Three
There was a gaggle of drag queens in Dante’s house.
A gaggle—if that was the right word—getting drunk off their asses and chattering loud enough to wake the dead.
To be fair, Dante reminded himself, one of them did live there, but no man needed to come home to find a man the size and hirsuteness of a water buffalo dressed only in a gold lame thong bending over his leather couch.
Dante avoided a pinch from a four-foot-tall Asian man slinging margaritas from the dining table, then liberated a couple of sodas from a Styrofoam cooler near the kitchen door. Another hop, skip, and dodge, then he was free, closing the screen door behind him before joining his partner on the front porch. Handing Hank a root beer, Dante winced as the questionable party inside the house erupted with bursts of high-pitched screams, giggles, and spiced profanities. He checked the cushions of one of the rattan chairs for any of the neighborhood cats, then sat down to open his drink.
“Thanks for the soda.” Hank looked over his shoulder when another auditory assault hit. “Do I even want to know what’s going on in there, Montoya? They need help or something?”
“Waxing,” Dante muttered. “Trust me. You do not want to go in there.”
They’d come back to Dante’s house, worn down to the bone, tired, and thirsty. A brief stop at a fish taco shop on the way up Wiltshire was enough to ease their hunger, but a street party near the park stalled traffic to a standstill, cooking the detectives in Los Angeles’s muggy evening stew. By the time Dante pulled up in front of the two-story bungalow he shared with his uncle Manuel, he and Hank were drenched to the skin and more than a little bit tired of being in a car.
East Hollywood was quiet—with the exception of the burlesque and body maintenance cabaret going on behind them. Old-school Mexican music whispered out of a tiny pink adobe bungalow across the street, and a few houses down, a young woman in a yellow bathrobe stood next to a shivering tiny dog on a leash, encouraging the oversized rat to piss so she could go back inside. The sidewalks lined both sides of the street, slightly broken in spots where an old tree trunk lifted the cement or a quake rattled a panel too hard. The yards ran small, sometimes even to tiny squares of gravel or concrete painted green or terracotta, and nearly all of the houses boasted low chain-link or white-post fencing, mainly to keep dogs and children from wandering out into the broad street.
Gentrification was slow to move into the area. The houses were legacies passed on from one generation to the next, and Dante considered himself damned lucky to score his house from a property-seized auction nearly three months after he’d moved to Los Angeles. Neglected to the point of almost being uninhabitable, he’d installed his uncle in the mother-in-law cottage at the back of the property and spent most of his spare time breaking down walls and tearing up piss-stained carpet.
Now the back cottage was a beauty salon for Manny’s occasional clients, and Dante concentrated on the smaller projects he’d put aside—like tearing out the ugly concrete water fountain languishing in his sunburned front lawn.
“Want me to run you up home?” Dante asked, sipping at his soda.
“Nah, the Red will take me right to my doorstep,” Hank refused with a shake of his head. “And don’t take this wrong, but the last thing I want to do is crawl into that POS speck you drove us in.”
“Not my piece of shit, remember? The truck’s in the shop. Just be thankful Manny loaned us his car. It was either the Z/28 or your wife’s minivan.”
“God no, not the Cheerio-mobile. The dog puked into the AC vent last week. I think we’re going to have it exorcized or something. I can’t even get into it without wanting to vomit.” Hank slurped on his can, then rolled the cold aluminum across his face. “Hey, how is Manny doing? Better?”
“Yeah, doing good. Tío got the all clear from his oncologist last week. Cancer free, five years running. He’s just happy his hair’s back, but I know he was scared.” Dante caught himself crossing his fingers over his chest and shot Hank a sheepish look. “I don’t know what’s worse, not being able to shake off old habits or just being too stupid to learn new ones.”
Their phones buzzed and sang at the same time, and Dante frowned, dragging his cell out of his back pocket while Hank hunted his down. Scrolling through a long text message, Dante resisted the urge to fling his phone across the yard and possibly take out a piece of the damned fountain while he was at it.
Stevens was out of jail and, most likely, in the wind.
“How the fuck did he get out?” Hank gritted his teeth. “Motherfucking shit and hell. He’s up for fucking murder! And they just let him walk?”
“Released on his own recognizance. You saw those lawyers marching in. You think that wasn’t money they were wearing? Some of those damned suits probably cost more than my mortgage payment,” Dante murmured, rereading the text from their captain. His partner stood up, and Dante watched Hank pace up and down the porch. “Surprised it took them this long to get him out. He can’t go back to his place. That’s locked up tighter than the rosary beads Manny got from the Pope. Where can he hide? ’Cause if we lose track of him, we’re screwed.”
“Next of kin was listed in his records,” his partner pointed out. “Archibald Martin. Address is up in the Hills. Maybe an uncle or something? No, grandfather. The guy was listed as his grandpa.”
“Living up in the Hills?” Dante snorted. “How much money do you think Stevens is making fleecing people with those plastic rings and stuffed monsters? And he’s got a relative living up there?”
“Could be a gardener or an ass-licker. People up there are so rich, they pay people to live in their houses and suck up to them. Stevens looked like he could suck up really good if he wanted to. Shit, this uncle-cousin probably conned his way into some old lady’s bed and is waiting for her to die so he can spend the rest of his life taking care of her poodles.” Hank grimaced when Dante gave him a reproachful look. “What? Like you weren’t thinking it.”
“I wasn’t. Mostly because it didn’t dawn on me. Listen, Stevens can’t go back to his place. The shop and apartment are still a crime scene, so he’s got to go someplace else.” Dante shrugged. He tapped at his cell’s screen to look up Archibald Martin of Beverly Hills. What came up made him blink. “Holy shit.”
“See if we can run a profile—” Hank stopped short as Dante held up his phone for his partner to see his search results. “What the fuck? Stevens is loaded.”
“Or his family is. Something’s off here, because I can tell you this relative was nowhere to be found when Vince and I were hunting him down. Now all of a sudden he’s got some guy with a nice address? Something’s fishy. But if Stevens is even still in LA, he’s with this guy or that assistant we couldn’t find.”
“What was her name? Charlotte? No, Charlene? We don’t have any other known associates tagged on his file. Shit, we barely have a file.” Hank sighed. “Shit, you worked for Toss-It Harry then. I heard that asshole tossed files out like they were three-week-old Chinese food.”
“Yeah, he did. He ordered us to get rid of what we’d gathered up because word came down the DA wasn’t even interested in looking at Stevens—and never would. I think that was the final straw for Vince.”
“Surprised we didn’t get more lawsuits out of what he did.” The redhead crumpled his empty soda can. “We’re going to have to go digging through microfiche and hope Records scanned everything.”
Dante thought on the boxes he’d stashed away years ago on the day Vince tossed his badge across their captain’s desk and stalked off, leaving Dante behind to clean up the mess he’d made of their lives. Clearing his throat, Dante said, “Yeah, about that. Vince and I, we made copies. Mierda, I’ve got tons of files. They’re upstairs… in one of the walk-in closets.”
Hank blinked. “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. I’ve still got everything Vince and I dug up on him, which wasn’t a lot, but at least I have it. Names of people we thought he was pulling jobs with or for. All the way back to when he was a teen. Stevens wasn’t marked as a big player in the ring until later on. He was a kid. Vince and I figured he was a runner for the fence. It’s not a hell of a lot of personal stuff on him but might give us something.”
“Dude, that’s… against department policy. I mean, even if that asshole Vince broke every damn rule in the book tampering with evidence, you don’t take shit home.” Hank whistled softly. “Wow. The captain’s going to have a field day with it.”
“I know. I should have… turned everything over or something after Vince was forced out, but it seemed pointless. DA still wasn’t going to reopen any case we had. It just… pissed me off to throw everything out because shit happens, you know? Stuff comes back up, but—”
“No, no! Montoya, don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been more fucking proud of you in my life.” Hank slapped Dante on the shoulder. “Shit, you don’t even let me jaywalk, and here you go, squirreling up a mother lode of confidential files. It’s almost like you’re… human.”
“There is a living room full of men in there who’d love to get a hold of you,” Dante pointed out. “I’ve got a Taser. Manny’s been wanting to fix your hair for a long time. You’d be sporting a pompadour before you even hit the floor twitching, acere.”
“Don’t be a hater, Montoya. It was a compliment.” Hank ran a hand over his gingery hair. “And the way I see it, we’re going to need all the help we can get on this. Stevens still looks good for the murder, and there’s a big damned rock sitting in evidence with one of his sticky fingerprints. We can totally make a case that Anderson broke into the store, lifted the gem from where Stevens was hiding it, and was caught when he came in.”
“Lab’s still got to get to the diamond. We’re not even one hundred percent sure it’s real or even if it’s his fingerprint. We also don’t have a murder weapon, and the lab wasn’t sounding all too sure there was gunshot residue on him,” Dante grumbled. “That break and run of his contaminated everything on him.”
“You pounding him into the dirt didn’t help.” Hank grinned when his partner snorted. “That’s what we get for responding to a call. Should have kept driving and hit up that ramen place on Second.”
“I’d rather nail Stevens to the wall.” Dante’s cheeks flushed when he heard himself. “For the murder.”
“Connecting him to the diamond is fucking genius. Shit, we need that to pan out,” Hank said. “Think about it, if we can line him up with all the shit he did back when you and Vince were chasing him around, it’ll be more than a simple nail-to-the-wall, it’d be a slam dunk. So, we hunt down Archibald Martin tomorrow?”
“Like his name is Daffy and it’s duck season,” Dante agreed. “The sooner we get our hands on Stevens, the better. I think we rattled him during the interview, but he was right. Murder’s not his thing, but something happened there. Maybe killing Dani was an accident. I don’t know, but if he did it, I want to be the one to shut that jail door in his face.”
“If those burglary charges are still inside limitations, that would be like icing on the cake.” His partner’s grin nearly ate up his face, Hank’s freckled cheeks pulled up into plump rosy balls on either side of his long nose. “Kind of like a last victory for Vince, eh? Even if he went sour in the end, he was a pretty decent guy to you. Better than Dawson was to me.”
“A hell of a lot better.” Dante nodded. “Yeah, let’s nail this bastard for everything we can get to stick. We just have to do it right. I don’t want him walking away, Hank. Not this time. Not again.”
Manny’s friends poured out of the house as Hank was walking down the steps. A ruffle of words, protests, and laughter, then Dante found himself waving good-bye to his partner as the evening’s bartender and designated driver folded Hank into his SUV to head off to West Hollywood. Carrying in their empty soda cans, Dante turned off the porch light, then locked the front door behind him.
He found his uncle in the kitchen, puttering about in a pair of violent pink and yellow floral pajamas and house slippers that’d seen better days. Manuel Ortega stood on a low step to wash the dishes someone’d left in the sink, his sleeves rolled up nearly to his elbows to keep from dragging in the soapy water. Dante’s uncle barely came up to Dante’s bicep, his shortness accentuated when standing next to his six-foot-tall nephew.
Manny’s pleasant, good-natured face was creased with smile lines and crow’s-feet, and his wavy black hair was shot with fine silver, much more than he’d had before he’d gotten breast cancer. They’d laughed when one of Manny’s friends shaved his head before he lost it all, and they’d held a funeral for his then shoulder-length curls, flushing the locks down the toilet like a dead goldfish. Having survived the rigors of treatment, Manny’d bounced back, his squat, plump body and smiling face nearly a mirror image of his older sister, Dante’s mother.
And much like the days when his uncle and mother slept on the living room floor of their childhood home, they shared the same taste in clothes too.
“Tío, you’re going to burn somebody’s eyes out with those pj’s,” Dante teased in Spanish, picking up a cloth to dry a serving platter Manny placed in the drainer. “I’m going to have to start wearing sunglasses inside the house soon.”
“Hah, you’re the one who gave them to me,” his uncle scoffed. “Last Christmas.”
“I’d still have burns on my hands if I’d touched those in the store.” Dante eyed his uncle’s clothes. “I gave you a Vespa and gift cards for the mall.”
“And this is what I bought with them.”
Manny reached for a glass a few feet away, and Dante noticed his hand shaking slightly before his fingers closed around it. Catching his nephew’s suspicious look, Manny frowned.
“Don’t give me that look. I can be a walking stereotype if I want to. So I like loud colors. So what?”
“And loud people. My ears hurt from tonight.” Dante nudged his uncle with his elbow. “And the pajamas are fine. At least I don’t have to worry about you sneaking up on me in the dark. You and Mama, both of you dress loud enough a blind man can feel you coming.”
“Ah, your mother.”
His uncle tried to put on a casual face, but Dante caught the edge of need in his eyes.
“How is she? Has she called you since last week?”
“No.” He started on the stacks of clean butter containers Manny used to store food in, carefully drying the lids one by one. “It’s harder for her to sneak a call to me right now. Papa’s business is down, I think. She’s not talking about it, but I can tell.”
“Still, she should call you. You’re her son. Your father being an asshole, well—he likes being that hard-nosed macho stereotype. I’m glad you take after our side of the family.”
It was a familiar argument. One they’d had ever since Dante moved to Los Angeles and bullied his sick uncle into living with him. Thrown out by his own Mexican family, Manny hated seeing history repeat itself in Dante. Every chance he got, Manny pushed Dante to reach out to his parents—the same parents who’d shown him the door when he confessed to being gay.
Maricón was the least offensive thing he’d been called that night.
He sported a scar on his jaw from the beating his Cuban father’d given him before physically tossing him out. A beating he’d not fought because, back then, Dante felt like he’d somehow deserved it. His uncle’d felt the same way once and welcomed Dante with open arms, glad for a companion in his exile. Manny wore his own scars, and they’d cried over their family’s betrayal one night, piss drunk from whiskey shots and brandy-filled chocolates. But the person Manny missed the most was his sister, Dante’s mother, the woman who said nothing as her husband beat their eldest son nearly to death.
Dante still couldn’t drink whiskey without tasting tears and blood.
“The case you have, it’s a bad one?” Manny handed Dante the last of the dishes, a mug he’d gotten from a Korean gentleman’s club in Garden Grove.
“They’re all bad, tío. This one is… complicated.” He stood fast against Manny’s assessing gaze. “We arrested someone I’d tried to bring down before. With Vince. It was our last case. Don’t know if you remember that one. You had a lot going on then.”
“I was sick, mijo. Not unconscious.” His uncle turned around to lean against the counter. “That’s the one Vince… he gave up, no? Dios, what was he thinking risking you with his stupidity?”
Trust Manny to scrape away Dante’s scabs with a quick, precise cut of his tongue.
“I hated this guy got away the last time,” Dante sighed. “But now I’m wondering if I can be fair. I can’t fuck this up, tío. It’s like a second chance I’ve got to fix what I fucked up the last time.”
He couldn’t tell his uncle he wanted Rook Stevens in his bed—nearly as badly as he wanted Stevens behind bars.
“You can’t blame yourself for Vince messing up or him dying, honey. He made the choice not to be honest, not to get treatment.” Manny began to fit lids to the empty butter containers, making sure they matched up. “He was sick, mijo. He could have gotten help, but he didn’t. That is not your fault.”
“He gave up, tío. Because I fucked up our case. I let Stevens get into my head. After the club. It all went to shit after that.”
Dante hated he could still feel the silken smoothness of Stevens’s skin on his hands and the velvet brush of the former thief’s mouth on his. Especially since he was having a hard time remembering what Vince looked like when he’d been alive. The strongest memory he had of the man who’d taught him how to be a detective was a sliver of waxy yellow skin and bones, coughing himself to death in a hospital bed.
“Everybody fucks up, Dante.”
“I’m a cop, tío. People depend upon me to be objective. I want Stevens to pay for what he’s done, but it’s got to be done right—by the book.” Dante scrubbed at his face with his bare hand, rasping his palm over his stubble-rough jaw. “I just need to be fair, you know?”
“Of course you can be, Dante.” His uncle patted his arm. “You’re the fairest man I know. But what you need to be more is honest with yourself. If you have that, everything else can take care of itself. Now, help an old queen get to bed and turn the lights off after me. You know I hate to walk through a dark house.”
“Ah no, not with these on.” Dante tugged at the sleeve of his uncle’s outrageous pajamas. He bent over, kissing his uncle on the cheek. “As long as you have these, you’ll never have to be scared of the dark ever again.”