Free Fall

I put on my jacket, looked around my office, then went to the door and locked up. I had once seen a James Bond movie where James Bond pasted a hair across the seam in the doorjamb so he could tell if anyone opened the door while he was gone. I thought about doing it, but figured that someone in the insurance office across the hall would come out while I was rigging the hair and then I'd have to explain and they'd probably think it was stupid. I'd probably have to agree with them.

I forgot about the hair and went to see Eddie Ditko.

CHAPTER 7

The Los Angeles Examiner is published out of a large, weathered red-brick building midway between downtown L.A. and Chinatown, in a part of the city that looks more like it belongs in Boston or Cincinnati than in Southern California. There are sidewalks and taxis and tall buildings of cement and glass and nary a palm tree in sight. Years ago, enterprising developers built a nest of low-rise condominiums, foolishly believing that Angelenos wanted to live near their work and would snap the places up to avoid the commute. What they didn't count on is that people were willing to work downtown but no one wanted to live there. If you're going to live in Southern California, why live in a place that looks like Chicago?

I put my car in the lot across the street, crossed at the light, then took the elevator up to the third floor and the pretty black receptionist who sits there. 'Elvis Cole to see Eddie Ditko. He's expecting me.'

She looked through her pass list and asked me to sign in. 'He's in the city room. Do you know where that is?'

'Yep.'

She gave me a peel-and-stick guest badge and went back to talking into the phone. I looked at the badge and felt like I was at a PTA meeting. Hello! My name is Elvis! I affixed the badge to my shirt and tried not to look embarrassed. Why risk the hall police?

I went through a pair of leather upholstered swinging doors, then along a short hall that opened into the city room. Twenty desks were jammed together in the center of the room, and maybe a dozen people were hanging around the desks, most of them typing as fast as they could and the rest of them talking on the phone. Eddie Ditko had the desk on the far left corner, about as close to the editors' offices as you could get without being one of the editors. A woman in her late twenties was working at a terminal next to him. She was wearing huge round glasses and a loud purple dress with very wide shoulders and a little purple pillbox hat. It was the kind of clothes you wore when you were establishing your identity as a retro-hip urban intellectual. Or maybe she was just odd. She glanced up once as I approached, then went on typing. Eddie was chewing on an unlit Grenadiers cigar and scowling at his VDT when I got there. He had to be forty years older than her. He didn't bother glancing up. 'Hey, Eddie, when are they going to make you an editor around here and get you off the floor?'

Eddie jerked the cigar out of his mouth and spit a load of brown juice at his wastebasket. He never lit them. He chewed them. 'Soon's I stop saying what I think and start kissing the right ass, like everybody else around here.' He said it loud enough for most of the room to hear. The purple woman glanced over, then went on with her typing. Tolerant. Eddie grimaced and rubbed at his chest. 'Jeez, I got chest pains. I'm a goddamned walking thrombo.'

'Lay off the fats and exercise a little.'

'What're you, my fuckin' mother?' Eddie leaned to the side and broke wind. Classy.

I pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, hooking my arms over its back. 'What'd you find on the REACT guys?'

Eddie clamped the wet cigar in his teeth, leaned toward the VDT, and slapped buttons. The little VDT screen filled with printing. 'I put together some stuff from our morgue files, but that's about it. REACT is an elite surveillance unit, and that means the cops block their files. They can't do their jobs if everybody knows who they're surveilling.'

'How many guys we talking about?'

'Five. You want the names?'

'Yeah.'

He hit a couple of buttons and a little printer beside his VDT chattered and spit out a page. He handed it to me. Five names were listed in a neat column in the center of the page.

LT. ERIC DEES

SGT. PETER GARCIA

OFF. FLOYD RIGGENS

OFF. WARREN PINKWORTH

OFF. MARK THURMAN

I looked over the names. They meant nothing. 'They any good?'

Eddie grinned like a shark with his eye on a fat boy in baggy shorts. 'They wouldn't be a REACT team if they weren't any good. They target felons and they've got a ninety-nine-point-seven percent conviction rate. Dees has been down there almost six years, along with Garcia and Riggens. Pinkworth joined a couple of years back and they picked up Thurman a year ago. He's the baby.'

'How'd Thurman make the squad?'

Eddie hit more buttons and the printing on the screen changed. 'Same as everybody else. Top ten of his academy class, a string of outstandings in his quarterly evaluations, Officer of the Month four times. You remember that nut pulled a gun on the RTD bus and threatened to start killing people unless Madonna gave him a blow job?'

'Sort of.'

The purple woman looked over. Interested.

'Hell, I wrote about that one. Guy stops the bus in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, and Thurman and a guy named Palmetta were the first cops on the scene. Thurman was, what, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old?'

The purple woman shrugged.