Tropical Depression (18 page)

“That’s right, I’m a fishing guide. You come on down, I’ll give you a discount.”

He blinked for the half-second it took him to realize it was a joke. “Right, a discount, okay.” He paused for his gentle and vague smile. “Hey, you look great. I mean—really. Geez, lookit you.”

I was starting to get the idea that I looked great. Before Charlie could enter me in a beauty contest I figured I should say something. “You have time for a cup of coffee, Charlie?”

He hesitated. Charlie was not the brightest guy alive, and it took him a minute to decide things. But his heart was good. He took some ribbing about his low IQ—cop humor tends to be basic—but he was well-liked. “Coffee, huh? Well—sure. Sure. Sure, I got a few minutes here. Come on.”

He led me out the front door to a place about a half-block away. A pencil-thin black man with a tiny mustache and a crisp white hat stood behind the counter in the cleanest apron I had ever seen. He nodded to Charlie. “Officer,” he said, very distinctly.

“Hey, Philbert, how are you today?”

They chattered for a few moments and I stood waiting. I was used to it. One of the disadvantages of being partnered with a guy like Charlie is that everything takes twice as long. He can’t go anywhere without seeing somebody he knows, and if he knows them he has to talk to them.

Eventually he got two cups of coffee out of Philbert. Charlie remembered how I liked my coffee, and we sat and sipped at a small round table in the front window.

There was really not a lot to say, but that was never a problem with Charlie. We spent close to half an hour just gossiping. Charlie told me Putz Pelham never did come down with AIDS, but the thought that he might had scared him badly and he was now Born again in the most self-righteous way possible.

There was other stuff, little things, mostly about buddies we shared, new things we wanted to mention. It was more like college roommates meeting by chance than two guys who had been cops together in one of the worst urban jungles in the country.

As I said goodbye and walked back to my car there was really only one thing that stuck in my mind from the whole talk, and I couldn’t even figure out why it was sticking until I was pulling out of the parking lot.

At one point Charlie had given his head a sad little shake and said something about maybe quitting, maybe going into business with his brother who was a plumbing contractor.

“You don’t mean that,” I told him. “Not really.”

He looked away, out the cluttered window. A bus went by. “Ahh. I don’t know,” he finally said. “Hasn’t been much fun lately. Maybe I really shouldn’t be a cop.”

“It’s not that bad, is it, Charlie? Come on.”

“Yeah, well. Since the riots. The riots were—you know, it was like nobody knew what to do and we were waiting for orders that just never came.” He crumpled his empty Styrofoam cup. “I really don’t like that feeling. Like the brass either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. I don’t like that.”

And as I pulled out of the lot into traffic I realized why I was replaying that small chunk of talk.

This was the third time I’d heard the same message: cops felt like the command structure had let them down during the riots. Roscoe had said it was “almost like deliberate sabotage.” And he had wanted an outsider, somebody he could trust—because he had a suspicion that somebody on the inside was guilty?

Ed had mentioned having the same feeling of mistrust, like the high command wasn’t quite right. “Like somebody tried to fuck us up on purpose,” he had said. And now Charlie—for Charlie to mention it at all it had to be something everybody was thinking about, even talking about.

And when I added all that to my notion that somebody with major clout had been leaning on the investigations into Hector’s and Roscoe’s murders, it started to add up to—

To what? Was the bump on my head making me stupid? Did I really think somebody in the command structure was behind Hector’s murder? And Roscoe’s? If it was bribery or nepotism, sure. No problem. Easy. That happened every day.

But murder? Cops killing cops? A cop on the roof with a sailboat? That wasn’t even farfetched. It was stupid.

It was just too whacko. I’d just been away too long. I wasn’t thinking like a cop anymore—I was thinking like Nicky, like one of his New Age conspiracy theories.

No, cops were still cops, even if they wore suits instead of blues. The idea was totally nuts. I let go of it and headed for the freeway.

Before I could buy into a whacked-out idea like cops killing cops, I had to chase down a few more obvious leads. The first one was the paper trail.

Roscoe was an administrator. His earliest training and his personal instincts for political survival would guarantee that he had left some kind of hint on paper somewhere. I was as sure of that as I could be. His first commandment was Thou Shalt Cover Thine Ass, and a political cop’s favorite ass-cover would be paper: memos, reports, briefings, summations, anything he could think of.

There had to be something. Knowing that,
what
and
where
were just a matter of poking.

I went to a sushi place not far away and called Ed. The telephone smelled like Windex, but at least it worked.

“It’s me,” I said when he answered. “You said you had Roscoe’s datebook. You have any other personal papers?”

He blew out smoke. “I got the datebook cause I’m checking background. The other stuff, it’s all in a box somewhere, but I can’t get at it without some kind of official reason.”

“For an official reason, would an anonymous tip do the trick?”

“Works for me. If it’s from a usually reliable source.”

“Uh-huh. Well, here’s an anonymous tip for you, from a usually reliable source. Roscoe’s personal papers will reveal something about his background that has a lot to do with his murder.”

“You sweet-talking devil. Call me later, I’ll see what I can do.” He hung up.

It wasn’t even a hunch. It was just a routine piece of investigative footslogging. Sometimes that stuff pays off—that’s why it’s routine. Maybe we’d get lucky and the papers would turn up something.

I sat at the bar and thought about what to do next. The bar surface was clean, highly polished dark wood. I ordered a beer and a couple of California rolls, just to have something to do. It was good. When it was gone I had decided.

I was close to Park’s Honest Good Food Grocery, and I still had some questions. I got in my car and pointed it that way.

The neighborhood hadn’t changed since my last visit a couple of days ago. The Thrifty had the same specials going. The burned-out car hadn’t moved. I guess once you find a good parking place, you hang onto it.

I parked across the street again. I looked up at Park’s roof and my head throbbed. I crossed the street.

An electronic chime sounded as I pushed open the door. It took me a second to get my bearings in that frantic clutter.

Park didn’t help. He stood in his cage, completely motionless. I stepped over in front of him. “I need to talk to your daughter again,” I said.

His eyes moved fractionally, up to the knot on my forehead, then down to my eyes. “Black boy do that?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

He looked at me for a long moment. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe that’s just as well. Then his eyes moved away. “Lin not home.”

“When will she be home?”

The slight lift of his right shoulder was almost a shrug. “After school,” he said.

I looked at my watch. It was close to three. “I’ll wait.”

Park didn’t even shrug. He just went back to motionlessness. He reminded me of an alligator waiting for something to walk into range.

I stepped back into the street in front of the store. The blue plastic milk crate was still there to one side of the door. I sat on it.

A few cars went by. Some buses passed, too. A thin black kid, about eight, ran past like a werewolf was after him. A few minutes later a group of kids about the same age came by in more casual style. They laughed and hit each other until they came even with me. Then they got very quiet and filed by, looking at me with gigantic eyes. As soon as they were past they laughed again. Life goes on.

I watched them until they were almost out of sight. Then I heard a soft swish. I turned into a faint clean smell.

“Oh,” Lin Park said. “Mr.—ah, it’s you.” Her eyes flicked to the knot on my forehead and she colored faintly under her flawless skin.

I stood up. “That’s right. It’s me.”

“Oh. Well—” She could obviously think of a few people she’d rather talk to.

“I need to ask you a couple more questions,” I said.

She bit her lip. “I—don’t know. I just—like—what kind of questions?”

“I just need to know a few things about Hector’s posse.”

Lin shook her head hard. “I don’t—that’s not like a very good idea.”

“Why not?”

She hesitated and looked around out of the corner of her eyes.

“Lin, I’d like to try to find out who killed Hector. I can’t do that until I know a couple of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like were any of the posse not there when Hector was shot?”

She frowned, an incredibly elegant expression on her. “Why would you want to know that?”

“Because Hector was set up. So somebody had to set him up. So whoever set him up might not be there because they knew it was a setup.” If she looked like Roseanne Arnold I probably wouldn’t have been so patient. But she didn’t look like Roseanne, not by two hundred pounds and a few yards of creamy skin. “So was anybody missing?”

She shook her head. “Just Spider. The guy that, you know.” She nodded slightly at my forehead. “But that wasn’t—he had to, like, go to the hospital.”

“Why?”

“He like fell off the roof? And was busted up for a couple of weeks. So it couldn’t have been Spider.”

“When did he fall from the roof?”

Lin raised one shoulder in a graceful shrug. The collar of her blouse opened slightly and I fought not to look. “It was like almost the same time. He rode the ambulance they brought for Hector.”

I nodded. “I need to talk to him.”

Lin hissed. “That’s not a good idea.”

“Why not?”

She raised a hand. I watched it flutter for a moment like a small lost bird, then it dropped. “He hasn’t been—you know. Since Hector got shot, Spider has been kind of wild? Like, not a real good person to bother? I mean—” And she nodded at my forehead again.

“I’d still like to talk to him, Lin. It might be important.”

She shook her head again, but it didn’t mean no this time. It was just something to do while she was thinking about it. So I pushed. “Can you get him here?”

She smiled, a very old and very feminine smile. “Oh, I can get him to come here. If I ask him, Spider will come. That’s not the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

She bit her lip and looked away.

“What do you think Hector would want you to do?” It was shameless and probably wouldn’t have worked on anybody but a sixteen-year-old. But it worked on her, or something did.

She looked carefully up and down the street. “I’ll call him,” she said. “But be real careful, okay? Meet me on the roof in like ten minutes?” And she was gone into the store.

I looked up and down the street and didn’t see anything. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. But at least I didn’t see it.

Lin was acting more like somebody stuck in a moral dilemma than somebody afraid. I thought she might be tough to scare. So I guessed she wanted to make sure nobody saw her talking with the enemy.

I walked down the alley between the bank and the grocery store. Park’s dumpster was there. It stank, but it was neat. Enigmatic, too.

Around back I pulled on the tattered rope and climbed the stairs to the roof. I walked across the gravel and tar and stood looking down into the street.

What had Spider seen? If he had been on the roof at the same time Hector was shot, I was willing to bet my boat he had seen something. There was even a chance he could identify the killer.

But he hadn’t come forward and said anything at the time—why? It smelled like guilt to me. Guilt about what, I couldn’t say.

But the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I was right. Spider had been one of the good kids, helping to cool down violence with Hector’s posse. Now he had gone bad. It could be simple bitterness, but he was young for that. Guilt would be a lot stronger as a motivation.

There was a clatter and Lin came up the ladder, followed moments later by Spider, the kid with the porkpie hat.

He stopped dead when he saw me and then turned with a sour look and said something to Lin. She shook her head. Her hair whirled around her face like shredded silk. She spoke passionately for a moment, her face serious, animated, heartbreakingly lovely.

That was not lost on Spider. He watched her, licked his lips, and shrugged. When she placed a hand on his shoulder he stiffened, then slowly nodded.

He turned to face me, then strutted across the roof to where I stood.

“Hey, ghost, sorry about your face, man.”

“Shit happens,” I said.

“Yeah, but whoa. Look like shit happen to your face a lot, man.” He shook his head, reached a finger toward the knot on my face. “You get beat up a lot, ghost?”

I snatched at his hand. He tried to yank it back, but I caught his wrist. I didn’t pull or squeeze or anything dramatic. I was trying to get him off balance mentally, not physically. I just held his arm motionless while he struggled to retrieve it, giving him a friendly smile the whole time.

After a few moments he gave it up. “Damn, man, okay, you can hold my hand, that what you want?”

“No. That’s not what I want.”

“Then what
is
what you want, motherfucker?”

“I want to know something only you can tell me, Spider.”

“Goddamn, you let go my arm I’ll tell you anything.”

“Okay. How does it feel to kill your best friend?”

For a long moment he didn’t breathe. All the blood left him. He sagged and if I had let go of his arm he would have fallen to the tarpaper.

When he finally gathered enough air to speak, it sounded like a small boy talking from the bottom of a well.