Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 11

THE INTERVIEW ROOM was small, a dispiriting box without windows. There was a battered steel desk with broken-backed swivel chairs on either side. The walls were pale brown, with no decoration, and the floor, which had once been painted the same color, was now scuffed and scratched. In this room a sixteen-year-old had confessed to me how she’d shot her father. Drunk, he’d made the mistake of falling asleep in front of the TV, having sodomized her the previous night. I’d shown a mother photographs of her homosexual son, beaten to death with a frying pan; his body wasn’t found until five days later, by which time maggots had got to his face, and his scrotal sack was swollen the size of a football. Here I’d told a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people about the death of a loved one. As a situation it was no longer quite real for me but one of those moments when I felt the awful unreality of the real.

I glanced at the snapshot I’d picked up in Mae Richards’s house. Technically, this was a no-no, against all the rules that said never to monkey with a crime scene; legally, it was a misdemeanor. I wasn’t even sure what had made me take it. In the picture Ricky Lee had a full, soft, grinning face. He’d probably been about sixteen at the time. Thinking about the tennis racquet, I remembered reading somewhere that he’d been a star athlete at Venice High.

My own mother had died in a hospital ward in the north of England, the room so hot the paint had blistered on the walls, her shivering body eaten so thin it scarcely left an impression on the mattress. She’d died sorry to miss the performance of The Mikado that was coming up in next year’s amateur theatricals. She’d been afraid, though I was the one who’d gripped her hand tight: don’t go.

Maybe there’s no such thing as an easy death. My mother’s had been slow, a terrible disintegration of the sort we all fear, though most people’s special modern dread is reserved for sudden death, by which we don’t mean unlingering death — that would be OK — but violent death, in the street, or on the freeway, a quickening of fear and then . . . what? Extinction? For a few seconds, from out of nowhere, at a stupid art gallery party, I’d heard the engine turning. I didn’t feel shaky. I felt like I’d been watching TV too long. My nerves were lasered.

A uniformed patrolman brought in Ricky Lee with his hands cuffed behind him. Tall, skinny, aloof, his face much gaunter now, Ricky Lee wore a black suit and a trim goatee beard. His dark eyes popped out and his dark hair, falling thick on either side of a middle part, was cut off at the top of the ear — a warrior’s helmet of dreadlocks. Thick blood oozed around his nose and mouth, staining the brilliance of his teeth. I wondered if Mae Richards had thought of him as she died. His eyes met mine without greeting or any noticeable change of expression. He glanced down at the floor, and when he raised his head he let his eyes hit me this time with a murderous, searing rage. “Where’s my mother?”

The beefy patrolman was a Cuban, a tortilla cowboy who’d once played ball in the minor leagues and carried at his hip not the Department automatic, but a Smith & Wesson special issue six-shooter in a quick-draw holster. I said, “You the guy who made the arrest?”

“Yes, sir,” he said carefully, talking Pentel pencil language, the one they write the reports in and rub out and change later. The Department used more erasers than the entire LA Unified School District. “The suspect rushed at me and my partner, sir, and we were compelled to restrain him.”

“Very good.” I glanced at the name on his badge. “Officer Campes. I’ll take the report now. Thanks. You may leave us.”

When he’d gone I took the report and ripped it in two, then in four, then in eight, and scattered the pieces on the floor. I said to Ricky Lee, “You and I both know this is bullshit. Your lawyer’ll show up any minute and he’ll serve you out of here faster than Archimedes jumping out of the bath.”

“I’m supposed to be impressed?” His voice was neither high nor low.

“No, you’re not supposed to be impressed.” I’d read in a book about a doctor out in the Midwest who healed people with the smell of herbs and flowers. She cured senility with laurel leaves, asthma with geraniums. For high blood pressure, rosemary was best. It was mostly in the people’s minds, of course, and therefore she had to be very careful about the way she presented each of them with their different flower. She had to gain their trust, almost as if she were trying to seduce them. Interviews are like that. You have to hand over the flower, just so — sometimes gently, or the other way. “You’re free to go,” I said. “But before you do you should probably take this with you.” I held out the snapshot I’d taken from the house. “I took it. I stole it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

He glanced at the photo, then into my eyes, but it was his that changed. “What’s happened to her? What’s happened to her, man?”

“There’s no easy way to say this. Your mother’s dead. She was murdered.”

He staggered, about to fall, but when I reached out to grab him, he pushed me away and drew himself up again. “Get your fucking hands off me. Fuckin’ asshole. Fuckin’ cop.”

Ricky Lee’s rap sheet was pretty much what I’d expected: burglary, burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of . . . possession of . . . possession of . . . Most of these convictions had occurred before he was twenty, and he was now twenty-seven. Until tonight there’d been only one arrest in seven years; extraordinary, given that so many acronyms were intent on taking him down. Ricky Lee was the real thing, no doubt about it, a live proper gangster. There was a story that once, after a drug deal turned bad, the two colleagues who’d double-crossed him were tied, blindfolded, and bundled into the back of a closed truck, where Ricky Lee himself had shut their mouths with duct tape. The truck had been driven down to San Diego, and all the while Ricky Lee was in the passenger seat, reading out poetry and passages from the Bible. The word was that Ricky Lee liked to read. He’d only learned when he was in jail in his late teens, and now he was making up for lost time. The men must have known, during the two-hour drive, that they were certain to die. They were taken to an abandoned motel, where Ricky Lee shot them in the head. The bodies were found stacked in the bathtub. No one had been able to prove this, but no one doubted it either. It became a story everyone in the Department heard at one time or another, a part of Ricky Lee’s legend, along with the usual Robin-Hood-of-the-ghetto bullshit.

He’d become famous following that one recent arrest, when he was put on trial for the attempted murder of a federal officer. This was after a rush-hour shoot-out on the Santa Monica Freeway. He’d escaped by getting out of his car, jumping over the meridian, and somehow weaving his way through the traffic. The pursuing ATF agent, busy capping off rounds from his machine pistol, was swiped by a Mexican in a 1962 Chevy flatbed and wound up in Cedars-Sinai with both legs broken and early retirement on full pay.

The ATF guys claimed that Ricky Lee had fired a shot at them, initiating the shoot-out, and that he’d fled, leaving behind a kilo of coke in the trunk of his car. The trial was a fiasco. Ricky Lee’s attorneys established first that it was the federal agents who’d fired all the shots, and after that it was only logical to conclude that the coke had been a plant. Ricky Lee walked; he skated; he made fools of them all.

I had no feelings about any of this one way or the other. There’d be media heat on the case because of his involvement, which would mean pressure from within the Department to come up with a perpetrator quickly. If I did, I’d give myself some help toward the next promotion; if I didn’t, I’d lay the blame on other factors, whether human or not. Homicide was a career and not a moral problem. For me it hadn’t always been such, but then, as my father once said, “Age doesn’t bring wisdom, but it sure makes you more tired. You can’t go on beating your head against the world.” I didn’t feel the full extent to which I’d become an outsider; nor did I sense the beginnings of a long journey to the inside, free fall.

“Here’s some of the precinct’s special poison yolk. The comedians among us call it coffee,” I said, setting down two plastic cups, at which he didn’t even glance.

Ricky Lee’s watchfulness was impressive, frightening, but he registered only the important details: my face, the Sony tape recorder I took from a drawer in the table, the door, which was still open behind him. “Suppose you tell me about it, when you’re ready. I’m going to use this, OK?” I held up a cassette tape and flipped it into the Sony. “Let’s talk about your mother. Easy stuff. When was the last time you saw her?”

He wasn’t about to cave so easily. His hands were steady in front of him on the table.

“Maybe you killed her yourself.”

He kicked back the chair and stood, raising his fist and baring his teeth. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker.”

“Hey, good! You have feelings.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” he said, but wiping blood from his hand on the table.

“She didn’t get shot by magic, Ricky Lee. It happened. One billiard ball hit another and somehow it led to her death. Are you going to help me or not?”

He sat back down in the chair, his eyes challenging mine with the same defiant stare.

“When did you last see her?”

His eyes didn’t budge. “Three days.”

“Where?”

“At her house.”

“Did you see her often?”

“Once, maybe twice a month. We kept in touch. She’d never take money from me, or nothing like that.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Shit, man, I don’t remember.” His eyes went dead as the moon. “She was always wanting me to go to church. We listened to some music. She loved to hear music.”

Ellen loved music. “Moody food,” she called it. Her brain fumed with that, while my own still sometimes steamed for our lost love.

I said, “What music?”

“Old stuff, her stuff. Jazz, soul.”

At first he was unable to accept even that the murder had happened, that the power of its prevention had eluded him; now he was starting to think about the perpetrator. Later, grief would bring him all the way back around the track.

“Someone do this to get at you?”

“Any fool on the street know better than to pull some shit like this,” he said, and as his eyes fired up again, there was the bright flash of something in the upper right corner of his mouth. At first I thought it was gold set in a tooth; it was a diamond.

“Who killed her?”

The dreadlocks danced on his head. “I don’t know, man, but when I find out, that fool is a dead fool.”

I was calm, sipping my coffee. “You ain’t gonna pull any of that revenge shit, because if you do I’ll bust you, Ricky Lee. You’ll go down just like I shot you in the head. But you know what? That ain’t gonna happen. You’re gonna help solve this case. And you’re gonna start by telling me as much as you can about your mother. Who she was. Who her friends were. Where she worked, if she worked. Cop shit. Then I’m gonna go get the bad guy. That’s the way it works.”

Some statements are meant to soothe, some to echo, others to entice. This one was a confrontation, and he rounded on me, lashing out, yet not quite relaxing the tight control of his anger. “You’re a cop. You ain’t interested in who killed my mother. Making yourself look good, that’s all you fuckin’ care about. I spit on you, cop. Your fuckin’ clearance rate, that’s what worries you, keepin’ your ship nice and clean so you look good for your superiors. You know nuthin’ ‘bout where I live. You know nuthin’ ‘bout justice or the way I feel. How could you? Fuckin’ uniform.”

I said, “You finished yet?”

For a moment he fought the impulse to jump across the desk and try to kill me then and there. I said, “Where’s your father?”

“Don’t know. Ain’t never seen him.”

“Never?”

“He took off after I was born.”

“Did she talk about him?”

“He didn’t have nuthin’ to do with this.”

“That’s for me to find out. Did she talk about him?”

He sighed, giving way a little. “Yeah, she talked about him. He was some kind of a musician, living up in San Francisco last I heard.”

“Address or number?”

He shook his head. This was Jack the Bear, getting nowhere.

“Any brothers or sisters?”

“I had a brother. He died. He was shot.” His bulging eyes stared straight into mine. “That was to do with me.”

“When?”

“Seven years ago.”

“What happened?”

“Two cholos from Culver City took him out. Was me they was looking for. Now those two cholos are long gone. Missing in action.”

Poor Mae Richards: husband fled, one son murdered, the other a dope dealer; she must have been a remarkable woman to have come through such catastrophe and chaos, all that life, and then only to end butchered, dead on her own kitchen floor. Some cases are simple. Others take you on journeys you never forget. Connections spark, doors open. There are unexpected tunnels and detours. Drew Diamond talked about the termite holes of cause and effect. A case might take you into not just one other world, but several. You might find all the rules altered. You might sink there like a stone.

“You know she’d never take nothing from me. Nothing. She went to clean houses rather than take my money. I could’ve looked after her, man. She didn’t need to live in that house no more.”

“Where did she work?”

“What?” His eyes shot out again, weapons.

“You mentioned that she cleaned houses. Where did she do that? Any names and addresses?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

I leaned back in my chair. On the table between us the tape was still running in the Sony. “I know how you feel.”

His look wasn’t watchful now, or even contemptuous. He wanted to burn me down.

“I know you don’t believe that and I don’t really care whether you do or not,” I said. “But you have to do better.”

“Why the fuck should I?”

“I need more. Think, Ricky Lee. Help me help you.”

His shoulders quivered a little beneath the discreetly expensive black cloth of his jacket. My own was from Loehmann’s, year-end sale. He said, “Was it quick?”

I thought about the burn marks on Mae Richards’s chest, about the fact that she’d been tied. “It was quick.”

“You lyin’?”

“No, I’m not lying.”

He absent-mindedly put his hand to his mouth and then to his forehead, leaving a smear of blood. “You’re a murder cop, right?”

“Head of the homicide section.”

He said something strange. “You a good man?”

This wasn’t a matter I sat around discussing with Diamond, Cataresco, and the others in the squad room. Mostly we talked about where and what to eat. “I try.”

“Yeah, I reckon you do. And you’ll catch who did this?”

“Usually happens.”

“If you do, when you do,” he said, “I’ll give you five hundred thousand dollars.”

The tape went on hissing through the spools in the Sony.

“Five hundred thousand. That’s how much this means to me. A half a million dollars. Don’t arrest the fuck. Just give him to me. Deal?”

For a moment I was lost in my thoughts, staring at the dull brown wall. Maybe I even felt a little afraid as well as insulted. I threw my cup of coffee in his face. He didn’t react as scalding black liquid splashed his cheeks and doused his beard.

I wanted to take him by the throat. I waited slowly while I counted to five and called out for the Cuban, Campes.

“I don’t need any further motivation to do my job. Have you got that, you arrogant shit?”

“I’m talking about my mother, man.” Slowly he mopped at the coffee on his face with a blood-stained tissue. “My mother.”

“I know that, and that’s why I won’t bust your face and your ass for trying to bribe a police officer.”

Campes was at the door, fingering his Smith & Wesson.

“Take Mr. Richards home.”

I’d confused Campes now. Despite his build, the would-be gun-slinging air, he had the puzzled expression of a small dog done down by the world, a Pekinese, say, paddling in its own urine. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but my report. The arrest.”

“There are no charges. Take Mr. Richards wherever he wants to go. And then you can come back and pick up your report.” I nodded down at the scattered pieces. “It’s right here.”

The precinct house was packed tight with smells: coffee, sweat, stale food, spilled soda, disinfectant — all cooked to a fug by the heaters. I walked back to the detectives’ squad room, where the homicide section was located in a corner behind a drywall section that stretched two-thirds to the ceiling, and positioned myself in my chair in front of the cabinets smelling sweetly of varnish. Often at the end of the day, I’d sit for an hour with the paper, clearing my head. In the early days I’d had the idea that if I sat here and did that, I could rid myself of all thoughts of death or violence; they’d be sent away into the murder books that surrounded me, stored there for the night, brain patterns invisibly imprinted, and I wouldn’t have to come back for them until the next morning. Now I did so merely from habit, hoping for the sign that would tell me it was time to go home, to leave — I didn’t really have a home anymore. And wherever I was, I wasn’t sleeping much. I napped for an hour at night and caught, sometimes, another hour in the car during the day. My eyes were pots simmering at twice the temperature of the rest of my body.

On that night I was hot, tired, and my head was so tense it seemed to sprout from my shoulders through a neck of steel angry at its rusting decline. I’d been dumb, letting Ricky Lee get to me. He was a gangster, someone who, because he risked everything, saw himself absolved from ordinary codes and demands. He believed he was whole, because he was brave and rich, because he’d made a run of big scores. He believed that death was meaningful because he’d lost his gangster friends. His mother was supposed to be outside the game, a nonparticipant, and when something happened to her, he knew only one way to respond: he’d offered me money. He probably didn’t even know he’d shown me disrespect, and now he’d even got me thinking in his language: they killed each other over that thing, the other currency of their world, respect. I didn’t want or need Ricky Lee’s respect.

I took a new binder from the box, stuck a red dot on the spine, and began the murder book on Mae Richards. I wrote in her name. I wrote in the date and the area of occurrence. Under the section marked ASSIGNED DETECTIVES, I paused and out of instinct looked up. I had a sense of someone or something moving behind me, in the corridor that led to the interview room, a quieter and swifter motion than cops employ when stomping around on their own territory; then it was gone.

There’s no section you go to in a bookstore called “How to Solve a Murder.” Each Department in the country has evolved its own technique. New York does it different from Chicago does it different from Denver and LA. Each section within each Department adds special twists and refinements, whatever works. My new job was to oversee all the cases within the precinct, to make sure things were running smooth, to keep up the clearance rate, our batting average, and only help out with particulars if needed, like tonight, interviewing Ricky Lee while Cataresco and Diamond were busy at the crime scene. There was nothing that said I couldn’t take on a case myself. I was, after all, the boss, but such a move was unusual. I had three other detectives under my command, though, in the normal run of things, Diamond and Cataresco would be assigned the book, since they’d been at the original scene. It didn’t always work that way but nearly always. Nonetheless, I hesitated.

The beefy Cuban was back, swaggering in the doorway of the squad room. I said, without quite knowing why, “Did you see someone out there?” He shook his head, puzzled, and then I was struck by something else. He’d been gone only ten minutes or so. “What are you doing here anyway?”

“He went to the front of the station to call a cab. He said he wanted to take a cab.”

“Listen, Officer Campes. I quite expressly told you. . .”

“Sir, with all respect, he didn’t want. . .”

“I don’t care what he said he wants or doesn’t want. Get back out there and give him a ride.”

“He said the smell of pig was making him sick, sir.”

“What?”

“He said that the smell of rotten pork was in the air.”

I heard myself say something like “That little asshole.” I grabbed the aluminum baton from the belt of the puzzled Campes and stormed through the duty room toward the front of the station. “The little prick, I’ll kill him,” I said. I went over to the soda machine, whacked it with the baton, and kicked it as well for good measure. A faulty strip light fizzed, crackling. My eyes scanned beneath the photographs of officers killed in the line of duty that looked down at me from the wall, fifteen guys, three of them friends. There was no sign of Ricky Lee.

A voice came from behind me, saying, “Detective McGrath?”

About thirty, with blond hair cropped shortish, she wore a black cashmere blazer, black silk blouse buttoned to the neck, and blue jeans. A raincoat that looked expensive and might have been a Burberry was folded behind her on the bench. Ward Jenssen wasn’t, with her slightly asymmetrical face, her lopsided cheekbones and too full mouth, a conventional beauty, but it was the eyes that got you. Their presumed honesty and gentleness had made her career. Not only was she holding a tape recorder, but now, as her companion stepped from the station entrance, where presumably he’d been filming the entire scene with the inconspicuous equipment he toted on his shoulder, I saw that she’d brought along a cameraman, a guy with a dripping combat jacket over an Aerosmith T-shirt and his name, ZED, stenciled on the outside of his chest pocket.

“Hello, Ward. I’d heard that you were working TV these days. Congratulations.” I turned to the cameraman. “You can’t film in here. You need a permit. As Miss Jenssen knows and I’m sure you do too.” I turned for support to the front desk, but it was empty. No duty sergeant. Great.

I’d met Ward years ago, down in South Los Angeles, when she was a beginning reporter for the Times’s Metro section, sent to cover a multiple homicide where one group of gangbangers had walked into a place and killed nine others. The inside of that room had looked like lasagne. It was inevitable that we’d run into each other again sooner or later. “How’s it going with you? Climbing toward the top of the mountain? What’s the view like?”

She said, “I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

“No comment.”

“Come on, Billy. You don’t even know the questions.”

“No comment.”

“Is Ricky Lee Richards under arrest at this time?”

“No, he is not, and no further comment.”

“Was he under arrest earlier tonight?”

As she pushed the tape recorder closer toward my mouth, I had a sudden vision of my own machine, sitting where I’d left it, on the table in the interview room. The tape of my conversation with Ricky Lee was still inside; no need to panic, and I didn’t, but I needed that tape.

“Look, Ward, I’m not trying to snow you or put you off, but there’s something I’ve got to take care of.” I pointed beyond the deserted front desk into the heart of the precinct house. “If you tell Zed here to turn off the camera so we can talk like civilized people, I’ll come back in a few minutes and answer some of your questions.”

“As charming as I remember,” she said, smiling with her head a little on one side.

“You must be thinking of some other guy.”

At her signal Zed eased down the trim camera, and then she herself turned off her tape recorder, unzipped her leather bag, and stowed it inside. She zipped her bag up again. She said, “How’s it all gonna go in court tomorrow? Big day, huh?”

“You know me. No shortage of big days.”

“I’ll see you in a minute then.”

“You bet.”

I walked to the interview room, knocking shoulders as I went with a guy hurrying out from the squad room in the other direction. I didn’t see the face. His presence was dark and bullish, and he strode away, waving his hand in apology and farewell. I assumed he must be with drugs or vice. They came and went at all hours. Thinking nothing of it, I pocketed the forgotten tape, locked the Mae Richards murder book in the varnished cabinet, and chugged out into the precinct parking lot. Right at that moment, talking to Ward Jenssen again was the last thing I needed.