Kind of Blue (30 page)

I also believed that whoever killed Relovich had killed Mitchell. I could understand why Fuqua would want Relovich dead. But what was his link to Mitchell? At the time Relovich had arrested Fuqua for armed robbery, he was no longer partners with Mitchell. Relovich had been promoted and was working as a Harbor division robbery detective, while Mitchell remained a patrol officer in Hollywood. So why would Fuqua go all the way to Idaho to take out Mitchell? That made no sense to me.

When the last light drained from the sky, and the moon rose over the office towers, I walked back down to my loft. I was hungry but discovered my refrigerator was almost empty, with just a six-pack of ale, jars of pickles and mustard, and a can of peaches. I changed out of my suit into jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt and was about to walk to dinner when I heard a knock on the door.

“Who is it?”

“I decided to make like a detective,” Nicole Haddad said. “Just show up at someone’s place without calling.”

I opened the door. “So where’s the boyfriend?”

“The on-again, off-again thing is off-again for a few days. He went out of town.”

“I’m not into the off-again, on-again dynamic. Maybe you should find someone who likes getting jacked around.” I crossed my arms and stared at her. Being Nicole’s backdoor man did not appeal to me. But standing in the doorway, in her tight jeans and black crop top, revealing her tanned stomach and navel pierce, she looked damn good.

“You going to invite me inside or not?”

“No,” I said, waiting a beat to gauge her reaction.

She looked hurt. As she turned to leave, I said, “I was just about ready to get some dinner. You like Korean barbecue?”

“Sounds good to me.”

We walked down Second Street to the edge of Little Tokyo. The restaurant was wedged between a sushi bar and a Japanese candy shop. We passed through the smoky front room to a small patio in back, bracketed by huge stands of bamboo. A waiter fired up the grill, which was built into the middle of our table. Nicole frowned at the menu.

“Why don’t you order for me.”

A few minutes after I ordered, a waiter returned with a pot of roasted wheat tea and then tossed a half dozen thinly sliced strips of marinated beef on the grill, stopping by every few minutes to turn them over. When the beef was ready, Nicole, following my lead, wrapped a piece of meat in a lettuce leaf and dipped it in a dark sauce with her chopsticks.

“Hmm,” she said, nodding appreciatively. “I can taste the soy sauce and garlic. What else?”

“Some oyster sauce, ginger, sesame oil, and a few other things.”

The waiter brought a large stone bowl with rice and an assortment of seafood. He cracked an egg, which cooked as he stirred it into the rice, and served us. I ordered a bottle of Korean rice wine called
bek se ju,
which was laced with ginseng.

She took a few sips of wine and said, “I like being with you.”

“Why do you like being with someone who is—” I paused, swirling the wine in my glass. “What did you call me that first night—numb?”

“On the surface, you are. But somewhere down there”—she reached across the table and jabbed at my solar plexus—“you’re not.” She smiled lasciviously. “You proved
that
the other night.”

I filled our wineglasses.

“Maybe you come off like that,” Nicole said, “because of all those bodies you’ve seen as a cop.”

“I saw plenty of bodies
before
I became a cop.”

“Where was that?”

“I was in the army. The Israeli army.”

“So that’s how you became familiar with Lebanon.”

“That’s right.”

“I remember when Israel invaded Lebanon back in the eighties. I was a little girl and I remember how my father followed all the news.”

“Did you know we were on the same side then?”

“Who’s we?” she asked.

“The Israeli army and the Christians in Lebanon. We were allies. They provided us with a key intelligence network. The Israelis figured they’d drive the PLO out of Lebanon, install a Christian as president who would control the Muslim hordes, among a few other geopolitical goals. Turned into a fucking quagmire.”

“I don’t really know that much about that time. It was something my father followed. To me, it was old country stuff.”

“The relationship between your people and my people—the Jews and the Lebanese Christians—go back a long time. In the thirties, when Zionists first made contact with them, they both thought they had a lot in common. They viewed themselves as enlightened islands of Western culture, surrounded by a sea of uncivilized Muslims. The relationship goes back thousands of years. I remember from my Hebrew school days that King Hiram in Lebanon sent the cedar trees down to Israel for Solomon’s Temple.”

“Why’d you enlist in the Israeli army?”

“I was just a kid, a naïve college student. I wanted to protect people. I didn’t want to see any more Jewish victims.”

“Your parents probably weren’t too happy about that.”

“They weren’t. When I joined the LAPD I promised I’d go back at night and get the degree. I eventually did. When I was thirty, at night.”

“Since you solved your case and got on TV the other night, you got your taste of glory. You must be feeling pretty good now that it’s all over.”

“Not really.”

She looked surprised. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not over.”

“Why not?”

“There’s more to the case,” I said, dropping my credit card on the tray. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.”

We walked back to my building, and as we entered the loft, she lifted my leather shoulder holster with the Beretta and the handcuffs tucked in a pouch off the back of a chair. She pulled out the handcuffs, crossed the room, and lightly ran the metal edges across my wrists. “We could have a lot of fun with these.”

“If you’ve seen some of the people I’ve hooked up, you’d have an entirely different image in your mind.”

She slipped her arms around my waist and kissed me lightly on the lips. “By the time I’m done with you, I’ll make sure you have a
new
image.”

I dipped my knees slightly, grabbed her by the knees, lifted her over my shoulder, and tossed her on the bed. Sitting astride her, I said, “Since they’re
my
handcuffs, I think I’m the one who’d better do the cuffing.”

“I don’t know if I can handle that,” she said weakly, a rare moment when she seemed to briefly lose her composure.

I pulled the key out of my pocket and clicked open the handcuffs. But before I could slip them on her wrists, my cell phone rang.

“Sorry,” I said, reaching for the phone.

“Can’t you pretend you didn’t hear it.”

I watched her stretch on the bed, her top rising and revealing the edge of her lacy black bra, and seriously considered her suggestion. “Can’t do it,” I said, as I climbed off the bed and answered the phone.

“I asked around about you,” Fringa said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m willing to talk to you.”

“I’ll stop by the mall tomorrow.”

“Make it tonight.”

“Can’t do it tonight.”

“Then you can catch me in two weeks. I’m taking the RV up to Oregon early tomorrow morning. We can talk when I get back.”

“How late you work?”

“Until midnight.”

I looked down at Nicole, splayed on the bed, giving me a half smile, and felt so frustrated, I kicked a chair across the room. “Okay. I’ll be there in a half hour.”

As I slipped off my jeans and T-shirt, tossing them on the bed, and pulled a pair of slacks and button-down shirt out of the closet, Nicole crouched in front of me, licking my stomach. “Can I persuade you to stick around?”

“Wish I could,” I said, my voice catching. “I’ll give you a call when things clear up.”

“The boyfriend’s gone for a few days. Let’s take advantage of our window of opportunity before it closes.”

When I stopped by the mall’s security office, Fringa said, “Let’s take a ride.”

I followed him through the dim, deserted mall, through a side door and into the parking lot. He hopped in a small, electric cart and said, “I gotta take a last patrol before end of watch.”

I climbed into the cart, and he began to cruise around the property. “Let me give you one piece of advice, Levine. Don’t fuck up like me. Or you’ll end up when you’re fifty driving a fucking golf cart at midnight around a mall. Do your twenty-five or thirty and don’t piss anyone off.”

“I’m trying.”

“Like I said, I asked around about you. I still got some friends in the department. Word on you is that you can act like a dickhead sometimes, but when it comes to doing the job, you’re old school. You’ll do whatever it takes to clear the case.”

“I think that’s a compliment,” I said, smiling.

“In my book, it is. Anyway, I’m glad you’re looking into Avery’s death. When you stopped by this afternoon, I wanted to make sure you’d do a righteous investigation. Not some quickie in-and-out LAPD whitewash. Anyway, I never thought it was a suicide.”

“Why’s that?”

“Just not the type.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“A few months ago. Sounded like the same old Avery. We talked a couple of times a year. Whenever he had to come to L.A., we’d get dinner. I was up to Idaho a few years ago. Stayed with Avery for a week. Went fishing.” He pulled the cart over, behind a department store. “Suicide? Naw. Just can’t see it. After I heard the news, I called the sheriff in that one-stoplight town in Idaho. Told him I didn’t think Avery was the suicide type. He said he’d look into it.”

“Where did you meet Mitchell?”

“At Hollenbeck. We were working patrol. We ended up as partners for a few years. Best partner I ever had.”

“Why was that?”

“He was funny as hell. Made those eight hours fly. And you could count on him. He always had your back.”

“Before Mitchell died, was he worried about anything?”

“Avery was kind of a closed-mouth guy, so I don’t know if he’d tell me.”

“Was he concerned about anyone coming after him?”

“Avery could take care of himself.”

“You have any ideas of who might have wanted to kill him?”

“No idea at all.”

“You remember when he transferred to Hollywood Division?”

“He didn’t transfer. He
got
transferred. Pissed off our captain for arguing with him about some stupid-ass thing. So the captain decided to give him some freeway therapy. Hollenbeck was only about twenty minutes from where Avery was living at the time with his family. Sending him to Hollywood added a lot of miles to his commute.”

“When was this?”

He tapped his finger on the steering wheel. “Thirteen, fourteen years ago.”

“Did you hear about Pete Relovich?”

“What about him?”

“He was killed at his house in Pedro?”

“Jesus.”

“There was an article in the
Times
.”

“I don’t read the
Times
. They’re always ripping the department. You think there’s a connection?”

“Do you?”

“I know Pete and Avery were partners for a few years. I had lunch with them once when I had some business up in Hollywood.” He started up the cart and began cruising the mall lot again. “Two partners getting waxed in the same year. That’s too much of a coincidence for me.”

“When they worked together in Hollywood, anything going on with Avery that sticks out in your mind?”

Fringa drove in silence for a minute of two. He stopped and turned
toward me. “The homicide is what you’re after, right? You’re not interested in stirring up a lot of shit are you?”

“All I care about is who killed them. Anything else they might have been involved in doesn’t interest me.”

“Okay. When Avery was working Hollywood he came into some money.”

“How much money?”

“I don’t know. I just know that it must have been a nice piece of change. Because that was about the time he bought his place up in Idaho.”

“Where’d he get the money?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it. I have no fucking idea. I’ll tell you this, though. He didn’t have any money before he hit Hollywood. He came into the money there.”

“Can you give me a better idea
when
he came into the money? Maybe an exact year?”

“Can’t remember exactly. Just sometime when he was working Hollywood.”

We cruised around for another thirty minutes, but I wasn’t able to find out much more about Mitchell. I had to listen to Fringa continue to complain about how he got royally screwed by the LAPD; how he wanted to sue the department but none of the shysters he talked to would take his case; how if he could do it all over again, he would have steered clear of the LAPD and, instead, gone into real estate, like his brother-in-law in San Diego, who’s now a millionaire.

I was at my desk at five o’clock the next morning, eager to get started. I finally had a direction to follow, some leads that had coalesced. The money that dropped in Mitchell’s and Relovich’s laps was a good starting point.

Relovich’s ex-wife told me that Pete purchased the house eleven years ago and the sale closed in February. I figured it was likely that Mitchell had scored his bundle of cash around that time. Previously, I had obtained from Records and Identification all the arrest reports from that year and the previous year as well. I began sifting through the arrest reports, starting when Relovich purchased the house and working backward. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but decided to
search for cases in which it seemed possible for Relovich and Mitchell to recover large amounts of cash or the carved Japanese figures.

By noon, I had studied all eighty-seven arrest reports. A half dozen of them, I decided, merited a more thorough investigation. I wanted to see the entire case files, which included witness statements, interviews, crime scene diagrams, photographs, and everything else that chronicled the investigation. So after stopping at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant on Sunset for chicken mole, I drove to the city archives, just east of downtown. Parking on the roof, I walked over to the musty office, where documents from city departments were stored, including building permits, personnel records, planning documents, and LAPD case files. The long, narrow room was filled with researchers and historians hunched over wooden tables, surrounded by white boxes filled with files. On the walls were faded pictures of former city officials, maps of Los Angeles, and old neighborhood photographs.