Never Fear

by Scott Frost

  “Traver call you?” Harrison asked.

  I nodded as we headed into the building. “Have you tracked the number?”

  “It came from a Western Union office in downtown L.A.”

  I stopped walking. “They would have video surveillance. ”

  Harrison nodded. A wave of relief swept through me. There wasn’t a single photograph of Gabriel in existence as far as we knew, and he wouldn’t walk into an office where he knew a camera would be watching.

  “It’s not Gabriel,” I said.

  Harrison nodded. “I don’t think Lacy’s in any danger.”

  “So who’s John Manning?”

  Harrison looked at me for a moment, then looked away. “He’s dead.”

  A gust of hot wind blew open the door to the lobby and sent leaves and scraps of paper swirling across the floor.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  Harrison nodded. “The coroner called. They’d like you to come and ID him.”

  “Why me? I don’t know a John Manning.”

  “They said he’s your brother.”

  2

  The county coroner is housed in a nondescript white industrial building a few miles east of downtown L.A. Twelve million people, give or take, live in L.A. County, and a good percentage of them are eventually headed right here. I’d been to the coroner’s dozens of times investigating murders, but never as a next of kin.

  The choice of placing the building on a street named Mission Road never struck me as ironic until that morning. The Spanish peasants of the land-grant days would bring their dead to the missions to be blessed and then buried. The ceremonies performed here were slightly less spiritual. Outside of New York City, more bodies passed through this building than anywhere in the country. More than a few cops have referred to it as the death factory.

  “You want me to come in?” Harrison asked.

  I nodded and got out of the car.

  “I was an only child,” I said, looking at the entrance. “I don’t know who they have in there, but I want to know why he tried to send me something last night.”

  I showed my badge to the receptionist, who directed us to the suite of cubicles where the investigators did their work. The air smelled of a little too much cleanser, but other than that, nothing gave away what took place on the examining tables and in the toxicology labs at the far end of the building.

  The coroner’s investigator in charge of determining cause of death was waiting in the hallway when we stepped inside.

  “Lieutenant, I’m Margaret Chow.”

  She was a small woman in her mid thirties with shoulder-length jet-black hair, dressed in black slacks and a white blouse. There was a wedding ring on her finger. She looked like she should be teaching sixth grade rather than sifting through the remains of L.A.’s dead.

  “I’m sorry to—” she started to say.

  “I don’t have a brother, Ms. Chow.”

  She looked at me with a certain amount of doubt in her eyes. Denial of all sorts was something she dealt with on a daily basis. The fact that I was a cop didn’t appear to register on her radar.

  “I know these things are difficult.”

  “It’s not difficult. I was an only child.”

  She nodded uneasily and glanced at Harrison as if to get a reading on my state of mind.

  “I’m sorry, this is Detective Harrison. You talked on the phone.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Lieutenant,” Chow said. “The paperwork I found in his apartment left no doubt that you are his only known relative, at least in his mind.”

  “What was the cause of death?” I asked.

  “Single gunshot to the head. Pending the autopsy, ballistics, and residue tests on his hands, it’s being treated as a possible suicide. Detective Williams from the Northeast division is in charge of the investigation.”

  “I’d like to see the body.”

  “Should I move him into a viewing room?” she asked.

  Assuming I wouldn’t need privacy, I shook my head.

  She nodded and started walking toward a door at the end of the hallway. The body vault was a large open refrigerated room with the deceased lying on gurneys. Most of the dead were wrapped in white sheets, a few of the more seriously decayed or damaged were wrapped in plastic. There appeared to be at least forty individuals awaiting the final disposition of their remains, and there were two more rooms just like this one. Even with refrigeration the air inside the vault was filled with the odor of death.

  Chow walked down the center of the room checking the numbers taped to the sheets. When she found the one she was looking for she quickly double-checked it with the number on the toe tag. There is nothing private about dying. Bodies are probed until the last piece of information gives itself up. For the most part secrets aren’t taken with someone at death. More often than not they’re spread out for all to see.

  “This is him,” Chow said. “There’s a wound on the right—”

  “You can uncover him,” I interrupted. If there was something I needed to find out from a body, I preferred to discover it myself.

  Chow slipped on a pair of surgical gloves, then stepped to the other end of the gurney and unfolded the sheet that covered his head and shoulders. John Manning’s skin had the look of old bone china that had faded and yellowed. I stepped forward and examined the small wound in his temple just in front of the ear— a little dark hole barely big enough for a pencil to fit in. A small amount of fatty tissue was evident in places around the wound. The skin surrounding it was discolored by the powder blast of a close contact wound. The black hair above it was matted with dark blood that hadn’t completely dried yet.

  “No exit wound?”

  “No,” Chow said. “The gun was a thirty-two. We haven’t retrieved the slug, but I’m guessing it mushroomed enough to slow the trajectory down so it couldn’t penetrate the other side of the skull.”

  I stared at the wound for another moment and then looked at his face for the first time. Death had relaxed the muscles. There wasn’t a line anywhere on his face. I tried to take a breath, but my lungs fought it. I knew him, but I had never seen him before.

  It reminded me of the face that occasionally looked out from the television set at two in the morning. The Cyclops victim, the hapless salesman, and the Indian who kissed a white woman on Bonanza. My home movies. I was looking at a memory.

  “Can you identify him?” Chow asked, though I didn’t hear her.

  As a cop I knew there was often nothing more unreliable than memory. What people remember is often more a reflection of desire than of fact. Was I seeing my father’s face in his because that’s what I wanted—a connection to a man who had vanished from my life when I was a child? I felt Harrison’s hand on my back and I unconsciously leaned into it.

  “What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

  “He was thirty-one. Lived alone in Los Feliz in a one-bedroom apartment. He was a private investigator for a lawyer named Gavin. They were involved in a car accident yesterday afternoon that critically injured Gavin. Sometime shortly after midnight he took a pistol registered to Gavin from the office and later fired one shot.”

  “Where was he found?” I asked.

  “Next to the river just south of Griffith Park. A park ranger found him by chance about three-thirty.”

  I tried to think like a cop, but working it like just any other investigation seemed a long way off.

  “How did he get there?”

  “Apparently he walked. He wasn’t wearing shoes and his feet have a number of cuts in them.”

  I stepped to the other end of the gurney and lifted the sheet off his feet. Pieces of grit and sand were embedded in his skin. More than a dozen deep cuts, now filled with dried blood, marked his feet like lines on a map.

  Harrison stepped next to me and quickly examined them.

  “He must have run over broken glass,” I said.

  Harrison nodded. “Why would a person do that?”
/>
  I tried to imagine a reason for a person to continue to run in such condition.

  “If he was suicidal, maybe he didn’t feel it.”

  I let the other explanation go unsaid, but I could see in Harrison’s eyes that he was thinking the same thing I was. There were two motivations that consistently rendered pain meaningless—love and fear.

  “Do you know him?” Harrison asked.

  I took a breath. “I’ve never seen him before, but it’s not impossible that he could be my brother, or half brother.”

  “Would you like a moment alone?” Chow asked.

  I shook my head. “Like I said, I’ve never met him before.”

  “What makes you think it’s possible that he may be your brother?”

  I stared at his face—the face of my father.

  “Home movies,” I said.

  “But you know nothing about him?” Chow asked.

  “I know for the first time in his life he tried to make contact with me last night.”

  Chow looked at me for a moment.

  “How?” she asked.

  “He sent a cover sheet of a fax to me, but the rest didn’t follow.”

  “That doesn’t sound inconsistent with someone contemplating suicide,” she said. “Maybe it was a suicide note and he changed his mind.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Can you release his personal effects?”

  “Everything but his clothes; we’ll need them if this is determined not to be a suicide.”

  She started to say something, hesitated, then finished the thought.

  “Will you be making arrangements for his remains?”

  I nodded. “If he’s my brother.”

  I looked at his face one more time, turned away as Chow slipped the sheet back over him.

  Outside the coroner’s office I called Lacy and left her a message saying everything was okay, that Gabriel wasn’t back in our life. But that was all I told her. The contents of the manila envelope I held in my hands, and the secrets that stretched all the way back to my father, if indeed that’s what it was, could wait. I looked beyond the concrete banks of the river at the towers of downtown.

  “Where do you want to start?” Harrison asked.

  “What was the name of that lawyer she said he worked for?”

  “Gavin.”

  “Chow said he broke in there and stole the gun. We’ll start there, work it forward. Chow didn’t know about the fax, so I assume the detective in Northeast is unaware of it also.”

  “You okay?” Harrison asked.

  The Santa Anas were gaining strength, blowing all the pollution toward the coast, where a brown layer of sky stretched across the horizon.

  “Okay?” I shook my head. “If he is my brother, I would like to know who his mother was. How he knew about me. Did our father stick around for him, or run from it all like he did to me?”

  I looked at Harrison. “I’d like to know if my father ever told him about me.”

  I looked at the envelope in my hands. “How are you at chasing windmills?”

  “I’ve done my share,” Harrison said.

  I thought about his young wife, whose death was never solved, and regretted asking the question.

  “Do you have a brother?” I asked.

  “An older one.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Harrison smiled, or nearly smiled. “He’s my brother . . . which I guess means he’s a bit of a mystery to me.”

  I looked back toward the river. “How many miles would you say it is from downtown upriver to Griffith Park?”

  “Eight, maybe ten miles.”

  I looked north, where the river traveled past railroad yards and industrial complexes before running past the hills of Griffith Park.

  “I want to know why John Manning walked or ran all that way without any shoes on, and then put a bullet in his head.”

  3

  The lawyer Gavin had an office in the Ensor building at Seventh and Grand in downtown L.A. It was a stone building from the turn of the century that appeared to have resisted the gentrification that was making over the rest of the block.

  We stepped off the elevator and found the office halfway down the hallway. A notice from LAPD forbidding entry was taped over the door. The dark wood of the door frame had been splintered around the lock.

  “Why would he break into an office where he worked?” Harrison said. “Wouldn’t he have a key?”

  I opened the envelope containing Manning’s effects and removed a key chain with half a dozen keys. A key with the number of the office stamped on it slipped into the lock and easily turned the dead bolt.

  “He did,” I said.

  I looked around the corridor; at least half the nearby offices were empty. The likelihood of anyone being around to hear the crack of the door was remote.

  “Why do you break into an office you have a key for?” I said.

  “To make it appear that someone else broke in,” Harrison answered.

  I pushed the door open and looked inside. It was a secretary’s office, though from the dust on the desk it didn’t appear to have seen much work lately. A pair of black hard-soled shoes sat on the desk. The door to Gavin’s inner office had been broken just as the outer door had. I tested the same key and it opened the lock with a smooth, worn motion.

  Gavin’s office held the scent of decades of cigar smoke. I flipped on the light and we stepped inside. Papers were scattered across the floor, the desk drawers had been rifled. A computer hard drive lay smashed in a corner where it appeared to have been thrown. A heavy wooden chair lay on its side just beyond the swing plane of the door.

  “What if John didn’t break in?” I said.

  Harrison studied the room for a moment. “Then I’d like to know if whoever did this was here before or after Manning, and I’d like to know what they were looking for.”

  I stepped over to the window and looked out. A fire escape dropped down to street level.

  “What if they were here at the same time?” I said.

  Harrison stepped over to the window and looked down at the escape, then back out to the secretary’s office.

  “He removed his shoes so he wouldn’t be heard on the marble floors.”

  “And it didn’t work.”

  I played it out for a moment, imagining his movements as he frantically searched the room for whatever he was looking for.

  “What would you do if you heard the crack of the outer door being forced?”

  Harrison walked over to the wooden chair on its side by the door and righted it. “The top rail of the chair back is dented. It’s possible he tried to brace the door.”

  I looked around the office. Pictures, most of them looking to be at least twenty years old, adorned the walls. Whatever brief fling Gavin had had with success appeared to have been long since past. There were half a dozen calendars from funeral homes and chiropractors tacked on the walls. From the papers spread across the floor it was clear Gavin was little more than an ambulance chaser. I looked at the door and tried to imagine John Manning hearing the sound of the door splintering, but it eluded me. What could possibly be in this room that could cost someone his life?

  “The simplest solutions are always the best,” I said. “John Manning, in a state of emotional distress, broke through two doors that he had a key to, then searched the office looking for the gun that he used to take his own life.”

  “So what was in the fax?” Harrison said.

  The Western Union office where the fax originated was three blocks south of City Hall on Broadway between Second and Third. The corporate towers of downtown were a mile to the west. This was old downtown, the part of town that was as alien to most suburban residents of L.A. as the Lower East Side of New York was to residents of Scarsdale. A line of mostly middle-aged men who transited in and out of a residential hotel down the block snaked out the door onto the sidewalk. Harrison pulled the squad car to a stop across the street.

  “Disability checks must hav
e come in,” Harrison said.

  I looked at the men, most of whom had taken notice of the two cops parked across the street. A few who probably had outstanding warrants slipped out of line and quickly walked away.

  “How far have we come from Gavin’s office?”

  Harrison checked the odometer.

  “Almost two miles.”

  “So why would he pick this place? Why didn’t he send the fax from the office or go home?”

  “If he was suicidal, reason probably didn’t have much to do with it.”

  “And if he wasn’t suicidal?”

  “Something couldn’t wait.”

  “Or he ran out of time.”

  We walked across the street and into the office. The smell of malt liquor and body odor from the line of men followed us inside. I stepped up to the bulletproof glass partition and showed my badge. The teller was Middle Eastern, probably Iranian. He had the imperious air of someone who held power over everyone who stepped up to his window.

  “I’d like to see the manager.”

  He leaned in and looked at my badge, then at my face, and motioned with a nod of his head to a door to his right.

  “Camera,” Harrison said, motioning toward the ceiling behind the teller.

  The heavy reinforced door buzzed and we stepped inside. The supervisor was in his early thirties, white, and looked like he never ate or slept. I introduced Harrison and myself.

  “I’d like to see your surveillance tape from last night.”

  He looked at me for a moment as if the question surprised him.

  “You guys have it already.”

  “What guys?”

  “Cops. They took it last night.”

  “What cops—LAPD?”

  “I don’t know, that’s what my night supervisor said when I got here this morning.”

  “What time did they take the tape?”

  “All he said was the middle of the night.”

  “Did he tell you the name of the officer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Uniform or plainclothes?”

  He pulled a cigarette out of his desk drawer and flicked it into his mouth but didn’t light it. “You know everything I know.”

  “Was he the only one working here last night?”