The Detective & the Pipe Girl (8 page)

13

A
n hour later, I was sitting at my desk, staring out the big slider. Pretty quiet on the property. I saw a few vans moving some stuff in and out of a warehouse across the lot. They were far enough away that I just heard the light drones of their engines. What was I thinking about? Well, I was trying not to think. To just let go for a moment. To enjoy the slight breeze coming in my office. To enjoy the sun slanting in and popping off my slick concrete floor.

I looked down at my desk, looked at the unopened letter that sat there. Vonz and Suzanne rattling around in my mind—whether I liked it or not.

I looked up and said aloud, “Oh shit.”

My friend Gary Delmore, the large-haired, white-toothed TV director, had appeared in my office. He was holding his Ping-Pong paddle, striking an aggressive pose, his head tilted in a way that said he was ready to fight.

“That’s right, Darvelle. You ready?”

I didn’t want to play. I wasn’t in the mood. I was thinking about something that I hadn’t quite gotten my mind around. But I rarely turn down a Pong challenge and I never turn down one from Gary Delmore.

I shook my head, pulled out the bottom drawer of my desk, and grabbed my best bat. A two-hundred-twenty-five-dollar Killerspin with thick rubber, beautiful wood, and no fucking mercy. I then produced a couple orange Halex three-star balls, and took my position at the table. We started hitting, warming up, and the rhythm of it, as always, felt good, nice, downright therapeutic.

Gary wasn’t that good. He had a decent serve, a solid backhand, but a weak forehand and—his biggest problem—an average understanding of the game at best. I could beat him giving it about forty percent.

“I don’t know if this is fair,” I said.

“Why?”

“Your teeth are blinding me. They’re an unnatural, glowing, strange-looking white.”

“I think it evens out.”

“Yeah?”

“The power alleys on your balding head send an equal, actually an even more intense, glare at me.”

Gary and I enjoyed insulting each other.

“I’m going to make this hurt, Delmore. I’m not really in the mood to play right now. And I was working, so I’m annoyed. You’re going to experience a pain equal to watching one of your TV shows.”

“Hey, serious question. Have you gotten married and divorced since the last time I saw you? I mean I saw you about a week ago, but your marriages are pretty quick.”

“I’m going to punch you in the face.”

“Just don’t mess up my hair, pal.”

“Three out of five?” I said as a formality.

“Yep. And remember, I’ve beaten you before. You’re not that fucking good.”

Gary had beaten me once. Once. I made the mistake of letting him hang in there for fun, assuming I could end the match as soon as it got too close for comfort. But Ping-Pong, like most things, can be unpredictable. Can take turns you simply cannot see coming. Gary hit a couple good shots, then hit a couple lucky shots, then hit a miraculous shot and won. I was stunned. Gary never stopped reminding me of it. And it never stopped bothering me. It’s been a couple years now. It’s sad, really, that it affected me like that.

We P-I-N-G-ed for serve and started up. Near the end of the first game I suddenly realized I was about to lose. For the second time. I was drifting off, distracted. It was 19–16, him.

Shit, my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about what Vonz had said. About love. About how it really only happens, if you are honest with yourself, a couple times in a lifetime. In a
lifetime
. I know it had happened to me only a couple times. And, like Vonz, I’d been guilty of not respecting it too. Letting it go. Letting my mind trick me into thinking it wasn’t that important, or that it wasn’t even happening. Not with my marriage—that was a different story. But with a woman whom I met after my marriage. I told myself, and I told her, that I “wasn’t ready.” I know, such a lame, trite, unacceptable phrase. And an even lamer excuse. And so I lost her. Not like Vonz, she wasn’t dead. But the magic was, so in a sense it was the same.

I forced myself to focus. Served the ball with spin I knew Gary couldn’t handle. Took the first game 21–19. The next two weren’t particularly close.

On his way out Gary said, “Well, I have to go to work. Point a camera at some people and make way, way more money than you will ever make. Then later, I’ll probably take one of the actresses, beautiful, beautiful actresses, back to my very large house.”

“You’re compensating for the sting of defeat, friend.”

“Maybe, but I’ll be compensating in the arms of a ten whose only goal in life is to be on an after-hours Showtime movie.”

I laughed. “See you, dude.”

“Yeah.”

He left.

I sat down at my desk, then, moments later, looked up to see I had yet another visitor.

It was a cat that belonged to one of the owners of a nearby warehouse. Not just any cat, though. This cat had been badly burned in a house fire. So random sections of his body had no fur, just skin. It was a strange patchwork of fur, then skin, then fur, then skin. He also had a twitchy left eye and a gimpy front right leg, both injuries caused by the mayhem of the fire. So when he walked he tilted way up, then way down, his left eye twitching all the way.

It was an amazing sight.

It was literally like nothing you’ve ever seen.

His name was Toast. And when his owner visited the warehouse and brought him, Toast usually weeble-wobbled down to see me—which I very much appreciated.

I went over and picked up the charred little creature. He looked at me, eye twitching, and did one of those bizarre cat hisses.

CAAAAAAAAAAA!

But I held him till he relented and just let me pet him and give him some affection.

“I love you, Toast. If you got killed I’d find out who did it.”

I put him down on a shaded part of the concrete that was nice and cool to the touch. He lay down on his side and stretched out his arms and legs—even the gimpy one. And then his eyes fought sleep, the twitchy one bouncing up and down, struggling to stay open. But Toast let it happen and drifted away for a little snooze.

I went back to Vonz’s question. Would they find out who killed Suzanne? She was a compelling woman. Vonz was right. So engaging. She affected you—in seconds. It was fascinating really. That charm, that energy.

But what was her story? What was she hiding? How did all that stuff I’d seen connect together to make sense, to give a reason for her death? Jimmy Yates. That trip to Mulholland. The man on her balcony.

Was I going to look into this myself? That was the question, wasn’t it? I met her face-to-face right before she got killed. I saw with my own eyes the activity before the murder.

Even if we don’t like to admit it sometimes, we want to know what happened to people we care about. Exactly what happened. And if it was something bad, we want the people who did it to pay. Vonz cared about Suzanne. And even I cared about Suzanne. I’d looked into her eyes and joked around with her on a beautiful Southern California day. I wanted whoever did it to pay. Turn the other cheek? No thanks. I wanted her killer to pay. I know Vonz wanted it too. He left that out of his discourse on love, but I know he wanted it too.

I thought, Darvelle, listen to yourself. Investigate the case. Go. Now. Do it.

So I did.

14

T
o work effectively as a private investigator you need connections. People who can give you information you otherwise couldn’t get. Reporters, people in real estate, people who work at the courts, people who have access. Sometimes it’s a cop, sometimes an ex-criminal, and, yes, sometimes it’s a current criminal. You’ve seen me use a few of these already. It takes a long, long time to create, and then to nurture, these relationships. Because most of the people who work in and around my world are pretty jaded fucks. Not Linda Robbie. She’s not jaded. She’s horny, but she’s not jaded. But most of my connections are. Even so, the truth is, if you give back, if you show you can keep a secret, if people know you’re in it for the right reasons, and you’re there to help them sometimes too, they
want
to help you out. Yep, another irony, folks. The jaded ones are the hardest to get through to, but once you do, once you prove yourself, they usually end up being the most helpful. Trust me, you still have to go through the dance. Even after they trust you. It’s almost comical. You get reminded that you’re being helped, told you’re a pain in the ass, told over and over and over that passing along information, that bending a rule, is putting their job on the line.

But the truth is, when you, or your connections, help someone out in a not-necessarily-legal way, it’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. And everyone inside the circle believes that. Because you know and they know it has to happen sometimes to keep the fight alive.

And we are all in this to keep the fight alive.

One of my connections is a guy named Elliot Watt. You guessed it—he works at the morgue. He shows me pictures. He gives me the coroner’s report. He tries to help me. And I pay him off in various ways. Cash, a front-row seat at a show Gary’s directing, sometimes just the skinny on what I found out because of his help.

I drove to the morgue. A strange place most people never see. A building full of drawers with dead bodies in them. Next time you drive by the morgue in your town, think about that. A massive dresser full of dead, formaldehyde-injected bodies. With arms and legs and eyes and hearts. It’s pretty damn creepy if you let yourself focus on it.

I walked in and Elliot got up from behind his desk. He looked like a morgue guy. A very thin man with deep-set blue bug eyes, black hair, pale pasty skin, a big mouth with too many big teeth. Maybe he looked like that and then just said to himself: You know what? I
look
like a morgue guy. I’m going to go get a job at the morgue.

“Yo, John. I can’t let you look at the body. Cops are coming back down to look at it some more. Here’s the report and the pics.”

Not the original. A copy he’d made for me, of course. He handed it to me.

I said with a grin, “Not just a quick look at the body?”

“Not unless you want to get caught and never get access to here again.”

See what I’m saying? He said it with real bite. He was tired, irritated. Like I said, you have connections, but it’s still a challenge to use them.

“Anything you saw that was out of the ordinary?”

“Yeah, John. I mean, murder is out of the ordinary.”

He gave me a blank, bug-eyed look, then calmed down a bit. “But not really. She was assassinated. Shot in the back of the head with a nine mill.”

I thought: Jesus. Brutal.

He went on. “Broken femur, three broken ribs, cracked mandible, broken ankle. All from the fall. None of which affected her death. She was dead when she fell. Had she
not
been, the damage from the fall would have been worse. It’s always worse when there is a conscious struggle.”

I thought again: My god.

He continued, “No drugs in the system. Nothing really to see in the pics other than the wounds. She has a couple tats, they all do these days. Oh, and . . . she had sex the night of the murder.”

“Was it . . .”

“Not rape. Sex. No sign of struggle on the body or anywhere else.”

I looked at this strange, bug-eyed man. No expression as he told me the details of the autopsy for a beautiful young woman whose head had been blown off and whose body had been cracked into pieces.

I said, “Why are the cops coming back?”

“No reason. Happens all the time. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know that. But sometimes there
is
a reason. You don’t think there’s a reason this time?”

“Oh. If I had to guess I’d say it’s because they’re not that thorough in the first place and they try to be all cool and cop-y and not ask too many questions like they know what they’re talking about when it comes to corpses when they really don’t. And then they get back to their desks and realize they haven’t retained anything I said when they
did
decide to ask me questions, because they were too cool to write down my answers. So they tell me they want to come back for another look but usually they just want to come back and ask me the same questions again so they can get the same answers I already gave them. But that’s just a guess, John.”

I smiled. Elliot was wound pretty damn tight. I found his rants amusing, and often true. When they weren’t directed at me, that is.

I held up the packet he had given me, nodded, and left. Back to my office to look at photos and an autopsy report of a dead Suzanne Neal.

Now at my desk, I
opened up the folder. There she was, the beautiful girl I saw in a park overlooking the Pacific. But now pale, purple, and dead. And with an exploded head and face. I looked at the pictures. I read Elliot’s report. Shot in the head, died, technically, for a couple reasons. Brain dead, loss of blood. But really, in layman’s terms, because someone had put a gun in the back of her cranium and pulled the trigger.

Violent. Horrible. Sickening.

I looked at the pictures of her naked body. Not nearly as gruesome as the shots of her head. Just the lifeless flesh of a young girl, of a dead body. You couldn’t really even notice the broken bones. They weren’t compound fractures. I continued to scan her body. There were the tattoos. One small tat on each ankle. Left outside ankle, a rose, not terribly original. Right outside ankle, what looked to be a small rendering of a pyramid. I didn’t want to be cynical in this moment, but I thought the pyramid was probably one of those attempts people make with their tattoos to be spiritual. Her version of Asian lettering. Hey, nobody’s perfect. In fact, a slip like this, a bad decision, could even be endearing.

Because we all make them.

I looked over the report again, looked at every photo again. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. But that was okay. That’s what I do all the time. Look at stuff others deemed inconclusive and try to make something out of it. Sometimes I find something. Sometimes I don’t.

I got out my case file where I’d put both the long and short versions of the events of the case that I had typed up. Looked at it. Found what I was looking for. Right, that was his name, Clay Blevins. And he had auditioned for the movie
Friendship
. I knew it, but now I was sure. I dialed up the young actor I’d spoken to at King’s Road Café.

“Hello,” he said.

“Clay. Hey it’s Tim—the casting director. I talked to you the other day at King’s Road. After your audition for
Friendship
.”

“Yeah,” with concern. “You were asking me about Suzanne Neal.”

“Right. Have you heard about her?”

“Yeah, man, it’s so crazy. We’re all so freaked out about it.”

“I’d like to talk to you about it.”

“Really? Why?”

“Clay. I don’t work at Raleigh Studios. And my name’s not Tim. My name is John. John Darvelle. I’m a detective. Of the private variety. I had met Suzanne prior to her murder. So now I’m looking into it to try and find out what happened.”

Quickly, “What? You’re a detective?”

“Relax. Yes, I’m a detective.”

“Listen, man. I don’t know anything or anything.”

People get strange when the heat is on.
I don’t know anything or anything
. What?

“I know, you were her friend. I’m on your side. Everything’s cool. I want to find out who did it. And I want to ask you some questions.”

“Can’t you talk to the cops or something?”

“Sure. And so can you. And you should. But I want to talk to you. Like I said, you were a friend of hers. You might be able to help me.”

“Well . . . when?”

“As soon as possible.”

“All right, yeah, I guess you can talk to me.”

“Let’s meet at King’s Road again. I’ll buy you lunch.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“In an hour. You’ll be there?”

“Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I’ll be there.”