THE KING,” I FACED SAL, “MY ASS.”
“Guy sticks up the store,” Sal grumbled half-heartedly, “it takes them all fuckin day to get here.”
“Murder isn’t a cash register, Kramer,” Garcia replied. He jerked a thumb at the door behind him. “Beat it.”
Sal looked a little startled. This was his office, after all. But Garcia stepped aside and Sal lost no time in getting out. A uniformed cop posted in the hall closed the door. Garcia turned around and held up a pistol, its barrel impaled on a pencil.
“Yikes,” said Lavinia, “so you’re the guy who smashed my back window and stole my roscoe out of the glove compartment?”
I cringed.
Garcia said quietly, “This isn’t high school, Miss Hahn.”
“That’s true,” Lavinia nodded. “Do you have a warrant?”
“Lavinia….”
Garcia forestalled me with a smile. “I do have a warrant,” he addressed her, “if you’d like to play that way.” He patted his breast pocket. “But if you so choose, you’re going to lose. Perhaps you’ll hear me out first?”
“Perhaps she will,” I insisted.
Lavinia had so much trouble with authority that she was perfectly capable of flying in the face of Garcia’s winning hand, even if she went to jail for it. Jails, in fact, are full of such people. Much as a scientist would watch a frog’s leg to which he’s attached an electrode, Garcia watched Lavinia. I watched her, too. My fate was a little too wired into her decision for comfort.
But some stroke of reasonableness stayed her contrariety. “So,” she finally said, “talk.”
Garcia talked. “Through a miracle of technology we’ve established that a second pistol fired three rounds at the scene of the Stepnowski murder.” Garcia let the pistol turn around the shaft of the pencil like a slow noisemaker, whose ominous appearance made up entirely for its silence. “But that gun didn’t fire the shot that killed him.” When the handle came around, we could see that the clip had been removed. Garcia looked past it at Lavinia. “Same caliber, different gun.”
“On cop shows on my television before I pawned it,” I interrupted, “ballistics tests took weeks.”
“It’s probably been several years since you pawned it,” Garcia said, with only mild condescension.
I nodded. “Ten, fifteen, twenty.”
“Other than the march of progress,” he said, with no condescension whatsoever, “you haven’t missed a thing.”
“What’s so hot about this murder case?” Lavinia asked. Despite her reasonable decision of just a moment before, her voice had reclaimed its accustomed note of antagonism. “Don’t you have important dead people to investigate?”
“Oh yes,” Garcia replied mildly. “But there are reasons to fast track this particular case.”
“What reasons?”
The gun began to turn again. “By the additional miracles of computerized record-keeping and gun control legislation, we have also established that the registered owner of a Lexus parked in the lot next to this very building has no gun permit. In fact, even if this handgun is registered, its serial numbers have been filed.”
Lavinia pursed her lips.
“So the pistol will remain in our custody until such time as it meets its ultimate fate as one of the many guests of honor at the annual Police Athletic League fundraiser, barbecue, and ordnance meltdown.”
It seemed to me that, while Garcia was letting Lavinia slide on at least two gun charges, he almost had to be aware of how she earned her living. “I sense a drift, here.”
“It took almost two hours to follow up on the tip that sent us to the De Haro warehouse,” Garcia said. “But a homeless guy who regularly sleeps on the roof of a building across the street from 112 De Haro gave us a first-rate description of you two, along with the license plate number of a Lexus registered to one Lavinia Hahn.” He shifted his eyes to me. “He mentioned a guitar case, too. We found one in the trunk of your Lexus.” He shot a cuff and checked his watch. “By now it’s at the lab. Which reminds me.” He opened the door. “Lavoix.”
Officer Lavoix turned around. Even with most of her raven hair tucked up under her service cap, she proved to be one of the prettiest cops I’d ever seen. “Lieutenant?” she said.
“You got a Number 3?”
Officer Lavoix produced a briefcase out of which she retrieved a large padded envelope, into which Garcia dropped the pistol, followed by its clip. From a spiral pocket notebook he recited a case number, which Officer Lavoix copied onto the flap. “Run this down to Pickering,” Garcia told her. “Suggest that he check it against the De Haro rounds. Come back and get me.”
“Yessir.” The door closed again.
“If it hadn’t been for that homeless guy, whose name is Jake Carter, you two would be in a world of trouble.”
Lavinia had a little more to hide than a mere unregistered gun; but I, for one, intended to play this frolic straight up the middle, because I had nothing to hide. I needed a murder rap or an accessory rap or any rap at all, let alone more face-time with cops and junkies, like Beethoven needed earplugs.
“I appreciate the consideration, Lieutenant,” I said politely. “So, given this homeless guy, what’s your understanding of the shooting on De Haro Street?”
Garcia didn’t exactly beam at this ass-kissing, but Lavinia, for once, kept her mouth shut. “Carter had just settled in to read a little Shakespeare by headlamp when he heard three shots. He didn’t check it out right away and, in any case, Jake wouldn’t want to stick his head up before he’d turned off his headlamp. Besides which he’s street-wary. Other people’s troubles are not necessarily his, and gunshots in the city aren’t exactly uncommon.”
“Sad to relate,” Lavinia commented pointedly.
“Yeah, well.” Garcia thinned his lips a little. “Jake took the trouble to put down his book, turn out his headlamp, get out of his sleeping bag, and take a careful peek over the parapet wall.”
“And he saw–?”
“The street was deserted. The Lexus was there already, but it didn’t attract his attention at first. He was just about to give up when the outside light at 112 blinked on and off.”
Lavinia could not restrain herself from commenting: “Son of a bitch.”
Garcia smiled without amusement.
I hurried it along. “So Jake settled in to wait.”
Garcia nodded. “Jake was just about to give up again when a woman came out of the metal door at 112 followed by a tall, bald, skinny guy.” Garcia paused before he added, “Jake described the woman as ‘skanky’.”
Lavinia gasped, then burst out with, “This insolent fuck, this dregs of society thinks just because he’s looking up from the gutter he’s got perspective?”
“What’s the matter, Lavinia? You’ve been dressing skanky for years. It finally worked.”
“Fuck you, you shitbird guitarist.”
Garcia said tiredly, “They argued….”
Lavinia rounded on him. “About what?”
Garcia shrugged. “At that distance, Jake couldn’t make it out. But after a little consultation the guy re-entered the building. The woman scuttled—”
“Scuttled?” Lavinia shrieked.
“We have it on tape,” Garcia pointed out mildly.
Lavinia hissed like a cat.
“—Scuttled along the loading dock and down the stairs at the corner, where she got into a recent-model Lexus parked westbound on Alameda Street, and took off. No more than a couple of minutes later, just as Jake was thinking it was time to go back to Richard III, the Lexus reappeared eastbound on 15th, made the corner onto De Haro, and stopped in front of the warehouse—northbound on the wrong side of the street—long enough for the bald guy to join her. Now the bald guy is carrying a guitar case. Interestingly, Carter observed that this case seemed too light to have an instrument in it. The bald guy hefted it wrong. He was careless with it. Carter’s words.”
“Your Shakespeare scholar is pretty sharp,” I remarked.
“Nosy bastard,” Lavinia grumbled.
“We left the guitar behind,” I explained politely, “in case things got rough.”
“How rough is murder?”
Nobody answered that one.
“Jake is sharp,” Garcia agreed. “He doesn’t seem to be a lush or a hophead or crazy, either. He’s just homeless.”
“Probably used to be a CEO,” Lavinia suggested.
“He likes the freedom. Lucky for you. From his perch Jake could see the clock on the old Folger’s tower at Brannan and Spear. It was twenty-five minutes to ten P.M.,” he added politely.
“Damn,” I said.
“More luck,” Garcia smiled. “Jake will make a good witness. Any defense lawyer would play him like a violin.”
“Oh shit, oh dear,” Lavinia said, “defense lawyers are expensive.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said.
Garcia shrugged. “The ballistics test on Miss Hahn’s pistol will about tear it for me,” he said, “if it comes up the way I think it will. We haven’t nailed it yet, but Stepnowski’s forensics should peg his death as approximately coincident with Curly’s visit to the Oakland jail, yesterday afternoon, six to eight hours before we can place either of you on De Haro Street. So I guess,” he clasped his hands in front of him, “you two can go ahead and get married.”
That got a laugh from me.
“Don’t make me puke,” Lavinia barked. “What kind of self-respecting girl lets herself get married to a guy with an octopus tattooed on his head?”
“Youthful indiscretion covers both categories.” I rubbed the flat of my hand over my pate. “Darling.”
“And a musician!” she noted spitefully. “Where’s the white picket fence?”
“On the album cover.”
“Marriages have started on shakier feet,” Garcia said sententiously.
“But not on eight slimy ones,” Lavinia said.
“Arms,” I said. “They’re arms.”
“With suction cups!”
“And a beak.”
“Disgusting.”
“The better to have and to hold.”
“Eew!”
Garcia said, “I’d like to disregard the various felonies and misdemeanors littering the landscape, in order to get to the nut of this case.”
“Some people have a hard time keeping their eye on the ball,” I said appreciatively.
“Some people,” Lavinia archly observed, “have a ball to keep an eye on.”
I nearly retorted that calling heroin retail a ball to keep an eye on was going a bit far, but I confined my reaction to a scowl. If Lavinia was determined to sass her way into a hat full of felonies by way of distracting the world from her complicity in a shootout in a liquor store, she was welcome to them.
“Ever heard of Narcotics Anonymous?” Garcia asked suddenly.
With the effrontery that comes only from someone convinced she’s pulled the wool over the eyes of the entire world, but especially over her own, Lavinia drew herself up to her full height and declared, “Narcotics Anonymous is for people with drug problems.”
“Is it not,” Garcia said.
“Next question.” Lavinia set herself to brushing an invisible particle of lint off her sleeve.
Garcia, who in any case was obviously interested in something else altogether, shrugged. “Okay. I was about to say that I’m fairly satisfied with your version of the story, so far as it goes.”
“Are you the guy who needs to be satisfied?” I asked.
“There will be the DA, when the time comes. The disposition of witnesses and evidence will be his call. But he takes suggestions from me. Plus,” Garcia inclined his head toward Lavinia, “he’s soft on victimless crime.”
Lavinia declined to rise to this bait. “And that time will come when?” I asked.
Garcia shook his head. “When we nail a suspect.”
“Do you have one?”
Garcia said nothing.
“Nobody?” Lavinia abruptly asked. “Stepnowski was a has-been musician trying to rip off a music store. How low can you go? He couldn’t have had many friends left.”
Garcia looked blandly at her. “Being friendless and ripping off King Kramer are not killing offenses—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Uh, right,” Lavinia admitted. “Not at all.”
“Did you talk with his wife?” I asked. “Did he have a band together?”
“We found his address book at the warehouse. It was full of musicians and club owners, producers, sound engineers and not a few drug dealers, but a lot of the numbers are out of date. So far only one person, a bass player, admits to associating with Stepnowski, but it’s been two years since they played together. Nobody seems to think Stepnowski had a band organized at all.”
“That’s really sad,” Lavinia said, almost to herself.
I said, “The De Haro warehouse seemed ideal rehearsal space. Why else would he have it? Was there a bunch of gear there? How about the PA system he bought from Kramer?”
“Nothing. In the room behind the one in which you found Stepnowski, we found an odd selection of parts—a small guitar amp, some cables, a couple of mike stands—but no mikes—a ruined double-neck guitar, a broken reel-to-reel tape machine, a ukulele, two or three folding chairs…. Nothing like what you’d expect in a working studio. No grand piano, no amp stack, no gobos, no mixing console, no patch bays or electronics racks—nothing like that.”
Lavinia frowned. “What are gobos?”
“Portable sound baffles,” Garcia patiently explained. “There are many kinds, but you position them around a player and his gear to isolate or shape his sound. Especially a drummer.”
“You know what gobos are?” I asked. “How come?”
“Well,” Garcia said, a little color rising to his cheeks, “I used to play a little bit. We had a band at the Police Academy. We called ourselves The Rookies. On La Bamba, we rocked.”
“On La Bamba,” Lavinia repeated, “they rocked.”
“You don’t play anymore?” I asked kindly, ignoring her.
“Not since I graduated, got married, had a couple of kids, made Lieutenant.”
“Not since you got a life, in other words.” Evidently, Lavinia felt compelled to make this point.
“Was there a kit?” I wondered.
“Not a drum to be seen.”
“How about clothes—or shoes?” Lavinia threw me a glance. “Shoes and clothes and stuff.”
“No clothes,” Garcia said, looking curiously at her. “His shoes were missing when we found him.”
“Same here,” Lavinia confirmed.
“Curious,” I mused. “His landlord told me he had moved there.”
“Ah, the landlord,” Garcia said.
Lavinia and I said together, “What about—” We exchanged a glance. “Him,” I finished. “Yeah,” Lavinia added.
“We think Stepnowski was set to blow town. The bass player told us that Stepnowski had called him out of the blue, quite recently, not to set up a gig or rehearsal but to flog a bunch of gear to him. The bass player claims he wasn’t interested. A drum kit was mentioned. So were a synthesizer and a Peavey sound system—board, speakers, amps, EQ, cables, and enough microphones to cover a four-piece band, with multiple mikes for drums, a four-track cassette recorder…. A truckload of stuff. Which reminds me. Stepnowski owned a cab-over Econoline van. It’s painted flat black. We haven’t found it yet. Have you seen it?”
Lavinia and I both shook our heads.
“That must be the system Sal sold to him,” I guessed.
“Very likely.”
“So what’s the hustle?”
“It’s a standard one,” Lavinia put in. “Ivy tells me it’s Sal’s biggest headache, to which shoplifting’s a distant second.”
Garcia pricked up his ears. “The inimitable Ivy Pruitt.”
“Let’s leave him out of this,” I suggested.
Garcia looked tentative. “That might be possible.”
Lavinia explained. “Guy starts buying stuff from Sal, little stuff at first. Drumsticks, mike stands, a set of speakers, all his trivial supplies. He gets a line of credit going. He buys more stuff—a drum machine, maybe a whole kit. One day he turns up with a bunch of stuff to trade and a little cash for sweetener. He’s got a story, too, like his band has landed an extended club gig or a recording contract or a short tour. At any rate, he’s got to make some moves equipment-wise. He trades in everything Sal will take off his hands, throws in some cash, gets the rest on credit, and walks out of the store with a top-of-the-line synthesizer, a computerized lighting board, a 24-track mixing console—whatever.”
“And until he manages to resell the gear for cash,” I realized, “he makes his payments right on time.”
“If he’s really desperate—strung out, a wanted man, whatever—he’ll drive to Reno and pawn the gear immediately to one of the big pawnshops there. That’s extreme, however, because a pawnshop won’t give top dollar. A private sale is much harder to trace and the money’s always better. But either way it’s pffft,” she pushed air with her tongue between her front teeth, “the guy and the gear are gone, and Sal is stuck for the balance.”
“Which is when Kramer calls in Ivy Pruitt,” Garcia said.
“Yeah, but first Kramer has to figure it out,” Lavinia nodded.
“If the artist times it right, Ivy won’t happen until long after the account comes past due—at least thirty days after a missed payment. Hell, a guy could sell the stuff and keep making the payments until he’s safely in Patagonia.”
“Stepnowski had a lot of money on him when he died,” Garcia said. “He must have moved a lot of stuff. By the way,” he smiled, “it goes down very well with me that you two took only what was owed you and left the rest. Very well indeed.” When even Lavinia had nothing to say to that, Garcia added, “It speaks volumes about your sincerity.”
I said carefully, “Stepnowski was into Sal for seventy-five hundred. The PA system was worth thousands more. If he sold it for half what it was worth in order to move it quickly, he—”
I stopped.
Garcia said, “You were saying?”
“Shut up,” Lavinia said simply.
Garcia fingered an audio cassette out of the side pocket of his trench coat and held it up for us to see. “Not to worry. We have the context. We’re still adding to it.”
I looked at the minicassette, then at Kramer’s desk. Amid the clutter at least two microphones weren’t even hidden. I looked at Garcia, who smiled. “Fast track. With Kramer’s cooperation, of course.” He returned the cassette to his pocket. “Assuming Stepnowski sold the missing synthesizer and his own drums too, eight grand sounds like a plausible minimum.”
“Eight thousand seven hundred and fifty-four dollars. I counted it myself. There should have been twelve hundred dollar bills, two twenties, one ten, and four singles in Stepnowski’s right hip pocket when you found him. Folded once. With all the presidents looking the same direction.”
“We subtracted only what was owed to Sal,” Lavinia hastened to be redundant. “No more.”
“It speaks volumes toward your integrity and your motive,” Garcia reiterated, a little bored.
Now that she knew she was speaking for the record, however, Lavinia felt compelled to ham it up. “For our good conscience, too.”
“Yes,” Garcia said, his tone darkening. “Your good conscience.”
I ventured to suggest that he had it all figured out.
“That’s possible, Watkins,” Garcia said mildly. “You don’t see any other angles?”
“What about the anonymous phone call?” I thought a moment. “What about the guy on Anza Street?”
“That creep,” Lavinia said.
“He told me his name,” I said. “Torvald.”
Garcia didn’t consult his notebook. “His first name is Eritrion. Calls himself Ari. We talked to him.”
“And?”
Garcia shrugged.
I said, “After he spilled the new address, he made a special request of me.”
“Which was?”
“He wanted me to be sure to say hello to Stepnowski’s wife. He said she and her girlfriends were very pretty, and he missed them.”
“Ugh,” Lavinia said.
Garcia smiled. “He didn’t mention that to me. Then again, I had Officer Lavoix running interference.”
Lavinia frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Garcia appeared to patronize her. “Perhaps you noticed,” he said, “that Officer Lavoix is … attractive?”
“So what’d the guy do,” Lavinia snapped testily, “drool his way through the interview?”
“Well,” Garcia said, “we might have stayed all night. Asked him anything. Fine by him.”
Lavinia looked at me. “Are you just going to sit there and listen to this sexist bullshit?”
“Hey,” said Garcia, “it’s just a fact.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, although I knew exactly what she was talking about, and what she was about to start yelling about, but when I looked from Lavinia back to Garcia again, Garcia compounded her anger by offering a man-to-man shrug, with no attempt to hide it from Lavinia. “Bitches,” he might just as well have said aloud. “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.”
“Angelica,” I said quickly, to forestall Lavinia blowing her top. “Wasn’t that her name?”
Again, Garcia didn’t bother to consult his notebook. “Angelica is her name.”
Lavinia abruptly frowned and turned her attention away from Garcia, back to me. Because she had been hosing dog off her undercarriage while I taxied to the Anza address, she hadn’t overheard my interview with Torvald, and now she had to admit that, while she had no idea what went on during my visit to Anza Street, Mrs. Stepnowski had never come up.
“So?” I asked. “Where is Angelica Stepnowski?”
Garcia nodded grimly. “That may well turn out to be your basic nine-millimeter question.”