Some Degree of Murder (20 page)

I adjusted my shoulder holster rig as I walked down the hall to the kitchen. I could smell coffee and something cooking. When I entered the kitchen, Teri was wearing a fluffy white robe and buttering an English muffin.

“I made some coffee.”

“I can smell it.”

She glanced at me then, her face tightening.

“It smells good,” I offered in apology.

She nodded slowly and went back to buttering the muffin. I pulled a coffee mug from the cupboard and poured.

“You want one of these?” she asked.

I shrugged.

We sat at the table and ate in silence. The coffee was strong and good.

“Good coffee,” I told her, finishing my breakfast.

“Thanks.” She looked directly at me. “Look, John, maybe it was uncool for me to ask you about staying here. I –“

I shook my head, holding up my hand. “No, it wasn’t.”

She stopped and watched me.

“I was just surprised,” I told her.

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.” I cleared my throat. “I’ve had some time to think about it and I think it’s a good idea. It makes sense. For Ben and for you, I mean.”

Teri’s face spread into a large smile. “Thanks, John. Really, I mean it. Thanks a lot.”

“Sure.”

She flashed me a smile and took a drink from her coffee mug.

My throat was dry, so I sipped my coffee, too.

“He’s a ghost.”

Lindsay had pulled up a chair next to me and flopped his notepad down on my desk. I ignored his messy, looping handwriting on the paper and turned my gaze to him.

“You didn’t find anything?”

“Oh, I found out a lot. I was here until nine o’clock last night finding things out. Even Ted worked until seven.”

“Run it for me,” I told him.

“California Department of Corrections was real helpful. When I finally got them to run the record check for me, the only white Virgil Kelley they could find that had served time and wasn’t currently incarcerated was a seventy-year-old from Sherman Oaks, California.”

“Maybe he’s an escapee, then. A walk-away.”

“I thought of that,” Lindsay said. “I asked them to do a head check. That went over like a Baby Ruth in a swimming pool. But –” he held up a fax, “they did it and reported all accounted for.”

“So it’s an alias.”

“Probably. I had them run it that way and they kicked me over to some other records division. I got the bitchiest woman this side of my wife. We went through twelve different records of guys who are white and your guy’s age that have used Virgil Kelley as an alias. Three sounded good and I had her fax photos.”

He handed me three sheets of paper. I thumbed through them. One was way too short and the second was too thin. The third was an older photo, but was a near match for physicals. I held it up. “This could be him. I have a couple people I could show it to.”

Lindsay shook his head. “Won’t do any good. That Virgil Kelley is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yep. Died in a car accident in 1984 on his way home from a Van Halen concert. Bitchface pulled the police report and everything.”

I thought about that for a second. “You think…”

Lindsay nodded. “Yessir, I do. I think your dude snatched a dead guy’s name.”

“They’re about the same size and build…”

“Hell,” Lindsay said, “from what you told me, this dude could go to the dead guy’s thirty-year high school reunion and fool everybody.”

“Then we’re no closer.”

“Nope.”

“What’d Billings get?”

“He didn’t get jack.”

“Big surprise,” I muttered.

“He called a lot of places,” Lindsay said. “He really did.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

He half-nodded, half-shrugged. “You said this guy was hooked up with the Mafia or whatever somewhere in Southern California.”

“Yeah, supposedly.”

“Well, I talked to LAPD Organized Crime last night while Bitchface had me on hold and afterward, too. Spoke with some detective who really knew his business. I asked him about Virgil Kelley and he didn’t know of anyone by that name. He said that he did know of seven or eight different guys named Virgil who were hired muscle.”

“Really. Any of them our guy?”

“I described him physically and he laughed at me. He said I just described every white guy who was hired muscle in the world.”

“What the hell, it was a long shot anyway. Southern California could be L.A., it could be San Diego. He could have lied to Andie Taylor and really be out of Vegas or Phoenix or who knows where.”

“It’s worse than that,” Lindsay said. “I asked the guy what his gang situation was and he told me that he had more gangs than Baskin Robbins had flavors. They’ve got Crips, Bloods, El Rukns, BGDs –”

“Black gangs. I don’t think this guy would run with blacks.”

“He had plenty of whites, too. Bikers, some guy name Torgenson, another guy name Saccamano and some other weird name that sounded Hungarian. And then he’s got the Russians, just like we do here. Plus the Asian gangs, who he said were pushing into everybody else’s territory.”

I sighed. “Any idea who Virgil Kelley is out of all of this?”

Lindsay looked defeated. “No. Like I said, the guy’s a ghost.”

“Maybe I need a gypsy and a crystal ball, then.”

“You want me to have the LAPD guy run every mafia muscle named Virgil up and send pictures?”

“I’m sure it’ll take a while, but yeah.”

“He said he couldn’t get to it ‘til next week, but he’d do it if we asked.”

“Yeah, do it.”

I drove in silence. I had sent Lindsay out with the picture of dead Mr. Kelley to start checking all the local motels. Maybe we’d locate him that way, staying at some dive just off the freeway.

I cruised out of the downtown area and down Sprague. I pulled slowly up to the sidewalk about two car lengths west of the BSC clubhouse. I sat in my car for a while, watching the clubhouse. Four bikes were parked out front.

I reached into my glove box and removed a small, five-shot .38 revolver in an ankle holster. I strapped it on and tried to remember why I wasn’t bringing a partner.

“Same reason you’re not telling radio dispatch where you’re at,” I muttered to the empty car. “’Cause as soon as someone else gets wind of where your case is at, you are done. Screwed.”

I took a deep breath and exited the patrol car. I ignored the cameras above the clubhouse and stepped up to the door. Standing to the side, I gave the door a graveyard knock. On the third knock, the door swung open.

“What the fuck do you want?”

A long-haired, bearded dirtbag stuck his head out the door and stared at me with contrived craziness. I flashed my badge.

He wasn’t impressed. “So what?”

“I want to talk to you and whoever else is home.”

“You got a warrant?”

“No.”

“Then get one,” he said and slammed the door shut.

I stepped forward and caught the door with my foot before he got it closed all the way. It bounced back into him and he let out a curse.

“You got a fucking death wish?” he growled at me.

“I could come back with a warrant in half an hour. You might be able to flush a lot of your stuff in that thirty minutes, at least until the City shuts off your water. But you’ll still be holding some of it. Besides, it’s kinda hard to flush a gun.”

He blinked, sneering and rubbing his cheek, but said nothing.

“I’m here because I’m working on the Sammy G. case.”

“Well, fuck, then,” he said. “Why didn’t you speak up right away?”

I took a step forward, but he held up his hand. “No, no, no. No pork in the clubhouse without a warrant.”

“How am I supposed to investigate this case if I can’t come in?”

“Wait here. We’ll come out.”

“I’m parked over there. I’ll wait by my car.”

“Whatever.” His eyes narrowed at me. “You know, we already talked to that other cop the day this happened. Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“Detective Browning is my partner,” I told him.

“Yeah, Browning. That was it.” He eyed me with suspicion. “What else you wanna know? ‘Cause I don’t think you sonsabitches are going to deal with this. I think you’re glad a brother is dead and it’s gonna take another brother to make things right.”

“If someone turns up dead, I’ll have to remember you said it.” I turned to walk away.

“You really got something on the guy that killed Sammy G.?”

I pointed at my car without looking at him or breaking stride.

It took them ten minutes to make up their minds. They came out one at a time, timid hairballs glancing around as they walked tentatively toward me like they expected a SWAT team to descend from black helicopters and scoop them up.

I interviewed three, doing my best to bluff my way through the interview. It must’ve worked, because they kept coming. The fourth one was Rowdy.

I knew it was him as soon as he approached. Grace had pegged him perfectly. He looked like a long-haired Howdy Doody.

Rowdy tried harder than the others to swagger as he approached my car. He made a show of smoking, trying to look tough. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw something there I didn’t like. Something broken.

“You the pig looking into Sammy G.?”

“I’m the investigating detective. Think we could drop the pork references long enough to get through an interview?”

Rowdy shrugged and took a hard drag from his cigarette. His eyes flitted up and down my body and to my car and back again.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Why?”

“You know the drill. Just tell me if you have a warrant or not. If it isn’t a felony, I won’t worry about it.”

“No warrants. Just don’t like talking to the Man.”

“You think I like talking to you? We’re both just doing what’s necessary here, all right?”

He shrugged again. “Name’s Rowdy.”

“Real name?”

“Yeah, I got one.”

I stared at him for a moment. After a little while, his defiance melted and he shrugged and flicked his burning cigarette into the street.

“It’s Cody. Cody Heinz.”

“See, Cody?” I gave him a tight smile. “Now we can be friends.”

Cody grunted and lit another cigarette.

I asked all of the same questions I’d asked the others, but barely listened to his answers. Instead, I watched his mannerisms as he spoke. How he shifted back and forth on his feet. How his eyes held contempt and sickness all at the same time. As he answered my questions, I made him as the omega wolf of the clubhouse. He was the one that everyone else picked on when there weren’t any outsiders available.

“You used to do Sammy’s job, didn’t you?” I asked him, interrupting him in mid-sentence.

He stammered out the final few words of his last sentence, then stared at me in surprise.

“Didn’t you?”

“For a little while,” he muttered, reaching for another cigarette. I watched as he shook it out of the pack, then drew it out with his lips.

“Fawn Taylor,” I said to him.

His face froze.

“Serena Gonzalez,” I said, pressing.

His lips parted and the cigarette fell to the sidewalk.

Oh Jesus
, I thought.
I have him.

Rowdy’s lips moved but no words came out right away. Finally he got some breath behind them. “Who-who’s those people?”

Careful now
, I told myself.
Don’t screw it up.

“Two dead girls
.”

“The, uh, the two from the newspaper?” He swallowed twice and pulled out another cigarette, leaving the other one on the ground.
He managed to light his cancer stick with a trembling hand
.

“We think we know who did it. We’ve got an idea anyway.”

“Yeah?”

“Problem is, he’s black.”

“Black?”

“And he’s laying low. Meanwhile, my boss doesn’t believe a minority could commit a crime like this.”

Rowdy took a wavering drag of his cigarette. “Doesn’t think a nigger can kill a chick?”

“He doesn’t want us focus on a black guy right from the start. Even if some of the evidence points at this guy.”

Rowdy smoked, watching me.

“While we’re looking for this creep who probably killed these two girls, I’ve gotta go through the elimination process.”

“Elimination process?”

“Yeah. I have to find as many white people as I can who ever had contact with these dead girls and eliminate them as suspects.”