Unpaid Dues (3 page)

"
What's this about?" she asked.

"How do you explain this?" He pointed to
the name typed on the form. Jane Ferrar, it read, aka New York Jane.

"A mistake?"

"Try again."

"Mace, this is like ten years old."

"
It was never fully adjudicated. "

"So . . . what? Are you here to bust me?"
She wasn't overly worried. Surely this was just a matter of a little
clerical cleanup. Their friendship would count for something. He
couldn't be this hard up for an arrest.

"Do you know Jane Ferrar?"

Munch felt a thrill of fear in her stomach, but she
sighed as if weary and sat down on an unopened case of coolant. St.
John took Lou's chair.

"Yeah," she said, "I know Jane. I
haven't seen her in a few—make that seven—years, maybe longer."

"Do you have an address for her?"

"
No. If she isn't in jail and still hanging out
in Venice Beach, you might want to look for her on Main Street"
Even as Munch spoke, she realized her information was dated. The
hookers might have moved to Pacific Avenue, or that little strip on
Washington in front of the Jol1y Roger. It was, by nature and
necessity a migratory business.

"How did your photograph and fingerprints show
up in a file bearing her name?"

Munch looked at the arrest report and pretended she
was thinking about it. The charge was drunk driving. It had happened
during one of the spells when she was trying to drink herself off
drugs. "Cleaning up" by her old definitions. So much of
that period was a blur, but it was hard to forget an arrest and the
night in jail that invariably accompanied it.

"
I got pulled over by the cops. I was drunk. I
wasn't carrying any ID, so I gave them Jane's name."

"Why her?"

"
I knew her date of birth and I knew she had a
driver's license. It would have been, uh, imprudent to give them my
own name. We're also about the same size."

"
I noticed," he said, sounding pissed off.

She wondered why he was making such a big deal out of
one little misdemeanor. Feeling a little on guard, she continued. "If
I gave them some made-up name and birth date, it would come back
unknown and make the whole situation much more, uh, complicated. This
way I knew they'd come up with a licensed driver and just bust me for
the DUI."

"
But you'd still go to jail," he said.

"
Oh, yeah. That was a given. One night and
they'd kick me out in the morning with a court date."

"
A court date you never kept and a warrant
issued in your friend's name."

"She had an alibi, as I remember. She was back
home in New York. Her dad was having heart surgery. We all kidded her
about her dad getting a valve job." Munch stopped talking,
remembering too late St. John's sensitivity on the subject of
malfunctioning hearts. "Sorry," she said in a small voice.

St. John waved away her apology with an annoyed
expression.

Munch spread her hands in a gesture of repentance.

"Look, I'm not saying it was right. I was a
jerk. Then. And frankly, I forgot all about it. What do I need to do
to clear this up?"

"Was Jane married? Did she have any children?"

"
Not that I know of, but really I don't know
anything. I never see those people anymore unless they wander into an
AA meeting. You know that. Why all this interest all of a sudden?"
She was keeping her voice calm, but she could feel the sweat forming
in her palms and armpits.

"
Jane Ferrar was murdered."

"Oh," she said. Now it all made sense, his
questions, his attitude. "I don't know anything about Jane and
any murders."

"Murders?"
 
 

Chapter 3

"Murders," St. John said again. "You
said murders."

"I meant murders in the general sense."
God, Munch thought, what an incredibly stupid slip. You'd think I had
a guilty conscience or something. She conjured a quick image of Jane,
but couldn't picture her with anything but wary fear on her face.
Jane always tried so hard to please, and always chose to hang out
with the people who cared least about her. "Do you know who
killed her? Any suspects?"

She heard the whine of the air gun through the office
door, and wished she were still out there tightening lug nuts.

"We just got her identified. That's why I came
to you for help."

She clenched and unclenched her fist, working the
finger that had been broken by one very bad guy the last time she
played cops and robbers. A month had passed since then. The flesh
wound on her arm had required twelve stitches. She was told the scar
would fade with time. The orthopedic surgeon said Munch would most
likely have trouble with her damaged knuckle, that she would almost
certainly lose flexibility When the splint was removed, Munch could
barely crook her finger.

She had woken up all through that night, bending and
unbending the finger until the pliability was completely restored.
Dr. Yuen had been amazed; she'd even called in the receptionist to
witness the miracle. What the doctor didn't know was that beating
long odds was one of Munch's special talents.

"I'm sorry," she told St. John. "I
wish I could help you, but I had nothing in common with Jane and her
crowd besides drugs. The last time I heard from Jane was right after
I got sober. She wanted to get together. I asked her what for and she
said we could go shopping." She gave St. John a wry look. "Not
my idea of a good time either. I told her that I couldn't associate
with her—that the only thing we ever did together was get loaded
and that since I wasn't doing that anymore I had no reason to hang
out with her. She got kind of bitchy with me." Munch affected a
lofty tone of voice. "She said, 'I didn't know you were nothing
but a bag chaser.' " Bag chaser—meaning any typical drug
addict who only cared about drugs.

"I said, 'I don't know how you could have gotten
any other impression.' " Munch laughed at her own punch line.

St. John smiled.

Munch liked to think he knew and appreciated how much
those small acts of defiance cost her, how, each time she stood up
for her new way of life and let another piece of the old life fall
away she had to face the lurking monster within. The monster
whispered that she was a chump, a turncoat, a sellout. She didn't
argue. You didn't beat the monster by arguing. The only way out was
through surrender. That's when the miracles happened.

Most of the time, in day-to-day life, work, caring
for Asia, cleaning, cooking, whatever, memories of the old days
didn't intrude. Especially lately, with the mess her love life was
in, she was properly distracted from the risk of relapse. That would
sound odd to a lot of people—normal people, that is. They might
expect that a recovering addict who was having problems would be the
most shaky when actually the opposite was true. In her experience,
the good times were the most dangerous. That's when people in
recovery might be tempted to think they didn't need a Higher Power,
that they were handling their own destiny that maybe an occasional
pill or drink would be as easily handled.

The monster was a sneaky bastard.

As long as she kept up her connections to AA, she
felt safe. Not 100 percent content or at one with the universe, but
at least firmly trudging the road to a happy destiny

"So you don't know if she had a kid?" St.
John asked again.

"It's entirely possible. She and Thor wanted
one, though I don't know what kind of parents they thought they'd be.
Thor had some big idea about having a son—you know, to carry on his
name and all that bullshit."

"And who's Thor?"

"He used to be Jane's old man, but I'm pretty
sure they split up. He's probably in prison or living under some
freeway bridge if he's still a1ive."

"You got a last name for this guy?"

Munch thought a minute and then shook her head.

"
Sorry He was always just Thor to me. He might
have used Jane's last name."

"
I think I'm noticing a trend here."

"
Hey" Munch said, "it was war out
there."

She watched him leave and
fought the urge to make a phone call. Cops looked for things like
that—who you called right after they left.

* * *

St. John searched CLETS, the California Law
Enforcement Telecommunications System, for any information on Jane
Ferrar, updating her status as deceased, the victim of a homicide. He
also cross-referenced her by name through the station's new and not
yet reliable CAD system, the Computer Automated Dispatch. He came up
blank, which didn't surprise him. If there was any recent activity on
Jane Ferrar, chances were that information would be at the Pacific
Division station that handled Venice Beach.

Even though the LAPD was beginning to emerge from the
dark ages, none of the eighteen geographic divisions' computer
systems were linked by a network, nor were they even compatible. When
St. John needed files from any other division, he had to drive there.

After stating his intentions to Cassiletti, who was
sitting at a table in the roll call room with the cinder block in
front of him, St. John grabbed his keys. His Buick had over a hundred
thousand miles on the odometer and needed a couple minutes of warm-up
before the lifters quieted down and the oil cleared out of the
combustion chambers. Or so Munch had explained.

He set the heater to low and headed off. The radio
was tuned to an FM station and an old Steppenwolf song played softly
beneath the static of his police radio. The song had come out when he
was twenty and wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army. In the early
days of his tour in Vietnam, he'd felt like some kind of god, just
out of high school and put in charge of million-dollar equipment. And
the hookers, they were everywhere—young, beautifully exotic, cheap
even by a cocky young American's standards.

He'd never felt so alive, especially as his belief in
his immortality wavered. Every morning was a victory. Every taste,
smell, and sound was savored—the moist morning air, men laughing,
stale cookies baked and sent from elementary-school kids stateside.
This was, of course, before the children were taught to be ashamed of
the war. Before all of them were. That came later.

While he was in-country while the cause was still
righteous, the world around him blazed with intensity. Coming home
had been a letdown. Colors seemed duller, everyday concerns seemed
unreal and unimportant.

He drove away his first wife, Nan, with his stock
dismissal to any and all of her complaints: "Is anyone shooting
at you?" How could any problem be a big deal if no one was
shooting at you."

He grasped entirely the seduction of urban warfare.

Now he wondered who that weathered old fart was who
stared back at him from his bathroom mirror each morning. Time has
passed, he told himself. The war is over. As Munch would say move the
fuck on.

The Pacific station on Culver Boulevard rewarded him
with a plethora of information. In addition to Jane Ferrar's criminal
record he found an instance where officers had responded to a
disturbance at the Star Motel on Rose Avenue in Venice Beach.

He went to the files and pulled the original copy of
the incident report. Management had phoned police when a coffee table
burst through the front window. The officers discovered a domestic
dispute between Jane Ferrar and a man who identified himself as Mac
Ferrar. Mac Ferrar was described by officers as a tall, red-blond,
bearded white male. Jane convinced the officers that the fight was
over and that it had all been her fault. The beat cops admonished her
to pay for the window before she checked out.

Those cops would be sued for that same shit now. Sued
and sent for "sensitivity training"

St. John ran the name Mac
Ferrar but found nothing. No criminal history; no California driver's
license, nada. He wasn't surprised. The name Mac Ferrar was no more
real than the baby in Jane Ferrar's arms.

* * *

Cassiletti measured the dimensions of the cinder
block and wrote down his findings on a legal pad. He also drew a
sketch of the block, noting the tongue-and-groove joints on either
end along with their widths and depths, and the two-inch-wide furrows
at the tops and bottoms of the long-facing sides. The block was a
light salmon color and weighed thirty-two pounds. Feeling he'd
exhausted his observational skills, he grabbed the thing by the web
between the two holes and carried it to his car.

His first stop was the Builder's Emporium on Bundy He
held the block in his left hand and away from his side so as not to
snag his dark slacks. Building materials were in the outdoor yard
next to garden supplies. The bitter scent of insecticides and
fertilizer assaulted him as he walked down the narrow aisles.

"
Can I help you?" asked a clerk wearing a
green apron.

"I need some information. What do you know about
cinder blocks?"