I managed to nod; my chest burned.
Mike was breathing easily, running like a machine. He said, laughing, “There are three million stories in the big city. Rape, murder, mayhem. But I’m off, so let them go to it.”
When we hit the down slope, another set of muscles took over so I wasn’t in as much pain. After a while, I began to get my wind back. Just when I thought I would be able to make it back to the lot where we had left the car, he said, “Want to do some sprints?”
I knew he knew how tired I was. I managed to say, “Go ahead.”
Grinning, teasing, he said, “You can do it.”
“Beast,” I gasped, and dropped back to a walk. He ran in big circles around me until I thought I would have to shoot him. Finally, wounded ego overcame pain, and I began to run again.
As soon as we left the path along the hill crest, we dropped down into heavy shade, and the air felt sweeter, moister. It was blessedly peaceful. There were small animals and birds. I saw occasional lover-pairs walking off together deeper into the undergrowth, for privacy. Now and then a mountain cyclist came by.
Mike said, “Ever see a better place to run?”
I said, “No ocean view.” And that ended the conversation. All in all, it had been a punishing run.
Mike needed to put in a painting shift at the house, and I thought maybe we both needed some time off from each other. I made other plans.
Ralph Faust wanted my answer, now, about whether or not I would appear with Baron Marovich that afternoon. For a number of good reasons, I didn’t want to do it. Certainly, I wanted to talk with the D.A., but I preferred a little private one-on-one with him, hash things out with no audience to pander to. With the fire at Kelsey’s and being tailed by George Schwartz as recent history, I had to think carefully about where that private meeting would take place.
I made one call, to Hector, before I called Marovich and told him where I would be if he wanted to talk.
I folded a load of clothes, put a new load in the washer, did a few other chores to give Hector some time. When I pulled into the lot at the LAPD Hollywood Division an hour later, he was waiting for me on the covered ramp that leads into the back of the old brick station house. He walked down to meet me.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
He chuckled. “It was either meet you or work on the sprinkler system with Mike’s dad. Believe me, you’re a whole lot better company than Oscar.”
“I won’t tell Oscar you said that,” I said. “The message you left yesterday, you said you had some reports for me?”
He opened the back door. “I’m not sure what you’re looking for. Be a whole lot easier for me if I did.”
“Be easier if I knew, too.”
We walked down a long, narrow hallway lined with framed, autographed movie posters-this was Hollywood Division.
Generally, the detective room looked like every other detective room I had seen: overcrowded with mismatched, scarred desks and chairs, ranks of no-color file cabinets, boxes and stacks of papers on every available surface.
Two things gave the big, open room some character. The first was the movie/TV presence in the form of signed cheesecake black and white glossies taped on nearly every desk and cabinet. The second was the big wooden, hand-carved, “somebody’s father-in-law got a router for Christmas” signs suspended by chains over each section. Very rustic. I wondered what old Dad must have thought as he carved “Rape,” “Robbery,” “Homicide” for the boys and girls down at the office.
Hector’s desk was in a back corner under the homicide sign. He pulled up a chair for me, cleared a space on his blotter, and opened a thin file. He handed me five computer print-out sheets, each with a line or two of type.
He said, “AFIS reports from the prints Mike lifted in your office. Tell you anything?”
“Plenty.” The computer had identified Ralph Faust, Jennifer Miller, Eusebio Kino, who was the building’s night janitor, Guido Patrini, and an unknown as sometime visitors of mine. I pulled out Jennifer’s print-out. “Mike lifted the prints Wednesday. As far as I know, the only time Jennifer Miller was in my office was Friday night.”
“Interesting.” Hector set her print-out aside. “I can’t do anything about it. I can’t bring Miller in if this is all I have. I can’t even show for a certainty there was a break in.”
“I wish you could bring her in,” I said. “But not for jimmying my lock. Has anyone spoken to Jennifer since last night?”
“No. Friday morning, she asked her ex to take their little boy for the weekend-said she had to work through. Security at her office building signed her in at eleven Friday night, signed her out twenty minutes later. The guard at your building ID’ed her as the woman who dropped off an envelope for you at midnight. From there, cold trail. She’s scheduled to pick up the kid around six tonight. If she doesn’t show… Well, I guess that will tell us something. Kelsey hasn’t been located, either.”
“Any word on the corpse in the fire?”
He shook his head. “Nada. It takes time.”
I caught myself before I let loose with something sarcastic. What I really wanted was a TV detective with sixty minutes, minus commercials, to bring everything together. The real-world delays were aggravating in the extreme. I said, “Show me what else you found.”
“Property dispo card,” he said, pulling out a photocopied evidence log. “You wanted me to dig out the prints from the Johnson murder scene and run them through the system.”
“Right.” I pulled my chair closer.
“There are no prints anymore. All of the hard evidence was tossed out years ago.”
“Say it ain’t so,” I said.
He smiled. “Think about it. We don’t have room to store all the crap from every case forever. Every six months to a year, the property room does a routine audit and asks the detective in charge of a case what he wants to do with his evidence. Look at the card: Fingerprints, shoe prints, some clothes-all consigned to the incinerator.” He ran his finger down a column. “See, property disposed per whoever’s signature that is, that badge number, that date.”
I said, “Jerry Kelsey’s badge number, the date is the same as Conklin’s sentencing date. Jerry sure was in a hurry to clean house, wasn’t he? Could he do that?”
“Absolutely. The assigned detective is the one responsible for the evidence. It was stupid to act so fast, though. Kelsey’s lucky there was no appeal on the conviction.”
I looked up at Hector. “I believe people make their own luck.”
“Yeah?” He laughed softly. “Guess I do, too.”
“There are no spent shells listed in the log.”
“Don’t see any.”
“Inside a tiny room, Johnson took six slugs at point-blank range. No slugs recovered from the body. No shells found. Where are they?”
“Who knows?” He said this with a worldly sort of disdain. “Souvenir hunters, maybe. Maybe the killer picked them up, or whoever cleaned up after swept them out. Bigger things than shells get overlooked all the time.”
“Oh,” I said. “Have anything else for me?”
“Not really. Mike had questions about a couple of the vehicles at the Hanna Rhodes scene. But I think I’ve cleared them all. I talked to Mike yesterday. Want to go over them?”
As I leaned over the list, Hector suddenly slid it back into the file and quickly slid the file into his top desk drawer, locked the drawer. Eyes down, he muttered, “Your man’s here.”
Baron Marovich was wending his way toward us through the ranks of desks. Wearing soiled tennis garb, and looking wary, he said, “Good morning.”
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “You know Detective Melendez, I’m sure.”
Hector offered his hand, “Mr. District Attorney.”
Marovich was only marginally courteous in this exchange. He said, “I should have recognized the address you gave me, MacGowen. What are you doing in a police station?”