"What was the suspect doing with his hands?"
Kelly closed his eyes in thought. "His hands weren't at his sides." He hesitated. "They weren't above his head either."
"Could he have been holding a gun?"
Kelly thought for a moment before answering. "No, his back was straight. He wasn't crouching. He wasn't standing the way someone holding a piece does. In fact, I got the impression that he was controlled, that he was afraid, rather than that he was going to fight. That's when the shit hit the fan. It was a damn setup. That no-good son-of-a-bitch Bailey used us as stooges. The caper didn't make sense from the get-go. Like how would Bailey know exactly when a hit was going to be made?"
"There was a chrome thirty-two found lying in front of the bar," Carr said. "Bailey had himself covered."
"Did the suspect live?"
Carr shook his head. "Bailey blasted him again when he was on the deck. He was pronounced dead at the scene."
"Who was he?"
"He had a long record as a cat burglar, lots of joint time. I have just one more question and then you can get some sleep. Was anything else said in the living room? You told me Bailey yelled, 'Police,' but was anything said before or after that?"
Kelly's face contorted in thought. "I don't think so."
"I'll stop by tomorrow."
Jack Kelly nodded his head slightly. He winked.
Carr quietly left the room. The pale green hallway was bustling with doctors and nurses dodging gurneys and strolling in and out of rooms. At the end of the corridor, Carr passed a nurses' station. A black nurse's aide behind a counter said something into an intercom, then looked up at him as he passed. "Mr. Carr?"
"That's me," Carr said. Behind the woman on a desk was a portable television. Nurses on the TV screen talked in a hospital corridor.
"Mr. Kelly wants you to come back to the room."
Carr retraced his steps to Jack Kelly's bed.
"Someone said, 'No,"' Kelly said.
"Whatsat?"
"In the living room at Hartmann's house … I'm not sure who said it, but I heard someone say the word no. No, like a statement. It was said after Bailey said, 'Police."'
"Did Bailey say it?"
Jack Kelly closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them. "I'm not even absolutely sure that's what I heard. I'm pretty sure though. Damn. My mind isn't working full speed yet. I guess they've been giving me lots of shots."
Carr patted Kelly on the arm. "Get some rest." He left the room and followed corridors to the hospital's main entrance, passed through a set of revolving glass doors into bright sunlight. The blacktop parking lot shimmered with heat. He played out the shooting a couple of times on the way to his sedan, trying to make the pieces fit.
The L.A. County Sheriff's Department Records Bureau took up an entire floor in the Hall of justice, a pre-World War II brownstone building with a pillared lobby that invariably smelled of cigar smoke.
Charles Carr peeked around eight-foot-high filing shelves looking for Delia Trane. He found her sitting at a desk in the corner. He thought she looked about as sexy as a woman dressed in a khaki short-sleeved blouse and green uniform skirt could look. Her back was straight as she worked computer keys. As always, her gold deputy's badge was pinned, about two inches lower than regulation, on the very point of her left breast. "Strutting her stuff," as she called it. Della would be Della.
She stopped tapping keys as he approached. "Hello, stranger," she greeted him.
Carr had almost forgotten her well-formed nose and mouth, the flawless, though perhaps slightly flushed, complexion. Only the hint of midriff bulge gave any real hint that she was over forty. Years ago she had been the topic of more than one police-bull-pen conversation.
"How do you like it here?" he asked.
"Anywhere is better than eight hours a day in the women's jail. I got to the point where I was waking up in the morning depressed as hell. The thought of pulling my shift gave me a headache. Anyway you cut it, it's eight a day in jail."
"I haven't seen you around any of the spots lately."
"I stop for a drink now and then," she said as she reached for her purse. She found a pack of cigarettes, lit up and blew out smoke. "Have you missed me? I love it here," she said without giving him a chance to answer. "I'm getting the salary of a deputy sheriff to sit here at this computer rather than shagging prisoners, driving around in a radio car waiting to get my neck broken or flexing my ass on a street corner to set up johns for the vice detectives. Hell, I just spent four weeks in a computer school. I actually liked it … By the way, I was sorry to hear about your partner."
"One of those things," Carr said. "Do you have time to run a nickname through your computer for me?"
"What's in it for me?" she smiled.
"Drinks?"
"Keep going."
"Dinner?"
"You're on. What's the nickname?"
"Bones. A male white about forty years old. He has gray-streaked hair and may have a record for burglary."
"Do you know how many people have the nickname Bones?" she asked smugly.
Carr nodded. "I have a photo I can compare with the mug shots." He pulled the nude photograph of Bones from his shirt pocket and showed it to her.
Della Trane curled her lower lip as she examined the photograph. "I've seen better."
Carr returned the photograph to his pocket.
Della Trane's fingers tapped keys. The nickname appeared on the computer screen. In a moment, the following message flashed onto the screen:
407 records match criteria
She tapped the printout button and the teleprinter raced as it printed the names of arrestees nicknamed Bones. "What you see is what you get," she said, squirming to point her breasts. "I mean the printout of course." Della Trane laughed with cigarette smoke in her mouth.
Six hours later Charles Carr still sat at a long wooden table in the musty-smelling Records Bureau. Next to him was a wheeled cart full of manila arrest folders. Who would believe that there were literally boxes of file packages on criminals nicknamed Bones?
He opened another manila folder, flipped pages until he found the mug shot envelope and opened it. Oddly, the prisoner, a man with greasy hair and beard, was smiling. Carr compared the mug shot to the photograph of the man in Sheboygan's bedroom. They weren't the same. He replaced the mug shot in the envelope and tossed the file back onto the cart. He stood up and stretched. His mind wandered back to the time he and Jack Kelly had sorted through hundreds of photos of red-haired men in order to identify a murderer. Was it three or four years ago?
Carr sat down and dug into another file. A mug shot, which was stapled to a booking form, was of a man with gray-streaked hair. He wore an open-collared shirt. Carr held the bedroom photograph up to the mug shot. It was the same man. Carr sorted through a stack of hand-printed arrest reports in the file. They showed that Robert Chagra aka Bones had been arrested nine times during the past twelve years. Six arrests were for conspiracy to commit burglary, three for illegal gambling (the arrests took place at private homes during the course of crap games). A note by one sheriff's detective in the file read as follows:
Forward copy of this arrest report to Organized Crime Intelligence Division: Chagra hangs with heavy hoods in Hollywood/Beverly Hills. He is a dice hustler, a mechanic. Games are usually set up by someone else. Conventioneers or other suckers are invited to a game usually at a private home. Chagra is brought in with loaded dice, suckers are allowed to win a little, then fleeced. He takes a piece of the action. When there is no game in town, he acts as a middleman between burglars and Beverly Hills types who want their homes burglarized to collect the insurance. For a fee, he gives back the swag after the burglary and the victim collects the insurance claim. Sometimes he just sets up burg's. He doesn't do them himself, but farms out the address and steers the stolen property to his own fencing channels. For a while, he worked as a chauffeur for movie actor Rex Piper, who reportedly bought lots of stolen jewelry from him.