Free Fall (3 page)

“No?”

“No.” Mark Thurman looked down at his feet and worked his jaw harder and then he looked up at me. “I’ve got another girlfriend.”

I stared at him.

“I knew that if she hired someone, they’d find out and tell her, and I don’t want that. Do you see?”

I said, “Another woman.”

He nodded.

“You’ve been seeing another woman and Jennifer knows something is up, but she doesn’t know what. And you’re trying to head me off so I won’t blow the whistle.”

He nodded again.

Riggens uncurled his arms and pushed up from the couch. “You don’t need to know anything else. The word is that you’re a straight shooter and we’re looking for a break. It was me I’d slap the bitch down and move on, but he doesn’t want to play it that way. Why don’t you give the kid a hand?”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Riggens, why’d you come along? Moral support?”

Riggens said, “No one’s trying to muscle you, smart guy. Everyone’s playing straight up.” Riggens jerked his head toward Thurman. “Tell him we’re playing straight up.”

Mark Thurman looked back at me, only now there was a lost quality to his eyes. “I didn’t want you telling Jennifer. When it comes, it’s got to come from me.” He was leaning forward so far I thought he’d fall out of the chair. “Do you see?”

“Sure. I see.”

“It’s personal. That’s how it should stay.”

“Sure.”

Riggens said, “No one’s asking you to turn down the fee. Just play it smart. Do us the favor and someday you’ll get a payback.”

“But I can keep the fee.”

“No problem.”

I looked at Thurman. “Some right guy you’ve got as a partner, Thurman, saying it’s okay for me to stiff your girlfriend.”

Riggens said, “Fuck you,” and banged out Thurman sat in the director’s chair, not saying anything, and then he pushed himself up. He was twenty-four years old and he looked like a baby. When I was twenty-four I looked a million years old. Vietnam. He said, “You do what you want, Cole. No one’s telling you what to do. But I’m asking you not to tell her what I said. I get ready, I should be the one tells her. Shouldn’t I?”

“Sure.”

“I just got to work this out, that’s all I’m saying.” Like he was in the principal’s office, like he had been caught throwing eggs at the class geek’s house, and now he was ashamed of it He went to the door. Riggens was already down the hall.

I said, “Thurman.”

He stopped and looked back at me with his right hand on the handle.

“Why don’t you just tell her?”

He didn’t answer. He stood there, sort of staring, like he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he didn’t.

I said, “She didn’t say anything to me about crime. She said that she thought you were seeing another woman. She said that she always knew you were that way.”

Mark Thurman went as red as Jennifer Sheridan when I told her that I hadn’t been making a pass. He stared at me with the sort of look you’d have if you were in a hurry one day and backed out your drive without looking and ran over a child. Like someone had
pushed an ice spike through your heart. He stared at me like that, and then he went out. He didn’t close the door.

I went to the little balcony and stood back from the rail and watched the street. Mark Thurman and Floyd Riggens came out of my building, climbed back into the brown sedan, and drove away. Neither of them spoke, as far as I could tell, and neither of them looked particularly happy. It was six minutes after one, and it looked as if my case was solved.

I closed the glass doors, sat on my couch, and thought about what I might say when I was inducted into the Detective’s Hall of Fame. Perhaps they would bill me as
Elvis Cole, World’s Fastest Detective.
Wouldn’t Jennifer Sheridan be pleased. She could say
I knew him when.
At six minutes after one, Jennifer Sheridan would be sitting in Marty Beale’s outer office, not expecting a phone call in which the detective that she had hired only moments before would crush her heart with one fell blow, service with a smile,
thank you, ma’am, and the bill is in the mail.
Of course, since I had made such a big deal to Jennifer Sheridan about her lack of proof, she might inquire as to mine, and I had none. I had only Mark Thurman’s word, and maybe he had lied. People do.

I put aside my thoughts of the Hall of Fame and called a guy I know named Rusty Swetaggen. For twenty-four years he drove a black-and-white in and around the city of Los Angeles, then his wife’s father died and he inherited a pretty nice restaurant in Venice, about four blocks from the beach. He likes it better than being a cop. He said, “Rusty’s.”

I made hissing and cracking noises into the phone. “I’m calling from the new car phone. Pretty good, huh?”

Rusty Swetaggen said, “Bullshit, you got a car phone.” Then he yelled at someone in the background. “It’s the big-time op, making like he’s got a car phone.” Someone said something and then he came back on the line. “Emma says hey.”

“Hey back. I need to find out about an officer and I don’t want him to know.”

“This guy active duty?”

“Yeah. His name is Mark Thurman. He works a REACT team out of the Seventy-seventh.”

Rusty didn’t say anything. I guess he was writing. Then he said, “Is this guy dirty?” He didn’t like asking. You could hear it in his voice. You ride the black-and-white for twenty-four years and you don’t like asking.

“I want to find out. Can you do this for me?”

“Sure, Elvis. I’d do anything for you. You know that.”

“I know. I’ll be by in a couple of hours. That okay?”

“Fine.”

Rusty Swetaggen hung up, and then I hung up.

I took the shoulder holster out of my bottom left drawer and put it on. It’s a nice brushed-leather Bianchi rig that cost a fortune, but it’s comfortable, and it’s made for the Dan Wesson .38 revolver that I carry. Stylish detectives often carry automatics, but I have never been a slave to fashion.

I took the Dan Wesson out of its drawer and seated it into the shoulder holster and then I covered the works with a light gray cotton sport coat. It looks great over my black-and-maroon Hawaiian beach shirt, and is ideal for hiding firearms in L.A.’s summer weather. I took the Watkins, Okum, & Beale stationery out of my desk, put it in the inside pocket of the sport coat, then called the deli and asked them if they still had my turkey and Swiss on baguette. They did.

I walked the four flights down to the deli, ate my sandwich at a little table that they have by the door, then left to find out whether or not LAPD Officer Mark Thurman was telling the truth, or telling a lie.

Either way, Jennifer Sheridan wouldn’t like it.

D
riving along Santa Monica Boulevard through West Hollywood and Beverly Hills is a fine thing to be doing in late March, just at the end of the rainy season. It was warmer than it should have been, with highs in the mid-eighties and mare’s-tail cirrus streaking the sky with feathery bands, and there were plenty of men in jogging shorts and women in biking pants and Day-Glo headbands. Most of the men weren’t jogging and most of the women weren’t biking, but everyone looked the part. That’s L.A.

At a traffic light in Westwood I pulled up next to a woman in pristine white biking pants and a white halter workout top sitting astride a white Japanese racing bike. I made her for Jennifer Sheridan’s age, but maybe she was older. The line of her back was clean and straight, and she leaned to the right, her right toe extended down to kiss the street, her left toe poised on its pedal. Her skin was smooth and tanned, and her legs and body were lovely. She wore a ponytail and bronzetinted sunglasses. I gave her the big smile. A little Dennis Quaid. A little Kevin Costner. She stared at me through the bronze lenses and said, “No.” Then she
pedaled away. Hmm. Maybe thirty-nine is older than I thought.

At the western edge of UCLA, I climbed the ramp onto the 405 freeway and headed north into the San Fernando Valley. In another week the smog and haze would build and the sky would be bleached and obscured, but for now the weather was just right for boyfriends tailing girlfriends and girlfriends hiring private eyes to check up on boyfriends and private eyes spending their afternoons on long drives into the valley where they would risk life and limb snooping around police officers’ apartments. If Randy Newman were here, he’d probably be singing
I Love L.A.

I edged off the 405 at Nordhoff and turned west, cruising past the southern edge of Cal State, Northridge, with its broad open grounds and water-conscious landscaping and remnants of once-great orange groves. In the prewar years before freeways and superhighways the valley was mostly orange trees, but after the war the orange groves began to vanish and the valley became a bedroom community of low-cost family housing tracts. When I came to L.A. in the early seventies, there were still small bits of orchard dotted around Encino and Tarzana and Northridge, the trees laid out in geometric patterns, their trunks black with age but their fruit still sweet and brilliant with color. Little by little they have melted away into single-family homes and minimalls with high vacancy rates and high-density apartment complexes, also with high vacancy rates. I miss them. Minimalls are not as attractive as orange trees, but maybe that’s just me.

Mark Thurman lived in a converted garage apartment in the northwestern part of the San Fernando Valley, about a mile west of Cal State, Northridge, in an older area with stucco bungalows and clapboard duplexes and mature landscaping. Though the structures are old, the residents are not, and most of the apartments
are rented to college students or junior faculty from the university or kids out on their own for the first time. Lots of bikes around. Lots of small foreign cars. Lots of music.

I parked across the street from a flat-topped duplex and looked down the drive. The sheet of Watkins, Okum stationery said that Thurman drove a 1983 blue Ford Mustang as his personal car, but the Mustang wasn’t around, and neither was the dark brown cop-mobile. Still out fighting crime, no doubt. Or tailing Jennifer Sheridan. A chain-link fence ran parallel to the drive along a row of eight-foot hedges. About halfway back, a little wrought-iron gate ran from the fence to the duplex, cutting the drive in half. Thurman’s converted garage was in the rear yard behind the gate, snuggled against the hedges A set of sliding glass doors had been installed where the garage door used to hang and someone had built a little sidewalk out of stepping-stones that ran around the side of the place by the hedges. A curtain of vertical blinds was drawn across the glass doors and pulled closed. It was a nice, neat, well-kept place, but it didn’t look like the kind of place a cop taking down heavy graft would keep. Of course, maybe Mark Thurman was smart, and the outward appearance of his home was just a dodge to throw off unsuspecting PIs. Maybe the inside of the place looked like Uncle Scrooge’s money bin and the walls were lined with cash and bricks of gold. Only one way to find out.

I got out of the Corvette, strolled up the drive, and let myself through the little wrought-iron gate. A young German shepherd was lying by the gate beneath the hedges next door. He watched me come and when I let myself through the gate he lifted his head. I said, “Woof.” He got up and walked with me. Police dog. If Thurman came home I’d have to go over the fence. Hope he didn’t bite.

There were three young women lying on towels in the little yard that separated the duplex from the guest house. One was on her belly, the other two were on their backs, and the one nearest to me was up on an elbow, adjusting a radio. U-2. Nobody was wearing very much in the way of clothes, and you could smell the suntan oil. The one with the radio saw me first and made a little gasping noise. I said, “Hi, ladies. Is Mark around?” Elvis Cole, the Smooth Detective.

The one with the radio relaxed and the other two looked over. The one without the radio was wearing little round sunglasses and the one on her belly smiled. The two on their backs were brunette, the one on her belly a blonde.

The one with the radio said, “He’s at work.”

I glanced at my watch and made a big deal out of looking disappointed. “He said he’d meet me here. I guess he got hung up.”

The one on her belly said, “Are you a cop, too?”

I said, “Do I look like a cop?”

The three of them nodded.

I spread my hands. “I’d do great undercover, hunh?”

The one on her belly said, “I don’t know. You might.”

The other two laughed.

The one with the little round glasses covered her mouth and said, “Ohmygod, do you know who he looks like? He looks like Mel Gibson in
Lethal Weapon.
Don’t you think so?”

I was liking the one with the glasses just fine. Maybe thirty-nine wasn’t so old after all.

The one with the radio said, “If Mark told you he’d be here, he’s probably on his way. He’s pretty good about that kind of stuff.”

I said, “I’ve just got to drop something off. You think he’d mind?”

Radio said, “You could leave it with us.”

“Couldn’t do that. It’s business-related. And it’s sort of a surprise.”

The one on her belly looked interested. “Evidence.”

The one with the little round sunglasses said, “Allie likes cops. She wants to see your gun.”

Allie slugged Sunglasses in the leg, and all three of them laughed.

The one with the radio said, “Go ahead. Mark’s cool. He keeps a spare key in a little Sucrets box to the left of the landing behind a plant pot.”

“Thanks.”

The German shepherd was waiting for me when I went around the side of the guest house, and followed me to the door. The Sucrets box and the key were exactly where Radio said they’d be. Some neighbors, hunh? I took out the key and let myself in. The German shepherd sat on his haunches and stared after me and whined. Helluva police dog, too.

Mark Thurman’s garage had been converted into a pretty nice apartment. The side door opened into a living room, and from the door you could see the kitchen and another door that led to a bedroom and a bath. A brown cloth couch rested against the west wall and a shelving unit stood against the north. The east wall was the glass doors. A CD player and a Sony TV and a VCR and about a zillion CDs were in the wall unit, but the CD player and the VCR were low-end Pioneer and neither was a bank breaker, even on a police officer’s take-home. There was an overstuffed chair at either end of the couch, and a coffee table of bright white pine that matched the wall unit. He would’ve bought the set from one of those discount places. Imported, they would have told him. Danish. There wasn’t a sea of gold coins that you could dive into, or mounds of money bags scattered around, but I
hadn’t yet seen the bedroom. One shouldn’t jump to conclusions.