Milo’d told me he was new to the division, a Detective I. For all I knew, this was his first case.
Last to arrive was Willis Hooks from Central. I’d met him when he worked Southwest.
A series of killings of handicapped people that had given me a glimpse of a cowardly new world.
Hooks was in his early forties, black, five-nine, heavy, with a clean head, bulldog jowls, and a thick, drooping mustache. His navy blazer had that baggy, too-long look you sometimes see with big-chested men. His shoes were dusty.
“Milo,” he said, sitting down. “Dr. Delaware. Fate keeps putting us in the same room.”
Aguilar watched and listened, trying, I guessed, to gauge Hooks’s mood. To know with whom to align himself.
“Fate or just plain bad luck, Willis,” said Milo.
Hooks laughed hoarsely and spread pudgy fingers on the table.
Milo said, “Willis, this is Robert Aguilar.”
“Newton Division,” said Aguilar.
“Charmed,” said Hooks. “Yours is the train?”
“Yup,” said Aguilar. “Ellroy Lincoln Beatty, male black, fifty-two.”
“Mine’s Leroy Washington Beatty, male black, fifty-two. Think they could be distantly related?”
Before Aguilar could answer, Hooks winked and said, “Mine went down around three
A.M., give or take.”
“Mine, too,” said Aguilar.
“How ’bout that?” Hooks turned to Milo. “It appears someone’s got it in for the
Beatty family. Maybe we should find out if they’ve got any other siblings. Maybe there’s some more Beatty 187’s all over town-hell, this could be a Beatty Holocaust.
If not, least we should do is warn them.”
Aguilar frowned. Taking out a gold Cross pen, he began writing in his pad.
Hooks said, “Got some ideas, Detective?”
Aguilar looked up. His lips were tight. “Just charting the data flow.”
Hooks pursed his lips and his mustache bristled. “Well, that’s good. So tell me,
Detective Sturgis. What’s your connection to the Bobbsey twins?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” said Milo.
We left the morgue at twelve-thirty P.M. Mission Road was alive with pedestrians.
The air smelled like fried chicken.
“Grease,” said Milo. “Yum. Lunch?”
“Not in the mood,” I said.
“Such strength of character.”
He’d left the unmarked in the red zone turnaround in front of the building along with other police vehicles. I’d used a nearby lot. A white-and-blue coroner’s van circled past us and cruised out to the street.
Milo said,” ‘Choo choo bang bang.’ A train and a gun.” He rested a foot on the unmarked’s front bumper.” ‘Bad eyes in a box.’ Both times Peake spouts off the day before. So when does the bastard go on the Psychic Hotline and start raking in serious money?”
“If the news got out, I’m sure agents would be doing lunch with him at Spago.”
He huffed. “So what the hell does it mean, Alex?”
“Two homeless men, a psychologist, a waiter,” I said. “Wide range of ages, both sexes, blacks, whites. If there’s a connection, I don’t see it. Maybe Wendell
Pelley’s behind some of it. But he didn’t do Dada. So if Dada’s part of the mix, it means more than one killer. Same if the Beatty brothers really were killed simultaneously.”
“Fine, fine, there’s a psycho army out there. For all we know, Peake spouted off about Richard, too, but till Claire showed up, no one was around to listen. The question is how the hell does Peake know?”
“The only logical possibility,” I said, “is that he has some link to the outside.”
“Got to be Pelley,” he said. “Or another Starkweather alum. Guys like that would know all the boozehound places like the train tracks, the alley where Leroy was shot. Booze and mental illness, you said so yourself: bad combination. And Pelley’s history fits: he was blind drunk when he shot his girlfriend and her kids. Now he’s living on the streets again. The Beattys are just the kind of people he’d run into.”
“Why use the train?” I said. “Why not shoot both of them?”
“The guy’s crazy. Maybe a voice told him to do it that way. Choo choo goddamn bang bang. The main thing is, there’s some pattern here.”
I didn’t reply.
He said, “You have a problem with Pelley?”
“No,” I said. “I just can’t see any conceptual link, even eliminating Richard Dada from the mix, between Claire and the Beattys.”