Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [53]
Sincerely,
Sergeant Donna Mader
I sat back and watched the tender morning light stalk Los Angeles, savoring a bite of cinnamon twist and then a sip of French roast coffee. Arizona, the military background, the rape assaults all added up like aces, but it was the wonderful way Ray Brennan had spiked some innocent ducks with a steel shaft going high velocity, then nailed the trophy feathers to some random piece of plywood, that made me know he was my guy. This was the twisted, grandiose offender I knew.
I drove against traffic to the Santa Monica Police Department. It was just before 8 a.m. I figured Andrew would be there or on his way. I cannot pretend the move was wholly case-related. I was under siege and running in crisis mode: every encounter held an equal urgency, and I was powerless to stop the stream of guidelines and commands that multiplied and split inside my head. I had a stunning piece of news to present to Andrew which might in some way justify the unsettling search from the night before. That is all I hoped for.
The dewy roofs of cars ticked by as I jogged the aisles of the crowded Civic Center parking lot, skimming for the unmarked burgundy Ford. Instead I came upon Margaret Forrester, sitting in her vehicle, pounding the steering wheel and howling with rage.
Even through the rolled-up windows you could hear it—throat-scraping screams, like an infant in pain. I have never experienced such sounds. They were what you might have heard if you had woken up in primal Africa, the first human on earth, surrounded by a jungle full of hostile, incomprehensible bellowing.
She saw me approaching and popped the door of the gold Lexus sedan.
“Look what he did to me!”
She got out and stood by the car. Her face was clear red, the way an infant’s entire body turns red when it’s yelling. The door was a barrier that stopped me cold. I was forced to look.
“What?”
She wrenched the back door open, too.
I was unable to detect any damage to the car. Except for the fading scarlet patches in her cheeks, she also appeared intact, a little tousled, the short cream-colored leather skirt and long legs in slingbacks none the worse for wear.
“What?” she mimicked. “This!”
And reached into the backseat, dragging out twenty, maybe thirty pieces of fresh dry cleaning in plastic bags, which slid to the pavement in a glimmering pile.
“I have been going there six years. Then suddenly today, out of nowhere, he says, ‘Take your dry cleaning and don’t come back!’”
“Who did?”
“Sam! The dry cleaning man! I’ve been going there six years!”
Instinct told me not to ask normal questions or offer common sense (Take your laundry somewhere else) because Margaret’s eyes were darting around like little black panicked fish, and I had the sense that whatever she had done to cause trusty old Sam to blow would prove beyond reason, anyway.
“I’m sorry that happened, Margaret.”
It was as if she had been pierced with a sharp instrument. She fairly yelped with hurt.
“I don’t want your empathy! Don’t you dare empathize with me!”
“Hey, look—”
“I’m a widow and my husband died, but that doesn’t mean you can empathize with me! Don’t you dare. I don’t want your empathy. Who the hell do you think you are?”
I put my briefcase down and said, “Let’s just pick this stuff up.”
There must have been a hundred dollars’ worth of dry cleaning billowing around, drifting slowly underneath parked cars.
“It’s like this all the time,” she complained. “When I was growing up, we had nothing.