“I’m not trespassing. I used to work here.”
Her long, white lab coat was splayed open to reveal a tank top and jeans when she waved her arms at him in the international gesture that meant go no further. He tried to show her his non-functioning card.
“I’m not looking at anything. And I wish you’d do the same.”
He had to smile to himself. Morty had described her well. The avodado breasts, the twin eggplant buttocks. Her voice as creamy as sweet ranch dressing. “You’re Delores.”
“Yes?” She regarded him warily.
“I need to see the boss. Is Mister Esposito in?”
“I wouldn’t know any of that. I work supply.”
“It’s very important. Could you please open the gate so I can drive around to the executive side?”
“How do you know my name?”
“A friend of mine did a favor for you.”
“Is that right.”
“Yes, Delores, that’s right.” He felt himself getting stronger. “And neither he nor I have any interest in implicating you in certain disappearances. That’s all been put to rest.”
She took him a step aside into the shadows. “Are you talking about who I think?”
“I don’t have time to dance.” He raised his hand a foot above his head to Morty Greene’s height.
“Shit. You the police?”
“Much worse.”
She became fiercely defensive. “I just brought him around the side like someone told me a coupla times. But I’m not down for killing shit!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know how you people work. You think everyone he ever talked to had something to do with it.”
“With what? Had something to do with what?”
“You telling me you don’t know?”
“Look at this fifty year old Jewish face. Does it look like it knows anything?”
She gave him a slow steady scan and agreed with his assessment. “It looks like Morty Greene comes by his name ‘The Mortician’ legitimately. He got taken in for killing that girl.”
“Killing what girl?”
Delores nodded toward the warehouse where at that moment a thirty-by-fifty foot billboard was being carried out proclaiming the arrival of Espe New Millennium shampoo. “That one,” she said.
The billboard had not yet been covered. The girl on the bottle and the package was not Alex, as it had been in the prototype. No.
The Espe New Millennium girl was Nicholette.
Bradley. He took a moment to wonder how every thing he was sure of was wrong. And for how long that had been true.
EIGHTEEN
Stein careened into the Malibu substation and parked in the restricted spot right behind Chief Bayliss’s Cutlass Sierra. He left the windows cracked open for Watson and hurried inside. Every police station Stein had ever been inside of-and during his activist days he had been inside quite a few-reeked of the same musty stench of arrogance and petty abuse of power that dispirits everything it touches.
It wasn’t the tear gas and truncheons that cops used to break up anti-war demonstrations that turned Stein into an activist. It wasn’t for any bleeding heart liberal outrage at their excessive violence against violent criminals. They had a dangerous job. Some of them snap. Ok, so do timing belts on Mercedes. It happens. What ultimately galvanized Stein against them was their attitude toward ordinary citizens. How they made people feel like criminals. How they made inefficiency the rule, taking the greatest number of steps possible to perform the simplest request. As if before they could make a phone call for you they had to first invent electricity.
The desk sergeant was typing a report on a stolen car. After each keystroke that he thumped in with a heavy index finger, he picked up the Driver’s License, changed glasses, found the next number, changed glasses, typed it, changed glasses and fumbled to pick up the license for the next letter. All the time ignoring Stein, who stood eighteen inches from him and made several futile efforts to impose himself in the sergeant’s line of sight. The name under the ON DUTY sign said Sgt. O’Bladovich.
“Sergeant O’Bladovich. I need to see Chief Bayliss.”
“O’Bladovich got transferred downtown.”
He continued his ritual, typing another letter, undoing it and correcting it. That was it. Stein strode past his post, barged through the door clearly indicated FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY into a vestibule outside the private office of Stein’s longtime foil and adversary, Deputy Interim Precinct Commander Jack Bayliss.
Bayliss’ career in law enforcement began as a seventh grade gym teacher. He had a tight, compact body, piercing gray eyes and a well-earned reputation for the liberal use of lanyard on ass cheek. When Bayliss’s uncle, a local hack politician and part owner of a roofing business, got himself elected to the local Civilian Police Review Board, he fast-tracked his ambitious nephew out of the gym and into the penal system. In the wake of the corruption scandal in the mid-90s that involved too many high ranking cops and too many hookers in hot tubs up in Arcadian Fields, Bayliss’s appointment to the job of assistant chief was LA politics at its purist. His uncle, by then sitting on the city council, made him a compromise choice over two men and a woman who were far more qualified than he, which is to say qualified at all.
There was a three-seat wooden bench outside the chief’s private office. Morty Greene was sitting on that bench, his left wrist in a metal cuff.
“Oh Jesus,” Stein sighed. “What the hell is going on?”
“Well look who’s here,” said Edna Greene. She was sitting beside her boy almost entirely eclipsed at first by his frame. “Mister no suggestion of wrongdoing.” Stein felt the sting of her rebuke for trusting him.
“Edna, I’m here to fix this.”
“It’s Mrs. Greene to you.”
Stein pushed open the door to Bayliss’s private office and marched in.
“Coach. What the fuck?”
Bayliss glared up at his long-time adversary. Over the years, by design or coincidence, Bayliss had been the victim of Stein’s most celebrated pranks. His original “Victory Garden” had been grown behind the parking lot of Bayliss’s first precinct; the “Pot in every Chicken” happening was staged at his promotion dinner.
“You don’t ‘what the fuck’ me, Howard. I ‘what the fuck’ you!”
The door was ajar and Edna clapped her hands in ironic appreciation of the performance. “Look at the two white boys arguing with each other. Oh, yes. I’m convinced.”
Bayliss kicked the door shut. “Don’t call me Coach. I will have you in a cell ‘till you’re ninety.” Bayliss was short and cold as the month of February. He prided himself on remembering the full first name of everyone he had ever arrested. Stein wisely withheld correcting him until he had gotten what he had come for.
“I just thought I would tell you, the guy you’ve got handcuffed out there isn’t Nicholette Bradley’s killer.”
“And you would know this, how?”
“Trust me.”
The hoarse gust of wind that wheezed out of Bayliss’s throat approximated an ironic laugh. Bayliss glared before speaking. The temperature in his eyes rising to the melting point of tungsten.
“I was up at the victim’s house the night she was killed. It was me who made the 9-1-1 call.”
“What in hell were you doing in that house, Howard?” Did you kill her?”
“Yes, coach, I did. You’ve busted this case wide open. Shall we call a press conference?”
“You think you’re so goddamn clever. Do you know how long I can put you away and not have to tell anybody why?”
“I’m coming to you as an ally.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way. But were you always this Jewish?”
“How could I take that the wrong way?”
Bayliss eyes half-lidded into a smile of savage mirth. “I know exactly what kind of athlete you were, Howard. Eleventh man on a nine-man team. Splashing oil on the base paths and thinking it’s funny to see other people fall. That’s what you are, Howard. You’re a disrupter.”