L. A. Heat (14 page)

Instead of answering, Martinez fished around in
the briefcase and withdrew four eight-by-ten glossy photographs, which he
dropped on the table between them.

“Know this man?”

“What the fuck?”

He shoved the pictures back but Martinez held them
in place.

“Take another look. You recognize this man?”

“No—” Then Chris realized to his horror he did. It
was Bobby. “Oh, my God.”

Martinez leaned forward, his swarthy face flat,
his eyes like a shark’s, unmoving, watching, dissecting. “You do recognize him.
Who is he? Give me a name.”

Chris looked away. “His name was Bobby.”

“Bobby who?”

“I don’t know.” Chris refused to look at the
images. He stared at a stain on the green wall behind Martinez. “He never gave
me his last name.”

“What was your relationship to this Bobby?”

“We were... friends.”

“Friends? But you don’t know his last name? How
long did you know him?”

“We’d only met a couple of times.”

“Where did you meet?”

“Why all the questions?” Chris tried to glare at
the fat cop. “What happened to him? Who did that?”

“Where did you meet Bobby?”

“A bar.”

“What bar?”

“What difference does it make?”

“What bar?”

“The Nosh Pit.” Chris was beginning to feel
afraid. Goose bumps crowded the bare skin of his arms. The knot at the base of
his head began to resolve into a pounding headache. “What is going on here?”

“Where is this Nosh Pit?”

“Hyperion. In Silver Lake.”

“Gay bar?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you better answer my questions,” Martinez
snapped. “Before things go bad for you.”

“What does that mean? Is that a threat?”

“When did you last see this Bobby?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

“I don’t—last week, I guess. Monday, I guess.”
Chris rubbed the skin of his knuckles. He found himself staring at his
distorted image in the mirrored glass. Who was watching from the other side?
“We had a couple of drinks at the Pit. I never saw him again.”

“Did he get into your vehicle?”

“What?”

“Did he enter your vehicle that night?”

“Sure,” Chris said. “He wanted me to take him
home... to my place. I didn’t want to. We argued. He got out and I never saw
him again.”

“What did you do while you were in the vehicle?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you solicit him for sex?”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like then, sir?”

Chris rubbed the back of his neck, startled to
find it was damp with sweat. Suddenly he’d had enough of this fat, overbearing cop.

“So we fooled around,” he said. “This is the
twenty-first century, right? Hell, according to Clinton it isn’t even sex.”

“Are you saying you and Bobby engaged in
fellatio?”

God, what a stupid word. “Shit, we were just
fooling around. End of story.”

“Except it’s not the end of the story, is it, Mr.
Bellamere.” Martinez pulled out a bulging handful of colored eight-by-tens. He
threw the pictures down on the table in front of Chris. “Want to have another
look at your handiwork, Mr. Bellamere?”

Chris glanced down at the images as they came to
rest atop the cigarette burns and knife work that adorned the battered table.
He was expecting more images of Bobby for him to ID, but what he saw made his
flesh flash ice cold and his stomach roll over.

“What’d he do, Bellamere?” Martinez was over the
table, in his face, screaming. “Look at you wrong? Say the wrong thing to you?”

It was Bobby. No mistaking that. But these images
showed a Bobby who had been hideously abused, his skin flayed and ripped off
his once gorgeous body. A circlet of blood ringed his neck and in one image it
looked like he was on his stomach, and the gaping wound between his legs made
Chris lose it.

He threw himself away from the table. Away from
the images. His hand went to his mouth, but it was like stemming a flood with
straw. Vomit spattered all over his legs.

Distantly he thought he heard Martinez yell, “
Hilo
de puto
. You asshole.” Then the door swung open and he looked up through a
blur of tears to see David enter the room. “Put those away. Shut that tape
off.”

Someone else entered the room and there was a
whispered conversation that Chris couldn’t make out. The next thing he knew
someone was guiding him out of the room, away from his own stink. Almost
immediately they turned into another room, a washroom. The door closed and he
was guided to the sink.

“Do you want a drink of water? Coffee?”

It was David. He brushed by Chris and turned on
the taps.

Chris blinked up at him. He took the damp paper
towels that were handed to him. “Here,” David said. “Clean yourself up.”

Chris forced himself to focus on David. He
clutched the towels in one hand. “How could you let him do that to me?”

“I’ll take that to mean you don’t want a drink.
Okay, can you answer some more questions?”

“
More
questions? Are you fucking nuts?”

David perched on the sink and Chris nearly
screamed when he pulled out his notepad. “Tell me what happened after Bobby and
you entered your vehicle.”

“You want a blow by blow account?” Chris snarled.
“I’m sitting here with fucking puke all over me and you want to know about my
sex
life
? Rent a video like everybody else does.”

“Like the kind Bobby made?”

“How the hell did you know about that—”

“If you had looked closely at those pictures
Martinez threw at you, you would have seen a strip of film around the
deceased’s neck. It was a porno loop, starring one Bobby Starrz.”

“Bobby Starrz?”

“His stage name. His real name was Robert Allen
Dvorak.”

“And what does any of this have to do with me?”

“You are so far the last person to have seen him
alive.”

“And you think I had something to do with
that
?”

“Where were you Tuesday morning?”

“Jesus, if I’d known I was going to need an
alibi—”

“Yes?” David leaned forward. “What would you have
done, Mr. Bellamere?”

“I’d have done something to be noticed. Maybe dance
naked on my front lawn so the neighbors could tell you I was home. Would that
have made you happy?”

“What time would you have felt compelled to create
this alibi?”

Chris opened his mouth to retort, then closed it.
His skin grew clammy. “You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you? Anything I say is
going to incriminate me now, isn’t it?”

“Do you feel you’re incriminating yourself, Chris?
Is there something you’d like to tell me?” David’s voice was gentle, almost
hypnotic. “You can talk to me, you know.”

Chris’s mouth hung open. Finally he pulled away
from David, holding his arms wrapped around his chest. “You really think I
killed him, don’t you?” he whispered. “My God, what kind of monster do you
think I am?”

“Talk to me, Chris. We can work this out.”

“Fuck you, David.” Chris was still whispering. He
staggered backward. “I’m not saying another word to you without my lawyer.”

Return to Contents

Monday,
12:20 pm, Northeast Community Police Station,

San
Fernando Road, Los Angeles

“WELL THAT WENT well,” David
said wearily as he rejoined Martinez in the detectives’ squad room.

“Still think we shoulda held him. Let him spend a
few hours in lockup. Pansy like him, he’d break like that.” Martinez snapped
his thick fingers. “Look how he fell apart when I showed him those pictures.”

“He hardly acted like he was seeing his own
handiwork.”

“He’s fucking psychotic, what do you expect?
Should have let him have a look at those loonies down in lockup. He’d have been
squealing to save his pretty ass.”

David’s hands closed into fists at the thought of
Chris being abused by animals like that. But all he said was, “We don’t have
enough to make a convincing arrest. You know the D.A.’s demanding we bring her
some solid forensics. She’s scared of his lawyer. This Weiss is a cobra, I
guess.”

“Then we need to find another way to break him.
You know those faggots got no guts.” Martinez slammed his hand down on the
desk. “Oh hell. He’d probably like it. Let those damned
vatos
plow his
ass from one end to the other and he’d be begging for more. Sick fuck.”

David suppressed a wince. “His vehicle been
checked out yet?”

A phone call confirmed the SUV was still being
processed. They grabbed a quick lunch at a nearby sub shop and met over the
freshly delivered report back at David’s desk.

“Fingerprints all over the passenger’s side—some
match this Bobby character,” Martinez said. “No surprise. Miss Swish admits to
having the fudge packer in his car. Nothing to suggest him or anyone else was
ever carried in the back.”

“So we have nothing,” David said. God, why did
that make him feel relief? What was happening to him?

“We have them together. We have opportunity. Can
he alibi the times?”

David shook his head.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me? We already got the
two at work telling us he came in late Tuesday and that was unusual enough to
be noticed by both of them.” Martinez consulted his notes. “They put him over
two hours late for work, which would gibe if he was busy playing with his
latest victim in his hidey hole.”

They knew the killer had to have a secure place he
could stash his victims. All the evidence so far suggested each had been held
for hours before being killed. The killer’s hiding place had to be a location
where he felt safe. Probably isolated, too. David thought of Chris’s Silver
Lake house. With neighbors crowding in on either side it hardly qualified as
isolated. And none of those houses had basements, either. Then again, Jeffrey
Dahmer had kidnapped and dismembered over a dozen guys in an apartment building
and gone unnoticed for years.

Still, maybe it was time to do a property search
on the guy. Maybe he had access to a second location. Someplace he could come
and go once his victim was secured.

David picked up the typed list of items found in
Chris’s SUV. It included one pair of black frame glasses and a T-shirt bearing
unknown stains. The shirt was still in the lab being processed. But it hadn’t
tested positive for blood or semen. Traces of semen had been discovered in the
vehicle’s front seat, so they were going to have to type Chris and see whom it
matched.

David tried to imagine the Chris who had responded
so hotly to his kiss being a calculating killer, aroused by another person’s
pain. He couldn’t reconcile it.

The glasses, though—that looked bad...

“Jason Blake wore glasses,” David said. “But can
we get a match on them?”

“I’m going back to Bellamere’s workplace,”
Martinez said. “See if anyone noticed anything else unusual. This guy’s job
gave him lots of freedom and with the damned cell phones they all carry he
could have called in from anywhere, claiming to be on the job.”

“He’d have to record his time. Maybe even get
employers to sign off.” David tapped the top sheet of the report. “Let’s find
out what jobs he was supposed to be doing the last six months. Match it up with
the job sites to see what he actually was doing.”

“Right.” Martinez grinned. “Nail him with the
discrepancies. Still think we should have let him go?”

“He’s got money. You saw his lawyer.”

“Right. We push, the next thing you know we’re all
a bunch of antigay bigots persecuting this poor faggot,” Martinez said. He
wiped his mouth as though tasting something foul. “
Dios
, that stinks.”

David pushed his own traitorous thoughts aside.
This wasn’t the time or the place. “So let’s make sure our case is unsinkable.
You check out the workplace. I’ll chase down Blake. While I’m at it, I’m going
to look at Daniel Anstrom. If I can talk to his parents, figure out Anstrom’s
activities before he went missing, maybe we can place Bellamere with him.”

“Let him explain that away.”

Monday,
12:25 pm, Northeast Community Police Station,

San
Fernando Road, Los Angeles

Chris stumbled out of the
station. Only when the sun started baking the vomit into his legs did he
remember he had no ride home.

Hailing a cab proved challenging. Two whizzed by
without slowing; when a third stopped, the driver took one look at the vomit
and hit the accelerator. The fifth demanded a fifty-dollar surcharge up-front.

At home, he threw the ruined jeans into a garbage
bag and tossed it outside. Then he crawled into the downstairs shower and
turned it up as hot as his skin could handle, emerging in a cloud of steam,
pink and tingling from his near scalding. But at least the smell of his own
vomit no longer clogged his nose. He reconsidered tossing the jeans—but at
eight hundred a pop he could swallow the shame. He dashed outside and dragged
the bag to the back step.

Retreating to the living room he flopped down on
the sofa and dialed Des’s number. Just his luck, Kyle answered.

“What the hell do you want?” Kyle snapped. “We
don’t need you bringing your cop troubles here. What did you do, anyway?”

What could Chris tell him? That the cops suspected
him of picking up a guy in a bar and butchering him? That the cops thought he
was the Carpet Killer?

“I just need to talk to Des. Put him on.”

“He’s not here,” Kyle said. “Leave him alone,
asshole.”

When he slammed the phone down, Chris lay back
staring at it for several minutes before it started beeping and he reached over
to hang it up.

Monday,
2:24 pm, Offices of Gilbert, Michelson & Gabronni,

West La
Palmas Avenue, Anaheim

“I’d like you to look at
something, Mr. Blake, if you have a few minutes.”