Fallen Angels (34 page)

“Excuse me,” Marge said, offering her best Miss America smile; then glancing around the room, obviously not embarrassed, she added, “My boss gives me indigestion,” gesturing toward Josie.

“Be as gross as you want; it’s not gonna work,” Josie said. She wasn’t embarrassed that easily either.

“You’re like a goddamn booger stuck on my finger. Can’t you give me a break and let this go. We’re doing what’s got to be done. What’s the fucking problem?”

“Fricke is assigned to home for a reason. You can’t have him out there doing police work.”

“He’s not actually doing anything. He’s a kind of . . . technical advisor. Look, you want us to find Mouse, right? Well she’s not at Cory’s apartment anymore or anywhere else we’ve looked. I needed Fricke to do his magic.”

Josie twisted in her chair. She didn’t like this. Having her subordinate do the sort of crazy unconventional thing she might’ve done made her uneasy. She suddenly realized what a nightmare it must be trying to supervise her, and almost felt a little sorry for Bright.

“You know I wanna find her. What’s that got to do with Fricke playing Russian roulette with his career?”

“He’s got a snitch we arrested last night who says she’ll take him to Mouse tonight in exchange for dropping her case.”

Josie knew she should order Fricke to stay home, but was fairly certain she wasn’t going to do that. Instead, she paid the bill, told Marge not to go without her and added, “After tonight Fricke’s done moonlighting and back to his living room watching
CSI
reruns or some other crap on television that’s got nothing to do with real police work.”

All the way back to the station, Josie kept reminding herself how stupid it was to allow Fricke to come anywhere near Hollywood, let alone out on the street. She finally stopped worrying about it by convincing herself it would be alright because if everything turned to shit, she’d do what she always did and swear she’d told him to be there.

More and more, it was becoming difficult to shrug off her nonconformist behavior because she knew Behan was right. By always taking responsibility for well-intentioned screwups, at some juncture in the hierarchy’s thinking, she was bound to become marginalized and irrelevant.

It was late afternoon by the time she drove into the station lot, and had just parked when Behan came out the back door of the building and walked directly toward her car.

“Better not go in there, boss,” he said as soon as he got within a few yards of her, and then turned and got into his car.

Josie knocked on his driver’s window until he opened it. She wasn’t in the mood to be ordered around especially by him. “What’s going on?” she asked, sounding how she felt, a little cranky.

He was quiet for a moment, then started to speak, but hesitated before saying, “Shit . . . Bright’s inside waiting for you. The Goldman kid’s dead.” Behan reached over the console and opened the passenger door. “I’m going out to the scene. Get in.”

She heard him, but didn’t react for several seconds before asking, “What happened?”

“Get in. We’ll talk on the way.”

Josie walked around the car. Instinctively, she knew the answer to her question but wanted to be wrong. They were quiet while she buckled her seat belt, and it wasn’t until he’d gone several blocks that she asked the question again.

“Ibarra’s saying suicide,” Behan said, not looking at her.

“Ibarra?” she asked, confused, thinking he’d taken a few days off before starting his new job at Wilshire division.

“Ibarra forgot to tell the watch commander to remove his number from the file so he got the call out. He knew you were shorthanded so he responded.”

“Great, just when you think things can’t get worse.” Josie meant to be sarcastic, but the words left a bad taste. Seems there were worse things in life than dealing with an inept lieutenant.

“He said he’d hold down the fort until I got there.”

Josie stared out the passenger window. She barely knew the boy, but the idea of him taking his own life unsettled her. The only time she’d ever felt like this was when she saw abused children or animals. She couldn’t stand the thought of helpless things getting hurt or mistreated. Cory wasn’t a child, but he was vulnerable in a lot of ways and she knew her uneasiness was guilt.

They had to drive across Melrose and almost into West Hollywood to reach Cory’s apartment. Rush-hour traffic was just beginning, but the east-west streets were already backing up as the studios and production houses emptied and tourists began their nightly quest for the ideal restaurant or theater. Life wasn’t always perfect but it could be entertaining with enough distractions, she thought, and never had understood suicide. Wasn’t it like stopping a movie before you knew how it ended? It seemed to her there were enough answers or rationalizations to get a person through each day. Maybe your luck would change, or a hero would appear to confront all those impossible problems and at least make life tolerable again.

“Don’t let them dump this on you,” Behan said. “That kid was fucked-up long before we talked to him.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t help.”

“Maybe not, but nothing we said or did made him kill himself.”

Josie knew he was right, but it didn’t make her feel any better. The sun was setting and the warming rays penetrated her window. It was going to be a beautiful evening for most people.

T
HERE WERE
black and white cruisers, an ambulance, and the coroner’s van parked within a block of the front entrance to Cory’s apartment building on Melrose. Josie relaxed a little when she was fairly certain her son’s dilapidated Jeep wasn’t anywhere in the immediate neighborhood. The troublesome thought of David’s negative reaction to all this had been nagging at her since she got into Behan’s car. Her son had warned her about Cory’s fragile psyche. In the future, he would no doubt remind her of that admonition at every opportunity. She could handle David’s accusations; however, it would be better if his outburst didn’t occur at this particular moment in this place. She felt bad enough right now without having to deal with him, too.

There were enough uniforms and detectives around the premises to tell Josie this must’ve been an unusual death. Some cops were fascinated with the macabre and had a morbid need to stop by the scene of every bizarre demise. She herded a few of them away from the building and back to their patrol duties, pulled the uniformed sergeant aside and told him to clear the street and building and to keep any unnecessary officers away. “You’re not paid to be a spectator,” Josie told the sergeant. She was disappointed that the guy was acting like a five-year policeman and not a supervisor. She probably overreacted but wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He had to learn his new status—and bigger paychecks came with responsibilities.

The sergeant followed her and Behan into the building, and cleared the hall and the doorway to Cory’s apartment. Josie got a faint whiff of putrefying flesh mixed with turpentine before they got inside and braced for the worst. One of the detectives had a small jar of Vick’s VapoRub and she dabbed a little under her nose to counteract the smell.

The cramped space wasn’t what she’d expected. It was relatively clean but unbearably warm and stuffy, cluttered with magazines and books stacked in piles everywhere. A large coffee can full of turpentine and a few dozen artist brushes had tipped over onto the counter between the living room and tidy kitchen. The smelly solvent was dripping onto the linoleum.

Original oil paintings covered the walls and half-finished canvasses were stacked in all the corners. Most of the pictures were dark, isolated landscapes or portraits of a man who resembled Cory’s father.

The only other area was the bedroom, where she found Ibarra standing near the bed and the body of Cory Goldman. Behan had immediately pulled his detectives aside, and they were huddled in a corner of the bedroom with the medical examiner.

“How weird is this?” Ibarra said, moving closer to her.

Josie didn’t answer. She was fixated on the corpse. Cory was lying naked on his back on top of an emerald green comforter. Lividity had begun leaving a blotchy, purplish discoloration on his legs, arms, and buttocks. Probably every other part of his body was covered with tattoos—only his genitals had been spared. Josie could see the ink continued around the sides of his body and most likely decorated his entire backside under the postmortem staining. It was a permanent bodysuit, his ultimate work of art.

Cory had carefully positioned himself on the bed with his arms outstretched so viewers got the full effect of the drawings. A white substance had dripped from the corner of his mouth to around his jaw and onto the pillow where it dried like milky vomit; otherwise, the boy’s expression seemed more at peace than Josie had ever seen it when he was alive and—similar to Hillary’s corpse—he’d died with a faint smile.

An empty bottle of sleeping pills was on the nightstand, usually a woman’s preferred method of suicide, but it fit in this case because Josie couldn’t imagine the timid young man shooting himself or doing anything that might ruin his body art.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Ibarra asked again.

She looked at him and for the first time since entering the room realized how pale, almost grayish he was. His dark eyes were sunken in even darker circles.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Wilshire not all you expected,” she said.

“Actually, I haven’t started yet. It’s nothing. I’m just tired,” he said and turned away from her. This quiet, introspective man wasn’t the Ibarra she knew. He appeared lost in his thoughts and wandered a few feet from the bed before patting Behan on the back on his way out of the room. Behan turned to her and shrugged. He’d noticed it too.

The bedroom was similar to the living room with more gloomy landscapes decorating the walls, but no pictures of his father were hung in this space. There was a piano keyboard in the corner next to the bathroom door, with sheet music and composition books piled on the floor and on the windowsill. The guy wrote music too, Josie thought, picking up a half-finished page of scribbled musical notes lying on the keys.

Behan tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped at the sudden interruption. Her thoughts were consumed with not only the wasted opportunities in this young man’s life, but also maybe a little apprehension about the condition of her talented son’s state of mind.

“Sorry,” Behan said. “You daydreaming?”

“Just thinking how sad this is.”

“It’s about to get worse. The bureau sent me a text the councilman’s on his way.”

“Probably better if he sees his kid here than in the morgue,” Josie said. The gut-wrenching smells, cold, and isolation of a steel slab in the morgue made the unimaginable even more appalling.

“Okay, but I’m gonna tell them to wrap up the body and have it ready to go as soon as his father’s done.”

“Fine, just let the man have some time with his kid,” Josie said. Her tone was testy because she hated when dead people got treated like sides of beef. She knew technically that’s what they were, but she’d been brought up Catholic and couldn’t help herself. She still believed people had a soul even when their blood stopped circulating and they began smelling like last week’s garbage.

The medical examiner and his assistant had the body on a gurney in a few minutes, but left the boy’s face uncovered for his father.

“Did your guys find a note?” Josie asked, while she and Behan stood by the bed watching the assistant carefully remove the pillowcase and put it in a manila evidence envelope for his detectives.

“My guys said Ibarra searched everywhere but couldn’t find one.”

“It’s not usually hidden, is it? Where was he looking?”

Behan shook his head. “Everywhere . . . closets, drawers, books, but I’m told he stopped before we got here.” He glanced around the room before adding, “Actually, I don’t know what he was looking for, but it sure as shit wasn’t any suicide note.”

“I’m guessing with such a short time to look he didn’t find it, so maybe your guys should do a more thorough search. There’s lots of places to hide stuff in here.”

She knew they weren’t going to recover any suicide note, but she suspected Behan, like her, hoped Mouse had stashed Hillary’s diary when she stayed here and that might’ve been the real reason for Ibarra’s search.

“They’re going through the living room now. I told them to target anything that’s handwritten . . . anything.” Behan’s voice trailed off and he was staring past her. She turned around as Goldman entered the room with Bright and Art Perry a few steps behind him.

Goldman hurried to the gurney, put both hands on the side railings, and hovered over the remains of his dead son. He touched the boy’s face, kissed his shaved head, and cried uncontrollably before unleashing a heartbreaking wail that filled the room like an ambulance siren. Nobody moved immediately to comfort him. Finally, Bright put his arm around the man’s shoulder and gently steered him away from the gurney. The medical examiner finished covering the body and rolled it out of the room and into the hallway. Goldman tried to follow, but Bright stopped him, whispering something in his ear that caused the councilman to stop crying. He visibly struggled to contain his emotion and managed to recover his composure.