Free Fall (6 page)

I said, “Maybe we should leave.”

“I’m all right.” She made loud whooping sounds like she couldn’t catch her breath and the tears rolled down her cheeks, making dark tracks from the mascara. The waiter stormed over to the maitre d’ and made an angry gesture. The woman with the big hair said something to an elderly man at an adjoining table and the elderly man glared at me. I felt two inches tall.

“Try to see it this way, Jennifer. Mark being involved with another woman is better than Mark being involved in crime. Crime gets you in jail. Another woman is a problem you can work out together.”

Jennifer Sheridan wailed louder. “I’m not crying because of that.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m crying because Mark’s in trouble and he needs our help and you’re
quitting.
What kind of crummy detective are you?”

I spread my hands. The maitre d’ said something to the waiter and the waiter came over.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

“Everything is fine, thank you.”

He looked at Jennifer Sheridan.

She shook her head. “He’s a quitter.”

The waiter frowned and went away. The woman with the big hair made a
tsk
ing sound like she thought they should’ve done something.

Jennifer said, “I want to be sure, that’s all. If he’s seeing this other woman, then who is she? Do they work together? Does he love her? Did you follow them home?”

“No.

“Then you don’t know, do you? You don’t know if they slept together. You don’t know if he kissed her good night. You don’t even know if they left the bar together.”

I rubbed my brow. “No.”

The woman with the big hair whispered again to the elderly man, then stood and went to three women sitting in a window booth. One of the women stood to meet her.

Jennifer Sheridan was crying freely and her voice was choking. “He needs us, Mr. Cole. We can’t leave him like this, we
can’t.
You’ve
got
to help me.”

The woman with the big hair shouted, “Help her, for God’s sake.”

The three women at the window booth shouted, “Yeah!”

I looked at them and then I looked back at Jennifer Sheridan. She didn’t look seventeen anymore. She looked fifteen. And homeless. I dropped my napkin into the niçoise. I’d had maybe three bites. “You win.”

Jennifer Sheridan brightened. “You’ll stay with it?”

I nodded.

“You see how it’s possible, don’t you? You see that I’m right about this?”

I spread my hands. The Defeated Detective.

She said, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Cole. Thank you. I knew I could depend on you.” She was bubbling now, just like Judy Garland in
The Wizard of Oz.
She used her napkin to dry her eyes, but all she did was smear the mascara. It made her look like a raccoon.

The woman with the big hair smiled and the elderly man looked relieved. The waiter and the maitre d’ nodded at each other. The three women in the window booth resumed their meal. The restaurant returned to its normal course of lunchtime events, and Jennifer Sheridan finished her hamburger. Everybody was happy.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

The waiter appeared at my elbow. “Is something wrong with the niçoise, sir?”

I looked at him carefully. “Get away from me before I shoot you.”

He said, “Very good, sir,” and he got.

A
t twelve fifty-five, I gave Jennifer Sheridan a lift the three blocks back to her office and then I headed back toward mine, but I wasn’t particularly happy about it. I felt the way you feel after you’ve given money to a panhandler because the panhandler has just dealt you a sob story that both of you knew was a lie but you went for it anyway. I frowned a lot and stared down a guy driving an ice cream truck just so I could feel tough. If a dog had run out in front of me I probably would’ve swerved to hit it. Well, maybe not. There’s only so much sulking you can do.

The problem was that Jennifer Sheridan wasn’t a panhandler and she wasn’t running a number on me. She was a young woman in pain and she believed what she believed, only believing something doesn’t make it so. Maybe I should spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out a way to convince her. Maybe I could rent one of those high-end, see-in-the-dark video cameras and tape Mark Thurman in the act with the brown-haired woman. Then we could go back to Kate Mantilini’s and I could show everyone and what would the
woman with the big hair think then? Hmm. Maybe there are no limits to sulking, after all.

I stopped at a Lucky market, bought two large bottles of Evian water, put one in my trunk, then continued on toward my office. Half a block later two guys in a light blue four-door sedan pulled up behind me and I thought I was being followed. A Hispanic guy in a dark blue Dodgers cap was driving and a younger guy with a light blond butch cut was riding shotgun. His was the kind of blond that was so blond it was almost white. I looked at them, but they weren’t looking at me, and a block and a half later they turned into a Midas Muffler shop. So much for being followed.

When I got up to my office I opened the French doors off the little balcony, then turned on the radio, and lay down on my couch. KLSX on the airwaves. Howard Stern all morning, classic rock all afternoon. We were well into classic rock and I liked it just fine. Lynyrd Skynyrd. What could be better than that?

It was a cool, clear afternoon and I could be at the beach but instead I was here. Portrait of a detective in a detective’s office. When a detective is in a detective’s office, shouldn’t he be detecting? One of life’s imponderables. The problem was that I didn’t suspect Mark Thurman of a crime, and crime still didn’t look good to me as the answer to Jennifer Sheridan’s problems. If you’re talking cops and crime, you’re talking motive, and I didn’t see it. I had been in Thurman’s home and I had talked to his fiancée and his neighbors, and the crime part just didn’t fit. When you’re talking cops and crime, you’re talking conspicuous consumption. Cops like to buy cars and they like to buy boats and they like to buy vacation homes and they explain it all by saying that the wife came into a little money. Only Thurman didn’t have a wife and, as near as I could tell, he didn’t have any of the other things, either. Of course, there could always be something else. Debt and dope are
popular motives, but Thurman didn’t seem to fit the profile on those, either. I had witnessed events and gathered evidence, and an examination of same had led to certain conclusions which seemed fair to me but not to the client. Maybe the client was crazy. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe the client was just confused and maybe I should have done more to alleviate her confusion, but I had not. Why? Maybe she should be the detective and I should be the client. We couldn’t be any more confused than we were now.

Sometime later the phone rang. I got up, went to my desk, and answered it. “Elvis Cole Detective Agency. We never lie down on the job.”

“Caught you sleeping, huh?” It was Rusty Swetaggen.

“Ha. We never sleep.”

Rusty said, “I talked to a guy who knows about REACT.”

“Yeah?” I sat in the chair and leaned back and put my feet up. It was quiet in the office. I looked at the water cooler and the couch and the two chairs opposite my desk and the file cabinet and the Pinocchio clock and the closed door to Joe Pike’s office. The water machine hummed and little figures of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse stared back at me and the coffee machine smelled of old coffee, but something was missing.

Rusty said, “Maybe I shouldn’t even mention this.”

“You’ve rethought our friendship and you want me to pay for lunch?”

“Nothing that important This guy I talked with, he said something that’s maybe a little funny about the REACT guys down at Seven-seven.”

“Funny.” I have seen these things in my office ten thousand times, and today something was different.

“Yeah. It’s like he wouldn’t’ve even mentioned it if I hadn’t pushed him, like it’s one of those things that
doesn’t matter unless you’re looking, and it probably doesn’t matter even then.”

“Okay.” I was only half listening. I picked up the phone and carried it around to the file cabinet and looked back at my desk. Nope. Nothing was off with the desk.

“He says their arrest pattern is maybe a little hinky for the past few months, like maybe these guys aren’t making the arrests that they should be, and are making a lot of arrests that they shouldn’t.”

“Like what?” I looked at the file cabinet. I looked at the Pinocchio clock.

“REACT was always big on dope and stolen property, and they’ve always posted high arrest rates, but the past couple of months they haven’t been making the big numbers. They’ve mostly been booking gangbangers and stickup geeks. It’s a different level of crime.”

“We’re not just talking Thurman? We’re talking the team?”

“Yeah. It’s a team thing. What I hear, Thurman’s got a great record. That’s why he got the early promotion.” I looked at the French doors. I looked at the little refrigerator. Nope.

Rusty said, “Hell, Elvis, maybe it’s just the offseason. I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”

“Sure, Rusty. Thanks.” I looked back at the Pinocchio clock.

Rusty Swetaggen hung up and then I hung up and that’s when I saw it. The Pinocchio clock was still. Its eyes weren’t moving. It wasn’t making the tocking sound. The hands were stopped at eleven-nineteen.

I followed the cord to where it plugs into the wall behind the file cabinet. The plug was in the socket, but not all the way, as if someone had brushed the cord and pulled it partway out of the wall and hadn’t noticed. I stood very still and looked around the office and, in the
looking, the office now felt strange, as if an alien presence were a part of it. I went back to my desk, opened each drawer and looked at it without touching it. Everything appeared normal and as I had left it. Ditto the things on the desk top. I got up again and opened the file cabinet and looked at the files without touching them and tried to recall if they were positioned as I had last seen them, but I couldn’t be sure. I keep all active files in the office cabinet as well as all cases in the current quarter. At the end of every quarter I box the closed files and put them in storage. There were twenty-seven files in the cabinet drawer. Not much if you’re the Pinkertons but plenty if you’re me. Each file contains a client sheet and day book entries where I’ve made notes along the way, as well as any photographs or paperwork I accumulate, and a conclusion sheet, which is usually just a copy of the letter I write to the client when the job is over. I hadn’t yet made a file for Jennifer Sheridan. I fingered through the twenty-seven files that were there, but nothing seemed to be missing. I closed the cabinet and looked at the little figurines of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio on my desk and on top of the file cabinet. Jiminy doffing his top hat had been moved, but Mickey and Minnie riding in a Hupmobile had not. Sonofagun. Someone had searched my office.

I put Jiminy in his proper place, plugged in the Pinocchio clock and set it to the correct time, then went back to my desk and thought about Mark Thurman. The odds were large that whoever had come into my office wasn’t Mark Thurman or anyone who knew Thurman, and that the timing had just been coincidental, but the timing still bothered me. I had thought the case was over, but apparently it wasn’t. I wasn’t exactly sure that the case was still on, but maybe that’s what I had to prove. Hmm. Maybe I should ask Jennifer Sheridan to
be a partner in the firm. Maybe she gave detective lessons.

I called this reporter I know who works for the
Examiner
named Eddie Ditko. He’s about a million years old and he loves me like a son. He said, “Jesus Christ, I’m up to my ass in work. What the fuck do
you
want?” You see?

“I need to find out about the REACT unit deployed out of the Seventy-seventh Division down in South Central L.A.”

Eddie said, “You think I know this shit off the top of my head?” Isn’t Eddie grand?

“Nope. I was thinking maybe you could conjure it in your crystal ball.”

“You got crystal balls, always imposing like this.” Eddie went into a coughing fit and made a wet hacking noise that sounded like he was passing a sinus.

“You want I should call 911?”

“That’s it. Be cute.” I could hear keys tapping on his VDT. “This’ll take some time. Why don’tchu swing around in a little while. I might have something by then.”

“Sure.”

I put on my jacket, looked around my office, then went to the door and locked up. I had once seen a James Bond movie where James Bond pasted a hair across the seam in the doorjamb so he could tell if anyone opened the door while he was gone. I thought about doing it, but figured that someone in the insurance office across the hall would come out while I was rigging the hair and then I’d have to explain and they’d probably think it was stupid. I’d probably have to agree with them.

I forgot about the hair and went to see Eddie Ditko.

T
he
Los Angeles Examiner
is published out of a large, weathered red-brick building midway between downtown L.A. and Chinatown, in a part of the city that looks more like it belongs in Boston or Cincinnati than in Southern California. There are sidewalks and taxis and tall buildings of cement and glass and nary a palm tree in sight. Years ago, enterprising developers built a nest of low-rise condominiums, foolishly believing that Angelenos wanted to live near their work and would snap the places up to avoid the commute. What they didn’t count on is that people were willing to work downtown but no one wanted to live there. If you’re going to live in Southern California, why live in a place that looks like Chicago?

I put my car in the lot across the street, crossed at the light, then took the elevator up to the third floor and the pretty black receptionist who sits there. “Elvis Cole to see Eddie Ditko. He’s expecting me.”

She looked through her pass list and asked me to sign in. “He’s in the city room. Do you know where that is?”

“Yep.”

She gave me a peel-and-stick guest badge and went back to talking into the phone. I looked at the badge and felt like I was at a PTA meeting.
Hello! My name is Elvis!
I affixed the badge to my shirt and tried not to look embarrassed. Why risk the hall police?