Feet scuffed. I opened my eyes.
My new friend with the attitude was towering over me, glaring down at me with comic-opera fierceness. “I asked you a question, fuckface,” he said. He kicked at me, popping my knee with his foot.
It made me mad. My knee was one of the few places that didn’t hurt. Had I really sunk this low, that I was getting kicked around by a bully in the drunk tank?
I hit him in the balls and stood up as he doubled over in pain. I was ready to peg him again, but he was already falling gently to his knees, so I just stood there. “It’s Mister Fuckface to you,” I told him. I felt a little better. Maybe a superhuman racist could beat me up without working up a sweat, but I was still a terror with drunks—even big drunks.
I sat back down again. The bully didn’t move for quite a while. Then he sat up suddenly, looked at me, and scuttled away, back to his place, without taking his eyes off me. I didn’t feel so great about hitting him anymore.
I sat there feeling sorry for myself for one of the longest nights I can remember. Five or six times a couple of cops showed up and pushed somebody new through the door.
Sunday was even worse. If there is a place deader than the drunk tank on a Sunday I don’t want to know about it. The whole day plodded by at slow speed, every minute dragging out to a full half-hour.
I guess the smell stayed the same, but after the first night my senses went numb. The moans continued; the singing tapered off. Small blessings.
There was a battered clock behind a wire mesh over the main door. Every time the door opened, every eye capable of movement would swing to the door, glance up at the clock, and swing back again to whatever patch of wall they were staring at.
It was just after ten-thirty on Monday morning when Ed finally came for me.
He stood at the bars for a little too long, just looking at me. Then the famous Cheshire cat grin spread over his face. “Billy!” he said with real delight. “You lookin’ good!”
“I feel great, Ed. Come on in, have a seat.”
He didn’t lose the grin, but he shook his head. “I’d love to, Billy, but I can’t afford to burn my suit. How ’bout you come on out instead?”
“If you’re sure—”
“Oh, I’m sure, Billy. I’m very damn sure.”
I stood up. It was a lot harder than it should have been. My knees creaked, and my back didn’t want to straighten out. But after a few moments I got them to do what they were supposed to do, and we all went over to the door.
“Can I assume you had the weekend off, Ed?”
He nodded. “Otherwise I never would have missed this,” he said.
“Are you going to get me out?”
He smiled a little broader, nodded. “In a minute. Let me look a little longer. This the most fun I had in a long time.”
There was a certain amount of paperwork before I got my belt and wallet back. They didn’t have my sleeve. Or my watch, or my shoes. I asked for a copy of the arrest report and they gave it to me.
I looked it over as we walked to Ed’s car. Ed shook his head. “It’ll be clean, Billy. I already checked.”
“You know these guys?” I asked. The two arresting officers were M. Stokes and G. Pietsch.
Ed nodded. “Stokes a brother. I know him, he’s all right. Little too serious, but—” He turned a hand over and raised an eyebrow. “Pietsch wouldn’t hurt nobody. All he cares about, the triathlon twice a year and his wife.”
“So they’re clean?”
“I don’t know they clean, Billy. But they ain’t got nothin’ to do with a asshole like Doyle, I know that.” He pointed his finger at me. “You got set up, man.”
“What else did you find out?”
He smiled and shook his head. “They got you off Boyd Street. Alarm went off in one of those toy warehouses. Pietsch and Stokes get there, you lying in front, covered with broken glass and stinking like old, cheap muscatel.” He looked at me with mock disappointment. “Thought you a Chardonnay man, Billy.”
It was a pretty good set-up. It even looked like they were showing leniency, reducing the charges from breaking and entering to drunk and disorderly. Two honest cops, and it was their word against mine.
And my defense? Well, Your Honor, a high-ranking police official beat me unconscious and I guess he must have brought me down here and broken the window himself so it looked like I did it.
Why? Well—you got a minute, Your Honor?
We were at the car. Ed walked around to the driver’s side and I climbed in the passenger seat. I had to move a huge pile of papers into the back. It didn’t quite fit.
Ed’s car was a 1967 Mustang. The engine and body were in perfect condition. The inside looked like somebody had dumped a filing cabinet onto the couch and then emptied ashtrays on it for a week.
Ed slid in, pushed the keys into the slot, and then just sat back. “So how come you ain’t dead, Billy?”
I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling now. He looked more like the Ed I’d seen briefly at the Thai restaurant, the one you could still hurt.
“I thought about that a lot,” I said slowly. “I think it works out like this. If somebody sort of credible is walking around saying Doyle is a killer and a racist, things could get tough for him. Even if there’s no real proof, it could be enough to get somebody good to start digging into his background. And sooner or later, somebody would find something. Nobody is so good they can hide everything forever—he’s got to know that.”
“But if the somebody saying all that bad shit have a record of Drunk and Disorderly, and shows up barefoot, smelling like his ten best friends been peeing on him for two weeks, that’s a little different, huh?” said Ed, nodding. “Yeah-huh, I can believe that.”
“And in a way, it’s better to have somebody saying this stuff if that somebody is hard to believe. Because that way if it comes up again, it’s old news from a crank. So he makes sure I’m not credible anymore, and then the charges of murder and racism aren’t plausible ever again. In a way, I’m a lucky break for him,” I said. “As long as he can make me look bad enough.”
Ed looked at me from the driver’s seat. “Don’t have too far to go with that.”
“He’s taking away my options, Ed. And I would guess that he’d have something cooking for you, too.”
Ed started the car. “Shit,” he said. “My ass already cooked.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but you better just drop me at the hotel and forget about me.”
“Too late for that,” he said. “What you gonna do? Go home?”
“I don’t know yet. But not that.”
“But you want me to?”
I looked him over. He was smiling, but his eyes showed the hurt again. It might be true what he said, that he was already marked by this thing. If that was true, then the only thing he could do to salvage his career would be to make sure I took Doyle down.
Besides that, the killings had hurt him, hurt the things he believed in, from the hope Hector had made him feel all the way down to his bedrock, the LAPD. He wanted in on the end of this, one way or the other.
The only problem with that was that I still didn’t have a clue what I was going to do.
“All right, Ed,” I said. “But drop me at the hotel anyhow. I need to think.”
“Sounds dangerous,” said Ed. “Considering how you done so far.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I put my clothes in a plastic bag I found in the closet and threw them into the trash. Then I took the longest shower I can ever remember taking. After the first ten minutes I no longer felt like things were growing on me. The next ten minutes took most of the knots, bumps, and dead spots out of my muscles. The final ten minutes were just because it felt good.
Then I sat on the bed and picked up the telephone. I’d done an awful lot of thinking over the weekend, especially considering that I’d been surrounded by a group that was louder than the average college fraternity party and smelled even worse than the next morning at the
same frat.
I’d thought mostly about two things: first, Doyle, and how to bring him down. I hadn’t come up with a whole lot. He seemed to have all the chips and all the cards. On the other hand, I had moral superiority. I would have traded it for one thumbprint.
The other thing I had thought about might be a little easier if I could do it right. So I called.
“Hello?” Nancy said when the receptionist at the clinic put her on. Hearing her voice sent a wave of goose bumps over my skin.
“Hi,” I said.
There was a pause. “I’m not sure I want to talk to you,” she said finally.
“I know,” I said, “and this sounds really stupid, but I can explain.”
“Boy, I’ll just bet you can.”
“Nancy, listen, I’m sorry. I got caught up in something, and I couldn’t call.”
“Couldn’t call? Really? And there were no telephones anywhere around?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m sure the telephone company would love to know where you were so they can rush over and put in a pay phone,” she said, and I could hear in her voice that she thought that was a pretty good line to hang up on.
“I was in jail,” I said, as fast and clear as I could.
Another pause, a long one. Then that wonderful throaty laugh started and rose to a middle A before it stopped again. I realized I was holding the phone in a death grip, shoving the receiver hard against my head, so I wouldn’t miss a note of it.
“It figures,” she said at last. “All right, Billy. You got one explain coming to you. What were you in for?”
“Drunk and disorderly,” I said. “But I was innocent.”
“This just gets better,” she said.
“I know how that sounds.”
“Uh-huh.”
I could feel it going against me. It was the same feeling I used to get in court, trying to explain how the good-looking, clean-cut guy in the well-tailored suit did all those awful things I had arrested him for, and seeing the jury eat up his innocent expression and admire his tailored elegance. No sale.
“Nancy, just give me a chance to lay this all out for you. None of this is what it seems.”
“It never is,” she said.
“Please,” I said.
She gave it one more long pause, for effect or for real, I couldn’t tell. I felt my greasy jail breakfast knot in my gut while I waited. “All right,” she said at last. “Meet me after work. Six o’clock at my place.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
“You better be,” she said, and hung up.
I lay back on the bed and thought about what to do with Doyle. My first thought was to take the whole thing to Captain Spaulding. He would figure he owed me, and he was the ultimate stand-up guy.
The problem was, there was really nothing he could do. He would have to turn it over to Internal Affairs, and then it was back in Doyle’s court and Doyle had enough muscle to squash it. If Spaulding investigated it himself, he would hit the same blind alleys Roscoe had hit.
I needed somebody with even more clout than Doyle. I could think of only one person. I didn’t exactly have a warm relationship with him, but I was pretty sure he’d let me in the door.
I put on clean clothes, the best I’d brought with me, and headed out.
A police cruiser blocked the entrance to the small parking lot outside the hotel. The lights were flashing, and two officers stood beside my car, looking into it.
They looked up as I approached. “This your car?” asked the first one. He was maybe twenty-eight, white and baby-faced with a small, fuzzy mustache.
“It’s mine,” I told him. “Is there a problem?”
“Could I see some identification, please?” He asked it politely, but his partner had moved into the Academy-approved position to cover his partner in case I had a bazooka in my wallet.
I took my driver’s license from my wallet and handed it to Babyface. He glanced at it. “It’s him,” he told his partner, and they drew their guns.
“Against the car. Move!” Babyface said. I leaned against the car.
“Am I allowed to ask what this is about?”
He kicked my feet apart, frisked me, and put his cuffs on my wrists without answering. “In the car,” he said, and he walked me to the cruiser.
Three and a half hours later I was still wearing the handcuffs. I was sitting in an interrogation room at the Hollywood bureau where Babyface had dumped me while he filled out paperwork.
I had one anxious eye on the clock. I wasn’t worried about spending another night in jail, but I didn’t want to miss my appointment with Nancy.
The door swung open and a potbellied guy about forty came in. He wore a cheap suit, a vague expression, and several gallons of cologne that smelled like he’d found it in the rest room of a disco.
“You Knight?” he asked, turning a chair around and leaning thick forearms on its back.
“That’s right.”
He put a grimy toothpick in the corner of his mouth and started chewing. “Detective Mancks. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Too bad,” I said. “Because I don’t have any answers at all.”
He cocked his head to the side. “That so?”
“Yup. I’m afraid my lawyer has all my answers. He’ll be happy to talk to you.”
“I’m investigating a capital crime, Knight.”
“And I bet you’re doing a bang-up job, too.” I held up my wrists with the cuffs on them. “This one of your investigative techniques?”
He licked his lips and shifted his eyes to the wall behind me. “I told them I had some questions for you. I guess they went overboard. I can get the key.”
“Good to know. But I have some questions for you, too.”
He looked cautious. “Like what?”
“Are you the Detective Mancks who’s investigating Roscoe McAuley’s murder?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So who’s leaning on you not to find anything?”
He looked at me for a full two minutes. I looked back. It wasn’t easy. Mancks had bad skin and bad teeth and couldn’t decide if he should play hostile or dumb.
He finally got up. “I’ll see if I can find that key,” he said, and walked out.
Ninety minutes later a cop in uniform came in, a big, middle-aged guy with a red nose. “There you are!” he bellowed at me. “Nobody knew where you went.”
He unlocked the cuffs and threw them on the table. “You can go,” he said.
I rubbed my wrists and stood. “Anybody feel like telling me what it was all about?”
He gave me a big smile. “You got me, buddy. All I know is, you beat the rap, whatever it is. You can go.”
I walked back to the hotel. If I hurried I could still make it to Nancy’s by six. But as I came up Franklin in front of the hotel, another police cruiser went by. The cop in the passenger seat looked hard at me and turned to speak to his partner.
The car slowed and swung into a gas station at the corner and turned around.
I sighed. I knew what was coming and I knew why, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Before the cops got back to me I ducked into the liquor store attached to the hotel and found a telephone.
“It’s me,” I told Nancy. “I’m having some problems.”
“Really,” she said, sounding unsurprised.
“Nancy, this is out of my hands. I’m about to get hauled off to jail again.”
“My tax dollars at work.”
“Can we make it tomorrow night at six instead?”
There was a long silence on the other end. I could see the two cops swaggering up to the glass door, adjusting their hats and nightsticks. “Please, Nancy. I don’t have much time, but this is important.
“All right, Billy. Tomorrow night at six.” She hung up.
There was a tap on my shoulder. My ride was here.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
This time I was in a h
olding cell. It wasn’t as nice as the interrogation room, but at least I didn’t have cuffs. Life is a series of trade-offs.
They kept me until ten o’clock at night, and then they let me go again, still with no explanation.
I didn’t really need an explanation. I was getting the message loud and clear.
I needed to be able to move around to get Doyle. Doyle was not going to let me move around.
He had played it cautious, leaving me alive. He didn’t know who else might know what I knew. But he could make damn sure I didn’t learn anything else.
I made it all the way back to my hotel room this time. I called Ed at home and told him what was going on.
“Figured something like that might happen,” he said. “What you gonna do about it?”
“I only have one move. I don’t like it much, but it’s all there is. Tomorrow morning I’m going to see a high-powered lawyer and lay out the whole thing for him.”
Smoke hissed out into the telephone. “What’s chances Doyle can get to this lawyer?”
“Pretty good, I’d say. You got a better idea?”
“Nope.”
“Well then, wish me luck and watch my back.”
“I’ll do that, Billy.”
Century City sticks up from a surrounding area of low, expensive homes. You can see it from ten miles away on a good day. But there are damned few good days in L.A., especially in August.
I took Olympic Boulevard west. It’s usually faster. For twenty minutes I watched the dim fingers of the high-rises growing gradually cleaner in outline. I also watched my rearview mirror, but there were no cops following me this morning.
I pulled into the underground parking lot of one of the buildings just about ten. The sign told me that if I wasn’t making about two and a half times minimum wage, I’d be losing money to park here while I worked. L.A. is the only place I know where you can have a job that you can’t afford to go to.
Eli Woodstock had an office near the top of the building. It was behind a very plain door that said FINKLE WOODSTOCK & KLEIN. That was it; I guess anyone passing by would know that they had to be lawyers with a name like that. Or maybe anybody who didn’t already know wasn’t welcome.