SERGEANT COLE FROM VICE SQUAD shows his sensitivity right away: “You a pro, Judy?”
The girl doesn’t lift her eyes. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Sure you don’t.” Cole believes he’s got this all figured out. “You smell good. Lilac?”
Back downtown, at Police Headquarters, Lovely, Paez, Cole, and a few random swing-shift cops with nothing better to do than crowd one scared, shamed girl victim, Judy, Caucasian, not quite seventeen, wrapped and rocking back and forth in a fetid wool blanket, on a wooden chair beside Cole’s desk.
“She told you what happened,” Lovely grumbles.
Paez has a warning in his tone. “Lovely.”
“Her version.” Cole has bad teeth that he sucks at when he does what passes for thinking. “Situation like this, people sometimes, they see things . . . different. It’s like, what’s his version? Her date? Possibly, she led him on. Possibly, it was the both of them was frisky, and then things got a little rough, and she—”
“Who’s the victim here?”
“Well it sure as shit ain’t you.” Cole’s chin is the likely target Lovely considers tapping with a fist.
Judy glares dully at Cole. “You think I asked for this?” Her eye is bloody, her face purpled from open-hand abuse, her mouth swollen.
The Vice cop is unmoved. “You got the short red dress, the low-cut top. You’re a looker, Judy. By your own admission you took a cab to this man’s motel room all dolled up.”
Judy’s eyes go dead.
“This was a mistake,” Lovely says. Then, to Judy, “You’re wasting your time with these morons. I’ll take you home.”
Cole shoots an irritated look at Paez, so Paez yanks Lovely up out of his seat and shoves him across the room, suggesting, “Let’s get some air, Ry—”
Judy, small, almost inaudible, insists, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Lovely barks back at the Vice cop, “I know what you’re doing, and it stinks.”
Cole ignores him, offering Judy a patronizing nod. “We’re not saying you did, we’re trying to protect you.”
Lovely tries to twist away from Paez, hot. “Pick up the rocket scientist! I saw what I saw, Cole—”
Paez ushers Lovely out the door into the hallway, as Lovely continues to yell—“And while you’re at it, ask why A. R., A as in Atlee R. Drummond—was waving a gun at him yesterday.”
The door bangs closed.
Lovely shrugs Paez off and steps away, to the other side of the corridor, tired and punchy. He’s been up all night.
“I saw what I saw, Henry.”
“You don’t know what you saw.”
Through the glass door they can still see Cole: “Judy. Judy . . . should you decide to pursue this, and file charges, which is your right—as the details come out, all the details, well, it’s just natural that people will start to think. About, you know, you. Lawyers and judges are probably going to ask some embarrassing, intimate questions.”
Judy looks around, at the eyes of the other policemen, idly fixed on her. Measuring her. Judging her. They’re not bad cops, just men of a certain perspective. Soldiers who serve under a self-righteous chief, with his tortured, rigid, crypto-fascist thesis of right and wrong.
“You really want to travel down this road?” Cole has put on his compassionate face.
Judy’s voice, muffled: “I just want to go home.”
Cole nods.
Lovely turns away and, low, intense, braces Paez, because who else is there? “He drugged her, he raped her, he beat her up, and he threw her out of his car.”
“Or she jumped out,” Paez counters. “Could be it wasn’t even him in that car; did you see him? Can you say positive that you saw him? You can’t. He could be back at the motel, you don’t know. You don’t even know his name.”
“Lamoureux.”
“You think. You overheard, during an argument, while you were trespassing on restricted government property.”
“Who does the girl say drove?”
“You and I both know the girl isn’t gonna be pressing charges.”
Behind them, a matron has come into the squad room to help Judy up and walk her away from Cole and his desk.
“Who’s pulling your strings, Henry? Feds? Aerojet? Is this guy marked ‘special handling’? What was he doing outside my wife’s apartment?”
“What is wrong with you? You think you can save this girl and make up for not saving your wife? Well, you can’t.”
Lovely is rocked. “Maybe not, but at least somebody gets saved. You know, there was a time when you guys actually believed in protecting the victims of crimes.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got something to show you and something to tell you.” Paez pulls Lovely away from the squad room, down the hall and through a doorway labeled PROPERTY.
Lovely has been in here before. The smell is rank: as if evidence carried the perfume of its crimes. Shelves of crime scene collections and confiscated property kept behind locked chain link. A low table where items not yet booked are spread out and tagged, with paperwork attached.
“While you were wasting your time harassing federal VIPs, we got a search warrant and tossed A. R. Drummond’s apartment on account of apparently your wife worked for him and they were known to be friendly.” Paez shows Lovely the gun box that was, when Lovely last saw it, under Isla’s bed.
Now there’s a pistol inside. Military-issue, showing rust and lots of miles. A strange nick on the handle, worn deep by repeated insult. Lovely tries to remember if it’s the one he saw Drummond attempt to use.
“Ballistics makes it for the murder weapon,” Paez says. “Drummond’s prints are all over it.”
Lovely is shaking his head. “How did you even know about Isla and . . .” Then it hits him. “What anonymous tipster?”
“Concerned citizen.”
“Phone call. Or some Aerojet PR lackey?”
“Look, we get phone tips all the time.”
“Pretty convenient, led you right to the dingle.”
“You gonna argue with hard evidence?”
“Drummond barely knows which end of a gun to hold. And I saw the rocket scientist take that gat away from him today, and I didn’t see him give it back.”
“Will you forget the scientist? You’re correct. He’s off-limits. Okay? So. But more to the point? It was Drummond killed your wife. We’re gonna find him, and we’re gonna fry him. The end.”
Paez bangs the box down and goes back into the corridor. Lovely takes one last look at the gun, then hurries to catch up.
“Maybe that’s what he wants you to think.”
“Who?”
“Why would Isla save news clippings of the Blohm girl in her diary?”
“Oh, for crying out loud—”
“Just let me look at the Sarah Blohm casebook,” Lovely says, and Paez stops walking.
“What I think? Preacher knocked Isla up. Panicked. Bad press for the Church of the Cosmic Whatsit. She wouldn’t get rid of it, so—bing bang. Drummond plugged her.”
“Isla was a deliberate person. She wouldn’t save something if it wasn’t important.” He thinks of the diary. He wonders if he’s even right.
“Ninety percent of all murders are domestic in origin.”
“Maybe there’s a connection.”
Paez loses it, face flushed: “NOT EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED! Okay?” Henry’s voice rattles up and down the empty corridor and back down to where the door labeled CHIEF OF DETECTIVES opens and Agent DeSpain steps out . . . followed by the rocket scientist Lovely knows as Lamoureux. They pretend to be oblivious to the hallway noise, pause to shake hands in the doorway with a well-fed Central Bureau captain. Everybody smiling like they’re expecting a photo to get taken.
Lovely is not so much surprised as disappointed.
“Anyway, you got bigger fish to fry, my friend.”
This chills him, and Lovely remembers that Paez had something else he wanted to tell. He glances, sidelong, curious, apprehensive.
“Central narcs raided the Fall-Out tonight, and Lily Himes was caught with a brick of Mexican loco weed hidden in her dressing room.”
Oh, Jesus. “What?” Lovely is pretty sure he knows whose brick it is.
“Yeah. Chief Parker is over the moon. You know how much he loves celebrity busts.”
Lovely, stunned, tells them that Lily doesn’t use.
The cop shrugs, asks when that has ever mattered when dope turns up. “It’s not good,” Paez adds unnecessarily. “Given the volume, full disclosure, the charge is possession with intent to sell.”
—
BRIGHT AND EARLY the next morning, the Commodore two-tone pulls in and parks in its space beside the Aerojet barn at the bottom of the Arroyo Seco. Lamoureux gets out, jingling keys, whistling, and unlocks the front door. Lovely allows it to open partway, then jams his foot against it, steps out, and punches Lamoureux in the face.
Lamoureux reels. Lovely hits him again. “How does it feel, Doc? To be on the receiving end?”
Defenseless, a punching bag, the scientist, flailing miserably, throws a feeble counter that Lovely slips, and then steps inside to nail Lamoureux so hard under the ribs the man’s legs go rubbery and he pitches sidelong into a lab stand.
“Not so good, huh?”
Lamoureux is making a high-pitched noise, holding his bloody face, curled up, pathetic. There’s no solace in this for Lovely; he spent half the night at the Hall of Justice getting the runaround on Lily’s bail, until finally a churlish deputy in the women’s wing informed him that “that hophead jazzbo won’t be going anywhere for a spell.”
No visitors, no bail.
It’s a free country, America, Lovely thought ruefully as the elevator spat him back out in the Hall’s marble lobby and the slow bleed of dawn. A free country except when it isn’t.
But, hey, at least now we have the bomb.
“Get up.”
Lamoureux says no.
“Get up.”
“No, you’ll just hit me again.”
Lovely stares at the trembling man, catching his breath, his hand tingling. He always forgets how much effort it takes to hit a man, even when he doesn’t hit back. “You’re right.” He’s cranky, having spent what remained of his night trying to nap in the Rover.
With a woozy flap of arms and legs Lamoureux manages to get himself righted, sitting, back against the bench, legs stuck out straight like a cartoon. All kinds of ugliness leaking from his nose.
Lovely says, “I watched you toss a girl out of your car up on Mulholland.”
“Did you know,” Lamoureux snuffles blood, “that Oppenheimer is a communist sympathizer? Or ‘fellow traveler’ is the more delicate term. And yet. Not even Senator McCarthy can touch him.
“Father of the A-bomb. Don’tcha know.” A blood-limned grin.
“You think you’re that important to them?”
Lamoureux quips, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His head must be starting to clear, because his eyes bear in on Lovely with real interest, putting pieces together. “You must be the fruits-and-nuts man who was asking the good reverend questions about Isla.”
“That’s right. The name is Lovely. Get up, I’m done hitting you.”
Lovely steps back. His hand throbs. The knuckles will be swollen for a week. In the OSS they taught him never to hit a man in the head with a naked fist; the skull is rock hard. Use a blunt object, the instructors had said. Your palm or your elbow. Or aim for the throat.
Lamoureux rises and wobbles to a lab sink, where he runs water and splashes it on his face. Petulant: “You’re not supposed to be in here.” Lamoureux stuffs two rolled plugs of tissue up his nose. He looks like a wrongly drawn vampire. “Do you think he shot her?” Lovely says nothing, so Lamoureux turns and looks at him. “Drummond, I mean.”
“I know who you mean.”
Lamoureux just waits for an answer to his first question. Imperious, even in defeat.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“He says no.” Lamoureux shrugs. “I believe him.” Lovely decides not to argue. The rocket-science man towels away the blood and water, and tilts his head back as if with arrogance, which only amplifies, Lovely decides, the man’s rancid stink of superiority. “If he was going to kill anyone, it would probably be me.”
“And why’s that?”
“I accused his girlfriend of stealing from me. Atlee has taken umbrage.”
“Girlfriend.”
“That’s what I said. Isla. They knew each other . . . in the biblical sense.”
“What’d she steal?”
“Atlee Drummond and I were at Caltech together. Roommates for three years. We took . . . well, slightly different career paths after graduation.”
“I didn’t even know Caltech had a religious studies department.”
“Science is the future of everything, Mr. Lovely.”
Lovely doesn’t believe this, but wants to see where Lamoureaux will go with it. Immodesty in full bloom: “Did he tell you that his Church was made on a dare?”
“Didn’t talk about religion, no.”
“Atlee was an angry atheist, anti-papist, and downright Darwinian. Loved to gripe about how all the great religions were just moneymaking monopoly scams fostered by demagogues and fantasists. Phone companies, he’d say, staking out exclusive territories, taxing our personal dialogue with the unknowable. So one night, after a considerable amount of alcohol and cannabis, I said, ‘You think you can do better?’ He wagered me a thousand dollars that he could. And here we are.”
“You get a piece of his action?”
“No. I don’t have messianic yearnings. But while I’m not a holy man, I do have something of a following among the well-heeled cognoscenti. Occasionally I throw fundraisers for the Church. It’s the least I can do for the man who got me through Calculus. Derivatives being my Achilles’ heel.”
Gathering things from the lab benches, Lamoureux heads for the back door out of the barn and gestures for Lovely to follow him. “In fact, it was the morning after my last soiree that I discovered that some extremely important papers were missing from my study. Where Isla had put the coats. QED.”
“When was this?”
“April. Right around Passover. Or just after the Castle Bravo nuclear test. Depending on which God you worship. In Atlee’s ever-evolving eschatology, the Great Confluence of ’54.”
“Sounds like it could have been anyone, stole your secrets.”
“Could have been. Wasn’t: I alerted security. Who alerted the federal authorities. Who intercepted a ransom demand from a certain aforementioned woman, which resulted in her getting hauled in for questioning. You can ask them how that went.”
Behind the barn is a testing yard, perhaps twenty by thirty yards, the bare ground peppered with glittery sharp metal fragments that could only have come from things that have violently exploded. A giant aperture holds a fixed firing cylinder rigged inside a frost-laced refrigeration device powered by a chuffing compressor and wired with ignition and blast baffles, something out of Buck Rogers or Strange Tales.
“She evidently informed them,” Lamoureux continues, all the while making adjustments and enhancements and corrections to the apparatus, “that my old school chum, A. R. Drummond, was the dirty commie who put her up to it. You can imagine how that made him feel.”
“Stealing secret papers and selling them back to you.”
“Or to the Russians. It wasn’t clear. You might want to step back a bit.”
Lovely does, just in time, because Lamoureux triggers the ignition and the blast cylinder erupts, spitting chartreuse flames and causing the whole rig to rock and shudder for five, ten, fifteen harrowing seconds, a hellfire of controlled combustion that finally sputters out anticlimactically, and vomits a clinging black exhaust that doesn’t seem like it would be part of any successful trial.
“You didn’t see that,” Lamoureux mumbles irritably, stepping up with a chrome canister chemical extinguisher and furring out spot fires with clouds of suppressant, checking gauges, scrawling notes.
As Lovely watches, he flashes back to the wake of the war, and Operation Overcast, and all the so-called men of science he encountered while working for the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. “You ever cross paths with Strughold?”
Lamoureux freezes, turns, wary, “You know Hubertus?”
“I was the one who caught him trying to sneak off to Brazil under the ID of a blind German grocer we later found rotting under the floorboards of his shop.”
“He’s at Heidelberg,” Lamoureux says. “Running the physiological institute and doing top-secret research for the Air Force.” Lovely is pretty sure Lamoureux is lying when he adds, “I only know him in passing.”
“Yeah. He said the same thing to me, once, about science. Future of everything. I guess not for all those Dachau human test subjects he crammed into air-pressure chambers and inflated and popped like cheap balloons. For science.”
Bristling, Lamoureux reminds Lovely that Strughold was never charged with anything at Nuremberg.
“No, he wasn’t,” Lovely admits. “They hung his assistant, though, for war crimes. Guess that makes it okay, then. Lamoureux your real name?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Were you Vichy, or just part of the Ruhr Valley crew that wound up working at Peenemünde?”
Lamoureux stops and regards Lovely like some kind of nasty skin rash. Takes a deep breath, looks up at the sodden clouds. “Do you know what an inversion is, Lovely?”
“When things are upside down?”
“A deviation from the normal, or the natural order of things.”
“David and Goliath.”
“I mean meteorologically.” Gesturing to the sky. “All this stratocumulus. It never lasts. It burns off, bringing clarity.”
“Is that what you think you have?”
“Something else you wanted to ask?”
Lovely wants to hit him again, but instead says, poker-faced, “Gee. No. Yours is a crackerjack story, Doc. Thanks. Normally I have to grind that kind of detail out of people, but you, you just had it all cued up for me like a goddamn dissertation.”
A slow boil. “Do I detect sarcasm?” Lamoureux drifts back toward the open back door of the barn. “You bug me, Lovely.” And now Lovely realizes he’s made a miscalculation. Now it’s evidently beginning to dawn on the scientist that Lovely may be considerably more intelligent than he supposed. And while this might have rattled him more than Lovely’s fists ever will, it brings out the bully, too, the one with an inexhaustible legion of government goons standing loyal and patriotic right behind their golden boy so he can spit threats like “You know what? Security checks in on the half hour, they might take exception to a private dick tenderizing one of their prime assets. So why don’t you just cop a breeze and we’ll call it even.”
Lovely chides himself for letting his pride manifest, but it’s an honest mistake, and the blush of entitled rage on Lamoureux’s cheekbones, the juvenile jut of chin cause him not to regret it. “Another girl tumbles out on Mulholland,” Lovely says evenly, “next time I won’t let you get up.”
Lamoureux kicks the back barn door and slams it shut. Rattle of the deadbolt. The launch apparatus smolders and the smell of burned circuits lingers. There’s the muffled murmur of Lamoureux’s voice on the phone.
Time for Lovely to make his usual uphill getaway. His head hurts, from all this thinking.