Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

I drove west on Olympic to La Brea and turned north. Pink’s was on the left-hand side, and crowded. It was always crowded.

I ordered two chili-cheese dogs and a cream soda and, when they came, I squeezed into a seat at the back of the room, under a row of eight-by-ten pictures of famous people I’d never heard of.

I inhaled the first dog, and as I stopped to breathe I opened the manila envelope.

The first reports of rioting had come in about four o’clock. The log showed that the chief of police was on his way to give a speech at a spot about an hour away. He heard about the trouble en route but continued on his way and gave his speech anyway.

I thought about that one for a few minutes. Was it suspicious for the chief to keep going, an hour out of town, when a riot was breaking out? Wouldn’t it be normal for a police chief to head back, cancel his speech, be on the scene? Did it mean something when he went ahead with a speech and left his men on their own?

It could—but chances were it was simpler than that. The chief had no way of knowing how bad it would get. There were plans in place, capable people to get things moving. In an image-conscious town like L.A. he might have felt that he had to show a calm, unruffled front. Business as usual would calm people down, let them think things were under control.

Anyway, whatever else you said about Chief Gates, he was all cop. I couldn’t even fantasize about his being guilty of anything more serious than an overdue library book.

I glanced down the sheet. Three other top administrators were on duty: Doyle, Tanner, and Chismond.

Douglas J. Tanner was new to the LAPD. He’d come from Miami, where he had made a name for himself at Metro Dade Homicide with a new system of computer-generated personnel record-keeping. I remembered the jokes when he arrived, only about six months before I left. They were calling him Software Tanner—only partly because of his interest in computerizing everything.

Albert Chismond had been a fiery black radical in his younger days. Somewhere along the way he’d become so outraged by the police that he’d decided to become one. He was smart, streetwise, and ambitious. He’d come up fast. I knew him slightly; he had been behind Ed Beasley’s decision to buck for Detective.

Warren Francis Doyle was the third man. He was from one of the old L.A. families, had lots of money, was in the department for idealistic reasons. His brother had been on the city council for a while. A family tradition of service, like the Kennedys.

All three had been on duty when the trouble started. All three had, at least in theory, access to the civil disturbance planning and the power and duty to act.

I had a starting point: three names that might or might not have done something, or not done something they should have done. But where did I go with them?

Two young men sat down at the table with me. They were so pale they were almost green, and their long scraggly hair clacked when they moved. They were dressed in slashed black leather vests, with lots of things hanging off their necks, arms, and heads. Things like twisted chunks of metal, skulls with green eyes and devils. One of them wore a bright red penis dangling from his neck.

“Fuck, no!” one of them screamed as they sat down. “That shit sucks. Michaels is a cunt!” Neither of them even looked at me. They just launched into their lighthearted witty talk.

“He can suck my dick,” the other one agreed.

“What the fuck IS this shit, huh? Can somebody tell me what this shit is?”

“He’s a fucking douche bag,” said the other one.

“It’s my fucking band!”

L.A. is the cultural capital of the western world, I thought.

“Fuck that shit!”

“Fucking right.”

I got up and walked back to my car.

Ed was still at his desk. That was no surprise, and neither was the sour expression on his face. He looked like his ass had sent out roots into his desk chair and it hurt like hell.

His face didn’t improve as I told him what Spider had said, and what I had figured. He lit a series of Kools, slurped his coffee, and made mean faces. Then I showed him the documents from Parker Center. He bit the filter off his Kool.

“Figures,” he said when I was done.

“I don’t like the idea. But it would explain an awful lot.”

“Explaining is one thing. Proving something like this, man, that’s gonna be a little more complicated.”

“Roscoe would have left some kind of paper trail. If it doesn’t prove anything, it might at least point towards something that does. So now I’d really like to see Roscoe’s papers,” I said.

“You ain’t the only one.” I raised an eyebrow, and he nodded. “Talked to Roscoe’s widow. Didn’t know nothing. I don’t think she has a lot of joy in her heart about the LAPD being on the job. She put her maid on the phone.”