The Man With the Iron-On Badge Read online

  Lauren was beautiful.

  It took her a half an hour to finish her coffee; then she drove off across the parking lot. I was right behind her, I mean literally, as she stopped for traffic at the exit. She glanced into the rearview mirror and I ducked down, as if searching for a station on the radio.

  When I looked back up, praying that she hadn’t seen my face, Lauren had already shot into traffic on Las Posas. I tried to follow, but nobody would let me in. It was bumper-to-bumper and the space between the cars and the sidewalk was too narrow for me to fit into. I watched in desperation as she sped through the intersection and on towards the freeway onramp.

  If I didn’t get through the intersection before it turned red, she’d hit the freeway and I’d never catch up to her.

  I swore, turned the wheel, and hit the gas, speeding with half my car on the road, the other half on the sidewalk, the underbelly of my Sentra scraping the curb and spraying sparks as I went. But Lauren didn’t see any of that; her Range Rover had already disappeared down the embankment to the freeway.

  I made it through the intersection as the light turned yellow, and raced onto the freeway in time to see Lauren’s Range Rover about five cars ahead of me.

  I weaved through cars until I’d cut the number of cars between us down to two, then I relaxed, settling back into my vinyl seat, noticing for the first time that my entire body was drenched with sweat.

  I’d almost lost her and yet, the truth is, I loved every desperate moment.

  I spent the next forty-five minutes on the freeway into Santa Barbara torturing myself, wondering if I’d screwed up and she’d done all that on purpose to lose me.

  But if Lauren had, she wasn’t making it too hard for me to keep up with her.

  Then a Highway Patrol car roared up behind me, tailgating me for a while and giving me something new to worry about. I convinced myself he could tell I was stalking this beautiful woman and he was just waiting for back-up before arresting me. But after a mile or two, he got off the freeway and let me go back to torturing myself over previous events.

  The further north we got, the foggier and cooler it got. It’s what my mother used to call “beach weather.” She liked it misty and gray like that. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s one of the things I might have asked her, if she hadn’t walked out the door one morning when I was fourteen and decided not to come back.

  That’s around the time I started reading mysteries. I began with Encyclopedia Brown, which I liked for the tough puzzles and the simmering erotic tension. I kept waiting for him to cop a feel from Sally, the prettiest girl in the fifth grade and the only kid in school who could kick the shit out of that bully Bugs Meany, but if it ever happened, I missed it.

  I went from Encyclopedia to the Hardy Boys, and then at a garage sale I stumbled onto a pile of ratty, old paperbacks by Richard Prather. He wrote about Shell Scott, a detective who, like me, had a twenty-four-hour-a-day hard-on and looked like a freak. Shell was six feet tall with white hair and white eyebrows. I was gawky and covered with zits. He got laid all the time by women he called tomatoes. I masturbated a lot.

  When I wasn’t reading or jerking off, I watched PI shows on TV. We had a great UHF station that showed all the old stuff, everything from “77 Sunset Strip” to “Cannon.” The PIs on The Strip, they were cool cats, even though one of the detectives was played by an actor named Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. If a guy with a name like Efrem could fool people into thinking he was cool, maybe Harvey Mapes wasn’t such a geek name after all. Private Eye Frank Cannon was an ugly fat-ass, but I admired how he got the job done anyway. I thought it’d be great if in one episode he overpowered a hitman by sitting on him, but I don’t think he ever did.

  Lauren took the first off-ramp into Santa Barbara, where Kinsey Milhone lives, though she calls it Santa Teresa, which doesn’t fool anybody. I followed Lauren as she drove along the broad beach and I wondered which of the hotels she’d end up at. She had her choice of meticulously maintained, retro-style motels or one of the lush, expansive resorts. They were all pricey and only a few stories tall to maintain Santa Barbara’s friendly village ambience and ensure unobscured views of the offshore oil rigs.

  I figured she’d choose a motel, because even at three hundred fifty bucks a night, there was still a certain dirty charm to a room you could drive up to.

  But she surprised me by driving past the pier, and the turn into the downtown shopping district, and heading into the beach parking lot instead. She paid her two bucks and found a spot. I did the same, noting the expense, the time, and the location in my notebook and admiring my own professionalism.

  Lauren got out of her car, took off her shoes, and walked out on to the sand. I stayed where I was and just watched her.

  She walked down to the shore and strolled with her bare feet in the surf. I waited expectantly for the illicit rendezvous and two hours later, my bladder bursting, it still hadn’t happened.

  Lauren just sat on the sand, staring at the waves. For me, looking at all that churning surf only made my predicament worse.

  I kept glancing at the restrooms, trying to gauge how long it would take me to run inside, piss, and come back out, and if she could disappear in that time. I was never good at math or geometry.

  I decided to take a chance.

  I bolted out of the car and ran into the restroom, which was thick with flies and the fetid stench of urine. I hurried up to a urinal and pissed. It seemed to take forever. And while I was doing it, I became aware of a homeless man sitting on the floor in a corner, staring at me furiously, like I’d broken into his house and started pissing on his rug.

  As I zipped up my fly, I smiled at him and actually said I was sorry. I ran out, took a deep breath of fresh air, and looked at the beach.

  She was gone.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d only been away a few seconds and she’d disappeared. I looked for her car. It was still there, so she couldn’t have gone far.

  Unless she got into her lover’s car.

  I told myself there wasn’t time for that to happen. She’d been down by the water, she couldn’t have gotten back to the parking lot that quickly.

  I ran out towards the water, looking everywhere for her as I went.

  And that’s when I almost stepped on her.

  She was right where she was supposed to be, only now she was lying down, which is how I’d missed her. I quickly spun around, turning my back to her, and hoped for the second time that day that she hadn’t noticed me.

  I walked quickly back to my car, got inside, and gave some thought to how to avoid pissing on duty in the future.

  I passed the time reading the Spenser book and noticed he never had bladder issues on the job, which I now knew from experience wasn’t very realistic. I was thinking about writing a letter on the subject to the author when Lauren got up off the sand and trudged back towards her car.

  I made a notation of the time and started my car up in anticipation.

  As Lauren got closer, I could see the sadness on her face. Perhaps it was longing for the lover who never showed up. I briefly considered volunteering to take his place, but ethically, it just wasn’t the right thing to do. I also lacked the courage, the looks, and the charm to pull it off. But there was a light, cool breeze buffeting her blouse, making her nipples big and hard, so I couldn’t help at least fantasizing about the possibility.

  I took another picture. This one was also for me.

  She got in her car, backed out slowly, and drove off. I took it easy and let a couple cars pass before leaving the parking lot and following her down the street the way we came.

  It was going just fine until we were nearly at the freeway. She went through the intersection and the light turned yellow on the car that was between us.

  There was only one way to stay with her.

  I ran the red light.

  The only thing I really remember about the accident was the sound of the impact when the van clipped me.

  I do
n’t know what it felt like when the car rolled over all those times, or what I was thinking when I unbuckled my seat belt, crawled out of my upside-down Sentra, and vomited on the pavement.

  What is real clear to me was the terror on the face of the van’s Mexican driver as he slowed to look at me, and then the sound of his tires squealing as he sped off, dragging his front grill along the pavement.

  Chapter Five

  In a strange way, it was my lucky day.

  The driver of the van that hit me must have been an illegal alien or a wanted criminal or something, because he didn’t stick around to accuse me of running the red light and causing the accident.

  That wasn’t the only break I got.

  The witnesses were totally unreliable. Because the driver of the van fled, in their minds that made him the bad guy, even though they must have seen me run the red light. They resolved the conflict between what they saw and what really happened by simply changing what they saw.

  I helped things along by looking as pitiful and pained as I possibly could, hoping to appeal to their compassion and gullibility.

  It worked.

  To the police, I was the poor victim of a hit-and-run driver and he became the asshole who hit me. Obviously, I didn’t say anything that would change their minds, but now I know what eyewitness testimony is really worth.

  I also made sure to describe the Hispanic driver as black, and say, with absolute certainty, that his Chevy van was a Ford. The last thing I wanted the police to do was find the guy, and the witnesses helped me again. One witness described the driver as Asian, another saw a white woman, and no one knew what kind of van it was.

  The paramedics insisted that I go to the hospital, but I didn’t want to make a bad day worse by adding a medical deductible to my problems. Besides, all I had were a few cuts and bruises, which they’d already doctored up just fine. So I swallowed four Advils, thanked them, and walked away to inspect what was left of my Sentra.

  There was no question that my car was totaled. I was insured, but I had a thousand-dollar deductible to keep my rates down. I doubted my car was worth much more than two grand, and with only seven hundred eighty-eight dollars in the bank, I saw financial disaster in my future.

  I borrowed a cop’s cell phone and called my insurance agent, and discovered my luck was still holding. The deductible didn’t apply in this situation. The insurance company had a deal with a body shop in Santa Barbara; all I’d have to do is have my car towed there and they’d take care of everything, even give me a free rental until they could cut me a check for the negligible market value of my heap.

  I figured if I kept working for the next week or so at both jobs, I could still come out of this ahead financially and with a car no worse than what I had before.

  So, while I waited for the tow truck, I salvaged my uniform, cameras, and notebook from the car and tried to figure out how I was going to hide this huge fuck-up from Cyril Parkus.

  I glanced at my watch. It was five twenty-five.

  Lauren Parkus could be anywhere. Fucking her lover or robbing banks or hopping a jet to Rio, for all I knew.

  Cyril Parkus was going to want a complete account of his wife’s activities, and if I made something up, I stood a good chance of being caught.

  What would happen, for example, if I reported that she went to the movies at three, but when Cyril Parkus got home he discovered his wife had bought a couple stone lions for their back door? Her shopping trip wouldn’t be in my report and I’d be outed as a moron.

  The last time I’d seen Lauren was two hours ago, getting onto the southbound Ventura Freeway. If I was very, very, very lucky, she went straight home, but I didn’t hold out much hope.

  It was after eight by the time I got out of Santa Barbara in my rented Kia Sephia, Korea’s idea of an automotive practical joke. I was certain if I hit a speed bump too fast, I would be killed instantly.

  Even so, I drove the car as fast as it would go, managing to nudge the speedometer all the way up to fifty-six miles per hour without the engine bursting into flames and covering the freeway with bits of charred hamster.

  All in all, my first day doing detective work wasn’t quite what I’d hoped it would be. There was no glamour. There was no action. And the only nipples I saw were from a distance. It was a complete disaster. Even so, I was exhilarated in way I hadn’t been since, well, since ever.

  I knew I wasn’t going to have time to go home before starting my shift, so I stopped at Target and reluctantly parted with fifty bucks. I bought a fresh shirt and pants, a battery-operated alarm clock, a bunch of snack food, and some personal hygiene stuff.

  I stopped at a Chevron station and cleaned myself in the restroom. I shaved, brushed my teeth, and washed my hair in the corroded sink. I slathered Arid Extra Dry Ultra Fresh Gel under my arms, shook the broken glass off my uniform, and put it on, hoping no one would notice in the dark just how wrinkled and dirty it was.

  Exuding ultra-freshness, I got back in my car and drove to Spanish Hills, parking down the block from Bel Vista Estates. I set the alarm clock for eleven fifty, put it on the dash, and closed my eyes.

  The alarm rang on time. I swiped it off the dash and stuck it in the glove box, which I discovered was roomier than the trunk. I made a mental note to myself to scratch the Kia Sephia off my list of possible new cars.

  Every part of my body ached from the accident and within seconds of waking up, my stomach started cramping with anxiety. I still had no idea what I was going to tell Cyril Parkus. I didn’t want him to find out I was incompetent, at least not until I got more of his money, which I needed more now than ever.

  I got out of the car, told myself I was as ultra-fresh as I smelled, and walked up to the shack to relieve Clay Denbo, sort of a younger version of me, only black and two hundred pounds heavier. I weight one ninety, so you get the picture.

  Clay worked part-time while going to community college in Moorpark, the way I did, only I went to Cal State Northridge, which is a better school.

  He was thinking of either becoming a radio psychologist or a parking concepts engineer. Redesigning the layout of parking lots to add more spaces was kind of his hobby. He had a whole sketchpad of ideas he carried around with him and was always asking me to keep my eyes open for problem parking areas he could visit.

  Clay was packing up his textbooks and sketchpad as I walked up. One of the books was called History of Vehicle Parking in the Urban Landscape, a real grabber. He took one look at me and his mouth kind of hung open.

  “Jesus Christ, Harvey, what happened to you?” he asked.

  “A woman,” I replied. It wasn’t exactly a lie, but the implication was certainly dishonest.

  Clay broke out in a big grin, and I realized he’d make a terrific black Santa Claus and, with the political correctness and diversity thing being trendy at the time, I thought it might even be a money-making idea for him. But I kept the idea to myself, not sure if it’d be taken as some kind of racist jab. You can’t be too sure these days.

  “Hot damn,” Clay said. “Looks like she crawled all over you.”

  “She really likes a man in uniform.” I smiled.

  “Think she’d go for a lot more man in a lot more uniform?”

  “I hope not.”

  Clay gave me a jolly slap on the back as he stepped out of the shack. “See you tomorrow, stud.”

  As soon as he was gone, the first thing I did was rewind the tapes from the gate’s surveillance cameras until I came across Lauren Parkus returning home.

  I froze the tape on her Range Rover going through the gate. According to the time code, she drove in at four seventeen, not even an hour after I last saw her.

  That meant she drove straight home. She couldn’t have stopped anywhere between Santa Barbara and the gate in that amount of time.

  I fell into the chair and nearly cried with relief.

  I had a second chance.

  Cyril Parkus drove out of the community and up to the shack aroun
d seven thirty in the morning.

  “So?” he asked.

  I gave him my handwritten report. “She had coffee, took a walk on the beach, and came home.”

  Parkus didn’t look up from the piece of notebook paper, as if staring at it real hard would reveal new details even I had missed.

  “She didn’t see anybody all day?” he asked.

  “Not unless you count the guy who served her coffee.”

  “I see you noted the seven dollars you paid for parking,” he said. “That would be one of the expenses you were talking about.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The one hundred and fifty dollars a day doesn’t cover parking?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was playing with me, or just being cheap. He didn’t wait for me to answer, he just handed the paper back to me.

  “Thanks, Harvey,” he said. “Keep up the good work.”

  And with that, Cyril Parkus drove off, the smell of leather upholstery lingering in his wake.

  He didn’t even say anything about how lousy I looked. Maybe I really was ultra-fresh. Or maybe he just didn’t give a damn.

  Sergeant Victor Banos showed up a few minutes later, and he made up for Parkus’ oversight regarding my appearance. I won’t share all the snide remarks he made, they really aren’t pertinent to the story. Needless to say, I got out of there as fast as I could, returned to my Sephia, and changed into my new clothes.

  I’d just got my pants on when Lauren Parkus drove out of the gate. She was getting a very early start. I turned the key in the ignition, hit the gas pedal in my stocking feet, and followed after her.

  Lauren didn’t make it difficult for me this time. She went right down to the freeway and headed south. We hit the tail end of rush hour traffic, so keeping up with her was easy, though my Sephia struggled mightily going up the Conejo Pass between Camarillo and Newbury Park. The car was such a little shitcan, I was afraid if a bug slammed into the windshield the car would be totaled.

  She took me across the San Fernando Valley to Studio City, where she got off at Coldwater Canyon and headed south towards the Hollywood Hills.