He staggered, about to fall, but when I reached out to grab him, he pushed me away and drew himself up again. “Get your fucking hands off me. Fuckin’ asshole. Fuckin’ cop.”
Ricky Lee’s rap sheet was pretty much what I’d expected: burglary, burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of . . . possession of . . . possession of . . . Most of these convictions had occurred before he was twenty, and he was now twenty-seven. Until tonight there’d been only one arrest in seven years; extraordinary, given that so many acronyms were intent on taking him down. Ricky Lee was the real thing, no doubt about it, a live proper gangster. There was a story that once, after a drug deal turned bad, the two colleagues who’d double-crossed him were tied, blindfolded, and bundled into the back of a closed truck, where Ricky Lee himself had shut their mouths with duct tape. The truck had been driven down to San Diego, and all the while Ricky Lee was in the passenger seat, reading out poetry and passages from the Bible. The word was that Ricky Lee liked to read. He’d only learned when he was in jail in his late teens, and now he was making up for lost time. The men must have known, during the two-hour drive, that they were certain to die. They were taken to an abandoned motel, where Ricky Lee shot them in the head. The bodies were found stacked in the bathtub. No one had been able to prove this, but no one doubted it either. It became a story everyone in the Department heard at one time or another, a part of Ricky Lee’s legend, along with the usual Robin-Hood-of-the-ghetto bullshit.
He’d become famous following that one recent arrest, when he was put on trial for the attempted murder of a federal officer. This was after a rush-hour shoot-out on the Santa Monica Freeway. He’d escaped by getting out of his car, jumping over the meridian, and somehow weaving his way through the traffic. The pursuing ATF agent, busy capping off rounds from his machine pistol, was swiped by a Mexican in a 1962 Chevy flatbed and wound up in Cedars-Sinai with both legs broken and early retirement on full pay.
The ATF guys claimed that Ricky Lee had fired a shot at them, initiating the shoot-out, and that he’d fled, leaving behind a kilo of coke in the trunk of his car. The trial was a fiasco. Ricky Lee’s attorneys established first that it was the federal agents who’d fired all the shots, and after that it was only logical to conclude that the coke had been a plant. Ricky Lee walked; he skated; he made fools of them all.
I had no feelings about any of this one way or the other. There’d be media heat on the case because of his involvement, which would mean pressure from within the Department to come up with a perpetrator quickly. If I did, I’d give myself some help toward the next promotion; if I didn’t, I’d lay the blame on other factors, whether human or not. Homicide was a career and not a moral problem. For me it hadn’t always been such, but then, as my father once said, “Age doesn’t bring wisdom, but it sure makes you more tired. You can’t go on beating your head against the world.” I didn’t feel the full extent to which I’d become an outsider; nor did I sense the beginnings of a long journey to the inside, free fall.
“Here’s some of the precinct’s special poison yolk. The comedians among us call it coffee,” I said, setting down two plastic cups, at which he didn’t even glance.
Ricky Lee’s watchfulness was impressive, frightening, but he registered only the important details: my face, the Sony tape recorder I took from a drawer in the table, the door, which was still open behind him. “Suppose you tell me about it, when you’re ready. I’m going to use this, OK?” I held up a cassette tape and flipped it into the Sony. “Let’s talk about your mother. Easy stuff. When was the last time you saw her?”
He wasn’t about to cave so easily. His hands were steady in front of him on the table.
“Maybe you killed her yourself.”
He kicked back the chair and stood, raising his fist and baring his teeth. “I’ll kill you, motherfucker.”
“Hey, good! You have feelings.”
“Fuck you, asshole,” he said, but wiping blood from his hand on the table.
“She didn’t get shot by magic, Ricky Lee. It happened. One billiard ball hit another and somehow it led to her death. Are you going to help me or not?”
He sat back down in the chair, his eyes challenging mine with the same defiant stare.
“When did you last see her?”
His eyes didn’t budge. “Three days.”
“Where?”
“At her house.”
“Did you see her often?”
“Once, maybe twice a month. We kept in touch. She’d never take money from me, or nothing like that.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Shit, man, I don’t remember.” His eyes went dead as the moon. “She was always wanting me to go to church. We listened to some music. She loved to hear music.”
Ellen loved music. “Moody food,” she called it. Her brain fumed with that, while my own still sometimes steamed for our lost love.
I said, “What music?”
“Old stuff, her stuff. Jazz, soul.”
At first he was unable to accept even that the murder had happened, that the power of its prevention had eluded him; now he was starting to think about the perpetrator. Later, grief would bring him all the way back around the track.
“Someone do this to get at you?”
“Any fool on the street know better than to pull some shit like this,” he said, and as his eyes fired up again, there was the bright flash of something in the upper right corner of his mouth. At first I thought it was gold set in a tooth; it was a diamond.
“Who killed her?”
The dreadlocks danced on his head. “I don’t know, man, but when I find out, that fool is a dead fool.”
I was calm, sipping my coffee. “You ain’t gonna pull any of that revenge shit, because if you do I’ll bust you, Ricky Lee. You’ll go down just like I shot you in the head. But you know what? That ain’t gonna happen. You’re gonna help solve this case. And you’re gonna start by telling me as much as you can about your mother. Who she was. Who her friends were. Where she worked, if she worked. Cop shit. Then I’m gonna go get the bad guy. That’s the way it works.”
Some statements are meant to soothe, some to echo, others to entice. This one was a confrontation, and he rounded on me, lashing out, yet not quite relaxing the tight control of his anger. “You’re a cop. You ain’t interested in who killed my mother. Making yourself look good, that’s all you fuckin’ care about. I spit on you, cop. Your fuckin’ clearance rate, that’s what worries you, keepin’ your ship nice and clean so you look good for your superiors. You know nuthin’ ‘bout where I live. You know nuthin’ ‘bout justice or the way I feel. How could you? Fuckin’ uniform.”
I said, “You finished yet?”
For a moment he fought the impulse to jump across the desk and try to kill me then and there. I said, “Where’s your father?”
“Don’t know. Ain’t never seen him.”
“Never?”
“He took off after I was born.”
“Did she talk about him?”
“He didn’t have nuthin’ to do with this.”
“That’s for me to find out. Did she talk about him?”
He sighed, giving way a little. “Yeah, she talked about him. He was some kind of a musician, living up in San Francisco last I heard.”
“Address or number?”
He shook his head. This was Jack the Bear, getting nowhere.
“Any