Angel of Vengeance (16 page)

“Hey, where are my manners? This is my partner, Detective Elliot,” Coombs says.

I shake Elliot’s hand and study him while he does the same to me. He’s younger and thinner than Coombs with a snarl of curly brown hair that could still be weeded of its gray. What his face lacks in chin it tries to make up for in nose. The overall effect makes his head look top-heavy. Taken together they couldn’t be more different. The only things they have in common are the cheap suits and the bacon-smelling aftershave.

“Mind if we come in?”

“Actually, I’m kind of in a hurry. I have an appointment.”

“It won’t take long,” Elliot says, speaking for the first time. His voice is nasal and a little whiny and I imagine it’s the reason he leaves most of the talking to Coombs.

It all sounds polite and friendly, but I can tell I don’t really have a choice here, so I let them in. I figure this visit has to do with either Dallas or Vin Prince. Problem is I don’t know which and it doesn’t seem like a good idea to ask.

Coombs and I sit at my desk just like before. I apologize to Elliot for not having an extra chair.

“That’s all right. I like to stand. Like to move around,” he says. As if to prove the point he walks over and picks the photograph of me and my old band mates up off my desk and looks at it.

“This you?”

I shake my head. “My grandpa.”

“Looks just like you.”

“That’s what Grandma always said,” I say with a thin smile. “So, uh, what’s all this about?”

“You in a hurry?” Coombs asks now.

“I think I said I was.”

“Oh that’s right, you did say that. You’re going somewhere, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, as Elliot circles behind me like a shark to inspect the aluminum foil covered window.

“Big date?”

“Something like that,” I say.

“What’s the deal with this?” Elliot asks now, aiming one narrow finger at my window. This must be how they do it. Keep the questions coming hard and fast and keep the suspect off balance. Got to give it to them—it worked.

“It gets hot in here during the day with that eastern exposure. The foil helps keep it cooler.”

“Gotcha.” Seemingly satisfied, Elliot nods and moves on.

I turn my attention back to Coombs. “So, why are you fellas here?”

“Oh, well, see, uh, turns out your name came up in a little investigation we’re working on.”

“That right?” I ask.

He nods, scratches his nose. “Mmm-hmm.”

“What kind of investigation?”

“Homicide. Your name turned up in the phone logs of the decedent.”

It’s my turn to nod. In my peripheral vision, I see Detective Elliot pluck at the fabric over the knees of his suit pants and stoop down and pull the door of my mini-fridge open.

“Would you mind not doing that?” I say. You have to draw the line with cops or else they take compliance as a sign of guilt.

“Why not? You don’t have anything to hide, do ya?” Elliot says with a smile.

I see his smile and raise him a grin. “Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

He laughs and looks inside anyway. It’s empty. Before turning in last night I made a point of stashing what remained of Vin’s blood in a cooler in an unmarked grave I keep in a certain well-known city park just in case I ever need to go to ground for a while. I also stashed my kit, my satchel, my gun, and some of Leroy’s cash there. Right now I feel very glad I did.

I turn back to Coombs, who consults a notepad he has taken out. “Are you familiar with a woman by the name of Callie-Dean Merriweather?”

I plaster a puzzled look to my mug and slowly shake my head back and forth. “I don’t think s—”

“She’s a stripper and part-time call girl. Goes by the stage name Dallas.”

“Oh, Dallas,” I say, nodding now. “I know Dallas.”

“How well?”

“Not very.”

Coombs nods. “You happen to remember the last time you saw her?”

This is where a stupid person would lie. I’m no genius but I know enough to spot a trap when I see one. Cops rarely ask a question they don’t already know the answer to. Not if they’re any good they don’t.

“Sure. Just the other night. I went into the club where she works to see her.”

Coombs nods, scribbles notes. “What for?”

“Her name came up in a case I’m working on.”

“That’s right, you’re a detective yourself, aren’tcha?” He says it with the patronizing tone all cops use with all private detectives. It makes me sore, but I let it go with a nod.

“What’s the case?”

“Missing person. I’m helping a girl find her fourteen year-old sister who’s run away.”

“And you thought this Dallas might know something?”

“That’s right. I heard through the grapevine that she knew the girl.”

“So you went to ask her about it.”

“That’s right,” I say again.

At this point Elliot jumps in to let me know he’s parched and to inquire after a glass of water.

“Sure,” I say. I start to get up, but he waves me back down.

“Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll get it.” He points at the doorway that leads to my little kitchenette. “Through there?”

I nod. He exits. I turn back to Coombs.

“So you went and talked to Dallas about this missing girl.”

“Right.”

“And was she helpful?”

“Not very.”

“I gotcha. So then you left?”

“Right.”

“And that’s the last time you saw her?”

He’s good. Real good. I see the potential to walk smack into another trap, but this time I’m not sure how to field it. I don’t know how much he knows. If I admit to going to Dallas’s house later, then I’ve just put myself at the scene of the crime on the night she was killed, but if I lie and Coombs knows I was there then I become his number one suspect.

I’m saved from answering by Elliot’s appearance in the doorway. He has a mug of water in one hand and a perplexed look on his face.

“You know you have a buncha dirt in your freezer?”

“Yeah,” I say. “What were you doing in my freezer?”

“Looking for ice cubes,” he says. “Mind if I ask why you keep dirt in there?”

“I like my dirt cold,” I tell him, and turn back to Coombs who’s looking at me like he’s still waiting for an answer. “Sorry. What was the question?”

“I asked if the club was the last place you saw Dallas.”

I stall by fumbling for my pack and lighting a cigarette. The more I think about it, the more I see I’ve been looking at this all wrong. I’ve been trying to minimize the amount of trouble I’m in, when I should be thinking about the greatest possible gain. On the one hand, if I tell them I was there and they don’t know it, I put myself at the top of their death penalty ‘to do’ list. On the other hand, if I lie and they do know it, all I’ll be doing is confirming what they already know. It won’t look good, but I’m already in deep and a little deeper won’t make much difference. Either way, if I’m there I’m screwed. It’s just a matter of degrees. I don’t exactly have the kind of lifestyle that can bear a lot of scrutiny—or any for that matter. The only way I can hope to come out ahead is if I walk away from this interrogation farther off their radar than I was to start with, and the only way to do that is to lie and hope these coppers are dumber than I think. So I lie.

“Right. Yeah, that’s the last place I saw her,” I say.

I can tell from the look that passes between the detectives it’s the wrong answer. I can smell their high-octane excitement as adrenaline dumps into their bloodstreams and pumps from their pores. They have me. I don’t know why or how, but they have me.

“Would you mind coming downtown with us, Mr. Angel?” Coombs says.

“What for?”

Coombs shrugs. “Just to talk.”

Elliot nods confirmation.

“We’re talking now.”

“We’d prefer to continue downtown,” Elliot says. “That way we can get your statement. Make it official.”

This time Coombs nods agreement.

“Well I’d like to, but I can’t. Like I said, I have an appointment.”

“I think you’re going to have to reschedule it,” Coombs says.

“We’re going to have to insist,” Elliot says.

I notice that he has moved between me and the door while we’ve been talking.

“Could you guys at least tell me what this is about?”

“Sure. We’ll explain everything. Downtown,” Coombs says.

“Downtown,” Elliot nods.

I sit, watching my cigarette burn to ash like a vampire at dawn, and consider my options. There aren’t many. As I see it I can either take a ride downtown like they want, or rough them up and disappear, or kill them both. I can’t say I like any of them much. I don’t like cops as a rule—never have—but these two haven’t done anything to make me think they might deserve killing. My gut tells me they’re on the up-and-up, and thirsty as I am, I have rules about that sort of thing. Roughing them up and disappearing is probably the safest route to go, but vampires are creatures of habit. You get used to a place over time. You get comfortable. Call it a fatal flaw. Except for the time I spent up in San Quentin, I’ve lived in Los Angeles my whole life long. It’s home. I don’t want to go through the trouble of finding a new place. A new life. I will if I have to—we all do what we have to—but I’d need to know just exactly how bad my situation is to commit to a course of action that drastic.

One last drag and I stand with a smokescreen sigh. “All right,” I say. “Let’s go downtown.”

Turns out it’s bad—real bad—and they enjoy telling me all about it in the claustrophobic little closet of an interrogation room they stick me in when we get where we’re going. They tell me about how one of the other strippers remembered Dallas dancing for several Midwestern insurance salesmen in town for a convention. And about how she left with one of them at the end of the night. And about how they managed to catch up with him at his Burbank hotel room just hours before he caught a flight out of town. And about how the guy had a busted nose when they found him. And about how it got that way because of a certain S.O.B.—his words not theirs—who was waiting in the house for Dallas when they arrived back that night. And about the description he gave them of the S.O.B.

“Imagine our surprise when we show up at your place and you fit the description,” Elliot says, enjoying himself. “Funny huh?”

“Hilarious,” I say.

“Well if you like that, you’ll really get a kick outa this,” Coombs tells me.

“The insurance salesman is on his way over here as we speak to take a look at the lineup we’ve arranged. Should be here any time now.”

Coombs and Elliot share a look of great amusement.

“You okay, pal?” Coombs asks.

“I’m fine,” I say, faking a smile. It’s a lie and he knows it.

It’s funny, all the people I’ve killed over the years and the only two times I’ve ever been in any kind of real trouble for murder it’s been over ones I didn’t commit. If I wasn’t so capital-letter-f-Fucked I’d probably bust a gut over it.

Coombs assumes my sickly reaction is due to all the bad news he just unloaded on me, but he’s only half right. The fact is my need is growing. I haven’t had a fix since shooting my fill of Vin’s blood last night. It has held me over this long, but now my junkie hands are getting shifty on me and I’m starting to perspire. Just a little right now, but it will get worse. A lot worse. Already my fingers have taken on the translucent bleached-white color that comes with blood starvation. In vampires, the need for blood starts in the extremities and works its way in toward the heart; much like crucifixion. As the need grows, a cramping, Charlie horse-like pain gradually invades your limbs, your torso, your chest, until, racked with agony, all you can do is lay like a curled dead spider on the floor and pray for relief from an uncaring God.

Obviously I’m going to have to do something before my old pal Tom arrives and seals my fate, but I’d like to do it the non-bloody legal way.

If I can.

“We know you were there, Mick,” Coombs says, seated across the burn-scarred table top from me. The sister smells of desperation and fear emanate from it in waves; ghost emotions cast off by all those who have squirmed here before me. “Why don’t you just make it easy on yourself and come clean?”

“Yeah,” Elliot says, slouching cross-armed under the camera rigged in one corner of the room. “I mean, just because you were there doesn’t mean you did it. But if you keep lying about it, what do you expect us to think?”

“We want to help you, Mick,” Coombs says. “Help us help you.”

I groan inwardly. The only thing worse than good cop, bad cop is good cop, good cop.

“All right,” I say. “I’ll talk. But I want my phone call first.”

Coombs smiles like he wants to be my buddy, but I’m making it difficult. “Why don’t we hold off on that for a little bit?” he says.

“How ’bout a soda instead?” Elliot says.

They finally give me my call when they know there’s no chance I can get a lawyer down here before the lineup. A blue-suited uni takes me to a greasy pay phone in a hallway as sallow and dead-end as I feel and leaves me to it. Because of the lack of blood in them, my fingers are even more numb and useless than usual and it takes all my concentration just to get them to punch up Reesa’s cell phone number. She answers. I’ve caught her between shows. It’s the first bit of good luck I’ve had all night.

“Hi, doll,” I say.

“Mick, where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you.” The sound of genuine concern in her voice reminds me just how long it’s been since I had anyone who gave a shit about me. It’s nice. Real nice, if you want to know the truth.

“Ran into a little trouble on the case. One of the girls I questioned ended up dead.”

“Who?”

“A stripper by the name of Dallas your sister stayed with for a little while before taking off again.”

“And the police think you had something to do with it?”

“I think that’s safe to say.”

“Oh my God. That’s awful.”

“It’s not good,” I agree.

“Why do they think you were involved?”

“No reason, except they think they can put me at the scene.”

“That’s it? What about a motive?”

“They don’t care about that. The prosecutor can always make one up later.”

“But you didn’t even know Callie. Why would you want to kill her?”