77th Street Requiem Read online

  “Good story,” Frady said, but he checked his watch as if he had someplace else to be right then. “Wish I’d been there.”

  “Where you shoulda’ been is court.” Hector, forgetting caution, pushed away Mike’s restraining hand and grabbed Frady’s sleeve. “We go to the arraignment, and the asshole’s public defender starts whining about police brutality, says that Mike cuffed his client and told the alleged victim to beat him with his stick. The judge turns to Mike, says, ‘Officer Flint, can this allegation be true?’ And Mike says …” Hector started to laugh and couldn’t go on, but laughing at the wrong time was why Hector never could tell a story right. Senecal prodded him until he caught his breath. “So, the judge asks Mike if he gave his stick to the victim. And Mike turns and gives the judge that innocent librarian look, and he says, ‘Your Honor, does that story sound reasonable to you?’”

  By then, they had gathered an audience; good storytelling always does. While the other three men attracted women with their good looks, Mike’s asset was personality. A couple of the women started cheering about the rapist taking his medicine, draped their perfumed arms around Mike, and wanted more details. Wanted him. Someone bought Mike a drink. He blushed, dropped his head, laughed into his chest.

  “Good thing we’re all family,” he said.

  According to Hector, Frady seemed distracted. At 8:30 on Hector’s watch, Frady told the others he had to call his girlfriend. Telephone company records show that the call was placed at 8:34 and lasted ten minutes, thirty-three seconds. The girlfriend corroborated the records.

  Hector remembered Frady excusing himself to make a second call at around 9:15. There are no records of a second call. Any number of things could have happened: the number he dialed was busy, or he changed his mind and didn’t call at all. Maybe he ran into someone on the way to the telephone and stopped to talk in the corridor beyond the bar.

  There is a possibility that Frady needed a private conversation with someone who was there that night, and they stepped outside into the rock garden. His girlfriend’s ex-lover, who also worked out of Seventy-seventh Street, was in the bar at some point in the evening. No one seems to remember when the ex, a cop named Ridgeway, arrived, only that he was shit-faced when he left at ten o’clock. When questioned, Ridgeway said he was so drunk that he blacked out the entire night, couldn’t remember anything.

  It is also possible that Hector, after his fifth beer, was simply wrong about a second call. There were a lot of people in the Embers Room by 9:15, a lot of coming and going and table-hopping. Who could keep track of anyone?

  There is a consensus that at 10:40 Frady said he was late for a date in Long Beach. After his good-byes, he left the academy, alone, driving his own two-year-old gold Pinto station wagon. At that point he had been drinking for over four hours. Mike Flint didn’t remember Frady as being drunk when he gave him a farewell handshake. But by 10:40 Flint wasn’t in very good shape to judge anyone’s sobriety.

  Roy Frady might as well have driven his car out of the academy lot and into the stratosphere for all anyone has been able to find out.

  Frady never showed up in Long Beach. There has been a lot of speculation about where he might have gone, or who he might have met. Speculation, but no answers.

  After being missing all night, Frady reappeared in the jurisdiction of Seventy-seventh Street Division at 8:30 Saturday morning.

  Mrs. Ella Turner was out of milk that Saturday morning. She had planned to make a special pancake breakfast as a farewell meal for her nephew, who had been visiting for a few weeks. So she sent her fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, and her eighteen-year-old nephew, Walter, to walk to the market two blocks away on Main Street.

  Mrs. Turner specifically reminded the boys not to shortcut through the alley behind Eighty-ninth Street, because everyone in the neighborhood knew that a house on the alley had been burned down after a bad drug deal, and that the people in the house next door ran a bookie operation and car-theft scam. But who can tell teenage boys anything?

  Cutting through the alley behind Eighty-ninth Street, Matthew Turner and his cousin Walter saw Roy Frady lying on the floor of what had been a bedroom in that burned-out house. At first they thought he was a bum sleeping it off and they picked up some gravel to peg him with. But his clothes—pressed chinos, chukka boots, a plaid Pendleton shirt—looked too good for a bum. So they decided he was sick or drunk and might have stumbled in the dark the night before and hurt himself.

  Mrs. Turner’s lectures on Christian charity apparently had some belated effect. The two boys went into the forbidden ruins to help the man. But they stopped when they realized that the Pendleton shirt was wrapped around the man’s head, and that the dark smear they originally thought was vomit was instead the man’s blood and brains leaking through the flannel.

  The burned-out house was rebuilt years ago. Roy Frady’s two young children have children of their own, and do not remember him. In the foyer of the Seventy-seventh Street Division an enlarged and faded black-and-white portrait of Frady hung among the portraits of six other officers killed in the line of duty until the spring of 1995, when the Seventy-seventh Street station was demolished and the portrait was sent to a government warehouse. But don’t construe this to mean that Roy Frady has been forgotten.

  Frady’s murder is still an open case, never solved. The investigation is kept active by one senior homicide detective, who has Frady’s murder book on his desk at Parker Center, the police administration building. Witnesses move, change their stories, die, and all of it is carefully entered into the record.

  Police regularly update a special bulletin asking all law-enforcement agencies to test-fire every 9-mm weapon that is booked in, hoping one day to discover one with characteristics that match the Browning cartridge cases and bullets taken from Frady’s body and found at the scene: 9-mm parabellum, six lands and grooves, right-hand twist, lands .085.

  Even though I am not authorized to see them, I have read the frayed reports in Frady’s murder book. They tell a good story. Good enough that they sold my network on Frady as a subject.

  Roy Frady may have been a bad boy, but he was also one hell of a nice guy. The angle to his story that I found irresistible from the beginning, and the angle that cinched the project, was that there seemed to be a lot of people who wanted Frady dead, and even more who claimed to have done the deed.

  I have the senior detective’s full cooperation on the project. He knows that there is someone out there who knows what happened to Roy Frady between 10:40 Friday night and 8:30 Saturday morning. Publicity can only help find them.

  The detective is due to retire from the department in May. Last night he told me that before he empties his desk drawers into a cardboard box and turns his back on the city forever, Frady’s murder book will be shelved among the closed cases. After he told me that, the detective turned over and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Mike Flint cried out in his sleep and wakened me. The bedside light was on—had been on the last three nights. I leaned over him, watched the nightmare contort the features of his craggy face, wondered which version of the terror was playing this time. The soft light behind his white hair gave Mike an off-center halo, made the sweat on his face all shiny.

  You don’t wake up sleepwalkers, but what are you supposed to do for someone in the middle of a three-night nightmare? Do you let him sleep, hoping he forgets about it in the morning? Or do you rescue him?

  I wiped Mike’s face with a corner of the sheet, then went on to dry his neck and chest. He woke up with a gasp like a drowning man reaching the surface. He grabbed my arm. “Maggie?”

  “You okay?”

  “Hector was here,” he said, his voice loud in the quiet house. He raised up on one elbow to look around the room for Hector. “Hec sat right here on the bed between us. He talked to me.”

  “You were dreaming, Mike.”

  “Jesus, Maggie, it was so real.”

  “What did
he say?”

  “Usual bullshit about the old days.” Mike dropped back against the pillow. “So damn real. We were talking. Then he got up and walked over to the window. Talking all the time—you know how Hector talks—he climbed up on the sill and he jumped. He didn’t say good-bye or anything, he just floated away.”

  “You were crying.”

  “No. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, that’s all.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  He shook his head, splaying damp tendrils of his fine hair on the pillow. “It’s easier to believe Hector can fly than to imagine he’s gone. Hector in a box. Jesus Christ, Maggie. He survives almost twenty-five years working the streets, kicking ass, taking names, buying his own share of lumps. I’ve seen him take on three of the biggest, badass scumbags all at once, all by himself, and he gets nothing more than a scuff on his spit shine. So how is it he goes over to help out a neighbor, and now he’s in a box?”

  “The neighbor had a gun. You always tell me domestic calls are the riskiest.”

  “So, why did he go in there? He’s on his day off. He’s not obligated to do anything. Why did he go talk to the guy? Asshole wants to die, why interfere just because some old lady comes crying, ‘My boy’s going to jump.’ He was supposed to say, ‘So, lady, call nine-one-one and keep off the sidewalk till it’s over.’ This is what I’m going to say in the eulogy: Hec, you big dumb fuck, don’t you remember anything you learned out there?”

  “I didn’t know Hector all that well until we started looking into Roy Frady’s murder,” I said. “I’ll miss him. The interviews he did for me with people who remember Frady are amazingly good, but I can hardly watch them without coming apart. How did he find all those people after so much time, and how did he persuade them to talk to a camera?”

  “Hec was the smartest detective who ever worked this city. The best partner I ever had.” Mike let out a quavery breath. “Jesus Christ, Hector.”

  Mike had tears on his cheeks. He’s one of those throw-backs who thinks he’s too tough to cry and too tough to need any help. I’m forever waiting him out, looking for the back way in. If he’s difficult, he’s also worth the effort. I got up on my knees with my back to him and started detangling the sheets so he could finish what he needed to do without a witness.

  He put a hand on my arm when I bent over him to free the sheet caught under his hip. I kissed his flat abdomen, rubbed my cheek against the long muscle of his marathoner thigh.

  “Please,” he said, and caressed my shoulder. When I stroked him, though, he stayed soft. When I went down on him, I could feel his deep sighs, but they were the sighs of grief and not of passion. The sort of comfort he thought he wanted, his body would not give him.

  I sat up, took him by the shoulders, and pulled him up eye-to-eye with me. “Let’s run.”

  “In the middle of the night?” He put on his glasses to look at the clock. “It’s three-thirty. The neighbors will call the cops.”

  “You are the cops.” I got out of bed. “Come on. Get dressed.”

  The night was clear, cold for October. We warmed up in the backyard of the rented house we shared in South Pasadena. Mike’s nearly grown son, Michael, lived in the small guesthouse at the bottom of the yard. Tuition alone at Michael’s private college was a stretch on Mike’s detective salary; there wasn’t enough left for campus housing. Mike stopped at the guesthouse on his way to the alley gate, listened at his son’s door, and checked the lock. It’s a reflex. I had looked in on my teenage daughter, Casey, before we came downstairs.

  The dog followed us out of the house. He loves to run with us, but Mike stopped him at the gate and told him to stay, leaving him standing sentinel over the yard.

  Off in the distance I could hear the freeway, a sound like rushing waves. But around us there was the profound silence of a neighborhood asleep. Even the mange-eaten poodle at the corner didn’t bother to come out and bark at us when we passed his fence.

  We ran at an easy pace down the middle of the street, a luxury of open space, our shoes a soft pat-pat on the asphalt. Mike is by far the better runner in range and speed and generally looking cool than I am, but he stayed close beside me. For social reasons, I thought.

  Halloween was less than a week away. Some of the bare sycamore trees on our block were hung with big plastic pumpkins, as they would be hung with plastic Christmas bulbs in another month. A few families had done their best to make spooky yard displays: bedsheet ghosts, stuffed-blue-jean scarecrows, witches draped with polyester cobwebs. By day they were funny, but in the shadows of night they were eerie, like prowlers lurking under dark windows.

  We passed a yard lined with cardboard headstones. I smiled as I read the handwritten inscriptions, recognizing the names of the kids whose balls kept finding their way over our fence: Here Lies Chris, Died for a Kiss. Poor Hannah, Tripped on a Banana. Final Resting Placey, Our Ugly Sister Tracey.

  “Seven months to retirement,” Mike said, reading the headstones as we passed by. “The four of us, we went through so much together, we were always going to go out together. Frady’s gone, now Hector’s gone. Just me and Doug left.”

  “The Four Horsemen,” I said.

  He bumped my shoulder. “That was a long time ago. A very long time ago.”

  “What are you going to say in the eulogy?”

  “That we’ve been cheated out of one hell of a retirement party.”

  Mike picked up the pace, challenging me to keep up. We crossed Fair Oaks at Mission Street and began to sprint when the park was in view. I dropped back when he entered the park: the grass was uneven, like hammered silver in the pale moonlight. Instead of running on ahead, Mike began to tease me, egging me into playing follow the leader. He ran into the children’s sandlot, then vaulted through a swing, making sure I was behind him. He pounded up one side of the teeter-totter and rode it down the other. On the slide ladder he touched only two rungs on his way to the top; I hit every two. There was no way I could keep up with him when he turned it on, so he ran in circles around me, made me mad.

  In the picnic area, Mike jumped onto the bench attached to a picnic table, stepped up onto the table, then in a long leap, hit the ground on the far side. He vaulted three tables the same way. I pumped as hard as I could, skipped the third table, and reached the fourth one right on his heels. I was on top of the table when he touched down on the grass and started to sprint. I pushed myself into the air, flew into his back, brought him down flat on his belly. Sitting on his legs, I yanked down the back of his shorts, smooched his round, white ass—a shiny full moon against the darker turf—and then I was gone before he had his pants back up and had found his feet.

  I ran as fast as I could, but in four steps he caught me around the legs, spun me, dropped me, hard, onto my back, pinned my arms over my head, and straddled me.

  “When will you learn?” he said, whiskering my neck. “Tug on Superman’s cape, you have to pay.”

  “Kissing your sweet butt is all the pay I need.” I struggled under him just so it wouldn’t be too easy, all the time trying not to laugh. Inside his shorts, where he pressed against me, he was hard. I lay still and looked up into his Bogart face, watched his smile finally break wide.

  “Mike.”

  “You can’t get away from me.”

  “I don’t want to get away. Do me now.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Doug Senecal dropped in for breakfast. To check on Mike he said, but it was Doug who looked in need of cheering. He set a place for himself at the table next to Michael, Mike’s college sophomore son, and dropped an English muffin into the toaster. Michael filled him in: school was fine, his mother was fine, his girlfriend was still his girlfriend, and yes, it was nice to have Casey and me cluttering up the house after baching for so long with his dad.

  “I ever tell you about the day I first met Mike?” Doug asked Michael as he poured his second cup of coffee.

  “I don’t think so.” Michael, a more handsome v
ersion of his father, winked at me—we had all heard the story. “Tell me about it.”

  “I was still a probationer, fresh out of the academy. Right off, they assigned me to Seventy-seventh, toughest division in the city. We’re talking war zone. Seventy-seventh is where the real cops were, the old-time gunslingers, legends. Street brawlers, guys’d as soon shoot ’em as book ’em. I was just a sweet young thing back then. And just a tad nervous.”

  Mike laughed. “Trust me, you were never a sweet young thing, Doug. And you weren’t a little nervous, you were all but shitting your pants.”

  Doug leaned back in his chair and smiled at Michael, woebegone no more. “I report to roll call, find my name on the assignment sheet, partnered with P-three Flint, my training officer. I start checking name tags. Room’s full of bad-looking guys, big and mean-looking guys. I’m thinking, I’m going to go out there and learn to be a real policeman with one of these cowboys. I’m getting excited. Then I spot the name I’m looking for, Flint, and the guy looks like a librarian. I think, fuck, I’m doomed. I’ll get killed out there, riding Tonto to a scholar when I need the Lone Ranger.”

  Doug and Mike both laughed, a male-bonding thing. Michael got up and refilled my cup and his, patted my back when he sat again; we were outsiders together.

  I said, “But, as it turned out, Mike was the baddest guy in the division.”

  “Yeah.” Doug looked at Mike with pure love. “Taught me everything I know about police work. If it wasn’t for Mike, I’d be a captain now.” He slathered marmalade on his second muffin. “We sure had fun. God, I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.”

  “Partners seven years, shop eighteen A ninety-seven—drove the wheels off that car. With Roy and Hector out there as backup. We were good. Got a lot of criminals off the street.” Mike pushed his plate away and sighed. “They don’t keep partners together that long anymore. You ride with a new man every rotation, you’re never sure you can rely on him or not.”