Читать книгу Sunset People - Herbert Kastle - Страница 15

Larry Admer spent Sundays with his five-year-old son Larry Junior, whom he called J.R. Gloria had remarried. Almost seemed as if she’d been waiting for him to cut out. Two months after the final decree she was at the altar with a new guy, partner in an Orange County real estate company with his name on the for-sale signs. An older man, maybe forty-five, but in good shape and so together and friendly he made Larry sick.

But what the hell, he was good to J.R., no doubt about that. Good for him, too, and Larry hadn’t been, and wasn’t. Not that he hadn’t tried.

Just not the daddy type, he thought, driving back from Huntington Beach and the expensive sea-view house. Not the husband type either.

But he didn’t envy Roscoe Green of Green Realty lac. Sure, he would’ve liked some of that heavy bread, and wouldn’t have minded the classic Jag convertible either. But Green wasn’t what he considered a real man, a blood-and-guts man, the kind that won the wars and made the country what it was . . . or had been. Like George C. Scott playing Patton. Jesus, the world’s greatest movie!

Larry Admer had been a damned good soldier—got his Silver Star to prove it—but Vietnam had been the wrong war. He hated thinking of the way they’d pulled out. God, the wasted American lives! The fine lives. And the ones who had copped out and stayed home, who bought their way out with college courses, had run around the streets making shit out of those sweating, bleeding, dying men.

Well, it was long finished and no one wanted to remember, so fuck the great American public that had sat on its ass and watched the war on television. Just another show and the ratings had gone down so cancel one war. Catch Larry Admer enlisting in the next one!

Still, he’d been a helluva soldier. And parlayed his Silver Star and a lifelong ambition into becoming a helluva cop. And that meant a helluva man, which Roscoe Green, whatever else he was, could never be. Which few men could ever be.

He smiled. Everything going along well. He had Roberta and sometimes a new chick and he could’ve moved in with a dozen chicks in the two years he’d been separated from Gloria. He’d gotten his B.A. from Los Angeles Community College, and then his lieutenant’s bars—had to give Gloria credit on both, as he was a lousy student—and the bread wasn’t bad at this level. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do . . . if he couldn’t quarterback the L.A. Rams.

He came off the freeway, and opened the glove compartment for his cigarettes. He didn’t smoke when he was with J.R., because neither Gloria nor Green smoked and she’d asked him not to “give the child bad habits.” Right. But he made up for it on the trips home.

Lighting his third unfiltered Camel of the evening, he saw the massage-parlor sign. And immediately thought of that victim’s sister. And tried not to.

Small, neat sign, this one. Blue letters on a white background lighted from underneath: A-l MASSAGE. No more blinking arrows and bright neons and all the rest of the attention-getters of two, three years ago. The few that had managed to renew their licenses tried not to draw too much attention to themselves. (The regular customers knew where to go. The tourists who searched long enough would find a place.) Vice still hassled them, and he’d spent five months on Vice and hated every day of it. No job for a real man.

Some of the girls were good-looking. Some were hard. Some were junky kids trying to feed their habits without using the streets and a nigger pimp. Some were just pathetic.

He wondered again how a girl as knockout as Diana Woodruff had sunk so low.

And how a girl who had sunk so low had the nerve to treat him the way she had!

He was raging on the instant.

He could drive over to her house right now and take her in her own bed and what the hell could the whore do, yell rape?

He laughed aloud to hear the sound, to show himself what a nothing the whole scene was. And stopped at a gas station and entered the phone booth to call Roberta and say he’d be over by eight. And dialed Diana Woodruff’s number instead.

The ring sounded six times before she answered, and her “Hello” was thick, groggy.

“It’s Lieutenant Admer. I’ve got some questions to ask. Either I come over to your place, or you come down to the Central West Station.” His hand was sweating on the phone. He was upset, and annoyed with himself for being upset.

She mumbled something he couldn’t make out.

“What’s wrong with you?” he snapped.

She cleared her throat “Doctor prescribed a sedative. Lieutenant Admer, you say?”

He began to feel lousy. “We can do it another time.”

“That’s all right. Just have to shower and clear my mind of sleep. Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.” She made a laughing sound. “Shakespeare obviously didn’t have a murdered sister.”

“I don’t really have anything important to ask, Diana.”

She was quiet, and he began to say goodbye, and she surprised him. “I haven’t eaten in almost two days. I’m either going to die or grief and starvation, or I’m going out to dinner. Want to take me?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said eagerly, then was embarrassed and tried to cover. “Maybe you’ll show me some of those massage-parlor moves, so I can use ’em on my girlfriends.” And winced because the remark sounded so gross, so stupid. “Erase that,” he muttered. “I can’t seem to say anything right with you.”

“What difference does it make?” she asked, and he regained his balance and said, “Yeah, see you in about half an hour.”

A whore, he kept reminding himself as he drove toward the coast and Malibu, with a bunch of good looks and some style and . . . and shit, a murdered sister, like she said, which made him sorry for her.

But when she answered the door to her condo, he had no thought of feeling sorry for her. Red-rimmed eyes and all, she was the best-looking woman he’d ever seen. And she knew how to dress—a long black skirt and black high heels and a satiny deep-green blouse and thin silver chains around the neck of that blouse and her hair hanging long and dark and a delicate hand that moved out to take his. He didn’t want to think of what that hand did at the parlor, and couldn’t help thinking of it. At the same time, she was about as far from cheap and whorey as she could be.

He raised her hand and kissed it.

She said, “Rather gallant for a cop.”

“Fuck my being a cop,” he snapped, angered by her patronizing manner.

“That’s more like it, Lieutenant.”

He sighed. “Sorry. Had a long day. I meant, I’m not a cop right now, with you.”

“But you are,” she said firmly. “The cop who’s going to avenge my sister.”

“Well, avenge . . .”

“That’s the word.”

He shrugged, and she kept looking at him, and he finally said, “Okay.”

She directed him to a seafood restaurant set on pilings right over the water. There were tables available, but not the one she wanted so they waited at the bar. He had a Chivas and water. She had plain water and asked if he ever experimented with alcohol—martinis, Manhattans, Margaritas, some of the more exotic drinks. He said, “No. Booze is booze.”

“Then you should drink straight domestic vodka. That way you’ll get the most effect for your money. With Scotch, bourbon, brandy, you pay for the congeners, the color and flavor elements that are as superfluous as the fruit juices, flowers, and coconut shells of exotic drinks.”

“You lecture this way all the time?”

“With friends, yes. Not that I have many.” She looked away and tapped her long, slender fingers on the bar. She wore a silver and jade ring in the shape of a curled serpent holding the Earth in its mouth.

“Nice ring,” he said. “Gift?”

“No. I bought it myself, at an auction in Beverly Hills. An extravagance, but I wanted it.”

He raised her hand for a closer look. It was as knockout as she was. And looking past her, he realized that a man at the other end of the bar, with a pretty woman of his own, was sneaking glances at Diana. And the bartender, young and bushy-haired, passed by more often than necessary. And other men at tables along the wall looked at her occasionally.

And they only saw what he had first seen. They didn’t know her voice, soft yet incisive; her obvious intelligence; her poise . . .

He was proud to be with her. Still, he heard himself saying, “I wouldn’t think you’d have to buy jewelry. Men must give you presents all the time, trying to make contact outside your place of business.”

“Carla was wearing two of those presents when she died. I sold all the others. Most were costume pieces. A few were genuine. None were to my taste.”

The maitre d’ was there, smiling at Diana, saying, “Your table is ready now, Miss Woodruff,” barely including Larry in the sweep of his arm.

But that was okay. That was part of the pleasure of being with this surprising woman.

Their table was in a corner where two glass walls met. Sitting down, they were suspended over black, rolling water which gave a shattered reflection of moon and stars. It was incredible, and he looked from the view to her, wanting to comment but afraid his words wouldn’t be right, would disappoint her. He waited for her comment.

She said, “Tell me what you’re doing to find the man who killed Carla.”

He lit a cigarette. “We’re just starting.”

“Tell me how you’re starting. How many officers are working on the case. How they’re chosen.” She leaned forward. “Tell me everything.”

He sighed. It was simple enough to explain to a cop or reporter or anyone who knew the Los Angeles Police Department. But explaining it from scratch was another matter. He’d have to shorthand it.

“When there’s a homicide, it’s given to an S.I.T., a special-investigations team. Some teams have as many as six detectives, some as few as three. Mine has four. Teams are headed up by a lieutenant, and mine operates out of the Central West Station. We were assigned the case because your sister was found in our area. My men are Marv Rodin, Vic Chasen, and a detective who hasn’t been designated yet, who’ll report tomorrow.

“When your sister was discovered Saturday morning, the information was relayed to DHQ—Detective Headquarters—in Parker Center. They phoned me at home, and I phoned Marv. If we hadn’t been available, DHQ would have sent a man of their own, who’d have filled us in the next day, then left the case. Right now we’re waiting for the autopsy and lab reports. No weapon was found, and it’s doubtful whether any fingerprints will be either—no surfaces on which to find them.”

“What,” she asked, “can you expect from the autopsy and laboratory reports?”

“Not much. We know she was killed by a twenty-two caliber firearm. We found the casing and fragments of the bullet on the sidewalk. Looks like a hollow-point load, also called dum-dums, which struck the brick apartment house wall after passing through the victim’s skull.”

She winced.

“Sorry. That’s the trouble with explaining these things to relatives. Should I stop?”

She shook her head.

“The fragments are too small to be of much use, though we’ll try to match them up with larger fragments found in the cab of the driver who was killed a few streets away. His was definitely a gangland execution. If we can tie him to your sister . . .

She was shaking her head. “I knew her life. It was remarkably free of entanglements. She had a steady boyfriend from her job. No contacts with gangsters.” She paused. “And no one on that street where she was found.”

He’d heard parents, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers and lovers, insist they knew everything there was to know about a victim’s or criminal’s life. And from long experience had learned that no one knew everything about another person; that in fact, people knew remarkably little about each other.

Diana Woodruff was a smart woman, but she fit the surviving-relative pattern . . . which gave him a badly needed shot of superiority.

He said, “She might have been a passenger in the cab, or witnessed the shooting from the street. She might have been chased by the killer; gone several blocks before she was caught and killed. That’s our best hope for a solution.”

“Why? I thought gangland executions were rarely solved.”

“Oh, we solve a few. Because we can use snitches—police informants—who are often underworld figures themselves. But if it’s a random killing, then we’re in big trouble. That’s why I thought . . .” He stopped, and she finished for him:

“That Carla was a prostitute. Because psychopaths often pick on streetwalkers, or those they classify as such. From Jack the Ripper on. But would such a man be satisfied with one victim? The Ripper wasn’t. The Hillside Strangler kept killing; so did Son of Sam.”

“There’s no way of telling. For every repeat killer, there might be a thousand one-shot psychos who never get identified as such, or even caught. But one thing is certain: Here in Los Angeles, we’ve had no recent killings that match your sister’s.”

“Have you interviewed the tenants in that apartment house near where she was found?”

“More than half, and we’re still in the process. So far, no one saw a thing or heard a sound.”

“Not a sound? How can that be—a gun going off on a quiet street at night?”

“Small calibers like twenty-twos don’t make all that much noise. And then there’s the possibility it’s a silenced weapon. Professional killers sometimes use them. A professional killer wouldn’t go out hunting hookers—those he thinks are hookers. Which is reason to believe your sister witnessed the driver’s death and was eliminated because of it. Then again, there’s no law which says a psycho can’t get hold of a silenced weapon.”

“Any other prospects?”

“We’re hoping the lab comes up with skin, hair, or cloth under your sister’s fingernails. If she struggled with the killer . . .” He shrugged. “It’s not likely she got the chance with a pro. And if it was a random killing, the odds aren’t good that we’ll find him.”

“Unless he kills again.”

“Right. Then the odds begin to narrow.”

“Though Jack the Ripper was never caught.”

He spread his hands, apologizing for the failings of his profession.

“I guess it was simpler in Chaucer’s day,” she murmured. “ ‘Murder will out,’ he said. Cervantes said it too.”

He remembered Chaucer from an English Lit course. “Maybe they were talking about religion, not detection. Some people believe a murderer is punished by God and his conscience, no matter what the law does.”

She was looking at him, surprised . . . which both insulted and pleased him. “Do you believe that?” she asked.

He would have liked to comfort her. But then again, he doubted she would believe such crap. He said, “Unless we kill them or jail them, they get away with it. And even when we jail them, I don’t think I’ve seen one killer in ten who’s sorry for anything except that he got caught.”

She nodded, and their food came. He enjoyed his fresh snapper, looking from the sea to her every so often, trying to get her to share the experience. But she kept her head down, eating quickly. Maybe too quickly, because she suddenly stopped, pressing her hands to her stomach.

“Excuse me,” she said, and left the table.

She was gone about five minutes, and returned holding a tissue to her mouth. “Would you mind if we went home?”

He called for the waiter.

At her door, he said, “Don’t bother asking me in,” because he was sure she wasn’t going to. Also, he wanted to make some sort of impression on her. She’d certainly made one on him!

At the same time, he couldn’t help wondering if her stomachache was real, or an act to dump him early.

He began to turn away.

She said, “Will you call me again?”

“Or drop in at the parlor,” he muttered.

She opened her door.

“Forgot. No cops allowed,” he said.

She went inside.

He wondered why the hell he should feel ashamed, and stalked off. But he turned back before he reached his car.

She answered the bell. He said, “Sorry. I’ll call again.”

She said, “I’ll look forward to it. And to holding my dinner down next time.” She smiled.

He wanted to kiss that beautiful smile. Wanted to very badly. But he nodded and walked away.

He used Sunset to drive from the shore to Laurel Canyon, then took Laurel north past Mulholland into the Valley to Studio City. It was better than an hour’s trip, and he never traveled that far for a chick.

But as he entered his apartment, he realized he could hardly wait for the next time.