True Detectives (15 page)

Petra said, “Four kids gunned down in front of a party and no one saw a thing. We’ve got a pretty good idea who’s behind it. Son of an allegedly reformed banger who scored a big city grant to keep guns out of the hands of people just like him and his offspring.”

Moe said, “Meaning pretend to work it hard but don’t do squat without the mayor’s okay.”

“Listen to him,” said Biro. “So young, yet so cynical.”

One of Sturgis’s favorite lines. Moe’s appreciation for the Loo’s influence climbed a notch.

He said, “I’ll go with you to the copy machine.”

On the way over, Petra said, “Who’s your partner on this?”

“No one.”

A
aron sat in the Opel, within eyeshot of Swallowsong Lane, listened to music on his iPod and fought the erosion of confidence.

Billing Mr. Dmitri for hours of surveillance was okay up to a point. He had to produce.

Moses being involved didn’t help. Hand his brother a simple case, Aaron had no doubt Moe could close it. But a deep-freeze whodunit?

Maybe he was being too hard on bro, letting a lifetime of… relationship get in the way.

Blood ties be damned, he and Moses had turned into strangers.

Had they ever been anything else?

Complicated … well, they could always blame Mom.

One of a kind; thinking about her made him smile.

She never stopped smiling.

Except when she did.

Bagpipes and tears, so many men in blue, some of them are also crying.

Mom in black, veiled.

Big blue shapes looming over his four-year-old self, talking about Dad.

Off to one side, Jack sits there, crying harder than anyone.

All of a sudden, he’s living in the house.

It had seemed like the very next damned day. Years later, when Aaron had acquired snoop skills, he went looking for the marriage certificate, found it easily enough in the County Archives.

Mom and Jack had tied the knot three months after the funeral. Civil ceremony, probably one of those deals where couples waited in line to get their ninety seconds of semi-attention from a half-asleep judge.

Despite that, he’d never think of it as anything but the next damned day. That was the point. A four-year-old needed to construct his own reality and hell if he hadn’t
coped
. Never opening a fresh mouth to Jack, even when Jack nodded off in the middle of a chess game or Monopoly or watching TV.

Never ratting Jack out when he picked Aaron up from school, stinking of booze.

Poor little Aaron had a new daddy, everything was going to be just fine. Meanwhile, poor little Aaron’s waking up in the middle of the night, sweaty and shivering, seeing his real daddy’s smiling face. Getting tossed up in the air by his real daddy, tossing the football, man this feels so good, feels so damned damned good.

Then: Real daddy lying in a pool of rich, deep blood.

Smiling up at Aaron, despite the blood and the pain. Mouthing
Good-bye, little man
.

Aaron lived with the dream for years, never told anyone about it because that would be chickenshit.

New daddy.

New
baby
.

Pink and freckled as Jack, unable to do nothing but squall and crap and suck on Mom’s …

As Aaron grew older, he craved details about Dad. Mom had no problem pulling out the photo albums, talking about the love they shared, what a wonderful man, a handsome man, a smart man. Jack, sitting
off by himself, watching the tube, able to hear but it didn’t even bother him. What kind of man was
that?

When Aaron was seven, he built up his courage, got Jack alone, asked Jack what had happened.

Jack avoided looking at him. “That’s just a real sad story, son.”

I’m not your son!

Jack reached for his glass of vodka. Or scotch. Or whatever was on sale at the liquor store.

Aaron walked away and Jack didn’t follow. That decided it for Aaron.

He’s a coward. Maybe that helped kill Dad
.

Freeze him out.

Jack dealt with Aaron’s rejection by being super-permissive, sometimes indulging Aaron behind Mom’s back. That only decreased Aaron’s respect for the intruder who slept with his mother.

No spine. The way he’d corroded his own liver was proof positive of that.

When Aaron was thirteen, Jack went
out
with no style.

Falling off a damned stool. No bagpipes.

Mom crying, but in a different way.

When Aaron had a year of patrol under his belt, he went looking for the original case file, finally found it at Parker Center, stashed like any other hopeless unsolved on a dusty metal rack.

Waiting until the records clerk left, he pounced, dry-mouthed, wet-eyed, heart churning like a drill-bit.

What he found was two pages of poorly punctuated cop-prose describing the basics of Patrolman Darius Fox’s untimely demise, and an unsigned paragraph at the end blaming Dad and Jack for being careless.

Sitting on the cold, concrete floor of the records vault, crying silently and hoping to God no one walked in, Aaron pored over the arid memorial. Went over it again. Again.

The anonymous author of the blame-conclusion suggested that August 9, 1979, be used as a teaching tool but the case had never come up during Aaron’s training.

Aaron nosed around the academy library in Elysian Park, finally unearthed a fifteen-year-old manual that included the case among several examples where “failure to observe procedure produced disastrous results.”

Most of the blame visited on Dad, for letting his guard down.

But that was based on Jack’s report that Dad had let his gun drop when the Cadillac’s driver’s window rolled down.

So where the hell were you?

Aaron returned to the vault, planning to photocopy the file, forced himself past emotion, tried to squeeze something evidentiary from Dad’s behavior.

A seasoned cop relaxing meant he’d faced someone he didn’t consider threatening.

Or knew.

Suddenly the file was nothing but paper and ink. He stuck it back and left without copying.

One day, he’d work the case. When he had enough money to kick back for an extended stretch of time, really concentrate.

He was doing great financially, each year better than the previous, his retirement fund was looking okay, and his equity in the house was growing. So maybe sooner rather than later.

How would Mom react?

How would Moe react?

Let the damned chips
fall
.

At twelve forty-six a.m. headlights slapped him alert.

White Jag with the top down driving down Swallowsong. Middle-aged couple, woman at the wheel, man looking grim. Six minutes later, a painfully slow-moving dark Range Rover rolled down and passed.

Two gay-looking guys, the passenger mussing the driver’s hair, causing the SUV to swerve toward the Opel, then correct jerkily.

Hoots as the SUV rolled away. Must be nice to enjoy your own stupidity.

Aaron stretched as much as the Opel’s seat would allow. His eyes
felt like they’d been rubbed with beach sand. He moistened with the drops he carried in his Dopp kit. Popped another can—Coke, not Jolt, let’s not push the endocrines too hard.

He’d taken two sips when the black Ram pickup appeared.

Running the stop sign as usual. Aaron was ready, spotted Mason Book slumped in the passenger seat. That same zombie stare he’d spied during the drive to the Colony with Rory Stoltz.

Moments later Aaron was easing back and forth in light west-moving Sunset traffic, playing the Opel like a trombone slide. Sneaking in split-second stares that coalesced into a single image, like pictures in a flip book.

Ax Dement, wearing a black leather jacket despite the heat, greasy hair tied back in a tail, broke the speed limit by ten mph as he puffed a doobie in plain sight.

Lynyrd Skynyrd thumping out the driver’s window, all bass-enhanced.

Rich kid really piling on the outlaw thing. Where was the Confederate flag and the gun rack?

They were in Beverly Hills, now, a city teeming with cops, but illegal smoke was still blowing out the truck’s window. So Ax was a serious risk-taker. Maybe because Daddy’s dough had buffered life’s sharp edges. Or he was just too stupid to be afraid.

Aaron shifted to the right, hazarded another look at Mason Book.

The actor sat low, stared straight ahead, mouth small and tight.

Indulging in nothing but misery.

The Ram continued west.

All the way to the beach, and down the ramp to PCH, big surprise.

Here we go again. Mason Book craving ocean breeze, had found himself another chauffeur.

For all his outward depression, Book was the star, Ax just a pseudo-macho hanger-on who came panting like a puppy when Book commanded.

Ax had his foot to the pedal and keeping up with him worried
Aaron; all he needed was some Highway Patrol hotshot pulling him over.

Black man at the beach.

As they neared the Colony, Aaron braced himself for a turnaround. But this time, the truck kept on going, picking up even more speed past the Pepperdine campus, where Caitlin had once studied and Rory still did. Where Malibu began turning rural.

Heading to Daddy’s spread in Solar Canyon? Late-night mass at the family church?

But the Ram zipped right past Solar, Kanan Dume, Zuma, Broad Beach. Hooked a quick right that caused Aaron to kill the Opel’s lights as he downshifted.

He watched from twenty yards back as the truck pulled off at the land-side entrance to Leo Carrillo State Beach.

About a mile before L.A. County gave way to Ventura, and some of California’s prettiest sand and water.

On the land side, where the truck was, were trails leading to campground and wilderness hikes. A couple of years ago, a cougar had mauled a mountain biker to death not far from here.

Aaron rolled a little closer, trying to spot the truck’s taillights. The angle of the dip into the lot and the surrounding brush hid the Ram. To Aaron’s left, the poorly limned ocean was more sound than sight.

Steady whoosh of tide. In and out, like lazy sex.

Aaron had driven by this spot tons of times, on trips to Oxnard, Ventura, Ojai, Santa Barbara. But the last time he’d actually stopped at Carrillo was … his sophomore year in college, he’d taken a girl there to explore the tide pools, stretch out on clean white sand. Pretending to care about starfish and sea anemones in order to get some romance going. Hoping to catch a glimpse of dolphins, because chicks loved dolphins.

Toward sunset, he and … what was her name … had spotted a pod of Flippers and that had done the trick. Great session in the back of his car, what
was
her name … brunette, half black, half white like him, said she wanted to be a psychologist… Ronette
… Ronelle
DeFreeze, long, lithe body, green eyes, pretty head turned to one side as she …

Concentrate, Detective Fox.

He edged the Opel closer, got twenty feet from the entrance to the park where a sliver of the lot was visible. The truck was parked fairly close to the highway, blocked by yellow gates that closed off the park after dark.

Impossible to see if it was occupied or not.
Gee thanks, starless night
.

That day with Ronelle, Aaron had parked just past the yellow gates. Concentrating, he dredged up memories. Ranger booth, list of regulations. Entry road shaded by trees.

Ax and Book were either sitting in the truck or had exited to proceed on foot. Either scenario was risky: a darkened vehicle illegally parked could easily attract attention from a patrolling park ranger. So would the marijuana reek sure to cling to the truck’s interior.

But this was a guy who sped through B.H. toking up.

Maybe the boys had been here before, knew it was safe because ranger patrols were infrequent.

If budget cuts stuck a handful of Smokeys with covering miles of wilderness, that made sense.

What did that say about the safety of camping—something Aaron had always considered a pathetic grab at phony machismo.

And this was Carrillo, he’d heard rumors about the place, the good old days of the Manson Family, other assorted whacks running cannibal parties under full moons. Human sacrifices, blood rites, not to mention your garden-variety sexual psychopath lurking behind every pine.

C’mon, Jimmy and Judy! Mom and Dad have found a super-neat place to set up our little Sterno stove and cook our wienies and our marsh-mallows …

Even if the rumors were tall tales, what was the pleasure in waking up at sunrise with achy muscles and a mouthful of dirt, some rabid raccoon or weasel or whatever farting on your head …

What were Mason Book and Ax Dement doing here at close to two a.m.?

One way to find out.

Nope, too risky.

Encountering the two of them would blow his cover and render him useless.

Moe would love that…

First Commandment of the job: Thou Shalt Not Fuck Up.

He settled down for another bout of inactivity.

Twenty-four minutes later, he saw two figures return to the truck— so they
had
taken a walk.

The Ram backed away from the yellow gates, swung onto PCH, hooked an illegally acute left turn that took it across the double-double. Starting up the Opel, Aaron checked for ongoing traffic, completed his own iffy turn, pushed the car up to seventy.

Moments later, with the Ram just starting to come into view, red lights flashed in his rearview.

Wonderful
.

Before Aaron could respond, the CHP cruiser flashed its brights.

Patience, man, what’s it been, a nanosecond?

Next the idiot would be bellowing over his loudspeaker. Aaron pulled over at the first hint of turnoff.

The cruiser glided to a stop twenty feet behind.

It took a long time—way longer than usual—for the Chippie to approach. Careful to keep his hands on the wheel, Aaron watched the patrolman head his way through the side mirror.

Young, just a kid. Big and pouty-mouthed and heavy.

Slow, deliberate John Wayne waddle, one hand resting near his gun.

Black man at the beach
.

The CHP officer stopped five feet behind the Opel, just stood there.

No reason to be worried, Kiddie-cop. You’ve already taken your sweet time running the tags
.

Following proper procedure.

Hefting his flashlight high, the way they teach you in every police academy, the Chippie advanced some more. Stopped again. Hand
on
his gun.

Aaron sat there.

Finally: “Step out of the car, sir.”

Pasting his best guileless/harmless/aw-shucks look on his face, Aaron complied at exactly the pace he would’ve appreciated back in his uniform days.