Kind of Blue (25 page)

“I don’t know about that,” Fuqua said, looking uncertain.

“Now getting back to Relovich, I’m giving you one final chance to give me your side of the story.” I planned to flip the video back on if Fuqua said anything interesting.

Duffy barged into the interview room and said, “Come on out for a sec.”

When I shut the door, Duffy asked, “Did he cop to it?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ve got DNA. This case is cleared.” Duffy clapped softly. “Hell of a job.”

Graupmann, staring at his desk, mumbled, “Good work.”

“I just talked to the chief,” Duffy said. “He and Grazzo send their congratulations. They’re setting up a press conference at eight tonight in the auditorium. Before you write the arrest report, give me what you got. I’ll send it right over to Press Relations. They’ll write a release.”

“What’s the rush?”

“The DA will be sending out their own press release after they file charges. We don’t want them stealing our thunder. We want to beat them to the punch.”

Duffy shook my hand and walked back to his office.

When I returned to the interview room, Fuqua said, “While you gone, I been thinkin’. I remember that clown in your car say he ain’t your partner. It come down to
you
be workin’ this case alone.
You
the one tryin’ to dog me out. So
you
my main problem.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“When I was attendin’ Folsom State
University
,” he said with a grin that looked like a grimace, “I did myself a lot of readin’. Here’s a quote I come across from a guy named Stallman: ‘No man, no problem.’”

“It’s Stalin, you moron,” I said.

“That not the point.”

“What
is
the point?”

“Now
you
the fucking moron.”

I was so enraged I could barely speak. “So you’re saying that if you can get someone to cap me, you don’t have any problem?”

He shrugged.

I slowly leaned across the table and looked into Fuqua’s eyes. When he began to grin again, I threw a punch and nailed him in the cheek, knocking him to the ground. For a few seconds he was on his back, woozy, staring at the ceiling. When he staggered back to his chair, I said, “Don’t ever threaten me again or I’ll crack your fucking head open.” I stood up and said, “You might as well get used to following orders right now, you piece of shit, because you’ll be following a lot of them after I send you to death row. Stand up, turn around, shut up, and face the wall.”

I cuffed him, grabbed him by the wrists, and ferried him to the elevator. At the ground-floor jail, I fingerprinted Fuqua and then, feeling a flood of relief and exultation, booked him for Pete Relovich’s murder.

At midnight, after the press conference, after I finished writing the three-page arrest report and the nine-page follow-up investigation report, I called Nicole.

“Yeah,” she said, sounding groggy.

“Did I wake you?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“Saw you on television tonight.”

“Yeah. If it bleeds it leads. Anyway, I wanted to stop by.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“It’s too late. Some other time.”

“How about tomorrow night?”

“This isn’t a good weekend for me. I’ll give you a call next week.”

I decided to back off. “Sure,” I said, hanging up the phone. I slipped the murder book in the bottom drawer of my desk, shut off the computer, took the elevator to the ground floor, and walked out into the night. I could smell the fog before I could see it, that distinctive brackish scent blowing in from the ocean. It was late May, but Southern California’s traditional June gloom had descended on the city a few days early. The skyscrapers on Bunker Hill were barely visible, with just the tops of the buildings peeking through, their lights twinkling in the swirling mist. The fronds of the palm trees bordering PAB were beaded with water and dripped onto the sidewalk.

I was still charged up from the sudden windup of the case, too restive to return home, so I walked over to Hill Street, crossed the freeway overpass spanning the 101, the stream of headlights dimly flickering down the ribbon of wet asphalt. I entered a narrow courtyard at the
fringe of Chinatown, where aqua and yellow paper lanterns glowed in the fog. A ginseng store, a dusty acupuncture office, and several small sweatshops were tucked away in the courtyard, one of which was still open. Two young Asian women, surrounded by bins of fabric and enormous spools of thread, were hunched over sewing machines, beneath the glare of florescent lights. The scene reminded me of my father. Another sweatshop; another part of downtown; another century.

At the end of the courtyard, I walked through a door beneath a red neon sign shaped like a lizard and into a small lobby with a black and red terrazzo floor. A wizened Asian man behind a desk scrutinized me for a moment. When he recognized me, he flashed a toothless smile. He stepped on a floor button and buzzed me through a door that led to a bar.

I discovered the Red Gecko a few years earlier while I was investigating the murder of a Chinatown jewelry store owner. The man regularly played high-stakes mah-jongg in the back room, and I originally thought another gambler had killed him. I later discovered that two members of a Hong Kong triad whacked him because he wouldn’t pay their shakedown fee. The owner and employees of the Red Gecko were grateful that I had never notified vice detectives about the game in the back room. Since then, whenever I wanted a quiet drink, they welcomed me with beers on the house.

Sitting at a table near the back, I could hear the click of mah-jongg tiles in the adjoining room. The only other patrons in the bar were a wealthy Chinese restaurant owner, his young Vietnamese girlfriend, and two heavily made-up bargirls wearing carved jade pendants. One made her way toward me, but the bartender shouted at her in Vietnamese and she swiveled around and returned to her stool. He then walked over with a Tsing Tao beer and a glass.

“Every time, you always welcome here, Detective Ash Levine,” he said in heavily accented English.

“Good to see you, Lam.”

I handed him a few dollar bills. “How about some quarters.”

Lam returned with the change, and I scanned the tunes on the jukebox, my favorite one downtown because the recordings were all vintage jukebox classics. I punched in a dozen of my favorites, including “Blue
Gardenia,” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” After I downed two beers, I tried to pay, but Lam waved me off. So I walked back to the table and left a ten dollar tip.

In the courtyard the smells of garlic and sautéed onions hung in the air. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I realized that I was ravenous. I walked over to Broadway, sat at a corner table at Hop Woo, a brightly lit restaurant that stayed open late on weekends. When I finished my fried rice with duck and scallops, I walked back onto Broadway. The fog was now so thick I couldn’t see across the street. My face and hair were speckled with mist. I felt disoriented as I struggled to find my way back to Hill Street, up the freeway overpass, and through downtown to my loft.

I flipped on the CD player and skipped through
Kind of Blue
to “Flamenco Sketches,” a moody, plaintive cut that usually soothed me when I was too amped up to sleep. I played it over and over, closing my eyes, trying to relax, concentrating on Miles’s and Coltrane’s soaring sound, hoping I would be able to sleep tonight. But images of the case continued to flash in my mind’s eye, like a slide show run at warp speed: the floor tile, the
netsuke
, the
ojime
, the blood splatter pattern, the Kleenex, the fractured hyoid bone, the broken glass behind Relovich’s house, the uncle’s fishing boat, the ex-wife’s tears.

By five o’clock, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I left my loft and walked south on Los Angeles Street, past the sleeping homeless in small tents and cardboard boxes, emaciated hookers waving at passing cars, and street corner dealers selling rocks that contained more baking soda than cocaine. The fog was thick overhead, but to the east, I could see the faint signs of sunrise: pinpoints of light irradiating the sky a pale pink.

I cut over to Maple and then slipped into the Flower Mart, a vast, cavernous warehouse bustling with shippers, shoppers, distributors, merchants, bargain hunters, and floral designers. From end to end, wholesalers displayed their wares, acre upon acre jammed with flowers of every genus and hue.

I liked to stroll down the aisles after I cleared a case. The end of an investigation often left me—after the initial thrill and sense of accomplishment—drained,
empty, and despondent, because I knew that in the next hour or day or week, there would be yet another murder; another grieving wife, child, or mother left behind; another killer to track. At the flower mart, the rush of sweet, heady fragrances; the luxuriant mélange of colors, textures and shapes; the earthy scent of freshly cut stalks was a palliative. I felt that it purified me, provided a brief infusion of grace and optimism that enabled me to regain my perspective, to ready myself for the next case.

After an hour of wandering about, I felt my head clear from the long night, the beers, the sustained adrenaline rush of the case, the disappointment about Nicole. I returned home, crawled into bed, and immediately fell asleep.

When I awoke, I checked my digital alarm clock: 6:12, but I had no idea if it was morning or evening. I looked outside and could see shafts of sunlight slanting through the office towers. The sun was setting. I closed my eyes and I began to think of Nicole, those glittering flecks of green in her eyes, the night we spent together, her bizarre needs and, now, her distant manner.

After I showered and dressed, I hopped in my Saturn and sped to Venice. The sky was still overcast and the arched Venetian bridges were cloaked in mist that rose from the canals. When I heard Nicole slam her screen door, I walked up the path and joined her on the porch.

“Do I have a stalking cop on my hands?” She smiled, but it did not reach her eyes.

“What’s going on?”

“I had a great time the other night. But the on-again, off-again thing I’ve got with the ex-boyfriend is on-again.”

I shrugged. “The old song.”

“I guess so.” She leaned over and kissed me, then lightly licked me on the neck. “I’d still like to see you sometimes. But not here. The weekends are going to be tough for me. I’ll let you know when.”

“That kind of deal’s not going to work for me. If things change, call me,” I said over my shoulder as I climbed off her porch and walked toward the canal.

When I heard her door close, I stopped and lingered in the pewter light, staring out at the water, feeling hurt and foolish. The last time I
had been at her house, when the night was full of promise, the intoxicating fragrance of jasmine filled the air. Now an offshore breeze carried the stench of society garlic—wispy purple flowers that grew in a corner of her yard. The scent of a moldering affair.

When I reached my desk Monday morning, I picked up a note from Duffy: “Hell of a job! Congrats on clearing the case. I knew I could count on you. I’m in meetings this morning. Let’s talk this afternoon.”

As Ortiz sauntered through the squad room door, he called out, in a mock newscaster tone, “Detective Levine, do you feel a sense of closure? Do you feel the unfortunate ghetto youth was compelled to commit murder because of his underprivileged childhood?”

He leaned over my desk, shook my hand, and said softly, “You did Pete Relovich right. He was a good cop. I’m glad you nailed that gangster. And I hope—”

Ortiz paused when he heard Graupmann’s booming voice.

“I softened Fuqua up,” Graupmann boasted to another detective. “I was like the guy at the bullfight who jabs at the snorting bull with one of those spears until he’s covered with blood. You know that guy.”

“The banderillero,” Ortiz called out.

“That’s it,” Graupmann said. “Then when Fuqua was just about ready to give up, the Manischewitz matador stepped up and finished him off.”

Ortiz chuckled and said, “Maybe you just got yourself a new partner.”

“God forbid.”

“I haven’t eaten. Let’s grab some breakfast.”

“I don’t think I—”

Ortiz wagged his finger at me. “You just cleared your case. Duffy’s not here. Face it, you got no excuse this morning. And to celebrate, I’m buying.”

“Okay, I’ll take you up on your offer. A cheap bastard like you will probably never make it again.”

• • •

Ortiz drove to his favorite restaurant, Astro’s, a twenty-four-hour coffee shop a few miles north of downtown. As we sipped coffee, waiting for our omelets and toast, he said, “So how’s that hottie that Papazian pimped for you?”

“She was all over me like a cheap suit. Then she dumped me.”

“It’s one thing if your wife walks out on you. That’s normal. Happened to you—happened to half the guys in Felony Special. Christ, that’s what my first and second ex-wives did.” Ortiz sipped his coffee. “When I was at Hollenbeck, the crusty old D-3 who recruited me to work homicide said, ‘Don’t get married. Just find a woman you hate and buy her a house, a car, and give her half your pension. Because after you work homicide for a few years, she’ll divorce your ass and take it all anyway.’”

The waitress brought our breakfast, and as I shook salt on my omelet, I said, “She mentioned something about an old boyfriend coming back on the scene.”

“Sounds like a load of shit. Anyway, if your wife leaves you, it’s nothing personal. That’s the way it goes. But if some broad you nail once dumps you, now that’s a
real
insult.” Ortiz patted me on the shoulder. “Let me give you some advice,
mijo
. Next time you want to get your rocks off, don’t go after some classy art gallery bitch. She’s out of your league. You gotta know your limits. You know what they say about boxers: when they move up in weight, they can’t take their punch with them. Well, you just moved up in weight, too, and you never had a chance. Come with me to an academy barbecue. I’ll find you a nice cop groupie who’ll rock your world and come back for seconds.”