The Fallen

8

McKenzie met me outside Uptown Management over on Fifteenth. Al Bantour was a slender man in an old blue suit. Sixties, gray hair and eyes. He mouthed an unlit cigar and gave us a canny once-over as McKenzie explained what we needed. He smiled around the cigar, then explained that yes, Garrett Asplundh had a place at the Seabreeze Apartments down in National City. Too bad what happened. Garrett was the last guy in the world he thought would get murdered. When the cops are getting killed it’s a bad situation, most bad. Bantour said the on-site manager at the Seabreeze was a guy named Davey, and Davey ought to have an extra key. Any problems, just call. Wasn’t I the guy who got thrown out of the hotel?

We headed down I-5. Light traffic and the fog still thick out over the ocean.

I told McKenzie about my meeting with Carrie Ann Martier, about the sex videos made for Garrett, the Squeaky Clean Madam, her spot callers, and the girls in convertibles. McKenzie shook her head and exhaled in disgust. She told me she’d run across Squeaky Clean Madam’s enforcer and he was a real cool guy.

“Cool, like he’d cut your nipple halfway off to teach you respect,” she said. “Cool, like he’d break some ribs and toss you into Glorietta Bay to watch you suffer. Six-four, three hundred. Half of him’s tattoo. One of those big dudes with too small a head but he shaves it anyway. He’s got a carjack crew that works San Diego and TJ, and he runs cockfights out in east county. And an occasional gig for Jordan Sheehan because he likes pretty girls. Chupa Junior. Short for chupacabra. And ‘Junior’ because his daddy was just like him.”

I’d heard tales of the chupacabra. It meant “goatsucker” in Spanish. It was a vampirelike creature with huge red eyes and a row of spines down its back. They were reputed to stand five feet tall and suck the bodies of goats, sheep, and other animals almost completely dry.

I thought about Carrie Ann Martier versus three hundred pounds of Chupa Junior and hoped she wasn’t foolish enough to run a hustle on her boss. She couldn’t win that one.

I thought of Gina again. I imagined her at work now, standing beside her chair, arms raised, shears and comb in hand, snipping away. Last year for her birthday, I bought her a pair of Hikari Cosmos scissors, among the best money can buy. They had molybdenum-alloy blades that were said to be able to “melt” through hair. The Rylon glides were for accuracy from pivot to point. They cost twelve hundred dollars. They fit her small hands particularly well without the inserts she sometimes had to use. I’d had them inscribed along the inside of the tang, which is where the cutter rests his or her finger. It said Hugs and Kisses, Me, though because of limited space the words were hard to read. She somehow left them at the Mick Jagger trimming up in Beverly Hills not long after. The next day she’d made a dozen phone calls to the hotel but had never gotten them back. She was crushed. She couldn’t believe she’d just forgotten to put them back into their case and box. I couldn’t either so I scanned eBay for them and sure enough, there they were, with “genuine hair from Mr. Jagger.” I tried to quickly trump all bids by offering five hundred dollars over the asking price of thirty-five hundred, so long as I could authenticate the engraving first. I was willing to travel at my own expense and would of course pay in cash. The owner of the shears and hair turned out to be in Culver City. When I got to a squalid apartment I felt bad for the young maid who had found or more likely stolen them. Her muscular husband suddenly demanded seven thousand so I thanked the woman, put the shears in my pocket, and headed for the door. When the husband charged me I finally lost the temper I’d been trying so hard to keep and I punched him sharply in the solar plexus, pulled his shirt over his head, and pushed him to the floor. He was balled up and gasping when I walked out. I’d committed more than one crime in all of this, including assault and battery, and I drove home to San Diego with my stomach in a knot.

McKenzie interrupted my thoughts. “Hollis Harris called me yesterday afternoon. Asked me out for a drink after work and I said yes.”

“McKenzie, that’s good.”

“You don’t think he’s yuppie scum?”

“I liked the cut of his jib. And I could tell he was showing off for you.”

“Me too. But I didn’t think he’d call. I gotta give him some credit, leaving a message on some lady cop’s answering machine, asking her out on a date. We had drinks at Dobson’s. You get a lot of attention when you walk in with Harris. For some reason, when I’m on duty I can stare people down. Anybody. But when I’m just me I want to look away. What the hell. Drinks led to dinner and I had the lobster. Whew, good. Did you take Gina out?”

“We stayed in.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Really was.”

We’d gotten to the Seabreeze Apartments by then, in the heart of National City. Built along the waterfront south of San Diego, National City used to be a railroad town but now it’s all ships. Huge Fifth Fleet Navy vessels tie up to the massive shipyard piers for repair and maintenance, thousands of men and women scurrying over them. Every ship is a small, self-supporting city. Booms and cranes bristle into the sky, welders’ torches join steel to steel, and at night the bars are edgy and rough.

The Seabreeze was three stories, gray, built in the fifties. One outside wall was claimed in black spray paint by the Ten Logan 30s. The foyer had dusty windows and a glass door with a metal handle that scraped when I pulled it open. There was a wall of mail slots with the names mostly missing or marked over. Jazz came from a downstairs unit that said MANAGER on its open door. An amused-looking black man stared at us from the doorway, then slowly raised his hands.

“I didn’t do it.”

We both badged him. “Here to see Garrett’s place.”

“Bet you are. Two-oh-five, upstairs. He was Jimmy around here. Didn’t know nothing about any Garrett until the picture in the paper. Elevator’s busted.”

“We’ll need a key,” I said.

“Oh, no you won’t. Just knock.”

“And who’s going to answer it?” asked McKenzie.

The man smiled. “You tell me.”

His laughter followed us up the stairs. The carpet was worn away on the steps and landing and the air smelled like disinfectant and mildew.

Garrett’s unit was the last on the left of a short hallway.

McKenzie popped the holder on her hip holster and stood left of me. I knocked and stood to the right.

“Who’s there?”

A woman’s voice.

McKenzie frowned. “Detectives Cortez and Brownlaw, San Diego Police. We’d need to talk to you.”

I heard a chain latch click, then a dead bolt thunk back.

The door swung open. She was just a girl, young and pretty. She wore jeans and sheepskin boots and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled. Brown eyes and fair skin and her cheeks had a blush to them. Dark hair, up and disorganized. She looked like Stella Asplundh.

“We’d like to talk about Garrett,” I said. I told her our names again.

“Okay. I’m April Holly.”

She stepped back to let us in, then closed the door. McKenzie badged her and April Holly looked at me uncomfortably.

The apartment was neat and sparsely furnished. Hardwood floor and an old red sofa that looked comfortable. There was a small gas-burning fireplace with a tidy little flame running the length of the logs. Two bedrooms off a short hallway. Framed photographs on the wall, black-and-whites that looked like Garrett Asplundh’s. There were no high buildings to the west, so a swatch of Pacific showed in the distance.

“What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “I can make coffee. You can look around. Or—”

“Just sit down,” said McKenzie. “You don’t have to entertain us.”

April Holly pointed at the red sofa, then clunked softly into the small dining area and brought a chair over for herself.

“You know that Garrett’s dead,” I said.

She nodded. “I saw the papers. And TV. He told me his name was Jimmy Neal. I saw him the night it happened.”

McKenzie glanced at me as she got out her notepad and pen.

“I want you to tell us about that,” I said. “But first, April, can you tell us who you are and why you’re here?”

She blushed and looked away. “Gee, that’s kind of a lot, isn’t it?”

“It might help us find out who killed him,” I said.

She continued to look away from us. Down at her boots or maybe the floor.

“You know... um, basically what it is... I ran away from home and was heading for some trouble and Jimmy, he was all, ‘You’re ruining your life, April.’ So he made me come here and basically get my act together.”

“Were you working for Jordan?” I asked.

April shook her head and blushed. She wouldn’t look at either of us. I was heartened to see her shame because so few people have it anymore.

“I was about to,” she said quietly. “But Jimmy said no way. He wouldn’t let me.”

McKenzie looked at me again, then scribbled.

“How old are you?” asked McKenzie.

“Eighteen.”

“Tell us about Garrett and how you met him,” I said.

When she finally looked back at us her eyes were shiny with tears. She wiped them with her palm. “Why would anybody want to kill that man? He was the most gentle and kind man I’d ever met. Ever.”

“Talk to me, April,” I said.

April spoke for almost half an hour before we asked her another question. Her colors and shapes were true. She was fairly intelligent but naive. She didn’t seem to harbor illusions about herself. She didn’t make a lot of excuses, which, you learn very early as a cop, is what criminals do, with endless energy and creativity. She felt bad about some of the things she had done, which is something that criminals almost never do, because they’re too busy blaming someone else.

Home was a crammed-in tract in Temecula, a bustling little city north of San Diego. Dad was long gone, Mom involved with boyfriends, little brother a petty thief and drug user. April knew her effect on men, but the boys her age were immature and totally random. At a party one night a friend’s father had gotten her aside and offered her a hundred dollars to take her clothes off out in the pool house but she said no. This was a year ago. Later some of the tough chicks at school said you could get men at the mall to give you two hundred bucks if you’d get in their car and do oral. Use a rubber, never take off so much as your bra, it was over in five minutes and if you did it five or six times a week you had enough for just about anything you wanted. April had said no to that, too, though she’d hung out and watched her friends hustle and had come close to trying it. This was last June, after graduation. By fall she’d had it. Always thought of that Thanksgiving as the most miserable day of her life. So she ran away to San Diego and hostessed in the Gaslamp for a while but that paid minimum and Hooters was hiring but she wasn’t twenty-one yet and it seemed like every time she turned around some guy was hitting on her, guys a lot older than her, half of them with wedding rings on, made her wonder why anybody got married in the first place. Then, you know, she needed some work on her teeth and she got pneumonia and didn’t have health insurance for the antibiotic and her car tanked and she heard about the Squeaky Clean Madam from one of her new friends, Carrie Ann, and... well, yes, she had actually met one of Jordan’s spot callers and got “approved,” and Carrie took her over to meet this guy Jimmy, who she didn’t know until two days ago was really named Garrett Asplundh, and he paid her five hundred bucks to come back to this apartment and they talked for pretty much the whole night and when they were done April wasn’t going to be a Squeaky Clean anymore, she was going to live here, get a straight job, which she did, and save up for a better car and her own place.

“Did you have sex with him?” asked McKenzie.

April shook her head. “Never.”

“Did you accept gifts or money from him?”

“Well, yeah. I did. All this.”

April admitted how unreal it might sound but Jimmy had something that went straight into her heart and saw everything she was and made her be totally honest with herself and the world around her.

“He never asked you for sex?” asked McKenzie.

April shook her head again. “No. I would have, too. I wanted to please him. Because I think he’d have done anything for me. He was like a good father. He had standards and you wanted to live up to them.”

He had ethics, I thought.

“And now?” she said very quietly. “I can’t believe they killed him. I just can’t believe it.”

“Tell us about the last night you saw him,” said McKenzie.

“He came here about seven-thirty. I was done at the camera stand at six so I’d been here maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Camera stand?”

“Oh, duh. I work at SeaWorld. The stand for disposables and film and videotape and stuff.”

“What did Garrett want? Why did he come here?”

“He was checking up on me. Usually every other day. At least three or four times a week. We’d try to make it at a mealtime but couldn’t always. I mean, we both worked.”

“Just checking up on you?” asked McKenzie.

“Yes, just checking up, believe it or not.” There was an edge to her voice as she glanced at McKenzie. Like she was talking back to her mother.

McKenzie looked at me. By now she is impressed by my “instincts” about whether or not people are being truthful. I was waiting for the red squares of deception to roll out of April’s mouth but they didn’t come. No symbols or colors at all, which is how most conversations go. So I nodded.

“What?” asked April.

“Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”

“He was random that night,” said April. “He was all, ‘I can’t have dinner with you and I can’t stay long.’ I’m all, ‘I’m fine, I’ll be okay. I’ve got some laundry to do and this cute guy from the freeze stand — that’s at SeaWorld, too — he’s going to meet me out at the movies.’ And Jimmy was fine with that.”

“Whatever,” said McKenzie, frowning. She wasn’t buying April’s story.

“Whatever nothing,” said April.

“What time did he leave here?” I asked.

“Around eight.”

“Where was he going? Why the hurry?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t say. But I got the feeling he was looking forward to something. Like he was going to do something he really wanted to. Like he was eager.”

McKenzie’s pen shot across the pad.

“What was he wearing?”

“That’s hard. Jimmy was a really cool dresser.”

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Picture where you were in this apartment. And think of what you talked about.”

She closed her eyes. Took her time. Then, “Hmmm. Oh, duh, black suit and white shirt, and he changed his necktie before he left here. At first he had on a gold one, which I remember because it’s the color of my new Mazda. I’m pretty sure it’s still here, in Jimmy’s room. But before he left, he put on a light blue one. Very cool.”

We sat for a moment without talking. I remembered Garrett Asplundh’s pale blue tie, drenched and splattered. I listened to a car passing down on the avenue, bass loud enough to quiver the Seabreeze windows and the singer’s voice sharp with anger over his bitches. I was trying to fit the singer and Garrett Asplundh into the same world but it didn’t work. Maybe that’s why Garrett was dead. Though maybe the singer was dead, too.

“He said lots of things,” said April. “He told me about his daughter that drowned and his wife. He told me about being a cop before he was an Ethics guy. I called him ‘E-man.’ Anyway, he talked about making yourself. About how good things make you stronger and bad things make you weaker. About what’s true and what’s not and how you can tell them apart. And the scams people will run on you. About creating character and the cost of behavior and losing people you love. Jimmy knew all about that. I didn’t understand everything or agree with everything. He was trying to figure out his own stuff, not just mine. He was hard on himself and on me, too. But it was all good. And once he told me something that I thought was so poetic and true. It was about him. He told me he was afraid of losing himself in the spirit of the chase.”

“Afraid of losing himself in the spirit of the chase,” I said.

“Yes,” said April. “Those were Jimmy’s exact words. I remembered them like you remember lines from a song you really like.”

“Why were they true about him?” asked McKenzie, without looking up. I could see that she was writing carefully, to get those words just as Garrett had said them.

“Well,” said April, “because he was looking for something extremely important.”

“Like what?” asked McKenzie.

“I have no idea. I don’t know if he even knew. He always told me not to let the questions become the answers. Don’t let the path become the woods. And I think what he meant about the spirit of the chase was that the spirit was leading him away from what he wanted. It’s like, the faster you chase, the further away you get from your goal. But he couldn’t help himself from chasing, you know?”

“I like that,” I said.

McKenzie sighed and sat back.

April looked at each of us. “My turn to ask you a question. Why do you think Jimmy would help someone as lost as me?”

“Why do you think?” said McKenzie.

“Because he was lost, too. It was the first thing I noticed about him. That’s why it was so good to see him looking forward to something that evening. Whatever it was. Whoever it was. And that’s why when I saw the news the next day it felt like somebody had ripped out my heart and thrown it off a cliff.”

I thought of something my mother told me once when I was a teenager.

Robbie, a person needs three things to be happy: Someone to love. Something to do. And something to look forward to.

Maybe he was looking forward to his twice-monthly date with Stella, I thought. Did he always look forward to it that much, or was there something else?

“Had you ever seen him eager like that before?” I asked. “Looking forward?”

April thought for a moment. Knocked the toes of her boots together softly. “No. I think he was onto something special.”

April showed us the kitchen and her bedroom. Her room was girly and not very neat. She’d brought home a big cardboard stand-up of a killer whale jumping out of the water and it took up most of one wall. She’d bent out some of the bottom teeth to hang necklaces on. Her bed was pink and there were clothes everywhere.

The second bedroom was Jimmy’s. She said he’d asked her not to go in there, and though she’d stuck her head in a few times she had never gone in and looked around. Not that there was much to see.

I pushed open the door. Just a card table and two folding metal chairs over by the window. A gold tie over one of the chairs. On the card table was a printer, a CD burner, and a laptop. On the wall under the window was a picture of what looked like a stream or river.

Pay dirt, I thought. The other half of Garrett Asplundh.

McKenzie sat, looked down under the table, and pushed the “on” button of a surge protector with her toe. The machines whirred to attention, green lights blipping. She had worked fraud a few years before I did, where she had specialized in computer crimes. And she’d taken special department classes in computer forensics. She can figure out or bypass a password in a matter of minutes.

She opened the laptop and smiled.

“Oh,” said April. “He brought the laptop with him that evening. He did that pretty often, left something here and picked it up later.”

I asked her if anyone else ever came over and asked for Garrett, or maybe to pick up something for him.

“No. He was always alone.”

McKenzie glanced up at me, then back down to poke at the keyboard with curious authority.

“You have no idea what’s on that laptop? No idea what Garrett did in here?” I asked.

“None. That was Jimmy’s stuff. I didn’t mess with Jimmy’s stuff. That was the first rule of the house.”

“What was the second?”

“He said if I ever turned a trick, I was out.”

“Now what are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m taking over the rent as of the first. Got a roommate maybe coming in from the park. You’re welcome to take these things if they’ll help you.”

I thanked her, even though the computer and peripherals weren’t hers to give away.

“I’d like to ask you one favor,” she said. “Please get me invited to the funeral if there is one.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

April excused herself, said she had to get ready for work but to make ourselves at home.

McKenzie watched her go then looked up at me. “I’m in.”