Hard News Page 9

  Fry made as if to interrupt.

  “Please, Ms. Fry,” Crawford said. “I haven’t begun to consider the issue of custody. However, I feel that it is within Mr. Owens’s rights to have visitation privileges.”

  “He’s not stepping foot in my house,” McCarthy declared.

  “Mr. McCarthy, he will come to your house on any weekend day, with advance notice, of course. He may take the children for six hours,” the judge said firmly.

  Brady said, “Six hours, Judge? My client was hoping to take them to New Mexico for a couple of days at least. Traveling all this way for a few hours is a hardship.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Mr. Brady,” Crawford said. “The fact remains that your client disclaimed responsibility for those children for almost five years. Let’s see how he does with six hours. Custody hearing in seven weeks.”

  In the hall outside the courtroom, Owens said, “I have business in Santa Fe and won’t be able to make it back until the end of the month. I’d like to take them to a baseball or football game.”

  McCarthy glanced at Fry, who nodded. He swallowed at the bile that crept up the back of his throat. “They’ll be ready,” McCarthy said. “But Charley, I know what you’re capable of.”

  The smooth demeanor Owens had displayed inside the judge’s chambers evaporated. “Is that right?”

  “You bet,” McCarthy said. “The thing is, I’m capable of much, much more.”

  “Is that a threat, McCarthy?” Brady demanded.

  “Oh, you better believe it.”

  They stared at each other. Brady blinked first. “Let’s go, Charley.”

  As Brady and Owens walked away, Fry said, “It’s about the best we could have hoped for.”

  “We got crucified,” McCarthy said. “Next time I’ll be a better terrorist.”

  She’s Got a Tragedy Jones …

  THREE HOURS LATER THE disheveled pickup truck wheezing south on the freeway in front of Augustus Croon and Abby Blitzer spewed forth a dense cloud of diesel smoke. The stench poured in through the vents, hanging about the interior of the white Ford Escort. Blitzer choked, “Jesus, Croon, get around this Okie or I’ll suffocate.”

  Croon, who was used to sucking down noxious fumes from his days doing pushups in the SEAL tear gas chamber, startled. “Sorry, Abby.”

  He floored the gas pedal and shot by the truck, which was being driven by an obese woman with no teeth. “Been almost sixty years since Dorothea Lange shot those great pictures and they’re still coming here,” he said.

  Blitzer drummed on the dashboard. “It’s what makes California great: Li’l Abner can tool the freeway right next to Daddy Warbucks.”

  She seemed to like that idea, which warmed Croon’s heart. His partner had been in a foul mood lately. It had been weeks since they’d gotten into a good tragedy. He stifled the urge to moon, contenting himself with quick peeks. He was still amazed to be head over heels with a woman half his size.

  Before Blitzer joined The Post, action held Croon’s heart. Although he’d been a straight A student and salutatorian of his high school class with full scholarship offers from the University of Chicago and Duke, Croon had enlisted in the navy, preferring physical challenge to academia.

  He qualified for SEAL training, made the West Coast team, and spent ten years swimming all night in freezing oceans, storming beaches, reading voraciously, and shooting too many bullets to remember. After a decade of corporal punishment, Croon woke up to realize he no longer enjoyed being told what to do. When his tour ended he decided to pursue a career as a photographer, one of his childhood passions.

  Soon he was out prowling the streets of Honolulu with a scanner, making a name for himself as a shooter willing to go to any extreme for a good picture. After SEAL training, dodging police lines and irate relatives to snap the latest misfortune proved effortless.

  The Post offered Croon a job after he won a first place prize for spot news photography in Hawaii. Lawlor assigned him to the front line: hard news. The ex-underwater demolition expert made it clear when he took the job that he worked alone, no silly reporters to interfere with his all-consuming need to capture events as they happened. After several months on the job the issue was moot; the newsroom had decided that Croon was a post-traumatic stress case who drove the streets salivating at the thought of mayhem.

  All that changed the day the Stanford Hotel burned to the ground. Constructed in the early 1930s as an upscale establishment, the Stanford had steadily descended from swank to second-rate to seedy. Two years before the fire, a Los Angeles developer named Clinton Hand obtained low-income housing funds and converted the Stanford to a single-room occupancy hotel for the elderly. Hand bribed city inspectors to overlook the illegal fire escapes and the shoddy construction materials.

  The fire started at 10:00 P.M. Sixty-seven-year-old Ethel Grace fell asleep while smoking in her fourth floor room. The blaze spread quickly through the thin walls. Within minutes the structure was engulfed in smoke and flames. Without adequate fire escapes, the little old ladies who lived in the Stanford Hotel had nowhere to go but out the windows.

  It was Blitzer’s second week at the paper. She was working nightside general assignment when word reached the newsroom. Croon was staking out the docks for an essay he was doing on violence generated by an ongoing longshoreman’s strike.

  Both of them arrived on the scene simultaneously, both of them instantly absorbed in the grim splendor of terrified old ladies in gauzy white nightgowns falling like snowflakes. Croon leapt the fire barricade to shoot. Blitzer talked to survivors. Two of the women told her the same story—that there’d been complaints about faulty electrical wiring, about the lack of adequate smoke detectors, about the shaky fire escapes.

  “It’s not just that, honey,” a first floor resident named Carey Wilson said. “I worked in my brother’s contracting office for years. I know when a building’s up to code. Fires don’t spread this quick if the walls are put up right.”

  Meanwhile the fire chief had ordered Croon removed from the scene. Blitzer elbowed her way past two cops. She poked her finger into the fire chiefs navel, screaming, “This place is going up too fast for it to be an accident! And the only way the public’s going to get the story is if you let Croon and me do our jobs.”

  The fire chief glanced at the fire, then at Croon and Blitzer. “Just stay out of my way, okay?”

  At that moment, backlit by the flames and nightgowns dropping through the winter night sky, Croon knew he’d met a reporter as tough as himself. Fifteen minutes later he realized he’d met a reporter tougher than half the SEALs he knew.

  It so happened that Clinton Hand, the developer of the Stanford, was in town to oversee the illegal conversion of another flophouse when the fire broke out seven blocks from his digs in a tony $150-a-night hotel. He arrived on the scene in a black Mercedes. A pretty young thing in gold lame stood at his side.

  Carey Wilson limped up and shook her aluminum walker at him.

  “You bastard!” Wilson said evenly. “We asked you to fix those fire escapes for weeks. Now Winny and Kate and Nancy are all dead over there.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dear,” Hand said soothingly. He turned to Blitzer. “She must be upset at the loss. Those escapes were built exactly to code. It’s all in the city documents.”

  “Liar!” Wilson cried. She slapped Hand across the mouth, an event which Croon recorded with his Nikon F4.

  Hand retreated toward his Mercedes. A call to his attorney on the cellular phone seemed appropriate. The pretty young thing in gold lamé sensing her sugar daddy’s impending status implosion, filtered off into the crowd. Blitzer raced after the developer. She stuck her foot in the car doorjamb and grabbed on to the frame of the open window.

  “Is it true you didn’t build to code, Mr. Hand?” she shouted. “What’s the matter, couldn’t make a profit the legal way?”

  Other reporters on the scene heard Blitzer’s interrogation above the ro
ar of the fire. They rushed in behind Croon, who was capturing Hand’s meltdown for the morning editions.

  The developer shrunk from the media swarm’s hornet whine, put the Mercedes in gear, and hit the gas pedal. Blitzer held on to the doorframe, yelling questions at him. She held on when he crabbed the car sideways over the fire hoses. She held on as he accelerated to shake the bantamweight avenging spirit with hair like flames and eyes like stormy oceans.

  The Mercedes was doing thirty-five when Blitzer finally let go; the impact broke two ribs, snapped her wrist, and gashed her forehead. Lying in the street with the pack descending on her—she’d become as integral to the story as the old birds jumping from the ledges—Blitzer felt better than she had in years. Straight Jack Daniel’s had nothing on a chilled adrenaline highball served in the saloon of face-to-face confrontation!

  Croon’s heart swelled with joy. He knelt by her crumpled form. “Abby Blitzer, I think I love you.”

  “That’s nice, Mr. Croon,” she’d replied blearily. “But I don’t think love’s the right drug for me at this moment.”

  Croon cradled her head in his massive hands. “I’ll wait, Abby Blitzer. I’ll wait.”

  Now, as they drove toward the mid-city address where Billy Kemper lived, Croon realized it had been more than a year since he’d declared his adoration and become a fellow witness to calamitous events, an unrequited lover amid the shock of mutilation, a surreptitious mooner at graveside ceremonies.

  “Abby, you don’t talk much about how it was back at the paper in Philadelphia.”

  Blitzer flinched. She’d always been able to keep him off the subject of her past. “Not much to tell. The last couple of years I was a drunk. End of story.”

  “It’s easier sometimes if you talk about it. Did you lose somebody back there?”

  Blitzer shrugged. “Myself.”

  “Other than that?”

  He wasn’t going to let up. She decided to give Croon a little more, something that would stop him cold. “A man I was going to marry,” she said. “A good man.”

  Croon flushed. “A reporter, too?”

  “No, an engineer.”

  “What happened?”

  Blitzer pointed at the exit. “Get off here.”

  Croon flipped the blinker, then glanced at her expectantly.

  “Goddamned McCarthy,” she said. “This isn’t my kind of story, Croon. I’m your basic there’s the ten-car pileup, there’s the drowned child. Find the center of pathos, write it down.”

  Croon, who’d hung around reporters long enough to know a dodge, slipped it and came back in her face. “I’ve been your partner for a more than a year. I deserve to know.”

  “I fell apart,” she said in a stony voice. “We saw each other in a different way and that was the end of it.”

  A pit yawned in his stomach. “You still in love with him, the engineer?”

  Blitzer was quiet for a moment. “No. Not with him. Maybe with the idea of him, if that makes any sense. That’s it, 2100. Pull over.”

  She jumped out before he could ask another question and jogged toward 2100 Pinewood, a small white house with an even smaller lawn. A red cement walkway led to a green front door. The drought-parched lawn reeked of cat. The sun hung low in the west. The blinds were drawn to block the day’s last strong light. Loud country music played inside. They knocked and knocked again. The volume fell.

  A woman called out: “Who’s there?”

  “My name’s Abby Blitzer. I’m here with Augustus Croon. We work for The Post.”

  “Don’t read the papers. Waste of time, sorry.”

  “No, ma’am. We’re not here to sell you a subscription. We’re reporters.”

  There was silence. “What do you want?”

  “Billy Kemper. Does he live here?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “It’s about Carol Alice Gentry,” Croon said.

  Silence again. “He’s sick. Don’t want to see no one.”

  “It’s important, please,” Blitzer pleaded.

  The blinds parted and a woman in her early twenties peeked through. Thick gobs of mascara hung from her eyelids. Her face was pasty with makeup, like oatmeal with powdered sugar on it.

  She disappeared. They heard mumbled conversation. Then the door opened. She stood at the screen, a woman of many curves and angles, all of them magnified by black Lycra exercise shorts a size and a half too small for her and a kelly green stretch top so tight it pinched the nipples of her big breasts into gumdrops.

  “Fifteen minutes,” she said. “Billy’s sick.”

  “Nice to meet you …?” Blitzer said.

  “Mary.”

  “Got a last name, Mary?”

  “Just Mary. I ain’t saying nothin’. He’s in there on the couch.”

  Blitzer came around the front of the ratty couch. Day-old containers of Chinese food sat in a heap on the cheap coffee table. She winced at the sight of Billy Kemper.

  The beating had been a bad one. The left side of his face had taken the brunt, swollen, blackened, and purpled. Stitches webbed his left eyebrow. His right arm hung in a sling. Thick tape swathed his rib cage. She winced again, but forced herself to look. Taut muscles etched his body. His brush-cut hair reminded her of hand-rubbed mahogany. And behind the puffiness, perfect hazel eyes. No wonder Gentry had taken him as her boy toy.

  “We’re helping another reporter, Gideon McCarthy, who’s looking into the murder of Carol Alice Gentry,” Blitzer said. “We heard you knew her.”

  Kemper made a noise that wanted to be a laugh. “Could say that.”

  “Got any ideas who’d want to kill her?”

  “ ’Bout everybody.”

  “How about you?” Croon asked.

  Kemper gave Croon the look of estimation strong men give each other when first meeting. “Maybe once. I got over it.”

  “What happened?” the photographer asked, pointing to the wounds.

  “Got jumped three days ago. Came home from work about eleven. Mary and Tim—I rent a room from them—they was out. Soon as I come through the door I knew it was wrong. That light by Mary’s sewing machine was on. She don’t leave stuff like that on when she goes out. Anyways, I got low, ready. The light went off. There was two, maybe three of them.”

  Mary leaned against a wall by the kitchen. She said, “We found him by the door. Whole place was wrecked.”

  “They take anything? Stereos, television?”

  “Nothin’ we can figure,” Mary said. “Then again, not like there’s much to take.”

  “Carol Alice’s place was broken into before she was killed,” Blitzer said.

  Kemper nodded. “It shook her up real bad. I was staying in another place then and she crashed there for a couple of days.”

  “She say what they were after?”

  “Maybe.” He moved and grunted in pain. “Mary, can I get a brew?”

  “Doc said that’s no good with them painkillers.”

  “Fuck the doc, Mary. I need a brew here.”

  Mary scowled, then disappeared into the kitchen.

  Blitzer said, “Billy, we know there was a porno video with you and Gentry and another woman.”

  “It wasn’t like that!” Kemper protested. “Who told you it was porn?”

  “Your dad,” Croon said.

  “My dad worships at the temple of John Wayne.”

  Mary handed Kemper a beer. He took a long swig, staring at Blitzer over the top of the bottle. Blitzer averted her eyes. Men like Billy Kemper could look into your soul and read your dark secrets. She made a show of smoothing the pleats in her skirt. She held her notebook to one side, shook back her tangle of red hair, and said, “So tell us how it was with this movie with you and Carol Alice and the other woman that wasn’t porn.”

  Kemper glanced at Mary in a way that made Blitzer aware that Mary’s husband better stay at home at night more often.

  Mary waved her beer bottle at him. “I ain’t your mother here listenin�
��. Tell ’em.”

  Kemper stripped the wet beer bottle label with his thumbnail. “Carol Alice liked hoots. That’s what she called them. Hoots. You know, drive her car fast the wrong way down one-way streets. Go to fancy restaurants and act like she was someone famous, then leave without paying the check. Hoots were her way of pushing out the edge.”

  “So the videotape of you and her having sex was a hoot?”

  “Because I’d never done it before. Because she got to watch me watch myself afterward. The taping, that was routine. Videotapes, little cassette tapes. She recorded everything. She carried a recorder with her wherever she went. Said it helped her keep track of who she was and who everyone else was. She had a strange head.”

  “Who was on the tapes?” Blitzer said.

  “I only saw a few videos. She put one on when we made love one afternoon. It was just her and the camera, you know, like by herself?”

  “Jesus,” Mary said.

  If it was possible under all those bruises, Kemper reddened. “Yeah, and there was another time, she had a tape of a phone call. On it, this guy wants to come over to see her and she’s putting him off. Teasing him, you know? She thought that tape was great. She’d get doubled over laughing when she listened to it. Couple times she’d make me … while she listened … well, you know.”

  “Jesus,” Mary said again.

  “Who was the guy?” Croon asked.

  “I didn’t know then, but later, when the stories started coming out, I figured it was one of those cops because of the stuff he was saying about his nightstick loving her.”

  At that Kemper fell quiet.

  “That bothered you,” Blitzer said.

  “I liked her.”

  “You knew she was a hooker.”

  “Not at first. She kept everything in her life separate. But I could never see her at night and stuff. I followed her one night to the Boulevard. She saw me, saw that I knew, and it was like I’d become someone different, someone she didn’t want around.”