The Program: A Dickie Floyd Detective Novel Page 2

  The judge was asking counsel if they were prepared to proceed, and Josie began counting breaths again but lost track as her thoughts were consumed with the itch on her leg—she should have thrown the fucking boots away. She had paid just under four hundred dollars, so there hadn’t been much chance of her doing that. She could hear her mother saying, Ustedes son unos desperdiciados. No tienen idea lo que es to have no money para comprar comida. No tienen idea no tener money for clothes. Ustedes piensan que el dinero grows on trees? A declaration of her disapproval stated in her eclectic mix of Spanish and English—Spanglish—and accentuated by head shaking and tongue clicking, perhaps picking at the lint on her own frayed and threadbare thirty-year-old sweater to drive home the point.

  “Is the witness ready?” His Honor’s voice thundered through the near-empty chamber.

  Josie snapped out of her reverie and met the magistrate’s eyes. His brows were up, expectantly. Had he asked her something else? What did she miss? She nodded—though somewhat hesitantly—and said, “Yes, Your Honor. I’m ready.”

  The judge was a former detective himself, though one from a previous generation of cops and an era different than anything Josie knew. It was widely known that the Honorable Charles A. Jackson—the A for Alfred, but his former colleagues had changed it to “Action”—had been a storied homicide cop himself, the only black member of LAPD’s infamous hat squad. The nickname came during the fifties when LAPD was a formidable force of serious practitioners of law enforcement, no-nonsense men who saw to it at all costs that justice was swift and that the City of Angels remained untarnished, as far as anyone in the suburbs would know. The squad’s landmark case had been the Black Dahlia murder, which remains unsolved seventy years later, though it was some considerable time after it happened when Action Jackson donned a fedora himself. Some said he was the last of the hat squad, but Josie knew better; her beloved sheriff’s homicide bureau had a hat squad of its own, namely her partner, Dickie Jones. He had broken her in on the floor, handling scores of murders in the few years they were together on Team 2. Now they were both assigned to Unsolved Homicides where she was not only burdened with a dozen unsolved cases of her own, cases she brought from the floor to Unsolveds, but hundreds of other cases that had cooled off while in the hands of other bulldogs currently or previously assigned to the bureau. Some were now as cold as ice.

  The Honorable Action Jackson told the defense to proceed, punctuating his soft-spoken words with a wave of his meaty hand as he leaned back in his tall leather chair and turned his attention to the witness box. Josie proffered a slight closed-mouth smile, then turned her gaze toward the defendant’s counselor who stepped to his podium and said, “Good morning, Detective Sanchez.”

  2

  Dickie’s iPhone lit up in its cradle on the dash, the display indicating an unknown caller ringing through. He lowered the volume on his AM radio where he monitored traffic reports every ten minutes—on the ones, 11 past the hour, 21 past the hour, et cetera—pushed the button to answer the call and aimed his chin at a microphone tucked into the headliner. “Jones,” he said flatly.

  “Hey dummy, where’s your partner this morning?” It was Davey Lopes, one of the senior members of the Unsolveds unit. Dickie pictured him sitting at his desk with his feet propped up, a cup of coffee steaming next to him, his mischievous eyes fixed on the pair of miniature flags that stood in a coffee mug at the edge of his desk: Old Glory and a scarlet flag featuring an eagle, globe and anchor, and a banner beneath the insignia bearing the words United States Marine Corps.

  “Good morning to you, too, asshole. My partner’s in trial this week, what’s up?”

  “Stover’s looking for her, said some dude’s trying to beef her for stalking him.”

  Dickie chuckled. What most men would give to have Josie stalking them. Who in hell would beef her for that? He said, “What’d the captain say? He tell you anything about who this asshole is?”

  “Just that the dude’s a convict, someone she put away and is now on his ass again. Anyway, just thought I’d give you a heads up. You comin’ in today, or what?”

  Dickie had no idea what the beef could be about, but he’d send Josie a text the next time traffic bottled up on the southbound I-5 and he came to a stop, let her know the skipper was on the warpath. It was the least a partner could do. He said, “I’m on my way in now, if it’s any of your business.”

  “Good,” Lopes said, “get your ass in here. I need you to roll with me out to Pico.”

  Dickie knew he meant Pico Rivera, a city south and east of downtown L.A. which contracts with the sheriff’s department for law enforcement services, but he wasn’t certain if Lopes was talking about going somewhere in the city, or to the sheriff’s station, aptly named Pico Rivera station. He said, “What’s up in Pico?”

  “Your mother’s ankles. Now hurry up, get your ass in here.”

  Lopes hung up and Dickie grinned as he turned his radio back up, thinking, You asshole, Lopes, then focused on the tail end of another traffic report.

  Traffic slowed, so he shot Josie a text:

  Some dude beefed you for riding his ass.

  While waiting for a reply, he thought about any cases Josie might be working where a suspect or person of interest could have felt the pressures of an old sore being reopened. That was exactly what it must’ve felt like to have thought you’d gotten away with murder, only to have a couple of homicide cops knock on your door again ten or twenty years later. That type of surprise contact could sometimes be enough to crack a case wide open, the proverbial floodgates of guilt giving way to the relief of repentance. Dickie thrived on such occurrences. It was the thing he had come to enjoy most about working unsolved cases, showing up on the steps of people who thought they had gotten away with something, thought that the cops had stopped trying. All too often, that was the case—they had stopped trying. You could only reopen so many unsolved cases every year, which meant hundreds of them never got a second look. Which made clearing cold cases that much more rewarding.

  Perhaps that’s what he’d be doing later with Lopes, opening an old wound to see what happened. It was always entertaining to watch the Marine captain-turned-homicide cop put the screws to a guy, especially if that guy was a gangster. Lopes was merciless when it came to gangbangers, and he had a gift for breaking them.

  Dickie saw that Josie was typing a response.

  Josie

  . . .

  Or was she?

  . . .

  Finally, short and to the point:

  WTF?

  IDK… just what Lopes said. Captain was looking for you.

  There were more dots, but then they stopped, and no text appeared to replace them. Traffic was moving again, so Dickie placed his phone back in its cradle and got lost in his thoughts as he crept along in the number one lane, crowding the median to have a better look at what he was up against in this morning’s commute. He was thinking about the allegation of Josie stalking someone, and it took him back to the case in which she had been kidnapped and held in the mountains by a game warden named Jacob Spencer. But it hadn’t been obvious that it was Spencer who had done it, and it took a year of Josie gnawing on that bone like a true bulldog would before enough evidence was gathered to charge him. Some might have said she stalked him, too, but isn’t that what a good detective did? Spencer had hung himself just before the trial started, and Josie had been alone with him in lockup shortly before it happened. Dickie sometimes imagined things that he would keep to himself when pondering to what lengths Josie might go to put a bad man away.

  Josie

  Can you get a drink after work tonight? We need to talk.

  Great, he thought. Whatever it was that the captain had on his plate, Josie must’ve known it was coming. With traffic now moving along, he opted to hold off on replying just yet. He’d contemplate the whole thing for a while and also find out what the wife had planned for the evening before committing to drinks with Josie. Besides, it wasn’t a
s if they couldn’t step outside the office later and discuss whatever they needed to talk about, Dickie knowing it was most likely related to this beef Lopes had told him about.

  He had to admit that he was more than a little curious, eager to find out who had lodged a complaint and what it was about. After all, there were few cases that Josie had worked without him, which meant there was a fair chance he would at least know something about it. But nothing came to him at the moment, so he wondered if it were even about a homicide case. Maybe it was something personal, a domestic situation. Maybe Josie was stalking an annoying neighbor, or a hot UPS driver or, God forbid, some hose jockey she met at the gym. It always struck him as odd how little he knew about her personal life.

  3

  Josie finished her testimony and remained in the courtroom in the role of an investigating officer, taking her seat next to McKnight. It was impromptu, not something previously planned or discussed, but a fairly common practice in homicide cases nonetheless. Though the murder of Trinidad Flores was not a complex one, and it was unlikely that the prosecutor would benefit from her remaining at his side, Josie had another agenda. There was something she needed to find out, a so-far unresolved personal mystery, one on which McKnight could perhaps shed some light.

  She and McKnight had recently spent an evening preparing for the trial. Afterward, they had gone for drinks, and for the first time in her life, Josie couldn’t remember everything that may have happened. In fact, she couldn’t remember much of it at all. She hadn’t had that much to drink—that, she did know—so she should have been able to clearly recall the events of the entire night. But she couldn’t.

  They had been alone in his office, a small private room on the seventeenth floor of the criminal courts building with a view of the hall of justice across the street, going over her testimony for the trial. It had been a bit overdone, she knew, given the simplicity of the case: two men argued in a bar, they took it outside, and one fatally stabbed the other. Nonetheless, there she had sat late into the evening, confined to a room decorated with certificates and awards and photographs memorializing McKnight’s days on the campus of Chapman University and the Fowler School of Law, as well as on its football turf. Josie had pondered that evening what position he might have played, since he was of only average height and had the build of a runner. Maybe he had been a kicker, or he played safety, a position where speed was more important than size. She had resisted asking so as not to stoke his ego or step onto the slippery slope of mixing business with pleasure. Not that any of her thoughts about him—that evening or in the days and nights that followed—necessarily delved into the pleasurable, or at least not all of them had. Though she would admit, if only to herself, that it had been difficult to suppress the memory of frat boy standing up from behind his desk and plunging a hand deep into the front and then back of his slacks under the guise of tucking in his dress shirt. There was something to be said for narrow hips and a flat stomach on a thirty-something man who spends the bulk of his days behind a desk or in a courtroom.

  Following the unabashed adjustments of his wardrobe, McKnight had glanced at his watch and announced that there was time to catch the last of the USC game at Brandy’s, a local sports bar with good food and drinks and a big-screen television outside for patio dwellers, which McKnight had suggested would be perfect that evening. She had been caught off guard and couldn’t come up with a plausible reason to refuse, so instead she had said, “You don’t have anyone expecting you home soon?” She cringed after she said it, thinking she may as have just asked if he planned to take her to bed after. To her actual question, though, he had replied, “Just Chappy, but I’ll call my neighbor and have her let him out for me,” explaining that Chappy was his Chinese crested, a breed of dog with which Josie was unfamiliar. She had said, “Chinese what?” picturing some type of pug.

  Chappy. He had named his toy dog after his preppy school, this intellectual prosecutor who was quick on his feet and probably even faster with his hands, given the speed at which he had shoved one of them deep into the crotch of his slacks right in front of her that night. And what was with the neighbor? She would come over and take care of the dog… Josie wagered that this slutty girl-next-door took care of more than just the dog on his lap. And what straight men owned lap dogs anyway? Or was the young lawyer gay? She had pondered that for a moment and then decided it couldn’t hurt to have a drink with the man.

  So she had gone with him to this Brandy’s joint, leaving her car at the courthouse and riding in his BMW because he had told her parking would be at a premium at the pub. She remembered being wedged between McKnight and another thirty-something professional who had shed his tie and worn an open collar, and whose dark eyes contrasted with his overdone toothy smile. Mr. Smiley had greeted her—how could he not; they were exchanging body heat through summer threads, each turned toward their own dates but likely thinking of the stranger beside them whose physical touch was incidental, although not necessarily unwelcome. Certainly not for him, Josie knew.

  When McKnight went to the restroom, Smiley made his play, his elbow accidentally finding its way beneath the back of her arm and brushing across the side of Josie’s breast. They each turned the quarter-turn it took to look into the other’s eyes, and Smiley apologized profusely, assured her he hadn’t meant to cop a feel—in so many words—and offered to buy her a drink. Of course Josie declined, and her eyes met those of the stranger’s companion, a bottle-blonde with heavy makeup and tired eyes that told Josie the bitch was loaded—on what, she had no idea. Droopy forced a smile, as if she were resigned to whatever would or would not happen. Josie turned away from them both, taking the opportunity to scoot her stool a few inches away from Smiley to avoid further contact. She had been hit on by couples before, and she knew how that felt. Smiley and Droopy were looking for a threesome, or maybe even a foursome. Either way, they were looking in the wrong direction.

  Josie remembered Mc-what’s-his-face returning and having to stand as Josie had left no room for him at the bar in her effort to separate herself from the perverts. As McKnight stood behind her, Josie rotated on her stool for a more intimate setting with him, a subtle message to her neighbors that she was only interested in her date. But was she? Was it even a date? She didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that her back was to the bar, and her drink behind her, out of her view. She knew better than to take her eyes off of a drink when out at bars, yet she had somehow managed to overlook that precaution as she focused on ending any interaction with Smiley. At some point, McKnight reached over her to get her drink, and then his, from the bar. With a simple nod, he had suggested they move to a nearby table. Had he noticed something about Smiley as well? She followed him across the patio, where they slid into a more private setting for two as another couple left it.

  Josie had no recollection of anything beyond that moment until she awoke the next morning in a king-size bed with satin sheets and a naked dog staring at her. Thankfully, the hairless crested was the only one in the buff. Josie was somewhat relieved to see she was wearing her panties and an oversized T-shirt advertising a CrossFit gym she had never heard of, which had caused her to wonder where she was. She hoped she was with the deputy district attorney with whom she had gone out for drinks. But why did she have no recollection of getting there?

  As it turned out, she had accurately assessed that much of the mystery. Shortly after she had awoken, McKnight appeared with coffee in hand. He had demonstrated sincere concern for her well-being, mentioning the condition she had been in by the time they left the pub, that there was no way she could have driven home. He told her she had really been out of it, and she wasn’t even able to tell him where she lived so he could drive her there. As he had fussed with her pillows, encouraging her to sit up and have some coffee, he told her he had even thought to look for an ID in her purse so that he could get her home, but the sight of a pistol therein had deterred him from further intrusion.

  Josie had ended the pi
llow talk when a sudden wave of nausea washed over her. She tossed off the covers and pushed past her lawyer host and rushed to the bathroom to throw up, but she found herself mostly dry heaving. That answered the one question she had awakened with: how much had she drunk? Very little, she surmised. It didn’t happen often—and not for a very long time—but Josie knew what throwing up after over-indulging looked like.

  That had brought up the next question, one upon which she deliberated extensively while composing herself to the extent she could behind the closed bathroom door, and with which she still wrestled: could she have blacked out if she hadn’t consumed much alcohol? Josie had never experienced any such loss of consciousness and memory, even when she had drunk to excess. Drinking with cops tested the limits of one’s ability to handle their alcohol, and Josie—no different from her peers—had become a serious practitioner of consumption. With cops, it began as camaraderie, and oftentimes, for many, morphed into an unacknowledged necessary coping mechanism. So how had she found herself in such an awkward, inexplicable situation?

  The lawyer, with his perfect hospitality, had left her with a new toothbrush, clean linens, a piece of dry toast and a soft drink for her upset stomach to replace the untouched coffee. An hour later, he dropped her off at her car, the charcoal-gray Dodge Charger one of a half dozen sedans speckling the vast flat of pavement behind the idle courthouse on a tranquil Saturday morning. She had spent the remainder of that day curled in her bed battling extreme bouts of nausea and unrelenting muscle aches. It had occurred to her that perhaps she had a case of influenza, and later that evening—when she was physically able—she scoured the internet to see if any such combination of the flu and alcohol could result in memory loss. It didn’t seem to be the case.