"I was thinking . . ." Miro began, "since you used
to be
police, and since
I have a few old issues there, I was wondering if maybe there would be some way
we could help each other."
"You mean, I talk to somebody for you and get your file
erased, and then you give me ten million dollars? Something like that?"
"Ten million seems a tad high," he replied with mock
seriousness. "I was thinking more like I could get one of our boys to
answer your phone or something. I have this new one, Jackson Mississippi—he
doesn't have a place yet. He just sits around waiting for out-calls. Be nice to
give him something useful."
"He's from Jackson, Mississippi?" Jack asked. "No,
that's his name. Don't tell him I told you, but I think he made it up. Least
it's nicer than this other boy I had, named Bangor Maine. So how 'bout it? Wanna
trade favors?"
"No can do." Jack was beginning to wish Miro would just
leave so he could take a few more Percocets.
Suddenly, like in a Bogart movie, the door opened and one of the
most beautiful women he had seen in six months was standing in his doorway,
briefcase in hand.
"Is this the Jack Wirta Detective Agency?" she asked
hesitantly.
"Yes, ma'am," he said smiling, giving her his whole
grill . . . the entire sixteen.
"Well, I guess Miro should go back and feed his ducks."
Roca got to his feet and really worked it, heading toward the door.
The beautiful woman watched him walk away, and as soon as he was
gone she smiled. "Graceful."
"He used to dance professionally," Jack said, and
started to clear a space in the office. "Sorry about the clutter. I'm just
moving in here."
She moved over to the cracked leather chair where Miro had been
sitting and settled in. "I'm Susan Strockmire," she said, putting her
knees together and laying her briefcase across her lap. "I called the
LAPD. They gave me your
name when I asked for recommendations on an agency.
"The police department recommended me?" He was puzzled.
"Yes. I talked to a Lieutenant Matthews. He said you had the
qualifications necessary for a job I need done."
Lieutenant Steve Matthews had been Jack's CO back when he worked
the Homicide table at Rampart. Jack had been in the Valley interviewing a
witness on a triple drive-by gang killing when the bank shooting went down,
heard the call on the scanner, and had rolled on it. He was the second blue on
the scene. Not knowing the bandits were already out of the bank with assault
weapons and full body armor, he'd walked right into a barrage of gunfire with
only his puny little police-issue Beretta. That's how he ended up stopping the
Parabellum. It had gone through his oblique and shattered two
vertebrae—miraculously missing his spinal cord, or he would have finished out
his life whizzing around in a motorized wheelchair. When Jack finally retired
on a medical, Matthews put him up for the Medal of Valor, but it hadn't been
approved. Cops who went down and didn't die or manage to neutralize the target
rarely won the MOV. Instead he'd gotten the Certificate of Merit. All these
years later it looked as if the lieutenant was still trying to even the score
and throw some work his way.
"What qualifications are we talking about?" Jack asked,
fully prepared to lie like a street junkie to get his first job.
"I understand you worked a lot of cases up in San
Francisco."
"More than my share," he said, wondering what on earth
she was talking about. L.A. cops hardly ever worked up north. A few extradites,
or the occasional nomadic criminal who started here and ended up there, or vice
versa. But those were mostly phone jobs. The department rarely sprang to send
you anywhere.
"Could you be slightly more specific?" he asked, his
back pain now so bad he couldn't bear to go on for another moment. He reached
into his pocket while she was fiddling in her briefcase for something, planning
to use this moment
to
sneak a few more pills. He retrieved the bottle, quickly shook two into his
hand, then swallowed them dry, but she looked up and caught him.
"Allergies," he smiled. "Santa Ana winds really get to me."
"Oh," she said, and handed him a newspaper article from
the
San Francisco Chronicle,
headlined:
Computer
Hacker Found Dead in Hotel Room
While he read it he could see her out of the corner of his eye
surveying the chipped walls, eyeing the faded furniture, taking inventory. It
was a loser's hangout. Jim Rock-ford only lived in a trailer, but at least he
had a nice view of the ocean. Rockford would spit on this place.
He finished scanning the rest of the article. It was boilerplate
reportage, no real info. It told how somebody named Roland Minton, who had a
history of computer crime, was killed at the New Fairview Hotel in San
Francisco. No details. Typical police b.s.
Foul play suspected. . . No
suspects . . . no leads.
That sort of thing.
"Okay," he said quickly, trying to get her to look back
at him and stop surveying this sinkhole where he'd set up shop.
"The lieutenant said you had good contacts on the San
Francisco Police Department," she said.
"Excellent. Among the best." He wondered what the hell
Matthews was talking about. He knew no one up there.
"Roland Minton was working for our legal institute when he
was killed. My father, Herman Strockmire, is the director and founder, and he
wants to make sure the investigation is adequately pursued."
Jack liked that word,
institute.
Institutes were
commercially secure, abundantly funded organizations, so Jack tacked another
five hundred a day onto his price.
Then it hit him who he knew in San Francisco. He had told the
lieutenant about it almost three years ago. It was one of his old love affairs
that hadn't ended well. He'd dated a sergeant who worked the juvie detail up
there. He'd
picked her up in
a cop bar while she was in L.A. visiting her family. It ended like all of
Jack's important female relationships—with recriminations and threats. Her name
was Sergeant Eleanor—
If I ever see you again, you better run, you prick
—Drake.
"I think the lieutenant was referring to my extremely close
working relationship with a Sergeant Drake of the SFPD."
"Do you think Sergeant Drake might be able to help us view
some of the official case material related to Roland's death?"
"If I'm the one to ask her, I think I can say, without
hesitation, no problemo." Another lie. But he reasoned now that he was in
business that a lie was really just a sales promise.
The pills were beginning to take his pain threshold down below
nine. At least that gave him hope for the next ten minutes.
"How much do you charge?" she asked.
"Tell you what, I need some coffee. There's a nice outdoor
restaurant right downstairs. Whatta you say?" Jack needed to get out of
his depressing office before he broke into tears.
She looked at her watch as if this was already taking too much of
her time, but then she smiled—a hesitant little smile, so adorable that Jack
had to stifle the urge to grab her hand and stroke it.
"Why not?" she finally said.
They sat in a patio restaurant called
The All-American Boy, surrounded by gay trophy exhibits—musclemen in workout
tanks and short shorts with plucked eyebrows and shaved bodies. Jack, with his
rugged blonde attractiveness, was getting all the sidelong glances while Susan
Strockmire was being ignored. She might as well have been wearing a Janet Reno
mask. This neighborhood was going to take some getting used to.
"What exactly is your fee structure?" she inquired
again.
He had called around after he got his license and found out that a
good working rate for P.I.s in L.A. was a thousand a day. Long-range employment
contracted out at between thirty-five hundred and four thousand on a weekly
guarantee. But, for an institute he was compelled to charge a little more.
Fifteen hundred is what he told her.
"It seems awfully high," she said, wrinkling her
adorable nose, scowling slightly, bringing her laugh lines into play.
"You might think it's high, until you break it down," he
said, launching into his pitch. "To begin with, I'm a trained police officer
fifteen years on the force, both in squad cars and at the detective division.
You can't buy that kind of on-the-job experience at any price. If you were
hiring a psychiatrist, some guy in Armani with a Vandyke who got his doctorate
through the mail, you wouldn't think twice about paying him a hundred and fifty
dollars an hour. There are personal trainers in this town who get twice
that."
"It's not that I'm questioning your fee structure . . ."
"I should hope not," he said, trying to look indignant.
"It's just that the Institute for Planetary Justice is a
nonprofit institute and we have to watch expenses carefully."
If institute was a good word, nonprofit was a bad one. When they
were in the same sentence it was disastrous. "Nonprofit institute"
was a phrase as depressing as "fatal collision" or "aggressive
malignancy."
"I see," he finally said. "Well, I guess because
I'm sort of open at the moment I could take a small cut on my normal rate—say,
down to a thousand dollars a day. But that's really the base number."
"Deal," she said, and reached out and shook his hand.
Her grip was warm, her grasp firm. "I'll give you our local phone
numbers." She dug into her purse and handed him a business card. He looked
down at it: cheesy—the kind you get printed at Kinko's. She had crossed out the
Washington, D.C., phone number and written a local one in pencil. Of course, he
didn't even have a business card. It was on his list of things to do, right
after setting up some metal chairs in the hall to piss off Miro.
"Lemme write my number down," he said, grabbing a paper
napkin, even though he wasn't dead sure of the number. The phone had only been
installed yesterday. He thought for a minute, then wrote it down,
323-555-7890.
"Either that or 7809," he told her with a wave of his hand, as if
it really didn't matter. "New office, new number."
But the same
old bullshit,
he thought.
"You know, I guess I can tell you this now," she
ventured hesitantly. "When I first looked into your office, it was so
small, and well. . ."
"Dingy?" he offered, and she smiled an acknowledgment.
"Yes. So I wasn't even going to go in or even talk to you.
You know what changed my mind?"
Jack didn't have a clue, so he just
fixed an interested expression on his face and waited.
"It was your gay friend."
"Miro?" He was truly confused. "How so?"
"Our institute has advocated for gay rights. Most cops have
this kind of overly macho thing going on. Y'know, like gay people aren't even worth
spitting on, just because they have a different lifestyle. But I looked in and
you're both sitting there chatting. He's your friend. That tells me something
really important about you."
"Yes . . . yes," Jack said, hard-pressed to deal with
that, but determined to try. "I find that people are just people, and that
once you cut through all the surface stuff—the lifestyle choices, the color
lines, the sexual whatevers— what really counts is who they are
underneath." He smiled at a few of the overly developed men nearby to make
his point.
They smiled back. One of
them waved.
"Exactly," she said earnestly, taking his heart and his
breath away at the same time.
He gazed into her blue-green eyes swimming in their luminous
beauty, thinking,
Maybe this neighborhood isn't gonna be so bad after all.