Body Copy (20 page)

That evening, Tremaine pulled the Cutlass into the Chez Jay parking lot in Santa Monica. Tremaine looked around, didn’t see Lopez’s black Mustang, not here yet. He hopped out of his car and walked toward the entrance. Chez Jay, a spot both he and Lopez enjoyed. An old-school sailor bar right across from the beach. Lots of tradition, nice and dark.

The kind of place where most nights you’d see regulars, but Michael Craven

because of the atmosphere and the extra-cold beer and the juicy steaks, often you’d see a Michelle Pfeiffer or a Jeff Bridges tucked away in the corner.

Tremaine grabbed a table near the back, lucky, the place was packed. He ordered two bourbons and sat back and waited. Five minutes later, Lopez entered, a manila folder under his arm.

“Mr. Lopez!” Tremaine said as he stood up and handed John Lopez his bourbon.

“Tremaine, I’m getting lobster. I hope you know that.”

“I didn’t
know
that, but I figured it. That’s what I do in my line of work. I figure stuff. You rarely know stuff.”

Lopez tossed the manila envelope onto the table and sat down. “There you go,” he said. “There are police reports in there for all of the murders in the greater Los Angeles area, a week before and a week after the murder of Roger Gale.

There are some nice pictures in there, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Getting desperate, huh?”

“No comment.”

“That Donald Tremaine magic eluding you?”

“There’s not a whole lot of evidence in this one, John.”

“Sometimes the guys down at the old station house do their jobs. And sometimes there’s just not a lot of answers.

As you know, Tremaine, there are lots and lots and lots of unsolved cases out there.”

“Thanks for the history lesson, pal.”

Lopez put the brakes on giving Tremaine shit. He said,

“Just so you know, Peterson and those guys looked at the 200

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other murders in town around the time of the Roger Gale thing. Said none of ’em even gave them the slightest indication of anything.”

Tremaine thought about Peterson, the bribe he took, the dinner they had in Atlanta. But he didn’t mention it. He just said, “Like I said, there’s not a whole lot of evidence.”

Tremaine took Lopez through the case, where he was, the stuff he’d found out, omitting, of course, information he couldn’t part with—the Peterson stuff, posing as a cop in the Explorer . . . Lopez listened, sympathized. Some intriguing stuff, sure, but most of it was vague and left the mind still questioning, grasping for connections.

When the waitress came around, Lopez said, “How’s the lobster?”

The waitress responded, “Oh, it’s real good.”

Lopez said, “Actually, I don’t care how it tastes. Just as long as it’s expensive.”

“It is,” she said.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

The next day, up on top of the trailer, Tremaine examined some of the crime statistics and police reports Lopez had given him. In the year Roger Gale was murdered, there were more than five hundred murders in the greater Los Angeles area. Five hundred. Pathetic. During the two weeks surrounding Roger Gale’s murder, there were sixteen, including his.

Tremaine thought, more than one a day. So, every day, somebody in L.A. wakes up for the last time . . .

Tremaine focused on the sixteen murders. Miraculously, 201

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most of them had been solved. Closed cases. Four of them hadn’t been, one of those being Gale’s. Of the three other people who had been killed during this time, two of them had been killed on the same day as Roger Gale. The other person had been killed two days before Gale was.

The two people who had been killed on the same day as Gale were named Juanita Hernandez and Kelly Burch. The person killed two days prior to Gale was named Theodore Epps.

Tremaine studied these three murders. First, he looked at the information on Theodore Epps. Black, twenty-five years old. Murder took place in Compton, California. Shot to death, gang-related, drive-by.

Juanita Hernandez was stabbed to death in a crack house in Englewood, California. Tremaine didn’t need to look much further to know that this case probably wasn’t the most heavily investigated in LAPD history. The police report didn’t list a single possible suspect. It just described the scene. Abandoned crack house, one local relative who refused to do a body identification. Dental records confirmed the woman’s identity.

Tremaine looked at the third murder, Kelly Burch. This killing certainly didn’t scream of a connection to Roger Gale, but this wasn’t a gang murder and it didn’t take place in a crack house, so, to Tremaine’s eye, there was at least a little mystery to it, a little hope.

Burch was shot in her studio apartment in Hollywood.

She was listed as twenty-eight, Caucasian, addicted to cocaine, no living parents, no job. Her sister, Angela Coyle, who lived in Indio, California, had come out to bury her.

Tremaine looked at the report. According to police offi-202

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cers, this was probably a case of someone either not paying or betraying her dealers and getting killed for it. The cops, however, never found out for sure. Probably had to move on to another case, Tremaine thought.

Tremaine looked at the photo of Kelly Burch. Dead on her own kitchen floor, shot in the face. Tremaine tended to agree with the cops—probably a drug crime. Often those were macho killings. You fucked me, I’m going to blow your face off.

Tremaine never really got used to looking at crime pho-tography. You could become desensitized, to be sure, but that was a trick the brain played. Because if you allowed yourself to stop and think about what you were looking at, it got you every time.

Tremaine, up on his roof in the sun, enjoying another beautiful day, but looking at a horrifying sight. Kelly Burch’s picture. Whatever that girl had going, whatever hope she had, even if it was absolutely minute, it was gone now for good. Anyone she’d ever affected, a family member, a friend, a clerk at a grocery store, would never see her again. Ever. Looking at this picture in some perverse way made Tremaine realize why he’d taken the Roger Gale case in the first place, why he took any murder case.

Because someone was dead.

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Kelly Burch had lived on North Harper, in Hollywood.

Tremaine took the Ten to La Cienega, then headed north for a couple miles into the flatlands of Hollywood.

This wasn’t the Hollywood of movie stars. It wasn’t bad, it was okay, pretty nice even, but it was a far cry from the Hollywood people dreamed about. Not too many million-aire actresses walking designer Chihuahuas and driving electric cars that they didn’t even like. No, this was the Hollywood where you lived before you made it. If you made it.

Apartment living. And shops and modest restaurants and a sizable amount of angst in the air. Intensity. Lots of people walking around with heads full of dreams and ideas. And lots of traffic, too. Tremaine sat at the light at La Cienega and Beverly forever. But he didn’t really mind. He hadn’t B O D Y C O P Y

been to this little stretch in a while. He could see the Hollywood Hills to the north, the Beverly Center Mall right to his left. He even snuck a glance over at Nude Nude Nude, a famous strip club right on La Cienega. He remembered a case he’d investigated a few years back that required him to visit that particular establishment a handful of times. But he hadn’t enjoyed it at all, going in there and talking to all the strippers. Nope. It was just business. That’s right, just business. Tremaine smiled as he drove by it. What was that one dancer’s name? The one he interviewed a couple times?

Rhonda? Tonya? Something like that. She was pretty.

Couldn’t spell her own name, but she was pretty. She could dance, too. Stay focused, Tremaine . . .

Tremaine got off La Cienega, weaved through some of the back streets, then onto North Harper. He found a spot right away. Out of his car now, he looked at the names listed on the panel at the front door of 347 N. Harper and, sure enough, he found Vicky Fong, the landlady from the police report. He rang the bell.

“Who is it?” a voice said from the buzzer box.

Tremaine said, “Is this Miss Fong?”

“Who is it?”

“I’m a private detective. I was hoping to talk to you about Kelly Burch.”

The buzzer rang.

Tremaine entered the building—not a dump, but certainly not nice. He found Apartment 101 and, before he knew it, Vicky Fong appeared. About five-two, with a furrowed brow. Her black hair graying a little. She wore a little kimono dress.

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She said, “Is someone finally looking into the case again?”

“Not really,” he extended a hand. “My name is Donald Tremaine.”

Her skeptical look turned into a smile and she said,

“The old hippie surfer?”

Tremaine laughed. Hippie? Whatever. That year he won the world title paid off every now and then. “I don’t think I was ever a hippie, but those years are a little foggy.”

Vicky Fong laughed and said, “We used to watch you at the U.S. Open. I grew up in Huntington.”

Tremaine politely thanked her for remembering him, then gave her the standard routine about his life after the waves. She invited him in.

Inside her neat, modest apartment, Tremaine sat down and began explaining himself. “I’m actually investigating another case. Another murder. A man by the name of Roger Gale. Do you know that name?”

“No. But what does he have to do with Kelly?”

“Nothing.”

“So?”

“So, the case I’m on is a tough one. I’ve found out a lot about the man, Gale, but it’s only made me more confused.

Right now, I’m doing a little poking around with the murders that happened on, or near, the date of Gale’s.”

“You think they might be connected?”

“I don’t know. But I’d love to ask you a few questions about your former tenant.”

Vicky Fong made some coffee and continued to pepper Tremaine with questions about his surf days. When they 206

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both had a cup, and were both seated in the living room, they got to the matter at hand.

Tremaine said, “What was Kelly Burch like?”

“She was a drug addict. But don’t let me get off on the wrong foot. I loved Kelly, she was a sweet girl. I felt sorry for her.”

“Why?” Tremaine said.

“She was so beautiful, so beautiful, but she was sad. She had no family except one sister, who wasn’t in her life.”

Then Vicky said, “She didn’t live in this building. She lived above the garage in the back. I barely charged her rent.”

“Can I see where she lived?”

Tremaine and Vicky walked out the front door, then around to the back of the apartment, where there were six garages. Over the last two, the building became two stories. Kelly Burch’s old apartment.

“That’s where she lived,” Vicky said. “We rented out the room to her for five years. When she first got to town, she wanted to be an actress. But that never really went anywhere. After a while, she didn’t go to any more auditions, she just went to the parties. And then she got into drugs.

She was a sweet girl.”

“Who lives there now?”

“No one. We were only taking four hundred a month from Kelly.”

“So what’s up there?”

“Storage for the other tenants. Do you want to see inside?”

There was nothing to what was formerly Kelly’s apartment. Just one room, kitchen attached, hardwood floors, 207

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a bathroom, a shower and boxes and other things that belonged to the current tenants.

Vicky scanned the room and said, “This place is a mess.

It needs to be cleaned up. It’s a mess.”

It actually doesn’t look too bad, Tremaine thought, as storage rooms go. It certainly didn’t have that utterly depressing feel like some can have. An old, beat-up bike here, a random tennis racquet there, broken strings, of course . . .

Nope, it looked pretty organized, comprised of things that would be used again someday.

Not to Vicky Fong, though.

Tremaine said, “Do you have any theories as to why Kelly was killed?”

“You know, Mr. Tremaine, many times you only know the side of a person that they let you see. I did know Kelly did drugs, so that would be my only guess. But really, to me, Kelly was a sweet girl. Very beautiful. Dangerously beautiful. But she got into drugs, it was obvious. Started losing weight. I started seeing her less and less. I’d catch her in little lies. She had this old boyfriend from when she first moved out here, Evan, who kept an eye out for her, felt sorry for her. He came to me a couple times when he couldn’t find her. Evan confirmed what I already thought.

That Kelly was on drugs. And drugs, when you’re addicted like that, lead to bad things.”

Vicky scurried around the room, inspecting the boxes and other stored stuff, making sure she recognized everything. Making sure everything belonged to people who were paying rent.

“You mean like, prostitution, dealing, those kinds of bad things?” Tremaine asked.

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“I don’t know. I’m not the P.I.,” she said.

Tremaine laughed. Clever was Miss Fong. He said, “But in general, that would be your guess—the drugs led to her getting killed? Maybe she got wrapped up in a world, maybe she owed somebody some money or something, maybe she stole something from the wrong person—then paid the ultimate price?”

“Yeah, that’s about right. Who knows? I don’t know about the drug world and all that. I know what I see on TV. And I know Kelly was missing her rent sometimes and looking bad. Thin. But still beautiful. Drugs make you make the wrong decisions. Who knows?”

Tremaine scanned the old apartment, the picture of the dead girl coming in and out of his vision. He walked over and stood at the spot where Kelly Burch died. Where she lay in the picture.

Tremaine said, “What about the old boyfriend, Evan?”

“Evan Mulligan. Really nice guy, kind of a jock type.

They dated for years when she first got out here. When she was innocent. But Kelly was too much for Evan, too fast. I think he loved her, but eventually gave up. She was too fast for him. You should talk to him. He’s a good guy. Maybe a little dense, kind of a jock type, like I said, but a good guy.