Gay Hendricks - The First Rule of Ten

Morris’s handshake was damp and halfhearted. I refrained from wiping my palm on my jeans.

“I’ve seen you around town,” I said to Morris. “What’s up?”

Tatum stepped in before Morris could reply. Interesting. Must be two jurisdictions.

“We’re hoping you can help us with an investigation,” Tatum said. “But first, I guess congratulations are in order. I hear you just put in your papers.”

“Word gets around fast. What division are you in?”

“Sheriff’s Department. Fifteen years on the job.”

“My sympathies,” I said, which elicited a tiny, tight smile from him. There’s no love lost between the LAPD and County.

I gestured toward the kitchen table. They sat.

“Want a cup of coffee?” Dumb question. They were cops. Of course they wanted coffee.

I busied myself setting out two mugs, filling them with the strong Arabian brew left over from breakfast and stored in a carafe. I tend to make a lot of coffee. I don’t always drink it all, but I like knowing it’s there. As I set down the mugs, I mentally ran through my cold cases, trying to work out what brought them to my house.

I came up blank.

“So, what’s the investigation?”

Tatum and Morris exchanged glances.

Tatum again spoke first. “There was a woman in a beat-up Volkswagen seen coming up your road yesterday. One of your neighbors thought she might have turned into your driveway.”

“Barbara Maxey,” I said. “She was looking for her ex-husband, Zimmy Backus.”

I gave them the quick sketch of my brief interaction with her, leaving out my little frisson of attraction.

Morris scribbled in a small notebook. His writing was spiky and crabbed. It looked disappointed, too.

“This about the car?” I asked. Stealing a rusted VW didn’t usually warrant a house call by two cops from two different departments, but you never know.

Detective Tatum’s face narrowed. “What about the car?”

“It’s hot. She stole it. From the cult, she said.”

“That explains the expired plates,” Morris put in, and made another note.

Tatum just shook his head. “No. We’re definitely not here about the car.”

“What did she do, then?” Car theft aside, she didn’t strike me as felon material.

“She didn’t do anything,” Tatum said. “She got it done to her.”

A thin spear of dread drilled downward from my heart to my belly. I swiveled in my chair to look out the window. I think something bad may be going on. I took a deep breath. Turned back to Tatum. He was eyeing me closely.

“What happened?” I asked.

Tatum opened his mouth. Then closed it. One more silent exchange with Morris. I knew this look too well-Bill and I had shared it many a time when questioned by a well-intentioned citizen. I was the civilian now. Kicked out of the tribe, maybe for good.

Well, I would have to create my own tribe, then.

“We’ve got her on a slab downtown,” Morris said. “We need somebody to I.D. the body. She’s got no next-of-kin as far as we can tell, so that leaves you.”

I have nowhere else to go.

I stood up.

“I’ll meet you there.”

I headed south down Topanga Canyon, pulling a left on Pacific Coast Highway. Usually I loved to take the Mustang through her paces, but I was too distracted to enjoy the drive. I hugged the coast, glancing once or twice at the ocean to my right. It was dark and choppy today, like my mood. I wondered about Barbara’s connection to Zimmy, her concern about his royalties. I had been so quick to dismiss her fears. Too quick by far.

I continued onto the 10. It was smooth sailing for about nine miles, until I ran into the inevitable clog of cars that meant downtown was close. I zigged onto the 110 toward Pasadena, zagged onto the 5 South, merged onto the 101, and took the Mission Road exit. Driving in L.A. was like negotiating a labyrinth. It took me years to learn my way around.

I entered Boyle Heights, land of the gang, home of the disenfranchised. Last count, it was over 90 percent Latino, and who could blame them? Their forefathers were victims of restrictive covenants that limited land ownership throughout L.A. to only the whitest of lily-whites. South Central and Boyle Heights were the exceptions. Now these two neighborhoods marked their territories with spray cans and bullets.

I pulled into the County Coroner’s entrance and parked in an open slot in front of the emphatic “Visitors Only!” sign. That was me, now. A visitor only.

Ahead of me loomed an ornate confection of brick and cement that seemed better suited to an art academy than its singular, grim purpose. Eight hundred bodies passed through the County Coroner’s building every month-anyone whose death was sudden, unnatural, or suspicious in any way. Anyone not under the care of a doctor. Anyone who had fallen off the map. I have nowhere else to go .

I slowly ascended the stone steps, dreading the job ahead. The last time I came here, it was to buy a beach towel-among other distinguishing features, this was the only Coroner’s office in the country with its own gift shop. Skeletons in the Closet stocked an array of morbid but amusing knickknacks, from skull business-card holders to numerous items decorated with the ominous traced outline of a fallen homicide victim. Some of the proceeds raised money to educate kids about drunk driving; though it seemed to me a tour of the morgue after a bad pile-up might serve just as well. Whatever. At the time, I’d been invited to a retirement party for a fellow cop who was taking his pension and hightailing it to Hawaii. The Body Outline Beach Towel seemed like just the thing.

I entered the lobby. Passed a small cluster of people surrounding a young woman racked with sobs. Passed an elderly man, sitting, staring blankly ahead, at nothing. Took a deep breath in, then out. Mortality is hard to face, but impossible to avoid. Me? I’d been trained to view the inevitability of death as a goad to living a more meaningful life-by showing compassion to others, for example. I only wish it were that easy.

I headed for the morgue.

Death wears many masks, and I’ve seen more than my share: from the smiling visage of an esteemed lama who, after a lifetime of compassion for all sentient beings, passed peacefully while seated in an advanced state of meditative luminosity, to the gaping stare of a young gangbanger, cut down in his neighborhood war zone by a blunt act of violence. I was at that scene within moments, and his dark spirit still circled his place of death like an angry raven.

Then there’s my first. The death that marked me for life. When I found my mother, she was lying in a heap on the floor, her once-beautiful face mottled and puffy, misshapen from the toxic mix of prescription drugs washed down with a liter of Bordeaux. The stink of stale vomit and alcohol clung to her like a stain. I am still haunted by it . The cologne of death.

“Ready?” Tatum asked.

I nodded.

The attendant tugged the sheet to just below the chin. Barbara Maxey’s features were pale, yet somehow defiant as well. Death had robbed her of her ruddy complexion but not of her fine bone structure. I shivered in the chill, antiseptic air of the morgue as I scanned her face. No visible signs of trauma, at least that I could see. I wanted to ask the morgue attendant to pull the sheet lower, but something told me to wait.

I turned to Tatum and nodded again.

“That’s her, then? Barbara Maxey?”

“Yes. That’s the name she gave me, anyway.”

Morris passed over a long-expired California driver’s license. Barbara smiled back at me, many years younger, glowing with the bliss of the newly clean and converted. She must have just joined the cult.