The Fallen

She yelped.

The lighter fell to the wooden beams of the pier and I watched it roll to a stop. She watched it too.

I picked it up and she didn’t try to kick me and run. Sure enough, it was a lighter. But the other end was a pepper sprayer. I’d heard about them from some of the Vice officers.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get that drink. I’ll drive.’

She flexed her wrist. ‘I wasn’t going to use that on you. Swear to God, man—’

‘I think you were.’

‘Give it back.’

‘I’ll give it back later.’

‘Garrett would have lit my cigarette.’

‘Maybe that’s why he’s dead.’

At the Beachside she drank Irish coffees and I had a beer. I asked her what her name was and she said Carrie Ann Martier worked just fine. She said she grew up in San Diego, rich family, though her father was a bastard and her mother was kind but insane.

‘Schizophrenia, with a paranoid subtype,’ she said. ‘Not a good combo when you’re married to a sneak like him.’

She told me Steven Stiles, an aide to Ninth District Councilman Anthony Rood, had punched her in the body twice and stiffed her because he couldn’t get it up. This was back in February. Two bruised ribs – he really laid into her. His wedding band had scraped her skin, which she found ‘highly ironic,’ along with the fact that it was the day before Valentine’s Day. She leaned toward me and waited until I leaned toward her.

‘And, Mr Brownlaw,’ she whispered, ‘nobody treats Carrie Ann Martier like that.’

She said that after getting hit, her ribs had tensed with pain every time she breathed or talked. Laughing was worse, but sneezing and coughing took the cake. She missed two weeks of work. She told me she’d gone to Garrett because Garrett wasn’t a cop and she knew he’d be interested in city employees and contractors buying girls. She wasn’t about to go to the police and she still was not willing to file a criminal complaint, though her ribs still hurt every time someone told her a good joke, which wasn’t often.

She said she’d made the discs for Garrett with a video cam hidden in her flop. She used a room at the Coronado Oceana Hotel, had ‘good relationships’ with security out there. Two girlfriends had similar recording setups, not because Stiles had beat them too, but because they were ‘pissed off at Jordan’ and thought they should be able to show a solid connection between Jordan’s phone calls, which they’d recorded on the sly, with actual men paying for actual sex.

‘Tell me about Jordan,’ I said.

‘You don’t know anything, do you?’

I shook my head. Actually, I knew a little. Vice had been working up a case against Jordan Sheehan for months.

Jordan was the ‘Squeaky Clean Madam,’ said Carrie. She got the name because years ago she actually started a maid service called that. She had made some good money, gotten popped for illegals, labor violations, and back taxes. She did her time, and when she got out she discovered that sex paid more than custodial skills and she didn’t even have to buy mops and vacuums if her girls were pretty enough. Now she ran fifty or sixty girls, more for conventions and special events like the Super Bowl. She had some kind of investment-counseling business as a cover, some fakey name like Sheehan & Associates or something. She had associates, all right. Jordan’s girls dressed like corporate receptionists, they looked like the girl next door, they had to have good manners and pretty smiles, and they cost a lot. Hotels couldn’t even spot them if they rotated right. Pure class and plenty of rules, she said – nothing kinky, nothing rough, no toys, no drugs, no pain or threesomes. Never in a car. They were not allowed to wear risqué clothing. No ‘CFM shoes’ and no pierced body parts except the ears. No swearing, no smoking. No girls over thirty. Every girl had a pager. You never talked to Jordan because the madam was like the top of a pyramid and beneath her were the ‘spot callers’ who told you when and who the John was. Jordan lined them up by the dozen. She had this way about her, pure and simple. Jordan owned men. Jordan could turn a priest into a paying customer in five minutes. The girls did their own marketing, too; they didn’t just wait around for the pager to go off. Jordan told them to drive VW Cabriolet convertibles so the guys could get a look at them. The fleet manager at Mission Center VW was a friend of Jordan’s and would make them deals on the Cabriolets. It was just automobile advertising, like for pizza or exterminators, only for women. Jordan got the idea from Ida Bailey, the old madam in the Gaslamp who used to parade her girls around in carriages so the guys could see the choices and pick. So you got fifty total foxes zooming around San Diego, and guess what happens when you whistle or wave, man, they pull right over and make you a deal. An hour later you’re a grand poorer but you’ve been Squeaky Cleaned. Jordan got four hundred per contact, the ‘meet tax.’ The girls got what they bargained for over that. A thousand was ‘industry standard’ for a Squeaky Clean but sometimes you had to take less. If you were with a city guy, one of Jordan’s ‘special clients,’ then you got a lot less, just the tip, but some Johns thought twenty bucks was a tip. If you tried to cheat on the meet tax Jordan had this huge guy called Chupa Junior with a tiny shaved head and tats all over him and he is not nice. Why cheat though? Could make an easy thousand plus on your lunch hour – you’d be surprised how good lunchtime could be – and afternoons, too, with the flex hours a lot of men worked. And a good night you got home before the sun came up with three or four grand in your purse, sometimes more.

‘Except me,’ she said. ‘I go straight to the ATM and deposit my winnings. That’s where the trouble starts for working girls – they spend faster than they save and some nights you don’t work at all. Sometimes a whole week you won’t work. But you wouldn’t believe the stuff they buy. Jewelry and electronics and clothes and trips and dope – they party like crazy when they’re off duty, just like everybody else. But not Carrie Ann Martier. Nope. I shop catalogs for my work clothes because I look good in anything. I shop Costco for bulk stuff because I’m sole proprietor of my own business. I happen to think that’s funny. And so what if I have two gallons of hair conditioner under the sink? I’m saving for a place in Maui and I’m going to get it before I’m thirty. I am going to get it. After that, it’s aloha Squeaky Clean Madam. I’m leaving the life. I’m going to surf and garden and learn to make my own sushi.’

‘Wow, that’s quite a plan,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’

She shrugged and a faraway look came to her eyes, which were blue. ‘Whatever.’

‘No, I really mean it.’

She studied me. ‘I think you’d pop me in a second if you could get a raise or a promotion out of it.’

I sipped the beer. She had a point, though it had nothing to do with money or status. The law was just the law. Sometimes a cop could look the other way, for the greater good, you know. Sometimes not. I thought back to the white VW Cabriolet I’d seen outside Stella Asplundh’s place and the red one coming from the HTA parking lot earlier that day. Both driven by attractive young women.

‘Why were your friends mad at Jordan?’

‘For raising their meet tax to six hundred.’

‘Why’d she do that?’

‘To make room for the younger girls. The younger ones get a little lower contact charge to get them started and locked in. Young is what the Johns want. Cost of business goes up the older you get. Six, seven, eight hundred per meet. Pretty soon you’re either working all for Jordan or you’re not working.’

‘So you and your friends sneak the videos and make some discs. You give copies to Garrett for his investigation because you got beat up by a politician’s aide and Garrett has made it right for you. But what about the two other girls? What were they going to do with their copies? Blackmail Squeaky Clean for the higher taxes?’

‘It isn’t blackmail if you’re being ripped off.’

I thought about two young working girls trying to run a hustle on their own madam. It sounded perilous. ‘Does Jordan know about the videos?’

‘She couldn’t. If Jordan even suspected we’d done that, she’d have pulled the plug on us by now – she’d never call. Or worse.’

‘Chupa Junior?’

She looked at me and drank the last of her second Irish coffee. ‘Yeah. There’s talk. Always talk, you know? Then something happens. One day a girl is working, then she’s gone. Maybe she crossed Jordan. Shorted her one too many times. Tried to get the Johns calling her direct. Made a scene. Disappointed or pissed off somebody important. Chupa shows up here. Chupa shows up there. Like something out of a nightmare. It makes you wonder.’

‘Have you ever met Jordan Sheehan?’

‘Not face-to-face. Not many of the girls have, unless she recruited them personally. Those are mostly the spot callers. Maybe that’s why Squeaky Clean is still in business. She lives in La Jolla somewhere, running her little investment company. Ha, ha.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m curious,’ I said.

‘Trying to figure what I’m worth?’ She squared her shoulders, frowned, and shook her head once. Her shiny blond hair flared with light, then settled back into place.

‘I’m twenty-nine,’ I said.

‘You’re not selling.’

‘That must be kind of weird. Selling yourself. I don’t mean any offense by that.’

‘You can’t offend me, Robbie. You’ll wear out someday, too. We’ll both end up in the same trash pile.’

I thought about that, about everybody ending up in the same condition. I’d often had that thought and could never figure out if it was a reason to cry or to smile until I was thrown from the Las Palmas. Somewhere on the way down I realized that the fact that you’re going to die is a reason to smile. Every second you live, you’re getting away with the biggest prize there is.

‘You look familiar,’ she said. ‘TV or something?’

‘No.’

‘Magazine?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve seen you. I’m sure.’

‘A lot of people think that. I’ve got a common face. Sorry.’

She looked at me hard again and nodded. She began a smile, then turned it off.

‘I can take you back to your car,’ I said. I paid up and we walked into the foggy night.

‘I checked you out with the PD. And with some of my friends who do a little business with the PD once in a while. You came back clean. Bet you never thought a whore would run a check on you, but I didn’t know what I was going to run into on that pier tonight. Maybe someone who enjoyed Squeaky Clean girls. Maybe someone who knew what Garrett had. Maybe they figured I’d be better off quiet, too. That would make one less person to tell this wretched little story.’

I liked the way Carrie Ann Martier, or whoever she was, tried to take care of herself. I liked her aloneness and her bravery. Her foolishness worried me.

‘Don’t try to run a number on Squeaky Clean,’ I said, ‘You can’t win.’

‘I’m not suicidal.’ ‘Why don’t you just get out of this business?’

‘Stay off my side, Robbie.’

I drove us back to the pier. It wasn’t more than

a few blocks. The acrylic-surfboard sculpture still glowed in the darkness, its colors dampened by the fog. I could tell that Carrie Ann was looking at my profile, trying to locate a memory to go with it.

Her car was a yellow VW Cabriolet convertible, in keeping with her employer’s wishes.

‘When do I get my lighter back?’

I dug it out of my coat pocket and gave it to her.

‘You remind me of Garrett,’ she said.

‘I’m not cute and sad and a totally great guy.’

‘Yes you are. Even if you did get thrown out of that hotel. You lied to me. You’re the Falling Detective. You’re famous.’

6

Gina didn’t come to the door when I walked in. Lots of lights on, but no music. No sounds from the back. No smell of cooking. The house had an odd feel, like something had changed. I stood in the living room for a moment.

‘Gina?’

I hustled into the bedroom but she wasn’t there. The bed was made and it almost never was. There was an envelope on my pillow and a letter inside. I read in Gina’s cheerful, big-looped handwriting:

Dear Robbie,

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hate myself and you deserve an explanation. I feel like my heart is shrinking down to almost nothing and I don’t know why. I often feel so unhappy. I do love you. It’s not that I don’t. But I need some space right now, so I’m with friends from Sultra. I need some time to think and to work through the problems inside me. I wish I could take out the unhappy parts and fix them and put me back together whole and happy like when we first got married. Hard to believe that was five years ago, isn’t it? I’m going to come back tomorrow while you’re at work to get a few more things. Please don’t come by the salon looking for me. I think I’d just cry and make an even bigger mess of things and if Chambers saw that he might toss me out and get someone lower maintenance. You know how Chambers is. I drove through Taco Bell so there’s two tacos and a Burrito Grande in the fridge for you. You got a little box of fishing stuff from The Fly Shop so maybe that will help take your mind off things. It’s on the kitchen table. I’m sorry I’m putting you through this. I’m so, so, so, so sorry. Maybe someday we’ll still be the best friends in the world and we’ll look back at this and laugh.

Love,

Gina

I stood there and read it two more times. The very first thing I thought was what a surprise this was. What a huge and horrible surprise.

My second thought was no. This was not a surprise at all. You saw this coming. You knew something was wrong and you did nothing about it.

I lay down on our bed and wrapped her pillow around my head. Clamped my arms across it. Listened to the throb of blood in my ears and smelled her perfume and imagined her face. For a long moment I felt like I was falling from the Las Palmas again, only slower.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This cannot happen.’

I jerked upright, sat there for another minute, then tossed the pillow against the wall.

I called Rachel and got her machine. I said if Gina was there, I wanted her to know I loved her and understood how she felt and was looking forward to talking to her about it. I tried to think of something optimistic and soothing to say before I hung up but I couldn’t think of anything except I love you and don’t worry, Gina, we’ll get over this hump.

I opened a bottle of brandy we’d gotten for Christmas one year and poured a coffee cup almost full. I forced down a couple of big gulps, then poured the rest down the drain and opened a beer.

I put the dinner Gina had gotten me in the microwave and mistakenly set it for two hours instead of for two minutes. By the time I realized what I’d done, it was severely overheated. It sat before me on the breakfast-nook table billowing steam and bubbling. I thought of calling my buddy Paul, but he was working swing shift, repaving Interstate 5 up near Carlsbad. I thought this would be a good time to have a brother or a sister.

I thought of calling my mother and father but didn’t want to make them anxious about a misunderstanding. They lived down in El Cajon, just east of San Diego. My father is a sales representative for Pacifi-Glide, a subsidiary of Great West Consolidated. They manufacture sliding tub and shower doors. My mother has worked as a secretary in the San Diego School District for twenty-four years, ever since I started kindergarten. They’re not old people, but I saw no reason to upset and alarm them. My father had a heart attack last year, though it was considered minor and stress-related. Besides, things between Gina and me were going to work out. Why get other people worried?

After dinner I sat at my table in the cold garage and tried to tie some flies. But I kept wondering why Gina was so unhappy, and I couldn’t concentrate on the tiny hooks and feathers. How long had this been happening? Five years ago, when we first got married, she was happy. She was only nineteen then, but she was almost through the College of Beauty and had a job waiting for her when she got out. I was twenty-four and had just started working fraud. We got married in June at the Pala Mission out on Highway 76, because Gina is Catholic and St Agnes Church in San Diego was booked up that day. We rented a place here in Normal Heights and all we did for two straight years was work hard, party, and make love. Between her friends and mine we always had something fun to do. Sometimes I might have spoiled things for Gina’s crowd because they wanted to do drugs. I didn’t mind but I didn’t want to watch them do it or see them drive a vehicle while acutely impaired. Rachel would occasionally pass joints under my nose and smile tauntingly, but mostly she pretended I wasn’t there. I tried to take up cigarettes as a way of fitting in but they made my mouth and fingers stink. Most of Gina’s friends were pretty and nice. In general, hairstylists are a talkative people. They are curious and have an eye for the unusual. They don’t stick closely to the facts. They are tremendous gossips. Many of the men were gay, though not all of them.

I sat there at my fly-tying table, drinking another beer, fingering the new packets of feathers. The new #3 Metz Brown Capes looked good, though I would have liked the higher-quality #1. Cops are always on a budget, unless they’re on the take. I dropped them back to the tabletop, shut off the garage light, and went back into the empty house.

So when did it start to go wrong?

I remembered a night about a year ago, when Gina had discouraged me from going to a party with her. It was a loft party in Little Italy thrown by a producer of surfing movies. She came home just before daylight. She was jittery and chilled in her flimsy clothes and I could tell she’d taken some kind of stimulant, which she denied. I wondered why someone as chipper and verbal as Gina would want more stimulation. I made her some herbal tea and as she sat at the table I wrapped a blanket over her shoulders. She threw it off and said, You’re smothering me don’t smother me, don’t smother me. She stormed off to the shower and when she came out, told me she only meant smothering her with the blanket. We made incredible love, one of our top ten, at least for me. She was extraordinarily passionate and cried after. I think she had begun to slip away.

Later that morning at roll call I overheard some of the night-shift patrol talking about the party at the movie producer’s loft in Little Italy. ‘Babes and buns and boobs all over the place,’ is how one patrolman put it, out of earshot of our female officers. They’d shaken down some of the louder partiers on the street outside, popped one for coke, one for ecstasy, and one for Mexican brown heroin. Hey, Brownlaw, isn’t your wife a redhead that cuts hair downtown?

Since then, scenes similar to the smother scene have played out more than once. I admit it. None has been quite as surprising as that first one, and our reunifying lovemaking happens less often. But Gina and I are durable. We’ve always eased back together from these sudden fights and everything is fine for a long time. We have never slept in separate beds except for two nights when she visited her parents in Nevada.

So tonight would be a first.

I thought about Gina while I rinsed the dishes. Thought about her while I showered. Thought about her while I drove to the store for a six-pack and some pretzels. When I couldn’t think about her anymore, I got the Asplundh murder book from the trunk of my take-home and sat at the breakfast table.

First I leafed through the Hidden Threat Assessment of Garrett Asplundh. Although the HTA report was 180 pages long and contained the names of hundreds of people, living and dead, who had had contact with Garrett Asplundh, no one, including Garrett, had set off a ‘Threat Alarm’ on the HTA software.

A fuzzy picture emerges when thousands of facts about a person are collected but given no real degree of importance. It’s like cutting a photograph of someone’s face into small pieces and arranging the pieces at random. I learned, for instance, that Asplundh had had a hernia operation at the age of six and that his twice-divorced surgeon had filed bankruptcy a decade before the operation. I learned that Garrett had gone to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship. He played safety and was later drafted by the Detroit Lions but never signed. And I learned that the pool in which his only child drowned had been built by a company owned by a man named Myron Franks. Franks’s son, Lyle, was a convicted felon in the state of Arizona – attempted murder.

93I was interested to find on page 156 that then

– Vice detective Garrett Asplundh had arrested Jordan Sheehan for drunk driving way back in 1990. Fifteen years ago. He was also listed as a visitor at the Federal Women’s Detention Center in Westmoreland, where Sheehan had done time for tax evasion.

I was also interested to see that Garrett had interviewed for a job with the DEA in Miami roughly one year before he interviewed for his job with the Ethics Authority here in San Diego. Both interviews had been with John Van Flyke.

I found out that Garrett’s older brother, Samuel Asplundh, was a special agent assigned to the FBI office in Los Angeles and that he had been Garrett’s best man at his marriage to Stella.

All interesting, but I believed that the motive for Garrett’s murder lay somewhere in his recent work, not in his past. So I forced myself to read through the pages, searching for something that might shed light.

I learned many facts but nothing jumped out at me.

I kept thinking about the eight hundred dollars a month that Garrett Asplundh had been paying to Uptown Property Management. I had already made a noon appointment with Al Bantour, the manager of Uptown. If Garrett Asplundh was paying eight hundred a month for what I thought he was – a small, secret place, off the radar of anyone he knew – maybe I could find the discs he’d been given by Carrie Ann Martier, and the intelligence he’d gathered on the city’s wayward personnel, and the laptop issued by the Ethics Authority.

I thought that Garrett knew his shooter. I thought Garrett had agreed to meet him – or her – and while he was waiting, he was taken out. I thought the shooter’s name would be right there, in the trail of Garrett’s recent investigations. I thought of what Stella had said when we asked about enemies.

Hundreds.

I closed the murder book, wondering if Carrie Ann Martier was working right now.

At midnight I walked around the house. I grew up in this home, so every space and corner is packed with memories. Gina and I were very fortunate to be able to buy it from my parents several years ago, before the real estate market really topped out. We couldn’t have done it without my folks’ help – they wanted a low-maintenance condominium, so they made us a good deal and carried the paper at a low interest rate. It’s small and old but in good repair because both my father and I are handy with household tools. It’s grown in value.

Our Normal Heights neighborhood is fairly nice and convenient. It got its name from a teachers college, or normal school, that used to be here. I went to elementary and junior high just a few blocks away. Hit my first home run at the Little League field. Hung out with Gary and Jim and Rick. Fell in love with Linda when I was ten and Kathy when I was eleven and Janet when I was thirteen. They all lived within a mile. After Gina and I were married she lobbied hard for a high-rise condo downtown by the bay, but the rents are astronomical down there. The one she wanted was twenty-eight hundred a month. The rent on our first place here in Normal Heights was fourteen hundred plus gas and electric but you got trash pickup and a garage. Two years later I was happy to buy my childhood home, though I understood Gina’s lack of enthusiasm. It is not a high-rise by the bay.

I tried to imagine this place without Gina in it and it was difficult because I knew that she would come back and we would take care of whatever was bothering her. Gina teases me sometimes about trying to fix the unfixable. Once I dropped a dinner plate, which shattered badly, but I glued it back together. It took hours, gathering the shards and wondering which tiny triangle or sliver fits with another. The repaired plate was ugly and incomplete and useless and really kind of funny. Actually, it worked okay collecting runoff under a potted plant out on the back patio.