The Black Marble (12 page)

“Pardon?” Now Valnikov had lost the thread again. It was unraveled and he hadn't the faintest idea why she was upset, why she was raising her voice.

“You've been working this division one month,” she smirked. “We've hardly said more than a good morning before today. We've been partners for, oh, four hours. And you think you can dance me into a porno movie for a nooner?”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” she sneered, shoving the paper cup into the bag. “Let's finish handling our calls.”

Valnikov sipped the rest of the coffee but his lunch was ruined. He knew for certain that he had offended her but didn't know why. He was troubled and didn't know what to say to make it right. The sparkling motes were swimming. He did the only thing he could. He started all over again. “Natalie, would you like to see a movie?”

She whirled in her seat, eyes narrowing behind the over-sized glasses. She viciously brushed back a wisp of frizzy, buckskin hair.

“Do you mean
now?
”

“Oh, no. We're on duty. I meant tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or sometime. It doesn't matter. I haven't seen a movie in … I don't know how long.”

“You don't know how long.”

“No.”

“Several years. Since
Nicholas and Alexandra.
”

“Yes, so I can wait. Maybe next month sometime?”

Oh, shit. She turned back and watched the foot traffic sliding by in the shimmering smog. She lit a cigarette. “Valnikov, do you want to take me to a porno? I mean a dirty movie? Is that it?”

“Well, I'd rather
not
see a dirty movie,” he said, wiping his watery eyes on his shabby coatsleeve. “But if that's the kind of movie you like, I'm willing. I just thought maybe you were lonely and I felt sorry for you.”

“How dare you!” Natalie screamed, in consummate frustration, making Valnikov hit the brakes, almost causing a van to rear-end them on McCadden Place. “How
dare
you say that to me! You don't even
know
me!”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“Wrong! You feel sorry for
me!
You want to take
me
to a porno house!”

“No, I've never even
been
to a porno house. I just gathered that's what
you'd
like. I mean, you said two policemen took you to this dirty movie so I thought maybe you liked it, and, well, if that would make you happy, I just thought …”

Natalie was going to scream when they got a radio call.

“Roger that, Natalie,” he said, wondering why she was yelling.

“What … what …”

“We just got a call,” he said. “Roger it, please.”

“6-W-232 roger,” she mumbled into the mike, and now she was looking dazed.

“Western and Romaine, see the vice officer. That was the call, Natalie. Wonder why they want a burglary team? Oh well, that's what makes our job interesting, eh?” He looked at her and smiled and blinked, his cinnamon hair blowing back from the gust of wind as he suddenly “speeded” up the detective car. Now they were going fifteen miles an hour.

The vice cop was about twenty-five years old. He wore his auburn hair in a huge Afro which he had done once a month at a beauty parlor on Sunset where he got a police discount. He was shirtless in a leather vest and wore five strands of beads around his neck. He recognized Natalie but didn't know Valnikov.

“You working burglary?” He leaned in the detective car window from the street side.

“Whaddaya got?” she asked.

“Maybe something for you. There was a pawnshop burglary about three weeks ago. Down on Melrose, I think.”

“Western Avenue,” Valnikov said.

“Yeah, that's right, on Western,” the vice cop said, nodding his shaggy head. “They ripped him off for some shotguns, one a double-barreled custom job with silver inlay …”

“Mother-of-pearl,” Valnikov said.

“Mother-of-pearl?”

“Yes,” Valnikov said.

“Was it your case?” the vice cop asked.

“No, I just remember the report.”

“And you remember for sure it was mother-of-pearl?”

“Yes,” Valnikov said, wiping his eyes.

“Okay, guess this ain't from that job.” He held up a silver-inlaid, double-barreled twelve-gauge, the walnut rubbed smooth from years of loving care. “I'll just book it and let robbery try to make it on some other job. Just thought it might have been from that pawnshop burg, is all.”

“What's happening here anyway?” Natalie asked. There was an ambulance in front and a crowd of onlookers from the surrounding homes. There were seven men being loaded into the black-and-whites. “Somebody get shot?”

“No, but he might wish he had,” said the vice cop.

“Catch the suspect?”

“Yeah,
he's
the suspect,” the vice cop said, pointing to the blanket-covered man being bandaged by a paramedic as two policemen helped lift the gurney into the ambulance. “Thought he was Jesse James. Decided to take down a crap game that floats in this apartment about every Wednesday. We been staking out next door since this morning, and damned if Jesse James here doesn't come crashing in the room just as we were about to make a little gambling bust. He leaps up on the table and fires his twelve-gauge into the ceiling to get all the players' attention. I was next door alone, almost messed my pants. While I'm trying to call on the CC unit for some help, he gets carried away with scaring everybody. He's not satisfied that the players're shaking and begging so he fires
another
round to make them move a little quicker.”

“And that's just a double-barreled shotgun,” Natalie observed.

“Yeah, and one by one, all the players noticed that too. They say the last thing old Jesse James says is ‘Uh-oh.' And that may be the last thing he ever
does
say. They got through with him, his head squirms around like a water bed. Well, does your heart good once in a while to see justice done. Makes you think God ain't dead after all.”

When they were back on Vine Street stopped behind a fender-bender traffic accident, Natalie said, “Did you really remember that Western Avenue pawnshop burglary?”

“Yes,” Valnikov said.

“You must read hundreds of burglary reports.”

“Yes.”

“What was unusual about this one?”

“Nothing,” he shrugged, at last his eyes starting to clear from the havoc of Russian vodka.

“Then how do you remember?”

“I always remember crime data. I don't know why. I've been a detective so long I just seem to remember.”

Memories. Twenty-two years a policeman. Fifteen of them working homicide downtown. Homicide. The first team. The varsity. Shootings, stabbings, rapes, mayhem. Torture murder, extortion murder, kidnap murder, sex murder. Domestic murder: husbands, wives, mothers, fathers. Who said a father never killed his seed? Valnikov knew better. But mothers were more innovative murderers of little children. Lots and lots of child murders. Whodunits, howdunits, whydunits. The Stinker Squad. Corpses. The faces of corpses: bewildered corpses, winking corpses, grieving corpses, laughing corpses, screaming corpses. There was no predicting the expression a corpse would wear to eternity. At times there were just chunks of corpses, slivers of corpses. Sometimes just heads. Remember Homer from Hollenbeck?

Sergeant Ambrose Schultz was the cutup of the Stinker Squad. He loved a good joke. They had been trying to help solve a headless whodunit in Hollenbeck Division for two months. Finally someone informed on a woman who poisoned her unfaithful boyfriend named Homer, and who beheaded the corpse
with a shovel
, which took an hour of relentless hacking but got rid of her tension. Then she preserved the lover's head in a crock of formaldehyde. (Why? they asked. You often discovered the who and the how but less often the why. Who can say why? Why anything?)

Homer's head was hanging around the squad room for a few days after they found it. The preserving fluid had long since leaked, and now Homer's head was putrefied, blackened, engorged.

Homer took with him to eternity the face of a gorilla.

One day Ambrose Schultz happened to notice that clerk typist, Lupe Rodriguez, had made her weekly trip to the panadería and bought four pounds of delicious stone-ground, corn tortillas, handmade in Boyle Heights by Mexican women squatting over brick firepits. Ambrose stole the tortillas out of Lupe's sack when she went to the john, and he left Homer's head inside. Lupe Rodriguez, a perennial dieter and incurable nibbler, was right in the middle of reading a sexy crime report when she reached down inside the sack to nibble. It was odd. The tortillas felt soggy. And
hairy?
They say her shrieks could be heard clear up in the chief's office. It was the best joke Ambrose Schultz pulled that year.

Until Ambrose happened to be handling a homosexual murder wherein one lover strangled the other one and whacked off his penis with a handsaw. Rodney, the demented survivor, said he kept Claude's ragged frontispiece in a fishbowl on his mantel to show his friends at a dinner party he gave after his lover had disappeared. The dinner party was not a success in that the first guest to examine the strange floating fish ran screaming to a telephone. Rodney couldn't understand it because he had spent a fortune on stuffed squab and party favors. He later told detectives he couldn't bear to part with that part of Claude just yet, and besides, he thought the penis in a pickle jar would be tacky, but in a fishbowl it would be a
great
conversation piece. The fishbowl and contents ended up in the care of Ambrose Schultz. Poor Lupe Rodriguez transferred to Personnel Division after
that
one. Memories.

“I said we've still got several victim contacts to make.”

“Pardon me, Natalie?”

“I was talking to you.”

“Sorry,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “We have some more victims to contact, I think.”

And that was the way the day went. Almost. The difference being that at 6:00 p.m. that day, when she should have been off-duty—when she should have been home in the bathtub, sipping a gin and tonic, listening to Englebert Humperdinck sing his heart out—she was cowering on a napless carpet of a dingy apartment corridor, trying her best to keep her sphincter muscles tight and her bladder in control. (Oh God, I'm not wearing panties today!) For the first time in her entire police career she was on the verge of being shot to death. And it was all her fault. Not Valnikov's.
Hers.

The call came at 4:20 p.m. It's never a call exactly, it's a scream. First the hotshot beeper over the radio. Then a shrill voice: “All units in the vicinity and 6-A-39! Officers need help, Lexington and Vermont! Shots fired!
Officers under sniper fire!
”

And then, heaven help any pedestrian or motorist within a hundred feet of a police car. Coffee cups splashing in the street. Dozing policemen jerking upright. Seat belts click and whir tight. Engines roar, transmissions scream. A hundred yards of burning rubber is smeared on Hollywood asphalt, curb, sidewalk. And, all too often, two police cars (one in compliance with regulations, using siren, another in a hurry to be first,
also
using his siren) collide at a blind intersection and never get to the call.

Probably the only Hollywood unit on the street which proceeded in its original direction was 6-W-232. Natalie was outraged.

“Valnikov, didn't you hear the hotshot call?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Aren't you going to roll on it?”

“Well, I hadn't planned to. We're over a mile away in heavy traffic. Besides, there'll be plenty of coverage.”

“Well that tears it!” Natalie sneered. “Are you a police officer or not!”

“Do you want me to go to the call? If you do …”

“Of
course
I do. Jesus Christ!”

“All right, Natalie,” Valnikov shrugged. Then to please her, he stepped on the accelerator. They speeded up to twenty miles an hour. Natalie was beside herself.

“Put your frigging foot in the carburetor!” she yelled.

“All right, Natalie. Calm yourself,” he said.

Valnikov looked around cautiously, tightened his grip on the wheel, and speeded up to thirty miles an hour. Natalie gurgled and rolled her eyes.

Surprisingly, there were only four radio cars and one other plainclothes unit at the scene when they arrived. Still, it was bedlam. The radio cars were parked on the curbs, their doors wide open on the street side. Rush-hour traffic couldn't pass down the narrow street and was backed up for blocks. People were on their front lawns, and on balconies of nearby apartment buildings, and hiding behind palm trees. No one wanted to miss the police shooting somebody to death. Or being shot.

One young policeman, hatless, red-faced, was crouching behind his radio car screaming into the uncoiled hand mike. When he was finished he threw the mike into the car.

“Down! Get down!” he screamed at Natalie as she jumped out of the detective car and ran toward the black-and-white, skirt hiked up over her knees, revolver in hand.

“What's going on?” Natalie yelled, eyes ablaze.

Valnikov struggled to get free of his seat belt. He'd never pulled it so tight before. Natalie had startled him into it.

“A barricaded suspect!” the young bluesuit yelled. “Upstairs in the back! He threatened to kill his wife and when she ran out the door he starts popping caps at her! She says he's got an army rifle and three handguns in there!”

“You call for SWAT?” Natalie yelled. They were ten inches apart, screaming into each other's face.

“Yes!” the young cop yelled, spraying her with saliva.

“Is there a sergeant here!” Natalie sprayed him back.

“No!” he screamed.

“Valnikov!” Natalie screamed over her shoulder as he finally got out of the car and came toward them. “Valnikov, you're in charge here!”