the Prostitutes' Ball (2010) (21 page)

Chapter
34.

"What is it?" Hitch said, crowding in to look over my shoulder. "DWP seal"

"The electrical panel? Shouldn't it be against the side of the house? Why would they put it way out here?" "They wouldn't."

I was beginning to remember where I'd seen one of these poured
-
concrete garages before. It was at an old turn-of-the-century house I'd visited at a party up in the Malibu Mountains a few years back. "You know what I think this is?" I said. "What?"

"This garage is covering an old water well. I've seen one of these before."

"A well. Why would they need a well?" Hitch asked.

"This house was built in 1908 and back then they didn't have an extensive water system in L
. A
. That was before the Owens Valley project. These old houses were built way before the water mains were installed up here. The owners would pay DWP to drill down to the water table and install these private wells. After the water mains were put into service, the private wells were decommissioned."

"So what's the garage for?"

"The guy who owned the house where I saw one of these told me you can't fill in a water well because it connects to an underground aquifer and whatever you pour down the well to fill it in just gets washed away."

"So they capped it, right?"

"Right, but the problem with that is vandals kept pulling the caps off. My friend told me in the mid or late twenties one or two kids fell down these old wells and died. DWP got sued, so they built these concrete garages and locked them shut to protect the welleaps from vandals."

"Okay, so it's nothing, then," he reasoned. "It got planted out because it was ugly."

"Yeah," I said. "Probably."

But as I was turning to go, I started thinking that holly was a strange choice for that job. There were better and cheaper ground covers. Then I remembered that holly was often used by people who lived in areas where city-use ordinances prohibited high fences. If home owners wanted to secure their property, but couldn't because the city limited fence height to four feet, they often planted holly bushes, which reached ten or twelve feet high. Holly also has plentiful inch
-
long spike-like thorns. It was an effective barrier and a deterrent to prowlers.

I started to wonder if it was just a coincidence that the well house had been planted out with holly, or had someone, like Stender
Sheedy and Thayer Dunbar, not wanted this structure messed with like they didn't want anyone messing with the house?

"Let's open this thing up," I said.

"Why?

"Let's just do it."

I looked at the door clasp. It was held shut by a heavy chain with no lock. The chain had been welded to itself.

"Hang on," I said. "I'll be right back."

I ran to our D-ride parked down the street in the bushes, opened the trunk, and pulled out the jack handle. Then I ran back up the hill. By the time I got there Hitch had pulled the welded chain out as far as it would go.

"Okay, stand back."

I slipped the jack handle through the small loop he had created with the chain and tried to use its two-foot-long leverage to apply enough force to snap a link. It didn't yield.

"Grab on to this," I said. "Give me a hand."

We both hung on to the jack handle and put all our weight into it. After about two minutes of bouncing, one of the links finally broke and Hitch and I landed in the thornbush we'd just cut down from the front of the metal door.

"This better be worth it," Hitch growled, picking a painful-looking thorn from his palm.

We got up and pulled off the chain. Then we both yanked on the metal door. The hinges were rusted and the door was heavy, making it extremely tough to move. We managed to force it open wide enough to slip through. Musty air poured out of the crack and greeted us as we turned on our flashlights, both took a deep breath, and slipped inside.

The first thing 1 saw in the gloom was a large, boxy shape. I shined my light on it. It was a massive square object of some kind with
a r
otting tarp slung over it. The thing was sitting in the center of the rectangular space.

Hitch and I pulled off the canvas. Once it was removed, it revealed a thirty-year-old box-back armored truck. The faded red letters on the side read:

BRINKS
MONEY & VALUABLES,

SAFETY & DISPATCH

"Damn. Look at this," Hitch said softly.

We moved around the truck. The tires were all flat from years of sitting here. Hitch climbed up on the running board and shined his light inside the cab.

"Auugh!" he screamed, and jumped back, almost falling down.

I moved up and shined my light where he had just been looking.

Staring back at me were two empty eye sockets and a bone white skull. A full skeleton was slumped over the wheel, its missing eyes turned to look out the window. All of the flesh had rotted away. A Brinks uniform hung on the bones like a scarecrow s clothing. In the passenger seat was another skeleton. This one was slumped against the passenger door, its uniform also in shreds. Bugs and bacteria had managed to get inside and do their work. Over the years, both guards had been eaten to the bone.

Hitch and I stumbled from the concrete structure and stood outside trying to deal with what we'd just discovered.

For almost two minutes, neither of us spoke. Once Hitch regained his composure, he looked over at me, pale but intense in the moonlight. His exact expression was hard to assess. There was excitement there, even avarice, but mostly he just seemed very happy.

"I told you once we got it worked out, the first act would be killer. In case you missed it, this is the rest of the big dark secret that was lying under Act One. It just exploded to the surface, changing everything."

"Huh?" I said, sounding like a Dunbar party guest. "This is what we've been praying for, dummy. It's our major complication in Act Two."

Chapter
35.

Ten minutes later Hitch and I were sitting in the front seat of our slick-back, arguing about what to do next.

"We gotta take this to Jeb," I said.

"Forgetting the Permission to Search we got from Brooks, which I'm not even sure is completely valid, 'cause he was stoned; if our bosses find out we came up here to work on a whole second homicide without telling anyone what we were doing, we're capital-F fucked. The department will give us the grand tour, with that all-important career-ending last stop at Internal Affairs."

"But how can we sit on this?" I asked. "We got dead bodies stacking up like cordwood. These two have probably been in that truck since Thomas Vulcunas death in eighty-one. They're probably part of the motive for his murder."

"I know. I know. Shit. Cool as this is movie-wise, if we divulge it to our bosses, were gonna get sacrificed. We should ve never come up here. Let's just think this out for a minute. Maybe there's another way to go."

"Look, Hitch. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't button up and walk away. Besides, since we've cut down that berry bush, somebody's gonna find that garage and truck tomorrow anyway. We gotta deal with this."

"I know."

"If you don't want to go to Jeb, then I say we start with Alexa."

"No."

"She's a good street cop. She thinks like a cop, not a suit. She'll understand why we went after this. Especially once Dahlia told us to take the 7.65 slug off our evidence sheet."

"Are you nuts? She's the head of the Detective Bureau."

"She's also my wife and a primary responder on the Sladky murder. We're gonna eventually have to tell Jeb too, so let's just get it over with and call them both. I don't see any way around it."

"A lot of people don't believe this, but I really love this job," he said. "I don't want to end my career on the LAPD with a blindfold and a cigarette."

"We'll get through it. Stick with me, here. I've been in tighter spots."

I took out my cell and dialed Alexa. It was after three A
. M
. but she was still in her office at the PAB.

"Why aren't you in bed?" she asked.

"I'm up at the house 011 Skyline Drive with Hitch. You need to collect Jeb and get up here now."

"What's up?"

"Plenty. Just get up here. I'd rather show you than tell you."

We spent a tough hour waiting for Alexa and Jeb, while we worke
d o
ut our plan of attack and a few of our arguments. Captain Calloway arrived first.

"This better be either great or really, really good," Jeb said as he pulled in. He'd thrown on an old LAPD sweatshirt, jeans, and flip
-
flops.

"I'll let you assign the degree of greatness," I told him.

Alexa drove up a couple of minutes later and Hitch and I led them up the hill to the concrete well house. We had left the door ajar.

"Get ready for a shock," I advised as we accompanied them inside. Hitch and I turned on our flashlights, illuminating the Brinks truck for them.

"Drivers are still inside. Dead," I said. "Take a deep breath, cause it ain't pretty."

Both of them looked through the truck's windows at the skeletons. Alexa said nothing, but as Jeb looked, I could see he was breathing through his mouth and swallowing air. I cut him some slack though because he was born in Haiti where they still practice voodoo. When they finished, everyone backed out and we all stood outside.

"That truck is old," I said. "Late seventies or early eighties."

"I'll bet it's the armored car that disappeared off Wilshire Boulevard in eighty-three," Jeb said. "It was carrying something like fifteen or sixteen million in gold bullion from the Jewelry Mart. Case is still open, but very cold."

"It's still open?" I said for no other reason than to slow this down a little. I was getting overrun by events.

"Everybody thought the guards pulled the heist and escaped to Tahiti or someplace, to live the good life," Jeb explained. "Apparently not. I'll run the plate to confirm it, but I'm sure this is it."

"How did you find that garage?" Alexa asked. "I didn't see it before."

"You want to tell em?" I asked my partner.

"You can do it," Hitch replied.

"We found this because we were working an old double murder/ suicide from 1981. The Vulcuna family used to own this house in the eighties. The father was supposed to have killed his wife and daughter, then shot himself," I began. "Instead of working on closing loose ends for ADA Wilkes on Sladky, we were working that old double murder/suicide instead. We don't think Thomas Vulcuna was the doer. We think he was murdered too, shot back here. That's where the 7.65 slug came from. I'm really sorry about this, but cutting to the chase, I guess we were disobeying Jeb's direct orders."

"That may be an overly harsh assessment," Hitch jumped in, trying to massage it. Then the bullshit started flowing. "Put in a friendlier light, we were operating as good police officers, following the lead of our commander, Captain Calloway, who said that the 7.65 bullet we found over here should definitely stay in the Sladky case. But it needed to be explained and in an attempt to do that, we discovered it wasn't part of Sladky at all. So, in a dedicated and extremely professional way, we "

"Please shut up," Jeb said softly.

Hitch fell silent. We all stood quietly trying to assess the situation.

"There's no way we can keep this from Dahlia," Alexa finally said. "This is going to affect her prosecution."

"We're fucked," Hitch whispered in my ear.

Chapter
36.

Jeb said he would make arrangements for a police tow truck to take the armored car back to the new Forensic Science Center on the Cal State campus while Alexa was trying to scare up a home number for Dahlia Wilkes. Before either could dial, Hitch and I moved in on them with an alternate idea.

"We need to talk to you guys for a minute," I started.

"You can't take this truck to the police garage at Cal State," Hitch said.

"Why not?" Jeb wondered.

"Once its there a whole lot of people will know about it and this thing is gonna leak, Skipper."

"So then it leaks," Jeb said. "We re not the KGB, we don't conduct investigations in secret."

"Well, maybe this one time we should consider it," I suggested.

"And just how do we keep this quiet?" Alexa was tapping her foot as she asked this. I could tell from having known and loved her for years, it was not positive body language.

"Listen to all of it first," I said. "There's a lot you still don't know. Once you have the whole deal, then decide."

"There's more?" Alexa asked.

"Yeah," I answered. "A lot."

Hitch and I filled them in on the rest of the '81 Vulcuna case, taking them through everything we'd learned. Alexa had not been in L
. A
. back in '81 but Jeb remembered some of the Vulcunas' tragic story. We ran it down for them and told them about getting Brooks to sign off on a warrant so we could do the Luminol test in the master bedroom. They were both surprised to hear that it had been negative. We told them about the pressure from city government to close the case down, and how McKnight and Norris had only worked the Vulcuna massacre for nine hours before being pulled off and reassigned.