City of Saviors Read online

  “Cats,” Colin explained. “Cats and their enemies.”

  I slipped off my blazer. “Enemies—you mean mice?”

  “Rats. And then, the raccoons come. They mostly come at night . . . mostly.”

  I swallowed. “Tetanus and rabies and . . . Aliens would be cleaner and . . . My lord, what are we about to see?”

  The four uniforms gold-bricking beneath the magnolia tree glanced in our direction. Then, they whispered to each other.

  My ears burned—the side eyes and gossip involved me.

  “Fitzgerald, one of the jerk-wads over there,” Colin said, nodding toward the klatch, “he’s the R/O.”

  I grabbed my leather binder from the passenger seat. “He’s doing the best he can with that tiny brain of his.”

  Tavaris Fitzgerald turtled toward us, passing a rusted toolbox, a tangled nest of wires, and an abandoned air-conditioning unit. He wiped his sweaty brown face with his wrist, then gave Colin the “what-up” nod. He regarded me as though I’d eaten the apple fritter he’d been saving all day.

  “Who’s our special guest this morning?” I asked him.

  Fitzgerald flipped open his steno pad. “Eugene Washington. Lives here alone. A Bernice Parrish”—he pointed to the closest radio squad car, where a pair of thin brown calves ended in feet clad in dusty gladiator sandals—“found him in the den around seven fifty this morning. She claims to be his girlfriend. Has a key to the place. Anyway, EMT got here about ten minutes later, pronounced him dead, and they’ve been throwing up ever since.”

  The now-recovered fireman was patting the back of another vomiting hero.

  “And we’re here because . . . ?” I asked.

  “The EMTs found a gun near the body. No obvious bullet wounds, but . . .” He shrugged. “It was there and we can’t ignore it.” Suspicious death? Sure.

  “You talk to anybody other than Bernice Parrish?” I asked Fitzgerald.

  “Nope.”

  “Anybody other than you and the EMTs enter the house?”

  The patrol cop smirked. “You don’t have to worry about lookie-loos going off in there.” He eyed my silk blouse, my slacks, and loafers. “Must be nice.”

  My face flushed and I cocked an eyebrow. “It is nice, thank you. Anything else?” Would he dare speak those words he had whispered behind my back today, and many days before? Crazy bitch. Suicide queen. Ass kisser. Dick sucker. Would he? Fitzgerald had never liked me—to him, I thought I was “all that” with my B.A. and J.D., my Porsche and silk blouses. To him, I wanted attention so much that I’d hurled myself and a small SUV into a parked truck. I had used my boobs and color to be promoted from patrol to detective and, now, detective sergeant. Overrated. Underserving. Two full scoops of cray-sins. And he was not only a member of the Screw Lou fan club—he was also the president.

  Please do it. Please say something. A bead of sweat slipped across the scar above my eyebrow. The sting made me grimace and pissed me off just a little bit more.

  But Fitzgerald knew better than to insult a woman packing two guns on a hot day. He said, “Vic’s in the den,” then turtled back past the toolbox, past the wires and past the air-conditioning unit to reach his posse beneath the tree.

  “All that sexual tension,” Colin said as he doused two handkerchiefs with Aqua Velva. “Thought you were gonna take him behind the house and make him a star for three minutes.”

  I took a hankie from him. “Well, I’m glad you stayed. If we’d been alone, I would’ve straddled him on top of the rotten mattress over by that hill of cat poop.”

  Colin and I zigzagged through metal tubes and broken Igloos, very dead felines and moldy cardboard boxes. We bounded up the porch’s rickety stairs, passing four very alive cats now chillin’ on banisters as though visits from homicide detectives occurred every Tuesday at nine thirty. After signing in with a round female officer who obviously had no sense of smell, I pressed the cologne-soaked hankie against my nose and stepped across the threshold and right into the living room.

  Two grubby, mustard-colored armchairs faced a cold fireplace and an entertainment center holding a thirty-inch television and a VCR. Dusty paintings of lighthouses, countryscapes, and sad clowns hung lopsided on the walls. Dark crown molding, natural light, and hardwood floors in a moderately clean house would’ve made the cottage-cheese ceilings tolerable. But the worrisome . . . everything else—from the rotten carpet and the moldy walls to the vermin—was nowhere in the realm of tolerable.

  “Wow,” Colin said.

  With the handkerchief to my face, I used my other hand to work my mini-Maglite around the room. “I spy, with my little eye . . .”

  “Tetanus,” Colin said.

  “You said tetanus outside.”

  “Fine. Hantavirus. My turn. I spy, with my little eye . . .”

  Atop the stack of boxes near the fireplace, a gray momma cat licked two skinny kittens nestled in her paws. “I spy feline HIV.”

  We moved down a dim hallway crowded with sagging boxes of vinyl record albums, mildewed stacks of Reader’s Digest, clothes on and off hangers, beer bottles, and plates and bowls in various states of dirty, filthy, and broken. Something crunched beneath my loafer—and it wasn’t dirt.

  My calm was starting to flake off like old paint. With a shaky hand, I pushed the hankie harder against my nose. “Glad I had Doritos for breakfast.”

  The funk of bad meat, abandoned fruit, and forgotten eggs intensified with each step. In the kitchen, dishes piled high beside thousands of empty tins of cat food, plastic milk containers, and food wrappers. Cats and clutter filled every drawer and cabinet. Two cats perched atop the fridge—the orange one had no right eye, and the gray one was just a bag of bones.

  In the den, the heavy green curtains had remained closed since John Lennon’s murder, and the folds in the fabric had petrified. None of this bothered Eugene Washington. Dressed in green and gray flannel pajama bottoms and a gray wifebeater, he sat in a stained plaid armchair surrounded by old newspapers, fast-food bags, soiled boxers—and a Smith and Wesson revolver. He no longer watched the Judge Mathis episode now playing on the ancient floor-console television—his eyelids had swollen shut.

  The TV’s shoebox-size remote control sat on the old man’s right thigh. His right hand, covered in red welts, had clenched into a tight fist. Froth had dried on his swollen tongue now stuck between swollen blue lips, and blue splotches now colored his freckled butterscotch complexion. No blood anywhere from a gunshot wound. And a gun that big would’ve left its mark all over the place. Blowflies darted around his gray hair and beard. A silver cat sat atop the television, waiting.

  Gee. And Dr. Matthew Popov had thought that red wine played a major role in my high-blood-pressure woes.

  “At least we got here before the cats started nibbling,” Colin said. “Cats don’t care about jack when it’s time to eat.”

  I aimed the flashlight’s beam at the man’s swollen blue face. His tongue, also enlarged, stuck out from between his crusted lips. “No maggots yet. No decay. Did he eat something?”

  On a rusty tray beside the armchair, I spotted a half-empty forty-ounce bottle of Schlitz and a white casserole dish with blue flowers around the rim. Inside the dish was something goopy—and delicious to the roaches now stuck there. Other roaches sprinted in and out of the malt-liquor bottle and swarmed over their dying compatriots trapped in the casserole dish.

  And the flies. Oh, the flies. Their buzz competed against the TV plaintiff named Cinnamon now yelling at Judge Mathis about the money being a loan and not a gift.

  “I can’t . . .” Colin stumbled backward, bumping against plastic milk jugs filled with worrisome yellow liquid.

  The fumes of cat urine, dust and dander, and dead things made my eyes tear. Made it damn-near impossible to study the dead man before me.

  There was no inhaler, no EpiPen, and no medic alert bracelet on Washington’s wrist—objects often found near those with asthma or known food allergies.

  I
aimed the light at the man’s left bicep.

  The blue-black ink of a tattoo. TO HELL AND BACK 66–69 VIETNAM.

  The cologne’s atoms gave up and the protective power of the handkerchief disappeared. My gag reflex awakened, making me back away from Eugene Washington. With my stomach roiling, and knees threatening to dump me into a mound of fur and bones, I stumbled through the maze of trash and back out into the hot, still air.

  To hell and back.

  3

  YOU WILL NOT VOMIT.

  I tripped to the front porch. Found stability by crouching against the rotted wood banister. Willed myself to swallow spit and bile.

  You will not vomit. Not now. Not in front of them.

  I hid my face in the crack of my arm, and whispered, “Just the wind. Just the wind.”

  “I damn-near endoed off the porch.” Colin’s gravelly voice scraped against my tender nerves. “But almost breaking my neck kept me from hurlin’ all over the—you okay, partner?”

  Still flustered but less gaggy, I forced myself to stand. “I’m good.”

  It was hot and mean out here, but there were no crummy ceilings or dead men. At least.

  Fitzgerald had slicked yellow POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape through the property’s white picket fence. His partner, Monty Montez, doubled up with bloodred CAUTION BIOHAZARD tape to drive the point home. Here there be monsters and dragons and roaches and all kinds of bloody bogeymen that you can’t get off your shoe soles or out of your mind.

  Neighbors stood behind the tape with their arms crossed and their faces wet with sweat. Most held phones to take pictures and video. No one cried—a strange thing. Typical crime scenes came with their own soundtracks: wails to the heavens, curses at cops, why oh why lord and that’s my momma in there.

  This scene’s soundtrack featured the gags of men, the splatters of vomit, and the purrs of cats. Tetanus and mesothelioma were silent killers.

  “Being inside that house . . . that was simply remarkable.” I blew my nose into the handkerchief, clearing it of insect eggs and vaporized cat poop.

  “So?” Colin asked.

  I rested against the banister. The urge to puke warmed my ears again. “So, what?”

  “No dead people speaking to you, telling you who done it? No shining? No ghost-whispering?”

  “The gun’s odd, but I see no blood. Plus, he’s old, it’s a hundred and thirty-eight degrees today, and there’s cat shit and asbestos and jugs of pee everywhere. He’s supposed to be dead. We’re supposed to be dead, goin’ off in there unprotected.”

  Colin gaped at me. “But . . .”

  “I get it: You want me to point to the mold on the wall-paper and say, ‘Aha! Those spores originate in the mountains of Bolivia, so, someone must’ve planted them there two years ago to slowly kill him.’ That’s what you want?”

  Colin’s mouth moved, but no words came. Finally, he said, “Yeah. That’s what I want.”

  “Give me a minute, then, all right? It’s a hundred and thirty-eight degrees today.”

  A moment later, Fitzgerald and the other uniforms huddled with Colin and me on the porch. “No one goes back in there yet,” I instructed. “We still need to figure out what happened. Let’s put up a tarp, though, to shield the door. And from now on until forever, we’ll wear full protective gear, top to bottom.”

  Break!

  “Call the M.E.,” I told Colin, “and call Zucca, too, if you could. I’ll go chat with the girlfriend.”

  “So, you think this is murder?”

  “Good question,” I said, walking away from him. “Call Zucca, okay?”

  Did someone kill this man? Had he been shot and we just couldn’t see the fatal wound from our vantage point? Did he die from the heat like most of the other old people around the city and the gun just happened to be there—like the other countless pieces of crap near that armchair? Or had his lungs simply filled to capacity with dust and decided not to work anymore?

  Even though my head said, “natural death,” my gut said “murder.” Because I knew Death—we were homies. Closer than close. Heart attacks, strokes, hypothermia—not my domain. Strangulation, gunshots, decapitations, stabbings? That was me, all day.

  Once a medical examiner arrived and took possession of the body, I’d get to find out which part of me—brain or gut—would reign supreme until the next case.

  Bernice Parrish sat in the front seat of Fitzgerald’s squad car. Her bloodshot eyes flicked between the badge on my hip, her dead boyfriend’s house, and the screen on a cell phone that matched her Pepto-pink shorts set.

  I introduced myself, remembering to say “sergeant” now instead of “detective.”

  “I ain’t done nothing,” Bernice Parrish snapped.

  “I ain’t said that you did,” I snapped back.

  This woman knew her way around a rat-tail comb, edge-control gel, and curly Remi hair extensions. Her hard brown eyes suggested that she was just twenty-seven years old, but her calloused and scarred hands told the truth: mid-to-late fifties. She rocked in the car seat and fanned at her face with those middle-aged hands. Beads of sweat pebbled on her hair like morning dew on vines. “Lord Jesus Father God,” she whispered. “Be with me, be with me, Lord. It’s too damn hot today.”

  “I totally agree. It is too damn hot today.” I opened my binder. “Your full name, ma’am?”

  “Bernice Parrish. That’s with two Rs.” She lived in Inglewood, across the street from the Forum, and owned a hair salon over on Market Street. “Who Do Yo Hair,” she said.

  I blinked. “Umm . . . Her name’s Herschelle, and she’s over on—”

  Bernice Parrish sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes. “No, sweetie. That’s the name of my salon. Who Do Yo Hair.”

  I smiled. “Oh. Got it.”

  She squinted at my ponytail and fringed bangs. “Sweetie, I ain’t mean to be rude, but you needs a trim.”

  I flushed, and millions of pins pricked my warm cheeks. “I know. It’s been a while.”

  “You on some drugs?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can tell.” She pointed at my head with one copper-polished fingernail, then used that finger to flick at my bangs.

  I tensed and came thisclose to breaking her hand. “Ma’am, you need to remove your—”

  “Drugs always come out in the hair. Makes it dull and brittle. Tell her to give you a protein pack after your next relaxer. Then, she need to follow it with a clear cellophane. And then, she gotta give you a good trim. You gotta get that stuff off before you go bald.”

  “I’ll tell her next week when I see her. Thank you.”

  She frowned, shook her head. “A man put his hand up in there, he likely to cut his finger off.”

  This morning, a man did have his hands up in my hair. But the blood on Dr. Popov’s fingers had been mine.

  “Cuz you look nice with that suit,” she was saying, giving me the up and down. “I saw something just like it at the Walmart over in Torrance. Is that where you got it? At the Walmart?”

  I forced a smile. “How did you know Mr. Washington?”

  “He was my boyfriend.”

  “How long were you dating?”

  “Six months or so.”

  “He lives here alone?”

  She snorted. “He did, if you don’t count all them cats.”

  “How old was he?”

  “He just turned seventy-three yesterday.” She craned her neck to look at the house. The sweat pooling in the scoop of her clavicle trickled down her breastbone. “When y’all gon’ let me go in? Gene left me something.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. Too soon, Bernice. Too soon.

  “It’ll be a moment, ma’am,” I said. “Tell me how you came to find him today.”

  “Every Tuesday,” she said, “I help him straighten up a bit. And today is Tuesday.”

  I paused before saying, “Straighten up . . . what?”

  She cocked her head. “The house. What you think?”

  I
pointed at the yellow house behind me. “That house?”

  “Yes, that house.” She narrowed her eyes as Fitzgerald and Montez unfurled a blue tarp at the foot of Washington’s porch. “Folks from church gon’ be coming by soon, takin’ stuff when Gene told me—”

  “No one’s going in, okay? Now: you got here at what time?”

  “Around seven fifty. I used my key to get in.” She fished around her stained suede bag. Pulled out a key ring that held a crucifix the size of a freeway sign, an I HEART JESUS fob, and a mini bottle opener. “I stepped in and shouted, ‘Gene—,’ ” she yelled.

  I startled and almost dropped my pen and binder.

  “ ‘Gene,’ ” she shouted again, “‘where you at?’ And then I smelt it.” She sprang up out of the passenger seat and pinched her nose. Standing, she wasn’t that much taller. “It usually stank off in there, especially with all them cats. But this stink was different. Extra cheesy smelling. And sweet. Like . . . old sticky cherries mixed with Parmesan cheese. You know what I’m sayin’?”

  Impressed, I nodded. “Did you touch him?”

  “Oh, hell no. Not with all them bugs crawling everywhere. Gene said I could officially have his—he called ’em his ‘soup pennies.’ ”

  “What’s a soup penny?”

  “You know, bullion coins? Bouillon is soup, ain’t it? And pennies are bullion coins. Soup. Penny.” She laughed. “He had a way of naming things interesting. But he said that they’re mine. He wrote all that down somewhere. Officially.”

  “In a will?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” she said with a cocked chin. “Back in July, our church, Blessed Mission over on La Brea, had a will-making seminar and we was all required to go.”

  “We?”

  “Anybody over fifty-five. See: white folks do their wills and be-hests and all that, but we black people, we wanna bury our money in the ground with funerals and don’t take care of our family. But with a will, everybody know they been taken care of.”

  With numb fingers, I was writing all of this into my notepad.