A Cold Heart

2

Petra Connor, barely out of her no-guys phase, knew the pantsuit had been a stupid idea.

Three-month no-guys phase. The way she saw it, she deserved more self-indulgence than that, but her forgiving nature had taken over, and now she could look at carriers of Y chromosomes without wanting to punch them.

She was the only female detective working nights at Hollywood Division, and pretending to be nice was hurting her facial muscles.

The first month of the phase had been spent convincing herself it wasn’t her fault. Even though here she was, barely thirty and a two-time loser in the Serious Relationship Sweepstakes.

Chapter One: the rotten husband. Chapter Two was even worse: the boyfriend who’d gone back to his ex-wife.

She’d stopped hating Ron Banks. Even though he’d been the one to come on to her, had pursued her gently but unrelentingly. Weakening her resistance by being courtly and caring and tender in bed, a genuine nice guy.

Like so many nice guys, essentially weak.

Some would say Ron had done the right thing. For himself. For his daughters.

Something else that had attracted Petra to him: terrific father. Ron was raising Alicia and Bea while his ex, a Spanish beauty, trained horses in Majorca. Two-year-old divorce, you’da thought it would stick.

Sweet little girls, six and seven. Petra had allowed herself to become attached to them. Pretending…

Petra had endured a hysterectomy at a freakishly young age.

Toward the end, when Ms. Caballera was laying on the pressure big time- calling Ron ten times a day, talking dirty to him, e-mailing him bikini shots, begging- he’d been a basket case, crippled by conflict. Finally, Petra shoved him in the right direction, and he took leave from his Sheriff’s Homicide job in order to sort things out and flew to Spain with the girls.

To Petra, Spain had always meant art. The Prado, Degas, Velasquez, Goya. She’d never been there. Had never been out of the country.

Now, Spain meant over.

Ron called Petra once, breaking into sobs. So sorry, baby, so, so sorry, but the girls are so happy, I never realized how unhappy they were…

The girls had always looked okay to Petra, but what did she know about kids, barren thirty-year-old spinster that she was.

Ron stayed in Spain for the summer and sent her a consolation gift: stupid little carving of a flamenco dancer. Castanets and all. Petra broke off the limbs and tossed it in the trash.

Stu Bishop, her longtime partner, had bailed on her, too. Resigning a promising career to care for a sick wife. Oh, that spousal obligation.

Soon after, she switched to the night shift because she couldn’t sleep anyway, felt in synch with the special poison that scented the air when Hollywood streets turned black.

Comforted by the sorrows of people in a lot worse shape than she.

During the ninety days of the no-guys phase, she caught three 187s, worked them all solo because staffing was thin and she didn’t protest when the nightwatch commander raised the possibility. Two were easy-solves that had gone down on Hollywood ’s east end: a liquor-store clerk shooting and a knifing at a Latino dance club, multiple witnesses all around, both files closed within a week.

The third was a whodunit, an eighty-five-year-old woman named Elsa Brigoon found bludgeoned in her apartment on Los Feliz Boulevard.

That one took up most of the ninety days, a lot of it spent chasing false leads. Elsa had been a drinker with an abrasive personality who quarreled at every opportunity. She’d also taken out a hundred-thousand-dollar term life-insurance policy on herself last year, and the beneficiary was a do-nothing son caught in a stock-market bind.

But none of that panned out, and Petra finally put the case to rest by running meticulous checks on every habitue of the apartment complex. A handyman hired by the landlord turned out to have a record of indecent exposure, sexual assault, and burglary, and his eyes jumped to Mars when Petra interviewed him in his filthy downtown SRO. Subsequent, skillful interviewing by Detective II Connor brought the jerk around.

Three for three. Petra ’s overall solve-rate was approaching the champ’s- Milo Sturgis’s over in West L.A. – and she knew she was fast-tracking to DIII, might make it by year’s end, was sure to incur lots of envy among her colleagues.

Good. Men were…

No, enough of that. Men are our biological partners.

Oh, Lord…

Day Ninety, she decided that bitterness was eroding her soul and resolved to be positive. Returning to her easel for the first time in months, she tried painting in oils, found her sense of color wanting, switched to pen-and-ink and filled pages of bristol board with tight, hyperrealistic faces.

Children’s faces. Well drawn but tacky. She ripped the drawings to shreds, went shopping.

She needed to go for color, one look in her closet made that painfully obvious.

Her casual clothes consisted of black jeans and black T’s and black shoes. Her work duds were dark pantsuits: a dozen black, two navy blues, three chocolate browns, one charcoal. All slim-cut to fit her skinny frame, all designer-labels that she purchased at discount outlets and the Barney’s warehouse sale and last-day markdowns wherever she found them.

She drove from her Wilshire District apartment to the big Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and splurged on a half-price Vestimenta soft wool number.

Silk-lined lapels, ticket pocket cut on the bias, strong shoulders, pegged trousers.

Powder blue.

She wore it that night and drew shocked looks from the other detectives. One wiseass covered his eyes, as if shielding himself against glare. Another said, “Nice, Petra.” A couple of others whistled, and she grinned at the lot of them.

Before anyone else could crack wise, phones began ringing, and the squad room filled with the business of death. Taking her place at her metal desk, in a corner next to the lockers, Petra shuffled paper and touched a powder blue sleeve and figured she knew what was running through the guys’ heads.

Morticia changes her style.

Dragon Lady comes up for light.

She came across funereal, but a lot of it was biology. She had sharp features, ivory skin, thick, straight jet hair that she kept in a glossy wedge cut, deep brown eyes that leaned toward piercing.

Kids brought out the softness in her, but now Alicia and Bea were out of her life and Billy Straight- a young boy she met working a case who’d touched her heart- was nearly fourteen, had found himself a girlfriend.

Billy never called her anymore; the last time Petra had phoned him, more silence than conversation had passed between them.

So she supposed she could be forgiven a Dragon Lady persona.

The D.A.’s office had faxed her some questions on the Elsa Brigoon case- stuff the novice ADA could’ve known from reading the file. But she answered anyway and faxed back her replies.

Then her phone rattled and a patrol officer named Montez went on about a 187 cutting on Fountain near El Centro and Petra was out of the station in a flash.

She arrived at the scene and conferred with the assistant coroner. He informed her that the morgue was backlogged and the autopsy would take a while. But cause of death didn’t look to be any great mystery.

Single knife wound, exsanguination, most of the blood pooled beneath the DB, establishing the kill spot. Petra, in powder blue, was glad there wasn’t more gore.

Then she read the victim’s license and got sad because, for the first time since she’d been a detective, this was a name she recognized. She’d never been into the blues- not musically, anyway- but you didn’t have to be to know who Edgar Ray Lee was.

AKA Baby Boy. The driver’s license in his pocket just stated the basics: male Caucasian, a DOB that put him at fifty-one. Height: six-two, weight: two-seventy. Petra thought he looked bigger than that.

As she recorded the data in her pad, she overheard someone- one of the morgue drivers- remark that the guy was a guitar god, had jammed with Bloomfield, Mayall, Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Petra turned and saw a ponytailed and bearded ex-hippie type in morgue coveralls staring at the body. White ponytail. Wet-eyed.

“Talented,” she said.

“Those fingers,” said the driver, as he unfolded a black plastic body bag.

“You play?” Petra asked him.

“I noodle. He played. He- those fingers were… magic.” The driver dabbed at his eye, yanked angrily at the bag, virtually ripped it open. Zzzzzzzip.

“Ready?” he said.

“In a sec.” Petra crouched by the body, took in the details, again. Jotted in her pad.

Yellow T-shirt, blue jeans, shaved head, tiny chin beard. Tattoos blued both arms.

Ponytail walked away looking disgusted. Petra continued studying. Edgar Ray Lee’s mouth hung open exposing broken and rotted teeth that made Petra think: Junkie? But she spotted no track marks among the tattoos.

Baby Boy hadn’t been dead more than an hour, but his face had already taken on that greenish gray pallor. The EMTs had cut the shirt around the stab wound. Three-inch vertical slit up the belly, gaping at the edges.

She sketched the wound and slipped the pad back into her purse. She was stepping away when a photographer behind her announced, “I want to make sure my lighting was okay.” He moved in, lost his balance, fell on his ass. Slid feetfirst into the blood pool.

His camera landed on the asphalt and rattled ominously, but that wasn’t Petra ’s concern.

Crimson splotches and speckles decorated her pants. Both trouser legs ruined.

The photographer lay there, stunned. Petra did nothing to help him, muttered something sharp that widened his eyes and everyone else’s.

She stamped away from the scene.

Her own damn fault, going for color.