Robert Crais - Free Fall

“Why don’t you people make him go back to AA? When he was in AA he was doing a lot better.”

“Let’s just keep this our little secret, all right, Ms. Riggens? That way it looks better for you all the way around.”

She crushed out the cigarette into the over-full ashtray and pushed ashes out onto the table. “Look, I don’t know what Floyd’s mixed up with, and I don’t want to know. I’m not aiding and abetting anything. I got enough to worry about.”

“Sure. Thank you for your time.”

I got up and went to the door. Margaret Riggens stayed at the table and lit another Marlboro and drew the smoke deep off the match and stared out through the windows into her shabby backyard. You could hear the kids screaming over the loud bass throbbing of the music and I imagined that it went on without end, and that her living hell wasn’t a whole lot different from Floyd’s.

Out in the living room there was an upright Yamaha piano that looked like it hadn’t been played in a long time. A schoolbag was sitting on one end of it, and half a dozen wilting yellow roses were floating in a glass jar on the other end. Between the two was a framed picture of Floyd and Margaret Riggens standing together at his police academy graduation. They were fifteen years younger, and they were smiling. It was a photograph very much like the one that Jennifer Sheridan had, only Jennifer and Mark still looked like the people in their picture, and Floyd and Margaret didn’t.

I guess romance isn’t for everyone.

When I pulled away from the house that Floyd Riggens once shared with his wife and children, the sun was low in the west and the ridgeline along the Verdugo Mountains was touched with orange and pink. I worked my way across the valley, letting the rush hour traffic push me along, and enjoyed the darkening sky. I wondered if Margaret Riggens found much in the mountains or the sky to enjoy, but perhaps those things were too far away for her to see. When you’re hurting, you tend to fix your eyes closer to home.

I cut across the northern edge of Burbank and Pacoima, and then dropped down Coldwater to a little place I know called Mazzarino’s that makes the very best pizza in Los Angeles. I got a vegetarian with a side of anchovies to go and, when I pulled into my carport fifteen minutes later, the pizza was still warm.

I opened a Falstaff and put out the pizza for me and the anchovies for the cat, only the cat wasn’t around. I called him, and waited, but he still didn’t come. Off doing cat things, no doubt.

I ate the pizza and I drank the beer and I tried watching the TV, but I kept thinking about Margaret Riggens and that maybe I had come at all of this from the wrong direction. You think crime, and then you think money, but maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe Mark Thurman had gotten himself involved in another type of crime. And maybe it wasn’t Mark alone. Maybe it was Mark and Floyd. Maybe it was the entire REACT team. For all I knew, it was the full and complete population of the state of California, and I was the only guy left out of the loop. Me and Jennifer Sheridan. I was still thinking about that when I fell asleep.

At ten oh-six the next morning I called this cop I know who works in North Hollywood. A voice answered the phone with, “Detectives.”

“Is that you, Griggs?” It was this other cop I know, Charlie Griggs.

“Who’s this?”

“Guess.”

Griggs hung up. Some sense of humor, huh?

I called back and Griggs answered again. I said, “Okay, I’ll give you a hint. I’m known as the King of Rockin’ Detectives, but I wasn’t born in Tupelo, Mississippi.”

“I knew it was you. I just wanted to see if you’d call back. Heh-heh-heh.” That’s the way Griggs laughs. Heh-heh-heh.

“Lemme speak to Lou.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“C’mon, Charlie.”

“What do you say, wiseass? You wanna speak to Lou, tell me what you say? Heh-heh-heh.” This guy’s an adult.

“I’m going to get you, Griggs.”

“Heh-heh-heh.” Griggs was killing himself.

“I’m going to give your address to Joe.”

The laughing stopped and Griggs put me on hold. Maybe forty seconds later Lou Poitras picked up. “I don’t pay these guys to goose around with you.”

“Griggs hasn’t done a full day’s work in fifteen years.”

“We don’t pay him to work. We keep’m around because he’s such a scream. Sort of like you.” Another comedian.

I said, “Four months ago, a guy died during a REACT arrest down in South Central. You know anyone I can talk to about it?”

“Hold on.” Poitras put me on hold again and left me there for maybe eight minutes. When he came back he said, “Suspect’s name was Charles Lewis Washington.”

“Okay” I wrote it down.

“There’s a guy working Hollywood named Andy Malone used to be a partner of mine. He’s a uniform supervisor on the day shift. He just came out of the Seventy-seventh. You wanna go down there now?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call him and set it up.”

“Thanks, Lou.”

“You got that twelve bucks you owe me?”

I made a staticky noise and pretended we had been cut off. Works every time.

Forty minutes later I parked in a diagonal parking place outside the glass front door of the Hollywood Police Division, and went past three black women who were standing on the sidewalk into a trapezoidal public room with a high ceiling and a white tile floor. There was a pay phone on the wall up by the front glass and padded chairs around the perimeter of the wall for your waiting comfort. The walls were aqua, the glass was bulletproof. A Formica counter cut off the back third of the room, and three uniformed officers sat on stools behind the counter. Two women and a man. One of the women and the man were talking on telephones, and the other woman was writing in a small black notebook. A Hispanic man and woman sat in the chairs under the pay phone. The Hispanic man sat with his elbows on his thighs and rocked steadily. He looked worried. The Hispanic woman rubbed his back as he rocked and spoke softly. She looked worried, too.

I went past them to the officer writing in the little black notebook and said, “Elvis Cole to see Sergeant Malone.”

“He expecting you?”

“Yes.”

“Have a seat.”

She left the counter and went back through a door into the bowels of the station house. There was another door on the customer side of the counter. It was heavy and dense and if no one buzzed you through it’d probably take a rocket launcher to get past it. I sat opposite the door and waited. In a couple of minutes the female officer reappeared behind the counter and said, “He’s finishing up a couple of things. He’ll be with you in a minute.”

“Sure.”

I waited some more.

A well-dressed black woman came in and asked the people behind the counter if Officer Hobbs was in. The same officer who had gone to see Malone said something into a phone, and a couple of minutes later a tall muscular black officer came through the heavy door. He smiled when he saw the woman and she smiled when she saw him. He offered his hand and she took it and they went out through the glass door to hold hands in the privacy of the sidewalk. Love at the station house. Two Pakistani men came in past the lovers. One of them was maybe in his fifties and the other was maybe in his forties. The older one looked nervous and the younger one wore a loud pink shirt and leather sandals. The younger one went to the counter and said, “We would like to speak with the chief of police.” He said it so loud the Hispanic man stopped rocking. The two desk officers glanced at each other and smiled. The desk officer on the phone kept talking like it was nothing. Guess you work the desk at Hollywood, nothing surprises you. The male desk officer leaned back on his stool and looked through the doorway behind the counter and yelled, “We got a citizen out here wants to see the chief.” A uniformed lieutenant with silver hair came out and stared at the Pakistanis, then frowned at the desk officer. “Knock off the shit and take care of these people.”