She sipped at her decaf. “Let’s think about Mario Martinez. Nineteen years old, a Culver City gang member. We got a good idea that one of Ricky Lee’s homeboys made the hit, which means the word on the street must be they did it for sure. A week later someone takes out Ricky Lee’s mother.” She tossed off the rest of her coffee. “You gotta wonder.”
Maybe Cataresco was right, but the obvious solution felt like too much. “Kill the mother of Ricky Lee Richards and you’re not talking tit for tat. You’re talking extermination. And those burn marks. Burn marks on the body of a forty-five-year-old woman. Does that feel like a gang thing to you? I’ve got the strongest feeling that this was to do with her, not him.”
“So what’s Ricky Lee’s next move?”
“The word’ll go out. He’ll let the street know how well he’ll reward a favor. Maybe he’ll even try and call a truce. One thing for sure is that we’ve gotta find the perp before he does. We do everything we usually do and make sure we get seen doing it. The brass will squat on me because for sure all the press and TV will be swarming all over them. We solve this quick. Go back and talk to the neighbors again. Find her friends. Try and find her husband, or her ex or whatever the hell he is, Ricky Lee’s father. Why did someone slice off her finger ends?”
“What was it you told me? Murderers do dumb things.”
I’d once caught a perp driving around in a victim’s car, with her credit cards and driver’s license in his wallet, and a Gideon Bible with her name in the front open on the passenger seat beside him, and this was five days after the murder, as if he’d done the deed and slipped into a trance. “Talk to your guy at DMV and get some luck with that partial plate.”
“GSG? The three tenors?”
Drew Diamond was there now, constrained on all sides by a pinstripe suit of almost funereal sobriety. “I don’t want to make an issue of this,” he said in a huffy way. “But Tito Gobbi was a baritone. At his best in villainous roles. Like Scarpia in Tosca. Scarpia’s the head of the Italian police, and he’s in love with this singer, Tosca. So he snatches her boyfriend, and he’s got the guy holed up in a cell, torturing him so that Tosca can hear the screams while he’s trying to get inside her panties. Man, he’s one nasty perpetrator.”
“Drew,” I said. “This is clearly something of importance to you, so I’m very glad you are making an issue of it. So he was an evil dude, this baritone, Toto Gobbi?”
“Tito,” said Drew.
“Didn’t I say that? Now if we could return to the trivial matter of the homicide at hand.”
All of a sudden my anger came spitting up. In that moment I hated him, his attitude of feigned dry-cleaner boredom, his opinions, his way of going about our work. He’d had his jeweled, enchanted moments, brave acts, beautiful women, important cases cracked and won — though not recently. These days his soul sang in the pistons of his restored Jaguar XKE while his 1982 Detective of the Year Badge from the Elks Lodge on Pico Boulevard still contrived to assure him that he was the glue holding Los Angeles together.
I said, “Listen. What I’ve decided is that I’m going to work the Mae Richards case with Cataresco.”
There was a silence. Cataresco shook her head at Drew, as if to say this was the first she’d heard about it, and then looked at me and rolled her eyes. I meanwhile stared at Diamond to see how this would go. Not well; his eyes were vacant and a little dazed, momentarily uncomprehending. Cops live by the book, love the rules and regs, and all at once I’d offended the accepted order. I couldn’t have shocked him more if I’d pulled a gun; indeed, I’m sure Drew would have preferred that. He said, “For Chrissakes, Billy,” and swept his hands through his hair, trying to calm himself. “I’ve had a rough time recently and I was looking forward to getting back in the saddle.”
I glanced at my watch. “C’mon, Drew. We’d better go. We’re due in court at ten. I won’t ride with you. I’ll take my own car. Is that a problem?”
•
Denise Corcoran was white, twenty-five, gorgeous, and she’d been found on the floor of her living room, shot twice in the face with her own pistol, a pretty little over-and-up Derringer with a pearl handle and a silver-plated barrel. From the start there was something that worried me about the crime scene, and though I never quite put my finger on what, this unease still nagged, a light that flickered and guttered.
The house had been ransacked: cushions ripped, chairs turned over, TVs and glassware broken, paintings slashed, a once beautiful interior reduced to a nervous breakdown. Our first assumption was that she must have interrupted a burglar, but soon we began to find evidence to the contrary. Nothing seemed to have been taken: no cash, no jewelry, none of the undamaged art. There was no sign of forced entry. Her husband Charlie Corcoran’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, and his alibi proved to have more holes in it than one of Madonna’s string vests. Corcoran had dated Madonna, once upon a time, before he met Denise in Las Vegas, where she was a blackjack dealer and he was in town for a shindig organized by motion picture distributors.
The district attorney had been reluctant to take the case, because it was another dubious-looking celebrity murder; and Corcoran himself, as time went on, put up a more and more plausible front. He was great on the stand: modest, forthright, shattered by this tragedy. He was an actor, but he didn’t come off like one in this, the best, least self-conscious performance of his life, while other witnesses confirmed on his behalf that Denise had been no piece of cake. In the months before her death she’d been weeping, breaking down, crying. She drank; she took drugs; she had an impossible temper.
The problem here was that I believed I knew Charlie Corcoran had killed his wife. He’d told me so himself, outside his house on Mulholland Drive, minutes after Drew Diamond had asked him if he’d mind coming in to answer a few questions. He’d been in a state of shock. He’d blurted out, “I lost my head, man. I killed her.” His head had ducked down into his hands. “Did you see her face? One of her eyes was still open. Oh, God, what have I done?” No tape recorder had been running, and Diamond hadn’t even read him his rights yet. The confession had not been admissible. Truth was, we’d been surprised, not to mention dazzled, taking down a movie star. That hadn’t been a phony blood-spattered Picasso up on the wall of his house, which was a contemporary masterpiece by Rem Koolhaas. By the time we’d charged him and got him into the interview room, his lawyers had joined the party.
They peppered us with experts. They conducted weekend seminars to judge each of the jury’s nuanced sways. They roughed up Drew Diamond’s reputation with stories that worked in my favor, when, early in the trial, it came down to him and me for the promotion. They pointed out that Corcoran’s prints had every right to be all over the Derringer, since it was registered in his name, after all, and he’d used it for target practice at the Beverly Hills Shooting Club the previous night, before negligently forgetting to clean it and bringing it home. Much emphasis was placed on this last word, home, where, the defense pointed out, with heavy irony, a ghastly crime had been committed, the perpetrator of which was still allowed to roam free by the city’s esteemed Police Department.
It was another of LA’s shows, though not as big as many, because from about halfway through the trial pretty much everyone was guessing at Corcoran’s acquittal. The media lost interest in him and even the disorderly mental state of his murdered wife, turning instead toward us, the Department. Only Drew, so bulldoggish and straight-ahead, kept his nose down, sniffing at the idea of a conviction. The job, with all its strictures and prejudice, had shaped him out of clay with its own hands. He knew no other existence. Police work was his life, yet he seemed to have lost the knack, and it was his testimony that finally decided the course of the case.
Drew couldn’t cut it on the stand. In court he’d been dry-mouthed and twitching inside those fine clothes. His concentrated brooding face made it appear he was trying far too hard. He was trying far too hard. Drew didn’t understand that sometimes you have to be an actor, a liar even, to be a good