Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 14

THE NEW County Coroner’s Office was a low rectangle in beige concrete. On the edge of East Los Angeles, snug beneath a curve of the Golden State Freeway, as architecture the building was neither tasteful nor the reverse; it was anonymous as a factory, across the parking lot from the old building, a rather more impressive structure in birdshit-spattered red brick that had been badly damaged in an earthquake in the 1970s, and a thrift shop in whose doorway a drenched cat was taking shelter and where, if you desired, you could buy the unclaimed clothes that dead people had come in wearing; of course they’d been washed and fumigated. Round the back there were deserted picnic tables with rain bouncing off the top of them.

Randy Juster met me at the door to his office and took me down in the elevator to the basement. Following a busy weekend, bodies lay beneath blue and pink sheets in the docking area, lined up and ready to be weighed. Bodies were in the report room, waiting for their toe tags. The door to the crypt opened to reveal each steel shelf filled, a hundred or more bodies swaddled in thick, clear plastic. Some bodies were white and doll-like. Others were bloated, flesh squeezed against the wrapping, and some were already decayed and dehydrated. It all depended on how long after death they’d been found. A brown toe stuck out from one package, like a rotten stump waiting to be broken off. An orderly came by and shut the crypt door, leaving in the corridor a cold smell of decay barely contained.

This was Randy’s kingdom, and he strode through it like Patton visiting the countryside. Graying, a guy of about my age, he was the coroner’s chief investigator, responsible for determining who all these people were and how they had died. He treated everybody alike, both the dead and the living, as though they were highly contagious. He had a huge, round, pockmarked face that drooped at the cheeks as if the air had been let out, and I’d never seen him when he wasn’t smiling. He’d said to me once, “You think you know about death? I guess you think you do, being a murder cop. And I guess that in your career you’ll handle two hundred cases, three hundred tops. I see more death than that in a week, every week.” Upstairs, in his office, he had a vast library on the subject. He liked to keep himself up to speed.

We were in the changing room when he said, “So what’s up? Who was this lady anyway? I mean, I know her name. Mae Richards. But there’s a guy from the FBI here and one from the DEA. She’s got herself an audience.”

“Her son’s a big time dope dealer.”

“He’s here, too.”

I paused while loosening my tie. “Ricky Lee?”

“Yeah, that’s his name.”

“You let him in?”

“Hey, Billy, how many times you been to one of these? A hundred, a hundred and fifty. But it always lives with you, right? You think I’d let a son watch his own mother get sliced and diced? Give me credit for not being an asshole the size of Hollywood.”

After that Randy went on for a while, riding his hobby horse, muttering about how even though the soul had left the temple the body still had to be treated with as much dignity as was feasible while the job was getting done. There was something about the guys who worked here. They spent their days cooped up with bodies, weighing bodies, photographing bodies, cutting them up or scraping skin from beneath their fingernails. No wonder they were a little kooky. I’d seen Randy once with a mad Peter Lorre look pumping a tray of shriveled fingers full of a chemical brew of his own devising so that they’d swell up again, become supple and pliant, and prints could be taken. Sometimes months went by before the formula achieved its effect — depended on the state of the finger. While doing this portion of his job, he sat in a former broom closet surrounded by severed digits in jars.

Randy mopped at his forehead with a tissue and slipped his fingers into surgical gloves. He put on a green cotton surgical suit and helped me into one. He picked out a mask, handing it to me as if it were a bridal bouquet, and we passed into a secured area leading to the autopsy suites.

The naked body of Mae Richards, clean and slightly blue, was laid out on a table. The dewed flesh seemed already less than human. The sleeve of Randy’s green paper suit went straight and crackled as he reached forward to touch a scar above the hairline on her forehead. “That’s old,” he said. He peered into the ruined jelly of her eye before introducing me to the three others who were already there — the doctor and the guys from the DEA and the FBI, indistinguishable in their protective gear. I’d no right to be smiling. With our big surgical boots and masks with conelike filters on either side, this was probably the closest any of us had ever come to being mistaken for a rocket scientist.

The doctor, impatient at having been kept waiting, was all brisk purpose. “Whatta we got here? Head shot, mmm, mmm. I assume I’m checking for the ordinary? I see your perpetrator didn’t leave us any fingernails to clip. Inconsiderate; clever. Look at these burn marks.” With a scalpel he scraped skin into a jar from one of the burns on Mae Richards’s breast. “Hey, I’ll get my money down on Havana. Any of you been in Cuba?” He pronounced this Hoooba, not expecting a reply. “Check it out. You can vacation there now, and the fishing’s excellent. Just excellent.”

He got his little buzz saw going and did the Y-cut, popping out the chest plate. He cut from the vagina to the anus, turned the corpse on its side, and cut out the anus itself while the guys from the DEA and the FBI traded looks beneath the masks. Randy Juster meanwhile watched with feigned nonchalance. He didn’t show anything at all.

The doctor perked up. “Well, here we are. Contusions, trauma, evidence of blood and other fluids. I’ll have this sent up to the lab. This should help you some, you ever find yourself a suspect.”

Randy said, “There’s no way I’m going to let any guy see this happen to his own mother, I don’t care who he is. I sent the kid upstairs to wait in the souvenir store.”

He wasn’t joking. There really was such a store, upstairs by the elevators. It sold books, key rings, license plates, and jackets or T-shirts in black with white fallen-body outlines printed on them; but Ricky Lee was gone from there by the time the autopsy was completed and I’d changed back into my suit. I found him in the lobby, in front of the LA city district councilmen up there on the wall. Dressed in black, he didn’t move when he saw me. He wasn’t a big man, but there was a sense of threat about him. All his life, and at that moment all his rage, came shooting through his eyes, so forceful you’d think the rest of his body would have been shocked into movement by their power, yet he stood quite still.

He said, “I have to see her.”

I thought of what he’d witness in the autopsy suite: body parts being sorted into different bags, a scene from the charnel house. I said, “Not like that.”

“It’s my right, man. I’m her son.”

“I know, but that’s not your mother anymore down there.”

“I want to see her so I’ll know what to do to the human being who took her life away.”

“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to pull any of that revenge shit.”

“We agreed nothing, cop.” He wheeled away, as if the anger in his eyes had at last burned his body into movement. He stood with his back to me at the window. There was a brief pause in the rain. Clouds sailed quickly by, wrestling with their cargoes. A wind nipped from the north, clattering the lobby doors. “I had you checked out, Detective McGrath. Seems that you used to work Internal Affairs, busting the bad cops. Word on the street is that you’re some kind of a magician at this murder stuff. You wave your wand and cases get solved, like you’re some kinda Merlin ’n can do magic ’n shit.”

I was supposed to feel stroked.

“Word is, you’re a cool motherfucker, and you once wasted a dude.”

I said, “That’s not quite fair or accurate. Did you? Ever waste a dude?”

His bitter laugh rang in my ears. “Shit, that’s good. ‘Did you?’ I like that.” He raised his hand, and from a ramp beneath the spattered old building, a black four-wheel drive, a Toyota Land Cruiser, flashed its headlights and came sailing up into the parking lot like a statement: I’m efficient, low key, I don’t need to flash around in no BMW or sky-blue Cadillac. There was a woman in the back, a blonde, but it was a guy, one of Ricky Lee’s crew, also dressed in black, who got out of the driver’s seat, while another black Toyota made a U-turn outside the thrift shop and, having pulled up, disgorged three more bodyguards, impressive and imposing feats of nature who planted themselves on the sidewalk like redwoods — Ricky Lee’s show of force.

Now I was supposed to feel small.

“These are the rules. One of my guys will call you each morning with a new number and you can check in if you need to. I can’t have cops calling me whenever they get the urge; hear what I’m saying?”

I smiled at his assumption of who was calling the shots. I wondered if he’d give me the shtick about how white cops had let a white guy get away with murder, but he didn’t; he said not a word about the Corcoran case. He knew Los Angeles was out of joint and didn’t worry about trying to set it right. Maybe he expected criminals to be rewarded, so long as they knew how to work the system. Ricky Lee tried very much to come on like a movie star himself, with class, no longer needing to strive, but still restless and mercurial, edgy, almost overly conscious of the qualities that had made him who he was. No fool, a ghetto star who no longer lived in the ghetto, he needed the bodyguards in case rival gangsters tried a kidnap. There were probably Uzis stashed beneath the seats in those Land Cruisers, weapons for which he’d have obtained permits.

He said, “This is how it was between my mother and me. I lied to you last night. I didn’t see her much at all. She wouldn’t let me. She wouldn’t let me help her or see her. Everything changed for her after my brother died. She was a good woman, she was in pain, and I know everything would have come right between us in the end.”

Wanting to keep this going, I said, “My mother died about twenty years ago. It was cancer; back in England.”

“You spent time in England? Hey, my girlfriend, she’s always talking ‘bout going to Paris. See the fashion shows ’n all that shit.”

In the distance there was the rumble of heavy thunder. “Paris is in France.”

“Shit, I know that; you think I’m a dumb nigger?” The back door of the first Toyota was opened by one of the redwoods, and Ricky Lee’s girlfriend got out, a blond model type, one long black-sheathed leg languidly coming after the other. “Sugar,” he called, waving, and I briefly glimpsed the diamond in his dental work again before the smile was wiped from his face and he got down to business. “That other thing I spoke of last night? Stands. I’m not insulting you, man, I’m serious. Five hundred thousand. Like I said, I need.”

This time, before I could respond, the elevator doors opened and out stepped the guy from the FBI and the one from the DEA. The former wore a black slicker and a black baseball cap above whose sides the bony cartilages of his ears stuck out like flags; the latter sported cowboy boots, a snakeskin belt, and flowing blond hair like George Custer. The serious law-and-order merchants looked like a pair of clowns.

Ricky Lee took them in at a glance. “Feds? Tell them they can’t have me,” he said without a smile, and I watched as he walked outside to hug his girlfriend. The two of them got into the first of the black Toyotas; then both cars headed in convoy out of the parking lot before merging with the traffic on Mission Avenue and speeding toward the freeway.

The DEA guy came up to my side with his fingers tucked inside that snakeskin belt, saying, “Nobody even really knows if that guy’s dealing drugs anymore. He’s more secretive than the CIA and he’s spread his cash around. Real estate. Corner stores. Stocks and bonds. Several boats.” He hitched up his pants. “But I’ll tell you something. That guy’s not gonna go on getting away with what he’s been getting away with.”

“I’m not sure I quite understand that.”

“You think he killed his own mother?”

He’d scarcely be offering me a fortune if he’d killed her, not unless he was a lot more twisted and tortured than I thought. “Hey, that’s quite a notion,” I said. “Excuse me.”

From a phone in the lobby I dialed the office. Various business cards had been stuck to a bulletin board above the receiver. There was one from Forest Lawn, quite a few from other funeral homes, and one I’d never seen before: “Crime Scene: Steam ’n Clean.” Cataresco answered and this time the subject of Corcoran did come up. “That guy should be exterminated,” she said.

“Maybe he’ll have a thrombosis signing the first of his no doubt various three-million-dollar book deals.”

“I’m praying,” she said, while I thought, Five hundred thousand dollars; that’s also a shitload of money. I wasn’t really aware of being tempted. I was just wondering, idly, off-handedly, not even seriously, what I’d do with it. Five. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.

Cataresco was saying that Mae Richards had at one time been a singer. “This was from one of the neighbors who just called me back. Mae also paid her bills on time and worked hard. Turns out she wasn’t exactly a cleaner herself but ran a small cleaning business, organizing work for eight or nine other women.”

“What kind of a singer? When was this?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“My mother used to sing.”

“You never mentioned that. Do you have a mother, Billy? I thought you were created by the Department with a murder book in your hand.”

“Used to. She always blamed my father for the fact that when they split her career was about to happen. Divorce denied her a glamorous Los Angeles screen career, and she had to retreat to England. Most likely it was bullshit.”

Maybe it was, but that was my mother’s story. Something was always denying her something. She saw no romance in her failure. The damage to her pride made her spit and lash out, and yet, oddly enough, it wasn’t my father who’d made me dream of and long to return to America. It was my mother, together with my grandfather. She didn’t talk about the place or her experiences there very often, but when she did, it was with a bitter glow, remembering a promise broken, fulfillment almost attained and then denied. I don’t think she ever wanted to have children. She talked about America the way Drew Diamond did about the sixties; you knew it could never have been quite that good, but your curiosity was aroused. America continued always as a part of her story, her myth.

My grandfather told me of the grit, the reality, first in terse and funny letters, and later when he came to see us in England. He and my mother always got along. He called her Princess. He himself was Duke, though the suggestion was anything but aristocratic. To witness this duke in an English seaside boarding house was to watch a man uncomprehendingly at war with an alien horse. He held cucumber sandwiches as though they were Venus fly traps, possibly deadly and not for nourishment. He never spoke to me about his work in those days. This was soon after he’d retired, decked out with every medal and merit badge the Department had to offer; and at that time, even more so than now, the Department went in for status decorations in a big way. He and I would sit in front of a small TV set and wait for the BBC to bless us with a Western. He took my plastic soldiers, built a model on a low table with sand from the beach scattered beneath it, and illustrated for me just how it had gone down at the OK Corral. “You don’t wanna be a cop, Billy,” he said. “Get some education. Remember what the job did to your father.” I didn’t know then what the job had done to my father. I inferred something bad.

“Maybe we should discuss this over a drink, your mother, your family,” said Cataresco. Down the other end of the line I heard her eating, avocado and alfalfa sprout sandwich, I guessed, her usual office snack. She never went out for lunch. The first time I met her I’d known she was ambitious. This was up in the Hollywood Hills, at the Academy. I’d been requalifying for shooting. She sat at my table in the cafeteria for coffee, just a rookie, having decided to become a cop after taking a degree in business administration. She asked how long I thought it would be before she made captain. These days the smart people in the Department viewed it not as an instrument of justice, but as an unwieldy and manipulable corporation, a series of rungs up the promotional ladder to a decent salary or transfer. Behind the wheel of a car, she drove smoothly but fast. Drew was out of date, she was the new model, and I was in between, the crossroads man.

“A drink, right,” I said, wondering about “Crime Scene: Steam ’n Clean.” Maybe they went in and laundered your home after murder was done there. Some job; but if there was an angle to be found, someone in Los Angeles would find it. Across the lobby the guys from the FBI and the DEA were exchanging business cards. “You know anything about Steam ’n Clean?”

Her voice was exasperated. “Billy, what are you talking about?”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about the details that don’t fit. The strawberries. I don’t know why, but I’ve got a feeling she didn’t buy them herself. The shell casing — I think it was put there because someone wanted us to find it. And the garbage bag. Did anyone check on that?”

“You gave the job to Drew, remember? Before you fired him from the case.”

“So I did. But let’s find out where that thing came from. There’s usually a batch number somewhere. I’ll see you at the office later, OK?”

Having hung up, I saw the conversation between the two federal agents flicker and die, as if they’d been talking about me, most likely asking each other whether I could be trusted, comparing notes on what they’d heard, wondering how I could be used to get to Ricky Lee. This time the FBI guy spoke, the one with the baseball cap and the hard pink ears. “I heard about the job you did on the Farber case. Outstanding! Outstanding! Farber was a swift and evil perpetrator.”

“A stone killer,” said the one who fancied himself like George Custer. “I heard you got him right between the eyes.”

“I was shooting to miss.” I told them to be in touch if I could help in any way, and crossed the lobby to pass through the glass doors into the sparkle and deluge of the rain.