Flight ik-8

by Jan Burke

  She fell into a brooding silence. He let it stretch, caught up in his own thoughts. He wondered how well anyone had really known Phil Lefebvre.

  “Did you know Elena Rosario?” he asked Irene.

  “Who?”

  “Narcotics detective who was with Lefebvre the night they found the Randolphs. She quit the department right after Lefebvre went missing.”

  “No,” she said, “not really.”

  He would have asked more, but the phone rang.

  “Harriman,” he answered.

  “Frank — good to have you back.”

  “Hello, Pete. How’d you know I was home?”

  “Partners have no secrets, right?”

  “Who told you — Carlson?”

  “That asswipe? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Then Cliff called you.”

  “Cliff and I go way back, you know?”

  “Terrific.”

  Pete missed the sarcasm. “So he told me you and Ben found Lefebvre. I hope you pissed on his bones before you packed them up.”

  Frank was silent.

  “Listen,” Pete said uneasily, “no need to take that wrong. I want to help you out here. I called to invite you to breakfast. Me and some of the other guys who were around back then thought we’d bring you up to speed.”

  “It’s Sunday. I didn’t get yesterday off, and I don’t want to spend Sunday working.”

  “But—”

  “Cold cases, Pete. They can wait.”

  “Well, we’re all together here at the Galley.”

  “All? Who’s with you?”

  “Vince, Jake, Reed — a couple of other guys. Why don’t you come on down and join us? Then the rest of the day is yours.”

  “The day’s already mine.”

  “Frank, c’mon,” he said. “Let’s get this over with and behind us, okay?”

  Irene was tracing her hand along his spine. He looked down at her; her hand stilled.

  “I don’t know, Pete,” he said, and the hand began moving again.

  “Frank, I’m asking this as a personal favor.”

  Frank covered the phone, but before he could say anything, she was out of bed and putting on the blue kimono.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She looked back, shrugged, and said, “Me, too,” before walking out of the room.

  He heard her turn on the shower.

  “Frank?” he heard Pete say.

  “I can’t be there sooner than an hour,” he said into the phone.

  “Aw, for God’s sake, Frank. It’s only ten minutes from your place.”

  “An hour. And next time, partner, call me first — not last.” He hung up and hurried down the hall, wondering if her temper had led her to lock the bathroom door.

  But she opened it before he reached it and said, “Get a towel.”

  He laughed. “What a relief — if you didn’t grab a towel for me, I guess you weren’t too sure of me.”

  She smiled, slipped the kimono off, and stepped into the shower.

  So he had been wrong, he thought, but couldn’t bring himself to feel bad about it.

  4

  Sunday, July 9, 9:00 A.M.

  The Galley Restaurant

  They were all detectives, he realized, as he walked toward the table. A half dozen of them. They stopped talking when they saw him approach. There was a moment when, just as they looked up at him from their cups of coffee, their faces reflected how angry they were. He was surprised by the intensity of it and certain it wasn’t because he had kept them waiting. Five of them — Pete Baird, Vince Adams, Reed Collins, Ned Perry, and Jake Matsuda — worked in Homicide with him. Vince and Reed were partners, as were Ned and Jake. Although they had their disagreements here and there, Frank thought of all five of them as friends — the closest of these his own partner, Pete. During an average week, he spent more waking hours with Pete than he did with Irene.

  He knew little about the sixth man — Bob Hitchcock — although he had seen his name in the case files he had read last night. Hitch was a heavyset man, with sagging jowls and small eyes. His hair was cut short, bristling gray over his round head. A few times, Frank’s team had played against Hitch’s in the amateur ice hockey league they were in, but Hitch never got much ice time. He had come over to the house once, when Frank and Irene had held a barbecue after a hockey tournament — but he hadn’t stayed long. Pete had once told Frank that Hitch used to be a good player, but he was out of shape now.

  Pete broke the silence, smiling and saying, “Frank! You made it. Pull up a chair.”

  Hitch smiled — a phony smile, Frank thought — and came awkwardly to his feet. He held out a hand that looked like five sausages attached to a water balloon. “You may not remember me, Frank. I’m Bob Hitchcock. Most of these guys call me Hitch.” Although his palm was damp, his grip was firm. Frank forced himself not to wipe his hand off before he sat down next to Pete.

  Hitch gestured toward the table, where the remains of their breakfasts congealed unappetizingly on heavy white ceramic plates. “We waited for you like one hog waits on another,” he said, and gave a little laugh.

  “You still working Narcotics?” Frank asked.

  “Surprised you remember that,” Hitch said, pleased. “No, I’m in Auto Theft now. I’m close to retirement, so it’s kind of nice to just be able to spend the day taking phone calls and saying, ‘Gee, that’s too bad — yeah, here’s the police report number for your insurance.’”

  A waitress came by and cleared away the dirty plates. She asked Frank if he wanted to order something. Eyeing the plates, he asked for a cup of coffee.

  Another silence fell.

  “You wanted to talk to me about Lefebvre?” Frank asked.

  “Don’t even say that name,” Vince snarled.

  Frank leaned lazily back in his chair. “Then this will take less time than I thought it would.”

  Vince leaned forward, but Jake Matsuda held up a hand. “You weren’t in Las Piernas when it happened, Frank,” he said quietly.

  “Which, I’m told, is exactly why I got the call. Were you in Homicide then, Jake?”

  He shook his head. “I was in uniform. In fact, I spent some time guarding Seth Randolph’s room. But even if I hadn’t — we all suffered because of what Lefebvre did. The Randolph case was high profile. Seth Randolph was a young hero, as far as everyone in town was concerned. We got attached to him, too. He was a good kid—”

  “And he was going to help us nail the biggest bastard in town,” Pete said.

  “Yes,” Jake said, “but even if Whitey Dane hadn’t been a part of it, the public had sort of adopted Seth.”

  “We all felt that way,” Ned Perry said. “The department had adopted him, too. Like Jake, I was in uniform back then. My unit was dispatched to the marina on the night Trent Randolph and his daughter were murdered. I’ll never forget that night as long as I live. When Lefebvre came off of that yacht with that kid, we thought we had three dead. No one thought Seth would make it, and when it looked as if he might — well, we were all rooting for him. The kid had guts — he had fought off Dane. And he was willing to testify against him.”

  “Which is something a hell of a lot of grown men weren’t willing to do,” Pete said.

  “People who were going to testify against Dane seldom made it to court,” Vince said. “If they didn’t change their minds about what they saw or suddenly lose their memories, they had a way of disappearing.”

  “But this time, it was a cop who took the payoff,” Pete said. “And he killed this kid.”

  “How do you know he killed Seth Randolph?” Frank asked.

  Pete made a sound of exasperation. “I thought you read the files.”

  “You’ve had ten years to think about it. I’ve had less than twenty-four hours. Humor me.”

  “He was the last person to go into Seth Randolph’s room before the kid’s body was discovered,” Vince said. “The guard reported that Lefebvre was in there
for a long time.”

  “The guard that had been talking to nurses all evening? The one Lefebvre had reprimanded in front of the nurses on the previous evening?”

  “You did read the files,” Pete said.

  Frank nodded.

  “Not everything,” Vince said. “Or you’d know that Lefebvre signed out the evidence and returned the box with nothing but a watch in it.”

  “What do you suppose that was about?” Frank asked.

  Vince shrugged. “Who knows? The guy was the biggest fuckin’ fruitcake on the force.”

  “He acted crazy?”

  Vince hesitated, then said, “Naw, he was just odd, you know? A loner. Never went out for so much as a beer with anyone in the department. Never saw him with women, even though sometimes women came on to him. God knows why. Ask your wife about it.”

  “Damn it, Vince!” Pete said. “See if you can rent some sense from somebody. Frank — ignore him.”

  “No insult intended,” Vince said with a smile. “Besides, Frank, that was before the two of you got together. She wasn’t supposed to be a nun all those years, right? I mean, some women have a thing for—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Vince,” Pete said.

  “Nothing to get upset about,” Vince said. “Ugly as he was, women went for him. Remember that TV reporter who was practically stalking the guy? Even Hitch’s partner wasn’t immune to him.”

  “Rosario the Lesbo?” Hitch said. “You gotta be kidding. The other guys in Narcotics used to call her ‘Twenty Below,’ because that’s how cold you felt if you tried to get next to her. But you seem to have been real interested in everybody’s sex life, Vince. Weren’t you getting any back then?”

  Pete laughed. “No, he wasn’t. I remember, Vince — you were splitting up with Blond Bitch Number Three then, right?”

  “Oh, man,” Hitch said, “I remember that one, too. San Onofre.”

  The others laughed, even Vince. Hitch turned to Frank. “You ever see that nuclear power plant on Interstate Five?” He cupped his hands in front of his chest. “She had a pair of knockers that made those twin domes look like anthills.”

  “I thought we were here to talk about Lefebvre,” Vince said, and had to put up with another round of laughter.

  “So Lefebvre worked in a department where everyone hated him?” Frank asked.

  “No,” Pete said. “You’re getting the wrong idea. Nobody hated him until after he killed Seth Randolph.”

  “Nobody?”

  “He could be a little abrupt,” Hitch said. “He pissed a few people off.”

  “But we all thought he was a good cop,” Pete said.

  “Good?” Ned Perry shook his head. “We thought he was great.”

  “He’s right,” Reed said. “You’d have to be a priest — a very old priest — to have as many sinners confess to you as Phil did. And Phil wasn’t physical — he never so much as touched ’em. He had a brain, too.”

  “He got a little too smart with that brain,” Pete said.

  “I was just starting in detectives when this whole thing broke,” Reed said. “I used to really admire him. Until he took that payoff, he won the department all kinds of praise. That made it worse, really.”

  There were nods of agreement from everyone but Hitch and Vince.

  “Not that I don’t just live to see you guys,” Frank said, “but I was having an enjoyable Sunday morning until Pete called. Okay, so I came down here. But nothing you’ve told me is big news to me — except the part about Vince’s ex.”

  Everyone but Vince laughed.

  “The point,” Pete said, “is to let you know what this means to us. It’s going to be bad enough that the guy’s name is before the public again. This is going to rake up a lot of ill will. The department doesn’t need it.”

  Frank eyed him skeptically. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “No, there’s not. Look, Cliff said you didn’t find the payoff money, and he thought maybe you had some questions — were leaning toward trying to clear Lefebvre’s name.”

  “Now we’re getting warmer.”

  “So you haven’t recovered the money,” Hitch said. “That doesn’t mean he was innocent. Everything else pointed to him — the fact that he was the last one to see the kid, the fact that he was the last one to handle the evidence. Those two facts alone are enough to make it clear that he’s the killer. You don’t settle this quickly, you make life miserable for all of us. No one is going to be happy with you if you start making this out to be something more than it was. It will just give the Express an excuse to make us look bad.”

  Vince, Pete, and Ned voiced their agreement at length. Jake and Reed stayed quiet.

  “What if he was innocent?” Frank asked.

  “He wasn’t,” Vince insisted. “Get that through your head, Harriman.”

  Frank turned to Matsuda. “You feel that way, Jake?”

  “I don’t think it’s at all likely that anyone other than Phil Lefebvre killed that boy, Frank. And I think Hitch is right — no good will come of bringing it all up again.”

  Frank looked at Reed, who was resolutely staring into his coffee cup. “You, too, Reed?”

  Reed shrugged, still not meeting his eyes.

  Pete, on the other hand, returned his stare, reading him. “Aw, shit,” he said.

  Frank smiled. “Thanks for your concern,” he said to the group.

  “Shit,” Pete said again as Frank stood and dropped a couple of dollars on the table.

  “You’re not going to—” Vince began, but fell silent when Pete grabbed his arm in warning.

  “Not going to let you pressure me?” Frank said. “No, I’m not.”

  “Look,” Ned Perry said, “no one wants you to compromise an investigation. We’re just asking you not to drag it out unnecessarily.”

  “Believe me,” Frank said, “until this morning, I didn’t feel any particular urgency about this set of cases.”

  He walked away. Behind him, he heard Pete say, “Shit.”

  5

  Monday, July 10, 10:00 A.M.

  Las Piernas Police Department

  Homicide Division

  Frank looked through the file on Lefebvre until he found the phone number for Lefebvre’s parents, in Quebec. The coroner’s office had obtained dental records and identified the remains from the wreckage as those of Las Piernas Police Detective Philip Lefebvre, aka Philippe Jean-Michel Lefebvre, age forty-two. Cause of death to be determined, but preliminary findings indicated massive injuries received in the crash.

  Frank hated this part of the job — notifying parents that their son was dead. That Lefebvre was an adult son who had been missing for ten years would not, he knew, make it any easier for them to hear of his death. He was further dismayed to read a note near the phone number: the Lefebvres refused to communicate in English.

  He rubbed his forehead, feeling a headache coming on. He couldn’t use just anyone to translate the news of Phil Lefebvre’s death to his parents. It was hard enough to give someone that kind of news in a language you both knew. He looked for the number for Lefebvre’s sister, Yvette Nereault.

  Same notation.

  “Hey, Pete — we have any French speakers in the department?”

  Pete shrugged and said nothing. Pete had been shrugging at him all morning. He was ready to shove Pete’s neck down into his shoulders to save him the effort for the next one. He sighed and said, “I’ve got to make a next-of-kin notification here. Lefebvre’s parents are French-Canadian.”

  Pete stayed busy with some paperwork on his desk.

  “Great. Very considerate of the family. Maybe someday someone will have to call your elderly mother in Rome, New York, and ask her to get one of her English-speaking neighbors to come over — so that we can tell her in Italian that we hated her son so much, we talked about pissing on his bones.”

  Pete flushed red, but still said nothing.

  Frank picked up the file and locked his desk, deciding he’d try
calling Lefebvre’s sister anyway, and make the next-of-kin call from a more private phone. As he was leaving, Reed Collins called out, “Frank.”

  It was the first time anyone had spoken to him all day. The others frowned at Collins for breaking the silence.

  Reed ignored them. “Try Mike Tran in Gang Prevention.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said.

  “Don’t thank me yet. For all I know, Vietnamese French and Canadian French may not be anything alike.”

  “Thanks, anyway.”

  He suffered another setback when he learned that Tran was on vacation. He decided to go outside the department and called Guy St. Germain — a friend who had grown up in Montreal. Guy said he’d be glad to help and invited Frank to come to his downtown office.

  A former pro hockey player, Guy had then followed a family tradition and gone to work in banking. Frank had met him through Irene — he dated Irene’s best friend, so the couples went out together fairly often. And Guy had been aiding Frank’s efforts to learn to play ice hockey — a game he’d been unaware of while growing up in Bakersfield.

  “What a sad business you are in,” Guy said as Frank settled into a soft leather chair in the banker’s office.

  “Notifying the families is one of the worst parts of the job,” Frank agreed.

  Guy shut the office door and took a seat behind a large desk. “I’ll use the speakerphone — even though you may not understand the language, it’s better if you hear the tone of the other’s voice, I think.” He dialed the number. Three tones sounded, and even before the English explanation was spoken, Frank knew what they meant.

  “Disconnected. Hell, I could have saved you the trouble.”

  “You’ve had all the trouble,” Guy said. He tried the sister’s number.

  A man answered. Frank heard Guy ask for Yvette Nereault. A rapid exchange occurred in which he thought he heard the word “California.” Then he heard Guy say something about the Las Piernas Police Department.

  “The Las Piernas police?” he heard the man ask in English.

  “Oui—” Guy answered, but before he could say more, the man hung up.

  “What happened?” Frank asked.