The Crime Writer Read online

  Standing to the side of the jamb, Cal knocked with the butt of his flashlight. “Richard Collins? LAPD. Please open up.”

  A clattering inside, perhaps a chair falling over.

  “Open up, please. We just have a few questions.”

  “The hell you guys want?”

  “Sir, open this door now.” Thumping footsteps across the room. “Last chance, then I’m sending in tear gas.” Glancing over at me, Cal shook his head reassuringly.

  He strode down the hall, lifted a fire extinguisher from its mount, and returned. He pulled the pin and tossed it to me across the door, then loosed a carbon-dioxide blast through the window’s gap. A shriek, and then Collins stumbled into the hall, arms raised.

  Cal spun him against the wall and frisked him. “Let’s go back inside.”

  The apartment smelled of pot. As Cal stood Collins up against the wall, I strolled around the front room. A table had been pushed into the corner by the alcove kitchen. A fork protruded from a pot of reheated SpaghettiOs. A chair lay overturned, resting on the bright orange button-up shirt that had been slung over it.

  “I didn’t do anything, man. I can’t have a third strike. I can’t.”

  Cal asked, “Where were you the night of January twenty-second?”

  To his credit, Collins looked baffled. “I don’t know. When was that?”

  In the sink, shoved halfway down the disposal guard, was a dime bag. I glanced up from the sink, and Collins was looking over at me, terrified.

  “Thursday, three nights ago,” Cal said.

  “I was working.”

  “Between ten-thirty and two?”

  I walked over and righted the chair, pulling up the still-hooked shirt with it.

  “Working, man. You can check my time card, talk to my manager. I’m a stocker. I work nights.”

  “Where?”

  I looked at the familiar logo stitched into the button-up’s fabric at the breast. To say I felt chagrin would have been a significant understatement. Cal looked over and caught sight of the uniform just as Collins said, “Home Depot.”

  Cal chuckled once, but it caught fire and he doubled over, hands on his knees, laughing.

  Collins said, “Wait a minute. What’s going on?”

  From the kitchen I asked what was, in hindsight, a stupid question: “You remember selling anyone electrical tape?”

  “I don’t work the floor. I just unload. Electrical tape, sure. Crates of it. Listen, if you talk to my manager, please don’t tell him about my record. I lied on the application. I’m sorry. I couldn’t get a fresh start, not with the drug charges.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cal said.

  Collins was still staring at me. “I’d be so fucked if I got a third strike. Twenty-five to life. I got child support I gotta pay. I been clean for anything that matters. I been clean.”

  In my fervor I’d made a big leap, transforming Collins from pothead to savage killer. In doing so, I was ready to fuck up his life worse even than mine, and he didn’t have a handy brain tumor to get him off the hook. Pretending to wash my hands, I let the water push the Baggie of marijuana down into the disposal.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  Cal didn’t talk to me as we walked back down the stairs to the car. Before leaving he’d gotten the Home Depot manager on the phone and confirmed Collins’s hours the night of January twenty-second. I’d taken away one piece of information, but it came loaded with so many variables as to be nearly useless. If the wrapping had come from the killer’s electrical tape, then he’d bought it at the Home Depot in Van Nuys. If he’d shopped close to home, that would make him a Valley boy. Two if s weren’t going to advance the home team’s cause significantly.

  We climbed into the car. I expected Cal to yell, but he just looked over and smirked. “Don’t quit your day job.”

  Lloyd called me on my cell phone as I was driving home from Cal’s. “How’d it go?”

  I told him.

  “Ouch,” he said. “Sorry to pile on, but the DNA tests came back from Broach’s body and the drop cloth we found in your trash. It’s yours. Not that it undermines your alibi, but I just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  I thanked him and hung up. Heading home reminded me of my damaged front door and Preston’s note about the dangers it might leave me vulnerable to. I called information and got one of the alarm companies I’d seen advertised on metal posts shoved into neighborhood flower beds.

  “Sorry, pal. Can’t get someone in to wire you until Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.”

  “You sure you don’t work for the phone company?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Never mind.”

  I gave him my address and made an appointment. Then I called Home Depot, figuring they owed me one or I them, beeped my way through an elaborate menu, and left a message for the door department that of course stood no chance of being returned but left me feeling as if I’d fulfilled due diligence in addressing my editor’s notes.

  Richard Collins. Professional electrical-tape handler. Don’t quit your day job indeed.

  I decided I’d give myself the rest of the drive home to feel discouraged. But I blew my deadline. I was too worn down for a cigar on the deck, so I plopped into my reading chair, mulling over my missteps. After a while I tired of myself and clicked on the TV.

  Humidity was low, terrorist chatter was high. Another day in America. Guess what was reairing on TNT? Hunter Pray. Sure enough, there was Johnny Ordean, wearing an ill-fitting priest’s collar and holding a scumbag’s dripping head above a rank toilet bowl. “Cough it up or we go another round on the baptism.”

  Good God.

  The resultant gurgling spurred my thumb to action. A seductively named hurricane was ravaging the Georgia coast. Newscasters were emboldening the terrorists. A teen singer had been in a fender bender at Fairfax and Le Brea, and a news unit was there to capture each cracked taillight and curse word.

  While I’d been occupied, public attention had moved on.

  I punched the button and sat in the relative darkness. There is no silence quite as plaintive as that of an empty house when the television turns off. Now that the media were no longer mistreating me, I felt left out.

  The back cushions on the couch, strewn by Preston, jarred loose a recollection of Genevieve. Before we’d watch a movie or an opera on PBS, she’d pull apart the whole damn couch like a kid building a fort, and rearrange it to her liking, which usually entailed transforming it into a faux-suede nest, elevating her like Cleopatra on the barge. From her regal perch, she studied me now with those imploring French eyes.

  “I’m working on it,” I said. “Everyone has setbacks. Remember Waterloo?”

  She vanished at the ring of my cell phone.

  “Who’s the mack daddy?”

  “Barry Bonds?” I guessed.

  A sound of disgust. “Chic Bales, that’s who.”

  I told him about Richard Collins, the innocent, pot-smoking Home Depot felon.

  “Don’t despair, Chicken Little. I got us a spray artist. We ride at first light.”

  After the call I stared at the couch, but Genevieve wouldn’t reappear. I didn’t blame her. I was lousy company, and I might have shoved a boning knife through her rib cage.

  Upstairs I dozed sporadically, finding myself wide awake at 1:00 A.M. The Genevieve hour. Each whistle of the wind was a screen being slit, every creak in the house a foot set cautiously down. Turning on the lights before me, I retrieved spare cuts of plywood from the garage and hammered them across the broken windows in my front door.

  Back in my bedroom, I lay in the darkness, surrounded by familiar shadows.

  You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

  I’d looked stupid. It wasn’t a first. I’d spent the evening spinning my tires. Not like I had anything better to do. I’d played a card with Cal I could’ve saved for later. So wha
t? I had more up my sleeve. Tomorrow could bring a graffiti-artist eyewitness, another body, a rise in the ocean that left us all breathing through snorkels.

  For Genevieve, for Kasey Broach, for myself, I was committed. I was in the plot. After blood, sweat, and tears would come an ending, favorable or not.

  For the first time since I’d awakened in that hospital bed, I slept soundly.

  18

  I met Chic in a part of Compton that had been revitalized, meaning the crackheads looked better fed.

  He leaned over my window and said, “Genevieve’s father invested in a company that owned a boutique that Kasey Broach once bought soap at. They bought car tires from the same wholesaler, Broach in person, Genevieve through her mechanic at Lexus.”

  “What’s that give us?”

  “Nuthin’ worth marking on the scorecard.” He grinned. “Database guy is good at digging stuff up, not necessarily good stuff. We’ll see what else he comes up with. I don’t think there’s gonna be much between the two of them—it’s a connection between Broach and you that would smell like pay dirt to me. If it links Genevieve, too, trifecta.” As we crossed the street, Chic flicked his chin at the warehouse up ahead. “That’s our boy’s art studio there.”

  “Art studio?”

  “That’s right. And don’t go embarrassin’ me and callin’ it graffiti.”

  “What do I call it?”

  “Aerosol art.”

  “Naturally.”

  We entered to find a large woman behind a reception desk, blowing on a set of fingernails that doubled the length of her hand. She looked up, eyebrows raised as if we’d shoved in on her in a changing room.

  “Engelbert Humperdinck here’s lookin’ for Bishop,” Chic said, jerking his head in my direction, “but he didn’t want to come down alone because he’s afraid you all might put him in a cannibal pot.”

  “One o’ them black ones?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Lemme go get it.” She pushed back from the desk and disappeared through a metal door. Her voice came amplified through the walls. “Bish! Folks here to see you!” We couldn’t make out the response, but we heard her say, “Then sit reception you own damn self.”

  She reappeared, holding the heavy door for us to pass through. She eyed me as I passed. “He a cop or a buyer?”

  “He a writer,” Chic said.

  She snorted. “Which restaurant?”

  We entered the warehouse proper. Aside from a desk in the far corner, several cardboard boxes, and a rotund naked black man, the room was empty. The man was giving us his generous backside, facing an enormous canvas, marked with splotches, that was strapped to the far wall. Paint dripped from his fingertips, streamed down his broad calves.

  I looked at Chic, and he shrugged. We crossed the vast space, admiring the blown-up photos adorning the walls—distinctive graffiti art on trains, billboards, even a few cop cars. The cardboard boxes were full of spray-paint cans, tips and nozzles, night-vision goggles flecked with backspray.

  Chic cleared his throat, but Bishop didn’t turn around. He bent over, plucked a roller from a pan of purple paint, and ran it from his shins to his neck. Emitting a bass roar, he charged forward and flung himself against the canvas, leaving a large purple mark. He took a few steps away from the wall, wiped himself down with a wet towel, and pulled on a pair of velour sweatpants.

  “Interesting technique,” Chic said. “Seems like…”

  “Bullshit?” Bishop said in a great rumble of a voice. “Course it is. But it fetch me three grand at the gallery. If you could get that for a Rorschach of your nutsack, tell me you wouldn’t.”

  I said, “If I could get three grand for anything involving my nutsack, I would.”

  He laughed. “You gentlemen lookin’ to buy?”

  “Actually, just a quick question for you.” I unfolded a copy of the freeway ramp graffiti from my back pocket. I’d pulled some Kinko’s magic, blowing it up, zeroing in so as to leave the body out of frame.

  Bishop glanced at it and said, “Wudn’t me.”

  “I know the feeling,” I said, “but we’re not cops or prosecutors, and we don’t care that it’s illegal.”

  “No, I mean it wudn’t me.” He gestured grandly to the surrounding photographs. “See the 103 tag? Lower-right corner, every time?”

  I studied the photos. The numbers resolved, almost as in the posters at the mall that you squint at for twenty minutes before being awarded a 3-D image or a migraine.

  “That ’ cuz I came up on 103rd in Watts.” Bishop tapped the copy in my hands. “Ain’t no 103 there. Beside, I don’t use no Amazon Green and Metallic Periwinkle. That ain’t Bishop’s palette. This some toy done bite my piece.”

  “Translation for the white guy?”

  “I’m a fame writer. That’s why y’ all knew to come find me. But this a toy writer, a kid comin’ up. He bite my work—copy my shit—to show props.”

  “Do you recognize which kid made this graffi—”

  Chic cut me off. “Aerosol art?”

  “Course. That his name right there, fool.” Bishop flicked the paper in the upper-left corner. Hidden in the puffs and bubbles of color were two letters, rendered in abstract hypercalligraphy. WB. “West Manchester Boulevard, by the Forum in the ’ Wood. That where he came up. Inglewood. Junior do good work, bombs freeway ramps and long-term storage joints. No stencils or airbrushing shit, squiggles the tail on his Q s.”

  He’d pronounced the name soft, Latin style: Hoon-yore.

  “He Mexican?” Chic asked.

  “Ain’t no racial issues in the graf community. We about the art.”

  “You know where we can find him?”

  “Yeah. Boy send me fan mail.” Bishop plodded over to the little metal desk and dug in the drawers, sending candy-bar wrappers fluttering to the ground. He pulled out a crumpled letter from a drawer full of correspondence. It contained a Polaroid shot of a rolling storage door that had been transformed into a spray-paint wonderland. The letter read:

  Dear Bish,

  I think your the best there is. Heres a piece I did like your job on the Metro Red. Its not as good but someday I hope to tag as good as you. When I get older I gona tag the white house right on them pillars. Ha ha ha. Maybe when I off probation I could meet you and here your stories.

  You da man!

  Junior Delgado

  I flipped the envelope over. The return address listed a place called Hope House with an address on West Sixth. I pulled the Bic from behind my ear and copied the address in a black-leather detective’s notepad Cal had given me years ago.

  “I gotta go meet with a distributor at the restaurant,” Chic said. “Think you’ll be safe visiting Junior without a big Negro holding your hand?”

  “Dunno.” I looked at Bishop. “Wanna hold my hand?”

  Bishop smirked. “I’m spoken for.”

  19

  A guy with gang tattoos across his throat flew down the handicap ramp on a wheelchair and veered toward the van parked beside my car. I’d called Preston on my way over, and he’d googled Hope House for me. It proved to be a residential placement facility—social services–speak for a group home—just above MacArthur Park. It was a six-bedroom house, two kids per room, with overnight staff. Last stop before juvy for problematic Angeleno youth.

  I climbed out of my car. The guy was laboring to get out of his wheelchair and into the driver’s seat.

  “Give you a hand?” I asked.

  He turned. The lettering on his baseball cap read THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO YOU. “Yeah, I came all the way down here, and I don’t know how to get in my fucking van.”

  So far I was a hit.

  The house was a dilapidated two-story—peeling paint, crooked shutters, the whole deal. I walked into a whirlwind of motion, young teens flying out of rooms, screaming at one another, tumbling over the broken-down play structure in the backyard. A Hispanic counselor paced, biting her nails, phone pressed to her ear. “His PO ha
s not shown up, we’re short a driver, and I have to bail Patrick out, so I can’t take him.”

  She hung up, blew a sigh. “Are you my driver?”

  “No, I’m looking for Junior Delgado. I need to ask him—”

  “Just”—her hands flew out, then she caught herself and finished in a gentler tone—“go wait out back. You’ll have to talk to Caroline Raine—she’s our clinical therapist. She’s upstairs dealing with a contraband issue. She’ll be down in a sec, but this isn’t the best day. Grab a cup of coffee.” She pointed to a row of homemade mugs hanging from wooden pegs. “Might be a while. Wash it out when you’re done.”

  Refueling on caffeine, I strolled out back and sat on the lip of a planter lled with dirt but no flowers, next to a kid who looked about as animated as James Taylor. “You know where Junior is?”

  “Dunno, man.” He got up and trudged away. My presence had offended him.

  It struck me how much movies had colored my view of kids’ homes. Here there were no long-lashed Latin boys with smooth skin, no girls flashing million-dollar smiles from beneath dirt-smudged faces, no eager minds waiting for a role model, a state-sponsored music program, a whimsical mathematics instructor. Just a lot of baggy shorts, Converse sneakers, and scowls. The play-structure slide had rusted, and two of the monkey bars were missing. I thought kids like this probably deserved something better to play on, but they seemed to be making do.

  A Down syndrome kid sat in one of the cracked rubber swings, holding his head in his hands and weeping. “I waa ma mama.”

  A boy in a lime green sweatshirt weighed in. “You killed your mom, retard.”

  “I know. I know.”

  I thought, I will never complain about anything ever again.

  A scrawny Latin kid, maybe fifteen, wore a Lee jacket, bell-bottom jeans, and PRO-Keds. He looked like someone Fat Albert had sat on. When he turned to huddle with a co-conspirator, I saw that the back of his jacket was custom-painted. Aerosol art, I believe the term is.