Morris Epstein went livid. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. He flung an angry arm in the direction of the door and hissed, "Leave this house before I have you sued for police harassment. I have friends in the A.C.L.U. They'll fix your wagon for real, flatfoot."
Lloyd pushed past Epstein's arm into an art-deco living room festooned with framed movie posters and outsized gilt-edged mirrors. A glass coffee table held a single-edged razor blade and traces of white powder. There was a large cabinet against the wall by the fireplace. Lloyd opened and shut drawers until he found the glassine bag filled with powder. He turned to see Epstein standing beside him with the telephone in his hand. When he held the bag in front of Epstein's eyes, the little man said, "You can't bluff me. This is illegal search and seizure. I'm personal friends with Jerry Brown. I've got clout. One phone call and you are adios, motherfucker."
Lloyd grabbed the telephone from Epstein's hand, jerked the cord out of the wall and tossed it on the coffee table. The table shattered, sending glass shards exploding up to the ceiling. Epstein backed into the wall and whispered, "Now look, pal, we can bargain this out. We can-"
Lloyd said, "We're past the bargaining stage. Bring me the gun. Do it now."
Epstein unzipped the top of his jumpsuit and kneaded his chest. "I still say this is illegal search and seizure."
"This is a legal search and seizure coincident to the course of a felony investigation. Bring me the gun-in its case. Don't touch the gun itself."
Morris Epstein capitulated with an angry upward tug of his zipper. When he left the room, Lloyd gave it a quick toss, searching the remaining drawers, wondering whether or not he should go to the Beverly Hills Station and check out the burglary report. Dentinger had said that no prints were found, but maybe there were F.I.'s on yellow Jap imports or other indicators to jog his brain.
He went through the last drawer, then turned his attention to the mantel above the fireplace. He could hear Epstein's returning footsteps as his eyes caught a cut-glass bowl filled with matchbooks. He grabbed a handful. They were all from First Avenue West-one of the two bars that Jungle Jack Herzog was working.
"Here's your gun, shamus."
Lloyd turned around and saw Epstein holding a highly varnished rosewood box. He walked to him and took the box from his hands. Opening the lid, he saw a large blue steel revolver with mother-of-pearl grips mounted on red velvet. Arranged in a circle around it were copper-jacketed softnosed bullets. Taking a pen from his pocket, he inserted it into the barrel and raised the gun upward. Clearly etched on the barrel's underside were the numbers 9471.
"Satisfied?" Epstein said.
Lloyd lowered the barrel and closed the lid of the box. "I'm satisfied. Where did you get the guns?"
"I bought them cheap from the producer of this Civil War mini-series I packaged last year."
"Do you know the serial number of the other gun?"
"No, but I know the two guns had consecutive numbers. Listen, do the Beverly Hills fuzz really think I padded that burglary report?"
"Yes, but I'll slip them the word about how you cooperated. I saw some matches here from First Avenue West. Do you go there a lot?" "Yeah. Why?"
Lloyd took a photograph of Jack Herzog from his billfold. "Ever see this man?"
Epstein shook his head. "No."
Withdrawing a photocopy of his Identikit portrait of the man seen with Herzog, Lloyd said, "What about him?"
Epstein looked at the picture, then flinched. "Man, this is fucking weird. I did some blow with this guy outside Bruno's Serendipity one night. This is a great fucking likeness."
Lloyd felt two divergent evidential lines intersect in an incredible revelation. "Did this man tell you his name?" he asked.
"No, we just did the blow and split company. But it was funny. He was a weird, persistent kind of guy. He kept asking me these questions about my family and if I was into meeting this really incredibly smart dude he knew. What's the matter, shamus? You look pale."
Lloyd gripped the gun box so hard that he could hear his finger tendons cracking. "Did you tell him your name?"
"No, but I gave him my card."
"Did you tell him about your guns?"
Epstein swallowed. "Yeah."
"When did you talk to the man?"
"Maybe two, three months ago."
"Have you seen him since?"
"No, I haven't been back to Bruno's. It sucks."
"Did you see the man get into a car?"
"Yeah, a little yellow job."
"Make and model?"
"It was foreign. That's all I know. Listen, what's this all about? You come in here and hassle me, break my coffee table-" Epstein stopped when he saw Lloyd run for the door. He called out, "Hey, shamus, come back and shmooze sometime! I could package a badass fuzz like you into a series!"***
Running roof lights and siren, Lloyd made it back to Parker Center in a record twenty-five minutes. Cradling the gun box in the crook of his arm, he ran the three flights of stairs up to the offices of the Scientific Indentification Division, then pushed through a series of doors until he was face to face with Officer Artie Cranfield, who put down his copy of Penthouse and said, "Man, do you look jazzed."
Lloyd caught his breath and said "I am jazzed, and I need some favors. This box contains a gun. Can you dust it for latents real quick? After you do that, we need a ballistics comparison."
"This is a suspected murder weapon?"
"No, but it's a consecutive serial number to the gun I think is the liquor store murder weapon. Since the ammo in this box and the murder ammo is antique, probably from the same casting, I'm hoping that the rifling marks will be so similar that we can assume th-"
"We can't make those kinds of assumptions," Artie interjected. "That kind of theorizing won't hold up in court."
Lloyd handed Artie the gun box. "Artie, I'll lay you twenty to one that this one gets settled on the street. Now will you please dust this baby for me?"
Artie took a pencil from his desk and propped open the lid of the box, then stuck another pencil in the barrel of the revolver, the end affixed to the upper hinge of the box, forming a wedge that held the gun steady. When the box and gun were secure, he took out a small brush and a vial of fingerprint powder and spread it over every blue steel, mother-of-pearl, and rosewood surface. Finishing, he shook his head and said, "Smooth glove prints on the grip, streak prints on the barrel. I dusted the box for kicks. Smudged latents that are probably you, glove prints that indicate that the box was carefully opened. You're dealing with a pro, Lloyd."
Lloyd shook his head. "I really didn't think we'd find anything good. He stole the companion gun, but I figured he might have touched this one, too."
"He did, with surgical rubber gloves." Artie started to laugh.
Lloyd said, "Fuck you. Let's take this monster down to the tank and see how it kicks."
Artie led Lloyd through the Crime Lab to a small room where water and tufted-cotton-layered ballistics tanks were sunk into the floor. Lloyd slipped three slugs into the.41's chamber and fired into the top layer of water. There was the sound of muffled ricocheting, then Artie squatted and opened up a vent on the tank's side. Withdrawing the "catcher" layer of cotton, he pulled out the three expended rounds and said, "Perfect. I've got a comparison microscope in my office. We'll sign for the liquor store shells and run them."
Lloyd signed a crime lab chit for the three rounds taken from the bodies of the liquor store victims and brought them, in a vinyl evidence bag, to Artie's office. Artie placed them on the left plate of a large, doubleeyepieced microscope, then placed the three ballistics tank rounds on the right plate and studied both sets, individually and collectively, for over half an hour. Finally he got up, rubbed his eyes and voiced his findings: "Discounting the fact that the set of rounds fired at the liquor store were flattened by their contact with human skulls, while the tank rounds were intact, and the fact that the impact of the liquor store rounds altered the rifling marks, I would say that the basic land and groove patterns are as identical as slugs fired from two different guns can be. Nail the bastard, Lloyd. Give him the big one where it hurts the most."