End Time (17 page)

This seemed to deflate Bhakti considerably, and he went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. But Cheryl wasn't deterred.

“Herman, some person, somebody, some nobody, maybe
three
nobodies—
knows
something. I want the names of the people who sit in the cubicles and what floor of the new Parker Center they work on. Maybe we'll be lucky and there'll be an expert, a nosy cop in one precinct. And I want to know tonight.”

Herman looked around at the pale sea-foam yellow of the Holiday Inn room. “Do you mind if I go down to the bar-restaurant? I work better in dark, cool air-conditioning.”

They met him about forty minutes later; Herman had borrowed a Holiday Inn writing tablet and a ballpoint pen. A couple of names were scribbled on the tablet. His smartphone screen looked a touch sweaty. He was on his second G&T. You could tell by the rings on the bar.

He took a long swig. “Do you have any idea how tricky it is to ask questions like this? The copper you're asking can't know
why
you're asking or
who
you're asking for.” He pointed his finger at Cheryl. “And the patsy has to tell me what you want to know without getting himself stuck on
you,
tar baby.”

He took another draught of the clean G&T. “So when you get your cute little nosy nose slammed in the Parker Center rat trap it doesn't have
his
cheese on it. So nu?” Herman saw the Indian didn't get the Yiddish. “Capiche?” And that wasn't much better either.

“So how did you do it?” Bhakti asked somewhat amazed.

“
Feh,”
Herman cawed; a Jewish seagull dismissing his question. “What's it to you?” Bhakti's mouth dropped a little. But the union lawyer's take on the business did make a kind of sense. There was safety in anonymity.

“One more thing.” Cheryl used her sweetest smile on the man, like she was asking Daddy, pretty-please, for a favor. “Can we borrow the car?”

Herman's face dropped. “Oh, that's just perfect.” Then he sighed, resigned; so much for compartmentalized anonymity. He looked to the bartender; ordered a third G&T. It came and he pounded half of it back. “I probably shouldn't drive now anyway.” He fished the keys out of his pocket and slid them across the bar. “You can take the wife's MINI Cooper at home. If you're not back by morning, I'm reporting it stolen.”

*   *   *

12:30 a.m., the new Parker Center, the LAPD Headquarters, had the nighttime quiets, with a slow, sleepy pulse in the building. The occasional ring of a phone, someone answering, soft murmurs. The duty sergeant didn't even blink when Cheryl signed in at the front desk in the lobby. He pushed the sign-in book at her and vaguely looked at her badge and ID. The desk cop didn't even bother with Bhakti, saying, “He's with you?” Not caring whether the Indian fellow was or not. They took the elevator to the third floor.

There was no name on the third-floor office. A wall of translucent glass; a door with a viewing slit in it. A cardboard, handwritten sign was taped to the glass wall by the door reading
GANG TASK FORCE.
And some joker had scrawled the smiling face of Felix on it. Cheryl knocked. Nothing. No answer. She peered through the viewing slit. Empty.

Inside, the nameplate on the clean, organized desk:
F. FREDERICK
. And that rang a bell somewhere, but she couldn't place it. A nagging tic at the back of her head. She glanced around the office; it looked clean, almost unused. A map of greater Los Angeles on one wall showed the rough gang territories marked with Post-its. Nothing special, nothing an ordinary cop wouldn't already know. Crips here this block, Bloods there that block. No big deal.

The steel filing cabinet wasn't even locked.

She opened the
E-F-G-H
drawer using a ballpoint pen to unlatch the handle; then poked through the
F
file using the tip of the pen. Slim pickings. One folder contained a slew of photos: Felix photos, pictures of graffiti on walls, tattoos on anonymous arms, a photo of the Bang-Flag-Gun that got her into all that trouble. She flipped past it, but discerned no discernable order, no notations, no police work to the drawer. This place was the dead-letter office.

“There's nothing here,” Cheryl said to Bhakti. “Come on; let's go. We'll try that precinct guy in West Hollywood Herman knows.”

The elevator doors opened at the lobby; Cheryl and Bhakti walked toward the front doors. The desk sergeant dozed at the reception desk, but opened his eyes as they passed.

“Thanks,” Cheryl said to him. He didn't reply.

As they left the building another cop, plainclothes, opened the glass door for them. Something familiar about him. Cheryl and Bhakti scooted through, nodding thanks. The plainclothes cop nodded too, then paused, watching them as they walked away.

Cheryl could feel the man's eyes on her neck. He was staring and thinking. Thinking and staring, but she kept on walking. Then it struck her: he was the Internal Affairs guy at her interrogation. The ferret-looking cop with the pockmarked face. The guy who needled her,
Are you sleepy, Officer Gibson? Are we boring you?
Nicknamed Felix by the police captain—the mayor's crony who'd told the ferret,
Oh, I think we've covered what we can today, Felix.
The ID tag read
FREDERICK
. Just like the nameplate in the office upstairs.

“Nice to see you again, Officer Gibson,” the Internal Affairs cop said from the door.

“Just keep walking,” Cheryl muttered to Bhakti.

And he dutifully followed, without a clue.

*   *   *

The precinct in West Hollywood was definitely open for business. Nights were long in this part of town. And at 1 a.m. things were just getting started. This time the desk sergeant, a tough-looking lady named Dubois, took a moment from the general cacophony of prebooking to give Cheryl some professional courtesy.

“Steinholtz? You want Detective Steinholtz?” Sergeant Dubois looked over Cheryl's shoulder. “He's right there. Coming in now.”

The detective—a round, grumpy man in his mid-fifties in a disheveled brown suit—was escorting a suspect into the precinct. And not just any suspect. The young lady was about thirty, tricked out for a night on the town.

Broderick Fallows—A-list movie director. His newest offering, the third installment of the
Zyklon-B
trilogy, had just broken 200 million after two weekends. It was titled
Inexplicable.
And no, Cheryl hadn't bothered to see it; she'd wait for cable. Oh, that's right, no more cable for a while without Rachel. Well, maybe the Holiday Inn.

Worse still for Mr. Fallows, his face had been on the magazine
Transformation
—for two weeks in every corner news box and newsstand, his extra notoriety the result of some sort of sex change, breast enhancement or estrogen therapy, male to female, at the urging of his/her “girlfriend,” a famous dominatrix to the stars. Cheryl had forgotten most of the details, if she ever knew.… Rachel had even taken Cheryl to a law-firm dinner with the guy once. But that was back when Fallows was a boy. He'd played with his broiled salmon and quinoa sautéed with yellow peppers and red onion, but didn't eat much.

Now, mincing into a West Hollywood precinct in do-me heels and cuffed, Lady Fallows looked awful. Blond dripping hair a mess, lipstick smeared, missing a false eyelash. When Steinholtz brought Lady Fallows to the high desk for booking he/she hitched up her top over an impressive boob job. The $500 Victoria's Secret décolleté chamois top in purple wasn't chopped liver either.

“Soliciting. Hollywood and Vine,” Detective Steinholtz told the sergeant. “Outside the saloon Boys 'n' Bears
.
She can keep his cell phone, her cell phone. Don't throw him in the pen with the others. But don't let him run outside either.”

Desk Sergeant Dubois wagged her head a little. “
Again,
Mr. Fallows?” She smiled. “Some of us here just wish you'd move to San Francisco.”

“It's too cold,” Fallows replied. Dubois nodded. True enough. Then to Steinholtz, who'd started to walk away, “Some people for you.”

Steinholtz halted in his tracks. A once-over of Cheryl in her blues and Bhakti in his preppie wear. “Oh yeah, Herman's nameless friends,” he said not even using their names. “My desk is upstairs.”

A cluttered desk with two extra chairs facing it in a large room packed with desks, all of them taken: cops on the phones, shouting, laughter, guys eating breakfast at 2 a.m.—the noisy West Hollywood circus. Steinholtz just stared at Cheryl. He held her badge in a meaty hand. Staring at it and rubbing the silver with a damp thumb. Even when he handed it back, he didn't say anything. Glanced at Bhakti, then back at the lady from the California Highway Patrol.

Finally, “Nice shooting over by Pharaoh's Lost Kingdom. I read about it in the paper. This city is going to miss you.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

Steinholtz shrugged, a wry smile, then got up from his desk. “Let's go to the men's room. We do our best work there.”

Silently he led Cheryl and Bhakti inside the men's room, a battered wall of urinals, a battered wall of stalls, a long grimy mirror over the sinks. A large map of the city was spread out over one side of the long mirror, taped at the edges. The map was plastered with stickers at various locations and intersections. The stickers were Felix the Cat faces, each one about the size of a shirt-collar button, no bigger. Still you could see the cat's goofy smile.

The map looked like it had been hosed with a thousand rounds from an Uzi. Just top to bottom tiny black tags, many in clusters, overlapping in certain areas.

“I had the stickers made up myself,” Detective Steinholtz said. “This is the record since your cat appeared. Gotta buy a new batch every two weeks. Everybody in the precinct helps out a little. We call it the Kitty Litter Map.”

“Jesus,” Bhakti remarked. “It looks like a virus, like a disease.”

“Yeah, doesn't it? And that's not even San Diego.”

Cheryl pointed to one spot, one Felix dot off by itself. All by its lonesome. She knew the area. The Taylor Yards: railroad tracks and old warehouses. The Taylor Yards were 1930s old, not used much now, and many of the warehouses had fallen in the quake of '94.

Suddenly Cheryl remembered her dream of Sweet Jane talking to her out of the storm, then suffering under ugly hands. It came back clear and strong: the dark, blue-and-gray clouds rolling over themselves, the sound of galloping hooves. A figure at the edge of the patio looking plaintively at her, begging her for something. To find her before she lost her arms. Then the abandoned warehouse with pigeons cooing on the rafters, Sweet Jane tied to a table, mewing behind a gagged mouth; now the knife was going in; now the arms were coming off … And somebody was singing,
“Take a little tip”
—

No, she had a name now: the late Sweet Janet Singh sitting in the Nambe urn back at the Holiday Inn beside Bhakti's Lacoste shirts.

“Yeah,” Steinholtz told her. “An old warehouse. Stands out, doesn't it? I went over, didn't find anything. I'll give you the address. Fresh eyes and all that.”

*   *   *

Bhakti and Cheryl bumped back and forth across the abandoned tracks of the Taylor rail yards in the cramped MINI Cooper borrowed from
Mrs.
Herman, crawling between parked dump trucks and bulldozers, even a crane where the authorities were still trying to clean up after the quake over a decade ago. Not a high priority, though there'd been a flurry of recent activity when the city toyed with the idea of turning the area into some kind of railroad museum, near the state park. Intact buildings dotting the landscape between piles of fallen rubble took on the appearance of broken teeth.

Many of the warehouses had long ago lost their signs or building numbers. Never mind their lights and power and their windows. It was that strange time of night, right before dawn, when the streetlamps still cast umbrellas of sodium light and the sky lightened to an incandescent blue. Thank God they'd brought flashlights.

Bhakti stumbled on the concrete steps of a truck bay; the metal gate was locked. This was the place. A few bays down, a battered roll-gate stood open two feet, but jammed in place. Just enough room to squirm through. Bhakti got a good snort of plaster and concrete dust laced with pigeon dung. But Cheryl got through without mussing her uniform. Practice.

A strange mélange of streetlamp and dawn sky lit the windows, bluish orange. The flashlights flashed on—swords of light in a large void turning the rest black.

“We should have come during the day,” Bhakti whispered. Something about being in a large, black space made him want to whisper. Bits of concrete crunched underfoot, the occasional tang of metal when they kicked a bit across the floor. Not the kind of place to run heedlessly about; maybe cracks or pitfalls out ahead.

Go slow, go quiet.

Against one wall a gated elevator stared at them like a black mouth. The elevator stalled between floors halfway up. Bhakti touched the slide gate and it clanged a little, making him jump—a large empty sound in this empty space. Not inviting. His light sliced up and down.

“Let's try the stairs,” Cheryl said softly. “Somehow in my dream it felt like the top floor of a building, not the downstairs.” She paused for a moment, considering. “Does that make sense?”

“Sure. I guess so,” Bhakti told her. “It was your dream.” He followed her to a large door, ajar, marked
STAIRWELL
. Cheryl found a screwdriver with a broken handle on the floor and took the precaution of jamming the tool over the bottom hinge, wedging the door open. They carefully climbed the stairs, flashlights down to make sure of the steps. At one landing the wooden stair rail grip gave way and fell at their feet with a noisy clatter.