Питер Робинсон - No Cure for Love

It was mid-afternoon. Apart from the bartender, the waitress, a few pairs of illicit lovers and a seasoned alcoholic at the bar knocking back the Martinis as if they were going out of style, Joe and Arvo were the only ones in the place.

Joe Westinghouse was a detective with Robbery-Homicide Division. He and Arvo had consulted on a case once before. They shared an interest in football and baseball and had been to games together now and then. Joe had been to UCLA on a football scholarship until he tore up his knee.

Joe was tall and broad-shouldered, his skin the color and texture of well-tanned leather. His cropped black hair was sprinkled with gray at the temples, and his deadpan eyes occasionally twinkled with humor. Arvo thought he looked a bit like Dave Winfield, the baseball player. Also like a baseball player, Joe wore a lot of gold — watch-band, wrist chains, gold stud in his ear, and probably even more under his white button-down shirt, where Arvo couldn’t see.

Joe was working on a rye and ginger, and Arvo was drinking coffee. They had been playing catch-up on sports and department gossip for half an hour, bitching about the brass, but now it was time to get down to business.

“Okay. You’re right,” said Arvo. “It’s about that body your guys found on the beach near Pacific Palisades a couple of days ago.”

Joe took another sip of rye and ginger. “Uh-huh.”

“You know anything about the case?”

“Let’s say I’ve got a passing interest.”

“Anything on it yet?”

Joe squinted at Arvo for a moment, swirling the ice in his drink, then seemed to decide to cut him a bit of slack. Must have been those great seats to the Dodgers’ last game of the season, Arvo thought.

The waitress came by in her black fishnet tights and pink tube-top. “Youse guys all want another?” she asked.

“Why not?” said Joe. “He’s paying.”

She smiled and went to fetch their drinks, wobbling on her high heels. Joe and Arvo watched her go. A body like hers took work, lots of it. Joe raised his eyebrows. They waited until she had set the fresh drink in front of Joe, refilled Arvo’s coffee cup and tottered off again, then Joe said, “Okay. Shoot. What do you want to know?”

“Have you ID’d him yet?”

Joe nodded. “That was the easy part. Prints on file. Name’s John Heimar, Caucasian male, just turned nineteen last October.”

“What’s his background?”

“Exactly what you’d expect of a good-looking kid from the boondocks come to find fame and fortune in the city of sin.”

“He worked the streets?”

“Uh-huh. The Boulevard.”

Arvo nodded. He knew Joe meant the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard that passed through West Hollywood, a big gay cruising area. A saccharine string arrangement of “All My Loving’ drifted across the room like a bad smell. Arvo winced and sipped his coffee. “Where’s he from?”

Joe rubbed his eyes then spoke in a monotone, as if he had heard it, seen it and said it all before. “Grew up in Magic City, Idaho. Would you believe that? Middle-class parents, ordinary decent folks who didn’t know what to do with a wayward kid. Pop runs the local hardware store and Mom teaches kindergarten. Real Leave It To Beaver shit. It seems Magic City, Idaho, didn’t have whatever magic it took to keep young Johnny around, ’cause he kept on running away since he was thirteen. New York once. Chicago twice. New Orleans. San Francisco. He wound up out here a couple of years ago. Lived on the streets ever since. Hollywood Division’s had him in and out like they’ve got revolving doors. Nickel-and-dime stuff, mostly. Shoplifting, a little dealing. Nothing violent.”

“So what happened?”

Joe shrugged, tapped out a Winston and lit it. Arvo licked his lips. He’d given up smoking three years ago, when he moved out to LA to join the TMU, but he hadn’t gotten rid of the craving yet. Cigarettes, he remembered, went especially well with coffee. With alcohol, too. And after dinner. Not to mention sex.

“You tell me,” Joe said, blowing the smoke out. “Just plain bad luck, I guess.”

“Sex crime?”

“Looks like it.”

“How was he killed?”

“According to the coroner’s office, somebody slit his throat from behind with a very sharp knife and stabbed him in the chest and neck. Then cut him up with some kind of saw or serrated blade. Arms. Legs. Head. Torso. Put him together again on the beach like a jigsaw puzzle and half buried him in sand.” He shook his head slowly.

“The throat?” said Arvo. “That’s pretty common in homosexual homicides, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. Shrink says it’s got something to do with the mouth and throat connection with oral sex.” Joe shrugged. “I don’t know about that. All I know is I’ve seen too much of it. You get it in a lot of high-octane emotional murders, too, mostly domestics. Seems when people see red they aim for the throat and chest with a knife. What the experts call the “overkill” element. Means the poor fucker’s dead before the last fifty stab wounds.”

“Any fingerprints? Footprints?”

Joe shook his head. “No physical evidence at all. Not yet.”

“Was Heimar killed on the beach?”

Joe tapped a column of ash into the glass tray. “Nope. Not enough blood. He was just... reassembled... there. With about as much success as Humpty Dumpty.”

“Where he was killed, there’d be a lot of blood, right?”

“Yup. But so far we’ve got diddly. No suspects and no idea where it happened. Could’ve been some other beach, maybe the desert, up in the hills, or anywhere else out in the wilds. Could’ve been in some apartment for all we know. Or a house. A nice house somewhere in the ’burbs like Palos Verde or San Marina. People’d be surprised some of the things going on there behind locked doors out in the ’burbs. Gacey. Dahmer. Who the fuck knows anything any more?” Joe tossed back the rest of his rye and ginger and crunched the ice cubes. He waved for the waitress and she brought another. Arvo stuck with coffee.

“So what’s your interest?” Joe asked finally.

“Sarah Broughton.”

Joe nodded. “Right. She found the body. She wouldn’t have been receiving any unwanted attention from warped members of the viewing audience lately, would she?”

Arvo smiled. “You got it. Nasty letters.”

Joe cocked a finger at him and clicked his tongue. “I’m not a hotshot detective with RHD for nothing, man.”

“There’s nothing concrete,” Arvo said. “It’s just—”

“Too much of a coincidence?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you think there’s a connection?”

“No,” said Arvo. “People who write weird letters are generally wimps. They’d be no more likely to commit murder than a nun would. But like you said, it’s too much of a coincidence. I have to check it out.”

Joe nodded. “Uh-huh. Never did trust those nuns,” he said. “Anyway, a team of detectives canvassed the Boulevard strip, and all they could come up with is that a couple of other street kids saw John Heimar getting into a car about eight o’clock on the night he was killed. They figured he’d scored, of course. Needless to say, none of them was especially forthcoming.”

“Did they get the make?”

“Yeah. It’s a blue-green-black Ford Chevy convertible sedan pick-up truck from Japan.”

Arvo laughed. “Okay. Sorry I asked. You said earlier you thought it was a sex crime. Any other evidence yet, apart from the MO?”

“Some. The kid had been sodomized sometime before death, but there’s no telling when, or how willing he was. And there’s no evidence at all to show that he was forced. Given the victim’s line of business I’d say it’s likely enough he’d been with at least a couple of other chickenhawks earlier that night, wouldn’t you? On the other hand, you sometimes get cases where the john cuts off the guy’s air supply from behind with some sort of ligature while he butt-fucks him. Supposed to be a real turn-on. Something like that could have happened, gone too far, then the john panicked and tried to cover up, make it look like a sex murder. The coroner’s office found traces of semen from two different sources in the anus. Either he hadn’t heard of AIDS or he liked to take risks. Or maybe the rubber had a hole in it.”