Cold Shoulder Read online

  She even mentally castigated the police for being so slow in finding the cabdriver who had driven her home that afternoon. If she had been on the case it would have been the first thing she’d have checked. She closed her eyes, trying to remember if he had driven off before she crossed the road. She was sure he had and then she remembered Jake and Rosie helping her up the staircase. Had he seen them? She was sure he had already driven off.

  Satisfied she was in the clear, she left the apartment, her pace quickening as she walked toward the bus stop on Marengo. Nothing in her appearance resembled the woman the police had described: her hair was well cut. She looked elegant, though her shoes were too tight and she was without a purse, but she was more confident than she had been in years. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the grocery store window as she passed and didn’t even notice the rows of liquor bottles, so intent was she on admiring herself. It was another day, and she had moved on faster than she could ever have anticipated or believed possible.

  3

  Captain Rooney looked over the reports and statements from the various officers. They were, as he had half expected, of little use. It was already mid-June, Norman Hastings’s body had been discovered on the seventeenth of May and they had, in Rooney’s estimation, fuck all. The taxi driver had given them a bum address and nobody had located the bloodstained woman with only one shoe. She had disappeared—could even be dead. The Summerses had been questioned again to see if they could match the description of the man driving the sedan from the anonymous caller. He was similar, they said, but they were not too clear about the driver of the vehicle. When shown a photograph of Norman Hastings, they were sure that it was not him. Rooney doodled over his notebook.

  He wondered again if they were looking for two killers, the man and the blond woman working together. They had killed Hastings and then had an argument, maybe they had come to blows inside the car at the shopping mall. The woman subsequently made the anonymous phone call describing her partner, husband, or lover.… But if that was so, she would have known the killer’s height and could even have given his name, although that might have incriminated her, too. Rooney concluded that the woman was probably not involved in the murder and did not know the killer’s name or height because she was, as he had first thought, a prostitute the driver had simply picked up. But what kind of nut picks up a whore with a fucking body in the trunk of his car?

  The missing blond woman had become a vital witness to the murder of Norman Hastings. Somebody out there knew who she was. A man and a woman had helped her out of the cab. Rooney instructed his officers to step up the search for her, and called in the two officers Lorraine had met earlier.

  He checked over all the statements they had taken. They were convinced that no one had lied. They thought the cabdriver might have been mistaken. “We saw only one blond woman, Captain, but she had all her teeth, her hair was short, and she was real smart, just staying with her friend. She didn’t look like a whore or the type to know one.”

  Rooney told them to go back and question everybody again. Seeing them exchange covert, bored looks, Rooney snapped, “Get the cab-driver to go with you if you have to. Go on, get moving!”

  The two men had just reached the office door when Josh Bean walked in. “You better look at this, Captain.”

  Rooney reached out his beefy hand for the internal fax sheet. Rooney looked up. “We’d better check this out. Looks like our missing girl.”

  He snatched up his jacket, told the two officers they could go off duty. If the new information panned out, they had just found their star witness and the search was over.

  The run-down apartment block was a graffiti jungle. Burned-out rubbish littered the disused yard and every window was smashed. The Paradise Apartments billboard, showing palm trees and a seminaked girl sunbathing, was peeling and covered in daubed slogans. A lot of buildings around this section of East Fair Oaks and Colorado were going to be part of a big redevelopment. The apartment block was now being patrolled by a security company and makeshift fences had been erected around the grounds. Some sections offence were broken down, but the big gates were usually locked.

  The security guard was sweating, holding the lead of a snarling dog that looked like a cross between Lassie and a pit bull terrier. Rooney overheard him explaining that he had first seen the car on his day shift, two days ago. He’d told the company it had been dumped but nobody had done anything about it.

  Rooney stepped under the obligatory yellow tape to join the group gathered around the covered corpse. There were two patrol cars, lights blinking, and officers assembled to clear the area. Groups of kids were hanging around watching avidly. This wasn’t unusual in the middle of the day as most of them never bothered to attend school for more than one or two days a week, if that. This was becoming known as crack dealer territory.

  “Who found her?” Rooney asked as he approached the corpse.

  “That kid over there, one with the red hat on, but he must have had help to drag her from the trunk of the car. That’s been there for maybe two days, by the way—the car, dunno about the body.” The young officer was sweating, it was almost ninety degrees, and the sun blistered down. Flies were everywhere.

  Rooney stared at the kid, who was no more than six or seven and laughing as he pointed to the dead body, nudging his pals. The sweating officer continued. “I talked to the security guard, seems they stopped patrolling nights for a few days when they got short-staffed, and this was dumped about the same time. He says he told his company about it but nobody did anythin’ about it.” Rooney wrinkled his nose; the stench was disgusting. “Yeah, you said. Anythin’ else?”

  “She was in the trunk of a wrecked car, we think the kid dragged her out here, said he thought she was alive—but if she had any jewelry on her, she ain’t got it now.”

  As he crouched down, Rooney took out his handkerchief to cover his face—the stench was of a decomposing body at least two days old, and with the heat, it smelled like longer. So much for the kid’s story about thinking she was still alive. She was wearing a floral-patterned dress, with a belt and flat black shoes. Rooney checked them and noted they were the same size as the one they had found in Hastings’s car. Her thin legs were bare, and one stretched out at an odd angle. Her arms were by her sides, the back of her dress undone. The thin blond hair was matted with dark congealed blood; a wound gaped at the base of her skull, so deep, he could see white bone. Slowly they turned over the un-wieldy corpse. Her face had been hammered out of all recognition. Blood obliterated the brightly colored flowers that had once patterned the front of her dress.

  There was nothing Rooney could do; he couldn’t tell if it was their witness or not. His only option was to wait for the report to come in, and for her to be cleaned up so he could see her face.

  “Any of her teeth missing?” he asked as an afterthought.

  An officer peered down into the mass of blood hiding her face.

  “I can’t tell, her nose has been flattened so bad.”

  Rooney plodded over to the kid, who, seeing the big, square-shouldered man head toward him, was suddenly not quite so cocky and self-assured.

  “You move the body, did you?”

  “Yeah, I was gonna do mouth-to-mouth, been learnin’ it at swimmin’.”

  “Have you? So once you dragged her out, then what did you do?”

  “Nothin’. I ran to the guard, told him, that’s all I done, honest.”

  Rooney drew the boy close and told him to turn out his pockets, but he had nothing, no jewelry, and started to cry.

  “Any of your pals take anythin’ off the body?”

  “No, sir, I swear, nothin’, I done no thin’.”

  Rooney returned to his office with Bean. He opened a bottle of Scotch, and even the lieutenant had a heavy hit. No matter how many you see, it’s always the smell that gets to you, stays in your nostrils. The sweet, sticky, cloying smell of rotting flesh.

  “I think it’s our witness. Cindere
lla,” Rooney said flatly. “Fuck it! Really needed to talk to her.” He sighed.

  “Yeah.” Bean knocked back his drink. His eyes watered, not being a drinker, but seeing the corpse had made him feel very shaky. He hadn’t seen that many and Rooney knew it. He indicated the bottle for a refill and Bean shook his head.

  “No, thanks, I’m okay.”

  “I sincerely hope you are, son, because we got a lot of work to do.”

  Rooney looked up as his secretary peered in. A message had come through from the city morgue: the corpse wouldn’t be ready for viewing until at least the following day, maybe longer. Did he want to speak to the scene-of-crime officers? Rooney jerked his head for Bean to go and do the legwork; he had some paperwork to finish. Bean raised his eyebrow, knowing Rooney always said that when he wanted to take off for home. But he was wrong this time: Rooney spent the next hour making phone calls to different precincts. It was something one of the officers had said—or he might even have said it himself. She had been hammered in the face and at the back of the head. He wanted to know if anyone else had a similar homicide—weapon used probably some kind of hammer, that was all he had.… In reality, he spent more time shooting the breeze with old buddies, in no hurry for the facts. He knew he wouldn’t get them straight off, if at all. Old files would have to be sifted through and checked out on computer. Probably wasting everybody’s time, but he caught up on gossip, arranged a game of billiards, and agreed to have a drink with Colin Sparks, an old poker-playing pal he hadn’t seen for six months.

  Sitting on a bar stool in Joe’s Diner, his fat ass bulging over the red plastic stool top, Rooney had downed two beers and a chaser by the time Sparks walked in, but promptly ordered another round and a fresh bowl of peanuts.

  Sparks whacked him on the back, then handed Rooney a dog-eared file. “I’m late because I got interested in this! It happened before I got transferred—it’s been around for four years. Dead hooker. Go on, read it.”

  Rooney grinned at the young, fresh-faced lieutenant and cuffed him like a father would his son. “Looking sharper than ever, Colin. How you keeping?”

  “Fine, new baby on the way—everythin’s good.”

  Rooney opened the file. He looked at the prostitute’s face, her dyed blond hair scraped back from her head showing at least an inch of dark hair growth. Half-Mexican. Maria Valez, age thirty-two. The next page had a photograph of her body when it was discovered in the trunk of a wrecked Buick. Like the dead woman that afternoon, Maria’s face had been virtually obliterated by heavy blows. There was an enlarged shot of the back of her scalp, showing the deep wound. Type of weapon, possibly a claw hammer. No witness, no arrest, no charges, case closed for lack of evidence, but authorized to remain open on file.

  Rooney closed the file and tossed a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “Can I keep this? There’re a few details on blood groups I’d like to check out with my case.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks.” Rooney smiled and waved at the waitress for another round. “An’ I’m gonna treat you to the best raw fish in Pasadena! You know that Japanese place? Serves good shark fin soup, you ever had shark fin soup?”

  Rooney, well toasted, and Sparks, still fairly sober, left Joe’s Diner to head for the Japanese restaurant farther up the road on Holly. Rooney’s crumpled jacket flapped. The file was stuffed under his arm and he was sweating in the early-evening heat. He upped his flat-footed pace to get into the air-conditioned restaurant.

  Lorraine emerged from the health club Fit as a Fiddle feeling like a washed-out rag. Her heels were blistered, her silk blouse creased, beads of sweat dripped from her bangs, and her hair was wet at the nape of her neck. So far she had applied for ten different jobs to discover either that the position had been filled, or that she didn’t have the required experience. At Fit as a Fiddle she had snapped back at the Cher-with-muscles look-alike: “How much fucking experience do you need to pick up a phone and book an appointment?”

  Cher had wafted a hand adorned with fake nails. “Maybe I was just bein’ polite. You look like death warmed over for starters—and you’re too old, okay? That real enough for you?”

  Lorraine had slammed out and was about to throw in the towel and go home when she saw the whitewashed storefront with a handwritten sign in the window: STAFF WANTED. Lorraine checked the notes she’d taken from the help wanted ads on the AA board. She squinted at the storefront; printed in fading letters was SELLER SALES. She figured she might have gotten lucky—maybe they’d just started advertising. She straightened her jacket, used the sleeve to wipe the sweat from her face, and walked to the door at the side of the store’s front window. The buzzer sounded like a low fart. A moment later and she would have faced Captain Rooney as he and Sparks walked into the Japanese restaurant three doors down the street. As it was, she almost walked straight out of Seller Sales: there was no one in the reception area—just a counter, a bowl of wilting flowers, two posters for Gay Liberation, and a faded breakfast cereal ad. She looked toward a large makeshift screen dividing the shop front from the back room and could hear the tinny sound of a radio playing. She coughed, edged closer to the side of the screen. A man shot around it, covered in white paint. “Thank God! Come on, come on, hurry up. I’m Art Mathews. I’ve been getting desperate.”

  Lorraine hesitated, then she closed the door behind her, following Art around the screen and into the back room. He was about five foot four with a tight, muscular little body shown off by a close-fitting white T-shirt, skintight white jeans, white sneakers, and white socks. His dark eyes were too large for his face, magnified behind huge glasses—round, thin, red-framed bifocals—and made even more striking by his complete baldness. The room was cluttered with paints, trestle tables, stacks of canvases, ladders, and rolls of carpet. Art walked in small, mincing steps, sidestepping all the paraphernalia with a dancer’s precision.

  “Now the phone is somewhere, and the lists. Oh, Jesus, where did I put the lists? I’m so behind—and they said you’d be here hours ago …”

  Lorraine looked around. “I think there’s a misunderstanding.”

  Art stood, hands on hips, his little rosebud mouth pursed.

  “I was wondering about the job on offer, printed in the window and—” she was interrupted.

  “Seller thingy closed down months ago, I’ve taken the lease over. I’m opening an art and photographic gallery here tomorrow, would you believe it? My God, if you knew what I’ve been through … where’s the fucking phone!”

  Lorraine spotted it beneath a table. Art dragged it out, swore because it was off the hook, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

  Lorraine watched as he arched his body in order to drag out a card from his jeans pocket, and punched out some digits.

  “What are you here for?”

  She coughed. “Receptionist.” She tried again. “Salesperson.”

  He looked at the card, then back to Lorraine, his eyes darting like a demented frog’s. He pursed his lips as his call was connected. “This is Mr. Art Mathews and I was promised a … hello? Fucking answering machine!”

  He sprang to his feet. “I need someone to call my guest list, there’s over a hundred people, and I need it done by tonight. I need someone here to help me open this up. I’ve got to get that paint on the walls, hang those canvases and photos. I called this shittin’ agency for them to send someone, did they? Jesus Christ!”

  Lorraine unbuttoned her jacket. “I’ll do it. How much you paying?”

  Art clapped his hands. “Ten bucks an hour—I love you. What’s your name, darling?” She told him. “Right, Lorraine, here’s the phone, grab a seat, I’ll find the list and you start with the calls. I need to know how many are coming so I can order the wine …”

  “Have they been invited already?” Lorraine asked.

  “They have, dear, but not to this address. I had a problem with my last place. Now, if I don’t open and show all these canvases and photographs, I’ll be fucked—I’ll lose
my credibility and it’s hanging on a thread as it is. Now sit yourself down and dial, sweetie.…” He alighted on a bulging Filofax. “Right, darling, here you go. Be charming, be cool, but get an answer.”

  Lorraine perched on the chair, took out her cigarettes and lighter, and studied the guest list, detailed in a neat fine scrawl, in pinks, greens, and blues with red stars drawn against some names. “Does the red star mean they’re important?”

  “No—just a good lay!” Art shrieked with laughter. He did almost a triple pirouette as the buzzer sounded in reception. He scurried out, flapping his hands at Lorraine. “Dial, go on, start dialing, and get results.…”

  Lorraine could hear a lot of shrieking and raised voices, then Art returned with a massive floral display—and two extraordinary-looking transsexuals, carrying a basket of food, a crate of distilled water, and two more floral displays. “These are my dearest friends, Nula and Didi, they’re going to help me. This is—what’s your name again, dear? She’s going to make all the phone calls and be Girl Friday.”

  Nula and Didi began to put down their supplies as Art moved to clear the back of the room. Lorraine smiled at them and continued to flick glances in their direction as she started making calls. They were both outrageous to say the least, but Nula—the one wearing a silky red wig down to her waist—was particularly startling. She had on a frilled off-the-shoulder bright yellow Spanish-style blouse, a six-inch-wide black stretch belt with an enormous buckle, tight Lycra orange pants that almost matched the red of her wig, and she was wearing high stacked heels, her toenails painted a dark plum red, matching her long fingernails. Her makeup was applied so thick it was shiny with sweat, but her thick lips were perfectly outlined with dark maroon pencil and pink lip gloss. Nula was even taller than Lorraine, and as she plucked the wig off her head, she revealed a classic male hairline that was receding to almost the middle of her scalp. She tossed the wig onto a table and opened a bottle of water.