Kill the Messenger

15

According to the Pakistani woman who had been managing the mailbox place for the last three months, Box 501 belonged to a woman named Allison Jennings, whom she did not know. The box had been rented to Ms. Jennings in 1994. The rent was paid by a money order left in the box once a year. These facts had been noted in the file, each year’s note in different handwriting. It seemed a lot of people had used Box-4-U as a stepping-stone to bigger things.

Box-4-U occupied a deep, narrow space between a Lebanese take-out place and a psychic who was running a special on tarot card readings. The mailboxes made a corridor from the front door back to an area with a counter, shelves stacked with shipping cartons, padded envelopes, rolls of tape, bubble wrap, and giant bags of foam packing peanuts.

From the back it took an effort to see past all the stuff to the mailboxes if one cared to pay attention to who was going in and out. Probably the great majority of box renters entered and left in anonymity. As long as they paid their rent on time, no one cared who they were.

The manager who had rented Box 501 to Allison Jennings had made a copy of her driver’s license and stapled it to the rental form as required. The license was from Massachusetts. The photo on the copy was nothing but black ink. Parker had the manager make copies of both sheets, and he and Ruiz went back out onto the street, where they had parked in a loading zone.

As they got into the car, Parker paused to look at the psychic’s storefront. A lavender neon sign read: “Madame Natalia, Psychic to the Stars.” She gladly accepted Visa and MasterCard.

“You want to go inside?” Ruiz asked. “Maybe she can see your future.”

“Why would anyone go to see a psychic in a shithole place like that? If Madame Natalia can see the future, why hasn’t she won the lottery by now?”

“Maybe that’s not her destiny.”

Parker put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. He had been about to say people make their own destiny, but that didn’t reflect kindly on himself, so he said nothing at all. He knew he had set himself up for his fall from Robbery-Homicide by being too cocky, too mouthy, too visible. And he had made his own choice to stay where he was now, a sidetrack to nowhere. He had also decided he would prove himself again, go out a winner. But according to Ruiz’s logic, maybe that wasn’t his destiny.

Ruiz called in the DL for Allison Jennings. Who knew? Maybe the woman would turn out to be a fugitive.

The physical address the woman had listed on her renter’s form for Box-4-U was a redbrick building in a dicey downtown neighborhood where everything, including the population, had been neglected for decades. Street people decorated the landscape, digging in garbage cans, sleeping in doorways. Across the street from Allison Jennings’s building, a crazy guy in a parka that had once been white marched up and down the sidewalk, screaming epithets at the construction crew working on the building.

The place had been gutted and was being redone for downtown’s newest invasion of urban hipsters. The sign advertising the development company promised one-, two-, and three-bedroom luxury apartments in LA’s hippest, most happening new district. The artist’s rendering of the finished project did not show the screaming homeless guy.

“Are they crazy?” Ruiz asked. “No one in their right mind would move down here. There’s nothing here but crack houses and schizo street people.”

“Wait ’til they put a Starbucks on the corner,” Parker said. “There goes the neighborhood. Bring in the young urbanites, next thing you know, the price of illicit substances is through the roof. The average pipehead won’t be able to afford to live here. It’s a social tragedy.”

“You think this woman is still around here?”

Parker shrugged. “Who knows? She filled out that form ten years ago. She could be dead by now, for all we know. This Damon kid maybe bought the box off her, or took it over. He’s got to be around here someplace if he’s using it.”

“Someplace” covered a lot of territory. Central Bureau policed four and a half square miles of downtown LA, including Chinatown, Little Tokyo, the financial district, the jewelry and fashion districts, and the convention center. A lot of ground, a lot of people.

Parker pulled the car into the lot at the station and turned to his partner. “First thing, take Damon’s job ap to Latent. See if they can get a match with anything off the murder weapon. Then call Massachusetts. Then look for any local Allison Jenningses. Then get on the computer and see if you can find any crimes similar to the Lowell homicide in LA over the past two years. And call the phone company for the local usage details on Speed Couriers.”

Ruiz looked perturbed. “Anything else, Master?”

“Start going through the calls. Maybe this Damon kid doesn’t have a phone, but maybe he does. And get the phone records for Lowell’s office and for his home.”

“And what will you be doing while I’m doing all of this shit?”

“I’m going to talk to Abby Lowell. Find out how she got her name in the paper. She’ll like talking to me more than she’d like talking to you.”

“What makes you so sure of that?”

He flashed her the famous Kev Parker grin. “Because I’m me, doll.”

With Ruiz out of his hair, Parker drove directly to Lenny Lowell’s office. He wanted to walk through the crime scene and around the street in daylight, without the distractions of the uniforms and the criminalists, a trainee, and the Robbery-Homicide goons. He found it centering, calming in a macabre sort of way, to spend time in the place where a victim had died.

He wasn’t sure he believed in ghosts, but he believed in souls. He believed in the essence of what made a being, the energy that defined a person as being alive. Sometimes when he walked a scene alone, he believed he could feel that energy around him, lingering. Other times there was nothing, emptiness, a void.

He had never paid attention to such ideas in his former life as an RHD hotshot. He had been too full of himself to sense much about anyone else around him, alive or dead. One good thing he had gained in his loss: awareness, the ability to step back from himself and see a clearer picture of what was around him.

The neighborhood was no more attractive in daylight than it had been at night, in the rain. Less so, actually. In the stark light of a gray morning, the age and dinge and tiredness of the place couldn’t hide.

The little two-story strip mall where Lowell’s office was located looked to have been built in the late fifties. Hard angles, flat roof, metal panels of faded color—pale aqua, washed-out pink, puke yellow. Aluminum frames around the windows. Across the street, the 24/7 Laundromat squatted, a low brick building with no discernible style.

The better scum defense attorneys had offices in Beverly Hills and Century City, where the world was beautiful. This was the kind of place where the lower end of the food chain hung their shingles. Though it seemed to Parker that old Lenny had been doing pretty well for himself.

Lowell’s Cadillac had been towed away from the back door of the office, taken away to be checked for evidence. The car was new but had been vandalized. His home address was a condo in one of the new downtown hotspots near the Staples Center. Pricey stuff for a guy whose clients used the revolving door at the bail bondsman’s office.

Parker wondered why the killer would have risked smashing the Cadillac’s windows if all he had wanted was to steal the money in the safe.

Was it an act of punitive rage? A former client, or a family member of a client who hadn’t beaten the rap, and blamed Lowell? Had the motive for the murder been revenge and the money a bonus? Or had the killer been after something he hadn’t found in the office? If that was the case, this murder was a much more complicated affair. Besides the money in his safe, what could a guy like Lenny Lowell have that would be worth killing for?

Parker unsealed the crime-scene tape and let himself in the back door of the office. The smell of stale cigarette smoke clung to the fake wood paneling, and had been absorbed into the acoustic-tile ceiling, dyeing it an oily yellow. The carpet was flat and utilitarian, and a color chosen to camouflage dirt.

There was a bathroom on the left. The criminalists had gone over it, dusting for prints, plucking hairs out of the sink drain, but they had found no trace of blood. If the killer had gotten Lenny Lowell’s blood on him, he’d been smart enough not to try to clean himself up here.

Lowell’s office was next. A decent-size space now awash in paper, and fingerprint dust residue, and bits of tape marking evidence locations on the rug. The lawyer’s blood had soaked into the carpet in a barely discernible stain (another selling point for the manufacturers: hides large bloodstains!). Drawers had been pulled out of file cabinets, out of the desk.

“You’re disturbing a crime scene,” Parker said.

Abby Lowell, sitting behind her father’s desk, startled and gasped, and banged her knee trying to stand up and back away.

“Oh, my God! Oh, my God, you scared me!” she scolded, her splayed hand pressed to her chest as if to keep her heart from leaping out.

“I have to ask what you’re doing here, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said, taking a seat across the desk from her. The arm of the chair was speckled with blood. “We seal crime scenes for a reason.”

“And do you make funeral arrangements?” she asked, gathering her composure around her again like the cashmere sweater she wore. “Do you know where my father kept his life insurance policy? Will you call the company for me? And what about his will? I’m sure he has one, but I have no idea where it is. I don’t know if he wanted to be buried or cremated. Can you help with that, Detective Parker?”

Parker shook his head. “No, I can’t. But if you had called me, I would have met you here and helped you look. I would have known what you touched and what you moved. I would have known if you had taken something other than your father’s will or his life insurance policy.”

“Are you accusing me of something?” she asked, sitting a little taller, arching one dark, elegant brow.

“No. I’m just saying. That’s how a crime scene works, Ms. Lowell. I can’t care that the victim was your father. It can’t matter to me if you think you have a right to come into this office. My job is very clear to me. The second your father ceased to breathe, he became my responsibility. I became his protector.”

“Too bad for my father you weren’t here to protect him from being killed. And by ‘you’ I don’t mean you personally, I mean the LAPD.”

“We can’t predict when and where a crime is about to happen,” Parker said. “If that were the case, I’d be out of a job. And frankly, you would be ahead of us in expectation of being able to protect your father. You knew his habits, you knew his friends, you probably knew his enemies. Maybe you knew he was into something that could have gotten him killed.”

She looked incredulous. “Are you now saying it’s my fault some thug broke into my father’s office and killed him? You’re incredible. How insensitive can you be?”

“You wouldn’t want to find out,” Parker said. He took his hat off and crossed his legs, settling in. “You didn’t seem all that sensitive yourself last night, if you don’t mind me saying, which you probably do. You walk into a room, your father is posing for the big chalk outline. You seemed more upset that your dinner plans had been disturbed.”

“Why? Because I didn’t fall down weeping? Because I didn’t become hysterical?” she asked. “I’m not the hysterical type, Detective. And I do my crying in private. You don’t know anything about my relationship with my father.”

“Fill me in, why don’t you? Were you and your father close?”

“In our own way.”

“What way was that?”

She sighed, looked away, looked back. The relationship, like most relationships, was more complicated than she wanted to attempt to articulate—or more complicated than she expected him to understand.

“We were friends. Lenny wasn’t much of a father. He wasn’t around. He cheated on my mother. He drank too much. His idea of quality time with me when I was a child was to drag me along with him to the racetrack or to a bookie bar, where he would promptly forget I existed. My parents divorced when I was nine years old.”

“Why didn’t you hate him?”

“Because he was the only father I had. And because, for all his faults, Lenny wasn’t a bad guy. He just couldn’t live up to expectations.”

Restless under scrutiny, she got out of her father’s chair and started a slow pace back and forth in front of his bookcases, arms crossed, eyes scanning the few things that hadn’t been knocked from the shelves in the ransacking. She was model gorgeous in the sapphire sweater and matching skirt, a pair of very nice black boots on her feet. “I was angry with him for a long time after he left. Mostly because I was stuck with my mother.”

“But you forgave him?”

“We sort of found each other when I started college. Suddenly I was an adult. We could have a conversation. I wanted to become an attorney. He took an interest in me.”

“You became friends,” Parker said. “Which is why you call him Lenny instead of Dad.”

She looked away again, not wanting him to see her have an emotional reaction to her memories of her father. But it was there—a thin sheen of tears in the dark eyes, a tightening along the jawline. That was some kind of steely control, Parker thought.

He supposed maybe that was what a little girl learned to do while her father was busy handicapping the sixth race at Santa Anita. And what a little girl did when she was caught between warring parents, what she did when her father left, what she did when he reappeared in her life. She maintained control. She suppressed reactions. She could survive any challenge if she didn’t let anything penetrate her armor.

“Did you know your father’s friends?” Parker asked quietly. “His enemies? Whether or not he was into something dangerous?”

She seemed to laugh a little to herself. Some private joke she had no interest in sharing with him.

“Lenny was always looking for an angle. Maybe he finally found one. I don’t know. If he was involved in something . . . I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. We talked about my classes. We talked about him wanting me to work with him after I pass the bar. We went to the racetrack.”

Her voice strained on the last sentence. Her relationship with her father had gone full circle, only this time around they were pals and he gave her the attention she had craved as a child. Craved so badly she had gone into her father’s profession to please him—consciously or not.

Parker said nothing for a moment, letting his gaze move without focus over the stuff on the desk. Abby Lowell continued her slow pace. She wanted out, he supposed. Not even innocent people wanted to be around cops. He had no way of knowing how innocent she was or wasn’t.

“You’re in charge of making the funeral arrangements?” he asked. “Does he have any other family?”

“He has a brother in upstate New York. He has a daughter from his first marriage, Ann. I haven’t seen her in years. I think she moved to Boston. And three ex-wives. None of them would cross the street to spit on his corpse.”

“You’re the only forgiving one in the bunch.”

She didn’t comment, didn’t acknowledge that he had spoken. She picked up a black Coach leather tote from the floor, and put it on the desk. It matched her boots.

“Do you mind if I smoke, Detective?” she asked, already digging a cigarette out of a pack of Newports.

He let her get it to her mouth, lighter poised, before he said, “Yes, I do.”

She cut him a look from under her brows and lit up anyway. As she blew a stream of smoke at the nicotine-stained ceiling, she said, “I only asked for form’s sake.”

She leaned against the side of the desk. Her profile belonged in an Erté drawing, the long, graceful, subtly curving lines of the early Art Deco movement. Her skin was like porcelain. Her hair spilled down behind her like a dark waterfall. There appeared to be nothing of Lenny in her looks. Parker wondered if the other daughter had been so lucky. He wondered if this one was trying to distract him.

“Did you speak to anyone last night after you left here, Ms. Lowell?”

“No. I went home.”

“You didn’t call your mother? Tell her her ex checked out?”

“My mother died five years ago. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” Parker said automatically. “You didn’t call a friend? A boyfriend?”

She sighed, impatient, stubbed out the cigarette, started to move again. “What are you trying to get at, Detective? If you have a question, ask it. We don’t have to play twenty questions about my personal life. I have arrangements to make, and I have a class at eleven. Can we get on with it?”

Parker cocked a brow. “A class? No day off to mourn, to try to grasp the idea that your father was murdered less than twenty-four hours ago?”

“My father is dead. I can’t change that.” Her pace picked up a step. “He was murdered. I can’t grasp that idea. I don’t know how anyone possibly could. What good would it do me to stay home in my pajamas, contemplating the meaninglessness of life?” she asked. “I may seem cold to you, Detective Parker, but I’m dealing with this the only way that makes any sense to me—moving forward, doing what has to be done because no one else is going to do it for me.”

“Cope now, fall apart later,” Parker said, rising from the bloodstained chair. He positioned himself where she had been, leaning against the end of the desk. “I’ve been a cop nearly twenty years, Ms. Lowell. I know survivors deal with grief in their own way.

“I had a case once,” he said. “A woman murdered in a carjacking. Her coat caught in the door when the perp shoved her out. She was dragged nearly a block. It was horrible. Her husband was a reasonably successful artist, a painter. His way of coping, of exorcising grief and guilt, and all the rest of it, was to lock himself in his studio and paint. He painted for thirty-six hours straight, no sleep, no food. For thirty-six hours he raged in that studio, hurling paint, brushes, cans, anything he could put his hands on. The whole time he was screaming and shouting and sobbing. His assistant called me because she was afraid he’d had a psychotic break, and worried he might try to kill himself.

“Finally everything went silent. The guy came out of the studio, spoke to no one, took a shower, and went to bed. The assistant and I went into the studio to see what he’d been doing all that time. He’d done a dozen or so big canvases. Incredible work, brilliant, miles beyond anything he’d done before. Pollock would have wept to see it. Every emotion tearing this man apart was up there, raw, angry, crushing grief.

“When the guy woke up, he went back into the studio and destroyed every one of them. He said they were private, not meant for anyone else to see. He buried his wife, and went on with his life.”

Abby Lowell was staring at him, trying to figure out how she was supposed to react, what she was supposed to think, what kind of trick this might be.

Parker spread his hands. “Everyone handles it the only way they can.”

“Then why were you judging me?”

“I wasn’t. I need to know the why of everything, Ms. Lowell. That’s my job. For instance, I need to know why it said in the Times this morning that you, a twenty-three-year-old student at Southwestern Law, discovered your father’s body.”

Something flashed in her eyes, across her face, there and gone. Not anger. Surprise, maybe. Then the poker face. “I don’t know. It isn’t true. You know it isn’t true,” she said defensively. “I was at the restaurant when I got the call. And I don’t know any reporters. I wouldn’t talk to them if I did.”

“And you didn’t speak to anyone after you left this office last night?”

Exasperation. “I told you. No.” She checked her watch, shifted her weight, put her hand on her purse.

“How about before? Did you call anyone from the restaurant or from your car on your way over here? A friend, a relative?”

“No. And I’m sure you can get my cell phone records if you don’t believe me.” She put the strap of her bag over her shoulder and looked toward the door to the front of the office. “I have to go,” she said bluntly. “I have a meeting with a funeral director at eleven.”

“I thought you had a class.”

The dark eyes snapped with annoyance. “The class is at one. I misspoke. I have a lot on my agenda, Detective. You know how to contact me if you need anything more.”

“I can find you.”

She started past him to leave. Parker reached out and gently caught her by the arm. “Wouldn’t you like to know when your father’s body is going to be released from the morgue? I’m sure the funeral director will need that information.”

Abby Lowell looked him in the eye. “His body won’t be released until after the autopsy. I’m told that could be several days, or as much as a week. I want everything arranged so I can get this over with as soon as possible.”

Parker let her go. She had the composure of a knife-thrower’s assistant, he had to give her that. He wondered if there was anything more behind it than a lonely little girl protecting herself.

His gaze drifted across the desk as he tossed these thoughts and observations around in his head. She’d left empty-handed, no sign of the things she had come here to look for. Lenny’s life insurance policy, his will.

He went out to the car, got the Polaroid camera out of the trunk, and went back in. He shot photographs of the desktop, the open filing cabinets, the floor around the desk. Then he carefully lifted a long black plastic envelope out of a half-opened desk drawer. In gold stamped letters across the front: CITY NATIONAL BANK. It was empty. The impression of a small key had been left in one frosted plastic pocket. Safe-deposit box.

Parker eased himself into Lenny Lowell’s big leather executive’s chair and looked around the room, trying to imagine what Lenny would have seen as he surveyed his domain. What he would have focused on. Abby’s photograph had been knocked over on his desk. He looked down beside the chair. A couple of travel brochures lay at cockeyed angles half under the desk. Parker inched them out with the toe of his shoe.

LOSE YOURSELF IN PARADISE. THE CAYMAN ISLANDS.

“Well, Lenny,” he said to the empty room. “I’d hope you’re in another paradise now, but I imagine you’ve gone where all scum defense attorneys go. I hope you took your sunscreen.”