T Parker - L. A. Outlaws

She looked at him. “I talked to your boss, the guy with the fish’s name.”

“Marlon.”

“Yeah. He asked me straight-out if I knew about the meeting and I said I did. So next he wants to know if I came in and scooped up those diamonds. Then Barry’s insurance company investigators, they pretty much told me I’d ended up with the diamonds. They’ve been following me not very cleverly. They want to sweat me. Is that why you’re here? You going to bust me?”

“Should I?”

“Should you?”

Hood shook his head. “I don’t think you have the diamonds.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t seem the type to come waltzing into a place with dead men all over, steal something, then step over your boyfriend’s body to make your getaway. I apologize for the images.”

“A cop who believes in innocence here in twenty-first-century Los Angeles?”

“I believe in nonguilt.” Hood smiled and Melissa did, too. “But someone did take the diamonds.”

“Really?”

“Really. Not a diamond was found at Miracle Auto Body.”

Melissa sat back. “Who?”

“It was someone who knew.”

“Barry talked a lot.”

“So did other people, Melissa. It’s the natural thing to talk. I need the name of every person you told. Every one. This is very important, maybe the most important thing you can do for me, and for Barry.”

Even through the makeup Hood saw her blush. She admitted telling some of the people she worked with, some of the women in her book group, some of the people in her AA group, some friends, her hairstylist, mother, father and an aunt, and a guy she happened to be sitting next to in a restaurant bar one night.

“You told them all ?”

“Well, yes. I did. But not everything to everybody.”

“Who knew the most?”

Melissa thought, green eyes roving up. “Octavia, from work.”

“Did she know the time and place of the payoff?”

“Yeah, eventually. She asked me about things almost every day. You have to know Octavia to know what a sweet and absolutely harmless person she is.”

“Melissa, this is very important-who else knew the time and place of the payoff?”

Melissa thought, and Hood slipped a short stack of coffee napkins across to her, along with his extra pen.

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“Please, Melissa.”

She shook her head and squared the napkins on her left, then picked up the pen with her left hand. “In order of who knew most?”

Hood found Octavia Dumont at Macy’s in the Sherman Oaks Galleria. She had even more beautiful skin than Melissa’s. She struck him as good-hearted but dim, and she freely admitted to telling the “Barry and His Diamonds” story to several people. The main ones were her boyfriend Derek and his roommate Frank. Octavia said Frank was in the market for an engagement ring, and when he heard about Barry’s situation with the gangsters he thought he smelled a deal. Frank managed the two Heavy Petal flower shops in L.A., but they weren’t making him exactly rich. So Frank was curious. He always wanted to know how it was going with the diamond broker. He asked lots of questions. Octavia figured he was looking for a way to buy a good rock on the cheap for his future wife.

• • •

Hood found Frank Short at the Heavy Petal on Wilshire. The shop was sunny and cool and smelled of blossoms. Frank was early twenties, tall and pale, with straight brown hair in a ponytail and a gold stud in his left ear.

Hood had him get an employee to work the front, then followed Frank to his office.

It was cramped and humid and smelled not of blossoms but of bleach. Frank spoke softly and without apparent emotion. He said he would have loved a distress sale on a good piece of ice, but mainly he was curious about Barry because it was such a cool story. Barry getting killed in the shoot-out seemed appropriate, Frank said.

“I never met him, though, you know?”

Hood nodded and watched the young man. Diffident people disturbed him.

Then there was a knock on the door and a young blond woman pushed through. She wore jeans and hiking boots and a sleeveless blue plaid blouse. Her arms were wiry and tanned.

“What,” she said, looking at Hood then Frank.

“Not a problem, Ronette,” said Frank. “You’re early today.”

“I’ve got some killer protea.”

“Uh, Ronette, meet Deputy Something-or-other. He’s interested in Barry.”

She was blue-eyed and freckled and didn’t smile.

“Ronette’s one of my suppliers. I should let her show me what she’s got. That’s all I know about the diamond guy.”

On his way to the Camaro, Hood noted the faded and slouching Growers West van parked at the deliveries curb outside the store.

He interviewed three more people on Melissa’s tell-list that day. One was a very talkative hairstylist, one was a girlfriend named DeVry, one was Melissa’s Aunt Shirl. He made notes as they talked, but nothing popped or contradicted what he knew or pointed in the direction of who might have used Melissa’s generous gossip to interrupt the diamond payoff from Barry to the Asian Boyz.

The next day he tracked down the other six, putting close to two hundred and fifty miles on his old IROC. In a traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway the car began to overheat, so Hood pulled off and found a place to park and wait awhile for the radiator to cool before he put in some fresh fluid from the trunk.

He got more names, but each new possibility was further removed from Barry than even Frank, who had never met him. Hood sensed the degrees of separation widening with every interview, wondered if he was sniffing the wrong trail. Then he worried that he might have overlooked something obvious, or maybe seen something rough and ordinary on the outside but missed the gleaming diamond within.

That Friday evening Hood was off patrol duty and he met Lenny Overbrook down in Muscle Beach. They joined the skaters and boarders and joggers and walkers northbound on the sidewalk. The ocean flashed silver and black and an old red biplane lugged a banner that said “Lose 20 lbs. in One Month-No Drugs” across the powder blue sky. The outdoor stalls offered everything from falafel to Mexican sandals to pendants with the wearer’s name hand-painted on a grain of rice. Hood smelled incense and tobacco.

Lenny Overbrook was slight and short, with a ramrod posture and a luckless face. He still had a military haircut but Hood knew he’d been discharged nine months ago, just before his own tour had ended. Lenny wore jeans and sneakers and a light jacket against the breeze.

Hood had first encountered Lenny in a Hamdaniya living room in which an Iraqi father and his three sons had been shot to death. Hood had blundered into the crime scene during the tail end of a late evening firefight, drawn by a ferocious outburst of automatic fire. In the hot, smoke-filled twilight Hood saw soldiers running from the house-six of them-and he’d yelled for their attention, but they ignored him as they vanished into the labyrinthine Hamdaniya alleys.

Hood rounded a doorway inside the house and saw a young corporal wiping down an AK-47 with his shirttail. When he was done, he placed it in the hands of a bullet-riddled Iraqi man slumped against a blood-splattered wall.

At that moment Hood knew that for the rest of his life he would be tied to this bloody young marine corporal who positioned the machine gun in the dead man’s lap then turned with a look of blue-eyed innocence. That look would come back to Hood in dream after dream after dream.

I wish I hadn’t seen that, soldier.

You see what I did.

I saw the others.

There weren’t no others.