“Your name is Nancy, right?”
“Sure. I know ten girls named Nancy in a big town like this.” She was about twenty, maybe less, Petroff figured. The word on the street was that she had been a good friend of Joisette Brown, the little black hooker who’d gone down with an OD of heroin.
“Your best friend in the whole world was Joisette, right?”
“Yeah, I knew her.”
“You know where she stayed.”
“Right. We met there sometimes to goof off and sober up.”
“She stayed with a man named Shortchops Jackson. Isn’t that right?”
“Never knew no last name. She called him Shortchops. He was a bass man. Played a wicked lick.”
“How many times you been booked for hooking?”
“Two or three maybe.”
“Wrong, Nancy. You’ve been picked up nine times now. Ten and you get six months in the slammer.”
“Maybe I been in here four times.”
“Nine, Nancy. All you have to do to walk is tell me where Joisette lived. That’s all. You give us an address and we drive out there and you show me which door to knock on. Hell of a lot better than doing six months hard time.”
“Oh, shit. I wasn’t even there when she died.”
“We know. Now where did she live?”
“I can walk? No strings?”
“No strings.”
The unmarked detective’s car pulled up in front of a rundown four-unit apartment house on 27th Street off Imperial Avenue. It was the edge of Logan Heights, an intensely black and poor neighborhood. The building didn’t look like it had been painted for ten years.
“Which apartment?” Petroff asked
“Upstairs on the left, number four. Can I go now?”
Petroff looked at the hooker where she sat in the secure rear seat of the police car.
Detective Lasiter had come along as backup for Petroff. He shook his head. “Missy, you stay put back there. We’ll be back directly.”
“You damn well better be here, Shortchops,” Petroff said as he and Lasiter climbed to the second floor and looked at the apartment door. Petroff knocked three times, then three more. “Open up, police,” he called. No response. Lasiter stepped back and slammed his foot and his 180 pounds against the door right beside the door lock. The old-fashioned lock popped loose and the door swung open.
With guns out, the detectives surged into the room. They found it scattered with garbage: take-out food containers, opened cans, dirty dishes, and unwashed clothes.
The detectives spent an hour in the apartment, searching everywhere including the spots where people often hid things. They came up with nothing. Not even the phone book helped. Lasiter dropped it, and it opened to a different page three times in a row. It didn’t look like Shortchops Jackson had been home for a week, maybe not since the day Joisette had died.
“Another nail in the old bass player’s coffin,” Lasiter said. “If he didn’t do it, why disappear?” They left, closing the door behind them even though it didn’t quite latch.
At the unmarked car, Petroff opened the back door and motioned the girl out. “He wasn’t there. Anyplace else he might be? He ever say any friends he had he might be staying with?”
“He never talked much. Not while I was around. I don’t know where he went off to.”
“He’s got to be somewhere. You know who Joisette was, who her father was?”
“No, she never said.”
“You ever hear of Billy Ben Brown?”
“You kidding? Every cat knows about Billy Ben. He was the greatest jazz musician of all time. They had a big TV special about him when he died three or four months ago.”
“Joisette was a late-life daughter of Billy Ben Brown.”
“No shit? She never once said a word. Man, he was loaded. I mean he had more money than sense, somebody said. But jeez, could he wail with a jazz band.”
Back at headquarters, Petroff had three phone messages. He put two of them down and called the last one, a good contact at the courthouse.
“Petroff, you owe me one,” the clerk said. “The will of Joisette Brown has just been filed in probate. The girl finally came into her dad’s money. Her estate is something like three-point-five million smackeroos.”
“Good haul for a hooker.”
“A damned rich hooker. I can’t get you a copy of it, but I remember the beneficiary. One Shortchops William Jackson is the main heir. Then there are four others mentioned. Each to get fifty thousand. They are described as being the other members of the Gaslamp Quarter Jazz Band. Be in probate for about four months. Shortchops is also named executor of the will.”
“When does he show up in court?”
“He doesn’t. He hired a lawyer.”
“Who is his lawyer?”
“Am I getting in trouble here?”
“Not a bit. Court filings are public records, open to the public and the cops. Give.”
“Harlan J. Emmersome. Yeah. Around town he’s also known as Loophole. If there’s a loophole in the law he can find it.”
“Thanks. He’s my next courtesy call.”
It took Petroff twenty minutes to look up the lawyer’s address and find his building. It was a one-man law office in an uptown location not known for high rent. Emmersome was on the third floor, and the elevator worked. Petroff walked through the door and found a small outer office with a pert blonde, about twenty-five, working on her nails.
“Yes, sir, may I help you?”
After the preliminaries, she opened the door to the big man’s office. He was a big man, just over seven feet, and yes, he had played basketball, and no, not in the pros.
“So, what can I do for the city’s finest today?”
“One of your clients is in a sticky situation over the death of a girl and we need to clean it up. Problem is, we can’t find him.”
“Is there a name? That would help.”
“You know the name, Shortchops Jackson.”
“Yes, I know Mr. Jackson. But with the client-lawyer privilege, that’s all I can tell you.”
“One small item to consider. If I can prove that Shortchops had anything to do with Joisette Brown’s death, he won’t get a dime out of her estate, which means you won’t collect your big fat fee for handling the probate. Let’s see. My lawyer friends say that would come to something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand for your fee. More cash than you’ve seen in a whole good number of years.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Sergeant, but my fee is guaranteed, even if the client is found guilty and he gets nothing. Nice try, but it won’t work this time. I know probate law.”
“So, what if I tie you into the murder, make you an accessory to the crime, show that you helped in the OD? Then we’ve got you and you don’t get a cent.”
“You can’t do that.”
“You want to bet your future on it? I can manufacture witnesses who will say almost anything to stay out of the slammer. It would only take two.”
The lawyer slumped in his chair. “Shit, you’d probably do it just to spite me. Okay, but I don’t have an address on Mr. Jackson. He calls in once a week to find out if he’s needed. He won’t be. It’s all fairly routine.”
“Unless I charge him and you with murder. Then I make one phone call to the probate judge and everything comes to a ridiculously fast and screeching stop.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“Not if I can talk to him and he can clear himself. He was seen with the girl a half hour before she died. He was a heroin user. He was high on something when he was with her. It’s entirely possible that he gave her the last shot of her life, and she went OD.”
“What about the other four men in the will? Aren’t they suspects too?”