Chocolate Quake (27 page)

42

The Elimination of Croker and Bad Girl

 

“Y
ou brought a
car!” she exclaimed, as if I’d brought roses.

“Yeah, it’s hard for two people to sit on a motorcycle doing surveillance without being noticed by the sur veillee.” She gave me a don’t-be-mean look, but hell, she knew we had to be in the area before Arbus stopped to let Croker out. I had to risk a speeding ticket to get us there. “If he gets picked up by another car, we drive after him.”

“Is this your car?” she asked.

Just like a female, more interested in the car than the work at hand. If I hadn’t been gay before, working with Mrs. Carolyn Blue would have done the trick. “It’s Paul’s car, and if we put so much as a scratch on it, he’ll kill us both.”

“Then you shouldn’t have driven so fast.”

“If you hadn’t insisted on tagging along and then turned up late, I wouldn’t have needed to, and if I’d gotten a ticket, believe me, you’d have paid the fine. Now forget about the car. If Croker starts out on foot, we walk.”

“Of course.”

She’d gone into that prissy, indignant mode. Pretty soon she’d be bitching about my language. “There he is.”

The squad car pulled up across the street; Croker got out and started walking. “Get out quietly. We’ll stay on this side. You hold my hand.”

“I will not. I’m not afraid of a policeman.”

She met me on the sidewalk, and I grabbed her hand, muttering under my breath, “We’re trying to look like a couple. If he glances over at us, you look up at me and giggle or some damn thing.”

“Oh, I see,” she murmured grimly.

We didn’t have to do any couple imitations because Croker never looked around. He walked half a block, turned right, walked a block over, and went into a place called The Barnum—hotbed hotel. I pulled the scarf from Carolyn’s hair so it dropped around her face in an unchar acteristically messed-up way. She didn’t look like a whore, but she’d have to do. “Quick, unbutton a few buttons.”

“What?” She turned and gaped at me.

“Your blouse. You need to look like you’re coming here to meet some guy. Get inside and see if you can find out what room he’s going to. I’ll be behind you but coming in the alley door so he doesn’t recognize me.” I watched her sashay in, actually swinging her hips and flipping her hair. A little overdone, but it probably wasn’t part of her repertoire. I pelted around the corner to the alley and met her at the elevator.

“Two-oh-seven,” she said. “The desk clerk knows him and the number. He didn’t even pay.”

“Right. He’s a cop.” I’d poked the up button on the elevator, while the desk clerk yelled, “Hey, you. You’re not—” but he didn’t catch us. I dragged Carolyn in and hit the close button.

So who was Croker meeting? Was he on the take and picking up a payoff? I patted the gun I’d stuck in my belt. He wasn’t going to be happy to see me, even if being caught did eliminate him as a suspect in Denise Faulk’s death. We got off and headed down the hall to two-oh-seven. I could hear a female voice behind the door. Shit! It wasn’t graft, and Carolyn was going to be embarrassed. If we were lucky, the woman wouldn’t have taken off too many clothes before we got in. I knocked and said, muffling my voice, “Hey, Croker, it’s Arbus.”

Croker opened the door and tried to close it when he saw me, but I gave it a good shove and pushed him back into the room. The woman was already on the bed, buck naked, and Croker had his shirt off and his pants unzipped. Evidently they weren’t into precoital conversation. Having followed me in, Carolyn gasped at the view.

“What the hell, Sam?” Croker snarled. His face was red, and he looked ready for a fight, which I could provide, although the ladies probably wouldn’t appreciate the show. Or maybe the one on the bed would.

She said, “If you think you’re bringin’ your friends for freebies, Marcus, forget it.”

He said, “Shut up, Lucille.”

I said, “Sorry to interrupt this interlude, Croker, Lucille. I just want to know if you do this every week. Like last Thursday. Was Croker here with you last Thursday, Lucille?”

“What do you care, Flamboise? You wanna watch?” Croker sneered.

I glanced at Carolyn, who was frozen in astonishment as she figured out what was going on. “Maybe your wife hired me to follow you,” I suggested.

“The fuck she did!”

“Listen, Croker,” said Lucille, “this is too weird. Is he some I.A. guy who’s gonna drag the both of us into court because I’m trading sex for protection? If I end up in jail, I’m gonna tell them the kinda stuff you do. I don’t
like
bein’ roughed up. Maybe I can file charges. Can I do that, mister?” she asked me.

“Shut up,” said Croker.

“This wasn’t my idea,” Lucille whined. “He said I put out or he jailed me. Every time he saw me on the street, he’d pull me in and charge me.”

“You meet him every Thursday this time of night?” I asked. Croker moved threateningly toward Lucille, so I pushed him against the wall. “That the deal, Lucille?”

“Yeah, ask the guy at the desk. I even gotta pay for the room. Last Thursday. This Thursday. Every Thursday since he decided I was the whore of the month. He gets here at 8:00, 8:15. An hour in the sack with this gorilla. I could do three guys in an hour an’ make some money, but I gotta meet Mr. Let’s-Try-All-the-Weird-Stuff here.”

“Always an hour?” I asked. She nodded and stared defiantly at Croker.

“OK. That’s what I wanted to know. You feel like reporting him, you got my permission, Lucille.” I grabbed Carolyn’s arm, and we were out of there.

“That’s horrible,” she whispered as we slipped into the elevator, which I’d jammed open. “And he’s a policeman. Isn’t that illegal?”

“You bet,” I agreed, “but he didn’t kill Denise. You want to catch bus eighteen with me and see what we can find out about Bad Girl?”

I figured she’d decide to go home, but she agreed. We walked back to the car with me keeping a wary eye out for Croker. Not likely he’d have any friendly feelings for me in the future. Carolyn was bemoaning the sad and seedy fate of prostitutes as we sailed along in the BMW. There wasn’t much traffic on the streets, so we made it to a number-eighteen stop in about fifteen minutes, then parked and waited for the bus to show up.

When we got on, the driver, a friendly black guy, said, “First time I seen someone git outa a BMW and git on my bus. You slummin’ or what, man?”

I paid the fare and described Bad Girl to him.

“Whatchu want with her?” he asked as the bus chugged up a steep hill. “She mindin’ her own business back there. Sleepin’ most likely. Guess she back on her pills the las’ few days. Don’ bother the passengers so much. Nods off. Mos’ nights we git to the park, I wake her up, she git off an’ head out into the trees. She do like the trees. Say her mama sometime a tree.”

“Would you remember, sir, if she was on your bus last Thursday?” Carolyn asked politely.

“My, oh, my. Ain’t you a nice-spoken lady? Whatchu runnin’ around with an ugly bald guy for? In this here town it’s a real pleasure to pick up someone that talk an’ look normal like you, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” said Carolyn.

“Lotsa strange folks live in San Francisco, an’ I do think they all ride my bus.”

“I suppose it’s hard to remember one passenger who might have been on your bus a week ago,” she said sympathetically.

“Oh, I’m not likely to forgit las’ Thursday. Had to stop an’ call an ambulance. Poor little Martina, she goin’ plum crazy. Like to scare the white hair off this ole lady live near the end of my route ’fore I start up to the park. Girl screaming at the old lady ’bout knives an’ such. Sayin’ ‘Don’ let him git you, Mama.’ I try to calm her down. Then I put in the call. She back on Monday, say, ‘Mr. Bus Driver, why you send me to the bad doctors?’ Guess they keep her in the hospital the whole weekend. She do hate that. She cain’t hear her mama when the doctors givin’ her them pills an’ shots.”

Carolyn sat chatting with the bus driver about what the kindest thing might be to do for someone in Bad Girl’s situation. She didn’t even notice when I went to the back of the bus to wake up Martina L. King, who seemed both sad and sane when I talked to her. She had indeed been in a psych ward for four days. When she got off at the circle fronting the museum, I had to restrain Carolyn from trying to take her home. The driver let us stay on and ride his bus back to Paul’s car.

“Well,” said Carolyn, “this has been a dreadful evening, but we have eliminated three suspects.”

“Who’s your candidate for innocent number three?” I asked.

“Timatovich. He wasn’t at the center last Thursday. He was working another job at the Faulk Building. Of course, we’ll need to check it out, but I think his son was telling the truth. So Timatovich may be able to tell us whether Faulk was at his office that night.”

“Well, I can make it four. Harry Yu called me just before I picked you up. A S.W.A.T. team ferreted Freddie Piñon out of his rat hole and took him to jail. He’s facing charges for shooting a clerk in a convenience store robbery Sunday night, and it turns out he was robbing another one on Thursday around the time Denise was killed. That clerk chased him out with a gun and identified him in a lineup tonight.”

There were no spaces on Sacramento within two blocks of Carolyn’s place, so I double-parked and walked up the stairs with her. She had her key in the lock when the first shot rang out. Because we were completely exposed on that stoop, all I could do was pull her onto the cement and roll us both down the stairs and into the shelter of a car parked on the street.

“What have you done to me?” she groaned. “Every bone in my body is broken.”

I heard the third shot hit glass and hoped it wasn’t a window in Paul’s car.

43

Safe at Sam’s

 

C
an you believe
it? Someone actually shot at us, Sam and me, right out on the street. There I was, huddled on the sidewalk by a car, shielded from further bullets by Sam’s considerable bulk, and staring at the gun in his hand. Where had that come from?

Whoever fired the three shots evidently gave up and went away. After a moment of silence, we heard a door slam, and a car roared up to the brow of the hill and over. Sam was up as soon as he heard the slam, but he didn’t shoot at the retreating car. “You got a notebook?” he asked as he helped me up. “Write down ’98 Toyota Camry, four-door, dark blue or black, California plate 375.”

“That’s a very short plate number,” I mumbled. I was shaking and badly bruised, although evidently I hadn’t broken any bones.

“Lucky I got any numbers,” he said, sounding rather short-tempered, and he took my notebook right out of my hands, flipped through, muttering curses, and wrote down the information he’d given me. “You OK?”

“No,” I said, aggrieved. “I hurt all over.”

“But you weren’t shot?”

“I don’t think so.” I looked myself over under the street lamp but couldn’t see any blood. “Unless a bullet hit the back of me. But I certainly am bruised.”

“Well, I did my best to shield you on the roll down, Carolyn. At least you’re alive.”

“Me? Why would anyone be shooting at me? They must have been shooting at you. Or maybe it was one of those random drive-bys.”

He was punching numbers into his cell phone. “The first bullet hit right by your head. If they’d been shooting at me, I’m a much bigger target, but they didn’t come close.” Then into the phone, “Yeah, my name is Sam Flamboise. Three shots were just fired on Sacramento. The shooter got away in a ’98 Camry. I got partial plates. If you can contact Homicide Inspector Harry Yu, this is probably related to the Denise Faulk case. Drive-by shooters don’t get out of the car, shoot, and get back in,” he said to me. “Yeah, we’ll wait here.” He gave an address.

By then Mr. Valetti had joined us and wanted to take me indoors. Sam said we had to wait for the police. Mr. Valetti lamented the deterioration of the neighborhood now that criminals were attacking innocent tenants at his front door. A couple from the floor above Vera’s sublet arrived and became alarmed when the situation was explained. People across the street were hanging or peeping out their windows as two patrol cars arrived and the officers began to interview us. I didn’t have much to tell them except for the nature of my bruises. Other officers arrived and looked for bullets, one of which they dug out of Mr. Valetti’s front door. A second was found in the backseat upholstery of Paul’s BMW. In fifteen minutes or so, Harry Yu arrived. I pointed out to him that my mother-in-law, presently locked up at the Hall of Justice, was obviously not the person who had shot at us. Harry Yu said that maybe Sam had enemies, unconnected to the Faulk murder. Sam insisted that I had been the target. I started to cry. Mr. Valetti yelled at Sam, who yelled back.

“Could it have been Officer Croker?” I sniffled.

“Why would he shoot at you?” Sam demanded. “I’m the only one he recognized, and he’s a good shot. He’d have hit me if it was him.”

“What’s this about Croker?” Inspector Yu asked.

“He’s forcing a prostitute to have sex with him in return for not being arrested,” I explained. “And he evidently has . . . unusual tastes.”

Cammie Cheever arrived in time to hear that and said, “Why doesn’t that surprise me? Everyone knows Croker is a thug.”

“What does Croker have to do with this case?” Yu asked. “I told you he was on patrol the night of the Faulk killing.”

“Nothing,” Sam replied, “but we just crossed him off the list tonight. He was screwing a whore named Lucille when Denise Faulk got killed. It’s his regular Thursday thing.”

“The hell it is. The man’s on patrol Thursday nights,” Yu snapped.

“Like that means anything,” said Cammie. “Let’s go get him.”

“I think I’ll go in now,” I murmured. “I don’t like being out here on a street where people shoot guns in my direction.”