Billie’s face was pinched, her eyes completely out of synch. “Let’s go,” she said.
I looked at my watch. “You’re a little early. What’s going on?”
Billie’s fingers were clenching my car door so hard they looked arthritic. “We need to go now.” She leaned toward me, a movement so slight I almost missed it, and said out of the corner of her mouth: “Please, Charlotte. He’s got Turquoise.”
From inside the car at the curb, I could hear the child’s tinkling laugh and see her silhouette along with that of another, bigger head. “Can we just get in the car?” Billie urged.
I slipped my gun from my purse into one of the grocery bags and toted them over to Billie’s car. Although my brain felt tight inside my skull, I forced my voice to be bright: “Good thing you caught me. I was just about to take some of these groceries over to my neighbor.”
His face stretched into a smile as I got into the front seat. “Good to see you, Detective.”
Mrs. Franklin’s vision said I would suffer from the malice of a pretended friend, but I had no idea this was what it meant. He was wearing khakis and a burgundy Izod shirt that fit snug over his ample chest. With his clean-shaven face, Dodgers cap, and aviator sunglasses, I almost didn’t recognize him. He was playing patty-cake with Billie’s little girl like he was an old friend of the family. The only thing that suggested maybe he wasn’t was the nine millimeter that lay across his lap.
I tried to ignore the handgun and made myself flash him one of my best smiles. “If it isn’t sweet Chip LeDoux! This is a nice surprise, but I don’t recall writing down my home address when I gave you my card.”
“You didn’t,” he smiled. “Wright called me at home this morning, told me Detective Truesdale wanted to talk to the officers who rolled out to that news anchor’s house. So I called Billie here and convinced her that my information on your ‘Kinky Sex Bandit’ was worth discussin’ face to face. And, lo and behold, come to find out she’s workin’ the Mitchell case with you. I couldn’t pass up the chance to see you again, and she was kind enough to oblige me.”
Oh, dear God; now I knew which cops Lance had taken pictures of, probably minutes before we encountered him on King Boulevard that Friday.
Turquoise yanked at the sleeve of LeDoux’s shirt. “Can we play patty-cake some more?”
“No, darlin’, but you can sit on my lap.”
Turquoise clambered happily into the patrolman’s lap. He put his right arm around her and jiggled her up and down, causing the gold watch he wore to give off sparks in the afternoon sun. His left hand held his weapon, which also caught the sun in its deep, silvery glow.
“Now I know, Officer LeDoux,” I forced a smile into his too-blue eyes, “you didn’t bring your sweet self all the way over here just to see where I live.”
“Call me Chip,” he smiled back, but there was something disturbingly vacant in his eyes.
“So, what’s up, Chip?”
LeDoux rubbed his gun thoughtfully against his cheek. “You girls have put us in a real bind. Me and Darren had no intention of writin’ up a report on that news anchor. Faggot didn’t want his big-bucks career going up in smoke. We could respect that.” His mouth twitched upward, a grotesque, grinning mask. “Besides,” he snickered, “as you know, the evidence came in handy later.”
These are your colleagues, sworn to protect and serve, I thought with a chill.
Keeping my eyes on his face, I tried to size up the situation quickly. LeDoux was sitting in the middle of the backseat, over the car’s transmission hump. I could see Billie’s mind working, too, calculating whether she could grab the weapon from him in such close quarters. If she tried it, Turquoise would surely be hit, if not killed outright, and maybe one or both of us, too. As much as I knew it would be my first inclination as a mother, the cop in me said, Don’t risk it, Billie.
But as hard as I was thinking, I was also praying frantically, the words rising up whole in my mind’s eye as if it were 1978 again and I was on my knees, mumbling the psalm that kept me going after my family was killed: Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock . . .
LeDoux’s smile dissolved as quickly as it appeared. “But then Darren called from the station, and I knew we were gonna be the ones with our careers in the dustbin if we didn’t get this situation under control PDQ.”
“It doesn’t have to go down like this, Chip,” I said. “What have you got—twenty-five years in the Department?”
“Twenty-seven,” he corrected. “Joined up right out of ’Nam.”
My mind was calculating furiously for the dates LeDoux would have been there, trying to fabricate some kind of connection between us. “I have a brother who was in Vietnam—Sixty-five to sixty-seven” was the lie I came up with. “Can’t remember the name of his platoon.”
“He wouldn’t have been in my unit. I was Special Forces.”
I caught a glimpse of someone walking on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, but I couldn’t tell who it was. All my attention was focused on Chip LeDoux.
Who was saying, “But everybody in our unit had a second job, regardless of our rank or specialization.” He formed a gun with his right hand, pointed a loaded finger at Turquoise’s stomach, puffed out his cheeks, and blew in her ear.
Turquoise giggled. I could feel Billie flinch in the driver’s seat and my stomach turn, but I swallowed down my fear and revulsion to concentrate on LeDoux.
Reminded myself to stay calm. Watched that left hand of his and said, “With your skills and discipline, you must have been in high demand when you got back stateside.”
“Very high,” he agreed. “I got a lot of respect in the Department for my talents when I first got back. And when Watts blew up, I helped to kick some serious butt to keep this city safe. I even got a commendation from Chief Parker. That put me on the fast track through most of the seventies. Brought down a lot of lowlifes, too, until they outlawed the choke hold. Then the job got real ugly in the early eighties, when the gangs started takin’ over the streets with their drugs and drive-bys. And with the courts jammed up the way they were, you’d bust one of ’em in the mornin’ and he’d be out by noon, standin’ on the same gotdamn street corner, grabbin’ his dick and talkin’ about your mama.”
Turquoise’s eyes grew round. “Mommy, he said a no-no.”
“It’s okay, honey, Officer LeDoux is only playing. Be still and let grown folks talk.”
Billie reached over her seat to soothe her daughter only to have LeDoux put the real gun in Turquoise’s side. “Don’t go trying something you’ll regret later, Detective,” he warned her.
Tears welled up in Billie’s eyes. “Don’t hurt her, LeDoux. She’s just a baby.”
“I’ve got an idea,” I added quickly. “Let Turquoise take these groceries over to my neighbor. Mrs. Franklin will look after her so then the three of us can go somewhere and talk.”
Billie’s tears stimulated Turquoise’s. “I don’t want to go, Mommy,” she whimpered. “I want to stay with you.”
“See, she wants to stay with us.” LeDoux bounced the child more vigorously on his knee, placed his lips close to her ear. “You can stay, angel, but you have to promise to be very good and very, very quiet. Can you do that for me?”
Turquoise nodded solemnly. LeDoux kissed her cheek and held her tighter, so tight I was afraid he would squeeze the breath from her.
I had to keep him talking, wait for an opening to get a clean shot. But how could I find some common ground with this man, what could I say that wouldn’t push him over the edge, dragging all of us into the abyss with him?
I tried, “I was in the Southwest Division in eighty-three myself, gang table. Things were really getting ugly by that time. Sleazy lawyers getting their bottom-feeding clients off on technicalities . . .”
Forgive me, Perris.
“. . . sometimes we couldn’t get an arrest to stick to save our souls.”
I struck a nerve; LeDoux’s eyes connected with mine. “So you know what’m sayin’?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I nodded, and I did. For wasn’t I, so full of hatred for Cinque Lewis and everything he represented for all these years, different only in degree from the wild-eyed man before me, a man who probably started out with a lot less anger than I had back then? There was one big distinction between us, though. I had tried to heal, find solace in the work, in the knowledge I was making a difference. And, ineffective as I felt at times, I had prayed.
But there was enough of LeDoux in me, in the icy fury I could see congealed in his eyes, beneath his reddened skin. Maybe by reopening my old wounds, I could make him believe I was more like him than different, kindred spirits, truly a brother and sister in blue. Maybe it would be enough, enough for him to let us live.
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves. “When I was with the Southwest,” I began, “Royals and Deathstalkers were running the streets, polluting them with their drugs, and killing a lot of innocent people in the process. I lost my husband and kid in a drive-by, for Christ’s sake! I wanted all of them dead.”
That part was no lie, God forgive me. Except I wasn’t willing to step outside the law to make it happen.
I held LeDoux’s eyes: “And then they started the budget cutbacks. Fewer resources, these little pop guns they give us against the Uzis, and the lawyers tripping us up at every turn. How were we supposed to do our jobs?”
He was with me, his eyes deep blue pools of glistening rage. “It was just like ’Nam: ‘Take care of this mess for us. We don’t care how you do it, but just keep it away from our kids, and our homes, and our schools.’ The brass had their goodies, their cushy lives behind the line. We were the ones out their dodging bullets, just like today. As if we don’t have families we want to protect, too. And the money! Why did they think we’d keep riskin’ our lives for that chump change they were payin’ us? I’m drivin’ a twelve-year-old Honda, and these little thugs are driving Bimmers and Benzes!”
“It ain’t fair,” I agreed, trying to convey empathy in my eyes when all I wanted was for God to strike this man dead.
Don’t let him catch you judging him, I reminded myself. “So what did you do?” I asked instead.
“Went to the top, to the Big Dog himself.” LeDoux was tickled by his own joke. “He had more than enough to share. There he was, richer than Rockefeller, and he expected to sell crack in our sector without giving us our props?”
“ ‘Us’ being you and Wright?” Billie asked.
“Darren wasn’t up for it at first. But I made him see they owed it to us. Kind of a hazardous duty pay, y’know what’m sayin’?”
“You must have been upset when Big Dog got croaked,” I said.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen.” The red in LeDoux’s face deepened. “Me tryin’ to keep three kids in private school and Darren with those payments on that sailboat. Doin’ the Dog meant the end of our gravy train.”
I could see worry creasing his forehead. He idly stroked Turquoise’s hair. “My little one’s got a learnin’ disability. Do you know how expensive those special schools are?”
“Tell us what happened with Big Dog,” I said softly.
“It wasn’t intentional!” His eyes searched my face, then Billie’s, begging for understanding. “We went to meet him at this building they use to store their drugs, and Givens started talkin’ shit about how they didn’t need our protection anymore, that they were too big for that. Can you imagine the balls it takes to get up in my face and front me off like that? After all that we did for him? Darren wouldn’t have had to shoot him if Givens hadn’t gone for his shit. And once Darren took the Dog out, his little partner, June Bug, had to go, too. We tied them up with some wire we found to make it look like a gang hit.”
So that’s why Givens missed the big gang summit. My stomach rumbled and my head began to throb. I ordered my face to be neutral. “You were lucky your partner had your back” was all I could think of to say.
“We look out for our own—even the ladies among us.”
“How do you mean?”
“I was the one who kept you from crackin’ your head in the ER.”
So it was LeDoux’s arm around me that night at the nurses’ station. “I owe you twice, then.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the words “thank you” this time.
LeDoux nodded, a brief smile flitting across his face. “After we smoked Big Dog and June Bug, things got away from us. Like King Boulevard; that wasn’t planned either. Darren and I had been lookin’ all over for that white-haired sonofabitch ever since he ran out of that storefront on Crenshaw . . .”
“Cinque Lewis was with Givens that day?” I asked.
LeDoux nodded. “Lewis musta been hidin’ and watchin’ us somewhere because we saw him slippin’ out a side door as we were leavin’. We tailed him all the way over to the Coliseum, but then we lost him somewhere in them bungalow apartments. We kept lookin’ for him, but he didn’t surface until that next Friday.”
Hiding out at Mrs. Sparks’s house, no doubt. “So which of you killed him?” I asked.
“There was some baling wire from a television box somebody dumped behind the stand,” he said. “Technique I learned in ’Nam—use whatever’s at hand. Rusty nail, ballpoint pen, whatever. But the garrote was my specialty back then; I liked to feel their last breath when they went down. And they’d go down real quietlike if you knew what you’re doin’.
“Maybe I was a little rusty or somethin’ ’cause this one wouldn’t go down easy. Kept strugglin’ and cursin’. But I held on, so by the time Darren popped him, he was already gone. But that didn’t stop me from enjoyin’ watchin’ his body jerk one last time . . .”
I swallowed back the wave of nausea that ran through me. Not even Cinque Lewis deserved to die like that.
“. . . or from picking his pockets,” LeDoux was saying. “Lucky for us we did. That boy had five thousand dollars on him.”
Peyton’s money for school. So Cinque Lewis had been honest in his desire to help his half brother through college. My heart thudded when I realized I might not live to tell him.
But if I was going to die, I was going to die knowing the whole truth. “But why kill Riley, Chip? He was just a harmless old man.”
He shook his head. “You told us yourself he made us. He had to go,” he explained, “just like that doctor—he saw us cap Lewis. Even took pictures of it, for God’s sake. We had to get our hands on those pictures. That’s why we went through his glove compartment at the scene. Luckily in all the confusion, no one noticed. Then we saw you had him and tried to get him away from you . . .”
“You were the one who twisted my arm out there?”
“I’m real sorry about that, but we had to get that camera,” he explained. “When you got away, Darren suggested we follow you to the hospital and intercept him. We almost had him, too, until his little co-worker volunteered to take him downtown.”
A muscle tightened in LeDoux’s jaw. “I coulda killed that little bitch.” Then he laughed, a frightening sound that started deep in his chest and bubbled up out of his mouth to something just short of a cackle. “Thought about it again when she showed up at his house Tuesday night.”
I took a closer look at the gold watch on LeDoux’s arm. It was a Patek Philippe, the same brand Holly Mitchell said she gave her husband for their anniversary. No doubt Wright had the Rolex.
“So it was your and Wright’s footprints outside Mitchell’s house,” Billie said.
“The dispatcher had us down as still workin’ the scene at the gallery, so we had plenty of time to leave early and search the house. But we didn’t find the pictures or the camera. We were in the bedroom when Mitchell got home, so we slipped outside and waited on the patio, hopin’ maybe he had the camera on him. The girl showed up a few minutes later. We stood out there forty-five minutes, waitin’ for him to finish boppin’ her,” LeDoux chuckled to himself. “Young girl nearly wore him out.”
“Why didn’t you just kill Jamilla Brown, too?” I asked.
“Outside of pissin’ me off when she took Mitchell to Parker Center and makin’ a nuisance of herself at Mitchell’s house, she hadn’t really done nuthin’,” he conceded. “Mitchell was the rabbit we were huntin’. ”
LeDoux half-laughed—more of a sneering sound really, just like the sound he made when he joked about Lewis to Wright and me on King Boulevard—and shook his head. “When he saw us in the bushes after she left, he got all indignant, demandin’ to know what we were doin’ on his property. But then he caught on to who we were and tried to get away. I still had some of that wire from the Lewis scene on me . . . he was dead before I knew it.”
After LeDoux killed Mitchell, Wright took over. Afraid the coroner would discover the ligature marks and link the two killings, Wright went to their patrol car parked down the street and got the rope and magazines from their call to Brett Stewart’s house the night before. “Darren said it made more sense to make it look like the doctor snuffed himself. With all that erotic art and shit up in there, it wasn’t much of a stretch. And we knew Stewart wasn’t going to file a complaint.” He looked at the two of us as if seeking our approval. “I thought it was pretty damn creative.”
“And then you turned around and answered the Mitchell call when it came in,” Billie added.
“We were just gettin’ in the unit when the call came, but we told the dispatcher we were just comin’ off of a Code 7 at a greasy spoon down on Crenshaw and we’d go on up the hill and check it out. That extra fifteen minutes or so really helped. Gave us time to vacuum up the broken pottery and the dust from our shoes, and put the bag in the car before Bansuela arrived with the crime scene van. But we still didn’t find what we were lookin’ for.”
LeDoux suddenly pointed the gun at me. “Where’s that boyfriend of yours, Detective?”
I held my face perfectly still for an instant, then tried to register confusion. “I don’t know what you mean . . .”
“Wright and I finally put it together today,” LeDoux said. “That was Mitchell’s camera your doctor friend brought to the gallery on Tuesday night. That’s why we couldn’t find it when we tossed his house.” He shook his head. “And to think we almost had our hands on it that night.”
“He had the film in the camera developed already, but you and Wright aren’t in those pictures; I saw them myself,” I lied. “And with no photos,” I hurried to add, “no one could ever prove you killed Lewis.”
A cold blue flicker flared up in his eye. “They could with what I’ve just told you.”
I held his eyes in mine, tried to penetrate the core of his dark soul, make him believe I was on his side. “They won’t hear it from me,” I said flatly.
Billie, whose worried eyes hadn’t left her daughter’s face the whole time, nodded and whispered, “Or me.”
LeDoux’s dead ones told me he didn’t believe a word we were saying.
“You did me a big favor whacking Lewis,” I argued. “The bastard killed my husband and child. At least let me return the favor.”
He tightened his grip on the gun. “Sorry, Detective.”
“Take it easy, Chip,” I said. “We’re on your side.”
His blue eyes told me he doubted that.
The child had begun to whimper. Tears fell freely from Billie’s eyes. “Don’t do this in front of the kid, Chip,” I pleaded. “It’ll ruin her life. Let her go over to my neighbor’s, then Billie and I will go wherever you want.”
LeDoux licked his lips nervously and glanced at his watch. “I don’t think so. Wright’s on his way to take care of that newscaster. I’m gonna do the three of you, then we’re gettin’ on his sailboat and gettin’ the fuck out of here!”
“Mommy, Mommy,” Turquoise squealed and squirmed, her eyes big with fear, “he said the ‘F’ word!”
LeDoux cursed and shoved Turquoise off his lap, knocking her hard into the door. She cried out and grabbed at the door handle.
For a minute I thought she had opened the door and fallen out, then realized someone must have yanked it from the outside and removed her. The sudden movement distracted LeDoux for just a moment. It was just enough time for me to reach between my feet, grab my gun, get the safety off, and get a bead on him.
The shots from my weapon sounded like thunder in my ears and were intensified by the sound of another gun fired into the backseat from the open rear door. Then there was the blood, splattering like rain all over the back of the car, some of it even ricocheting off the right window and misting my face and arms.
Billie was nowhere to be found; her car door was open, and I could hear a muffled cry coming from somewhere in the street. Dear God, don’t let her be hit, I prayed.
There was an odd sound coming from the backseat. Afraid at what I would find but as curious as Lot’s wife at the Tower of Babel, I looked back. I had to be sure.
There was a gaping hole in the middle of his face, another in his chest. Blood was spurting everywhere, and he was jerking like a marionette caught up in his own strings. But it was just a reflex. Chip LeDoux was already dead.
Billie had removed her daughter from the line of fire and was crouching behind a tree with Mrs. Franklin, shielding Turquoise with her body from the carnage inside the car. I didn’t breathe until I saw my partner and that child move.
I sat there breathing deeply, trying to calm myself, when the door on my side of the car opened and a hand reached in for me. Pulled me up and away from the blood and death, up out of the past. Wrapped me in strong arms. Held me warm and close until I dropped my armor.
Finally.
Gratefully.
And cried. Cried for all the times I couldn’t, for the tears that had been burned from my soul by hate as strong as LeDoux’s, hate that left me dry-eyed and angry at a world that would allow those I loved most to be cut down, and then left me alone, pretending to live without them. Cried for the love of a mother who didn’t know how to show it. The love of a husband snatched away too soon. The love of a little girl whose scent and heft in my arms I could still recall whenever I looked into a child’s eyes.
Aubrey Scott stood there holding me, unafraid of my pain, my blood-splattered clothes, my wild, wet eyes.
“Are you all right, Char?” he said loudly, looking into my eyes. “Are you hit anywhere?”
I shook my head gratefully. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Perris emerge from checking LeDoux’s vital signs in the back seat, his .357 Magnum still in his hand. Perris placed his gun on the hood of Billie’s car and walked around it to join us on the grass. He hesitated, stopping just short of where we stood. Struggled to say, “I tried to warn you, but you weren’t listening . . . When you said a cop was picking you up, I didn’t know what to think. And I couldn’t be sure the black-and-whites would make it in time or if they’d even come, given what was in those pictures.”
Sirens screamed in the distance as I told Perris about LeDoux’s confession. “We gotta think fast,” I told my brother. “If you get tagged as a cop killer, it could ruin your practice.”
“I’ve got an idea.” Perris flipped open his cell phone, his fingers a blur as he punched in a number. “This is Perris Justice,” he said into the mouthpiece, “I’ve got a big one for you, but you’ve gotta get here quick . . .”
While Perris walked away, talking rapidly into the phone, I looked down the street to see three black-and-whites speeding toward us. I felt a chill and the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. The voices were whispering in my ear again, but they were telling me, It’s going to turn out okay this time.
Mrs. Franklin, Billie, and Turquoise came to stand with us, Billie clinging to her daughter as if she were a life raft in a storm at sea. Turquoise’s face was streaked with gravel and tears, and Billie’s wasn’t much better. “I got a owie,” the child whimpered, pointing.
“She scraped her knee.” Billie was laughing through her tears. “That’s all. It’s just her knee.”
I put my arm around Billie’s shoulder and whispered to Turquoise, “Come on in the house. We’ll put a Band-Aid on that owie. And after we get you patched up, how about a big piece of Mrs. Franklin’s chocolate cake?”