Kind of Blue (8 page)

Gupta dissected Relovich’s neck, snipped out the larynx, and then with a few deft slashes just above the throat, removed the U-shaped hyoid bone, which was encased in pink tissue. He pointed to a jagged edge of bone and said, “The hyoid’s cracked. Your guy was probably strangled.”

I pointed to Relovich’s hands. “No defensive wounds at all. An ex-cop like him would have been fighting to his last breath. Doesn’t make sense.”

“I agree.”

“So what’s the cause of death. Gunshot or strangulation?”

With tweezers, Gupta lifted Relovich’s lips and studied the gums. He then examined the tissue inside the eyelids, bent over, and peered into his eyes. “No sign of petechiae at all. Which is also very curious. If someone’s been strangled, you’ll see those distinctive red specks inside the mouth or eyes.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“You, Ash Levine, are the homicide detective, not me.”

“Hard to figure,” I said, adjusting my mask. “Maybe our killer fires the shot, ransacks the house, and right before he’s about to split—even though Relovich was dead—our shooter wants to make sure, to give him a coup de grace. But he doesn’t want to risk another shot and tip off the neighbors. So he strangles him.”

“You should have been a doctor.”

I laughed. “You sound like my mother.”

Gupta dropped his scalpel on the counter. “Indian mothers are the same as your Jewish mothers. My mother was so proud when I became a doctor. But when I chose to become a pathologist, she wanted to cry. She wants me to have a nice office in Artesia, so all her friends can make appointments with me and see how important I am. Now she’s embarrassed to tell them where I work. She thinks I’m crazy.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Any other ideas why your perpetrator wished to strangle this gentleman after he was already dead?”

I shrugged. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

I changed my clothes at home, hopped into my Saturn, drove across town, and pulled up in front of my mother’s duplex. Before I could ring the bell, my nephew, Ariel, a skinny, wide-eyed seven-year-old wearing a
Sponge Bob
T-shirt, opened the door and jumped into my arms.

“Where we going today, Uncle Ash?”

“It’s a surprise. Get your jacket and we’re off.”

As Ariel ran back into the duplex, my mom emerged from the kitchen. “Had breakfast?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You want an early lunch?”

“Not hungry. Just came from an autopsy.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“It’s part of the job.”

“Don’t get me started on that. Anyway, Ariel hasn’t eaten anything all morning. He was too excited about seeing you.”

She shook her head, looking somber. “He can’t go the entire day without food.”

I rolled my eyes. “You don’t think I’ll be able to find a restaurant in the entire city of Los Angeles that’s open on Sunday?”

She limply held out her palms. “I just don’t want him—or you—eating
chozzerai
all day.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom.” I then whispered, “When’s Marty getting out of rehab?”

“A few more weeks.”

“Any chance that marriage can be saved?”

She shook her head glumly. “I hope so. It’s been very hard for Ariel. So these Sundays with you are very important to him.” She handed me a booster seat and patted his cheek. “You’re a good boy.”

Ariel slammed the front door of the duplex and ran down the pathway to the car. I opened the back door, dropped the booster seat inside, and strapped him in.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” my mother said, leaning through the back window.

He kissed her.

“Okay,
einekl
,” she said. “Don’t give your Uncle Asher any trouble.”

As I drove down the Harbor Freeway, Ariel said. “
Now
can you tell me where we’re going?”

“San Pedro. We’re taking a boat ride in the harbor. I’ve just been down there for work and thought about you. Thought you’d like seeing all those big ships.”

“Grandma told me you’re a policeman again.”

“That’s right.”

“Why are you a policeman?”

“Because I want to help people.”

“Mama said it’s because you didn’t try in school, and that’s what happens to boys who don’t try in school, because they can’t get a good job, and that’s why I should try in school, or I’ll end up like you, but I told her I want to end up like you, and I want to be a policeman when I grow up, just like you, so I can carry a gun and shoot bad people, and she got mad, and she told me I should be a lawyer like my father or a psychologist like her, and I told her I wanted to be a policeman, and she told me to be quiet and go watch
Rugrats
.”

“You should listen to your mother.”

“Why’s my father in the hospital?”

“Well, um,” I sputtered. “I know he’s sick, but I don’t know much about it. You better ask your mother to explain.”

When I pulled off the freeway I headed away from the harbor, up a steep hill, and stopped in front of Relovich’s house. I climbed out of the car and unbuckled the booster seat.

“Hey, I thought we were going for a boat ride,” Ariel said.

“In a few minutes. I wanted to check on something.”

“Why does that house have yellow tape around it?” Ariel asked. “It looks like the ribbon around a present.”

I put an index finger to my lips and whispered, “Shh. Follow me and be real quiet.” We walked around to the back of the house and waded through a hedge to a window that had a jagged hole in the center.

“Who broke the window?”

“A man lived here and he forgot his key so he had to smash the window to get into his house. But I’ve been thinking about this window the past two days and something bothers me.”

Ariel nodded, wide-eyed and serious, flattered that I was talking to him like a grown-up.

I pointed to the shards on the sill and then the tiny specks of glass that speckled the dirt at the base of the hedge.

“You know that book I bought for you, where you look at a drawing and there are ten things wrong with the picture and you have to pick all of them out?”

Ariel nodded.

“Well there’s something wrong with this picture.” I pointed to the window. “Say the man smashed the glass, opened the window, and then crawled inside. Where would all the glass be?”

Ariel squinted, concentrating hard, and said, “Inside the house.”

“Right.” I crouched and pointed to the dirt. “If he crawled inside the house right after he smashed the window, why are there tiny pieces of glass here and not any inside the house?”

Ariel tugged on my pants. “I’m bored. Can we go now and see the ships.”

Ariel hugged the railing during the harbor cruise and marveled at the big fishing vessels at dock, their spotting towers silhouetted against a
scoured blue sky; the huge white cruise ships pulling into port for the afternoon; the cargo vessels lined up under the soaring cranes that cast enormous shadows on the splintery docks. The boat steamed around Terminal Island, through oil slicks, reflecting rainbow prisms in the sunshine, past the federal prison encircled with double chain-link fences and topped with razor wire. A few of the prisoners, lined up for yard time, waved at the boat passengers.

“Did you arrest any of them?” Ariel asked, excited about seeing his first criminals.

“Naw,” I said. “This is a federal prison. I only send people to state prisons.”

“What’s the difference?”

Ignoring him, I pulled a sweatshirt over his head as the wind picked up. Watching him grip the railing, smiling, enjoying the boat ride, I felt a sudden, piercing tenderness toward him. I picked Ariel up and hugged him.

I thought of my father, living with his parents and younger brother—who was about Ariel’s age—in a small German town on the North Sea. In 1941 they were sent by cattle car to the ghetto in Lodz, Poland, then on to Treblinka. They waited patiently at the station, under the impression that they had arrived at a labor camp. The Nazis sent most of the Jews—including the children and the elderly—to one line. A few dozen of the young men, who looked like they’d be good workers, waited in the other line. My father was sent with the young men. He watched his father, mother, and brother marched to a corner of the camp. His father panicked at leaving his oldest son and ran toward him. He was shot in the back. My father never saw his mother and brother again.

I leaned over, kissed Ariel’s cheek, and thought of my father’s little brother. Asher. My namesake.

“Why aren’t you married anymore?” Ariel said.

“That’s a long story.”

“You miss Aunt Robin?”

“I guess so.”

“I miss my dad.”

“He’ll be home soon.”

“Maybe Aunt Robin will too?”

“I don’t think so.”

After Robin left me, investigating murders became a much more dismal, onerous task. The interviews with grieving relatives, the autopsies, the crime scenes with walls splashed with blood and imbedded with bone and tissue, all weighed more heavily on me. Whenever I picked up a new case, I could feel a tightness in the pit of my stomach, as if the spirit of the newly departed had remained to pressure me, to insure I did not forget my duty. Robin had always been a countervailing force; spending time with her had helped alleviate the strain of the job, ease that pressure in my gut.

After the cruise, Ariel was hungry so we ate fish ’n’ chips at the harbor, and then bought ice cream cones and walked along the docks. I helped Ariel with his spelling by having him read the names on the fishing boats—many of them the first daughters of the skippers. At dusk, as Ariel snoozed in the backseat, I drove back to the city, thinking about Relovich’s broken hyoid bone and the smashed bedroom window.

When I returned home, I removed from my briefcase the envelopes containing Relovich’s cancelled checks and phone records, and spread them out on my dining room table. Most of the cancelled checks covered routine expenses and none of them piqued my interest. I examined his phone bills from the last few months. His cell bills didn’t list any numbers called, just the amount owed; but his home phone bills recorded all the toll calls, which I highlighted with a yellow marker. Relovich had not made many repeat toll calls, but one phone number with a 213 area code stood out because during the past two months he’d called the number more than a dozen times.

After clicking on my computer, accessing an LAPD site, and checking a reverse directory for the address, I discovered that it was a business listing a few miles west of downtown: L.A. Elegant Escorts. A woman by the name of Ann Licata was registered as the owner. I decided to see what she had to say.

I cruised down a side street a few blocks north of Olympic lined with small, shabby apartment buildings. The night was damp and columns of mist glowed a sickly yellow under the streetlights. When I double-checked the address, I realized that the establishment with the genteel name of L.A. Elegant Escorts was located in a rundown dingbat—Los Angeles’s grim contribution to urban blight. I was particularly incensed about dingbats because the street where I grew up was once composed of gracious Spanish-style duplexes. But when I was in grammar school, developers began tearing them down—the story of L.A.—and throwing up hastily constructed dingbats: stripped down two-story stucco boxes with rows of parking spaces in front, the exteriors adorned with flimsy metal lamps and cheesy decorative starbursts. Dingbats are the residential analogues of strip malls.

I walked along the side of the dingbat, up a dank staircase, the steps dotted with specks of stucco that had fallen from the walls, and stood on a landing flanked by two front doors. I rang the bell of apartment number four. I waited about thirty seconds and rang the bell again. I heard rattling in the back of the apartment and then a sleepy voice call out, “Who is it?”

“LAPD. Open up.”

“Do you have a search warrant?”

“I’m not interested in searching your place. I just want to talk to you. I’m investigating a murder.”

An obese woman with stringy hair, wearing a ratty yellow bathrobe, opened the door a few inches. “ID,” she barked.

I showed her my badge. “You Ann Licata?”

“Yeah. But I want you to understand something right off the bat. First of all, any money that changes hands between my girls and the
gentlemen who contract for their services is simply for companionship,” she said, as if she was delivering a memorized speech. “Anything that might occur during their time together is a matter of personal choice between two consenting adults over the age of eighteen. There is never, at any time, any written or verbal guarantee involving the exchange of sex for money. Is that clear, officer?”

“I don’t care if you’re a hooker booker. That’s not why I’m here. I’m investigating a homicide. I don’t plan to inform vice of our conversation. If you’re honest with me now and help me with my case, I promise you I’ll leave you alone to run your business.”

“All right then,” she said, turning around, taking a few steps, and flopping on a threadbare sofa. I followed her into the small living room and sat across from her. Her robe inched up, revealing two enormous blotchy thighs that enveloped an entire sofa cushion.

“Do you know Pete Relovich?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Again, let me give you the ground rules. Be honest with me, and I’ll walk out the door and let you run your business. Bullshit me, and I’ll call vice right now, and they’ll shut down your operation and haul you out of here in handcuffs. What’ll it be?”

She squirmed on the sofa for a moment. “Yeah, yeah,” she said wearily. “I knew Pete. He was a driver for one my girls. What’s going on with him?”

“He was killed.”

She pulled her robe tight and muttered, “Jesus.”

“Which girl did he drive for?”

“Her name’s Brittany.”

“What’s her real name?”

“Jane.”

“Last name?”

“Granger.”

“Address?”

She reached into an end table, riffled through a spiral notebook, scrawled down the address on a page, ripped it out, and handed it to me.

“What’s a driver?”