Читать книгу One Murder at a Time: A Casebook - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 8

BLACK BOY IN A BOX

“I don’t think so. I don’t work narco. Never have.”

“I know that. I have your record right here.”

“Well, then.”

“Besides, I’ve known you for your whole career.”

“Well, then.”

“Tell me why you feel this way, Marvia. You’re one of my best people. You’re a fine detective. You have a great arrest record and an outstanding conviction rate. Why don’t you want this assignment?”

Sergeant Marvia Plum shifted in her chair. It wasn’t just that Lieutenant Yamura was her boss. If anything, that should have made it easier. Keep things objective, professional. Don’t let your feelings get control. But it wasn’t that way. Lieutenant Yamura was her friend and had been her sponsor in the Berkeley Police Department, had coaxed her into the job to start with, and had pushed her promotion to sergeant.

More, Dorothy Yamura had helped her get her job and her stripes back when she’d resigned from the force to marry and move out of state, and then returned with an annulment in one pocket and a restraining order against her new ex in the other.

“Look, Dorothy, I’ve got a twelve-year-old. He asks me why it’s okay for me to have a drink after work. And he wants to know why it’s okay for TV stars to smoke cigarettes and baseball players to chew tobacco, but a high school kid can get busted for smoking a joint. And I have a hard time answering him.”

Dorothy sighed. “It’s the law.”

Marvia shook her head. “I tell him that. The law is the law. But he just turns off. And I don’t blame him.”

“So you don’t want to work narco.”

Marvia nodded. She wouldn’t refuse the assignment if Dorothy Yamura made it an order, but short of that, she hoped she could argue her way out of it or plead her way out of it. She’d much rather work on a nice juicy murder.

But Dorothy Yamura wasn’t biting. “We’re not talking about high school kids smoking a little pot, Marvia. We’re talking about bad, bad stuff. We’re talking about crack and smack and ice. And we’re pretty sure that the stuff is going through the Crash Club.”

“Okay.” Marvia touched the corner of her badge, as if subconsciously afraid that it wouldn’t be there. “Just raid the place.”

“You’re kidding. We’d have a riot. Hundreds of university students, slumming yuppies, you know the kind of trashing we’d take in the city council?”

“Who owns the club?”

“Solomon San Remo.”

“Saintly Solly?”

“The very.”

“I thought he was running some kind of real estate scam. You sure we’re talking about the same leading citizen?”

“Yes.”

Marvia caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the glass fronting on a citation hanging on the wall behind Dorothy Yamura’s desk. Short, black hair. Dark complexion, heavy bones, a generous figure that required a constant struggle to keep under control. Her Berkeley police uniform was immaculate, although she knew she’d work in civvies if she worked a narco case.

“Last I knew, Solly was running a youth rehab center on University Avenue. Pulling in funds all over the place—federal, state, city, private donors, do-gooder foundations. What’s he doing running a nightclub?”

“You know Solly. He managed to live high and sock away a fat retirement fund for himself, bought up a nice parcel of real estate on University, announced the ground-breaking for his project.”

Yamura paused. Marvia Plum waited for her to go on, and finally she did.

“Wouldn’t you know, the whole thing just never quite happened. The neighbors started hollering NIMBY. Everybody was in favor of a rehab center, but Not In My Back Yard! They got their city council member—who had been one hundred per cent in favor of San Remo and his good works—to fight against it when it came up for a vote. You know the buzz-words. Dangerous characters roaming the streets, school children and old people getting mugged or worse, send these troubled individuals off to the wholesome air of the countryside someplace.”

“I get it,” Marvia put in. “So there was Solomon San Remo with all that real estate and nothing to build on it.”

“Right.” Yamura stood up and studied some papers held onto a file cabinet with superhero magnets. Marvia Plum recognized Mary Marvel and Supergirl and Wonder Woman. “Guess I don’t need my invitation to a retirement party three weeks ago. A free pass to a movie that closed last month.” She pulled a few scraps from beneath the magnets and dropped them in her waste basket.

“So now he wants to put up a couple of condo’s on the land. Take him years to pull that deal together and get it through all the boards and commissions. But in the meanwhile he wound up owning the Crash Club and he’s kept it open because it generates a nice little cash flow for him.”

Marvia Plum let the heel of her hand rest on the grip of the 9 mm. Glock resting in a holster on her hip. She’d got so accustomed to carrying a piece in her years on the Berkeley force, she’d felt half-naked without it when she moved to Nevada. It was a comfort to have it back.

She said, “Who’s dealing the dope at San Remo’s club?”

Yamura looked stolidly at Marvia. “I don’t know.”

“Have we talked to Solly? Is he cooperating? If we can show criminal activity at his club, even if he isn’t involved, unless he exercises due diligence he can lose his license.”

“That’s just it. We think Solly himself is behind it. Either he’s looking the other way, letting the pushers do their work and taking baksheesh for his kindness—or he’s actively involved.”

“What do our sources say?”

“Nothing. Nada. Nix. You have to get past Solly’s personal door dragon to get into the club, and he’s got a sharp eye. Seems as if he knows all the regular junkies and speed freaks in town, won’t let ’em inside the place. And a real terror on ID. Crash Club caters to UC students, twenty-something’s, yuppies. We can’t even get an underage kid in there to bust ’em for selling liquor.”

Marvia Plum lowered her face into her hands and pressed against her eyelids. Flashes of light went off inside her eyes. Images of past busts, trials, funerals. “Okay.” She raised her head. “Okay, Dorothy. What’s our strategy?”

Dorothy Yamura briefed Marvia on the plan for taking down the operation at the Crash Club. When she finished talking, Marvia stood up and turned to leave Yamura’s office. Dorothy stopped her with a word. “Marvia.”

Plum turned around and waited.

“Marvia,” Yamura repeated, “What convinced you?”

Marvia managed a weak smile. “You know I’m a realist, Dorothy. I don’t believe in ghosts or visions or ESP or UFO’s or any other hooey. I go to church once in a while, but that’s not belief, it’s desperation.”

Yamura raised her eyebrows. She was in uniform today, her creases razor-sharp and her lieutenant’s insignia glistening in the cold glare of fluorescents. She waited for Marvia to get to the point.

She did. “I had a little vision. Something like old Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas Yet-to-Come.” She shuddered and rubbed her hands against the sleeves of her woolen uniform blouse; the friction gave her a little warmth. “I saw my boy in a box. Is it too late, Spirit? Can I not change this, Spirit? I’ll do anything it takes, Dorothy.”

* * * *

The Crash Club was on the north side of University Avenue, less than a mile from the UC campus. The doors opened at 9:00 PM, and the first band wasn’t scheduled to play until 11:00. Marvia Plum had checked out and gone home for a quiet nap and a light meal before making her rendezvous a few blocks from the club.

Time was, time had been, when she could have worked a full day, stayed up most of the night on a stakeout and gone back to work after a shower and breakfast. Right. And time had been when she could party all night and keep on going the next morning, too.

She wondered if she could pass for young enough to patronize the Crash Club.

She was teamed with Evangeline Rhee. Marvia had known Vangie for years, knew that she had worked deep cover for the DEA before she got disgusted with the agency’s tactics and her boss’s high-handed attitude and resigned. No explosion, no confrontation, that wouldn’t have been Vangie’s way. A quiet, dignified letter of resignation, and a new job at the local cop-shop.

Vangie had started life as a forensic photographer. She knew everything there was to know about lenses and shutter speeds, apertures and emulsions. Moving from that role into undercover work had brought her out of the lab and into the world of hitters and snatchers, bagmen and mules. Her later hiring by the BPD was done quietly and she pursued a public career as a celebrity photog, a member of the paparazzi gang who would turn up at everything from opening night at the San Francisco Opera to opening day at the Oakland Coliseum. She sold photos to the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Trib, the Express, and the San Francisco Mirror.

And she got into backstage scenes, dressing rooms and locker rooms and smoke-filled rooms (there were still a few of those) and provided reports to the Berkeley PD Intelligence Unit that had put more than one fence, skank, or sleaze-bag into San Quentin, Soledad, or Pelican Bay. It was risky work, and she knew that if her cover were blown she’d be lucky to get out alive.

She loved it.

Dorothy Yamura had told Marvia that there would be a couple of male plainclothes officers in the crowd at the Crash Club, and a ’tac squad ready to close in if needed. That was the good news. But the officers going inside would be unarmed. The Crash Club’s bouncer/manager, “Chuff” Fernández, had installed a metal detector just inside the club’s doorway. No guns, no knives, no weapons in the club.

It was a good idea. Nobody could complain about that, not even City Councilmember Sherry Hanson, last of the red-hot radicals. She considered the police department a pack of Fascist pigs and Marvia Plum a traitor to her race, her gender, and her class.

The detector kept weapons out of the club. It also meant that the police couldn’t carry their normal equipment with them without giving themselves away.

Marvia had raised that question, and Dorothy Yamura had said, “We can’t risk it. If Solly is in cahoots with the pushers—or if Chuff Fernández is—and we clear our presence in advance, there’s no way we’ll catch anything. The support will be outside, that’s the best I can offer.”

Now Marvia and Vangie stood on the sidewalk outside the Crash Club.

They were surrounded by celebrants of varied persuasions. Most of the line was composed of young people, and it was moving, up ahead. Red and blue neon made garish patterns on the customers. Some got past Chuff Fernández and disappeared beneath the Crash Club’s neon logo. Others too young to pass muster were turned away. Some tried to argue the point, but Fernández never yielded.

Ahead of Marvia and Vangie were a couple with spiked Mohawks, the taller partner’s hair dyed a vivid green; the shorter partner’s, a rich maroon. They wore identical black biker’s jackets and silver chains running from their ears to their nostrils.

The line lurched and Marvia felt a shove from behind. She turned and saw that the person behind her was apparently alone. Not that it mattered: he was big enough for a party of four. His skull was completely hairless but he sported a bushy iron-gray beard. His forehead had a single word tattooed on it: TOD. Drops of blood—Marvia realized they were simulated—ran from the letters and disappeared into the man’s eyes. He wore a long-sleeved shirt with fancy embroidery at the cuffs: braid like the decoration on an army officer’s dress uniform, with a grinning dinosaur peeking between the loops. At least the strange man had a sense of humor.

Outside the Crash Club, what looked like a onetime church announcement board had been adapted to list the night’s attractions. Hitler Youth…Smutnik…PRYZN GYRLS.

The line reached the door. Marvia had the price of admission in her hand but Vangie Rhee held up her camera with one hand and her press pass with the other. She was testing a new electronic camera tonight, courtesy of the San Francisco Mirror. A combination camcorder and minicomputer, it would allegedly store an image on a silicon chip instead of a piece of celluloid and display the image on a rectangular screen without benefit of chemicals.

Chuff Fernández nodded at Vangie. Vangie pointed over her shoulder at Marvia. Chuff grabbed Marvia by her biceps and propelled her inside the club. He was dark-skinned, darker even than Marvia. His shirt had a Cuban flag on it. He didn’t say a word.

At least she’d got through the metal detector with her badge in her pocket. Not enough metal in it to set off an alarm. She might not be able to apply deadly force, but if it came down to it she might accomplish something with moral force.

Sure.

The club was already jammed. If the BPD or the ABC didn’t close it down, Marvia thought, then the Fire Marshal ought to give it a try.

The bands had brought out their respective followings, and Marvia played a silent game, identifying patrons by their musical taste. It was easy enough to pick out Hitler Youth’s fans—skinheads, some of them in T-shirts and jeans, some in pseudo-military attire. Swastika necklaces and sneering faces and lots of bad complexions. Smutnik fans wore death-white makeup and black clothes, black hair and black lipstick. There were even a few black Smutniks with deep white sockets painted around their eyes to simulate death.

And PRYZN GYRLZ seemed to draw Lesbian couples. When a pair drew near one of them put an arm across Marvia’s chest and leaned her mouth against her ear. Her breath was hot and moist. She said, “Ditch the white bitch, honey, what’s the matter with you?”

Marvia shook free. “We’re just friends,” she managed.

The two PRYZN GYRLZ fans traded looks and nods. They were both wearing PRYZN GYRLZ T-shirts. “Sure, honey. Just don’t waste it. Come on over and have a drink.” They headed for the bar.

Marvia looked at Vangie.

Vangie’s eyes lit up as if she’d seen an old friend and she disappeared into the crowd.

Marvia and her new friends fought through the crush to reach the bar. Somehow they succeeded. Marvia found herself with a new friend on either side. Two black women, both of them in sweat-stained T-shirts. Marvia wore a sweatshirt, its sleeves chopped at the shoulders. She missed the familiar weight of a piece on her hip or in a shoulder holster. The bar was dark wood, had a real brass rail, a huge mirror on the wall behind the bartenders. Clearly, the heritage of some earlier incarnation of the Crash Club.

One of Marvia’s new friends yelled at a female bartender. She slapped a bill onto the wood. The bartender drew three beers into plastic cups and set them on the mahogany. There was a stack of paper napkins printed with the Crash Club’s logo, a huge, ancient Buick convertible wrapped around a tree.

The woman to Marvia’s left raised her glass and said, “To us, honey.” They all drank. Marvia took as little beer as she could; it wasn’t the old drinking-on-duty taboo, she just needed to keep her wits as sharp and her reflexes as fast as she could.

The club was already dark, Marvia thought, when she came past Chuff Fernández. Now it got darker. A spotlight hit a man standing on the stage. Marvia recognized Solomon San Remo, but just barely. He’d been a heavyset man when she’d known him—or known of him—in the past. She hadn’t seen him for a long time, not since a couple of years before she moved to Nevada and not since she’d moved back. Now he looked emaciated. He wore his iron gray hair in a pony-tail and a hippie-style headband straight out of the Summer of Love.

He announced the first band.

Hitler Youth pounded and screamed at the audience. They wore fatigue caps with death’s head insignia and they flashed Nazi salutes. The audience shifted like a giant organism. By osmosis, skinheads moved toward the stage. They returned the salutes and shouted. “Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

The room seemed to grow hotter. Marvia was sweating. She realized this was no illusion. The body heat of a couple of hundred young, sweating, jumping humans could raise the temperature to any level. One of Marvia’s new friends had her arm around her shoulder.

Marvia said, “I have to—” She left the sentence hanging. She’d put her beer back on the wood. She headed for the bathroom. She managed to squeeze into the room. It was as crowded as the club itself. She smelled a too-familiar odor, pungent and slightly sweet. Somebody was passing a joint around. She didn’t care. She was looking for bigger game. The city council had ordered the police to give marijuana offenses the lowest possible priority anyway, lower than throwing gum wrappers in the street, and she wasn’t going to waste her time on a simple weed bust.

She squeezed into a stall and relieved herself and headed back to the floor. Hitler Youth was taking an encore. An ancient advertising clock shaped like a DeSoto sedan showed that they’d played for forty minutes. Marvia didn’t know about that. For a while there it had seemed as if they’d been pounding and howling for centuries.

A fight broke out between a skinhead and a fat white woman in a PRYZN GYRLZ T-shirt. From nowhere, a squad of bouncers appeared and surrounded the fighters. Marvia recognized Chuff Fernández among them, giving directions. In seconds the skinhead was out of sight, the woman returned to her friends. It was as if nothing had happened.

Marvia was at the edge of the stage. From her perspective she could see into the wings on the opposite side. There wasn’t much room there, but some paparazzi were crammed into a few square feet of space. Marvia recognized Vangie Rhee, her classic Korean features distinctive.

For a moment Vangie looked down into the audience and Marvia caught her eye and nodded. Vangie made a gesture with her head.

A figure emerged from the shadows on the far end of the stage and Solomon San Remo walked to the microphone and announced Smutnik.

They were less abrasive than Hitler Youth. The Nazi wanna-be’s drifted away from the stage. Maybe they were leaving the club, headed off to meetings somewhere to practice goose-stepping or read selections from Mein Kampf. If they knew how to read. Smutnik played a kind of slow, pulsing dirge. A singer slithered up to the microphone and mumbled monotonous lyrics in an androgynous voice.

The audience took its signal from the band, swaying slowly, looking as if they were interested only in slow, dreamy oblivion.

The skinheads had been candidates for ice, for crank, for whatever form of speed was this year’s charted hit. Hitler himself, Marvia had learned, liked uppers. Cocaine had been the drug of choice in the Fuhrerbunker. Smutnik fans were a different breed. They would go for reds, booze, Quaaludes, ecstasy.

If anybody came to the club stoned, there was no way the police could control that. Marvia would have staked a week’s pay that half the audience, at least, had some form of illegal substance in their bloodstream. But there had been no evidence of pushing in the Crash Club. At this rate, the night’s efforts were going to come up with a fat nothing.

Marvia drifted through the club. The wall opposite the bar was covered with a mural left over from an earlier era. She recognized some of the faces from her childhood. She and her brother, Tyrone, had been too young to participate fully in the Sixties phenomenon, but living in Berkeley they had been exposed to all of the controversy and all of the euphoria of that brief, colorful era.

There was Jimi Hendrix, there was Janis Joplin, there were Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia. All of them dead. All of them victims.

The powder flowed, the needles gleamed, the crack pipes glowed and still they died. They never learned.

She thought of a black boy in a box.

She saw a familiar face, recognized a Berkeley cop in beard and army fatigues. He was dancing with another Berkeley cop. The bearded officer locked eyes with Marvia, nodded, gestured toward the stage with his head.

Smutnik was off the stage and Solomon San Remo was giving the featured band of the evening a big buildup. Women were crowding toward the stage, some of them yelling at San Remo and gesturing at him, urging him off the stage. He took the hint and disappeared.

PRYZN GYRLZ charged onto the stage.

Their fans cheered as if nothing else in the universe mattered.

The band leaped into their first number, the drummer pounding at her drum-kit, the bass player thundering deep notes, the guitarist making her instrument screech and wail. Marvia felt tears of pain come to her eyes.

The leader of the band was a tall, bony young woman with vaguely Asian features. She clutched a cordless mike, panted into it, rubbed it on her body. She used the stage name Apryl Pyzn, Marvia knew from her briefing.

The PRYZN GYRLZ fans jumped and chanted.

Apryl Pyzn retreated to the back of the stage. There wasn’t much room. The singer ran full-tilt to the front of the stage and launched herself into the air.

A dozen arms emerged from the crowd and caught her. She was passed across the heads of the crowd, the microphone still in her hand, holding it to one ecstatic fan after another, to add a word or a phrase to the song. The rest of PRYZN GYRLZ stayed on the stage, working their instruments to the max.

The singer came within inches of Marvia. She saw the woman, her face covered with perspiration, her expression entranced. An arm came up from the crowd. Marvia couldn’t see who wore it but she recognized part of a shirt-sleeve, an odd cuff with gold braid and a grinning dinosaur. And she saw something else. She saw something flash toward Apryl Pyzn’s leg, then disappear back into the crowd. At the same moment she saw a flash from the stage wings, as bright and brief as a photographer’s flashbulb.

Something else appeared in Apryl Pyzn’s face: surprise; and then she was gone, surfing across the crowd, handed back toward the stage and pushed upright.

She looked around. Marvia spotted Vangie Rhee in the wings, shooting the stage and the audience. Then Apryl Pyzn looked pleased, then she dropped the cordless microphone and slumped to the stage.

Women in the front of the room started screaming. The bass player and guitarist dropped their instruments and ran to Apryl. The drummer, absorbed in her music, pounded away for thirty seconds that seemed like a month before she looked up from her drum-kit, stopped playing, dropped her sticks and tried to run straight toward Apryl, forgetting that the floor-mounted bass drum and top-hat cymbals were between them. The drums and cymbals crashed to the stage. A heavy brass disk bounced once and then crashed into the crowd.

Marvia grabbed the undercover officer she had spotted earlier, yelled, “Get out, get backup,” and headed for the stage. She held her badge in a red-gel spotlight and shouted. “Everyone stay calm. Turn on the house-lights. No one leave, the club is surrounded by police officers.”

There was a stir in the crowd as the fat man with TOD tattooed on his forehead tried to escape from the crowd but he moved too late. He reached the club’s stage door and ran into the arms of half a dozen Berkeley police officers.

* * * *

Sergeant Marvia Plum and Detective Evangeline Rhee sat in Dorothy Yamura’s office; the man with TOD tattooed on his forehead sat in a conference room nearby, talking earnestly with his lawyer. The man with TOD tattooed on his forehead looked dramatically different than he had at the Crash Club. The blood-red word and the simulated drops of blood were gone, washed clean after he had been photographed by police ID techs.

More, he looked oddly shrunken. The belly was gone. His T-shirt hung loose around his torso and his jeans would have fallen off if he hadn’t held them up with one hand. If it hadn’t been for his heavy beard, he could have passed for the brother of Solomon San Remo.

Dorothy Yamura gazed levelly at Marvia Plum and Vangie Rhee. “I thought I’d heard everything, but this one is new to me. The fake tattoos weren’t a big surprise, I’ve seen perps before who put on some bizarre garment or wig to distract attention from their faces, so the tattoo makes sense. Grisly sense of humor, though. Tod.”

“I thought that was his name,” Marvia put in, “or maybe the name of a lost love.”

“That would be Todd with two d’s. Tod with one d is German for Death. And that’s what he was peddling. Good thing your new little camera works, Vangie.”

Computer-generated blowups of the key frames Vangie had shot during Apryl Pyzn’s final crowd-surf lay on her desk. In one of them the tell-tale embroidered sleeve was visible. From it protruded a hand holding a hypodermic needle, about to plunge it into Apryl Pyzn’s leg.

“But that fake belly…where do you think he got the idea for that?”

“Some movie,” Evangeline put in. “They send stills to us at the Mirror and the other papers all the time. They can make a fake anything now, that you can hardly tell from a real one. Including a big roly-poly belly.”

“And Tod—or whatever his real name is—carried his stock of poison inside the fake belly. In the Crash Club it was easy to deliver his drugs and collect cash. Dark, crowded, the place was full of odd characters, most of them anonymous. As for killing Apryl Pyzn—we’re still checking her background, and the rest of PRYZN GYRLZ, but I expect we’ll learn that Tod was their supplier and he got into some kind of fight with Apryl. She wouldn’t pay her bills, or he’d been delivering bad merchandise, or—whatever. We’ll find out. I expect the other PRYZN GYRLZ will be happy to cut a deal and get Tod sent away forever if not longer.”

Dorothy Yamura allowed herself one of her rare smiles. “You think you could work narco again, Marvia?”

Marvia didn’t answer at once. She was thinking of her son, in bed and asleep now. She thought of him in the daylight, running, laughing, alive.