Good. Men were...
No, enough of that. Men are our biological partners.
Oh, Lord...
Day Ninety, she decided that bitterness was eroding her soul and resolved to be positive. Returning to her easel for the first time in months, she tried painting in oils, found her sense of color wanting, switched to pen-and-ink and filled pages of Bristol board with tight, hyper-realistic faces.
Children's faces. Well drawn but tacky. She ripped the drawings to shreds, went shopping.
She needed to go for color, one look in her closet made that painfully obvious.
Her casual clothes consisted of black jeans and black Ts and black shoes. Her work duds were dark pantsuits: a dozen black, two navy blues, three chocolate browns, one charcoal. All slim-cut to fit her skinny frame, all designer-labels that she purchased at discount outlets and the Barney's warehouse sale and last-day mark-downs wherever she found them.
She drove from her Wilshire District apartment to the big Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and splurged on a half-price Vestimenta soft wool number.
Silk-lined lapels, ticket pocket cut on the bias, strong shoulders, pegged trousers.
Powder blue.
She wore it that night and drew shocked looks from the other detectives. One wiseass covered his eyes, as if shielding himself against glare. Another said, 'Nice, Petra.' A couple of others whistled, and she grinned at the lot of them.
Before anyone else could crack wise, phones began ringing, and the squad room filled with the business of death. Taking her place at her metal desk, in a corner next to the lockers, Petra shuffled paper and touched a powder blue sleeve and figured she knew what was running through the guys' heads.
Morticia changes her style.
Dragon Lady comes up for light.
She came across funereal, but a lot of it was biology. She had sharp features, ivory skin, thick, straight jet hair that she kept in a glossy wedge cut, deep brown eyes that leaned toward piercing.
Kids brought out the softness in her, but now Alicia and Bea were out of her life and Billy Straight - a young boy she met working a case who'd touched her heart -was nearly fourteen, had found himself a girlfriend.
Billy never called her anymore; the last time Petra had phoned him, more silence than conversation had passed between them.
So she supposed she could be forgiven a Dragon Lady persona.
The D.A.'s office had faxed her some questions on the Elsa Brigoon case - stuff the novice ADA could've known from reading the file. But she answered anyway and faxed back her replies.
Then her phone rattled and a patrol officer named
Montez went on about a 187 cutting on Fountain near El Centro and Petra was out of the station in a flash.
She arrived at the scene and conferred with the assistant coroner. He informed her that the morgue was backlogged and the autopsy would take a while. But cause of death didn't look to be any great mystery.
Single knife wound, exsanguination, most of the blood pooled beneath the DB, establishing the kill spot. Petra, in powder blue, was glad there wasn't more gore.
Then she read the victim's license and got sad because, for the first time since she'd been a detective, this was a name she recognized. She'd never been into the blues - not musically, anyway - but you didn't have to be to know who Edgar Ray Lee was.
AKA Baby Boy. The driver's license in his pocket just stated the basics: male Caucasian, a DOB that put him at fifty-one. Height: six-two, weight: two-seventy. Petra thought he looked bigger than that.
As she recorded the data in her pad, she overheard someone - one of the morgue drivers - remark that the guy was a guitar god, had jammed with Bloomfield, Mayall, Clapton, Roy Buchanan, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Petra turned and saw a ponytailed and bearded ex-hippie type in morgue coveralls staring at the body. White ponytail. Wet-eyed.
'Talented,' she said.
'Those fingers,' said the driver, as he unfolded a black plastic body bag.
'You play?' Petra asked him.
'I noodle. He played. He - those fingers were... magic.' The driver dabbed at his eye, yanked angrily at the bag, virtually ripped it open. Zzzzzzzip.
'Ready?' he said.
'In a sec' Petra crouched by the body, took in the details, again. Jotted in her pad.
Yellow T-shirt, blue jeans, shaved head, tiny chin beard. Tattoos blued both arms.
Ponytail walked away looking disgusted. Petra continued studying. Edgar Ray Lee's mouth hung open exposing broken and rotted teeth that made Petra think: Junkie? But she spotted no track marks among the tattoos.
Baby Boy hadn't been dead more than an hour, but his face had already taken on that greenish gray pallor. The EMTs had cut the shirt around the stab wound. Three-inch vertical slit up the belly, gaping at the edges.
She sketched the wound and slipped the pad back into her purse. She was stepping away when a photographer behind her announced, 'I want to make sure my lighting was okay.' He moved in, lost his balance, fell on his ass. Slid feetfirst into the blood pool.
His camera landed on the asphalt and rattled ominously, but that wasn't Petra's concern.
Crimson splotches and speckles decorated her pants. Both trouser legs ruined.
The photographer lay there, stunned. Petra did nothing to help him, muttered something sharp that widened his eyes and everyone else's.
She stamped away from the scene.
Her own damn fault, going for color.
Petra worked the case hard, doing all the usual procedural things as well as researching Baby Boy Lee on the Internet. Soon, she felt immersed in her victim's world, wondered what it had been like to be Edgar Ray Lee.
The bluesman had started out upper-middle class, the only child of two professors at Emory University in Atlanta. Ten years as a child prodigy on violin and cello had ended when Edgar's teenage rebellion aimed him at guitar and landed him on a Greyhound to Chicago, where he found a whole new lifestyle: Living on the streets and in borrowed cribs, sitting in with the Butter-field Blues Band, Albert Lee, B. B. King, and any other genius who happened to be passing through. Developing his chops but picking up bad habits.
The older musicians recognized the chubby kid's talent right away, and one of them gave him the nickname that stuck.
Baby Boy spent two decades scratching a living as a sessions sideman and a bar-band frontman, endured big promises that petered, cut records that went nowhere, finally recorded a top-40 hit with a Southern band called
Junior Biscuit. The song, penned, sung and guitar-riffed by the big man, was a gut-wrenching lament entitled 'A Cold Heart' - the very same ditty Baby Boy had played moments before his death.
The song made it to 19 on the Billboard Top 100, stayed on the charts for a month. Baby Boy bought himself a nice car and a whole bunch of guitars and a house in Nashville. Within a year, all the money was gone, as Lee kicked up his pattern of voracious womanizing and dining, and polydrug use. The next several years were a blur of fruitless rehab stints. Then: obscurity.
No relatives called about the case. Lee's parents were both dead, he'd never married or sired a child. That, God help her, made her care about him deeply, and the image of his corpse stayed in her head.
The usual procedural things were: having Baby Boy's apartment taped off before dropping in for a personal look-through, interviewing Baby Boy's band mates, his manager, the owner of the Snake Pit, bouncers and bartenders and cocktail waitresses, the few patrons who'd stuck around to gawk at the crime scene and had gotten their names on a list.
No one had any idea who'd want to hurt Baby Boy. Everyone loved Baby Boy, he was a great big kid, naive, good-natured, would give you the shirt off his back -would give you his guitar, for God's sake.
The high point of usual procedure was an hour in a tiny, close interview room, in the company of star witness Linus Brophy.
When Petra first heard about an eyewitness, her hopes
had surged. Then she'd talked to the homeless man and realized his account was next to worthless.
Brophy's description boiled down to a tall man.
Age? No idea.
Race? No idea.
Clothing? Not a clue.
It was real dark, Detective Lady.
If that wasn't enough to endear her to Brophy, the bum had a media jones, kept pestering her, wanting to know if someone from TV would be talking to him. Petra wondered how long till Brophy tried to peddle a screenplay. Hawking his story to the tabloids: I WATCHED ALIENS MURDER BABY BOY LEE.
Only problem was, the tabs couldn't care less. Because comeback attempt notwithstanding, Baby Boy was no celebrity. It had been eighteen years since the hit with Junior Biscuit, and in the age of rock-as-porn, Lee was just what MTV didn't want.
The gawkers from the scene said volumes. All were kids young enough to be Baby Boy's offspring and every single one admired him only by association: last year Baby Boy had played backup guitar on an album by a twentysomething band called Tic 439, a disc that had gone platinum and had fueled the big man's rebound attempt.
Still, Petra wondered if Baby Boy had taken in some heavy cash from the hit - big money was always a good motive. But that idea was quashed quickly when she spoke to Lee's manager.
'Nah, it didn't make Baby rich. Didn't make him squat.' The former custodian of Lee's career was a big-haired, stoop-shouldered, denimed ferret named
Jackie True, who spoke in a clinically depressed mumble.
'Why not, sir?'
'Cause it was bullshit, a scam,' said True. 'Those kids, they hooked him in by telling him they idolized him, he was God's answer to whatever. Then guess what they paid him: double scale. I tried to get a piece of the profits, at least the net, but...' True blew out air and shook his head. 'I didn't even take my cut. Baby needed every penny.'
'Too bad,' said Petra.
'Too bad was Baby's theme song.'
She was talking to True in the manager's crappy North Hollywood apartment. Jackie's boots were scuffed, and his nails were ragged. What did managers get - ten, fifteen percent? This one didn't come across like he had a stable full of thoroughbreds. Did Baby being gone mean that fresh footwear and manicures would remain dreams for Jackie? If so, scratch another motive.
No way Jackie True could be her man, anyway. The one thing Linus Brophy seemed sure of was that the killer had been tall, and True would be five-five after a session on the rack.
She moved on to the next name on her list: the soundman, a grad student at USC freelancing for the night, who'd barely heard of Baby Boy.
'Tell the truth,' he said, 'it really wasn't my thing. I'm into classical.'
Petra visited Baby Boy's residence the afternoon following the murder. It turned out to be an apartment every bit as sad as Jackie True's, a ground-floor unit in a boxy white sixplex off Cahuenga, midway between Hollywood and the Valley. The building sat behind a cypress-lined parking lot. Oily pools dotted the asphalt and like Lee's thirteen-year-old Camaro, the resident cars were tired and dusty.
Given Lee's history, she'd expected dysfunctional clutter, poor hygiene, empty booze bottles, dope, whatever. But Baby Boy had been living clean, in every sense of the word.
The flat consisted of living room, kitchenette, bedroom, bathroom. Off-white walls, shag carpeting the color of Mexican limes, low, cracked ceilings, sixties-era light fixtures with a nod toward sparkle and gold paint. Petra started at the back and worked her way forward.
The bedroom smelled of stale sweat. Baby Boy had slept on a pillow-top, king-size mattress set upon a box spring that rested on the floor. No stash space underneath. Lee's clothes took up half the stingy closet: T-shirts, sweats, jeans, one huge black leather jacket so crackled it appeared ready to disintegrate. A nightstand drawer yielded a mostly empty date book and some overdue utility bills.
Petra took the book and continued to look around. No dope or alcohol anywhere, and the strongest nostrum she found in the bathroom was an economy-sized bottle of extra-strength Advil, the top left loose, indicating frequent use.
The avocado-colored fridge held yogurts, cottage cheese, decaf, nonfat Mocha Mix, some bruised peaches and plums, grapes that had started to pucker. In the freezer was a package of skinless chicken breasts and a dozen boxes of Lean Cuisine.
Dieting. Trying to better himself, the poor guy. And someone had gutted him like a fish.
The living room contained two straight-backed chairs, eight guitars on stands, and three amplifiers. Atop one amp was an obtrusive bit of elegance - a charming little cloisonne box, black enamel decorated with red dragons. Inside was an assortment of guitar picks.
