Death on a High Floor (24 page)

“Fuck!” Spritz said. He had pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and was trying to clean himself off, without much success. Drady was staring at his hand, which was dripping vomit.

“Looks like this car will have to go to the carwash,” I said.

As soon as they hustled me out of the smelly car and got me inside the building, Spritz disappeared. Maybe he went to clean up. Once inside, I heard someone ask if I needed medical attention.

“Nope, he’s fine,” Drady said.

They led me up to a set of cages that looked like the teller windows in a bank. Then Drady went through my pockets and handed my wallet, keys, money, and whatever else he found there to a man who sat behind one of the cages. Kind of like a bank teller who took deposits of objects instead of cash. Finally, he took off my watch and handed that to the teller, too, who put all of it in a plastic bag and labeled it. When that was over, I was frisked again and told to sit in a plastic chair, still handcuffed. I was there for maybe half an hour, after which Drady and another guy took me into the room next door, removed my handcuffs, and promptly stripped me.

There is nothing quite like being stripped naked in front of strangers to remove any feeling that you might still be important.

“Is this really necessary?” I asked.

“Standard procedure for felony arrests,” Drady said.

After they went carefully through my clothing and conducted a body search I’d rather not describe—while wearing plastic gloves—they let me get dressed again, minus underwear, belt, and tie, and re-handcuffed me. Another cop, whose name tag identified him as Cronch, came in. He led me back to what I took to be a booking room. There was a second cop there, sitting at a desk, reading the sports section of the
L.A. Times
. He didn’t identify himself, and I couldn’t see his name tag. He didn’t look up.

I looked at Cronch. “Could you loosen my handcuffs a bit, Sergeant?”

“I’m not a sergeant, Mr. Tarza. Just a jailer. No special title.” He walked over to me, took a key out of his pocket, and made some adjustments to the cuffs. It helped; they chafed less.

“Thank you.”

“No worry. Would you just stand over there?” He pointed to a mark on the floor, between a camera on a tripod and a height chart on the wall. I went and stood there, facing him and the camera.

He looked at me appraisingly, the way I imagined a portrait photographer might. Then he pulled a piece of Kleenex out of a box on the desk and walked up to me.

“I’m going to wipe your nose,” he said. “Whatever dripped out of it isn’t going to look so great in your booking photo.”

I thanked him as he wiped. There wasn’t actually a lot of drip. It was amazing how little had gotten on me.

“Aren’t you,” I asked, “going to hang a number around my neck?” When had I become so damn helpful?

“No, new process,” he said. “It’s generated digitally by the computer.”

“Oh.”

Cronch fiddled with the camera. I had a thought. “Could I have my tie back for the picture?”

“Sorry, can’t do that. SOP is no tie or belt.”

“Why?”

“So you won’t hurt yourself. Or us.”

He made some adjustments to the tripod, and then cranked it up a few notches. The last guy had evidently been shorter.

“Okay, Mr. Tarza, please look directly at the camera,” he said.

I did, but immediately thought about something that had always bothered me when I saw booking photos in the newspaper. Almost no one ever smiled. I had long ago remarked to myself that if I were ever booked—not that that had seemed even remotely a possibility—I’d try to smile.

But I couldn’t. I don’t know whether it was because I couldn’t summon a smile in the circumstance or because I was subconsciously worried that a smile might send the wrong message. In any case, I heard the shutter click and ended up with the same dour look on my face as every other suspect who’d ever had his mug shot taken.

Cronch glanced over at a computer screen on the desktop. “Looks good,” he said. “Officer Grady will print you now.” He motioned me toward the desk.

The guy who had now been identified as Grady put down his paper and produced two fingerprint cards and an ink pad. I could see that my name and some other data had already been put on the cards. Without a word, he took my right hand, inked the tip of each finger and, one by one, carefully rolled the finger’s print onto the paper. I tried to make small talk.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m shocked you guys still use ink instead of a computer scanner.”

Grady didn’t respond, but simply proceeded to do my left hand. When he was done, he handed the cards to Cronch and went back to reading the paper. It was odd, but I felt offended. The actual feeling I had was that I had been accused of an important crime, and that Grady should pay more attention.

A small color printer was whirring, spitting out the picture. Cronch picked it up and looked at it. “Good enough.” He put it in a manila folder, together with the fingerprint cards.

“May I see the picture?” I asked.

“Sorry, that’s against regs,” Cronch said.

“I can’t see my own picture?”

“You’ll get to see it in the papers, I’d bet.” He gave me a slight smile.

I found myself thinking that I liked Cronch. At least compared to Grady. Which was odd, trying to figure which one of them I liked. Three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about either one of them. Perhaps it was the beginning of the Stockholm syndrome.

“Officer Cronch, may I ask what happens next?” I said.

“You’re free to go.”

“What?”

“Somebody bailed you out.”

“Who?”

“I have no idea.”

With that, he led me back to the reception room, where the desk officer handed me the plastic bag into which he had put my things less than an hour before. “Please go through them, and if everything is in order, sign on that line there at the bottom,” he said.

I rummaged through the bag.

“What about my tie and my belt?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If you want to wait around, I’ll see if we can find them.”

I wanted out of there before someone changed their mind. I would skip the tie and belt. “No, don’t bother. I have others.”

The desk clerk handed me a sheet of paper. “This is your arraignment date.” I read the date. “It’s more than a month from now.”

He looked at me like I was some kind of moron. “Are you in a hurry to be formally accused of murder?”

“No.”

“Well, then go thank the fairy godmother who bailed you out.” He jerked his thumb toward a door to my left.

I opened the door, which opened onto a kind of waiting room, larger than the room I was exiting. I froze with surprise in the doorway. Oscar Quesana was standing there.

“What are you doing here, Oscar?”

“I bailed you out.”

“Why?”

“Jenna asked me to.”

“How’d she know I was here?”

“As soon as they took you off the plane, it was on the news. Anyway, let’s get out of here.”

I followed him through the front door, out into a large parking lot filled with dozens of cars.

“Where’s your car?” I asked.

“Well, my friend, normally, they’d do me the courtesy of letting me park inside here to pick you up. But Spritz is apparently pissed at you about something, so they made me park out on the street.”

“Okay, I could use the walk,” I said.

“Right. But we’ll have to walk through the media gauntlet that’s right outside the front gate.”

I looked out across the parking lot and could see that it was surrounded by a high wall, pierced by a large, filigreed iron gate. We started walking toward it.

As we walked, I could see the masts of microwave trucks poking above the wall, rotating, searching for something in the sky. The Blob itself was still mostly hidden from view. For the moment, it appeared as nothing more than a solid black mass that blocked the light from coming through the grillwork on the gate.

“How many of them are out there, Oscar?” I felt genuine horror. As if Spritz had arranged to have me fed to wild animals.

“A few dozen maybe. Fewer than there’d be if the mayor had just been booked.”

“That’s not funny,” I said. “How far is your car?”

“About a block.”

“That’s not so far.”

“No, but it’s three o’clock,” he said.

“So?”

“Feeding time for the four o’clock news, Robert. They’ll be in a frenzy.”

We had by then gotten up to the gate, and it slid back, retracting into the wall. I could see, just on the other side, the Blob manifest—a surging tide of boom mikes, bodies, and cameras. Then I could hear it. So many staccato shouts that it was hard to make out the individual words. One shout seemed to rise above all the others: “Mr. Tarza! Afraid of the needle?” I felt my stomach tighten, even as we penetrated the first wave of bodies.

The Blob jostled and pushed and grew still louder. A lot of flashes dazzled my eyes. Oscar was in the lead, blocking for me. We were managing to move, but not very fast. I kept ducking to avoid the boom mikes, which danced just in front of my face. The shouting had become a continuous din.

Suddenly, a woman’s high-pitched voice was right in my ear. “We can take you live right now on
News Now
! Live! Right now!” I was tempted, if only for a second, to take them up on their offer. Maybe
News Now!
would protect me from the rest of them while it got its scoop.

Then I realized that my pants were about to come down. I’ve always had narrow hips, and without the belt, together with the weight I’d lost in the prior ten days from not eating very much—nerves I guess—my pants were going to be on the ground. I grabbed my waistband with my left hand, which prevented the disaster, just. But it left me with only one arm to block.

After what seemed an eternity, we finally made it to Oscar’s car. Despite the sea of bodies and equipment that surrounded the car like the tentacles of a huge squid about to engulf its prey, Oscar managed to open the passenger door for me.

I got in, still holding up my pants, and shut the door. Oscar got in on the other side and started the car. We began to move ever so slowly through the crowd. Dozens of flashes were still going off.

“Why don’t you just step on it and kill them,” I said.

“Not a good idea right now,” Oscar said.

We made it out of the Blob and began to accelerate.

I relaxed a bit. “How did you manage to bail me out?”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I thought you couldn’t bail out capital crimes.”

“Who told you you’ve been charged with a capital crime?” Oscar seemed genuinely surprised.

“Spritz told me,” I said. “He claimed I was lying in wait or something.”

“Lying in wait? That is a special circumstance that can bring the death penalty, but it’s rarely used and can be hard to prove.”

“They kept harping on that in the car when they brought me in, and that reporter just shouted it out at me.”

“Don’t know anything about it in your case. They booked you on straight murder one. One killing, no special circumstance. At least for now.”

“Oh. Who set the bail amount?”

“Nobody. They have a bail schedule. You look down the left-hand column. It lists the crime. You look across to the right, it shows the amount. Like a price list. Murder-one is the priciest.”

I was almost afraid to ask. “What’s the price of murder one?”

“One million.”

“A million dollars? Jesus.”

“Jesus wasn’t able to make bail,” he said.

I ignored the comment.

“Where did Jenna get a million dollars?”

“She didn’t. I posted it. In cash. Well, actually in short term CD’s.”

A million dollars is a good chunk of my net worth. After what must have seemed to him an awkward pause on my part, Oscar spoke again.

“Jenna said you were good for it and would pay me back?” He said it the way a teenager would, with the rising inflection at the end. It was the first time I’d ever heard Oscar unsure about anything.