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Ed blew out smoke again. “Weird, Billy. Coroner says it was probably a straight razor.”
It took me a minute to register that. “A what?”
“Yeah. I know. I didn’t know they still made ’em. My daddy had one he’d put in his boot on Saturday night, but shit, Billy, ghetto kids nowadays got Uzis. Who the fuck uses a straight razor?”
I couldn’t think of anybody. It also occurred to me that it wasn’t my job to think of anybody. “Why did you call me, Ed?”
I heard him slurp a little coffee. “Just wondered what you knew, Billy,” he said a little too casually. “Your name is in his appointment calendar. He flew back there to see you. Now he’s dead. I wondered what you two talked about, that’s all.”
“His kid.”
“Uh-huh.” I could hear the routine cop suspicion settling into his voice. I was on the outside now, even to my old partner. I was in a drug zone, and a cop in an expensive suit had been brutally murdered after visiting me.
“For God’s sake, Ed, you must have something besides me.”
“Well, you know how it is, Billy. You guys just stood around and talked about his kid, huh?”
“That’s right.”
He blew out more smoke. “He flew all the way across the country, three thousand miles, to talk to you? About his kid?”
“He was very broken up about it, Ed. Had some crazy idea that I could help him find out who whacked out his kid.”
“What’d you tell him?”
I came close to biting my tongue. “Ed, you sound like you take that idea seriously.”
“That
means you said no, huh?”
“Stop it, Ed. That shit is crazy. What was I supposed to do?”
“I worked with you for two and a half years, man. I know what you can do, just like Roscoe knew it.”
“I’m retired. I take people fishing. Give me a break, I can’t do anything you couldn’t do a hell of a lot better.”
There was a long pause while Ed sipped, then blew out a lungful of smoke before he finally said, “Roscoe thought you could.”
I said a bad word. Ed didn’t say anything, so I said it again and hung up. I stood up and paced the room, stomach churning.
Maybe Donahue was right. Maybe we can’t run from our problems. If we do, maybe they run after us and catch up sooner or later. Maybe all the talk shows are right, all the pop psychology and easy, comfortable clichés. Maybe we really need to Face Negative Feelings and Be Okay with them. It didn’t seem to matter too much right now.
It mattered a lot less to Roscoe. He’d come to me with a problem and I’d told him to go to hell. Now he was dead in a messy, public way. His last thought was probably how much he hated going like that, in the street, his suit and carefully knotted silk tie ruined by all that sloppy blood.
His problem had caught up with him. When he couldn’t get me to help he tried to do it himself. He knew he wouldn’t be any good at it, but he had to try. After all, he was a cop. He was a pampered, street-stupid headquarters cop, but he was a cop and that meant something. It didn’t mean much to the person who had tried to saw his head off with a minstrel-show weapon, but to Roscoe it meant he had to deal with the problem. He knew from the start he couldn’t do it, but he had to try.
So he tried it himself and sure enough, he couldn’t handle whatever it was. Instead it handled him; casually, contemptuously, turning his carefully cultivated appearance into gutter garbage, a sad heap of guts in a $1200 suit.
Of course it was possible that his death was completely unconnected to his son’s murder. It was possible—but not likely. Like the indoor cat that feels untouchable looking out the window but knows it will get its ass kicked if it goes outside, Roscoe knew he didn’t belong on the street. Whatever drove him down an alley in Hollywood that late at night was important, and the only thing that important to Roscoe, important enough to risk a mark on his personnel file and to bring him all the way across the continent, was his son.
Ed Beasley was right. Whatever killed Roscoe was connected to his visit to me. I couldn’t tell Ed any more than that, but I knew one more thing. Roscoe had found something. The pampered, indoor cat had found the bad coyote and it ate him. Roscoe was not tough, and he must have known that he was up against something that might get him. But big surprise; he’d tried anyway. He’d found something. And if Roscoe could find it, I was pretty sure I could find it.
And with that thought I realized something awful, something so sickening it actually made my face numb and my ears burn. As the thought formed I fell back in the chair, gasping for breath like a gill-netted fish.
I was going to go to Los Angeles. I was going to go back where I swore I would never go again and find out who had killed Roscoe and his son. In some really stupid and maybe self-destructive way, Roscoe’s problem and mine had gotten twisted together. I couldn’t stay here anymore. It wasn’t safe. The beast had come out of the cave and found me and the only way to put it to rest for good was to go back and kill it where it was born.
I was going back to Los Angeles.
