“Okay, turn.”
“Jesus.”
“Hand me that.”
“Hello, Mr. Jones, just take it easy.”
Two uniformed cops came through the door, glancing around quickly, trying to assess the scene as rapidly as possible. One, a bulky six-footer with a thick mustache, focused on me while the other went down the hall to the bedroom.
Before he could ask his first question, the cabby was at the door.
“You need me anymore, man?” he asked.
My cop wheeled around. “You’re going to have to stick around, sir. If you’ll just wait in your cab, I’ll be down to speak to you shortly.”
The cabby rolled his eyes and retreated, but not before giving me a look that seemed to say, “Thanks a heap, pal.”
“You called 911?” the cop asked me.
I admitted it. I told him who I was, and that I was doing a feature on Lawrence Jones for
The cop’s eyes narrowed. “You work for
The paper has, over the years, been somewhat critical of the city’s rank and file. “That’s right,” I said. The cop said nothing else and waited for me to continue. I told him how I’d joined Lawrence the last few nights on a stakeout in front of a men’s store on Garvin, and when he hadn’t shown up-
“Wait a minute,” the cop said. This habit of his, of interrupting me all the time, was getting annoying very quickly, but I didn’t see that there’d be much to gain by complaining about it. “Garvin? That’s where that store was hit, within the last hour or so?”
“Yeah. I called that one in to 911, too.”
His eyes got even narrower. “Any crime scenes you haven’t been to tonight?”
They brought Lawrence out of the room on a stretcher, his face under one of those respirator masks, his eyes closed, blood everywhere. He didn’t look anything like the tough, cool, unflappable guy I’d been hanging out with the last few days. They maneuvered him through the door and angled him delicately down the stairs.
“Which hospital?” I called out to them.
“Mercy General,” one of the paramedics grunted as he took the high end of Lawrence’s stretcher down the stairs.
“I don’t know who I should be calling,” I told the cop. “I don’t know about any of his family. All I know is, he’s got a boyfriend… I’m trying to think.”
“He’s gay?”
“Yeah.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“You gay?”
“I don’t know, are you?”
“Hey, listen, if you want to be a smartass, I got all night for this, pal.”
“I just don’t know what that has to do with anything. Lawrence is a friend, someone I’m doing a story on. But there’s someone who should know, I think his name is Kent, runs a restaurant in the east end.”
“We can worry about that in a minute. Tell me how you got in here.”
He had several more questions, all of which I answered as honestly as possible. He slipped away a moment to talk to the other officer, who was standing outside the door to the bedroom. These guys were too low on the totem pole to start doing any real investigating. They’d be holding the fort until the crime scene guys and the detectives, the types they built glitzy TV shows around, showed up.
I wandered into the kitchen, glanced at the picture of Lawrence and the man I had assumed earlier was Kent. Then I remembered the name of the restaurant. Blaine’s.
I grabbed a phone book tucked up against the wall under the cabinets and opened it to the
“Blaine’s restaurant. I’m sorry, but we’re just closing.”
“Is Kent there?” I asked.
“Who’s calling?”
“My name’s Zack Walker. But tell him it’s a friend of Lawrence’s.”
I leaned up against the kitchen counter and waited. Finally, “Hello?”
“Is this Kent?”
“Yes.”
“Look, you don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Lawrence’s.”
“A friend?” Suspicious. I could almost imagine the eyebrow going up.
“Listen, not a close friend. But I don’t know anything about Lawrence’s next of kin, or who should be contacted, but he mentioned your name one time.”
“Next of kin?” Kent asked. The words were, I realized as soon as I’d said them to Kent, loaded. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s at Mercy General. You should probably get there.”
I went downstairs and stepped out onto the sidewalk, took in a deep breath of the cool night air.
As if there weren’t enough cars at the curb, including the cab that brought me here, an unmarked black Ford with a whip antenna and mini-hubcaps screeched to a stop in front of Lawrence’s door. A tall man with a mustache and short black hair, dressed in a black Burberry trench, got out from behind the wheel. It took a moment before I realized who he was. Detective Steve Trimble, from two nights before, who’d been investigating Miles Diamond’s death-by-SUV at the men’s store on Emmett.
He glanced at me as he strode by, no doubt thinking he recognized me from somewhere, then bounded up the stairs two at a time to Lawrence’s apartment. In a matter of seconds he was back down, pointed in my direction, and said, “With me.”
He started back to his car, turned to make sure I was following him, which I was. He motioned for me to go around to the other side and get in. I did.
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked. “I know you from somewhere.”
I said, “If I want to be spoken to like I’m a piece of shit, I can stay home. I’ve got teenagers.”
“Who are you?”
“Zack Walker. We met night before last. The thing on Emmett. Miles Diamond.”
Trimble squinted. “You were with Lawrence.” It was almost a question.
“That’s right.”
“And here you are again.” There was something about the way he said it, that this was some sort of cosmic coincidence.
“Yeah,” I said. “I found him.”
“Isn’t
“No more than his former partner showing up to find out who tried to kill him.”
He tried to conceal his surprise, but the flash in his eyes was there. “Yeah, we used to work together. Lawrence told you that?”
“Yeah.”
“What else did he tell you?”
I said nothing for a moment. “He told me a lot of things. Why don’t you ask your questions.”
The flashing red lights from the other emergency vehicles burned shadows across Trimble’s face.
When he didn’t ask one right away, I said, “He mentioned that you two worked together, plainclothes. That you went through some tough spots together.”
“Yeah, well, your paper did its best to make sure things didn’t go easy for me.”
I honestly didn’t know what my newspaper had written about that night when Trimble had frozen and
