Fallen Angels (12 page)

“Knucklehead?” Fricke asked, with a hurt expression. “I ain’t the one that lost my car keys tonight.”

Josie left them outside the coffee shop arguing in their usual way, and knew everything was back to normal between them. She admired and trusted Fricke, but realized with some sadness she wasn’t as concerned about locating Mouse as she was nervous about those bad vibes growing around one of her officers.

SEVEN

C
riminals didn’t take days off, so weekends, holidays, kids’ birthdays, and special occasions meant business as usual for most cops. Sometimes they got lucky and were given the time off, but Josie had never counted on it. She went to the office every day. Her staff didn’t come in on the weekends, but it was quiet so she usually got caught up on a week’s worth of paperwork. The bureau rarely worked on weekends, meaning there were no annoying phone calls or worthless trips to the Wilshire offices.

The adjutant’s desk was clean, which meant Bobby Jones had dumped everything back on hers. Her adjutant was a good worker. Josie didn’t understand why Behan disliked the guy so much, but chalked it up to the veteran detective’s irritable disposition.

She’d almost forgotten Behan was in Las Vegas getting married this weekend. Josie couldn’t wait to see the bride. She pictured this cranky white-haired old woman with a cane, stuffing stale wedding cake into the big grouchy redhead’s mouth. The image was so bizarre she forced herself to stop thinking about it.

Most of the paperwork was finished and stacked on her secretary’s desk or shifted to her computer before noon. Josie straightened up her office and went upstairs to see if her vice lieutenant was working. The office was empty except for Lieutenant Marge Bailey, hunched over a computer keyboard arranging an assortment of booking photos on the monitor.

Marge supervised the biggest vice unit in the city with a major portion of her efforts and personnel dedicated to prostitution enforcement. Hollywood had more than its share of working ladies who’d come to tinseltown by the truckload looking for fame and fortune, and when they got hungry enough settled for a dime bag and the price of a room.

This lieutenant seemed to be the most unlikely person to run an operation as unwieldy and gritty as this one. Marge was beautyqueen gorgeous, tall, with a swimsuit-model figure and long, naturally blond hair. She was in her thirties but looked twenty, and became something of a legend in undercover vice lore as a young officer when she dressed as a hooker and tried to catch unsuspecting johns on Sunset Boulevard. This gorgeous blond stopped traffic for hours and drew an unruly crowd of admirers, causing a mini-riot. But, anyone who mistook her for anything but a dead serious cop was in for an eye-opening experience. She was an expert shot, studied martial arts and swore like a longshoreman. Josie considered her a friend, probably the only female friend she had in the department.

“What’s up?” Marge said, still fixated on her keyboard. “You busy?”

“Fuck, yes.”

“Good. Want to hear about your meeting last night?”

Marge groaned and finally looked up. “No, but I guess since you took mercy and let me celebrate my birthday away from Vince Milano, I should pretend to care. Did he ask about me?” She grinned and turned off the computer.

“He was a perfect gentleman and your name never came up.”

“Did he hit on you?” Marge asked and laughed when Josie grimaced. “Why not? You’re tall, dark and beautiful.”

“I’m also over thirteen years old which in his world is ancient.”

“What’d he want?”

Josie told her what happened at the meeting and everything she had learned about Peter Lange. The prospect of creating a cheat sheet for the club owners to obey the law didn’t appeal to Marge but she agreed to do it.

“Have you and Behan compared notes on this Hillary Dennis homicide?” Josie asked. With the murder happening in Lange’s house and his connection to Vince Milano, she wanted Marge’s resources involved.

“Kind of.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I asked if I could help and he told me to fuck off . . . in so many words.”

“What’s Avanti’s like?” Josie changed the subject. She’d deal with Behan when he returned.

“Basically, an old warehouse cesspool, but a very enticing, welldecorated septic tank. The music’s too loud; it’s too dark; crowd’s too young . . . got everything from alcohol to drugs and unprotected sex in dark corners. Your typical Vince Milano dive. We’re checking a couple of clubs tonight. Want to go with us? See for yourself.”

“How often are your people in there?”

“At least a couple times a week,” Marge said and sat back. “Wait, is that dirtbag complaining about us, again?”

“Actually no, he was one of the few that didn’t, but I was wondering if you might have citations that could tell us who Hillary went clubbing with. Do you remember seeing her at Avanti’s?”

“Probably not, but we can do a run on citations and FI’s.”

Josie knew the field interview cards were probably more valuable since officers really didn’t need a violation of law to make one. Sometimes it was just a suspicion, an intuitive nagging that made them jot down the information that put a particular person in a place at a certain time. On numerous occasions those FI’s identified a suspect when all other means had failed.

Josie wasn’t crazy about spending her Saturday night clubhopping, but it wasn’t as if she had anything else to do, so she agreed to tag along for a few hours.

“I’ll talk to Behan on Monday,” Josie said. “He’s got to work with you.”

“Thanks, I love sharing my day with Mr. Sunshine.”

“He’s getting married today. He should be pleasant for a few months.”

“He’s divorced again?”

“Hope so,” Josie said. “Wanna get something to eat when you’re done here?”

“No mad dash to get home . . . Is hubby out of town?” Marge asked.

“Don’t exactly know where he is. But I’m not in the mood to talk about it.”

Marge got up quickly and covered the computer. She was wearing tight Levi’s and a belt equipped with a brown leather holster containing a small .45 semi-auto. She took a long leather jacket from another chair and slipped it on to cover the gun, her badge and a small handcuff case on her belt.

“Let’s go across the street and get a glass of wine,” Marge said, gently pushing Josie toward the door. “I gotta hear all about this.”

They walked across Sunset to Nora’s, an upscale restaurant with a dingy bar that had great chili fries and a decent selection of beer and wine. After several minutes of insisting she didn’t want to talk about her marriage, Josie told her friend everything.

“Do you want him back?” Marge asked when Josie finished.

Josie hesitated, but not because she didn’t know the answer. She wanted Jake back, but was determined not to sound pathetic.

“We’ll see,” she said.

They were both hungry and ate large hamburgers and a couple of orders of chili fries washed down with glasses of Pinot. Marge didn’t give advice or pretend to understand what Josie was feeling. She allowed Josie to talk and share her thoughts because they were both old enough to know this wasn’t an intellectual problem that could be fixed with counseling or rational thinking. She listened, and at the right time changed the subject.

“You kill ‘Not So’ yet?” Marge asked, raising an eyebrow as she sipped her wine.

“You always know how to make me feel better.”

“Bastard needs to die.”

“No, he needs to irritate somebody else. I kind of feel sorry for him,” Josie said and wondered if she really meant that or if it was the wine talking.

“Why? He’s evil.”

“No,” Josie said, trying to sound serious. “You’ve got to be smart to be evil . . . he’s just nasty.”

“That’s our bureau, ‘Not So’ Bright and Art Perry . . . Nasty and Sneaky, two of the original department dwarfs.”

They nearly finished a bottle of wine while identifying the other five dwarfs—Jerky, Shaky, Slimy, Nerdy, and Dopey—within the department’s higher ranks. Josie realized this was the first hurts-to-breathe laugh she’d had in a long time. It revived her spirits. The wine, however, made her tired, and she excused herself after a couple of hours to take a nap on her office couch before the vice unit started its trek through the clubs.

Traffic in the administrative area was Saturday afternoon light. Most cops knew these office workers took weekends off, so one or two of the uniformed officers would use the empty desks to write reports or make personal calls in a quiet place. Josie closed the door to her office and turned off the lights. There wasn’t a window in the building, so the room darkened immediately. She lay down on the couch but couldn’t sleep. Her thoughts were a mix of David and Jake, mostly Jake. She wondered how he was doing on his own. He’d seemed pretty pathetic the last time she saw him with his wrinkled suit and sauce-stained shirt. For days, she’d resisted the temptation to call his cell phone or leave a text message. It would be easier to talk to him in person, but she finally turned on the light and took her Blackberry out of her jacket. “Hi, hope you’re ok, love J,” was all she sent. That was enough. She curled up on the couch and fell asleep.

The pounding on her door woke her about three hours later.

“Ma’am, Lieutenant Bailey says it’s time for roll call,” a female voice shouted from the other side of the door.

“I’m coming,” she yelled back, surprised at not feeling any illeffects from the lunchtime wine fest. Actually, it was the best sleep she’d had in days, and she was completely refreshed. She checked her Blackberry, no messages.

On her way to roll call, Josie stopped in the locker room, washed her face, combed her hair and was ready to enjoy the night’s activities.

Marge organized about thirty officers to work the task force. They gathered in the roll call room and waited for their assignments. She’d borrowed six uniformed officers from patrol and Fricke and his partner had offered to assist. Josie knew the two hype officers frequently worked with vice since they shared a number of the same clientele.

Fricke stopped Josie as she entered the roll call room and explained that he and Frank hadn’t been able to locate Mouse, but would continue to look for her. He seemed distracted and excused himself after a few seconds. She watched him jostle for space on the back row bench, leaning against Butler until his partner was pressed against the wall. Their behavior and banter was normal again . . . as normal as they got, but Fricke wasn’t as chatty with her tonight as he usually was.

The other vice officers were in plainclothes, and were assigned to mingle among the crowds in the different clubs to spot violations. Josie sat in the back of the room and watched Marge go over the game plan for the evening. That night, they’d inspect six of the biggest night clubs in Hollywood. The plainclothes officers would go in groups of five to each of the locations. When Marge and the uniformed officers arrived they would start writing the citations and/or making arrests. It was a concise and simple plan. Marge understood the secret to a good strategy—don’t have too many moving parts because nothing ever goes according to plan; and when it turns to shit you’ve got to have confidence that you’ve picked the best people who can improvise and get the job done anyway. Some supervisors never understood that basic rule and were constantly frustrated.

“You can ride with me, Captain,” Marge said, after she’d dismissed the officers. “Nothing’s gonna happen till I get there.”

“Where’s Avanti’s on your list?” Josie asked.

“I figured we’d stop there close to the end, give them time to work themselves into a fucking frenzy of violations,” Marge said, grinning. “But, we can’t wait too long. Sometimes word gets out we’re working, and they clean up their shit before we get there.”

Their first stop was the club belonging to the woman who objected to the frequent vice checks. Her doorman, an overweight Samoan-looking young man in a polyester Hawaiian shirt, groaned when he saw Marge.

“Man, don’t you guys got nowhere else to go?” he whined, as they moved past him into the barely lit lobby.

The owner immediately appeared. She was ready to do battle until she noticed Josie standing next to Marge.