Last Call (15 page)

“How many?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Three, four, sumpin’ like that.”

“What’d you win?”

“Nothin’.”

“You scratch ‘em in the store or outside?”

“Outside.”

Keesha brings Reginald a steaming mug.

Frank says, “Hey. Where’s mine?”

The girl looks at Reginald and his shoulders jerk.

“Then what’d you do?”

“Drove around some more. Lookin’ for my dawgs, Rabbit and TJ, but I couldn’t find neither of ‘em.”

“And then?” she prompts.

“That’s when I ended up at Jackson’s. About six o’clock. I give up lookin’ for them boys.”

“Who saw you there?”

“Fuck, man, that homes a yours was always scribbling some mad shit down. Don’t you got all that in his notes? And he musta taped me ten times. I know I already answered all this shit.”

“I want my own notes. Who saw you at Jackson’s?”

Reginald curses and Keesha slams another mug onto the coffee table.

“Thanks,” Frank calls after her sulky back. She questions McNabb for over an hour. His story never wavers.

As Frank prepares to leave, Keesha complains, “You ain’t drunk your coffee.”

Frank winks. “I’m sure it was delicious.”

Keesha blushes hard, leaving Frank wondering only
which
body fluid was in it.

Over the weekend Frank makes the drive to Calipatria. William Coleman is doing consecutive nickels behind a sexual molest and aggravated assault on an eight-year-old girl. Told her he’d kill her if she told. Brave girl told anyhow and now Coleman is in solitary for his own safety.

She starts the interview by indicating the folder in front of her. “I’ve read your jacket, William. It looks like you’re in a hell of a pinch here. Cons aren’t real fond of short-eyes, are they?” He opens his mouth to answer but she cuts him off. “Point is, we might be able to help each other out. You give me what I want, I might be able to help you out.”

“You gonna commute my time?”

“I’m not saying I can do that. Depending on what you tell me, though, the D.A. might be willing to work a deal. That’s up to you. What I can do today, and for quite a while on, is to provide you with certain, oh, let’s say, entertainments, to help you maximize your pleasure while you’re in sol.” Flipping the folder open, she slides kiddie porn borrowed from the evidence room across the table.

Willie reaches hotly but Frank pulls it back.

“And there’s more,” she coaxes. Pulling at her nose and looking at notes, she adds, “Says here you like girls’ underpants. Is that true?”

The unpleasant man looks away and Frank makes a laugh.

“It’s okay. You can tell me, William. Or do you like Bill?”

“Willie,” he says in a voice like rats slithering.

“Willie then. I’ve seen it all. Been a cop close to twenty years. Nothing surprises me. Nothing disgusts me, either. To be perfectly honest, the only thing I care about is numbers. And right now, I’m working a case I can’t close and that’s pissing me off. You know the case, Willie.” She watches his reaction when she says, “Ladeenia Pryce.”

Willie looks alternately surprised and curious. She can see his mind running like a mouse in a maze. She lets it race from one dead end to the next.

“You know, Willie, this is a terrible thing to say. But I don’t really care about that girl and I don’t really care who did her. Or the little boy either. I see that sort of stuff on a weekly basis, and I just don’t give a fuck. But you know what bothers me, Willie?” She studies him hard and just as he’s about to venture a guess she answers, “The numbers. I’ve got a ninety-six percent case rating, Willie. Do you know how good that is? Of course you don’t. But let me tell you, it’s excellent. And you know what’s fucking my case rating up right now? Ladeenia Pryce. I don’t mean to be brutal, Willie, but I want that bitch off my books and out of my life. Do you understand?”

Willie nods.

But Frank says, “I don’t think you do. No offense, but I don’t think you can begin to comprehend the satisfaction of a one-hundred percent case closure. Not many people can, not even cops. Most of them don’t even come close. So let me just say that I would be extremely happy, and extremely
grateful,
to whoever helps me get Ladeenia Pryce off the books. Do you know what I’m saying? I would be so happy, I’d do whatever I could to make that son of a bitch, short-eyes or not, happy. It’s worth that much to me.”

Frank pauses, pulling at her nose again. She thinks it’s a Karl Maiden, TV cop kind of affect a creep like Coleman might be able to relate to.

“You like girls’ panties, don’t you, Willie?”

Again the con has to glance away from Frank.

“I can get ‘em for you.” After a beat she confides, “Used.”

Sick Willie flinches despite himself and the light comes up in his eyes. Frank watches him thinking, could it be true? Could it
possibly
be true?

“Don’t be shy.” Frank laughs again. “I know you like ‘em. It says so right here.” She taps the folder. “How about bras?” She suddenly lowers herself close to the table. “I can get them too. Little ones, like training bras. You like those best, don’t you?”

She nods and Willie acts nonchalant, not wanting to commit himself, not wanting to believe he might actually get his hands on such contraband treasure.

“You help me and I’ll help you,” she whispers, leading him through an increasingly perverse scenario. Twisting his fear and monstrous lust into one pliant rein she leads Willie to that deadly Friday. She guides him through the fantasy of what he did to Ladeenia, how he caught her, how he held her, how he fucked her, and even how he killed her.

After three hours, Frank is exhausted. Sick Willie glows with insane satisfaction. She thinks him fully capable of murdering a child, but not Ladeenia Pryce. She didn’t go down the way Willie claims. His story is all over the map, without one detail similar to the versions he told Noah. She maintains that her perp is a man who prefers older girls, but not knowing if she’ll ever need Sick Willie again, she leaves him with the advice to keep an eye out for a package.

The deputy returns Frank’s gun and she snaps it into place. She takes grim comfort knowing that even though she’s been anaesthetizing herself too often and too thoroughly of late, at least a guy like Willie Coleman still makes her want to scrub her skin off.

Miss Cleo calls, asking when they can meet. Frank tells her to meet her at the Tarn’s by the station. Resplendent in red linen, she is there when Frank arrives. Frank wonders how much time it takes Miss Cleo to get prepared for the day.

“I talked to an associate of mine. She was with Reggie a while back but she’s just an old Hoover now.”

A Hoover was a crackhead so down and out she’d scavenge carpet piling for rock crumbs.

“I guess you were sweating him pretty hard back then. She said it was outrageous how you kept pickin’ all his girls up. It sounded like he never even saw the child you was all sweatin’ him about. He made the girls he had left turn twice as many tricks and if they didn’t, he’d beat them so bad they could hardly walk. That’s why I’ve never had me a daddy. ” Miss Cleo shivers in disgust. “I talked to some girls but they didn’t know anything. You ask me, that boy’s never hired anyone smarter than a cockroach. And that’s disrespecting cockroaches.”

“What else?” Frank asks.

Miss Cleo raises a slim shoulder. “Doesn’t seem like there is much else. The girls he hires may be young, but that seems to satisfy his appetite.”

“A’ight. What about Floyd?”

“I can’t find anything about him. He’s up from the Courts. Nobody here knows him very well.”

“And Coleman?”

Miss Cleo flaps a meticulously manicured hand. “Don’t know nothing about him, neither. I can’t find anybody who’s ever heard of him.”

“Keep looking.” Frank drains her coffee and rises.

Miss Cleo gasps. “Don’t I get something for today?”

“Get me something better than nothing and I’ll front you a Franklin.”

Frank hasn’t expected the drag queen to come up with a solid lead and it reinforces Frank’s belief that Noah’s best suspects are dead ends. Still, she wants to check out the last one. Returning to the office, she rereads everything Noah has on Charles Thomas Floyd.

Male, black, thirty-two. Would have made him twenty-six at the time of the Pryce murders. Noah had scratched out seven different addresses for Floyd. The latest is in Watts, at Imperial Courts.

“Great,” Frank bitches. “Has to be one of the best pin-and-pops in town.”

Referring to the proclivity of the project’s inhabitants to pin visiting cops down with sniper fire, she debates going to the Courts alone, deciding a cold case doesn’t warrant any urgency. She’ll
go
in with a unit first thing in the morning, before the cars start getting backed up on calls and while the majority of the Court’s residents are still asleep.

Floyd’s rap sheet is as long as a Michener novel, involving multiple felony possessions, assaults, grand thefts, larcenies and burglaries, with dozens of misdemeanors thrown in for color. He’s been sent up twice, once on AWDW and once on GTA The grand theft auto doesn’t bear inspection but Frank scours the assault with deadly weapon rap.

Four months before the Pryce case he was busted for raping a thirteen-year-old at knifepoint. The girl had stopped at a liquor store on her way home from school to buy Ding Dongs. According to her later testimony, Floyd had come on to her, mackin’ and wooin’. She’d admitted to being flattered at first and had let him walk with her. Her concern started when he switched from flattery to pressure. Refusing his overtures only encouraged him. The girl became truly frightened when Floyd’s pressure turned into threat, a threat he eventually fulfilled by pulling a knife on her and dragging her into an alley. He raped the girl from the back, telling her all the while that he’d cut her if she made a sound.

Floyd’s history made him a compelling suspect. His alibi on the day of the abductions was weak. Only two lowlifes who’d rather fall out of a tree than tell the truth could corroborate it. Problem was, at that time Floyd lived a good sixty miles from South Central. No one could make him in the area during the requisite time frame. Along with a fistful of cousins and an uncle, Noah had unearthed Floyd’s local connections. They were mostly gutter hypes and wannabe balers. None of them had seen Floyd that weekend. Half of them didn’t know where he was, the other half said he’d gone up north.

Because Floyd is wanted for parole violation, she has an edge on him. She calls his parole officer and leaves a message. The PO still hasn’t returned Frank’s call by the time she’s ready to roll after him on a foggy Monday morning.

She drives a slickback with a patrol unit behind her. She’s anxious going into the projects, the building melding into the shroud of marine layer. Searching for the street number, Frank mutters, “Welcome to Shangri-fuckin’-la.”

She pulls up next to a chain-link fence, assembling quietly with Munoz and Garcia. All three scan the neighborhood. Two older women carrying grocery sacks frown at the cops, and a scrawny teenager slips into a house across the street. Mostly the fog is keeping everyone inside. Despite the weather, a whistle sounds. Curtains move aside and windows open. Frank and the uniforms maintain an even pace to Floyd’s door, then knock loudly.

The adrenaline in their system makes the cops hyperalert. Munoz hits Frank’s arm. “Hey! Is that him?”

Frank turns to see an armed male black running from another building. He fits Floyd’s description. Holding an assault rifle, the man pauses to unlock a primered 280Z long enough for Frank to get a good look.

“Shit!” Frank says, sprinting.

The man dives into the car. Over rising jeers and taunts, Frank hears the Datsun’s engine turning over. It catches, and Frank shouts at Munoz and Garcia, waving them toward their car.

Then the Datsun’s motor dies.

Munoz gets to the car first. Deploying to the rear, he screams at the man, “Put your hands outside the car!”

Frank sees the man turn in his seat, wide-eyed. He brings the rifle up. Garcia has already taken a knee, aiming her 9mm. As Frank hears the rifle’s
ack-ack
and sees the exploding glass, she drops belly-first onto concrete. Munoz goes down backwards, dropping his gun.

Blind fire continues from the car. Worming toward the Datsun, Frank yells for Garcia to get down but the cop is in her own world, squeezing off rounds as calmly as if she’s at the range. The assault rifle suddenly stops and Frank hears one of Garcia’s shots. A drawn-out moan comes from the car. Frank uses the front bumper for cover while Garcia advances.

The man sits in the front seat, strangely stiff. He stares with huge eyes at Frank. He looks like Charles Floyd. The rifle is canted against the steering wheel. Blood spills from his neck.

Frank orders him to get his hands in the air but he doesn’t comply. She repeats the order, swearing, but Floyd moves only his lips. With Garcia covering, Frank yanks on the driver’s door. Floyd’s eyes follow her, hugely terrified.

Again she yells, “Hands up!”

Floyd squeaks, “I can’t move.”

Sizing up the neck wound, Frank has to decide whether Floyd’s telling the truth or not. The rifle butt is only inches from where his right hand lies on the seat. Frank aims point-blank at Floyd.

“Get your fucking hands up,” she speaks slowly and deliberately, “or I’m blowing your fucking head off.”

“I can’t,” Floyd yelps again, the horror in his eyes genuine.

Careful not to place herself between Garcia and Floyd, Frank darts in. Jamming her Beretta against Floyd’s temple she swipes at the rifle.

She backs away with it. Floyd still hasn’t so much as twitched. Frank smells the stink of her own sweat, feels it running onto her ribs. She grabs Floyd’s left arm and pulls him to the concrete. He cries out but still doesn’t move and Garcia has him cuffed in seconds.

Frank tells her to call for an ambulance and backup, even as another unit squeals into the complex. Munoz is sitting up, holding his hand against the blood seeping through at his shoulder.