Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (10 page)

“My name is Rupert Simms,” he said. “I’m sixty-seven years old, I’m living with lung cancer, and I wrote a song about getting laid.”

The group laughed and called out, “Hi, Rupert.” Terry joined in, one class clown supporting another.

“I just got back from Baltimore, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Houston,” Rupert said, his voice rough and gravelly from his disease. “I’ve got a brother, two sisters, four kids, eleven grandkids, and a boatload of nieces and nephews. I love most of them, I ain’t too keen on a few of them, but I wanted to say goodbye to all of them. I figured if the Grateful Dead could do a farewell tour of America, why not the Grateful-I-Ain’t-Dead-Yet?”

Rupert then proceeded to captivate the room with highlights of his journey, the details of which were both shamelessly funny and painfully poignant. I got so caught up in his story that I stopped thinking about why I was there and let my mind drift to thoughts of Joanie, who like Rupert, lived her dying days to the fullest. She’d have enjoyed hanging out with him.

“Best two weeks of my life,” he said, wrapping it up. “I want to thank all of you for teaching me how to focus on living instead of dying, and I want to thank my higher power for giving me the strength and the bus fare to do it.”

Everyone applauded, including me and Terry. Hands went up again, and Charlie pointed to a woman, but I never heard her name. I was too busy eyeballing the latecomer who had just come in. It was Bruce Bower.

He walked quietly toward the back row, saw me and Terry, and panicked. But he was too far in to bolt and too close to pretend
not to see us. He nodded a perfunctory hello, then sat off to the side and several rows in front of us.

The meeting hummed along. Almost everyone shared. But not Bruce.

When the hour was almost up, Terry leaned toward me and whispered. “I guess old Brucie boy figured it out on his own. We didn’t even have to tell him.”

“Tell him what?” I whispered back.

“He has the right to remain silent.”

CHAPTER 23

THE CLOCK ON
the wall read 8:59 when Charlie took the floor again. “We lost one of our own this week,” he said. “Cal Bernstein. We’ll be giving Cal the usual sendoff at Halligan’s tonight, and in keeping with LWD tradition, all of our serious drinking will be accompanied by sharing memories of his life, not focusing on his passing. Let’s close the meeting with a moment of silent prayer for Cal.”

Heads bowed, the room went still, and my mind replayed the scene of a desperate man with the barrel of a shotgun under his chin. He had urged me to walk away. Warned me not to look. But I couldn’t, and now the final frame of Cal Bernstein’s existence is forever burned into my memory bank.

“Amen,” Charlie finally said, snapping me back into the moment. “I hope to see all of you back here again on Friday.”

The meeting broke up, and Bruce Bower was the first one out of his chair. He wasted no time getting to the front of the room. He whispered something to Charlie, who nodded, looked up at me and Terry, waved, then headed our way. Bruce followed reluctantly.

“Detectives,” Charlie said, extending a hand. “I’m Charlie Brock. Bruce just informed me that you’re with LAPD, but I told him I knew that the minute you walked through the door.”

“Is it that obvious we’re cops?” I said, shaking his hand.

Charlie laughed. “Heck no. I saw you on TV,” he said, pointing at me. “Bruce just told me you swung by his place this afternoon to talk about Cal. If you have any questions for the rest of us, come on over to the bar and ask away. The problem is, I can’t imagine that any of us will have any answers that will help. You sat through this meeting. What Cal did is the exact opposite of what we believe in.”

“How well did you know him?” I asked.

“I didn’t know him long, Detective,” Charlie said, “but when two people are thrown together the way Cal and I were, you learn a lot about each other in a very short time. The two of us would go out for a couple of pops after the meeting. Plus, we talked on the phone a couple of times a week.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Anything and everything. Mostly guy stuff—sports, TV shows, politics, women. Sometimes, especially on the weekends when there were no meetings, we would talk upbeat stuff about our lives, past and present, just to help each other stay positive. The thing is, people in this program talk a blue streak. It’s like being in a lifeboat. Sometimes you’ve got nothing better to do than to jaw with the other guy in the boat. And sometimes it’s because you’ve got something you don’t want to take to the grave, and you need someone to pour your heart out to.”

“Like confession?” Terry, the lapsed Catholic, asked.

“Cal was Jewish,” Charlie said, grinning. “I don’t think he was too big into confession. I’m talking more about getting shit off your chest.”

“Did Cal say anything to you about having a grudge against Dr. Kraus?”

“Not to me. How about you?” he asked Bruce.

Bruce shook his head.

“One of the things you learn when you get here is not to dredge up resentments from the past,” Charlie said. “The cancer is eating away at my liver fast enough. If I dig up some old grudge,
it’s going to start festering and destroy my liver that much faster. LWD teaches us not to ruminate about yesterday or worry about tomorrow. You know what they say—you’ve got to take it one day at a time.”

“You mean like Alcoholics Anonymous,” Terry said.

“Kind of, but there are two differences,” Charlie said. “AA helps people recover from alcoholism so they can get on with their lives. But recovery isn’t in the cards for us.”

“What’s the second difference?” I said.

“The people in Alcoholics Anonymous don’t get to go out for drinks after their meetings. We do.” He winked. “Every storm has a rainbow. Come on, I’ll buy you guys the first round.”

CHAPTER 24

HALLIGAN’S WAS EVERY
bit the Irish pub I thought it would be. Wooden floors, brick accents, cozy lighting, and a burly bartender who gave a shout-out to Charlie and his entourage as we came through the door.

In addition to Charlie and Bruce, there were seven others in the LWD contingent, all anxious to either toast their dead comrade or drink their fears into oblivion.

As soon as Charlie explained who we were and why we were there, the guiding principal of Living With Dying went out the window. Everybody wanted to focus on Cal’s death, especially once they knew that I had witnessed his demise.

It’s human nature. The more grisly the crime, the more details people want. It’s what sells supermarket tabloids.

We sat them all down at a large table, then asked Rupert to join us at a booth in the back.

Charlie was blindsided. “I thought we were doing this all together,” he said. “You know—a group grope.”

“I wish we could,” Terry said, “but there’s a difference between a support group meeting and a police investigation. You know what
we
say? One witness at a time.”

Rupert, who had been open and forthcoming at the meeting, was guarded sitting across from us. I got the feeling he was a people person, but not if those people were cops. “You think I
know anything about Cal Bernstein shooting that doctor?” he asked.

“No,” Terry said. “If you do, it would help, but we’re more interested in what you can tell us about the shooter.”

He nodded. “What do you want to know?”

“What was he like?”

“Bernstein? He was kind of a broken record. Whenever he shared, he would try to start out with something positive, like ‘I saw a good movie,’ or some shit like that, but mostly he was a Negative Nancy, always kicking himself for missing the boat.”

“What boat?”

“He thought he was going to be a hotshot lawyer, but he flunked out of school and wound up bouncing from one dead-end job to another. The only time I had a drink with him I told him I ain’t going to die rich either, but at least I can die with a smile on my face. He looks at me and says, ‘You don’t get it.’ Fuck him. Life is too short to waste on whiners. Are we done here?”

We were done. The other interviews went just as fast. None of the other six people were close with Cal, and nobody had anything to hide. Nobody except Charlie and Bruce.

We thanked them all and left.

“Charlie Brock is a much better liar than Bruce,” Terry said as he made a U-turn on Colorado Avenue. “His big mistake was when he stopped lying to us. That warm and fuzzy tale about him and Cal talking on the phone is one hundred percent true, and it’s going to bury him before the cancer does.”

“As soon as he got going about how the two of them were phone buddies, it was all I could do to not give you a high five,” I said. “I’ll bet they talked a lot. There’s only one problem. The phone company doesn’t have any record of Cal’s phone connecting to any number that belongs to Charlie.”

“Charlie is our man with the burner phone,” Terry said. “And if you had any doubt, did you see Bruce race up to the front to tell him that Five-0 was in the house?”

“We still don’t have a motive,” I said. “We’ve got some interesting puzzle pieces—two dead guys connected to Chilton-Winslow and two terminal killers, but we have no clue why this is all going down.”

“Or who’s behind it,” Terry said. “Charlie Brock is a soldier, a handler to work Bruce and Cal, but nothing about him says he’s running the show. First thing tomorrow morning, let’s have Muller run a background check on him.”

“How about second thing tomorrow morning,” I said. “If we’re lucky, first thing will be somebody slapping a search warrant in our hands.”

Terry turned onto Pico Boulevard, and I folded my arms across my chest, tilted my head back, and closed my eyes. I’d had enough talking for one day.

“I relate to that whole living with dying concept,” Terry said, ignoring my cue.

“How so?”

“Think about it, Mike. Death and dying is what we do every day. We’re never going to be immune to it, but we’re comfortable talking about it.”

“You are so fucking transparent,” I said, opening my eyes. “There’s nothing to talk about. I said what I had to say when I came back from meeting with Eli.”

“That was eight hours ago. Since then you went to see the hematologist. What did he say?”

“He said it’s going to be five days before we know anything, and in the meantime I should make the most of every day and just have fun.”

“In that case, you have had a fabulous day. You started out this morning at the morgue, and you ended with a room full of people who are getting ready to take the big dirt nap,” he said. “If you work homicide, it doesn’t get any more fun than that.”

CHAPTER 25

“IS THAT ALL
you’re going to order?” Charlie asked.

“I can barely drink this,” Bruce said. “I’m too nervous.”

“About what?” Charlie said, digging into a bowl of caramel apple crisp.

The two of them had left Halligan’s and driven to a Denny’s on Lincoln Boulevard.

“
About what
? About those two cops. First they came to my house, then to the meeting. They know something.”

“Bruce, they know that Cal shot the fertility doc. That’s what they’re investigating.”

Bruce took a deep breath. The herbal tea he’d ordered was lukewarm at best. “So you don’t think I fucked up?” he asked, taking a sip.

“You? No. But Cal? He fucked up big time. The instructions were simple. Make it look like an accident. In what universe is walking into a doctor’s office and gunning him down supposed to look like anything but Murder One? Did you know that he called me the night before he killed the doc?”

“No. About what?”

“He was making me promise for the hundredth time that his wife would get paid after he did the deed. I kept telling him not to worry, this is a well-funded operation. As soon as the news breaks that Kraus is dead, the money will be wired to her
account. That calmed him down. He said it would happen soon. But did he tell me he was going to burst into a crowded medical office with his gun blazing? If he had, I’d have pulled the plug on the whole deal. But he didn’t say a word, and now we’re caught up in a goddamn murder investigation.”

“So does that mean his wife isn’t getting paid?” Bruce asked, taking another taste of the tepid tea.

“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t give her a dime,” Charlie said. “Plus, I’d make her give back the advance money. But it’s not my call. The boss isn’t happy about how it all went down, but a deal’s a deal, and the money is being wired to Cal’s widow as we speak.”

“Claire’s already got her money. It takes a big load off my mind.”

Charlie wiped a trail of vanilla ice cream and caramel goo from his chin. “Then I guess you can rest in peace.”

“What do you think the cops asked Rupert and the others?”

“The same shit they asked us. Do you have any idea why Cal shot the doc?”

“Do you think they asked them anything about…” Bruce looked around the diner and lowered his voice. “About me running down Yancy?”

“Bruce—did they ask you about it?”

“No.”

“Then it’s not on their radar. And you know why it’s not on their radar? Because you got it right. Homicide cops don’t investigate traffic accidents.”

“That’s what Claire said. She said they’re only here about Kraus. They don’t even know about Yancy.”

Charlie focused on spooning up the dregs of the cream and the remaining bits of brown sugar crumble.

“How can you eat that poison?” Bruce said. “Did you see the nutritional facts on the menu? Seven hundred and forty calories. Eighty-nine grams of—”

Charlie let go of his spoon. “What the fuck did you just say Claire said about Yancy?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“Bullshit, Bruce. You said Claire said the cops don’t even know about Yancy.”

“And they don’t.”

“But why would your wife even think that a traffic accident you had three weeks ago would be of any interest to two homicide detectives?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. Feminine logic. Who knows how they think?”

Charlie leaned across the table. “Claire knows it wasn’t an accident, doesn’t she?”