for a dead man. Another problem for the police.
He gave Turnbull-Langley another look. They were about the same size. He took off his coat and laid it on the floor. Then he pulled the well dressed dead man away from the table.
“ What are you doing?”
“ I’m going to undress him.”
“ Oh my God. Why?”
“ My clothes look like they’ve been slept in and I need a shave. How far do you think I’d get walking out of here looking like this? But dressed in Turnbull’s clothes I’ve got a chance. His suit doesn’t look like it’s spent the night in jail, my clothes do.”
Without further thought, he took off the dead man’s coat. He felt a slight tingle run up his spine as he unbuttoned the vest and removed it. His hands trembled and he fought shaking fingers as he took off the tie and the white shirt.
“ Now the hard part,” he said under his breath.
He pulled the dead man out of the chair, laid him out on the floor. He untied and removed the leather shoes, leaving the socks. Then he loosened the belt, pulled off the trousers.
For a couple seconds he studied the dead man, wondering if he had children who would be crying tonight. He shrugged off the thought and undressed, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor. He took another look at the bodies, then he put on the dead man’s suit. Everything fit, the jacket even covered his cast, but he grimaced as he put on the shoes, they were at least a size too small and they hurt. But his Nike trainers hardly went with the suit, so he stuffed his feet into the expensive leather.
“ You forgot the tie.”
“ I hate ties.”
“ You’ve gone this far, put it on,” she thought and he obeyed.
“ Time to go,” he thought and once again he started for the door.
“ Wait a minute. What about the policeman’s gun?”
“ They have metal detectors in police stations and jails, to keep guns out.”
“ Oh.” Then she added a thought, “Do they check you when you leave?”
“ I don’t know, but I’m not going to take the chance. I’m going to leave the gun.”
“ Then, let’s go,” she thought.
Jim opened the door, looked down a long corridor with several tall oak doors opposite each other, anyone of which could open and disgorge a policeman or policemen who could cut off his escape.
He stepped into the hallway and made his hurting feet move along the tiled floor. Sweat rolled down the back of his neck and still another chill crept up his spine. He tried to control his breathing by sucking air deep into his gut. He concentrated on swinging his arms in a casual, but purposeful manner. A man with a mission, but not in a hurry. A man with time, but not too much. He needn’t have bothered, because he reached the end of the hallway without incident. No police, no lawyers, no clerks, no one.
He held onto the rail as he went down the stairs, gritting his teeth against the pain the cramped shoes were causing. He had to turn right at the bottom, into another corridor, this one filled with people. He plunged ahead, passing them without acknowledging them. He might as well have been alone. The many voices and languages of the hustling police station all carried on as if he were invisible, just another attorney doing his job. The corridor opened onto a large room full of uniformed policemen, talking, drinking coffee, writing, laughing, doing their jobs. They paid him no attention as he waded among them, a fish among sharks.
A large room, many desks, two possible ways out. Which one to take? He had to decide. He couldn’t ask. Then luck attacked like lightning strikes. He saw his wife, on the far side of the room, talking to an elderly man in a cheap suit and a loud Hawaiian print tie. He stopped, saw her shake the man’s hand, turn and go through door number one.
He followed her into another hallway, moving faster in an effort to catch up. In spite of his trouble, she’d come for him. Maybe she’d finally seen Kohler for what he really was. Maybe she wanted him back. Maybe everything was going to be all right, after all.
He followed her out of the police station.
“ Julia,” he called, but the striking woman turning her head to meet his gaze wasn’t his wife. Even though she had been crying, her smile was too quick, too real. Julia hadn’t smiled like that in a long time.
“ Hello, Jimmy,” Roma, his wife’s twin, said as she smiled at him through her tears.
Chapter Three
After booking Jim Monday, writing the report and dealing with the motor pool about the damaged car, Washington and Walker were forty-five minutes over shift. Walker wanted to go home and Washington, after lighting his third cigarette for the day, wanted to go to work.
He wanted the Askew case. He wouldn’t get it, because he wasn’t a homicide detective anymore and there probably wasn’t going to be a case. Hit and run-open and shut. That’s what they were calling it. But it didn’t feel right. People didn’t speed around corners in Belmont Shore during the middle of the day. Too many cars, too many people. It felt wrong.
Whoever was driving that Buick wasn’t out for the Southern California sun or the specialty shops. He was out for murder. That car came out of nowhere, struck Askew, made a quick right on a residential street and was gone in a flash. It wasn’t accidental and Washington wanted the case.
“ There is no case, so you can stop worrying about it,” Walker said.
“ I wasn’t worrying about it.”
“ You were worrying about it.”
Walker was amazing, Washington thought, he’d only been his partner for six months and he could read him better than his wife, better than his daughter, better than any partner he’d ever had. Maybe it was because they were a lot alike, both from poor backgrounds, both overeducated and they both loved police work better than life.
“ Fess up, you think it was murder and you want the case. Admit it,” Walker chided.
“ Yeah, I think it was murder and if I didn’t at first, the bullet through the back window would have changed my mind. Hell, it would have changed anybody’s. And the Buick-that had to be a set up. That SOB was waiting. He saw his target, stepped on the gas, got him and vanished. Yeah, it feels like murder to me and I’ll bet it feels like murder to you.”
“ Easy counselor, I went to law school, too. You don’t have to convince me. Use your logic on somebody who can do something about it.”
“ Nobody wants to hear.”
“ Then it’s over.”
“ If I was still in Homicide, we could work it in.”
“ What do you mean we, kimosabe? This Injun has a wife and two little girls at home, who don’t see enough of him as it is.”
“ Maybe you should have stayed a lawyer.”
“ Least I tried it, you didn’t even take the bar.”
Silently Washington agreed. He’d gone into the academy five days after he’d graduated from law school. Jane was pregnant. He had to get married. He had to provide a home. He told himself he’d take the bar next year, when they got a little ahead, but next year just never seemed to roll around.
“ How come you gave it up?” Washington knew Walker had quit a prestigious Century City law firm.
“ I didn’t like getting rich, white collar crooks off the hook. What I really wanted to do was put them behind bars. So I quit and became a cop. Now I do what I like. I was lucky, the money helped.”
Walker was an enigma to Washington. His parents had been killed in a small plane crash when he was sixteen. He was an only child, with grandparents in California. He came west to live with them and inherited twenty-one million dollars on his twenty-first birthday, a million for each year he’d been alive. He didn’t have to work, he could live comfortably off the interest.
