Bad Guys (17 page)

There was a small corkboard next to a wall-mounted phone, with a few business cards pinned there, including mine, and a color photo, taken at the beach, of Lawrence and a male friend, arms looped around each other’s necks playfully, grinning into the camera. White guy, brown hair, brown eyes. I wondered whether this might be his friend Kent, the restaurateur.

In the sink I saw a rinsed cup and a couple of spoons and an empty beer bottle, and atop the adjoining counter was a bowl filled with apples and bright yellow bananas. I reached over and touched one of the perfect-looking bananas, wondering whether it was wax. It was not.

Enough light spilled out from the kitchen to allow me a view of the living area, which included a small dining room table, couch, big TV in the corner, and four small silver speakers on stands placed strategically around the room. Surround sound. Part of an entertainment system. On a set of shelves were hundreds of CDs—Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, every other great jazz artist who ever lived—and dozens of DVD cases.

“Lawrence?”

I crossed the room to the main door, the one that must open onto a set of stairs that led down to the door on the sidewalk. I flipped back the deadbolt and opened the door, confirming for myself that it did indeed open onto the flight of stairs leading downward.

There was a short hallway leading off to the right away from the main door. I flipped on a light switch, and now I could see there were three doors leading off it. The first was a bathroom. I flicked on the light, eased my head in, peered around the back of the door into an empty bathtub. Shampoos and soaps were perfectly arranged in a device that hung from the shower head. The shower curtain was as clean as the day it came out of the package, the tiled corners free of mildew. Lawrence was one mean neat freak.

The next room had to be Lawrence’s study. It was not nearly so neat.

Filing drawers had been pulled out, papers tossed across the floor, books thrown off shelves. It didn’t look as though someone had just searched this room. They’d torn through it in a fit of rage.

I felt my unease move up a notch. Especially when I glanced down and saw drops of blood in the blue carpeting that appeared to start near the study door and lead toward the third door in the hallway.

The blotches on the carpet grew larger as I neared the door. Whoever had lost blood was losing more of it as he moved along.

There was an inch of light between the door and the frame, and I pressed my palm up against the door and eased it open.

I went very cold. I had found Lawrence.

He was on the bed, stretched out from one corner to the other, on top of the covers, fully dressed in a sports jacket, slacks, and black dress shoes. He was on his stomach, and his right arm was down by his side, his left stretched out awkwardly above his head.

The powder blue duvet was soaked red with blood.

He was not moving.

I stepped into the room. “Lawrence,” I whispered. “Oh man, Lawrence, what the hell did they do to you?”

I placed my hands, tentatively, on his back, not knowing what else to do. I knew I couldn’t roll him over. I’d only been playing amateur private eye for a few hours, and hadn’t expected to run into anything like this, but I knew enough from watching TV that I wasn’t supposed to move the body.

Except I was sure I felt the body move, ever so slightly, under my hand.

Lawrence was breathing, just.

He was alive.

I PUT MY WEIGHT gently on the bed, careful not to jostle Lawrence, and leaned in close to his ear. “Hang in, man, I’m getting help.” I had no way to know whether he understood what I saw saying or could even hear me.

There was a phone on his bedside table and I was about to snatch the receiver off its cradle when I thought, “Don’t touch anything.”

So I got out my cell and punched in the three emergency digits. Before the operator had a chance to get in a word, I barked out the address, then told her there was a man here, very seriously injured, who’d lost a lot of blood. I couldn’t pry my eyes off Lawrence as I spoke. Looking at him, I couldn’t see any signs that he was still alive. His breathing was too shallow to make his back rise and fall.

“How was the injury sustained?” the operator asked.

“I haven’t turned him over. But someone’s tried to kill him. He’s been attacked. He might have been shot, he might have been stabbed, I just don’t know. Is the ambulance already on its way?”

“Yes, sir. Don’t try to do anything yourself. Wait for the paramedics.”

“Hey, don’t worry. They may have a hard time finding this place. It’s just a door between two shops. I’m gonna go down and—”

“Sir, please don’t leave the phone—”

“I don’t have to. I’m on a cell.” I held on to the phone, but didn’t bother holding it to my ear as I ran out the apartment’s main door and down the narrow stairwell, and turned back the deadbolt on the door that opened out to the sidewalk. The cabby was still sitting where I’d left him. I opened the front passenger door.

“You’re running up quite a fare,” he said, only half glancing up from his crossword.

“I need you to stay here,” I sad. “There’s going to be an ambulance here any minute now, and when you see it, direct them to this door.”

“An ambulance? What’s an ambulance—”

“Once they’re here, you find me, I’ll pay you what I owe you for the cab. I don’t know if I’ve got enough cash, but if not, I’ve probably got a blank cab chit from
The Metropolitan
in my wallet.”

“Yeah, sure, but let me ask you this. What’s a five-letter word for a dog? Starts with a ‘p.’ ”

I turned and ran back up the stairs, leaving every door I went through wide open. I returned to the bedroom, found Lawrence exactly as I’d left him (like, maybe I was expecting him to be sitting up and making phone calls?), and put the cell back to my ear.

“I’m back.”

“Sir, you shouldn’t have left—”

“Look, I’m assuming you’re sending the police, too, because, in case I forgot to mention it, somebody tried to kill this guy.”

“Yes, sir, you did tell me that.”

I was so rattled I was repeating myself.

The operator wanted my name, and Lawrence’s, and as I gave her all the information, I could hear the wail of a siren in the distance, getting louder with each passing second. And, a few seconds later, a commotion at the bottom of the stairs as the paramedics came charging up.

“Up here!” I shouted. I told the dispatcher help had arrived, hung up, and slipped the phone back into my jacket.

Two paramedics appeared almost simultaneously at the bedroom door.

“He’s still breathing,” I said. “At least he was five minutes ago.”

Said one, “I’ll have to ask you to move out to the living room, sir, so that we can do our job. But I would ask that you not leave the apartment, because the police are going to have to ask you some questions.”

I did as I was asked. In the living room, I looked at the CDs and books and DVDs on Lawrence’s shelves, seeing them but not seeing them, while from Lawrence’s bedroom I could hear the sounds of urgency and controlled chaos. Snippets of hurried conversation slipped out.

“Okay, turn.”

“Jesus.”

“Hand me that.”

“Hello, Mr. Jones, just take it easy.”

Two uniformed cops came through the door, glancing around quickly, trying to assess the scene as rapidly as possible. One, a bulky six-footer with a thick mustache, focused on me while the other went down the hall to the bedroom.

Before he could ask his first question, the cabby was at the door.

“You need me anymore, man?” he asked.

My cop wheeled around. “You’re going to have to stick around, sir. If you’ll just wait in your cab, I’ll be down to speak to you shortly.”

The cabby rolled his eyes and retreated, but not before giving me a look that seemed to say, “Thanks a heap, pal.”

“You called 911?” the cop asked me.

I admitted it. I told him who I was, and that I was doing a feature on Lawrence Jones for
The Metropolitan
—

The cop’s eyes narrowed. “You work for
The Metropolitan
?”

The paper has, over the years, been somewhat critical of the city’s rank and file. “That’s right,” I said. The cop said nothing else and waited for me to continue. I told him how I’d joined Lawrence the last few nights on a stakeout in front of a men’s store on Garvin, and when he hadn’t shown up—

“Wait a minute,” the cop said. This habit of his, of interrupting me all the time, was getting annoying very quickly, but I didn’t see that there’d be much to gain by complaining about it. “Garvin? That’s where that store was hit, within the last hour or so?”

“Yeah. I called that one in to 911, too.”

His eyes got even narrower. “Any crime scenes you haven’t been to tonight?”

They brought Lawrence out of the room on a stretcher, his face under one of those respirator masks, his eyes closed, blood everywhere. He didn’t look anything like the tough, cool, unflappable guy I’d been hanging out with the last few days. They maneuvered him through the door and angled him delicately down the stairs.

“Which hospital?” I called out to them.

“Mercy General,” one of the paramedics grunted as he took the high end of Lawrence’s stretcher down the stairs.

“I don’t know who I should be calling,” I told the cop. “I don’t know about any of his family. All I know is, he’s got a boyfriend . . . I’m trying to think.”

“He’s gay?”

“Yeah.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“You gay?”

“I don’t know, are you?”

“Hey, listen, if you want to be a smartass, I got all night for this, pal.”

“I just don’t know what that has to do with anything. Lawrence is a friend, someone I’m doing a story on. But there’s someone who should know, I think his name is Kent, runs a restaurant in the east end.”

“We can worry about that in a minute. Tell me how you got in here.”

He had several more questions, all of which I answered as honestly as possible. He slipped away a moment to talk to the other officer, who was standing outside the door to the bedroom. These guys were too low on the totem pole to start doing any real investigating. They’d be holding the fort until the crime scene guys and the detectives, the types they built glitzy TV shows around, showed up.

I wandered into the kitchen, glanced at the picture of Lawrence and the man I had assumed earlier was Kent. Then I remembered the name of the restaurant. Blaine’s.

I grabbed a phone book tucked up against the wall under the cabinets and opened it to the
B
’s. I ran my finger down the listings, found the one for the restaurant, and dialed it on my phone. Someone picked up on the second ring.

“Blaine’s restaurant. I’m sorry, but we’re just closing.”

“Is Kent there?” I asked.

“Who’s calling?”

“My name’s Zack Walker. But tell him it’s a friend of Lawrence’s.”

I leaned up against the kitchen counter and waited. Finally, “Hello?”

“Is this Kent?”

“Yes.”

“Look, you don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Lawrence’s.”

“A friend?” Suspicious. I could almost imagine the eyebrow going up.

“Listen, not a close friend. But I don’t know anything about Lawrence’s next of kin, or who should be contacted, but he mentioned your name one time.”

“Next of kin?” Kent asked. The words were, I realized as soon as I’d said them to Kent, loaded. “What are you talking about?”

“He’s at Mercy General. You should probably get there.”

I went downstairs and stepped out onto the sidewalk, took in a deep breath of the cool night air.

As if there weren’t enough cars at the curb, including the cab that brought me here, an unmarked black Ford with a whip antenna and mini-hubcaps screeched to a stop in front of Lawrence’s door. A tall man with a mustache and short black hair, dressed in a black Burberry trench, got out from behind the wheel. It took a moment before I realized who he was. Detective Steve Trimble, from two nights before, who’d been investigating Miles Diamond’s death-by-SUV at the men’s store on Emmett.

He glanced at me as he strode by, no doubt thinking he recognized me from somewhere, then bounded up the stairs two at a time to Lawrence’s apartment. In a matter of seconds he was back down, pointed in my direction, and said, “With me.”

He started back to his car, turned to make sure I was following him, which I was. He motioned for me to go around to the other side and get in. I did.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked. “I know you from somewhere.”

I said, “If I want to be spoken to like I’m a piece of shit, I can stay home. I’ve got teenagers.”

“Who are you?”

“Zack Walker. We met night before last. The thing on Emmett. Miles Diamond.”

Trimble squinted. “You were with Lawrence.” It was almost a question.

“That’s right.”

“And here you are again.” There was something about the way he said it, that this was some sort of cosmic coincidence.

“Yeah,” I said. “I found him.”

“Isn’t
that
interesting.”

“No more than his former partner showing up to find out who tried to kill him.”

He tried to conceal his surprise, but the flash in his eyes was there. “Yeah, we used to work together. Lawrence told you that?”

“Yeah.”

“What else did he tell you?”

I said nothing for a moment. “He told me a lot of things. Why don’t you ask your questions.”

The flashing red lights from the other emergency vehicles burned shadows across Trimble’s face.

When he didn’t ask one right away, I said, “He mentioned that you two worked together, plainclothes. That you went through some tough spots together.”

“Yeah, well, your paper did its best to make sure things didn’t go easy for me.”

I honestly didn’t know what my newspaper had written about that night when Trimble had frozen and Lawrence had shot that kid. That was back when I was working at home, writing science fiction novels, and not keeping up with the news the way I had to now. For a moment, I felt wistful.