Freefall, Part 10
10 - La Stanza Bianca
It was always disappointing when a cop who knew you and didn’t like you showed up to take your statement.
At least Butler - or as he was known around the station, “Butthead” - came with a rookie named Salazar who didn’t know him and treated him just like any other guy who’d gotten his house burgled. Butler kept prowling around, like he was looking for something incriminating. Was he hoping to see some gay porn just laying around, or maybe a collection of dildos? If he’d known he was coming over, he would have bought one and slapped his picture on it.
There were some surprise visitors, though: Gordo and Seb. They wandered in, and Butler - who had been in charge of the scene before their arrival - got instantly tense. “Something I can help you with?” he asked, respectful but still slightly arch.
Gordo gave him a bored look, which was worth a thousand hateful stares. He was now the senior man on the scene and he knew it, just as he knew Butler resented it. That was one of the things that Roan really didn’t miss about being a cop: all the bullshit protocol. “This might be our jurisdiction, Ron.”
Butler look confused, his beetle brows dipping low beneath his caveman forehead. “This isn’t a cat crime.”
It was Seb who shrugged. Gordo was wearing a silver grey suit coat, while Seb was rocking the khaki trench coat look. He was like a black Columbo, but without the lazy eye. “If it’s a hate crime, it is.”
Butler scoffed and spread his arms wide, indicating the entire room. “There’s no sign of a hate crime here.”
Gordo gestured to Roan, who was watching the tech gal, Imahara, dust for prints. “Roan said he thought DT was behind it.”
Butler scoffed. “There’s no evidence of that. And last time I checked, feminine intuition doesn’t count as proof.”
Gordo’s look hardened into ice. “You’re on report. Get out of here.”
“What?” The question was one of genuine confusion, not defiance.
“You heard me. Go home, Butler. You’re done here.”
His mouth opened to protest, but Gordo and Seb were a brick wall, all stiff shoulders and withering looks, so he huffed a breath through his nose like an angry dragon and stomped out. Salazar looked painfully embarrassed, but closed his notebook and followed Butler out, with a shrug that was probably an apology. Imahara continued working, pretending she wasn’t listening.
“I could have just kicked his ass,” Roan pointed out.
“I didn’t like that he felt so comfortable insulting someone in front of me. I ain’t putting up with that shit.” Gordo heaved a weary sigh, an indication of a topic shift. “Is Eli’s computer all they grabbed?”
“As far as I can tell. They broke a window to get in and tossed some furniture around, but clearly they were after one thing.”
“Someone called us about an altercation at the Church, but Mr. Harvey said only that you two had a “loud discussion”, and it was nothing of merit. Despite the fact that he looked very pained, and isn’t a very good liar. His little assistant - who must have made the call - looked shell shocked. You beat the shit out of Harvey?”
“I think I’d better take the fifth here.”
Seb snorted, a swallowed laugh. “Why? You’d get a medal down at the station if you did.”
He knew they didn’t like the church at the cop shop or the state house, but that seemed like a more extreme reaction than usual. “Why? They been making more trouble than usual?”
Imahara stood up, and her knees cracked like distant shotgun blasts. She was a vaguely attractive woman who seemed to like looking plain, wearing drab clothes and no make up, her hair cut in an economic style. She looked like a person always on the verge of sinking into the background. It had to be a deliberate choice. “Well, got some good prints, but I suspect they’re yours, Roan. There’s a lot of smears indicating someone with gloves was here recently. You don’t wear gloves in the house, do you?”
The first thing that sprung to mind was a fisting joke, but it was so awful he couldn’t make himself say it. “Not as a rule.”
She nodded. “That’s what I thought. Well, I’ll let you guys know, but I’m thinking we’re looking at a couple of pros here. They knew what they were doing. This was a smash and grab.”
“They were also uninfected, probably because Harvey actually thought he could fool me into thinking it wasn’t him.” Imahara gave him a quizzical look on the way out the door, but it was Seb who asked, “How do you know they weren’t infected?”
“He’d smell ‘em if they were,” Gordo explained for him.
As soon as Imahara was gone and shut the door behind her, he asked, “So what’s been going on with the Church?”
Gordo sighed and Seb’s shoulders sagged, all signs of defeat. “Since Eli’s death, recruitment has been on an upswing,” Gordo told him. “They’ve been having lots of parties where the infected and uninfected mingle, but they don’t hold them at the church. They’re been moving them around randomly, like house parties or raves, trying to avoid being busted. We’ve got some undercover agents posing as wannabe teens in the chat rooms, trying to get invited to these things, but they’re more paranoid than ever. It’s harder and harder to get a bite.”
Roan nodded, sure knew where this was going. “You want me to see if I can find one?”
“It’d be a big help.”
“Yeah, fine. I know sex workers, people in the scene. If there’s kinky shit going on somewhere, they’ll know.”
Gordo smirked. “I’d ask how you know sex workers, but I’m sure I’d get in trouble.”
“Just consider that all of us freaks stick together, because if we don’t, who will?”
Seb nodded and Gordo just gave him a strange look, but that seemed to be the end of it. “We can pay another visit to the church, mention the theft, see if we can shake him up,” Gordo offered.
Roan shook his head. “Not necessary. All they got was a shell. I pulled the real hard drive out ages ago.”
“So what do they have?”
“An empty hard drive. A shitload of nothing.”
Seb snickered. “Man, I can’t believe people still try you.”
“Of course they do. I’m just a dumb ex-cop who has to make his living taking pictures of other people’s cheating spouses. I can’t be that hard to fool.” Roan moved to the couch and sat on the arm, figuring things were done.
Gordo looked strangely concerned, at least for him. “You really think this guy’s gonna roll over and take it? I just talked to him for a few minutes, but there seemed to be somethin’ kinda … off about him.”
Roan could only shrug. “I imagine he’s gonna come back at me. But I don’t care. If I can’t take a sleazebag like that, I deserve to get cut down.”
“I know it’s your macho talk, but shit like that worries me,” Gordo replied, surprising him. “Sometimes idiots get lucky. Keep trying them, and someone will.”
He was right, of course, and Roan dipped his head in acknowledgement. “You take your chances every day. That’s just how it is.”
Gordo’s stare was piercing and skeptical. “And you don’t care if you get on the wrong side of it?”
“Of course I care. I’m not some suicidal asshole.” But even as he said it, he wondered if maybe Dylan was right about his death wish.
After they left, he put on Drive Like Jehu as he picked up the furniture and CDs, and taped up the broken window. It might be an invitation for thieves who somehow made it into his backyard, but he had a simple solution for that. He propped up a piece of plywood in the taped up hole that had “Infected” written on it in bright red letters. It was remarkably good at keeping people away.
When he was done, he went off to County to speak with Rocco Santorelli about his previous cellmate. He actually didn’t expect anything useful from this man, he only wanted to cover his bases. Roan hated prisons and the way they smelled, like industrial cleansers, body odor, hate, and fear ; desperation flop sweat mixed with a toxic stew of testosterone and nowhere to go. Long ago he’d figured out being a caged animal in the long term would be no good for him - he’d tear everyone to pieces. He now wondered if his lion side would be out all the time in such a situation. (Unless Dylan was right about that too, and it was just the darker side of his personality. But either way, he figured it’d be out and causing a scene.)
Sitting behind shatterproof glass in the sterile, depressing visitors booth, he found himself finally facing Santorelli. He was six feet of muscle crammed into a five foot five body; he was squat and squared off, a miniature refrigerator of a man, with no neck and a perfectly spherical shaven head resting on shoulders as straight as a level, his eyes small and widely spaced around a large nose that had clearly been broken several times in his life. His mouth was an uneven slash, his lower lip distorted with a faint scar near the left corner. This was a man who’d been in lots of battle, the type that Roan himself would be reluctant to mix it up with simply because he probably knew how to hurt someone badly and quickly, and had no qualms about doing it. The funny thing was, the way his dark eyes seemed to settle on the scars on his face, he had a feeling Rocco was thinking the same thing abut him. “Who the fuck ’ re you?” he asked into the receiver set into the wall.
“I’m trying to find something out about Roger Jorgenson, a former -”
Rocco sniggered derisively, lips curving into a sneer. “The fucking child molester. What, he diddle your kid or somethin’?”
“No, but I think he may have something to do with my friend’s kid going missing.”
Rocco shook his head. “That fat bastard? He was a coward. A fucking pussy whipped momma’s boy. He saw blood he freaked the hell out. Naw, he’d never kill one of ‘em. He didn’t have the decency.”
What an odd way to put it, but he sort of knew what he meant. “You remember him well.”
He shrugged one of his blocky shoulders. “Everybody was trying to shank him. I would’ve done it myself, but I got moved out to another cell by the time I got a shiv, and besides, he had that guy protecting his fat ass. Don’t know why; maybe he was poundin’ him or something.”
Charming. But Rocco was turning out to be more of a help than he ever could have imagined. “What guy? Chesney? Tucker?”
Rocco’s eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared into the folds of his face. “You a cop?”
“Do I look like a cop?”
He scrutinized his face with an intensity that made him feel like he was under a magnifying glass. But after a long moment, he said, “Naw, yer too pretty.” Now that was funny. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Paris Lehane,” he said, the lie coming easy. Being a detective was about eighty percent lying persuasively. At least that was twenty percent less than being a politician. “I’ve been researching Jorgenson, but I’ve hit a brick wall.”
“Prob’ly his head,” Rocco replied darkly. “The fucker was stupid and repulsive. He had nothing goin’ for him at all.”
“Who was protecting him?”
“Eh, what’s his face, the guy with the bug tattoo. Rollo.”
“Roland?”
Rocco shrugged. “Guess so. That fucker was nuts. I think he aligned with the Aryans.”
Did Roland Chesney have a bug tattoo? It was mentioned he had tattoos, but what kind were never specified. “Why was he nuts?”
“You mean besides picking out the blob for his bitch? He had these razor marks on his arms that he put there himself, he said that was how he kept track of the people he did.”
It was funny how the word “did” could have so many meanings. “You mean killed?” Rocco looked at him like he was the biggest idiot in the world, so Roan took that as a yes. “But this was before he killed his ex-girlfriend. You’re saying she wasn’t his first?”
He scoffed. “If you believed his bullshit, she was like number twelve or twenty or something. He claimed to be smarter than the pigs, that he had a lot of bodies buried out in the desert and no one was ever gonna find ‘em. But everyone says shit like that here, like bein’ a serial killer makes you such a bad fucker no one wants your ass.”
Roan felt his stomach clench and his blood turn cold. Yes, people made up shit in prison all the time. But if any of this shit was true, he may have found his man. “Did he say where he buried ‘em?”
Rocco shrugged and shook his head. “I dunno. Can’t remember. It was somethin’ like Sundown or some shit like that. But you ain’t gonna tell the cops, are you? I ain’t a rat.”
“Why would I tell the cops anything? They haven’t helped me at all.” Sundown? Was that a reference to something? There was no place called “the Sundown desert”. Then again, if he was just making it up to make himself look like a hard ass, there wouldn’t be.
The bizarre thing was Rocco was so forthcoming because he was lonely. He wanted to talk, and just as a tacit thank you for the information, he listened to him ramble for about five more minutes about how he ended up here on a trumped up charge that wasn’t his fault anyways. If you listened to inmates, there were no guilty people in prisons, but the odds were there had to be some.
Rocco actually suggested he come back sometime. Wow, that was lonely. Roan only said he’d see what he could do. If Rocco’s information panned, out he would.
Roan thought about this while waiting for Godfather’s to make his pizza, and even examined the map he had in the glove compartment. There were no deserts on this side of the state - wrong climate - but the eastern side had a couple. Hell, you could make the argument that the whole eastern half was a desert that had been partially paved over. Nothing named Sundown or Sun-anything, though. He needed to do a computer search.
But he tried not to think about this as he paid a visit to Dee, as Dee would catch his preoccupation and probably be offended by it. He was mostly recovered from his flu, but was still puttering around his place in a dark green fuzzy bathrobe. He waited until Dee finished lecturing him about not going to the hospital after being shot in the hand, and helped himself to some pizza as Dee finally told him his news. He had a serious boyfriend finally - definitely a cause to celebrate - name Luke Cho. Not a doctor this time but a nurse, he was also mixed race (half Korean, half Philippino), so that was two things he and Dee had in common right off the bat. Dee thought they might be moving in together, which was a huge step for Dee - he could see why he was a bit anxious about it all.
But Dee wasn’t content to stick to his own life. He had to butt into his. He told him if he really didn’t love Dylan, he had to cut him loose. “He’s a sweet kid,” Dee said around a mouthful of pizza. “If you can’t love him, you should cut him loose and let him find someone who can.”
Roan nodded, as he not only knew it, he agreed. He should do it; it was the right thing to do. Would he do it, though? He didn’t know.
He had to tell Dee about the other night too, when he beat up the gay bashers. Never mind that he wasn’t treated by the paramedics, their gossip network still got back to him. Dee seemed to be concerned that he was “hanging around” with a hustler, especially one with Fox’s reputation. “I don’t fuck hustlers,” Roan reminded him. “I don’t pay for sex on principal. I got nothing against them, though.”
“Neither do I, and hey, some of those guys you can find on that escort site … hot damn, I may pay for that,” Dee admitted shamelessly, picking up his glass of what he called his “Nyquil smoothie” (actually it didn’t have Nyquil in it, just a dash of cold medicine amongst honey, tea, and brandy). “But this Fox guy … you know his reputation, right?”
“I ran him in once. He recently helped me on a gig. He’s not some prostitute gangster, he‘s just a guy who made a couple of fucked up decisions and is trying to make the best of where he is.”
Dee fixed him with his scolding, strangely paternal glare that let him know he thought he was being a complete idiot. “He’s a gay guy that most straight street thugs don’t want to mess with. Doesn’t that set off warning bells for you?”
Roan sighed. How did he get in the position of defending Holden? “Look, the street is just a game. He plays it better than most, that’s all.”
“Which means he’s a schemer, and if he’s set his sights on you, it’s time to worry.”
“I can take of myself, Dee.”
“Normally. But you’re collapsing in on yourself and starting to shut down. And don’t deny it, ‘cause I know the symptoms. You’re only half here as it is; your eyes are distant.”
This is why Dee was such a pain as a boyfriend. He said shit like this all the time. “I’m working a case, Dee. I just got what might be a break. I didn’t expect it”
Dee just sat back on his sofa, eyes shiny with fever, and Roan felt like he was lying even though he knew he wasn’t. No one should be able to make you feel like that.
Goddamn it. Exes were never anything but trouble.