He was large-shouldered and swarthy, with curly black hair falling over his forehead, a shadowy growth on his face.
“Ah, Police Inspector Boxer,” he said. “Please sit, be my guest. Sorry the surroundings are not so plush.” The room was musty and smelled of books and smoke. An ashtray and a pack of unfiltered Rothmans were on the desk.
I lowered myself into a seat across from him and pulled out my pad. I handed him a card.
“Homicide,” Lemouz read, bunching his lips, seemingly impressed. “So I suspect it’s not some rogue etymological nuance that brings you here?”
“Perhaps another interest of yours,” I said. “You’re aware, of course, of the events going on across the bay?”
He sighed. “Yes. Even a man with his nose in his books most of the time brings it out now and then. Tragic. Totally counterproductive. Fanon said, ‘Violence is its own judge and jury.’ Yet, one cannot find it completely surprising.”
Lemouz’s phony sympathy appealed to me about as much as a dentist’s drill. “You mind telling me just what you mean by that, Mr. Lemouz?”
“Of course, Madam Inspector, if you would be so kind as to tell me just why you are here.”
“It’s Lieutenant,” I corrected him. “I head up the Homicide detail. And I was given your name as someone who might have some firsthand knowledge of what’s going on here. The ideological scene. People who might find blowing up three sleeping people and almost killing two innocent children as well as virtually imploding someone’s vascular system an acceptable form of protest.”
“By ‘over here,’ I assume you mean the peaceful, academic groves of Berkeley,” Lemouz said.
“By ‘over here,’ I mean wherever someone would want to do these awful things, Mr. Lemouz.”
“Professor,” he replied. “The Lance Hart Professor of Romance Languages”—I saw the glimmer of a smile—“as long as we’re spouting credentials.”
“You said you didn’t find these murders surprising.”
“Why should they be?” Lemouz shrugged. “Should the patient be surprised he is ill when his body is covered in lesions? Our society is infected, Lieutenant, and the very people who transmit the disease look around and go, ‘Who, me?’
“Do you know,” he said, raising his eyes, “that the powerful multinational corporations now have an output larger than the GNP of ninety percent of the countries around the globe? They have supplanted governments as the system of social responsibility in our world.
“Why is it,” he laughed cynically, “we are so quick to rail against the moral outrage of apartheid when it threatens our racial sensibilities, but are so asleep to recognize it when it is economic. It is because we do not see it through the eyes of the subjugated. We see it through the culture of the powerful. The corporation. On TV.”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but I’m here about four gruesome murders. People are dying.”
“Yes they are, Lieutenant. That’s exactly my point.”
There was a part of me that would like to have grabbed Lemouz by the lapels and shaken him. Instead, I pulled out the photo of the au pair on Wendy Raymore’s ID and a police artist’s sketch of the woman videotaped walking into the Clift Hotel with George Bengosian. “Do you know either of these women, Professor?”
Lemouz almost started to laugh. “Why would I want to help you? It’s the state who is the architect of this injustice, not these two women. Please tell me, who has committed the larger injustice? The two women suspects”—he threw the front page of the Chronicle across the desk at me—“or these sparkling examples of our system?”
I was staring at photos of Lightower and Bengosian.
“If these people are signaling the start of a war,” Lemouz laughed, “I say, let it unfold. What is the new phrase, Lieutenant?” He smiled. “The one Americans have embraced with all their moral imperative? Let’s roll.”
I picked up the pictures, closed my pad, and placed it back in my bag. I stood up, feeling tired and soiled. I walked out on the Lance Hart Professor of Romance Languages before I blew him up.
Chapter 34
I was steaming all the way back to the Hall thanks to Lemouz’s sanctimonious rantings, plus my frustration that we weren’t getting anywhere on these murders. I was still hot when I got to the office after six. I called Cindy and made a date to meet at Susie’s. Maybe we could get something accomplished over lobster quesadillas. I needed the girls on this.
As I hung up with Cindy, Warren Jacobi stepped into my office. “Yank Sing,” he said.
“Yank Sing?”
“It’s a better bet than quesadillas. Dim sum. Women always open up with Chinese. You should know that, LT. While you’re there, they say the chicken in salt and ginger caused the downfall of the Qin dynasty.
“Where you been?” He sat down. He had something for me. I knew that sly grin of his.
“Out wasting my time, in the People’s Republic. You got something, other than the restaurant review?”
“We got a hit on the Wendy Raymore APB,” he said, grinning.
That got my juices flowing.
“A Safeway across the bay called in. Night clerk thought he recognized the face. There’s a video on the way. He said she has red hair now and was wearing sunglasses. But she took them off for a second to count the cash, and he swears it’s her.”
“Where across the bay, Warren?”
“Harmon Avenue in Oakland.” I drew a little mental map, and we both came to the same realization. “Near the McDonald’s where little Caitlin was found.”
Geographically, it was starting to fit into place. “Get that photo to every storefront in the neighborhood.”
“Already done, LT.” Jacobi’s eyes had that little sparkle they got when he was holding something back.
“There been a lot of calls,” I said, cocking my head at Warren. “What makes you think this one’s real?”
He winked. “She was buying an asthma puffer.”
Chapter 35
Cindy, Claire, and I had finished most of our Coronas and a plate of wings by the time Jill arrived. She hung her coat and came up warily to the booth, the nerves easy to read in her thin smile.
“So,” she said, dumping her briefcase, and tossed herself next to Claire, “who wants to be first to prod?”
“No dissection,” I said. “Wings … and here …” I tilted what was left of a beer into her glass.
We all raised our glasses, Jill a little hesitantly. We had this moment of quiet, everybody trying to figure out just what was right to say. How many times had we met together before? At first, four women with tough jobs who had come together just to pool our resources, solve a crime.
“To friends,” Claire said. “Ones who will be there for one another. That means for anything, Jill.”
“I’d better drink this,” Jill said, her eyes starting to grow moist, “before I run my nose in it.”
Jill drained about a third of the glass in a deep swallow. She drew a breath. “Okay, no reason to beat around the bush, right? You all know?”
Everyone nodded.
“Telephone, telegraph, tele-Boxer.” Jill threw a wink my way.
