The Crime Writer Page 12

  Chic said, “Where’d you get these?”

  I’d neglected to mention them when he’d picked me up from Parker. I told him I stole them from the interrogation room.

  He whistled his admiration, then turned one print sideways, appraising the graffiti artist’s terminated composition on the ramp’s underbelly. “That’s some serious spray work.”

  Preston said, “Let’s focus on the body.”

  Chic slid a second photo out from the sheaf, this one showing a number of officers standing around or squatting by the chain-link. A hexagon outlined with police tape now staked off the corpse. Feathers dusted the spray-painted concrete, stuck to the ramp. The camera flash had brought out the glitter of shattered beer bottles.

  “Lookie here,” Chic said. “Our first real lead.”

  Preston, peering over Chic’s shoulder, shrugged.

  “It tells a story, Story Man, you just ain’t reading it.”

  I seized the photo and scrutinized it. “I don’t see it.”

  Chic slid out from the booth, bringing me with him. “Then lemme show you.”

  15

  There was no chalk outline, no bloodstain, no sad tendrils of crime-scene tape to commemorate the body that had been here less than seventy-two hours before. Just the crumbling asphalt, the beat-down coupe, and me and Chic. Vehicles hummed overhead. The ground smelled of urine and beer. The sun was in its descent, and Rampart was no place to get caught after dark. Chic spread his arms wide.

  “Wah-lah.”

  “Wah-lah what?”

  Chic pointed at the cloud of elaborate spray paint brightening the bottom of the freeway ramp. The artist had stretched the proportion of the piece to fit the rising concrete so that when viewed straight on it looked as if it were in normal perspective. Even so, I wasn’t sure what it was. Explosions and protuberances and bubble letters, all impressively three-dimensionalized. The piece had been left unfinished, the right half fading off into gray concrete. Feathers stuck to the lower fringe, dried into the paint.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  I followed Chic over a trampled section of chain-link.

  “Cops got here in a hurry, right?” he asked. “And the criminalist?”

  “That’s what I was told. Nearby having a burrito.”

  “Patrolmen see the body. Criminalist shoots the picture, captures how it is before everyone fucks up the evidence, all that. Then what’s the first thing they do?”

  “Secure the scene.”

  “Secure the scene. Which means they check this here shadow.” He ducked into the dark triangular recess where the ramp met ground. An outburst of pigeons, spooked from their nighttime roosts atop the supporting beams, disrupted the relative quiet. Chic stumbled back toward me, waving his arms, pigeons squawking around his head. He’d gotten more than he’d bargained for. His retreat detracted from the solemnity of his account, but he brushed himself off, picked something off his tongue, and continued, unfazed.

  “Cops scared up the pigeons. The stray feathers got stuck to the paint.” Chic beckoned for the crime-scene photos and showed me the one that had captured Broach’s body before the crime scene had been blocked off—no feathers yet in evidence. “Which means the paint was still wet. And that means”—a finger raised with academic emphasis—“the tagger was at work spraying the ramp that night when he was interrupted.” He flicked his head at the painting’s terminated edge. “What makes a tagger run? A car. What’s the first car that showed up, scared him away?”

  “The killer dumping the body.”

  Chic’s wide grin broke across his face. “We got ourselves a maybe witness.”

  I stared at the coupe’s hood, white with droppings. “The Case of the Telltale Bird Shit.”

  “In-fuckin’-deed.”

  “How do we locate the spray painter?”

  Chic indicated the colorful work overhead. “You’re looking at his signature, Colonel Sanders. That’s what a tag is.”

  We’d fallen into familiar roles. Chic was one of my most useful rough-draft readers, adept at inlaying street logic to a character’s motive or transforming a run of dialogue into alleyway patter. I watched him chewing his lip, another adviser turned accomplice.

  He held his eyes on the graffiti an extra beat, as if committing it to memory, then said, “Lemme poke around on it, call some of my brothers.”

  Spread throughout Los Angeles were about twenty-seven of Chic’s gold-incisored brothers, who appeared in various guises to fix a car, bartend at a party, unload a new flat-screen. Most, like him, were Philly transplants. A few he might actually have been related to.

  The breeze swirled up debris, knocked from the beams during the pigeon eruption. I crouched over a fallen nest, larger than I would have thought. Inside was a ring of stiff plastic wrap, about twice the circumference of a beer holder, still boasting a Home Depot price sticker.

  I no longer heard the whistle of the wind, the cooing of the displaced pigeons, the cars overhead. I no longer heard anything but the pounding of my heart.

  It was wrapping for a roll of electrical tape.

  16

  The door swung open, and for a moment there was nothing but darkness, a curl of pale hand on the knob, and the incessant chirping of crickets. Then Lloyd stepped forward into the throw of light from the outdoor lamp and said, “The hell is this, Drew?”

  “It’s a clue.” I held the to-go bag aloft. “Inside a doggie bag from Spago.”

  Unimpressed, Lloyd checked his watch. It was only six-thirty, but it was as dark as midnight, and I guessed he’d had a long day. His worse judgment got the better of him, and he said, “Wait here.”

  I stood on the porch for maybe five minutes while I heard him moving in the house, a soft, feminine voice answering his. Some shuffling, and then a door closed.

  He opened the door again and beckoned me in. We sat in the same places, he on the sofa, I in the reading chair. The TV tray on the floor was still laden with tacos. Only one was unwrapped, missing the bite I’d seen him take. Down the hall, the same strip of yellow light glowed beneath the bedroom door. It was as if no time had elapsed since last night, as if no time ever elapsed in this house.

  I caught him up on my Rampart adventure, ending with the electrical-tape wrapper I’d found in the fallen pigeon nest. His expression vacillated between shock, anger, and annoyed admiration.

  “Jesus, you’re really on this, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am, Lloyd. Four months of jail time, a murder trial, and two dead women, one of whom I cared about quite a bit. The stakes are fairly personal here.”

  He eyed the restaurant bag, still unopened. “And what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to dust it for prints.”

  “Look, Drew, offering you some facts is one thing. But running a print?”

  “Tell me you’re not curious.”

  “We don’t even know it’s our guy’s. It could be trash that blew in from somewhere else. Or got picked up by a roaming pigeon.”

  “Could be.”

  “And what, the guy was so stupid he left a wrapper with his fingerprints lying around near the body?”

  “The cops—or you—found a burnt plastic drop cloth in my trash can, maybe for lining a car trunk. Maybe he taped Broach inside his trunk, left the wrapper in there. It could’ve stuck to her body when he dumped her, then blown free.”

  But Lloyd wasn’t to be dislodged from his objections. “And besides that, we’ve got no chain of custody for the evidence. There’s nothing to keep a lawyer from saying you brought this in from somewhere else.”

  “I’m not just looking to put someone away.” The comment hung self-righteously in the stale air.

  “We’ll need to if you want to exonerate yourself. Isn’t that what you’re driving at?”

  “I just want to find out what happened”—I caught myself—“what’s happening.”

  His stare had not left the bag.

  “Tell me you’re not curio
us,” I said again.

  He clasped his hands, let out a sigh that originated from somewhere deep inside him. “I’m curious.”

  “Remember when you lifted my DNA from my toothbrush to show me how it worked? What’s the difference here?” I opened the bag and tilted it so he could look inside. “It’s not like the cops found this evidence. It would’ve been lost anyway. I happened to find it lining a pigeon’s nest.”

  “Pigeon nests are unlined. But they’re big trash eaters, pigeons. It has a ridge of adhesive residue—there.” He pulled the pen from behind my ear to point. “That can be sweet. The bird probably mistook it for food and brought it to its nest.”

  The range of his knowledge, as always, staggered me. He knew virtually everything’s intersection with crime. How swollen the maggot. How rare the dry-cleaning mark. How ripe the blowfly egg in the mouth cavity.

  “Why don’t you just dust it?” I said. “No point in arguing if there’s not even a print.”

  I’d finally handed him the rationale he was looking for. He went out to the van and returned with a laptop and a case that opened into shelves and levels, like a tackle box. Down on the carpet, he set to work and within minutes managed to raise a single print—a fragmentary ridge on the curved outside of the stiff wrapping, right beside the Home Depot price sticker. He sat back on his heels.

  “Should have enough points for a match.”

  I couldn’t tell if he sounded regretful or excited. Probably a combination.

  I said nothing. Sometimes I actually know when to keep my mouth shut.

  After a few moments of internal deliberation, he reached into his case and removed a tape lift, a clear adhesive strip the size of a small cell phone. He peeled it off its backing and applied it to the dusted area, then returned the strip to its backing, locking in the print in two dimensions. He disappeared into the rear of the house and returned with a digital camera. He shot the tape lift and uploaded the image into his laptop. When he angled the screen away from me so I couldn’t see him input his password, I felt a surge of excitement. We were going to the fingerprint database.

  I waited silently as he tapped away, pictures of him and Janice grinning back at me everywhere I looked. A wicked reversal on Dorian Gray—all that wellness preserved behind glass while the real thing languished in a back room.

  Lloyd’s eyebrows rose and quivered. I resisted the urge to ask, and finally he spun the laptop around. A booking photo stared woefully out at me, a guy with deep-set eyes, a thinning pate, and a square jaw. Richard Collins. His birth date put him at thirty-one, but he looked at least a decade older. He’d gone down on two possession charges, the last three years ago, but he had a clean record since.

  My first to-the-investigative-moment glimpse of Genevieve’s or Broach’s possible killer. I was disappointed that Collins didn’t look more formidable; he seemed like a workman who’d do a shitty job on your house and not care when you wouldn’t pay him.

  “Who’s this guy to you?” Lloyd asked.

  I’d been asking myself the same question. Had my path crossed Richard Collins’s during my days of wine and roses? Had I dated his sister? Elbowed him aside in a cocktail lounge?

  “I don’t know. I don’t recognize him.”

  “Well, if he’s been trying to frame you, it’s a safe bet he recognizes you.”

  “Now what?”

  “You hand it off to a detective.”

  “You can’t run with it?”

  “This isn’t like on TV. The criminalist doesn’t solve the case. Even if I didn’t have my hands full.” Lloyd placed the tape lift and a computer disk containing the digital photo into a Ziploc and said, “Anyone can take it from here. And don’t tell them I ran it for you, or the secret handshake guys’ll get after me.”

  His step seemed a little lighter as we headed out. Despite the caveats he’d offered to brake my excitement, he, too, felt the exhilaration of circling a suspect. I was winning him over, one selfish demand at a time.

  My shoes crunched on the gravel driveway.

  “Good luck, Drew,” he called after me. His tone was uncharacteristically upbeat, but when I turned around, the door had already closed behind him.

  17

  “This is a fingerprint lifted off a piece of evidence found at the Kasey Broach crime scene. It belongs to a convicted felon, Richard Collins. As a free citizen, I am going to his residence to ask a few questions. I think you should accompany me.”

  Cal stared back at me through his screen door, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He wore a wife-beater that showed off thick shoulders marked with Calvin and Hobbes tattoos that had probably been a good idea when he was eighteen and drunk. The tape lift and computer disk, visible through an evidence bag, made a far more dramatic impression than the Spago take-out bag had the last go-round.

  He palmed the screen open. “You out of your fucking mind?”

  “Pronounced so by a jury of my peers.”

  “You have no peers, asshole. Talk.”

  I gave him a full account, leaving out Lloyd. His silence indicated his interest. Or he’d fallen asleep with his eyes open.

  When I finished, he asked, naturally, “How’d you run the print?”

  “I just recognized the whorl pattern. Don’t you?”

  He grimaced, entertained by my wit. “You sure you didn’t leave that fingerprint yourself? In a mystically induced trance, of course?”

  “I’m currently certified one hundred percent brain-tumor-free.”

  “Aside from your overactive imagination.”

  “My overactive imagination didn’t produce this.” A shake of the bag, in case he’d failed to notice it.

  “The chain of custody is shot—”

  “Fuck chain of custody. It’s been blowing around there all week because your colleagues didn’t find it. This isn’t about making a case right now, it’s about asking some questions. Which I’m going to do.”

  He tried to take the Ziploc, but I pulled it back.

  He said, “Give it to me. I’ll look into it.”

  “Look, pal, you had a chance to play RHD detective when I came to you yesterday, but you were too busy bemoaning violence in the media. So this is now a citizen’s investigation. I’m going to visit Mr. Collins, and there’s no law that can stop me from doing so. If you’d like to come, I think it might be beneficial to your career.”

  “You said you were a free citizen. Let me remind you, you’re a relatively free citizen.” He held out his hand for the bag, but I kept it. “Determined fucker, aren’t you?”

  “Are you driving or am I?”

  He stared at me for maybe ten seconds. That’s a long time to be stared at, especially when you’re staring back. I bet he regretted not having his tough-guy sunglasses to complete his expression. Finally he stepped aside from the door, letting it swing open in unspoken invitation. On the couch behind him, I could see the well-thumbed pages of my manuscript.

  He turned, walking away. “Let me grab my badge. It’ll impress Mr. Collins.”

  Christened the Ronald Reagan Freeway in ’94 by nostalgic legislators, the 118 runs unglamorously through the north San Fernando Valley to Simi. Cal stared out his car window as Granada Hills rolled by in a blur of strip malls and tract housing. We’d stopped by the station for him to rescan the print. When Richard Collins and his Northridge address had popped up on the computer screen, Cal had glanced over at me and said, deadpan, “Nice eye, Danner.”

  We took in the passing view, indistinguishable from one mile to the next. Away from the city, beyond the fringes of manufactured cool, these neighborhoods lacked even the glamour of the urban wastelands, the Crenshaws and South Centrals and Comptons, where dead presidents change hands and bullets crackle and tricked-out Escalades brighten dingy blocks. I wondered if the people out here resented the blandness. The year-round sun, beach access, and just-right humidity ensure they don’t even get to suffer.

  Maybe that’s what had made Richard Coll
ins murderous. An address at Corbin and Parthenia.

  After a while I realized that something more than the scenery had soured Cal’s mood. “Why so cranky?”

  A pause as he considered whether we were friends again. “Annoying date. This broad could be from one of your books. If you wrote horror.”

  “That annoying?”

  “‘When Patches meows like this, she’s saying she’s hungry. When Patches meows like this, she’s saying she loves me.’”

  I laughed. He didn’t. “Nothing doing with the ex, huh?” I asked.

  “She’s remarried. To an agent. He’s got a punch-me face, and he’s named Jeremy. Jeremy.” Cal shook his head.

  I decided not to ask any more questions.

  We exited the freeway and pulled up on an apartment building that looked like every other apartment building we’d passed. He climbed out, but I sat for a moment, the reality of the situation sinking in. We were going to knock on the door of a man who might have killed two women and set me up. I wondered what was keeping my fingers from the door handle. A cold blade of doubt in the base of my spine. What if we discovered that Collins was our guy but that he’d framed me for only one murder? What if the Bertrands’ hateful courtroom stares proved to be justified?

  Cal came around the car and leaned over my open window. “Lose your nerve?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe you should. We knock-noticed a guy last year who crapped in his hands so no one would want to cuff him.”

  “What gets someone to that place?”

  “Daddy put out cigarettes on his forehead. Mom didn’t shower him with affection. Too much Black Sabbath before puberty.” Cal straightened up. “Sometimes there is no good reason. Sometimes people are just fucked up.”

  Yeah, I thought, but reasons are more interesting.

  He started for the stairwell, and I had to move to catch up. His hand darted inside his jacket, unsnapping the break on his shoulder holster. One of Apartment 11B’s windows overlooked the floating hall. The pane was shoved back a few inches, but the curtains were drawn.