Last Call (17 page)

Frank takes the sandwich into the living room. She forces it down with gulps of Scotch. “Sweet and Lovely” spills from the speakers. It’s one of the songs she and Gail danced to the night they made love for the first time. Frank feels like a red-hot poker has been rammed down her throat. She can’t breathe around the pain in her chest. She is sure it will suffocate her. And is equally sure that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

The call comes in next afternoon just as Frank is leaving for the Alibi. Lewis catches it and leans into Frank’s office. “Hey, I gotta go look at a possible and Jill’s out talking to a wit.”

“Who else is out there?”

“Nobody.”

Frank swears in her head but says, “A’ight. Go get a car. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Their silence is thick as they drive up to a crumbling apartment building. Paramedics are stowing their gear. Frank follows Lewis to a doorway flanked by patrol officers and neighbors. Inside a woman is screaming and kids are howling. Frank steps around clothes, toys, plastic diapers and dirty dishes. The squalor is oppressive and Frank is pissed at being called out so close to end of watch.

In the kitchen, a toddler lies on cracked and peeling linoleum. Its face is so badly burned Frank can’t guess at a gender.

Garcia’s the responding officer and Frank asks her, “Boy or girl?”

“Boy, Lieutenant.”

The kitchen floor is slick with oil. The kid floats on it.

“What’s the story?”

Garcia looks at her notes. “One of the kids ran next door, to a Martina Morales, in apartment five. She couldn’t understand him at first because he was screaming but she finally got that his mother had burned the baby. Mrs. Morales ran over and saw this. She called nine-one-one and they called us. The mother claims she slipped while she was taking the oil off the stove. Says it was an accident.”

Frank checks the pattern of bubbled skin. It starts at the kid’s head, where most of his hair is peeled off. The blistering has obliterated his face and deformed his shoulders. She studies the spill pattern. It’s concentrated in a thick pool near the body. Dabbing two fingers in the spattered oil Frank rubs them together. She shakes her head, lamenting, “Should’ve used Crisco. Less greasy.”

Lewis blows up to Frank like a gust of wind. “That was uncalled for, LT” She keeps her voice low, but Lewis’s outrage is loud enough. Frank pivots to give the detective her full attention. Anger colors Lewis’s face, which is square in Frank’s. She adds, “You’re talking some cold, disrespecting shit. Lieutenant.”

Lewis’s
cojones
amuse Frank, but she has sense enough to know a smile will only fuel Lewis’s fire. She can almost feel the heat coming off her.

“Right you are,” Frank admits. Lewis holds her glare and Frank shrugs. “Sorry.”

“Tell him,” Lewis says, tipping her head toward the kid. She wheels out to the living room. Frank is left with the boiled body and Garcia, who looks everywhere but at her commanding officer. Frank sees Lewis take the neighbor aside. She follows her detective into the next room and listens. Frank is suddenly tired and Lewis is asking good questions. She leaves the apartment, grateful for the relatively fresh air outside.

Frank waits outside against the black-and-white, the sun heavy on her closed lids. Lewis was right to jump her case. Frank ponders what’s happened to her—when she got so callous—but can see no defining moment. Frank knows she’s hurting. And doesn’t know what to do with the hurt. She can’t tackle it head-on like the shrinks and Gail would have her do. She’s got to come at it sideways. Sooner or later she’ll get a handle on it, but right now it twists and squirms inside her like a slippery knife blade. It’s easier to shut it all out, turn off everything, rather than feel anything.

The hardness is easy after so many years. Law enforcement, especially in the relentlessly murderous divisions, exacts its pound of flesh from those who pursue it. The most common blood sacrifices include divorce, alcoholism and apathy. If these aren’t enough to break a cop, the toll escalates to bitterness, rage and not-infrequent suicides. Frank considers which rung of the burnout ladder she’s on and thinks of Noah.

“Bastard,” she whispers.

He’s the lucky one. Noah got out while he was still whole. She wonders if the endless glut of human ugliness would have ever gotten to him. The Pryce case did in the beginning and she was glad when Joe finally put him back into full rotation. He resumed sleeping and eating, and Frank knew he was all right when he started whining again. She couldn’t imagine the job permanently beating him down and was glad she’d at least been spared seeing that. Maybe it never would have happened to Noah. Tracey and the kids were his lifeline. They kept him afloat in a sea of shit. And it was Noah that had kept Frank’s head above water. Without him, she wonders if she is drowning.

When Lewis emerges from the building Frank pushes off the car and calls her over. “First, I’m sorry about what I said in there. You were right. I was absolutely outta line.”

“It surprised me, is all. It’s not like you to—”

“Second thing,” Frank interrupts. “This is a slam-dunk. Tell me why.”

“Well, the mother says she slipped. You ever slipped with even a tiny pot of oil? Shit goes
everywhere.
You be wiping it outta the crack of your ass for weeks.”

This earns Lewis a tight but legitimate smile.

“And the worst mess on that kid is from the top of his head down. Not random like you’d expect if he got spattered in a spill. That
bitch poured
it on her kid.”

Frank nods, pleased. “You gonna bring her in?”

“Yeah, I’ma bring her in!” Lewis says, indignant.

“When you get her calmed down ask her two things—
why
she was moving a vat of boiling oil off the stove, and
where
was she going to put it?”

Lewis writes this down.

“Did the kids see anything?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“A’ight. Look, I got an appointment. You need me here?”

“Nah, I got it, LT.”

“I’ll have Garcia stay with you. Let her talk to the kids. You be nice to her and she might be your partner someday.”

“Or my detective,” Lewis says with a sly smile.

“You plannin’ on replacing me?”

Lewis blushes, explaining, “Yeah, see, ‘cause you gonna be my captain.”

Her detective’s passion is a balm to Frank, who smiles for the second time that afternoon. “S’all good to the gracious,” she says with a slap at Lewis’s shoulder. “Call if you need me.”

What Frank neglected to tell Lewis was that her appointment was with a highball glass. Traffic on the I-10 is knotted and while Frank inches along she worries about going native.

“I was off” the rim,” she confides to the windshield. “That’s bad when a D-I has to boot my ass.”

The Crisco remark might be something she’d say behind a pitcher of beer with the boys, but certainly not on scene. Frank strives for respect with the rankest of victims and she’s instilled this into the nine-three. It creates a professionalism that Frank completely lacked today. And when she swung on Johnnie.

Meandering through the last couple months, she logs other instances. She embarrassed Bobby with a castrated banger that had bled to death, joking in front of the mother that she was glad she wasn’t going to have to make a cast of the wound. Then there was the incident with Miller, provoking the bastard to swing so she could get in his face. Bobby’d seen that one, too.

Embarrassment blooms in the forefront of Frank’s consciousness. It’s a new sensation, and one she doesn’t want to get familiar with. She stares at the camper mired next to her. A young white male sits behind the wheel. He’s thin and stubbly. French or German, Frank thinks. They’re big on renting campers. The guy’s stuck in downtown L.A. traffic with no clue where he is.

“Maybe I’ve got no clue,” she mutters. Maybe she should talk to Clay. He’s retired now from the department’s Behavioral Science Unit, but before he pulled the pin he sent a letter informing her he’d be available for limited private practice. Frank can’t remember if she saved the letter.

She checks out the camper again, thinking that’s the answer. As soon as the Pryce case blows over she’ll take a leave of absence and get her head back on. Rent a camper and travel around the states. Except for some extraditions and chasing leads down, she’s never done any traveling. It might be good to see the big old USA.

But the possibility occurs to her that she might never close Pryce. Frank is good, but she’s not a magician. Some cases just never come off the books. Noah was a good cop. He worked it hard for over a year and got nowhere. In the six intervening years, they still haven’t discovered the primary scene or uncovered one witness. The paucity of physical evidence they started with has disappeared and, barring a miracle, any unrecovered evidence will have long since followed. Odds are, lacking a credible confession or other wildly lucky break, the case may well remain a whodunit.

Unpalatable as it is, Frank has to admit this eventuality. The thought adds to her grim mood and she wishes she’d bought a pint for the road.

“Jesus.” She shakes her head. “What a fucking drunk.”

She turns the radio up. Sig alerts and sky cams won’t do her much good now. She changes bands, pulls in KROK. Recognizes R.E.M. and keeps scanning. Jammin’ oldies. Minnie Riperton. Please. She stops at The Beat. Her fingers dangle over the steering wheel and she bats them on the dashboard to an old Tupac song.

“Baby, don’t cry,” she mouths along. “Got to keep your head up.”

Lewis’s outraged face looms again and she recalls the reproach in Bobby’s eyes, sees the wariness in her other detectives. Maybe she’s outplayed her hand. Maybe she’s so beyond burnout she doesn’t even know it.

She didn’t used to be like this. She doesn’t want to be a relic, x-ing days off the calendar until she collects a watch, but on a day like today leaving sounds good. Take early retirement and travel around. Get the fuck out of Dodge while the getting’s good. Maybe she’ll do like Steinbeck, only without the dog. Travels with Lieutenant Franco. She’ll visit the house in Kansas that Truman Capote memorialized. Trace the shooting spree Mailer chronicled in
Belly of the Beast.
Maybe write a travel guide to homicide in the U.S.

The camper eases past her and she thinks about what she’d take with her. Except for a couple changes of clothes, her CDs are all she really wants. After twenty years in this town all she has to show for it is what she can hear on any good jazz station. Frank mulls this over and tries not to be depressed. She studies the camper, figuring what sort of mileage they get these days. She remembers the
I Love Lucy
episode where Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel piled into an Airstream and headed out West. She’d love to see the inside of one of those. She imagines lazy breakfasts in roadside diners. Waitresses with beehives pouring Folgers coffee at Formica counters.

Formica counters.

“Holy fuck.”

Formica countertops. With the metal stripping around the edges. The camper in the Pryce pictures. The kitchen when you walk right in the door. Confined quarters. Take Ladeenia on the table. Spill some coffee, knock the sugar over. Bruise her leg against the edge of the table. Take her against the stove where she burns her thumb.

“Holy fuck,” Frank repeats, throwing the Honda into neutral and jerking the parking brake. She scrambles through her briefcase, finding the picture.

A Mercedes behind her bleats, trying to get Frank to advance another twelve feet. Frank ignores the imperative. She scrutinizes the photo. It’s the long shot from the dumpsite. Six vehicles down from the photographer, barely visible behind a work truck on the south curb, is a truck with a cab-over camper. Frank stares and the Mercedes’ driver leans on her horn.

Frank moves into the space without even looking from the picture. Noah had checked every vehicle on the street. The camper had stood out because it was parked three blocks from where the owner lived. The brother of one of the women Noah had interviewed on tape. The woman who watched Oprah every day and bitched about having to feed her family. And her brother visiting from up north. Frank swears, wishing the murder books weren’t on her dining room table. She tries to quell her enthusiasm. Noah would have teased it out if there was something worth teasing.

Wouldn’t he?

Noah had interviewed the brother and marginal notes seemed to indicate he’d dismissed him as a potential suspect. Frank dredges the mud in her brain, trying to remember what Noah had written. She exits on the closest ramp and works north to Pasadena. The twenty-minute drive still takes almost an hour and Frank is so hyped when she gets home she forgets to pour a drink. She doesn’t even unload her belt or pockets before flipping through the murder books. She can’t find the obscure notation and has to go through the notes again, slowly.

There it is. Antoine Bailey. Sister said he was with her all day. Went to the grocery store in the morning, watched TV together and played Mexican Train all afternoon. Noah had run Bailey through the system, coming up only with minor vehicular infractions and traffic misdemeanors. An addendum to his notes showed Noah talked to the brother ten days later. He was on disability, an electrician by trade. Traveled back and forth between his folks’ place in Bakersfield and his sister’s in L.A., where he collected his check once a month.

“Don’t get your panties in a wad,” she tells herself. “It’s probably nothing.”

But she lays out Ladeenia Pryce’s autopsy photos. She studies one in particular. The closeup of the bruise on Ladeenia’s leg.

The bruise is shaped like the ribbed edge of a Formica tabletop.

Frank is in the squad room long before the rest of the crew comes in. She can’t call the Disability Insurance office until eight so in the meantime she runs Bailey through the system again. His name pops up on two priors. One’s a lewd and lascivious charge about two years after the kids were murdered, and the second is a dismissed assault only seven months old. By 9:00 am she has tracked Bailey through the DI records. His check gets sent to an address in Bakersfield. Frank cross-references the address to Kevin and Sharon Ferris. This doesn’t surprise her.