Flipping Out (25 page)

'Don't
bet on it,' Marilyn said, getting up and putting her empty bowl in the
dishwasher.

'What
is that supposed to mean?' Terry said.

Marilyn
hesitated. 'Well, seeing how she's dead, it's not going to hurt anyone to let
the cat out of the bag. Marisol was having Tony followed.'

Terry
and I both came up with the same knee-jerk response. 'You knew about that?'

'Well,
that sure hit a nerve,' she said. 'Yes, I've known it for a while.' She went
back to the table and ate another spoonful of ice cream direct from the
container.

'How
did you know,' Terry said, 'and why didn't you tell me?'

'Martin
told me, but he swore me to secrecy. Marisol suspected there was another
woman.'

'There
wasn't,' Terry said. 'We just talked to the PI she hired. Marisol claimed that
Tony wanted out of the marriage, but there was no other woman.'

'Ha!'
Marilyn said. 'There's always another woman.'

'I
wish we could find her,' Terry said. 'Ninety-nine percent of the guys who ask
for walking papers have another woman to walk to. And since there doesn't seem
to be one, the question is, why was Tony leaving her'

'I
don't like to speak ill of the dead,' Marilyn said, 'but in case you hadn't
noticed, Marisol was a total bitch.'

'Or
maybe she just had her own reasons for tailing him,' Terry said, 'and she
invented the affair as a cover.'

'If
only I actually cared,' Marilyn said. She put the lid on the Rocky Road. 'Are you
coming to bed, or do I have to take this ice cream with me for emotional
support?'

'Give
me five more minutes with Mike, and I'll be in.'

'I'm
putting a clock on it,' Marilyn said. 'Any longer than five minutes, and the
two of you can sleep with each other.'

'I'm
going to bed too,' Diana said to me. 'I don't have a five minute rule. Just
show up.'

The
two women left.

'I'm
going to bed too,' I said.

'You
don't want to talk this through just a little more?'

'Terry,
we're not going to resolve anything in five minutes. And I'm not sleeping with
you.'

'The
case is closed, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions.'

'I
think they had the same problems with the Kennedy assassination.'

'I'll
make you a deal,' he said, if you look me straight in the eye and tell me to
drop the case and stop being such an obsessive-compulsive asshole, I will.'

'Fair
enough,' I said, looking him straight in the eye. 'I want you to drop the case
and stop being such an obsessive-compulsive asshole.'

He
looked hurt. He hadn't expected me to give up that easily.

'Then tomorrow
morning, when you wake up,' I said, 'you can reopen the investigation, because
if you weren't such an obsessive-compulsive asshole, I'd start looking for a
new partner. Good night.'

'I feel human
again,' I said to Terry as we got into the car the next morning. 'Six hours'
sleep, a hot shower, and two cups of coffee work wonders.'

'
It's
all part of the service at Chez Biggs. Picking up where we left off last night,
how much longer do you think we can stall Kilcullen on the paperwork?'

'Actually, Diana
had an interesting idea last night,' I said.

Terry smirked.
'So did I, but by the time I got my clothes off and climbed into bed, Marilyn
was snoring like a bull moose with a deviated septum.'

'I'm being
serious.'

'Me too. Do you
know how much sexual tension builds up after spending the day talking about how
hot Marisol was?'

'Diana made me
realise that we're swimming in uncharted waters, and we can't see the forest
for the trees.'

Terry put on his
tough cop voice. 'Back away from the metaphors, Lomax. I'm with the Logic
Police. Plain English, or I'll shoot.'

'Think about
it,' I said. 'The pressure is always on us to close a case. This time, we're
slow dancing, hoping to keep it open. But what if we finished the report real
fast? What would happen next?'

'We'd get
assigned another dead body. It's kind of what we do, and like the boss said,
there's never a shortage.'

'But what
happens to the paperwork we turn in?' I said.

'The DA's office
reads it, blesses it, closes up the case, and feeds the report to the political
piranhas.'

'Exactly. Cops
don't close cases. District attorneys do. Unless...' I stopped and let it hang.

'Give me a
break, Mike. Dramatic pauses are worse than metaphors. Spit it out.'

'Unless the DA
who is assigned to the report zeroes in on the same inconsistencies that bother
us. The case would stay open.'

He didn't say
anything, which with Terry is always a good sign.

'Of course, we'd
need a real smart deputy DA,' I said. 'Someone we can trust, who will send us
back to dig deeper, instead of accusing us of sloppy police work.'

'Someone like
Anna DeRoy,' he said.

'Now you're
getting the hang of this uncharted-waters thing,' I told him.

Five hours later
we walked into Kilcullen's office with the good news.

'The report is
done,' I said.

'About time,' he
said. 'Let me take a quick look.'

'Anne Batchelor
is typing it up as we speak.'

Anne is a civilian
employee and the fastest typist in the department, maybe even on the planet.

'Good call,'
Kilcullen said. 'That'll move it along. Last night I thought you were going to
start dragging your heels on me.'

'We were just
trying to be totally buttoned up,' I said. 'With all these politicians looking
over our shoulder, we didn't want anything to come back and kick us in the
ass.'

He snorted out a
laugh. 'My shoulder.
My
ass.'

We laughed along
with him.

'As soon as it's
typed, we'll hand-carry it over to the DA's office,' I said.

'Let's just hope
they assign it to someone good,' Terry said.

Kilcullen looked
up. The possibility that the DA's office could somehow assign it to the wrong
lawyer and screw up the process had never crossed his mind. 'You would think
those guys know this is a hot potato,' he said.

'I'll tell you
who would be right for this,' I said. 'Anna DeRoy. She's fast, she's smart, and
she won't let you give the mayor anything less than perfect. If we're lucky,
she'll catch the case.'

'Fuck luck,'
Kilcullen said, picking up the phone. 'I'll call ahead and make sure they
assign it to DeRoy.'

A half hour
later we were standing outside Anna's office. Her door was shut. Terry knocked.
'It's your two favourite cops,' he yelled in.

'Cagney and
Lacey?' Anna yelled back.

'Wrong gender,'
Terry said.

'Batman and
Robin?'

Terry opened the
door. 'Oh, you were so close,' he said. 'We're the other ambiguously gay
dynamic duo.'

'I've been
expecting you,' Anna said. 'Your boss just called my boss, and I've been told
to put this on the fast track. Congratulations on solving it.'

I handed her the
report. 'We didn't solve it,' I said, 'and we're not sure it's really solved.'

'In that case,'
she said, handing the report back to me, 'come back when it's
really
solved.'

'It's not that
simple,' I said, shutting the door. 'One of the victims hired a PI to spy on
her husband. Her business partner, Martin Sorensen, helped her pay the fee, so
that hubby wouldn't catch on. But it turns out Sorensen is the killer, and now
he's dead.'

'Who's the
wayward husband?' DeRoy asked.

'Tony Dominguez,
the hero cop who shot and killed Sorensen.'

'Well, isn't
that nice and messy,' she said. 'Does your report get to the bottom of that
little triangle?'

'No. Last night
the PI gave us the video he shot when he tailed Dominguez, but we haven't had
time to go through it.'

'There are a
bunch of other red flags,' Terry said. 'Like one victim's husband suddenly
inherited a million dollars from his wife. He and one of the other husbands are
planning to take a one-way trip to the other side of the world.'

'I'm missing
something,' she said. 'Explain to me why you're rushing to close this case.'

'We're not.
Everyone else is.'

'You bastards,'
she said. 'You don't have the balls to stand up to your boss, so you come over
here and make me the heavy?'

'Standing up to
Kilcullen won't work,' I said. 'There's a shortage of testicles going all the
way up the chain of command. Nobody is willing to tell city hall that we need
more time, so we decided to finish the report and put it into the system.
That'll keep the bureaucrats at bay for a day or two while we try to dig up
some more information.'

'So even though
you know the case is full of holes, you want me to spend time wading through
it, write up my decision, and then bounce it back.'

'
It's
not what we want. It's the way the system works. Four members of cops' families
got killed. One of those cops shot and killed the bad guy.' I held out the
report, it's all nice and tidy, ready to be signed, sealed, and archived.'

'And what makes
you think I won't just sign off on it?' she said.

'Because, Deputy
DA DeRoy, you're one of the few people in this flawed fucking system who
actually has balls.'

She took the
report from my hand. Terry and I left without saying another word.

We spent the
afternoon catching up on some of the paperwork we had let slide for ten days
since Jo Drabyak was murdered. Around four o'clock Charlie Knoll showed up.

'I'm turning myself
in,' he said. 'I tried to escape on that houseboat, but it doesn't navigate too
good once you get past Redondo Beach. If I'm ever going to sail to Australia,
I'm gonna have to help Reggie buy something a lot more seaworthy. Especially
now that I'm rich.'

'How you
feeling?' I said.

'The good news
is my heart is OK. The bad news is my wife is still dead. You schmucks really
thought I killed her?'

'You inherited a
lot of money,' I said. 'All I did was ask.'

'You didn't ask.
You accused.'

'Sorry,' I said.
'But once we found out about the money,
we had to wonder
why you never mentioned it.'

'You're a cop,
Charlie,' Terry said. 'Didn't you ever ask an innocent person a question that
pissed them off?'

'
It
happens all the time,' he said. 'I'll be working a burglary, and I'll say to
the victim, "Are you insured for that?" And they'll look at me and
say, "Are you accusing me of stealing my own diamond ring for the
insurance money?" Usually that's not what I'm getting at. But sometimes,
that's what's actually going down.'

'So tell us why
you never mentioned the million,' Terry said.

'God's honest
truth, Thursday when it all happened, I was in shock. It never crossed my mind.
The next day in the hospital, it finally dawned on me that I had all this
money, but I felt like I had it before Julia was killed. We shared everything.
It wasn't half mine, half hers. It was all ours. We weren't even thinking about
spending it. It was tucked away, invested. I knew it wasn't relevant to the
case. But I also knew if it got public that I had a million bucks, everyone
would look at me different.'

'Different how?'

'Different like
maybe old Charlie Knoll killed his wife for the money,' he said. 'And then even
after you found out Martin killed her, I was still worried about people saying,
"Hey, Charlie is rich. Maybe I can hit him up for a few bucks." All I
was doing was protecting my privacy. It's none of anybody's business how much
money I have.'