Vigilante

CHAPTER 39

Ten minutes after I got to Venice, Alexa called to tell me she wouldn’t be home until later that evening. Deputy Chief Hawkins had put the Stephanie Madrid case under Alexa’s direct supervision, and she was stuck in the office working on a media plan with Bert Myer. The press had already scooped up the arrest report, which was now public information. An hour after that, Nix Nash had a mobile unit parked in front of the Police Administration Building and was doing shotgun interviews with anyone who he thought might conceivably touch the case.

I hung up with Alexa and, to take my mind off this disaster, was trying to decide what to do for dinner or if I was still even hungry. Just then the phone rang again. This time it was Hitch.

“Dawg, get your skinny ass up to my place, inmediatamente!”

“I was just gonna go down the street to get something to eat,” I told him.

“Got that covered,” he said, sounding excited. “Stop arguing and get up here.”

“All the way to Mount Olympus? Man, can’t we at least meet halfway?”

“No. Gotta be here. You’ll thank me. Just get moving!” He hung up.

I don’t much like being commanded, so in a self-involved show of indifference I wandered slowly into the kitchen, poured some orange juice, swallowed it down, taking my time about it. Then I ambled out to the Acura, took the keys off the visor, got in, and inched back slowly onto the street. I know, I know, pretty juvenile.

All the way up to Hitch’s place in Hollywood, I kept checking behind me for gray Navigators. Every time I looked in the rearview mirror, I remembered Nash’s bug sequestered in there. I’ve had these devices planted on my vehicle once or twice in the past. They can often be turned into a very effective source of disinformation. I was circling a few ideas as I drove.

Thirty minutes later, I parked in the drive of Hitch’s magnificent house and rang the bell. The familiar Dum-da-dum-dum chimes sounded, followed by Hitch’s voice over the intercom.

“Come on in!” he yelled. “It’s open!”

I entered, leaving the Dragnet theme behind, and was greeted by the classical sounds of some turn-of-the-century European composer like Strauss or Rachmaninoff. The music was coming from Hitch’s thirty-thousand-dollar wraparound sound system. Then the aroma of something delicious engulfed me. Hitch was cooking.

“In the kitchen,” he called out.

I went into his beautiful living room-sized, professionally outfitted kitchen and found him perched on a wood stool beside the stove. He had a drink in one hand and a cooking spoon in the other.

“You gotta fix that doorbell,” I said. “I go from Dragnet to Rachmaninoff. It’s giving me whiplash.”

“Not Rachmaninoff, it’s Bach. Sonata Number Five in C Major.” Hitch set down the drink, then looked at me expectantly and said, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“The smell. You recognize it?”

I took another sniff. “Kind of, but I’m not sure from where.”

“Lita’s house, man. This was what was in the curtains. It’s been driving me nuts. I’ve been combing through cookbooks ever since we found her. I finally came up with it.”

I realized he was right. This was the same smell that we’d experienced when we first walked into Lita Mendez’s living room.

“You’re right. It’s more pungent of course, because it’s still being cooked. But you’re right. It’s the same.”

“You know what it is?”

“Uh-uh.”

“It’s fucking gumbo, dude.”

“It is?”

“Yep. Look.”

He showed me the cookbook. The page was open to a recipe for gumbo.

“Besides the chicken, your main ingredients are garlic, onions, tomatoes, cayenne, okra, and ta-da-a … andouille.”

“What’s andouille?”

“A spicy country pork sausage. It’s what gives it that pungent odor. They use it in a lot of Cajun dishes.”

As I read the recipe, he removed the lid from the pot and waved some of the steam in my direction.

“I thought it was the bay leaf and garlic,” he said, grinning. “But I tried that and it didn’t do it. Then I found that recipe. It was the andouille.”

“Damn,” I said, smiling at him. “Lita couldn’t have had all these ingredients. You think the killer brought his own groceries?”

“Don’t know. Let’s eat this stuff before it gets cold. I’ve got the rice all steamed.”

“Isn’t that like eating evidence?”

“Right. Grab a plate, dummkopf.”

We each dished up a large helping on rice, then grabbed some lagers from the fridge and went out onto the deck.

The view tonight was partially eclipsed by a low blanket of fog hanging over Hollywood, but the air wasn’t too cold and we sat at the table and tasted the gumbo. Masterful.

“So who do we know in this big, ugly, bullshit case who could be cooking Cajun?” Hitch asked.

“Lee Bob Batiste,” I said.

“Correcto mundo.” He beamed. “Our Creole-French chucklehead from Louisiana.”

“Okay, okay. Hold on. Let’s not get carried away. This is a big jump. Let’s take it slow.”

“Fine,” he agreed. “But remember what you said about Nash calling Lee Bob Bobby? I think you were actually on to something there.”

“Now you think Lee Bob and Nix Nash knew each other when he was a cop?” I asked. “I thought you said I was grasping at straws.”

“Maybe the bust in the Everglades was for real and Nash fucked up on the square, or maybe he knew the guy and arranged to get him kicked loose. Either way, it’s the same result. What’s important is, I think he knows him now.”

I thought it over for a minute before I said, “So you’re saying Nash cut a deal with Lee Bob Batiste to commit these murders at times when Nash is out of town and alibied up. Then Nash solves the case on his TV show, looking like a genius, making huge ratings and multi-million-dollar grosses.”

“Exactly,” Hitch said. “Going back to Atlanta, what if Lee Bob Batiste, not Fuzzy, was wearing that overcoat when he killed those girls in Piedmont Park? During the murders, Batiste gets their DNA on the coat. Then Nash finds Fuzzy sleeping in the public toilet there. He’s brain-dead from all the meth and doesn’t know if he’s upside down or inside out. They give Fuzzy the coat. It’s December and he’s glad to have it. Then, a day or so later, Nash just happens to find poor old Fuzzy in the evidence-stained overcoat, and the Atlanta PD busts him while Nash is rolling cameras, taking all the credit. How hard would it be to get a schizophrenic to cop to the six kills? Fuzzy had a pet spider named Louis, for chrissake.”

“It also helps connect the two murders here in L.A.,” I said, warming to Hitch’s idea. “Obviously, Nix had nothing to do with Hannah Trumbull’s death in ’06, because he was still in prison, but this could explain how he was able to link Lita and Hannah to Stephanie and Lester Madrid. He worked backward, like you said before. But the second death, Lita’s, wasn’t random like we thought. He selected her because of the fights she’d had with Stephanie and then he had Lee Bob kill her.”

“Bingo,” Hitch said. “He starts with the cold-case Trumbull murder from ’06. Nash, or some L.A. contact, finds out Hannah was dating a cop and that turns out to be Lester Madrid. He probably turned that up just like we did, by asking around. Then he starts looking at Lester’s life and up pops Stephanie, who runs IA and has a history of public dustups with his old compadre from the Anti-Police League, Lita Mendez. She’s an acquaintance of Nash’s, but she’s also a perfect murder victim who will be a high ratings getter for V-TV, so she goes into the chipper.”

This take wiped out the impossible coincidence of both those seemingly unrelated cases touching the Madrids. “Nash sets up his alibi in advance,” I said, ironing out a few more wrinkles. “He accepts an invite to be at that fund-raiser in Boca Raton while Lee Bob, or Bobby as he calls him, sneaks over to Lita’s house. Batiste beats her to death and then double-taps her with the nine-millimeter Federals.”

“A perfect murder,” Hitch said, nodding.

Then I remembered another detail from the meeting in Captain Bligh’s cabin. “Nash told me that in the Everglades, Batiste was stealing food out of his victims’ backpacks and cooking it over their own campfires. Could that be some kind of MO? The Gumbo Killer? He whacks Lita, cooks a Cajun meal in her kitchen just like he cooked food from the backpacks of the campers he killed in the Everglades.”

We both thought about it. The gumbo feast over Lita’s body seemed a little far-fetched. He would have had to bring all the ingredients. But in ten years of solving homicides I’ve seen some very strange behavior.

“Sociopaths and psychopaths have strange realities,” Hitch said, picking up my unspoken thought. “Remember that gay unsub in Santa Monica who killed boys on their twenty-first birthdays? He brought them home, sat them up at his dinner table, and served the corpses birthday cake.”

“Okay, let’s put a pin in that for a minute. We don’t know why he actually cooked a Cajun dinner, but let’s assume he did. Then he washed the pots and pans, vacuumed the body. This guy used very strict crime scene protocol. The kind an ex-cop or an ex-lawyer like Nix Nash would be able to give him.”

I pulled out the photo of his boot print. “Let’s go on the Internet and see if we can get a picture of this Baffin rubber boot,” I suggested.

We went into Hitch’s office, logged onto his Mac, and found it on the Baffin Web site. That particular boot came in black rubber and neoprene and was calf high.

“Lookit this,” Hitch said. “They’re called Marsh boots. Good choice for a guy working the Florida swamps.”

We went back to the porch feeling like supercops and kicked back on the deck chairs.

Finally, Hitch broke the silence. “What do we do now, Batman?”

“Let’s start by finishing this great gumbo you cooked. Then we need to go down to the PAB and get this theory blessed by a rabbi.”

“Thank god you’re married to yours,” Hitch said somberly.