Free Fall Page 5

  "Okay." I was only half listening. I picked up the phone and carried it around to the file cabinet and looked back at my desk. Nope. Nothing was off with the desk.

  "He says their arrest pattern is maybe a little hinky for the past few months, like maybe these guys aren't making the arrests that they should be, and are making a lot of arrests that they shouldn't."

  "Like what?" I looked at the file cabinet. I looked at the Pinocchio clock.

  "REACT was always big on dope and stolen property, and they've always posted high arrest rates, but the past couple of months they haven't been making the big numbers. They've mostly been booking gang-bangers and stickup geeks. It's a different level of crime."

  "We're not just talking Thurman? We're talking the team?"

  "Yeah. It's a team thing. What I hear, Thurman's got a great record. That's why he got the early promotion." I looked at the French doors. I looked at the little refrigerator. Nope.

  Rusty said, "Hell, Elvis, maybe it's just the off-season. I hear anything else, I'll let you know."

  "Sure, Rusty. Thanks." I looked back at the Pinocchio clock.

  Rusty Swetaggen hung up and then I hung up and that's when I saw it. The Pinocchio dock was still. Its eyes weren't moving. It wasn't making the tocking sound. The hands were stopped at eleven-nineteen.

  I followed the cord to where it plugs into the wall behind the file cabinet. The plug was in the socket, but not all the way, as if someone had brushed the cord and pulled it partway out of the wall and hadn't noticed. I stood very still and looked around the office and, in the looking, the office now felt strange, as if an alien presence were a part of it. I went back to my desk, opened each drawer and looked at it without touching it. Everything appeared normal and as I had left it. Ditto the things on the desk top. I got up again and opened the file cabinet and looked at the files without touching them and tried to recall if they were positioned as I had last seen them, but I couldn't be sure. I keep all active files in the office cabinet as well as all cases in the current quarter. At the end of every quarter I box the closed files and put them in storage. There were twenty-seven files in the cabinet drawer. Not much if you're the Pinkertons but plenty if you're me. Each file contains a client sheet and day book entries where I've made notes along the way, as well as any photographs or paperwork I accumulate, and a conclusion sheet, which is usually just a copy of the letter I write to the client when the job is over. I hadn't yet made a file for Jennifer Sheridan. I fingered through the twenty-seven files that were there, but nothing seemed to be missing. I closed the cabinet and looked at the little figurines of Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse and Pinocchio on my desk and on top of the file cabinet. Jiminy doffing his top hat had been moved, but Mickey and Minnie riding in a Hupmobile had not. Sonofagun. Someone had searched my office.

  I put Jiminy in his proper place, plugged in the Pinocchio dock and set it to the correct time, then went back to my desk and thought about Mark Thurman. The odds were large that whoever had come into my office wasn't Mark Thurman or anyone who knew Thurman, and that the timing had just been coincidental, but the timing still bothered me. I had thought the case was over, but apparently it wasn't. I wasn't exactly sure that the case was still on, but maybe that's what I had to prove. Hmm. Maybe I should ask Jennifer Sheridan to be a partner in the firm. Maybe she gave detective lessons.

  I called this reporter I know who works for the Examiner named Eddie Ditko. He's about a million years old and he loves me like a son. He said, "Jesus Christ, I'm up to my ass in work. What the fuck do you want?" You see?

  "I need to find out about the REACT unit deployed out of the Seventy-seventh Division down in South Central L.A."

  Eddie said, "You think I know this shit off the top of my head?" Isn't Eddie grand?

  "Nope. I was thinking maybe you could conjure it in your crystal ball."

  "You got crystal balls, always imposing like this." Eddie went into a coughing fit and made a wet hacking noise that sounded like he was passing a sinus.

  "You want I should call 911?"

  "That's it. Be cute." I could hear keys tapping on his VDT. "This'll take some time. Why don'tchu swing around in a little while. I might have something by then."

  "Sure."

  I put on my jacket, looked around my office, then went to the door and locked up. I had once seen a James Bond movie where James Bond pasted a hair across the seam in the doorjamb so he could tell if anyone opened the door while he was gone. I thought about doing it, but figured that someone in the insurance office across the hall would come out while I was rigging the hair and then I'd have to explain and they'd probably think it was stupid. I'd probably have to agree with them.

  I forgot about the hair and went to see Eddie Ditko.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Los Angeles Examiner is published out of a large, weathered redbrick building midway between downtown L.A. and Chinatown, in a part of the city that looks more like it belongs in Boston or Cincinnati than in Southern California. There are sidewalks and taxis and tall buildings of cement and glass and nary a palm tree in sight. Years ago, enterprising developers built a nest of low-rise condominiums, foolishly believing that Angelenos wanted to live near their work and would snap the places up to avoid the commute. What they didn't count on is that people were willing to work downtown but no one wanted to live there. If you're going to live in Southern California, why live in a place that looks like Chicago?

  I put my car in the lot across the street, crossed at the light, then took the elevator up to the third floor and the pretty black receptionist who sits there. "Elvis Cole to see Eddie Ditko. He's expecting me."

  She looked through her pass list and asked me to sign in. "He's in the city room. Do you know where that is?"

  "Yep."

  She gave me a peel-and-stick guest badge and went back to talking into the phone. I looked at the badge and felt like I was at a PTA meeting. Hello! My name is Elvis! I affixed the badge to my shirt and tried not to look embarrassed. Why risk the hall police?

  I went through a pair of leather upholstered swinging doors, then along a short hall that opened into the city room. Twenty desks were jammed together in the center of the room, and maybe a dozen people were hanging around the desks, most of them typing as fast as they could and the rest of them talking on the phone. Eddie Ditko had the desk on the far left corner, about as close to the editors' offices as you could get without being one of the editors. A woman in her late twenties was working at a terminal next to him. She was wearing huge round glasses and a loud purple dress with very wide shoulders and a little purple pillbox hat. It was the kind of clothes you wore when you were establishing your identity as a retro-hip urban intellectual. Or maybe she was just odd. She glanced up once as I approached, then went on typing. Eddie was chewing on an unlit Grenadiers cigar and scowling at his VDT when I got there. He had to be forty years older than her. He didn't bother glancing up. "Hey, Eddie, when are they going to make you an editor around here and get you off the floor?"

  Eddie jerked the cigar out of his mouth and spit a load of brown juice at his wastebasket. He never lit them. He chewed them. "Soon's I stop saying what I think and start kissing the right ass, like everybody else around here." He said it loud enough for most of the room to hear. The purple woman glanced over, then went on with her typing. Tolerant. Eddie grimaced and rubbed at his chest. "Jeez, I got chest pains. I'm a goddamned walking thrombo."

  "Lay off the fats and exercise a little."

  "What're you, my fuckin' mother?" Eddie leaned to the side and broke wind. Classy.

  I pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, hooking my arms over its back. "What'd you find on the REACT guys?"

  Eddie clamped the wet cigar in his teeth, leaned toward the VDT, and slapped buttons. The little VDT screen filled with printing. "I put together some stuff from our morgue files, but that's about it. REACT is an elite surveillance unit, and that means the cops block their files. They can't do their jobs if ev
erybody knows who they're surveilling."

  "How many guys we talking about?"

  "Five. You want the names?"

  "Yeah."

  He hit a couple of buttons and a little printer beside his VDT chattered and spit out a page. He handed it to me. Five names were listed in a neat column in the center of the page.

  LT. ERIC DEES

  SGT. PETER GARCIA

  OFF. FLOYD RIGGENS

  OFF. WARREN PINKWORTH

  OFF. MARK THURMAN

  I looked over the names. They meant nothing. "They any good?"

  Eddie grinned like a shark with his eye on a fat boy in baggy shorts. "They wouldn't be a REACT team if they weren't any good. They target felons and they've got a ninety-nine-point-seven percent conviction rate. Dees has been down there almost six years, along with Garcia and Riggens. Pinkworth joined a couple of years back and they picked up Thurman a year ago. He's the baby."

  "How'd Thurman make the squad?"

  Eddie hit more buttons and the printing on the screen changed. "Same as everybody else. Top ten of his academy class, a string of outstandings in his quarterly evaluations, Officer of the Month four times. You remember that nut pulled a gun on the RTD bus and threatened to start killing people unless Madonna gave him a blow job?"

  "Sort of."

  The purple woman looked over. Interested.

  "Hell, I wrote about that one. Guy stops the bus in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard

  , and Thurman and a guy named Palmetta were the first cops on the scene. Thurman was, what, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old?"

  The purple woman shrugged.

  "Yeah, he was just a kid. That was part of the story. Anyway, the nut shoots this fat guy in the leg to make his point, then grabs this nine-year-old girl and starts screaming he's going to do her next. He wants Madonna, right? Palmetta puts the call in for a hostage negotiator and the SWAT team but Thurman figures there ain't time. He takes off his gun and goes into the bus to talk to the guy. The nut tries to shoot him twice but he's shaking so bad both shots miss, so he puts the gun to the girl's head. You know what happened then?"

  The purple lady was leaning forward, frowning because she wanted to know.

  Eddie said, "Thurman tells the guy he's had Madonna and Madonna's a lousy lay, but he knows Rosanna Arquette and Rosanna Arquette is the best blow job in town. Thurman tells the guy if he puts down the gun, as soon as he's out on bail, he'll set it up with Rosanna Arquette 'cause she owes him a couple of favors."

  The purple woman said, "And he went for that?"

  Eddie spread his hands "Here's a nut believes he's gonna get Madonna, why not? The guy says only if she blows him twice. Thurman says, okay, she'll do it twice, but not on the same day, she's got a thing about that. The nut says that's okay with him 'cause he's only good for once a week anyway, and puts down the gun."

  The purple lady laughed, and she didn't look so odd anymore.

  Eddie was smiling, too. "That was, what, a couple years ago? Thurman gets the Medal of Valor and six months later he wins the early promotion to plain-clothes and the REACT team. They're top cops, pal. Every one of those guys has a story like that in his file else he wouldn't be on the team."

  "Eddie, what if I didn't want the good stuff? What if I was a reporter and I was looking for something that maybe had a smell to it?"

  "Like what?"

  "Like maybe I'm looking to see if they've crossed over."

  Eddie shook his head and patted the VDT. "If it's in here, it's already public record. Someone would've had to lodge the complaint, and it would've had to come out through LAPD PR or one of the news agencies or the courts. It wouldn't be a secret and no one would be trying to hide it."

  "Okay. Could you check for allegations?"

  "Substantiated or otherwise?"

  I looked at him.

  "Reporter humor. It's probably over your head." Eddie hit more keys and watched the screen, and then did it again. When he had filled and wiped the screen three times, he nodded and leaned back. "I had it search through the files keying on the officers' names for every news release during the past year, then I threw out the junk about them saving babies and arresting the Incredible Hulk and just kept the bad stuff. This is pretty neat."

  I leaned forward and looked at the screen. "What's it found?"

  "Excessive-force complaints. 'Suspect injured while resisting arrest.' 'Suspect filed brutality charges.' Like that. 'Course, these guys are busting felons and felons tend to get nasty, but check it out, you've got twenty-six complaints in the past ten months, and eleven of them are against this guy Riggens."

  "Any charges brought?"

  "Nada. IAD issued letters of reprimand twice, and dealt a two-week suspension, but that's it."

  I read the list. Twenty-six names ran down the left side of the page, and next to each name there was a booking number and the arresting charge and the claims levied by the defendants and the accused officer or officers. Riggens had all or part of eleven of the charges, and the remainder were divided pretty evenly between Pinkworth and Dees and Garcia and Thurman. Thurman had part of three.

  Eddie said, "You've got to understand, cops on these special tac squads get charges filed all the time, so most of these really are garbage, but if I'm looking for tuna I'm looking for losers, and that's Riggens."

  "Thanks, Eddie."

  Eddie stuck the cigar in his mouth and rolled it around and looked at me. "What you got going here, kid? It any good?"

  "I don't know. I'm still just running down the leads."

  He nodded and sucked on the cigar, and then he gazed at the editors' offices. He wasn't getting any younger. "If there's a story here, I want it."

  "You bet, Eddie."

  Eddie Ditko spread his hands, then hacked up something phlegmy and spit it into the basket. No one looked and no one paid any mind. I guess seniority has its privileges.

  I went back the way I came, took the elevator down to the lobby, then used the pay phone there to call Jennifer Sheridan in Marty Beale's office. I asked her for Floyd Riggens's address. She said, "Which one?"

  "What do you mean, which one?"

  "He's divorced. He used to live in La Cañada, but now he's got a little apartment somewhere."

  I told her that if she had them both, I'd take them both. She did. She also told me that Riggens's ex-wife was named Margaret, and that they had three children.

  When I had the information that I needed, I said, "Jennifer?"

  "Yes?"

  "Did Mark ever complain to you about Floyd?"

  There was a little pause. "Mark said he didn't like having Floyd as a partner. He said Floyd scared him."

  "Did he say why?"

  "He said Floyd drank a lot. Do you think Floyd is involved in this?"

  "I don't know, Jennifer. I'm going to try to find out."

  We hung up and I went out of the building and across the street to my car.

  CHAPTER 8

  Floyd Riggens was living in a small, six-unit stucco apartment building on a side street in Burbank, just about ten blocks from the Walt Disney Studio. There were three units on the bottom and three on top, and an L-shaped stair at the far end of the building. It was a cramped, working-class neighborhood, but working class was good. Working class means that people go to work. When people go to work, it makes things easier for private eyes and other snoopers who skulk around where they shouldn't.

  I parked three houses down, then walked back. Riggens had the front apartment, on top. Number four. None of the units seemed to belong to a manager, which was good, but the front door was open on the bottom center unit, which was bad. Light mariachi music came from the center unit and the wonderful smells of simmering menudo and fresh-cut cilantro and, when I drew closer, the sound of a woman singing with the music. I walked past her door as if I belonged, then took the stairs to the second level. Upstairs, the drapes were drawn on all three units. Everybody at work. I went to number four, opened the screen, and stood
in Riggens's door with my back to the street. It takes longer to pick a lock than to use a key, but if a neighbor saw me, maybe they'd think I was fumbling with the key.

  Floyd Riggens's apartment was a single large studio with a kitchenette and a closet and the bath along the side wall. A sleeping bag and a blanket and an ashtray were lined against the opposite wall and a tiny Hitachi portable television sat on a cardboard box in the corner. A carton of Camel Wides was on the floor by the sleeping bag. You could smell the space, and it wasn't the sweet, earthy smells of menudo. It smelled of mildew and smoke and BO. If Floyd Riggens was pulling down graft, he sure as hell wasn't spending it here.

  I walked through the bathroom and the closet and the kitchenette and each was dirty and empty of the items of life, as if Riggens didn't truly live here, or expect to, any more than a tourist expects to live in a motel. There was a razor and a toothbrush and deodorant and soap in the bathroom, but nothing else. The sink and the tub and the toilet were filmed with the sort of built-up grime that comes of long-term inattention, as if Riggens used these things and left, expecting that someone else would clean them, only the someone never showed and never cleaned.

  There were four shirts and three pants hanging in the closet, along with a single navy dress uniform. Underwear and socks and two pair of shoes were laid out neatly on the floor of the closet, and an empty gym bag was thrown in the far back comer. The underwear and the socks were the only neat thing in the apartment.

  An open bottle of J&B scotch sat on the counter in the kitchenette, and three empties were in a trash bag on the floor. The smell of scotch was strong. A couple of Domino's pizza boxes were parked in the refrigerator along with four Styrofoam Chicken McNuggets boxes and half a quart of lowfat milk. An open box of plastic forks and a package of paper plates sat on the counter beside the sink. The sink was empty, but that's probably because there were no pots or pans or dishes. I guess Riggens had made the choice to go disposable. Why clutter your life with the needless hassle of washing and cleaning when you can use it and throw it away?