conference at eight tonight in the auditorium. Before you write the arrest report, give me what you got. I’ll send it right over to Press Relations. They’ll write a release.”
“What’s the rush?”
“The DA will be sending out their own press release after they file charges. We don’t want them stealing our thunder. We want to beat them to the punch.”
Duffy shook my hand and walked back to his office.
When I returned to the interview room, Fuqua said, “While you gone, I been thinkin’. I remember that clown in your car say he ain’t your partner. It come down to you be workin’ this case alone. You the one tryin’ to dog me out. So you my main problem.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“When I was attendin’ Folsom State University,” he said with a grin that looked like a grimace, “I did myself a lot of readin’. Here’s a quote I come across from a guy named Stallman: ‘No man, no problem.’”
“It’s Stalin, you moron,” I said.
“That not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“Now you the fucking moron.”
I was so enraged I could barely speak. “So you’re saying that if you can get someone to cap me, you don’t have any problem?”
He shrugged.
I slowly leaned across the table and looked into Fuqua’s eyes. When he began to grin again, I threw a punch and nailed him in the cheek, knocking him to the ground. For a few seconds he was on his back, woozy, staring at the ceiling. When he staggered back to his chair, I said, “Don’t ever threaten me again or I’ll crack your fucking head open.” I stood up and said, “You might as well get used to following orders right now, you piece of shit, because you’ll be following a lot of them after I send you to death row. Stand up, turn around, shut up, and face the wall.”
I cuffed him, grabbed him by the wrists, and ferried him to the elevator. At the ground-floor jail, I fingerprinted Fuqua and then, feeling a flood of relief and exultation, booked him for Pete Relovich’s murder.
CHAPTER 18
At midnight, after the press conference, after I finished writing the three-page arrest report and the nine- page follow-up investigation report, I called Nicole.
“Yeah,” she said, sounding groggy.
“Did I wake you?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry.”
“Saw you on television tonight.”
“Yeah. If it bleeds it leads. Anyway, I wanted to stop by.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“It’s too late. Some other time.”
“How about tomorrow night?”
“This isn’t a good weekend for me. I’ll give you a call next week.”
I decided to back off. “Sure,” I said, hanging up the phone. I slipped the murder book in the bottom drawer of my desk, shut off the computer, took the elevator to the ground floor, and walked out into the night. I could smell the fog before I could see it, that distinctive brackish scent blowing in from the ocean. It was late May, but Southern California’s traditional June gloom had descended on the city a few days early. The skyscrapers on Bunker Hill were barely visible, with just the tops of the buildings peeking through, their lights twinkling in the swirling mist. The fronds of the palm trees bordering PAB were beaded with water and dripped onto the sidewalk.
I was still charged up from the sudden windup of the case, too restive to return home, so I walked over to Hill Street, crossed the freeway overpass spanning the 101, the stream of headlights dimly flickering down the ribbon of wet asphalt. I entered a narrow courtyard at the fringe of Chinatown, where aqua and yellow paper lanterns glowed in the fog. A ginseng store, a dusty acupuncture office, and several small sweatshops were tucked away in the courtyard, one of which was still open. Two young Asian women, surrounded by bins of fabric and enormous spools of thread, were hunched over sewing machines, beneath the glare of florescent lights. The scene reminded me of my father. Another sweatshop; another part of downtown; another century.
At the end of the courtyard, I walked through a door beneath a red neon sign shaped like a lizard and into a small lobby with a black and red terrazzo floor. A wizened Asian man behind a desk scrutinized me for a moment. When he recognized me, he flashed a toothless smile. He stepped on a floor button and buzzed me through a door that led to a bar.
I discovered the Red Gecko a few years earlier while I was investigating the murder of a Chinatown jewelry store owner. The man regularly played high-stakes mah-jongg in the back room, and I originally thought another gambler had killed him. I later discovered that two members of a Hong Kong triad whacked him because he wouldn’t pay their shakedown fee. The owner and employees of the Red Gecko were grateful that I had never notified vice detectives about the game in the back room. Since then, whenever I wanted a quiet drink, they welcomed me with beers on the house.
Sitting at a table near the back, I could hear the click of mah-jongg tiles in the adjoining room. The only other patrons in the bar were a wealthy Chinese restaurant owner, his young Vietnamese girlfriend, and two heavily made-up bargirls wearing carved jade pendants. One made her way toward me, but the bartender shouted at her in Vietnamese and she swiveled around and returned to her stool. He then walked over with a Tsing Tao beer and a glass.
“Every time, you always welcome here, Detective Ash Levine,” he said in heavily accented English.
“Good to see you, Lam.”
I handed him a few dollar bills. “How about some quarters.”
Lam returned with the change, and I scanned the tunes on the jukebox, my favorite one downtown because the recordings were all vintage jukebox classics. I punched in a dozen of my favorites, including “Blue Gardenia,” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” After I downed two beers, I tried to pay, but Lam waved me off. So I walked back to the table and left a ten dollar tip.
In the courtyard the smells of garlic and sauteed onions hung in the air. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I realized that I was ravenous. I walked over to Broadway, sat at a corner table at Hop Woo, a brightly lit restaurant that stayed open late on weekends. When I finished my fried rice with duck and scallops, I walked back onto Broadway. The fog was now so thick I couldn’t see across the street. My face and hair were speckled with mist. I felt disoriented as I struggled to find my way back to Hill Street, up the freeway overpass, and through downtown to my loft.
I flipped on the CD player and skipped through Kind of Blue to “Flamenco Sketches,” a moody, plaintive cut that usually soothed me when I was too amped up to sleep. I played it over and over, closing my eyes, trying to relax, concentrating on Miles’s and Coltrane’s soaring sound, hoping I would be able to sleep tonight. But images of the case continued to flash in my mind’s eye, like a slide show run at warp speed: the floor tile, the netsuke, the ojime, the blood splatter pattern, the Kleenex, the fractured hyoid bone, the broken glass behind Relovich’s house, the uncle’s fishing boat, the ex-wife’s tears.
By five o’clock, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I left my loft and walked south on Los Angeles Street, past the sleeping homeless in small tents and cardboard boxes, emaciated hookers waving at passing cars, and street corner dealers selling rocks that contained more baking soda than cocaine. The fog was thick overhead, but to the east, I could see the faint signs of sunrise: pinpoints of light irradiating the sky a pale pink.
I cut over to Maple and then slipped into the Flower Mart, a vast, cavernous warehouse bustling with shippers, shoppers, distributors, merchants, bargain hunters, and floral designers. From end to end, wholesalers displayed their wares, acre upon acre jammed with flowers of every genus and hue.
