“Then let’s try this. You’re what we call a suborned informant. People like that make enemies. Think about it and give me some names.”
“Fancy words for snitch and fink and stool pigeon.”
“Names, Mr. Kafesjian.”
“Men in prison can’t break into nice family houses. I got no names for you.”
“Then let’s talk about Tommy and Lucille’s enemies.”
“No enemies, my kids.”
“Think. This guy breaks in, breaks phonograph records and mutilates your daughter’s clothing. Did those records belong to Tommy?”
“Yes, Tommy’s long-play record albums.”
“Right. And Tommy’s a musician, so maybe the burglar had a grudge against him.
He wanted to destroy his property and Lucille’s, but for some reason he didn’t get upstairs to their bedrooms. So, _their_ enemies. Old musician buddies, Lucille’s old boyfriends. _Think_.”
“No, no enemies”–soft–say his brain just clicked on.
Change-up: “I need to fingerprint you and your family. We need to compare your prints against any prints the burglar might have left.”
He pulled a money clip out. “No. It’s not right. I clean my own–”
I squeezed his hand shut. “Play it your way. Just remember it’s Exley’s show, and I owe him more than I owe Wilhite.”
He tore his hand free and fanned out C-notes.
I said, “Fuck you. Fuck your whole greasy family.”
Rip, tear–he trashed two grand easy.
I waltzed before it got worse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shitwork time.
Pinker labbed the dogs. The print guys got smudges, partials. The crowd dwindled; blues canvassed. Junior logged reports: nothing hot that night, archetypal Kafesjian rebop.
Dig: epic family brawls, all-night sax noise. J.C. watered the lawn in a jock strap. Tommy pissed out his bedroom window. Madge and Lucille: wicked tantrum shouters. Bruises, black eyes–standard issue.
Slow time-let it drag.
Lucille and Madge took off–adios in a pink Ford Vicky. Tommy practiced scales–the lab men popped in earplugs. Beer cans out the windows–Lunch of Champions.
Junior fetched the _Herald_. A Morton Diskant announcement: press conference, 6:00 tonight.
Side 27
Ellroy – White Jazz
Time to kill–I hit the lab van, watched the techs work.
Tissue slicing, extraction-our boy jammed the dogs’ eyes down their throats.
Back to my car, a doze-bum sleep two nights running stretched me thin.
“Dave, rise and shine”–Ray Pinker, too goddamn soon.
Up yawning. “Results?”
“Yes, and interesting. I’m not a doctor and what I did wasn’t an autopsy, but I think I can reconstruct some things conclusively.”
“Go. Tell me now, then route me a summary report.”
“Well, the dogs were poisoned with hamburger laced with sodium tryctozine, commonly known as ant poison. I found leather glove f ragments on their teeth and gums, which leads me to believe that the burglar tossed them the meat, but didn’t wait for them to die before he mutilated them. You told me you smelled chloroform, remember?”
“Yeah. I figured it was the washrags in their mouths.”
“You’re close so far. But it wasn’t chloroform, it was stelfactiznide chloride, a dry-cleaning chemical. Now, J.C. Kafesjian owns a string of dry-cleaning shops. Interesting?”
The man broke in, stole and destroyed. A psycho, but precise-no disarray. Bold: and time-consuming. Psycho-crazy shit: and neat, precise.
“You’re saying he might know the family, might work in one of the shops.”
“Right.”
“Did you find the girl’s pants?”
“No. We found charred fabric mounds in that garbage can with the dogs, so there’s no way to test the semen for blood type.”
“Shit. Fried pedal pushers sounds just like J.C.”
“Dave, listen. This verges on theory, but I like it.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, the dogs were chemically scalded right around their eyes, and the bones in their snouts were broken. I think the burglar debilitated them with the poison, clamped down on their snouts, then tried to blind them while they were still alive. Stelfactiznide causes blindness when locally applied, but they flailed too much and bit him. They died from the poison, then he gutted them postmortem. He had some strange fix on their eyes, so he carefully pulled them out, stuffed them down their throats and stuffed the washrags soaked in chemical in their mouths. All four eyeballs were saturated with that chloride, so I rest my case.”
Junior and a bluesuit hovering. “Dave–“