He finds the remote and exercises his thumb on the volume.
“Ever watch this?” he asks.
I look at the screen.
“A cultural watershed,” I tell him.
“Yeah, and the hostess has good tits,” says Leo. He mutes the sound but doesn’t turn it off, his eyes glued to the set as if he’s waiting for his two favorite peaks to appear.
“I take it you didn’t come by for beer and conversation?”
“How could you think that?” I tell him.
He smiles, and we talk about the D.A.’s office, changes in the investigative staff since Kline’s ascendancy. Leo tells me there is a good deal of insecurity, people who were bosom buddies yesterday now willing to slip a shiv in your spine. Leo would know. He has his own carefully honed collection of these.
“It’s no longer fun getting up and going to work,” he tells me. Like this has always been a major pleasure point in Leo’s life.
“Sounds like good cause for disability,” I commiserate.
“If safety retirement offered a presumption for working with assholes, I’d be out fishing,” he tells me.
“Kline and his entourage are that bad?”
“Having to say ‘good morning’ to that prick is enough to get a prescription for Valium,” he says. He calls him a “Jesus freak.” In Leo’s lexicon this could fit anybody who has darkened the door of a church in the last decade.
He has complained about every D.A. elected in the county in this century, while he searched for the crease in their ass and puckered his lips. He has climbed over the carcasses of dead colleagues in three different regimes to become a supervisor. If Stalin took over tomorrow, Leo would show up for work dressed like Beria the next day.
“Seems like lately we spend all day reinventing the wheel,” he complains. According to Leo, Kline insists the best ones have four corners. He follows this with a few carefully chosen profanities, all synonyms for his employer.
“You should get other work,” I tell him.
“Yeah, right, at my age.” What offends Leo is the last word in my comment, the one that starts with W. Besides, where else would he find such intrigue?
“Just when you get one of these fuckers well trained,” he says, “the voters turn his ass out of office.” Leo talks as if the elected D.A. were Pavlov’s dog, and the army of perennial bureaucrats were a form of the canine corps with choke chains and training leashes.
I remind him that Nelson left as DA. to take the bench.
“Same thing,” he says. “We were finally getting on with him. A good prosecutor,” he calls him. This is in stark contrast to the nouns and adjectives he used to describe the man two years ago.
“This one’s a humorless, tight-ass. . fuckin’ soul saver.” To Leo religion is a crime.
“Yes. I’ve heard that he prays to the bush in his office,” I tell him.
He cuts his tirade in mid-syllable and he looks at me, wondering if perhaps I am serious.
“Someone has seen this?” he says. Leo would like pictures so that he could get Kline certified to the state booby hatch.
“No. They’ve just smelled the bush burning,” I tell him.
It takes him an instant before he realizes that I am kidding and he cracks a smile.
“Maybe they’ll do like Nelson,” he says.
I give him a look.
“Appoint the fucker to the bench.” He’s talking about Kline.
This would suit Leo. Take someone whose personal views offend him, and make him a judge so that Leo’s life of indolence could be made easier.
“Talking about judges,” he says, “you heard about Acosta?”
“Read it in the paper,” I tell him. “Cried all night.”
My problems with the Coconut are well-known, a matter of record among the D.A.’s staff.
“Yeah. I figured you’d be out selling tickets for a table at the wake,” says Leo. “Maybe that’s why you came by this evening?” He’s back to the main course. Wondering why I am here.
“In a manner. It has to do with Acosta, and the grand jury,” I tell him. “Got a client, a cop. Good cop.” This puts me on the side of the angels. “But he’s gotten himself a little sideways with. . ”
“Tony Arguillo,” he says. Before I can finish my pitch Leo is on me. If it slithers through the bushes in this county Kerns knows about it.
I make a gesture, like “There you have it.”
“And you’re wondering how this good cop got himself in all this trouble?”
I’m making a lot of hand gestures, bobs and weaves with my head, all of which add up to “yes.”
“Word is, it’s the company he keeps,” says Leo.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he’s gotten in with some bad people.”
“Lano and his crowd?” I say.
Leo says nothing, but I can tell by his silence that this is exactly what he means.
“I grant you Lano,” I say, “is not someone I would take home to meet the family. And I’m aware of the allegations, skimming from the pension fund. Still it seems like a bit of overkill,” I tell him. “Roll out the canons. Call up the grand jury. Sounds like a little union busting to me.”
“If that were all of it,” he says.
I take a bead on Leo. He is a bullshitter extraordinaire, but there are moments when you know he is dead serious.
“Jungle drums and smoke signals?” he says.
This means that what is about to follow comes from the office grapevine, rumors that have no confirmation this side of the grave.
“It’s my life on the line,” he tells me. “You gotta promise it goes no further.”
I give him three fingers in the air, poking out from my beer can, like some blood oath between brother inebriants. Leo cannot wait to tell me, which, knowing the man, is a good hint that what is to follow is bad news.
“There was a case, maybe six months ago, a cop named Wiley, shot in a raid out by the park, a crack house.”
“Killed, as I recall,” I tell him. “I remember reading about it. Some controversy.”
“He was off duty at the time, which raised a few eyebrows,” says Leo. “Part of a rat pack. Hotshots with battering rams in the trunk of their cars like other people carry fishing rods. Their idea of a good time was picking some pusher’s nose with the barrel of a Beretta. You know the type,” he says.
To Leo this is a mortal sin, a violation of the wages and hours rule that governs all life. Leo has never worked a minute of overtime for which he was not paid.
“They made some kid for the killing. Sixteen. They tried him as an adult,” says Leo.
“Sounds like justice to me,” I tell him.
“Except for one thing,” he says. “The kid denied he did it. Said the gun wasn’t his.”
“Imagine that,” I say. “Novel defense.”
“Yeah, very novel,” says Leo. “Novel-type story. That’s why nobody gave it much credence. They checked the serial number. This is no Saturday night special, mind you. Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. Well, lo and behold,” says Leo, “the piece was stolen. Household burglary. So everybody figures the kid for it. Right?”
I give him an expression, the picture of logic.
“Except there’s more history to this particular piece. Seems one of the clerks down in Property is going through records doing a little inventory, trying to see how much they lost over the course of the year, cars, planes, hotels, that kinda shit, and what do you think he finds?”
I give him a shrug.
“One thirty-eight Smith and Wesson-missing.”
“Let me guess. The same serial number.”
“Bingo,” says Leo. “Theory is somebody, one of the cops, dropped the piece on the kid at the scene.”
“What? An accidental shooting? One of them panicked?”
“You’re too trusting,” says Leo. The only man more cynical than me.
“Then why?”
“That’s the other shoe,” says Leo. “We been hearin’ rumblings-no complaints, mind you-but tom-toms from the street for over a year that some cops have gone into business for themselves, shaking down dealers, taking cash, and when they can, drugs. Nothing too big,” says Leo. “A little here, a little there, a grand here, a kilo there. It all adds up. Now, mind you, these guys, the victims, are in no position to file a consumer complaint. So what we hear is just informal.” Leo’s getting animated, into the story.