Good to the Last Kiss (7 page)

Paul just stared at the assistant district attorney. David removed his hand. The doctor left.

Earl Falwell had the bass up so loud the car shook. His fingers tapped the steering wheel of his black ’88 Camaro more out of impatience than trying to keep the beat. The traffic was snarled on the interstate between Daly City and San Francisco. And he was steamed.

It was his day off. He’d had his morning workout at the gym and sometimes, even after getting juiced, he’d be a little calmer after a bout with the weights. All through the workout, he hadn’t had those thoughts, that feeling. But he knew when it was coming and it was coming now. It was like that kid in grade school who knew when he was going to have a seizure and he could tell the teacher and they’d know what to do. But this wasn’t exactly like that and there was nothing to do about this. There was no one to tell. No one to lock him in a room or tie him to a bed until the sensation went away.

The traffic snarl was getting to him. Maybe he’d swing off this pike and hit the mall. Maybe he wouldn’t have to do it today. Yeah, right. It would take him over by evening. It was all so predictable. He’d do it. He’d feel better. He’d get depressed. He’d kind of go down, like a submarine, into some other part of him. Then there was nothing he could do about it. Then he’d feel good. Then he’d feel terrible and it would start all over again.

He probably should have worked. Earl didn’t mind loading the trucks. He wasn’t too fond of his coworkers, but most of the time he could just tune in on himself and work up a decent sweat, eventually tiring out his body. The boxes were filled with paper products, computer paper mostly, and they were heavy. He did more work than the others. They didn’t mind. Neither did he. The time passed faster. He put more strain on his body and that was good. Sometimes his mind would follow and he could resist the urges.

He should have worked. If he were stuck in traffic much longer, the day would be a waste anyway.

The car ahead of him, a silver Honda Prelude, moved a few feet and Earl pushed the Camaro almost close enough to nudge this immediate barrier to speed. His left foot on the clutch, he revved the engine threateningly a few times, looked up, caught the reflection of his eyes in the rearview mirror.

He pulled the mirror down so that it showed his face. Zits. At twenty-two, Earl Falwell still had zits. Maybe it was the steroids. He inched the mirror down so that it gave him a look at his chest. The pecs were starting to look real good. Somebody at the gym told him he looked like Eminem. Was it at the gym or somewhere else? Someone else? Eminem. That wasn’t too bad. But he wanted to look mean and Earl didn’t think the rapper looked all that tough wearing those loose jeans and showing his shorts and all that.

Earl weighed one hundred ninety pounds. Six months ago, he was at one hundred forty-five. Six foot, two inches, and a lousy, puny one hundred forty-five pounds. Not any more. He was on his way to two hundred and twenty-five.

Nobody would fuck with him anymore. Not like they did in the Army. Not like they did in Leavenworth. He’d already put the scare of God into his stepdad. No more messin’ around from him.

Earl pushed the mirror back up, noticed the Honda had advanced a few feet. This time Earl let the Camaro tap the fender as he closed the gap. The Honda driver turned and scowled. Earl gave him the finger.

The little scene was played again as the guy ahead inched forward. Earl tapped harder this time. Earl couldn’t tell what the guy was screamin’ at him, the ugly face all wrenched around over the seat. Now, shit, the guy was putting the Honda in reverse. Banged back.

It had been a game. Now it wasn’t. Suddenly, it wasn’t fun. Earl didn’t really know where the anger was coming from. It seemed as if it just welled up out of his chest and into his head, into his breathing or something and he was ready to explode.

Earl put the Camaro in neutral, jerked on the hand brake and was out of his car in one movement. The guy in a gray suit was getting out of his car, but Earl helped him a bit by grabbing the suit and jerking him out. The kid had pummeled the guy’s head three times before the guy even knew what was going on.

Earl slammed the guy back down on the hood of the Honda, his knuckles coming down hard on the guy’s forehead, right over the eyebrow. Blood was coming from somewhere. Now horns were honking. Earl and this guy were the only ones out of their cars. There were screams in the midst of the smell of auto exhaust.

People were telling Earl to stop. The guy was trying to say something, but all he could manage was the gurgle of bloody spittle.

Earl could see himself in the reflection of the hood of the Honda. He could see splatters of blood there too. And that just seemed to make him angrier.

FIVE

G
ratelli, on his second visit, guessed the woman who left Julia Bateman’s room as he came in was a social worker, some kind of rape therapist. He couldn’t be sure. His dominion the last eight years was homicide and a lot of things had changed in the way the police handled sex crimes.

When he saw Bateman, she was sitting up in bed staring down at her hands. Her head was still swollen. Hard to tell whether the condition was a result of the surgery or the beating. Beside her, in a chair pulled up close to the bed, was David Seidman, the assistant D.A.

David was telling her that he didn’t know what to say. She didn’t offer to write his lines.

Gratelli had seen Seidman in court. Seidman, in front of a judge, was a sharp, confident prosecutor. Jurors were impressed with his courtroom demeanor, his conservative good taste in clothes, and the handsome head of dark hair with gray temples almost too perfect to be anything other than hair salon magic.

His prosecutions were flawless. Since Seidman often took the capital offenses, the big cases, Gratelli witnessed the smooth and simple way the young prosecutor laid out difficult and complex cases. Unlike many, he had a full grasp of every, intimate detail. He’d always done his homework. The police liked him. The media respected him. The public was beginning to hear of him. There were rumors he would be mayor, perhaps governor some day, despite his surprising lack of charisma.

This was a different guy altogether, hunched over, embarrassed.

‘Professional visit?’ Gratelli asked, startling Seidman.

‘Not exactly.’

‘Miss Bateman,’ Gratelli said to Julia. She didn’t look up.

‘She’s been like this,’ Seidman said. He reached down and touched her hand.

She didn’t respond.

‘I thought you were homicide, Inspector. This is sex crimes or General Works, right?’

Gratelli shrugged noncommittally. He wasn’t in the mood to explain anything – let alone the serial homicide connection – to Seidman. He’d know sooner or later. But like the press, it was better later.

‘I want to talk with her,’ he said to Seidman in a tone that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but official.

There was an awkward moment when it appeared Seidman would insist on staying for the conversation. But Gratelli’s disapproving look must have changed the lawyer’s mind. Seidman got up slowly and went to the door.

‘If there’s anything I can help you with, let me know.’

‘You and I probably need to have a little chat too,’ Gratelli said.

‘Inspector Gratelli?’ Seidman said at the door.

Gratelli turned.

‘She didn’t know, I think.’

‘Know what?’

‘What happened to her. The woman told her.’

‘What did happen to her?’ Gratelli asked, wanting to know what the assistant D.A. knew.

‘That she’d been raped,’ Seidman said, a puzzled look on his face.

‘Was she?’ Gratelli asked.

‘Wasn’t she?’

Gratelli shrugged.

‘What in the hell do you mean?’ Earl said, staring across the table at the little red-headed lawyer who unburdened his tattered briefcase of a half dozen manila folders.

‘What I said,’ the guy replied. ‘They won’t do your bail.’

‘You talked with them?’

‘Yes, I talked with them.’

‘What did they say? Exactly.’ Earl asked, pushing the anger down. He’d already screwed up by letting his temper get the best of him. That’s why he was sitting here.

The lawyer rolled his eyes. ‘Exactly, your father said . . .’

‘My fucking stepfather!’

‘Your fucking stepfather said . . .
exactly
, he said: “Let the little asshole rot.”’

‘Was she there? My mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said exactly nothing.’

Earl looked away, then up. His eyes locked on a corner where the walls met the ceiling.

‘That guy’s gonna live isn’t he?’

‘Appears so.’

‘You don’t like me, do you?’

‘I have to defend you. I don’t have to like you. Now, tell me again, who got out of the car first?’

Inspector Mickey McClellan sat at the Formica topped table in the Stockton Street noodle joint when Gratelli came in. Chinatown used to be McClellan’s beat when he first came on the force and he hung out there whenever he had the chance.

‘So what’d she say?’ Mickey asked.

‘Nothin’.’ Gratelli sat down. Though it would make his bladder work overtime for a few hours, the police officer ordered tea. The coffee was lousy there.

‘Couldn’t, wouldn’t, what?’

‘Dunno,’ Gratelli replied. There was a long pause while Mickey slurped some noodles off the chopsticks. ‘Maybe in shock. Maybe brain damage,’ Gratelli continued. ‘Mouth wired shut, vacant stare and I doubt if she could hold a pen even if she knew what the hell was going on.’

‘A zombie,’ Mickey said. The Inspector’s insensitivity was legendary. He called blacks ‘jungle bunnies’ and gays, ‘those little winged creatures.’ Women were ‘babes’ unless they possessed the qualities he imagined all female police officers had. Then they were members of the ‘lesbo squad.’

Gratelli took very little notice of Mickey’s apparent prejudices. The balding, potbellied Inspector McClellan held everyone at the same level of disgust. It was equal opportunity bigotry. His prejudice was universal. Vietnam, years of vice, drugs and homicide brought him into contact with the baser elements of every category of humankind. The only difference between Mickey and a good percentage of the other cops who felt a kind of generalized hate as personal defense, is that he never bothered putting on a public face.

His hate, however, was no longer full of passion, no longer malevolent. Calling Chinese ‘slants’ was a way to keep people at a distance, keeping them as lifeless objects so he wouldn’t puke or have nightmares when he saw some Asian kid floating in the bay.

‘We get a victim who could tell us something and the lights are out on the top floor,’ McClellan said.

‘Yeah,’ Gratelli said looking out of the corner window seeing the stream of Chinese faces flowing by.

‘Bateman’s a P.I., right?’ Mickey asked. ‘Maybe she made some nasty enemies if I can guess what you’re thinking.’

‘That wasn’t what I was thinking.’

‘You don’t seem to buy into the idea that this Bateman gal gets a serial number like the others. Copycat maybe?’ McClellan asked.

‘Dunno. She was beat up. None of the others were.’

‘Same guy,’ McClellan said. ‘Something goes wrong. Maybe she freaks out. Asshole loses his nerve, beats her up, but not so fucked up he leaves without the tattoo.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘I don’t know. Same kind of chick.’

‘Julia Bateman is not the same kind of ‘chick’,’ Gratelli said. ‘She’s not poor. She’s not helpless . . .’

‘She is now . . .’

‘She’s not that young.’

‘Well, Bateman was within the drive time. Two hours from the city. Old or young, beat up or not, she’s got the mark. Nobody knows about the mark.’

‘A lot of people know about the mark.’

‘Who? Nothin’ in the papers, nothin’ on TV about the mark,’ Mickey said, deftly trapping some noodles in the grip of the two little wooden sticks.

‘Thirteen sets of cops, fourteen sets of coroners, maybe even ambulance drivers and who knows who else. And no doubt a couple of ambitious prosecutors.’

‘So you’re sayin’ we got two cases, not one.’

‘No.’

‘What are you sayin’?’

‘Nothin’.’

‘Well, here’s the skinny. They want us to stay on the Bateman thing.’ Mickey used the word ‘they’ for anything that came down from the Lieutenant or higher. For him, everybody above him was some vast ‘they’ bureaucracy. Some gray machine. He’d accepted them as he did everybody else, putting them in a specific category of the general category – ‘asshole’ – and keeping them at arm’s length.

‘What about the task force?’ Gratelli asked.

‘If you look at the organization chart on this thing we are connected to those folks by a little dotted line. We talk to them. They talk to us. But you and me bub, we are by ourselves from now on. Just Bateman and only Bateman so help us God.’ He smiled. ‘That suits me.’

‘You’re not saying that like you mean it.’

‘Yeah, well, what the fuck?’

‘I don’t like it either.’

‘It’s like we’re not doing the job,’ McClellan said. ‘I’d like to know who the fuck would’ve done it better. You ever heard of this? Takin’ us out like this? Shit.’

‘Political,’ Gratelli said. ‘Too hot. There’ll be another news conference.’

McClellan was quiet, except for the slurping sound the noodles made as they disappeared between his lips. An incredibly mild explosion, Gratelli thought. He was taking it too well. McClellan’s life wasn’t about acceptance, but that seemed to be what he was doing, gradually slipping from nearly uncontrollable anger to indifference.

‘So what do we do now?’ Gratelli asked, sipping his tea.

‘I think we take in a little baseball or take a little drive up to Gurneville. Your choice, kiddo.’