“How’d this story make the paper at all?” Parker asked.
“Slow news day. They got down to press time and needed filler on the page. Caldrovics had two inches of ink for them.”
Parker’s pager vibrated at his waist. He unclipped it from his belt and squinted at the screen. Diane’s cell phone number.
“Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “I have to make a call to someone much more important than you.”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “You’re just trying to stick me with the tab.”
Parker ignored her and went out of the restaurant to return the call.
The marine layer had crept into the city, a cold, silver mist tinged with salt. Parker could feel it envelop him and seep into his bones, making him wish he’d grabbed his trench coat.
Diane answered before the first ring had finished. “Did I tear you away from a hot date?” she asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Where are you?”
“Morton’s. Where are you?”
“The Peninsula. A fund-raiser for the DA. I just overheard your name in a conversation.”
“Yeah? And then did they all turn their heads and spit on the ground?”
“It was Giradello,” she said. “And Bradley Kyle.”
Parker said nothing. Everything seemed to freeze in and around him for a few seconds as he tried to process the significance of the information.
“Kev? Are you there?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. What was the context?”
“I only caught a few words. I got the impression Kyle was supposed to have done something about something, but hadn’t.”
“And my name was in there somewhere?”
“First there was a name I didn’t recognize. Yours came later in the conversation.”
“The first name—do you remember what it was?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t mean anything to me.”
“Try.” Parker held his breath and waited.
Diane hummed a little as she searched her memory. “I think it started with a D. Desmond? Devon, maybe?”
A rush of internal heat went through Parker like a flash fire. “Damon.”
25
Parker went back into Morton’s, hailing the waiter en route to the table and making the universal hand signal for “Check, please.”
“Let’s go,” he said to Kelly. He pulled out his credit card and handed it to the waiter, then grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and started shrugging into it.
Kelly looked up at him. “No dessert? Some date you are.”
“Sorry,” Parker said. “You know, I’m not the kind of guy your mother would like anyway.”
Kelly rolled her eyes as she stood up. “She’d like you fine—for herself. What’s the big rush?”
Parker’s eyes did a quick scan of the tables. The waiter hustled back with his credit card, and Parker hurriedly added a generous tip and scrawled his signature at the bottom of the slip. He didn’t speak again until they were out the door.
“I’ve got a dead low-end defense attorney nobody should care about but his nearest and dearest,” Parker said as they walked just past the valet parking stand. “Why do you think Robbery-Homicide and Tony Giradello would have an interest in that?”
Kelly drew a breath as if she had an answer, but nothing came out. Parker could all but hear the wheels in her head whirring like Swiss watch parts. “They wouldn’t,” she said. “But you’re telling me they do?”
“A couple of Robbery-Homicide humps showed up at the crime scene last night. Kyle and his partner. Tried to throw their weight around.”
“But they didn’t take over the case?”
Parker shook his head. “No. I called their bluff and they backed down, and I don’t get that at all. What the hell were they doing there if they weren’t there to steal the case? And I mean there, Johnny-on-the-spot, not their usual MO.”
The Division cops always locked down the scene on a homicide, and Division detectives usually began the initial investigation. Then if the case was big enough or bad enough or glamorous enough, and Robbery-Homicide decided to take over, they would waltz onto the stage and take over with attitude and press conferences.
“No fanfare,” Parker said. “No trumpets, no warning, no press, except this clown Caldrovics—”
“Who won’t name his sources on a nothing story about a nobody lawyer.”
“And now I’m told those same Robbery-Homicide hotshots reported to Giradello in the middle of a fund-raiser tonight.”
Kelly shrugged it off. “That could have been about anything. They’re preparing for the Cole trial. Just because you’re paranoid—”
“Why would my name get mentioned in that conversation?”
Kelly looked at him like she thought she must have missed out on something earlier in the conversation. “You didn’t have anything to do with Tricia Cole’s homicide investigation.”
“No, nothing. No regular grunts like me were involved. The body was discovered by the daughter, who called Norman Crowne. The Crowne brain trust called the chief directly. The chief sent Robbery-Homicide.”
“I know,” Kelly said. “I was there. That was my story, is my story. So why would Giradello be talking to Robbery-Homicide cops about you?”
“The only common denominator between me and Bradley Kyle is Lenny Lowell,” Parker said, carefully omitting the fact that the name of his chief suspect had also come up in the same conversation.
It was one thing to dangle a carrot in front of Kelly; giving her the store was something else. Parker wouldn’t compromise his case by selling himself out. As a cop, he had had a healthy hatred of reporters drilled into him long ago. But he liked Kelly, and he owed her, and he certainly wasn’t above siccing her on Bradley Kyle or Tony Giradello. As Parker saw it, it was a mutually advantageous arrangement.
“But why would Giradello have any interest in your stiff?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, Andi,” Parker said, digging his ticket out of his coat pocket and turning toward the valet. “Why don’t you ask someone who might know.”
Kelly handed her ticket over. “And get back to you.”
“Symbiosis, my friend,” Parker said. “In the meantime, we’re going to go ask your little pal Jimmy Olsen if Bradley Kyle is a secret friend of his.”
Kelly’s face dropped. “We?”
“Well, I don’t know the guy. You do.”
“He’s not my child, for Christ’s sake. How would I know where he is?”
“You’re an investigative reporter. Where would you investigate if you were looking for young, asshole reporters?”
The big sigh. Parker’s Chrysler rolled up. “Maybe I can get a pager number.”
“Maybe you can do better than that,” Parker said, as Kelly’s car pulled to the curb behind his. “Where do the young monkeys hang out to drink and beat their chests these days?”
They each went to their respective driver’s door.
“If you kill him,” Kelly said. “I get the exclusive.”
The only single group of people Parker knew who drank as much as cops were writers, all kinds of writers. Screenwriters, novelists, reporters. The nearest watering hole was where the animals gathered to commune and commiserate. As solitary as writers were by nature, they had the particular stresses and paranoias of their work in common. And no matter what the profession, misery consistently loves company.
The bar Kelly led him to was a downtown die-hard joint that probably didn’t look much different than it had in the thirties. Except that in the old days, the air would have been white with smoke, and the clientele would have been predominantly male. In the new millennium it was illegal to smoke damn near anywhere in LA, and women went wherever they pleased.