Private Midnight: A Novel

caught myself saying, I want to be the first to know about anything that’s not above board, and El Miedo said, You would. That’d be just like you. You pussy.

I heard a mention of prior convictions … and I didn’t think suspended sentence or time off for good behavior, I thought about my convictions. I’d had infractions. I’d had warnings. I’d been written up. But convictions…. Had I ever had any of those? Really?

Even when I had the shakes I hadn’t been as shaky as I’d been at the grand jury that morning. Coming back to the Precinct, it just got worse. The whole welter of phrases and faces. Arraignments. Bail postings. Extradition orders. Interstate flight.

I was trying to get up to speed on the Whitney case when the Captain fronted me for a chat. He called our prep briefing sessions chalk talks, as if we were back in high school. He’d come up through Alcoholic Beverage Control and COMPSTAT—terrifically appropriate training for someone heading a major case squad like Robbery-Homicide. He looked, dressed and tried to talk like Larry King, and could recite every section of the California Penal Code. He was waffling on to me about some regulation, when I got hand-delivered the final divorce agreement from Polly’s lawyer. Their office, on her instructions no doubt, was always sending the stuff to work, so in case anyone in the station house just might’ve happened by some mad chance not to have heard, they’d get the picture.

And what a pretty typical picture it was. Especially for a cop. It felt like cold paper to me, but coming not long after my partner on the job had requested a transfer, it didn’t make me feel so hot. Bruce Wyburn, who’d worked with me less than a year, had given me the heave-ho. A guy named Bruce, for God sakes. I signed on the dotted line and tried to focus. But I couldn’t. The song had crept into my mind again. The tune. Her voice.

It was one of those obscure jazz weepers—with the kind of sentimental lyrics you hear when you’re weaving out of a fern bar—the melody something a spare change saxophone would do in a tiled tunnel by a bus stop … always wavering and wandering, getting away from you … then slipping an evening-cool hand back into your pocket when you were well past. That’s what it sounded like. The past. Lost secret moments that hurt you to recall and yet you longed to regain—and believed you could recapture … like an escaped felon … but only while the song lasted. As if, just beyond the bars of the music, she … whoever she was … was waiting beneath a streetlight for you. Time had changed its mind … summer was back for a refill and the precious sorrow was about to begin again. Wayward Heart … always leads me in danger … of staring fondly at strangers …

It was nothing that some goat hair and dynamite couldn’t fix, but I’d taken the pledge. Not even El Miedo could scare me back in the gutter again. That made it line ball which I hated more … the emptiness of the weekend or …

… also referred to as … perdida del alma … Susto is an illness attributed to a frightening event that causes the soul to leave the body. Individuals with susto also experience significant strains in key social roles. Symptoms may appear any time from days to years after the fright is experienced. It is believed in extreme cases, susto may result in death … Ritual healings are focused on calling the soul back to the body and cleansing the person to restore bodily and spiritual balance.

—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR)

THE

DARK

WAY

HOME

T WAS WHAT MY MOTHER WOULD’VE CALLED A BIG floppy day. As in hot—brutally hot for only early May. I called it ball-sweating, and out of the scorching blue, in struts Jack McInnes. I might not have recognized him if it hadn’t been for the Brut 33. Can’t say what it was exactly that was different, but something. Hadn’t seen him in just on a year and then he stunk into my cubicle as if I was expecting him. As if. I was getting ready to go meet Padgett to take a statement in the Whitney case. As soon as I realized that it was in fact Cracker Jack, I tried to look even busier. But I was on my guard from the get-go. Jack had this unearthly ability to start shit—to get you in over your head before you even knew it. He laid a business card down on my blotter and walked out. Not one word. I was relieved. At first. The smell of the Brut was enough to deal with. It brought back the whole dark tangle from before.

Once upon a crime we worked Vice together over in Wetworld, the street name for the Warfield district—partners in an op to take down Freddy Valdez. I’d been seconded because I speak decent Spanish. Things were cooking along OK until Jack got a little too cozy with Raven, Valdez’s favorite whore at the Jaguar House. She tipped him off to a score he could skim and wound up with a police caliber bullet in her left breast on a ruptured waterbed with red satin sheets soaked in even redder blood. A wad of hundred dollar bills that smelled suspiciously like those bags of stale peanuts they sell at the racetrack found its way into my pocket. Exactly $10,000 when I counted it over a bottle of Vat 69 behind the Chicken Shack.

The guy who set up the deal was known as the Mongoose. Whether he had a personal beef with Valdez I don’t know. But he got greedy. Then Raven got her thong in a knot about Freddy dissing her somehow. McInnes caught a whiff of opportunity and cut me in before I had a chance to say no, gracias. As my oldest and pretty much only friend, Jimmie One-Leg, had once told me, McInnes is what you could become, if you’re not careful. We were shooting eight ball at Jimmie’s club at the time, and I remember I almost gouged a strip in the putting green.

How much old Cracker pocketed I never asked, and whether he pulled the trigger or the Mongoose, I didn’t want to know. The 10 G was my take for keeping quiet and not asking questions. The first serious felony I’d ever been party to. I’d like to think my last.

Of course Valdez was no fool. News was out on the street by the time I finished throwing up in a little park near my house. My wife Polly was just as quick, but she didn’t ask any questions. Sweet Polly Purebred never did.

Two days later, the Mongoose was found with his forehead blown off, his own wiped down Colt Cobra beside him. The next day McInnes and I were sitting in a bar at Frontera and 6th waiting to meet a snitch when a Columbian in an aluminum gray suit walks in. I figured this was it. Out of towner hired to do the deed. I half wanted to let him. Then he spilled. Valdez’s fat frijole heart had attacked him when he was doing the nasty with some new black chick. His contract on us wasn’t going to be paid and there was actually a bit of celebration amongst the Latino Brothers about his demise. The op was a bust but we were in the clear for the moment in Wetworld, and as far as we knew, no one on the Force was the wiser. McInnes ordered a double. I vomited my guts out on the way home. The next week I went back to Robbery-Homicide and never said another word to Jack. Didn’t want to see him again, and hadn’t until he came in with the card. I should’ve thrown it out, but you can’t turn your back on a guy like that. Old friends like Jack make you paranoid, if you’re smart. I slipped the card into my pocket and hurried to meet Chris.

We were going to interview a fresh widow—a special breed I always enjoyed. It was usually a snap to get a squirm of submission out of them. If there was anything that wasn’t kosher, they’d be working the grief show hard. And if there was any real change on the table, the squirm could be particularly satisfying, with an almost guarantee of some titty getting flashed.

Her late husband was Deems Whitney, a real estate tycoon found dead in his burned up Mercedes at a lookout on La Playa, the day after he’d fairly publicly changed his will. The new wife was still under warranty, sixteen years younger, with a nice set. The dead man’s three grown kids, who thought they stood to inherit at least two mil each, not including a pleasure palace near the Gardens, smelled last week’s fish.

Chris Padgett, my new partner, was 32 and still moist behind the ears. I called him Cub—as in Cub Scout. He hated that. At 49, I was doing the uncle / brother thing, teaching him the ropes. This was only our third case together.

On the surface, Whitney appeared to have committed an extravagant see-you-later. The lover’s lane turnout in question commanded a good view of the harbor despite a lot of development nearby, some of which he’d played a key role in. As the event had occurred early in the morning, it wasn’t surprising that the RP was a lone dog walker. According to his testimony, there was no one else around. Whitney was last seen dowsing his Mercedes saloon inside and out with gasoline. Then he slipped inside. The vehicle erupted in flames and then partially exploded. There was no evidence of any car bomb and the Forensics investigation indicated Whitney himself had lit the fire with a cigarette lighter. The thing that made it doubly hard to process was that the remains of his badly charred corpse showed that he had been chained inside the car, which going with the Forensics theory, meant that before setting the interior alight, he’d secured himself in such a way as to make exiting the car impossible. The full fuel tank had been fed with soaked wadding to try to make it blow—which it had. It wasn’t any kind of suicide like I’d ever seen, and I’d seen them all, from a 12-gauge in the mouth to guys who got clever with shoelaces. DNA from the barbecue indicated similarities to Whitney—although not a direct match. Another incongruity. But with that kind of weenie roast, who knows. To my instincts, the whole thing reeked. Greed, rage, accelerants. We couldn’t put anyone else at the scene and the dog walker’s story checked out. Nevertheless, I found it hard to accept that a millionaire businessman with a trophy wife and no record of depression or mental illness would do himself in that way.

Then there was the revised will. He’d been remarried for five months. Why hadn’t he changed it earlier if he’d wanted to be so generous? And why such an aggressive prenup? Things didn’t tally. Given the significant financial motive, the new flesh was the prime candidate for further inquiry. Maybe the Forensics boys were right and Whitney had just cracked. But it didn’t hurt to look a little deeper. I told the Cub Scout to take her back to the station. He told me to fuck off. I think Chris actually liked me. He was good at pretending anyway. The curvy Mrs. Whitney would lawyer up faster than she could reveal more cleavage, but as long as I kept the paperwork in order, I figured he’d slam dunk it whichever way it panned out—and he’d have learned something about looking beyond the obvious. I pulled out the card McInnes had left. It gave me the feeling—like El Miedo was awake and watching—like something was going to go down. What can I say? I’m superstitious. Always have been. You’d have been too, in my shoes.

The marriage with Polly was my second time at bat. Since leaving her and the house in Vanilla Land, I hadn’t had a drink, and the only action I’d gotten was one night back in Wetworld with a butterface hooker called Echo (because she repeated every damn thing you said). Muzzle velocity was slow but I hit the target and she saluted the cannon. Still, that part of town was filled with unexploded ordnance. I couldn’t face it before sundown, but I could feel El Miedo coming on. I had to do something. I found myself examining the card. It had an unexpected texture to it, slippery and sticky all at once, with just a street address on it—4 Eyrie Street, an address I recognized as being in Cliffhaven. The numbers and lettering were made of scarves—colorful silk scarves neatly curved and arranged. My first thought was that it was some high class hooker. McInnes had no doubt heard about me and Polly. Probably about Wyburn too. Maybe he was trying to do me a favor. Then again, maybe he was just trying to do me. I couldn’t get a steady fix on the vibe. But I needed more female trouble like I needed another kidney stone or a subpoena. I decided to head over to the Long Room and shoot pool with Jimmie—see if he’d gone to the doctor like I’d been telling him. That old gimp could make me worry like a mother hen. Instead I found myself driving over to Cliffhaven.

The district used to have some high brow mansions, but during the War the big places got divided up or turned into rooming houses for drunks and servicemen. Now a lot of them had been chopped up into apartments or bulldozed to make way for newer high rises. In some cases, the history had just been plowed under, leaving gaping pits and vacant lots waiting for someone with enough dough, like the late Mr. Whitney, to erect another cement and glass monster.

The neighborhood had been built on a granite and sandstone escarpment, riddled with smugglers’ caves it was said. Half sat up on a bluff. The rest was a nest of dwellings constructed around tunnels and cellars bored into the rocks and serviced by steep narrow stairs. Down below was a landfill spit, formerly home to Zagame’s, a gangster-owned seafood restaurant that had been torched a couple of months before. The fire had swept across the car lot into Funland, one of the last great derelict seaside amusement parks, a place that was so melancholy it always cheered me up. The park had been struggling before the blaze and had been shut down tight ever since. I pulled up at the Cyclone fence and gazed at the wreck of the Scenic Railway with the huge seahorse made of plywood, and rows of shattered light bulbs. You got the feeling that if you kept watching, you could see those broken bulbs fall down into the water one by one. I took another look at the card and got a shock. The lettering seemed to have changed colors—and the stock seemed to be a heavier weight. It was little unnerving. The address was the same though. 4 Eyrie Street.

I sat in my car down by the closed up gates to Funland, savoring the residual odor of some green enchilada I’d eaten at the wheel while waiting to bust the chops of a fence over on Republic. It was peaceful watching the trash drift between the shuttered ticket booths. Padgett phoned in with a report on the widow. He was a diligent Cub Scout, I had to give him that. Wasn’t his fault that his life had been such a straight drive, although sometimes he had just a little too much bounce in his stride. Like a guy striding down the fairway, and not ducking and weaving on streets of whores and dealers—spittle and grime—and things no one in their right mind would want to know about. He’d learn.

A freighter passed by in the distance—probably full of electronic gear I couldn’t afford anymore. I tried to remember how I’d spent the ten grand McInnes had divvied me in for, but all I could bring to mind was a mammoth stainless steel barbecue that Polly had nicknamed the Beast. Just before I left her to the lawn nazis, I found there were mice living in it. My cell rang again. Her lawyer’s secretary. The cunt. Dragging me through the dirt. I looked back down at the card again.

Jack’s normal style would’ve been something more along the lines of Get Horizontal at the Vertical Smile. This had an unpredictable level of class to it. But it was a hooker, I was pretty sure. It was trouble I was certain.

All the smells and feels of Wetworld came back. Sailors and cradle robbers—the girls appearing like hastily planted flowers. Runaways from Spokane … rebel daughters from some Main Street in the Midwest. Strippers past their use-by-date trying to hide their wrinkles.

Then out of the blue neon one summer night, there’d suddenly be this lap dance mirage. A new twilight-blonde mink with jackknife legs and marzipan boots—eyes like bits of bashed-in mirror. I slipped the peculiar card in my pocket and turned on the ignition, feeling like I’d been asleep for a hundred years.

Still, some things never change. Mondays are such damn lonely days.

UMBER 4 EYRIE STREET WAS AS DIFFERENT FROM THE Jaguar House as you could get and as close to a castle as you’d find in Cliffhaven. A cream colored villa packed in against the stone steps connecting the park at the top of the bluff to one antique streetlight down at the bottom on the ribbon of asphalt between burnt-out Zagame’s and Funland. It was a solid seven figure address. I felt my Buick’s tires compress against the curb and switched off my cell. I had an intuition that whatever lay inside—wherever the situation was, I wouldn’t want to be taking a call smack dab in the middle of it.

There was a tall iron gate with a dragon medallion on it guarding the driveway, but it was locked without an intercom box. When I crossed the street to access the stone stairway, I saw a sliver of lawn and a clean bed of geraniums under the front bay window. I seemed to remember a poem from high school by T.S. Eliot about a madman shaking a geranium. I hated school like poison. Which is maybe why I didn’t learn to hate poison enough.

I got to the narrow stack of sandstone steps—maybe two-thirds of the way to the top, with no houses below to block the view, but a demolished and partially leveled site for one on the first cross-path up from the streetlight. Above and behind I could see the scaffolding bones of some construction project, although it was hard to judge the proposed size of the building at this stage. I should’ve turned around and gone home. But I kept seeing the scarves that formed the address on the card. Who has just an address on a card unless it’s something bent? Or very gracefully curved. I’m not the kind of guy who gets scared by some tricky card.

I opened the stiff little gate to the garden and spat out a wad of gum into the geraniums. I reached into my coat pocket for another stick as I strode up the steps—and was surprised to find a Camel. I must’ve not worn that coat for a while. I used to smoke like a coal plant until I quit cold. And don’t think El Miedo made that easy.

The porch was swept as clean as a rich old lady’s kitchen floor, and for an instant I imagined that some wealthy white-haired woman lived there. Maybe she had some private security needs. McInnes had always done freelance stuff—most of it legit, for him. He’d heavied whiplash fakes for a PI company, done personal protection, debt collection. I could handle that. I started to relax and reached in my pocket for the Camel. Then the front door opened and I saw her for the first time—but it was really more like seeing for the first time. I didn’t even know I’d put the cigarette, my first in months, into my mouth. Her eyes moved on me like a pit boss.

You can’t smoke in the house, she said, and lit me up.

I dropped the cig and ground it under my heel on the welcome mat that read Hello Goodbye in bristle letters.

She let me pass and I caught a hint of her perfume. I couldn’t place it and I’ve had women tell me I know a lot about perfume. But it had the expensive hint of entrapment. She closed the door behind us and we were standing in a Victorian-era entryway, gaudy and austere all at once. There was a black bamboo umbrella holder in the corner with a white parasol poking out and a rose globe with filigreed brass overhead. Polished wooden steps with a red Persian patterned runner climbed to a landing and then zigzagged out of sight. At the base was one of those Sweetheart stair elevators set into a wrought iron frame with mythological faces peering out. To the right, through French glass doors was a sitting room inhabited by a pink satin sofa with mahogany paw feet, a leather library chair and a fireplace topped by a marble mantel. On view was an original looking 18th century or so clock. Beside it was a sex toy. I figured my first assessment was dead on the money. It was starting to look like I knew where I was after all. Of course the moment I thought that, I recalled how much danger that kind of relaxation had gotten me into before. There’s something about being a cop. You can’t relax. Something is bound to break out right in front of you. Or behind you.

Why are you late? she asked, plucking out a long beige cigarette from an enameled case and inserting it in a gold holder.

I’d somehow gotten hold of her lighter and was put in the awkward position of igniting the tip of her cigarette before I gave it back. She slipped into the sitting room, then into the library chair. I heard more than saw her slap the uncomfortable looking sofa, although I couldn’t work out how she’d reached over that far. It reminded me of the way you’d summon a dog.

She wasn’t beautiful in any conventional way. Early 40s, maybe late 30s. Five foot eight or thereabouts … brunette to auburn shoulder length hair. It was hard to tell the eye color. Somewhere in the brown to hazel range. I got the feeling that she had a full sensual body but it was impossible to be sure because she was covered up in a pricey velveteen lounge suit the color of ashes of rose. Made me want to do a pat down. She wore no foundation make-up. Just mascara and Seville leather tinted lipstick. Her face, or my impression of it anyway, seemed to arrive intermittently, as if broadcast from some distance.

I tried to avoid looking at the Chinese balls on the mantel, shiny silver on a length of beaded tassel. They seemed to demean the richly decorated clock.

I know what you’re thinking, she said with her teeth clamped on the holder.

I dropped the long beige cigarette from my lips, hastily retrieving it, before it burned the Turkish rug. When had I accepted one of hers? I tossed the smoke in the grille of the fireplace.

Then you know I’m thinking that I’m not late. I’m just here, I said. Women always think they know what you’re thinking—that they know you because you’re a man. Then they complain when you don’t share. Shit.

Oh, really? she laughed, and blew a smoke ring that circled my head like a noose. Where would you like to be? Back in the valley with the shitkickers—and what do you call them—mojados? You’re the mongrel product of two misdirected machismo cultures, amigo.

How do you know that? I asked.

How trumps why in my book every time. Did you get good look at the assailant? Can you pick him out of a line-up? Will you go all to pieces on the stand?

But damn McInnes. I kept trying to think what I’d told him about my past.

You’re an open book, she shrugged and went over and manipulated the window blind. The sun was still hot and ripe, like a blood orange. That freighter I’d seen before was still going past, unless it was one just like it. I suddenly felt very tired. She walked back to the library chair and sat down again.

You’re tired, she said.

Yeah, I nodded. I’m tired of … I was going to say having my chain pulled, but when I thought about it … allegations, alimony, AA … being single again … yeah, I was tired of …

Everything, she answered, and her voice changed. Soothing … like calamine lotion or aloe vera. You want something you don’t know how to ask for. That’s why you’re here. You’ve come looking for something beyond anything you could expect—or imagine.

I wanted to say something sarcastic, but I couldn’t help thinking she was damn right.

What about you?

You may call me Genevieve, she said and pressed down on the arm of her chair, which released a brass ashtray. She crushed out the butt. And I’m going to call you Sunny.

S-sonny? As in little boy …?

She pointed out the window at the tortured ball that was setting the windows on fire like lights at an accident. S-U-N-N-Y.

My mother had called me that—before Dad died. It was weird.

M-my name’s Ritter, I grumbled.

B-birch Ritter, she mimicked, becoming hard again. What did kids call you? Bitch? Shitter? Switch Hitter?

Yeah … I chuckled. Couple of kids did make that mistake. Once.

Birch had been my grandfather’s name. The kids’ nickname that hurt the most was actually Cheese Grater on account of my acne, which set in early and checked out late.

But you learned ‘em didn’t you? she nodded, the orange-red glow filling the room but not quite reaching her face. What do you weigh? 230-240? With hands like meat slabs.

I w-was a wrestler in school, I said—not sure why. You can’t blame a guy for being big. I hadn’t eaten myself there. I was born that way. At least I had a good head of hair.

A way for you to be intimate and violent with other boys without calling attention, she said.

I let that pass. When it comes to looks, I have all the sex appeal of a bar code. The acne scars didn’t help, but all that oil had dried up at last, just like my self-esteem when I was a young buck. As a grown man what women liked about me was my size, the sheer don’t-mess-with-me bulk. Didn’t always work—but that’s what fists and 9 mm’s are for. Yes, I’d had a few biffs on the chin and my jaw and nose broken more than once. But I never ended up in the ICU on a respirator. Other men had.

You chose police work because of the violence. The same reason you joined the Army before that. You thrive on violence, Sunny. But only if it’s approved. Like wrestling. You need an arena, a badge. Sanction.

The sunlight was starting to make me hot and itchy. Where was this broad headed?

"And you were attracted by the gear, the equipment. The uniforms. The weapons. You like the power, but you adore the objects and implements. You appreciate textures. Steel. Vinyl. Rubber. Velvet."

Is that why you think I’m here? I asked. You some whips and chains gal?

Sunny, you’re already so chained up, I doubt you’d notice any others, she answered softly. You’re here, as I told you, because you want to see life through a new window.

Well, I shrugged. I’m not liking the view from here.

She stood up and unzipped the lounge suit, which fell away onto the floor, where I saw she was barefoot. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?

She was stark naked underneath. Heavy well-formed breasts with unusually large nipples, but a narrower waist than I’d have thought. Punishingly narrow. And skin that seemed much too clear and tight for a woman her age. Didn’t seem right.

I still don’t like the view, I gulped and tried to get up off the sofa. Talk about a well-trimmed lawn.

Then you must be blinded, she smiled.

That does it, I thought. Door time.

Not permanently, she laughed, and then from under the chair she pulled out a yellow scarf made of raw silk with a delicate fringe on the ends. It was like the scarves on the card, the invitation that had lured me there.

Sure, I snorted. You tie that around my head and then what? I end up with a knife at my jugular?

Is that what you’d like, Sunny?

Stop calling me that.

El Miedo was starting to close in. A claustrophobic amputated feeling.

I can do something you can’t imagine. You’re trying but you can’t. I could send you out that door right now, and it would drive you wild. Not knowing.

I managed to rise.

I could send you away, Sunny. But that really would be cruel. Worse than any whip—or branding iron.

The mention of a branding iron got me. Why was the sun so fierce? It was like an alarm that wouldn’t stop blaring.

Do you know what the scarf smells like? she whispered, snaking out her arms and passing the fabric slowly between her legs.

Jesus, I breathed.

He left earlier. But he’s coming back.

I tried to grin. So, you’re just going to blindfold me. And then I’ll tell you … what I …

You don’t need to say anything. And you don’t listen well enough yet to hear me.

I don’t get it then, I shrugged, and realized I was sitting back down on the sofa.

That’s why you want to stay. Why you will stay.

Her voice worked like cortisone on an achy joint.

Do I take off my clothes?

She solemnly shook her head. "Another time perhaps. I already know exactly how you look. You think I’m naked,