Scavenger hunt

Chapter 42

Jimmy set down the beer, and the bottle fell over on the uneven ground, bubbling toward where his notes were spread. "Son of a bitch." He picked up the printout of Walsh's phone records and shook them off. He knew there was something important about the professor's reconfigured time of death, something that set off bells without him knowing why. He turned away from the printout, looking down at the distant koi pond. He had a headache from thinking.

The midafternoon sun was hotter than the morning, but he didn't notice. He sat in the shade of a scrawny lemon tree safely upwind from the stink, alone with his unfocused suspicions. Rollo and the professor were long gone. Just Jimmy now. He watched the bloated pig carcass bob serenely in the brown water and thought of Michael Danziger swimming against the tide in that little pool of his, never reaching the far side. Sugar pressed the buzzer and heard some Greek melody. Nice. He had probably rung as many doorbells as any cop-a little personal touch was appreciated. He squared his shoulders. He had brushed off the dirt from the playhouse, then gotten in his car and driven to the nearest mall, stolen a license plate from one of the cars parked outside the movie theater, and stuck it on top of his own plate with a couple dabs of Super Glue. The Super Glue would keep the fake plate in place, but he could remove it on the way home with a strong tug, The LoJack indicated that Jimmy was well on his way back to L.A.-that boy better be careful, the Highway Patrol was hell on speeders. He rang the bell again. That Greek tune could grow on a fellow. He adjusted his navy blue sport coat, the one he always kept in the trunk of the car, for official purposes. He smiled at the peephole.

The door opened, the security chain taut. "Yes?" The woman was suspicious, which he thought was an attractive quality in a female, and she was wearing a frilly blue apron, which really won his heart.

Sugar flipped open his wallet and let her take a good look at his gold shield while he took a good look at her. "Detective Leonard Brimley." He left the wallet open, like he was holding open the Red Sea with it. He grinned at her. "You can call me Sugar, Stephanie. Everybody else does."

Stephanie glanced at his car parked in the driveway, a five-year-old Ford with a little salt corrosion on the chrome. "Do I know you, officer?"

"Not yet, but we'll fix that." She had lost a lot of weight. They had never been introduced, but Sugar had seen her leaving April's office on three or four different occasions, watching her from the darkness of the stairwell as she trudged down the hall toward the elevator. She must have lost fifty pounds, but she still slumped. "I need to talk to you about your gentleman caller earlier today."

Stephanie slowly unchained the door. "My daughter gets home from school at three. I like to meet her at the bus stop."

"You're a good mama, but don't you fret, we'll be done by then." Sugar sniffed. "Something good's cooking."

Stephanie wiped her hands on her apron. "I just finished making cookies."

"Let's talk in the kitchen then." Sugar beamed. "Nice to see that there's still women out there who bake from scratch instead of opening up a bag of store-bought."

Stephanie clutched the apron. "I'm not much of a cook. I just wanted to whip up something my daughter could bring to class. The other kids have been picking on her."

"Kids can be so cruel. Nothing like passing out cookies to make everyone your friend."

"That's just what I was thinking."

Sugar followed her into the kitchen. It was small but neat and clean, real shipshape. A carton of eggs was on the counter, next to open bags of flour and sugar and a stick of butter. The mixing bowl was almost empty. Crayon drawings were magneted to the refrigerator. Two batches of cookies were cooling on a wire rack. The stove was gas.

"Can I get you some water, detective?" Stephanie let the tap run while she got out two tall glasses. She handed him his glass a moment later, ice cubes clinking. She looked surprised, noticing his thin leather gloves for the first time.

"Eczema," explained Sugar, taking a long drink. "Ah." He smacked his lips. "Nothing like cold water on a hot day."

"Filtered water." Stephanie took a demure sip from her own glass and wiped her lips with a pinky. "I used to drink five or six cans of soda pop a day, but now I just drink water." She blushed. "I used to have a weight problem. My whole metabolism was out of kilter."

"I find that hard to believe." Sugar ran the spatula around the rim of the mixing bowl and tasted it, gauging her reaction. "Ummm, chocolate chip-everybody's favorite." She didn't look annoyed, she looked pleased.

"I limit myself to just one cookie per batch. They used to be one of my trigger foods. Chocolate of any kind is my weakness." Stephanie broke a corner off one of the cookies and surreptitiously placed it into her mouth. "Do you take vitamins?"

"Can't say as I do."

"You really should, detective."

"Call me Sugar."

"You really should, Sugar. I'm a distributor for some of the best chelated vitamins on the market. No sugars, no starches, no fillers. They boost your energy level naturally."

"I guess we could all use a little more energy." Sugar leaned against the oven. It was warm but not hot. "You're a real good businesswoman. I like that. Shows character."

"It's not really a choice." Stephanie broke another piece of cookie off. "I'm a single parent. Somebody's got to pay the bills."

"Maybe I'll pick up a couple bottles of vitamin C when we're done here. I don't know much about vitamins, but I heard that's good for colds."

"I have a very good thousand-milligram time-release C available. If you buy two bottles, the third one is free. I also have some aloe vera gel that will help that eczema of yours."

Sugar grinned at her. "Looks like this is my lucky day. I almost hate to have to talk business with you, but I have to." She took a longer drink, and he watched her white throat shiver as she swallowed. "This gentleman you were talking to"-he flipped through his notebook-"Jimmy Gage. What exactly did he ask you about?"

Stephanie drooped like a week-old daisy. "I'm not in any trouble, am I?"

Sugar patted her arm. "I've got the inside track with the district attorney. Not to brag, but if I say you're a friend of the department, that will pretty much settle things."

"I really never knew what was going on. Not until it was too late. Could you write that down?"

Sugar wrote it down in his notebook, while Stephanie leaned over to watch. "You told that to Mr. Gage?"

"Yes, I did. I certainly did."

"You said you didn't know what was going on until it was too late. So later you did realize what was going on?"

"Well, yes, but by then-"

"By then it was too late. Not your fault." Sugar wrote that down too.

"Jimmy said I was going to be an unnamed source. He promised me."

"Jimmy Gage is interfering in a police investigation. He can't promise you anything."

"I see." Stephanie's hand shook. "You meet someone, you think you can trust them… It's my own fault. As I said, I used to be mildly obese. A fat girl, she always trusts a man who smiles at her. I guess, deep down, I'm still a fat girl."

"Stephanie, I need to know exactly what you told him. The whole investigation could be compromised. I'm sure he mentioned a photographer that April McCoy used."

"Willard Burton. Yes, Jimmy knew all about him."

Sugar looked up from his notes. "Would you mind pulling the drapes? I'm getting a wicked reflection off the window." He waited until Stephanie had closed the drapes and returned to the sofa. The room was darker now, cooler.

"Jimmy wasn't really that interested in Willard Burton," said Stephanie.

"No, I expect he was interested in Heather Grimm. He thinks somebody put her up to going to Garrett Walsh's beach house."

"Well, actually he knows that April sent her there." Stephanie drank the last of her water, the ice cubes tumbling against her upper lip. She looked pleased with herself. Nothing nicer than being able to correct a police officer. "What he wanted from me was who it was put April up to it."

Sugar took it all down. "And who did put April up to it?"

"I have no idea. That's what I told him."

"Was that the truth?"

"Yes, sir, it was."

"I know this Jimmy Gage, Stephanie. He doesn't take no for an answer. I'm sure you must have told him something he could use."

"Well, I told him that April put Heather under contract. He seemed excited by that. April said Heather had a real career in front of her. She had her lined up for a big part, a real movie, with stars and everything. Then she got killed."

"Did April ever tell you what the movie was?"

"That's just what Jimmy wanted to know." Stephanie shook her head.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him I couldn't remember. It was the truth too."

It didn't matter. If Jimmy asked the question, he was already halfway to the answer. Sugar saw her glance at her watch. "What time does your daughter get off the bus?"

"Quarter to three."

Sugar closed his notebook. "I'd like some of that fancy vitamin C."

Stephanie beamed and headed toward the back of the house. "How about some aloe vera too?" she called over her shoulder. "No reason you should have to wear those hot gloves all the time."

"Sold." Sugar followed her into the hallway and waited until she disappeared, then went back into the kitchen. He stared at the child's drawings taped on the refrigerator: a stick-figure picture of a girl and a woman riding bicycles under a smiling, yellow sun. It made his stomach hurt. He turned away, opened the stove, slid out the wire shelves, and laid them against the wall. On one knee now, he blew out the pilot light and closed the oven door. He thought for a second, then snagged a small cushion off one of the kitchen chairs, laid it in the bottom of the oven, and closed the door again. He turned on the gas full blast, listening to it hiss. "Stephanie? Make it two tubes of that aloe vera gel."

"You got it, detective," Stephanie called from the rear of the house.

Sugar listened to the hissing oven for a few more minutes, then strolled back down the hallway and saw Stephanie coming out of a bedroom holding a paper bag.

"I put in a few skin-care samples. I know a big strong man like you doesn't care about things like that, but the lady in your life will appreciate it."

"There is no lady in my life."

Stephanie cocked her head. "Really?"

Sugar smiled. "I've never been much of a ladies' man."

"I find that hard to believe, detective."

Sugar looked inside the bag. "You really think these pills and potions will help me?"

Stephanie sniffed. "I smell gas."

Sugar followed her into the kitchen and found her holding the door to the oven open, waving at the rank air. He stopped her as she went to turn off the gas.

"What are you doing?"

Sugar closed the door. "We have to talk."

Stephanie lunged again for the stove dial. "The pilot light must have gone out again."

Sugar held her tightly against him, felt her struggle, and the heat and friction aroused him. "Listen. Just listen. Stephanie, listen. That's better," he said, as she stopped for a moment. "I want you to know, this is not my fault."

"What's not your fault?"

"What's going to happen next."

"Detective, you're scaring me."

"Not as bad as I scare myself."

Stephanie moistened her lips. "I want you to turn off the gas." Sugar shook his head. "I'm sorry."

Stephanie bolted for the back door, but Sugar caught her, She kicked and struggled, screaming now, her voice high-pitched and shrill.

Sugar pushed her face against his chest as she screamed, his flesh muffling her cries. He patted her head, endured her kicks, and kept on talking, his voice soft and soothing. "I don't blame you. It's a lousy thing to happen to a good woman like you, coming out of the blue like this, but that's the way it's got to be."

Stephanie pulled half away from him, howling for help, but there were no neighbors to hear her, they both knew that.

Sugar drew her closer and wrapped his big arms around her. "Shhhhh."

Stephanie kneed him, but he had been kneed by experts, and it hadn't stopped him.

"We haven't got time for this," said Sugar, his lips brushing against the pink shell of her ear. "Your little girl is going to be home soon. You don't want me to be here when she comes in through the door." He felt her shudder. "She's going to walk in, call your name, maybe ask why you weren't there at the bus stop-and then she's going to see me, and I'm not going to be able to stop myself."

Stephanie whimpered and pulled away. She was stronger than she looked. "Why are you doing this?"

"Don't concern yourself with that. It's your little girl you should be worried about."

"Please don't hurt her."

"I'm not a monster. It's Jimmy you should be mad at, not me." Stephanie scratched at him, but he turned his face away and held her close.

"You keep that up, you're just going to make it worse." Sugar's voice was calm and steady. He had taken a course in hostage negotiation once; the instructor said he had the perfect voice, reassuring and nonthreatening. "If you keep fighting, you're going to bang yourself up, and you're not going to make a believable suicide. That changes everything. Then it's got to be a break-in; I'll have to spend time rifling the house, going through your purse, and when your daughter walks in and finds me here-"

Stephanie sagged. Please-please, don't." You would have thought someone had pulled a cork in her belly and her insides had poured out onto the floor. It never ceased to amaze him how it worked sometimes. "Please don't hurt her."

"That's up to you." The gas smell was stronger now, even with the oven door closed. His head was throbbing. "If your little girl comes home when I'm still here-well, it's going to give me indigestion for the rest of my life. Don't do that to me."

Stephanie's fists beat against his chest. She might as well be hitting him with flowers.

"You're a good mama. I could see that the moment I walked into the house."

Stephanie was sobbing now.

"I'll make sure I leave the doors locked. I won't let your little girl walk in and see you. There's someplace she can go if she can't get in, isn't there? Some friend down the street?" Sugar felt her nod. "It won't be so bad. You just lay your head down on the pillow, take a few deep breaths. You'll just go to sleep and dream forever."

"What did I ever do to you?"

"Not a darned thing." Sugar rocked her and felt her heart fluttering against him as the oven hissed away. The room was heavy with gas. "Not a blessed thing."

"Please-"

"You want to blame someone, blame Jimmy Gage. He's the one responsible."

"Jimmy? I-I hardly talked to him. A half-hour, that's all."

Sugar lifted her off her feet. Stephanie lay limply in his outstretched arms as he carried her toward the stove. "Lady, once upon a time it took just five minutes to turn my life upside down. Five minutes." He flipped open the oven with a fingertip. "A half-hour is forever in my book." "I'm just tired," said Jimmy. "No, I'm fine, Jane, I'll see you tonight." He snapped the phone shut and tucked it away. The breeze shifted, and he wrinkled his nose, catching a whiff of the koi pond. He finished the beer, hefted the long neck, and considered standing up to make the throw, see if he could bounce it off the little piggy fifty or sixty yards below. Then he remembered Walsh's body floating in the same spot, swollen like a zeppelin, the skin blistered and split, pecked by crows. Katz had needed dental records to make a positive ID, but Jimmy had known it was Walsh as soon as he saw the devil tattoo on the corpse's shoulder.

Jimmy riffed through the phone records on his lap. He ran a finger down a column of Walsh's phone calls, wanting to remind himself of the last call that Walsh had made. Vacaville. Of course. Phoning home. He stopped and checked the notes he had written earlier after talking with the professor. He stared at the phone log again, not believing it.

The last two calls had both been to Vacaville, the state spa where Walsh and Harlen Shafer had done time together. Jimmy hadn't thought much of it when he and Rollo first went over the records; Walsh had called the prison every few weeks since he first got out, short calls to the main switchboard, forwarded to some paid-off guard probably. No way to trace that. Walsh was just contacting his cellies, leaving word that he had kept the promises that most cons made when they got kicked: checking up on wives and girlfriends, maybe taking a kid to the zoo in place of his three-strikes daddy. That's what Jimmy had thought at the time. Not anymore.

If the professor was right about the time of death, those last two calls had been placed after Walsh was already dead. Somebody else had called Vacaville while the fishes were fighting over Walsh's soft parts. Jimmy considered the possibility that Boone's time-of-death estimate was the right one, but he didn't consider it for long.

Flies floated over the koi pond, a dark cloud in the distance. Jimmy sipped his beer, thinking, glad that he couldn't hear the buzzing from where he sat. He had enough noise in his head.

Walsh had been murdered. Jimmy had been right about that, but the good wife's husband wasn't behind it. Those regular calls Walsh had made to Vacaville weren't to his bunkies-he was playing for time, tap-dancing for some O. G. with a grudge, somebody who could reach out through the bars and touch him. Touch him dead. It wasn't love or jealousy that did Walsh in. He had gotten whacked over an unpaid carton of smokes, or for talking during Baywatch, or maybe just for looking at the wrong guy the wrong way. With Walsh's mouth it was a wonder he had lasted seven years inside without getting shanked.

The last two calls made from Walsh's phone had been placed by his killer, the first one passing on the news that Walsh was dead, the second one-it had lasted barely a minute-confirming that the message had been received. This prison honcho had probably used Harlen Shafer to set up the hit, used him as a stalking horse, getting Walsh so stoned he couldn't fight back. Shafer himself had probably been killed for his trouble.

Jimmy wanted to be wrong, because if he was right, all his efforts trying to find the good wife and the husband-none of it mattered. Walsh had been in a panic that night in the trailer, full of tales of love and vengeance, his bravado collapsing with every noise outside. There was a jealous husband all right, there was always a jealous husband with a guy like Walsh. Whether it was Danziger he was afraid of, or his prison karma catching up with him, at the end all Walsh had left was his fear. Leave it to Walsh to think that a screenplay would save him. To be white hot once again. Untouchable. The return of the golden boy.

Jimmy tipped the bottle to his lips. The beer was warm and bitter now. Why did the killer wait around so long afterward? Do it and go, run away, that's what Jimmy would have done. But the man who had killed Walsh had been in no hurry to leave. Probably took a shower afterward, went through Walsh's refrigerator. He owned the place. He had waited two days to make that second call, searching the trailer, seeing if there was anything he wanted, cleaning out the rest of the dope and booze. Showing his yard cool.

Jimmy smacked the beer bottle on the ground, angry at himself. That's what had happened to Walsh's screenplay. Jimmy had been convinced that the missing screenplay proved that the husband had been behind the killing, but the killer had taken it. Grabbed it as a souvenir. Or maybe, knowing Walsh had once been famous, he thought it had to have value. Helen Katz was going to laugh her ass off when he told her. He could hear her now, telling him to leave the police work to the police, that amateurs always made crime more complicated than it really was.

Jimmy stood up and hurled the beer bottle at the koi pond, putting everything he had into the throw, but it landed short.