“Why were you at the Cock-a-doodle-do on Wednesday night? If Jennifer was your friend, why meet her there?”
Tremell pushed his seat away from the table, leaning his elbows on his knees and looking up at her. She had been wrong about his eyes as well. They were the same color gray as his father’s and just as vibrant.
“You guys keep records,” he said. “I’m sure you know more about me that even I do. The speeding tickets, the DUIs and bar fights, some of the women I went out with in the old days who spent most of their time trying to get noticed and get picked up by those crappy entertainment shows on TV. It wasn’t the fake trips to rehab that saved me. And it wasn’t the warnings from the judges I faced, or the embarrassment you might expect that I felt when I woke up in the morning. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I was too high. What saved me was meeting my wife. She was the one who opened the door to the possibility that I might step out of my father’s shadow and become something on my own. I got a late start. And I’m not all the way there yet. But she was the one who opened the door.”
“How’s she get along with your father?”
Tremell grinned. “Not very well. But he knows what she’s done for me, so I guess that’s good enough. He tolerates her, and she tries to be nice to him.”
Lena gave Tremell a long look, studying his face and relaxed posture. He didn’t know. He didn’t know what his father was doing behind his back. When it clicked, she let the thought go and moved on.
“Okay,” she said. “So, why were you meeting Jennifer?”
“I needed to end it, but I didn’t know how. I was planning to tell her that night. My wife had given me a son. She was feeling better. There was no reason to keep seeing Jennifer except that I still liked her. And that’s not really good enough.”
“Why there?” Lena said. “Why take the risk that someone might recognize you?”
He laughed. “That’s probably the one place in this city where no one would. And even if they did, they’d keep quiet about it because someone might ask them why they were there.”
She could see his point. If the murder hadn’t taken place, there was a good chance no one would have mentioned it.
“That place isn’t exactly what it looks like,” he said. “Especially if you like music. The food’s good and the woman who owns it isn’t a phony. We met there because Jennifer had an appointment in Torrance. We met halfway.”
“How did she react when you gave her the news?”
“I never did. I couldn’t get the courage. And she had to leave for another appointment. I stayed for a while. When the band finished their set, I split.”
Lena sifted through her memory of the interview she and Rhodes conducted with Natalie Wells. Everything Tremell was saying seemed to match what the waitress said.
“What about her job?” Lena said. “You obviously knew what Jennifer did for a living. Were you ever jealous?”
Tremell’s face reddened, his voice, quieter now. “You’re a woman, so this is kind of hard.”
“Believe me. There’s nothing you could say that I haven’t heard before.”
He spent a few moments tossing it over, then sat up and shrugged. “The truth is that I kind of liked it. It turned me on. That probably means I’m still fucked up, but that’s the way it was. And Jennifer didn’t talk about it that much. It was just kind of there in the background. It wasn’t like she was gonna do it forever. She told me she met someone who wanted to help her out.”
“Who?”
Tremell shook his head. “She didn’t say, but I could tell that he was a client. She called him her personal patron.”
“And you still weren’t jealous.”
“Maybe a little,” he said. “But I think I was secretly hoping that it might be an easy way out of all this. If she ended it, then I wouldn’t have to.”
“She never mentioned the guy’s name? She never told you anything about him?”
“No, but I got the feeling that he was older. Maybe even a little kinky. He bought her a nurse’s costume and made her wear it. That’s all she said about him. He liked nurses and he was from Beverly Hills.”
It hung there. The two of them looking at each other. Then the door snapped open and Barrera rushed in.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you’ll need to pick this up later. Lena, I need a word with you.”
She walked out and saw Rhodes waiting in the alcove. Barrera shut the door and lowered his voice.
“Something’s come up,” he said.
“Fontaine?”
Barrera seemed surprised. “No,” he said. “The guy who rented the garage on Barton Avenue. We’ve got his name and address.”
31
What’s his real name?” Lena shouted.
Rhodes brought the Crown Vic up to speed, hit the Christmas lights, and rolled up his window. “Albert Poole. He’s renting an apartment in Hollywood. The building manager says he’s home.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Someone recognized him from that sketch and called it in. Another doctor, I think.”
“So our guy got his training at USC.”
Rhodes shook his head. “The call came from the trauma center in Inglewood, less than a mile from the Cock-a-doodle-do. Poole got back six months ago and showed up looking for a job. He spent four years in Iraq as a combat field surgeon, so it looked like a perfect fit. Only now Poole’s back and he’s got issues. He worked one weekend in Inglewood, then flaked out.”
“What issues?”
“Sounds like a head case, but we’ll see when we get there. The manager’s a vet. He said they talk once in a while. Poole got shipped from Iraq to Germany and ended up at Walter Reed.”
“As a doctor?”
“As an outpatient. From what the manager said, he got lost in the bureaucracy at Walter Reed. They spit him out before he was ready and never said thanks.”
“You talked to him yourself?”
Rhodes nodded, then picked up the file on the seat and handed it to her. Inside, Lena found the composite sketch they had worked up of the man calling himself Nathan Good. Underneath were copies of Poole’s driver’s license and photo ID from the trauma center in Inglewood. The likeness was unmistakable, even in the dim afternoon light. Although his eyes were set wider apart in the photographs, his hair less blond, and he wore a smile instead of a frown, she could see it.
She turned and looked out the window. The cars on the Hollywood Freeway appeared to be standing still. Frozen in time and somehow disconnected. When she glanced over at the speedometer, the dial was pegged at ninety and Rhodes’s eyes were glued to the road.
“Barrera told me what happened,” he said.
Lena didn’t say anything. She wasn’t thinking about the chief anymore.
“What about Tremell?” he said. “Why did he come in?”
She gave him a summary of her day. Rhodes listened without interrupting. At one point he opened the glove compartment and reached for his emergency pack of cigarettes, then rejected the idea and slammed the door shut.
“You think the kid would’ve agreed to a polygraph?” he asked.
“I needed more time,” she said. “I didn’t get the chance to ask, but that’s the direction things were going.”
“What about Fontaine? The chief said hands off. Is what Justin Tremell said enough to open the door?”
Lena thought it over. In a rational world, it was more than enough. In the chief’s world, up was down, left was right, and green lights meant stop. Nothing would be good enough because strings were attached.
Rhodes gave her a look. “Are you okay?”
“The back and forth,” she said. “Something’s gotta give, Stan. And we still need to talk to Fontaine.”
Rhodes exited off the freeway at Beachwood Drive and made a left on Franklin. By the time they reached Poole’s apartment building and found a place to park, the winter sun had already slid behind the hills, the streets bedded down in a dusky blue light.