Fugitive Nights (6 page)

“Seven
A.M.
!”

“Hey, you don't make a thousand bucks tax-free by staying in bed unless you're working at one of those chicken ranches in Nevada.”

“What if he really goes hiking? You don't expect me to tail him out on the open desert without being spotted?”

“Just stay with his car and wait,” she said. “I've got some good binoculars I'll let you use. Never let the car get out of sight till he goes home.”

“How about after momma goes back to L.A.?”

“Same thing. We'll tail him in the daylight hours and in the evening if he goes out. When he goes nighty-night we go home.”

“What if he goes out later in the night?”

“Where?”

“I don't know. Maybe to a hot little sperm receptacle for another donation. How do you
know
he can't get it up? Maybe with his wife he's limp, but with his private squeeze he's Rasputin.”

“Why the need for a sperm bank then?”

“Why not? Maybe his friend can't conceive in the normal way. Maybe they decided that test-tubing's the only way to go.”

“Let's try it for a few days and see how it goes, okay?”

“If I wasn't totally bankrupt I wouldn't touch this crap,” he said. “That'll teach me to let Charles Keating do my income tax.”

“Do you go around just pissing off people on purpose? Are you tough enough for that?”

“Yeah, I'm a tough guy,” he said. “Except on Tuesdays when I have to get my legs waxed. Is this Tuesday, by the way?”

Breda Burrows' office consisted of a pair of rooms on the second floor of a commercial building just off Indian Avenue. The other tenants included a children's photographer, a C.P.A., an optometrist, and an office for the landlord, who used the digs as a place to clip coupons and get away from his wife, who'd become as touchy as cholla cactus after turning seventy.

The anteroom of Breda's office was really a cubbyhole with a couple of chairs, a small table, and a lamp, all bought at a second-hand store. Her inner office wasn't much more posh. She had an inexpensive computer, a typewriter and a phone with two lines. On the wall behind a desk of oak veneer were several framed law enforcement certificates-of-training from her police days, as well as her B.S. degree in police science from Cal State Los Angeles. It had taken her eight years of part-time study to get the degree.

Lynn slumped on one of the two chairs in front of the desk, and when Breda sat, she put on Yuppie eyeglasses with strawberry frames.

“I been thinking,” he said. “Clive Devon oughtta get a splint for his member. I hear they got electronic implants. Only trouble is, if your neighbor hits his garage door-opener you might get a bulge in your shorts.”

While Breda was rummaging in her desk drawers for her binoculars and the file on Clive Devon, a shapely young woman entered the outer office and tapped on the open door. She wore jeans and a white cotton turtleneck with a gold Rolex worn over the cuff. She had a raging auburn dye-job.

“May I help you?” Breda asked, and to her astonishment, Lynn Cutter actually stood up. Maybe he wasn't
quite
as crude as a Hell's Angels' picnic.

But then he reassured her by leering at the young woman's tits, saying, “Dazzled to meet you. May I be of service?”

“I'm looking for … Ms. Burrows. Is the first name Bretta?” She had a little voice that Lynn Cutter thought went well with big bazooms.

“I'm Breda Burrows. It's pronounced Bree-da. An Irish name.”

“I got referred by a friend of a friend. I have … a problem I'd like to discuss.”

Lynn took his cue and said, “I'll wait in the outer office.”

Breda knew he'd scope out the woman's booty before closing the door, and he did. After which, Breda peeked at
his
booty and hated to admit that it wasn't bad.

When they were alone, the woman said, “Before I tell you any names I wanna know how much a certain job'll cost me.”

“Let's hear your problem,” Breda said.

The young woman said, “I got this boyfriend who's married, see. Met him over at a hotel where I used to do nails. We been going together for three years and he promised he'd divorce his wife and marry me but he keeps making excuses. Now I know he's a cheat and a liar.”

“If you know all that what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to take a picture of him having sex with the other woman.”

“Another other woman?”

“No,” she said, and Lynn Cutter would've been disappointed to see that she chewed gum with her mouth open. “The
only
other woman. Me.”

“You want a photo of you two having sex?”

“Yes. A secret photo.
Real
explicit. Without him knowing.”

“What for?”

“So I can send it to his wife and show her what a bastard he is.”

“You wanna punish him, that it?”

“No. I wanna marry him. I wanna make her dump him. He broke up my engagement to another guy by making me fall in love with him. I'll tell him my old boyfriend musta hired somebody to take the secret picture.”

“I'm sorry, I don't do that kind of work.”

“Why not?”

“Too complicated.”

“Okay, if you did it what would you charge?”

“I wouldn't do it for any amount of money.”

Suddenly, the young woman dropped her demure little voice. “Well, no shit! A keyhole-peeper with scruples!”

Lynn could hear Breda raise her voice then, and he heard the shapely young woman raise hers right back.

When the young woman came storming out, she said to Breda, “I got two words for you, a verb and a noun: Fuck you!” Then she was gone.

Lynn looked at Breda, who stared at him through her Yuppie strawberry eyeglasses with that irritating grin.

“It's a pronoun,” Breda said.

“What is?”

“You. As in … fuck …
you.
”

“Your lenses're fogging,” Lynn said. “My musk glands must be overactive.”

U
ntil she was driving home that afternoon Breda Burrows hadn't realized how stressful the day had been. It wasn't the Clive Devon case; she'd work that out or she wouldn't, and either way the money was too good to pass up. Her stress was caused by having to work with a man for the first time since she'd retired from police work.

A few of her old police academy classmates had warned her that after she retired she might spend months remembering nothing but the good times and then months remembering all the bad times. Maybe meeting that smart-mouth Lynn Cutter had started the bad-time memories.

Breda had been one of the female officers chosen to work uniform patrol when the LAPD first started putting women out on the street in radio cars. By the time she'd retired in June of 1990 things were a
lot
better for female officers, even though the younger women complained that not much had changed. Breda knew better. When she was a young officer on patrol, women
couldn't
complain.

It was considered amusing in those days for male cops to stand around grinning like baboons and watch a female bust her bra trying to wrestle a semiconscious wino from the police car to the drunk tank. And more than once she'd found herself put in a dark and terrifying place, all alone, wondering if they'd left her out there on purpose. Sometimes she'd worried that they wouldn't back her up the way they would a man, until she'd proved she had the moxie of a man.

Proving themselves once was never enough; the women had to prove themselves time and again. If a male recruit made a mistake during his probationary period he was a callow lad who needed seasoning. If a woman made the same mistake she was a useless bimbo who should be fired on the spot. Every woman who went through the rigors of recruit training in those days learned soon after graduation that their troubles had just begun.

Even so, she'd been proud of her badge and had made friends she couldn't seem to duplicate in civilian life. At least when male and female cops were out on the streets—sometimes with personalities as compatible as Gorbachev and Yeltsin—each would literally lay it on the line for the other if one's safety depended on it. That kind of experience never happened in civilian life. She missed that bond.

But she didn't miss the male bonding that was an important part of police life, that weenie-welding experience where every practical joke—some of them nasty—was tried on female cops. The women were coffee-talk for the boys who figured that
every
female cop could be had, and it was the duty of each one of the guys to prove it.

And
because
they were women, the females often had to become surrogate mothers or big sisters out there in the patrol units at night to all those blue-suited Rambos who temporarily traded testosterone for teddy bears, whining and whimpering about that bitch they married, or that bastard of a sergeant, or the ungrateful taxpayers. She'd heard every complaint that could be uttered by boys in blue. It seemed that the siege mentality demanded release whenever a woman was riding in a car with a man.
Mommy, make it all better!

And heaven help the female officer in those days who got pregnant.
Pregnant? Maternity leave? But I didn't make you pregnant, Officer. The department didn't make you pregnant.

One of the former chiefs had made a public utterance, widely quoted in the L.A. press, to the effect that the females would never measure up to the male cops because, as he put it, “the girls have their monthlies, you see.”

Breda had been present one terrible day when a female cop had tried and failed to revive a three-year-old boy who'd fallen in the family swimming pool. The young woman had worked on the tot for fifteen minutes in the back of a police car while Breda drove a screaming code-three run to the receiving hospital. The child was DOA despite the effort, and Breda's partner started to cry and couldn't stop.

Two bluesuits from their own division happened to be in the emergency ward taking an ADW report from a poolshark who'd been beaned with a nine ball tossed by a guy he'd hustled out of fifty bucks.

When the male cops saw the young woman bawling her eyes out, one of them asked Breda, “What's a matter? Did we mace each other by accident and run our mascara?”

The other said, “What's a matter, we having a little P.M.S. attack, are we?”

Breda glared at them with her pimp-killer grin, and said, “As far as I'm concerned, P.M.S. comes from PUKEY MEN'S SHIT, YOU HEMORRHOIDS!”

In the old days, you could just about depend on the guys to call for a female backup every time somebody arrested a fighting-mad dyke who wore leather and spikes and greased-back hair. The guys got off by putting the female officer in the back seat with the dyke and cooing stuff like, “No playing patty-fingers on the way to the station,
girls
!”

And there were citizens who, after calling the police, would gape dumbfounded when a female cop stood on the threshold. They'd usually say, “They sent a
woman'
?” And Breda would usually answer, “Yeah. Don't you feel
silly
?”

Rape or sex crimes involving kids usually got kissed off to a female cop. The men would call for them and when they arrived, it was always, “Won't talk to me. Needs a woman's touch. Catch you later. Bye.”

And then the male would be off to the donut shop with the other guys while the female might spend the rest of her watch with a woman or child who might've been abused in ways that came back to you in the night. That was one of the reasons Breda had never used alcohol as a sedative. She didn't want the alcoholic wormies at three
A.M.,
because that bed got awfully crowded when you loaded it with little kids.
All
those little kids …

She'd worked sex crimes with kiddie victims for such a long time that when she went back to detective duty with grownups, she'd found herself talking like a diaper dick, interrogating forty-year-old burglars and sounding like Mister Rogers: “Now, see, Harry, you have the right to remain silent. Do we understannnnnd siii-lent?”

Those sex crimes that were not filed by the D.A. because of insufficient evidence were often memorable. Like the five-year-old girl with new cigarette burns over old ones, who kept repeating, “I'm a bad girl. Daddy did it cause I'm a bad girl.” And that child was put
back
in the home!

The wormies at three
A.M.:
Boss, I'm outta here! I need a vacation!

When Mommy or Daddy, or Mommy's boyfriend actually
killed
a child, when she'd attend postmortems with homicide dicks—those from the gag-and-giggle school of corpse-cops—they'd always make sure she was with a particular pathologist who liked to post a body like he was doing caesar salad for the pathologist's picnic. No tying things off to keep the bile in place, no way. Just mince, dice and
toss.
And all that lettuce and cucumber and bell pepper—which were really tiny bits of a former human child—would stick to her sleeves.