“I guess you’d know about that,” Ruiz said.
Parker shot her a glance. “Baby, I could write a book. But right now we’ve got better things to do.”
15
According to the Pakistani woman who had been managing the mailbox place for the last three months, Box 501 belonged to a woman named Allison Jennings, whom she did not know. The box had been rented to Ms. Jennings in 1994. The rent was paid by a money order left in the box once a year. These facts had been noted in the file, each year’s note in different handwriting. It seemed a lot of people had used Box-4-U as a stepping-stone to bigger things.
Box-4-U occupied a deep, narrow space between a Lebanese take-out place and a psychic who was running a special on tarot card readings. The mailboxes made a corridor from the front door back to an area with a counter, shelves stacked with shipping cartons, padded envelopes, rolls of tape, bubble wrap, and giant bags of foam packing peanuts.
From the back it took an effort to see past all the stuff to the mailboxes if one cared to pay attention to who was going in and out. Probably the great majority of box renters entered and left in anonymity. As long as they paid their rent on time, no one cared who they were.
The manager who had rented Box 501 to Allison Jennings had made a copy of her driver’s license and stapled it to the rental form as required. The license was from Massachusetts. The photo on the copy was nothing but black ink. Parker had the manager make copies of both sheets, and he and Ruiz went back out onto the street, where they had parked in a loading zone.
As they got into the car, Parker paused to look at the psychic’s storefront. A lavender neon sign read: “Madame Natalia, Psychic to the Stars.” She gladly accepted Visa and MasterCard.
“You want to go inside?” Ruiz asked. “Maybe she can see your future.”
“Why would anyone go to see a psychic in a shithole place like that? If Madame Natalia can see the future, why hasn’t she won the lottery by now?”
“Maybe that’s not her destiny.”
Parker put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. He had been about to say people make their own destiny, but that didn’t reflect kindly on himself, so he said nothing at all. He knew he had set himself up for his fall from Robbery-Homicide by being too cocky, too mouthy, too visible. And he had made his own choice to stay where he was now, a sidetrack to nowhere. He had also decided he would prove himself again, go out a winner. But according to Ruiz’s logic, maybe that wasn’t his destiny.
Ruiz called in the DL for Allison Jennings. Who knew? Maybe the woman would turn out to be a fugitive.
The physical address the woman had listed on her renter’s form for Box-4-U was a redbrick building in a dicey downtown neighborhood where everything, including the population, had been neglected for decades. Street people decorated the landscape, digging in garbage cans, sleeping in doorways. Across the street from Allison Jennings’s building, a crazy guy in a parka that had once been white marched up and down the sidewalk, screaming epithets at the construction crew working on the building.
The place had been gutted and was being redone for downtown’s newest invasion of urban hipsters. The sign advertising the development company promised one-, two-, and three-bedroom luxury apartments in LA’s hippest, most happening new district. The artist’s rendering of the finished project did not show the screaming homeless guy.
“Are they crazy?” Ruiz asked. “No one in their right mind would move down here. There’s nothing here but crack houses and schizo street people.”
“Wait ’til they put a Starbucks on the corner,” Parker said. “There goes the neighborhood. Bring in the young urbanites, next thing you know, the price of illicit substances is through the roof. The average pipehead won’t be able to afford to live here. It’s a social tragedy.”
“You think this woman is still around here?”
Parker shrugged. “Who knows? She filled out that form ten years ago. She could be dead by now, for all we know. This Damon kid maybe bought the box off her, or took it over. He’s got to be around here someplace if he’s using it.”
“Someplace” covered a lot of territory. Central Bureau policed four and a half square miles of downtown LA, including Chinatown, Little Tokyo, the financial district, the jewelry and fashion districts, and the convention center. A lot of ground, a lot of people.
Parker pulled the car into the lot at the station and turned to his partner. “First thing, take Damon’s job ap to Latent. See if they can get a match with anything off the murder weapon. Then call Massachusetts. Then look for any local Allison Jenningses. Then get on the computer and see if you can find any crimes similar to the Lowell homicide in LA over the past two years. And call the phone company for the local usage details on Speed Couriers.”
Ruiz looked perturbed. “Anything else, Master?”
“Start going through the calls. Maybe this Damon kid doesn’t have a phone, but maybe he does. And get the phone records for Lowell’s office and for his home.”
“And what will you be doing while I’m doing all of this shit?”
“I’m going to talk to Abby Lowell. Find out how she got her name in the paper. She’ll like talking to me more than she’d like talking to you.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
He flashed her the famous Kev Parker grin. “Because I’m me, doll.”
With Ruiz out of his hair, Parker drove directly to Lenny Lowell’s office. He wanted to walk through the crime scene and around the street in daylight, without the distractions of the uniforms and the criminalists, a trainee, and the Robbery-Homicide goons. He found it centering, calming in a macabre sort of way, to spend time in the place where a victim had died.
He wasn’t sure he believed in ghosts, but he believed in souls. He believed in the essence of what made a being, the energy that defined a person as being alive. Sometimes when he walked a scene alone, he believed he could feel that energy around him, lingering. Other times there was nothing, emptiness, a void.
He had never paid attention to such ideas in his former life as an RHD hotshot. He had been too full of himself to sense much about anyone else around him, alive or dead. One good thing he had gained in his loss: awareness, the ability to step back from himself and see a clearer picture of what was around him.
The neighborhood was no more attractive in daylight than it had been at night, in the rain. Less so, actually. In the stark light of a gray morning, the age and dinge and tiredness of the place couldn’t hide.
The little two-story strip mall where Lowell’s office was located looked to have been built in the late fifties. Hard angles, flat roof, metal panels of faded color—pale aqua, washed-out pink, puke yellow. Aluminum frames around the windows. Across the street, the 24/7 Laundromat squatted, a low brick building with no discernible style.
The better scum defense attorneys had offices in Beverly Hills and Century City, where the world was beautiful. This was the kind of place where the lower end of the food chain hung their shingles. Though it seemed to Parker that old Lenny had been doing pretty well for himself.
Lowell’s Cadillac had been towed away from the back door of the office, taken away to be checked for evidence. The car was new but had been vandalized. His home address was a condo in one of the new downtown hotspots near the Staples Center. Pricey stuff for a guy whose clients used the revolving door at the bail bondsman’s office.