Т Паркер - Pacific Beat

Watching with concern as this unfolded in the papers, Weir was impressed with Dennison’s sense of running to daylight. He had gone from obscurity to interim chief virtually overnight, then parlayed the momentum into his political debut — all with a smoothness that made the transition look natural. Weir had seen a huge blowup of Dennison’s face on the back of a transit district bus on the way to the station, and in some indescribable way, it looked perfect there.

Weir noted a large GROW, DON’T SLOW! poster on the chiefs wall, and easily figured why a cop/mayor would throw in with the land developers: bigger tax base, fatter budgets, expanded power. Likely, they were financing his campaign.

This was Virginia’s latest cause, he thought, Proposition A — another slow-growth measure that she and like-minded citizens had shoehorned onto the coming June ballot. Jim wondered whether Ann’s death would bring Virginia’s activism to a halt. For a moment, he could see her face when he told her.

He tried to rally his thoughts back into the room. He needed a handle. His gaze fell on the MAYOR BRIAN DENNISON poster and for a moment he was held by the big black pupils of the eyes. Apply yourself, he thought: Remain present.

He tried to picture Dennison’s opponent, attorney Becky Flynn, a local beauty who’d grown up in the same neighborhood that Jim had. Jim had followed her career, mostly in the papers, since quitting the Sheriff’s two years ago to find the Black Pearl. That was when he had quit Becky, too, and she him. Her occasional calls since then had the tone of discovery motions. He imagined her without effort now, standing in a green robe in the porch light of her bungalow. Becky had been, to date, the love of Jim Weir’s life.

The interim chief looked briefly at his GROW, DON’T SLOW! poster. Dennison’s lively eyebrows always seemed to be compensating for the calm of his pale, unhurried eyes. They arched up now in a blend of concern and helplessness. “Jim, we’ve got a... a very uh, interesting situation here. I’ve talked with Mike and Raymond about it, and we agreed to give something a try. Something that we’ve, uh, never tried before. Never had to try before...” Weir waited, noting how hard Dennison was trying to talk like a politician.

“Jim, we have a witness.”

Weir’s sense of abstraction was replaced by a pristine clarity. He straightened in his chair.

“Kind of. His name is Malachi Ruff. Ring a bell?”

“One of the bay bums.”

“That’s right. Mackie was sleeping down in Galaxy Park that night — a couple hundred yards east of where we found... Ann.”

“What did he see?”

Dennison walked slowly to the coffee machine. “Some of this, Jim?”

“What did he see?”

Dennison stirred in some creamer with a red plastic stick, laying out Malachi Ruffs story. Ruff was sleeping and he was drunk. Mackie, of course, is always drunk unless he’s in the tank. He woke up when he heard a woman scream. He looked over the bushes he was in, couldn’t see anything because of the fog. Mackie figured he was dreaming. He lay back down. Then he heard footsteps down by the water-that was about a hundred feet away — so he got up from the bushes again and looked. The footsteps were of someone running, running steadily, like a jogger might. He still couldn’t see very well because of the fog, but he got a glimpse of a man running toward the street. Then he heard a car door open and shut. The engine started, and a second later — says Mackie — a car rolls down Galaxy, going toward Pacific Coast Highway.

Jim watched Dennison sip his coffee, look at Paris, then go back to his desk. He straightened something in front of him and looked at Paris again.

“Mackie said it was a cop car,” said the chief. “One of ours — white, four-door, emblem on the side.”

Raymond stared at something on his thumbnail. Weir saw that Dennison’s thick, heavy face had reddened. Paris sat immobile, knees crossed.

Not a good plank in a new mayor’s platform, Weir concluded. He said nothing.

Dennison sat down and looked at Raymond. Jim saw that some transfer had been made. Raymond spoke next, his voice soft, with little inflection. “You know and we know that Mackie Ruff is about as unreliable a witness as we could find. But for right now, he’s what we have. We can’t function as a department if a Newport Beach cop on patrol three nights ago killed Ann. We think Mackie got it wrong. But nobody here takes a statement like his lightly, even if it’s from a drunk.”

Mike Paris collected a glance from Dennison, uncrossed his legs, and looked at Weir. “At the same time,” said Paris, “we’re kind of stuck, Jim. We don’t want a word of this out, and we don’t want Internal Affairs on it unless we’ve got more than a drunk’s word. The press, the suspicion-morale would go to hell. If one of our men did it, then we’ll take him down. Until then, we don’t want the press or the public or anybody else speculating. It’s my job to keep things going smoothly on the outside, and on the inside. Our going-in position is that Mackie Ruff is full of shit, and we don’t want to turn this place upside down if we can help it.”

Raymond stood up and went to the window. “We could use someone on the outside, someone who knows the ropes, can work with evidence, and has some halfway plausible reason to be hanging around, checking facts. I thought of you.”

“And I think it’s a good suggestion,” said Dennison. “You’ve got the tools, two years with the Sheriff dicks, and you can ask questions about the death of your sister without drawing too much suspicion.”

The death of your sister. The words struck Jim oddly, as if Ann had gone from flesh and blood to a case number in less than a heartbeat. The fact of the matter was that she had. Something cold stirred inside him, then sat up alertly on its haunches and waited. “I can’t get much that would stand in court,” he said. “Not as a civvy, I can’t.”

“If you find anything that will get us near a courtroom, this department will be all over it,” said Paris.

“That’s the whole issue,” said Dennison. “The second you find something wrong, we take over. You’d walk point for a few days — that’s all.”

Weir looked at Raymond, slouching against the window.

“We need you, Jim,” he said.

Weir said nothing. If a Newport cop had killed Ann, Weir knew he’d have a war on his hands. If not, he would still make a lot of trouble for himself, fast. But when it came right down to it, there was really no choice. “I’m on,” he said.

Dennison nodded, staring at Jim with his placid gray eyes. “There are three things we need to get clear on before you start. One, not a word from you to anyone about who! you’re looking at, what you’re looking for. If rumors start, we’ll leave you hanging in the wind. Two, we’ll pay you a hundred an hour under the table — no records, no IRS, nobody knows you’re on the roll. Three... Cruz, you want to cover this?”

Raymond sat down next to Jim again and leaned forward in his chair. “It isn’t lost on me or Brian that we’re just as much suspects in this case as any other cop on the force. We I expect you to be looking at us. We suggest you start with the chief and me, since we’re the ones you’ll be reporting to and—”

“We don’t suggest it,” said Paris, more to Dennison than Jim. “We demand it.”

“We demand it,” echoed the chief. “We’ve got to start clean, Jim. Clean... from the top down. When you’re satisfied that it wasn’t me driving Mackie Ruffs cop car that night, and it wasn’t Raymond, then I’m your contact here in the department. In my absence, report to Mike here. Until then, we don’t know you. I’ve talked with Ken Robbins at the Crime Lab. He’ll be available to you for all the forensics backup you’ll need. That’s Robbins, personally. His people won’t know what you’re doing. Of course, my men are investigating the murder while we sit here. Innelman and Deak. I personally woke up Dwight’s wife when I called that morning, and he was sawing logs beside her. He drives an unmarked, anyway. So Dwight’s clean — we know that.”