The Crime Writer

Chapter 12

I woke bright and early, with a renewed sense of purpose. My home telephone line was still dead, so I retrieved my cell from the office. I called the coroner's office, talked to a clerk I'd paid in the past to smuggle me sample reports, and asked him if he could get me the Broach autopsy.

He said, "You're a murderer. Fuck off and don't ever call me again." Then he hung up.

I went downstairs, made a $138 cup of espresso, and toasted Gus on the back deck. "You and me, we're just players in this crazy game called life."

Gus, a discerning critic, scurried up the Mexican fan palm at the edge of the lawn.

I called a DNA analyst I knew in the medical examiner's office. She didn't take my call, though I heard her stage-whispered rebuff through the admin assistant's imperfect clasp over the mouthpiece.

My first manuscript had received seventeen rejections before a sale. I figured the odds here to be slightly better. I returned to the murder book and rechecked all the names of cops, criminalists, coroners, and clerks, even deciphering the scrawled signatures at the bottoms of the chain-of-custody forms. The only familiar name was the one I'd started with. Aside from the detectives, Lloyd Wagner would know Genevieve's case better than anyone, having handled everything from recovering my voice-mail messages to matching the knife with the wound. And he'd processed Kasey Broach's body as well. Given our rapport, I hoped that if I could talk to him for a few minutes, I might convince him to give me a little of his time.

I got his voice mail at the lab and on his cell and his answering machine at home. Given that he'd reported my last message to the detectives, I didn't want to leave another. I closed the phone, rubbed my temples, drank another cup of espresso to wash down my Dilantin.

If I couldn't get someone inside the case, I could at least try for someone with an inside track to the case. Cal Unger, my main consultant when it came to matters Chainer, was a divisional detective out of the West L.A. Station. His job had none of the glamour if such a word can be used in this context of the cases hooked by the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. RHD detectives pulled serial killers, bank robbers, and media-intensive cases like mine. They had citywide jurisdiction, better resources, and sharper suits. Cal a Coors man all the way had closed some key divisional cases and had been bucking for a promotion to RHD for a while now. It was not lost on me that of the myriad hours he'd given me over the past few years, most of them had been spent talking about Robbery-Homicide.

Cal and I had an unspoken agreement: He wouldn't stiff-arm my questions, and I wouldn't write an unflattering portrait of someone closely resembling him. So he indulged me, and I respected his talent and toughness, and nothing had yet turned up in print to make LAPD's public-information officer put a boot up his ass. There was an undercurrent of tension, to be sure. Cal always squeezed a little too hard when demonstrating a choke hold on me, and he was certain to evince a certain veiled disdain for my job, stemming from, I guessed, the fact that we both knew that if he was really hard-core, like Bill Kaden, he wouldn't be talking to a writer or partaking vicariously of a fictional RHD detective's exploits. Cal fell into that camp of cop consultants who were generous with their time yet continually decried entertainment bullshit, how this dumb-ass novelist had called a revolver a pistol and this sellout TV actor had referred to his Glock. 357 Magnum. They'd bust my balls in the squad room, and I'd smile and nod along, knowing that once the others weren't around, once we were alone in the car heading to lunch or driving a patrol, they would clear their throats sheepishly and pitch me a script idea, something about burned-out cops and missing little white girls or even, sometimes, about the bad-ass power of Jesus.

Despite all this or perhaps because of it I liked and respected Cal. He was handsome and well proportioned and could wear a pair of sunglasses like Eastwood wears a scowl. Some people exude coolness, and Cal was one of them. Like Lenny Kravitz or Bono, whom you could listen to with impunity anywhere, in any company. A hard-to-find quality. No matter how much you might secretly enjoy Kelly Clarkson, you still roll your windows up at the stoplight when she's on your radio. Not Cal, though. Cal was Bono. You'd never have to roll your windows up on Cal.

I called his desk. Voice mail. Tried his cell phone. He picked up mid-order: "And a double-double, no onions." And then, at full volume, "Unger."

I hung up. He was where we often met for lunch In-N-Out Burger in Westwood.

I glanced at the clock: 10:32 a.m. Getting an early start on his caloric intake. His shift had probably begun at seven, taking a report from a hysterical Bel Air divorcee about a stolen tanning bed. Big black market in those, I'd heard.

I shot down Roscomare into Westwood and found Cal sitting at one of the brightly colored tables. A line of palm-tree tiles decorated the wall at his back. His partner, a young cop I didn't recognize, picked at some fries. Not In-N-Out's strong suit, fries.

Cal's gaze swept over me and registered nothing. I introduced myself to the new kid Sam Pellicano and looked over at Cal, who still had not spoken. "I'm sure you've heard about my case," I said. "Things aren't what they seem. There's another story here, and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. I'd really appreciate your help."

Cal wiped the space on the table in front of him, though he'd left behind no crumbs. "Here's how it went down," he said. "You knew the captain's cousin because you hooked him up with an agent once. Captain put you in touch with the PIO. The call went around who's gonna get stuck with this one? We curse L.A. I get hosed because Captain's pissed that his niece has a crush on me. The PIO tells me to be nice, let you swing from my ears now and then. I let you pretend you know a thing or two because you use the right forensic terminology and you've got a few cop buddies who hang out with you for your money and your bullshit. I take you on ride-alongs. I laugh at your jokes. You pick up the tab at lunch, take me to the occasional movie screening. You got a house in the hills with a nice deck to smoke a cigar on. That's why I put up with you."

Cal slid on his sunglasses in preparation for leaving. My reflections in the mirror lenses looked chagrined and foolish.

"You're a murderer now," Cal said. "Which means that I don't have to pretend to like you anymore. Or help you." He slid out of the booth, and I had to step back so he could stand. Sam looked impressed, like this was the coolest thing he'd witnessed in his whole fifteen years.

"I think guys like you are exploitive bastards," Cal continued. "You dream up terrorist cells and serial killers, and you feed off real people's fears and live large doing it. Doesn't enough shit go wrong in the world without you glorifying it? You played around in the dark, and you don't like what you came out with. No concern of mine. Not anymore."

"Okay," I said. "Done being morally superior in front of the new kid?"

"For the moment."

"Then we'll just pretend we both forgot your one-hour-drama concept you told me about. The one with the detective who works too many overtimes tracking the wasn't it the Red Glove Killer? and his wife just don't understand?"

Cal pushed past me, knocking my shoulder. Sam looked concerned, unsure whether to step up on me with some tough-guy face time or scurry after the scoutmaster.

"The boys at RHD are too busy asserting their own superiority to take a fresh look at these murders," I said after him.

Cal pivoted, mouth jerked left in a scowl. "Kaden and Delveckio? Boy, I'd sure love to show up those fancy detectives from Homicide Special. If only I had a crazy novelist to give me an in."

Sarcasm aside, he'd been following the case, as I'd bet he had.

I withdrew the pages I'd rolled and stuffed into my back pocket and held them out. "This is the case to date. From my perspective. If you were smart and ambitious, you'd realize you have an exclusive line into a major investigation."

"I'm neither." But he was staring at the sheaf of paper a bit too hungrily for someone who'd just eaten a double-double.

"Take it anyway. It's only twelve chapters. You can read it in the bubble bath. I'm gonna come bother you in a while for something or something else and you'd best have done your homework so when we're smoking cigars on my nice deck you can look sufficiently foolish about all the conclusions you jumped to."

I swung the rolled pages so they tapped Sam in the chest, and, looking confused, he took them. I walked out before he could throw them at me.