Kate slowed the Plymouth, peering up at the Casbah Motel and its adjacent Turkish restaurant. With Taylor dozing beside her, she drove around the block.
Orange Drive, the street behind the Nightwood Bar, was lined with old two-story stucco homes sun-faded into muted colors, the roofs of dusty red tile. All the lawns were small and neat and made bright by occasional clusters of asters, zinnias, pansies, nasturtium. Typical of many Los Angeles streets, there were few trees—only two or three of any size. One handsome building stood out, gray with blue awnings, cool-looking with its large shade tree and well-tended shrubbery. Kate turned at the corner and cruised the short block to La Brea, admiring the startling beauty of scarlet hibiscus virtually covering the roof of a white frame house.
S285, S288, S290. The cryptic figures taunted her.
They were somehow connected with Dory Quillin’s death—of that she was certain.
She circled the block once more. On Orange Drive an older black man had come out to tend his tiny lawn. The neighborhood, Kate knew, had been fully integrated for well over a decade. She gazed up behind the stucco houses at the heavily wooded hill that separated this neighborhood from the Nightwood Bar. There seemed no logical reason why a killer or killers would attempt access to the crime scene over this hill and then over a high redwood fence, but still the street had been canvassed by Hansen’s officers. No one on the block had noticed anything unusual this past Sunday evening, Father’s Day…
Thinking balefully about Roland Quillin, she turned the car toward the station. She and Taylor would spend the balance of this day on other pending cases, on the most pressing aspects of followup and paperwork; then she would return here tonight. The discoveries of this day notwithstanding, she had to develop more information about Dory Quillin’s current life, not her past. She had to find Neely Malone. Tonight she would question individual women until she gleaned something she could use.
* * *
Just before nine o’clock, Kate parked in the crescent-shaped driveway in front of the enclave of businesses on La Brea. A single employee in the car rental agency was busily closing up; only the mailbox rental office remained open at this hour. Kate trudged up the hill, examining again the path a killer or killers had taken to reach Dory Quillin.
“…Break your head open you dyke bitch…”
“…Rearrange your face you motherfucker…”
“…Queerbashing asshole…”
Other incoherent invectives shouted by male and female voices reached her. Hurriedly she crested the hill and saw at the lighted windows of the Casbah Motel figures looking down into the parking lot. Adrenaline rushing through her, she ran toward the rear of the Nightwood Bar.
In orange light thrown by a single light standard more than a dozen women, including Maggie Schaeffer and Andrea Ross, formed a milling semicircle around two youths, one muscular and black, the other white with greasy blond hair, both of them in jeans and tank tops. Brandishing lengths of thick pipe, they held Audie pinioned between them.
On the pavement in front of a black car with flames painted across its hood, Roz sat astride the writhing body of a third male, her smothering bulk squarely on his chest, her skirt thrown over his face.
Ash, Tora and Raney, led by the shrieking Patton, surged toward the two youths who swung their weapons, howling curses; the women retreated, then gathered to move forward again—a wave swaying forward and back, its long dark shadow arcing across the parking lot in chaotic choreography.
“Police!” Reaching into her jacket for her gun, Kate pushed her way through the women, shoving the screaming Raney aside.
“Police!” She leveled her gun on the two men. “Stop right there!”
“Fuck off!” Patton danced angrily in Kate’s gunsights, waving her arms.
“Patton, get out of the way. Now!”
“Patton,” Maggie yelled, “get the hell back here! All of you get out of the way!”
The wave of women swayed uncertainly, broke. The black youth holding Audie twisted her arm up behind her; Audie uttered a sharp cry of pain. Raney rushed past Kate; Kate grabbed her T-shirt and flung her aside. Raney staggered and fell to her hands and knees.
Patton yelled, “Come on, let’s get these creeps!”
“Move back!” Kate roared the command. “Maggie, get these women back!”
“All of you move,” Maggie snarled, “or you’re eighty-six in this place till hell freezes over!”
Kate’s eyes were fixed on the two young men who were pulling and dragging Audie backward with them toward their car; only Patton remained in a corner of her vision.
“Boys, stop right there,” Kate said in a calm voice. “Listen to me. Drop the pipe now, nothing happens.”
“Sure,” the black youth sneered. “You drop the gun, we drop the pipe.”
“Shoot their dicks off,” Patton shouted gleefully.
“Shut up,” Kate snapped. How to control Patton and defuse this situation without the use of force, without someone getting hurt?
“Patton,” Maggie yelled, “shut your goddamn stupid mouth and get back here!”
“Boys, drop the pipe,” Kate repeated, striding deliberately toward them. Choosing her man, she angled her wrist so that the thick black barrel of the .38 was at eye level of the blond youth.
His eyes, glassy and darkened by distended pupils, focused on her weapon. Audie jerked free of his grip, stumbled, fell to her knees. In the same instant, reacting with pure instinct, Kate lunged, bringing the handle of her gun down on the wrist of the blond. He dropped his pipe with a yowl of pain.
She caught the flash of movement; the black youth was swinging his weapon as Patton launched herself at him. Kate shoved the blond man with all her force into him. Both men crashed into the car.
Kate dug her gun into the throat of the black man. “Drop it.”
The pipe clattered onto the pavement.
“Face the car,” she hissed, glaring into his dark eyes. “Now.” Where was the other man? She couldn’t spare an instant to look. She tensed, hunching her shoulders, knowing he was recovering his weapon.
As the black man turned she shoved him violently sideways. He stumbled along the side of the car, struggling to recover his balance. Yanking her handcuffs out of her bag, stuffing the gun into the belt of her pants, she grabbed his arm and clamped a cuff on one wrist. She dug the edge of the other cuff viciously into his spine. As he writhed she wrenched his other arm back and snapped on the remaining cuff.
Seizing her gun she leaped away from him and spun down into a defensive crouch, the gun raised and braced in both hands—and realized gratefully that Tora, Kendall and Maggie had pinned the other youth over the car; his arms were raised to protect his head as Patton, leaping manically from side to side, beat on his arms with his own pipe. “Gaybashing asshole!” she shrieked.
“He’s covered,” Kate shouted, “everybody back!”
The women pulled away from the car except for Patton; Maggie grabbed her by the belt of her low-slung jeans and wrestled her aside.
Kate raised her voice: “Somebody call me some backup.”
“I already have,” Andrea said from somewhere behind her.
The blond youth gained his balance, stared at Kate in glassy-eyed rage. He brushed at his arms and wrists as if to remove the blows he had received. “Dyke,” he spat, leaning toward her, an arm loosely swinging.
“Stay right where you are.” Kate raised the barrel of her gun level with his face, knowing in despair that she might very well have to fire the weapon. He was a doper, he was mindless with drugs.
She heard sirens, the sound strengthening rapidly. Another minute, she needed to retain control for no more than another minute…
He stumbled toward her. “You ain’t got the balls to shoot, cunt.”
“Don’t take another step.” Only a doper, invulnerable with the courage of drugs, would not recognize his peril, would choose this moment when both of his friends were out of commission to make this suicidal move.
“Bulldykes, all of you—”
“Hi-yiih!” Patton shrieked, leaping to swing her pipe at his head.
In the same instant Kate seized and spun him, drove him forward and slammed him face down onto the hood of the car. Jamming the hard barrel of her gun into his neck, she put her face down next to his and screamed directly into his ear, “Shut your mouth you asshole or I’ll blow your head off!”
“Make me puke, dykes—”
All control left her. Rage poured through her, engulfing the adrenaline, choking her. “You slime,” she screamed into his ear.
“Fucking dyke pig—”
Seizing his greasy blond hair she yanked his head up and then slammed his face into the hood of the car. She felt cartilage give way.
“My nose!” The voice was a high anguished scream. “You busted my nose!” He broke from her grasp to paw in a frenzy at his face.
Kate backed away. The intense pain of a broken nose would break through even drug-induced armor.
“Police brutality, asshole,” Patton sneered. “Big macho man, we’ll all testify how this lady cop busted your nose, you no-balls asshole.”
With both men apparently incapacitated and backed up against the car, Kate kept her gun rigidly leveled on them. “Roz,” she called, “everything okay over there?”
“No problem.” Roz pulled her skirt from the face of her captive, a beefy young male with stringy black hair and a face scarlet with impotent rage.
Maggie said breathlessly, “We heard noise out here, they were trying to—”
“Later,” Kate ordered. She needed all of her concentration for the two men in her gunsights. “And stay behind me.” Maggie had come up alongside her.
“Okay, sure.”
Shrieking sirens cut off on La Brea. Two black-and-whites climbed the hill, their lights cutting through the shadowed parking lot. Other sirens howled in the distance.
“Hey sister,” the black man called softly to Audie, “we didn’t figure you belonged here, we were just trying to get you away from these queers.”
“Of course.” Maggie stepped forward and bowed. “Gentlemen like yourselves, you were politely forcing Audie into your scummy car and we were rude enough—”
“Hey sister,” the black youth said to Raney, his handcuffs clinking as he futilely jerked his arms, “you my black sister, remember that.”
“You animal, who you calling a sister? These sisters are my sisters, you lowlife creep.”
Carrying shotguns, officers rolled out of their cars, Knapp and Hollings followed by Pierce and Swensen. Nodding to the officers, trying to conceal her relief, Kate replaced her gun in her shoulder holster.
Hollings cuffed the blond and patted him down, ignoring his blubbering about his nose. Pierce and Swensen walked over to Roz’s captive and stood looking down at him, grinning.
“We’ll take over from here, thank you ma’am,” Pierce said, and assisted Roz to her feet.
“Roll over, Beethoven,” Hollings ordered her captive, gesturing with the barrel of his shotgun, jingling his handcuffs.
Kate looked at Audie. She was huddled against Raney, her black face blank with shock, tears dripping from her eyes; she did not attempt to wipe them. Kate beckoned to Maggie. “Take her inside, will you? You and Raney take care of her. Get everybody inside, I’ll be right there.”
Officers had already escorted the black man to a police car. She said to Hollings, “Keep them separate, make sure their rights are read to them. I’ll get the full story here and be along.”