Such a lady.
The first agency they tried had gone out of business. Six days ago, according to the bag lady camped in the shelter of the empty office’s doorway. Parker thanked her, gave her his card and twenty bucks.
“Why’d you do that?” Ruiz asked as they got back into the car. “Crazy, psycho bag lady. Man, did you get a whiff of her?”
“They don’t offer steam showers and aromatherapy at the Midnight Mission. Besides, she’s not a psycho. She was lucid, at least she was today. Who knows what she might see living out here. If a couple of bucks makes her think more kindly about talking to cops . . .”
Parker shot Ruiz a look out of the corner of his eye. “How long have you been on the job?”
“Five years.”
“And in five years you haven’t learned anything? Do you have pictures of the chief with a farm animal?”
“Maybe I’m just cheap,” she returned, holding back the temper.
“I’m not even touching that. It’s too easy.”
“I mean, I can’t afford to run around handing out money to street people.”
“Right. That would put a dent in your shoe budget.”
“And you can afford to pass out money to whoever?”
Parker frowned at her. “Twenty dollars? I’m not exactly going to have to give up eating red meat. Investing in a person like Mary there is like putting a few on a long shot at the track. Maybe you lose, but maybe you win and get a nice payout. You didn’t have snitches on that gang task force?”
“Not my job. I worked undercover—and no wiseass remarks,” she cautioned.
Parker raised his brows. “I didn’t say a word.”
“And don’t talk to me about shoes. Those Tod’s wingtips on your feet are like six hundred fifty dollars. I don’t know any other cops wearing six-hundred-fifty-dollar shoes.”
“Except yourself.”
“That’s different.”
“How so? I’ll bet your closet is stacked with Manolos and Jimmy Choos. You haven’t worn the same pair twice in a week. Me, I’ve got maybe five pairs of shoes.”
“So maybe I have a friend who likes to buy me nice things. Clothes, shoes—”
“You have a friend?”
She didn’t take the bait. “So maybe you have a friend like that,” she said slyly. “Maybe you have hidden talents. What about it, Parker? Are you some rich lady’s boy toy? Is that where you got that Jag you drive on the weekends? If you’re that good, you might be worth a second look after all.”
“What do you know about my car?”
She shrugged and played coy. “I’ve heard rumors.”
Parker glanced at her then away as a traffic light ahead turned green. “I don’t think it’s wise for a cop to accept expensive gifts. You never know. That special someone might be in a real jam with the law one day. Maybe he or she asks for a big favor. Even if you don’t grease some wheels for that person, someone’s going to find out you’re wearing a gold Rolex courtesy of the defendant, and then it’s your anatomy in the wringer. Impropriety, bribery. Next thing you know, you’ve got some Internal Affairs parasite crawling up your ass.”
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide,” Ruiz commented.
“Everybody’s got something to hide, sweetheart.”
“Yeah? What have you got to hide, Parker?”
“If I told you, I wouldn’t be hiding it. Never reveal a fear or a weakness, doll. Someone will spin around and knock you flat with it when you least expect it.”
They rode in silence for a moment, creeping down the street in the morning traffic. Lawyers and more lawyers, accountants and more accountants, bankers and more bankers going to their offices in the tall buildings of downtown. Mercedeses, BWMs, Porsches. The car the detectives got was a nondescript domestic sedan of questionable vintage. Robbery-Homicide got better rides. They had to look good on TV. The main requirement of cars in Parker’s division was that they not be tempting to car thieves.
At the second messenger agency—Reliable Couriers—a good-looking young guy in J.Crew and hip glasses, Rayne Carson, spelled his name out so he would get proper credit in any future report. He told them Leonard Lowell was on their list of deadbeat customers who had racked up a bill then refused to pay. They no longer did business with him.
“Can you believe most of that list are attorneys?” he confided to Parker, pointing to the list taped to the wall behind the desk.
“The only debts lawyers want paid are for billable hours,” Parker commiserated.
The phone rang and Rayne Carson held up a finger and flashed an apologetic look as he punched a button on the phone console and listened to the caller via his wireless headset, pen in hand poised over a notepad.
He looked like he should have been a concierge at some happening hotel or a waiter in a trendy restaurant in West Hollywood, Parker thought. But times were tough. The well-tipped professions were staffed with out-of-work writers and actors, victims of the reality TV craze.
Ruiz looked at Parker, rolled her eyes, and gave the Big, Bored Sigh. “I think he wants to ask you out,” she mumbled.
Carson made the “talk, talk, talk” motion with his hand, then pointed at Parker and mouthed: “Great hat.”
“Everybody wants me, doll,” Parker muttered to Ruiz in a Bogart accent. “That’s the curse of being me.”
“I don’t want you.”
Rayne Carson ended his call with a very pointed, “I have to go, Joel, the police need to speak with me about a very important matter . . . . No, it’s not about you. But I could change that.”
He rang off and apologized to Parker. “My agent—such as he is. I’m perfect for a new gay reality show Fox is putting together, and this clown can’t get me arrested.”
“We could,” Ruiz said sweetly.
“Can you get me on America’s Most Wanted? A couple of days reenacting some horrible crime. It takes up space on the résumé.”
“Some other time,” Parker said. “Do you have any idea what messenger company someone like Lowell would go to, with his bad track record?”
“One of the small companies. Desperate and disreputable. Cheap and dirty.”
“Such as?”
“Right Fast, Fly First, Speed Couriers.”
11
Eta Fitzgerald was a creature of habit. Every morning at quarter of six she dumped the last of her wake-up coffee in the sink, kissed her elderly mother on the cheek, and hit the road.
She lived with her mother and four children in a nondescript little tract house in a nice working-class neighborhood beneath one of the more commonly used flight paths for jets in and out of LAX. The Fitzgerald family had migrated to Los Angeles from New Orleans eight years earlier, during a booming economy, before bankruptcy and terrorist scares cut a swath through the airline industry. Her husband, Roy, a jet mechanic, had taken a job with Delta, and never missed a day’s work in six years, until a platform collapsed while he was working on a 747 and he fell to his death.
At quarter of six it took Eta no time to get downtown. By quarter of seven the trip would be twice as long. By quarter of eight the roads would be bumper-to-bumper and so slow that she would be able to read the LA Times front to back before she got where she was going.
Her first stop downtown was always the Carl’s Jr. at Fifth and Flower, where she would sit down for a second cup of coffee and a greasy, calorie-busting, artery-clogging egg and sausage sandwich. More often than not she saw some of her messengers there as they fueled up for the day. Sometimes she would chat with them and catch up with their lives off their bikes. Sometimes she only observed.
She could have found a better-paying job. She had worked dispatch for the New Orleans Police Department, and for a couple of years with a private ambulance company in Encino. But she’d had her fill of life-and-death situations, and she didn’t need to make a million. Roy’s insurance and pension took good care of the family. Eta liked working at Speed. The messengers were strange and interesting characters, a ragtag bunch of kids and grown men who had never been able to take any road but the one less traveled. They were a family, of sorts. Eta was their mother hen.