No offence Intended - Barbara Seranella (11 page)

What would Ruby say about all this? Probably
something about how death was often the inevitable result of using.
Munch didn't think she could bear hearing any glib AA clichés. Trite
truisms didn't make a friends death any more palatable. She could
think of only one person who would truly understand: Deb.

She hit the steering wheel with her palm. Goddamn him
to die and leave her all this shit. Now what was she supposed to do?
And what about Asia?

If Lisa was her only relative, would she be
automatically placed there? More like sentenced, if that were the
case. The kid deserved better. Sleaze would have wanted more for his
little girl.

It was almost seven by the time she got back to her
apartment.

She parked in the alley and came in through the back
door. The back door was a big selling point when she rented her
apartment. Having another way out was an advantage she wouldnt have
felt comfortable without. She knew what it meant to live without
options.

Dropping her notebook on the kitchen table, she
kicked off her shoes and sank heavily into a chair. The card Sleaze
had written Deb's number on was propped up against the salt shaker,
its invitation clear. She reached for the phone and dialed the
combination of digits that would connect her with her old life. The
phone rang six times before it was picked up, and even then, it was a
few more moments before anyone spoke. She heard the familiar sounds
of glasses clinking, jukebox music, and boisterous voices yelling
over the music. Finally a man's gruff voice spoke into the phone.

"Snakepit."

"Hi, is Deb there?"

"Hold on," he said in an annoyed growl.
"Deborah!" Munch heard him yell.

She waited; here stomach growled, and she remembered
she hadn't eaten.

"Nah," the man said, returning to the
phone.

"She ain't been in tonight."

"Can I leave a message?" she asked.

"No," the man said. "This ain't her
goddamned answering service." He hung up.

She stared at the telephone. The buzz of the dial
tone had never sounded so rude. She didn't realize how badly she
missed Deb until just then. The ache for the familiar sound of her
f1iend's voice filled her chest. She loved Deb like a sister, more
than a sister. The things they had been through together bonded them
for life.

Deb had been there for her at one of the worst times
of her life. It was the morning after she had been released from the
hospital, leaving behind the little blob that would later turn out to
be the only baby she could ever have had. Nobody had warned her how
attached you could become to a two-month-old lump of tissue, neither
boy or girl. She hadn't even been showing yet. The grief she felt
afterward caught her totally off-guard, leaving her as bereft as if
she'd known the kid for years.

Deb didn't comment on the one-hundred-proof Southern
Comfort Munch had been guzzling the day before and how that might
have brought on the miscarriage. When Munch arrived at her door, Deb
simply led her inside. She was cooking French toast for Boogie. Munch
sat on the counter and watched, too numb to do anything else.

"Want some?" Deb had asked.

Munch had devoured plateful after plateful, surprised
at her need. But then, she had never tasted love before.

And now Deb and Boogie were living in the country
happily ever after and without her. After she hung up the phone, she
said a quick prayer that wherever Deb was, she was safe and happy
While she had the celestial line open, she added, "You made
Sleaze, so do the right thing by him, too. Please."

She often called her
Higher Power "You," figuring any otherworldly force who
could read her thoughts was also perfectly capable of sorting out
when It was being addressed.

* * *

When Blackstone left the coroner's, he drove straight
to the Sheriff 's Department crime lab. The facility was the best in
the city—every bit as good as the Department of Justice's—and
only a few blocks away He signed in at the front anteroom and was
buzzed through the heavy door that led to a corridor decorated with
past triumphs of forensic investigation. The first picture he passed
was of a severed thumb on the floor of some room. Some miscreant's
attempt, he knew, to conceal his identity Further down the hall there
was another photograph of a bag of Cheetos with a pack of matches
taped to the cellophane wrapper—a poor man's incineration device.

The rogues' gallery continued. His favorite was of
the reported suicide victim lying on the floor beside her own murder
weapon. The gun was positioned close to her hand, but alert
investigators had noted the blood on her palm. And how would the
blood be there, the serologist had testified in court, if that hand
had been wrapped around the butt of a pistol? Her husbands conviction
date was noted in the caption.

There were also several photographs of Sheriff 's
Investigators standing on a wooden porch, shotguns resting in the
crooks of their arms, the windows behind them shot out and yellow
tape strung across the front door. It was taken right after the bust
of a cop murderer who left two highway patrolmen's bodies dumped
along the freeway The caption listed the suspect as DOA.

Still holding the piece of binder paper by the
corner, Blackstone entered the first door on his right. FINGERPRINTS
was painted in black on the top glass half of the door. He was
pleased to see that the technician on duty was Mike Kellman.

"I need some prints lifted," he said.

Kellman took the paper from Blackstone and set it on
a rack in a glass aquarium.

"Is this for a homicide?" he asked.

"It's a long story Can I wait for them?"

"Sure," Kellman said. "It'll take a
little while.

We'll need a set of your prints for elimination."

"Just my thumb and forefinger," Blackstone
said, inking and rolling his fingers on a Fingerprint card.

"Give me all ten just to be safe," Kellman
said.

"You're the doctor."

Kellman dusted both sides of the sheet of paper with
carbon powder, using long tweezers to flip the paper over. He made
little clicking noises in the back of his throat as he worked.
Occasionally he said,

"Hmm," and pressed his lips together.

Blackstone waited a half hour before he asked,
"Anything?"

''Just yours," the tech said, setting aside his
magnifying glass. "But you got some indented writing B here."
He held the paper with tweezers over the bright light on his
workbench. "Take it on up to Questioned Documents and see what
they can do."

"Thanks." Blackstone vaulted the short
flight of stairs two at a time to the second floor. When he entered
the room marked QUESTIONED DOCUMENTS, he found the pair of techs who
worked there hunched over a microscope arguing over the markings on a
twenty-dollar bill. They were a real Mutt and Jeff team: one was
tall, the other short and stubby Blackstone could never keep their
names straight. Both had pale waxy complexions, dandruff, and were in
need of manicures. He'd learned from past experience that prolonged
greetings weren't necessary or welcomed.

"You guys got a minute?"

They looked up at him with glazed eyes. The short one
leaned over and reached for the tweezers gripping the binder paper.
Blackstone caught a strong whiff of scalp oil.

"What you got here?" the taller one asked.

"Blackmail? Extortion attempt?"

"Possible accessory to murder," Blackstone
said, embellishing a little. "Kellman thought there was some
indented writing you might be able to lift."

"If it's there, we'll get it," the shorter
one said, breathing hard through his nose.

"You guys really ought to try to get out more,"
Blackstone said, watching as they carefully suspended the paper over
an ALS light.

The taller one pulled the door shut and dimmed the
lab's light. "Check it out," he said.

"Here it comes," Chubby echoed.

Blackstone looked over their shoulders and saw four
groups of faint lines and squiggles. Seconds later those characters
solidified into recognizable letters and numbers. Mutt and Jeff
played with the angle of the light until each word could be read. On
the top of the paper INVENTORY appeared. Below that, Canyonville, and
next to that the words
ace boon coon
.

"What's that in the upper corner?"
Blackstone asked. "Those numbers?"

"It's a date. Yesterday"

"Thanks, boys," Blackstone said, slipping
the binder paper into an evidence envelope. "Looks like the
pieces are starting to fall in place."

But who was she, he wondered as he left the building,
his mystery woman? She obviously knew the deceased and cared about
him enough to identify him. What was her connection to Canyonville?
Did Inventory refer to some sort of contraband? Weapons? Dope? Stolen
goods? What would her next move be? And what the hell did ace boon
coon mean? Was it some sort of code? Did the first letters of the
words, a b c, stand for something else? He pulled out his notebook
and listed each question separately to be dwelt over later. He
underlined the words: Who is she?

When he returned to the station, he learned that Alex
had already run the name John Garillo through CLETS, the California
Law Enforcement Teletype System, and had gotten an instant hit.
Jonathan Garillo had last been arrested in Venice on August 2nd. The
charge was a 647F, public drunk. Alex had just pulled the hard copy
of the arrest report when Blackstone caught up to him. The attached
photograph certainly looked like their Doe; the fingerprint card
would of course cinch the decedent's identity According to the
arresting officers narrative of the incident, the suspect had been
apprehended on Lincoln Boulevard after the officers observed him
walking erratically Garillo claimed to be just visiting friends in
the area and failed the field sobriety test.

After a four-hour detainment, Jonathan Garillo had
been released to a woman who identified herself as Lisa Slokum, his
sister. The report also listed all calls the suspect had made while
in custody There had been only two, but both were to the same number.
Alex called the number and listened to a disconnect recording. He
contacted the phone company and backtracked the listing. It belonged
to Lisa Slokum and the billing address was in Inglewood.

Blackstone phoned Sugarman and brought the coroner up
to speed.

"You think the sister might have been our
uninvited guest?"

"The thought occurred to me."

"Are you going to try to find her tonight?"
Sugarman asked. "I'll need her to come down and make an official
visual identification. There's also the matter of funeral
arrangements."

Blackstone checked his watch. " could run out to
Inglewood and be downtown by say seven." One of the women from
the secretarial pool delivered a picture of Lisa Slokum—it was a
booking photograph. Obviously she and her brother were cut from the
same cloth. He also realized—looking at her sullen, chubby
face—that the sister wasn't the woman he sought.

"It can wait till tomorrow, if you want,"
Sugarman said. "Wait a minute, you're off tomorrow, aren't you?"

"Yes." Blackstone dragged out the word,
dangling an unsaid but on the end of it. He hated to delegate any
part of his investigations, but he'd also been promising himself to
get a life outside of job and he did have a chess tournament at
mid-morning. "I suppose I can have two guys from the morning
crew run out there and see if they can locate the sister."

As he spoke, he wrote out a memo detailing the
situation to Tiger Cassiletti and Bumper Morris, the two dicks who
worked Sunday morning.

After they hung up, Blackstone made a copy of the
arrest report and the sisters picture, adding them both to the
steadily growing file of the homicide investigation. He made more
circles on his blotter. In each he wrote names and brief titles. The
top circle was given over to Jonathan Garillo—Victim. He drew a
line connecting it to the second circle, Lisa Slokum—Victim's next
of kin. With all these lowlifes involved, something was bound to
break soon.
 
 

10

As SHE CLEANED her small apartment Sunday morning,
Munch couldn't stop reliving sneaking into the coroner's office: the
delicious thrill of being in a forbidden place before the shock of
seeing Sleaze. Wasn't it just like God to pair those two things? Just
as she was enjoying a taboo-breaking rush . . . Bam. Old friend dead,
killed in action, a stark reminder of the inherent risks of her old
life.

But still, it was hard to shake that feeling of
excitement when the cops entered the room. She had even brushed by
one of them, touched his sleeve on the way out the door like an
Indian warrior counting coup. Even now the memory of that moment sent
a thrill through her stomach. She chuckled out loud, envisioning the
students who keeled over at the sight of blood.

She was shutting off the vacuum cleaner when she saw
her answering machine blink red as it answered a call. She picked up
the receiver and silenced the outgoing message.