He just couldn’t get himself to let go, close his eyes, and pull the trigger.
7
Ray Hall found a parking space near the courthouse complex on Van Nuys Boulevard, walked past the bail-bond shops and the stores playing Mexican music through their open doors, and down Delano Street to the police station. He went in to visit Al Campbell, the homicide cop. They talked about Campbell’s wife, who grew up in Ray Hall’s neighborhood, and about the strategy of the Dodgers, who were consistently beaten by players they had brought up, taught, and then traded to other teams. Then Hall asked him if he knew Gruenthal, the detective who had drawn the Kramer case, and Campbell took Hall to the next office to introduce him.
Gruenthal and Ray got coffee and sat down on opposite sides of Gruenthal’s desk to talk. Gruenthal showed him the drawings and photographs of the crime scene and asked him the obvious questions: what case Phil had been working on, which old cases had left someone angry, what vices he’d had, what his relationships with women were like.
When they had each told each other what they knew, it was clear that they didn’t know much. Hall said, “I’ll let you know if I find out anything,” but Gruenthal didn’t make the same promise.
The conversation exhausted Ray Hall’s will to talk. He was in the middle of a hangover, with a head that was pounding and lightsensitive eyes that had stopped producing moisture and stuck to his eyelids when he blinked. He had been expecting to show up at the office this morning only long enough to pick up his belongings and then go back home to bed, but now he was forced to think.
He decided to find a place to think where the sun wasn’t in his eyes. It had to be one where people spoke English, because he had no idea how to say “shut up” in Spanish, and his head hurt. He stopped at a restaurant he knew called The Sea Grill on Van Nuys not far from the agency office and sat at the bar. The bartender was a middleaged man who seemed to believe that the most important part of his job was cleaning the brass, wood, and glass for the evening, but he managed to pour Ray Hall a glass of scotch.
Hall drank half of it quickly, letting it burn down his throat, and almost immediately began to feel its anesthetic qualities. Then he took small sips and thought about Phil Kramer. Hall had known Phil for ten years, but nothing about his death made any sense to him.
Phil Kramer was big and aggressive, the kind of detective who would smile as he approached a man he wanted to talk to, and then stand too close to him when he asked questions. But he wasn’t a bully, and he wasn’t the sort of man who would forget that a bullet could kill him. Ray Hall had been with him on a number of investigations, and Phil had been careful. If he left his car in a dangerous neighborhood, he would return to it by a different route and see if he found anybody watching for him.
Despite his size, he was good at keeping a low profile. He dressed in drab colors, usually wore a nylon windbreaker, seldom a sport coat because cops and private detectives wore them. He could fade into a crowd of strangers, assess their posture and facial expressions, and imitate them. He would often start a conversation so he would appear to be one of the group instead of an outsider.
He was a credible liar. He never used a simple lie, always a story. When he pretended to be a deliveryman, he acted tired and irritated, a middleaged guy forced to moonlight to pay off a debt. When he pretended to be a lawyer, he was an unethical overpaid one with the perfect amount of swagger and unfounded self-regard. That was his secret: an understanding of credulity. He let people assume the things he wanted them to believe. He didn’t make some bogus claim and then stare into a person’s eyes without blinking, like a bad poker player. Most people didn’t want to stare into anyone’s eyes like that. They wanted to be lazy and comfortable, and Phil Kramer let them.
Phil had always seemed too careful to be murdered in an ambush. And why would anyone want to kill him? Phil Kramer wasn’t anybody’s enemy. He was a mercenary. Nobody hired a private detective until he was pretty sure he knew what the detective would find. His clients were wives who already knew their husbands were getting laid somewhere else, lawyers who wanted to bolster the evidence in lawsuits that had already been filed, businessmen who already knew somebody was skimming the cash receipts. It wasn’t as though killing Phil would end somebody’s troubles. Phil Kramer had been in the business of proving what people already knew.
Hall had been withholding something from the investigators. He had been acting as though he believed the theory that Phil had been on a case when he was killed. That was what everybody on the outside assumed: Detective Gruenthal, Emily. But at the back of Ray Hall’s mind there was a feeling that the idea wasn’t quite right.
The thought brought Hall to a tangle of complications. After Phil got out of the marines over twenty years ago, he went to work as a trainee at Sam Bowen’s agency until he got his license, then founded his own agency. At first he had worked cases alone. Emily would answer the phones, do the billing and filing, and probably write the reports for the clients.
When Sam Bowen closed his own detective agency, Phil had hired Sam to work for him. A couple of years later, he had hired Ray Hall. Ray had been inexperienced then, and he had tagged along with Phil or Sam at first and, in time, had learned to work on his own. As the business grew, Phil added people. He always hired young men who were physically rugged and had a reasonable level of untrained intelligence. He let them work their three years as trainees and tested them by giving them the worst jobs. They were the ones who sat watching an apartment building for seventy-two hours, or went through a neighborhood every day at three A.M. writing down the license numbers of the parked cars, and then spent the rest of the day at the DMV filling out forms to obtain the owners’ names. When the trainees were ready, he would give them cases of their own and hire new trainees. Phil ran his agency like a pyramid scheme.
As the years went by, the young detectives got better and Phil Kramer got lazier and more careful about putting himself in dangerous places. First he stopped taking the hardest cases for himself. Eventually he stopped working cases with the young apprentices to teach them how things were done. Instead, he relied on Hall or Dewey Burns to take them on. Over the past year, he seemed to have lost all interest in the agency. He had let five of the other detectives go off on their own and had not replaced them. Bill Przwalski was now the only trainee, even though there were a dozen applicants a week calling April and asking for the chance to work for a license.
Phil still showed up at work every day, but he often left without telling anybody where he was going. The idea that what he was doing when he wasn’t in the office was working cases had never occurred to Ray Hall. When Ray had heard Phil Kramer had been shot, it had taken a minute or two before he could even concede that his death could possibly have anything to do with a case.
There were other complications to the task of investigating Phil Kramer’s murder. As Hall sat in the bar sipping his second drink, he pictured Emily Kramer at the retirement party the night before Sam Bowen moved to Seattle. Everyone in the agency liked Sam Bowen, and everyone had benefited from Bowen’s vast circle of snitches, cops, lawyers, bail bondsmen, and stringers. Emily Kramer had been grateful to Bowen because she still went over the books in the early years, and she knew what he had contributed to Phil’s income and hers.
The party had been loud and jovial and chaotic at times, but it lapsed into periods of quiet, earnest talk about the past and the future. There had been an edge to these discussions because Sam Bowen said he was sixty-eight years old, but he was actually older. People at the party knew that once Sam Bowen was a thousand miles from L.A., they weren’t likely to see him again.