San Diego Noir - [Anthology] Read online

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  San Diego Noir

  Ed by Maryelizabeth Hart

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  PART I: WORKING STIFFS

  T. Jefferson Parker Kearny Mesa

  Vic Primeval

  Diane Clark & Astrid Bear Sherman Heights

  The Home Front

  Jeffrey J. Mariotte Mount Soledad

  Gold Shield Blues

  Martha C. Lawrence La Jolla Cove

  Key Witness

  PART II: NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

  Debra Ginsberg Cortez Hill

  The New Girl

  Taffy Cannon Rancho Santa Fe

  Instant Karma

  Morgan Hunt Hillcrest

  The Angel’s Share

  Ken Kuhlken Newport Avenue

  Homes

  PART III: LIFE’S A BEACH

  Don Winslow Pacific Beach

  After Thirty

  Lisa Brackmann Ocean Beach

  Don’t Feed the Bums

  Cameron Pierce Hughes Mission Beach

  Moving Black Objects

  PART IV: BOUNDARIES & BORDERS

  Gabriel R. Barillas Del Mar

  The Roads

  Gar Anthony Haywood Convention Center

  Like Something Out of a Comic Book

  Luis Alberto Urrea National City

  The National City Reparation Society

  Maria Lima Gaslamp Quarter

  A Scent of Death

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  INTRODUCTION

  “America’s Finest City”

  T

  he southwesternmost metropolis in the contiguous United States, resting a mere forty feet above sea level, tends to garner positive national attention. San Diego is home to the world-famous San Diego Zoo, Balboa Park (with its history reaching back to the 1915-16 Panama-California Exposition) , temperate climes, and a sunny reputation. It is also the home of shooter Brenda Ann “I Don’t Like Mondays” Spencer, disgraced Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, and San Diego County medical examiner-turned-killer Kristin Rossum.

  Joseph Wambaugh chronicled crime crossing the border in 1984’s Lines and Shadows, a saga about the challenges facing the Border Crime Task Force that continues today, even after the squad whose efforts it chronicled has been disbanded. My first strong sense of the city’s noir undertones came in the late 1980s, when La Jolla socialite Betty Broderick fatally shot her ex-husband Dan and his new wife Linda Kolkena, after gaining entrance to her ex’s new home with a key she’d taken from her daughter’s purse. (The incident where she drove a vehicle into his home was separate.) When Mysterious Galaxy, the bookstore I co-own, opened its first location in Clairemont in 1994, the Clairemont Killer, Cleophus Prince Jr., had already been convicted of killing six women in the neighborhood—including a murder in the apartment complex my family briefly resided in.

  San Diego has a strong military presence dating back to the establishment in the early 1800s of what is now Old Town Historical Park, along with army and naval intelligence divisions, the nation’s first military flying school (remember Top Gun?), and active ports and support industries. San Diego was where Shawn Nelson stole an M60 Patton tank in May 1995 and drove it down the freeway until forcibly stopped by police. Downtown, once filled with quick entertainment for military men passing through, has risen to meet and exceed the community center dreams that Ray Bradbury and company conceived for Horton Plaza . . . although the locals still recall the Gaslamp Quarter’s not-too-distant history as a haven for tattoo parlors and hookers.

  The city is sometimes referred to as San Diego-Tijuana, a conurbation, with all its attendant border issues—illustrated in true noir fashion in Orson Welles’s classic Touch of Evil, adapted from Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson. A ways up the coast from the border lies the grave of Raymond Chandler, who resided in the wealthy enclave of La Jolla from 1946 to 1959; that area masquerades as “Esmeralda” in Playback, his final Philip Marlowe novel. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser visits Esmeralda in Stardust.

  San Diego has been the setting for a number of television and film mysteries, including the unforgettable chase across the rooftops of the Hotel del Coronado in The Stunt Man; and has been the backdrop for investigations by the protagonists of Simon & Simon, Veronica Mars, and most recently Terriers. While the city can exist as a cohesive whole, drawn together to rally against fires, mudslides, or rival sports teams, like many places in the American West, it is a metropolis of a variety of individual neighborhoods whose boundaries have slowly grown into each other. The upper-crust concerns of Del Mar and its racetrack have little in common with the idiosyncratic habits of Ocean Beach residents. The working-class neighborhood of Kearny Mesa is only minimally impacted by the surrounding high-tech development areas like Sorrento Valley. And while some San Diegans welcome the annual influx of 150,000 attendees at the largest celebration of popular culture, Comic-Con International, others bemoan the invasion of aliens and superheroes.

  Through the stories in this volume, readers can visit many of the popular local sites, as well as some prosaic areas that are more familiar to residents than tourists. The contributors cover a wide range of the diversity of this Pacific Rim city. Don Winslow, Astrid Bear, and Diane Clark include the town’s military history in their stories. Ken Kuhlken, Debra Ginsberg, and Taffy Cannon weave tales that could perhaps occur in any city—but are colored with the particular scents and sounds of San Diego. The protagonists of the stories by T. Jefferson Parker, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Martha C. Lawrence, and Cameron Pierce Hughes all make a living because of crime. Morgan Hunt, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Lisa Brackmann imbue local attractions with a new sensibility. Gabriel R. Barillas reminds us that for many residents, the town is defined by its connected freeways—freeways put to use by Luis Alberto Urrea’s characters. And Maria Lima contributes something rare for the Akashic Noir Series, a cross-genre story set in the heart of the city’s downtown.

  I hope that reading this intriguing collection will result in you not just thinking of Shamu (the whale of SeaWorld fame), but maybe a shamus or two, when America’s Finest City comes to mind.

  Maryelizabeth Hart

  San Diego, California

  March 2011

  >

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  PART I

  Working Stiffs

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  VIC PRIMEVAL

  by T. Jefferson Parker

  Kearny Mesa

  Y

  ou know how these things get started, Robbie. You see her for the first time. Your heart skips and your fingers buzz. Can’t take your eyes off her. And when you look at her she knows. No way to hide it. So you don’t look. Use all your strength to not look. But she still knows. And anybody else around does too.”

  “I’ve had that feeling, Vic,” I said.

  We walked down the Embarcadero where the cruise ships come and go. It was what passes for winter here in San Diego, cool and crisp, and there was a hard clarity to the sunlight. Once a week I met Vic at Higher Grounds coffee and we’d get expensive drinks and walk around the city. He was a huge guy, a former professional wrestler. Vic Primeval was his show name until they took his WWF license away for getting too physical in his matches. He hurt some people. I spend a few minutes a week with Vic because he thinks he owes me his life. And because he’s alone in the world and possibly insane.

  “Anyway,” said Vic, “her name is Farrel White and I want you to meet her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m proud to have you as a friend. You’re pretty much all I got in that department.”

  “Are you sh
owing us off, Vic? Our freak show past?”

  He blushed. “No. But you do make me look good.”

  Vic was bouncing at Skin, an exotic dance club—strippers, weak drinks, no cover with military ID. “I don’t love that place,” I said.

  “Robbie, what don’t you like about pretty women dancing almost naked?”

  “The creeps who go there.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky. You’re lucky with the ladies.”

  “What do you know about my luck with ladies, Vic?”

  “Come on, man. You’ve got luck. Whole world knows that.”

  More luck than I deserve, but is it good or bad? For instance, seven years ago Vic threw me out the window of the sixth floor of a hotel he’d set on fire—the Las Palmas in downtown San Diego. I was trying to save some lives and Vic was distraught at having had his World Wrestling Federation license revoked. This incident could be reasonably called bad luck.

  You might have seen the video of me falling to what should have been my death. But I crashed through an awning before I hit the sidewalk and it saved my life. This luck was clearly good. I became briefly semifamous—The Falling Detective. The incident scrambled my brains a little but actually helped my career with the San Diego Police Department. In the video I look almost graceful as I fall. The world needs heroes, even if it’s only a guy who blacks out in what he thinks are the last few seconds of his life.

  “Just meet her, Robbie. Tonight she goes onstage at eight, so she’ll get there around seven-thirty. I start at eight too. So we can wait for her out back, where the performers go in and out. You won’t even have to set foot in the club. But if you want to, I can get you a friends-and-family discount. What else you got better to do?”

  ~ * ~

  We stood in the rear employee-only lot in the winter dark. I watched the cars rushing down Highway 163. The music thumped away inside the club and when someone came through the employee door the music got louder and I saw colored shapes hovering in the air about midway between the door and me.

  I’ve been seeing these colored objects since Vic threw me to that sidewalk. They’re geometric, of varying colors, between one and four inches in length, width, depth. They float and bob. I can move them with a finger. Or with a strong exhalation, like blowing out birthday cake candles. They often accompany music, but sometimes they appear when someone is talking to me. The stronger the person’s emotion, the larger and more vivid the objects are. They linger briefly then vanish.

  In the months after my fall I came to understand these shapes derived not so much from the words spoken, but from the emotion behind them. Each shape and color denotes a different emotion. To me, the shapes are visual reminders of the fact that people don’t always mean what they say. My condition is called synesthesia, from the Greek, and loosely translated it means “mixing of the senses.” I belong to the San Diego Synesthesia Society and we meet once a month at the Seven Seas on Hotel Circle.

  Farrel had a round, pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair cut in bangs, and one dimple when she smiled. Her lips were small and red. Her handshake was soft. She was short even in high-heeled boots. She wore a long coat against the damp winter chill.

  “Vic tells me you’re a policeman. My daddy was a policeman. Center Springs, Arkansas. It’s not on most maps.”

  “How long have you been here in San Diego?” I asked.

  “Almost a year. I was waitressing but now I’m doing this. Better pay.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-four years old.” She had a way of holding your eyes with her own, a direct but uncritical stare. “Vic told me all about what happened. It’s good that you’ve become a friend of his. We all of us need at least one good friend . . . Well, guys, I should be going. I’d ask you in and buy you a drink, but it’s supposed to work the other way around.”

  I glanced at Vic and saw the adoration in his eyes. It lit up his face, made it smarter and softer and better. Farrel smiled at him and put her hand on his sleeve.

  “It’s okay, Vic.”

  “Just so good to see you, Farrel.”

  “Vic walks me in and out, every night. And any other of the dancers who want him to. You’re a cop so you know there’s always someone coming around places like this, making trouble for the girls. But not when Vic Primeval is in the barnyard.”

  “I don’t really like that name,” said Vic.

  “I mean it in a good way.”

  “It means primitive.”

  “It’s only a show name, Vic. Like, well, like for a dancer it would be Chastity or Desire.”

  I watched the inner conflict ruffle Vic’s expression. Then his mind made some kind of override and the light came back to his eyes. He smiled and peered down at the ground.

  A hard look came over Farrel’s face as a black BMW 750i bounced through the open exit gate and into the employees-only lot. It rolled to a stop beside us. The driver’s window went down.

  “Yo. Sweetie. I been looking for you.” He was thirty maybe and tricked out in style—sharp haircut, pricey-looking shirt and jacket. Slender face, a Jersey voice and delivery. He looked from Farrel to Vic, then at me. “What’s your problem, fuckface?”

  I swung open my jacket to give him a look at my .45.

  He held up his hands like I should cuff him. “Christ. Farrel? You want I should run these meatballs off? They’re nothing to do with me and you, baby.”

  “I want them to run you off. I told you, Sal. There isn’t a you and me. No more. It’s over. I’m gone.”

  “But you’re not gone, baby. You’re right here. So get in. Whatever you’ll make in a month in there, I’ll pay you that right out of my pocket. Right here and now.”

  “Get off this property,” said Vic. “Or I’ll drag you out of your cute little car and throw you over that fence.”

  Vic glanced at me and winced right after he said this. When he gets mad at things he throws them far. People too.

  Sal clucked his tongue like a hayseed then smiled at Vic as if he was an amusing moron.

  “No more us, Sal,” said Farrel. “We’re over.”

  “You still owe me eight thousand dollars, girl. Nothing’s over till I get that back.”

  I saw black rhombuses wobbling in the air between us. Black rhombuses mean anger.

  “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can. You think I’m dancing in a place like this just for the fun of it all?”

  “Move out of here,” I said. “Do it now.”

  “Or you’ll arrest me.”

  “Quickly. It’ll cost you forty-eight long cheap hours or two expensive short ones. Your pick.”

  “I want what’s mine,” Sal said to Farrel. “I want what I paid for.”

  “Them’s two different things.”

  “Maybe it is in that redneck slop hole you come from.”

  The window went up and the car swung around and out of the lot, the big tires leaving a rubbery low-speed squeal on the asphalt.

  “I’m coming in for a while,” I said.

  I had a beer and watched Farrel and the other dancers do their shows. They were uninhibited and rhythmic to say the least. Some were pretty and some were plain. Some acted flirtatious and others lustful and others aloof. Farrel seemed almost shy and she never once looked at either me or Vic from what I could tell. She had a small attractive body. Vic stood in the back of the room, lost in the lush plum-colored curtains, his feet spread wide and arms crossed, stone still.

  After an hour passed and Sal had not come back, I nodded a goodnight to Vic and went home.

  ~ * ~

  Two days later Vic left a message for me and I met him outside the Convention Center. There was a reptile show in progress and many of the people were entering and leaving the building with constrictors around their necks and leashed iguanas in their arms and stacks of clear plastic food containers filled with brightly colored juvenile snakes.

  “Look at this thing,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his aloha shirt and p
ulled out a huge black scorpion. “They don’t sting.”

  Vic Malic had enormous hands but that scorpion stretched from his thumb tip to the nail on his little finger. It looked like it could drill that stinger a half inch into you anytime it wanted. In his other hand was a clear plastic bag filled with crickets. They were white with dust of some kind. They hopped around as crickets do.

  “Scorpion food?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And they dust them with vitamins for thirty cents.” He looked down at the creature then slid it back into his shirt pocket. “That son of a bitch Sal is stalking Farrel. That was the third time I’ve seen him. He shows up everywhere she goes.”