Kill the Messenger

10

Here’s your shit work,” Ruiz said, throwing a single sheet of paper down on Parker’s desk. The paper floated and settled gently on a stack of files, ruining her big show of affront.

Parker glanced at it. A list of messenger companies within a five-mile radius of Lenny Lowell’s office. It had to have taken her all of three minutes to get it off Yahoo!

“You do realize ‘plays well with others’ is a part of your evaluation, don’t you?” he said, as he got up to go to the coffee machine.

It was 6:43 A.M. He’d had roughly two hours’ sleep. There were two other detectives in the room. Yamoto and Kray had caught the family annihilation Nicholson had been at before she showed up at Lowell’s office. Multiple murders and a suicide. An all-nighter just dealing with the paperwork.

Yamoto, another trainee, was writing reports on a snazzy laptop computer he’d brought in himself. He was neat, courteous, professional, and wore better than average suits. Kray didn’t deserve a trainee like Yamoto.

Kray was facedown on his desk, sound asleep, drooling a puddle onto a bright green memo reminding everyone that it wasn’t too late to sign up for the stress-management seminar: Life and Death Don’t Have to Kill You.

Parker went back to his chair and sat down. “You’ve got to learn to lock down that temper, doll,” he said seriously. “What happens when you get some dirtbag killer in the box and he starts in with you?” he asked. “He’ll call you names filthier than any even you know. He’ll suggest you let him perform eighty-three different kinds of unnatural acts on your naked body. You need to get a confession out of the guy, and you go off calling him a fucking whatever? That’s not acceptable.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” she pouted.

“You just did it with me.”

“You’re not a suspect.”

“No, I’m your immediate boss. You have to respect that whether you like it or not. You’re always going to have a boss in this business, and a lot of them will make me look like a prize. Chances are better than even, you’ll be answering to one or another asshole from now until you need your first face-lift.”

He rose and dumped the coffee in the trash. Two slugs of it was enough to jump-start a truck engine. “Fire in the belly is a good thing. Use it while you’ve got it. But if you don’t learn to control it, you won’t last on this job. Anger alone won’t keep you going. It clouds your judgment. You’ll alienate people you need, and piss off people you shouldn’t.”

“You’re the voice of experience on that,” she said.

“Yeah,” Parker said quietly. “I am. You’re learning from a master.”

He felt a hundred years old, most of them spent running up mountains, cocky and sure of himself, then skidding down the other side face-first.

Parker shrugged into his charcoal raincoat, an Armani take on the classic trench. A recent splurge courtesy of his other life. He flipped the collar up and reached for the old fedora he’d had since he made detective. A detective had worn it before him, and another before him, going like that all the way back to the thirties. The good old days when LA was still a frontier town and the Miranda warning wasn’t even a twinkle in the court’s eye. Back when cops used to meet gangsters as they got off the plane from New York or Chicago, beat the hell out of them, and send them back to where they came from.

“Come on,” he said to Ruiz. “We’re starting on these messenger companies. We’ll start with the ones closest to Lowell’s office and work our way outward until we find who got the call.”

“Can’t we just do it on the phone?” she whined. “It’s raining.”

“You don’t learn how to read people over the damn phone,” Parker snapped. “You want to solve mysteries over the phone, get a job with the Psychic Friends Hotline.”

She gave him the finger.

Such a lady.

The first agency they tried had gone out of business. Six days ago, according to the bag lady camped in the shelter of the empty office’s doorway. Parker thanked her, gave her his card and twenty bucks.

“Why’d you do that?” Ruiz asked as they got back into the car. “Crazy, psycho bag lady. Man, did you get a whiff of her?”

“They don’t offer steam showers and aromatherapy at the Midnight Mission. Besides, she’s not a psycho. She was lucid, at least she was today. Who knows what she might see living out here. If a couple of bucks makes her think more kindly about talking to cops . . .”

Parker shot Ruiz a look out of the corner of his eye. “How long have you been on the job?”

“Five years.”

“And in five years you haven’t learned anything? Do you have pictures of the chief with a farm animal?”

“Maybe I’m just cheap,” she returned, holding back the temper.

“I’m not even touching that. It’s too easy.”

“I mean, I can’t afford to run around handing out money to street people.”

“Right. That would put a dent in your shoe budget.”

“And you can afford to pass out money to whoever?”

Parker frowned at her. “Twenty dollars? I’m not exactly going to have to give up eating red meat. Investing in a person like Mary there is like putting a few on a long shot at the track. Maybe you lose, but maybe you win and get a nice payout. You didn’t have snitches on that gang task force?”

“Not my job. I worked undercover—and no wiseass remarks,” she cautioned.

Parker raised his brows. “I didn’t say a word.”

“And don’t talk to me about shoes. Those Tod’s wingtips on your feet are like six hundred fifty dollars. I don’t know any other cops wearing six-hundred-fifty-dollar shoes.”

“Except yourself.”

“That’s different.”

“How so? I’ll bet your closet is stacked with Manolos and Jimmy Choos. You haven’t worn the same pair twice in a week. Me, I’ve got maybe five pairs of shoes.”

“So maybe I have a friend who likes to buy me nice things. Clothes, shoes—”

“You have a friend?”

She didn’t take the bait. “So maybe you have a friend like that,” she said slyly. “Maybe you have hidden talents. What about it, Parker? Are you some rich lady’s boy toy? Is that where you got that Jag you drive on the weekends? If you’re that good, you might be worth a second look after all.”

“What do you know about my car?”

She shrugged and played coy. “I’ve heard rumors.”

Parker glanced at her then away as a traffic light ahead turned green. “I don’t think it’s wise for a cop to accept expensive gifts. You never know. That special someone might be in a real jam with the law one day. Maybe he or she asks for a big favor. Even if you don’t grease some wheels for that person, someone’s going to find out you’re wearing a gold Rolex courtesy of the defendant, and then it’s your anatomy in the wringer. Impropriety, bribery. Next thing you know, you’ve got some Internal Affairs parasite crawling up your ass.”

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide,” Ruiz commented.

“Everybody’s got something to hide, sweetheart.”

“Yeah? What have you got to hide, Parker?”

“If I told you, I wouldn’t be hiding it. Never reveal a fear or a weakness, doll. Someone will spin around and knock you flat with it when you least expect it.”

They rode in silence for a moment, creeping down the street in the morning traffic. Lawyers and more lawyers, accountants and more accountants, bankers and more bankers going to their offices in the tall buildings of downtown. Mercedeses, BWMs, Porsches. The car the detectives got was a nondescript domestic sedan of questionable vintage. Robbery-Homicide got better rides. They had to look good on TV. The main requirement of cars in Parker’s division was that they not be tempting to car thieves.

At the second messenger agency—Reliable Couriers—a good-looking young guy in J.Crew and hip glasses, Rayne Carson, spelled his name out so he would get proper credit in any future report. He told them Leonard Lowell was on their list of deadbeat customers who had racked up a bill then refused to pay. They no longer did business with him.

“Can you believe most of that list are attorneys?” he confided to Parker, pointing to the list taped to the wall behind the desk.

“The only debts lawyers want paid are for billable hours,” Parker commiserated.

The phone rang and Rayne Carson held up a finger and flashed an apologetic look as he punched a button on the phone console and listened to the caller via his wireless headset, pen in hand poised over a notepad.

He looked like he should have been a concierge at some happening hotel or a waiter in a trendy restaurant in West Hollywood, Parker thought. But times were tough. The well-tipped professions were staffed with out-of-work writers and actors, victims of the reality TV craze.

Ruiz looked at Parker, rolled her eyes, and gave the Big, Bored Sigh. “I think he wants to ask you out,” she mumbled.

Carson made the “talk, talk, talk” motion with his hand, then pointed at Parker and mouthed: “Great hat.”

“Everybody wants me, doll,” Parker muttered to Ruiz in a Bogart accent. “That’s the curse of being me.”

“I don’t want you.”

Rayne Carson ended his call with a very pointed, “I have to go, Joel, the police need to speak with me about a very important matter . . . . No, it’s not about you. But I could change that.”

He rang off and apologized to Parker. “My agent—such as he is. I’m perfect for a new gay reality show Fox is putting together, and this clown can’t get me arrested.”

“We could,” Ruiz said sweetly.

“Can you get me on America’s Most Wanted? A couple of days reenacting some horrible crime. It takes up space on the résumé.”

“Some other time,” Parker said. “Do you have any idea what messenger company someone like Lowell would go to, with his bad track record?”

“One of the small companies. Desperate and disreputable. Cheap and dirty.”

“Such as?”

“Right Fast, Fly First, Speed Couriers.”