He drove to a gas station at the edge of town, told Frank to stay in the car, gathered up a roll of dimes, got out, and walked over to a pay phone.
When he got back to the car, he seemed amused.
“What’s so funny?” Frank asked.
“I’ll tell you in a second.” He turned to Mouse. “Just talked to Detective Mattson. He and Tucker are going to meet with you and a prosecutor who’s the head of a task force that has been working on an investigation into Chief Cross. Cross is about to lose his job. And being unemployed will be the least of his problems.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Just tell them what you told us, and they’ll put it together with some other little facts they have about Darryl and his dad.” He hesitated, then said, “When all that’s over, I have a friend who will give you a ride to Las Piernas. She has family there and is headed back there for a visit tomorrow. She’ll take you to a place that’s run by another friend of mine down there, someone nobody else here is connected to. It’s a place where runaways can stay, so you’ll be older than most of them, but she said she’d welcome having someone there who’s between her age and theirs to listen to them, help them out. If you can’t stay clean while you’re there, then I’ll find another situation for you, but you have to promise me you’ll at least try to stay out of trouble while you are under her roof.”
“Does she know I’m a junkie and a hooker?”
“Ex-junkie, and I’m hoping, ex-hooker. Up to you, Mouse. But she’s not afraid of your history, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“What is she, some kind of nun?”
He laughed. “No. Her name is Althea Fremont. Her son ran away from home and joined a biker gang. She can’t do much for him, so she decided she’d give other runaways a safe place to stay while they sort things out.”
“I could have used a place like that a couple of years ago.”
“I knew you’d see why it’s important. What do you say?”
“She really wants me to be there?”
“Really.”
Frank saw a look of longing come over her face.
“What if I fuck up, Bear?”
“Not the end of the world. Humans fuck up all the time. You’re a survivor, Mouse. And if you don’t like it there, give me a call. I’ll drive down there personally and help you work something else out.” He reached into his roll of dimes and held up a pair of them. “Before you leave, I’ll give you my number and a couple of emergency dimes. You lose the dimes, you can call collect.”
She stared out the windows, tears rolling down her face. “Okay,” she whispered. Then louder, she said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
As they drove toward the place where they were meeting the detectives and the prosecutor, she said, “You never told Frank what was so funny after you got off the pay phone.”
Bear laughed. “The person who is giving you the ride to Las Piernas is Irene Kelly. She’s a young reporter, new here in town.”
“He’s been trying to get me to meet her,” Frank said.
“So far, he’s been cleverly sabotaging my efforts. Anyway, she’s on the police beat, and she won’t be able to keep hold of this story-too big for a new reporter, so it’s already been taken from her.”
“You told a reporter about this?” Frank asked, appalled.
“Hell, no. No need to. She heard the call for the meat wagon on the scanner and went out to the trailer park, where she got very little of the story until she talked to one Mrs. Erkstrom.”
Frank groaned.
“Before anything was on the television news,” Bear went on, “she was over at the Starlight Arms, the snazzy apartment building O’Keefe used to manage. She goes door-to-door, good little news hound that she is, breaking the news to the tenants and asking about O’Keefe, when all of a sudden she hits pay dirt.”
“I’m afraid to ask,” Frank said.
“One woman turns pale as polar ice and says, ‘Oh my God! I never thought this day would come. Wait here.’ And she goes back into the apartment and comes back with a shoebox full of cassette tapes. She says, ‘Donnie told me that if he ever died under mysterious circumstances, I was supposed to turn these over to the newspaper. I thought he was being overly dramatic, but I humored him.’”
“And?”
“Chief used to keep a mistress at the Starlight Arms. He used her place to meet some other-‘associates,’ let’s say. Mistress used to drive Donnie nuts, and he knew she wanted him out of the job. So Donnie bugged her place, and thought at first of using the recordings as a threat-until he figured out what kind of people he’d be threatening. So he decided instead to have this lady who was fond of him keep the tapes as a kind of insurance, in case something happened to him. Tapes may not be admissible in court, since the taping couldn’t have been legal, but they will still cause him problems. Plus, they included one Donnie made himself, saying he was afraid Chief Cross would have him killed for what he knew about him.”
“The Bakersfield Californian has them now?” Frank asked.
“Contacted the DA’s office about them almost immediately.”
“Almost?”
“Made copies first, of course.”
“Wow. I could almost feel sorry for your reporter friend. Would have been a big story for her.”
“You feel bad about what happened to the big case you worked on today?”
“No. I’m not ready for a homicide case. I’d rather see the bad guy get what’s coming to him.”
“I have a feeling Irene would understand that exactly.”
Darryl Cross said that the death of O’Keefe was accidental. He liked O’Keefe, who had set him up at the trailer park and kept his identity a secret, so that he could have a place to have a little fun without his dad watching his every move. He’d been cleaning a gun when it discharged, and the stray bullet had gone through the wall of his trailer and into O’Keefe’s. When he saw that it had killed O’Keefe, he panicked and staged a suicide scene.
No one believed him.
Which might not have been fair, Frank thought, but the privilege of being the SOC was backfiring on Darryl in a big way. Frank wasn’t going to waste sympathy on him.
“You wanted to kick his ass that night, didn’t you?” Bear asked when they heard of his arrest.
“So hard he’d have to find a new way to shit.”
“What made you change your mind?”
“Something my dad once said to me.”
“About staying calm in the face of provocation?”
“Something like that.”
Justice and its wheels ground on, slow and fine.
They were grinding the chief’s privileged life down to dust.
Alvin, without his protector to save him, was also looking at a long stretch in prison.
Mouse had mailed the dimes back to Bear, with a note thanking him. She was happy at the Casa de Esperanza, the place Mrs. Fremont owned.
One night, at the conclusion of a long shift of what seemed like an endless walk down a hallway of human misery, Bear again invited Frank to meet his friend the reporter for dinner. Frank thanked him, but told him he had something planned.
“What?”
Frank just smiled and said he’d see him the next day.
He was starting to be curious about the reporter, but he hadn’t lied about having plans. He drove to an apartment building, where Len Meadows, the person he was meeting for a late dinner at a Denny’s, was waiting at the curb.
Maybe someone else would have shunned the company of a kid who had puked all over his patrol car, but the remorse Len had later shown for his actions caught Frank’s attention.
So with the gratitude and approval of Len’s overwhelmed mom, he met with Len, and suggested that instead of staging drunken rampages at sporting events, it might be better if once in a while the two of them went out for a burger and Len talked to him about whatever was on his mind. Len could have turned the offer down, but he didn’t. He later told Frank that he felt as if he couldn’t go any lower than he had the night of the game.