MY NAME IS Billy McGrath. I’m forty years old, a little under six feet, and find myself in my office late on this sulfurous Los Angeles night, talking to a tape recorder out of both sides of my mouth. I’m half American, half English — offspring of two nations, two languages, and two different ways of seeing the world. I was conceived in Arizona, born on the sixth floor of Santa Monica Hospital, but made my first confession in England, where I learned to shoot among drystone walls old as Julius Caesar and studied philosophy three years at the university of a northern town dominated by a soot-blackened cathedral on a hill, medieval reminder of man’s lofty aspiration and worldly impermanence.
It was a scholarship that brought me back to America, to study postgrad at UCLA, though the Ph.D. was already out of the picture by the time I met my wife, from whom I’m now divorced, at Marty McFly’s sports bar off Interstate 5 in Burbank with a Jack Daniel’s in my hand only three days before she saved my life. We have a kid, a girl, Lucy, and we used to live together in a two-story house that was painted muddy brown on one of those walk streets in Venice where you can’t park a car. After I moved out, my wife had the house remodeled and it’s now a pretty blue. I’m a cop, though it’s a while since I had anything to do with law and order.
Hanging from the ceiling in my office is a redwood sign that says HOMICIDE and has on it a little picture of a smoking gun, a 9 mm, lest I forget. Spinning in my chair, I see the locked filing cabinets that surround my desk on three sides. These cabinets, very different from the wrecked metal models elsewhere in the building, are custom made from pine by a carpenter in Mar Vista, a guy who also makes coffins, as it happens, and, perceiving an appropriate symmetry, offers the Department a rate.
The cabinets gleam and shine; there are eight of them, each six feet high by three feet wide, each containing seven shelves, and each shelf in turn supporting thirty two-inch blue plastic binders, the murder books, the records of every homicide investigation in the precinct. Some have a red dot on the spine — unsolved, still in progress. Those with the yellow dots we’ve closed: arrived at perpetrator and motive, teased out the causes of obvious or sometimes seemingly random events, brought order if not meaning to bloody chaos. Seven of the cabinets are completely filled. Only the one immediately at my back has any space left in it at all — two empty shelves. At my feet there’s an open box containing a stack of handsome new binders, ready to go, but it’s behind me that I reach, for one book in particular.
Before opening it, I want to mention that my very first homicide wasn’t here, in Venice, but down in South LA, Sixty-fifth and Vernon, a nice-looking wood frame house next to a host of similars, and every one of them had bars on every window. Two victims. First was a black guy, the back of his head taken away by a cross-nosed bullet. Second was his white girlfriend; she’d been shot in the face, and both her arms had been hacked off. The shovel that was used for the job was on the floor amidst a butcher’s mess of blood and bone. One skinny white arm lay next to it, and we never did find the other or figure out that particular detail, though the really bad thing was the little girl, a child of mixed blood, two years old and fine, at least not physically hurt. She’d been strapped in her highchair with her mouth taped shut so she couldn’t scream while she saw the death of her mother and father.
I was just a rookie, a raw recruit, a boot, a uniform at the door trying not to get his feet in the mess, but when I went home that night the soles of my boots were clogged with blood and a dried grayish matter I realized must be brain. I sat at the kitchen table to clean them off and asked myself how such things could happen. I wondered at what point an act became evil. How bad and premeditated did it have to be? I swore that I’d keep in contact with that little girl every six months or so to make sure that she was OK. I made good on the promise until she was a six-year-old with pigtails who still refused to talk, but then for no good reason I can remember I missed an appointment, then another and another, until at last I felt embarrassed to go back.
I don’t want to make too much of this, though I think the story, along with my lack of the proper equipment of roots, my missing of that cathedral on a hill, does have a bearing on all that happened. I grew too used to seeing evil done. You begin by trying to make a difference and end by doing it yourself, though even that sounds like casting around. At forty I had twenty years’ English and twenty American, which might be to say that I had nothing.
I COULDN’T SAY how big that crowd was on Santa Clara Avenue, there was so much rain and so many glistening umbrellas, and people kept jumping, moving, and shuffling in the storm, but I did see that most of the faces were the same, with identical expressions of eager, drenched excitement, all keen to see the show. I saw a black street kid with his head shaved, maybe ten years old, gangstered down in a dripping white T-shirt and baggy, sodden jeans with the crotch almost at his ankles.
“Hey, kid. What’s your name?”
“Nelson.” Grinning, he turned to show his buddies that he wasn’t afraid. Rain flicked from his eyebrows and caught me under the chin.
“What’s happenin’, Nelson? Tell me what’s up, man.”
“Some lady got killed.”
“Just one?” I grinned back at him, but Nelson wasn’t sure whether I was joking or not. Before he could decide and start acting tough, I’d moved on and was making myself imagine that there was no crowd, that there were none of those thirty or more uniformed guys, milling and looking busy, that I was on my own, trying to figure this out. I tried to sweep away all the clutter and noise, to put my mind in a silent place, as if I were about to step into the woods after dark, and every little thing from now on — each falling leaf or twig that snapped — would have to be recorded and remembered if ever I were to find my way out again.
The house was better than I’d expect in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, with a pair of plump white sofas, a new and expensive carpet, and pale, freshly painted walls. Up above the fireplace was a Jesus in an ebony frame, and beneath it, to the left, on a round glass coffee table, seven or eight family portraits. There was an expensive stereo and five VCRs all hooked up together for copies, and there were lots of CDs, hundreds, maybe even a couple of thousand. Someone in the house was crazy for music. There was a powerful smell that didn’t fit — strawberries.
In the kitchen I saw a black woman lying face up, with her head pointing south. She was about fifty and dressed in white — white jogging suit, white socks, expensive white sneakers. Her ankles were tied with white nylon cord, and from the way she was lying bumped up around the waist, I guessed her hands were tied behind her back as well. There were spots above the right trouser knee of the jogging suit, blood specks, like tadpoles with the tails pointing up.
The suit had been yanked open, ripped, and there were burns on her neck and chest. I counted seven, almost like brands on an animal, still bloody and sore, each the size of a red-hot dime. Could be they’d been made with the angry end of a cigar or cigarette. She’d been shot in the left eye, and blood had dribbled from the nostrils. Her open right eye gazed at the ceiling. The other, the wrecked one, was a mess of red and black, turned inside out like a crushed snail. A thick gray ooze of brain escaped at the corner.
The back door was locked and bolted. On the counter next to the water cooler was a clean spoon and a plastic honey bear lying flat on its belly; two or three drops had leaked out, and the ants, fled inside from the rain, were starting to gather.
The doors to the cupboard under the sink were open. A folded report card sat like a little white tent over the shell casing where it had fallen, beneath the U-bend. Sitting in the sink itself was a black garbage bag, also folded, as if