Death in the Haight by Ronald Tierney

promise not to tell a soul how he got the information. He told Lang everything he knew but not from whom he had learned it. What he was told, though, didn’t make a lot of sense to Lang. It boiled down to the idea that a gay kid hired a female prostitute, then killed her. Didn’t seem right. On the other hand, Lang thought, maybe religion could do that to a guy.
    Â * * * 
    The alarm rudely intruded upon a day on a beach somewhere in paradise. Obviously Lang’s unconscious was having a better time than his conscious. And now the conscious self had to go out into the cold, damp night.
    It wasn’t the kind of fog that made things disappear. It was the kind that made you look through gauze. And in the gauzy light of a street lamp was the ghostlike form of Inspector Stern. His tie was in his left jacket pocket, and something weighed it down on the right—a gun or a pint of whiskey, maybe. Lang thought the cop might be drunk, but even so, a practiced drinker like him wouldn’t be sloppy and slur his words. He was the type to drink himself sober and mean.
    Lang waved with one hand and plucked his cell phone out of his windbreaker with the other. He hit the speed dial. Thanh answered on the second ring.
    â€œYour bike running?” Lang asked.
    â€œLike a leopard,” Thanh said.
    â€œI’m outside my office. Stern is forty feet away. It has the potential of getting ugly.”
    â€œBe right there,” Thanh said.
    â€œWorking late?” Lang said, shouting at Stern, to bridge the distance he hoped to maintain. He wasn’t afraid of Stern, the man himself. But this could be it. Lang appeared to be on the verge of that no-win situation he’d thought about earlier.
    â€œI’m not working,” Stern said. “Not officially. You?”
    â€œMe? Getting ready to call it a day—or night, I guess.”
    â€œVanderveers aren’t answering their phones back in Michigan.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œYou working with them?”
    â€œDidn’t we cover that territory the other night?” Lang asked.
    â€œYou didn’t listen, did you? I told you.”
    â€œI thought you said you weren’t working,” Lang said. Neither approached the other.
    â€œI asked you a question.”
    â€œNot at the moment. I’m talking to you. And given our feelings for each other, I don’t know why we’re doing that.”
    â€œIf you’re working with them . . . Fuck, why do I even bother with ‘if’? You are in the way of a murder investigation. That’s criminal. I try to arrest you”—he smiled—“you resist.”
    â€œI take your meaning.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œThe only job I have at the moment is working for an attorney on a case that requires attorney-client privilege. So I can’t tell you anything without a court order.” He knew what he said didn’t matter, but he’d feel better if they just kept talking.
    Stern looked to the side as if someone were standing in the shadows.
    â€œI think what we have here is not a failure to communicate, Lang. You have simply failed to understand the rules.”
    â€œOh, the rules?” Lang said, telling himself to ask him questions, keep him talking. “What are they again?”
    â€œYou know, there are rules that are written down and we all agree to abide by them. And most of us know that those kinds of rules mean very little in the real world. The real rules have to do with who has the power. Lang?” He waited.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI have the power,” Stern said.
    â€œYou mean if you want my bag of fajitas you can just take it,” Lang said, referring to a well-known local police brutality case.
    â€œThere you go, sport. I figured you knew the score.”
    Cars passed, a little surge now and then when the light changed.
    â€œI want to know about the Vanderveers.”
    â€œI do too,” Lang said.