Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

The 737 passed off my left wingtip at a distance of less than two miles. I could see an Eskimo’s face painted on the vertical stabilizer. Alaska Airlines. I wondered how many Eskimos were on board. My guess was zero.

* * *

I checked the answering machine in my office at the airport after landing. There were no messages. Not that I expected any. OK, that’s a lie. I had hoped that maybe Savannah would’ve called to offer a truce. But I suppose she could have just as easily called me on my cell phone. She hadn’t done that, either.

Kiddiot was asleep in the oak tree when I got home. I told him that I’d missed him and encouraged him to come down and share some quality time. He raised his head, yawned, and went back to sleep. My punishment for having abandoned him.

“He wouldn’t touch his food,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, dragging a trash bag out her back door. “I’m telling you, that is one persnickety cat.”

I took the bag from her despite her insistence that she was perfectly capable of taking out her own garbage and deposited it in a can out in the alley.

“By the way, somebody else came by looking for you,” she said when I walked back into the yard through the gate. “Not the hunky bill collector, either.”

“Who was it?”

“I didn’t ask. But I’ll tell you one thing: whoever he was, he was no fan of yours. Some piece of work, this schmuck. He wanted to know where you were. Tells me he’s your friend. So I say to him, ‘If you’re his friend, you must know where he is. You don’t gotta ask me.’ Then he gives me this look, like Paul Muni in Scarface, you know, the original, before the remake, the one with – what the blazes is his name?”

“Al Pacino?”

“Al Pacino – always screaming! Every movie like a human steam whistle, this man. OK, Mr. Top of Your Lungs, we know your vocal cords work. What else did you get for Hanukkah? Paul Muni never had to raise his voice. Not once. Now, there was an actor. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: his name wasn’t Muni. It was Meier – Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund. And I don’t have to tell you what kind of name that is. That’s right. Paul Muni was Hebrew! Lauren Bacall, too, and Kirk Douglas. And William Shatner! Not to mention Mr. Spock.”

“Not to change the subject, Mrs. Schmulowitz, but could we please go back to the schmuck who came to see me?”

“The schmuck. Right. So anyway, again he asks me, ‘Where is he?’ Meaning you. So I tell him, ‘Listen, buster brown, if you don’t get off my porch in the next five seconds, I’m calling the cops.’ He gives me that look again, like I’m supposed to be afraid, then turns around and leaves. A real shtik fleish mit tzvei eigen, that one.”

The man she described was dusky, five-foot-ten, maybe taller, 180 pounds or so.

“Built like a wide receiver,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said.

He wore sunglasses, blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, untucked, and a yellow ball cap with the logo of a cow on it.

“You sure it was a cow?”

Mrs. Schmulowitz smirked. “I may not come from a long line of farmers, Bubeleh, but I do know what a cow looks like.”

“What about his car? What did that look like?”

“Small. White. With fancy schmancy wheels, and one of those things on the back.”

“Things?”

“Like a race car.”

“A spoiler?”

“Spoiler, schmoiler. One of those things. Like a wing.”

I asked her if the car could’ve been a Honda.

“What do I know from a Honda?” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “All these cars today. A New Yorker. A Buick Regal. Now, those were cars!”

White. Small. With fancy schmancy wheels. And one of those things on the back. It sounded suspiciously like the car that had pursued me from the airport before I left for Los Angeles.

Kiddiot climbed down from the tree with slow caution, one paw after the other, and jumped the last couple of feet to the ground. He rubbed up against Mrs. Schmulowitz’s legs, making little chirping noises. When he was finished showing my landlady how much he was into her, he sauntered toward me – and trotted past without stopping, straight into the garage. I made a note to self: no more cat toys for Kiddiot from the clearance bin at Petco. No more Taco Bell leftovers, either. Not until he showed me some love, too.

“Some nerve,” Mrs. Schmulowitz observed. “After all you’ve done for him.”

* * *

You don’t need an appointment at Primo’s on Cortez Avenue in downtown Rancho Bonita. You walk in and climb into Primo’s ancient barber chair, assuming it’s otherwise unoccupied. Primo hands you a well-worn Playboy without asking and pins a sanitary neck strip around your neck. He takes a cutting smock and flaps it high into the air, the way matadors flap capes, then lets it settle gently around your shoulders while you thumb through the magazine. He raises the chair with a few pumps of the pneumatic lift, pivots you so you’re facing the mirror, and then, standing beside you, comb and scissors at the ready, asks, “So, how would you like your hair cut today?” Then he proceeds to ignore your detailed instructions and cuts your hair the way he thinks it should be cut, which is usually not half-bad. For fifteen bucks, including a beard trim and a five-minute neck rub, you can’t go wrong.

Business was slow that morning. Primo was sitting in the chair, his own jet-black hair pomaded and perfectly combed as usual, wearing his usual spotless sky-blue Mexican wedding shirt. The bell jingled over the door. Primo looked up from the latest issue of Boxing Monthly.

“Que pasa, Logan?”

“How’ve you been, champ?”

“It’s all good, boss.”

Primo got up out of his barber chair, a little stiff, befitting a sixty-one-year-old former fighter. I settled into the chair. The comfortable brown leather seat was warm and bowed like an old swayback horse. He handed me a Playboy.

After the sanitary strip had been pinned in place and the smock settled down around me, he said, “And how would we like our haircut today?”

“In silence,” I said, perusing Miss February. “Need to catch up on my reading.”

“In silence it shall be,” Primo said.

Our little joke.

Primo and I rarely talked while he worked his magic on my tresses. We liked it that way, content in each other’s company. No need to humor or impress. He’d been a pretty good welterweight in his prime, I gleaned from what little of his career he’d shared with me. His nose was bent like the blade of a hockey stick – a souvenir from a summer night forty years earlier when he’d gone twelve rounds with Pipino Cuevas at the Fabulous Forum. The crowd cheered, “Primo! Primo! Primo!” over and over as he stood toe-to-toe with the younger, stronger Cuevas, giving as good as he got, only to loose on a split decision. Every writer sitting ringside that night said it was a con job. But it didn’t matter to Primo. He’d gone the distance with the champion when every bookie from Reno to Tijuana swore the match wouldn’t last two minutes.

He got out barber shears and a clean comb from a drawer while I read all about Miss February. I was old enough to be her father. Snip-snip-snip. Primo circled me like he was still in the ring, clipping and combing. The shop was redolent of bay rum and Aqua Velva. My scalp tingled pleasurably. I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. Fifteen minutes later, we were done.

He handed me a mirror to check the back of my head. I nodded my approval and gave him twenty bucks. He deposited the bill in an old cigar box and took out a five spot.

“Keep the change.”

Primo forced the bill into my hand. “No way, boss.”

“It’s called a tip, Primo.”

“You ain’t been in for a cut in three months, Logan. That tells me you gotta be more hard up than me. So you keep it. Spend it on your lady. Buy her some flowers or something.”

I made a joke about him not realizing how much flowers cost these days.

“Don’t matter how much they cost. Just get ’em. It’ll make her feel good,” Primo said. “The thing you always gotta remember about women is this: at any given moment, they are what they feel.”

Primo’s version of a fortune cookie. Every customer got one on their way out the door, whether they wanted it or not.

“I have no idea what that means, champ.”

“Go buy yourself a copy of Cosmo,” Primo said. “Probably do you some good.”

He was right. It probably would’ve helped, if I’d actually had a woman in my life. One particular woman, anyway.

ELEVEN

They say meditation is an adventure in self-discovery. It’s supposed to bring one a sense of fullness, of completion. It is, according to those who swear by its power, the eternal essence of nature taking on the order of the universe within the mortal human frame. Whatever the hell that means.

I’ve tried sitting and meditating. The sit-stand method of meditation. The recliner-chair method. I’ve tried mirror gazing. All with no joy. While I wait for the indescribable bliss that the earth is supposed to unleash upon those who meditate with sincerity and patience, my head is filled with questions like, “Who do the Broncos play Sunday?” or “Does anyone really know what Jell-O is made of?” or “I wonder what Savannah is doing right now?”

Savannah. It always seemed to come back to Savannah.

I was sitting lotus-like on the sand at Jenkins Beach, trying to become one with the universe and failing miserably. In the haze, the oil platforms two miles offshore resembled aircraft carriers. A jogger ran past me, her path paralleling the retreating tide line. She was petite, mid-twenties, with sinewy legs and a strong, determined face more handsome than pretty. Her chestnut hair was pulled back in a severely tight ponytail that flapped side-to-side like a metronome, the way Savannah’s hair did, when we used to go running together.

I shut my eyes and tried to focus on my inner self. “I am not this library of memories. I have no history. I have no biography.” I repeated it over and over, my self-inquiry incantation. “I am the space. I have always been the space, and I crush these bonds of attachment now.”

But it was no use. The universe and I definitely were not one.

My phone rang. The caller ID said Savannah Echevarria. She was angry with me. What else was new?

“First, you tell my father you think his business partner killed Arlo—”

“—I never said that.”

“Then, you have the audacity to tell him that Miles Zambelli did it?”

“I never said that, Savannah.”

“Well, you certainly insinuated it!”

“You asked me to help. I’m trying to.”

“I asked you to go to the police. I didn’t ask you to piss off everybody. You need to stop asking all these questions.”

“Why? Because you’re afraid of what I’ll find out?”

The anxiety in her voice was undeniable. “Just stop. Please. Before it’s too late.”

She hung up.

I sat on the beach the rest of the afternoon, staring at the waves, trying to comprehend her words. Before it’s too late. Why did Savannah want me to back off when she’d been so adamant that I get involved to begin with? I thought of Primo’s advice: At any given moment, a woman is what she feels. Savannah’s fear was palpable. But why? What had happened in the interim between her begging me to tell the police what I knew about Echevarria, and her insisting that I stop asking questions about who may have killed him? The answer had to be in the kind of questions I was asking. Or the people I was asking them to.

I called Buzz. Dangling the promise of a gift certificate to Dave and Buster’s, I asked him to check the records for me on Miles Zambelli. Buzz said he’d get back to me.

I drove a circuitous route to the airport, checking my mirrors frequently, my gun tucked between my legs. Nobody followed me.

* * *

Larry’s hangar was empty. He’d gone for the night. There were two messages on my answering machine. The first was from Eugen Dragomir, my one and only prospective student pilot. His father was rushing him a check made out in my name for $5,000. Eugen would be by with the money as soon as it arrived. I allowed myself a smile. Another five grand on top of the twenty-five large from Carlisle. I vowed not to tell Kiddiot. Knowing him, he would definitely demand I buy him more cat toys.

The second message was from Lamont Royale. He said he needed to speak with me urgently. I called him at the number he left. It took him several rings to answer.

“I’m in the middle of something,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Let me get back to you.”

“I’ll be here.”

I sat down at my desk and reread the paid death notice Savannah placed in the Times after Echevarria died.

He was born in Oakland in 1961. Bullshit. The Arlo Echevarria I knew was born in Guatemala and emigrated at age five, crossing the border at Calexico with his mother, both hidden behind the driver’s seat of a tractor-trailer truck hauling cantaloupes up from Zacatecas. They’d settled in San Diego and later Oceanside, where Echevarria’s mother found work cleaning the bachelor officers’ quarters at Camp Pendleton. The Marines made a lasting impression on Echevarria. He would enlist in the Corps on his seventeenth birthday.

He earned a business degree from San Francisco State. Like hell. The only college Echevarria ever graduated from was what we in Alpha jokingly referred to as the “University of Direct Action.” Like the rest of us, he’d earned a bachelor’s in close quarters battle and a PhD in “Look at Me so Much as Sideways and I Will Fucking Blow Your Shit Away.”

He’d built a successful international trading company. The trading company was little more than a mail drop in a three-story Art Deco office building on Geary Street with gilded styling and a terra cotta exterior, a half-mile west of downtown San Francisco. An outsourced answering service in New Delhi fielded incoming telephone traffic. The operators were instructed to say that Mr. Echevarria was “in a sales meeting” and to take a message whenever anyone called.

“He is survived by his loving and devoted wife and soul mate, Savannah… Spare me. To have a soul mate, one first needs a soul. Arlo Echevarria had no soul as far as I was concerned, not after wrecking my marriage. There were times, sure, when I stepped on my own meat in the course of the marriage, but that didn’t give him the right to leave his wife and take mine, even if mine ultimately chose to go willingly. As a fellow operator, Echevarria should’ve kept his hands off my wife in the same way I kept my hands off his. Not that I was even for a moment attracted to his wife. The Janice Echevarria I remembered from the few times I’d met her was a foul-mouth she-devil with too much mascara and too little regard for her husband’s welfare beyond how much money he brought home. Under the circumstances, I suppose I couldn’t much blame Echevarria for having made a play for Savannah. Then again, maybe I could.

I folded Echevarria’s death notice and returned it to the belly drawer of my desk. I thought about what Miles Zambelli had told me in the limo driving in from North Vegas, how Janice Echevarria, Arlo’s first wife, had abundant reasons for wanting him dead. The planet is thick with divorced people who secretly wish such ill on their former spouses. Very few, fortunately, ever attempt to carry out those fantasies.

My office phone rang. It was Lamont Royale, calling from a very loud casino. He said he had hoped to talk to me in confidence while I was still in Las Vegas, but that would’ve been impossible. Carlisle, he said, planted listening devices everywhere, including all of his automobiles.

“I have some… on… Mr. – ” Lamont said.

I could barely hear him above the din of carnival music and the metallic clink-clink-clink of slot machines paying out.

“Say again?”

He repeated himself, only louder and slower. “I have some information on Mr. Echevarria’s murder.”

Something thudded heavily just then against the concrete floor to my left, caromed off my trash can, and came to rest near my feet. I looked down: the object resembled the kind of cardboard roll toilet paper comes on, only metal and painted olive drab, with a big metal cap on each end. A stun grenade.

“Five-banger,” I thought to myself.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

A succession of deafening but otherwise harmless explosions meant to shock, not kill, rocked the hangar, as helmeted SWAT officers in green Nomex flight suits from the Rancho Bonita PD came swarming in with short-barrel shotguns and MP-9 submachine guns. They were yelling “On the ground!” and “Get on the ground!” and “Lemme see your hands!” and it looked like they couldn’t wait to put a bullet in somebody, anybody. I sat with my hands folded placidly on my desk so that somebody wouldn’t be me. Two seconds later, I was kissing the concrete, gun barrels jammed against my head, knees against my back, while my arms were yanked painfully behind me and my wrists handcuffed. I noticed there were many dust bunnies under my desk and a ballpoint pen I’d been hunting for more than a month. I remember thinking to myself, I really do need to do some cleaning around here.

The police yelled, “Clear!” and two SWAT officers hoisted me up off the floor by my armpits. A third frisked me, a big, jarheadlooking dude with freckles.

“I’d offer you coffee,” I said to the lawmen, “but, one, I don’t have any, and, two, you guys look like you’re already way over-caffeinated.”

It wasn’t hard to find the two-inch revolver stuck in my belt. Freckles handed the weapon to his sergeant, then finished patting me down.

“He’s clean,” Freckles said. The officers who’d hoisted me off the floor slammed me back down into my desk chair.

Czarnek and Windhauser strolled in as if on cue.

“Five-banger,” I said to the detectives. “A little overkill, don’t you think?”

Windhauser propped his ass on the corner of my desk, planted a cowboy-booted foot up on my chair, and squinted hard at me, arms folded, while Czarnek read me my Miranda rights from a little laminated card. I told them I understood my rights. I was happy to talk. The entertainment value alone would make the conversation more than worthwhile.

Windhauser smoothed the ends of his Wyatt Earp moustache with his thumb and index finger and said, “We know you killed him, Logan.”

“Killed who?”

“You know who.”

“You play games with us, Mr. Logan,” Czarnek said, working his Nicorette, “and I guarantee you, it’s gonna go a lot harder on you than you can ever possibly imagine.”

They had on the same winter-weight wool sport coats they wore the last time I’d seen them. Same color shirts. Same ties.

“Dragnet called,” I said. “They’d like their wardrobe back.”

Windhauser grunted.

“We spoke to your ex-wife,” Czarnek said. “She confirmed you were quite upset with Mr. Echevarria as far as the two of them getting, you know, romantically involved.”

“Guilty as charged.”

The two detectives looked at each other. This was starting out better than they’d planned.

“So, you’re saying you did do him?” Windhauser said.

“I’m saying I was upset. I didn’t say I killed him – not that I didn’t frequently consider it.”

Another look between them.

“Lemme spell it out for you,” Windhauser said. “We got a warrant to search for the murder weapon. So we’re gonna toss this place – I mean, rip it the fuck up. We don’t find the weapon here, we’re gonna toss your apartment cuz we got a warrant for it, too, OK? And if we don’t find it there, we’re gonna rip up your airplane. Then we’re gonna rip up your truck. We don’t find the gun by then, we’re gonna come back and start all over again. So why don’t you just do yourself and everybody else a favor and tell us where it’s at.”

“You guys need some new threads,” I said. “I mean, tweed is so three years ago.”

Windhauser exhaled. He got up, took a couple of steps toward the door, then turned and pointed a finger at me. “You think you’re so fucking smart. Lemme tell you something, chuck wagon, this is gonna go south on you in a hurry unless you start singing another tune.”

“Did you just call me chuck wagon?”

The SWAT sergeant stepped in. “We found this on him,” he said, showing Windhauser my little revolver. “Bad boy was fully loaded.”

Freckles and his sergeant shared a celebratory fist bump. The murder weapon had been recovered. Case closed.

“It’s Miller time,” Freckles said.

Windhauser stared up at the ceiling and rubbed the vein in his forehead.

“Maybe if you morons had bothered to read the warrant, you’d know the weapon is a .40-cal semi-auto, not some fucking wheel gun! I don’t even know why we even bothered calling you people in to assist. I mean, Jesus Christ!” He shouldered past Freckles and out of the hangar.

The Rancho Bonita sergeant looked forlorn enough at having been put in his place by the big city detective that for a moment I thought he might start crying. He handed my revolver to Czarnek who tucked it in his sport coat, dug a fresh toothpick out of the breast pocket of his shirt and began picking his teeth.

“We checked with your landlady,” he said. “She confirmed you and her have dinner Monday nights during football season. Only she has no specific recollection of the night Echevarria was killed.”

“We had pot roast with carrots and potatoes. The gravy was excellent. No lumps.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure it was delicious but, see, here’s the deal: if the old lady can’t remember eating with you that night, and you got no other alibi, then we got no choice but to start looking for that semi-auto. Unless you want to tell us where it is.”

“Look in the desk.”

Czarnek cocked his head and his eyebrow, intrigued. “It can’t be that easy.” He pulled open a side drawer and started tearing through it like a kid opening a present on Christmas Day.

“Belly drawer,” I said.

He shut the drawer he was rummaging through and opened the one I’d told him to check. Inside were mostly aircraft maintenance records and FAA paperwork. Czarnek found the photo of Echevarria and me, posing with the dead Arab.

“Your ex-wife showed us this picture,” he said. “You Photoshop this?”

“Photoshop. Right. I’m still trying to figure out how to retrieve email.”

Czarnek set the picture aside and dug deeper through the drawer.

“No gun,” he said when he was finished.

“Never said there was a gun.”

“Then what the hell was I just looking for?”

“Receipt.”

“A receipt?”

“One pint of vanilla ice cream, one frozen apple pie, and, if I recall correctly, six cans of Fancy Feast cat food.”

Czarnek spit his gum into my trash can. “OK,” he said. “I’ll bite.”

“Mrs. Schmulowitz forgot dessert that night,” I said. “She sent me out at halftime – which, according to your records, would’ve been just about when Echevarria got shot. I walked over to the Portola Street Market, a couple blocks from my apartment. Owner’s name is Kang. Good guy, except he’s an Oakland Raider fan. Kang’ll remember me being there that night. He remembers everything.”

Czarnek looked at me questioningly, then went back through the belly drawer to find the computerized cash register receipt. The date and time stamp confirmed that I’d made my purchase within five minutes of when Echevarria’s neighbors began calling 911 to report gunshots.

“Without traffic, Echevarria’s house is a good hour and a half drive from Rancho Bonita,” I said. “Even if I’d flown there that night, I would’ve had to land at Van Nuys, then rent a car or take a taxi. There’s no way I could’ve been there and at Kang’s market within a span of five minutes. Unless, of course, I was Carlos Castaneda.”

“Who’s Carlos Castaneda?”

“The whole Mesoamerican, shamanism thing, being in two places at once?”

Czarnek gazed at me blankly.

“Forget it,” I said.

He conceded that there was no way any prosecutor would ever file murder charges against me, not with the receipt he had in his hand, and not after Kang, the owner of the market, vouched for my whereabouts that night.

“I do find it a little strange, you keeping receipts from the corner grocery store,” Czarnek said.

“My landlady’s thinking of taking flying lessons. As a prospective student, the pie and ice cream are legitimate business expenses.”

Czarnek glanced at the receipt. “What about the cat food?”

“Cat’s narcoleptic, not to mention the fact he has the IQ of a houseplant. I’m fairly confident the FAA would never issue him a pilot’s license.”

Czarnek probably would’ve laughed if the LAPD didn’t have an image to maintain. He tucked the receipt back in the belly drawer of my desk. Then he unhooked the cuffs.

* * *

Windhauser wasn’t happy about his partner wanting to cut me loose. He theorized that I could’ve cooked up a cover story by having somebody go to Kang’s market and get a time-stamped receipt for me, while I was really down in LA, murdering Echevarria. Windhauser even insisted that Czarnek drive us over to the Portola Street Market so that he could personally question Kang. I waited unobserved in the backseat of the detectives’ Crown Vic, the windows rolled down, and enjoyed the show.

Kang stood behind his cash register, arms folded, answering Windhauser’s questions while watching a strung-out speed freak in a hooded sweatshirt prowling the bread and donut aisle. Kang was a stout hardhead with shifting slits for eyes that missed nothing. He’d been a martial arts instructor in the South Korean Army. No would-be shoplifter ever made it out the door at Kang’s market on Portola Street in one piece. Ever.

He told Windhauser he was “100 percent positive” he’d seen me the night of the murder.

“Logan give me crap at halftime for being Raider fan. He funny dude. Good customer.”

“How can you be so sure it was halftime when he came in,” Windhauser said.

“Halftime, we talk. Game, I watch. No talking.”

“How do I know you’re not covering for him?”

Kang’s eye slits shifted from the meth head to Windhauser like the detective’s question was delivered in a foreign language.

“Maybe he calls in,” Windhauser speculated. “Maybe he says, ‘Hey, Kang, old buddy, do me a favor and ring me up some pie and whatnot and I’ll be by in a couple hours to pick it up.’ You figure the request is a little weird, but what the hell? The guy’s a good customer. Isn’t that what you just told me?”

“He buy ice cream and want me to put it under counter? Ice cream melt under counter.”

“The freezer. Whatever. I’m just saying.”

Kang shifted his eye slits back to the druggie, who was getting a little too intimate with a twelve-pack of Ding Dongs.

“You gonna buy those or have-a-sex with them?”

The tweaker looked over at the no-nonsense Korean shopkeeper and the no-nonsense bulge under Windhauser’s sport coat, and wisely returned the Ding Dongs to the shelf.

“Ice cream in a bag, under a-da counter,” Kang said to Windhauser, still watching the crank head. “You fuckin’ crazy, man.”

“Look,” Windhauser said, “you need to understand something here, chief. We’re conducting a homicide investigation. Let me repeat that: a homicide investigation, OK? I find out you’re providing false and misleading information, you’re on the first sampan back to Peking.”

Kang slowly shifted both eye slits back toward Windhauser like the battleship Missouri bringing all guns to bear.

“I’m Korean-American,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my store, chief.”

The detectives drove me the two blocks home. Windhauser said he still harbored suspicions, but conceded that there was no evidence to keep me in custody. Czarnek said he hoped there were no hard feelings and shook my hand. I offered to take them both sightseeing in my airplane. Forgive and forget, I always say. Well, maybe not always. Czarnek said he’d definitely think about it and gave me my gun back. Windhauser said nothing.

* * *

I returned Lamont Royale’s call the next morning and got his voice mail. If he had any insights as to who killed Echevarria, I told him, I was all ears. My next call was to Detective Czarnek. I asked him to fax me a copy of Echevarria’s autopsy report.

“I can’t do that,” Czarnek said.

“Sure you can. All you do is put some paper in the machine and hit send.”

“I’d have to clear it with my supervisor, and I don’t think he’d go for it.”

“I’m trying to help you, Detective.”

Czarnek exhaled. “I know.”

Kiddiot sat in front of his cat door and looked at it like he’d never seen it before, yowling mournfully to be let out. No use arguing with an animal that dumb. I opened the people door. He sauntered past my feet and into the backyard like he was the one doing me a big favor.

I asked Czarnek if the LAPD had any other suspects in the case. He cleared his throat and lowered his voice.

“You were it,” he said.

I could hear Windhauser’s voice in the background. He was bitching to someone about how much he’d been ripped off for termite repairs on his house.

“How many other homicides you guys working?” I asked Czarnek.

“I don’t even fucking know at this point,” the detective said. “Gangs are keeping us crazy busy right now. Big turf war going on. Pacoima Flats and Paxton Street Locos. Little punks. I’d like to take a bazooka to all of ’em.”

“I know a couple of places where you could pick one up cheap.”

“That story you rattled off at lunch the other day,” Czarnek said, “about you and Echevarria doing the Lord’s work. That true?”

“Well, if it wasn’t, it ought to be.”

There was a pause like he was thinking about it. Then he said, “Gimme your fax number.”

I had no fax number. Mainly because I had no fax machine. Couldn’t afford one. I gave Czarnek the number to Larry’s machine in the hangar instead.

Larry’s fax machine was broken. Something about the feeder mechanism. Every incoming page looked like it had gone through an accordion, then splotched black. Larry said he’d been intending to get the piece of crap fixed but lacked the necessary funds. Now that I’d finally paid him what I owed him in back rent, he could send it out for repair.

“I’ll get to it next week,” he said, bent over his workbench, tinkering with a troublesome magneto.

I called Czarnek back, told him my machine was on the fritz, and gave him the number for my “other fax.” I didn’t tell him I happened to share it with Kinko’s.

* * *

The seven-page report was waiting for me by the time I drove downtown to the copy shop a half-hour later. Czarnek had also faxed a copy of the LAPD’s preliminary investigation of Echevarria’s homicide, including witness statements.

“Interesting reading,” the clerk said.

“Only if you like blood and gore,” I said.