Flat Spin (8 page)

T
he lead investigator in Echevarria’s homicide answered his phone at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire station on the first ring.

“Detective Czarnek.”

Gravelly baritone. Smoker. He sounded world-weary and badass. Somebody in the background was singing “Girl Watcher” by the O’Kaysions. I could hear others laughing. I identified myself and explained why I was calling. It took him a second to connect the dots.

“Which case was it again?”

“Arlo Echevarria.”

“Echevarria, Echevarria.” I heard a drawer slide open and the sound of files being gone through. “Echevarria, Echevarria. Oh, yeah, right. Echevarria, Arlo. And you say you’re who again?”

I repeated my name. I told him that I was calling from Rancho Bonita, but that I’d be happy to drive to Los Angeles to meet with him at his convenience, to provide whatever information I could.

“You say you’re up in Rancho Bonita?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Nice town if you can afford it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, I tell you what, Mr.—what’d you say your name was again?”

“Logan.”

“Mr. Logan, I wouldn’t mind taking a little drive up the coast and come see you. Give my partner and me an excuse to breathe some air we can’t actually see for a change.”

“OK by me.”

“There’s a little Mexican place up your way I’ve eaten at— El Grande’s,” Czarnek said. “Best tortas this side of Ensenada. I believe the city of Los Angeles can afford to spring for lunch. What’s tomorrow looking like for you?”

El Grande Taqueria is an anonymous, green and white taco shack on the working class, lower east side of Rancho Bonita, an eatery with undersized, overpriced servings and no atmosphere— unless you count the beer trucks and lowriders rumbling past outside. You order your food at one window and pick it up at another. Hardly haute cuisine, but more than a few aficionados swear by the place. Half a dozen Mexican joints on Verde Street offered tastier chow in larger portions and at lower prices. But if the good taxpayers of Los Angeles were willing to spring for lunch, who was I to play enchilada snob? Two free meals in two days. An underemployed flight instructor could get used to that kind of treatment.

“Tomorrow’s good,” I said.

“Eleven o’clock?”

“A little early for Mexican food, isn’t it?”

“We like to start early around here,” Czarnek said. “Beat the traffic that way.”

Whoever it was who was singing in the background was now joined by what sounded like at least two other male voices. The tune had changed. It was now Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby.” A man singing about the wonderment of pregnancy. Listening to it felt like the lyrical equivalent of being water-boarded. I told Czarnek I’d see him at eleven and signed off.

After that, I went inside the bank and deposited Gil Carlisle’s check.

L
APD homicide Detective Keith Czarnek was not what I imagined over the phone. He was about fifty and built like a pear. Pink cheeks. Pudgy hands. Receding blonde hair and a high forehead that was beaded with sweat and precancerous skin lesions. Except for the faded Marine Corps eagle, globe and anchor tattooed on his left forearm, and the requisite push-broom cop moustache insulating his top lip, there was nothing badass about the man.

“I’d mainline this stuff if I could,” Czarnek said as he spooned salsa onto his torta.

“Face it,” said Czarnek’s partner, Detective John Windhauser, working on his fourth fish taco, “you’re a beaner food addict.”

We were sitting on molded white plastic chairs, around a molded plastic table. El Grande Taqueria was mobbed as usual. It was approximately 140 degrees in the shade of the restaurant’s corrugated plastic awning. I picked at a cheese enchilada that had coagulated on my plate into a formless red and yellow blob.

“So,” Windhauser said, low enough so the diners around us couldn’t hear, “Mr. Echevarria was shot almost a month ago. How is it you decide to contact us only now?”

“I only heard about it a few days ago,” I said.

Windhauser nodded a little too empathetically. He had a snowy crew cut and a cleft chin, and his face looked like Verdun, pockmarked and ravaged by the acne he’d evidently suffered as a teenager some five decades earlier. He wore pleated Dockers khakis and soft-soled black walking shoes and, like Czarnek, a short-sleeved, light-blue dress shirt. Windhauser’s tie was red paisley. Czarnek’s tie was one of those brown knit jobs with a square bottom, the kind popular back when Eisenhower was in the White House. Czarnek’s gold tie bar said “187”—California penal code for homicide. Windhauser’s tie tack was a set of tiny dangling handcuffs. Both detectives had removed their winter-weight wool sport coats and slung them over their seat backs as a concession to the merciless autumn heat. Other diners tried not to stare at the badge and Kimber .45-caliber pistol clipped to each of their belts.

“You can’t find food like this in LA. This stuff ’s
authentico
,” Czarnek said, mopping up chili sauce with a piece of tortilla. Drops of sweat fell from his face onto his plate.

“Got some salsa on your tie,” Windhauser advised his partner.

“Look who’s talking.”

Windhauser looked down and held up his own tie for closer inspection. “Fuck.” He dipped his paper napkin in his water glass and scrubbed the stain clean.

Neither cop seemed particularly eager to discuss Echevarria’s murder. I didn’t push it. We ate and talked mostly about flying. Windhauser boasted of having served two tours as a door gunner on a Huey in Vietnam. Czarnek confided that he got airsick riding the flying Dumbos at Disneyland. Their approach was straight from the Big Book of Standard Police Interrogation Techniques. Take your time. Build rapport. Put the interview subject at ease before you start jamming him. They smiled openly, their torsos and feet pointed toward me. Their rate of speech, vocal tone, the size and number of their gestures, all mirrored mine. The subliminal message they were trying to send was, “We like you. You should trust us.” Both detectives were playing good cop. I wondered how long and which one would turn bad first. My money was on Windhauser. He had a tough time not narrowing his eyes when he looked at me.

“Must be nice, having your own airplane,” Czarnek said, sipping iced
horchata
through a straw.

“The
Ruptured Duck
’s a good bird—aside from the fact that something’s always breaking. That’s what happens when you get old and crotchety.”

“The
Ruptured Duck
. What kind of name is that?’” Windhauser asked.

“Everybody getting out of the service at the end of World War Two was supposed to wear a temporary insignia on their uniforms to let the military police know they’d been honorably discharged and weren’t AWOL. The insignia was intended to look like an eagle inside a wreath. Only everybody decided that the eagle looked more like a duck. Some wiseacre said it looked like a ‘ruptured duck.’ The name stuck.”

“So you went with it,” Czarnek said.

“I would’ve gone with Tweetie, but it was already taken.”

Czarnek smiled. Windhauser wiped his mouth, wadded his paper napkin, and tossed it on his plate. Then he sucked down some Diet Pepsi. Czarnek sniffed audibly and cleared his throat. The prearranged signal. Time to get down to police business.

“So, Mr. Logan,” Windhauser said, “you say you knew Mr. Echevarria how?”

“We hunted terrorists together and usually killed them.”

The two LAPD detectives glanced at each other, then at me.

“You wanna run that one by us again?” Czarnek said.

I told them how Echevarria and I had been assigned to a top-secret team of government assassins tasked in the wake of September 11th with terminating individuals across the globe who had been deemed threats to the homeland. I even used the term, “extreme prejudice.” I explained how our rules of engagement dictated that there were no rules of engagement. I told them how we operated with clear understanding that if any of us were ever captured by hostile forces, the Secretary truly would disavow any knowledge of our activities. I explained that there was no shortage of evil people around the globe who would’ve loved to murder Echevarria, but that they were all on the run, or hunkered down overseas in remote rat holes like the tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan, pursued relentlessly by counterterrorist forces and unable to take a decent dump in peace, let alone locate and murder a retired go-to guy living in anonymous obscurity in the San Fernando Valley. Yes, I told the two LAPD detectives, I knew it all sounded like so much made-up Hollywood, Mission Impossible guano, but there it was. The straight poop on Arlo Echevarria. They could do with the information as they wished, I said. I didn’t care one way or the other.

Czarnek and Windhauser studied me. They looked at each other. Then they both started laughing.

“Oh, man,” Czarnek said, dabbing at the corners of his eyes, “that is some wicked good shit.”

“Extreme prejudice,” Windhauser said, mimicking me between spasms. “Christ.”

They had responded in the very manner I had anticipated, with disbelief. Everybody lies to the police. Cops hear crazy crap all the time from people they’re sworn to protect as well as those they get paid to arrest: the CIA planted a chip in my head and is controlling my thoughts; Martians are living in my attic; the devil made me do it. But the “I Was a Paid Assassin for the Government” spiel, that was a new one.

Windhauser’s laughter tapered to a cold smile. He fixed me with an iron stare meant to intimidate. “Some little hottie down at the beach you’re trying to hit on, she might fall for that crock of shit. But you’re not talking to
her
now, are you?”

“Could be little hotties down at the beach aren’t necessarily my cup of tea if you get my drift, Detective, and I think you do.” I winked at him provocatively.

Windhauser’s smile departed altogether.

“If you think I’m gay,” he said, “you’re mistaken.”

“Nothing wrong with being gay,” I said. “Plenty of people are gay. They come out of the closet all the time. Even homicide cops.”

Windhauser gripped the arms of his chair, his blood pressure twenty points higher than it was a minute before. He looked over at his partner and said, “Who the fuck does this asshole think he is?”

Czarnek unwrapped a piece of Nicorette White Ice Mint gum, watching me.

“We just want the truth, Mr. Logan,” he said.

“I told you the truth.”

Windhauser said, “I can’t fucking believe we drove all the way up here to talk to this lying lump of shit.”

“Be honest, Detective,” I said, “you drove all the way up here for the tacos.”

Windhauser glowered. A V-shaped vein rose in the middle of his forehead and throbbed noticeably.

“We talked to Mr. Echevarria’s wife,” Czarnek said. “She told us he worked for the federal government. But we can’t find any record of that.”

“You won’t. Our operations were classified.”

Windhauser got to his feet suddenly, like he wanted to lay hands on me. His plastic chair clattered onto its side. Other diners paused and looked over to see what the commotion was about. The restaurant fell silent.

“C’mon, partner, let’s get out of here,” Windhauser said, grabbing his jacket off the floor. “This guy’s fucking nuts.”

Czarnek stayed put, eyeing me. “Mrs. Echevarria told us she used to be your wife.”

“She was. I never knew what true happiness was until we got married. Then it was too late.”

“Why’d you break up, you don’t mind me asking?”

“She dumped me.”

“Why?” Windhauser demanded

“Because she fell in love with Echevarria.”

Czarnek stopped chewing his gum. The detectives traded another look. Windhauser righted his chair and lowered himself into it.

“How exactly would you describe your relationship with your ex-wife?” Windhauser said.

“Strained.”

“What about with Mr. Echevarria?” Czarnek said. “What kind of relationship did you have with him?”

“We had no relationship. Not after what he did to me.”

“So, what you’re saying is, the two of you stopped being friends after your wife left you for him. Is that what you’re saying?”