Waving the paper. Petra took it but didn’t read it.
Schoelkopf said, “Go. He’s due over in a couple of hours. Find him a desk and make him feel at home.”
“Should I bake him cookies, sir?”
The captain’s big black mustache spread as he flashed too-white caps. Last summer, he’d been gone for three weeks and had come back with a scary tan and new dentition and what looked like more hair in front.
He said, “If that’s where your girlish talents lie, Detective, go ahead. My personal preference is oatmeal crunch.” He waved Petra away.
When she reached his door, he said, “That Armenian thing squared away?”
“Seems to be.”
“Seems to be?”
“It’s all set with the D.A.”
“What’s on your plate, now?”
“The Nunes stabbing—”
“Which one’s that?”
“Manuel Nunes. The bricklayer who troweled his wife—”
“Yeah, yeah, the bloody mortar. You on top of it?”
“It’s not a whodunit,” said Petra. “When the blues showed up Nunes was holding the trowel. I’m dotting the t’s and crossing the i’s.” She resisted the temptation to cross her own eyes and give the bastard a goofy look.
“Well, dot and cross everything—speaking of whodunits, you ever accomplish anything on that musician—the fat boy, Lee?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re telling me it’s ice-cold?”
“Afraid so.”
“What,” said Schoelkopf, “some nutcase just walked up and gutted him?”
“I can bring you the file—”
“Nah,” said Schoelkopf. “So you got stuck. Guess what, it’s good for you, once in a while. Gain a little humility.” More caps. “Lucky for you he wasn’t a big-time celebrity. Small potatoes like that, it goes cold, no one gives a shit. What about his family? Anyone squawking at you?”
“He didn’t have much family.”
“Lucky for you, again.” Schoelkopf’s big smile was polluted by anger. The two of them had gotten off to a bad start, and no matter what Petra did, she knew it would never improve. “You’re a pretty lucky gal—’scuse me, lucky woman—aren’t you?”
“I do my best.”
“Sure you do,” said Schoelkopf. “Okay, that’s all. Show G.I. Joe the ropes. Maybe he’ll turn out to be a lucky guy, too.”
She returned to the detectives’ room, calmed herself down, glanced at the scrap. Expecting a capsule background on her new partner. But all Schoelkopf had scrawled on the form was a name.
Eric Stahl
Eric. Cute-sounding. A military guy. Petra got herself a hot chocolate from the vending machine downstairs and climbed back up with her imagination in high gear. Picturing Eric as buff and cut, a Clint Eastwoody type, maybe one of those precision military buzz do’s. An outdoor dude who surfed and biked, skydove, bungee-jumped, did all those adrenalized things.
A high-energy partner was fine with her. He could do the driving.
He showed up twenty minutes later. She’d been right about the haircut, but nothing else.
Eric Stahl was thirty or so, five-ten, tops, painfully thin, stoop-shouldered and gangly-limbed. The buzz was medium brown, prickly hairs riding the narrow, brooding face of a starving poet. Lord, this white boy was white! A too-many-hours-in-the-library complexion. Except for incongruous coins of pink on his cheeks—fever spots.
Sunken cheeks. Dagger-point chin, lipless mouth, the deepest-set eyes Petra had ever seen. As if someone had poked them with two fingers and pushed them back into his skull. Same matte brown as the hair. Static.
He said, “Detective Connor? Eric Stahl,” without extending a hand or moving. Just stood by her desk, wearing a black suit, white shirt, and gray tie.
Petra said, “Hi, why don’t you sit down.”
Indicating a chair at the side of her desk.
Stahl considered the offer, finally accepted.
His black suit seemed to compound her own outfit: an ebony Vestimenta pantsuit she’d bought at the Barney’s hanger sale two seasons ago. Funereal; the two of them looked like the welcoming committee at Forest Lawn.
Stahl didn’t bat a lash. High energy, indeed. That face . . . grow out the buzz cut and dress him in leather pants and a bunch of other punky whatnot, and he’d fit right in with any of the dissolute hustlers you saw staggering down the boulevard.
Keith Richard’s younger brother. Keith, himself, at the worst of his junkie days.