Flat Spin (18 page)

I folded Echevarria’s death notice and returned it to the belly drawer of my desk. I thought about what Miles Zambelli had told me in the limo driving in from North Vegas, how Janice Echevarria, Arlo’s first wife, had abundant reasons for wanting him dead. The planet is thick with divorced people who secretly wish such ill on their former spouses. Very few, fortunately, ever attempt to carry out those fantasies.

My office phone rang. It was Lamont Royale, calling from a very loud casino. He said he had hoped to talk to me in confidence while I was still in Las Vegas, but that would’ve been impossible. Carlisle, he said, planted listening devices everywhere, including all of his automobiles.

“I have some . . . on . . . Mr.—” Lamont said.

I could barely hear him above the din of carnival music and the metallic clink-clink-clink of slot machines paying out.

“Say again?”

He repeated himself, only louder and slower. “I have some information on Mr. Echevarria’s murder.”

Something thudded heavily just then against the concrete floor to my left, caromed off my trash can, and came to rest near my feet. I looked down: the object resembled the kind of cardboard roll toilet paper comes on, only metal and painted olive drab, with a big metal cap on each end. A stun grenade.

“
Five-banger
,” I thought to myself.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

A succession of deafening but otherwise harmless explosions meant to shock, not kill, rocked the hangar, as helmeted SWAT officers in green Nomex flight suits from the Rancho Bonita PD came swarming in with short-barrel shotguns and MP-9 submachine guns. They were yelling “On the ground!” and “Get on the ground!” and “Lemme see your hands!” and it looked like they couldn’t wait to put a bullet in somebody, anybody. I sat with my hands folded placidly on my desk so that somebody wouldn’t be me. Two seconds later, I was kissing the concrete, gun barrels jammed against my head, knees against my back, while my arms were yanked painfully behind me and my wrists handcuffed. I noticed there were many dust bunnies under my desk and a ballpoint pen I’d been hunting for more than a month. I remember thinking to myself,
I really do need to do some cleaning around here
.

The police yelled, “Clear!” and two SWAT officers hoisted me up off the floor by my armpits. A third frisked me, a big, jarheadlooking dude with freckles.

“I’d offer you coffee,” I said to the lawmen, “but, one, I don’t have any, and, two, you guys look like you’re already way over-caffeinated.”

It wasn’t hard to find the two-inch revolver stuck in my belt. Freckles handed the weapon to his sergeant, then finished patting me down.

“He’s clean,” Freckles said. The officers who’d hoisted me off the floor slammed me back down into my desk chair.

Czarnek and Windhauser strolled in as if on cue.

“Five-banger,” I said to the detectives. “A little overkill, don’t you think?”

Windhauser propped his ass on the corner of my desk, planted a cowboy-booted foot up on my chair, and squinted hard at me, arms folded, while Czarnek read me my Miranda rights from a little laminated card. I told them I understood my rights. I was happy to talk. The entertainment value alone would make the conversation more than worthwhile.

Windhauser smoothed the ends of his Wyatt Earp moustache with his thumb and index finger and said, “We know you killed him, Logan.”

“Killed who?”

“You
know
who.”

“You play games with us, Mr. Logan,” Czarnek said, working his Nicorette, “and I guarantee you, it’s gonna go a lot harder on you than you can ever possibly imagine.”

They had on the same winter-weight wool sport coats they wore the last time I’d seen them. Same color shirts. Same ties.

“
Dragnet
called,” I said. “They’d like their wardrobe back.”

Windhauser grunted.

“We spoke to your ex-wife,” Czarnek said. “She confirmed you were quite upset with Mr. Echevarria as far as the two of them getting, you know, romantically involved.”

“Guilty as charged.”

The two detectives looked at each other. This was starting out better than they’d planned.

“So, you’re saying you
did
do him?” Windhauser said.

“I’m saying I was upset. I didn’t say I killed him—not that I didn’t frequently consider it.”

Another look between them.

“Lemme spell it out for you,” Windhauser said. “We got a warrant to search for the murder weapon. So we’re gonna toss this place—I mean,
rip it the fuck up
. We don’t find the weapon here, we’re gonna toss your apartment cuz we got a warrant for it, too, OK? And if we don’t find it there, we’re gonna rip up your airplane. Then we’re gonna rip up your truck. We don’t find the gun by then, we’re gonna come back and start all over again. So why don’t you just do yourself and everybody else a favor and tell us where it’s at.”

“You guys need some new threads,” I said. “I mean, tweed is so three years ago.”

Windhauser exhaled. He got up, took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned and pointed a finger at me. “You think you’re so fucking smart. Lemme tell you something, chuck wagon, this is gonna go south on you in a hurry unless you start singing another tune.”

“Did you just call me
chuck wagon
?”

The SWAT sergeant stepped in. “We found this on him,” he said, showing Windhauser my little revolver. “Bad boy was fully loaded.”

Freckles and his sergeant shared a celebratory fist bump. The murder weapon had been recovered. Case closed.

“It’s Miller time,” Freckles said.

Windhauser stared up at the ceiling and rubbed the vein in his forehead.

“Maybe if you morons had bothered to
read
the warrant, you’d know the weapon is a .40-cal semi-auto, not some fucking wheel gun! I don’t even know why we even bothered calling you people in to assist. I mean, Jesus Christ!” He shouldered past Freckles and out of the hangar.

The Rancho Bonita sergeant looked forlorn enough at having been put in his place by the big city detective that for a moment I thought he might start crying. He handed my revolver to Czarnek who tucked it in his sport coat, dug a fresh toothpick out of the breast pocket of his shirt and began picking his teeth.

“We checked with your landlady,” he said. “She confirmed you and her have dinner Monday nights during football season. Only she has no specific recollection of the night Echevarria was killed.”

“We had pot roast with carrots and potatoes. The gravy was excellent. No lumps.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure it was delicious but, see, here’s the deal: if the old lady can’t remember eating with you that night, and you got no other alibi, then we got no choice but to start looking for that semi-auto. Unless you want to tell us where it is.”

“Look in the desk.”

Czarnek cocked his head and his eyebrow, intrigued. “It can’t be that easy.” He pulled open a side drawer and started tearing through it like a kid opening a present on Christmas Day.

“Belly drawer,” I said.

He shut the drawer he was rummaging through and opened the one I’d told him to check. Inside were mostly aircraft maintenance records and FAA paperwork. Czarnek found the photo of Echevarria and me, posing with the dead Arab.

“Your ex-wife showed us this picture,” he said. “You Photoshop this?”

“Photoshop. Right. I’m still trying to figure out how to retrieve email.”

Czarnek set the picture aside and dug deeper through the drawer.

“No gun,” he said when he was finished.

“Never said there was a gun.”

“Then what the hell was I just looking for?”

“Receipt.”

“A receipt?”

“One pint of vanilla ice cream, one frozen apple pie, and, if I recall correctly, six cans of Fancy Feast cat food.”

Czarnek spit his gum into my trash can. “OK,” he said. “I’ll bite.”

“Mrs. Schmulowitz forgot dessert that night,” I said. “She sent me out at halftime—which, according to your records, would’ve been just about when Echevarria got shot. I walked over to the Portola Street Market, a couple blocks from my apartment. Owner’s name is Kang. Good guy, except he’s an Oakland Raider fan. Kang’ll remember me being there that night. He remembers everything.”

Czarnek looked at me questioningly, then went back through the belly drawer to find the computerized cash register receipt. The date and time stamp confirmed that I’d made my purchase within five minutes of when Echevarria’s neighbors began calling 911 to report gunshots.

“Without traffic, Echevarria’s house is a good hour and a half drive from Rancho Bonita,” I said. “Even if I’d flown there that night, I would’ve had to land at Van Nuys, then rent a car or take a taxi. There’s no way I could’ve been there and at Kang’s market within a span of five minutes. Unless, of course, I was Carlos Castaneda.”

“Who’s Carlos Castaneda?”

“The whole Mesoamerican, shamanism thing, being in two places at once?”

Czarnek gazed at me blankly.

“Forget it,” I said.

He conceded that there was no way any prosecutor would ever file murder charges against me, not with the receipt he had in his hand, and not after Kang, the owner of the market, vouched for my whereabouts that night.

“I do find it a little strange, you keeping receipts from the corner grocery store,” Czarnek said.

“My landlady’s thinking of taking flying lessons. As a prospective student, the pie and ice cream are legitimate business expenses.”

Czarnek glanced at the receipt. “What about the cat food?”

“Cat’s narcoleptic, not to mention the fact he has the IQ of a houseplant. I’m fairly confident the FAA would never issue him a pilot’s license.”

Czarnek probably would’ve laughed if the LAPD didn’t have an image to maintain. He tucked the receipt back in the belly drawer of my desk. Then he unhooked the cuffs.

W
indhauser wasn’t happy about his partner wanting to cut me loose. He theorized that I could’ve cooked up a cover story by having somebody go to Kang’s market and get a time-stamped receipt for me, while I was really down in LA, murdering Echevarria. Windhauser even insisted that Czarnek drive us over to the Portola Street Market so that he could personally question Kang. I waited unobserved in the backseat of the detectives’ Crown Vic, the windows rolled down, and enjoyed the show.

Kang stood behind his cash register, arms folded, answering Windhauser’s questions while watching a strung-out speed freak in a hooded sweatshirt prowling the bread and donut aisle. Kang was a stout hardhead with shifting slits for eyes that missed nothing. He’d been a martial arts instructor in the South Korean Army. No would-be shoplifter ever made it out the door at Kang’s market on Portola Street in one piece. Ever.

He told Windhauser he was “100 percent positive” he’d seen me the night of the murder.

“Logan give me crap at halftime for being Raider fan. He funny dude. Good customer.”

“How can you be so sure it was halftime when he came in,” Windhauser said.

“Halftime, we talk. Game, I watch. No talking.”

“How do I know you’re not covering for him?”

Kang’s eye slits shifted from the meth head to Windhauser like the detective’s question was delivered in a foreign language.

“Maybe he calls in,” Windhauser speculated. “Maybe he says, ‘Hey, Kang, old buddy, do me a favor and ring me up some pie and whatnot and I’ll be by in a couple hours to pick it up.’ You figure the request is a little weird, but what the hell? The guy’s a good customer. Isn’t that what you just told me?”

“He buy ice cream and want me to put it under counter? Ice cream melt under counter.”

“The freezer. Whatever. I’m just saying.”

Kang shifted his eye slits back to the druggie, who was getting a little too intimate with a twelve-pack of Ding Dongs.

“You gonna buy those or have-a-sex with them?”

The tweaker looked over at the no-nonsense Korean shopkeeper and the no-nonsense bulge under Windhauser’s sport coat, and wisely returned the Ding Dongs to the shelf.

“Ice cream in a bag, under a-da counter,” Kang said to Windhauser, still watching the crank head. “You fuckin’ crazy, man.”

“Look,” Windhauser said, “you need to understand something here, chief. We’re conducting a homicide investigation. Let me repeat that: a
homicide
investigation, OK? I find out you’re providing false and misleading information, you’re on the first sampan back to Peking.”

Kang slowly shifted both eye slits back toward Windhauser like the battleship Missouri bringing all guns to bear.

“I’m
Korean-
American,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my store,
chief
.”

The detectives drove me the two blocks home. Windhauser said he still harbored suspicions, but conceded that there was no evidence to keep me in custody. Czarnek said he hoped there were no hard feelings and shook my hand. I offered to take them both sightseeing in my airplane. Forgive and forget, I always say. Well, maybe not always. Czarnek said he’d definitely think about it and gave me my gun back. Windhauser said nothing.