CARLO TOZZI ran every morning—just as the sun came up, when night was turning into day but everything was still cool. He and Gretel, a half-Shepherd half-anybody’s-guess, usually ran the bike trail behind the Tahquitz Creek Country Club, and at that hour, they pretty much had it to themselves. Shadows were still deep but fading in the little wisps of ground fog that would themselves vanish soon in the heat of the sun. The yellow sage was in full bloom, the sand changing colors with the approach of day, but he could still see the red lights on the towers atop Mount San Jacinto. The nighttime breeze was dying down.
Carlo was an unenthusiastic runner. He did it purely to keep in shape, and at a pace that qualified as aerobic without really pushing himself. A mile and a quarter down, a mile and a quarter back, cool off, and home to the apartment for a hearty breakfast, pancakes and eggs, which he could then consume in clear conscience.
Gretel, who could have outdistanced him with no effort, mostly stayed with him, but she was wont to go exploring now and again, on the trail of a rabbit or a lizard, though she was careful about snakes. A desert-wise dog.
At some point in their run, she went off on her own. Carlo had continued along the path for maybe a quarter mile before he realized she wasn’t with him. He stopped, running in place, and looked back and around.
“Gretel,” he called. “Hey, girl. Where’d you go?”
No response. He looked down the path the way he’d been going. He was almost to his turnaround point anyway. He decided he might as well start back a little early and find her on the way. She never strayed far afield.
He went another quarter mile without seeing her and began to get just a trifle worried—usually, the desert rattlers did their searching in the cool of the night, and by this time, with the sun now definitely above the horizon, the air already warming rapidly, they were mostly looking for shelter from the sun. And Gretel definitely avoided them if she spotted one.
Still, if she carelessly crossed path with a green Mojave…. They were mean; they could be defensive of their territory.
He stopped dead, looking and listening, and heard her nearby, chuffing as if she were having a conversation with herself. He jogged up a slight rise to his left and found her, digging frantically at the sand with her front paws, tail swinging wildly. Something had excited her curiosity. Carlo wrinkled his nose. A faint breeze carried an odd rotting smell with it.
“Hey, girl, you’re probably scaring the shit out of some harmless bunny rabbit. Why don’t we head for home, and I’ll get you a nice…?”
She was paying him no attention. He sighed and, coming closer, bent to take hold of her collar, meaning to pull her away from her task. As he did so, something flopped out of the crater Gretel had dug in the sand. Carlo stared at it. The sour smell got stronger. He took a step or two closer, not quite able to believe he was seeing what he was seeing.
Then, he bent over, away from the dog and the hole, and the coffee he’d downed before starting out came up in a violent heave.
“WE FOUND the missing boyfriend,” Hammond said into the telephone.
“Jeff? He’s dead, right?” Tom asked.
“Right. A runner found him in one of the canyons, buried, but not deep enough. Guy had his dog with him. The dog got all excited over a mound of dirt, started digging. Guy went to pull the dog off, and a hand popped out. Called us on his cell phone. At least he was smart enough to wait there till we arrived, or the coyotes would have been all over it.”
“How did he die? Any idea yet? Not another of those phony snake bites, I hope?”
“No. At a glance, I’d say he was strangled. He’s got bruises on his throat, look to me like finger marks. I’m on my way to Riverside now to meet with Doc Murphy. He may tell us otherwise, but I’d bet a wad on it. Want to ride along? I’ll swing by and pick you up.”
Tom glanced again at the clock, poked Stanley with his thumb. “Give us half an hour, okay?” He put the phone back on its cradle. Stanley blinked at him from the next pillow.
“Guess what,” Tom said. “We get to take a shower together.”
Stanley smiled back at him. This was his idea of water sports.
Tom correctly read the message in his eyes. “Not that much time,” he said, but not in a discouraging way.
“I can be quick,” Stanley said, throwing the covers aside. “If I have to be.”
HAMMOND PICKED them up in a department car, the traditional Crown Victoria, plain gray. He drove, with Tom in front beside him, and Stanley sat in the rear. They had gotten coffees to go from the Inn’s café and sipped them as they headed down the highway.
They rode for several miles in silence, nothing but disembodied voices coming at them from the police radio, when Hammond said abruptly, “Tell me something, do you miss it? Homicide detective?”
“Yes,” Tom said.
“I don’t,” Stanley said, but the other two didn’t seem even to hear him. Tom was like that, always quick to slip into cop mode with another officer, and Stanley knew Hammond didn’t really take him seriously.
“The impossible mystery,” Hammond said. “I always think of it like that.”
“But most of them get solved,” Stanley said, determined to wriggle his way into the conversation. He hated being shoved aside because he was, in anyone else’s opinion, too gay. In his mind, he was just gay enough.
“By which you mean,” Hammond said, meeting Stanley’s eyes in the rearview mirror, acknowledging him, if reluctantly, “the murderer gets caught. But that’s not what I meant. That’s not the great mystery. What I mean is, there’s always something that doesn’t make any sense, some question impossible to answer.”
“For instance?” Stanley asked.
Hammond considered for a moment. “For instance, why did the wife whose husband has been slapping her around for years decide to plug the guy now? What was it about this one night, this one beating, that changed everything for them? Or, this guy, he robs the corner liquor store, and then after he’s gotten the money, for no apparent reason, he shoots the clerk who wasn’t putting up any resistance. There’s always a question left that you can never put an answer to.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Stanley admitted, deciding maybe the policeman wasn’t as dense as he had heretofore suspected.
“You know what I miss?” Tom asked. “I miss the buddy thing, the other guys. I never thought I would, but I do.”
“Yes. I know what you mean. Only, it isn’t them, exactly, it’s the camaraderie.”
“Sometimes you don’t even like them as individuals,” Tom said, thinking it out as he spoke. “Hell, some of the guys I worked with were real jerks, but there you are, all of you working together to solve something, focused on the same goal. There’s a tension and an energy that you share, that you don’t get any other way.”
Hammond took a sip of his coffee and glanced briefly sideways at him. “Do you feel that same energy working as a private detective?” he asked.
Tom turned in the seat to look back at Stanley, who blinked owlishly at him. “Yes, and no,” Tom said. “I like working with Stanley, we make a good team, seems like to me, but we’re always on the outside of a case looking in, you know what I mean? Like this one. It’s your case. All we can do is sniff around the edges. Hopefully we’ll figure it out. Or more likely you will, but maybe, hopefully, we’ll get to add something to the picture. But it’s not the same thing either, not like working with a whole department.”
Hammond thought about that for a mile or two. “Everything’s changed, though, the last few years. At least it has here. Nowadays, it feels more like you’re always working alone, in a sense. If you’re seriously trying to be a detective, anyway. I expect you were. I get that feel from you, but there’s not so many of them anymore, not real detectives. Take the Treasury boys, for instance, or the FBI, or, hell, most of the boys back at the station in the homicide division, when you come right down to it—they’re just glorified clerks. Most of them are practically kids. Sure, they know how to do a wiretap or work a crime scene, they interview somebody and take a lot of notes, they’ve got technology we never used to have, but they don’t know how to think things out. How to look at the clues and move them around until they come together to form a picture for you. You can’t teach somebody that in school.”
“I never thought of it like that, but you’re right,” Tom said. “That kind of thing, you either have it or you don’t. That’s the good part about working with Stanley. He has this, I don’t know, this feel for things. Like pulling rabbits out of a hat. Sometimes it’s damned amazing.”
“Is that so,” Hammond said, surprised, taking a quick look in the mirror. He drove in silence for a mile or so.
“Well, still,” he said, “for an old-time kind of detective like me, in the end it always comes down to just you alone, trying to get into some killer’s head. And the work cuts you off from everybody else. People are uncomfortable around cops. And that camaraderie you talked about, even that’s not the same anymore.”
“Maybe not,” Tom said. He was thinking of the guys he had worked with in San Francisco. At one time he had felt close to all of them, but that had begun to fade in his last few months with the department. Or was that only because he’d linked up with Stanley? Once he’d been assigned to a case with Stanley, the others had begun to look funny at him, act differently. It had never been the same afterward.
At first, he had fought against that. He hadn’t wanted to be paired with Stanley. But working with him, sharing the same dangers, covering each other’s back, he had come to see Stanley in a different light. And, somehow, somewhere along the way, he had fallen in love. The kind of love he had never known before, or even imagined. It had necessitated his leaving the bureau. He couldn’t pretend, he couldn’t hide Stanley away somewhere, and he couldn’t work with the other detectives knowing that he and Stanley had hooked up—hearing them snicker, seeing the funny looks they gave him.
It had come down to Stanley or them. He’d opted for Stanley.
“It’s not just police work either,” Hammond was saying. “It’s the whole world, if you think about it. Take my oldest boy. He was the perfect son, did what he was told, played football—hell, he was the touchdown king—good-looking, smart. My youngest, the other one, he wears funny black clothes and his hair is braided. Goth, he calls it. Smokes too much weed, can’t hardly stay in school. Just lays around his room, listening to some god-awful music. Rap, he says. Crap, I call it. Won’t do anything I say. There’s no parental authority anymore.”
“In my opinion, most of us never really grow up,” Stanley said. “We just learn how to behave in public.”
Hammond might not have heard him. “Same with police authority, you ask me. That’s gone too.”
“What happened to the older boy?” Stanley asked.
Hammond glowered briefly over his shoulder. “What makes you think anything happened to him?”
“The way you talked about him, in the past tense.”
Hammond drove for a moment or two in silence before he said, “He’s gone.”
“Gone? As in…?”
“Signed up for the Marines. Got himself shipped to the Middle East. Wasn’t there any time at all before he got shipped back again. In a box this time.”
Stanley didn’t know what to say to that. He thought it best if he just said nothing. If Hammond noticed his silence, he didn’t show it. After a bit, he began to talk again, more now as if he were talking to himself than to them.
“I tell you what, I think if I was to pick a job as the loneliest in the world, I’d say homicide detective.”
“You think so?” Tom said, more to be polite than from any real interest. He was not much of a philosopher.
“Seems like it to me. Think about it. In time the friends of the victim, the families, everyone gets over it, at least they go on with their lives. I can’t say they ever really forget, but they push it into a far corner, like the attic of their mind—but the investigating officer never really forgets an unsolved case. It haunts him forever. It always has me, anyway.
“Which is why,” he said, looking sideways at Tom, “I want to get this one solved. I don’t want those boys haunting me.”
He was silent for a few more miles. Then he said, out of the blue, “They want me to retire.”
Neither Tom nor Stanley responded. Tom was thinking that probably this was where the whole conversation had been headed. Stanley was thinking about that bottle of bourbon in Hammond’s desk drawer. The result of them wanting him out? Or the cause of it?