Nature of the Game by James Grady
“You drink on the job?” asked Rawlins.
“No.”
“Me either.” Rawlins looked up at the waiter as he reached their table. “Vodka rocks.”
Wes ordered coffee. Rawlins shook a filtered cigarette out of a pack, tore the filter off, and tossed it in the ashtray. He lit up, nodded to the discarded filter.
“Makes my wife think I’m being cautious. Bumper pads for coffin nails.”
A Chinese woman in a tailored suit worth a week of Wes’s salary sashayed past the table, ebony hair sleek on her shoulders.
Both men watched her petite hips sway away. Rawlins’s eyes were waiting for the Marine’s gaze to return to business.
“You never get used to that in L.A.,” said Rawlins. “So many of ’em. You married? Kids?”
“Not lucky enough for either.”
“This is a hard town to be married in.” The cop rubbed out his cigarette. Sipped his vodka. “So how come a L.A. street cop like me with a D.U.O. on ice has a federal case on his hands?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I hate the classified blues.”
The waiter returned, took their lunch orders.
“Naval Investigative Service,” said Rawlins when the waiter had left. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“You been to more than law school.”
“I’m a Marine.”
“Ah. With a little rock ’n’ roll time. Now you’re gumshoeing this ex-sailor—Hopkins.”
“Has anything changed?”
“He’s still dead.”
“You know what I mean.”
Rawlins sighed. “Nobody’s claimed his body, nobody’s called. San Fran P.D. doesn’t list him as a missing person and found nobody at his place, so they’re done with him. Our coroner says could be accident, could be somebody pushed him down the stairs in back of that bar. The County will keep his body on ice for thirty-one days, then if no other authorities protest and nobody claims him, he’ll get a cheap hole at the county cemetery.”
“That’s it?”
“Hopkins is a case of the could be’s and don’t cares.”
“What about your investigation?”
“I figure you’re the center of my investigation.” Rawlins’s voice was even. Cool.
“I’ve got nothing to add to what you know,” said Wes.
“You could subtract some of the could be’s.”
The waiter brought their food.
“I’m just making sure everything is in line,” said Wes.
“What line?”
When Wes wouldn’t answer, Rawlins cursed, but they both knew it was pro forma.
Throaty feminine laughter came from the table to their right, a steadier-toned laugh than Beth’s. A lean, hawk-faced woman with curly brown hair, a tailored jacket, and a midthigh leather miniskirt used humor to insist that the three studio men she was meeting with take her seriously.
“Do you have any suggestions?” said Wes.
“You could go to the Oasis, talk to the night bartender. Guy named Leo. He found the stiff. That’s all he told us.”
“Was there anybody else there that night?”
“Like who?” asked Rawlins.
“Nobody special.”
“As far as we know, nobody special is who was there.”
Rawlins told Wes how to find the Oasis, suggested a hotel. The detective agreed to send Wes the autopsy report.
“With Leo,” said Rawlins, “try a little lean, try a little green. I ain’t had the time or motivation for a second round with the boy.”
“Thanks.”
Wes gave the waiter cash and took the receipt stub. He stood, looked down at the cop. He liked him.
“There’s an outside chance I may need help,” said Wes.
“We all take our chances,” said the cop. Smiling.
Wes called private eye Jack Berns in Washington from the L.A. pay phone the CIA said Jud had used.
“You said you could provide a service,” said Wes.
“I said I could provide any service.”
“It would be helpful to know the calls placed from a pay phone in L.A. The number called, who the number is registered to.”
“‘Helpful’? You cagey lawyers!” Berns laughed. “Local calls are damn near impossible. Long distance … can be done.”
“How fast?”
“It’s a question of timing. You’re in the middle of a billing cycle, so if somebody were to ask the computer, the machine would make a special run, and then that somebody might get hit with questions none of us want asked.”
“I don’t want to ring any alarm bells,” said Wes. “How soon can you get me what I need?”
“I’m betting a couple days—if you can afford to ask.”
“I can afford to ask, but not to wait forever.”
Wes gave him the number, dates bracketing the night Jud called.
“So you’re in L.A.? Where should I call you?”
“Don’t try.” Wes hung up. He was on a busy road, a second-class commercial strip.
Why here? he thought. Why this phone?
Leo was polishing glasses at the far end of the Oasis’s bar when Wes opened the door. Wes stood in the entrance, giving the bartender a black silhouette in front of the red sunset.
The half dozen drunks scattered through the bar paid the newcomer no mind as he stepped into their dim-lit world. When Leo saw the jacket and tie, the clean-shaven face, he knew.
“You’re new,” he called out to the obvious cop.
“Same as I ever was,” said Wes, leaning on the bar. He casually waved his black ID case, stuck it back in his pocket without opening it, and beckoned for Leo to join him.
“Sorry I didn’t come down right away,” said Leo. His breath smelled of pizza. “Dozen years after the USC game and the knee still locks up.”
“Just tell me the rest about the dead guy,” said Wes.
“I told you guys everything. He went out there, he died. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, don’t know him, end of story.”
“If it were end of story, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t want no trouble. I run a nice place.”
“Bullshit.” Lawyer Wes held his breath, but Leo didn’t object to such arrogance from an authority. “I’m not here to bust you, I’m not here to be your buddy. But I’ll do one or the other before I go.”
“What do I gotta do?”
“Tell me what happened—all of it, not just the skim you laid on the other cops. Tell me about the dead guy.”
“So he and I shot the shit. So he helped me out.”
“How?”
“Helped me drag a rummy out there to the bull pen. Didn’t mean nothing, so I didn’t say nothing.”
“What about this rummy?”
“Passed out.” Leo’s face lit up. “The guy who died? He went back out there to check on him.”
“What did he find?”
“The wrong way to go down the stairs.”
“What about the other guy?”
Even Leo got it now.
“The other guy came back in first, walked out the front.”
Wes knew such a rigged identification would be thrown out of court, but he didn’t care about court. He showed the bartender Jack Bern’s surveillance photo of Jud.
“Yeah. That’s the guy we dragged out.”
“You know him? He live around here?”
The idea came slow to Leo, but it came.
“This guy in the picture: if I was to call in what I knew to Crimesolvers, might be a reward in it for me.”
“And you’d get busted as an accessory after the fact, plus obstructing an investigation.”
The bartender frowned. While he was talking, Wes laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table.
“That guy ain’t been back,” Leo said, eyeing the bill. “I think he lives at a fleabag up the street called the Zanzibar.”
“That’s not much for a whole lot.”
“Maybe his name is Bill,” he said.
Wes shook his head, nodded to the money.
“Buy yourself some lying lessons,” he said.
“I figured you guys would be asking about him,” said the pockmarked man behind the registration desk at the Zanzibar Hotel Apartments. He smelled of violet perfume. With one hand he held a slim cigarillo, with the other he tapped the picture Wes had laid on the desk. “Figured.”
“Is he here?” asked Wes.
Beneath the smog of cigarillo smoke, the Zanzibar smelled of dust and mold.
“No. Been, oh, few weeks since he paid his rent. We closed out his room.”
“Why did you figure we’d be around asking about him?”
“What am I: stupid? The gentleman’s a burglar, right?”
“What makes you think he’s a burglar?”
“He’s a juicer who jaws your ear off. How important he is, how much he knows. He’d get an attitude. Tell me I didn’t have a clue. Hah! He’s supposed to have this day job? Sure enough, no matter how loaded he got the night before, morning come, he’d crawl out of bed, get a bus to somewhere. But I don’t buy it as a job. One day he shows me this bag of tools. I seen lockpicks before. Says he’s the top locksmith in the country. I say yeah, great, but I had it figured.”
The clerk blew a cloud of smoke.
“A walking ticky-tocking time bomb, that one.” He smiled. “Jud, right? Jud … Seward?”
“Something like that,” said Wes.
“So am I going to be reading about him in the papers?”
“I doubt it. You said you closed out his room.”
“After we didn’t see him on rent day, I boxed up his stuff, gave the room to a more responsible party.”
Springs stuck from holes in the lobby’s sofa. The pay phone on the wall was battered. The muffled sounds of a man and a woman yelling at each other floated down the open stairwell.
“What happened to his stuff?”
“It’s in the back room. We’re a legit place, so we must hold stuff like that for a month. How do you figure the law?”
“I quit trying. I’d like to see the stuff from his room.”
“I’d like to see that ID you waved at me again,” said the clerk.
When Wes passed the clerk his ID case, a twenty-dollar bill was sticking from it. The clerk slid the bill out, checked it, gave the unopened case back to Wes.
“Nice picture,” said the clerk. He crooked his finger.
The back room was jammed with boxes, suitcases, stacks of clothes, and bundled papers. The clerk found a shoebox and two unlocked suitcases, put them on a dusty table, and left Wes alone.
Nothing in the shoebox but toiletries.
The suitcases were made of battered aluminum and had once cost a great deal. The clothes inside them varied from worn-out and formerly expensive to worn-out and formerly dirt cheap. Wes assumed that any valuables Jud had left behind had long since been appropriated by the clerk.
Wes found a car key with a Mercedes emblem, left it.
In the pocket of a tattered blue Hawaiian shirt, he found two wrinkled and faded Polaroid snapshots.
The first picture was of Jud and another man, sitting on a red couch, smiling for the camera. The other man looked nervous. In the picture, the two men were probably in their thirties. Jud’s companion had black hair barbered over his ears, a shirt, blue jeans. He was lean, clean-shaven.
The second picture was of a woman. A gorgeous woman, stunning even in a badly composed, aged Instamatic shot.
She had reddish-chestnut hair cascading from her head like a lion’s mane. A widow’s peak, like Beth’s, but thicker tresses. Her face looked Italian, oval with wide lips, huge brown eyes. Her grin showed innocent embarrassment, thought Wes. She seemed small, though as she turned to be surprised by the camera, her white sweater pulled tight against heavy breasts. She stood on a dune; behind her was an ocean.
Wes kept the pictures.
It took Wes an hour the next morning to find where Jud had worked. Wes used the yellow pages, reached Angel Hardware & Lock on the ninth call, and asked for Jud. The man told him Jud had quit. Wes realized the store was close to the pay phone Jud had used and drove there.
This guy was born scared, thought Wes as he interviewed the pudgy owner in the back workroom. As they talked, an old man with a stubbled face disassembled a lock at the workbench.
The owner chewed his lip, confirmed little more than that Jud had failed to show up for work the day after Hopkins died.
“There has to be something you can tell me about him!” Wes insisted.
“No, I, no, nothing, I …” The fat man shrugged.
“Was he a good locksmith?” asked Wes in desperation.
“Ah, yeah, as …” The owner lost his ability to speak.
“He was not locksmith,” said the man at the workbench.
Wes turned around.
“Locksmith?” said the old man, Europe thick in his words. “No. I am locksmith. Jud was an artist. He had angels in his hands. This man can manipulate safe. Do you know what this means?”
“No,” said Wes.
“Dial,” said the old man. “He could dial open a safe. By touch. By sound. By scent. Do you know how rare that is? This is a craft, demanding, ever changing. You must be trained. But few of us are ever more than technicians. To dial a safe like he can … perhaps two men in this country. Perhaps one in Europe.
“And I tell you this: wherever he learned what he knew, it wasn’t to fix security systems for silly starlets.”
“He took things from me,” blurted out the owner, afraid to speak, but more afraid to be upstaged by the old man.
“You owed him,” said the old man.
“What things?” asked Wes.
“Just tools,” said the old man. “Of our trade—yes?”
The owner licked his lips, nodded.
Wes thanked the old man, left.
He went back to the same pay phone and called Jack Berns.
“Good timing,” said the private eye. “I think I got what you want: two long distance calls that may be hot.”
“Two?” said Wes. Cars whizzed by him on the street. Where had Jud gone? And how had he gotten there? Bus?
“There’s one to a special number you may know at the firm where our mutual friend works.”
“I know about that.”
“I bet,” said Berns. “Plus one to Takoma Park, just over the D.C. line. Phone’s listed to a Nick Kelley.”
“You did good.”
“I did more,” said Berns.
“I hired you to do what I told you!”
“Then you don’t want to hear what I got?”
Wes silently cursed, said, “Go ahead.”
“Nick Kelley’s a reporter. Or used to be. At my old friend Peter Murphy’s column.”
“Don’t jerk me around, Berns.”
“Not unless you pay me to.” The private eye laughed. “I recognized the name. Met him a few times way back. My business, you get a hit, you follow through. I dropped by Peter’s office—”
“You what!”
“I see Peter a few times a year. I found out that our boy Nick quit reporting way back when to write novels. Wrote a spy book once. Think our mutual friend would like to hear that?”
“He’ll hear what I tell him.”
“Be sure to tell him Nick Kelley is back on the beat.”
“Huh?”
“Peter let it slip that Nick came in, cut a deal to pick up the press pass and do a piece on spooks. He works out of some office he’s got up on Capitol Hill.”
“Way I figure it,” said Berns, “you aren’t experienced with reporters, so I’ll take a run at Nick and scope out what—”
“Forget it!” Wes felt on fire; his voice was ice. “I told you to get me numbers and names. You went way beyond that—”
“And I scored, Major.”
“Your games stop now. Do you he
“Don’t worry. I know where my money’s coming from. I’ll sit right here and wait for it. And for you.”
The private eye hung up.
Wes swore, wanted to smash the telephone. A customized 1967 red Corvette roared past Wes, honking its horn at a Japanese family car that was trying to nose its way across the intersection.
Got it! He dropped more coins in the pay phone.
“Detective Rawlins,” said the voice that answered.
“Can I get a geographic breakdown of reported crimes with the LAPD computer?” Inspiration tingled through Wes.
“There’s a guy at a terminal across the squadroom could do just that,” said the cop.
“Can you tell me if somebody stole a car?” Wes gave him the address of the pay phone, asked for a six-block-square grid search. “On that night that Hopkins died, the next morning.”
“You riding a crime wave, Marine?” said Rawlins.
But he put Wes on hold. Came back a minute later.
“You should play the lottery,” said Rawlins.
“What’s the license plate and make?” asked Wes excitedly.
“You probably won’t care. The Highway Patrol recovered it three days later at a rest stop up north. Vandalized, but what the hell. They didn’t turn up any interesting prints.”
Wes swore.
“Why don’t you drop by my office,” said Rawlins.
“Can’t,” said Wes, “I’ve got a plane to catch.”
It’s late, Wes told himself when the taxi from the airport left him in front of his Capitol Hill apartment building. He was whipsawed by jet lag into a feeling of timelessness, though he knew that here in Washington, it was half an hour until midnight. The indigo air held a chill. A matron in a topcoat coaxed a wirehaired terrier from lamppost to fire hydrant. Neither woman nor dog looked at Wes as they worked their way down the block. His eyes scanned the parked cars lining his street to be sure they were empty, then he carried his bags of old clothes and new secrets into the building.
Dear Occupant junk waited in his mailbox.
The white adhesive tape black-inked with B. Doyle had been replaced by one of the typed labels issued by the landlord.
He couldn’t stop a foolish grin, climbed the stairs.
The fish-eye peephole in her door betrayed nothing of the quarters behind its convex glass. The molding made it impossible to tell if lights were on in her apartment.