I drove out to the mall in Glendale, parked in front of a department store, and found my way to the security office. I asked a young woman manning the counter if Randy Fringa was working today. She held up an index finger, mumbled into an old-fashioned two-way radio, and said, “He’ll be back in five.”
When Fringa arrived, he studied me with a sour expression and said, “Do I know you?” He was a skinny man with a bobbing Adam’s apple, who wore a wrinkled short-sleeved white shirt and a stained red polyester tie.
I handed him my card and told him I wanted to talk about Avery Mitchell. He led me to a small, windowless office, sat behind a desk, and crossed him arms over his chest.
I opened a battered metal folding chair leaning against a wall. “So I understand you worked at Hollenbeck. My first training officer ended up as a lieutenant there. That guy was-”
“What do you want to know?”
Most retired cops miss the camaraderie of the station and enjoy swapping news and gossip. I was surprised that Fringa was so hostile.
“I’m looking into Avery Mitchell’s death.”
“I heard it was a suicide.”
“I have reason to believe it wasn’t.”
He tapped my card on his desk. “To tell you the truth, I’m pretty damn pissed off at the LAPD. If I could’ve stayed for thirty, or at least twenty-five, I would’ve have had a decent pension. Something I could’ve lived off of. I might have joined Avery up in Idaho. and spent my days fishing, instead of humping my butt at this chickenshit job.”
“What happened?”
“I took a poke at a some spic who was fat mouthing me.”
“How’d they find out?”
“He was cuffed to a detention bench and this boot with a stick up his ass ratted me out. When I was coming up, boots kept their mouths shut or they wouldn’t last a month in the department. It’s a different fucking world today.”
I nodded and tried to appear sympathetic.
“My captain cut a deal with me. Retire and he wouldn’t write it up. I knew that poke, in today’s LAPD where the politicians run the department, could get me fired. I had twenty years and change, so I pulled the pin.”
“When did you work with Mitchell?”
He studied my card. “I still got buddies in the department. Before I say anything, I’m going to ask them about you. When I’m ready to talk, if I’m ready to talk, I’ll give you a call.”
I knew there was no point in trying to pressure a bitter ex-cop. All I could do was hope I passed muster with his buddies.
I paced on the roof of my apartment after the interview with Fringa. Red-rimmed clouds massed behind the San Gabriels, purple in the waning light. A lost seagull squawked overhead, skimming the rooftops, searching for food. Watching the first stars prick through the sky, I considered the links between Mitchell and Relovich: they were partners when Relovich hit the $60,000 jackpot; they had similar netsukes and ojimes; they had hidden the figures; they had both been murdered.
I knew that when retired or off-duty cops were killed, detectives invariably assumed the homicides were connected to their police work. Often they were wrong. As a result, the detectives frequently ignored key elements of their personal lives that could have led them to the killer. But these two homicides, I suspected, were connected to their days on the street when they were patrol partners. I just didn’t know how.
I also believed that whoever killed Relovich had killed Mitchell. I could understand why Fuqua would want Relovich dead. But what was his link to Mitchell? At the time Relovich had arrested Fuqua for armed robbery, he was no longer partners with Mitchell. Relovich had been promoted and was working as a Harbor division robbery detective, while Mitchell remained a patrol officer in Hollywood. So why would Fuqua go all the way to Idaho to take out Mitchell? That made no sense to me.
When the last light drained from the sky, and the moon rose over the office towers, I walked back down to my loft. I was hungry but discovered my refrigerator was almost empty, with just a six-pack of ale, jars of pickles and mustard, and a can of peaches. I changed out of my suit into jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt and was about to walk to dinner when I heard a knock on the door.
“Who is it?”
“I decided to make like a detective,” Nicole Haddad said. “Just show up at someone’s place without calling.”
I opened the door. “So where’s the boyfriend?”
“The on-again, off-again thing is off-again for a few days. He went out of town.”
“I’m not into the off-again, on-again dynamic. Maybe you should find someone who likes getting jacked around.” I crossed my arms and stared at her. Being Nicole’s backdoor man did not appeal to me. But standing in the doorway, in her tight jeans and black crop top, revealing her tanned stomach and navel pierce, she looked damn good.
“You going to invite me inside or not?”
“No,” I said, waiting a beat to gauge her reaction.
She looked hurt. As she turned to leave, I said, “I was just about ready to get some dinner. You like Korean barbecue?”
“Sounds good to me.”
We walked down Second Street to the edge of Little Tokyo. The restaurant was wedged between a sushi bar and a Japanese candy shop. We passed through the smoky front room to a small patio in back, bracketed by huge stands of bamboo. A waiter fired up the grill, which was built into the middle of our table. Nicole frowned at the menu.
“Why don’t you order for me.”
A few minutes after I ordered, a waiter returned with a pot of roasted wheat tea and then tossed a half dozen thinly sliced strips of marinated beef on the grill, stopping by every few minutes to turn them over. When the beef was ready, Nicole, following my lead, wrapped a piece of meat in a lettuce leaf and dipped it in a dark sauce with her chopsticks.
“Hmm,” she said, nodding appreciatively. “I can taste the soy sauce and garlic. What else?”
“Some oyster sauce, ginger, sesame oil, and a few other things.”
The waiter brought a large stone bowl with rice and an assortment of seafood. He cracked an egg, which cooked as he stirred it into the rice, and served us. I ordered a bottle of Korean rice wine called bek se ju, which was laced with ginseng.
She took a few sips of wine and said, “I like being with you.”
“Why do you like being with someone who is-” I paused, swirling the wine in my glass. “What did you call me that first night-numb?”
“On the surface, you are. But somewhere down there”-she reached across the table and jabbed at my solar plexus-“you’re not.” She smiled lasciviously. “You proved that the other night.”
I filled our wineglasses.
“Maybe you come off like that,” Nicole said, “because of all those bodies you’ve seen as a cop.”
“I saw plenty of bodies before I became a cop.”
“Where was that?”
“I was in the army. The Israeli army.”
“So that’s how you became familiar with Lebanon.”
“That’s right.”
“I remember when Israel invaded Lebanon back in the eighties. I was a little girl and I remember how my father followed all the news.”
“Did you know we were on the same side then?”
“Who’s we?” she asked.
“The Israeli army and the Christians in Lebanon. We were allies. They provided us with a key intelligence network. The Israelis figured they’d drive the PLO out of Lebanon, install a Christian as president who would control the Muslim hordes, among a few other geopolitical goals. Turned into a fucking quagmire.”
“I don’t really know that much about that time. It was something my father followed. To me, it was old country stuff.”
“The relationship between your people and my people-the Jews and the Lebanese Christians-go back a long time. In the thirties, when Zionists first made contact with them, they both thought they had a lot in common. They viewed themselves as enlightened islands of Western culture, surrounded by a sea of uncivilized Muslims. The relationship goes back thousands of years. I remember from my Hebrew school days that King Hiram in Lebanon sent the cedar trees down to Israel for Solomon’s Temple.”
“Why’d you enlist in the Israeli army?”
“I was just a kid, a naive college student. I wanted to protect people. I didn’t want to see any more Jewish victims.”
“Your parents probably weren’t too happy about that.”
“They weren’t. When I joined the LAPD I promised I’d go back at night and get the degree. I eventually did. When I was thirty, at night.”
“Since you solved your case and got on TV the other night, you got your taste of glory. You must be feeling pretty good now that it’s all over.”
“Not really.”
She looked surprised. “Why not?”
“Because it’s not over.”
“Why not?”
“There’s more to the case,” I said, dropping my credit card on the tray. “I’ll tell you about it some other time.”
We walked back to my building, and as we entered the loft, she lifted my leather shoulder holster with the Beretta and the handcuffs tucked in a pouch off the back of a chair. She pulled out the handcuffs, crossed the room, and lightly ran the metal edges across my wrists. “We could have a lot of fun with these.”
“If you’ve seen some of the people I’ve hooked up, you’d have an entirely different image in your mind.”
She slipped her arms around my waist and kissed me lightly on the lips. “By the time I’m done with you, I’ll make sure you have a new image.”
I dipped my knees slightly, grabbed her by the knees, lifted her over my shoulder, and tossed her on the bed. Sitting astride her, I said, “Since they’re my handcuffs, I think I’m the one who’d better do the cuffing.”
“I don’t know if I can handle that,” she said weakly, a rare moment when she seemed to briefly lose her composure.
I pulled the key out of my pocket and clicked open the handcuffs. But before I could slip them on her wrists, my cell phone rang.
“Sorry,” I said, reaching for the phone.
“Can’t you pretend you didn’t hear it.”
I watched her stretch on the bed, her top rising and revealing the edge of her lacy black bra, and seriously considered her suggestion. “Can’t do it,” I said, as I climbed off the bed and answered the phone.
“I asked around about you,” Fringa said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m willing to talk to you.”
“I’ll stop by the mall tomorrow.”
“Make it tonight.”
“Can’t do it tonight.”
“Then you can catch me in two weeks. I’m taking the RV up to Oregon early tomorrow morning. We can talk when I get back.”
“How late you work?”
“Until midnight.”
I looked down at Nicole, splayed on the bed, giving me a half smile, and felt so frustrated, I kicked a chair across the room. “Okay. I’ll be there in a half hour.”
As I slipped off my jeans and T-shirt, tossing them on the bed, and pulled a pair of slacks and button-down shirt out of the closet, Nicole crouched in front of me, licking my stomach. “Can I persuade you to stick around?”
“Wish I could,” I said, my voice catching. “I’ll give you a call when things clear up.”
“The boyfriend’s gone for a few days. Let’s take advantage of our window of opportunity before it closes.”