Vertical Coffin

Chapter 34

Jo and I split up and I used the walk back to Parker Center to gather my thoughts. I climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor, taking them two at a time, using the brisk climb to clear my head. Frankly, my spirits were a little low.

I was beginning to think maybe I had been wasting my time, like everybody kept telling me. When you got down to it, Jigsaw John retired twenty years ago. Things were different when he was on the job. Back then, each division only had two or three homicides per week. Now we have that many a night. With the growing caseload, there just wasn't time to investigate this way anymore.

In theory, you study pre-event behavior to determine mindset. You look at the victim to see what might have been going on in that person's life to draw the perp in.

If something didn't fit it could signal a mistake in reasoning, but it didn't have to. It was entirely possible that Smiley had just gone nuts and started shooting like Jo said, and then, because he was completely delusional, had chosen not to use his carefully dug tunnel.

What had been eluding me was a plausible alternate theory. Without that I had no line of logic to follow, nothing to work on.

I suppose it was always possible that these two SWAT teams were shooting at each other, but that was a hard concept for me to buy into. SWAT teams were supposed to be the cream of any law enforcement agency. All the evidence to the contrary, I just couldn't believe that SRT and SEB would try and settle a grudge with long guns. Was that valid reasoning, or just me trying to prop up the last vestige of a once-treasured idea? I wasn't sure any longer.

This afternoon I'd probably be getting a call from one of Hatton's federal IOs, with a new list of things to investigate. They'd treat me like a stupid lackey, ordering me to do scut work they were too busy for. They'd want me to background every member of SRT and SEB, looking for somebody with anger-management problems, or a history of unprovoked violence. There was no chance that the police union was going to let any of them be polygraphed.

I reached my cubicle in Special Crimes on the fourth floor, out of breath from running the stairs, and sank into the chair at my desk. Jo and I had divided our workload. She was going to see if she could get her computer genius to run down the insurance policy. Then she was going out to talk with Marion Bell and any of the members of the Rock Stars mountain climbing club she could locate.

We both had Vincent Smiley down as a loner. It would be worth finding out if he really belonged to some survivalist group or Nazi wilderness outfit. If that proved to be a reasonable alternate theory, it would move this investigation off SWAT and onto an antigovernment hate group. Skinheads always make convincing bad guys.

While Jo was running that down I was going to stay on the few hot trails we'd turned and work my way through Vincent's school years.

Busy work?

I looked up Mrs. Kimble's Country Day Middle School in Eagle Rock and placed a call. When I asked for the director, somebody named Rose Merick came on the line.

"Mrs. Kimble is retired," the sweet-sounding woman said.

One of my little games is to see if, over the phone, I can guess a person's age by their voice tonality. She sounded about sixty. I wrote 60 and put a question mark after it, then circled the number.

This was one of the many ways I attempt to alleviate boredom on the job. Innocent enough, I guess, but boredom, like violence, can change you. Some cops become so tweaked, they carry their emotional remedies to dangerous extremes.

Back in the late seventies, the entire night shift at Devonshire Division was so far into the ozone they devised a weird photo contest. They each put up ten bucks, then ran a monthly competition to see who could come up with the grossest photo. These guys were crawling onto beds with overdosed hookers while their partners snapped Polaroids. That's how screwed up you could get.

Humor is the shield that protects cops from the grim realities we're forced to deal with every day. As your view of life darkens you can quickly come to believe that most of humanity is primal, corrupt, and deadly. Little by little, if you're not careful, your humor becomes so sick that you're crawling into bed with a dead sixteen-year-old junkie just to get a laugh. The more death and human depravity you see, the more disillusioned you become, until one day you find yourself sitting on a toilet in some restaurant bathroom with the door locked and your service revolver in your mouth. After you pull the trigger nobody you work with even has to ask what went wrong or why you did it. They all know you just couldn't find a way to laugh anymore.

Angrily, I scratched out my 60, thinking I had better find a more constructive way to dodge my boredom.

"I'm sorry I can't be of more help," Mrs. Merick was saying.

She was about to ring off when I had a thought.

"Do you still have records of your student body from the late eighties?"

"My goodness, no," she said. "That's over fifteen years ago. And if we do, they're in storage someplace. This is a very small facility."

"Were you teaching there during that time?" I asked.

"No. Except for Midge Kimble, I don't think anybody from the eighties is still around."

"Is Mrs. Kimble still in the area?"

"Yes she is."

"Could you give me her number?"

"I could, but I'd need to see your badge first. We can't just give out phone numbers anymore. Times have changed."

"How about you call me back at Parker Center. I'm in Special Crimes. Sergeant Scully. You can get the number out of the book so you'll know it's legit."

"I guess I could do that…"

Three minutes later my phone rang. Rose Merick again. She gave me Midge Kimble's number and address.

I called and reached a recording. If Mrs. Merick sounded sixty, Midge Kimble sounded a hundred. I'm out right now, a raspy voice shouted. Leave your number and I'll call back.

I did as she instructed.

I was gathering my notes, getting ready to head out, when the phone rang again. I snatched it up.

"Scully, it's Cletus."

Clete James was a friend who worked in the Juvenile Justice Division. He was going to try to cut through the red tape and pull Vincent Smiley's early record.

"Your guy Smiley had some juvie busts in 'eighty-eight and-nine, but I'm in a tug of war with the Pasadena City Attorney," he said. "She's being bitchy and set her heels on me. I'm gonna need a court order to open them."

"Pasadena?" I said, writing that in my crime book with the years '88–89.

"Yeah, that's where all his juvie cases were filed."

"Nothing in my records about Pasadena. I have him living in Glendale, Burbank, and Agoura, going to middle school in Eagle Rock, but nothing in Pasadena."

"Well, Eagle Rock is only a few miles west of Pasadena. I think it's even in the same school district," Clete pointed out.

"Listen, in the late eighties Smiley had to have been about ten or twelve. Can you check to see if there's a bicycle license in Pasadena or Eagle Rock for a Vincent Smiley? Could be under his dad's name, Stanley, or maybe Edna."

"No problem. Hang on for a minute while I log on." Clete came back a few minutes later.

"Got it. Stanley Smiley. A Schwinn Scrambler, registered in March of 'eighty-eight-2346 Mountain Circle, Pasadena."

"Thanks, Clete. I owe ya."

I hung up and pulled a Thomas Street Guide out of my bottom desk drawer. Midge Kimble now lived on the far east side of the L. A. basin, way out in Duarte. I decided I'd start in Smiley's old neighborhood in Pasadena. Once I'd canvassed that, I'd move on east, check out Mrs. K., then head back and stop in at the hospital in Pasadena. I figured, if Vincent lived there in '88, there was an outside chance he was born in Pasadena at Huntington Hospital. I packed my stuff and headed out.

Mountain Circle is a side street off a main drag called Fair Oaks Boulevard, which runs north and south, stretching up into the Pasadena foothills. The further up Fair Oaks you go, the more sketchy and run-down it gets. I quickly found myself in a mostly black and Hispanic neighborhood. Single-story, rundown houses sat next to three-story, brown stucco project buildings that, when they were built, were heralded as the answer to urban blight, but within years had turned into urine-soaked, graffiti-marked monstrosities.

As I passed the Foothill Projects I witnessed a drug deal going down through a chain-link fence, right in plain view. The seller was a thirty-year-old banger dirtbag in a hooded blue sweatshirt and satin basketball shorts. The buyers looked like two fifteen-year-old girls. I didn't stop. Not my turf\ Why sweat what you can't change? I told myself.

I knew, even as these thoughts hit me, that I was wrong. Every time I see something like that and instead of stopping choose to just drive on and give it a wave, I know I'm losing a small part of myself. I become a little more jaded and skeptical with each lost opportunity. But experience taught me that if I did stop and chase that dealer and those teenagers through the projects and caught them, I'd likely face angry parents who would claim that I'd used unnecessary force during the arrest. They would file charges against me and then the crowded court system would plead the busts down to misdemeanors rather than prosecute. In the end, nothing much would have changed, except that a few more 181 complaints would be added to my IAD file.

Why bother? It won't change anything. But, of course, it does. It changes you.

I found Mountain Circle almost in the foothills, turned right, and eventually pulled up across the street from 2346. It was a small wooden house that had definitely seen better days. The long-dead lawn had been beaten into a hard dirt playground littered with broken plastic toys. An old black Cadillac Brougham with a single hubcap and primered trunk was parked in the driveway.

I walked up to the door and rang the bell. The broken ringer snapped and buzzed like an angry wasp. Moments later the door opened to chain width and an angry black woman of indeterminate age glared out at me.

"Police?" she said, before I could even get my badge out. Something, some vibe had warned her that I was The Man and up to no good, even though I was smiling.

I showed her my shield and she glared at it with contempt. She'd seen dozens of badges, and experience told her it always turned out badly.

"Are you the owner of the house?" I asked.

"Got a warrant?"

"No ma'am," I said. "I'm just trying to find out if there's anybody living here who remembers Stan and Edna Smiley. They owned this house back in the eighties."

"Ain't no Smileys here," she growled.

"No-I know that. They used to live here. I wonder if there's anybody still in the neighborhood who might remember them from back then."

She looked at me with shrewd distrust. "What dis be about?" she said. " 'Nother nigger goin' down?"

"No ma'am, the Smileys were Caucasian."

Maybe she was glad to see some white assholes finally getting popped, or maybe she just wanted to be done with me. Either way, she blurted out the answer:

"Try the Phillips. They 'cross the street on the corner. Been here forever."

Then, without waiting for my thank you, she slammed the door in my face.

Across the street I saw a set of curtains close. You could almost feel a warning pulsing through the neighborhood. Cop on the block. How many eyes were watching me? Hard to say. I felt exposed, like a soldier caught behind enemy lines. I walked up on the Phillips' front porch and rang the doorbell.

"Who is it?" a high-pitched man's voice yelled.

My estimate? Seventy-five at least. Call that my last guess. One for the road.

"Police," I called through the door. "Mr. Phillips, I have a few questions about a case we're working. Maybe you can help us," trying to sound like Ed McMahon delivering a million dollars.

After a moment I heard half a dozen latches being thrown. The door creaked and a very old man was standing in front of me. His skin was so white I could see blue veins on the backs of his hands and around his temples. I'd undershot my guess by at least twenty years. A complete Magoo-round, hunched, half blind, and almost bald, he was dressed in a frayed checkered shirt, tan slacks, and old tennis shoes. A hearing aid the size of a bottle cap stuck out of his right ear, and thick, horn-rimmed magnifiers rode his bony nose.

"What was that you said?" he shouted at me, reaching for the volume on his hearing aid.

"Can I come in, sir?" I held up my badge.

He squinted at it. "Pasadena police?"

"Los Angeles."

"Fucking drugstore glasses," he mumbled.

Without saying anything further, he turned and hobbled into his living room.

I followed, breathing in Vicks VapoRub and mildew.

"Who is it, Albert?" a woman shrilled from the back.

"I got it. Go back to yer soaps," he yelled.

We sat on his uncomfortable coil-sprung sofa and he leaned forward.

"We don't give to no charities," he shouted, without warning. "Police included. Food Stamps. Social Security. You want money from us, gonna have to knock out our teeth and steal our fillings." Then he laughed. It was a strange, high-pitched, braying hee-hee.

"No sir. This isn't for money. It's about a case we're working on."

"A what?" He leaned in and again cranked up the volume on his hearing aid. It started screeching, but he didn't seem to notice.

"Sir, I think you should maybe turn that down a little."

He looked at me, blinking like a lizard on a flat, rock, but made no attempt to adjust the volume.

I plunged on. "Do you remember the Smileys?" I asked loudly. "Stanley and Edna? They lived across the street at 2346 back in 'eighty-eight or 'eighty-nine."

"Right," he said. But I wasn't sure he'd heard me.

"Edna and Stanley Smiley," I repeated.

"Yeah-that fucking plumber," he said. "I had him work on this place once. Fucked up everything. Had shit running out the overflow pipe in the backyard. We was on septics back then."

"Do you remember their child? He would've been about eleven or twelve."

"Which one?"

"What?"

"Which kid? Had two-boy and a girl."

"A boy and a girl?" I said, taking out my notebook.

"Ain't that just what I said? What's wrong? Y'deaf?" He actually said that to me while his hearing aid was wailing like an air-raid siren.

"How old was the girl?"

"Shit-how do I know? They was little kids 'bout eight or ten, both around the same age."

"Albert, who is it?" the woman demanded impatiently from the back.

He ignored her, or maybe he didn't hear her.

"Can you tell me anything else about them? What were their names?"

"The girl was Susan, the boy-can't remember what they called the little bastard. Both were assholes. Loud. Playing outside all hours. The parents were drinkers. Them kids was out sometimes riding their bikes around after ten o'clock at night, makin' noise. Edna and Stan inside, drunk as skunks."

"Was the boy's name Vincent?" I asked.

"Don't remember, mighta been. It wasn't like all I had t'do back then was watch the fuckin' plumber's house," he snapped. "If you say he was named Vincent, fine. Ain't gonna get no argument from me."

"How long did they live here?"

"One year. One year and one year only. Just one year." Why he said it four times, I have no clue.

"And then what? They sold the house and left?"

He thought about that, then nodded and sliced a withered hand through the air between us. "Good riddance. Fuck 'em."

He finally reached up and turned down the ear piece.

"You don't happen to have any pictures, do you?" I asked.

"Why would I take pictures o'assholes?" he said reasonably.

"And you have no idea where they moved to?"

"Nope."

"Albert, who is it?" the woman yelled again.

He didn't answer, but I knew he heard her this time, because an annoyed look followed.

"Well, thank you, sir. You've been a big help."

I walked to the front door then turned back to say good-bye. A strange, troubled expression appeared on his pale face. I thought he was about to say something, but he just lifted one haunch and farted. I let myself out.

Once outside I called Jo on my cell phone. She picked up on the second ring.

"I might know what happened to the other five hundred thou," I told her.

"Let's hear."

"Smiley had a sister named Susan. Maybe she got the other half. The old man I talked to said he couldn't remember if Vincent was the boy's name or not, but the guy was ancient. Waiting for the chariot."

In light of that, we decided to scotch what we were doing and meet to reorganize at a restaurant I knew in Pasadena.