He wasn’t joking. There really was such a store, upstairs by the elevators. It sold books, key rings, license plates, and jackets or T-shirts in black with white fallen-body outlines printed on them; but Ricky Lee was gone from there by the time the autopsy was completed and I’d changed back into my suit. I found him in the lobby, in front of the LA city district councilmen up there on the wall. Dressed in black, he didn’t move when he saw me. He wasn’t a big man, but there was a sense of threat about him. All his life, and at that moment all his rage, came shooting through his eyes, so forceful you’d think the rest of his body would have been shocked into movement by their power, yet he stood quite still.
He said, “I have to see her.”
I thought of what he’d witness in the autopsy suite: body parts being sorted into different bags, a scene from the charnel house. I said, “Not like that.”
“It’s my right, man. I’m her son.”
“I know, but that’s not your mother anymore down there.”
“I want to see her so I’ll know what to do to the human being who took her life away.”
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to pull any of that revenge shit.”
“We agreed nothing, cop.” He wheeled away, as if the anger in his eyes had at last burned his body into movement. He stood with his back to me at the window. There was a brief pause in the rain. Clouds sailed quickly by, wrestling with their cargoes. A wind nipped from the north, clattering the lobby doors. “I had you checked out, Detective McGrath. Seems that you used to work Internal Affairs, busting the bad cops. Word on the street is that you’re some kind of a magician at this murder stuff. You wave your wand and cases get solved, like you’re some kinda Merlin ’n can do magic ’n shit.”
I was supposed to feel stroked.
“Word is, you’re a cool motherfucker, and you once wasted a dude.”
I said, “That’s not quite fair or accurate. Did you? Ever waste a dude?”
His bitter laugh rang in my ears. “Shit, that’s good. ‘Did you?’ I like that.” He raised his hand, and from a ramp beneath the spattered old building, a black four-wheel drive, a Toyota Land Cruiser, flashed its headlights and came sailing up into the parking lot like a statement: I’m efficient, low key, I don’t need to flash around in no BMW or sky-blue Cadillac. There was a woman in the back, a blonde, but it was a guy, one of Ricky Lee’s crew, also dressed in black, who got out of the driver’s seat, while another black Toyota made a U-turn outside the thrift shop and, having pulled up, disgorged three more bodyguards, impressive and imposing feats of nature who planted themselves on the sidewalk like redwoods — Ricky Lee’s show of force.
Now I was supposed to feel small.
“These are the rules. One of my guys will call you each morning with a new number and you can check in if you need to. I can’t have cops calling me whenever they get the urge; hear what I’m saying?”
I smiled at his assumption of who was calling the shots. I wondered if he’d give me the shtick about how white cops had let a white guy get away with murder, but he didn’t; he said not a word about the Corcoran case. He knew Los Angeles was out of joint and didn’t worry about trying to set it right. Maybe he expected criminals to be rewarded, so long as they knew how to work the system. Ricky Lee tried very much to come on like a movie star himself, with class, no longer needing to strive, but still restless and mercurial, edgy, almost overly conscious of the qualities that had made him who he was. No fool, a ghetto star who no longer lived in the ghetto, he needed the bodyguards in case rival gangsters tried a kidnap. There were probably Uzis stashed beneath the seats in those Land Cruisers, weapons for which he’d have obtained permits.
He said, “This is how it was between my mother and me. I lied to you last night. I didn’t see her much at all. She wouldn’t let me. She wouldn’t let me help her or see her. Everything changed for her after my brother died. She was a good woman, she was in pain, and I know everything would have come right between us in the end.”
Wanting to keep this going, I said, “My mother died about twenty years ago. It was cancer; back in England.”
“You spent time in England? Hey, my girlfriend, she’s always talking ‘bout going to Paris. See the fashion shows ’n all that shit.”
In the distance there was the rumble of heavy thunder. “Paris is in France.”
“Shit, I know that; you think I’m a dumb nigger?” The back door of the first Toyota was opened by one of the redwoods, and Ricky Lee’s girlfriend got out, a blond model type, one long black-sheathed leg languidly coming after the other. “Sugar,” he called, waving, and I briefly glimpsed the diamond in his dental work again before the smile was wiped from his face and he got down to business. “That other thing I spoke of last night? Stands. I’m not insulting you, man, I’m serious. Five hundred thousand. Like I said, I need.”
This time, before I could respond, the elevator doors opened and out stepped the guy from the FBI and the one from the DEA. The former wore a black slicker and a black baseball cap above whose sides the bony cartilages of his ears stuck out like flags; the latter sported cowboy boots, a snakeskin belt, and flowing blond hair like George Custer. The serious law-and-order merchants looked like a pair of clowns.
Ricky Lee took them in at a glance. “Feds? Tell them they can’t have me,” he said without a smile, and I watched as he walked outside to hug his girlfriend. The two of them got into the first of the black Toyotas; then both cars headed in convoy out of the parking lot before merging with the traffic on Mission Avenue and speeding toward the freeway.
The DEA guy came up to my side with his fingers tucked inside that snakeskin belt, saying, “Nobody even really knows if that guy’s dealing drugs anymore. He’s more secretive than the CIA and he’s spread his cash around. Real estate. Corner stores. Stocks and bonds. Several boats.” He hitched up his pants. “But I’ll tell you something. That guy’s not gonna go on getting away with what he’s been getting away with.”
“I’m not sure I quite understand that.”
“You think he killed his own mother?”
He’d scarcely be offering me a fortune if he’d killed her, not unless he was a lot more twisted and tortured than I thought. “Hey, that’s quite a notion,” I said. “Excuse me.”
From a phone in the lobby I dialed the office. Various business cards had been stuck to a bulletin board above the receiver. There was one from Forest Lawn, quite a few from other funeral homes, and one I’d never seen before: “Crime Scene: Steam ’n Clean.” Cataresco answered and this time the subject of Corcoran did come up. “That guy should be exterminated,” she said.
“Maybe he’ll have a thrombosis signing the first of his no doubt various three-million-dollar book deals.”
“I’m praying,” she said, while I thought, Five hundred thousand dollars; that’s also a shitload of money. I wasn’t really aware of being tempted. I was just wondering, idly, off-handedly, not even seriously, what I’d do with it. Five. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.
Cataresco was saying that Mae Richards had at one time been a singer. “This was from one of the neighbors who just called me back. Mae also paid her bills on time and worked hard. Turns out she wasn’t exactly a cleaner herself but ran a small cleaning business, organizing work for eight or nine other women.”
“What kind of a singer? When was this?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“My mother used to sing.”
“You never mentioned that. Do you have a mother, Billy? I thought you were created by the Department with a murder book in your hand.”
“Used to. She always blamed