Part 4 (2/2)
”Their money's as good as anyone else's. Better than most. And don't downgrade them, captain; they're the great American middle cla.s.s. The people who pay your salary, by the way.”
Palatazin nodded thoughtfully. Gayle's dark brown eyes still held a hint of anger, glittering like deep pools of water disturbed by the casual throw of a stone. ”Well,” he said, ”I'd better get to work and earn that salary. Just what is it you wanted to see me about?”
”Never mind. You answered my questions already. I was going to ask you why you thought Roach had gone into hiding.” She capped her Flair and dropped it back into her purse. ”You might be interested to know that he won't be the lead story next week.”
”I'm relieved.”
She stood up from her chair and slung the purse over her shoulder. ”Okay,” she said. ”Off the record. Are you any closer to catching him than you were last week?”
”Off the record? No. But we may have some new leads.”
”Such as?”
”Too premature yet. We'll have to wait and see.” She smiled thinly. ”Don't trust me anymore, do you?”
”Partly that. Also partly that we're working on some information that came off the street today, and you of all people should know how reliable that can be.” He stood up and went with her toward the door.
She stopped with her hand on the k.n.o.b. ”I ... I didn't mean to lose my cool. But I got involved in something that was pretty hairy today. Something weird. You must think I'm pus.h.i.+ng pretty hard, don't you?”
”Yes, I do.”
”That's because I don't want to stay on the Tattler all my life. I have to be there when you get him, captain, because riding this story to the ground is the only way I'm ever going to move up. Okay, I'm ambitious and opportunistic as h.e.l.l, but I'm a realist, too. Something as big as this comes along for a journalist only once in a blue moon. I'm going to see that I take advantage of it.”
”We may never find him.”
”Can I quote you on that?”
His eyes widened slightly; he couldn't tell if she was kidding or not because her expression was serious, her gaze sharp and piercing. ”I don't think so,” he said, and opened the door for her. ”I'm sure we'll be talking again. By the way, what knocked Roach off the front page? Something about a little old lady who found Howard Hughes's will in her attic?”
”No.” A chill pa.s.sed through her; she could still smell the rot of those corpses in the cemetery as if her clothes were full of it. ”Grave robbers over at Hollywood Memorial. That's why I was late; I had to call the story in and talk to the Hollywood cops.”
”Grave robbers?” Palatazin said softly.
”Yeah. Or rather coffin robbers. Whoever it was ripped about twenty caskets out of the ground and left . . . everything else lying around.” Palatazin took the pipe out of his mouth and stood staring at her, a dull pulse beating at the base of his neck. ”What?” he said in a strange, hoa.r.s.e voice that sounded more like the croak of a frog.
”Yeah. It's weird.” She started out the door, but suddenly Palatazin's hand was gripping her arm just short of painfully. She looked at him and blinked. His face had gone waxen, his lips moving but making no sound.
”What do you mean?” he said with an effort. ”What are you talking about? When did this happen?”
”Sometime during the night, I guess. Hey, listen . . . you're . . . you're hurting.”
He looked down at his hand and instantly released her. ”I'm sorry. Hollywood Memorial? Who was first on the scene?”
”I was. And a photographer from the Tattler-Jack Kidd. Why are you so interested? Vandalism isn't your detail, is it?”
”No, but. ..” He looked wan and confused, as if he might suddenly collapse on the floor in a limp heap. The set of his eyes with their glazed intensity frightened Gayle so much she felt a quick s.h.i.+ver ripple up her spine. ”Are you all right?” she asked him tentatively, and for a moment he didn't reply.
”Yes,” he said finally, nodding. ”Yes, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'd like for you to go now, Miss Clarke, I have work to do.” He held the door open, and she stepped out into the squad room. She turned toward him, intending to ask him to keep her in mind if and when they did get a solid lead on Roach. The door closed in her face. She thought, s.h.i.+t! What's his problem? Maybe what I've been hearing is true. Maybe the pressure is starting to crack him wide open. If so, that would make for a juicy human interest story. She turned away and left the squad room.
And behind that closed door, Palatazin was gripping his telephone with a white-knuckled hand. The police operator answered. ”This is Palatazin,” he said.
”Get me Lieutenant Kirkland, Hollywood Division.” His voice was urgent and full of terror.
FOUR.
The sun reached its zenith and instantly began to fall, deepening the shadows that clung like a precious autumn chill to the eastern facades of the ma.s.sive stone and gla.s.s buildings at the center of Los Angeles. In the slow decay of hours and light, the sun shone red on the smooth lakes of MacArthur Park; clear, golden beams wafted through the windows of shops and boutiques on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills; dust stirred lazily in the air among the cramped, boxy tenement buildings of East L.A., and clothes strung on lines from window to window caught bits of flying grit; the Pacific surf that rolled up to the edge of the Venice Beach boardwalk, where the kids darted and spun on roller skates like human tops, slowly turned orange, then red deepening toward purple; lights began to glimmer like hot jewels along Sunset and Hollywood boulevards; the San Gabriel Mountains were jumbled piles of light and darkness, the western face of stone glowing red, the eastern exposures almost black. And above the whole metropolis with its eight million separate lives and destinies sat the Kronsteen castle on a throne of rock. It was a huge, sprawling edifice of black weather-beaten stone with high turrets, arched Gothic roofs, broken gargoyles leering from towers or contemplating the patchwork of humanity in the valley below. Many of the windows had been shattered and replaced with boards, but some of the windows at the higher elevations had survived vandalism, and those that were of stained gla.s.s glowed red and blue and purple in the strong, hard light of the setting sun. A chill gathered in the darkening air and began to grow vicious. The wind hissed and whispered around stone battlements like a human voice through broken teeth. And many in the city below thought for just a cold, eerie instant that they heard their names called from behind the falling curtain of night. FIVE Rico Esteban's brain was scorched with hot neon. Around him there was the thunder of engines, the crisp notes of electric music rippling through the air.
He thought he should say something to the dark-haired girl who sat pressed against the other side of the car, but he could think of only one thing and saying it wouldn't be right-Holy s.h.i.+t. Beyond that crude summation of his feelings, his brain buzzed with overloaded circuits.
He thought, Prenado? Did she say she was pregnant? Only a few minutes before, he'd pulled his fire-engine-red Chevy lowrider in front of Merida Santos's apartment building on Dos Terros Street in the dark tenement barrio of East Los Angeles. Almost immediately she'd come running out of the hallway, where a single dim light bulb exposed a shaky set of stairs and walls layered with spray-painted graffiti, and slid into his car. As he kissed her, he'd thought that something was wrong; her eyes looked funny, they were a little sad, and there were the beginnings of dark circles underneath them. He'd started the Chevy, filling Dos Terros Street with a rumble that shook windowpanes and brought a couple of shouted complaints from the old folks, and then had screeched off toward Whittier Boulevard. Merida, her long black hair cascading in waves around her shoulders, sat away from him and stared at her hands. She was wearing a blue dress and the silver crucifix on a chain that Rico had bought for her birthday the week before.
”Hey,” he'd said, and leaned over to tilt her face up with a forefinger beneath her chin. ”What's wrong? You been crying? That crazy perra been beating on you?”
”No,” she'd replied, her soft voice trembling slightly. She was still more little girl than woman. At sixteen her flesh was smooth and tawny, her body as tight and lean as a colt's. Usually her eyes sparkled with shy, laughing innocence, but tonight something was different, and Rico couldn't figure it out.
If her crazy old mother hadn't been beating on her again, then what was wrong?
”Did Luis run away from home again?” he asked her. She shook her head. He leaned back, cus.h.i.+oned in the cup of his red bucket seat, and brushed a lock of thick black hair off his forehead. ”That Luis better watch out,” he said quietly, swerving around a couple of drunks who were dancing together in the middle of the street. He hit the horn, and one of them shot him the finger.
”The kid's too young to be running with the Homicides. I told him once, I told him a hundred times not to get mixed up with those ladrones. They're going to get him in trouble. Where you want to eat tonight?”
”It don't matter,” Merida said. Rico shrugged and turned onto the boulevard, where a gaudy carnival of neon pulsated over p.o.r.no movie houses, bars, discos, and liquor stores. Though it was just past six-thirty, the lowriders were already jostling for position, chugging like streamlined locomotives. They were painted every color of the rainbow from electric blue to Day-Glo orange and outfitted with zebra-striped tops or leopard-skin upholstery or radio antennae that seemed as tall as towers. The ma.s.s of cars moved at a crawl, bouncing and swaying like wild bucking horses along the boulevard, which was lined with hordes of Chicano teenagers looking for fun on a Sat.u.r.day night. Music from transistor and car radios blared at each other, the tumultuous frenzy of rock and disco overpowered only by the thundering ba.s.s lines that prowled out through the open doors of the bars. The air, sweet and hot with exhaust, cheap perfume, and marijuana, crackled with tinny voices. Rico reached over and turned his own radio up loud, his brown face split by a grin. The growl of KALA's Tiger Eddie became a hypnotic chant-”. . . gonna TEAR this town tonight, gonna lay it to WASTE, 'cause we're the BEST, beatin' all the REST on a SAT-UR-DAY night! Mighty KALA, comin' at you with The Wolves annnnddddd 'Born to Be Bad'!”
Merida had turned the radio off. The Wolves wailed on anyway from a dozen other sets of speakers. ”Rico,” she'd said, and now she was looking him straight in the eyes, and her lower lip trembled. ”I found out I'm pregnant.” He thought, Holy s.h.i.+t! Pregnant? Did she say pregnant? He'd almost said ”Who did it?” but stopped himself cold. He knew she'd been sleeping only with him for the past three months, even after he'd gotten his apartment down on the low, poor end of Sunset Boulevard. She was a decent, good, loyal woman. Woman?
he thought.
Barely sixteen. A girl, yes, but a woman in many ways, too. Rico was too stunned to speak. The waves of lowriders before him seemed to undulate, an ocean of metal. He'd used rubbers most every time and thought he'd been careful, but now . . . What am I going to do? he asked himself. Your big macho p.r.i.c.k has gotten this woman in trouble, and now what do you do?
”You sure?” he said finally. ”I mean . . . how do you know?”
”I ... didn't have my time. I went to the clinic, and the doctor told me.”
”Couldn't he be wrong?” He was trying to think-When did I not use protection?
When we were drinking wine that night, or when we were in a hurry . . .?
”No,” she said, the finality in her voice starting a dull throbbing in the pit of his stomach.
”Does your mama know? She'll kill me. She hates my guts anyway. She said if I saw you again she was going to shoot me or call the cops . . .”
”She don' know,” Merida said softly. ”n.o.body else knows.” She made a little choking sound like a rabbit being strangled.
”Don't cry!” he said too loudly and too sharply, and then realized that she was already crying, her head bent and the tears rolling down her cheeks in large drops. He felt protective of her, more like a big brother than a lover. Do I love Merida? he asked himself; the question, so simply stated, baffled him. He wasn't sure he knew what love would feel like. Did it feel like good s.e.x? Or was it like knowing somebody was there to talk easy to you? Or did it feel awesome and silent, like sitting in church?
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