K is for Killer (11 page)

“Cheney told me you were laid up, so I thought I'd pop by. I hope I didn't interrupt your paper.”

“I've read it three times. I'm so desperate I'm down to the personals. Somebody named Erroll wants Louise to call him, in case you know either one.”

I smiled, wishing he looked stronger, knowing I'd look even worse if I were in his place. I held out the magazine. “For you,” I said. “I figure nothing in your condition precludes an overdose of gossip. If you're really bored, you can always do the crossword puzzle in the back. How're you feeling? You look good.”

“I'm not bad. I've been better. The doctor's talking about moving me off the unit tomorrow, which seems like
a good sign.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “I'm taking advantage by refusing to shave. What do you think?”

“Very devil-may-care,” I said. “You can go straight from here to a life on the bum.”

“Pull a chair over. Have a seat. Just move that.”

The chair in the near corner had the rest of the paper and several magazines piled up on the seat. I set the whole batch aside and dragged the chair over toward the bed, aware that both Dolan and I were using chitchat and busy-work to cover a basic uneasiness. “What are they telling you about going back to work?”

“They won't say at this point, but I imagine it'll be a while yet. Two, three months. I scared 'em pretty bad, from what everybody says. Hell, Tom Flowers ended up doing mouth-to-mouth, which he'll never live down. Must have been a sight for sore eyes.”

“You're still with us, at any rate.”

“That I am. Anyway, how are you? Cheney told me about Janice Kepler. How's it going so far?”

I shrugged. “All right, I guess. I've been on it less than a day. I'm supposed to meet Cheney later. He's going to cruise lower State, looking for a snitch, and offered to point out a chum of Lorna's while he's about it.”

“Probably Danielle,” Dolan said. “We talked to her at the time, but she wasn't much help. You know these little gals. The life they live is so damn dangerous. Night after night, connecting up with strangers. Get in a car and you have to be aware it might be the last ride you ever take. And they see
us
as the enemy. I don't know why they do it. They're not stupid.”

“They're desperate.”

“I guess that's what it is. This town is nothing compared
to L.A., but it's still the pits. You take someone like Lorna, and it makes no sense whatever.”

“You have a theory about who killed her?”

“I wish I did. She kept her distance. She didn't buddy up to people. Her lifestyle was too unconventional for most.”

“Oh, I'll say. Has anybody told you about the video?”

“Cheney mentioned it. I gather you've seen it. I probably ought to take a look myself, see if I recognize any of the players.”

“You better wait 'til you're home. It'll get your heart rate right up there. Janice Kepler gave me a copy. She's feeling very paranoid and made me swear I'd guard the damn thing with my very life. I haven't checked the dirty-book stores, but it wouldn't surprise me to see half a dozen copies in stock. From the packaging, it looks like it was manufactured up in the Bay Area someplace.”

“You going up there?”

“I'd like to. Seems like it's worth a try if I can talk Janice into it.”

“Cheney says you want to take a look at the crime scene photographs.”

“If you don't object. I saw the cabin this afternoon, but it's been empty for months. I'd like to see what it looked like when the body was found.”

Lieutenant Dolan's brow furrowed with distaste. “You're welcome to take a look, but you better brace yourself. That's the worst decomp case I ever saw. We had to do toxicology from bone marrow and whatever little bit of liver tissue we could salvage.”

“There's no doubt it was her?”

“Absolutely none,” he said. He lifted his eyes to the monitor, and I followed his gaze. His heartbeat had picked
up, and the green line was looking like a row of ragged grass. “Amazes me how the memory of something like that can cause a physiological reaction after all these months.”

“Did you ever see her in real life?”

“No, and it's probably just as well. I felt bad enough as it was. ‘Dust to dust' doesn't quite cover it. Anyway, I'll call Records and get a set for you. When do you want to go over there?”

“Right now, if possible. Cheney doesn't pick me up for another three hours yet. I was up late last night, and I'm dead on my feet. My only hope is to keep moving.”

“Photographs will wake you up.”

 

M
ost of the departments at the police station close down at six. The crime lab was closed and the detectives gone for the day. In the bowels of the building, the 911 dispatchers would still be sitting at their consoles, fielding emergency calls. The main counter, where parking tickets are paid, was as blank as the ribs on a rolltop desk, a sign indicating that the window would open again at 8:00
A.M.
The door to Records was locked, but I could tell there were a couple of people working, probably data-processing technicians entering the day's warrants into the system. The small front counter wasn't currently manned, but I managed to lean over, peering into the records department around the corner to the right.

A uniformed officer spotted me and broke away from a conversation with a civilian clerk. He moved in my direction. “Can I help you?”

“I just talked to Lieutenant Dolan over at St. Terry's.
He and Detective Phillips are letting me look at some files. There should be a set of photographs he said I could take.”

“The name was Kepler, right? Lieutenant just called. I have 'em right back here. You want to come on through?”

“Thanks.”

The officer depressed a button, releasing the door lock. I went through into a back hallway and turned right. The officer reappeared in the doorway to Records and Identification. “We got a desk back here if you want to take a seat.”

I read through the file with care, making notes as I went. Janice Kepler had given me much of the same material, but there were many interdepartmental memos and notes that hadn't been part of her packet. I found the witness interviews the police had conducted with Hector Moreno, J. D. Burke, and Serena Bonney, whose home address and phone number I jotted down. There were additional interviews with Lorna's family, her former boss, Roger Bonney, and the very Danielle Rivers I was hoping to meet on lower State Street tonight. Again, I made a note of home addresses and telephone numbers. This was information I could develop on my own, but why pass it up? Lieutenant Dolan had left word that I could photocopy anything I needed. I took copies of countless pages. I'd probably interview many of the same people, and it would be instructive to compare their current opinions and observations with those made at the time. Finally I turned my attention to the crime scene photographs.

In some ways, it's hard to know which is more sordid, the pornography of sex or the pornography of homicide. Both speak of violence, the broken and debased, the humiliations to which we subject one another in the heat of
passion. Some forms of sex are as cold-blooded as murder, some kinds of murder as titillating to the perpetrator as a sexual encounter.

Decomposition had erased most of the definition from Lorna Kepler's flesh. The very enzymes embedded in her cells had caused her to disintegrate. The body had been invaded, nature's little cleaning crew busily at work—maggots as light as a snowfall and as white as thread. It took me many minutes before I could look at the photographs without revulsion. Finally I was able to detach myself. This was simply the reality of death.

I was interested in the sight of the cabin in its furnished state. I had seen it empty: sooty and forsaken, full of spiders and mildew, the fusty smell of neglect. Here, in full color and again in black and white, I could see fabric, crowded countertops in use, sofa pillows in disarray, a vase full of sagging flowers in an inch of darkened water, rag rugs, the spindle-lathed wooden chair legs. I could see a pile of mail on the sofa cushion where she'd left it. There was something distasteful about the unexpected glimpses of her living space. Like a house guest arriving early, who sees the place before the hostess has had the chance to tidy up.

Aside from a few photographs meant to orient the viewer, Lorna's body was the prime subject of most eight-by-ten glossies. She lay on her stomach. Her posture was that of someone sleeping, her limbs arranged in the classic chalk outline that marks the position of the corpse in any TV show. No blood, no emesis. It was hard to imagine what she was doing when she went down—answering the front door, running for the telephone. She wore a bra and underpants, her jogging clothes tossed in a pile close by.
Her long dark hair still carried its sheen, a tumble of glossy strands. In the light of the flashbulb, small white maggots glowed like a spray of seed pearls. I slipped the pictures back in the manila envelope and tucked them in my handbag.

I
was leaning against my VW, parked at the curb in front of my place, when Cheney came around the corner in a VW that looked even older than mine. It was beige, very dinged up, an uncanny replica of the 1968 sedan I had run off the road nearly two years before. Cheney chugged to a stop, and I tried opening the car door on the passenger side. No deal. I finally had to put a foot up against the side of the car to get sufficient leverage to wrench the door open. The squawk it made sounded like a large, unruly beast breaking wind. I slid onto the seat and pulled futilely at the door, trying to close it. Cheney reached across me and wrenched it shut again. He threw the gears into first and took off with his engine rumbling.

“Nice car. I used to have one just like this,” I said. I yanked at the seat belt, making a vain attempt to buckle it across my lap. The whole device was frozen, and I finally just had to pray he'd drive without crashing and burning. I do so hate to end an evening being flung through the windshield. At my feet I could feel a breeze blowing through a hole where the floor had rusted out. If it were
daytime, I knew I'd see the road whipping past, like that small glimpse of track you see when you flush the toilet on a train. I tried to keep my feet up to avoid putting weight on the spot lest I plunge through. If the car stalled, I could push us along with one foot without leaving my seat. I started to roll down the window and discovered that the crank was gone. I opened the wing window on my side, and chilly air slanted in. So far, the wing window was the only thing on my side that functioned.

Cheney was saying, “I have a little sports car, too, but I figure there's no point in taking anything like that into the neighborhood we'll be in. Did you talk to Dolan yet?”

“I went over to St. Terry's to see him this evening. He was a doll, I must say. I went straight from the hospital to the station to look at files. He even provided me copies of the crime scene photographs.”

“How'd he seem?”

“He was okay, I guess. Not as grouchy as usual. Why? What's your impression?”

“He was depressed when I talked to him, but he might have brought himself up for you.”

“He has to be scared.”

“I sure would be,” Cheney said.

Tonight he was wearing a pair of slick Italian shoes, dark pants, a coffee-brown dress shirt, and a soft, cream suede windbreaker. I have to say he didn't look like any undercover cop I ever saw. He glanced over at me and caught the fact that I was conducting a visual survey. “What?”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Perdido,” he said, naming a little town thirty miles south of us. “What about you?”

“I'm local,” I said. “Your name seems familiar.”

“You've known me for years.”

“Yes, but do I know you from somewhere else? Do you have family in the area?”

He made a noncommittal mouth sound that generally indicated “yes.”

I looked at him closely. Being a liar myself, I can recognize other people's evasive maneuvers. “What's your family do?”

“Banks.”

“What about banks? They make deposits? They do holdups?”

“They, mmm, you know, own some.”

I stared at him, comprehension dawning like a big cartoon sun. “Your father is X. Phillips? As in Bank of X. Phillips?”

He nodded mutely.

“What is it, Xavier?”

“Actually, it's just X.”

“What's your other car, a Jag?”

“Hey, just because he has big bucks doesn't mean I do. I have a Mazda. It's not fancy. Well, a little bit fancy, but it's paid for.”

I said, “Don't get
defensive.
How'd you end up a cop?”

Cheney smiled. “When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV. I was raised in an atmosphere of benign neglect. My mother sold high-end real estate while my father ran his banks. Cop shows made a big impression. More than financial matters, at any rate.”

“Is your dad okay with that?”

“He doesn't have any choice. He knows I'm not going to follow in his footsteps. Besides, I'm dyslexic. To me, the printed page looks like gibberish. What about your parents? Are they still alive?”

“Please note. I'm aware that you're changing the subject,
but I'm electing to answer the question you asked. They both died a long time ago. As it turns out, I do have family up in Lompoc, but I haven't decided what to do about them yet.”

“What's to decide? I didn't know we had a choice about these things.”

“Long story. They've ignored my existence now for twenty-nine years, and suddenly they want to make nice. It doesn't sit well with me. That kind of family I can do without.”

Cheney smiled. “Look at it this way. I feel the same way about mine, and I've been in touch with them since birth.”