Dreamland by Newton Thornburg

Author:Newton Thornburg [Thornburg, Newton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-04-05T07:00:00+00:00

Nine

Unlike the lieutenant in Santa Barbara, Sergeant Jack Olson only had a desk in the corner of the detective’s bullpen. The building itself, the Van Nuys police station, was modern and sprawling, with carpeting and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on a small tree-lined courtyard dominated by a golden cigar-store Indian. Or at least so the statue appeared to Crow, sitting with Jennifer and Reno around the crowded perimeter of the sergeant’s desk. Having already been there over an hour, Crow was about to stand up and stretch when the detectives from Hollywood finally arrived. Their names were Humboldt and Reed, and they were about as dissimilar as partners could get, Humboldt being young, white, and well-groomed, while his colleague was coal-black, middle-aged, and flamboyantly sloppy. Both, like the pink-skinned Olson, were detective sergeants.

From the outset, when Crow and the girls first got there, Olson had seemed interested only in what Crow had to tell him about the two dancer-hookers. The deaths of Crow’s father and of Jennifer’s brother were simply nonevents for him—an accident within his jurisdiction and a suicide without—this despite their being linked to the same photographs and the same scene as the hookers were. Like Lieutenant Kroneburg in Santa Barbara, Olson kept coming back to the fact that there were no photographs, that there were no suspects, no motive, not even a client, at least not until Crow could produce them. Meanwhile, the two hookers were very definitely an open case and Olson wanted the Hollywood detectives working on it to drive over and listen to Crow’s story and probably take a signed statement. To that end, he had called them almost an hour earlier.

In the interim, he had listened to Crow and Jennifer and Reno, nodding and sighing as he made little lists and diagrams on a legal pad: this alleged event leading to that one, and so on. And finally he began to deal one by one with the questions Crow had raised. The first, the identity of the client “Lee,” he tossed out to the bullpen at large, banging on his desk and asking in a foghorn voice if “any of you fine gents” knew of a Lee, first name or last, now in the department or retired. And all they came up with were two young motorcycle officers, one whose family name was Lee, the other having it as a first name. There was also a James E. Lee, now retired and living in the Ozarks. Olson checked with personnel downtown and learned that the man had been dead for over a year. He then asked the same officer in personnel to “crank up” the computer and send him a list of all Lees, first name or last, who had worked in the department during the sixties and early seventies, and to underscore those who might have worked with retired detective Sergeant Orville W. Crow. Olson gave them Crow’s father’s badge number, and then he turned to the next item on his list, the corner of Lankershim and Beck.

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