“Any fingerprints? Footprints?”
Joe shook his head. “No physical evidence at all. Not yet.”
“Was Heimar killed on the beach?”
Joe tapped a column of ash into the glass tray. “Nope. Not enough blood. He was just... reassembled... there. With about as much success as Humpty Dumpty.”
“Where he was killed, there’d be a lot of blood, right?”
“Yup. But so far we’ve got diddly. No suspects and no idea where it happened. Could’ve been some other beach, maybe the desert, up in the hills, or anywhere else out in the wilds. Could’ve been in some apartment for all we know. Or a house. A nice house somewhere in the ’burbs like Palos Verde or San Marina. People’d be surprised some of the things going on there behind locked doors out in the ’burbs. Gacey. Dahmer. Who the fuck knows anything any more?” Joe tossed back the rest of his rye and ginger and crunched the ice cubes. He waved for the waitress and she brought another. Arvo stuck with coffee.
“So what’s your interest?” Joe asked finally.
“Sarah Broughton.”
Joe nodded. “Right. She found the body. She wouldn’t have been receiving any unwanted attention from warped members of the viewing audience lately, would she?”
Arvo smiled. “You got it. Nasty letters.”
Joe cocked a finger at him and clicked his tongue. “I’m not a hotshot detective with RHD for nothing, man.”
“There’s nothing concrete,” Arvo said. “It’s just—”
“Too much of a coincidence?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think there’s a connection?”
“No,” said Arvo. “People who write weird letters are generally wimps. They’d be no more likely to commit murder than a nun would. But like you said, it’s too much of a coincidence. I have to check it out.”
Joe nodded. “Uh-huh. Never did trust those nuns,” he said. “Anyway, a team of detectives canvassed the Boulevard strip, and all they could come up with is that a couple of other street kids saw John Heimar getting into a car about eight o’clock on the night he was killed. They figured he’d scored, of course. Needless to say, none of them was especially forthcoming.”
“Did they get the make?”
“Yeah. It’s a blue-green-black Ford Chevy convertible sedan pick-up truck from Japan.”
Arvo laughed. “Okay. Sorry I asked. You said earlier you thought it was a sex crime. Any other evidence yet, apart from the MO?”
“Some. The kid had been sodomized sometime before death, but there’s no telling when, or how willing he was. And there’s no evidence at all to show that he was forced. Given the victim’s line of business I’d say it’s likely enough he’d been with at least a couple of other chickenhawks earlier that night, wouldn’t you? On the other hand, you sometimes get cases where the john cuts off the guy’s air supply from behind with some sort of ligature while he butt-fucks him. Supposed to be a real turn-on. Something like that could have happened, gone too far, then the john panicked and tried to cover up, make it look like a sex murder. The coroner’s office found traces of semen from two different sources in the anus. Either he hadn’t heard of AIDS or he liked to take risks. Or maybe the rubber had a hole in it.”
“Was he HIV positive?”
“Nope. They ran that test pretty quickly.”
Arvo took a sip of tepid coffee and pulled a face. “What was the time of death?” he asked.
“Between about eleven that night and two in the morning. Wouldn’t say any closer than that.”
“That’s three hours after the kid was picked up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Nobody saw him after he got into that unidentified car around eight?”
“Only the killer.”
“Any signs of torture?”
“Nope. Clean as a whistle. Under the sand, the kid was buck naked. Apart from the stab wounds and an old needle-mark or two, his body was in pretty good shape.”
“Are you running DNA tests on the semen?”
“Sure. Like I said, they got two different samples already. But you know as well as I do, Arvo, that shit takes time. Especially the way things are backed up right now. Thirty-eight homicides last weekend. Thirty-eight. Can you believe it? You can only push the coroner’s office so hard. Those guys are up to their eyeballs in stiffs. Plus it takes so long for toxicology to get the test results from some of these things.”
Four businessmen came in, laughing and joking, fresh from the office by the looks of their clothes.
Joe looked at his watch. Just gone three. “After-work crowd,” he said. “They get in early on a Friday. Sometimes they get here so early they just sort of merge right in with the late-lunch crowd.”
Arvo laughed.
“I guess it’s not often you get a homosexual killer writing love letters to a beautiful actress, is it?” Joe asked.
Arvo shrugged. “Statistically speaking, no.”
“Fuck statistics.”
“Still no. Like I said, letter-writers don’t usually do much more than write letters. I’m just poking around. All I’m looking for is some connection between Sarah Broughton and Heimar, and it doesn’t look as if there is one.”
“If there is, I don’t see it.”
“Me, neither. What’s your theory?”
“Sex killer of some kind. Got to be. And he’s so proud of his handiwork he wants people to admire it. Peacock mentality.”
“Pretty limited audience.”
Joe shrugged. “Maybe.” Then he paused. “These letters the actress has been getting. Anything there?”
Arvo shook his head. “I’ve only seen one, and it’s pretty low-level stuff. How did she react at the scene?”
“As you’d expect. I didn’t get there till later, but according to the first officer she was pretty shaken up.”
“She a suspect?”
“Come on, Arvo, what do you take us for? She wouldn’t be in England right now if she was, would she? When they’d got her calmed down, the detectives who caught the squeal had a good look around her place. No blood, nothing. Do you figure the stiff for her pen pal? He comes visiting and she kills him, then cuts him up, buries him under the sand and conveniently finds him on her morning run?”
Arvo shrugged. “It was worth asking. Weirder things have happened.”
“True. But the answer’s still no. She’s clean.”
“Did she see anything?”
“Nope. Said she might have heard a sound or seen a light in the night, or she might have imagined it. It was later she found the stiff, when she was going for her regular morning run. She says she leaned forward and tugged the arm and... well, I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?”
Suddenly, Joe’s eyes twinkled and he burst into laughter. It sounded like a braying horse. Some of the other drinkers looked over, smiling uneasily. “Hey,” Joe said. “What if the cameras had caught that, huh? TV star bends over to pull this guy up out of the sand and what happens? His fucking arm comes off, that’s what, and she falls flat on her ass holding it out in front of her.”
Arvo visualized the scene, too, and couldn’t help but laugh with Joe at the farcical absurdity of it. When they had calmed down, Joe knocked back the dregs of his drink and stood up. “Got to go, old buddy,” he said. “Or Mary will have my ass. Booked off early. It’s little Sue’s birthday party today and I promised I’d be there. Six. Can you believe it? Seems only last week she was crawling around on all fours and running through a six-pack of Huggies a day. Anyway, don’t be a stranger.”