“Seven years ago.”
“What happened?”
“Two cholos from Culver City took him out. Was me they was looking for. Now those two cholos are long gone. Missing in action.”
Poor Mae Richards: husband fled, one son murdered, the other a dope dealer; she must have been a remarkable woman to have come through such catastrophe and chaos, all that life, and then only to end butchered, dead on her own kitchen floor. Some cases are simple. Others take you on journeys you never forget. Connections spark, doors open. There are unexpected tunnels and detours. Drew Diamond talked about the termite holes of cause and effect. A case might take you into not just one other world, but several. You might find all the rules altered. You might sink there like a stone.
“You know she’d never take nothing from me. Nothing. She went to clean houses rather than take my money. I could’ve looked after her, man. She didn’t need to live in that house no more.”
“Where did she work?”
“What?” His eyes shot out again, weapons.
“You mentioned that she cleaned houses. Where did she do that? Any names and addresses?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
I leaned back in my chair. On the table between us the tape was still running in the Sony. “I know how you feel.”
His look wasn’t watchful now, or even contemptuous. He wanted to burn me down.
“I know you don’t believe that and I don’t really care whether you do or not,” I said. “But you have to do better.”
“Why the fuck should I?”
“I need more. Think, Ricky Lee. Help me help you.”
His shoulders quivered a little beneath the discreetly expensive black cloth of his jacket. My own was from Loehmann’s, year-end sale. He said, “Was it quick?”
I thought about the burn marks on Mae Richards’s chest, about the fact that she’d been tied. “It was quick.”
“You lyin’?”
“No, I’m not lying.”
He absent-mindedly put his hand to his mouth and then to his forehead, leaving a smear of blood. “You’re a murder cop, right?”
“Head of the homicide section.”
He said something strange. “You a good man?”
This wasn’t a matter I sat around discussing with Diamond, Cataresco, and the others in the squad room. Mostly we talked about where and what to eat. “I try.”
“Yeah, I reckon you do. And you’ll catch who did this?”
“Usually happens.”
“If you do, when you do,” he said, “I’ll give you five hundred thousand dollars.”
The tape went on hissing through the spools in the Sony.
“Five hundred thousand. That’s how much this means to me. A half a million dollars. Don’t arrest the fuck. Just give him to me. Deal?”
For a moment I was lost in my thoughts, staring at the dull brown wall. Maybe I even felt a little afraid as well as insulted. I threw my cup of coffee in his face. He didn’t react as scalding black liquid splashed his cheeks and doused his beard.
I wanted to take him by the throat. I waited slowly while I counted to five and called out for the Cuban, Campes.
“I don’t need any further motivation to do my job. Have you got that, you arrogant shit?”
“I’m talking about my mother, man.” Slowly he mopped at the coffee on his face with a blood-stained tissue. “My mother.”
“I know that, and that’s why I won’t bust your face and your ass for trying to bribe a police officer.”
Campes was at the door, fingering his Smith & Wesson.
“Take Mr. Richards home.”
I’d confused Campes now. Despite his build, the would-be gun-slinging air, he had the puzzled expression of a small dog done down by the world, a Pekinese, say, paddling in its own urine. He said, “Excuse me, sir, but my report. The arrest.”
“There are no charges. Take Mr. Richards wherever he wants to go. And then you can come back and pick up your report.” I nodded down at the scattered pieces. “It’s right here.”
The precinct house was packed tight with smells: coffee, sweat, stale food, spilled soda, disinfectant — all cooked to a fug by the heaters. I walked back to the detectives’ squad room, where the homicide section was located in a corner behind a drywall section that stretched two-thirds to the ceiling, and positioned myself in my chair in front of the cabinets smelling sweetly of varnish. Often at the end of the day, I’d sit for an hour with the paper, clearing my head. In the early days I’d had the idea that if I sat here and did that, I could rid myself of all thoughts of death or violence; they’d be sent away into the murder books that surrounded me, stored there for the night, brain patterns invisibly imprinted, and I wouldn’t have to come back for them until the next morning. Now I did so merely from habit, hoping for the sign that would tell me it was time to go home, to leave — I didn’t really have a home anymore. And wherever I was, I wasn’t sleeping much. I napped for an hour at night and caught, sometimes, another hour in the car during the day. My eyes were pots simmering at twice the temperature of the rest of my body.
On that night I was hot, tired, and my head was so tense it seemed to sprout from my shoulders through a neck of steel angry at its rusting decline. I’d been dumb, letting Ricky Lee get to me. He was a gangster, someone who, because he risked everything, saw himself absolved from ordinary codes and demands. He believed he was whole, because he was brave and rich, because he’d made a run of big scores. He believed that death was meaningful because he’d lost his gangster friends. His mother was supposed to be outside the game, a nonparticipant, and when something happened to her, he knew only one way to respond: he’d offered me money. He probably didn’t even know he’d shown me disrespect, and now he’d even got me thinking in his language: they killed each other over that thing, the other currency of their world, respect. I didn’t want or need Ricky Lee’s respect.
I took a new binder from the box, stuck a red dot on the spine, and began the murder book on Mae Richards. I wrote in her name. I wrote in the date and the area of occurrence. Under the section marked ASSIGNED DETECTIVES, I paused and out of instinct looked up. I had a sense of someone or something moving behind me, in the corridor that led to the interview room, a quieter and swifter motion than cops employ when stomping around on their own territory; then it was gone.
There’s no section you go to in a bookstore called “How to Solve a Murder.” Each Department in the country has evolved its own technique. New York does it different from Chicago does it different from Denver and LA. Each section within each Department adds special twists and refinements, whatever works. My new job was to oversee all the cases within the precinct, to make sure things were running smooth, to keep up the clearance rate, our batting average, and only help out with particulars if needed, like tonight, interviewing Ricky Lee while Cataresco and Diamond were busy at the crime scene. There was nothing that said I couldn’t take on a case myself. I was, after all, the boss, but such a move was unusual. I had three other detectives under my command, though, in the normal run of things, Diamond and Cataresco would be assigned the book, since they’d been at the original scene. It didn’t always work that way but nearly always. Nonetheless, I hesitated.
The beefy Cuban was back, swaggering in the doorway of the squad room. I said, without quite knowing why, “Did you see someone out there?” He shook his head, puzzled, and then I was struck by something else. He’d been gone only ten minutes or so. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“He went