Page 35 of Shield
“I know where it is. And no, I wasn’t drinking.”
I was sucking the dick of a key witness, buddy. Bet that beats a few shots at the local bar in terms of worrisome behavior.
“Good. Elena and I worry about you. Meet me at the Palace in ten. Beat cops are locking down the scene, but homicide has already been called. If we want any chance to even get a peep at the body?—”
“Yep, I’ll be there in ten. Eight, if I can skip putting on underwear.”
“You do you.” Mack hung up.
I splashed water on my face, rushed to dress, and jumped into my car. The ride took exactly six minutes if one raced through a few yellow lights.
Several girls in skimpy attire stood around the rear of the seedy establishment known as the Purple Palace. I parked next to a brick wall the color of a plum, grabbed a stick of gum, and walked over to where a couple of uniformed cops were talking to a woman in a thong and sparkly fishnet stockings. Her upper half was covered with a towel she clasped to her breasts. Tears flowed down her face.
Mack stood over the body, his hair as mussed as mine, chewing on a pen cap.
“Imagine meeting you here,” I quipped as I strolled up, showing my badge to one of the patrolmen as I ducked under some flapping yellow crime scene tape.
“We have to stop meeting like this. My wife is going to get jealous,” Mack replied, yawned, then pointed at the body with a pen. “Meet one Periapsis Lane.”
I took a knee beside the dead man, careful not to kneel in the ever-widening puddle of blood and brain matter. “The witness who called it in, Helga Smithers, over there,” he jerked a thumb at the dancer with the fishnets sobbing on a cop’s shoulder. “Said she stepped outside to have a smoke and found him hiding in the space between the wall and the dumpster. Thinking the man was sleeping one off, she gave him a shout and a push. That’s when he toppled over, showing Ms. Smithers that one side of his head was missing. She screamed, ran inside, and then someone in the club called the cops. Midge over there gave me a heads up when they arrived because of the small tattoo on the back of his hand that matched the one on our suspect.”
My focus left Mack’s tired face to focus on the back of Mr. Lane’s left hand. Yep, same stupid smiley face. “She and her partner made jokes about it when the initial APB went out a few weeks ago. And before you asked, yes, Midge and I dated for about two weeks when I first joined the force. Elena knows. You can stop thinking dirty things.”
“As if I ever think dirty things,” I replied as I rose, taking careful steps around the corpse. “Looks fresh. Blood is barely congealed, and it’s warm tonight. I gather no one inside heard the gunshots?”
“Doubtful, what with the music. Midge and her partner are ready to sign off on the scene now that we’re here.”
“Okay, yeah, we’ll start talking to the witnesses before homicide shows up waving their dicks around.”
Mack muttered something, then walked off to get as much information as we could. I eyeballed the guy on the ground for a moment longer as his unusual name tickled something in the far corner of my sleep-deprived and suddenly smitten mind. When it hit me, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves from my back pocket and eased Peri’s wallet from his back pocket. Nothing much in it. A few stolen debit cards—his name was not on the cards—a small cube of hash wrapped in foil, a condom, a few twenties, and a California driver’s license. Bingo. I took a picture of the license, shoved everything back into the wallet, and placed it on his chest. Then, I noticed the corner of a photo and tugged it free. This was the original photo from the clinic, and I held it up to the light, then bagged it.
“So, he did take it then,” Mack commented.
“Seems he did.” I passed the bag up to Mack and something caught my eye, and I pointed at it. “Writing on the back.”
He turned it over, and we stared at random words and letters on a list.
“Jesus Christ, tell me this isn’t some coded shit that leads to buried treasure,” Mack snarled.
I snapped a photo of the back and pocketed my cell. Then, I peeled off my gloves and turned to Mack, who had been pulled away by an older man who, it seemed, ran the club given that his T-shirt readMANAGERon the back. And my first boyfriend had said that all those years of studying Criminal Justice at UC Irvine were a waste of time. Fuck you, Adam. I’m now a detective making tons of… well, okay, maybe not tons, but… fuck Adam anyway, just because.
“Mack, let’s see if we can wake up a judge to get a warrant for Peri’s home address.”
“But the witnesses,” Mack began, and I waved it off.
Homicide was en route, along with the coroner. Both of them would rip me a new one for messing around with the body, so us leaving to do something else seemed a good idea. I’d fill in the showboats in homicide later because I was a good Joe who always played nice with other people’s toys. If we could tie the dead man to Ivan Baladin, which I assumed we could, since the moron had shouted Baladin’s name after hitting Joe the Good Doctor, we could pull Baladin in for questioning. It might be flimsy at best, but if the judge went along with it, we’d be able to haul Ivan in for a chat. I liked to chat with criminals at the crack of dawn. It always got me hard. And it would postpone my talk with Franks, so a win/win.
* * *
Ivan Baladin was nota happy camper. Mack and I were seated in a viewing room with another cop, Dennis, watching the man slowly simmer—like a pot of marinara, but far less appealing. The micro-camera in the corner was damn good. Showed us the little droplets of sweat on his brow and picked up all the mutterings he was making. Nothing of use, sadly, but he was agitated, that was for sure.
“How long has he been in there now?” Mack asked. I poured some fresh coffee from my Minnie thermos into my Minnie pink cup, sipped, sighed, then grinned at my partner.
“About an hour.”
I opened the file one more time, checking through the information we’d pulled from evidence at our dead attacker’s shitty apartment. Two names had been prominent—Ivan Baladin, wannabee gangster, evil asshole, and all around fucked-up fucker, and much to our surprise, the name of the sweetly innocent, always crying, Heloise Grant.
Turned out, Heloise was as deep into Ivan’s money laundering shit as she could be, which was why we had her cooling off in the next room over.
