Voodoo Ridge (25 page)

“Why’d you try to stab me?”

“I thought you were him,” Russell said.

“Who’s that?”

“Chad’s friend,” Sissy said, holding the washcloth to Russell’s cheek, “if that’s what you want to call him.”

As she explained it, Chad’s “friend” had called the day after Chad’s body was found. He told her that he’d done state time with Chad, and that the two of them, along with unnamed others, had become involved in some sort of impromptu business venture that had gone terribly wrong.

“The guy told me the police would be asking questions—who Chad knew, who he hung out with,” Sissy said. “He said the best thing I could do for my own good is to say I didn’t know anything. He said he knew where I lived cuz my son told him. He said he’d be checking up on me to make sure I played it smart and kept my mouth shut.”

“So you go and let some dude you don’t know inside the house?” Russell said to her accusingly, gesturing toward me. “That wasn’t playing it smart, Sissy. That was plain stupid.”

Put off by his remark, she grabbed his right hand and made him hold the washcloth to his cheek himself. “It wasn’t stupid, Russell. I knew it wasn’t the guy.”

“How’d you know I wasn’t the guy?” I said.

Sissy stood and began picking up pieces of the electric guitar lamp, depositing them on the love seat.

“Because you don’t sound like him,” she said.

“What did he sound like?”

“Like he wasn’t from here.”

“He had an accent?”

She nodded.

“What kind of accent?”

“I don’t know. England or somewhere.”

“Could he have been Australian?”

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“Foreigners,” Russell said. “They’re all assholes.”

I asked Sissy if her son had any friends from Australia.

“If he did, he never said nothing to me about it.” She reached over, still on her knees, and gulped down some bourbon. “Not that he told me anything after awhile. My mother told him I was a bad mother. She had him convinced I was the reason for every shitty little thing that went wrong in his life. Who knows? Maybe she was right.”

“You got skills, baby,” Russell said, “but mothering ain’t exactly one of ’em.”

“You go to hell, Russell.”

Sissy got off her knees, stormed down a hallway, and slammed a door behind her.

Russell looked at me like he couldn’t understand why she was upset.

“How’s your head?” I said.

“I’ll live.”

I checked his pupils. He seemed OK.

“Sorry about the knife, man. I saw you through the window and I got scared, that’s all.”

“No worries.” I walked over, snatched his knife off of the floor, and handed it to him, hilt first. “Sorry if I scared you.”

“Picked this bad boy up at the flea market in Pasadena,” Russell said, stashing the blade in his left boot. “I know the guy who sells ’em, if you’re interested.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”

As I walked toward the door, he said, “Listen, you didn’t get this from me. OK?”

W
HAT
I “didn’t get” from Russell was the name, telephone number and last known address of Jethro Murtha, a convicted armed robber and Chad Lovejoy’s cellmate at the California Institution for Men at Chino. To celebrate the two of them both being paroled, Chad invited Murtha home to his mother’s house in Thousand Oaks, where he introduced Murtha as his best friend. The two ex-cons sat in the backyard that night working on a case of Budweiser and debating the most efficient ways to knock off banks.

“If anybody on this earth knows anything about what happened to Chad up there,” Russell said before I left, “it’s Jethro Murtha. Just watch your ass. He struck me as dangerous.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks for the help.”

The address he gave me correlated to an apartment tucked above the A-1 Super Fine Discount Golf Shop on Olympic Boulevard, in the densely packed, Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Koreatown. Two open-air flights of stairs adjacent to the shop led from the boulevard to the second floor. I parked at a meter on the street, walked up, and knocked on the door. There was no answer. It was 4:10
P
.
M
. Assuming Murtha still lived there and held down a day job, I figured him to be home shortly after five.

I’d wait.

In the golf shop below, a clerk in beige golf shorts with long dark hair, lively eyes and a name tag in Korean pinned to her fuchsia-colored Callaway golf shirt, tried to sell me a $350 titanium putter, the head of which was only slightly smaller than a land-mine detector.

“The stainless steel head has a thicker face and top line,” she said in an accent that was more Sherman Oaks than Seoul, “so the feel is a lot more solid when you make contact with the ball. It’ll take three strokes off your game, guaranteed.”

I took the club if only to humor her and made a few practice putts while keeping an eye on the street.

“Sole weights at the heel and toe,” she said, “so you can change the head weight however you like. Sweet, right?”

“Very.” I handed her back the putter.

“I’ll make you a great deal. Even throw in a free cover, because if you take care of your putter, it’ll take care of you.” She smiled, her tongue flicking the side of her mouth provocatively.

“I don’t play golf.”

“Just learning?”

“No. Actually, golf seems like a giant waste of time to me.”

She looked at me funny. “But this a golf shop.”

“So it would appear.”

“Why come in if you don’t play golf?”

“I’m waiting for the guy who lives upstairs to come home. His name’s Jethro Murtha. You wouldn’t happen to know him, would you?”

The clerk thought hard for a second. “Big dude. Kinda angry all the time. Got these little tats . . .” She tapped her left cheekbone.

“Teardrops?”

The clerk nodded.

“You a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

I thanked her for her time and told her I’d definitely be back if I ever got into the game of golf. We both knew that would be never.

There was a donut place two doors to the west, past a dry cleaners and a cash-only dental office. The lady behind the counter was friendly in a minimum-wage kind of way. She wore a hairnet. I ordered a plain cake donut and a small coffee.

When I returned to my truck, there was a parking ticket under the left windshield wiper. Expired meter: sixty-three dollar fine.

“Proud to be an American.”

I stuffed the ticket in my jeans, wolfed down my donut, transferred what change I had in my pocket into the meter, and tried hard not to think about Savannah as I sat behind the wheel, watching the approaches to Murtha’s apartment. I checked my phone for any calls I might have missed, but there were none.

At 5:20, an orange and silver MTA bus rumbled by and pulled into the stop up the block. Two Asian girls stepped off, giggling teenagers, followed by an older Asian woman, and a hulking construction worker of about thirty-five with a shaved head and a tool belt slung over his shoulder. He walked past my truck with tired, downturned eyes. He was lugging a plastic bag filled with groceries. The teardrops tattooed above both of his cheekbones were easy to spot.

I got out and fell in behind him.

“Jethro, you got a second?”

He glanced over his shoulder at me, dropped his groceries, and bolted.

In my prime, I would’ve caught him easily. Not even broken a sweat. But the years can rob a man of speed, along with his desire to achieve it. I stopped and watched him grow smaller as he fled down the sidewalk, glancing back at me periodically, his billiard ball head bobbing above a sea of Asian pedestrians along Olympic Boulevard.

I picked up the bag he’d jettisoned and looked inside: a box of Froot Loops, a dozen dinner rolls, two cans of tomato soup, and a plastic jug of cheap, off-brand vodka.

Jethro would be back for the booze. I was pretty sure of that.

I
LEFT
his groceries, less the vodka, in the bag outside his door above the golf shop, parked my truck in a twelve-dollar-a-day lot two blocks away, and established an observation post inside a KFC almost directly across the boulevard from his apartment. Nobody would question my presence or kick me out as long as I was a paying customer, so I ordered a bucket of original recipe chicken and a soda with free refills. I was gnawing four hours later on a thigh, floating in a somewhat uncomfortable ether of salt, processed sugar, and saturated fat, when the ex-con I was eager to speak with came home.

He approached his apartment with an almost vaudevillian wariness, slowly looking this way and that, like a big cat slinking toward a watering hole, before cautiously ascending the stairs to his apartment. The top of the stairs was obscured from my vantage point at the KFC, but I knew that he’d gone inside because interior lights came on behind the shades in the two small windows over the golf shop.

I waited about fifteen minutes for him to settle in, wiped the grease from my mouth and hands on a half-dozen moist KFC towelettes, fetched Murtha’s jug of vodka from my truck, and returned to his apartment.

The grocery bag I’d left on his stoop was gone. Either he’d taken it inside when he’d returned home, or someone had stolen it. I climbed the stairs slowly, quietly, my eyes trained on the door above me, pausing every few seconds to listen. Amid the urban cacophony of cars, jetliners, and the faint, sing-song strains of people conversing in Korean, I could make out twangy country music coming from Murtha’s place—Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee.”

I rapped my knuckles on the door, careful to stand well to the side, lest I be greeted with a shotgun blast.

The tune inside stopped. The windows went dark.

I waited, then knocked once more.

No answer.

“If I were a cop, Jethro, do you really think I would’ve picked up your groceries and left them for you?”

Silence.

“I just want to talk,” I said.

Five seconds passed.

“About what?” came a voice from the other side of the door.

“Chad Lovejoy.”

“I don’t know no Chad Lovejoy.”

“You know that vodka you bought?”

“Wouldn’t know nothing about that, either.”

“Good. Then I guess I’ll have to drink it myself.”

More silence. Then the door opened with the security chain in place. Murtha eyed me up and down through the crack. He spied the jug of vodka in my hand.

“You got any ID on you?”

I slipped him my driver’s license and a business card. The door closed.

“A
flight instructor?”
I could hear him slip the chain off. The door opened wide. “You’re a flight instructor?”

“I am.”

“Hell,” he said, standing there in his stocking feet. “I was thinking about taking some flying lessons. Soon as I save me some money.”

“Come up to Rancho Bonita. We’ll make a pilot out of you.”

“What’s this about Chad?”

“Can I come in?”

Murtha glanced at the vodka jug in my hand.

I gave it to him.

“Welcome,” he said, stepping back with a grand, exaggerated sweep of his hand, “to the Taj-fucking-Mahal.”

His apartment was one room. Toilet and shower stall partitioned by a hanging green bed sheet. Soiled clothes strewn about the floor. A brown corduroy foldout couch, a card table and two folding chairs. A red velvet recliner that looked like it had been retrieved from some curbside. A Lynyrd Skynyrd poster. A fifty-inch flat screen TV resting on cinder blocks.

“Nice crib you got here, Jethro.”

“Yeah, right. Have a seat.”

I parked myself at his card table while he fished a chipped blue ceramic coffee cup out of the sink, rinsed it out, and filled it with vodka.

“You want one?”

“No, thanks. Why’d you run from me?”

“Thought you was parole. Didn’t feel like getting piss-tested today.” He gulped some vodka. “What’s so important, you hanging around here for four hours, wanting to talk to me about Chad?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his left hand. “The little prick didn’t tell you I still owed him money, did he?”

I said nothing, studying Murtha’s face and body language, looking for signs of obfuscation. I saw none.