The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin (3 page)

“Well, because I don't really want you to break into my house or my truck, let's say she's right and you're right. Would I really not get into trouble?”

“You really would not. I'd return it to Muriel and Peter, and I wouldn't tell them that it was you who took it. I'd tell them something else.”

“Why? Why would you do that?”

“Because that's the deal we're making.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Why don't you give me the ring, Heather.”

She looked at me. She stared at me. And then she smiled and held the smile on her face for a long, long time. I think she was contemplating again, maybe for the final time, whether she could trust me. I got the feeling that she had
trusted people before and it hadn't worked out all that well.

“Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”

We got up and walked out the door into the little central alcove. We put our shoes back on and went back outside.

Heather walked into the garden beneath her bay window. She dug her hand down into the soil next to one of the tomato plants and pulled out a small plastic ziplock bag. She walked back over to the sidewalk where I was, then brushed the soil off the bag, opened it up, and pulled out the ring. She handed it to me. I looked at it. A square diamond, emerald cut, I think, about one and a half carats, with deep blue triangular sapphires on either side of it.

I had to side with Muriel Dreen on this one. It was pretty. Classic. Classy.

Heather Press said, “The police didn't look in the garden.”

“The place that makes the most sense, yet somehow is ignored. There's some kind of poetry to that.”

She didn't respond. She just looked at me again. Giving me the green cat eyes, her mouth now a straight, serious line. And her face now saying “I trusted you” as she said, “I'm not going to get in trouble.”

It was a statement, not a question. But it was still a question.

“Scout's honor,” I said.

I'd never been a Boy Scout. I just said that for some strange reason. You ever do that? Just say a saying that you never really say, or maybe have never said even once? It just basically emerges out of freaking nowhere and it feels
weird coming out of your mouth and sounds even weirder? Have you ever done that? You've done that. What is that?

I looked at Heather and said, “Thank you. For the beer . . .” I held up the ring. “And for this.”

She nodded. I turned, walked over to the Focus, and got in. I buckled up, then cranked her up. Then I looked to my left, and there was Heather's face. Inches away from mine, framed by my window. I powered it down.

“You know how you asked me why I took the ring?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I think I know why. Muriel Dreen is the meanest person I've ever met. She's so mean to all the people who work for her. All the people who have been there
forever
, as she likes to say. And she was mean to me too. She would threaten to not pay me. And, see, she always talked about her ring. She would go on and on about how tacky everyone is nowadays, and for some reason she would always bring it back to how tacky everyone's engagement rings are today and how her beloved engagement ring from Inman was the kind of ring a classy girl gets. And she'd say it to me like I was the kind of girl who would never get a ring like that. I've never stolen anything in my life. It was an impulse. Just this out-of-the-blue impulse. I thought if I took her ring . . .”

I looked at her. Her face darkened with shame. But also defiance. And the beautiful vulnerability I'd seen right when I met her.

She continued, “I thought if I took her ring it would hurt her. Hurt her back. For hurting her staff all the time. And for hurting me.”

I nodded and said, “She won't know you took it.”

She nodded just a little bit, and I said, “Bye, Heather.”

I powered up my window and took off, headed for the Dreen house, Muriel's ring sitting in the empty cup holder next to the one holding my empty Fresca can.

I
called Peter Caldwell and said I was headed back to the house. He said he was running an errand but that he'd head back too. I got there first, then waited thirteen minutes for Peter to pull up in his BMW. Outside the front door, I told Peter I had an idea and that I wanted to look in Muriel's bedroom. He nervously agreed, then escorted me inside.

We walked through the house to the bedroom. I went over to the dresser next to the bed, the one that had housed the ring. I put my hands on top of the dresser and gave it a long, pensive stare. Then I got down on the floor and looked underneath it. I scooted my whole body over and looked underneath the bed. Unlike most beds, there was nothing, nothing, underneath it. No dust. No spare blan
kets or linens. No boxes filled with old, cracked coat hangers and half-filled photo albums. Nothing. I reached my arm way back under the bed and then, in a dramatic show, got my head, and then the whole top half of my body, under there too. Then I reverse-scooted out, stood up, opened my hand, and showed Peter the ring.

“There you go,” I said. “Under the bed. Problem solved. Case closed.”

“I don't understand. You're saying you just found the ring under there?”

“That's right.”

“Um, Mr. Darvelle, we looked everywhere in here. Including under the bed. The ring wasn't there.”

I handed the ring to Peter. “Didn't look hard enough.”

On the way out, we walked by the den, Muriel's room. I poked my head in. She was in her chair, sitting just like she had been when I was talking to her, only now she was asleep. Her magnified eyes were closed behind glass.

Even asleep, she looked . . .
mean
.

Outside, as I was getting
into the Focus, Peter said, “Mrs. Dreen's not going to believe this story.”

“Well,” I said. “
That's
the story. Okay? I'm going to go home, write up an invoice, print it out, and mail it to you.”

Snail mail. Better than e-mail. For invoices in my line, anyway.

Peter looked at me for a long time with those nervous but kind eyes and said, “Okay.”

“Want to give me your card so I know where to send the invoice?”

Peter reached for his wallet.

Back in the Focus, back
on the road. It was a terrible time to be driving in Los Angeles. Five bells. If you're on the road at this time in L.A. you're either a rookie or an idiot.

I thought, I have three choices. One, fight traffic and go to my office in Culver City. Two, fight traffic and go to my house in Mar Vista, which was a bit farther away. Three, go park somewhere and just sit in my Focus and wait. And fume. Fume in the Focus.

I chose option one, but with an asterisk. I'd take some pro-level side streets and try to beat the system. Which I did, sort of. By taking Beverly Drive into Beverlywood and winding through that perfectly nice, but a tad random, neighborhood sitting just south of Beverly Hills. I popped out the back of it onto Venice Boulevard, then stuck out a few depressing, stifling sections of traffic until I was free and clear in the warehouse district of Culver City.

Back at my desk, highly proud of myself for getting there reasonably unscathed, I wrote up my invoice, printed it out, envelope-d it, addressed it, stamped it, and put it on my desk to send out tomorrow. I still hadn't burned enough time to drive home in peace, not really even close, so I just sat there. Put my feet up on my desk and sat there.

As I mentioned, I work out of a warehouse, a pretty nice-sized one. Before it was mine, a movie producer used it to store a couple of midlife-crisis cars, thus the aforementioned cinder-block walls, slick concrete floor, and big
sliding door. Late afternoon is one of my favorite times to have it open. Cool air coming in; slanting, fading sunlight reflecting off the floor; the lot out in front of me that people use to access the other warehouses going from a sparse few folks to almost none.

Inside my space, I've got my desk, two chairs in front of it, two filing cabinets behind it, a sink, a bathroom, a little fridge, a coffeemaker, and, most important, an electric-blue Stiga indoor-only Ping-Pong table.

And before you ask: yes, there's enough room
around
the table to actually play. One of the things you see all the time, drives me crazy, is a Ping-Pong table stuck in a space without enough room around it. To properly play Ping-Pong, you have to be able to back up, away from the table, significantly. To properly defend shots. To properly position yourself for certain swings. And if you can't do that, if that's not an option, then it's not really Ping-Pong. It would be like having no room behind the baseline of a tennis court. That wouldn't be tennis. It would be some other form of cramped bullshit. Which would be a good name for what so many people end up playing when they think they are playing Ping-Pong: Cramped Bullshit Ping-Pong.

The other thing you should know about my Ping-Pong table is that I never use it as a table-table. I never empty my pockets and put the contents on it. I never put beverages on it, unless I'm playing beer pong, of course. Which I actually play later on in this story. But anyway, I never sit and eat at it, either. When I see any of this behavior, you know, when I walk into a house and see a bunch of shit on top of someone's table—bills, keys, a cookie, clothes, I swear,
clothes
—and I see this a lot—I always think: That is
a fucking crime. And I often say to the perpetrators of that crime: Have a little goddamn respect.

Moving on. Like I said, I was back at my office, sitting there at my desk, waiting for traffic to die down, feet up, kind of scanning my space, just thinking a bit about the little case I'd been on.

When my phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID: the Los Angeles Police Department. For a split second I thought, Did Muriel Dreen call the cops because she doubted my story? Did Heather Press call the cops because I told her that if she didn't give me the ring I'd use some unorthodox tactics to find out whether she had it? Nah, highly doubtful on both counts.

Far more likely they just wanted something. I work with the police department from time to time. And I know quite a few of the cops around town, as I'd explained to Heather Press. And I think that some of them are good at their jobs. Quite good. Certainly not all of them, not even close, but some of them. And I'm even moderately friendly with a few of them. All that being said, I like to give all of them, every last one of them, a little shit from time to time.

Which is why I answered the phone. “Yes?”

“Darvelle, this you?”

“It is.”

“It's Ott. You got a second?”

Homicide detective Mike Ott. One of the ones who are good at their jobs. And one of the ones who I like, in a we'll-never-hang-out-socially kind of way. Ott and I have crossed paths quite a few times over the years, most recently on a murder case involving a famous movie director and a high-concept crime ring.

I said, with over-the-top glee, “For you? Of course!”

“Listen. I have some business for you. You interested in taking a case?”

“Yep,” I said. “I am.”

“All right, you want to come down tomorrow? I'll tell you about it. Give you the case file.”

“You want to tell me anything about it now?”

“No. I'm busy. And it's not a rush. It's cold. Been cold for a while. Unsolved murder. Family wants it investigated further and we don't have the men.”

Notice how he left out the part where they'd looked into it and come up empty? I did. But I wasn't going to mention that. Not this time. The guy was throwing me business. Sometimes I know when to shut up.

Sometimes.

“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow when?”

“Let me think. You live in Mar Vista. So if I were to ask you to come at 8 a.m., it would be almost impossible for you to avoid sitting in the worst kind of fucking traffic. Which I know you don't like.”

Did I mention that some of the cops like to throw shit back at me as well? You give it, you got to take it.

I said, “I'm assuming you're about to say 8 a.m.?”

“That's why I'm giving you this business, Darvelle. You're a pretty good detective. Eight a.m. My desk.”

“Great,” I said. “Thank you, Mike. I'll see you at eleven.”

And I hung up.

And then I thought about
the old lady, the plant lady, and the ring again. Maybe taking a case that I wasn't all that interested in had somehow led to me getting this one.
Because sometimes getting going, even in the smallest way, opens up a cosmic window for something bigger to happen. Interesting how that occurs. You know? Whatever field you're in, when you just do
something
, anything, when you just get started, you are pushing a big inert rock, the big invisible wheel of momentum.

The two things don't even need to be tightly connected. You start organizing your office and the phone rings. You're on a case and you can't think of a theory to explain what's happening, so you throw out a first-thought idea, maybe even a terrible, nonsensical one. And then a decent idea pops into your head. You don't have an interesting case on your desk, so you take a not-so-interesting one. And then you get a call from Mike Ott about a murder the cops couldn't crack.

Yeah, you're giving the big rock a little nudge, a little push, and before you know it, it starts to roll down the hill. I wondered, if you looked at specific examples, whether the second things, the better things, actually only appeared if you engaged with the first things. Do you always have to somehow, even if just with an obscure action, press start on the Cosmic Momentum Wheel? Sitting there, I just didn't know the answer to that one. Might need to think about it a little more. What I did know was that I probably wasn't going to get to the bottom of it right then and there. I also knew that I could probably drive home now in relative peace.

So I got up, cut the lights, and cut out of there.

I got in the Focus
and headed off the lot. Right at the point where you leave the lot proper but are still technically on
the lot, there's a streetlight that kicks on automatically at dusk. It was on now, but because there was still some light in the sky, the beam coming out of it was weaker than it would be later. Sitting underneath it, and glowing just a bit because of the weak light, was a new gray Mercedes S-Class, one of the big-dog Benzes. It sat with its grille pointing conspicuously at the lot's exit. Under a spotlight of sorts, nothing covert about it. I drove—slowly—right in front of it. I looked through its windshield. There was a man sitting behind the wheel. An older man. Mid-, or maybe even late, fifties. He had dark hair slicked back, a trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee, and glasses. Big gold frames, with maybe just the slightest tint of bronze to them.

I looked right at him. I could only just see his eyes behind not one but two walls of glass. He looked right at me.
Stared
right at me. Expressionless.

I wondered, driving home, Was that guy there for me? Again I had one of the thoughts I'd considered when I'd seen “LAPD” on my phone: Muriel Dreen. Sitting there with her ring but not happy with the story that came with it. So she sends someone to look into me. Possible. More likely than her calling the cops about it . . . Or was it something to do with an old case? Somebody sent back to fuck with me? Wouldn't be the first time. Or did this guy in the Mercedes have something to do with my
new
case, the one I hadn't even gotten yet, the one I'd just talked to Mike Ott about? Stranger things have happened. Information travels fast.

Or was it just
nothing
? Just a guy sitting on a lot full of warehouses, minding his own business?

Somehow I doubted that.