Kind of Blue by Miles Corwin Page A

two steaming metal mugs of coffee. He was a tall, wiry man in his seventies with a bristly shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a face as leathery and lined as an old wallet.
    He pulled a pint of plum brandy out of his pocket and, hand trembling, poured a dollop into his coffee. “I don’t suppose you want an eye-opener.”
    “Some other time.”
    I took a sip of the coffee, which smelled as strong as diesel fuel, and said, “I want to extend my sympathies to you. Pete was a good cop.”
    Relovich stared out at sea. We sat in silence until I asked, “After Pete left the force, what’d he do?”
    “Went out with me on the boat sometimes. Helped around the dock.”
    “Why’d he leave the LAPD?”
    Relovich set his coffee cup on the desk. “I don’t really know.”
    “Why couldn’t he just take some time off? Why couldn’t he hang on seven more years and get his pension?”
    “Since his mom and dad died, we became close. But he never told me why.”
    “What’s your guess?”
    “Maybe he left to get sober. His drinking was getting worse and worse. It broke up his marriage. He had custody of his little girl every other weekend, but it got so bad she didn’t even want to see him. Maybe he figured if he was ever going to beat the bottle, he had to quit the LAPD.”
    “So after his wife left him—”
    “Who said
she
left
him
?”
    I took a sip of coffee waiting for him to explain.
    “Pete’s the one who took a hike. As bad as the drinking was, she didn’t want him to leave. Even after they got divorced, I think she was still pissed, still jealous as hell. She’d drive down here all the time and bang on his door at all hours of the night, trying to see if she could catch him in bed with some other broad.”
    “Jealous enough to kill him?”
    He stared out to sea, watching the wind from the west whip the whitecaps, the foam floating in the air like snowflakes. “Who knows.”
    “She ever threaten him?”
    “Don’t know.” He pulled a dirty handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose with such force it sounded like the blast of a foghorn. “Pete was a sharp kid. Could have gone as far as he wanted in the police department. But somewhere along the line, he lost his way. Why? I have no damn idea.”
    He poured another splash of brandy into his coffee and said, “Pete’s father—my brother—was the smart one. He knew this”—Relovich pointed to the line-up of fishing boats—“was a dying business. He got himself a good job at the LAPD with a pension. All I got was arthritis in my hands from all those cold mornings at sea.” He held up his gnarled fingers, the nails of the thumbs cracked like broken windshields. “Too many damn catch laws. Too many damn government regulations. Too many damn fishing season restrictions. And they’ve overfished the hell out of these waters. Christ, I can remember when the sea here was thickwith sardines. Now you couldn’t find a single one if your life depended on it.”
    He downed most of his coffee and tossed the dregs overboard with a flick of his wrist. “If I’d followed my brother in the police department I could be back on the Dalmatian coast right now, snoozing in the sun, collecting my monthly pension check, instead of busting my hump every day for a haul that doesn’t even pay for my fuel.”
    I tried to steer him back to the murder. “Was Pete security conscious?”
    “He was still a cop at heart. Suspicious as hell. He never opened the door without peeking through the front window to see who was there.”
    “Even when he was drinking?”
    Relovich cracked a gnarled forefinger. “He hadn’t touched a drop in three months.”
    “Any enemies from his days as a cop? Anyone he was concerned about? Any cases that were real problems for him?”
    “Don’t think so.”
    “Any idea who could have killed him?”
    Relovich coughed and spit into the water. “Probably some wetback from the projects.”
    After the interview, I headed to my late