Dating Dead Men (25 page)

chapter thirty-two

I
did not scream, but sound may have come out of me, because at some point, there was Doc. He moved me aside and took a long look at the body in the alley. Then he led me back into the shop, and folded his arms around me.

“It's Carmine,” I said. “The door was open, and there was a note and Margaret's gone and it was supposed to be a rat, but it was Carmine, with blood all—”

“Okay, it's okay,” Doc said. “It'll be all right. We'll call 911 in a minute. You need to put on clothes.”

I nodded, and started for the back room, still feeling like a sleepwalker. I stared, unseeing, into one of the metal lockers against the far wall, my afghan clutched around me. Doc joined me, pulled some sweats out of the locker, and led me to the sofa bed.

“Get dressed,” he said, then picked up his wallet from the floor and extracted a business card. He was practically naked himself. He pulled the cell phone out of his unzipped jeans, then sat down next to me as I worked myself into a pair of gray sweatpants. “Did you touch anything out there? The doorknob, anything—?”

I shook my head. “I don't know. Maybe. The door was open, I—”

“It doesn't matter. Just tell the cops—”

“Cops?” I snapped to attention. “I can't talk to cops!”

“You have to. There's a dead body on your doorstep.”

“But I can't—”

“Listen to me. Just tell them the truth. We slept in the shop because of the break-in at your apartment. Before that, while I was at the precinct answering questions, you were out with your best friend Joey. Leave P.B. out of it. And don't mention the graveyard. You with me?” He waited for my nod, then went on. “You went to the Beverly Wilshire for dinner with Whatsisname and then afterward—shit, did anyone see you meet Carmine last night, anyone who might remember?”

I pulled a sweatshirt over my head. “The entire night shift at Jerry's Deli.”

“All right, you'll have to tell them about that. Tell it all, just leave out P.B., and don't volunteer that you were at Rio Pescado on Friday. Can you remember that?”

“What about the Weasel and the burglary and the diamond—”

“Everything; it'll match what I told them. You've got nothing to hide—you're mixed up with these guys because they're after me and I'm living here with you.”

“What happens to Margaret?” I cringed to think of the ferret, left in her cage on the counter while we'd dead-bolted ourselves in the back room.

He tightened his lips. “I don't know. Put this away somewhere.” He handed me my dirt-encrusted dress and scanned the room. Then he punched numbers into his phone and asked for a Lieutenant Fondo. What happened to Dambronski? I wondered dully, then realized that this had all grown bigger than the murder of a mental patient in Ventura County. Fondo must be LAPD. Another of Doc's new best friends.

I stowed the red dress in the locker. Doc left a message on Fondo's voice mail, then dialed 911. He explained the situation calmly, his eyes on me. As I moved toward him, he zeroed in on my neck. “Is that dried blood?” he asked when he hung up.

We headed for the mirror in the bathroom. I wiped dirt from my forehead as Doc applied rubbing alcohol to a cut under my ear. It was not my best morning. Still, when I considered the cemetery, the fence I'd thrown myself over, gravel I'd hurled myself onto, splinters I'd impaled myself with, I wasn't doing so badly.

“Ouch.” I glanced at him in the mirror. “It's worse under my clothes. I hope they don't strip-search me.”

He lifted my sweatshirt up to my rib cage, revealing bruises and scrapes on my abdomen. His eyes met mine in the mirror. “I didn't notice this last night.”

I blushed. “It was dark.”

He pulled the sweatshirt back down and held me against him, my back against his front. His chest felt warm and I realized how cold I was. We breathed together. Then he said, “The cops will want to know how this guy broke in. I'd like to know myself. Even if he was familiar with this particular security system, he'd still have to guess the code.”

“That would be a long shot, wouldn't it?” I asked.

“Would it? Is there any significance to—what was it?—one-nine-six-eight?”

I closed my eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“It's the title of my Personals ad,” I said, “and the last four digits of my phone number, the one that's used for the Dating Project.”

“What are you talking about, what kind of ad?”

“The Personals.” I turned to face him. “We run an ad that says, ‘Where Were You in 1968?' If you call, you get a machine that says, ‘So, where
were
you in 1968?' It's a conversation starter.” He stared, conspicuously silent. “It doesn't always work,” I added.

“How many?” he said slowly. “How many men associate you with 1968?”

I looked away again. “Forty-two—”

“What?!”

“—guys called the number, but only thirty-six were on the level, thirty-two of whom showed up here for a preliminary interview. Of those, I've met and/or actually dated twenty-six. Twenty-seven,” I amended, remembering Phig.

“Jesus.” He walked out of the bathroom.

I followed. “It's still a long shot. Look: Carmine said Olof and Tor had you bugged, your cell phone or something. If they could do that, couldn't the Weasel? Isn't that a more likely scenario?”

He turned on me. “I was bugged? And you didn't mention it?”

“When did I have the chance? Between bodies? Between gunshots? And are you sure you installed the alarm correctly? I didn't see any instruction manual and—”

A stunned look came over his face. He turned and headed to the front of the shop.

“Now what?” I said, following.

“My Swiss Army knife.” He searched the counter, then checked his pockets. “It was here, next to Margaret's cage.” In a flash, he was out the front door.

“So what?” I followed him into the alley, the last place I wanted to be.

“It's got my prints on it.” We reached the lump that was Carmine, and I averted my eyes. Doc said, “Look around for it, would you?”

My stomach lurched. “But—don't touch him, for heaven's sake!” In spite of myself, I glanced at Doc as he squatted next to the beefy corpse.

He searched the ground. “It could be a setup. My knife could be in his back.”

“His back? But it's his front that was stabbed, his throat.” Did he expect me to help roll Carmine over? And remain conscious? I was about to set him straight on that point when the sound of a voice made us turn.

Two cops stood in the alley entrance.

Their guns were drawn and pointed at us.

         

B
ODIES SWARMED THE
SHOP
. If every cop, medical examiner, and fingerprint technician bought just one piece of merchandise, it would've been my best-selling morning since Valentine's Day. Of course, they weren't interested in greeting cards. They were interested in a few hundred other details, starting with what we'd been doing with the corpse.

After they frisked us, a fairly unpleasant experience, the first cops on the scene took us inside the shop to wait for the homicide team. I stayed with one of them at Condolences/Get Well Soon and tried to regain one or two of my wits, while the partner, a woman, led Doc to the corner table. She was absurdly young, a Girl Scout in a cop uniform. She flashed Doc a toothy and, under the circumstances, I thought, highly inappropriate smile. Funny how a detail like that could irritate me, even with a dead body in my alley, even with my shop being turned into a yellow-taped crime scene.

Eventually, guys in suits showed up. Mine was a Detective Pflug, gruff, rail thin, sporting a floral tie. He walked me through the actions I'd taken since waking, leading me around the forensic team dusting for prints. “Morbid curiosity” was the reason I gave for having gone out to look at Carmine a second time, which may have started Pflug and me off on the wrong foot. He made me look at the body yet again, to verify he was still in the position I'd discovered him in. Carmine looked worse in the full morning light, gray-skinned and huge, like a fallen elephant, and I hoped this was the last I'd see of him, or of any uncoffined corpse in this lifetime.

A woman in an LAPD windbreaker took Pflug aside and conferred with him. He returned with the news that they'd found a Swiss Army knife in the Dumpster, covered with what appeared to be dried blood. “Know anything about that?”

My insides turned to Popsicles. I shrugged. Smiled. “Unh-unh,” I said brightly. “So, are we done? Is that it?”

“That's it for here.” Pflug replied. “Now we head to the station.”

chapter thirty-three

T
he Hollywood Division police station on North Wilcox, across the street from S.O.S. Bail Bonds and the Wilcox Arms apartments (furnished and unfurnished) was true Hollywood, with gold stars embedded in the sidewalk leading to the entrance. Instead of show biz celebrities, though, these stars commemorated fallen officers.

Pflug herded me through a small lobby with a homey, YMCA feel to it, into a large room humming with activity and an improbably mauve carpet. We marched toward the back, through a maze of desks and bodies, to an equally mauve series of doors.

The interrogation room was a nine-by-twelve-foot box that could have used wallpaper. By hour number three I'd mentally redecorated it in four different themes, complete with cost estimates. The front-runner was Polynesian.

The good thing about long bureaucratic procedures is that they grind some of the fear out of you. I'd quaked through the first half hour, especially when I realized that there would be no contact with Doc, but then settled in as Pflug and a few others came to question me, offer me coffee, and leave. I was not under arrest, Pflug assured me, and while I did have a right to an attorney, he saw no reason for one. Did I?

No, I responded, particularly as (a) I didn't have an attorney, (b) I couldn't afford one, and (c) I was innocent of anything but getting mixed up with a bad crowd. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that sleeping with a still-married man might be some sort of crime, but I didn't ask for confirmation on that.

Just as Pflug seemed to warm up to me, the worm turned. I recounted how Carmine had more or less assaulted me in front of Jerry's valet parking, when Pflug gave me a ruminative look. “So Carmine was your pimp? Or your john?”

“No! I thought I explained, the Dating Project is not prostitution, it's—”

“True love?”

“Social science.”

“So you admit you dated him.”

“I didn't
date
him, I—”

Pflug leaned in. “Bullshit. What was your relationship with that dead body?”

I stared. “We had no relationship. Are you accusing me of necrophilia?”

At that, Pflug wrote down my name, went to the door, and handed it to someone outside. “Run a vice check,” he said, loud enough so that all forty or so people in the outer office could hear. He shut the door and sat, this time on the table, towering over me. “Tell me something: your boyfriend had no problem with your ‘dating'?”

The trick now was to guess how Doc would answer, much like
The Newlywed Game
. I spoke carefully. “He wasn't my boyfriend when the Dating Project started. Even now he's not—anyway, as I keep saying, it's not like there's sex with these guys. Dr. Cookie Lahven—surely you've heard of her, she's syndicated—will back me up on this. They're not even romantic, these dates, they're . . . exhausting. Doc knows that.”

Pflug looked down at his notes and frowned. His pager went off. He glanced at it, took out his cell phone, and made a call. This gave me time to wonder if having sex with Doc while participating in scientific research compromised the data. If so, was I perpetrating fraud? Perhaps not, if I reported it promptly to Dr. Cookie, but then, was I kissing my five grand goodbye? The thought made me want to cry.

And what about Doc's theory that any of my dates could have guessed the alarm code? Had I inadvertently dated the Weasel? My mind raced through the last week's worth of men. Dave was my first choice for a murderer, but the timing was wrong—he'd preceded my discovery of the corpse. Who else? Rex, who'd sent the alarm system? Cliff, the Jain enthusiast? Phig? The whole idea was ridiculous.

Pflug snapped shut his cell phone and returned to his notes. “All right: this meeting last night with the victim—did Flynn know about that as well?”

“Who's Flynn?” I asked.

Pflug's well-worn face registered confusion. “Tommy Flynn? Your boyfriend?”

“You mean Doc? I mean—Gomez. Gomez Gomez.”

“What are those, nicknames?”

The room grew very quiet. “I'm sorry,” I said. “What do you mean?”

He read from his notepad. “Flynn, Thomas, paroled from Tehachapi last week; high school science and math teacher, married, one daughter—”

The room spun around me. “Yes, that's him, but—”

“But you didn't know his name?”

The question hung there, an embarrassment. I closed my eyes.

         

T
HE INTERROGATION CONTINUED
, and as the hours drew on toward noon, my answers grew sloppier. I couldn't focus. My eyes alternated between the dirty white pegboard wall and the frightful saffron yellow floor, and all I could think about was that I'd fallen in love with someone who'd let me, in the heat of passion, call out, “Gomez Gomez!”

“So from the time you left Jerry's Deli,” Pflug was saying, “until the time you got home, around three, four
A
.
M
., you were with this friend of yours, this—”

“Joey Rafferty.”

“—whose married name and phone number you ‘can't recall.' And these places you went—” He referred to his notes. “Brentwood, Zuma, Encino—you just drove around, no reason, the two of you, and no one saw you, not one single person? Because”—Pflug shook his head—“I gotta tell you, this is a goddamn sad excuse for an alibi.”

If only you'd leave me alone to phone Joey, I thought, it wouldn't be so sad. I'd let her know what to corroborate and she'd doctor it up. Joey excelled at that.

“If you're covering for Flynn, don't bother,” he said, “because he's implicated up to his eyeballs. The knife we found in the Dumpster? His. Maybe it's a jealousy thing, maybe he finds out about you and the deceased getting it on while he's in the joint doing his grand larceny gig. Maybe he gets out and loses his temper and—what?”

I must have jumped, just a little.

“What part of this is news to you? Grand larceny?” Pflug lifted an eyebrow. “Along with his name, did Flynn happen to not mention he ripped off his students to the tune of thousands of bucks? This is a guy who steals from children. This is not a nice guy.”

Grand larceny. It seems I'd subconsciously constructed for him some morally defensible felony, like liberating zoo animals, because this truly shocked me. What a fool I was. Dr. Cookie was right: the List was the key to character, and I should have known Doc/Gomez/Flynn had none the minute I saw him in that elevator in those paper slippers and thought to myself, Number eight, Good Shoes.

Pflug watched me. I, in turn, watched the carnations on his tie, which seemed to expand and contract as he breathed. Finally he spoke. “Wollie. My impression of you is: good person, bad liar. Don't make me investigate what you're hiding. Busywork pisses me off. You don't have a vice record, you don't even have parking tickets, but if you don't come clean right now about where you were last night, I'll start a file on you that says perjury, hindering prosecution, and obstructing justice. Is he worth it? Take a minute and ponder that.”

I didn't need a minute. I felt sick to my stomach at the thought of Doc/Flynn, but my main concern lay elsewhere. “It's not Flynn that I'm covering for,” I said. “It's my brother. That's who Joey and I were with last night. I was hoping to keep him out of this, but if you investigate me, I guess you'll find out about him soon enough.” Come clean, I thought, and maybe no one will look very hard at P.B., maybe they won't connect him to the Rio Pescado murder. It was my only shot at protecting him.

Pflug nodded for me to continue.

“He was on an overnight visit from the hospital,” I said. “What he likes to do when he's out of the hospital is ride around L.A., so that's what Joey and I did, drove him around. We ended up at my Uncle Theo's for cinnamon toast at three this morning.”

Pflug's eyes narrowed. “Why not just tell me this two hours ago?”

“My brother has schizophrenia. He's scared of cops, and not without reason. No offense, but you guys don't have the best track record with the mentally ill.”

“Anyone who can verify this?”

I wrote down three numbers. Joey would be savvy enough not to mention the cemetery, and Dr. Charlie and Uncle Theo didn't know about it. “One more thing I want to confess,” I said. “The Swiss Army knife? If it says ‘To Daddy—Love, Ruby,' it might have my prints on it, because I rescued it the other day from the washing machine.”

Pflug shook his head as if I'd disappointed him, as if he knew about Dos and Don'ts number one: Don't Do His Laundry. With a sigh, he left the room.

I thought about being indicted for murder, or accessorizing or grave robbing or some crime I didn't yet know was a crime. I thought about being fired from the Dating Project. I thought about how losing the five grand wouldn't matter anyway, if Mr. Bundt picked today for a shop inspection. I didn't need him to tell me that homicides on company premises violated Welcome! corporation policy. Even if the police let me go, in Mr. Bundt's eyes I would forever be, like the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, under an umbrella of suspicion.

I thought about everything but the man I'd slept with the night before.

Forty minutes later I signed a statement and, to my surprise, was escorted out of the interrogation room, with orders not to leave town. From Pflug's incredibly messy desk I called Fredreeq at Neat Nails Plus.

“Sister, have I been worried about you,” she said. “Joey too. We've canceled your date for tonight, and I want you to sleep at my place, but meanwhile, come on over to the salon for a massage—on the house. I'm dying to know the skinny, and I bet you're a prime candidate for aromatherapy. Don't stop at the shop, it'll just upset you. They've reopened the mini-mall, but your place is surrounded by that yellow tape, all locked up.”

I was still digesting that piece of unpalatable news as Pflug escorted me to the lobby. There, on a wooden bench, staring up at Wanted posters, sat the second-to-the-last person I wanted to see.

         

R
UBY LOOKED AS
miserable as only a badly dressed eleven-year-old can. She gave the impression of having been planted there and left without watering instructions. I couldn't believe that I ever thought she was half Mexican. Looking at her now, it was clear she was Irish as a potato. What was she doing here, anyway?

I considered sneaking out a back entrance, and was engulfed by shame. What would Ruta say? To blame Ruby for her father's sins was—fascism, or something. I pasted on a facsimile of a smile and called, “Ruby?”

She turned. The look she gave me was so pleased that my resentment dissolved. “How ya doing?” I asked. “Hungry?”

She nodded with enthusiasm. I nabbed Pflug before he disappeared back into the bowels of the building and asked him what the story was with Flynn, because I wanted to take his kid to lunch.

“Take her to lunch, dinner, and breakfast, is my suggestion,” Pflug said. “I'll find you a ride home—Flynn's not leaving anytime soon. He's on parole, so he's going to answer any questions we have for him, lawyer or no lawyer. If he's arrested, he'll be here a lot longer. I'll let them know you got the kid.” He looked over at her and added, “There's a Denny's on Sunset.”

Doc's lawyer was here. That explained Ruby's presence; she'd stayed at the lawyer's house last night. I went back to her and mentioned Denny's. By way of response, she pantomimed an object the size of a bread box, which she then petted.

“Margaret?” I asked. I sank onto the bench beside her and fixed my gaze on the white painted wall, at a domestic violence poster. I felt Ruby waiting for an answer. Doubtless there were techniques for breaking bad news to children. They should have a poster in here for that, I thought. I turned to her. “Very early this morning, Margaret was kidnapped. It has to do with a missing diamond. The cops are looking for her. Well, looking for the guy that did it. That's part of why we're all here at the station, answering questions, and—”

I stopped. Ruby's hands pressed against her ears and her eyes scrunched shut. I watched her face go red with the effort not to cry, and I braced myself.

It took her nearly thirty seconds to lose the battle.

         

W
E DROVE THE
Rabbit around Hollywood in ever larger concentric circles, but nothing got a response from Ruby, not Denny's or McDonald's or International House of Pancakes. The painful, heaving sobs had given way to a glum silence. Food wasn't much consolation, I knew, but it was all I could think of; she
had
been hungry an hour ago.

“Frozen yogurt?”

She seemed to sit up a little straighter in the passenger seat, which I decided to take as a yes, since I was hungry myself and we were approaching Toppers on Beverly and La Brea.

Toppers had eight different kinds of yogurt. Ruby showed signs of life at cookies 'n cream and I went for peanut butter. As the clerk made change, four Orthodox Jewish schoolboys trooped in behind us. So frozen yogurt was kosher. Was Häagen-Dazs? I considered asking them. Obvious dessert connoisseurs, they also looked knowledgeable about the laws of kashrut, with their side curls and school uniforms and identical books. I listened to them discuss the upcoming school break for Passover.

Passover
, I though suddenly.
Books. Häagen-Dazs
.

No, not Häagen-Dazs at all.

I clutched Ruby's arm. “I know where the diamond is. At least, I know where it was last year at this time. And if we find it, maybe we could trade it for Margaret, maybe we—”

And Ruby was halfway to the door, dragging me with her.