Текст книги "Fangs Out"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Five

Bunny the Human Doberman was waiting for me when I stepped outside the federal courthouse. The plaza was steaming in the late afternoon sun. So was Bunny.

“Mr. Dowd doesn’t much appreciate what you’re doing,” he said.

“What am I doing?”

“Asking questions. Stirring things up. Making him look bad, like he didn’t do his job ’cuz Dorian Munz lost big-time. There wasn’t nothing nobody could do for that dirt bag, anyway. The case was a dog from the git-go.”

“You got it all wrong, Bunny. I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

Bunny stared at me like I was speaking Swahili.

“Forget it. Have a lovely day.”

I tried to sidestep him, but he clamped his paw on the front of my shirt and yanked me close. His breath reeked of garlic chicken.

“Best thing you can do, homeboy, is go get in your ride and go back to wherever the fuck it is you came from, before somebody gets themselves seriously hurt.”

“You have exactly five seconds to remove your hand,” I said, “or I will. And I guarantee you, you won’t like my methods.”

“Is that right? Five seconds, huh? Then what, you gonna—”

I reached down, grabbed his croutons, and squeezed like I was muscling the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.

Bunny grunted involuntarily and held his breath. His eyes bulged.

“That probably wasn’t three seconds, was it? Gosh darn. My bad. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, Bunny – I hope you don’t mind me calling you Bunny, it’s just that I feel so close to you right now – but really, I wasn’t counting. Which is why I was never much good at touch football. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. You have to wait to rush the quarterback? What kind of dumbass rule is that? Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d very much appreciate you removing your hand from my shirt before it gets wrinkled.”

He let go of me, gasping for air, his face the color of eggplant. And I didn’t even have to say please.

“I’m gonna let you down now, Bunny, nice and slow, and we’re gonna pretend like we never met, OK?”

He nodded in agony, then vomited. The Buddha must’ve been looking out for me that day because the spatter missed me entirely.

I lowered him to the ground with one hand still clutching his groin, while unholstering his .50-caliber Desert Eagle with the other. “Holy Moses, what do you shoot with this thing, mastodons?” I released him and started walking. When I was about thirty feet away, I turned and yelled, “Hey, Bunny.”

He was curled like a fetus on the sidewalk, moaning, both hands clutching his throbbing love spuds. I made sure he could see me toss his gun into one of those big municipal trash cans – I may be many things, but I’m no thief – then waved bye-bye. The Human Doberman didn’t bother waving back.

Whatever became of basic civility?

* * *

Having a friend and former colleague who works for a big government spy agency means knowing someone who has the resources and savvy to find out virtually anything about anyone. I needed a home address for Janet Bollinger. It was for that reason I reached out to my buddy, Buzz.

“If you think I’m gonna access classified government files and go to Leavenworth, Logan, just so you can go chasing some strange piece of tail, you’re dreamin’,” Buzz said. “Why don’t you do what every other creepy stalker does these days – look her up on the Internet.”

“First of all, I’m not chasing some ‘strange.’ I’m working. Second of all, I’m out of town and I don’t have my laptop. I’m not asking you to compromise national security, Buzz. I’m asking you to check open source records and find me an address, that’s all.”

“You don’t have a cell phone?”

“It doesn’t have Internet service.”

“Everybody has the Internet on their phone these days, Logan. What century are you living in?”

“The one that requires me to make a choice between eating or paying for cell phone service features I can’t afford. Are you gonna help me or not?”

Buzz grunted. He was among my oldest friends, a salty, hard-charging Delta vet who had shown me the ropes when I’d first transferred into Alpha. Buzz had done more to help populate the streets of Paradise with demented martyrs than just about any operator alive or dead. He’d lost an eye to an RPG, gunning down the Libyan boy who’d launched it at him. The injuries, both emotional and physical, compelled him to trade field operations for an all-source analyst’s post. But neither his wounds nor his desk job dulled the kiss-my-hind end attitude that made him who he was.

“The Three Tenors,” Buzz said.

“The Three Tenors?”

“They’re opera stars, Logan, you uncultured lout.”

“I know who they are. What about ’em?”

“Buy me their concert CD, and I’ll run the address for you.”

“Since when did you become an opera fan?”

“Since my old lady decided it was high time I stopped walking around on my knuckles. Face it, Logan, you could stand to do a little less swinging from the trees yourself.”

“Next thing, you’ll be telling me you’re into ballet, too.”

“Ballet? Me? Christ, no. Ballet’s for pussies.”

“Your denial’s just a tad over the top, Buzz. But that’s cool. There’s no shame in liking ballet.”

“OK, so I like ballet – but you tell anybody, Logan, I swear to God, the fire department’ll have to use the Jaws of Life to remove my foot from your anus.”

“Chill, buddy, your secret’s safe with me. Three Tenors in concert for Janet Bollinger’s home address. Fair trade.”

“I probably would’ve run the address for free, you know, you son of a bitch.”

“You’re nothing if not a true humanitarian, Buzz.”

He made a sarcastic smooching sound and hung up.

* * *

Ruth Walker’s former co-worker, Janet Bollinger, lived just north of the Mexican border in Imperial Beach, among San Diego’s decidedly lesser suburbs. I drove my black rented SUV south down the Golden State freeway from downtown San Diego, got off eighteen minutes later on Palm Avenue and headed west, passing junk shops, tattoo parlors, and various meth heads and other zombies wandering the sidewalks with dazed, whacked-out faces.

Buzz had gotten back to me with Janet Bollinger’s address ten minutes after I called him. Though he didn’t reveal his sources, it was evident he’d tapped state DMV records – a big no-no in the federal intelligence community if such inquiries are made for other than official purposes, which in truth they are all the time. More than a few analysts and case officers have stepped on their meat running license plates after spotting some sweet young thing in the grocery store parking lot. Buzz, I was confident, had been around too long and was too savvy not to have covered his computer tracks. Along with Bollinger’s address, he passed along her recent driving record. She’d racked up one moving violation in the previous six months and been involved in a two-car, non-injury fender-bender in suburban El Cajon. The other car, Buzz mentioned offhand, was registered to one Hubert Bedford Walker of La Jolla.

“You’re kidding me.”

“About what?” Buzz said.

“Hubert Walker.”

“Who’s Hubert Walker?”

“Big war hero.”

“So am I, Logan, but I don’t hear you launching fireworks every time my name is mentioned.”

“That fender-bender with Walker, you got any further details? Any idea when it happened?”

“Two-seven May of this year. That’s all it shows.”

May 27. The day before Dorian Munz was executed.

“Anything else I can do for you today, Logan? Take a bullet for your sorry ass? Lose my pension?”

“Thanks, buddy. The Three Tenors are in the mail.”

“Yeah, right. And if you believe that…”

Buzz grunted and signed off.

* * *

Janet Bollinger resided in a tired, two-story four-plex at Calla Avenue and Florida Street. The place was less than a mile from the beach, but about a million miles from anything about which the Beach Boys ever waxed poetic. Steel security grates covered the doors and windows. Black asphalt covered the grounds. Plenty of off-street parking and not a single flower in sight. A home on the downside of life’s bell curve. I checked the bank of tarnished brass mailbox slots bolted to the front wall. The mailbox marked “B” had a slip of paper Scotch-taped to it. Printed in a woman’s careful hand it said, “J. Bollinger.”

Apartment B was on the first floor, on the east side of the building. I rapped on the door. There was no answer.

On the second floor landing directly above Bollinger’s apartment, a chubby, brown-skinned dude in his mid-twenties leaned with his forearms on the wrought-iron railing. He was shirtless and in boxer shorts, smoking a doobie. His underwear was blue and was adorned with little yellow San Diego Charger lightning bolts. A likeness of the Virgin, her hands outstretched, was inked across his flabby gut and man boobs. A tat that said “Esmeralda” in cursive script took up much of the left side of his neck. He eyed me with unbridled disdain.

“How do you think the Chargers’ll do this season?” I asked with my most disarming smile.

He shifted his gaze dismissively, sucking in some weed, and stared out at the ocean.

“I’m looking for the lady who lives downstairs.”

“Wouldn’t know nothin’ about it.”

“You haven’t seen her around today, have you?”

Silence.

“I’m not a cop, homeboy.”

“Like I said, wouldn’t know nothin’ about it.”

“Well, what do you know?”

He turned his head and spit, like it was meant for me, then looked back out at the ocean.

“Guess what? I know something.”

He looked back down at me. “Yeah? Whadda you know?”

“I know that the Buddha never claimed to be a god, which has to make you wonder: is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion, because every other major religion entails some essential form of theism, right? But not Buddhism, which many scholars consider non-theistic or even atheistic. Your thoughts?”

“Mierde.”

“What’s your name, homeboy?”

He glared down at me. “Pinche marica come mierda.”

Making friends wherever I go.

I climbed into the Escalade and went to find some coffee. I’d wait for Janet Bollinger to come home.

* * *

There was a McDonald’s on Palm Avenue a few blocks away. I ordered a small cup and took my time swilling it. It tasted like something that could’ve leaked out of the Exxon Valdez. I didn’t care. Coffee’s coffee. Anything else brewed from a bean is overpriced pretense.

I called Mrs. Schmulowitz to check on Kiddiot. He remained a no-show.

“He’s probably got a girlfriend out there somewhere,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “Don’t think I don’t know how all you tom-cats are, bubby. That kitty of yours, he reminds me of Irving, my third husband. Could be he’s Irving’s reanimation.”

“I think you mean ‘reincarnation,’ Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

“Carnation, animation, whatever. I’m telling you, to look at him, you would’ve sworn Irving had brain damage—‘The Schmo,’ my father called him. But lock the bedroom door and, oy, the man was a Hebrew Mount Vesuvius. The bimbos went after him like flies at a picnic. They never bothered me much, though. He’d get tired of the floozies after a couple days and come slinking back to me, just like your kitty’s gonna do.”

Mrs. Schmulowitz said she’d gone to the market and was already cooking the brisket she was confident would lure Kiddiot home. She promised to call as soon as he turned up.

“Gotta run, Bubeleh. I’m off to the doctor. We’re discussing post-op procedures. When this is all done, I’ll have the tummy of a thirteen-year-old Nubian princess. Who knows? Maybe I’ll finally get bat mitzvahed.”

“Give ’em hell, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

Two fork-tailed fighter jets streaked overhead, F/A-18 Hornets climbing in trail out of the Navy’s air station at North Island. Somebody once said that piloting a combat aircraft at high speed is like having sex in the middle of a car crash – dangerous, a total rush, and when it’s over, it’s over fast. They forgot to mention that once you’ve flown combat aircraft, nothing else compares. The Hornets banked north in a sweeping right turn and headed out to sea. I was watching them wistfully when my phone rang.

“Just checking to make sure you made it to San Diego OK.”

“If I hadn’t made it, Savannah, your call would have gone to voice mail, would it not?”

“You don’t have voice mail, Logan.”

She was correct. One more thing I couldn’t figure out on my phone.

“You made it down in one piece, though?”

“I wasn’t involved in any midair collisions, if that’s what you mean.”

“Why are you being so obnoxious to me?”

“Why do you think?”

“Logan, Arlo’s gone – and my relationship with him began dying long before he did. I feel like I’m ready to move on with my life. I’m hoping you are, too.”

“His dying didn’t wipe the slate clean, Savannah. Walking out of a marriage isn’t some computer game. You don’t reboot and start over.”

“I understand that.”

“No, Savannah. I don’t think you do.”

I’m not sure I understood, either. If a man is lucky, he meets that one woman in his life and is forever transformed. She becomes all he thinks about, even when she’s no longer his. It’s like a favorite song you love and come to hate because you can’t get it out of your head. I wanted Savannah out of my head. And, at the same time, that was the last thing I wanted.

“In any case,” she said, “I have a surprise.”

“I hate surprises.”

“I’m aware of that, Logan. But maybe you’ll like this one.”

“Fire away.”

“I’d like to come down to San Diego, to stay with you for awhile, see how it goes.”

“I thought you wanted to go to neutral corners.”

“I did. I thought about it, and now I’d like to try again. We don’t have to go to SeaWorld if you don’t want to. I admit, I was being…”

“Petulant?”

Her tone took a sharp turn. “If you don’t want me to come down, Logan, just say so.”

I took awhile to answer, my heart thumping in my ears, a thousand disparate thoughts swirling inside my head. But even as I ruminated, I knew what I planned to say.

“I want you to come down.”

“You sure?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”

“Good, because I already bought a ticket.”

She said she was catching an 8:30 P.M. train out of Los Angeles’ Union Station, scheduled to arrive in San Diego at 11:15. I suggested she bring along plenty to read, considering that Amtrak in Southern California runs on time about as often as the Dodgers win the World Series.

“Can’t wait,” she said.

“Makes two of us.”

The dinner hour was approaching by the time I returned to Janet Bollinger’s apartment building. I parked up the street and walked back, not wanting to arouse the attention of her pot-smoking, gangbanging neighbor for fear he might set off alarm bells, but he was gone. An older, dark green Nissan Sentra with a dented back bumper that had a faded Castle Robotics parking permit on it took up the space directly in front of Bollinger’s unit. I could see diffuse light behind the angled mini-blinds covering the front window. She’d come home. I knocked.

“Janet? Hello? Avon calling.”

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder this time. That’s when I heard it – a moan so faint that at first I mistook it for the breeze blowing in off the ocean. I turned the knob. The door opened.

“Janet?”

I stepped inside. The place was Crate & Barrel tidy. A chamois-colored sofa with modern lines and a matching love seat dominated the center of the living room. There was a small set of decorative wooden shelves crammed with a collection of about twenty ceramic Hummel figurines. Above them on the wall hung a grouping of six family photos in inexpensive black frames. On another wall was a psychedelic-colored poster of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

“Anybody home?”

From down a short hallway, a woman’s voice emanated faintly at the same instant my brain registered the distinctive coppery essence of freshly spilled blood.

“… Help me.”

I ran.

She was lying on her back. Slender, mid-thirties, shoulder-length auburn hair styled in what I suppose you’d call a shag. Her gray, pullover sweater was wet with red, as was the off-white Berber carpet beneath her.

“Please,” she mouthed silently, her eyes pleading.

I knelt, careful not to move her, and gently raised the sweater a few inches. Janet Bollinger had been stabbed in the upper abdomen. The seeping knife wound was deep and jagged at the edges, the result of what I assumed was a serrated blade.

“Hang tough, Janet. You’re gonna be fine. Stay awake now for me, OK?”

The bathroom was six feet away. I grabbed a hand towel off a rack near the door and yanked the floral comforter off her bed. Using the towel to apply pressure on the wound, I tucked the comforter around her as best I could to slow the onset of shock, then dialed my phone with my free hand.

“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?”

“A woman’s been stabbed. She needs an ambulance.”

The emergency dispatcher took down the address, then asked me my “relationship to the victim.”

“Concerned citizen,” I said and hung up.

The towel already was soaked with blood. Janet closed her eyes.

“No sleeping on the job. C’mon, now, Janet. Stay with me, sweetheart.”

She was too weak to respond. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow. I stroked her face softly while applying pressure with my other hand and waited for help to arrive.

There was nothing more I could do.

* * *

The paramedics arrived within three minutes. Janet Bollinger was en route to the emergency room less than five minutes later. Whether she would survive the six-mile drive to the nearest hospital, in neighboring Chula Vista, was anyone’s guess. The rescue crew loaded her into the ambulance in grim silence. I shared their unspoken skepticism. Like them, I too had seen my share of gravely wounded individuals.

“You say you knocked on Ms. Bollinger’s door the second time you came back and it was unlocked?”

“Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that’s what I just said.”

San Diego County Sheriff’s Detective Alicia Rosario cocked an eyebrow at my insolent response to her question as she jotted notes on a reporter’s pad. She was pretty in a cop kind of way. Black slacks, black pumps, black silk blouse, her black hair cut cancer-survivor short. Under her black leather jacket, below her left armpit, a nickel-plated, 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson rode in a hand-tooled leather shoulder rig.

Her prematurely balding partner, Detective Kurt Lawless was decked out in a charcoal gray suit, white oxford-cloth dress shirt, button-down, pink polka-dotted necktie, and burgundy wing tips buffed to a high shine. He looked like a magazine advertisement for Brooks Brothers.

“What I still don’t get,” Lawless said, studying my driver’s license as the three of us stood outside Janet Bollinger’s apartment, “is what you were doing down here in Imperial Beach, when you live all the way up in Rancho Bonita.”

I wiped Janet Bollinger’s blood from my hands with a towelette from Kentucky Fried Chicken I found in my pocket and repeated what I’d already told the two detectives. How Bollinger’s testimony had helped send Dorian Munz to death row. How Munz, before he was executed, had implicated Gary Castle in the slaying of Bollinger’s friend, Ruth Walker. And how Ruth’s war hero father had hired me to help refute Munz’s last-minute claim that the wrong man had been convicted of murdering her.

“Ruth Walker,” Lawless said. “Never heard of her.”

“The story was all over the local news last month, from what I hear. Maybe you were on vacation. Shopping on Savile Row, no doubt. Nice threads, by the way. They must pay you guys pretty well.”

Lawless glared and handed me back my driver’s license.

It was easy to understand his knowing nothing about Ruth Walker’s murder. She’d been killed probably long before either Lawless or Rosario, both in their mid-thirties, became homicide detectives. And even though Munz had been executed only a few weeks earlier, and the story was widely reported, who under the age of seventy reads a daily newspaper these days or, for that matter, watches TV news? Moreover, Munz had been prosecuted by the feds. If you’re a local cop, federal cases might just as well be tried on the moon.

“So,” Detective Rosario said, “just so I’m clear, you say you’re staying with Mr. Walker, you drive down here intending to speak with Ms. Bollinger, to get her to give you some sort of statement saying this Dorian Munz individual was a liar. Ms. Bollinger’s not home, so you go to McDonald’s to wait. You come back approximately thirty minutes later. You hear a moan inside. Door’s unlocked. You take it upon yourself to enter, whereupon you find Ms. Bollinger bleeding on the bedroom floor.”

“I’d say that about sums it up.”

“But you didn’t stab her, right?” Lawless said.

“Why would I stab her?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Logan. I’m asking you.”

“Time out. Is Lawless really your name? Because if it is, it’s awesome. It’d be like me being a psychiatrist named Moody. Or Dr. Cockburn, your friendly local urologist.”

“I asked you a question, sir.”

“No, Detective, I did not stab Janet Bollinger.”

“Would you be willing to sit for a polygraph examination to that effect?”

“Only if we can schedule it around Dancing with the Stars. I try never missing an episode.”

“But you would be willing to take a polygraph?”

“No problem.”

Rosario crooked a finger at her partner. They turned away to commiserate in a low murmur, not realizing their voices carried.

“He called it in,” Rosario said. “What the hell kind of suspect does that? Plus, he’s too, I don’t know… sure of himself. I’m just not feeling it with this guy.”

“Well, if he didn’t do her,” Lawless said, “who did?”

“Considering there appears to have been no forced entry,” I said, “the perpetrator was probably somebody the victim knew. Possibly an acquaintance of Dorian Munz. After all, Ms. Bollinger did help put the guy on death row. Maybe it was a friend of Munz’s. Maybe it was the man upstairs.”

“What does Jesus have to do with this?” Lawless demanded.

I pointed to the second-floor landing. “The guy in the upstairs apartment. He was hanging out up there when I first pulled in, getting toasted in his skivvies – Charger boxer shorts with little lightning bolts on ’em. Very stylish.”

“What did he look like, aside from his underwear?” Rosario said.

“Hispanic, twenty-two, five-ten, 220. Big tattoo of the Virgin on his chest. Gang tat on his neck. Girl’s name. Esmeralda.”

“Not every young Latino with a neck tattoo is a gangster, Mr. Logan.”

“Agreed, but this guy was definitely playing the part. He wasn’t real keen on me being here, either.”

“You talked to him?” Lawless asked.

“Tried. He wasn’t too chatty. Made a few choice observations about my ancestry, I think.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Could be he thought I was one of you guys.”

Rosario smiled. “We seem to have that effect on a lot of people.”

She asked for my cell phone number, thanked me for my cooperation, gave me her card, and told me to keep in touch.

“If you do happen to come up with anything else while you’re looking into this Dorian Munz guy,” Rosario said, “I’d appreciate the assist. We can use all the help we can get these days. Department keeps cutting back on our overtime. Never know. Might be a tie-in somewhere.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

She shook my hand and told Lawless she was going off to canvass the neighborhood for possible witnesses. Lawless said he’d join her in a minute. He waited until Rosario walked off, then turned back to me and peered at me with one eyebrow cocked.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Logan,” he said, “but I got a bad feeling about you.”

I smiled and said, “Take a number.”