Gecko

by Ken Douglas

“ I deserved it.”

  “ Let me be the judge of that.” Turnbull took the chair closest to the door. Jim sat, facing the door, with his back to the window. “I have here,” Turnbull went on, opening his briefcase, “a legal pad and a pencil.” He lay a yellow legal sized tablet in front of Jim, handed him a pencil.

  “ What am I supposed to do with this.

  “ I’d like you to make a quick outline of what happened on Second Street this morning and the events that led to your arrest.”

  “ What’s to write? A hit and run driver ran down my best friend. I went berserk and attacked the doctor that was probably trying to save his life.”

  “ Probably?” Turnbull’s eyes turned to slits.

  “ Was trying to save his life.” Jim flipped through the blank pages of the legal tablet, picked up the pencil, fiddled with it for a second, dropped it on the tablet.

  “ Write it down.”

  “ Why?” Jim met Turnbull’s slitted gaze.

  “ You’d be surprised what comes to people when they put their thoughts onto paper. You might have seen something that caused you to act the way you did. Something that might have justified your actions. Something we can use to get you out of here.”

  “ I saw and old, beat up gray, 1980 Buick Regal, balding tires, chrome rims, tinted windows, driver’s window down, dented front fender, strike and kill David Askew. Although the driver’s window was halfway down, I didn’t get a look at the driver. I remember the vehicle because I’ve always had a teenage-like interest in cars. I notice cars like horny men notice beautiful women. Not that I don’t notice beautiful women. I don’t think I’ll remember much more if I write it down.”

  “ Humor me.”

  “ No.”

  “ I’m trying to help you.”

  “ I’m sorry, you’re right.” Jim picked up the pencil. “Fortunately I’m left handed.”

  “ Fortunately,” Turnbull echoed.

  Jim bent over the paper, tried to put his thoughts in order, but before he had a chance there was a light knock on the door.

  “ Can I come in?” a tall man, with a body builder’s shape trying to bust out of a yellow sport coat said. Jim couldn’t believe how ridiculous the man looked with his shoulder length, surfer-blond hair and paisley tie. The man had a nose three times too big for his face.

  “ That’s the driver!” Donna thought.

  “ Are you sure?” Jim thought.

  “ You notice cars, I notice people.”

  “ Are you sure?” Jim repeated his thought.

  “ Look at him! How many people look like that? Of course I’m sure!”

  The big man moved past Jim, picked up the empty chair and took it to the other side of the table, where he took a seat next to Jeff Turnbull.

  “ Hi, I’m Richard Monroe, I’m going to help get you out of here,” the bodybuilder said.

  “ Help kill you is more like what he really means,” Donna thought.

  “ You can’t be sure,” Jim thought back, but he felt her conviction. He believed her.

  “ You better do something, or the only place you’ll be going is the morgue. Yell, scream your head off!”

  “ No.” Jim picked up the pencil, flipped open the legal pad as if he were going to write something.

  “ What did you say your name was?” Jim asked, making conversation, hoping to distract the big man.

  “ Richard Monroe.”

  “ You’re an attorney also?”

  “ Yes sir, work for Cobb and Cobb, just like Mr. Turnbill.”

  “ Turnbull, the man’s name is Turnbull, not Turnbill,” Donna screamed the thought.

  “ I know.” Jim repositioned the pencil in his left hand with the eraser against the heel of the palm and the pointed end sticking out between the two middle fingers. Then he balled his hand into a fist with the sharpened pencil sticking out like a deadly spike. He took a deep breath, held it, then jacked his arm forward, driving the pencil into the big man’s left eye and on up into his brain.

  Death was instantaneous.

  “ What the-” Turnbull screamed, but Jim cut it short by bringing his right forearm down on the left side of Turnbull’s head, striking the temple with the hard cast. Turnbull fell forward. Dead.

  Though it had been almost forty years since he had killed, he’d killed a lot back then. Apparently he still remembered how. He stood and backed away. The two men were slumped down, heads on the table. The big one oozed blood out of his eye. The thick red liquid didn’t quite cover the orange eraser. A grotesque sight. Turnbull looked like he was peacefully asleep.

  “ Are they dead?”

  “ Big nose certainly is.”

  “ How about the other one?”

  Jim bent, touched two fingers of his left hand to Turnbull’s neck, on the carotid artery.

  “ Dead,” he thought.

  “ Shoot through!” Donna thought.

  “ I don’t understand?”

  “ Shoot through, before you get caught.”

  “ I don’t understand the expression.”

  “ It means, ‘Get the hell out of here. Take off!’”

  “ And go where? There’s a policeman on the other side of the door.”

  “ I forgot. Say, how come he didn’t come in when that weasel screamed?”

  “ Good question.”

  “ Better check.”

  “ Yeah.” He grabbed the doorknob with a shaky left hand. His sweaty palm slid over it without opening the door. It had been a long time since he had sweat fear. He gripped the knob harder and turned it. The latch clicked and echoed throughout the room, causing the fine hair on the back of his hands and neck to tingle out a warning. He felt sweat under his arms as he swung the door open and poked his head into the hall.

  The policeman was sitting back in his chair. He looked like he was asleep. Jim stepped into the hall and for a second time, in less than five minutes, he pressed the index and middle finger of his left hand against a carotid artery in a vain search for a sign of life. He found none.

  “ Dead,” he thought.

  “ Now what?” Donna asked.

  “ Don’t know,” Jim thought back. But he knew he was going to have to do something, and quickly, so he grabbed the back of the chair with his good left hand, wrapped his bad right arm around the front of the dead police officer and dragged him into the small room.

  He started back for the door, then stopped. Where could he go? Once the bodies were discovered, they would go to both his house and his condo. He put his hands into his pockets. No wallet, no money, no credit cards, they took them away when they booked him. He could hardly go to the officer on duty and ask for his property back.

  He turned to the dead men.

  “ You’re not going to search the bodies?”

  “ Got any better ideas?”

  “ No.”

  In the inside jacket pocket of the dead Turnbull he found a wallet which held just under six hundred dollars, a driver’s license along with several credit cards, all in the name of Patrick Langley. He also found five business cards in the name of Jeff Turnbull, Attorney at Law.

  He took the money, credit cards and driver’s license, leaving only the phony business cards. Any time the police spent trying to worry over who Turnbull really was, was time not spent trying to catch and crucify Jim Monday.

  Next he opened Big Nose’s sportcoat and fished inside for a wallet. There was none. Great, he thought, one of those who keeps it in his pants. He lifted the coat off the dead man’s buttocks and smiled as he saw the telltale bulge in the left hip pocket. This man wasn’t used to wearing a suit. He slid his fingers into the pocket, pulled out the wallet.

  Pay dirt, three thousand dollars in hundreds, plus another hundred in twenties. Thirty one hundred dollars. No credit cards. No driver’s license, only a business card in the name Richard Monroe, Attorney at Law. A false name for a dead man. Another problem for the police.

  He gave Turnbull-Langley another look. They were abo
ut the same size. He took off his coat and laid it on the floor. Then he pulled the well dressed dead man away from the table.

  “ What are you doing?”

  “ I’m going to undress him.”

  “ Oh my God. Why?”

  “ My clothes look like they’ve been slept in and I need a shave. How far do you think I’d get walking out of here looking like this? But dressed in Turnbull’s clothes I’ve got a chance. His suit doesn’t look like it’s spent the night in jail, my clothes do.”

  Without further thought, he took off the dead man’s coat. He felt a slight tingle run up his spine as he unbuttoned the vest and removed it. His hands trembled and he fought shaking fingers as he took off the tie and the white shirt.

  “ Now the hard part,” he said under his breath.

  He pulled the dead man out of the chair, laid him out on the floor. He untied and removed the leather shoes, leaving the socks. Then he loosened the belt, pulled off the trousers.

  For a couple seconds he studied the dead man, wondering if he had children who would be crying tonight. He shrugged off the thought and undressed, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor. He took another look at the bodies, then he put on the dead man’s suit. Everything fit, the jacket even covered his cast, but he grimaced as he put on the shoes, they were at least a size too small and they hurt. But his Nike trainers hardly went with the suit, so he stuffed his feet into the expensive leather.

  “ You forgot the tie.”

  “ I hate ties.”

  “ You’ve gone this far, put it on,” she thought and he obeyed.

  “ Time to go,” he thought and once again he started for the door.

  “ Wait a minute. What about the policeman’s gun?”

  “ They have metal detectors in police stations and jails, to keep guns out.”

  “ Oh.” Then she added a thought, “Do they check you when you leave?”

  “ I don’t know, but I’m not going to take the chance. I’m going to leave the gun.”

  “ Then, let’s go,” she thought.

  Jim opened the door, looked down a long corridor with several tall oak doors opposite each other, anyone of which could open and disgorge a policeman or policemen who could cut off his escape.

  He stepped into the hallway and made his hurting feet move along the tiled floor. Sweat rolled down the back of his neck and still another chill crept up his spine. He tried to control his breathing by sucking air deep into his gut. He concentrated on swinging his arms in a casual, but purposeful manner. A man with a mission, but not in a hurry. A man with time, but not too much. He needn’t have bothered, because he reached the end of the hallway without incident. No police, no lawyers, no clerks, no one.

  He held onto the rail as he went down the stairs, gritting his teeth against the pain the cramped shoes were causing. He had to turn right at the bottom, into another corridor, this one filled with people. He plunged ahead, passing them without acknowledging them. He might as well have been alone. The many voices and languages of the hustling police station all carried on as if he were invisible, just another attorney doing his job. The corridor opened onto a large room full of uniformed policemen, talking, drinking coffee, writing, laughing, doing their jobs. They paid him no attention as he waded among them, a fish among sharks.

  A large room, many desks, two possible ways out. Which one to take? He had to decide. He couldn’t ask. Then luck attacked like lightning strikes. He saw his wife, on the far side of the room, talking to an elderly man in a cheap suit and a loud Hawaiian print tie. He stopped, saw her shake the man’s hand, turn and go through door number one.

  He followed her into another hallway, moving faster in an effort to catch up. In spite of his trouble, she’d come for him. Maybe she’d finally seen Kohler for what he really was. Maybe she wanted him back. Maybe everything was going to be all right, after all.

  He followed her out of the police station.

  “ Julia,” he called, but the striking woman turning her head to meet his gaze wasn’t his wife. Even though she had been crying, her smile was too quick, too real. Julia hadn’t smiled like that in a long time.

  “ Hello, Jimmy,” Roma, his wife’s twin, said as she smiled at him through her tears.

  Chapter Three

  After booking Jim Monday, writing the report and dealing with the motor pool about the damaged car, Washington and Walker were forty-five minutes over shift. Walker wanted to go home and Washington, after lighting his third cigarette for the day, wanted to go to work.

  He wanted the Askew case. He wouldn’t get it, because he wasn’t a homicide detective anymore and there probably wasn’t going to be a case. Hit and run-open and shut. That’s what they were calling it. But it didn’t feel right. People didn’t speed around corners in Belmont Shore during the middle of the day. Too many cars, too many people. It felt wrong.

  Whoever was driving that Buick wasn’t out for the Southern California sun or the specialty shops. He was out for murder. That car came out of nowhere, struck Askew, made a quick right on a residential street and was gone in a flash. It wasn’t accidental and Washington wanted the case.

  “ There is no case, so you can stop worrying about it,” Walker said.

  “ I wasn’t worrying about it.”

  “ You were worrying about it.”

  Walker was amazing, Washington thought, he’d only been his partner for six months and he could read him better than his wife, better than his daughter, better than any partner he’d ever had. Maybe it was because they were a lot alike, both from poor backgrounds, both overeducated and they both loved police work better than life.

  “ Fess up, you think it was murder and you want the case. Admit it,” Walker chided.

  “ Yeah, I think it was murder and if I didn’t at first, the bullet through the back window would have changed my mind. Hell, it would have changed anybody’s. And the Buick-that had to be a set up. That SOB was waiting. He saw his target, stepped on the gas, got him and vanished. Yeah, it feels like murder to me and I’ll bet it feels like murder to you.”

  “ Easy counselor, I went to law school, too. You don’t have to convince me. Use your logic on somebody who can do something about it.”

  “ Nobody wants to hear.”

  “ Then it’s over.”

  “ If I was still in Homicide, we could work it in.”

  “ What do you mean we, kimosabe? This Injun has a wife and two little girls at home, who don’t see enough of him as it is.”

  “ Maybe you should have stayed a lawyer.”

  “ Least I tried it, you didn’t even take the bar.”

  Silently Washington agreed. He’d gone into the academy five days after he’d graduated from law school. Jane was pregnant. He had to get married. He had to provide a home. He told himself he’d take the bar next year, when they got a little ahead, but next year just never seemed to roll around.

  “ How come you gave it up?” Washington knew Walker had quit a prestigious Century City law firm.

  “ I didn’t like getting rich, white collar crooks off the hook. What I really wanted to do was put them behind bars. So I quit and became a cop. Now I do what I like. I was lucky, the money helped.”

  Walker was an enigma to Washington. His parents had been killed in a small plane crash when he was sixteen. He was an only child, with grandparents in California. He came west to live with them and inherited twenty-one million dollars on his twenty-first birthday, a million for each year he’d been alive. He didn’t have to work, he could live comfortably off the interest.

  “ The guy in the Buick is guilty,” Washington said.

  “ That he is,” Walker agreed.

  “ He should be put away.”

  “ That he should.”

  “ We could do it.”

  “ The suits will get mad,” Walker said.

  “ Are you with me on this?”

  “ They’ll get real mad.”

  “ Are you with me, or what?”
<
br />   “ I’m with you.”

  “ Because you’re right, they’ll get real mad.”

  “ I’m with you.”

  “ And if we do make a case, they’ll take it away from us and give it to Homicide.”

  “ I’m with you.”

  “ I won’t want to stop, even if they take it away. It’s the way I am.”

  “ I said, I’m with you. I’m with you till we, not some dick in Homicide, we, us, you and me, masked man, the two of us, find the son of a bitch in the Buick and put him away.”

  “ Spoken like a true rebel. Now let’s get out of here and get to work.”

  They went to the locker room and changed into street clothes without saying a word. Washington was lost in thought. He was back on the trail of a murderer. He wondered about Walker-because bucking the system would be like swimming out into unknown waters for him. Walker had always been a by-the-book cop, but Washington knew he wanted to make the bust. He wanted to move up to where Washington had been. He wanted to be where the action was. He wanted Homicide.

  After changing, they headed for the street.

  “ Your car or mine?” Walker asked.

  “ Yours I think. Mine is a little under the weather.”

  “ Noooo,” Walker said, stretching out the word, “say it isn’t so.”

  “ You’re not making fun of Power Glide?” Washington said. It was no secret in the department that Washington held a rather juvenile attachment to Power Glide, his 1959 Chevy Impala.

  “ Never,” Walker said.

  “ Come on, it’s a great car.” Washington reached to his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. He started to lift them out, then stopped himself and let the pack slide back into its nest.

  “ It never runs,” Walker said through a wide grin.

  “ Yes it does,” Washington said.

  “ We’ll take my car.” Walker laughed, closing off that part of the conversation as he lead Washington to a new white Mercedes.

  “ One ten El Jardin Drive,” Washington said.

  “ And that is?”

  “ Jim Monday’s address.”

  “ How’d you get that?”

  “ Off his driver’s license. I have a great memory.”

  “ Too bad it spends most of its time in the fifties.”