“I got two kids to feed. I got an old lady, too,” Curtis replied. Whether she was his children’s mother, he didn’t say. “Like I told you, gotta get Benjamins some kinda way, law or no law.”
A gung-ho lawyer could make something out of that, too, especially with things the way they were nowadays. Plenty of potential jurors might be out of work themselves. Even ones who weren’t would have cousins or brothers- in-law who were. In tough times, they might not want to come down hard on a guy who stuck a gun-an unloaded gun, the lawyer would insist-in a scared clerk’s face so he could feed his little children.
Well, that wasn’t Colin’s worry, or not very much of it. He had the arrest. Now he had a confession to go with it. The DA would carry the ball from here.
In the meantime, he nailed things down as tight as he could. He asked Cedric Curtis to describe the crime. Curtis did, with almost as much detail as the Circle K surveillance camera showed. Whatever a defense lawyer did, he wouldn’t be able to claim his client hadn’t done it.
When Curtis finished, Gabe said, “Odds are you’ll do some time. That’ll keep you fed, anyway, even if prison rations aren’t anything to write home about.”
“I know about jail food,” Curtis said. “There’s enough of it, no matter how shitty it is.” No, he hadn’t worried about getting caught.
“Okay,” Gabe said. “So you’ll have three squares and a cot for a while. But what about your kids? What about your girlfriend? Who’s gonna take care of them while you’re in the pokey?”
Cedric Curtis looked astonished, as if that had never occurred to him.
“Aw, fuck,” Curtis said softly. Maybe he could learn after all. But what lesson would he draw from this?
Well, Cedric wouldn’t be his problem for a while. The uniformed cop came back and took the robber away. “Nothing left of this one but the paperwork,” Gabe said.
“Yeah.” Colin wished he sounded-and were-happier.
“Lighten up,” Gabe told him. “He
“You hope. We hope,” Colin said.
“Honest to God, they aren’t,” Gabe insisted. “Me, I’m going outside to celebrate with a cigarette.” He grinned wryly. “Way to party down, huh?”
“If you say so.” Colin went back to his desk. He stolidly started working on Cedric Curtis’ file. The more you did now, the less you had to do later. But he hadn’t got far when his phone rang. He picked it up. “Ferguson. . Say what?. . Are you sure?. . Aw-fudge. . Okay, what’s the address?. . Right. I’ll get there soon as I can. ’Bye.” He slammed the phone down.
Gabe Sanchez was just coming back from his nicotine fix when Colin stood up. His face must have been all over thunderclouds, because Gabe blurted, “Jesus! What hit the fan now? Your family okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, they’re fine,” Colin answered. “But there’s a little old lady dead over on 139th Street, and the cop who found her says it sure looks like the Strangler got her. I’m on my way there now. Wanna ride along?”
“Shit, I’m dying to,” Gabe answered. But he walked out to the parking lot with Colin. Colin had known he would. They wasted a couple of minutes filling out the required forms for getting a car: like a lot of Southern California towns, San Atanasio had really tightened up as gas got scarce and expensive. But no one would say boo to this trip, not when Colin scribbled
The sun shone as brightly as it ever did since the eruption. The sky tried to be blue, but didn’t quite seem to remember how. It was somewhere in the high sixties. Seattle summer? It could have been worse. It had been last week, and no doubt it would be again before too long.
North on Hesperus to Braxton Bragg. East on Braxton Bragg to Sword Beach. Left onto Sword Beach, then a right at the next light and onto 139th. The corner there had a liquor store and a seafood restaurant that charged too much for some of the most mediocre dinners Colin had ever regretted ordering.
Once you turned the corner and headed up 139th, you fell back in time. Most of the houses on the little street had gone up not long after the war to give the kids of the Baby Boom bedrooms of their own. Some were even older: they looked like adobe even if they were stucco, and had roofs of Spanish (well, Spanish-style) tiles. They’d been moved here when the Harbor Freeway pushed through to San Pedro at the start of the Sixties.
Back then, San Atanasio had been white and Japanese. Oh, a few Mexican-Americans, but from families that had been in the States for generations. (Colin’s secretary, Josie Linares, came from a family like that.) Now there were whites and blacks and Mexicans and Salvadorans (the Cubans in San Atanasio mostly lived farther south and east) and Koreans and Vietnamese (the Japanese had moved south to Torrance and Palos Verdes when the blacks started coming in) and. . everything under the sun.
What there wasn’t was a lot of money. Not in this part of town. The cars that sat in driveways and on the street-and, here and there, on lawns-looked as if they’d been sitting a long time even before the supervolcano did its number on gas prices. A couple of them were up on blocks. The rust they showed argued they’d been on blocks quite a while, too.
A black-and-white with its light bar flashing was parked in front of 1214 West 139th. A heavyset black woman and a skinnier Hispanic woman, both getting close to middle age, descended on Colin as he got out. “Did that lousy son of a bitch do for old Mrs. Mandelbaum?” the black woman demanded fiercely.
“I don’t know yet, ma’am,” Colin said. “I got here from the station as fast as I could when the call came in. That was ten minutes ago, fifteen tops.”
“They ever catch that bastard, they oughta hang him up by the nuts,” the Hispanic woman said.
Privately, Colin agreed with her. He wouldn’t say so publicly. Gabe Sanchez would: “That sounds goddamn good to me.”
“How come you ain’t caught him?” the African-American woman asked. “You shoulda done it a long time ago, you wanna know what I think.”
Colin agreed with her there, too. All he could say, though, was “We’re doing our best, believe me. And now I need to see what we’ve got here.”
He started up the driveway to the house. The lawn was green. That meant less than it would have before the supervolcano blew. No more brown, neglected lawns in L.A. these days, not with all the rain that came down. But it was also neatly mowed and edged. Well kept-up: that was the phrase.
Just about all the South Bay Strangler’s victims who lived in houses had kept them up well. For a split second, Colin wondered if that meant anything. Then he saw a guy in a blue sweatshirt-a Filipino, was his first guess- standing on the front porch, and forgot about that. “Who are you? What are you doing there?” he barked.
“My name is Oscar Flores, sir.” Filipino, sure enough: name, looks, and accent all told the same story. “I had not seen Mrs. Mandelbaum for several days, so I flagged down the police car when it came by. The officers, they had to break down the front door”-which stood open behind him-“and they told me not to go in after them. But I am afraid there is no good news inside the house.”
Colin was afraid of the same thing. The sick-sweet odor welling out through the door might have been stronger, but there was no mistaking it. Something in there had died a while ago, and he could make a good guess about what it was.
“Maybe it’s natural causes.” Gabe Sanchez grabbed for whatever straws he could find.
“Nah.” Grimly, Colin shook his head. “They wouldn’t’ve called for us if it was natural. They just would’ve sent for the meat wagon, and that would’ve been that.” Gabe’s heavy-featured face fell. Colin had got one step ahead of him.
Into the house, with another warning to Mr. Flores not to follow. Colin didn’t know what he expected. Overstuffed Victorian furniture, probably. That was the kind of stuff you figured a little old lady would have.
What he saw instead was Fifties or Sixties modern: almost as outdated, but in a very different way. Sharp
