Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 12

THERE WERE two cars I drove, the Department’s unmarked Chevy and my own, a six-year-old Porsche 911, which was a bright fiery orange, had an eccentric shift, and which I’d bought mostly because, back at the beginning of the sixties, when my parents were still together, my father had driven an original Speedster in just that color. I remember his making me drive it in circles around the empty parking lot at Dodger Stadium, terrifying at first, but then I began to scream and laugh as we bumped along and I peeked up through the arms of the steering wheel at the sun-dazzled shield. I would have been five years old at the time, maybe six, and it was only a little while later that my mother left him for good and I took a plane with her to England, where she remarried. My father meanwhile quit his job with the Department and set off on his own travels. He went here and there, to Arizona, New Mexico, all the way up to Montana, but he never did exactly make a journey. From time to time snapshots would arrive, showing him at the wheel of, or leaning up against, his latest ride — a Mustang, an AC Cobra, a pretty pink Cadillac. No one ever knew where the money came from, and only when I was in my teens did it occur to me to ask who was taking the pictures — his latest ride, presumably. That sounds bitter, but I couldn’t forget or quite forgive the brilliance of that orange Speedster, and when people who’d known him told me — as they often did — how strikingly my own appearance resembled his, I was filled with shame and even anger. His memory was something I tried not to dwell on, though when Lucy was born I promised myself that I was going to do it different, that I wouldn’t mess this up the way he had. I messed it up anyway.

My Porsche, I’d discovered, leaked in the rain. I drove it that night nonetheless, descending deserted boulevards I knew by heart, Culver and then Centinela, before making a left and heading down to the ocean on Washington, with a puddle slowly expanding beside me in the empty well in front of the passenger seat. By then it was after two in the morning, and the rain was still refusing to give up. It had been going on all day, pretty much all week. Great rivers ran in the gutters. Rain smashed against the windshield and drummed up a million tiny detonations on the hood. The center of Lincoln was a rink. In front of me a Cadillac skated slowly sideways and came gently to rest against a signpost. The top of the post buckled forward, a guy tipping his hat.

I started thinking about Ricky Lee Richards. After all, it was possible that even if I did find his mother’s murderer, did my job, and delivered him into the big top of the justice system, the murderer would still walk away. The top didn’t always spin right. I’d seen it happen. What if I were to find the guy, give him to Ricky Lee, and take the money? Really make sure that it was the guy, then let Ricky Lee’s savage justice take over? It would probably be more efficient, certainly more sure, and I’d save the city the cost of staging a trial it might not win. It didn’t really seem like an option, even though I needed the money. And I did need the money, but I also had a code, and the path it provided, though crude, was at least certain. Do the job and try to keep your head above the hullaballoo.

I waited until the driver had untangled his Cadillac from the post, waved, and then got on the car phone to order pizza, one pepperoni, one pepperoni with mushroom, and one four cheese with extra cheese in case I changed my mind. I hadn’t eaten since lunch and I still wasn’t hungry. I figured both that I needed to be tempted and that I had time enough before the delivery boy arrived to swing by Ralph’s for a quart of milk and a bottle of Jack Daniels, so I made the detour, negotiated the flood in the parking lot, and was sidetracked by a pair of young German tourists stalking the brilliance of the liquor aisle. The guy had a big beery face and bright eyes behind shiny and expensive steel-framed specs. The girl was skinny and goosebumped in cowboy boots and shorts. Jet-lagged, settled not so snugly at the Jolly Roger Motel, they couldn’t believe the weather. Wasn’t the sun always supposed to shine in Southern California? They were rock and rollers, they said; they needed to buy drugs and I looked like the kind of a guy who might know someone.

That’s a thing about police work. It shows you the most heinous human shit, and then comes at you with outright human farce. I didn’t even try not to laugh. I exploded in their faces. “Yeah, I know some guys, but it’s because I’m a cop,” I said, and watched their eyes go panic stations. I took mercy. “Look, I’m not going to bust you or do anything except tell you that, at this hour, in this neighborhood, if you try to buy drugs you’ll get fucked or worse. I’m just a guy, OK? Be safe. Go to Universal Studios. Try to meet Steven Spielberg. Enjoy the city.”

I’d seen tourists who’d got themselves killed in just this way. On a gurney down at the county coroner’s they still looked young and alive, in their new Gap jeans and with the laces in their sneakers the way they’d tied them that morning; then there was the bullet hole, the wound from the knife. It made me wonder about human stupidity or optimism. They assumed they could handle a dangerous situation without knowing the rules. Sometimes they were right, they could; but they always invited the chance of wrong day, wrong guy, and ending up in block capitals on the first page of a murder book. When I first came on the job it amazed me, some people’s unceasing quest to get themselves killed. Then a part of me came to see the modern world as a hospital — most citizens unwell. So the hucksters step forward to put us together with drugs, with therapy, with sundry other glues or slogans, but they can never quite smooth away our feeling that, at heart, a human being is self-destructive, that in the heart’s innermost recesses there’s a secret urge just to be done with it.

I lived by the ocean, in an apartment I’d bought too quickly for too much money, part of a new complex at the marina that looked as though it’d been built to house a bunch of voyeurs or robots. The complex consisted of four crescent-shaped buildings in white concrete. Grouped together, facing each other, they formed a broken circle. From any apartment, when the weather was fine, you could spy on a hundred others. Consequently, about half of the residents kept their drapes drawn tight while the rest of us tried not to look, and tried to ignore the music, the coughs, the flushes and gurglings, all evidence of human activity, as well as the weird echoes and emanations that came from within the buildings themselves.

At one time, during the boom years of the 1980s, the marina had threatened to be a new Westwood or Montana Avenue. Bronzed yuppies had invested at the top of the market, bringing with them their Jeeps, their weights, and the hissing cappuccino machines, which were another contribution to the concrete symphony. Now, following the crash, the neighborhood hadn’t exactly gone on a downward slide, but it was poised. From the front I saw the ocean, the boats that sailed on it, and the purple and pearly skies that rose like shells from the horizon at Sunset. The view from my bathroom, however, at the back, was of swamp left undrained, ill-omened real estate, above which a floodlit sign showed a smiling young couple with the hopeful message: BRIGHT HARBOR DEVELOPMENTS — THE FUTURE IS YOURS.

An aging Toyota, a car of the type Drew Diamond referred to as a Border Brothers Cadillac, was in the building forecourt with a Domino’s Pizza bucket upended on its aerial like a tawdry lantern. Outside my apartment, way up on eleventh, the delivery boy pounded at my door. Seeing me, he grinned with relief. He’d been thinking no delivery, no tip, or maybe even that he’d have to pay for all those pizzas himself. He was a little Latino kid in a rustling nylon tracksuit that dripped all over the carpet. I told him to come in and he stood leaking there too, so I gave him a towel to dry off a little.

I had a living room, a walk-through kitchen, which I rarely used, and two bedrooms, the second for when Lucy slept over. After a year or so, when it began to be apparent that her mother and I weren’t about to rush back into each other’s arms, she’d started to make her own room cozy. As for the rest of the place, the carpets were clean, the plants watered, the twin black-and-white sofas arranged at a perfect right angle, and I might have moved in yesterday. I’d been there ever since Ellen and I split, though the only evidence of this passage of time was the slow filling of a stripped-pine bookcase. I bought four or five new books each month, mostly philosophy or fiction, and underlined in pencil any passages I thought pertinent, a help in life. I’d bought the bookcase unfinished, and, since I’d never got around to painting it, the shelves were starting to warp. The meaning of those passages I’d marked never seemed so urgent or true when I went back to them a second time; indeed, I was beginning to doubt the consolations of philosophy in general. A cripple goes by wheeled by his buddy in a supermarket trolley or a little girl is murdered by a charmer who blows air kisses to the jury. After that, I’m supposed to read Bertrand Russell?

I said to the delivery guy, “How d’you dig LA?”

His face lit up and he said, “Oh, man, I love it,” and I could see that he did. This, for him, was still the land of opportunity. He was young enough to be able to enjoy the weight that the struggle to survive made against his heart. Actually he looked young enough to be still living with his mother, but if he did, it was most likely in a one-bedroom apartment in Mar Vista or the Culver City projects with his own wife or girlfriend and children. The Latinos were the only ones who still believed in family through thick or thin, and they worked, they were America’s new blood; you didn’t see these guys holding out Burger King cups on Santa Monica Boulevard. “Hey, bro,” I said. “How about you take two of these pizzas? Just remember me when you’re mayor, OK?”

A little puzzled, bobbing nervously on black suede trainers that oozed, he said thanks, tucked the pizzas into an insulated delivery bag of red plastic, jammed his baseball cap over his eyes, and moved into the night with a squelching saunter, leaving me with a brief and absurd feeling of elation, as if I could win myself a little piece of redemption by making successful connection with the sprawl of the city beyond the window, with at least some of the millions who came here, urged by ambition and drawn by its irresistible magnetic dream.

I checked my messages: only one, from my grandfather, asking me to call. He was sick, that old guy, but he was tough. He’d discharged himself from a VA hospital six months previously, saying he wanted to die at home, a process — I was happy to say — that looked like occurring no time soon. He lived surrounded by medals and weaponry in an aluminum-sided bungalow in Culver City. Heaven help the homeboy who tried to rob the place.

I opened my mail, a depressing train of bills and final notices, until I was derailed by a letter from Ellen’s attorney about the sale of the house on Nowita Place, detailing the division of this last asset of the marital spoils.

I think it was Voltaire who said that nothing in a marriage is ever settled. Marriage is never a completed state, he said, so even after the divorce I’d clung to the fact that the house was still in both our names. Now this last knot was about to be untied, or not even that — cut. She’d found a buyer. I’d known, telling myself this could all fall through. Now my signature was required on a piece of paper, and then our house would be gone, and so would she.

I splashed more whiskey into the glass. Ellen’s big plan about Seattle: for months now I’d been trying to tell myself that everything was all right, that I’d still be able to check in every day and see Lucy whenever I liked, that everything was the same as it had always been, at least since the separation — but Ellen was moving on. Agreeing with her that the two of them should go was like an appointment I’d made way in advance and had never quite expected to have to keep. Now I was kicking against the day immediately at hand. I called her.

“Billy,” she said, with quickly restrained exasperation. She was patient, a little sad, too used to this. “It’s three in the morning. Don’t you have to be in court in a few hours’ time?”

“I’m tired, I want out, I want us to get back together.”

“Oh, Billy.” She sighed. “No, you don’t. And you know we won’t.”

“I don’t know that and I certainly don’t accept it.”

“Billy, we’ve been over it a million times.”

“A gangster just offered me half a million if I’d find who killed his mother.”

“Take it. Leave the Department.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Why are you telling me this? I don’t need to hear these things anymore.”

“I’m astonished you said that. I’ve never taken money from anybody.”

“I can’t discuss this now.” She sounded tired. “I know you’ll never take money from anybody.”

“So what do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t want to talk about anything. It’s the middle of the night. I feel like Bert being tormented by Ernie in Sesame Street. What I really want is to go to sleep.”

“How’s Lucy?”

Asking about Lucy, knowing that Ellen would have to answer — this was another of my unfair moves, and she sighed, reluctant commitment to the conversation’s continuance. “She was upset when you brought her back. She ran straight to her room. Something about Ted and a gun? I couldn’t get to the bottom of it. I was going to ask you tomorrow.”

“It wasn’t anything. Ted was being a fool. He was drunk. He produced this gun out of somewhere and started threatening a girl. I sent Lucy to the car.”

“What happened then?”

“Ted put the gun down.”

She was silent for a moment. “You’re not telling me everything.”

Basically, Ellen always knew the score. She was the measure of my soul, tough to fool. I changed the subject, saying, “There was a murder today.”

“How many times do you think I’ve heard that? Or, ‘Ellen, I was at a crime scene.’ Or, ‘Ellen, Drew Diamond went off like a loose cannon again.’ Or, ‘Ellen, there’s been a triple down in the southland and they need an extra guy.’ You soak it up. You’re a sponge. This job hasn’t just taken you over. You’re infected by it.”

I was always almost glad when I goaded her to anger; it made me feel less guilty. “Let it all out, Ellen. Tell me what a shit I am.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line while I walked with my glass to the window and pressed my forehead against the coolness of the pane. Outside, the storm was loud as ever, so violent it spread a kind of silence around itself. I was surprised when a smudge of light loomed up out of it, a glow, shapeless at first, but soon defining itself as a triangle, a sail, I realized, getting bigger and brighter as the boat beneath it tacked toward the marina. I wondered who’d be out sailing on a night like this.

An invisible car sluiced and swished on Admiralty Way below. She’d gathered herself. She said, “This is an amazing thing you’re doing for me, Billy, and I really appreciate it. I’m grateful, truly. I need air. I need to get out of this city so bad. It’s a fresh start for me.”

“I’m not so sure. I think now I want to stand in the way. I want to make myself as huge an obstruction as possible.”

“No, you don’t. Try and get some sleep, Billy, OK? Night.”

I’d been a rookie when we met. She was younger than I but she’d already had two years on the job by the time I joined the Department, having been detained by the bookish education of which she was now in pursuit — hence Seattle, where she’d been offered a teaching job while completing her doctorate in criminology. At Marty McFly’s the first time, I asked if she liked Wittgenstein, and she said she couldn’t stand that German beer. She had red hair and clear green eyes, the best eyes and the hardest head in all of LA County; she was tall, with big bones; she had a wonderful, mysterious face. Women adored her, men feared her, and for the same reason — she fascinated them. In those days she usually knew what I’d do before I did it. Nothing much had changed. She was a giggler. She had a blazing honesty that could make other people uncomfortable. She looked at me, her green eyes smoldered, and though she laughed at herself, knowing what she was doing, I still went up in flames, all in all a beautiful, if slightly giddy and drunken, beginning. She was someone I could talk to right from the first moment. A part of me flew across the room and became hers as soon as I saw her. Three nights later we were together on a routine call, domestic violence, in an apartment building in what wasn’t even one of the worst sections of Oakwood. A guy came sauntering down the steps, smiling, cool as you like. It all happened so fast. I didn’t even see him reach behind his back, and suddenly there was a six-inch blade in his hand. I went for my gun, but the holster was stiff and new — too slow; the guy was going to stab me. Then Ellen came up on my side, shot him in the shoulder, and the knife flew away as if in an unseen hand. She’d been my training officer that night, and the whole caper was over in a flash, five, maybe six seconds.

Her father was a Woodland Hills building contractor, and her mother ran a little diner on Ventura Boulevard. I wasn’t the sort of man they expected her to fall for. Back then I was driven, edgy, and half foreign to boot, while I in turn regarded them as a pair of hayseeds, first opinions that failed to modify themselves down the years during which Lucy was born, started to grow, and both our careers prospered.

Ellen made detective and worked Internal Affairs, a route I was to follow, and then she helped start up one of the antidrug programs for schools, which turned out great, a big success. She only went back into uniform when we separated, and it’s my belief that otherwise she’d never have done that. A sergeant by then, she was leading a team in pursuit of a suspect when she fell through the skylight on an abandoned sweatshop on Olympic. The suspect, naked for some reason nobody ever explained, streaked with blood, came at her, capping off rounds like crazy. Hit, flat out on a bed of broken glass, she shot and killed him. Afterward, the surgeons found a bullet in her hip and a nine-inch shard of glass puncturing her kidney through to her spine. She was paralyzed from the waist down.

Sipping at my whiskey, slowly now, I listened. A door banged and a man said, What the fuck. One of my neighbors, drunk, most likely the guy at the end of the corridor who tended bar in Santa Monica. I thought of the tape in my pocket, the conversation with Ricky Lee now snug and safe at my hip, and wondered, idly, if there was some way I could make Ellen take the money. I knew she’d never go for it; besides, it really wasn’t an option. I’d do my best to make sure that the system did work, keep myself aloof, above that sort of damage. I’d managed it thus far. My peers regarded me as a straight arrow that would never plummet. I was the guy Internal Affairs came to if there was a problem, and they trusted nobody; they were mean, nasty people.

Ripping open the cassette, grabbing a pair of scissors, I sliced the tape into strips that immediately curled up into little springs. I opened the window and threw out the whole bunch. One of them stuck, briefly clinging, a smudge on the glass; then it too was gone, whipped away into the storm’s heavy rumble.