Laugher Read online

  “Lawson!” I yelled.

  I shut the door and twisted the three deadbolts, assuming it was the only way out, and moved through the foyer into the sitting room, the pepper spray out and ready.

  “I know who you really are. Bartholomew Leitner, right?” I said. “I’m just here to talk.”

  As if the word “talk” was a trigger, a bullet whizzed by me and hit the wall as soon as I said it. I dropped like a rock and dove behind the dining set. Another series of bullets blasted their way through the maze of dining chairs. One of them struck me, but didn’t do anything except rip my sleeve.

  I grabbed an end of the table and tipped it for cover. It didn’t give me much wiggle room, but the wood was thick enough to stop bullets. I hoped.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?!” Lawson yelled from somewhere I couldn’t see.

  “Put the gun down and I’ll tell you.”

  “Fuck you!”

  "I’m unarmed. Look.” I rolled the pepper spray out from behind the table. “That’s all I got. Now put down the gun and just talk to me. I’m not a cop.”

  Silence. He was breathing, but that’s all I could tell.

  “You killed Jack Slavas, didn’t you? And you didn’t do it alone.”

  Then the breathing stopped.

  “Now, if you put the gun down, maybe we can work out a deal. Let’s just talk--” Three bullets shattered the chandelier overhead. Glass rained down on me.

  Then came steps of moving feet on hardwood floor. Too loud for my comfort. An overhead light cast a shadow on the floor. If I hadn’t seen that shadow, I’d probably be dead. My head craned upward just as Lawson appeared above me, ready to shoot me point blank.

  It had been so long since my time in the Marines, and I’d drank so much alcohol in hopes of forgetting it, but good lord was I grateful some of it stayed with me. It must have been old muscle memory that kicked in because I wasn’t conscious of the moment until it was over; I grabbed the barrel and moved my head to the side, took Lawson’s wrist with my other hand and smashed it into the edge of the table so hard I heard it crack. He screamed. The gun fell into my hands.

  I stood up to find Lawson rushing for the front door. Twisting those deadbolts when I arrived was a good idea. They bought me enough time to scramble to my feet and catch him just as he was opening the door. I cracked him on the skull with the butt of the gun. He got off a punch to my gut and scampered back down the hall into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. I went after him, but it was locked.

  “Come out, Lawson!” I yelled and slammed my shoulder into the door. It didn’t budge.

  “I’ll shoot the lock if I have to!”

  I slammed again and kicked it with the heel of my shoe. The wood crackled, but no dice.

  As I raised the gun to the door, I took a good look at it and realized I was holding...my own gun. I was holding my .45 Glock that was stolen from the Beach Motel. It wasn’t Denny who attacked me there after all. It was Lawson!

  But I didn’t have time to think about that right now. I stepped back and took aim at the knob, then fired off a few rounds into the lock and kicked it open.

  A neighbor must have called the cops from the first shots fired. Distant sirens were approaching and it was the only sound in the empty room.

  There was a window in the corner, but small. Much too small for a man Lawson’s size to squeeze through. He was in this room somewhere.

  “Come out, Lawson. You start cooperating now and you’ll be much better off, I promise you.”

  The closet to my left was open. A rack of shirts hung across it. I approached it slowly, the gun firmly in front of me...but he wasn’t there.

  Moving back toward the door, my feet made a squishing sound with every step. The carpet was flooding. But not with water.

  The bathroom door was out of my periphery when I entered, but now it was right in front of me. It was closed, but a red river flowed from underneath it.

  The sirens were loud now. Right outside. A voice called out through a bullhorn, “This is the police! Come out of the house now with your hands up!” but it was all white noise to me at that moment. I had opened the bathroom door.

  Bartholomew Leitner, aka James Lawson, was lying on the tile floor, in a pool of blood pulsating from the carotid artery in his neck.

  Chapter 14

  He did it with the nose clippers. Not the electric kind; the old fashioned ones that look like small scissors. Stabbed himself in just the right spot to bleed out and die within minutes. Apparently this was a better alternative than getting caught.

  Police burst into the room minutes later with a SWAT unit. I had dropped the gun on the bed and stood there holding my detective’s license in my raised hands. An obvious suicide, they still strapped cuffs on me and threw me in the back of a cruiser, the second time that day I’d been in police custody. I stayed silent on the way to the station. Repeating claims of innocence now would only make me seem guilty.

  It was around ten o’clock when we arrived at West Valley Station. I’d been there before to interview arresting officers in preparing cases, so I knew my way around it, but hadn’t seen the place since I became a P.I.

  An officer took my prints, escorted me to the holding cell and unlocked my cuffs.

  “Can I speak to the Lieutenant?” I asked.

  “Can’t speak to anybody till morning.”

  “I didn’t commit a crime. You know that, right? The guy killed himself.”

  “Not for me to say,” and he closed the cell door. His voice was muffled and broken through the glass when he said “Good night” and left.

  Questions piled up in my mind. Questions I thought I had answered. If Lawson was the one who attacked me in San Diego, then where was Denny? And where was Nora? Did she know who she left that motel with? Maybe she wasn’t back in New York. Maybe she was a hostage. I was back to square one with less of a clue than when I started.

  My sleep that night was few and far between. It’s difficult to sleep with bright fluorescent light burning your retinas, but I got a few hours in the end and woke up hoping Charlotte hadn’t gone to see me. If I missed her, I’d probably never see her again.

  The metal door clanged and slid open. “On your feet.” It was a different officer this morning. A rookie trying to sound tough.

  “Yes, sir,” I said with sarcasm subtle enough to slip past him.

  “Lieutenant wants to see you.”

  I’d known the Lieutenant for a long time. Justine Norwood. She was a key witness in my first trial. I also got to know her a little more intimately outside of our work. We were younger then.

  “Jimmy, take those damn things off him, will ya?” she said.

  Jimmy had a look of disappointment, like he was waiting for the Lieutenant to rail into me about where I was going to spend the rest of my life.

  “Yes, ma’am,” and Jimmy quickly unlocked the cuffs. I rubbed my wrists.

  “And leave us alone.” She said.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Now.”

  Jimmy nodded and left the interview room. Lieutenant Norwood opened the case file in front of her.

  “Hello, Marshall.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Long time.”

  “Few years, yeah.”

  She smiled at me. Perhaps a pleasant memory of our brief time together struck her mind.

  “Shouldn’t your partner be here?” I asked.

  “There’s no need.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because we won’t have to charge you with anything if you can prove to me that you weren’t trying to kill Bartholomew Leitner. And seeing as how he killed himself, I don’t think it will be a problem for you. But I would like to know why that house was shot to hell with a gun registered to you.”

  I told her what happened. How Lawson was a part of my case, how he had stolen my gun in San Diego, and everything that happened in that house. She grabbed a detective and had him call the Beach Motel to veri
fy my story. It took about half an hour, but the manager corroborated my whole tale.

  “All right,” she said. “You’re clear. I should revoke your gun license until you complete a safety course. In my opinion, you didn’t have any authority to shoot that lock. But I’ll look the other way this time. Besides, you did us a favor.”

  “A favor? How so?”

  “Leitner’s a drug peddler. His garage was full of ‘em. Mostly stolen prescription stuff, some illicit. Probably selling it.”

  “Was it GHB, by chance?”

  “GHB?”

  “Gamma Hydroxybutric acid. Liquid ecstasy.”

  She held the case report to her eyes. “’A cabinet containing various prescription and manufactured substances were found in the homeowner’s garage, along with an assorted number of syringes.’ That’s all it says. We’ll follow up on it and get specifics.”

  “Mm-hmm.” My eyes drifted away from hers.

  “Marshall. You all right?”

  “Just thinking.” Grayson would have to get wind of this soon. If Leitner possessed the same drugs that were found in Slavas’ system, then he’d know Lawson was the killer and get off my back about Denny and Nora.

  I stood up. “Thank you, Lieutenant. It was lovely seeing you again.”

  “One more thing,” she said, “Who is Benjy?”

  A random question out of thin air. The name sent lightning through my veins.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “When the cops found you, your hands were raised, you were staring at Leitner’s body and you were whispering ‘Benjy’ over and over again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what the report says.”

  I had no recollection whatsoever of that little detail.

  “Who is he?”

  I froze. Suddenly it wasn’t so lovely seeing her again. Every instinct in my body told me to leave that room, call her a lying bitch and storm out. How dare she ask me that.

  “Marshall?”

  “...he was my son. Are we done here?”

  Chapter 15

  They had towed my car to the lot behind the station. I picked up my keys from a woman who sat at a desk behind a wire cage. As she handed them to me I noticed an engagement ring on her left hand.

  “That’s a lovely ring,” I said.

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “Do you mind if I ask where you got it? Or where your fiancé got it, rather?”

  “Um...I think it was this retail place on Laurel Boulevard, near Sunset. I don’t remember the name.”

  “Dodson Jewels?”

  “Yes!” she smiled. “That’s the one. Are you in the market?”

  “I pocketed the keys. “I am now. Congratulations,” I said as I walked away.

  The only thing on my mind was putting a ring on Charlotte’s finger. Everything else was secondary until I saw the glimmer of refracted diamond light in her eyes.

  I scanned the rings in the display case for about half an hour before deciding on a Cathedral diamond set in 18 karat white gold. I had no idea what size Charlotte’s finger was, so I had them take it down a half-size from mine and hoped for the best. I dropped the box in my pocket and stepped out.

  She would be at the Demreau building and I had every intention of interrupting her work day. Never being one to like making scenes, the idea of strolling in and taking a knee to pop the question seemed too perfect for my rational mind to protest. The sun felt a little brighter today, the sky looked a little bluer. I actually felt excited, hopeful. Charlotte’s smile was clear in my mind already. This was right. I felt it.

  It pinched me in the back of my left hip. Then a burly arm reached around my chest and held on to me as my legs gave way. I thought I’d been hit with a tranq, but instead of going unconscious, I saw colors.

  The journey from to the back seat of an SUV was a mystery to me. I knew I was in big trouble, but I felt euphoric. Everything was dancing.

  A rock-jaw face was looking over me. Very familiar, though I couldn’t remember his name. That’s because I never knew it in the first place. It was “Fred.”

  “I know you,” I mumbled, probably with a smile.

  “Yeah you do, Bogus,” he said.

  We drove on for a while. I don’t know how long. One minute we were on Sunset, the next we were surrounded by desert. I don’t remember much.

  The ceiling of the car was rippling like a pond in a rain storm when a sheet of plastic was shoved over my mouth. Shrink wrap it looked like. He was wrapping it around the back of my head, tight. My nostrils flared struggling to inhale twice the oxygen they were used to.

  Another man was tying my wrists behind my back with a zip tie. When he was done there, he went to my ankles.

  It must have been the realization of what was about to happen to me that snapped me into half-sobriety. The plastic, the ties, the black bag my feet were now being slid into. Fred had a switchblade in his hand. They were going Silvio on me.

  Sounds similar to the ones I heard behind Grossman’s door that night were now mine. Euphoria quickly turned to panic.

  My legs flailed. My arms jerked. My head writhed. My whole body was in motion.

  “Easy, Bogus,” said Fred. “You still got time to pray.” My knees flew up and caught him in the back. By the sound of his groans I must have gotten lucky and struck a kidney. He gripped my throat with thundering force and aligned the blade to my neck, touching the edge to my Adam’s apple sending a cold shock that rattled my teeth.

  “Calm the fuck down!” It came from the passenger seat, which looked a thousand miles from me. The voice was wheezy with quiet intimidation, as if the speaker was using every breath to get the words out. Grossman. “Dose him again,” he said.

  I barely had time to grunt my defiance before Fred stuck me again. This time in the arm. The car resumed swirling. The men’s faces lost distinction, melting into fleshy masses.

  The next breath through my nostrils drew what felt like twelve times what they normally could. The euphoria was back. My limbs went limp while my mind sunk into a living nightmare clouded with pleasure, unaware of its failing consciousness to the impending hell around me.

  ----------------------------

  I thought I’d gone blind at first, the room was so dark. I reached over to turn on the lamp on my night stand and check the time. But my hands wouldn’t move. In fact, they were behind my back. Every movement I made was met with the sound of crinkling material, and I couldn’t breathe through my mouth.

  Consciousness was back. Euphoria was gone. I remembered where I was. Bound and gagged inside a closed body bag. Was it too late? Had they buried me already? Had they abandoned me on a remote dune in the Mojave? Perhaps I’m on a conveyor belt headed for the incinerator at the county dump.

  The kicking and writhing began again. I screamed as much as the plastic allowed me too, and I heard a faint voice: “He’s awake. Hey...” There were footsteps.

  I stopped. Listened. Just as I started believing I was only hearing things, the darkness split and the form of a man was standing over me in bright sunlight.

  “Let him breathe,” he said. A hand reached down and peeled the plastic away from my mouth. I drew in a breath like I’d spent an hour underwater. The air was dry, but fresh. After a short coughing fit I began to yell. Maybe I was forming words like “Help” and “Please”, but mostly just desperate noise.

  Someone kicked me in the hip. Had to be steel toed. I shut up and writhed.

  “At the risk of sounding terribly cliché, detective...out here no one can hear you scream.” He began to laugh. It was Grossman.

  “Where the hell am I?” I muffled.

  Grossman squatted down and for the first time I got a good look at his face. It was very tan, almost orange, and wrinkled from sun damage. His hair was thick and white, with a few streaks of black on the sides. He wore dark blue slacks with a green button-up and gloves. And he was holding my gun.

  “Somewhere on earth,” he said.
“I’m afraid that’s about as specific as I can be, Mr. Santone.”

  I looked around. I was nowhere. Nothing but Mojave sand and cacti, and the SUV parked a hundred feet away, tire tracks leading out through the dunes. Two men stood against it, smoking. One of them was Fred.