Tropical Depression (28 page)

“Mr. Knight.” His voice lashed at me. I looked back at him. “If I hear any more about this from you, you are going to find yourself in court, and then in jail. Is that clear?”

Now I looked at him long and hard. Cops develop resources, and one of them is the Hard Cop Stare. I gave it to Woodstock, both barrels. It was easy; I meant it.

I walked over to his desk. I got all the way there without sinking out of sight into his carpet. When I was there I leaned both knuckles on his desk and put my face as close to his as I could get it. Across that desk it still wasn’t very close.

“I don’t know what Doyle told you. I’d guess you’re not in it with him, because that takes a certain amount of warped passion, and I don’t think you’re capable of any, warped or otherwise. I think you’re just a garden-variety, self-important slimebag full of expensive insecurity and you don’t really know anything, so you think money is always the answer.”

“Really, Mr. Knight,” he started, but I stopped him. He had already lost a little of the color underneath his expensive tan. I could almost hear him thinking,
Nobody talks to me this way.

“Yes, really,” I said. “And I’ll tell you one more thing. You can go ahead and plan on seeing me in court. So
you
better find yourself a good lawyer.”

He licked his lips, and I left him there.

I rode down to the parking garage, where two cops stood beside my rented car. “William Knight?” they asked.

I was parked in front of Nancy’s building by 5:20. I had come straight from the Century City bureau, where once again I had sat in a room with no company until they decided I could go. Still no explanation. I wouldn’t have waited for one even if they’d offered it. Carefully observing all the traffic regulations, I drove across town and found a legal parking spot in front of Nancy’s building.

I spent thirty-five minutes grinding my teeth and listening to the radio. It seemed like all my doubts about coming to L.A were paying off double. I was getting nowhere with Roscoe’s murder. I was actually moving backwards, since all I’d done so far was alert the killer so he’d be ready for the first serious attempt to nail him. That and building up a police record.

And then the whole thing with Nancy. I’d gone into it without a clue about what I was doing and bungled it from the first. If she was still willing to speak to me when I finished explaining, it would be a minor miracle.

The radio droned on about terrible disasters all over the world, while I droned on to myself about all the stupid things I had ever done, just to prove to myself that all this was no fluke. I was back to the first grade, the time I sat on a cactus on a dare, when it was time to go in.

At exactly six o’clock I was knocking on the door to her apartment.

The door swung open.

We just looked at each other for a long moment. I was holding my breath, waiting for her to slam the door in my face. She was holding her breath, too, maybe trying to decide if she was going to slam the door.

Then she let out a long sigh. “Come on in,” she said. She held the door wide and I walked past.

I went over to the small sofa. The memories of it made me look up at her. She caught my eye and blushed. “Sit down,” she said. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “If you have a beer?”

“Of course,” she said, and went into her small kitchen.

I sat. I could feel the sweat starting on my face and on the back of my neck. We had both settled into the stilted, careful formality of two lovers who, having broken up badly, now met by chance. That wasn’t the start I needed.

Nancy came back in less than a minute holding a squat bottle of Miller’s. “My brother likes this,” she said. “I hope it’s okay.”

“Thanks, it’s fine,” I said. I wasn’t going to taste anything anyway, not until I got through this.

Nancy stood for a moment, her eyes flicking to the empty space beside me on the couch. Then she stepped back and sat primly on the high-backed chair opposite. “Well,” she said. “I believe you were going to explain everything?”

It was still freshly organized in my mind from my visit to Woodstock. I started at the beginning. The real beginning this time.

“There’s a few things I didn’t tell you,” I said.

“I’m sure there must be.”

“I was an L.A. cop for seven years,” I said. “I was married. Had a kid.”

It was tougher than I thought. I stopped.

“And now you’ve decided to go back to your wife,” she said, with an I-knew-it-all-along tone of voice.

“Can’t,” I told her, looking away. “She’s dead.”

Nancy didn’t say anything. I still couldn’t look at her.

“They’re both dead. My wife and my daughter. They were—killed. Caught up in something connected to my work. That’s why I quit, started fishing for a living. To get away, as far away as I could get. I never wanted to come back here again.”

“But you came back. Why?”

I looked at Nancy. There were spots of color burning in her cheeks. Her eyes were locked onto me, but I couldn’t read her expression.

“A guy came for me. Roscoe McAuley. A cop I knew.”

“McAuley—there was a Hector McAuley killed in the riots.”

I nodded. “Roscoe’s son. Roscoe wanted me to find the killer. I told him no. Then Roscoe got killed, too, and I had to come.”

She shook her head. “Hector McAuley was—people are still talking about—”

“I know.”

“And you were—that’s why you came back to L.A.?”

“Yes.”

Nancy looked at me. She chewed on her lip. I wished I could, too. “Have you found anything?”

I looked away again. “I know who did it, and how and why. I can’t prove any of it. So I tried to force something. The guy is very well connected, and he was too much for me. I wound up in the drunk tank. Now he’s got cops following me, taking me off to jail every two hours. No matter what I say or do now, it’s going to look like I’m a crank. The kind who’s always finding conspiracies under the bed. So I guess I’ve crapped out.

“I tried to tell the whole thing to a high-price lawyer the City keeps on retainer. I crapped out there, too. I’ve pretty much crapped out everywhere, all along the line, and I don’t have any idea what I can do now.”

“So you’re going to quit?”

“Nancy, it isn’t that simple.”

“Neither is life. But you already quit on that, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. She got quiet. “Until I met you.”

Now she looked away.

“But I’ve run out of ideas there, too.”

She didn’t look back at me. Her head was turned to one side. I watched her neck muscles. The red color slowly left her cheeks. I heard a clock tick.

“What is it you want from me, Billy?” She said it so softly I could barely hear her. “I’m not here to be your savior.”

“I know that.”

“You can’t just come barrelling into my life and take it over, that’s—I have a lot of other things going on.”

“I know that, too.”

“Because it was—at first I thought we had something really happening, you know, and then when I thought you were squirreling out on me, I did some thinking.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t know if I am ready for the kind of relationship you represent, Billy.”

“Okay.”

“God-
damn
it, Billy!”

Our eyes met.

“Don’t just sit there and agree with everything I say.
Talk
to me.”

“Nancy—I was starting to care for you, a lot. And that scared me. And made me feel guilty. And I am caught up in something very tough and it’s taking the heart out of me. I am at a dead end with both things. I don’t have any answers anymore. I don’t know if I’m capable of having answers.”

There was a long quiet stretched between us. I could see the last of the day’s sun slowly pulling its feelers back out the window. The traffic below was muffled but sounded lethal even four floors up.

I couldn’t take the quiet anymore. “Anyway, that’s what I wanted to tell you. I owed you an explanation. And an apology.”

“Oh, stop it.”

“I mean it. There might be things I’ve never talked about before. Maybe I took it for granted that you don’t have to talk about them even if you’re married to someone, and with you—I’m new at all this, Nancy. I don’t always know what I’m doing with you.”

“At the moment, we haven’t decided if you’re doing anything.”

“There is that.” I saw the beer sitting in front of me, still unopened. Mostly to have something to do, I opened it. I started to take a sip. Miller. Because her brother liked it.

I put the beer down.

“What’s the matter?” Nancy asked.

“Nancy, I don’t know what to do about us, except to say that I would like it to continue. I don’t know how that would work, but I will try as hard as I can at making it work. But about the other thing—”

“The murders, you mean?”

“That’s right.”

“What about them?”

“What kind of reporter is your brother?”

Dan Hoffman was a dark, very handsome man with eyes that seemed to look right through you, even while he was being patient. He had Nancy’s high cheekbones, and when he turned his head so the light caught it I could see the same golden highlights in his hair.

I went through the whole thing for him, the third time today. I was starting to get good at it.

He heard me out, leaning back in his swivel chair, fingers laced behind his head. He was a good listener. Once or twice he leaned forward and made a note on a yellow legal pad.

When I was done he didn’t say anything for a while. Then he sat up straight and tapped a pencil on the desk. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because it has to be done. Because there’s nobody else who can do it. Because—”

I stopped. Dan had started to hum softly: “The Impossible Dream.”

“Sorry,” he said. “But your name is going to be in this. And unless people can see right off where you are getting yours, they’re going to keep looking. Or make up their own answer. Woodstock was just the first.”

“I don’t have an angle, Dan.”

He looked at me for a while, nodding. Then he looked at his sister.

“How much can I trust him?” he said, as if he was talking about somebody in the next room. She swiveled around to look at me, and the two of them stared like I was an overrated painting.

“I’m not sure,” Nancy said. “Pretty much, I think, but I can’t be positive.”

He looked back at me. “You have to know that I am bound by rules just as strict as those governing the police and prosecutors. I can’t print something unless I can prove it.”

“I know that,” I said. “The point is, I don’t have anyplace else to go with this. He’s taken away my ability to move.”

“So what do you think I can do?”

“I don’t know if the murders are provable. Not in a way that will stand up in court, or even get a prosecutor to take it seriously. But I’ll be goddamned if I’ll walk away from it without sticking Doyle for
something.
”

“Membership in Die Bruders?”

“That’s what jumped out at me. It’s on the FBI list of subversive organizations and for an assistant chief of police to be a member is illegal.”

“Is he a member?”

“I think he’s the leader. Maybe you can prove that.”

“How?”

“You would know that better than me.”

“I’m just a lowly newspaper reporter.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard modesty from one of you guys.”

He laughed. It was a good laugh, a lot like his sister’s. It didn’t do the same things to me, but I could see that it came from the same source.

“All right, Billy,” he said, and held out a hand. It was warm, dry, and firm. “I’ll see what I can do. But it’ll be a lot easier without having to explain why you’re in jail all the time. You’d better disappear.”

I drove Nancy back to her apartment, mostly in silence. I felt good about what Dan and I had done. The feeling didn’t last long.

When I pulled up in front of her building she turned sideways in the seat to face me.

“I’m not going to ask you up, Billy,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I don’t think that would be right at this point. Because I don’t know what I’m looking for from you.”

“I know what I’m looking for,” I said. “I thought I’d found it.”

She looked away and nodded. “That’s part of the problem,” she said. “I don’t think it’s the same thing I’m looking for.”

“We slept together once. That’s pretty early in a relationship to decide all this.”

“Meaning we should sleep together again and then decide?” She said it with a mean glint in her eye like she’d caught me trying to sneak a fast one by her.

“That’s not what I meant, Nancy.”

“Isn’t it? Because continuing the relationship at this point means continuing sex, doesn’t it? Which is a pretty convenient coincidence for you.”

“Sex isn’t the only issue here, Nancy.”

“I’m very glad to hear that, Billy. Because as far as I’m concerned there isn’t going to be any more.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about the other stuff.”

“Damn you, Billy,” she said, and now she was crying. “Would you please just let go of me?” And turning away so I would not see her cry, she opened the door of the car and ran into her apartment building.

I watched her go. I felt like a cold dry wind was blowing through my bones. Long after she was inside I sat there, my hands on the steering wheel at ten of two, looking at the door to her building.

Everything was coming unglued. I had found Roscoe’s killer and he had beat me up and put me in jail. Now I couldn’t even follow up. I had to run for cover.

I had found one small hope for living again, and I had let that slip away, too.

And now I couldn’t even go back to my boat, because everything had changed, the careful shell I had built up had been eroded by the dry brown L.A. air.

My hiding place was exposed, and so was the careful picture I had built up of who I was now. There was a recall order for the new, improved Billy Knight. Coming back to L.A. had brought me partway back to life, but that wasn’t turning out to be a good thing.

I didn’t know where to go, what to do, or even who to be. Every reason I had for living was slipping through my fingers like water.