Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 15

VENICE, or so I understand, the other Venice, Venice, Italy, is a city of museums, of picturesque gondolas, of splendid palaces somewhat in decay, and canals that, come summer, turn to soupy swill. My Venice was likewise a city of contrasts. Millionaire actors rubbed shoulders with gangsters. Flophouse motels butted up next to fancy gyms and stores where you couldn’t even buy a T-shirt for $95. Parrots and palm trees were nature’s aerial accompaniment to baseheads, dope dealers, hookers (known as strawberries, as in pick what you like), and other, more earthly essentials of urban life. The streets at either end of the local high school were barricaded off to discourage drive-bys. Restaurants opened and shut again within weeks, only to give birth to others on the exact same location. The beach, by day the blond capital of the known universe, was transformed at night into a battleground of the lost. My Venice was small, brilliant, spacy, and mean.

I lived and worked by the beach and I loved it. This was my place, where homeboys paraded their pit bulls alongside the tourists, the tarot readers, the scam artists, and the panhandlers hustling a dollar for the next hamburger. Drew Diamond accused me of being too kind to these people. “What’s it with you and the dude in the liquor store? You ain’t turning into one of those touchy-feely guys, are you, Billy?” I didn’t bother telling him that compassion was a tool like any other.

The house where I’d lived with Ellen and Lucy had been bought at the top of the 1980s market with the help of a loan from Ellen’s father. Later, when his business was failing, we’d taken out a hefty mortgage to pay him back, and that was the big beginning of our money trouble. Part of Ellen’s thinking for the move to Seattle was that at least she’d be able to escape with some of the capital we’d sunk into the place, our lovely white elephant, which to me these days now belonged on a continent apart, even though I’d helped build the porch and had hung the wind chimes above the rocker with the faded and now drenched cherry-red cushions.

I walked up the ramps to find the doors open and the TV on without the sound, as if Ellen were expecting someone. Channel 5 was showing King Kong, the remake with Jessica Lange, the part where Kong staggered lost through the streets of New York. Kong was scratching his head as Ellen’s quick voice came from the kitchen. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“Please, that’d be great.”

There was a pause before she said, “Oh, Billy, is that you?”

I picked up a book from the coffee table, a fat new biography of Mozart. “Who else were you expecting?”

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.

I’d loved living in this house. The rooms were light and high, a lofty dream of peace. Now, every time I came back, there was a change. Books and flowers seemed to be breeding, filling the tables and the shelves on either side of the fireplace. A great red-and-yellow paper bird hung from the ceiling, swaying this way and that in the currents from the central heating. The old curtains were gone, replaced by ones with green and white stripes, which, in the rain, gave the room a pleasant underwater ripple. There was a table with a computer on it in the corner where my reading chair had been. I came here to be restored and replenished; it was home still, but it wasn’t my home. I felt pangs of regret for those times in the past when I should have been here, with my family, and instead had been out there, on the streets, on Broadway, or at Sixth and Alvarado, or down in the Southland, obsessing about some guy with a gun or a knife in case he did it again and destroyed another family. There was the irony: I’d helped others but had been unable to save myself. I’d had a great wife, a great life, a beautiful daughter, and I’d blown it. It weighed, this sense of having failed.

Marriage is improvised. It’s quicksilver; it rolls this way and that, needing to keep moving, needing to feel inspired. I knew, because I’d watched the treasure spill through my fingers.

Ellen said I romanticized the memory of our marriage, as Lucy romanticized me. Ellen herself romanticized only Marlon Brando. She admired Brando unreasonably. Before the shooting she’d pad through the house barefoot or, if the dog was shedding fleas, in a pair of thunderous clogs, mumbling lines from The Godfather or Apocalypse Now. She’d sprawl in a chair, legs dangling, and then leap up, waving her finger to make a point. All that energy was still there, inside. She’d always taken the world seriously, granted it due weight, so she wasn’t surprised when it turned around and clobbered her. She put on a pair of gloves and hit back. Before the shooting, she’d been strong and tireless, and I suppose that since then I’d tended not to see her as a real person with real faults. She had poise and imagination, but she could be childish — can’t we all? She had a cool front that said she was totally in control of her life; she wasn’t. My guilt had put her on a pedestal, which she hated. She wept and raged sometimes against the uselessness of her legs.

With her, my unsure self kept popping up like a stain. “Billy Zero,” I introduced myself to her new friends, and she knew that truth glimmered in the joke, as well as an inappropriate self-pity. I was nothing without her; at least, I was having to search for what I could be. “Face it, man,” Ted had told me, in his cups again but for once on the money. “Without her, you’re fucked.”

She was where I turned when I was losing my bearings and didn’t even know it.

I said, “Where’s that cup of coffee?”

She came to me, wheeling her chair from the kitchen with one hand and balancing my coffee in the other. She wore black leggings beneath a loose-fitting smock of purple and gold; her feet were bare, because she couldn’t feel the cold, though the toenails were carefully polished. She stopped the chair, cleared a space between a pile of books and a flower vase on the dining room table, set down the cup, and offered her soft mouth for me to kiss. She was quick, observant, energetic. She was beautiful still, though gray had mingled with the younger chestnut. Shit, I thought, I have nothing to offer this woman.

I surprised myself, saying, “I’ll quit the job. Move with you guys to Seattle.”

She seemed not to hear, or else she was weighing this, trying to take it in. She said, “I heard about the verdict. I’m sorry. You must be furious.”

“It was predictable.”

“Which doesn’t make it any better.”

“No, I guess not. I half hoped there’d be a riot — you know, a spontaneous outburst, anger, something. The guy would know what an asshole the world thinks he is. But people seemed pleased.”

“Corcoran’s got charm as well as money. He’s brilliant, capable, funny. In their book Denise got lucky, made an ambitious marriage, and getting smacked was all a part of it.”

“You’re angry.”

“I guess I am. How does it make you feel?”

“Right now? Exhausted, ready to quit.” In recent months, as it became certain that we’d lose the case, I’d reminded myself that people in shock sometimes confessed to murders they hadn’t committed, as if they needed to release a different guilt they felt, maybe about having let the victim down, not having done enough. “Maybe he didn’t do it, after all.”

“You were there, Billy. You were the one. Tell me whether he did it or not.”

From outside came the brief rumble of rap as a homeboy’s car cruised by, and I thought of something else I loved about this house. It was beautiful, but close to the boundary. You couldn’t hide here and forget what the city was like. You saw the dangerous edge of things. Most cops I knew didn’t live in the city anymore. They bought tract houses in Simi Valley or drove an hour or more at the end of their shift to retreat behind the walls of security estates in the Inland Empire. I suppose I resented that. Venice was difficult, dangerous, and certainly a mixed place to raise a child, but still a great place to live. I shook my head. “I can’t believe you’re leaving.”

She turned in the direction of the CD player and put on something big and romantic. “How do you like this music? Lucy’s gift for my birthday last week, which by the way you forgot.”

I’d forgotten? How could I have done that? “Last Wednesday. Jesus. I was helping a homicide guy from West Covina.”

“It’s OK; it’s OK. I’ve heard the story often enough.”

“Shit. Oh, Ellen, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your sorrow, Billy. I’m your ex-wife. Not your crippled ex-wife.” Her slim strong hands were shaking a little. “I don’t understand what you want from me anymore.”

There was a pause, her eyes not leaving mine, and then she glanced away, toward the fireplace.

“Hey, a sandwich would be good,” I said, and she looked at me again, her eyes crinkled and lit up with a smile.

“You’re such an idiot.”

“Don’t rub it in. Come on. Let’s have a hot date in the kitchen.”

Once upon a time, back in the fairy tale days, we’d sat together in these rooms, listened to music, and planned the future. Ellen had written questions on index cards and quizzed me about the next promotion exam. I always thought I was the driven one, the homicide star, the half-English guy who was nonetheless on top of the need to get to the point quickly, comfortable on the streets, soothing the victims, and easing the ride for the management jockeys. Early on, even before the Pakistani who killed his son, I’d had a couple of good cases, easy cases, really, not much detective work involved, but high profile: I busted a terrorist who slit the throat of a secretary in the Federal Building on Wilshire a couple of months prior to the ’84 Olympics, and then I talked down the serial killer who started taking potshots from the roof of a motel. I remembered being up there, baking in the heat, hot Santa Ana winds scorching my scalp and making my dazzled eyes water. That was in San Pedro, too. I didn’t care much for San Pedro.

There seemed to be good reasons for the presumption that my career was the more important, and those reasons had been part of the implied bargain between us, a flaw in the marriage. “We were apart when I was hurt,” she’d once said. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

In the kitchen after Ellen’s accident we’d torn out all the previous fittings and replaced them with counters at waist height and cupboards below so that everything was in reach of her wheelchair. Guys I’d never even met before had collected money from all of the city’s eighteen divisions and come around to help. They’d hired an architect, a studious-looking young German, who’d said where to put in the ramps and had rethought the place and redesigned the bathroom. They’d put in a security system and an intercom that connected with the neighbors. I’d always been a loner within the Department, but, looking at Ellen and seeing the work they did and the help they gave, I had the same dangerous and sentimental feeling that so many of them shared, namely, that because being a cop was the greatest and the shittiest and most thankless job in the world, no one else could understand us. I started feeling guilty and anxious, and soon I was never not feeling that way, even when the immediate cause was something else.

“You want mustard or mayonnaise?”

“Both. Plenty of each.”

“How bad was the rain when you came in?”

“Still pretty bad.”

“I’ve got to try to get to the store later.”

“I can pick up some stuff if you like.”

“No, really, it’s OK.” She smiled. “Thanks, though.”

Through the kitchen window I watched steam rise from the asphalt tiles on the garage, against which Lucy’s bike leaned, covered with a tarp; on the washing line an old denim shirt hung limp and heavy. From here at night I used to watch the moon rising among and then above the palms.

We kept going over the same ground, and I could never quite admit to having lost the battle. I lost all balance in her company, there was so much there still tearing at me. It was like the job: aging and bad luck had fucked up what was a noble thing. But that was too easy; in the case of my marriage there was also the matter of my bad choices.

She said, “Ted called. He said he wanted to apologize, not to me, but to you. I don’t get it. Why was he calling here? Did you tell him you’d be swinging by today?”

I couldn’t say it was because Ted held to the notion that Ellen and Lucy and I would one day live together again. “Ted’s confused.”

“He was always confused. Just what did happen last night?”

“Like I said, nothing. How was Lucy this morning?”

“She’s fine. Yesterday she asked if it would be OK if she became an astronaut. Then she said she had a crush on a boy at school and should she be thinking of sleeping with him?”

“Christ, she’s eleven years old.”

“I thanked her for sharing this with me, and told her it was really way too early for all that.”

Ellen spread butter on the bread, then mustard and mayonnaise; she built layers of ham, cheese, tomato, and lettuce, one on top of the other, and pressed down gently on the two slices before cutting them in half with one firm, confident stroke.

“If you’re going because of the money, don’t. I’ll find the money, OK?”

“Billy the optimist.”

“Billy the hope-deserted,” I said. “I only feel good at work. Think how bad things must be.”

“You always felt good at work,” she said, holding on to her calm. “I’m not going because of the money. I’ve got a job, remember?”

“And you couldn’t get one here?”

“Maybe. I don’t want to. I want the one I’ve been offered up there.”

She turned in her wheelchair, touched hair out of her eyes. “I can’t discuss this now. I’ve got an appointment in half an hour.”

“With Megan?”

Ellen, resolutely unflaky in all other matters, went to see a psychic, or rather consulted one, for these days psychics had gone straight. No longer were they middle-aged hippies living in ramshackle bungalows near the exits to freeways. Megan had another of those degrees in business administration and read the runes by phone or fax. She talked about closure, completion, journeys, and all the rest of that New Age paraphernalia, while of course continuing in vague terms to see success, a new job, the possibility of a life lived according to love.

“No, with someone else.”

As she moved her hand to close the fridge door, I saw that she was wearing a bracelet, a silver thing inlaid with linked silver-and-turquoise dolphins. I remembered a warm spring afternoon in the bedroom right above our heads when, home from work early, she’d walked toward me naked except for gold earrings and a gold chain around her ankle. She’d always loved jewelry. It made her feel wanton, she said once. I think I’d made some stupid joke about Chinese food.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“You were looking at me weird.”

If I hadn’t been unfaithful a couple of times when I was working down in South Bureau, Ellen and I might never have split, and if we hadn’t she might never have fallen through that skylight on Olympic. All this was spilled milk, I knew, and no use sobbing, but I’d cheated; I’d married a quality person, messed around, and lost her.

“That’s new?” I said.

“What?” she said, touching her wrist.

“There, the bracelet.”

“Oh, this. Yeah, it’s new. You’d better go now. I’ve got to get ready.”

It was only then that I put it together. “You’re seeing someone.”

She nodded, sighing, before her eyes met mine full on. “Yes, I’m seeing someone.”

“You’re having an affair?”

“Affairs only happen to married people. We’re not married anymore, remember?”

The computer where my reading chair had been, the freedom bird on the ceiling: this wasn’t a casual thing. “Is it serious?”

“You have no right to ask.”

“Of course I do.”

“Yes, maybe. It’s serious.”

“Who’s the guy?”

“Someone I like.”

Jealousy made the furious sprint from my liver to my brain. “No kidding? I’m not questioning your taste. I know you’ve got Lucy to think of and will be smart in this area.”

“I’ve learned, you mean?”

Touché, I thought, a hit, and the blade was unbuttoned; I was bleeding. “I guess you have. Who is he?”

“I’m not going to let you interrogate me.”

“He’s on his way over now? In the middle of the day. He’s not even a working guy?”

“Oh, sure, that’s right, I’ve picked a member of the idle rich. Frankly, Billy, it’s none of your damned business. A guy’s made the time to come and take me for lunch. It could be Mickey Mouse, and you’d have to like it.”

“I’d have no problem with Mickey.”

“Here’s yours.” She handed me a plate with the sandwich tightly wrapped in tinfoil.

“This is it? I have to go now?”

She was looking toward the living room. “I think you’d better watch this.”

On TV King Kong had been gunned down by the U.S. Air Force and Channel 5 had the news. Ellen hit the sound.

First of all there was the headline item, a restatement of the trial verdict and a review of Corcoran’s career. There was footage of the guy, grinning and sheepish, at the Oscar ceremony, as if saying to the world: “What, all this for little old me?” There were shots of various beautiful and famous women holding his arm as if it were everything, and there was a reminder of how he’d looked on the night of his arrest, with his dark suit rumpled and his eyes shut down.

The reporter herself popped up next, with her tweed jacket and black leather vest. It was Ward Jenssen. Her hair seemed even shorter than I remembered from just a couple of hours before, but then it was very possible she’d had it styled during the interim. “And now yet more clouds loom on the horizon for this once prestigious Police Department.” There was film of the crowd in front of Mae Richards’s house, a picture of Ricky Lee, one of me with my hand in front of my face, and then Ward Jenssen was back, retelling the more romantic aspects of Ricky Lee’s career, laying it on thick that he’d given thousands of dollars toward the building of a sports center in an abandoned movie theater down in South Central. They showed a clip from a movie in which he’d had a small part, and that was news to me. Then there was the sound of my bleating, “No comment, no comment,” and “Will you turn this thing off?” After that, Ward Jenssen wore a wolfish grin and said I was being handed this week’s award as the most obstructive and rude member of a famously obstructive and rude department — of which more in a moment, she said. Then it was back to Charlie Corcoran, squinting, with a match between his teeth in a gangster role he’d played.

“I guess they figure they had to let him go because he’s been famous for more than fifteen minutes,” Ellen said. “You sounded like an asshole.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” She was looking, not at me, but still at the screen, as she said, “She’s even more attractive these days.”

Now it was my turn to play dumb.

“Who?”

“Ward Jenssen.”

“Oh, her. I thought you thought she was a snake.”

“No, you were the snake, Billy.”

It was Ward I’d slept with while I was working down in South LA. It had only happened a couple of times, but Ellen had come by the precinct house when Ward was there, and she sensed the shock of electricity that passed between us. After that there’d been no retreat into denial, and this had happened when Ellen and I were going through stormy weather: not having enough money, not fucking often enough, not getting enough sleep, arguing about when and whether to have another child. I’d wanted the second youngster.

Ward was back on screen now, about to come in with her big punch. I should have seen it coming after what happened back at the courthouse. She said, “McGrath’s father was also a detective. He resigned from the Department in disgrace some thirty-five years ago, following a case that involved none other than Charlie Corcoran.”

“Oh, shit,” said Ellen. “I don’t believe this. They never quit, these people. . .”

Ward told how a young woman, an actress, had got drunk and drowned off Malibu in November 1961. A lone, mysterious witness walking his dog said he’d seen Charlie Corcoran in the water with her, though Corcoran, then at the beginning of his career, denied it, and several other witnesses stepped up to say they’d been with him in Santa Barbara, where he’d been attending a charity function. No charges were brought, and my father, one of the investigating detectives, left the Department in disgrace three months later. Corcoran, meanwhile — incredibly handsome — had risen above the scandal to success, sustaining a glittering career through his thirties, forties, on into late middle age.

Of course I’d known the story: it was the beginning of my father’s inexorable downward slide, though Ward said nothing of that, nor of certain other interesting details. For instance: my father had received a sworn and signed statement from that mysterious dog walker on the beach, while the Santa Barbara witnesses, all of them, had been on the payroll of Corcoran’s press agent.

Ellen said, “But you told his lawyers all about this, didn’t you?”

“Sure I did, because their investigators would have dug up the story anyway.” Its one real bearing on the Denise Corcoran case was the obligation I’d felt to slip aside from the wheel and allow Drew to drive the investigation. “And now they’re having their fun.”

Her distress was genuine. “It isn’t fair, Billy. It isn’t right.”

“I know it. Everything’s out of whack.”

I was on screen again myself, denying that I’d tried to frame Corcoran. I looked angry and defensive, saying, “This is absurd,” and then it was Charlie himself, smiling, with “No comment, no comment, no comment,” and one of Charlie’s million-dollar lawyers, maybe even the one who’d slipped Ward all this, looking into the camera with a thoughtful pause before: “We didn’t bring up any of this before, because we didn’t want the trial to turn into a personal issue, and because of Detective McGrath’s great reputation. Now that it’s come out in the open — well, I’m not saying the guy is necessarily a bad apple. I’m saying this revelation may throw some interesting light on why the city has harassed an innocent man and thrown away millions of dollars on a futile case they could never have won. Sons, sadly, do turn into their fathers.”

Storm clouds heaved and shouldered in the Sepulveda Pass. The unmarked Chevrolet followed a surge of water down the throat of a curving exit ramp choked with rain, and I stepped on the gas, reckless up San Vicente, then north toward Sunset, the hills beyond, and the gates of the house whose address I was apt to remember. A camera eye inspected me as I announced myself through the rain to the buzzing intercom. Almost to my surprise, the gate opened and I drove up the gravel drive to where four Cadillacs, five BMWs, three Rolls-Royces, and a pair of twin red Ferraris were huddled together out of the rain under a carport in the parking area. Corcoran was having a party.

The house was spare, beautiful, an idyll, its huge windows commanding a view of the city all the way down to Long Beach. Standing by the pool at the back, I remembered, you seemed to float above the entire San Fernando Valley. Either way you were up above the world. Charlie also had a ranch in Utah and a Manhattan triplex overlooking Central Park. He kept a suite at one of the big hotels in Beverly Hills and Triumph motorcycles, each with the same lock, in airport parking garages at twelve of the country’s major cities. Sometimes he disappeared for days on end, apparently to ride his bike from St. Louis to Chicago or from Denver all the way to New Orleans, to hit the road and hear the engine sing.

Maybe I’d misheard when I was out here the night of the murder. Maybe my ear had been only too greedy for what it thought Charlie said, for what it wanted Charlie to have said: “I lost my head, man. I killed her.” We can hallucinate, we may be wrong about the exact nature of something we touch, but no sense is as vulnerable as hearing; then again, I’d felt so sure: this guy is guilty as sin, guilty as me.

All through the trial I never thought that I might be interested in vengeance. I tried to behave honestly and honorably, admitting the connection between him and my father, making a tactical withdrawal from the daily detail of the case. Now all my certainties slid away in the swirl and extravagant hammer of the storm.

I was thinking about my beginnings, about how I was made in the back of that Porsche Speedster, my mother primed with schoonerfuls of Scotch whiskey. She said many times she wasn’t sure where I got my temper, Johnnie Walker Red or Black. I was thinking about Ellen and her new boyfriend. I felt under attack. I felt crazy and enraged. It was as if Charlie and his people with their power were trying to annihilate me.

I didn’t know what I was going to say. I thought maybe I wouldn’t have to say anything at all, not about the trial, not about my father. I thought maybe I’d let my mere presence ruffle his feathers. I thought maybe I’d hit him, hurt him, or worse. I was thinking a lot of things.

I was met at the door by the bodyguard, six-foot-five and wiry-haired, an agile hulk who looked me over with no great affection before lifting a fat cigar, rolling his lips around the butt, and luxuriating in what was less a puff than an insult. “Detective,” he said. His name was Ari Van Duzer; I’d have thought twice about picking a fight with him even had I not known that he’d been trained by the Mossad. “Don’t you think you’ve bothered him enough?”

“Not nearly.”

“I can’t let you in. You know that. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave, unless, of course, you have a warrant. Do you have a warrant?”

His voice was calm while the smile leaked out of his eyes and we stood facing each other, him with the cigar still between his teeth, in the wide open space of the white entrance hall.

Ellen had told me not to do anything stupid. Ward was only doing her job. What did I expect? Reporters sought intimacy so that they could betray you. I’d told her it wasn’t Ward I was blaming.

There was a sculpture alone on a table in the center of the hall: twelve inches high, a girl, upright, holding a bowl; it was simple, beautiful; it looked ancient. I picked it up, felt its history and beauty in my palm. I tossed it by its feet and caught it by its head. “How much would you say this is worth?”

“A lot more than you’ve got,” said the bodyguard, starting toward me, then backing off. He thought I might really break it. He was right.