Mae Richards.
Maybe some basehead had broken in and got carried away — unlikely, since there was no sign of forced entry or struggle.
Maybe she’d been surprised by a knock at the door, and had opened to invite in some random scumbag posing as a salesman or the guy from the gas company. It happens.
Maybe this was done by someone she knew, to whom she owed a debt or with whom she’d been in love. Very possible. In my work, motives tend to be simple and strong: anger, fear, or love turned sour; and money, of course, always money.
Some cases are dramatic from the start and muscle right into the TV news. Others, the sleepy ones, seemingly more commonplace, merit only a few lines in the local rag, but each, on closer examination, is a story, a melodrama within a mystery. People understand this; hence the fascination, mingled with the fear that they themselves could be killed, and the giddy, almost reassuring, suspicion that they too are capable of murder. Hey, I’ll blow your head off, motherfucker: these days the almost instinctive response to affront or rage or boredom, an answer like installing cable, but with more lasting if unanticipated personal consequences, and not only for the murderee.
From the distance came a church bell’s weary clang. This didn’t seem such a special one. I was trying to figure out why there was such a crowd outside when Cataresco and Diamond came in, the duty detectives, Cataresco first, ducking beneath the yellow tape, and then Diamond, who lifted it so he could walk straight under. Cataresco unzipped her leather jacket and met me with a smile. Blond, slender, with a talk-show host’s nimble alertness, she had a gift for getting into the minds of suspects. Diamond was squat and square-shouldered, powerful looking, a spiritual Dillinger who exuded boredom like the smell of dry-cleaning fluid. He wore a striped tie and a stiff sports jacket that hung slackly from his shoulders, as if suspended from an iron bar lashed across his upper back, and he thrust a hard paunch in front of him like swag. “Hey hey hey,” he said, popping a cigarette in his mouth without bothering to light it. “And to think last night I was almost like a human being. There I was, at home, Johnnie Walker in hand, Pavarotti on the CD. Of course this was while I was with your wife,” he said. “Must be a surprise to you that she’s an opera fan, huh?”
Cataresco rolled her eyes. One of the homicide section’s more tedious routines was the pretense that we spent the weekends trying to score with each other’s wives, a gag that had no real sting anymore, unless made by Cataresco.
“Knew she liked the opera,” I said. “Didn’t know she was so fond of you.”
At forty-five, Diamond had more years on the job than I did, though I was the one who made head of the section, six weeks previously. The money in our line of work wasn’t great; thus our struggles for power and status were intense, though everyone pretended otherwise, with the willed, taut nonchalance cops bring even to the world’s most obvious wrongs.
Sniffing, Diamond took the cigarette from his mouth and slid it back with its comrades. “Yeah, well, anyways,” he said, hitching up his pants to reveal a holstered Marine Corps Colt, a cannon. “That was yesterday I was with your wife.”
Twin gouts of blood had hardened to a mustache beneath Mae Richards’s nostrils. Her sneakered right foot turned in at an angle, as if the bone had snapped. Ants were on the march now up her neck and cheek. Soon they’d gather around the blood and meat of her eye and march back again, bearing their treasure. In my experience dead people never look like they’re sleeping. They look like they’ve been shocked out of their lives, and dropped, dumped bones suddenly no more connected than a bag of parts.
Drew Diamond went on. “And today here I am, back hanging with the brothers in Oakwood. You missed the party.”
“A gangster shows up, tries to break through the line,” said Cataresco.
“Not just any gangster,” said Diamond.
“Ricky Lee Richards,” said Cataresco.
Diamond did the thing with his pants again, pleased by the effect of the name.
“That Ricky Lee Richards?” I asked.
“The very same.”
“The Prince of Darkness?”
“The gangbanging piece of scum.”
Ricky Lee Richards was street-famous, already almost a legend. He’d entered the drug trade with only $200, supplying rock houses across Los Angeles, before in time becoming a chief cocaine wholesaler, the funnel through which the drug arrived from Colombia and Mexico and flowed into the United States. He was easily the biggest-time dope dealer to come out of Venice, yet he didn’t flaunt himself with gold and sports cars like some of the high rollers. He was known as the ten-million-dollar man. There were rumors that he was so rich now he was trying to get out of the business, but no one really knew. The guy was a mystery.
“Seems that the victim was Ricky Lee’s mother,” said Cataresco.
“Yeah,” said Diamond. “Musta put a dent in his day. Now he’s under arrest for assaulting a police officer.”
Cataresco said that Richards had arrived on his own, not surrounded by his crew, and had asked if he could come in; when they’d said no, going by the book, he’d gone crazy, hitting one patrol guy in the stomach and butting another in the face before they could cuff him. “That was when the crowd started showing up, and the press, boo-boo-boo.”
“Anyone from the DEA show up yet, or the Bureau?” There were so many good guys chasing drugs, all cranky about their acronyms and antsy for their budgets, all playing games with each other, all much too concerned with the size of their dicks, basically, that it was a miracle any big-time dealer ever got busted. The smart ones mostly didn’t, and Ricky Lee was smart, but there were a lot of people trying to find out what was going on in his life. “What about ATF, CRASH?”
“Not yet,” said Cataresco.
“Does he know she’s dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
Cataresco filled me in on what else they’d got. “Victim’s name Mae Richards, age forty-five, place of birth yeah yeah yeah you can read my report later. The body was found by a neighbor, one Louise Szell. She stopped by to ask if the victim would be going to church tonight. Evidently they usually walked together. She phoned in her report at three-thirty-one. No one heard a gunshot, no one heard or saw any signs of a struggle or anything untoward or unusual. Louise Szell said that someone did leave the house, about two-thirty, a guy, white, not young. Maybe fifty, fifty-five. He drove away in some fancy boat, a Cadillac or a Lincoln, dark color, maybe gray or blue.”
“Plate?”
“She remembered three letters. GSG.”
Diamond chipped in, “Gigli, Siepi, Gobbi.”
“Mafia guys?”
“Singers.”
Drew won that round. I turned to Cataresco, “She reliable, this Louise. . .”
“Szell.”
“Right.”
“The neighborhood busybody. Yeah, I’d say she’s reliable.”
“That’s something.” I went back to Diamond. “There’s a folded garbage bag in the sink.”
“I saw that,” he said. “Maybe our shooter brought it with. Or somebody with our shooter.”
“Messages on the machine?”
“None, or wiped.”
Diamond had opened the fridge for a peek. “I’m hungry,” he said to no one in particular. He picked a strawberry from the box on the counter. “I hate strawberries,” he said. He ate one anyway.