Whispers (20 page)

They stopped at another traffic signal.

The light changed, and they inched forward through the thickening traffic.

Neither of them spoke for a couple of minutes.

Then Tony said, “Whatever weakness and faults you might have, you’re a pretty damned good cop.”

Frank glanced at him, startled.

“I mean it,” Tony said. “There’s been friction between us. A lot of the time, we rub each other the wrong way. Maybe we won’t be able to work together. Maybe we’ll have to put in requests for new partners. But that’ll just be a personality difference. In spite of the fact that you’re about three times as rough with people as you ever need to be, you’re good at what you do.”

Frank cleared his throat. “Well . . . you, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Except sometimes you’re just too . . . sweet.”

“And you can be a sour son of a bitch sometimes.”

“Want to ask for a new partner?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Me either.”

“But if we don’t start getting along better, it’s too dangerous to go on together much longer. Partners who make each other tense can get each other killed.”

“I know,” Frank said. “I know that. The world’s full of assholes and junkies and fanatics with guns. You have to work with your partner as if he was just another part of you, like a third arm. If you don’t, you’re a lot more likely to get blown away.”

“So I guess we should think seriously about whether we’re right for each other.”

“Yeah,” Frank said.

Tony started looking for street numbers on the buildings they passed. “We should be just about there.”

“That looks like the place,” Frank said, pointing.

The address on Juan Mazquezza’s Vee Vee Gee pay record was a sixteen-unit garden apartment complex in a block largely taken over by commercial interests: service stations, a small motel, a tire store, an all-night grocery. From a distance the apartments looked new and somewhat expensive, but on closer inspection Tony saw signs of decay and neglect. The exterior walls needed a new coat of stucco; they were badly chipped and cracked. The wooden stairs and railings and doors all needed new paint. A signpost near the entrance said the place was
Las Palmeras Apartments
. The sign had been hit by a car and badly damaged, but it hadn’t been replaced. Las Palmeras looked good from a distance because it was cloaked in greenery that masked some of its defects and softened the splintery edges. But even the landscaping, when scrutinized closely, betrayed the seediness of Las Palmeras; the shrubs had not been trimmed in a long time, and the trees were raggedy, and the jade shrubs were in need of care.

The pattern at Las Palmeras could be summed up in one word: transition. The few cars in the parking area reinforced that evaluation. There were two middle-priced new cars that were lovingly cared for, gleaming with fresh wax. No doubt they belonged to young men and women of optimism and were signs of accomplishment to them. A battered and corroded old Ford leaned on one flat tire, unused and unuseable. An eight-year-old Mercedes stood beyond the Ford, washed and waxed, but a bit worse for wear; there was a rusty dent in one rear fender. In better days, the owner was able to purchase a twenty-five-thousand-dollar automobile, but now he apparently couldn’t come up with the two-hundred-dollar deductible part of the repair bill. Las Palmeras was a place for people in transition. For some of them, it was a way station on the upward climb to bright and beckoning careers. For others, it was a precarious spot on the cliff, the last respectable toehold on a sad and inevitable fall into total ruin.

As Frank parked by the manager’s apartment, Tony realized that Las Palmeras was a metaphor for Los Angeles. This City of Angels was perhaps the greatest land of opportunity the world had ever known. Incredible quantities of money moved through here, and there were a thousand ways to earn a sizable bankroll. L.A. produced enough success stories to fill a daily newspaper. But the truly astounding affluence also created a variety of tools for self-destruction and made them widely available. Any drug you wanted could be found and bought easier and quicker in Los Angeles than in Boston or New York or Chicago or Detroit. Grass, hashish, heroin, cocaine, uppers, downers, LSD, PCP. . . . The city was a junkie’s supermarket. Sex was freer, too. Victorian principles and sensibilities had collapsed in Los Angeles faster than they had in the rest of the country, partly because the rock music business was centered there, and sex was an integral part of that world. But there were other vastly more important factors that had contributed to the unchaining of the average Californian’s libido. The climate had something to do with it; the warm dry days and the subtropical light and the competing winds—desert and sea winds—had a powerful erotic influence. The Latin temperament of the Mexican immigrants made its mark on the population at large. But perhaps most of all, in California you felt that you were on the edge of the Western world, on the brink of the unknown, facing an abyss of mystery. It was seldom a conscious awareness of being on the cultural edge, but the subconscious mind was bathed in that knowledge at all times, an exhilarating and sometimes scary feeling. Somehow, all of those things combined to break down inhibitions and stir the gonads. A guilt-free view of sex was healthy, of course. But in the special atmosphere of L.A., where even the most bizarre carnal tastes could be indulged with little difficulty, some men (and women) could become as addicted to sex as to heroin. Tony had seen it happen. There were some people, certain personality types, who chose to throw everything away—money, self-respect, reputation—in an endless party of fleshy embraces and brief wet thrills. If you couldn’t find your personal humiliation and ruin in sex and drugs, L.A. provided a smorgasbord of crackpot religions and violence-prone radical political movements for your consideration. And of course, Las Vegas was only one hour away by cheap regularly scheduled airlines, free if you could qualify as a high-rolling junketeer. All of those tools for self-destruction were made possible by the truly incomprehensible affluence. With its wealth and its joyous celebration of freedom, Los Angeles offered both the golden apple and the poisoned pear: positive transition and negative transition. Some people stopped at places like Las Palmeras Apartments on their way up, grabbed the apple, moved to Bel Air or Beverly Hills or Malibu or somewhere else on the Westside, and lived happily ever after. Some people tasted the contaminated fruit, and on the way down they made a stop at Las Palmeras, not always certain how or why they’d wound up there.

In fact, the manager of the apartment complex did not appear to understand how the patterns of transition had brought her to her current circumstances. Her name was Lana Haverby. She was in her forties, a well-tanned blonde in shorts and halter. She had a good opinion of her sexual attractiveness. She walked and stood and sat as if she were posing. Her legs were okay, but the rest of her was far from prime. She was thicker in the middle than she seemed to realize, too big in hips and butt for her skimpy costume. Her breasts were so huge that they were not attractive but freakish. The thin halter top exposed canyonesque cleavage and accentuated the large turgid nipples, but it could not give her breasts the shape and uplift they so desperately needed. When she wasn’t changing her pose or adjusting it, when she wasn’t trying to gauge what effect her body had on Frank and Tony, she seemed confused, distracted. Her eyes didn’t always appear to be focused. She tended to leave sentences unfinished. And several times she looked around in wonder at her small dark living room and at the threadbare furniture, as if she had absolutely no idea how she had come to this place or how long she’d been here. She cocked her head as if she heard whispering voices, just out of range, that were trying to explain it all to her.

Lana Haverby sat in a chair, and they sat on the sofa, and she looked at the mug shots of Bobby Valdez.

“Yeah,” she said. “He was a sweetie.”

“Does he live here?” Frank asked.

“He lived . . . yeah. Apartment nine . . . was it? But not any more.”

“He moved out?”

“Yeah.”

“When was that?”

“This summer sometime. I think it was. . . .”

“Was what?” Tony asked.

“First of August,” she said.

She recrossed her bare legs, put her shoulders back a bit farther to elevate her breasts as much as possible.

“How long did he live here?” Frank asked.

“I guess it was three months,” she said.

“He live alone?”

“You mean was there a chick?”

“A girl, a guy, anybody,” Frank said.

“Just him,” Lana said. “He was a sweetie, you know.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

“No. But I wish he would have.”

“Why? Did he skip out on the rent?”

“No. Nothing like that. I’d just like to know where I could . . .”

She cocked her head, listening to the whispers again.

“Where you could what?” Tony asked.

She blinked. “Oh . . . I’d sure like to know where I could visit him. I was kind of working on him. He turned me on, you know. Got my juices running. I was trying to get him into bed, but he was, you know, sort of shy.”

She had not asked why they wanted Bobby Valdez, alias Juan Mazquezza. Tony wondered what she would say if she knew her shy little sweetie was an aggressive, violent rapist.

“Did he have any regular visitors?”

“Juan? Not that I noticed.”

She uncrossed her legs, sat with her thighs spread, and watched Tony for his reaction.

“Did he say where he worked?” Frank asked.

“When he first moved in, he worked at some laundry. Later, he got something else.”

“Did he say what it was?”

“No. But he was, you know, making good money.”

“He have a car?” Frank asked.

“Not at first,” she said. “But later. A Jaguar two-plus-two. That was beautiful, man.”

“And expensive,” Frank said.

“Yeah,” she said. “He paid a bundle for it and all in cold hard cash.”

“Where would he get that kind of money?”

“I told you. He was making good bread at his new job.”

“Are you sure you don’t know where he was working?”

“Positive. He wouldn’t talk about it. But, you know, as soon as I saw that Jaguar, I knew . . . he wasn’t long for this place,” she said wistfully. “He was moving up fast.”

They spent another five minutes asking questions, but Lana Haverby had nothing more of consequence to tell them. She was not a very observant person, and her recollection of Juan Mazquezza seemed to have tiny holes in it, as if moths had been nibbling at her store of memories.

When Tony and Frank got up to leave, she hurried to the door ahead of them. Her gelatinous breasts jiggled and swayed alarmingly, in what she evidently thought was a wildly provocative display. She affected that ass-swinging, tippy-toewalk that didn’t look good on any coquette over twenty-one; she was forty, a grown woman, unable to discover and explore the dignity and special beauty of her own age, trying to pass for a teenager, and she was pathetic. She stood in the doorway, leaning back slightly against the open door, one long leg bent at the knee, copying a pose she’d seen in a men’s magazine or on a cheesecake calendar, virtually begging for a compliment.

Frank turned sideways as he went through the door, barely able to avoid brushing against her breasts. He strode quickly down the walk toward the car, not looking back.

Tony smiled and said, “Thanks for your cooperation, Miss Haverby.”

She looked up at him, and her eyes focused on his eyes more clearly than they had focused on anything during the past fifteen minutes. She held his gaze, and a spark of something vital glimmered in her eyes—intelligence, genuine pride, maybe a shred of self-respect—something better and cleaner than had been there before. “I’m going to move up and out of here, too, you know, like Juan did. I wasn’t always just a manager at Las Palmeras. I moved in some, you know, pretty rich circles.”

Tony didn’t want to hear what she had to tell him, but he felt trapped and then mesmerized, like the man who was stopped in the street by the Ancient Mariner.

“Like when I was twenty-three,” she said. “I was working as a waitress, but I got up and out of that. That was when the Beatles, you know, were just getting started, like seventeen years ago, and the whole rock thing was really exploding then. You know? A good-looking girl back then, she could connect with the stars, make those important connections, you know, and go just about everywhere with the big groups, travel all over the country with them. Oh, wow, man, those were some fantastic times! Like there wasn’t anything you couldn’t have or do. They had it all, those groups, and they spread it around, you know. And I was with them. I sure was. I slept with some very famous people, you know. Household names. I was very popular, too. They liked me.”

She began to list bestselling rock groups from the sixties. Tony didn’t know how many of them she’d actually been with and how many she only imagined she’d been with, but he noticed that she never mentioned individuals; she had been to bed with
groups
, not people.

He had never wondered what became of groupies, those bouncy child-women who wasted some of their best years as hangers-on in the rock music world. But now he knew at least one way they could end up. They trailed after the current idols, offering inarticulate praise, sharing drugs, providing convenient receptacles for the sperm of the rich and famous, giving no thought to time and the changes it would bring. Then one day, after a girl like that had been burnt out by too much booze and too much pot and too much cocaine and maybe a little heroin, when the first hard wrinkles came at the corners of the eyes, when the laugh lines grew a shade too deep, when the pneumatic breasts began to show the first signs of sagging, she was eased out of one group’s bed—and discovered that, this time, there was no other group willing to take her in. If she wasn’t averse to turning tricks, she could still make a living that way, for a few years. But to some of them that was a turnoff; they didn’t think of themselves as hookers but as “girlfriends.” For a lot of them, marriage was out, for they’d seen too much and done too much to willingly settle for a tame domestic life. One of them, Lana Haverby, had taken a job at Las Palmeras, a position she thought of as temporary, just a way to swing free rent until she could reconnect with the beautiful people.