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Shared deprivation had bonded them, as had the emotional and the physical pain of living under the thumb of alcoholic fathers with fiery tempers. And a fierce desire to prove that even the sons of drunks, of poverty, could be someone, someday.
Seventeen years of estrangement, during which they had rarely spoken, dulled Ethan’s sense of loss. Yet even with everything else that weighed on his mind right now, he was drawn into a melancholy consideration of what might have been.
Dunny Whistler cut the bond between them with his choice of a life outside the law even as Ethan had been training to enforce it. Poverty and the chaos of living under the rule of a selfish drunk had given birth in Ethan to a respect for self-discipline, for order, and for the rewards of a life lived in service to others. The same experiences had made Dunny yearn for buckets of money and for power sufficient to ensure that no one would ever again dare to tell him what to do or ever again make him live by rules other than his own.
In retrospect, their responses to the same stresses had been diverging since their early teens. Maybe friendship had too long blinded Ethan to the growing differences between them. One had chosen to seek respect through accomplishment. The other wanted that respect which comes with being feared.
Furthermore, they had been in love with the same woman, which might have split up even blood brothers. Hannah had come into their lives when they were all seven years old. First she had been one of the guys, the only kid they admitted to their previously two-boy games. The three had been inseparable. Then Hannah gradually became both friend and surrogate sister, and the boys swore to protect her. Ethan could never mark the day when she ceased to be just a friend, just a sister, and became for both him and Dunny … beloved.
Dunny desperately wanted Hannah, but lost her. Ethan didn’t merely want Hannah; he cherished her, won her heart, married her.
For twelve years, he and Dunny had not spoken, not until the night that Hannah died in this same hospital.
Leaving the ruination of Sheryl Crow in the elevator, Ethan followed a wide and brightly lighted corridor with white painted-concrete walls. In place of ersatz music, the only sound was the faint but authentic buzz of the fluorescent tubes overhead.
Double doors with square portholes opened onto the reception area of the garden room.
At a battered desk sat a fortyish, acne-scarred man in hospital greens. A desk plaque identified him as Vin Toledano. He looked up from a paperback novel that featured a grotesque corpse on the cover.
Ethan asked how he was doing, and the attendant said he was alive so he must be doing all right, and Ethan said, “Little over an hour ago, you received a Duncan Whistler from the seventh floor.”
“Got him on ice,” Toledano confirmed. “Can’t release him to a mortuary. Coroner gets him first ’cause it’s a homicide.”
Only one chair was provided for visitors. Transactions involving perishable cadavers were generally conducted expeditiously, with no need of waiting-room comfort and dog-eared old magazines.
“I’m not with a mortuary,” said Ethan. “I was a friend of the deceased. I wasn’t here when he died.”
“Sorry, but I can’t let you see the body right now.”
Sitting in the visitors’ chair, Ethan said, “Yeah, I know.”
To prevent defense attorneys from challenging autopsy results in court, an official chain of custody for the cadaver had to be maintained, ensuring that no outsider could tamper with it.
“There’s no family left to ID him, and I’m the executor of the estate,” Ethan explained. “So if they’re going to want me to confirm identity, I’d rather do it here than later at the city morgue.”
Putting aside his paperback, Toledano said, “This guy I grew up with, last year he gets himself thrown out of a car at like ninety miles an hour. It’s hard losing a good friend young.”
Ethan couldn’t pretend to grieve, but he was grateful for any conversation that took his mind off Rolf Reynerd. “We hadn’t been close in a long time. Didn’t talk for twelve years, then only three times in the past five.”
“But he made you executor?”
“Go figure. I didn’t know about that till Dunny was here two days in the ICU. Got a call from his lawyer, tells me not only I’m the executor if Dunny dies, but meanwhile I have power of attorney to handle his affairs and make medical decisions on his behalf.”
“Must’ve still been something special there between you.”
Ethan shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Must’ve been something,” Vin Toledano insisted. “Childhood friendships, they’re deeper than you know. You don’t see each other forever, then you meet, and it’s like no time passed.”
“Wasn’t that way with us.” But Ethan knew that the something special between him and Dunny had been Hannah and their love for her. To change the subject, he said, “So how does your friend come to be pushed out of a car doing ninety?”
“He was a great guy, but he always thought more with his little head than his big one.”
“That’s not an exclusive club.”
“He’s in a bar, sees three hotties, no guys with them, so he moves in. All three come on to him, say let’s go back to our place, and he figures he’s so Brad Pitt they want to three-on-one him.”
“But it’s a robbery setup,” Ethan guessed.
“Worse. He leaves his car, rides in theirs. Two girls get him hot in the backseat, half undress him—then push him out for fun.”
“So the hotties were hopped on something.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Toledano. “Turns out they’d done it twice before. This time they got caught.”
Ethan said, “I came across this old movie on TV the other night. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello. One of those beach-party flicks. Women sure were different back then.”
“So was everybody. Nobody’s got better or nicer since the mid-sixties. Wish I’d been born thirty years sooner. So how’d yours die?”
“Four guys thought he’d cheated them out of some money, so they thumped him a little, taped his wrists behind his back, and submerged his head in a toilet long enough to cause brain damage.”
“Man, that’s ugly.”
“It’s not Agatha Christie,” Ethan agreed.
“But you’re dealing with all this, it proves there must’ve been something left between you and your buddy. Nobody has to be executor of an estate, they don’t want to be.”
Two meat haulers from the medical examiner’s office pushed open the double doors and entered the garden-room reception area.
The first guy was tall, in his fifties, and obviously proud about having kept all his hair. He wore it in a pompadour elaborate enough that it should have been finished with bows.
Ethan knew Pomp’s partner. Jose Ramirez was a stocky Mexican-American with myopic eyes and with the sweet dreamy smile of a koala bear.
Jose lived for his wife and four children. While Pomp dealt with the paperwork supplied by the attendant, Ethan asked Jose to see the latest wallet photographs of Maria and the kids.
Once formalities were completed, Toledano led them through an inner door, into the garden room. Instead of a vinyl-tile floor as in the reception area, this chamber featured white ceramic tile with only sixteenth-inch grout joints: an easy surface to sterilize in the event that it became contaminated with bodily fluids.
Although continually cycled through sophisticated filters, the cold air carried a faint but unpleasant scent. Most people didn’t die smelling of shampoo, soap, and cologne.
Four standard stainless-steel morgue drawers might have held bodies, but two cadavers on gurneys made an immediate impression. Both were draped with sheets.
A third gurney stood empty, trailing a tangled shroud, and to this one Toledano proceeded with a stupefied expression. “This was him. Right here.”
Frowning with confusion, Toledano peeled the sheets back from the heads of the other two cadavers. Neither was Dunny Whistler.
One at a time, he pulled open the four stainless-steel drawers. They were empty.
Because the hospital sent the vast majority of its patients home rather than to funeral services, this garden room was small by the standards of the city morgue. All possible hiding places had already been explored.
CHAPTER 7 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
IN THIS WINDOWLESS CHAMBER THREE stories underground, the four living and the two dead were for a moment so silent that Ethan imagined he could hear rain falling in the streets far above.
Then the meat hauler with the pompadour said, “You mean you released Whistler to the wrong people?”
The attendant, Toledano, shook his head adamantly. “No way. Never did in fourteen years, not startin’ today.”
A wide door allowed bodies on gurneys to be conveyed directly from the garden room into the ambulance garage. Two deadbolts should have secured it. Both were disengaged.
“I left them locked,” Toledano insisted. “They’re always locked, always,’ cept when I’m overseeing a dispatch, and then I’m always here, right here, watching.”
“Who’d want to steal a stiff?” Pomp asked.
“Even some perv wanted to steal one, he couldn’t,” Vin Toledano said, pulling open the door to the garage to reveal that it lacked keyholes on the outside. “Two blind locks. No keys ever made for it. Can’t unlock this door unless you’re already here in this room, then you use the thumb-turns.”
The attendant’s voice had been quickly worn thin by worry. Ethan figured that Toledano saw his job going down the drain as surely as blood was drawn by gravity down the gutters of an inclined autopsy table.
Jose Ramirez said, “Maybe he wasn’t dead, you know, so he walked out himself.”
“He’s deader than dead,” Toledano said. “Total damn dead.”
With a slump-shouldered shrug and a koala smile, Jose said, “Mistakes happen.”
“Not in this hospital, they don’t,” the attendant insisted. “Not since once fifteen years ago, when this old lady was in cold holding almost an hour, certified dead, and then she sits up and screams.”
“Hey, I remember hearing about that,” said Pomp. “Some nun had herself a heart attack over it.”
“Who had the heart attack was the guy in this job before me, and it was the nun chewin’ him out that gave it to him.”
Stooping, Ethan extracted a white plastic bag from under the gurney that had held Dunny’s body. The bag featured drawstrings, to one of which had been tied a tag that bore the name DUNCAN EUGENE WHISTLER, his date of birth, and his social-security number.
With a wheeze of panic in his voice, Toledano said, “That held the clothes he was wearing when he was admitted to the hospital.”
Now the bag proved empty. Ethan put it on top of the gurney. “Ever since the old lady woke up fifteen years ago, you double-check the doctors?”
“Triple-check, quadruple-check,” Toledano declared. “First thing a deader comes in here, I stethoscope him, listen for heart and lung action. Use the diaphragm side to hear high-pitched sounds, bell side for low-pitched.” He nodded continually, as though while he talked he were mentally reviewing a checklist of steps he’d taken on receipt of Dunny’s body. “Do a mirror test for breath. Then establish internal body temp, take it again a half-hour later, then a half-hour after that, to see is it dropping like it should if what you’ve got is really a deader.”
Pomp found this amusing. “Internal temperature? You mean you spend your time shovin’ thermometers up dead people’s butts?”
Unamused, Jose said, “Have some respect,” and crossed himself.
Ethan’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his shirt. “Well, if nobody could get in here to take him, and if he was dead—where is he now?”
“Probably one of the sisters jerking your chain,” Pomp told the morgue attendant. “Those nuns are jokers.”
Cold air, snow-white ceramic tile, stainless-steel drawer fronts glistening like ice: None of it accounted for the depth of Ethan’s chill.
He suspected that the subtle scent of death had saturated his clothing.
Places like this had never in the past disturbed him. He was disturbed now.
In the space labeled Next of Kin or Responsible Party, the hospital paperwork listed Ethan’s name and telephone numbers; nevertheless, he gave the harried attendant a card with the same information.
Ascending in the elevator, he half listened to one of Barenaked Ladies’ best songs reduced to nap music.
He went all the way up to the seventh floor, where Dunny had died. When the elevator doors opened, he realized that he had needed to go only as high as the garage on the first subterranean level, where he’d parked the Expedition, just two floors above the garden room.
After pressing the button for the main garage level, he rode up to the fifteenth floor before the cab started down again. People got on the elevator, got off, but Ethan hardly noticed them.
His racing mind took him elsewhere. The incident at Reynerd’s apartment. Dead Dunny’s disappearance.
Badgeless, Ethan nonetheless retained a cop’s intuition. He understood that two such extraordinary events, occurring in the same morning, could not be coincidental.
The power of intuition alone, however, wasn’t sufficient to suggest the nature of the link between these uncanny occurrences. He might as well try to perform brain surgery by intuition.
Logic didn’t offer immediate answers, either. In this case, even Sherlock Holmes might have despaired at the odds of discovering the truth through deductive reasoning.
In the garage, an arriving car traveled the rows in search of a parking space, turned a corner onto a down ramp, and another car came up out of the concrete abyss, behind headlights, like a deep-salvage submersible ascending from an ocean trench, and drove toward the exit, but Ethan alone was on foot.
Mottled by years of sooty exhaust fumes that formed enigmatic and taunting Rorschach blots, the low gray ceiling appeared to press lower, lower, as he walked farther into the garage. Like the hull of a submarine, the walls seemed barely able to hold back a devastating weight of sea, a crushing pressure.
Step by step, Ethan expected to discover that he wasn’t after all alone on foot. Beyond each SUV, behind every concrete column, an old friend might wait, his condition mysterious and his purpose unknowable.
Ethan reached the Expedition without incident.
No one waited for him in the vehicle.
Behind the steering wheel, even before he started the engine, he locked the doors.
CHAPTER 8 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
THE ARMENIAN RESTAURANT ON PICO boulevard had the atmosphere of a Jewish delicatessen, a menu featuring food so delicious that it would inspire a condemned man to smile through his last meal, and more plainclothes cops and film-industry types together in one place than you would find anywhere outside of the courtroom devoted to the trial of the latest spouse-murdering celebrity.
When Ethan arrived, Hazard Yancy waited in a booth by a window. Even seated, he loomed so large that he would have been well advised to audition for the title role in The Incredible Hulk if Hollywood ever made a black version.
Hazard had already been served a double order of the kibby appetizer with cucumbers, tomatoes, and pickled turnip on the side.
As Ethan sat across the table from the big detective, Hazard said, “Somebody told me they saw in the news your boss got twenty-seven million bucks for his last two movies.”
“Twenty-seven million each. He’s the first to break through the twenty-five-million ceiling.”
“Up from poverty,” Hazard said.
“Plus he’s got a piece of the back end.”
“That kind of money, he can get a piece of anybody’s back end he wants.”
“It’s an industry phrase. Means if the picture is a big hit, he gets a share of the profits, sometimes even a percentage of gross.”
