Rico’s stomach throbbed; he thought he was going to have to lean over and vomit.
“They could’ve already killed her,” Luis said quietly and turned the full force of his gaze onto Rico. “If she’s dead, then you helped kill her! You put her right in Viper hands, bastardo!”
“We don’t know what happened to her!” Rico said. “We can call the cops and let them—”
“NO COPS!” Luis shouted. He was trembling, trying to fight back tears. “This is business for the Homicides, for my brothers. Come on,” he said to the other boys, and instantly they stood up from the steps. “We got to go find Maven and tell him!” They started off along the street, swaggering like little roosters. But suddenly Luis turned and pointed a finger at Rico. “You better hope my sister’s okay!” he shouted, and then his voice cracked. “You just better hope and pray, man!” Luis turned away from him, and the trio of boys vanished along the street.
Rico watched them move out of sight. A surge of vomit came up from his stomach, and he stood in the mouth of an alley with his head bent, but he couldn’t throw up. Dead? he thought. Merida dead? Killed by the Vipers, a bunch of war-happy punks who were just kids when Rico was running with the Cripplers? A rain of slop came spattering into the alley from a window high overhead, and as Rico jumped away, he heard thin, vicious laughter. Dazed and prickled with cold sweat, he made his way to his car and quickly drove away from the hellish barrio.
SEVEN
“That there’s the dude.” The black prostitute with heavy-lidded, sensual eyes and orange-streaked hair slid the printed composite portrait across the interrogation-room desk to Lieutenant Reece. “I’d know him anywhere. Tried to run my ass down on Yucca Street. Tried to kill me. Oh yeah, that’s him.” She inhaled deeply on a Cigarillo and blew the smoke from the corner of her mouth.
“Did he mention a name to you, Miss Connors? Anything like Wally or Walt or Walter?”
“No. He didn’t say a word except to ask my…uh…price. Now look here.” She glanced nervously at the slowly turning reel of the tape recorder on the end of the desk. “You aren’t going to try to trick old Lizz now, are you? I don’t like my voice going into that box, you know?” She looked over her shoulder to where Officer Waycross and Captain Palatazin sat watching. “You promised me,” she said to Waycross. “You didn’t drag me down here to trap me on a soliciting charge, now did you?”
“No one’s trying to trap you,” Palatazin said quietly. “We’re not interested in what you do for a living. We’re interested in the man who picked you up Wednesday night. One of the problems we’ve faced during this thing is that you ladies usually don’t like to talk to us.”
“Well who’s to blame for that? John Law comes down hard on the sisters. We gots to make a buck, too, you know.” She returned her languid gaze to Reece. “There’s plenty of worse ways to get by.”
“I guess there are,” Reece agreed. “But you’re sure about these numbers? Two and seven?”
“Yeah. The last number might have been a three…or maybe a five. I don’t know.” Reece nodded and looked over the report sheet he’d filled in as the girl talked. “What about the letters? You think the first one was ‘T.’ What about the second one?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t have no time to stand there and read the man’s plate, you know. I was tryin’ to save my ass.” She blew out another plume of smoke toward the offending tape recorder. “I figure I did pretty good to remember anything at all.”
“Dave,” Palatazin said to Waycross, “why don’t you take the report and get started on the license trace right away? Ask McCullough and Price to give you a hand as soon as they’re free.”
“Yes, sir.” Waycross took the report from Reece and left the room.
“Can I go now?” the girl asked. “I’ve told you all I can remember.”
“In a minute,” Palatazin replied, leaning forward in his chair. “You said—if I can use your exact word—that you were ‘jumpy’ with this man. Why was that?”
“I usually don’t care who I date,” she said, “but this dude gave me the creeps. He seemed okay at first, kinda quiet and all. I figured a quick date at the Casa Loma Motel, and then I’d be on my way with fifty bucks. Easy cash because I don’t do any specialties, you know?” She raised her eyebrows and waited until Palatazin had nodded. “But his eyes were real funny, and he kept cocking his head to the side like he was having a nerve spell or something. But later on I thought about it, and it seemed he was…like…listening, you know?”
“Listening? Was the radio on?”
“No. It was like he was listening to something I couldn’t hear, and once I saw him smile this weird, peculiar little smile. Anyway, he turns off Hollywood about two blocks before we get to the Casa Loma, and I ask him where does he think he’s going, but he don’t answer. Just kinda nods. Weird. So then he pulls into this lot where a Seven-Eleven used to be, and he cuts the engine. I figure he wants me to do him right there because he’s grinning like a goon. He…uh…starts to unzip his pants. I was getting kinda jumpy then, but I figured what the hell? So I…uh…started to lean over and I see his hand drop down off the seat real fast. That’s when I got a whiff of stuff, like alcohol but a lot stronger. I didn’t know what it was, but old Lizz sure didn’t want none of it. I jumped out of that bug and started runnin’, and then I hear his engine start, and I say, ‘Oh God, that creep’s comin’ after me!’ It was then that I thought about the Roach. But you know, nobody’s been trashed by the bastard in a long time, so most of my friends and me figure the guy got his kicks and crawled back under a rock. I made it to the corner, and the Volks peeled right on past me, made the next right, and was gone. I walked to a pay phone and called my man, Tyrone. He came and picked me up.”
“This substance you smelled,” Palatazin said. “You said it had the odor of alcohol? Could it have been turpentine? Something like that?”
“Can’t really say.” She crushed out her Cigarillo in an ashtray. “But it was a sharp smell. I was so close to whatever was under that seat that my eyes started to burn. Whatever it was, it was wicked shit.” Reece smiled in spite of himself, then cleared his throat and looked away when Palatazin glanced at him.
“All right, Miss Connors. I think that’s enough.” Palatazin rose from his chair and switched off the tape recorder. “You’re not planning on taking a trip any time soon, are you? In case we need you for a positive ID?”
“Nope. My stompin’ ground’s right here in L.A.”
“Good. Thank you for coming in. And if I were you, I’d suggest to my friends that they keep their dates platonic until we have the Roach in a jail cell.”
“Sho’ nuff.” She gathered up her handbag, gave a little twitch of her tail to Reece and went out the door and into the squad room. Palatazin sat down again, took his pipe from beside the chair, and lit it. “What do you think?” he asked Reece. “Does that sound like our man?”
“Hard to tell. If this is the same guy who tried to pick up Amy Hulsett, he’s not showing the same modus operandi as Roach. There’s been no attempt at either rape or strangulation.”
“If this is our man, why would he change his pattern? I don’t know, something’s strange. That’s twice we’ve heard about a strong odor in this man’s car. What could it be?”
“Any one of a number of things from spilled gasoline to cleaning fluid.”
Palatazin sat for a moment, smoking his pipe in silence. Reece was reminded of a new TV show he’d seen last night, “Sheer Luck,” about some nutty private detective who thought he was the reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes and ran around L.A., trying to solve mysteries with his psychiatrist, Dr. Batson. It had been pretty funny. “The M.E. went over those four corpses as thoroughly as possible, didn’t he? Would he have found swelling or inflammation in the mucous membranes of the nose, or possibly in the eyes?”
“Sure.”
“But he didn’t, did he? That is to say, no unnatural inflammation other than what would come as a res
ult of the strangling. Right?”
Reece nodded. “What are you getting at?”
“Suppose the Roach has changed his M.O. Perhaps he didn’t like the way those girls clawed at him as they were dying. Perhaps he wanted to keep them from struggling so much. How could he do that?”
“Bop ’em over the head with a hammer, I guess.”
“Granted. But suppose he misses with the first whack and the girl starts screaming? Now remember, Miss Connors said that he was reaching for something under the seat and that the strong odor was coming from under there. What does that suggest?”
“Oh,” Reece said, “a drug, maybe. Something like…ether?”
“That or a similar substance. But in any case it would have to be strong enough to knock out an adult with just a few whiffs. Then the Roach could rape her, strangle her, do whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted.”
“What’s that stuff they used to use in the mad scientist flicks? You know, they always waved a bottle or a rag under a cat’s nose, and then the thing keeled over? Chloroform.”
“Possibly. But as far as I know, chloroform can’t be purchased over the counter. Maybe it’s still used in hospitals. But it would have to be strong, maybe even a concentrated liquid or powder. And where would our man get it?” He blew a long tendril of blue smoke toward the ceiling and watched it swirl in front of the air-conditioning duct. “Something you said a minute ago.” He narrowed his eyes. “What about gasoline?”
“Whiffing gas might make somebody upchuck all over the place, but I think it would take a while for gasoline fumes to knock you out.”
“Right, and we’re talking about something that could act in less than a minute.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Will you do me a favor? Since you’re going to be working this evening, why don’t you call some hospitals and pharmacists and get the names of whatever might do the job? I think we’ll be looking for a substance that’s available over the counter, but it wouldn’t hurt to check hospital inventories of ether-related drugs.” He rose from his chair and moved toward the door. “What Miss Connors smelled was probably szeszes.”
“Huh? What’s that?”
“Hungarian white lightning.” He smiled wanly and then picked up the composite picture from the table. His smile faded as he looked into that chunky, squirrelish face. The eyes, so vacant and detached behind those thick glasses, were what bothered him the most. Where are you? he asked silently. If you’re still striking, why haven’t we found any more corpses? Palatazin was well aware of an unfortunate fact: It was the corpse, or in this case the trail of them, that eventually pointed to the murderer, in the fragment of cloth clutched in a death grip, in the tissue and hair beneath the fingernails, in a telltale matchbook or printed napkin found in a handbag or pocket. Any homicide squad was practically powerless to stop a murder; all they could do was clean up and piece together the ugly jigsaw puzzles of passion. And without fresh corpses, great fragments of the puzzle were missing.
Palatazin pushed the picture back toward Reece. “It’s time we released this to the papers. Will you get it down to Press Relations for me?”
“Yes sir, I’ll take care of it.”
Palatazin left the interrogation room and walked back across the squad room—very quiet today, only a few detectives working—to his office. He glanced at his wristwatch—five-twenty. The sun was beginning to slide down across the sky, leaving cold, gray shadows in its track. It was time to get home to Jo, to try to get himself ready mentally for the next day’s work. Tomorrow morning there was going to be a meeting with the chief of detectives and the commissioner, and the caseload of non-Roach-related homicides was getting heavier day by day: a Chicano man found bludgeoned to death in a downtown alley; a pretty teenaged girl found stuffed into the trunk of a stolen car with her throat slashed from ear to ear; a middle-aged woman shot on the sidewalk by someone in a passing car; a three-year-old child battered beyond recognition and stuffed into the bottom of a garbage can. Palatazin was a reluctant witness to a daily sideshow of horrors. Some days, of course, were worse than others; on the worst of them, usually at the height of the summer, his nightmares were vivid with the heat-swollen corpses of men, women, and children, all of them holding out their arms to him and begging like lepers for a cure. And the means of murder in this city were terrifyingly infinite: Baseball bat, pistol, broken bottle, poisons from a dozen different countries, knives of all description and purpose, coat hangers, clothesline cord, barbed wire, and even in one instance a brass ball fired from a slingshot. The motives for murder were just as complex: Vengeance, money, freedom, hatred, and love. The City of Angels? Palatazin knew differently.
When he was fourteen years old, his Uncle Milo had gotten him an afternoon job sweeping up at his neighborhood police precinct station. He’d been fascinated with the cops-and-robbers shows he’d seen on the television in the window of the Abrahms Brothers Appliance store a block from the apartment, and he was thrilled to imagine himself as part of that world with its blue-uniformed policemen, sleek cars, and crackling, urgent radios. The officers liked his interest, and they went out of their way to explain the details of their jobs to him. For several years he was the willing recipient of every chase and shoot-’em-up story the cops could dish out, and those ran into the hundreds. Only it was years later, when he himself wore one of those crisp, blue uniforms, that he realized the world was not quite as black and white as the TV shows had depicted. He’d been walking his beat along Fountain Avenue when a fat, red-faced man in a white apron had started shouting about a robbery in his grocery store. Palatazin had seen the suspect—a thin black man in a long, tattered coat—running in the opposite direction with hands clamped around a couple of loaves of bread and a Polish sausage. He’d given pursuit—he’d been much thinner in those days and fast on his feet—and had caught up with the guy easily, grabbing his flagging coat from behind and yanking him to the ground. The food had scattered into the street and was smashed into pulp by the next passing car. Palatazin had wrenched the arms back, snapped cuffs on the wrists, and turned the man over.
It wasn’t a man; it was a woman, terribly thin, her stomach swelling in the sixth month of pregnancy. “Please,” she’d begun sobbing, “please don’t make me go to jail again. Please don’t make me…” Palatazin was stunned and ashamed; the red-faced man, who had as much beef in his belly as on his racks, came up and started shouting about “this whore, this filthy whore” who had come in and stolen right off his shelves in broad daylight and what were the cops going to do about it? Palatazin couldn’t answer; the cuff key in his hand burned like a white-hot flame. But before he could say or do anything, a police car came cruising up to the curb, and the shouting man turned his attention to the arriving officers. As they put the woman into the car, her sobbing had stopped, and her eyes looked like the empty windows of a long-abandoned building. One of the officers clapped Palatazin on the shoulder and said, “Good job, this broad’s been hitting stores all up and down Fountain for the past two weeks.” As the car pulled away, Palatazin stared at the paste of bread and sausage in the street. The red-faced man was bragging to a group of onlookers about how nobody could rob him and get away with it, “Nobody!”
Now a world away from Fountain Avenue, Palatazin felt a wave of regret pass over him. He took his coat from the back of a chair and wearily shrugged into it. Why hadn’t things worked out as he’d planned so many years before? His dream had been to take his wife and son up to a little town north of San Francisco where the climate was cooler and head a small police station where the most serious crime was kids stealing from a pumpkin patch. He wouldn’t even need a car, and he would know and be liked by everyone in town. Jo could open that florist shop she was always thinking about, and his son would be quarterback on the high school football team. He buttoned his coat and let the dreams drift away, like so much shimmering dust. After the second stillbirth Jo’s doctor had told her it would be dangerous for her, both physically and emotionally, to try aga
in. He suggested adoption and left it at that. And Palatazin had been caught, as everyone is, in the huge whirlpool of events that takes you down once, twice, a third and final time. He knew he would probably remain in this city until he died, though sometimes late at night he thought he could close his eyes and see that little town, full of white picket fences and clean streets and chimneys that puffed white plumes of cherrywood smoke in the long winters.
Time to go home, he thought.
And something rustled very softly behind him.
Palatazin, startled, whirled toward the door.
His mother was standing there as substantial as any flesh he’d ever seen. She was wearing the pale blue gown she’d worn the night she died, her skin wrinkled and white over frail, sharply jutting bones. Her eyes were fixed upon his face, terribly intense. One arm was thrust out, as skinny as a pole, the finger pointing toward the window.
Palatazin, the blood drained out of his face by the shock, took a step backward and collided with the sharp edge of his desk. His pipe rack toppled over, as did the framed photograph of Jo. File folders drifted to the floor.
His mother opened her mouth, showing almost toothless gums, and seemed to be trying to say something. Her finger was trembling, her face contorted with effort.
And then Palatazin saw the outline of the door through her, saw the gleaming doorknob as if in a haze of grayish smoke. Her figure rippled like gossamer caught in a high wind. And was gone.
The breath exploded from Palatazin’s lungs. He was trembling uncontrollably, his hands gripping at the desk behind him. For a long time he stared at the spot on the floor where his mother had stood, and when he finally waved a shaking hand over that spot, the air felt a few degrees cooler than the rest of the room.
He opened the door and thrust his head out so violently that Officer Zeitvogel, who was at the nearest desk promptly spilled a cup of hot coffee into his lap. Zeitvogel cursed and leaped to his feet, drawing the attention of the other officers to Palatazin’s pale, wide-eyed face. Instantly Palatazin retreated into his office but left the door open; he felt sick and light-headed, as if he’d just snapped out of a brain-burning fever. He stood staring dumbly at the folders on the floor, then bent and started picking them up.