Cold Shoulder (8 page)

‘I’d offer you some more but I made a pig of myself,’ Rosie admitted as she took away the bowl.

Lorraine snuggled down. ‘I’m full and it tasted so good… and I don’t mind you sleeping with me — you’ll never fit on that sofa out there.’

Rosie laughed. ‘Well, thank you very much! I thought I’d take the cushions off and put them on the floor. I’d kick you out, but Jake said you should watch it, you know, not roll about or bang your head. I’ll manage out on the sofa — but only for one night.’

Lorraine listened to the plodding feet moving around. Her hand had slipped up her panties to feel the money, afraid that maybe Jake had mentioned it to Rosie. It was still there, and it acted as a comforter. She had more than three hundred dollars, enough to get away from Rosie.

The bedroom floor shook as Rosie reappeared with some hot chocolate, slipped the mug onto the bedside table, turned on the night light, and straightened the duvet. It was the caring that did it, simply being tucked in like when she was a little girl, that made Lorraine’s heart ache.

‘Rosie… you still there?’ Lorraine whispered.

‘Yep, hovering like a hot-air balloon. Don’t forget to take your antibiotics.’

Rosie watched Lorraine slowly raise herself on her elbow, her face twisted. ‘You want an aspirin?’

Lorraine nodded, and Rosie fetched two tablets and held the mug of hot chocolate to her lips. Lorraine felt the thick sweet liquid slip down her throat.

‘I’ll be right outside if you need me.’

Lorraine flushed. ‘Rosie, I, er… well, I guess I do want my life back and if it means going to those meetings, well, then we’ll go together.’

Rosie nodded. ‘I should fuckin’ hope so. G’night, sleep tight. Tomorrow you’re back on the sofa.’

Lorraine gave a soft laugh, and nestled down. She hadn’t heard the sound of her own laugh for so long that it warmed her now, and made her feel good, as did the soft duvet and big, squashy pillows. Nearly four months, she calculated, and she had not had one drink. Could she — did she really
want
to stay on the wagon? The money was a hard lump in her panties. She eased it out and tucked it under the pillow, keeping her hand on it, feeling drowsy, wondering vaguely why the driving licence had a different picture from the guy who had picked her up. The car was probably stolen, she told herself, the wallet must have belonged to its real owner. She sighed deeply as she recalled the incident. The claw hammer kept in the glove compartment. Very convenient. The position he had forced her into on his lap, the reclining angle of the seat… as if he had done it before? Jake had said she was lucky to be alive, another fraction of an inch higher and he would have cracked her skull open. If she hadn’t bitten his neck she’d be dead. She knew she had marked him — the bite was deep. Should she call the LAPD in the morning, give them an anonymous tip-off? Describe the attacker? She yawned, maybe. Maybe she should just get some sleep, take it all day by day as Rosie said.

Rosie pulled the cushions off the sofa, turned the TV set down low and, from her reasonably comfortable position on the floor, propped herself on her elbow to see if there were any more game shows scheduled. She used the remote control to move from channel to channel, paying only a moment’s attention to the local news item that showed the photograph of Norman Hastings, whose body had been discovered in the trunk of his dark blue Sedan. He had been beaten to death with some kind of hammer. His wallet was missing. Anyone with any information regarding the dead man was asked to contact the local police, and a number was flashed onto the screen. Fifteen minutes later, she switched off the TV and settled down, with a regretful sigh. Tomorrow was another day, another meeting when she would have to admit she had slipped. She began to recite the twelve AA traditions. She rarely got beyond the sixth or seventh and tonight was no exception, By the third she was soundly asleep. ‘The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.’

T
HE NEWS bulletins about the discovery of Norman Hastings’s body were repeated on the early-morning television shows, but now included footage of the abandoned blue Sedan and a further request for anyone who had seen him or his vehicle to come forward. The officer heading the murder enquiry at the Pasadena Homicide Division was Captain William ‘Bill’ Rooney.

Directly after the morning shows, Rooney’s department received a phone call from a Don Summers. He was not a hundred per cent certain, but he thought he had seen the blue Sedan in a Pasadena shopping mall car park the previous afternoon.

Rooney did not get around to questioning Summers until the following day. He doubted if Summers’s evidence could help, since he could not be positive that he had seen the exact car, and had not made a note of the registration number. Neither had he had a clear view of the driver, only the woman who had been in the vehicle with him. Rooney was able to ascertain that at the time of Summers’s possible sighting of the blue Sedan, Hastings, according to the autopsy report, was already dead. Rooney also had details of the dead man’s missing wallet, and knew that it contained a few hundred dollars which Hastings had withdrawn from his bank on the morning of his death. He suspected that robbery was the murder motive as they had failed to come up with any other reason. Hastings appeared to be a happily married man, well liked at his work and without enemies or anyone with a grudge against him.

Rooney did not review Summers’s call-in statement until he had further evidence from Forensic and the full autopsy report. Although the interior of the Sedan had been cleaned and no prints found — not even those of the dead man — Forensic had discovered two further blood samples, one on the driver’s seat, the other on the inside of the glove compartment. What prompted Rooney to question Summers personally was the woman’s shoe found rammed beneath the front seat. It did not belong to Hastings’s wife.

Rooney sat with Mr and Mrs Summers, as Summers repeated his statement of how he had seen the blue Sedan parked, heard the man screaming and gone to investigate. He was now more sure that it was the one in the photographs shown to him by Rooney. His wife was convinced that if it was not the same car, it was the identical model and colour.

‘Okay, now, can you tell me about the woman? The one you stated was in the car?’

Summers gave a good description. Tall and thin, she was wearing a bloodstained flower-print dress. She was injured, her mouth was bleeding, and he thought she had a head wound. She was also clutching a purse. She had told him the man had tried to rob her. Summers’s wife interjected that she had thought it was a lie, because when they offered to call the police or for some assistance the woman had refused, insisting that she was all right.

Rooney asked for a more detailed description of the woman. Summers was hesitant, but his wife wasn’t, recalling the thin, wispy, badly cut blonde hair, that the woman was about five feet eight inches tall, but exceptionally thin and sickly-looking. She remembered remarking to her husband that the woman might be a prostitute.

‘What made you think that?’ Rooney asked.

Mrs Summers bit her lip. ‘I don’t know, just something about her, a toughness. She was very rough-looking, sort of desperate — and, of course, she was covered in blood.’

‘That doesn’t mean she’s a whore,’ said Rooney.

Don Summers glanced at his wife. ‘Maybe she wasn’t. All I can say, and I got a closer look than my wife, was that the woman was terrified — and she was really hurt, blood all over her dress.’

Rooney showed them the shoe found in Hastings’s car and they confirmed that the woman had been wearing only one.

‘We need to find our Cinderella,’ Rooney joked, but the Summerses didn’t find his comment amusing. They were overawed by the massive new Pasadena police station, a high-tech palace, the holding cells below computerized.

The building was so spacious that Rooney himself felt uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to so many corridors, rooms and sections, so many clerks. The old days, when a guy could pass a pal in the narrow, paint-peeling corridors, have a chat, smoke a cigarette, were over. Nearly every office had no-smoking signs; some officers had even stuck them on their computers. Only Captain Rooney continued to work in a haze of cigarette or cigar smoke. If the truth was told, he didn’t quite fit the new high flyers who surrounded him, but retirement was looming shortly. He reckoned the Hastings murder would be his last case and he hoped to crack it fast, get a good retirement bonus and then be put out to pasture. The prospect made him uneasy, but then so did the new station. He was unsure about life outside the police, which had been the only world he had known since he was eighteen.

By the time Rooney returned to his office there had been another call in connection with the Hastings homicide. This time the caller was anonymous and refused repeated requests to divulge her name. She did, however, give a detailed description of the man she thought was driving the car belonging to the deceased: around a hundred and eighty pounds, possibly about five feet ten, though she wasn’t sure, blue eyes, rimless gold-framed pink-toned glasses, a straight nose, thick-lipped mouth, wearing a linen jacket and shirt. She described a bite wound in his neck that would be visible above shirt collar level, close to his jugular. It would be deeply inflamed as the teeth had broken the skin and drawn blood. Furthermore, the man was in possession of a claw hammer, which he kept in the glove compartment.

Rooney looked at the duty sergeant’s notes. ‘She said all this over the fucking phone?’

‘Yes, Captain. Then she hung up.’

‘So, you get a trace on it? Shouldn’t take more’n a second with all this new-fangled equipment.’

The call had not been traced, partly because it was felt to be a ‘joke’ call, and when it had been deemed genuine, she had already hung up. Rooney plodded back into his office. He waved the anonymous statement at his lieutenant, Josh Bean. ‘You fuckin’ read this? Whoever she is she wants him caught — she’s even described the weapon. What’s odd, though, is that the only thing she seems unsure of is the guy’s exact height. Everything else, clothes, hair, glasses, mouth, even his weight, she gives it all. But not her name! And the stupid sons-of-bitches didn’t trace the call.’

Bean took a look at the statement. She hadn’t given the car registration number, he mused, as Rooney deposited his overweight frame behind his desk in his precious old leather swivel chair.

‘I reckon that Summers woman was right — she was a whore, that’s why she doesn’t know how tall the guy is. Maybe he never got out of the vehicle, just picked her up on the sidewalk…’

Bean nodded agreement. ‘Unless both the Summerses and this caller got the wrong guy. Maybe he just drives a blue Sedan.’

Rooney leaned on his elbows. ‘Possibly, but it’s the hammer, a claw hammer. If you read Forensic on the type of weapon used to kill Norman Hastings, they say: “A blunt-edged hammer-type head, one inch in diameter, with a claw section one and a quarter inches long”.’ He sifted
through his files until he found the Forensic photographs of the dead man, close-ups of the blows inflicted to his skull, cheeks, and chin. If the anonymous caller was right, they were looking for a killer with a big bite taken out of his neck.

Rooney looked at Bean and grinned. ‘This shouldn’t take long then, should it? We got Dracula out there now — but at least we can check all Hastings’s associates. No bite, we’ll eliminate them.’

Lieutenant Bean frowned, unsure if Rooney was joking. Suddenly he barked at Bean to get cracking.

‘I thought you were joking, for chrissakes!’

Rooney picked at his bulbous nose. ‘Fuck off. We got to take that call seriously, it’s too detailed not to. Go on, move it! And, by the way, the shoe we got could also be the whore’s. The Summerses sort of thought she only had one shoe on
but
they weren’t certain.’

‘Right. I’ll take the shoe with me — get everyone to try it on, maybe find the owner.’ Bean was joking but Rooney looked as amused as the Summerses had been by his Cinderella crack. He carried on, working through the file, yawning. Something was nagging at him — the description? Was it too pat? Some kind of hoax? But the fact that they had found bloodstains in the glove compartment where the anonymous caller claimed the man kept the hammer was just too close a coincidence. Rooney guessed the caller was the woman the Summers couple witnessed leaving the car — and that Mrs Summers had been correct. She probably was a whore.

Lorraine had the worst headache she had ever known. No hangover had been this painful. She was dizzy if she stood up, if she moved she felt sick — and she had vomited the first time she sat up. Thanks to the antibiotics and the aspirin, however, the splitting pain behind her eyes eased a fraction. She had made the phone call then, while Rosie was out getting ice from the grocery store. She had been brief intentionally as she didn’t want a trace made, and she was back in bed when Rosie returned.

The torn old sheet crammed with ice was soothing, but there was no way she could get up and go to the AA meeting. Rosie was uneasy at leaving her alone, but needed to go to the meeting herself. Lorraine just wanted to be left alone. Her whole body ached, but the pain across her eyes was torture, so bad she couldn’t even think of a drink, let alone getting up to pour one. All she wanted was for the pain to go away.

She remained in Rosie’s bed for more than a week, had to be helped to the toilet, for even that small amount of exercise exhausted her. She found any noise unbearable — no TV, no radio. She could eat, and Rosie waited on her hand and foot. She enjoyed being needed; it occupied her mind and, like Lorraine, she didn’t give a thought to booze.

Two weeks went by. Jake never got round to contacting his friend at the clinic to ask about Lorraine. In fact, like Rosie, he had grown quite fond of her because, sick as she was, she didn’t complain, and often made him laugh. Her pain was obvious, however, and he had told Rosie that if Lorraine’s condition did not improve she should be taken to hospital.