“Honey, I can trump your issues any day of the week.”
“Now you’re making me feel inferior.”
“Why did I call you?” Parker asked, exasperated.
“Because you want something, and you think I’m a whore for a good story.”
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”
“Which brings us back to my last question. What do you care about two sentences buried in the
Parker glanced back into Starbucks. Ruiz was still on her phone, but was making a note. He considered and discarded the idea of telling Kelly about Robbery-Homicide’s unofficial appearance at the scene. He believed in playing his cards one at a time.
“Listen, Andi, it’s nothing I can put my finger on yet. I’m just getting a weird vibe here. Maybe I’m just hinky because they don’t let me out of my cage enough.”
“Still in the minors, huh?”
“Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it? They wanted to get rid of me because they thought I was a rotten cop, so they sentenced me to train new detectives.”
“Management at its finest,” Kelly said. “There’s a method to that madness, though. Anybody else they would have sent down to South Central to work drug murders and body-dump jobs, but they knew you’d thrive there. They had a better chance making you quit by boring you to death.”
“Yeah, well, I showed them,” Parker said. “So what do you say? Can you make a couple of calls?”
“And if this turns into something . . . ?”
“Your number is in my phone, and I’ll buy you a bottle of Glenmorangie.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks.”
Parker stuck his phone in his pocket and went back into the coffeehouse.
“The number is a prepaid cell phone,” Ruiz said. “Untraceable.”
“Every criminal’s favorite toy,” Parker said. Every drug dealer, gang banger, and thug in the city carried one. The number was sold with the phone. No paperwork, no paper trail. He grabbed the newspaper and started for the door. “Let’s go.”
“Who were you talking to?” Ruiz asked as they got back into the car.
“I called an old friend for a favor. I want to know who wrote that bit.”
“Because they got it wrong?”
“Because what if they didn’t? If the daughter found the body—”
“Then she’s a suspect.”
“She has to be considered anyway. Most murder victims are killed by people they know. You always have to look at the family.”
“But she has an alibi.”
“I want you to check it out later today. You’ll need to speak with the maitre d’ and the waiter at Cicada. Was she there, when did she get there, when did she leave, what was she wearing, did she speak to anyone, did she use the house phone, was she absent from the table for any length of time.”
“But if she found the body, how did this reporter find out and not us?”
“That’s my question,” Parker said, starting the car. “Chances are, it’s just a screwup. Some low face on the totem pole at the
“I guess you’d know about that,” Ruiz said.
Parker shot her a glance. “Baby, I could write a book. But right now we’ve got better things to do.”
15
According to the Pakistani woman who had been managing the mailbox place for the last three months, Box 501 belonged to a woman named Allison Jennings, whom she did not know. The box had been rented to Ms. Jennings in 1994. The rent was paid by a money order left in the box once a year. These facts had been noted in the file, each year’s note in different handwriting. It seemed a lot of people had used Box-4-U as a stepping-stone to bigger things.
Box-4-U occupied a deep, narrow space between a Lebanese take-out place and a psychic who was running a special on tarot card readings. The mailboxes made a corridor from the front door back to an area with a counter, shelves stacked with shipping cartons, padded envelopes, rolls of tape, bubble wrap, and giant bags of foam packing peanuts.
From the back it took an effort to see past all the stuff to the mailboxes if one cared to pay attention to who was going in and out. Probably the great majority of box renters entered and left in anonymity. As long as they paid their rent on time, no one cared who they were.
The manager who had rented Box 501 to Allison Jennings had made a copy of her driver’s license and stapled it to the rental form as required. The license was from Massachusetts. The photo on the copy was nothing but black ink. Parker had the manager make copies of both sheets, and he and Ruiz went back out onto the street, where they had parked in a loading zone.
As they got into the car, Parker paused to look at the psychic’s storefront. A lavender neon sign read: “Madame Natalia, Psychic to the Stars.” She gladly accepted Visa and MasterCard.
“You want to go inside?” Ruiz asked. “Maybe she can see your future.”
“Why would anyone go to see a psychic in a shithole place like that? If Madame Natalia can see the future, why hasn’t she won the lottery by now?”
“Maybe that’s not her destiny.”
Parker put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. He had been about to say people make their own destiny, but that didn’t reflect kindly on himself, so he said nothing at all. He knew he had set himself up for his fall from Robbery-Homicide by being too cocky, too mouthy, too visible. And he had made his own choice to stay where he was now, a sidetrack to nowhere. He had also decided he would prove himself again, go out a winner. But according to Ruiz’s logic, maybe that wasn’t his destiny.
Ruiz called in the DL for Allison Jennings. Who knew? Maybe the woman would turn out to be a fugitive.
The physical address the woman had listed on her renter’s form for Box-4-U was a redbrick building in a dicey downtown neighborhood where everything, including the population, had been neglected for decades. Street people decorated the landscape, digging in garbage cans, sleeping in doorways. Across the street from Allison Jennings’s building, a crazy guy in a parka that had once been white marched up and down the sidewalk, screaming epithets at the construction crew working on the building.
The place had been gutted and was being redone for downtown’s newest invasion of urban hipsters. The sign advertising the development company promised one-, two-, and three-bedroom luxury apartments in LA’s hippest, most happening new district. The artist’s rendering of the finished project did not show the screaming homeless guy.
“Are they crazy?” Ruiz asked. “No one in their right mind would move down here. There’s nothing here but crack houses and schizo street people.”
“Wait ’til they put a Starbucks on the corner,” Parker said. “There goes the neighborhood. Bring in the young urbanites, next thing you know, the price of illicit substances is through the roof. The average pipehead won’t be able to afford to live here. It’s a social tragedy.”
“You think this woman is still around here?”
Parker shrugged. “Who knows? She filled out that form ten years ago. She could be dead by now, for all we know. This Damon kid maybe bought the box off her, or took it over. He’s got to be around here someplace if he’s using it.”
“Someplace” covered a lot of territory. Central Bureau policed four and a half square miles of downtown LA, including Chinatown, Little Tokyo, the financial district, the jewelry and fashion districts, and the convention center. A lot of ground, a lot of people.
Parker pulled the car into the lot at the station and turned to his partner. “First thing, take Damon’s job ap to
