Blood Work (1998) Read online

  He knew he wasn't helping her any by telling her the reality of the situation. But he wanted her to be prepared for his eventual failure. He had been good in his day but not that good. He now realized that by agreeing to take the case he had only set Graciela Rivers up for disappointment. His selfish dream of redemption would be another painful dose of reality for her.

  "Those men just didn't care," she said.

  He studied her downcast eyes. He knew she was talking about Arrango and Walters.

  "Well, I do."

  They finished eating in silence. After McCaleb pushed his plate aside, he watched her as she gazed out the window. Even in her white polyester nurse's uniform with her hair pinned back, Graciela Rivers stirred something in him. She had a kind of sadness about her that he wished somehow to soothe. He wondered if it had been there before her sister died. With most people it is. McCaleb had even seen it in the faces of babies-the sadness already there. The events of their lives seemed only to confirm the sadness they already carried.

  "Was this where she died?" he asked.

  She nodded and looked back at him.

  "She was first taken to Northridge, stabilized and then transferred here. I was here when life support was terminated. I was with her."

  He shook his head.

  "It must have been very hard."

  "I see people dying every day in the ER. We joke about it to relieve the stress, say they are 'Three-D.' Definitely Done Dancing. But when it's your own . . . I don't joke about it anymore."

  He watched her face as she shook it off, shifted gears and moved on, away from the trouble spot. Some people have that fifth gear that they can drop into, to get away.

  "Tell me about her," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "That's really why I came. Tell me things about her. It will help me. The better feel that I have for her, the better I'll be at this."

  She was quiet a moment, her mouth curled in a frown as she thought about how to sum her sister up in a few words.

  "Is there a kitchen on that boat of yours?" she finally asked.

  Her question caught him off guard.

  "What?"

  "A kitchen. On your boat."

  "Uh, it's actually called a galley."

  "Then galley. Is it big enough to cook real meals?"

  "Sure. Why are you asking me about my boat?"

  "You want to know my sister?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you have to meet her son. Everything that was good about my sister is in Raymond. He's all you have to know."

  McCaleb nodded slowly as he understood.

  "So how about I bring Raymond down to your boat tonight and we make you dinner. I already told him about you and about the boat. He wants to see it."

  He thought a moment and said, "Tell you what. How about we wait until tomorrow. That way I can tell you about how my visit to the Sheriff's Department went. Maybe I'll have something more positive to report."

  "Tomorrow will be fine."

  "And don't worry about cooking dinner. Dinner will be my job."

  "You're turning this all around. I wanted to-"

  "I know, I know. But you can save that for one night at your home. You're coming to my home tomorrow and I'll take care of dinner, okay?"

  "Okay," she said, still frowning but realizing he wouldn't be budged. Then she smiled. "We'll be there."

  Traffic south on the 405 was intense and the cab didn't drop him off at the marina in San Pedro until after two. The cab was not air-conditioned and he caught a slight headache from the mixture of freeway exhaust fumes and the driver's body odor.

  After he got inside the boat, he checked his phone machine and found the only message he had was a hang-up call. He felt out of sync because his travels that day had involved more physical activity than he'd had for a long while. His leg muscles were sore and his back was aching. He went down to the head and checked his temperature but there was no fever. Blood pressure and pulse also checked out fine. He logged it all on the clipboard, then went to his stateroom, stripped off his clothes and crawled into the unmade bed.

  Despite his physical depletion he had insomnia and lay wide awake on the pillow. His mind churned with the thoughts of the day and images from the video. After an hour of fooling himself, he got up and went up to the salon. He dug the notebook out of the jacket he had draped over a chair and read through the notes he had taken earlier. Nothing stood out but he felt comforted in some way at having started a record of his investigation.

  On a fresh page he jotted down some additional thoughts about the video and a couple of questions he wanted to be sure to cover with Jaye Winston the next day. Assuming that the investigators had linked the cases, he wanted to know how solid the connection was and whether the three hundred dollars taken from James Cordell in the first case was actually taken from the victim or from the ATM's cash tray.

  He put the notebook aside when he realized he was hungry. He got up, scrambled three egg whites in a skillet, mixed in some Tabasco sauce and salsa and made a sandwich with white toast. After two bites he put on more Tabasco.

  When he had cleaned up the galley, he felt the fatigue coming back and finally closing him down. He knew he could sleep now. He took a quick shower, another temperature reading and the evening batch of medications. In the mirror he saw he had what looked like a two-day growth of beard even though he had shaved that morning. It was a side effect of one of the drugs he was taking. Prednisone helped fight organ rejection and stimulated hair growth at the same time. He smiled at his reflection, thinking that the day before he should have told Bonnie Fox that he felt like a werewolf, not Frankenstein. He was getting his monsters mixed up. He went to bed.

  His dream was in black and white. They all were now but they had not been before the operation. He didn't know what this meant. He had told Dr. Fox about it and she had just shrugged.

  In this dream he was in the market. He was a player in the video he had been shown by Arrango and Walters. He was at the counter smiling at Chan Ho Kang. The store owner smiled back in an unfriendly way and said something.

  "What?" McCaleb asked.

  "You don't deserve it," Mr. Kang said.

  McCaleb looked down at the counter at his purchase but before he could see what it was he felt the cold ring of steel against his temple. He quickly turned and there was the masked man with a gun. McCaleb knew in the way knowledge and logic accompany dreams that the man was smiling behind the mask. The robber lowered the gun and fired into McCaleb's chest, his bullet hitting the ten ring-the circle of the heart. The bullet went through McCaleb as if he were a paper target. But the impact forced him backward a step and then in slow motion he was falling. He felt no pain, only a sense of relief. He looked at the killer as he was going down and recognized the eyes watching through the mask. They were his own eyes. Then came the wink.

  And he kept falling and falling.

  8

  THE DISTANT BOOMING of empty cargo containers being unloaded from a ship in the nearby Port of Los Angeles woke McCaleb before dawn. As he lay in bed, eyes closed but fully awake, he pictured the process. The crane delicately swinging the container the size of a truck trailer off the ship's deck and into the yard, then the ground man giving the drop sign early and the huge steel box dropping the last three feet and producing a concussion like a sonic boom echoing across the nearby marinas. In McCaleb's vision, the ground man was laughing each time.

  "Fucking assholes," McCaleb said, finally giving up on sleep and sitting up. It was the third time in a month it had happened.

  He checked the clock and realized he had slept for more than ten hours. He slowly made his way to the head and took a shower. After he had toweled off, he took the morning reading of vital signs and the prescribed complement of assorted pills and liquid chemicals. He logged it all on the progress chart and then got out his razor. He was about to spread shaving cream across his face when he looked in the mirror and said, "Fuck it."

  He shav
ed his neck so he would look neat but left it at that, deciding that to shave two or three times a day for the rest of his life, or for as long as he was on prednisone, wasn't an alternative. He had never had a beard before. The bureau wouldn't have allowed it.

  After dressing, he took a tall glass of orange juice, his phone book and the portable phone out to the stern and sat in the fishing chair as the sun came up. Between gulps of juice he constantly checked his watch, waiting for it to hit seven-fifteen, which he believed would be the best time to call Jaye Winston.

  The Sheriff's Department homicide offices were in Whittier on the far side of the county. From that location, the squad's detectives handled all killings committed in unincorporated Los Angeles County and the various cities the department contracted with to provide law enforcement services. One of those cities was Palmdale, where James Cordell had been murdered.

  Because the homicide squad offices were so distant, McCaleb had decided that it would be foolish to take an hour-long cab ride out there without knowing whether Winston would be in when he arrived. So he had decided on the seven-fifteen call rather than the surprise visit with a box of doughnuts.

  "Those assholes."

  McCaleb looked around and saw one of his neighbors, Buddy Lockridge, standing in the cockpit of his sailboat, a forty-two-foot Hunter called the Double-Down. Buddy's boat was three slips from The Following Sea. He was holding a mug of steaming coffee in his hand. He was in a bathrobe and his hair was standing up on one side. McCaleb didn't have to ask whom Buddy was calling assholes.

  "Yeah," he said. "Not a good way to start the day."

  "Point is they shouldn't be allowed to do that all through the night," Buddy said. "Goddamn nuisance. I mean, you gotta be able to hear that from here to Long Beach."

  McCaleb just nodded.

  "I talked to them over there in the harbor master's. You know, told them to make a complaint to the Port Authority but they don't give a shit. I'm thinking of gettin' a little petition going. You going to sign it?"

  "I'll sign it."

  McCaleb looked at his watch.

  "I know, you think it's a waste of time."

  "No. I just don't know if it will work. The port's a twenty-four-hour operation. They're not going to stop unloading ships at night because a bunch of people on their boats in the marina sign a complaint."

  "Yeah, I know. The assholes . . . I wish one of them boxes would drop on them one day. Then they'd get the idea."

  Lockridge was a wharf rat. An aging surfer and beach bum, he lived a low-cost, low-maintenance life on his boat, subsisting mostly on money from odd jobs around the marina like boat sitting and hull scraping. The two had met a year earlier, shortly after Lockridge had moved his boat into the marina. McCaleb had been awakened by a middle-of-the-night harmonica concerto. When he got up and left his boat to investigate, he traced the sound to a drunken Lockridge lying in the cockpit of the Double-Down. He was playing a harmonica to a tune only he heard on his earphones. Despite McCaleb's complaint that night, the two had become friends over time. This was largely due to the fact that there were no other live-aboards in that area of the marina. Each was the other's only full-time neighbor. Buddy had kept an eye on The Following Sea while McCaleb had been in the hospital. He also often offered McCaleb rides to the grocery store or a nearby mall because he knew Terry wasn't supposed to drive. In turn, McCaleb had Lockridge over for dinner every week or so. They usually talked about their shared interest in the blues, debated sailboats versus power boats and sometimes pulled out McCaleb's old file boxes and theoretically solved some of the cases. Lockridge was always fascinated by the details of McCaleb's stories about the bureau and his investigations.

  "I've got to make a phone call now, Bud," McCaleb now called over. "I'll talk to you later."

  "Sure. Make your call. Take care of business."

  He waved and disappeared down the hatchway into his boat's cabin. McCaleb shrugged and made his call after looking up the number he had for Jaye Winston in his book. After a few seconds he was connected.

  "Jaye, it's Terry McCaleb. You remember me?"

  After a beat, she said, " 'Course I do. How is it going, Terry? I heard you got the new ticker."

  "Yeah and I'm doing okay. How about you?"

  "Same old same old."

  "Well, you think you'll have a few minutes if I swing by this morning? You got a case I want to talk about."

  "You on the private ticket now, Terry?"

  "Nah. Just doin' a favor for a friend."

  "Which one is it, the case I mean?"

  "James Cordell. The ATM case on January twenty-two."

  Winston made ahmmph sound but didn't say anything.

  "What?" McCaleb asked.

  "Well, it's funny. That case has gone cold on me but now you're the second person to call about it in two days."

  Shit, McCaleb thought. He knew who had called.

  "Keisha Russell from the Times ?"

  "Yup."

  "That's on me. I asked her for the clips on Cordell. But I wouldn't tell her why. That's why she called you. Fishing."

  "That's what I thought. I played dumb. So who is the friend who talked you into this?"

  McCaleb recounted how he had been asked to look into the murder of Gloria Torres and how that ultimately led him to the Cordell case. He acknowledged that he was getting no help from the LAPD and that Winston was his only alternate route into the case. He left out the fact that his new heart had come from Gloria Torres.

  "So did I hit it right?" he asked at the end. "Are they connected?"

  Winston hesitated but then confirmed his assumption. She also said her case was in a holding pattern at the moment, pending new developments.

  "Listen, Jaye, I'll be right up front with you. What I'm hoping to do is come out, maybe take a look at the books and whatever else you care to show me, then be able to go back to Graciela Rivers and tell her all that could be done has been done or is being done. I'm not trying to be a hero or to show anybody up."

  Winston didn't say anything.

  "What do you think?" McCaleb finally asked. "You got some time today?"

  "Not a lot. Can you hold on?"

  "Sure."

  McCaleb was put on hold for a minute. He paced around the deck and looked over the side at the dark water his boat floated on.

  "Terry?"

  "Yo."

  "Look, I've got court at eleven downtown. That means I have to be out of here by ten. Can you make it before then?"

  "Sure. How's nine or nine-fifteen?"

  "That'll work."

  "Okay, and thanks."

  "Look, Terry, I owe you one, so I'm doing this. But there's nothing here. It's just some scumbag out there with a gun. This is three-strikes shit, that's all."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I've got another call on hold here. We'll talk when you get here."

  Before McCaleb got ready to go, he stepped up onto the dock and walked over to the Double-Down. The boat was the marina eye-sore. Lockridge had more possessions than the boat was built to hold. His three surfboards, his two bikes and his Zodiac inflatable were stored on the deck, making the boat look like a floating yard sale.

  The hatch was still open but McCaleb saw and heard no activity. He called out and waited. It was bad marina etiquette to step onto a boat uninvited.

  Eventually, Buddy Lockridge's head and shoulders came up through the hatch. His hair was combed and he was dressed now.

  "Buddy, what do you have going for today?"

  "Whaddaya mean? The same thing I've always got going. A big goose egg. What'd you think, I was going to Kinko's to update my r‚sum‚?"

  "Well, look, I need a driver for the next few days, maybe more. You want to do it, the job's yours. I'm paying ten bucks an hour plus any meals. You'd have to bring a book or something because there will be a lot of sitting around waiting for me."

  Buddy climbed all the way up into the cockpit.

  "Where're you drivin
' to?"

  "I've got to go out to Whittier. I need to leave in fifteen minutes. After that, I don't know."

  "What is it, some kind of investigation?"

  McCaleb could see the excitement building in Buddy's eyes. He spent a lot of time reading crime novels and often recounted their plots to McCaleb. This would be the real thing.

  "Yeah, I'm looking into something for somebody. But I'm not looking for a partner, Buddy, just a driver."