“Find anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “The geography’s the tricky part. You want a canyon or ocean view out of the smog belt. Michael has to be within easy commuting distance of Occidental in Eagle Rock. Casey needs access to Pasadena. I don’t want to spend my life on the freeway. The neighborhood has to be reasonably safe. We need at least three bedrooms, but we can’t spend much more than we’ll get in rent for this place, assuming we find a renter. Any ideas?”
“One thought,” I said. “If we find something big enough, I won’t have to rent an office. I miss working from home. When I have to work late, it’s so much easier to keep track of Casey if I’m in the next room instead of down the freeway. God, I’m beginning to hate the freeway.”
With a comer of the towel he dabbed at water on my cheek. “Sounds like regrets.”
“What sort of regrets?” I asked.
“Moving down. You miss your own house.”
“I miss order.” I played with the little patch of hair at the base of his throat. “I wish the elves would come in and move us to a cottage in the woods somewhere, do the laundry, drive Casey around while they’re at it, because the details are beginning to overwhelm me. That’s a long way from regret. Remember what I told you when we decided to live in sin?”
“Let me think.” He rested his chin on my wrapped head. “You said that you wouldn’t care if we had to sleep on army cots in an abandoned airplane hangar, as long as we could wake up together every morning.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“An airplane hangar would give us more space than we have here.”
“Look into it, will you?”
“Yeah.” He gathered the ads and maps and dropped them off the side of the bed.
“How was your meeting with the lieutenant?” I asked as he slid between the sheets and snuggled into me.
He found my breast inside the robe and covered it with his warm hand. “You don’t really want to talk about all that now, do you?”
“Actually, I do,” I said. “What did the lieutenant say?”
Mike frowned and rolled onto his back. “We didn’t get very far. He wanted to go over the case with me, check our procedures. Then he told me to take some time off. I can come with you to Casey’s orientation tomorrow. Maybe we can spend the rest of the day house hunting.”
“Time off? Like a suspension?”
“Not at all like a suspension. Just until things cool off, I’m going to be invisible. One thing you have to understand: As far as the department is concerned, I’m not in any trouble. They’re taking good care of me, because they believe me.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “But if you disappear, won’t it look like the department is hiding something, keeping you under wraps?”
“You know, we did some things differently in the old days when our job was keeping the peace instead of holding teat-to-teats with the bad guys to keep their feelings from getting hurt.”
“That’s a new one.” I laughed, getting a strong visual. Teat to teat was a definite improvement on head to head.
“You know what I mean,” he groused, but not serious about it.
“I know what you mean. You used to kick butt and take names later, or something.”
“Kick ass,” he corrected. “Kick ass.”
I had to ask: “Did you kick Charles Conklin’s ass?”
“I just helped him decide it was time to move out of the neighborhood. The witnesses were little kids and he kept them terrorized. Soon as he was gone, they couldn’t talk fast enough. They saw Conklin at the scene with a gun in his hand. They saw him run away. We had a jail-house snitch to corroborate them and, boom, we nailed Conklin, dead bang.”
“The D.A. says you intimidated the kids.”
“Didn’t have to. The girls came clean, that’s all.”
The girls. Hearing that made something click. Two girls, ages ten or eleven, about fourteen years ago. So, okay, I was a philosophy major, but I can still add about ten and about fourteen. Comes to about twenty-four.
Feeling something between befuddlement and anger, I scooted out of bed to get my bag. I pulled out the newspaper copies and, sitting with my back against Mike’s raised knees, I sorted through them.
“It’s weird, Mike,” I said, hearing sarcasm. I passed him the three short news items about the shooting of Officer Johnson. “I thought that when a police officer was shot everyone made a big fuss about it. Big funeral with thousands of officers in uniform, a eulogy by the chief, grieving family on TV, a motorcade, bagpipes-the whole twenty-dollar package. Johnson got none of that. Why not?”
“A few things.” Mike put his glasses back on and began reading through the articles. “Like I told you, Johnson was off duty and out of uniform when he got it. Second, we thought he might have been up to something dirty.”
“Dirty with Charles Conklin?”
“Don’t know. We didn’t pursue it once we had an arrest. You have any idea what our caseloads are like?”
“But a fellow officer was shot. Surely that meant something. Another thing, there was nothing in the paper about Conklin’s arrest. When did you get him?”
“About a year after the fact. Jail-house snitch came looking for a deal, spilled for us.”
“I’m so disappointed,” I said, nudging him to make room in the bed; he seemed to have spread out. “Where were you great big detectives all that time? Out eating doughnuts?”
“If it had been my case from the beginning, we would have gotten Conklin on day one.” Mike sounded defensive. “The original investigators screwed up on it, got lazy I think, didn’t follow up on leads. They talked to Conklin, but they let him go. The department did a six-month follow-up, then filed the case away for another six months. It probably would have stayed in limbo, except Chuckie Conklin got himself sent to jail on an unrelated charge-crimes against a child-and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. To keep from getting poop-chuted all day like the other pedophiles, he started bragging that he had taken out a cop.”
“Poop-chuted?” I said.
“Think about it.” He set the clippings aside.
“Oh,” I said when I got it. Mike should have come with a glossary of cop-speak. “Was he in jail when you arrested him?”
“No. He was out terrorizing the neighborhood again by the time we bagged him. It was a tough case to make; no one would ID him when he was out loose. Everyone was afraid of him, of his whole damn family-especially the kids. I told you, we helped him decide to move on.”
“You want to explain how you helped him decide?”
Mike yawned. “Aren’t you tired yet?”
“No,” I said. “I just love to listen to you talk. I could stay up all night.”
He looked down at me. “What is this? You have a recorder hidden somewhere?”
“Sho’, you right,” I said in my best imitation of Mike.
“Let me see.” He yanked off the covers and grabbed the front of my robe-his robe-and started to peel it off me. “I know you’ve got a bug in here somewhere. Give it up before this gets ugly.”
“Sometimes I like it ugly,” I said, laughing, trying to hang on to the robe.
“You called it.” His stiff little mustache tickled the inside of my thighs as he searched. And probed. I just threw off the robe and gave him access.
Mike is a genius with his hands and his tongue-expertise that comes from vast experience. After all of the wild and crazy things we have done with and to each other, he can still amaze me, make my eyes roll back in my head. But that night, though Mike was in peak form, I couldn’t clear my mind enough to be of much help. After a few minutes he figured something was wrong and raised himself. He looked at me, his face framed between my knees.
“Where did I lose you?” he asked.
“I’m confused.” I reached out for a handful of his hair. “I’m trying to put things together. I have two piles of information that should flow together, but they simply do not seem to exist on the same plane of truth. They will not merge.”