I ordered two chili-cheese dogs and a cream soda and, when they came, I squeezed into a seat at the back of the room, under a row of eight-by-ten pictures of famous people I’d never heard of.
I inhaled the first dog, and as I stopped to breathe I opened the manila envelope.
The first reports of rioting had come in about four o’clock. The log showed that the chief of police was on his way to give a speech at a spot about an hour away. He heard about the trouble en route but continued on his way and gave his speech anyway.
I thought about that one for a few minutes. Was it suspicious for the chief to keep going, an hour out of town, when a riot was breaking out? Wouldn’t it be normal for a police chief to head back, cancel his speech, be on the scene? Did it mean something when he went ahead with a speech and left his men on their own?
It could—but chances were it was simpler than that. The chief had no way of knowing how bad it would get. There were plans in place, capable people to get things moving. In an image-conscious town like L.A. he might have felt that he had to show a calm, unruffled front. Business as usual would calm people down, let them think things were under control.
Anyway, whatever else you said about Chief Gates, he was all cop. I couldn’t even fantasize about his being guilty of anything more serious than an overdue library book.
I glanced down the sheet. Three other top administrators were on duty: Doyle, Tanner, and Chismond.
Douglas J. Tanner was new to the LAPD. He’d come from Miami, where he had made a name for himself at Metro Dade Homicide with a new system of computer-generated personnel record-keeping. I remembered the jokes when he arrived, only about six months before I left. They were calling him Software Tanner—only partly because of his interest in computerizing everything.
Albert Chismond had been a fiery black radical in his younger days. Somewhere along the way he’d become so outraged by the police that he’d decided to become one. He was smart, streetwise, and ambitious. He’d come up fast. I knew him slightly; he had been behind Ed Beasley’s decision to buck for Detective.
Warren Francis Doyle was the third man. He was from one of the old L.A. families, had lots of money, was in the department for idealistic reasons. His brother had been on the city council for a while. A family tradition of service, like the Kennedys.
All three had been on duty when the trouble started. All three had, at least in theory, access to the civil disturbance planning and the power and duty to act.
I had a starting point: three names that might or might not have done something, or not done something they should have done. But where did I go with them?
Two young men sat down at the table with me. They were so pale they were almost green, and their long scraggly hair clacked when they moved. They were dressed in slashed black leather vests, with lots of things hanging off their necks, arms, and heads. Things like twisted chunks of metal, skulls with green eyes and devils. One of them wore a bright red penis dangling from his neck.
“Fuck, no!” one of them screamed as they sat down. “That shit sucks. Michaels is a cunt!” Neither of them even looked at me. They just launched into their lighthearted witty talk.
“He can suck my dick,” the other one agreed.
“What the fuck IS this shit, huh? Can somebody tell me what this shit is?”
“He’s a fucking douche bag,” said the other one.
“It’s my fucking band!”
L.A. is the cultural capital of the western world, I thought.
“Fuck that shit!”
“Fucking right.”
I got up and walked back to my car.
Ed was still at his desk. That was no surprise, and neither was the sour expression on his face. He looked like his ass had sent out roots into his desk chair and it hurt like hell.
His face didn’t improve as I told him what Spider had said, and what I had figured. He lit a series of Kools, slurped his coffee, and made mean faces. Then I showed him the documents from Parker Center. He bit the filter off his Kool.
“Figures,” he said when I was done.
“I don’t like the idea. But it would explain an awful lot.”
“Explaining is one thing. Proving something like this, man, that’s gonna be a little more complicated.”
“Roscoe would have left some kind of paper trail. If it doesn’t prove anything, it might at least point towards something that does. So now I’d really like to see Roscoe’s papers,” I said.
“You ain’t the only one.” I raised an eyebrow, and he nodded. “Talked to Roscoe’s widow. Didn’t know nothing. I don’t think she has a lot of joy in her heart about the LAPD being on the job. She put her maid on the phone.”
“Maid?”
“Uh-huh. A maid of Central American origin. Poco Ingles. Tiene miedo de los policias.” He threw out the Spanish casually, with a pure South Central accent.
I whistled. “When did this happen?”
He shrugged. “Gotta talk the talk if you gonna walk the walk.”
“You mean the walk up the ladder?”
“You know it. So anyhow, the maid say a man showed up and took away all the papers. I asked her what man? Very nice man, very good. Polite. He showed a badge. Oh, so the Señora let him in? Oh, no, she says, the Señora was at the funeral. Que lástima. What kind of badge, I say? She say a badge. Like the poor señor’s, but different maybe.”
“The papers are gone?”
“That’s the bad news.”
I let out a long breath, some of it wrapped around a bad word. “What’s the good news?”
He hoisted both eyebrows all the way up to his hairline and looked at me with mock surprise. “Why, Billy,” he said, “good news is we know there really is something in those papers. ’Cause I checked all over the damn department, and nobody the LAPD knows about was anywhere near those papers.”
“Which means the killer grabbed ’em.”
“Yeah-huh.”
“That isn’t very good news.”
He smiled. “Sure seem like it, way things been going.”
Chapter Nineteen
I was up early the next day and into my new routine: run up the hill, run back down the hill. Shower and shave, and then go downstairs to experiment with the menu in the coffee shop. I tried waffles, Canadian bacon, and a fruit cup.
The waffles were frozen; one was still cold in the middle. The fruit cup was from a can, except for one slice of really sour grapefruit. On the plus side, none of it actually killed me.
As I finished a second cup of the pale, soapy coffee I realized that without thinking about it I had decided to concentrate on Hector’s murder. It made sense to me that Roscoe was killed to cover up Hector’s death. It was theoretically possible that the two deaths were unrelated, but it seemed a lot more likely that I would become the next king of Norway.
With Roscoe’s papers missing I had a couple of choices, and none of them were very good. But since I was not tied down by police investigative procedure, the best idea seemed to be to skip trying to prove anything and just assume I was right.
I thought about my three suspects: Chismond, Tanner, Doyle. I knew almost nothing about them. I needed a starting point. All I really knew was that the killer was pretty good with a rifle. But with three cops for suspects, that wasn’t going to help much.
Of the three, which one had anything to gain from Hector’s death? Come to think of it, what had anybody gained from his death? The black community had lost a promising young leader—who could possibly profit from that?
Chismond seemed unlikely. He was black, too, and this was looking like a racially motivated crime. But if he was guilty, he’d had help; Spider had seen a white man.
Still, Chismond had been a radical in his youth and might still be. On the old theory of the worse things are the better, he could have arranged for someone to shoot Hector. Or he could have thought the kid was taking the movement in the wrong direction. It was possible; it seemed pretty unlikely.
&n
bsp; Doyle was almost as unlikely. There wasn’t a more squeaky-clean officer in the history of the department. With his rank, his wealth, and his standing in the community, I couldn’t see what he might possibly have to gain from a couple of murders. Besides, his whole life had been dedicated to improving the city, and a strong black leader in the figure of Hector would have helped.
That left Tanner. He was relatively new to the department, and I knew less about him than the other two. He was an appealing suspect in a couple of ways. First, he was primarily a bookkeeper, and I have a lifelong prejudice against bookkeepers. Second, by reputation he was so dull and ordinary and gray I couldn’t help thinking of the old saw about how ordinary evil has become in the twentieth century. And I knew Miami was a place where racism flourished.
I could picture it perfectly: the quiet, boring man, sitting at his desk with a blotter and a neat In basket, carefully plotting out the survival of the white race in a double-entry ledger.
Even if the picture was a cartoon, I had to start somewhere. I would start with Tanner.
Now the question was, how would I start?
One way would be to go through my contacts on the LAPD and get a look at Tanner’s personnel file, try to get any kind of handle there might be to get. But I didn’t want to strain my favor account too early. I might need it later.
Another way would be to go through the L.A. Times for the last year and find anything with his name on it that popped up. Or maybe I could call Miami—I had one friend there in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
But probably the best way to start was with routine surveillance. That way I could get a feel for Tanner right off. And I’m good at surveillance; I was pretty sure he wouldn’t know I was on his tail. He might go somewhere, do something, meet somebody he shouldn’t. I might catch him picking up his Klan robes from the dry cleaners.
I got out the phone book. There were a column and a half of Tanners listed. D.J. Tanner had an address in Eagle Rock. I figured he was my man.
I drove over on the freeway. Most of the traffic was going in the other direction, so it took only about thirty minutes to drive the seven miles to Eagle Rock.
Eagle Rock is a kind of bastard child of Glendale and Pasadena. There are some very nice areas, and there are some pretty tough neighborhoods, too. Sometimes they’re right next door to each other.
I couldn’t tell from Tanner’s address which kind of area he lived in. When I got there, I was mildly surprised to see it was one of the border areas: nice houses, racially mixed neighborhood.
In fact, as I drove slowly past Tanner’s house, a woman yelled something out of what looked like Tanner’s kitchen window at the house next door. I heard a loud caw of laughter and a black woman leaned out the side door of the house next to Tanner’s and yelled something back with a big smile.
Three kids raced past her as she stood there, two black and one white. The kids ran into Tanner’s house and disappeared. There was more yelling, most of it good-humored.
Okay. It didn’t mean anything. It might be a clever cover. Probably lots of racists lived next door to black people. Probably once you lived next to them, you had to let their kids run in and out of your house, just to avoid confrontation. And hey, maybe the murders had nothing to do with race. Maybe Tanner was in love with Lin Park.
I drove once around the block and didn’t really convince myself. But I still pulled in about a half a block down and waited, watching the house.
In about five minutes Tanner came out with a big smile. He was pulling at his jacket. The three kids were pulling on the other side of it. They were shouting and laughing and wouldn’t let him go.
After twenty or thirty seconds of this, Tanner did a pretty good King Kong imitation and the kids let go, squealing and running for cover.
Still smiling, Tanner walked to the curb, smoothing his jacket down over the soft roll of fat at his waist. He didn’t look like the kind of super-strong guy Spider had described. He didn’t even look like a cop. Tanner got into a year-old Lexus and headed for work. I followed.
The traffic was a lot worse in that direction. It took forty-five minutes to get to Parker Center. I watched Tanner pull into the parking garage, and then I kept driving around the block.
I stopped and bought a newspaper, a bag of doughnuts, and a cup of coffee. I expected to get something to eat later, when Tanner went out for lunch, but I wanted to have something in the car in case I was sitting there for a while.
I drove back and parked down the block from Parker Center, where I could watch the parking garage. I had decided that Tanner would not do anything incriminating at his desk in police headquarters. I just had to follow him if he left the building.
So I read the paper, glancing up from time to time to make sure Tanner didn’t sneak out to a Nazi rally while I was reading about Darryl Strawberry’s back problems.
I finished the paper. I ate one of the doughnuts. It tasted like somebody had deep-fried a wad of old newspaper and dipped it in a solution of lightly sweetened paraffin. There was some red goo in the middle that might have been jelly. It might have been melted crayon, too.
I fiddled with the radio for a while. You can find almost anything on the radio in Los Angeles. I listened to some Haitian rock and roll, some Japanese ceremonial drumming, a Bach guitar piece and “Spoonful” by Cream. Lunchtime came.
Lunchtime passed. Maybe Tanner was eating at his desk. If he was as hungry as I was getting, maybe he just ate the desk. I had a couple more doughnuts. They didn’t taste any better than the desk might have.
By three o’clock I was hungry enough to eat the rest of the doughnuts. But as I took one out of the white paper bag and stared at it, I decided I was already above and beyond the call of duty. I threw the doughnut into the gutter and drove the three blocks to the nearest convenience mart. I got a couple of sandwiches, a bottle of apple juice, and used the rest room.
Fifteen minutes later I was watching the garage again, from a slightly different spot. A tour bus had pulled into the parking place I’d been in before, but I got one almost as good.
I ate one of the sandwiches. I decided it had been made by the same person who made the doughnuts, except with yellow crayons instead of red.
Tanner didn’t come out until after six. The guy was starting to annoy me: he worked straight through lunch and then stayed late, too. There was such a thing as too much devotion to duty.
I followed him home through the miserable, honking, crawling, tire-biting traffic and watched from a half-block away as he went in the front door. I thought I could hear somebody shouting, “Daddy!” but maybe I imagined it.
And that was it. I sat there until almost midnight and there were no muffled gunshots, no burning crosses, no unusual hole-digging—nothing. Tanner went in. It got dark and the lights came on. The purple glow of television filled the front window. The purple glow went out. The lights went out.
I had plenty of time to think about all kinds of things. I thought about Darryl Strawberry’s back problems. I thought about the Burrito King down on Eagle Rock Boulevard. I thought about that voice yelling “Daddy” when Tanner went in the house. That took me in directions I didn’t want to go. But I thought about it for a while anyway.
At 11:47 the last light went out. I waited a few more minutes to be sure Tanner didn’t sneak out wrapped in a Nazi flag. Then I started the car and left.
I drove slowly down to Eagle Rock Boulevard and found the Burrito King. I had two beef burritos and a bottle of Corona from the liquor store next door. I barely made it back to the hotel, where I fell onto the bed and slept the night through.
Chapter Twenty
I overslept the next morning. I hadn’t left a wake-up call but I still felt guilty and stupid about sleeping so late. I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower without running. I felt like a weight was hanging from the back of my head and a family of mice was camping out in my mouth.
It was nearly nine o’clock when I got downs
tairs to the coffee shop. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I ordered French toast. I took the first bite, and all I could think was that if I walked back into the kitchen I could finally discover how yesterday’s doughnuts had been made.
I decided I wasn’t hungry anyway. I drank my water and left the sugar-heaped, fat-fried cardboard on my plate. I went back up to my room.
I was already having the kind of morning where you can’t figure out why you bother. It must be blood sugar. Or maybe it was geographical. Whatever it was, I sat on my bed for a half hour or so and tried to figure out what I should do and why.
The whole shape of the day was just adding to the feeling of stupid futility I had about tailing Tanner yesterday. One day of surveillance doesn’t generally tell you anything, but my gut was insisting that Tanner was exactly what he seemed: a hardworking, ordinary family man. Clean, decent, God-fearing—he probably had season tickets for a local church.
He was a typical police administrator, no more. He had the swivel-chair spread to prove it. I had watched him all day, and the idea of this agreeable family man flinging Spider off the roof with one hand was laughable.
That’s what my gut said. But Tanner could have had help. He might be the point man for a racist conspiracy. And listening to my gut made me think I was wimping out, whining about futility when I should just stick with it, no matter how long it took.
Should I stick with Tanner? Tail one of the others? Or do something else—like get on a plane and go home?
I turned it over in my head a few times, but I couldn’t decide. I could feel myself slipping backwards again, back into the dim, clenched-stomach place where nothing mattered and everything was gray. I missed my boat. I missed Nicky and Captain Art and the smell of the cat under my house. I wanted to feel the water moving me again, the fresh salty tang of it on my face. I didn’t want to be here.
But I was here. And if I let myself start thinking about that, it was going to lead me down again.