Kill the Messenger

5

Jimmy Chew made a sound like he had been impaled with something. Parker took it on the chin with just a hint of a flinch around his eyes. He pulled his hat off and offered his hand to Abby Lowell. She looked at it like she figured he never washed after going to the john.

“My condolences for your loss, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said. “I’m sorry you heard that.”

She arched a perfect brow. “But not sorry you said it?”

“It wasn’t personal. I’m sure it’s no surprise to you how cops feel about defense attorneys.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. Her voice was a strong, slightly hoarse alto that would serve her well in a courtroom. The withering gaze never wavered. She had yet to look at her father’s body. She kept her chin up, Parker thought, to avoid seeing him. “I’m in law school myself. Just so you can get a head start coming up with new and different derogatory ways to describe me.”

“I can assure you, we treat every homicide the same, Ms. Lowell. Regardless of who or what the victim was.”

“That doesn’t instill much confidence, Detective.”

“I have an eighty-six-percent clearance rate.”

“And what happened to the other fourteen percent?”

“I’m still working them. I’ll work them ’til they’re cleared. I don’t care how long it takes. I don’t care if by the time I close those cases the perps are hunchbacked old men and I have to chase them down with a walker,” Parker said. “There’s not a homicide cop in this town better than me.”

“Then why aren’t you working with us, Parker?”

Bradley Kyle, Detective 2 with Robbery-Homicide—LAPD’s glamour squad, bastion of hotshots and arrogant assholes. Parker knew this firsthand because he had once been one of them, and a more arrogant, hotshot jerk had never walked the halls of Parker Center. In those days he had been fond of saying the building had been named for him. Stardom was his destiny. The memory bubbled up inside him now like a case of acid reflux, burning and bitter.

Parker scowled at Kyle moving toward him. “What is this? A party? And how did your name get on the guest list, Bradley? Or are you just out slumming?”

Kyle ignored him and started looking around the crime scene. His partner, a big guy with no neck, a blond flattop, and horn-rimmed glasses, spoke to no one as he made notes. Parker watched them for a moment, a bad feeling coiling in his gut. Robbery-Homicide didn’t just show up at a murder out of curiosity. They worked the high-profile cases, like O.J., like Robert Blake, like Rob Cole—LA’s celebrity killer du jour.

“Don’t piss on my crime scene, Bradley.” Parker emphasized the name, dragged it out, knowing Kyle hated it. He wanted to be called Kyle—or at the worst, Brad. Bradley was a name for an interior decorator or a hairstylist, not a kick-ass detective.

Kyle glanced at him. “Who says it’s yours?”

“My beat, my call, my murder,” Parker said, moving toward the younger detective.

Kyle ignored him and squatted down to look at the apparent murder weapon—an old bowling trophy, now encrusted in blood and decorated with Lenny Lowell’s hair and a piece of his scalp.

Kyle had been on his way up in Robbery-Homicide while Parker was being driven out. He was at the top of his game now and eating up the spotlight every time he got the chance, which was too often.

He was a good-looking guy, good face for television, a tan so perfect it had to have been airbrushed on him. He had an athletic build, but he was on the slight side, and touchy about it. Made a point of telling people he was five eleven and a half, like he’d knock anyone on their ass for making something of it. Parker, who was himself a hair under six feet, figured Kyle for five nine and not a fraction more.

Parker squatted down beside him. “What are you doing here?” he asked quietly. “What’s Robbery-Homicide doing cruising the murder of a low-rent mouthpiece like Lenny Lowell?”

“We go where they send us. Isn’t that right, Moosie?” Kyle tossed a look at his partner. Moose grunted and kept on making notes.

“What are you saying?” Parker asked. “Are you saying you’re taking this? Why? It won’t even make the paper. This guy’s clients were scumbags and dirtballs.”

Kyle pretended not to have heard him, and stood up. Ruiz stood a scant few inches away from him. In her ridiculous heels she was almost at eye level with him.

“Detective Kyle,” she purred in a hot phone-sex voice as she offered her hand. “Detective Renee Ruiz. I want your job.”

This in the same tone she might have used to say “I want you inside me,” not that Parker had any desire to find out. He stood up and gave the dead eyes to his partner. “Trainee Ruiz, have you finished diagramming the crime scene?”

She huffed a petulant sigh at Parker, then tossed a sexy look at Kyle and walked away like a woman who knew a guy was watching her ass.

“Forget it, Kyle,” Parker said. “She’d grind you up like lunch meat. Besides, she’s too tall for you.”

“Excuse me, gentlemen.” Abby Lowell joined them. “If I might intrude on your little game of who has the biggest dick—” She offered her hand to Kyle, all business. “Abby Lowell. The victim is—was—my father.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Lowell.”

“You’re with Robbery-Homicide,” she said. “I recognize you from the news.”

“Yes.” Kyle looked as pleased as a second-rate dinner-theater actor thinking he was about to be asked for his autograph.

Parker expected Abby Lowell to say “Thank God you’re here.” Instead, she looked Kyle square in the eyes and said: “Why are you here?”

Kyle gave her the poker face. “Excuse me?”

“Come on, Detective. I’ve been around my father’s business all my life. His clients and their accused crimes should be way below your radar. What do you think happened here? Do you know something I don’t?”

“A man was murdered. We’re homicide cops. Do you know something I don’t? What do you think happened here?”

Abby Lowell took in the mess as if seeing it for the first time since she had entered the room: the files and paperwork everywhere, the overturned chair, maybe from a struggle, maybe from a ransacking after the murder.

Parker watched her carefully, thinking there was a whole lot stirring beneath the thin facade of calm. He could see it in her eyes, in the slight tremor of her lips. Fear, shock, the struggle to control her emotions. She kept her arms crossed tight, holding herself, keeping her hands from shaking. She was very careful not to look at the floor in front of her.

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe a disgruntled client, maybe a family member of a victim in a case Lenny won. Maybe someone wanted something here Lenny didn’t want to give up.”

Her gaze landed on a credenza at the far side of her father’s desk. A cube-shaped black safe that was maybe two feet square squatted in the cabinet, the door open. “He kept cash in that safe.”

“Did you check the safe, Parker?” Kyle asked, the Man In Charge.

Parker turned to Jimmy Chew. “Jimmy, did you look in that safe when you got here?”

“Why, yes, Detective Parker, I did,” Chew said with false formality. He didn’t so much as glance at Kyle. “When my partner and I arrived at nineteen hundred hours and fourteen minutes, we first secured the scene and called in Homicide. While looking around the office, my partner observed the safe was open and that it appeared to contain only documents, which we did not examine.”

“No cash?” Parker asked.

“No, sir. No money. Not in plain sight anyway.”

“I know there was money,” Abby Lowell said with an edge in her voice. “A lot of Lenny’s clients preferred to pay him in cash.”

“There’s a surprise,” Jimmy Chew muttered, retreating.

“He never had less than five thousand dollars in that safe—usually more. He kept it in a bank bag.”

“Was your father having problems with any of his clients?” Kyle asked.

“He didn’t talk to me about his clients, Detective Kyle. Even scum-sucking dirtbag attorneys have their ethics.”

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise, Ms. Lowell. I apologize on behalf of the department if anyone here may have given you that impression. I’m sure your father had ethics.”

And he probably kept them in a jar at the back of a cupboard, next to the pickled onions and some ten-year-old canned salmon, never to be opened, Parker thought. He’d seen Lenny Lowell at work in the courtroom. Short on scruples and ethics, Lowell would have impugned the testimony of his own mother if it meant getting an acquittal.

“We’ll need to see his client records,” Kyle said.

“Sure. As soon as someone rewrites the Constitution,” Abby Lowell returned. “That information is privileged.”

“A list of his clients, then.”

“I’m a student, not stupid. Unless a judge tells me I have to, you get nothing confidential out of this office.”

Color began to creep upward from Kyle’s starched white collar. “Do you want us to solve your father’s murder, Ms. Lowell? Or is there some reason you’d rather we didn’t?”

“Of course I want it solved,” she snapped. “But I also know that I now have to look out for my father’s clients and for the best interest of his practice. If I just hand over privileged information, that could open my father’s estate to lawsuits, compromise ongoing cases, and could very well keep me from my chosen profession. I don’t want to be disbarred before I even take the bar exam, Detective Kyle. This has to be done by the book.”

“You don’t need to compromise yourself, Ms. Lowell. Names and addresses aren’t privileged,” Parker said calmly, pulling her attention away from Kyle. “And it’s not necessary for us to access your father’s files. The criminal records of his clients are readily available. When was the last time you spoke with your father?”

He saw more value in trying to get Abby Lowell on his side than in bullying her into an adversarial position. She wasn’t some weak, hysterical woman, terrified of the police, which was what Kyle wanted her to be. She had already dug in her heels, put a chip on her shoulder, and dared him to knock it off.

She rubbed a slightly trembling manicured hand across her forehead and let a slightly shaky sigh escape, showing a tiny crack in the armor. “I spoke with Lenny around six-thirty. We were supposed to meet for dinner at Cicada. I got there early, had a drink, called him on my cell phone. He said he might be a little late,” she said, her voice tightening, her dark eyes filling. She blinked the tears back. “He said he was waiting for a bike messenger to pick something up.”

“Did he say what?”

“No.”

“Late in the day to call a messenger.”

She shrugged. “Probably something he needed to get to a client.”

“Do you know what service he used?”

“Whichever could pick up and deliver the fastest and the cheapest.”

“If we can find out which service, their dispatch office will have the address the package was going to, maybe a vague description of what was in it, and the name of the messenger they sent,” Parker said. “Do you know if the messenger ever arrived?”

“No. I told you, when I last spoke with Lenny, he was waiting.”

Parker glanced over at the safe, frowning.

“That would be stupid,” she said, reading his mind. “Like you said, his dispatch office will have the messenger’s name.”

Which could very well not be real, Parker thought. Bike messengers weren’t known for being stable, family types. They tended to be loners, oddballs, living a hand-to-mouth existence. The way they raced the downtown streets—balls-out, no fear for life or limb, no regard for themselves or anyone else—it wasn’t a stretch to imagine more than one of them was hopped up on something.

So some down-on-his-luck junkie messenger shows up for a package, gets a look in Lowell’s open safe, decides to elevate his social standing, kills Lowell, takes the money, and vanishes into the night, never to be seen again. The guy could be on a bus to Vegas while they stood around talking about it.

“It’s not my job to draw conclusions, Ms. Lowell. I have to consider all possibilities.

“Who called 911?” he asked, turning again to Jimmy Chew.

“The ever-popular anonymous citizen.”

“Anything around here open or inhabited?”

“Not on a night like this. There’s a 76 station and a bail-bonds place down the street, on the other side. And the 24/7 Laundromat.”

“Go see if anyone at the Laundromat has anything to say.”

“They’re closed.”

“I thought you said it was called 24/7.”

“It’s raining,” Chew said, incredulous. “Me and Stevie cruised past around six-fifteen. The place was locked up tight. Besides, they quit being open twenty-four after their night clerk was robbed and raped six, eight months ago.”

Kyle smirked. “Great neighborhood you work, Parker.”

“Killers are killers, no matter what neighborhood you’re in, Bradley,” Parker said. “The only difference is, you can’t make the news off the murders here.”

He turned back to Abby Lowell. “How were you notified of your father’s death, Ms. Lowell?”

She looked at him like she thought he might be pulling something on her. “One of the officers called.”

Parker looked at Chew, who held up his hands in denial, then looked at Chew’s partner, who shook his head.

“Someone called you. On your cell phone,” Parker said.

Abby Lowell’s eyes bounced from one man to another, uncertain. “Yes. Why?”

“What did the caller say to you?”

“That my father had been killed, and could I please come to his office. Why?”

“May I see your cell phone?”

“I don’t understand,” she said, hesitantly pulling her phone out of a pocket in her trench coat.

“LAPD wouldn’t tell you something like that over the phone, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said. “An officer or detective would have come to your residence to give you the news.”

Her eyes widened as the implication sank in. “Are you telling me I was on the phone with my father’s killer?”

“What time did you get the call?”

“Maybe twenty minutes ago. I was at the restaurant.”

“Do you have a call list on that thing?” Parker asked, nodding toward the phone she clutched in her hand.

“Yes.” She scrolled through a list of commands and brought up the screen that listed calls received. Her hand was trembling. “I don’t recognize the number.”

“You didn’t recognize the voice?”

“No. Of course not.”

Parker held his hand out. “May I?”

Abby Lowell handed him the phone. She couldn’t jerk her hand back from it quickly enough, as if it had just been revealed to her that the thing was in fact a live reptile. Parker checked the number, hit the button to call it back, then listened as it rang unanswered on the other end.

“Oh, my God,” Lenny Lowell’s daughter breathed. She pressed a hand to her lips and blinked away the gathering tears.

Parker turned back to Chew. “Track down the owner of the Laundromat. Find out who was working and what time they closed. I want that person located. I want to know if there was a single living being in proximity of this office between six-thirty and seven-fifteen. If a rat crawled by the back door and someone saw it, I want to know.”

“Roger that, boss.” Chew flipped Kyle’s smirk back at him as he went to speak to his partner.

Parker went to the vic’s desk. The old Rolodex was closed. He flipped the cover up with the tip of a pen, then turned to the Latent Prints tech. “Cynthia, I want every print you can lift off this thing, inside and out. Every frigging card, but priority on this one.”

Abby Lowell’s. Beneath her name was her home number, her cell number, her address.

“Go ahead and cover the bases for us, Parker,” Kyle said tightly as he stepped in beside Parker behind the desk. “But don’t get too cozy. If the word comes down from the mountain, you’re out.”

Parker stared at him for a second, then a new voice called from the front office. “Parker, please tell me your DB had a heart attack. I need a nice simple ‘natural causes’ so I can go home. It’s raining.”

Diane Nicholson, coroner’s investigator for the County of Los Angeles, forty-two, and a long cool drink of gin to look at. She took no shit and no prisoners—an attitude that had earned her the fear and respect of cops all over the city. No one messed with a Nicholson crime scene.

She stopped just inside the door to Lowell’s private office and looked down at Lenny Lowell. “Oh, shit.” This with more disappointment than horror. There wasn’t much that shocked her.

She looked at Parker with flat eyes, giving away nothing, then looked at Kyle and seemed offended at the sight of him.

“Parker is the detective of record,” she announced. “Until I hear differently from someone more important than you, Bradley, I talk to Parker.”

She didn’t wait for a response from Kyle. What he might have to say was of no interest or consequence to her. She worked for the coroner’s office. The coroner might jump to the bark of big dogs in Parker Center; Diane Nicholson did not.

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and knelt down to begin her examination of the body.

Lenny Lowell’s pants pockets yielded forty-three cents, a Chiclet, and a laminated, faded, dog-eared pari-mutuel ticket from a horse race at Santa Anita.

“He carried it for luck.”

The voice that had been so strong and forceful earlier was now barely audible. Parker looked at Abby Lowell, watched her eyes fill again as she stared at the small piece of red cardstock in Nicholson’s hand. She didn’t try to blink the tears back this time. They spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks, one fat drop at a time. Her face was white; the skin appeared nearly translucent, like fine porcelain. Parker thought she might faint, and brushed past Kyle to go to her.

“The ticket,” she said. She tried to force a sardonic smile at some private joke, but her mouth was trembling. “He carried it for luck.”

Parker touched her arm gently. “Is there a friend you can stay with, Ms. Lowell? I’ll have an officer drive you. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll set up a time for you to come into the station and talk more about your father.”

Abby Lowell jerked her arm away without looking at him, her gaze nailed to the floor, to her father’s wingtips. “Don’t pretend concern for me, Detective,” she said bitterly. “I don’t want your phony sympathy. I’ll drive myself home.”

No one said anything as she walked away and hurried down the hall and out the back door.

Nicholson broke the silence, slipping Lenny Lowell’s good-luck charm into an envelope in case it might turn out to be relevant later on. “I guess he should have cashed it in while he had the chance.”