettle black. As far as you're concerned, it's only favoritism when somebody other than you gets the spot.”
“That's not what I mean.”
“Really? Because it sounds like what you mean.”
“But…”
Fey dropped her hand from Colby's arm. “I don't have time for any more buts today, partner. Let’s get on with what we're doing. Time's ticking.”
Colby didn't quite know how to respond.
Fey shook her head, a wry smile racing across her mouth. “Let's call a truce, okay?” She pointed at the last bundles Colby had pulled out of the dryer. “What are you trying to strangle in your poor reverse-discriminated white hands?”
“Some truce,” Colby said, staring down at his hands as if he'd forgotten they were attached to his arms.
After a second, he turned and dropped the bundles on top of the washing machine. He popped the rubber band on the larger bundle and sorted through its contents. “Interesting,” he said, trying to get passed his emotional outburst.
Fey picked up the other bundle and unwound the rubber band around it. She flipped through the contents. “Another complete set of ID in the name of May Wellington. Victim's photo on the driver's license.”
“Same here,” Colby said, shuffling through the other bundle. “Only the name on this set is Madeline Fletcher.” He looked up at Fey. “What kind of scam was this woman running?”
Fey flashed back again to her silently repeated question. This time, she voiced it aloud. “I wonder who she really was.”
Colby waggled his eyebrows. “I guess we're going to have to make like detectives and find out.”
Fey waggled her own eyebrows, as if the two of them were engaged in a Groucho Marx impersonation contest. “Let's hope when we confirm her true identity, we'll also find who killed her.”
“You must be dreaming, Frog Lady. Life is never simple.”
Chapter 7
The cat yowled incessantly all the way back to the police station.
“We should stick the damn thing on the roof and use it for a siren,” Colby complained, holding his hands to his ears.
“The animal is upset,” Fey said. “How would you feel if you saw someone murdered right in front of your eyes?”
“You can't compare how an animal feels to how a human feels,” Colby grumbled. “Cats don't care about anybody. The stupid animal is only upset because it lost its meal ticket.”
“You really are Mr. Sensitive. I bet you volunteer to work off-duty security jobs protecting animal research labs.”
“Screw you.”
“Snappy comeback.”
The cat turned up the noise a notch. Colby twisted around and flailed his left arm at the animal, who was crouched on the backseat of the vehicle. The cat lashed out and clawed Colby's hand deep enough to draw blood.
Colby screeched. He stuck his lacerated hand in his mouth and, in a lightning motion, whipped his 9-mm Beretta out of its hip holster.
The cat was faster than Colby, sensing what was coming and diving for cover under the front seat.
Fey was faster than both. As Colby turned back to the front of the car, planning to stick his gun under the seat and blast the cat to hell, his nose collided with the barrel of Fey's wheel gun.
“Whoa!”
Colby reached out to knock the gun away, but Fey shoved it forward against his forehead. He froze.
Fey was still driving with her left hand, switching her gaze between Colby and the road. “If you hurt the cat, I'll plaster your brains across the landscape. If you don't think I'm serious, please test me.”
The cat had gone silent.
“No problem,” Colby said, finally. His face had blanched, his eyes wide and shocked.
“Put your gun away,” Fey said.
Moving slowly, Colby slid the 9-mm into its holster. He snapped the safety strap across the top.
Fey lowered her revolver then reached across her chest to shove it into its shoulder rig. She put both hands back on the wheel before stopping for the traffic light at Santa Monica Boulevard and Butler. When traffic cleared, she turned right on Butler to cover the last five hundred yards to the police station.
Pulling into the small police only parking lot, she found a slot and braked to a halt.
Colby was sitting straight ahead, staring out the windshield.
“You're a madwoman,” he said, without looking at Fey. His voice and tone were matter-of-fact, almost as if he were in shock.
Killing the ignition, Fey leaned her head back against the headrest. She sighed deeply. “Colby, I don't know if you are a good cop or a bad cop. I've got a feeling you could be a hell of a detective, but it's going to take a major attitude adjustment.”
She expected some kind of response, but Colby kept his mouth shut.
“Ever since you were assigned to this unit, you've had a King Kong-sized chip on your shoulder,” Fey said, her voice low. “I don't know what you have against women – maybe your mother took you off the tit too soon – but if you don't stop busting my chops, you're going to find out I play hardball with the best of them.”
Still no response from Colby. He was a sullen child enduring a lecture – the less response, the sooner the ordeal would be over.
Fey took a deep breath and let it out. “If you don't like working for a woman, Get Cahill to sign a transfer. But understand, you're going to go before I do. You may be a hotshot, but I've earned my stripes, whether you think so or not. I’m entitled to the respect you would show a man in my position.”
Colby still didn't look at her. “Are you through?” he asked.
Fey sighed again. “I'm through.”
Without saying anything more, Colby got out of the car. He slammed the door and walked away.
“I tried,” Fey said aloud to herself. She reached over to get her purse from the backseat. As she did so, the white cat emerged from hidin
g and hopped up next to the purse.
He let out a pathetic yowl.
Fey petted him. “I'm sorry, boy,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
The cat yowled.
Fey knew it was silly to think the cat was answering her, but she couldn't shake the feeling the cat was trying to communicate in its own fashion. Her fingers scratched the top of the cat's head, receiving a purring noise in response.
“I'll have to figure out what to do with you later,” she told the animal. “Right now I've got to go play detective.”
The day had turned cool and overcast. Fey didn't feel bad about leaving the cat in the car, but she did take the time to fetch water using an old, inverted hubcap as a bowl. She put the water on the passenger-side floorboards, and left the animal to its own devices.
Inside the station, she headed for the upstairs squad room. On the way she nodded to a few of the uniforms with whom she was friendly. She checked the homicide unit's box in records for new crime reports. It was empty.
Taking up almost the entire second floor, the squad bay was a beehive of late afternoon activity. Fey had used the back stairwell leading directly into the work area.
There was a front stairwell for citizens, which ended in a small lobby area. It was decorated with silk trees and a large, framed flag from the 1984 Olympics. There was also a bulletin board with pertinent information for citizens – including an 800 number for complaints if someone didn't get exactly what he or she wanted.
When Fey first saw the 800 number posted, she'd realized police work was changing. Too much had happened in reaction to the Rodney King arrest to let the department be the world leader in policing it had once been. Fey loved the job, but like many of her contemporaries, she was now looking forward to her retirement, when she could get out of the city and never look back. She'd be glad to leave it to the politicians, liberals, and hidden-agenda loudmouths to fight over, hyenas stealing from a lion's kill.
The incident involving Rodney King – a black man whose violent arrest had been captured by an amateur cameraman on videotape – had shocked the world. The video had been shown on television over and over, ad infinitum, until there didn't seem to be a single place in the world where it wasn't a source of dinner conversation.
All L.A. cops, good or bad, found themselves trying to explain to aggressively inquisitive friends and relatives an incident no straight could understand.
Cops understood it, though. They might have been appalled and sickened, but they understood it. While the politicians and police brass fought one another for scraps, the working cops held their heads up and did their job. Rodney King or no Rodney King, there were crimes to solve, people to protect, and criminals to put in jail. Life and crime went on, and there wasn't anyone else willing to jump in and do the job….
Be a cop? Are you, crazy? Those suckers get shot at. Not me, man.
The unprecedented media coverage of the trial of the officers who'd arrested King, the politically motivated destruction of L.A.'s police chief, and the findings of the Christopher Commission assigned to investigate the LAPD in the wake of the King incident resulted in hundreds of knee-jerk measures – like the 800 number hot line for complaints against the police.
Fey had read the Christopher Commission report cover to cover. In her mind it made the Warren Commission report on the John Kennedy assassination look like gospel.
Behind the detectives' lobby there was a long hallway hiding several interrogation rooms, a cot room, a small cubbyhole for the division's computer nerds, and a softly decorated, nonthreatening room for interviewing rape or child abuse victims.
The other side of the lobby led into the squad bay. One end of the bay was walled off to form a good-sized room for the fraud and forgery investigators. There was another small office, with windows looking out into the bay, for the detective lieutenant in charge of the squad, Mike Cahill. The rest of the room was taken up with clusters of desks assigned to different divisional investigative units; juvenile, Sex Crimes, Robbery, Burglary, Auto Theft, and Homicide.
Phones rang, files were filed, cases were assigned and investigated, suspects and victims were interviewed, jokes were told, coffee was poured, administrative details were handled, audits were audited, photo lineups were composed, and once in a while a crime was solved, if you were lucky. Cops didn’t need to worry about job security.
At the homicide unit's desks, Vance Hatcher had his feet up talking on the telephone. Monk Lawson was talking to two patrol officers. Monk raised a hand in greeting when he saw Fey.
Dumping her purse beside her desk, she slipped out of her shoulder rig and slid it into a side drawer.
Hatcher hung up the phone. “You look fried,” he said to Fey.
She dry-washed her face with one hand. “I'm okay,”.
“Where's Colby?”
“Off somewhere sulking,” Fey said. “Actually, I hope he's gone to see if he can rush the FIN run on the victim's prints.”
“We'll be lucky to see it before the end of the week.”
“Colby claims he's got a contact at the FIN unit who can expedite things.”
“Probably some little groupie who can't wait for him to get into her pants.”
“Probably,” Fey said. “Though I have no idea why.”
Hatch laughed. “He might not be your cup of tea, but I've seen him pull a few rabbits out of his hat. If he says he has a contact, it's probably true.”
“If you say so.”
“How's the new case?”
“It's going to be a rough year,” she told him. “It always is when the first murder is this complicated.”
“We might get a break,” Hatch said.
“Unlikely. This one is right out of the Twilight Zone.” Fey plopped into her chair. She picked up a file from her in box and checked it. “The sixty-day follow-up on the John Doe transient is due,” she said to Hatch. “Did you or Monk come up with anything further?”
Hatch grunted. “It's a loser. You know what this division is like. We've got the very rich and the very poor, and never the twain shall meet. Both groups ignore each other. Both are closed communities to working coppers.” He shrugged. “The victim was murdered in a drainage ditch probably fighting with another wino over a short dog. The suspect who did it has probably frozen to death by now while sleeping rough in the sheriff's area. We'd never hear about it. Even if we did, there'd be no way to put it together.”
“Write it up as best you can,” Fey said. “Let's keep the paperwork on schedule.” She pulled out another file. “What about the Bradshaw caper?”
“Monk's baby,” Hatcher said.
Hearing his name, Monk Lawson finished his conversation with the two police officers and came over to join the confab.
“I think we've got enough on Bradshaw's brother-in-law, Lance White, to go to the DA,” he said.
Fey could tell Monk was holding something back. Hopefully something good. The unit needed a break. “Not what you said when we last talked about the case,” she said. “What's happened since?”
“Lance hasn't surfaced since the killing. The victim's wife, Shirleen, finally broke down and admitted she'd told good old Lance all about the times Bradshaw beat her. Lance threatened to do something if it happened again.”
“Did it happen again?”
Monk's even white teeth appeared between his lips.
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” she said, waiting for the black detective to be more forthcoming.
“On the night of the murder,” Monk said, “Bradshaw split Shirleen’s lip for supposedly making a pass at a guy in a bar. Shirleen says she and Bradshaw were both drunk when it happened, but she got pissed because blood from her lip dropped on her new blouse. She took off with a full mad-on and went to cry on Lance's shoulder.”
“Which got Lance worked up,” Fey said.
Monk nodded agreement. “He grabbed a genuine Louisville Slugger and headed out of the house. Shirleen says she thought he was going to go over an
d scare the hell out of Bradshaw, but Lance came back forty-five minutes later looking like the devil was after him. He wouldn't tell her what happened, but threw a bunch of clothes in a suitcase and took off. It's the last time anyone saw him.”
“Do you believe her?”
“It took me long enough to get the story out of her. Yeah, I believe her.”
“I don't mean about what happened. I'm talking about whether anyone has seen or heard from Lance.”
“Monk looked thoughtful. “You light have a point. Give me a little time. If I can get her to tell me where he's hiding, we'll set up a surveillance – let her lead us to him.”
“You've got motive and opportunity,” Fey said, “but I don't see enough for the DA.”
“I saved the best for last. I found the murder weapon,” Monk said, a twinkle in his eye.
Fey raised her eyebrows.
Hatch took his feet off the desk, leaning leaned forward. “You didn't tell me,” he said to his partner.
Monk enjoyed being the center of attention. “I have to keep one or two surprises.”
“I give up,” Fey said. “Where did you find it?”
“The murder happened on a Wednesday night, but the body wasn't called in until late Thursday afternoon.”
“So what?” Hatch said.
“I was looking at the crime scene photos, saw there were several empty trash cans curbside. I checked the trash pickup schedule and found the refuse trucks go through about ten a.m. on Thursdays.”
Hatch caught on immediately. “Between the time of the murder and the time it was called in.”
Monk was almost dancing with the excitement of his discovery. “It gets even better,” he said. “I contacted the refuse company and talked to the guys who pick up on Bradshaw's route. Turns out the driver has a ten-year-old kid who's really into playing baseball. When he saw a perfectly good bat sticking out of Bradshaw's trash can, he pulled it out and kept it. He was saving it to wrap up for his kid's birthday next week.”
“I don't believe it,” Fey said, although it was obvious she did. “Great detective work.”
“The trash truck driver was real upset having to give up the bat. He's got a whole brood of little trash pickers, money is tight. The bat was probably going to be the only gift the ten-year-old got for his birthday. I was so happy to find the murder weapon, I went out and bought a bat, a glove, and a ball. The guy cried when I gave them to him.”