What the hell, why not?
After all, I couldn’t claim to be a police officer. But was it my fault if someone else chose to infer otherwise?
* * *
I drove out Eighth Avenue until it became Franklin Road, past the old Melrose Theatre, the shopping centers, pawn shops, liquor stores, convenience markets, and on under the freeway cloverleaf. Dark had settled in over what was a fairly redneck part of town, with a nearby housing project adding just enough of an air of danger to keep respectable people off the streets. To cap things off, the most popular gay bar in the city is right in the neighborhood as well. Most nights, parking lots for blocks around are packed with people headed for the Mine Shaft Cabaret.
I pulled into the Ponta Loma Apartments and slowed the car. The Ponta Loma was just another apartment complex: built sometime around the early Seventies, hip at the time but aging not very gracefully. In the real estate crash of the late Reagan/early Bush years, places like the Ponta Loma really suffered. The new apartment complexes had fireplaces, ceiling fans, saunas, Jacuzzis. The Ponta Loma was considered far out twenty years ago because it had two pools.
I’m lousy at snap judgments, but I couldn’t figure out why LeAnn Gwynn lived here. I always thought nurses made decent money. She ought to be able to do better than this.
I drove around through the parking lots slowly, looking for F Building. Not surprisingly, it was past the E Building and just before the G Building. And you thought I couldn’t handle this detective shit.…
The two-story building was long, narrow, with apartments off either side facing inward on a long hallway. If LeAnn’s apartment was 3-F, it was a safe bet she was on the first floor. If she was in the back, her apartment had a great view of the parking lot and the Dempster Dumpsters. If it faced the other way, she looked out on another building. Nice life, LeAnn. No wonder you were-how did Jackie Bell put it?-boinking a married man on the job.
I parked the car and doused the lights, then sat there for a few minutes, trying to get a feel for the place. It was quiet; no kids running through the parking lot, no splashing coming from the pool, no parties in progress spilling out into the common area. Not at all what I expected.
Each building had a bank of painted gold mailboxes, the kind you usually see in apartment houses. I looked at 3-F. There was a small white label showing, but neither LeAnn nor the apartment manager had bothered to write her name on it.
There was nothing else to learn by hanging around outside LeAnn’s apartment. This reminded me of my days on the paper, when I’d be checking out a story and preparing to question somebody who probably didn’t want to be interviewed. I’d get nervous and my gut would knot up, and I’d hang around outside thinking up excuses not to go in. Felt worse than a job interview sometimes, although that may be stretching it. Finally, it’s like diving into cold water; the best recourse is to hold your nose and jump in.
I knocked on the door to 3-F.
Inside the apartment, I could hear soft music playing, the kind of music that’s euphemistically called Lite Rock: elevator music for baby boomers.
I knocked again. I couldn’t hear footsteps or any change in the music I was about to give it up, when the peephole went dark. I stared into it, to let her know I’d seen her.
“Ms. Gwynn,” I said, “may I talk to you for a moment?”
The peephole went bright again; then there was a fumbling with the doorknob. The door cracked a fraction, held by one of those flimsy security chains that could be popped by a loud belch. I pulled out my license and badge.
“Ms. Gwynn, I’m Detective Harry Denton. I’d like to ask you a few questions, please, if I may.”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I thought. Spellman’s going to chew my butt ragged if he hears about this.
The half-hidden face behind the door studied the license, the badge, my picture. “You got a search warrant?” she asked.
Search warrant? What the hell has she got in there?
“No, ma’am,” I said, giving her the most insipid smile I could muster. “There’s no need for a search warrant. I just want to ask a few questions, and it won’t take very long.”
Her hair was coal-black, straight, cut short and sprayed. She was a little shorter than I remembered, but then I’d only seen her from a distance. In fact, I wasn’t even certain she was the woman in the hallway. She stared at me through the crack, then pushed the door closed. I heard the clicking of the chain being unlatched, then the doorknob turning. She opened the door, stood there for a moment, and I knew it was her.
LeAnn looked at me strangely, as if she were trying to place me as well, which was something I didn’t want her to do. Whatever misconceptions she was operating under, I wanted her to continue under them for a while longer. Time to distract her.
“Ms. Gwynn, I know it’s a little late to be making a visit, but when you’re investigating a murder, especially a murder of someone so prominent, you can’t delay on anything. May I come in?”
“Sure,” she said, tense and brittle. She turned and held the door open for me. I walked in and looked around, then stepped aside as she closed the door and led me toward the couch.
The place was a mismatched hodgepodge of rental furniture, bargains that she’d moved from one place to another over the years, odds and ends she’d picked up from friends, family, whoever had bought new and needed to hand me down the old.
LeAnn Gwynn was a surprise as well. Like I said, I’d never seen her up close. But if Conrad Fletcher was having a sleazy, disgusting, lurid affair with a hot, passionate, lusty nymphomaniac nurse-which was the scenario I’d always assumed-then LeAnn Gwynn would have been the last person I’d have cast in the role. In fact, she wouldn’t have even made the callbacks.
To begin with, she was attractive, but in a plainspoken, solid way. No randiness, no overwhelming sexual energy radiated from this woman. No surgically enhanced body parts. And she certainly didn’t have the kind of monied, sophisticated tastes that one assumed would appeal to Conrad Fletcher. In fact, unless this apartment was some kind of front she was using to mislead everybody, LeAnn Gwynn didn’t have much in the way of taste at all.
She wore jeans and an untucked man’s white shirt that hung down to midthigh, sort of early Patty Duke show. I wondered if the shirt belonged to Conrad, but decided to hold off on that one. She walked over to the radio-one of those late Fifties or early Sixties hi-fi floor models-and turned down the puke rock, thank God. Then she sat in the easy chair across from me, the one with lace doilies barely covering worn fabric.
“So, what can I do for you, Lieutenant, Sergeant-?”
“No, please, I’m just a detective. Detective Denton.”
She smiled uncomfortably through eyeglasses that were probably ten years old, the kind with the heavy plastic frames that today were unfashionable, if not downright geeky.
“Okay, Detective Denton, what can I do for you?”
I pulled out the pad and clicked my ballpoint, then held the two in position in front of me. “I’m investigating the death of Dr. Conrad Fletcher. I understand you knew the doctor.” A two-beat pause. “How well did you know Dr. Fletcher?”
She crossed her legs in front of me, a worn sandal tipping forward and dangling off the end of her foot. I could feel her fear, could tell that her calm was all surface and barely that. Finally, she sighed, as if she was relieved to get on with it.
“C’mon, Mr. Denton, if you didn’t know the answer to that already, you wouldn’t be here.”
Some color returned to her face. I saw now that her complexion was almost olive, her eyes nearly as black as her hair. When her face relaxed, she was lovely in a sort of different way, but there were the beginnings of crow’s feet around her eyes and even the faintest trace of wrinkle around her mouth. She was older than she looked.