“We’re on it,” said Raymond.
“Who’s he?” Oswitz asked, indicating Jim.
“George Bush. What the fuck do you care?”
The younger cop, Hoch — Weir recognized him as the “Eat shit and die” guy from the station — never stopped staring at him.
“We’ve got this wrapped,” said Ray.
The two officers nodded with strange mixtures of arrogance and duty, then headed back up to the highway.
Mackie, smiling dreamily, reached inside a filthy tire and removed from its recessed curve a bottle of Thunderbird. There was actually some left. He unscrewed the top and tilted back the bottle. He offered it to Jim, then to Raymond, with the smug optimism of a drunk who knows he won’t have to share. “See, too many cops in this town. That one on the left took me in once for minding my own business. We stopped at the big sliding door where they have to call in through that speaker box, and he told me it was my last chance to eat and I’d better order up some food real quick. ‘Talk right into the speaker box,’ he says. He ordered a burger to fool me. ’Cept some other Newport cop already pulled that one on me and got a big laugh from his partner, so I told him if the food was so good, he could have it himself. I said, ‘Well, sir, I’ll have a martini up with a twist.’ Now that detective I talked to, in and out...?”
“Innelman?”
“Yeah. He rubbed me the wrong way. His whole attitude was I was a useless bum who doesn’t even know what he sees. He treated me like I was having visions or something. I’ve been down here for forty years off and on, even when I had Lynette... and I’ve been rousted and busted and booked and beat up and pushed around and taken in and let out and... hell, I’ve been through more cops in my life than’s good for anybody. So, I know who I am. I know where I stand. Some cops, they’re okay, like you guys. Some are just assholes, like what’s his name. Guys like that don’t get anything from me.”
Raymond pushed off and came forward, lifted Mackie by the front of his shirt, clear off the ground, and pressed him against the big Coast Highway pylon. Weir noted the sureness with which Raymond pinned him there, so he wouldn’t fall.
“You ought to talk to him,” said Jim. Mackie’s feet were dangling in midair. The angle of the embankment was steep: A fall would be wicked. Mackie glanced down, then at Jim.
“I think he’s ready to talk, Ray. Let him go and let’s see.”
Rather than dropping him, Raymond set Mackie back on his feet and straightened his shirt for him.
Ruff raised his hands as if calling for a time-out, then squatted in the dirt and unlaced his right shoe. When he took it off, Weir saw that Mackie’s filthy brown sock didn’t go past his ankle: It was a sock dickey. Ruffs foot was a translucent white. Mackie gathered up the flimsy canvas tennis shoe and started prying around under the rubber patch that covered the toes. He lifted the rubber, held up the shoe toward the light of the bay, and looked in. “Got it,” he said. A moment later, he had worked it out, cupped it in his fist, and held his hand out to Jim. “Found it down by where she screamed before the cops came. They treated me so bad when they woke me up, I figured they could just do without this. That was before I knew it was Annie Weir. Swear.”
Jim felt the small, smooth object drop into his hand. He stepped out of the shadow and into the hazy sunshine. The surface against his thumb felt hard, specific. Something sharp prodded his palm. He looked down at a clear, marquis-cut diamond — half an inch long, a quarter wide — with a small bezel around its perimeter and a bent gold post protruding dead center from its back. The surface was smeared with blood.
“We got the tie tack,” he said.
“Something that big, got to be fake,” said Mackie. “But I still coulda got twenty for it.”
Raymond reached into his coat and pulled his wallet. He slid out some bills and handed them to Ruff.
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
Ray said nothing as he walked by Mackie, but he trailed a hand against the man’s shoulder. He stood beside Weir and looked down at the mounted stone. “How many cops you know wear half-carat diamonds to hold their ties?”
“None, offhand. But I know what kind of guy wears this. The same kind of guy who lives in a glass house on an island and answers his door in a black silk robe. Same kind of guy who left twenty minutes dangling between midnight and one.”
“Kearns was in uniform.”
“He changed into street clothes, then changed back. It would take about six minutes.”
Raymond looked at Weir, then started off toward the truck.
Mackie tossed his bottle down the embankment. It chimed and bounced against the earth, leaping in a graceful arc before landing in the mud. “This is Newport Beach, boys. Cops can do anything they want. Don’t forget that.”
Chapter 15
Dennison and Dwight Innelman met them at the county impound yard. The yard was ten miles from the coast, and the late-morning haze had metastasized into a suffocating, corrosive smog. The four men stood looking at Ann’s old Toyota as if a moment of silence was called for. Beside it stood Emmett Goins’s Chevrolet.
Raymond gave Dennison an evidence bag with the tie tack in it, and told his chief the story. Brian held the bag up to the polluted light and jiggled it, then handed it over to the detective.
Innelman took off his aviator shades and studied the tack, probing at it through the plastic. “How come he was so eager to give it to you, but not to me?”
“He doesn’t like your attitude,” said Jim.
Smile lines formed at the corners of Innelman’s mouth. “Guess I’m losing my touch.”
“Plus, we plied him with truth serum.”
“Now I see.”
Dennison told his detective to take the diamond into evidence, get it to Robbins for blood and latents, then run a trace with the local jewelers. Innelman set the bag carefully in the briefcase that stood at his feet. Brian turned to Jim. “Brief me on Blodgett and Kearns. You can talk in front of Dwight — he knows the... situation.”
Weir glanced at Innelman, who, still kneeling with his briefcase, regarded him deadpan from behind his sunglasses. For the first time since he’d taken on Dennison’s task, Jim felt a tug of diminishment. The men were the men, and the blue was the blue, and quitting to do something else hadn’t fully released him from that bond. But things were priorities now, and the first priority was Ann.
He told Dennison about Blodgett’s fifty-minute “coffee break” with the whole north-end patrol, the out-of-beat squad car that came off the bridge at midnight and headed south, the aborted fishing expedition of the night before. Then Kearns’s twenty minutes off-radio between 12:30 and 12:50 A.M.
Dennison shook his head slowly and muttered, “Jesus.” His eyebrows furrowed and rose; then, an odd smile as he turned to Ray. “You wouldn’t spend an hour at the doughnut shop, would you?”
“The Whale, maybe.”
The chief chuckled. Weir realized how hard Dennison had to work to legitimize himself to his men: His rise from captain to interim chief to leading mayoral candidate had been too quick for anyone’s comfort but his own. “He’s sure that unit coming off the bridge was one of ours?”
“No. He’s not sure.”
Dennison stared off into the hovering smog. “Too bad the chopper was down. Those guys see everything. Now, about Blodgett. He’s some kind of fishing freak — spends every spare minute out in his boat. I wouldn’t make too much of that. He might have been shaking down some new gear.”
“Was he on patrol?”
Dennison looked at Weir, then Ray. “No. But I’m sure he’s got a reason.”