"Kind of strange, isn't it? Protecting them. That's another reason I don't want to stick around."
"What's that?"
"Swig talks all the time about humane care, how they're human beings, too. But I just can't find much sympathy for them, and I'd rather work with people I care about. -At least they can't leave. I guess that's the main thing."
"Speaking of which," said Milo. "One of them did get out."
Her knuckles whitened around the purse handle. "I never heard that. When?"
"Before you came on staff."
"Who? What was his name?"
"Wendell Pelley."
"No," she said. "Never heard of him-why, is he some sort of suspect in Claire's murder?"
"No," said Milo. "Not yet. I'm just trying to cover all bases. Anything you could find out about Pelley would be useful. Like, did he and Peake associate with each other."
"I can try... long as I stay at Starkweather."
"Two more weeks."
"Yes, but if there's something you think I can... Are you saying this Pelley is what Peake's little speeches are all about? Pelley's been communicating with Peake?
Sending him messages, and Peake's babbling them back at me?"
"I wish I knew enough to theorize, Heidi. Right now I'm simply looking into everything."
"Okay... I'll do what I can." Sharp tug of the ponytail. Looking troubled, she opened the door. Milo and I walked her downstairs to the street. Her car was parked at the curb, half-lit by a streetlamp. Old, dented Chrysler minivan. A bumper sticker read, "Climbers Get High Naturally."
Milo said, "What's the highest mountain you ever tackled?"
"I'm more of a wall person than a mountain person. Sheer surfaces, the more vertical the better." She smiled. "Promise you won't tell? The best one wasn't exactly legal.
Power station near the Nevada border. We did it at three A.M., then parachuted down."
"Adrenaline high," said Milo.
"Oh, yeah." She laughed, got in the van, and drove away.
"Got your junior G-woman on the job," I said. "I think she's found a new source of adrenaline."
"Yeah, she's a little hyper, isn't she? But at least someone's cooperating.... So, what do you think about Peake's latest soliloquy?"
"If there's some deep psychological meaning, it's eluding me."
" 'Choo choo bang bang.' " He laughed. "Talk about loco motives."
We returned to the Robbery-Homicide room. A Dunkin' Donuts takeout box dominated
Mile's desk. He said, "Shouldn't you be getting home to Robin?"
"I told her it might take a while."
He studied the notes he'd scrawled in the interrogation room. "Heidi," he said. "Our little mountain girl. Too bad everything she's come up with is probably worth a warm bucket of spit.... 'Choo choo bang bang.' What's next? Peake reads selections from
Dr. Seuss?"
He rubbed his eyes, stacked some papers, squared the corners with his thumbs.
"You think it was poor judgment?" he said. "Asking her to check on Pelley?"
"Not if she's discreet."
"Worse comes to worst, Swig finds out, gets all huffy. He can't afford to make too big a deal of it-bad publicity."
"Anything new on Pelley's whereabouts?" I said.
"Zilch. Ramparts was notified by the P.O., so there's something positive. Other than that, the P.O. wasn't very helpful. Caseload in the hundreds; to him, Pelley was just another number. I doubt he could point him out in a crowd."
He pulled a folded sheet out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. LAPD Suspect
Alert. Pelley's vital statistics and a photo so dark and blurry I couldn't see it being useful for anything. All I could make out was a round, clean-shaven Caucasian face smudged with indeterminate features. Thin, light-colored hair. Serious mouth.
The crime was failure to report.
"This is what they're using?" I said, placing the paper on the desk.
"Yeah, I know-not exactly Cartier-Bresson. But at least they're looking. I did some looking, too. Driving around the neighborhood, checking out MacArthur Park,
Lafayette Park, alleys, con bars, some other bad-guy spots I know. Visited the halfway house, too. Old apartment building, cons out in front, some Korean guy running the place-sincere enough, told me he'd been a social worker in Seoul. But he barely speaks English, and basically all he does is warehouse the residents, do random drug tests maybe four times a year. Counseling consists of asking the cons how they're doing. The ones I saw hanging around didn't look at all insightful. As for Pelley, all the Korean could say was that he'd been quiet, hadn't caused problems. None of the cons remembered a damn thing about him. Of course."
He reached for a piece of stale cinnamon roll. "He could be a thousand miles away by now. I didn't do much better with Stargill's investment records. The Newport money managers wouldn't talk to me, and they informed him I'd been asking around. He calls me, all irate. I tell him I'm just trying to clear him, how about he voluntarily gives me a look at his stock portfolio. If everything checks out, we call it a day.
He says he'll think about it, but I could tell he won't."
"Hiding something?" I said.
"Or just guarding his privacy-everyone gets privacy, right? Even guys who cook and eat babies. Everyone except citizens who get laid out on steel tables, some white-coat peeling off their face, doing the Y-cut, playing peekaboo with their internal organs. No privacy there."
20.
ROBIN DIDN'T STIR when I slipped into bed beside her at one A.M. Visions of Peake's crimes and the knowledge that I hadn't helped Milo much kept me up for a while, heart beating too fast, muscles tight. Deep-breathing myself into an uneasy torpor,
I finally slipped off. If dreams intruded, I had no memory of them in the morning, but my legs ached, as if I'd been running from something.
By nine A.M., I was drinking coffee and catching what passes for TV news in L.A.: capped-toothed jesters hawking showbiz gossip, the latest bumblings of the moronic city council, the current health scare. Today, it was strawberries from Mexico: everyone was going to die from an intestinal scourge. Back when I'd treated children, the news had frightened more kids than any horror flick.
I was about to switch off the set when the grinning blonde gushed, "And now more on that train accident."
The story merited thirty seconds. An unidentified man had lain across the MetroRail tracks just east of the city limits, squarely in the path of an empty passenger train. The engineer spotted him and put on the emergency brake, but not in time.
Choo choo.
I called Milo.
He picked up right away. "Yeah, yeah, the little train that couldn't. Probably nothing. Or maybe Peake really is a prophet and we should be worshiping him instead of keeping him locked up. Nothing much else on my plate, so I called the coroner.
The deceased is one Ellroy Lincoln Beatty, male black, fifty-two. Petty criminal record-mostly possession and drank and disorderly. The only thing that intrigued me was that Beatty spent some time in a mental hospital. Cama-rillo, thirteen years ago, back when they were still open for that kind of business. No mention of
Starkweather, but you never know. The accident happened in Newton Division. I wish
Manny Alvarado had the case, but he retired and the new guy isn't great about returning calls. I figured I'd head over to the morgue before lunch. Feel free to join me. If it gets you hungry, we can have lunch later. Like a big rare steak."
"Basically, the head and the lower extremities," said the attendant. He was a short, solidly built Hispanic named Albert Martinez, with a crew cut and goatee and thick-lensed glasses that enlarged and brightened his eyes. The crucifix around his neck was gold and hand-tooled, vaguely Byzantine.
The coroner's office was two stories of square, smooth, cream stucco, meticulously maintained. Back in East L.A. Back at County Hospital. Claire's old office was a few blocks away. I hadn't realized it before, but she'd come full circle.
"The rest of him is pretty much goulash," said Martinez. "Personally, I think it's amazing we got what we did. The train must have hit him at what-forty, fifty miles per?"
The room was cool, immaculate, odorless. Empty steel tables equipped with drain basins, overhead microphones, a wall of steel lockers. A junior high student would recognize all of it; too many TV shows had dimmed the shock. But television rarely offered a glimpse at the contents of the lockers. Dead people on TV were intact, clean, bloodless props resting peacefully.
I hadn't been down here since internship, wasn't enjoying the experience.
"How'd you identify him?" said Milo.
"Welfare card in his pocket," said Martinez. "The lower extremities still had pieces of pants on and the pocket was in one piece. All he had on him was the card and a couple of bucks. The interesting thing is, you could still smell the booze on him.
Even with all the other fluids. I mean, it was really strong. Only other time I smelled it that strong was this woman, died in childbirth, must have drunk two bottles of wine that night and she arrested on the delivery table. Her amniotic fluid was red-wine-red, you know? Almost purple. She must have been saturated with
Thunderbird or whatever. The baby was dead, obviously. Probably lucky."
Martinez touched his crucifix.
"When's Beatty's autopsy scheduled?" said Milo.
"Hard to say. It's the usual backlog. Why?"
"It might be related to something. So you're saying Beatty must have been pretty juiced."
"To smell that strong? Sure. My guess would be way over the limit. He probably got blasted, wandered onto the tracks, lay down for a nap, and boom." Martinez smiled.
"So, could I be a detective?"
"Why bother?" said Milo. "Your job's more fun."
Martinez chuckled. "Those tracks-they really should do something about them, no fence, no guardrail when they get close to the train yard. I grew up around there, used to play on the tracks, but they weren't running trains back then. You remember last month? The little kid who wandered on, walking home from school? Not far from where Beatty got hit. That kid, we didn't get anything recognizable on him. They should put a fence up, or something.... So, anything else?"
"I'd like to look at Beatty."
"Really? How come?"
"I want to think of him as a person."
Martinez's thumb and forefinger closed around the bottom of the crucifix. "A person, huh? Well, maybe looking at him isn't the right way to do that, you know?"
Milo said, "Humor me."
Martinez walked over to a locker, slid the drawer out silently, drew back white sheeting.
The face was gray, surprisingly intact except for a thatch of lacerations on the left cheek. Ash gray, because in life Ellroy Beatty had been black. White lint of kinky beard stubble, maybe four, five days' worth. Untrimmed mass of gray hair. The eyes were open, dull, dry, the lips caked with pinkish crust. That vacant look common to all dead faces. No matter what your IQ in life, when the soul flies, you look stupid.
Below the neck was empty space. Clean decapitation except for a few fringes of trachea and jugular, meaty muscle fibers protruding. Two feet down the table was a white-wrapped package that Martinez needlessly explained was "the lower extremities."
Milo stared at the ashen chunk that had once borne the consciousness of Ellroy
Beatty. Not blinking, not moving. I wondered how many times he'd been down here.
Just as Martinez said, "Okay?" the door opened and a man strode in. He wore scrubs, a hairnet, paper slippers, a loose mask around his neck. About Beatty's age, tall, stoop-shouldered with a deeply tanned face and a thick black beard.
He glanced at us, read the index card in his right hand, and headed for one of the steel lockers, two rows away.
Then he saw Ellroy Beatty's head and flushed with anger. "What the hell's going on here?"
Martinez said, "Some kind of problem, Dr. Friedman?"
"I'd sure as hell say so. Who cut up my D.B.?"
"Your D.B.?" said Martinez.
"That's what I said. Are you deaf, Albert?" Friedman turned to Milo. "And who the hell are you?"
"LAPD."
"I thought Willis Hooks was on this one."
"No," said Milo. "Hooks is Central. This is a Newton case, the detective's Robert
Aguilar."
"What?" said Friedman, jabbing the card. "The paperwork says Central, Hooks. How long have you been doing this, Mr. Aguilar?"