Читать книгу Murder Book - Richard Rayner - Страница 9

I COULDN’T SAY how big that crowd was on Santa Clara Avenue, there was so much rain and so many glistening umbrellas, and people kept jumping, moving, and shuffling in the storm, but I did see that most of the faces were the same, with identical expressions of eager, drenched excitement, all keen to see the show. I saw a black street kid with his head shaved, maybe ten years old, gangstered down in a dripping white T-shirt and baggy, sodden jeans with the crotch almost at his ankles.

“Hey, kid. What’s your name?”

“Nelson.” Grinning, he turned to show his buddies that he wasn’t afraid. Rain flicked from his eyebrows and caught me under the chin.

“What’s happenin’, Nelson? Tell me what’s up, man.”

“Some lady got killed.”

“Just one?” I grinned back at him, but Nelson wasn’t sure whether I was joking or not. Before he could decide and start acting tough, I’d moved on and was making myself imagine that there was no crowd, that there were none of those thirty or more uniformed guys, milling and looking busy, that I was on my own, trying to figure this out. I tried to sweep away all the clutter and noise, to put my mind in a silent place, as if I were about to step into the woods after dark, and every little thing from now on — each falling leaf or twig that snapped — would have to be recorded and remembered if ever I were to find my way out again.

The house was better than I’d expect in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, with a pair of plump white sofas, a new and expensive carpet, and pale, freshly painted walls. Up above the fireplace was a Jesus in an ebony frame, and beneath it, to the left, on a round glass coffee table, seven or eight family portraits. There was an expensive stereo and five VCRs all hooked up together for copies, and there were lots of CDs, hundreds, maybe even a couple of thousand. Someone in the house was crazy for music. There was a powerful smell that didn’t fit — strawberries.

In the kitchen I saw a black woman lying face up, with her head pointing south. She was about fifty and dressed in white — white jogging suit, white socks, expensive white sneakers. Her ankles were tied with white nylon cord, and from the way she was lying bumped up around the waist, I guessed her hands were tied behind her back as well. There were spots above the right trouser knee of the jogging suit, blood specks, like tadpoles with the tails pointing up.

The suit had been yanked open, ripped, and there were burns on her neck and chest. I counted seven, almost like brands on an animal, still bloody and sore, each the size of a red-hot dime. Could be they’d been made with the angry end of a cigar or cigarette. She’d been shot in the left eye, and blood had dribbled from the nostrils. Her open right eye gazed at the ceiling. The other, the wrecked one, was a mess of red and black, turned inside out like a crushed snail. A thick gray ooze of brain escaped at the corner.

The back door was locked and bolted. On the counter next to the water cooler was a clean spoon and a plastic honey bear lying flat on its belly; two or three drops had leaked out, and the ants, fled inside from the rain, were starting to gather.

The doors to the cupboard under the sink were open. A folded report card sat like a little white tent over the shell casing where it had fallen, beneath the U-bend. Sitting in the sink itself was a black garbage bag, also folded, as if it had come right out of a box. This was odd, since there was a full roll of them up on a spinner by the back door.

I put that little detail away.

Sitting next to, and almost concealed by, the garbage bag, were the strawberries, two untouched trays and a third with just a couple taken. I turned to a uniform standing at the door who told me the victim’s name.

Mae Richards.

Maybe some basehead had broken in and got carried away — unlikely, since there was no sign of forced entry or struggle.

Maybe she’d been surprised by a knock at the door, and had opened to invite in some random scumbag posing as a salesman or the guy from the gas company. It happens.

Maybe this was done by someone she knew, to whom she owed a debt or with whom she’d been in love. Very possible. In my work, motives tend to be simple and strong: anger, fear, or love turned sour; and money, of course, always money.

Some cases are dramatic from the start and muscle right into the TV news. Others, the sleepy ones, seemingly more commonplace, merit only a few lines in the local rag, but each, on closer examination, is a story, a melodrama within a mystery. People understand this; hence the fascination, mingled with the fear that they themselves could be killed, and the giddy, almost reassuring, suspicion that they too are capable of murder. Hey, I’ll blow your head off, motherfucker: these days the almost instinctive response to affront or rage or boredom, an answer like installing cable, but with more lasting if unanticipated personal consequences, and not only for the murderee.

From the distance came a church bell’s weary clang. This didn’t seem such a special one. I was trying to figure out why there was such a crowd outside when Cataresco and Diamond came in, the duty detectives, Cataresco first, ducking beneath the yellow tape, and then Diamond, who lifted it so he could walk straight under. Cataresco unzipped her leather jacket and met me with a smile. Blond, slender, with a talk-show host’s nimble alertness, she had a gift for getting into the minds of suspects. Diamond was squat and square-shouldered, powerful looking, a spiritual Dillinger who exuded boredom like the smell of dry-cleaning fluid. He wore a striped tie and a stiff sports jacket that hung slackly from his shoulders, as if suspended from an iron bar lashed across his upper back, and he thrust a hard paunch in front of him like swag. “Hey hey hey,” he said, popping a cigarette in his mouth without bothering to light it. “And to think last night I was almost like a human being. There I was, at home, Johnnie Walker in hand, Pavarotti on the CD. Of course this was while I was with your wife,” he said. “Must be a surprise to you that she’s an opera fan, huh?”

Cataresco rolled her eyes. One of the homicide section’s more tedious routines was the pretense that we spent the weekends trying to score with each other’s wives, a gag that had no real sting anymore, unless made by Cataresco.

“Knew she liked the opera,” I said. “Didn’t know she was so fond of you.”

At forty-five, Diamond had more years on the job than I did, though I was the one who made head of the section, six weeks previously. The money in our line of work wasn’t great; thus our struggles for power and status were intense, though everyone pretended otherwise, with the willed, taut nonchalance cops bring even to the world’s most obvious wrongs.

Sniffing, Diamond took the cigarette from his mouth and slid it back with its comrades. “Yeah, well, anyways,” he said, hitching up his pants to reveal a holstered Marine Corps Colt, a cannon. “That was yesterday I was with your wife.”

Twin gouts of blood had hardened to a mustache beneath Mae Richards’s nostrils. Her sneakered right foot turned in at an angle, as if the bone had snapped. Ants were on the march now up her neck and cheek. Soon they’d gather around the blood and meat of her eye and march back again, bearing their treasure. In my experience dead people never look like they’re sleeping. They look like they’ve been shocked out of their lives, and dropped, dumped bones suddenly no more connected than a bag of parts.

Drew Diamond went on. “And today here I am, back hanging with the brothers in Oakwood. You missed the party.”

“A gangster shows up, tries to break through the line,” said Cataresco.

“Not just any gangster,” said Diamond.

“Ricky Lee Richards,” said Cataresco.

Diamond did the thing with his pants again, pleased by the effect of the name.

“That Ricky Lee Richards?” I asked.

“The very same.”

“The Prince of Darkness?”

“The gangbanging piece of scum.”

Ricky Lee Richards was street-famous, already almost a legend. He’d entered the drug trade with only $200, supplying rock houses across Los Angeles, before in time becoming a chief cocaine wholesaler, the funnel through which the drug arrived from Colombia and Mexico and flowed into the United States. He was easily the biggest-time dope dealer to come out of Venice, yet he didn’t flaunt himself with gold and sports cars like some of the high rollers. He was known as the ten-million-dollar man. There were rumors that he was so rich now he was trying to get out of the business, but no one really knew. The guy was a mystery.

“Seems that the victim was Ricky Lee’s mother,” said Cataresco.

“Yeah,” said Diamond. “Musta put a dent in his day. Now he’s under arrest for assaulting a police officer.”

Cataresco said that Richards had arrived on his own, not surrounded by his crew, and had asked if he could come in; when they’d said no, going by the book, he’d gone crazy, hitting one patrol guy in the stomach and butting another in the face before they could cuff him. “That was when the crowd started showing up, and the press, boo-boo-boo.”

“Anyone from the DEA show up yet, or the Bureau?” There were so many good guys chasing drugs, all cranky about their acronyms and antsy for their budgets, all playing games with each other, all much too concerned with the size of their dicks, basically, that it was a miracle any big-time dealer ever got busted. The smart ones mostly didn’t, and Ricky Lee was smart, but there were a lot of people trying to find out what was going on in his life. “What about ATF, CRASH?”

“Not yet,” said Cataresco.

“Does he know she’s dead?”

“I don’t think so.”

Cataresco filled me in on what else they’d got. “Victim’s name Mae Richards, age forty-five, place of birth yeah yeah yeah you can read my report later. The body was found by a neighbor, one Louise Szell. She stopped by to ask if the victim would be going to church tonight. Evidently they usually walked together. She phoned in her report at three-thirty-one. No one heard a gunshot, no one heard or saw any signs of a struggle or anything untoward or unusual. Louise Szell said that someone did leave the house, about two-thirty, a guy, white, not young. Maybe fifty, fifty-five. He drove away in some fancy boat, a Cadillac or a Lincoln, dark color, maybe gray or blue.”

“Plate?”

“She remembered three letters. GSG.”

Diamond chipped in, “Gigli, Siepi, Gobbi.”

“Mafia guys?”

“Singers.”

Drew won that round. I turned to Cataresco, “She reliable, this Louise. . .”

“Szell.”

“Right.”

“The neighborhood busybody. Yeah, I’d say she’s reliable.”

“That’s something.” I went back to Diamond. “There’s a folded garbage bag in the sink.”

“I saw that,” he said. “Maybe our shooter brought it with. Or somebody with our shooter.”

“Messages on the machine?”

“None, or wiped.”

Diamond had opened the fridge for a peek. “I’m hungry,” he said to no one in particular. He picked a strawberry from the box on the counter. “I hate strawberries,” he said. He ate one anyway.

This was the job, so much of it routine, an attempt to keep boredom at bay while assembling a picture of the past in terms of time and inches, like crawling on your hands and knees, trying to put back together a mosaic out of ancient pieces, tiny, millions of them, a near-infinity of details that must be re-created, and sometimes you never do find out which are the bits of gold, the ones that make the pattern.

Diamond and Cataresco would be there most of the rest of the night. They’d map the precise position of the corpse. They’d measure the dimensions of the kitchen and how far away from the body the spent cartridge had been found. They’d supervise the taking of prints and photos, and they’d go on gathering information about the victim. They’d watch while the coroner arrived and, to determine the time of death, slid a pointed thermometer into the victim’s liver. It would make a popping noise, like bubble wrap.

Every murder cop goes about with a parasite in the heart. It’s handy, this little worm. It eats up the feelings before they have time to reach the brain. In the end, though, there’s the question: which will survive, the parasite or the man?

“I’d better go see Ricky Lee.”

“Go right ahead and be sympathetic,” said Diamond. “But before you do, take a look at this.” He slipped on a pair of surgical gloves and, squatting by the side of the body, pushed his hand under and heaved it up gently. Mae Richards’s hands were tied behind her back. The killer had sliced off the last joints, where the prints were. The ends of her fingers were stumps clogged with gore and bits of splintered bone.

Diamond said, “Not too much blood. My guess is she was tortured and killed somewhere, then dumped back here.”

I wondered why the perpetrator had bothered to cut off her fingertips, usually done, along with smashing the teeth, to prevent an easy ID of the body — but pointless if the killer was going to leave the victim lying on her own kitchen floor. Perhaps she’d put up a fight after all, and the killer was on the ball enough to know the coroner would cut her fingernails to look for blood and skin tissue.

“What about the shell under the sink?”

“What about it?” said Diamond with a shrug.

“Any ideas?”

“Nope.”

“Nope?”

“Gee, Billy, don’t start.”

“I’m sorry, excuse me, but I seem to see a dead body here. I don’t know about you, Drew, but I’m out to get the murderers.”

He was about to say something, but I held up my hand. I said, “Call me old-fashioned. Thieves I can live with. White-collar fraud, blue-collar rip-offs — be my guest. But let’s think about rapists and child abusers. Let’s think about murderers. It’s unreasonable, of course, but it seems a good idea if maybe, maybe, guys like you and me step in and take a hand. What do you think, Drew?”

“Very funny, Billy,” he said, straightening his neck, squirming in his too-neat clothes.

“I’m not joking. Maybe the shell’s not from the same weapon. Maybe it’s a decoy. Maybe the perp was simple or wired or nuts. But someone really did this lady wrong, and I’m going to find him. Or her.”

On the way out I paused, attention caught by a framed photograph on top of a bookcase in the dining area, apart from the other family snaps. It showed Ricky Lee with one arm around the woman whose body was on the kitchen floor; in the other hand he held a tennis racquet. I slipped the photo out of its frame, into my pocket, and told Cataresco to remind Diamond about the garbage bag.

“He won’t forget.”

“Remind him anyway.”

“Don’t you think you should go a little easy on him?”

“Something about Drew makes me crazy. Maybe it’s those fancy clothes he’s started wearing. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what — he’s a loser.”

“Come on, Billy, the guy’s been having a tough time. And you’re riding him hard.”

“Fun, isn’t it?”

I started to push my way through the crowd and past the reporters into the rain. The boy Nelson was there by my car, dripping and on his own. “Hey, mister. Can I see your Beretta?” he said, as if asking for a quarter or candy.

Making a gun of my thumb and forefinger, I aimed it at him, and said, “Pow!”