Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 13

NEXT DAY I got up early, but Cataresco was already at the precinct house ahead of me. It was damp and cold, still raining, and I felt niggly, because I’d thought I’d better dress for court and my best suit was an expensive thin wool summer thing, but I’d put it on anyway and my skin itched against a white shirt with too much starch from the cleaner. I didn’t feel right. Cataresco’s quick glance took in the suit and I said, “What?”

She said, “Nothing. I wonder why you’re in such a lousy mood this morning.”

“Yeah, I wonder.”

In front of her at one of the long tables she had the opened murder book of Mario Angel Martinez, a Latino gangster who’d made the mistake of presuming to poach on the drug turf of Ricky Lee Richards. We’d found him about two weeks before, sitting up straight in a stolen Ford. He’d been shot in the back of the head three times with a 9 mm and was wearing his face like a bib.

Cataresco, different when she was by herself, could be shy and awkward; she was sure she still sometimes spoke with the stammer that had worried her as a child, though I’d never heard it. She’d grown up back East, in Brooklyn, where her father owned an Italian bakery. There was a younger sister she believed prettier and more talented. I’d like to have seen the sister.

She sipped at her decaf. “Let’s think about Mario Martinez. Nineteen years old, a Culver City gang member. We got a good idea that one of Ricky Lee’s homeboys made the hit, which means the word on the street must be they did it for sure. A week later someone takes out Ricky Lee’s mother.” She tossed off the rest of her coffee. “You gotta wonder.”

Maybe Cataresco was right, but the obvious solution felt like too much. “Kill the mother of Ricky Lee Richards and you’re not talking tit for tat. You’re talking extermination. And those burn marks. Burn marks on the body of a forty-five-year-old woman. Does that feel like a gang thing to you? I’ve got the strongest feeling that this was to do with her, not him.”

“So what’s Ricky Lee’s next move?”

“The word’ll go out. He’ll let the street know how well he’ll reward a favor. Maybe he’ll even try and call a truce. One thing for sure is that we’ve gotta find the perp before he does. We do everything we usually do and make sure we get seen doing it. The brass will squat on me because for sure all the press and TV will be swarming all over them. We solve this quick. Go back and talk to the neighbors again. Find her friends. Try and find her husband, or her ex or whatever the hell he is, Ricky Lee’s father. Why did someone slice off her finger ends?”

“What was it you told me? Murderers do dumb things.”

I’d once caught a perp driving around in a victim’s car, with her credit cards and driver’s license in his wallet, and a Gideon Bible with her name in the front open on the passenger seat beside him, and this was five days after the murder, as if he’d done the deed and slipped into a trance. “Talk to your guy at DMV and get some luck with that partial plate.”

“GSG? The three tenors?”

Drew Diamond was there now, constrained on all sides by a pinstripe suit of almost funereal sobriety. “I don’t want to make an issue of this,” he said in a huffy way. “But Tito Gobbi was a baritone. At his best in villainous roles. Like Scarpia in Tosca. Scarpia’s the head of the Italian police, and he’s in love with this singer, Tosca. So he snatches her boyfriend, and he’s got the guy holed up in a cell, torturing him so that Tosca can hear the screams while he’s trying to get inside her panties. Man, he’s one nasty perpetrator.”

“Drew,” I said. “This is clearly something of importance to you, so I’m very glad you are making an issue of it. So he was an evil dude, this baritone, Toto Gobbi?”

“Tito,” said Drew.

“Didn’t I say that? Now if we could return to the trivial matter of the homicide at hand.”

All of a sudden my anger came spitting up. In that moment I hated him, his attitude of feigned dry-cleaner boredom, his opinions, his way of going about our work. He’d had his jeweled, enchanted moments, brave acts, beautiful women, important cases cracked and won — though not recently. These days his soul sang in the pistons of his restored Jaguar XKE while his 1982 Detective of the Year Badge from the Elks Lodge on Pico Boulevard still contrived to assure him that he was the glue holding Los Angeles together.

I said, “Listen. What I’ve decided is that I’m going to work the Mae Richards case with Cataresco.”

There was a silence. Cataresco shook her head at Drew, as if to say this was the first she’d heard about it, and then looked at me and rolled her eyes. I meanwhile stared at Diamond to see how this would go. Not well; his eyes were vacant and a little dazed, momentarily uncomprehending. Cops live by the book, love the rules and regs, and all at once I’d offended the accepted order. I couldn’t have shocked him more if I’d pulled a gun; indeed, I’m sure Drew would have preferred that. He said, “For Chrissakes, Billy,” and swept his hands through his hair, trying to calm himself. “I’ve had a rough time recently and I was looking forward to getting back in the saddle.”

I glanced at my watch. “C’mon, Drew. We’d better go. We’re due in court at ten. I won’t ride with you. I’ll take my own car. Is that a problem?”

•

Denise Corcoran was white, twenty-five, gorgeous, and she’d been found on the floor of her living room, shot twice in the face with her own pistol, a pretty little over-and-up Derringer with a pearl handle and a silver-plated barrel. From the start there was something that worried me about the crime scene, and though I never quite put my finger on what, this unease still nagged, a light that flickered and guttered.

The house had been ransacked: cushions ripped, chairs turned over, TVs and glassware broken, paintings slashed, a once beautiful interior reduced to a nervous breakdown. Our first assumption was that she must have interrupted a burglar, but soon we began to find evidence to the contrary. Nothing seemed to have been taken: no cash, no jewelry, none of the undamaged art. There was no sign of forced entry. Her husband Charlie Corcoran’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, and his alibi proved to have more holes in it than one of Madonna’s string vests. Corcoran had dated Madonna, once upon a time, before he met Denise in Las Vegas, where she was a blackjack dealer and he was in town for a shindig organized by motion picture distributors.

The district attorney had been reluctant to take the case, because it was another dubious-looking celebrity murder; and Corcoran himself, as time went on, put up a more and more plausible front. He was great on the stand: modest, forthright, shattered by this tragedy. He was an actor, but he didn’t come off like one in this, the best, least self-conscious performance of his life, while other witnesses confirmed on his behalf that Denise had been no piece of cake. In the months before her death she’d been weeping, breaking down, crying. She drank; she took drugs; she had an impossible temper.

The problem here was that I believed I knew Charlie Corcoran had killed his wife. He’d told me so himself, outside his house on Mulholland Drive, minutes after Drew Diamond had asked him if he’d mind coming in to answer a few questions. He’d been in a state of shock. He’d blurted out, “I lost my head, man. I killed her.” His head had ducked down into his hands. “Did you see her face? One of her eyes was still open. Oh, God, what have I done?” No tape recorder had been running, and Diamond hadn’t even read him his rights yet. The confession had not been admissible. Truth was, we’d been surprised, not to mention dazzled, taking down a movie star. That hadn’t been a phony blood-spattered Picasso up on the wall of his house, which was a contemporary masterpiece by Rem Koolhaas. By the time we’d charged him and got him into the interview room, his lawyers had joined the party.

They peppered us with experts. They conducted weekend seminars to judge each of the jury’s nuanced sways. They roughed up Drew Diamond’s reputation with stories that worked in my favor, when, early in the trial, it came down to him and me for the promotion. They pointed out that Corcoran’s prints had every right to be all over the Derringer, since it was registered in his name, after all, and he’d used it for target practice at the Beverly Hills Shooting Club the previous night, before negligently forgetting to clean it and bringing it home. Much emphasis was placed on this last word, home, where, the defense pointed out, with heavy irony, a ghastly crime had been committed, the perpetrator of which was still allowed to roam free by the city’s esteemed Police Department.

It was another of LA’s shows, though not as big as many, because from about halfway through the trial pretty much everyone was guessing at Corcoran’s acquittal. The media lost interest in him and even the disorderly mental state of his murdered wife, turning instead toward us, the Department. Only Drew, so bulldoggish and straight-ahead, kept his nose down, sniffing at the idea of a conviction. The job, with all its strictures and prejudice, had shaped him out of clay with its own hands. He knew no other existence. Police work was his life, yet he seemed to have lost the knack, and it was his testimony that finally decided the course of the case.

Drew couldn’t cut it on the stand. In court he’d been dry-mouthed and twitching inside those fine clothes. His concentrated brooding face made it appear he was trying far too hard. He was trying far too hard. Drew didn’t understand that sometimes you have to be an actor, a liar even, to be a good witness. Corcoran’s lawyers made a fool out of him, this one-time Department highflyer who laughed inappropriately at his own jokes, muddled his syntax under pressure, and clipped his words as if sealing them in a coffin. He thought the system should believe him and have done with it; simple as that. He didn’t understand that people tend not to trust police officers these days; or, rather, he understood the fact but inarticulately raged against it. He died up there.

I remembered the first time I met him. It was about ten years ago, some months after Lucy was born. Ellen and I had found a sitter for the afternoon and gone to a party at Drew’s house. He was living up in Glendale with his then wife. This was soon after I made detective, and Drew was, I guess, something of a role model. Even though we’d never crossed tracks, I’d certainly heard enough about him. He was the arrogant homicide star back then, always with a cigarette in one hand, often with a glass in the other. To Ellen and me, convinced that nothing could ever break us, it was obvious that day that Drew was about to explode as a husband. He and his wife were at each other’s throat; mildly drunk, he was rude to everyone else. He spent most of the afternoon teaching his little girl how to hit the curve ball, a phenomenon she’d encountered to her recent distress in junior league softball. With her he was gentle and patient. It’s funny; you can think someone a total asshole until you see him with his kids, and then you realize, hey, this guy might be all right.

We didn’t work together at that time, though we saw each other pretty regularly for a drink or two, trading stories. When his marriage ended, he seemed blank and numb, but with a suppressed anger waiting to be turned on. Then he was out of my life for years, working East LA, working too hard, messing up his instincts, and by the time he came back to the Westside, to Ocean precinct, he seemed exhausted, as if suffering reaction and remorse, though nonetheless still expecting the promotion I got. He was, after all, the more experienced man.

I’d asked him after the promotion, “What keeps you at it, Drew? Why do you still bother? You’ve put in your twenty. You don’t seem interested anymore. You could quit, take your pension.”

“I’m keeping my eyes open,” he’d said, glancing at the sleeve of his blazer. “Maybe I’ll have an astonishing second act in my life.”

Charlie Corcoran was in his late fifties and had survived as a star in Hollywood for more than three decades, staying power he was reputed to take with him into the bedroom, where his prowess was legend and where he’d seemingly met with them all, from Fonda to Pfeiffer, from Seberg to Silverstone. Watching him, I thought I’d measured the true nature of his charm. He didn’t calculatedly seduce, but desired seductively, making each individual he looked at — whether man or woman — feel that he or she was, for that instant, the most important person in the world. He let you know how well he understood the rough-and-tumble of ambition, the tender comedy of imperfect human wanting. This is all far from a joke, his eyes said, but if by any chance it were one, I know the joke would be on me. He had the gift of seeming modesty. He had a still boyish charm.

The court room was packed. There were the larger than life personalities, the TV anchors, waving and smiling at each other. There were the high-profile print reporters, sharp in Armani, who added to their corrosive reputations during the course of the trial. There were the hardcore crazies, who waited outside each day on the off chance that they’d win the lottery for the leftover seats. There were the court reporters beneath the judge’s bench and the lawyers on either side of Corcoran himself, who gave off a carefully humbled air of confidence, with graying hair that was cut short and stood up in porcupine quills. His suit was dark blue, his shirt plain and white as the innocence that his blue eyes and even his spiky hair contrived to make hover around him like a halo.

It was over in minutes. The judge came in, a balding distinguished black guy who gathered his robes about him as he sat, swished and banged his gavel with self-conscious theatricality, and asked the foreman of the jury if a verdict had been reached in the matter of the State of California versus Charles Emerson Corcoran. The foreman — a woman actually, in her late forties, with red-framed glasses and no less susceptible to Corcoran’s strange magnetism than anyone else in that courtroom — said yes, nervously fingering a piece of pink legal-size paper she’d folded in two.

At university I’d read philosophy, not for its logical niceties, its fancy footwork and arguments, not for its frequent visions of very smart angels dancing on the heads of extremely intellectual pins, but for the sense it sometimes gave of another mind grappling with what it means to be human, with the problems of living well and fairly. I turned to the study of law and jurisprudence with the same idea. For the rule of law, for the enforcement of common order and justice, for a restatement of the principles of the Republic and why the United States had divorced itself from Britain in the first place — for all these, America seemed to cry aloud. And though I’d no intention then of becoming a cop, when in time I did I still believed I could make a difference. I was passionate, naive, and young, a man all bright and quivering, primed for fifteen years of the streets and disenchantment.

Justice is a commodity, I now knew, and this was the Los Angeles County Superior Court, which gave to monied might the means abundantly to confuse, confound, and humiliate the right. It was a disaster I was used to living with. In this court the poor got screwed, while the rich broke all the rules, duly expecting, and being granted, the sorts of privileges and exemptions that in England are given to the kings, queens, dukes — the aristocracy.

In the eyes of my colleagues and most people in Los Angeles I was an admired, even a celebrated, man. I solved big cases and got my picture on TV. I’d twice won the Department’s highest decoration for bravery, the first time for stepping out onto a bridge high above San Pedro to pull back a jumper, and then for saving a couple of kids from a burning apartment building. I had a certain fame myself, which, to be honest, I liked, though I tried never to let it interfere with the work. There was a mystique about homicide, something beyond the hours and the dead bodies. We crossed the border to touch finality. The most bizarre, terrifying murders could and did happen every day. True, mostly they happened to certain people, those whose unlucky birthright is crime, the chance of victimhood, though every now and then homicide would reach out to remind us of how it too cherished democracy, and those of us whose job was to deal with it would be reminded in turn how democracy reserved special favors for wealth. This was the way of the world, the system of which I was a part; justice was just only part of the time, a tough reality against which you’d break your foot kicking.

All this I knew to be true, watching Corcoran as he glanced at the neat, square nails of his right hand. And yet, in that hushed moment of waiting, I suddenly found myself willing a guilty verdict, needing a guilty verdict, and I realized that it wasn’t Drew Diamond who’d been rousing my anger that morning. It was Corcoran, and not just because he’d done this shit and most likely I was going to have to eat it.

“Not guilty,” said the woman in the red glasses, her voice with a smile in it while thirty camera shutters clicked as one, while Corcoran’s eyes didn’t budge from his own lucky hands, while people all around me gasped, then cheered, and the judge called loudly for “order, order,” even as lawyers swooned around, clapping Corcoran on the back.

I rubbed my eyes, stunned, so obviously deflated that the woman next to me, one of the lottery winners, said, “Hey, detective, are you gonna faint?”

Outside, in the corridor, I pushed through the crowd of reporters into the corridor, fleeing down the stairs, hearing my heels clatter a couple of flights down the stairwell before I struck back into the main body of the building and splashed water in my face from a drinking fountain. I didn’t quite know where or who I was. My heart was going fast and my skin prickled. A woman went by, rolling her cleaning cart with its wafting stench of ammonia and filthy water.

Corcoran had been a movie star, an American aristocrat, for so long that he thought he needn’t concern himself with matters of honor, trust, and fidelity. Given the chance to be completely corrupt, he grabbed it. He’d had affairs, and his life hadn’t been messed up. He’d killed his own wife, and gone free. Apparently for him it was a cleaner way of dealing with things than divorce. Throughout the trial, even in his performance of grief, he made clear to the jury, the audience, that he was the one who had suffered, who’d been oppressed; it was always Denise who was doing things to him. Taking drugs. Trashing the house. Sleeping around. He never for one second showed feelings of guilt about how both their lives had ended up, whereas in my case I felt as though I’d fired the bullet that smashed Ellen’s hip, as if I personally had picked up a shard of glass and severed the nerves in her spine. I didn’t understand how he could absolve himself in this way. I thought it evil, this ether of wealth in which he lived, high above morality and its tedious demands. He raised in me not revolutionary feelings, but, as Rousseau said, the smoldering hatred of a peasant. He made me feel cheap about myself and my own best qualities.

I walked down the remaining six or seven flights toward the lobby of the building, where outside, beyond security and the sliding glass doors, I saw the waiting hullaballoo: the TV and radio crews, the crowds and well-wishers waving placards that said, WE LOVE YOU CHARLIE. I wasn’t planning to join them. I was going to head down into the basement parking lot and out that way, when Ward Jenssen appeared from around the side of the elevators, with her cameraman, Zed, trotting alongside her. She was wearing jeans again, with cowboy boots, and a tweed jacket today that had hairs on it, with a dinky little leather vest beneath. It was the same microphone she held toward my face, asking how I felt about the verdict.

“Great. Justice took its course. How do you feel as a woman watching a guy get away with something like this?”

“But he wasn’t guilty. The jury found him not guilty.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Are you engaged in some sort of vendetta against Charlie Corcoran?”

“Why would you think so?”

I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t fair, that the guy had killed his wife and here she was coming after me; but I knew fair didn’t come into it. Zed’s grin told me how greedily the camera was gobbling this up.

“You don’t like Mr. Corcoran, do you? Maybe you were thinking about a little payback — by trying to frame him, take him down?”

“This is absurd,” I said, hurrying past them both, down the stairs toward the parking lot, where it was chill and the ground was slippery, dangerous with oil-slicked puddles. I looked for Drew, wanting to tell him that we were both on the same side, that I’d been astonished by the dizzy vehemence with which I’d willed Corcoran to be convicted. Between cops there was supposed to be brotherhood.

“Hey, Drew. Thanks for waiting.”

The dim neon lights crackled and made an angry fizz. Drew was sitting on his own in his Jag, arms spread wide across the bench seat in the back. His eyes were wide. “Fuck you, you two-faced prick. Fuck you, Billy.”