Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,74
tab and took a sip.
Whoever was in charge of cleaning the water filter on that faucet hadn’t done his job in about seven years, and I forced myself to swallow the mouthful of septic tank overflow I’d forced past my lips.
Watson was playing catch-up with Bobby, going over stories about how things were in the late ’80s and early ’90s down at Central and Rampart. Mostly Watson did the talking, with Bobby nodding and grunting every so often. Those decades were a dark time for Los Angeles, especially if a man or woman wore a blue uniform and a badge. A lot of good cops retired out early, fatigued by fighting the good fight and most of the time battling their fellow officers, who were as corrupt and demoralizing as the chief of police during that time. Law enforcement back then was geared toward oppression and suppression, with different response times and courtesy given to a person mostly based on their race and ZIP code. There were still a lot of cops out there who would’ve been very much at home during that time in LAPD’s history, and from the sounds of it, Watson seemed to really miss his late-night excursions through the dark streets, armed with his baton and shielded by a badge he never should’ve worn.
Not wanting to join in on their trip down a memory lane Bobby and I both never wanted to visit, I began to wander around the room, Muncie trotting behind me with his tongue sticking out and never coming closer than a yard.
The condo itself was a nice one, elegantly furnished in a style that had gone out of vogue about a decade ago. The view was spectacular, overlooking Downtown Los Angeles and the mountains beyond. Whoever designed the building knew what they were about, making the most of the main space by keeping it open, leaving a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the left of the front door over to the living room on the right. A hallway leading off the kitchen probably led to a bedroom or two, guessing by the spacing between the doors in the main hall.
But what really defined the space was that view. The condo’s outside wall was pure glass, broken up only by the black lines of heavy-duty girders and framing, with the rest of the walls being a standard gypsum board painted Navajo white—the cheapest and most common color used by developers. Its faint tobacco-yellow tint actually went well with the brown leather sectional and recliners in the living room, their arrangement centered on the nearly movie-screen-sized television mounted on the wall the condo shared with the outer hallway.
Judging by the pictures scattered about a set of thinly populated bookshelves, I gathered someone actually not only married Watson but also bred with him. There was evidence of a second wife, a small Filipina woman with a broad face and a thin smile, squished up against Watson’s massive frame in a variety of vacation shots, including what looked like a hunting trip where he brought down a small wild boar. Since the progression of children going from babies to adulthood were tall, freckled, blond-haired, and blue-eyed, I was guessing at the second wife, but I could be totally wrong about the whole thing and Watson’s genetics simply stomped hers down into a whimpering pile of thready DNA.
A niche in the wall possibly held the most interesting thing in Watson’s place—a painting I’d never seen before. It wasn’t like I was up on classical paintings. Sure, I knew how to recognize a Warhol, mostly by the presence of the tomato soup can, and while my exposure to the arts had increased over the years of being with Jae, to the consternation of my beloved husband, I was one of those people who didn’t really know art but knew what he liked when he saw it.
The painting didn’t seem to fit my perception of Watson. For all I knew, the man had depths of character I know nothing about, but since he was currently regaling Bobby with a story about how he and his partner jumped a bunch of Mexican teens coming out of a convenience store, mistakenly thinking they had robbed the place instead of just having finished doing inventory for their father, who owned the market, I was going to stick by my judgment of the man.
One thing about being with Jae and having Ichi around was that I knew more about art