Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

Ed Beasley was already at his desk. Ed was forty-two, black, good-looking in a sinister way, with thick eyebrows and mustache. He had one of those male-pattern baldness hairlines that receded in two fjords on top, leaving a kind of widow’s peak running down onto the forehead. It usually made him look rakish.

This morning he didn’t look rakish at all. He looked like he’d just pulled a string of all-nighters. He had a Kool smoldering in his ashtray and an enormous Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. His eyes were closed and his forehead was wrinkled in deep vees. He was talking on the telephone, the receiver wedged between his shoulder and ear. He looked up at me as I walked over, raising his eyebrows in mild surprise.

“All right,” he said into the telephone. “I’ll see what I can do. Okay,” he said and hung up.

He looked me over. I just stood and let him look. “Well, Billy,” he said finally. “Fish not biting?”

There was an edge to his voice that I’d never heard before and I guessed I was right about the all-nighters. I didn’t answer, and after a minute Ed just nodded at a chair to the left of his desk. “Took you almost twenty-three hours, Billy. You slowing down.”

I sat. Ed slurped his coffee. He half-raised the cup. “Get you some?”

“No thanks. I ate already.” He nodded and slurped some more.

“Doctor say this shit’ll kill me.”

“But he won’t say when?” I asked him, completing the ancient joke.

“Something like that,” Ed said. A young white guy with rolled-up sleeves, a shoulder holster, and suspenders stopped and put a pair of files on Ed’s desk. He looked at me, looked at Ed, shrugged, and walked off. Ed watched him go and shook his head. “He wears suspenders,” Ed told me, disgusted. “Thinks they make him look like Kevin Costner.”

“Why would he want to?”

Ed snorted and slurped coffee. “These new guys, man, I don’t know. Half of ’em even think Madonna’s sexy.”

“That’s better than thinking she’s talented,” I said. “I need to know what you’ve got on Hector and Roscoe McAuley, Ed.”

He gave me the biggest, brightest, toothiest smile he had. It didn’t hide the fact that he was mad as hell, and tired almost to the point of no return. “What I got is shit,” he said. “And what’s more, that’s all I’m gonna get.”

He slurped more coffee. “Word came down from on high. Community relations is paramount. So we can’t poke at nothing that might disturb the current delicate balance of racial tensions.”

He slurped some more and took a long hard pull on his Kool. Through a cloud of smoke, he said, “Which means if a cop dies in the course of investigating a death unofficially, on his own time, and it can be made to look kinda like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, we got to leave it alone, ’cause we can’t look like we’re putting more energy into a cop-killing than into securing a crack dealer’s civil rights. And it means that anybody dumb enough to get killed during the riots, meaning Hector, it’s like it never happened. ’Cause we don’t want nobody having no bad dreams about the riots, I guess.”

He rolled his eyes back for a moment and chanted, “Love to see them niggers sing and dance, but they get killed—don’t wet your pants. We gave the mother one good chance, he’s blown away by circumstance.”

I stared at Ed in astonishment. “Sorry,” he finally said. He pulled hard on his Kool. It was down to the filter now. “It’s a rap number. Kind of an underground hit in the hip-hop clubs since the riots.” He swiveled away from the desk and looked off to his left. “It’s supposed to be about Hector. And of course it has a lot to say about the current delicate balance of racial tensions. ’Specially on the Force.”

There was more of that edge in his voice, a whole lot more. Ed was one of those cops who believe God brought him through hell in h

is early life so he could be a better L.A. cop. To hear that much bitterness in his voice would have been unthinkable two years ago.

I was sorry for Ed. I knew what it meant to lose your faith in something pure and important. But I hadn’t come all this way to pat anybody on the head, not even myself. I pushed on.

“Do you think Hector’s murder was racially motivated, Ed?”

He gave me a long hard look. I thought I knew Ed. I’d spent a lot of time with him under tough circumstances. But I’d never seen a look like that.

“Racially motivated. That’s real pretty. You getting your cop talk back again, Billy?”

“Looks like I need to. How about it? Was it racially motivated?”

He lit another cigarette off the butt of his current smoke. “Roscoe thought so.”

“Roscoe wasn’t exactly an expert on murder, or on racism,” I said. “So why did he think that?”

Ed gave me a slight variation of the look. “Shit,” he said. “Every black man in America is an expert on racism.” He shrugged. “Why he thought it, I don’t know. But it’s maybe worth you thinking about.”

“Anything in the investigation lead that way?”

“Billy, you just don’t get it. Ain’t nothin’ in either investigation can even confirm somebody’s dead.”