Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

“So there’s nobody investigating either death right now?”

He hissed out smoke through the meanest smile I had ever seen. For a moment he really looked like the devil, the classical one who enjoys your agony only because it hides his own. “Hector was just another black kid who walked into a bullet. We got the paperwork going on Roscoe. There’s a team on it, but—” He shrugged and his smile faded into a cold look I’d never seen on him before. “Officially, we are making progress and expect an arrest momentarily.”

I nodded. We all know what that means: no progress, no leads, no investigation. “I’d like to see the files, Ed.”

Ed knew I’d come here to ask him for the files. Any file on a dead case is public record. Anybody can look at it. But the files of a case that’s still open are another thing. They’re not supposed to be passed around, even within the department.

These killings were still technically open. If I knew Ed, since I’d walked in he had been balancing the political implications of giving me the files against the possible good that might come of it. He had to decide if he still trusted me, because he could be putting himself in a world of trouble. If he made the wrong choice he’d never be a lieutenant.

He looked at me for a long moment. I looked back. Then he gave a half-shrug and a nod. “Don’t see how it can get any worse. I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Call you tonight?”

I stood up. “I’m staying at the Franklin,” I told him.

“Elegant as shit,” he said. His telephone rang and as he turned to stare at it, I left.

It was still just a few minutes after eight in the morning and I wouldn’t get to see the files until tonight, if at all. I thought I’d like to see the spot where Hector was killed, on the same goofy theory that looking at the spot where somebody died somehow attunes you to the killing.

I know it’s dumb, but cops and fishermen are more superstitious than most. I wasn’t sure which I was at the moment—maybe an ex-cop. At this point, maybe an ex-fisherman. Or half-cop, half-fisherman, some strange, mythical hybrid beast that lurches up out of the flats to solve crimes, like Aquaman. Whatever: I figured it couldn’t hurt to look at some scenery.

The only problem was, I didn’t know where Hector had died. At this hour it was going to be tough to find out.

I left my car at the police station and walked to Ivar Street, where the public library sits next to a strip joint. There were twin ramps crossing in front and leading down from street level to the glass doorway. Taped to the window beside the door was a sign with the library’s hours. It opened at ten o’clock today. I glanced at my watch. I had ninety minutes to kill.

I found a newspaper box up on Hollywood Boulevard, and a bus bench with almost six square inches of seat that had somehow been overlooked; there was no gum on it, no vomit, no bird droppings, no spilled chili or melted ice cream. I sat and read the paper.

A battered-looking woman in a greasy green plaid coat was standing at the far end of the bench. As I opened the front page she drifted down to my end and read over my shoulder.

The news wasn’t good anywhere. The comics weren’t funny, either. The sports reporters hadn’t learned to write yet. And the Dodgers were so far in the cellar they had a lock on last place for the next four years. For a saving second I saw my sour mood from outside and found it briefly funny. “Bah, humbug,” I muttered at the paper.

“Amen,” said the battered-looking woman.

By the time I was done with the paper it was a quarter of ten. I left the paper on the bench for the woman and walked back down to the library.

A fat security guard sat on a stool a few feet inside, chatting to a young woman with a large butt. I stood and waited. At exactly one minute after ten the guard stretched, glanced up at the clock, and sauntered slowly over to the door. It took him a full minute to cross the twelve feet of tiled floor.

He unlocked the door and held it open for me. “Morning,” he said. I nodded and headed up the half-circle of stairs to the stacks.

The Los Angeles Times for May 2 had what I wanted. On page fourteen of the A section was a small story, three paragraphs long, headed: POLICEMAN’S SON SLAIN. The first paragraph was mostly heavy-handed irony about how even a cop’s kid wasn’t safe from murder. The final paragraph was a quote from a community leader calling the death tragic and senseless. They made it sound generic.

Sandwiched in between were the two or three facts the reporter had thought might be interesting enough to sneak in. Included was an address near Pearl Street where the killing had happened. I wrote the address on an index card provided by the library for writing down reference numbers.

On an impulse, I pulled out the telephone directory. The free clinic where Nancy worked was only a few blocks away from the spot where Hector was killed. I wrote that address down, too, and stuck it in my breast pocket. Maybe she’d want to have lunch.

Everybody has to have lunch, right?

Chapter Eleven

I drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard, then south on Vermont. L.A. was not a melting pot, no matter how many different ethnic groups settled here. The melting-pot idea was dead. It had been swept away as unfair, and as a result L.A. was now a centrifuge. Every new group that arrived was rapidly whirled off to its own area, separated from any cultural contamination like the need to learn English. The new arrivals were all able to preserve the way of life they had fled from when they came to America, and avoid all the dangers and stupidities of this awful place. They could be Americans without ever seeing more of America than the corner store run by someone from their hometown, and whatever they saw on the local TV channel broadcasting in their own language by people from their homeland.

The new immigrants didn’t assimilate. They stayed in tight clusters, and there was little interaction. In fifty years America will be made up of a million small neighborhoods that can’t even speak to each other.

The area on Vermont I was driving into had become solidly Korean over the last ten years. The Koreans tended to be more insular than most, and they didn’t usually care for outsiders, especially anybody that smelled like police. If I needed to talk to someone in this area I would need some leverage, or some luck, or both.

Soon after making my turn on Washington I found the spot I was looking for and pulled off into a small mini-mall parking lot across the street. I stood beside the curb and looked over at it.

Down the block to the left was a row of stores that had been burned. The black smudges of smoke had half-covered most of the graffiti. Fallen beams twisted up at crazy angles.

In the other direction was a large Thrifty drugstore. It was still boarded up. Ads for specials on aspirin, motor oil, and dia