T. Parker - Red Light

Tim had on a knit cap, half against the cold and half because he looked cute in it. It reminded her of Hess, Tim’s father, because worn a hat the last couple of times she had seen him. Tim, Jr., looked like Hess. It was hard to think of him without thinking of all that gone wrong.

She banished Hess from her thoughts, trying to be gentle about it.

“Poker night,” said Clark. She knew it was poker night because her father was washing the dishes fast, eager to make his eight o’ game. It was Clark and his old retired friends from the Sheriff Department. Every Wednesday.

“Win lots,” she said absently. Her mind was on the work of the day, no matter how hard she tried to forget it. “Hey, we homicidals got our Christmas bonus today.”

“Your very own unsolved?”

“Mine’s from nineteen sixty-nine. A woman named Patti Bailey. I brought it home for pleasure reading tonight.”

Clark was scrubbing away at a saucepan. He was a tall, lean man with nice gray hair and glasses. She watched him scrub. Merci wondered at what year a man entered the age of sharpened elbows. Hess had sharp elbows, even though he had been built heavy and her father was built slender. Clark looked back over his shoulder at her.

“Buy a novel if you want pleasure.”

“You remember it?”

“Barely. I was just starting burg-theft in sixty-nine. I think Rymers and Thornton got that one.”

“They still around?”

“Thornton’s up in Arrowhead, I think. Rymers died.”

“How?”

Clark turned again. When he smiled the lines in his face changed direction and he looked sweet and wise. “Stroke.”

Merci said nothing. Her dad was always telling her to leave her work at work. To leave alone the things she couldn’t change. To understand that not every death in the world was a homicide she needed to solve. To get a life — a contemporary phrase he’d started using, which hugely irritated Merci.

He also wanted her to marry Mike McNally, have another baby, be a stepmom to Mike’s boy, Danny, be a mom instead of a mom cop. To Clark, being a cop was just a job, a concept that Merci had never understood.

To her it was a life. When she looked at her parents Merci couldn’t see where she’d gotten her single-mindedness and her drive. Who knew how Tim, Jr., would end up, if things like that could just barrel right into your soul.

While Tim pulled the ears and chewed the nose of a stuffed panda, Merci read the Patti Bailey file. The body was found in an orange grove culvert near the corner of Myford and Fourth, in unincorporated Orange County. Gunshot. The year was 1969.

The panda flew across the bedroom. Tim waddled in hot pursuit.

Myford and Fourth, thought Merci. Odd. It was just a couple miles from here. Now it was called Myford and Irvine Boulevard. She wondered if Brighton had shuffled the deck to give her something close to home, then wondered why he’d bother.

The dicks were Rymers and Thornton, just as her father had remembered. A kid had found the body in the ditch; his dad called the sheriffs. The responding deputy was one Todd Smith.

Merci looked at her son. He was gouging at the panda’s eye grunting happily.

Patti Bailey was a plain looking woman. Twenty-three, petite brown hair pulled behind her ears. She had heavy eyelids and a crooked smile in her mug shot. Merci thought it took a lot of guts to smile for a mug, or maybe a lot of alcohol or dope. Her impression of the year 1969 was that everybody was loaded and disrespectful to authority. She was only four at the time, so it was just speculation.

Bailey had been arrested three times for prostitution, tried and convicted once. She’d dodged marijuana and barbiturates charges dismissed, same judge. Two tumbles for possession of heroin: eighteen months in all.

While Tim throttled and cooed at his panda, Merci read through Todd Smith’s report. Bailey was found by the kid on the evening of August 5. Smith got there at 6:30 P.M. and found the woman facedown on the slope of the culvert. All she had on was a bra and a pair of shorts.

The medical autopsy found no conclusive signs of rape. No sign of struggle. There was THC in her system, nembutal and .08 blood alcohol. She’d eaten peaches and chocolate chip cookies less than an hour before she died. She’d been dead about twenty-four hours before the kid found her.

Merci looked quickly through the crime-scene and autopsy photos. The autopsy had been performed in a funeral home because the county had had no facilities of its own back then. The photos struck her as most homicide photos did: The victims looked so disrespected, so brutally dismissed. What could you have done to earn such contempt? She’d been shot from behind and up close. The bullet entry was a clean hole and the exit tore open a crudely triangular flap at the bottom. Went through her heart — right atrium. The M.E. said maybe a .38 or maybe 357 Magnum, which was the same diameter but considerably faster. Any number of more exotic calibers could have made the same hole.

Merci cringed when she looked at the bullet-path study, in which the deceased Patti Bailey lay on her side with a long dowel pushed through the middle of her torso. She looked like something spiked for a barbecue.

Merci turned over the pictures and sighed.

Tim now had his toddler’s hair comb and was styling the fur on the panda’s head. More like hitting it with the comb. He was talking to his customer, a series of bright syllables and occasional words that formed his sincere and expressive babble. He was smiling. From this angle, he looked like her.

Go into cosmetology, she thought, open a salon and make people pretty.

It struck her as strange that while she would trade little on Earth for her job, she wanted none of it for her own son. Maybe Tim will see it like Dad does, she thought: It’s all just a way to pay the bills. Be a banker, a sales guy, a lawyer. Take pictures of mountains or models. Play ball. Why see all this?

Because people die every day who aren’t supposed to, and the assholes who do it shouldn’t go free.

There it was. Inelegant but true.

It looked to her like Rymers and Thornton had done what they could. No murder weapon. No witnesses. Not much evidence collected: some partial shoe prints in the soft soil of the orange grove and a short list of drug-suppliers and johns who might or might not have had a reason to kill Patti Bailey.

The case stayed active for two years, open for eight more, then it was filed in the unsolved cabinet. Until now.

Merry Christmas.

Mike McNally called right after Tim went to bed, as he did almost every night.

“I’m really sorry about today,” he said.

“It’s okay.”

“Look, we’re going to get another girl to help on the outcall owner. But I know where to find him, and you should, too.”

Merci wrote down the name and the home and business addresses: Goren Moladan, Newport Beach and Dana Point.

“He’s got the assaults on the girls,” said Mike. “But he did his time and his probation, so he’s clean right now. I don’t think he knows we’re going inside on him.”

“We’ll do what we can to keep it that way.”

“You guys must have gotten prints all over the place in Aubrey Whittaker’s place, I mean.”

“She made dinner for someone that night.”

Mike said nothing for a moment. “Well, something’s going to pop then. You think it was the shooter?”

“That’s the percentage.”

“Domiciles are full of latents though. I mean, a lot of people come and go.”

“Yeah. Coiner says it was crawling with loops and whorls.”

Mike was quiet again for a beat. She could hear his bloodhounds, Dolly, Molly and Polly, barking in their run.

“Merci, I’m really sorry for jumping in your face today. I was just disappointed. We agreed to set Wednesdays aside for movies with the kids. You know, with the old men at poker night. I was just counting on seeing you. I know you’re tired.”