Flat Spin (39 page)

B
ut for the black steel security grates covering the windows and front door, the retired teacher’s house looked like Arlo Echevarria’s. Same uninspired architecture. Same blighted lawn. Only the paint scheme was different: Green Bay Packers green with gold trim.

“Mr. Ortiz must’ve been a cheesehead,” I said.

“What’s a cheesehead?”

“How in the hell did I ever stay married to somebody for so long who knows absolutely nothing about football?”

“The sex,” Savannah said.

No arguments there. I tried the doorbell. Broken. I knocked. No answer. No sound or sign of life inside. There were sooty smudges around the knob and up and down the frame. Fingerprint powder.

Savannah followed me around back.

A kidney-shaped swimming pool drained of water took up most of the tiny backyard. There was a six-foot privacy fence of redwood slats, many of which were rotted and falling down. Through the gaps in the fence, across the alley and the street beyond, I could see the front of Echevarria’s house. It looked tranquil, undisturbed.

Not so where Mr. Ortiz had died. The back door had been booted off its hinges, the jam splintered. Someone had tried to secure the opening after the fact by slapping up a thin sheet of plywood where the door had been, then tacking it into place with a few roofing nails. I peeled back the plywood and peeked inside:

The back door led into the kitchen. The unplugged refrigerator was standing open, its shelves overgrown with moldy, unrecognizable lumps of fetid food and swarming with flies. A jumble of filthy cooking pots was heaped atop a harvest gold electric range. More dirty pans and dishes were piled in the sink. A rusty swath of dried blood trailed out from the green Astroturf covering the kitchen floor into the living room. From the way the blood had pooled at the base of the sink, it appeared as if Mr. Ortiz had been shot there, then dragged into the living room, or crawled.

“What do you see?” Savannah said.

“I see that
Better Homes and Gardens
won’t be doing any photo shoots here anytime soon.”

I pounded the plywood back into place with the palm of my hand.

Savannah followed me to the house next door, to the west. The front yard was littered with skateboards and a battered street hockey net. No one was home. We tried the house to the east. A large dog barked and snarled, pawing frantically from behind the door to get at us. No one was home there, either.

Of all the houses on the block, the one directly across the street was by far the most decrepit, which was saying a lot considering that preventative maintenance seemed to be an abstract concept among the late Mr. Ortiz’s neighbors. Much of the roof was covered by rotting canvas tarps held in place using bricks and dead palm fronds. An untended maze of bougainvillea vines clung to the wood siding and covered what few windows still had glass left in them rather than cardboard. There was a pear tree not much bigger than a sapling out front. The tree was pruned so severely that it no longer resembled a plant so much as it did an amputee: the end of each severed limb had been bandaged with a tiny round Band-Aid.

The front door opened as Savannah and I made our way up the front walk. A thin old man was standing in the shadows behind a steel-reinforced screen door, naked but for a pair of baggy boxer shorts adorned with little smiley faces. He was unshorn and wildeyed, like Howard Hughes in his recluse phase.

Savannah took refuge behind me.

“Are you Jesus Christ?” the man demanded.

“My ex-wife used to think so.”

My ex-wife jabbed me in the kidney.

“I don’t take
Newsweek
,” the man said, “and I don’t take the newspaper and I don’t take Girl Scout cookies, so don’t ask me cuz I ain’t buying
nothing
from nobody.”

“It’s OK, sir. We’re not selling anything. There was a shooting across the street several weeks ago. Your neighbor, Mr. Ortiz, a retired teacher, was murdered. Did you happen to see anything?”

“Hell, I seen
every
thing.”

He spied something over my shoulder, blurted out “Goddammit!” and flung open the screen door, pushing past Savannah and me into the front yard, his old-man balls swaying under his skivvies like a pair of drunken sailors. Some Band-Aids had fallen from the branches of his pear tree. He picked one off the ground and tenderly reattached it as if the tree’s survival depended on it.

“They come along and do this just to torment me,” he said. “Kids today. Got no respect for anything.”

“Sir, can you tell me what you saw the night Mr. Ortiz was murdered?”

He peered suspiciously at Savannah, then leaned closer to me. “Who’s the skirt?”

“She’s with me.”

“You from Langley?”

“You know we couldn’t tell you that, even if we were.”

He nodded like we were all in on some big secret and rebandaged another tree limb.

“I’m inside reading my Bible,” he said, “when I hear this
pop,
then
pop—pop
. Little faggot had it coming. Used to have sex parties over there. I always knew one of his playmates was gonna cap his ass someday. I look out. Here comes this guy running out of the house. Jumps in a car he’s got parked the wrong way in front of my house, and takes off.

“What’d he look like, the shooter?”

“Six foot, 160 maybe. Jeans. Hooded sweatshirt. Young. Didn’t see his face. No moon that night. Let there be light, God said, in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”

“What kind of car was he driving?”

“White two-door Honda.”

My pulse kicked into overdrive.

“You didn’t, by any chance, catch the license plate, did you?”

“Three Mary King Lincoln three six eight. Got it all right up here in safe storage,” the old man said, tapping his temple with a crooked finger. “Went out with my flashlight when I heard him pull up. Was gonna call it in to traffic enforcement for the way he was parked, only he didn’t stick around long enough.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“Let them figure it out. They all think I’m nuts, anyway.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Savannah said condescendingly.

I shot her a disapproving glance. She looked at me as if to say, “I’m just trying to help.”

“I used to be a cop,” the man said, “before them geniuses at Parker Center said I wasn’t fit to—” He pressed his left index finger to his ear, like he was on a long distance phone call with a bad connection. “But you just told me . . . Well, if they ain’t from Langley, where the hell are they from?”

He looked up at me, his face suddenly contorted with fear.

“You’re not from Langley at all,” he said. “The sulfur, I can smell it on you!”

He slowly backed away from me, then turned and ran back into his house, slamming and locking the door behind him. “I am Gabriel, the archangel!” he yelled. “You hear me, Beelzebub? I invoke the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the burning bush, and order you to return to the bowels of Abaddon! Now, get the fuck off my property!”

I heard the click-clack of a round being chambered. A rifle barrel poked through a broken window. It was aiming at me.

“Five seconds, devil! Then I’m blastin’!”

Buddhism has no devils. No demons or mythological beasts. Not even any flammable shrubbery. No special effects. If any religion is low-fat, it’s Buddhism. The crazy old coot could’ve benefited from a teaching or two. But I wasn’t about to start sermonizing. Not with a rifle barrel pointed in my direction by a man who thought I was El Diablo.

I grabbed Savannah by the arm and got off his property.

T
WENTY-FOUR

“Y
ou’re dreaming,” Czarnek said. “Some lunatic gives you a plate number and you expect me to just drop everything and roll out the cavalry, especially after chasing your last tip? You can forget it, Logan. I’m already in enough trouble with my supervisor as it is.”

“That lunatic’s a former cop,” I reminded Czarnek.

Savannah and I were parked down the street from the dead teacher’s house. I put the phone on speaker so she could listen in.

“I know who he is,” Czarnek said. “His name’s Norman Buckhalter. Everybody calls him ‘Abnorman.’ Got tossed off the department for a bad shooting back in the eighties. Been in and out of the psych ward ever since. Calls us all the time with all kinds of crazy shit.”

“Run the plate, get me an address, I’ll do the legwork myself. It’ll take you five minutes.”

“I run that plate, I go to jail. It’s called misuse of police resources.”

“OK, then run the plate and
you
check it out.”

“The cases aren’t connected, Logan.”

“Two murders, days apart, one block apart, same street number, both middle-age Latinos, and they’re not connected? We have a saying where I come from, Czarnek: ‘If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, the goddamn murders are connected.’”

“There were two different weapons used. Echevarria got shot with a .40-cal. The teacher got it with a .45. Plus, every witness we talked to said Echevarria’s shooter had brown skin. Two wits on Elmira said the guy who shot the teacher was Caucasian. And nobody except Abnorman Buckhalter said anything about seeing any white Honda.”

I let Czarnek know about the white Honda that had been seen lurking near my garage apartment shortly before the place caught fire, and how Detective Ostrow from Rancho Bonita PD was eager to compare notes with him.

“There’s a million white Hondas in the United States,” Czarnek said. “It’s probably just coincidence.”

“This is hardly what I would describe as proactive law enforcement, Detective.”

“I told you, I got gang case files piling up on my desk faster than I can read ‘em. Look, I’ll get to your Detective Ostrow when I can. And if it’ll get you off my butt, I’ll drop by Abnorman’s place. Maybe next week, OK?”

“Joe Friday’s rolling over in his grave,” I said.

“I’m sure Joe Friday would find the situation less than ideal,” Czarnek said, “as we all do.”

“You know what I find, Detective Czarnek?” Savannah blurted into the phone. “I find it amazing that you’re getting paid to be a detective, because from where I sit, it doesn’t look like you could find your ass in the dark with both hands tied behind your back, let alone find the man who killed my husband.”

She hung up on him.

“Well played,” I said.

“You think that whacko knew what he was talking about, with the license plate?”

“Just because somebody’s nuttier than a port-a-potty at an almond festival doesn’t make them incapable of conveying the truth.”

“You are one profoundly articulate guy, Logan,” Savannah said, shaking her head in disgust.

“What can I say? It’s a gift.”

The sky was streaked brown. She sniffed the air. “There’s a fire somewhere. You can smell it.”

There was always a fire somewhere in Southern California this time of year, when the offshore winds turned the arroyos and hillsides to tinder. A spark from a weed wacker and entire neighborhoods went up in flames. Yet regardless of the risks, whether by fire or temblor or mudslide or murder, no true Angelino ever gave serious thought to living anywhere else. They were all too busy, I suppose, vying for their own reality shows.

“I’ll take you to the bus station now,” Savannah said.

I didn’t protest.

She slid the Jag’s polished walnut gear shifter into drive. We drove south on Elmira Avenue, toward the freeway.

Strange how random recollections can pop into your head at any given moment for every reason and no reason at all. At that moment, my mind’s eye filled with the image of Ray Allen, my high school football coach, flinging a helmet at me in the locker room after a game for failing to catch a pass. We’d been down by three touchdowns with less than a minute to play, and the football had been thrown ten yards in front of me, but that didn’t matter to Coach Allen. “If you don’t believe in your heart you can win,” he screamed, his cheeks florid with rage, “then there’s no point in getting out of bed at the end of the day.” No one dared to correct Coach Allen. Certainly not to his face.

“Never quit,” was the message Coach Allen was selling that day. Back then, I took to heart every dumb sports cliché every coach ever trotted out—too much, probably. Now I was stuck with them. My overwhelming urge was to get on the bus and get the hell out of Dodge. The only problem is, quitters never win and winners never quit.

Screw it.

I called Buzz and asked him to run the license plate the crazy ex-cop had volunteered. Buzz gave me grief about the illegalities of accessing official government records for unofficial purposes, and how I already owed him big-time for all the many other favors he’d done for me, then said it would probably take a few minutes to get back with the information I wanted. He was in the doctor’s office, he said.

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Hemorrhoids are flaring up. Plus, I’m out of Viagra.”

“Too much information, Buzz.”

“You ever wonder why they call it an asteroid when it’s outside the atmosphere, but they call it a hemorrhoid when it’s inside your ass?”

“Gotta run, Buzz,” I said and signed off.

“One of your
marketing
contacts,” Savannah said sarcastically.

“A buddy.”

“Why can’t you just tell me the truth, Logan?”

“That is the truth.”

She shook her head, aggravated with me per usual, and turned on news radio. The fire she’d smelled was burning in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles. Nearly twenty structures were already burned, and hundreds more threatened. Evacuations were being ordered. Water-bombing helicopters and a DC-10 carrying 12,000 gallons of retardant had been called in to stop the advancing flames. Much depended on the winds, and the winds weren’t cooperating. I ached for those who’d lost their homes, and those who soon would. I knew the feeling.

“People just don’t call up a ‘buddy’ and get confidential DMV records,” Savannah said.

“It’s a good buddy.”

“It’s the CIA. That’s who you and Arlo used to work for, isn’t it?”

“You know, Savannah, you could continue busting my
huevos
, or we could go get a drink and wait until my good buddy gets back to me with the information I requested.”