7th Heaven

sidewalk and convinced him to come to the Hall.

“You’re not under arrest,” I’d said, escorting him to our car. “We just want to hear your side of the story.”

Ricky was in “the box” now, glaring at me with his weird, wide-spaced green eyes, tattooed arms crossed over his chest, his face blanched with the nocturnal pallor of a man who hadn’t seen broad daylight in years.

Within the forest of tattoos on Malcolm’s right arm was a red heart with the initials R.M. The heart was impaled on the hook of a crescent moon. Malcolm looked predatory and violent, and now I was wondering if Junie’s story of Michael Campion’s death was true.

Had Campion really died of natural causes?

Or had this freak walked in on Michael and Junie – and killed him?

Malcolm’s sheet showed three arrests, one conviction, all for possession. I slapped the folder closed.

“What can you tell us about Michael Campion?” I asked him.

“What I read in the papers,” he said.

The interview went on in this vein for a couple of hours, and since Conklin’s charms had no effect on Ricky Malcolm, I took the lead. I was trying to get him to say anything, even lies that we could use to trip him up later, but Ricky was stubborn or cagey or both. He denied any knowledge of Michael Campion, alive or dead.

I blinked first.

“I think I understand what happened, Ricky,” I said. “Your girlfriend was in big trouble, and so you had to help her out. Pretty understandable, I guess.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The body, Ricky. You remember. When Michael Campion died in Junie’s bed.”

Malcolm snorted. “Is she saying that actually happened? And that I had something to do with it?”

“Junie confessed, you understand,” Conklin said. “We know what happened. The kid was dead when you got there. That wasn’t your fault, and we’re not putting that on you.”

“This is a joke, right?” Malcolm said. “Because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“If you’re innocent, help us,” I said. “Where were you on January twenty-first from midnight until eight that morning?”

“Where were you?” he shot back. “You think I remember where I was three months ago? I can tell you this. I wasn’t helping Junie out of a jam with a dead john. You guys really crack me up.” Malcolm sneered. “Don’t you know that Junie’s playing you?”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Yeah! She’s romantic, you know? Like a girl in the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ commercial. Junie wants to believe that she did Michael Campion before he croaked -”

I heard the tap on the glass I’d been waiting for.

Malcolm was saying to Conklin, “I don’t care what she told you. I didn’t cut anyone. I never dumped any freaking body parts anywhere. Junie just likes the attention, man. You should know by now when a whore is lying to you. Charge me, dude, or I’m outta here.”

I opened the door, took the papers from Yuki’s hand. We exchanged grins before I closed the door and said, “Mr. Malcolm, you’re under arrest for tampering with evidence and interfering with a police investigation.”

I fanned the search warrants out on the table. “By this time tomorrow, dude, you won’t have a secret in the world.”

Chapter 10

WHILE RICKY MALCOLM SLEPT in a holding cell on the tenth floor at 850 Bryant, I opened the door to his second-floor, one-bedroom apartment over the Shanghai China restaurant on Mission. Then Conklin, McNeil, Chi, and I stepped inside. A faint stink of decomposing flesh hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold.

“Smell that?” I said to Cappy McNeil. Cappy had been on the force for twenty-five years and had seen more than his share of dead.

He nodded. “Think he left one of those bags of body parts behind?”

“Or maybe he just kept a souvenir. A finger. Or an ear.”

McNeil and his partner, the lean and resourceful Paul Chi, headed for the kitchen while Conklin and I took the bedroom.

There was a pull-shade in the one window. I gave it a yank and it rolled up with a bang, throwing Ricky Malcolm’s boudoir into a dim morning light. The room was a study in filth. The sheets were bunched to one side of the stained mattress, and cigarette butts floated inside a coffee mug on the nightstand. Dinner plates balanced on the dresser and the television set, forks congealed in the remains of whatever Malcolm had eaten in the last week or two.

I opened the drawer in the nightstand, found a couple of joints, assorted pharmaceuticals, a strip of Rough Riders. McNeil came into the room, looked around, said, “I like what he’s done with the place.”

“Find anything?”

“No. And unless Ricky dismembered Campion with a four-inch paring knife, the blade’s not in the kitchen. By the way, the smell is stronger in here.”

Conklin opened the closet, searched pockets and shoes, then went to the dresser. He tossed out T-shirts and porn magazines, but I was the one who found the dead mouse under a steel-toed work boot behind the door.

“Whoaaa. I think I found it.”

“Nice door prize,” McNeil cracked.

Four hours went by, and after turning over every stinking thing in Malcolm’s apartment, Conklin sighed his disappointment.

“There’s no weapon here.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I guess we’re done.”

We stepped out into the street as the flatbed truck pulled up to the curb. CSIs hooked up Malcolm’s ’97 Ford pickup, and we stood by as the truck rattled noisily up the hill on the way to the crime lab. McNeil and Chi took off in their squad car, and Conklin and I got into ours.

Conklin said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks, or dinner – your choice, Lindsay -”

I laughed at his girl-magnet smile.

“I’ll bet you Michael Campion’s DNA is somewhere inside the bed of that truck.”

“I don’t want to bet,” I said. “I want you to be right.”

Chapter 11

JUNIE MOON’S PAINTED LADY looked tired and dull that afternoon as the sky darkened and a fine rain swept the city. Conklin lifted up the crime scene tape that was strung across Junie’s front door and I ducked under it, signed the log, and entered the same room where Conklin and I had interviewed the fetching young prostitute late the night before.

This time we had a search warrant.

The sound of hammers slamming into ceramic tile led us to the bathroom on the second floor, where CSIs were tearing up the floors and walls in order to get to the bathtub plumbing. Charlie Clapper, head of our CSU, was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door. He was wearing one of his two dozen nearly identical herringbone jackets, his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and his lined face was somber.

“Curb your expectations, Lindsay. There’s enough splooge in this whorehouse to tie up the lab for a year.”

“We just need one hair,” I said. “One drop of Michael Campion’s blood.”