An LA Crime Story - Best crime fiction and romantic mystery novel

Mar 31

Windy

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Rhea walked out of Gallows office at nine-thirty-five that same morning. Her car was parked half a block up, in the department lot. The air was thick with the edgy undertone it gets just before a Santa Ana wind has been freed. It tickled the back of her neck and got under her skin as she clenched her fists and walked fast – the sudden anger in her nearly exploding with the rules in her head:. “Fix myself. Forgive myself. Date old guys. What the fuck?! Don’t drink too much. Don’t eat sugar. Pay your rent. Stop the bad guys. Forgive yourself. Fuck! Find your sister. Find your sister. Find your sister…”

This was her choice: continue to see Gallows and “fix herself” and go back to the LAPD or… try and up her word count at the Hollywood Pulse and make enough to pay her rent and hopefully, eventually make enough more to go down to Ensenada and pursue the Domingos case – which could be connected to her sister- on her own. That wasn’t a bad idea. Working outside the system had it’s disadvantages. But it had it’s advantages too. She wouldn’t have to lose her driving force – her edge – by “forgiving herself” (what bullshit!) She wouldn’t have to follow department rules, either – and she could start sooner. Except for the money thing. Maybe she could start here in LA and wait to go to Ensenada. She needed to think.

The crawling rush hour traffic slammed to a stop just past Micheletornia. There was road work for a block and a half. She figured it would take about forty minutes to go the four or so miles to her apartment so she turned right on Echo Park Blvd and drove a few blocks up into the hilly little hood studded with little stucco bungalows to Valerie Bakery. A chocolate chess tart and a cup of coffee would surely help her think.

She was second in line at the funky neighborhood cafe, behind a tall lanky man with salty brown hair. She looked past him at the bakery case. There was one chess tart left. Then she saw his brown skinned finger point to it. Bummer.

She approached the counter, glancing at both the pasty case and the chalk menu – her choice now was between a six buck piece of pie, a six dollar croissant, a five dollar side of toast or a three buck cookie called the “Durango”. She went with the cookie and a three dollar cup of coffee. At six dollars, she was over her limit but, fuck-it.

She sat at a little outside table, wondering how many words she could conjure up to describe the medium sized chocolate chunk and pecan cookie, dusted with Hickory salt. Enough to survive? She contemplated going back to Gallows and wondered how long it would take her to successfully fake self-forgiveness.

As she pondered her options, the man with the tart walked up Echo Park boulevard. She watched his backside as he strolled deeper into the hood. He had a Day-Lewis vibe, she thought, with a little more hunk but, at about forty, he was at least twenty years too old to turn her on.

She turned her attention to a twenty-year-old riding his bike down the street. He stopped at a stop sign. He was a little skinny but fit. He looked at her. She smiled. He smiled back and rode away. In her mind he’d have to do. Words came. She wrote a few of them down:

“He brushed past me with a smile in his eyes and a random way of walking that could easily hypnotize any two-bit writer from Paradise to Blythe and baby… that was me. I followed his invitation up a windy little street to his bungalow … and gave him a bite or two of my cookie named Durango.”

Jun 04

Tart Man

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The man walked another four and a half blocks, up a winding little street to a four-unit stucco building built in the thirties. He entered the garden apartment. Inside, a battered and dusty old sky-blue surfboard propped up against the living room wall was the only bit of personality in the cracked plaster interior of the little one bedroom unit.

The man went into his tiny kitchen and put the tart on a paper towel. He got a dark beer out of his fridge and popped the top. As he started to take a bite of the tart, he heard a key turn in his front door. He opened the utensil drawer next to the ancient stove and took out a small twenty year old glock.

“Mr. Jones?” came a familiar voice. “You here? I’m gonna kill you.” The afore-mentioned Mr. Jones pocketed the glock and went into his living room.

“It was an accident, Leland.” Jones told Leland Hays, who was standing in his entryway, pissed off. “And stop threatening me every time shit happens.”

“Shit?!” Hays hissed, turning red. “That’s seventy five grand up in smoke! Why the hell were those girls in there?!” He carried on, talking about the Domingos fire.

“Ozrin wanted the pick-up there.”

“He never told me.”

“I thought he did–” Jones carried on, returning to the kitchen.

“You thought?! No. You don’t think, you do as you’re told. I had to hear it from the cops? The COPS!” Hays followed him.

“I just found out myself.” Panama told him, keeping calm.

“When?”

“This morning. I went over there for the pick-up, saw the Police tape–”

“The fire was three days ago. You were gonna leave them there for three days?”

“…I left them food.” Panama took out a knife, sliced the tart in half.

“I called Ozrin.” Leland informed Jones, “He says the pick up was tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? No–” He offered half the tart to Hays.

“And he said the location was never changed–”

Jones put the beer to his mouth, “Ozrin’s paranoid. He changes the location every other time then changes it back.”

Hays watched him take a long pull of the beer.

“Thought you quit all that.”

Jones took another. “I did.”

Hays took out his wallet,

“Get three more now, Before Ozrin takes his business somewhere else.” He tossed five twenties on the worn counter. “There’s a hundred for gas.”

He turned to leave, then turned back and almost smiled,

“Those girls dying is on you.” Then he was gone.

Panama Jones checked the time. It was ten-forty-five. He dumped the rest of the beer, took a bite of the tart, grabbed his board and left.

Jun 15

Jim Beam

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After writing five hundred and twenty words, Rhea hit a wall. She was done. She couldn’t think of another thing to write about donuts and twenty-year-old men or tarts and forty-year-old men. She’d tried her best to imagine it but she couldn’t. What she had wasn’t going to cut it – word-wise and, thus, money-wise. She took a break and decided to concentrate on the Domingos case.

She retrieved her LAPD passwords from an encrypted file and entered them into a department database. She waited, fingers crossed. She got in. Before her were the databases of records; the histories of people and buildings – the pages that told the stories that made up LA. She searched records and more records and more records trying to find any info she could on Domingos, Leland Hays and a bartender named Myrna.

Forty seven web pages into looking at Domingos’ business tax records and scant employee records she’d found little of importance except a three-year-old misdemeanor building code violation regarding the steps leading down to Domingos’s liquor storage cellar. That got her thinking about liquor delivery to the place. She wondered if the bartender signed for the deliveries. She called seven local liquor distributors and found two who had delivered to Domingos in the last year.

Young’s Liquor Distributors had an office and warehouse five and a half blocks west of Leland Hays’s Furniture Import warehouse. The manager – a nice, neat man named Mavery – was on the floor, counting cases of Jim Beam. Rhea flashed her badge – man this was getting easy – and Mavery told her Domingos was one of their smallest accounts but he remembered them well and was “Sorry to see them shut down.”

“Do you remember who signed for the deliveries?” Rhea asked him.

“Yeah…” he thought, “The bartender. A woman. ’bout fifty. Mexican, I think.”

“Do you remember her name?” Rhea asked, trying to push back that little thrill she felt when something just might go her way.

Mavery shook his head, “No. But–” Rhea held onto the thrill and he delivered, “I should have a copy of the receipt.”

Rhea followed Mavery into his office. And there in the middle of a tidy book full of receipts was a messy, scrawled signature: “Myrna Saldano.” Rhea took a photo of it, thanked Mavery and left.

She got in her car and smiled. She had a name! Her first impulse was to call Strickland. It was habit. Every little bit, good or bad, about a case she would share with him. But now she couldn’t. Her momentary high faded. She went back to her apartment determined to find Myrna Saldano.

But Myrna Saldano was nowhere. On paper, she did not exist. After again scrubbing through her best databases, Rhea found no record, no past or no whereabouts of Myrna Saldano. The only hint that the woman existed was that signed liquor delivery receipt and Mavery’s description.

Still… if she did exist and lived in LA, she’d need money. Her trade was bartending. Time to hit the streets.

Jun 04

Gardening

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About four-thirty that afternoon, a landscaper named Bernardo, with a survey map in hand, staked out the boundaries of Daisy’s land. The flattened little mound where the coyote had laid was, indeed, just outside the markers, like Daisy and Travis had thought.

“Do you want all succulents?” Bernardo asked her as they discussed the landscaping of the wild, sloping part of her back yard. “Or also some native brush, some rock rose, some agave.”

“The agave sounds good.” Daisy told him as she studied the placement of his markers, “And some flowering natives would be nice – maybe a tree for shade? A Palo Verde tree, right down there.” she pointed to a spot a few yards down the slope.

“Do you want hardscaping?” he asked her.

“Yes.” Daisy nodded, “I do… but maybe just some flagstones in the dirt. And a path to a small bench. Can you carve out a little path alongside the edge?” she pointed to the side of her property, next to the mound.

Bernardo looked around and made a few calculations. “It need some grading. And it’s a big area… Again Daisy nodded. “Six grand.” he estimated. “Ballpark.”

Daisy agreed. “When can you start?” she asked.

“I can start in five weeks.” he told her, adding, “I’ll need a two grand deposit at least a week before.”

“I’ll give it to you now.” she offered, “Then we’ll be all set.”

She easily scrambled up the few yards to her back wall. She stepped over it and strode back across her patio to the iron gate over her back door. It was heavily arched with a thick fuschia bouganvillea vine, studded with thorns – part of which had fallen across the gate. As Daisy grabbed the vine to pull it aside, Bernardo hurried to her.

“Careful, Miss–! It has thorns–” he warned. She smiled, unscathed and went inside.

A minute later she came back out with two thousand dollars, in cash. “Five weeks from today, I’ll expect your workers here.” she told him. “Don’t change the date, I don’t like to wait. If you do, I’ll take the deposit back and get someone else.”

Bernardo realized she wasn’t one to be messed with. He thought for a minute, going over his schedule in his mind. Satisfied he could deliver, he nodded then took the money. The date was set.

Bernardo drove his old pickup down the hill. Daisy went back out onto her patio. Poo and Ralphie were there, waiting. Inquisitory looks were on their faces. “Right now, it’s just landscaping.” she told them, “I don’t know yet if I want it dug up. I have five weeks to decide.”

Aug 26

Taquitos

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Out of the almost Seventeen hundred bars in LA., Rhea narrowed her search down to twenty-seven. Knowing that a fifty-something year old Mexican woman wouldn’t be mixing Twinkie-tinis at the Skybar or pulling drafts at Barney’s Beanery or keeping it neat at the Frolic Room eliminated close to a thousand. Adding in the geography of LA and transit times, that knocked out another six hundred.

Rhea started at eight at La Golondrina. It was Friday night. The popular place stayed open until eight-thirty. Weird. Especially for a tourist place but that’s the way it was. She knew Myrna probably wouldn’t be there but La Golondrina was on Olvera Street and walking Olvera was a good place to start – walking Olvera was also, for Rhea, a self-inflicted wound.

The trinkets and sweet treats sold at the brightly-colored wooden vendor booths hadn’t changed in twenty years, making it easy for Rhea to let the pain of her past memory there fuse with the goal of the present. Pain always focused Rhea, as did guilt. And the three-buck taquitos with green sauce at Cielito Lindo momentarily took the edge off. She bought two classic ones. She took them to a little green table and dug in. Heaven. Not wasting the moment and thinking ahead, she took out a little paper notepad she carried and a pencil and jotted down a few words: Young. Creamy, Hot Mouthful – about the creamy tang of the signature sauce that blanketed crispy curled tortillas and the promising guy who was dipping them into the fryer.

Downing the last bite, she walked across the brick path to the famed La Golondrina. The bar area was packed. The two bartenders were male. “Is Myrna on tonight?” Rhea asked one of them. “Who?” he replied. Rhea waved him off; knowing it was a long shot to ever expect to see a woman bartender working an old-school Mexican restaurant.

Next up, she crossed Alameda and went into Union Station. The deco Traxx restaurant had an old bartender who looked like Nosferatu. But they didn’t have a Myrna.

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth bars were scattered over a few blocks around downtown. All bartenders were men except for one transgender Russian woman. None had heard of a Myrna.

The seventh was a dark-red old-world bar in a classic Chinatown joint that featured Mu Shu pork, Won Ton soup and lots of plum sauce. Behind that small bar was a snake-skinned old dame named Madame Wu. Rhea asked her over a sidecar if she knew of another woman in town who poured named Myrna. Her dyed-black eyebrow barely raised. But it raised in recognition of the name Myrna. Ignoring Rhea, she moved down the bar to pour a shot of Chartreuse for a ninety-year old dancer. Rhea now had an answer. Myrna Saldano was real. And local.

It was last call. Rhea left three-fourths of her sidecar on the bar and left.

Once home, Rhea forced her mind away from bartenders and darkness and tried to finish her taquito review. She fished the notepad from her purse and jotted some more thoughts down. She liked using paper. She’d been using paper to take notes ever since she got her first notepad from Strickland when she was sixteen, a terrified kid looking to him for hope on the darkest night of her life.

“…write down anything you remember.” He’d told her as he wrote his phone number on the pad, “Anything at all, then call me. Anytime.”

She wished she could call him now and tell him how sorry she was for letting him down. But she couldn’t. She wrote. She had to make a lot of it up… “–a sinewy gaucho casually walking by bought me three taquitos with extra heat for five-twenty-five and he sprung for a Champurrado. In the back of his Camaro parked in a lot on Main, he turned me into a liar for every time I’ve ever said “no” to a man or a meal that could set me on fire..” She hated making it up. She wanted it real. She found a snack sized bag of Maui potato chips and turned on the tv. Not much was on her basic cable. OVC. News reruns. Old PBS shows. She settled on a Huell Howser re-run. He was visiting Porto’s Bakery. It was an entire show about cakes: Mango cheesecake. White chocolate raspberry mousse. Kiwi merengue torte. Grand Mariner with chocolate ganache. Lemon curd pound cake. Vanilla custard cake with pineapple filling… she should have turned it off but her mood was dark and so she watched and let her mind be pierced with thoughts of her sister.

A pledge break reeled her mind in. She turned the tv off and went outside to the courtyard. It was late. All the apartments were dark. She sat in a plastic chair by the pool. The only sound was the constant whisper of cars driving by outside.

A moving shadow startled her. A young coyote darted from behind a trash bin enclosure. It stopped when it saw her – stared her down, unafraid. Finally it skulked away and slipped out between the rails of the courtyard gate, heading up Laurel, toward the hills. A greeting came to it from somewhere in those hills, the sound of its entire pack howling. It died down. Rhea shivered. She looked at her phone. Three AM. When the quiet settles into the cracks of the night and the ghosts in the air kiss your skin.