The Crime Writer Page 25

  The door banged open, and Kaden ambled in. Cuffed sleeves, shoulder holster, smelling of chalk and coffee. Behind him Delveckio blew his nose into a handkerchief.

  “We found Kasey Broach’s shirt in the laundry-room sink of Genevieve Bertrand’s house,” Kaden said.

  The laundry room. I hadn’t even been bright enough to stumble over evidence planted for me.

  Delveckio added, “And your prints all over the house.”

  “Of course they are. I spent a lot of time there before we broke up.”

  Kaden said, “We have you on her street.”

  “I was taking a drive.”

  Kaden gripped the table, arms flexing. “Are you denying that you broke in to her house a few hours ago?”

  “I’m neither confirming nor denying anything until I talk to a lawyer.”

  “So why don’t you request one now?”

  “Because we’d have to stop talking. I know you think you’ve got something on me. Probably something horrifying. And I want to know what it is.” I was sweating through my shirt. “I can tell from the setup. Nine units pursuing me, handcuffs, the smug set of your mouth. So what do you got? My high-school prom date ten toes up beneath the bed of tulips in my front yard?”

  “You don’t have a bed of tulips in your front yard,” Delveckio said.

  “I know, but ‘hydrangeas’ is a mouthful.” A loaded silence. I was too anxious to let it stretch on longer. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Kaden said, “We were on our way to arrest you when an anonymous call tipped us to a break-in at Ms. Bertrand’s address.”

  “Why were you on your way to arrest me?”

  He threw down an evidence bag containing a familiar hair on the table in front of me. “This hair matches several left behind by the Redondo Beach Rapist over the past three years.”

  “I…what?”

  “He wears a ski mask, so we’ve never been able to get a composite. Seven rapes and we’ve got nothing but the occasional strand of brown hair.” Kaden eyed me. “Matches your hair color.”

  “This is bullshit. By the time we’re done, you’re gonna have me toilet training the Lindbergh baby with Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “You wanna tell me why the hell you were having our lab process a hair from a wanted rapist?”

  “They made a match and Ordean spooked,” I said, more to myself than them.

  “Of course he spooked. He’s a fucking TV actor. The CSI clowns consulting on his show ran a microscopic hair comparison to play show-and-tell, put it against strands from high-profile outstanding cases. It hits the jackpot, they about swallowed their tongues. Ordean said you gave him this hair. Has no idea where you got it.”

  “Where do you think I got it?”

  Kaden reached over and pressed a thumb to the swelling around my eye. “Morton Frankel.”

  I jerked away, and they snickered at me.

  Kaden asked, “Why were you at Genevieve Bertrand’s house?”

  “Someone tried to break in to my house tonight, then run me over with a brown Volvo. He left this behind.” Cuffs jangling, I pulled the Baggie holding the matchbook from my pocket—they’d missed it when patting me down for hardware—and flung it on the table.

  Delveckio examined the skull-and-crossbones matchbook sourly, or maybe that was just his face. The more I studied him, the less I could imagine him having anything to do with Adeline—or any of the Bertrands, for that matter. Rather, the less I could imagine them having anything to do with him. Delveckio awkwardly manipulated the bag, showing his partner the address inside.

  “Who tipped you?” I asked. “That I was allegedly at Gene vieve’s?”

  Kaden said, “An anonymous caller.”

  “Don’t you trace incoming phone calls?”

  “It came in to my private line. Not 911. Not dispatch.”

  “That’s a very anonymous anonymous call. When you go pick up Mort, why don’t you see if he’s got your digits written down somewhere?”

  “We can’t pick him up,” Delveckio said.

  “The guy tried to make me Volvo meat.”

  “Says you.”

  “And the matchbook.”

  “This evidence”—he tapped the bag containing the hairs—“was illegally obtained.”

  “But not by you,” I said. “So you know you can use it—for a warrant and to build a case. And I’ve been told that it’s all about building a case.”

  Kaden glared at me. “You ever fucking relent?” He jerked his head at Delveckio, and they left me alone with my none-too-chipper reflection.

  I wasn’t wearing a watch, so there was no way to gauge the time. Every few hours I’d ask to go to the bathroom, and I’d be respectfully led down a hall, passing under a clock.

  After my third escort deposited me back in the room, I asked if I’d been arrested, and he said, “Not yet. You’re still just being questioned.”

  I asked, “You guys trying out a new Zen interrogation technique?” He looked at me blankly, so I added, “Don’t you have to charge me or let me go?”

  “Not as long as we’re holding you as a person of interest.”

  “Person of interest,” I said. “That’s flattering. I think I’ll call my lawyer now.”

  “Hang on,” he said. And then, as if I’d argued, “Just hang on.”

  He exited, pointedly leaving the heavy door ajar. A few minutes passed, and then I heard the staccato beat of footsteps down the hall. Morton Frankel, led in cuffs, passed the open doorway, Kaden and Delveckio on either side. Catching sight of me, Frankel bucked against the detectives, elbows flaring, and glared in at me. Bruises ringed his eyes from when I’d broken his nose, and he stood stooped from my stabbing him in the thigh. A sheen covered his face, and he had sweat stains under his arms; they’d kept him under the lights. Seeming to relish the confrontation, the detectives gave him a moment.

  Frankel said, “I’m gonna gouge out your eyes and skull-fuck your head.”

  He lunged at me, causing me to jump up. My chair clattered over. Laughing, the detectives yanked him from view, and I heard Kaden ordering someone else to get him to Booking. Kaden and Delveckio returned, closed the door, and sat opposite me. Kaden’s eyes went to my knee, which was jackhammering up and down from the scare, and his lips pressed together in a smirk. From his watch it was already two o’ clock.

  “Good detective work,” Kaden said. “At his place our boys found a rape kit in a footlocker—ski mask, flashlight, pick set, cloth gags, plastic flex-cuffs, the whole nine yards. And the boy was just sentimental enough to keep a few trophies—a scarf, bathrobe sash, bracelet.” He paused, bit his lips. “Only one problem, Danner. One of his hair samples we have on record was from an attack he committed the night of January twenty-two under the Redondo Pier. Around, say, eleven o’ clock. That time and date ring a bell?”

  When Kasey Broach was kidnapped.

  Disappointment came in a rush. I sagged back in my chair.

  Delveckio gave me a wan grin. “So unless Frankel chartered a helicopter to make his rounds that evening, that pretty well puts him out of contention.”

  “Who borrowed his car?” I asked.

  “We’re looking into it,” Kaden said. “But we’re assuming he needed it to get to Redondo to rape Lucy Padillo.”

  “That was the car,” I said. “The dent on the right panel, everything.”

  Delveckio threw the matchbook on the table in front of me. “We had the lab take a look at this. No prints, which strikes us as a bit odd, given that it is a matchbook. But you’ll like this part even better: The handwriting didn’t match Frankel’s. Know whose it matched?”

  Kaden smiled. “Yours.”

  I opened my mouth but realized I had not a single goddamned thing to say.

  “You’re chasing a phantom all right, Danner.” Kaden unfolded a photocopy—the matchbook note next to a sample of my handwriting, pulled from a DMV form I’d filled out sometime last year. Matching characteristics
of the letters had been circled in red. At a glance it made a convincing argument.

  “Block letters are the easiest to forge,” I said quietly. I didn’t know this to be true, but it sounded good, and I had the force of desperation on my side.

  Kaden and Delveckio looked at me like well-intentioned friends about to point out that my belt didn’t match my loafers.

  “Right,” Kaden said, “and good ol’ Mort takes a crash course in forensic handwriting after his shift stamping metal.”

  “But congratulations,” Delveckio said with false cheeriness, “you caught a rapist, helped us close a case. So you’re in the clear.”

  He offered his hand, but I knew better than to take it.

  They both chuckled heartily.

  Kaden said, “It doesn’t quite work that way, as we tried to explain. You refused to walk the line, and now we have you on obstruction of justice, assault and battery, a couple B& Es. We asked you nicely, we asked you not nicely, and we warned you that this would wind up in the shit. But you were too busy playing gumshoe to think we were serious. That there would be consequences. So we’re gonna charge you. Because, see, we’re curious why you’re so desperate to hang Kasey Broach’s murder on someone else. You’ve got your taped alibi, fine, but we’re gonna connect the dots, because we know they’re there to be connected. And while we’re busy doing that, we’re gonna leave you in general pop over in Twin Towers.”

  Kaden stood and gripped my arm hard at the biceps. He led me out into the hall. What was I supposed to do? Kick and scream? Fight?

  We rode the elevator down, then drove across to Twin Towers. They tugged me out, me moving numb on my feet, not fully believing they’d put me in the fish tank with murderers and rapists but believing it at the same time. I was prodded into Tower One. The building’s hexagonal shape, contributing to the much-touted panoptic design, turned the interior into a house of reflections, each module faced and flanked by its multiple mirror image. The smell of the building had been singed into memory, bringing me back to those infinite four months. The stained concrete, the metallic din, the echo of wall-muffled shouts and clangs. The thick air took up bitter residence at the back of my throat.

  “You have to charge me first,” I said, “and let me call my lawyer.”

  The detectives left their Glocks in the gun lockers, and we passed through the double security doors into the no-man’s-land of Sheriff’s deputies with their tan-and-green uniforms and holstered pepper spray. Beyond one more gate of bars, I saw the inmates circling the vast rec room, talking shit, their too-loud laughter edged with aggression. Frankel wasn’t among them, but he would likely be soon. While two cohorts watched, a prisoner with a shaved head and a goatee leaned up against a skinny black kid, pinning him to a barred window. A ripple of awareness passed through the group, heads swiveling to the gate, to me behind it.

  I twisted my arm free. “This is bullshit. You can’t do this.”

  Kaden unlocked my handcuffs. The deputy nodded at a colleague behind ballistic glass, and then the gate hummed pleasantly and he drew it aside and gave me a little shove. I knew better than to turn back pleading, so I stood and faced the others. The rec room was deep, at least a hundred blue jumpsuits dotting the metal benches and hanging from the pull-up and dip bars. The air was still, un-cooled, and the heat from all those sweltering, stressed-out bodies vibrated the air like a low, sustained note.

  Behind me the gate closed with steel finality.

  Maybe fifteen convicts drew toward me, interest piqued. A man with matching crosses branded into his forearms stepped out in front, stretching his fingers wide as if flexing them. I moved to the side, putting concrete at my back as the others spread strategically and began their approach.

  40

  The inmate with branded forearms smiled, his red mustache seeming to spread, and he feinted at me. I jabbed, missing badly.

  The others whistled and laughed, and someone said, “Regular Mike Tyson.”

  “Shit,” one of the black inmates corrected, “white boy a regular Jack Dempsey, you gonna poke fun.”

  Another guy came from my left, and I swung hard, clipping his chin, my momentum throwing me off balance. The inmate with the brands slipped in from my right, tying me up from behind in a bear hug, his body pressed to mine, stale cigarette breath puffing across my cheek. Pivoting, throwing elbows, I tried to get in a blow, but he lifted me off my feet, and then I hit the cold concrete and saw scores of white canvas shoes shuffling in swiftly for me.

  There was a bang of steel, and then the crowd dispersed, my attacker pried off me. Two deputies at his side, Kaden hauled me up and hustled me out, down a corridor, onto an elevator, where he and Delveckio stood silently on either side of me like executives getting off work. Before my breathing had slowed, they’d moved me through the lobby and out into the bright afternoon.

  Kaden stuck his finger in my cheek. “Let us give you some pointed advice. You are to stay the fuck away from this investigation. Entirely. No. Let me correct. From all investigations and all LAPD activities. Understood?”

  My breath was still hammering through me. “Understood.”

  Delveckio shoved a shoe box into my chest, filled with my personals. The glass doors glinted, and they were gone. I took a few unsteady steps and sat on a planter.

  Two seconds of still, and then I began shaking violently.

  People passed oblivious, discussing weekend plans, complaining about coffee.

  After a few minutes, I was able to pull together my thoughts. My handwriting on the skull-and-bones matchbook? Maybe I was further gone than I’d imagined. But there was evidence, also, to the contrary. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. In fact, it would be easier to frame someone on perpetual edge.

  The night of Kasey Broach’s murder, Morton Frankel had been busy raping another party. But he’d been set up as Broach’s murderer, just like me. Was he the backup fall guy? Or had he been framed as the guy framing me? Was he really after me? Or was I being set up to take him out? There I was, hanging off the ledge in the treadmill shot from Vertigo.

  Finally I fished my cell phone from the shoe box and punched in Chic’s number.

  He answered on a half ring.

  “Pick me up,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  I’d settled considerably by the time Chic got there, but the thought of those unprotected minutes in the jail rec room still sent acid washing through my stomach.

  Chic pulled up and said, “I’m getting tired of picking you up from jail.”

  “Pretend you’re my pimp.”

  “Talk about your low-wage jobs.”

  When I explained that I had given the hair sample to Johnny Ordean, Chic just shook his head. “Come on, Drew-Drew. That’s minor leagues. You know better than to entrust a piece of evidence to someone who’s hysterical by vocation.”

  “What should I have done?”

  “I’m sure someone knows someone in the paternity-testing biz who could’ve run a hair. It’s quiet where it’s shady. Not under the klieg lights.”

  Not for the first time, I wished that I had been born with Chic’s sense.

  We drove for a while in silence as I ran through my next move in my head.

  My cell phone rang—Preston, desperate for an update. I brought him up to speed, and then Chic started talking in my free ear, so I clicked on the speakerphone.

  We all started talking at the same time; Preston, of course, prevailed. “So, fine, you were framed, Mort was framed. You’re missing the point.”

  “That’s what I been trying to tell him,” Chic said. “If Mort ain’t your guy—”

  “Then why’d he act so bizarrely hostile toward you?”

  Annoyed by their ebony-and-ivory routine, I took a moment to respond.

  But Chic didn’t give me a moment. “Because homeboy thought you was framing him.”

  “He’s on the wrong side of the story, just like you are,” Preston said
. “You’re still not asking the key question. And that is—”

  Preston and Chic, now side by side on the piano keyboard: “Who framed Mort?”

  Chic stared at me expectantly. Static from Preston. Clearly they were better at posing questions than coming up with answers. We sat in frustration for a few moments before Preston signed off. The silence that followed felt like defeat.

  My Highlander was parked on the dirt shoulder off Mulholland where it had been left.

  Chic gave me a wink as I climbed out. “Call when you find what you find.”

  I’d left the moonroof shoved back, and the seats gave off a deep warmth. Closing my eyes, I worked every link in the case like a rosary. How was I gonna know who would have a motive to frame Mort? I didn’t know anything about him. I stared at the view, the world’s most expansive dead end. It dawned on me by degrees—Preston and Chic’s motive approach was wrongheaded. It came down to opportunity.

  Not why would somebody have framed Mort? But who could have?

  I pictured that telltale dent on the right front wheel well of Frankel’s Volvo. My mind kept realigning the data, and I didn’t like what it was coming up with.

  I called the hospital and asked to be put through to Big Brontell’s unit.

  An unreasonably pleasant clerk answered. “I’m sorry, he stepped out for a bite. He’ll be back shortly.”

  I left my cell-phone number, which she kindly jotted down, and then I drove the remaining two miles home. Xena had pulled my high-tops from the coat closet and chewed the toes to a pulp, but last night she’d likely saved my life, which I figured worth a pair of Nikes. I reheated some taco meat and put it in her salad-bowl dish to reward her for her bad behavior. Then I went to my office and got the murder book and all the notes I’d gathered on the investigation.

  I was halfway down the stairs when I stopped, went back up, and grabbed my manuscript.