“Come on.” Solomon said, then reached out and pulled Clarence to his feet.
“Where we goin’?”
“Where you think we’re goin’?”
“No way, man. I don’t wanna see her lookin’ like that.”
“I don’t give a damn what you want. We’re gonna do right by Myra. She was a good woman.”
Clarence started crying again. Solomon threw an arm around his shoulder and the two men walked the three blocks back to the freeway underpass, where Clarence and Myra shared a small cardboard lean-to among the litter of street people who called the river bottom home.
When they got there, they were surprised to find the rutted earth beneath the lean-to was empty except for Myra’s dope kit, a jumble of plastic bags she used for blankets, and her clothes, which were scattered in the dirt.
No sign of Myra anywhere. Dead or otherwise.
“You sure this is where you left her?”
“I may be a drunk,” Clarence said, “but I ain’t crazy. She was right here.”
“Well, she ain’t here now.” Solomon picked up Myra’s jeans, dug in the back pocket, and found that same folded magazine page she’d shown him. He opened it up and stared at it, thinking how pretty she looked, thinking what a shame it was that she’d let the needle get ahold of her.
Clarence was crying again.
Then a voice from the darkness said, “You looking for the white girl?”
Solomon turned and saw Billy Eagleheart, a burly Mitskanaka Indian, curled up under his own lean-to.
“Yeah,” Solomon said. “Somebody come and collect her?”
“Collect her? Last I saw, she was up on her own two, more or less.”
Solomon and Clarence exchanged looks, and Clarence immediately stopped crying. “She’s alive?”
“Stood right where you’re standing,” Billy said, then nodded to the jeans in Solomon’s hand. “I don’t know what she was on, but she was ripping off them rags like they were burning her skin. Had me wishin’ I had a handful of dollar bills.” He grinned at the memory.
“Don’t you be playin’ with us, Billy.”
“I ain’t playin’ with nobody. Watched her stumble on up that hill, naked as a goddamn prairie bird. Looked like she was on a mission.” He chuckled. “Maybe she needed some new shoes to match her ensemble.”
Solomon turned, looking at Clarence. “You hear that? All that crying for nothin’.”
“No way,” Clarence said. “She was dead. I know dead when I see it.”
“Yeah, and I know dumb when I’m lookin’ at it.”
Solomon nodded thanks to Billy, returned the magazine page to Myra’s pocket, then gathered up the rest of her clothes and hooked a thumb at Clarence. “Let’s go round her up before the cops do.”
As they headed up the embankment toward Main Street, Billy said, “You find her, let me know what she does for an encore.”
Betty Burkus found the body.
She was an old woman who had trouble sleeping, the extra weight and the constant heartburn and the sleep apnea making life twice as miserable as it should have been. She had rolled out of bed a little after one A.M., hoping a glass of ice water would kill the fire in her stomach.
Standing at the refrigerator in her small courtyard apartment, she glanced out her kitchen window and noticed that, across the way, the Janovic door was hanging wide open.
She sighed. Carl Janovic had been a pain in her backside since the day he moved in. The way he and his friends paraded in and out of that apartment, she might as well have had a revolving door installed. It was times like this Betty wished to God she’d never agreed to take on management duties. A two-hundred-dollar rent reduction was hardly worth all the fuss and bother.
Moving to her phone, she picked up the handset and pressed number three — she had Janovic on speed dial, that’s how much trouble he was — then listened to it ring and ring. Not too surprised when she didn’t get an answer, she sighed again, cradled the phone, then threw on a robe and headed into the courtyard.
She was halfway to the Janovic apartment when she started to reconsider this little excursion. It was, after all, well past bedtime for most normal human beings, and an open front door at almost one-thirty in the morning was not a sign of welcome. Especially when you factored in the complete lack of lights. No porch light, nothing in the foyer, the place as black and silent as an abandoned mine.
But despite her complaints, Betty had always believed that if you take on a job you should do that job, so she soldiered on, trudging up to the open door and peering inside. “Mr. Janovic?”
She waited for an answer and got none. Also not a surprise. Chances were pretty good that Janovic had gone out with one of his light-in-the-loafers boyfriends and was so busy playing grabass he’d forgotten to close his door. Not that Betty had anything against his type. They could do whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own homes, but did they always have to flaunt it?
She leaned past the doorway. “Mr. Janovic?”
Still no answer. She was about to say to hell with it and pull the door shut when an odd smell wafted into her nasal radar. Betty frowned, sniffed. It smelled like… well, to be frank, like someone had fouled his pants.
Was it a plumbing problem? Had Janovic gone and clogged up his… Oh, God, the visual popping into her head right now was too awful to even contemplate.
Yet that smell was unmistakable. And if the plumbing was clogged, that meant it was up to her to get it taken care of.
Betty sighed again. Why, oh why had she ever taken this stupid job? Stepping into the foyer, she fumbled for the light switch. There wasn’t much point in saying anything out loud, but she nevertheless tried a third time: “Mr. Janovic? Are you home?”
She flicked the switch, half expecting to find a pile of excrement in the middle of the polished wood floor.
What she found instead was Carl Janovic, lying faceup in a pool of blood, wearing only a bra, panties, and a shiny blond wig, his eyes wide and lifeless, his bare chest and abdomen covered with dark, gaping puncture wounds.
That was when Betty Burkus backed out of the apartment and vomited a night’s worth of antacids, thin mints, and leftover Hamburger Helper into the ficus tree on Janovic’s front porch.
2
“Hiya, Frankie boy. Where’s your partner?”
“I’m dining solo these days.”
“Yeah? There’s a nice little after-dinner snack waiting for you inside.”
Detective Frank Blackburn was in a surly mood. The crime scene was an upscale courtyard apartment complex called the Fontana Arms and the crime tech wagons had beat him there. He was still half-asleep as he approached the gated entranceway, where Kat Pendergast, a cute, coltish patrol officer, was waiting for him.
“You the first responder?” he asked.
“Me and Hogan, yeah.”
Kat opened the gate and motioned Blackburn past. They moved together into the courtyard, where a platoon of crime scene techs flowed in and out of an open apartment doorway. Across the way, a fat woman in a faded bathrobe watched the proceedings from her kitchen window, hand clutched to her throat in horror.
Blackburn turned to Pendergast. “How many units this place have?”
“About ten.”
“You scare up any witnesses?”
“Not so far,” Kat said. “Hogan and a couple of the backup boys are shaking ’em out of bed as we speak.”
They moved up to the doorway, Blackburn taking in the glassy-eyed twenty-something who lay in the middle of the floor.
Jesus, what a mess. The bra, panties, and wig were a nice touch — and the reason they’d dragged him out of bed. Even a hint of sexual assault and it was his squad’s catch.