Fatally Haunted

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  “Let me call you back.”

  Chago rang the department’s gang unit. They knew Boxer. His jacket listed a felony assault and battery, resisting arrest, drunk and disorderly conduct, and a few lesser charges. They also had his most recent address, matching the one listed at the DMV.

  Chago texted me. Meet me in ten. Eva’s parking lot.

  Ten minutes later, Chago motioned me to get into his squad car.

  “I got Boxer’s address. Now, what’s this about?”

  I exhaled, then recounted my connection to Vero, the homicide victim whose photos I first saw on Chago’s phone. I told Chago about my narrow escape from her apartment on Saturday afternoon, and the gang guys wanting to harm me because of a long-standing vendetta. I brought the sergeant current on everything I’d done since I’d driven away from the station several hours ago.

  Chago listened intently. “What’s your connection to Boxer?”

  I walked him through a high school fight where Boxer and two of his buddies had jumped me. We both knew gang guys sometimes did random attacks on people with no connection to them.

  “When my dad passed away seven years ago, Mom told me the real story. Boxer’s old man had been hitting on her and harassing her at work. When Mom told my dad, he became enraged and got into a fight with Boxer’s old man. Slammed his skull into a street curb. Killed him. Dad escaped clean and lived out a gang-free life, the one he’d promised Mom. But the story didn’t go away, and his kid wanted vengeance. When Boxer saw me at the ten-year reunion, he knew I was in town.”

  “Rev, this is risky territory. We team up with the sheriff’s department on homicides most of the time in our little town. We’re almost at that point, but for now, I’m in. I want to see where this goes, so I’m coming with you.”

  Boxer’s last known address was on Kress Avenue in a small, deteriorated Craftsman house, one of many jammed on a street filled with WWII-era homes. We drove fifty yards past the address and parked under a huge fichus tree. The street was empty for a mid-afternoon.

  We both advanced quickly. Chago signaled for me to cover the back. Someone inside the house yelled, “Five-ohs!” as I moved along the side of the house. A screen door banged open at the rear of the house, and I caught sight of Boxer barreling toward a low fence separating his place and a neighbor’s property.

  Chago had kicked in the front door and gotten the drop on two gangbangers inside while I sprinted after Boxer. Boxer had a ten-yard lead as he crossed a neighbor’s yard and continued out into the next street. He ran along the sidewalk until I tackled him from behind.

  “You!” yelled the husky gangster clad only in a pair of Boxer shorts. “I been waitin’ a lifetime for this.” He extended his arms, palms up, fingers beckoning as he got to his feet, inviting me to fight.

  I knew gang guys liked to “rush” victims, so Boxer’s initial charge proved easy to sidestep. As a former Green Beret, I often used combat infighting techniques in physical altercations. It gave me an edge, one unknown to the powerful man standing before me.

  I circled to Boxer’s left, dukes up. I stepped inside, pop-pop, delivering two quick blows to Boxer’s face before dancing back out of range. A moment later, we were at it, toe-to-toe, street boxing, varrio style. Neighbors spilled out of doorways to watch our mano à mano combat.

  Boxer landed a hard right to my chest, knocking me off-balance for a moment. He charged clumsily at me. I switched in a heartbeat to battle-seasoned mixed martial art moves, delivering a pair of punches to Boxer’s head that drew blood from his nose and lips. It was easy to avoid his wild haymaker swings. Boxer was in his zone, but out of his league.

  I stepped inside the muscle-bound gangbanger and hammered him with two hard kidney punches, then executed a Bruce Lee sweep move to cut his legs out from under him. Boxer landed near a street curb. I pounced on him and slammed the back of his head hard into the curb. My combat training said, “Finish this bastard off!”

  Chago arrived and pulled me away. “Don’t do it, Rev. Learn from your dad.”

  I blinked twice, and my glittering eyes returned to the world around me. I rolled my beaten-up adversary onto his stomach, cuffed him, and said, “You’re under arrest.”

  Chago helped us both to our feet.

  The crowd applauded as we walked Boxer to a waiting squad car. A second squad car sped off with the two vatos Chago had collared.

  “Where to, Sarge?”

  “The interrogation room.”

  A half hour later, Boxer, his face puffy and scratched, held an ice pack to his swollen head. He wore an orange jump suit and sat with his free hand cuffed to a chair, both feet also in chains. He sat across the table from Chago and myself.

  Chago turned on a tape recorder. “We’re recording our conversation, Boxer, and you have the right to remain silent or ask for an attorney. But this one is between you and Officer Revenir here, between you going to death row, or you spending a few years in the can for assault. Understand?”

  Boxer looked down and stayed silent.

  I growled. “Why’d you kill Vero, Boxer? What’d she do to you to deserve that?”

  “Vero’s dead?” Boxer looked at me in disbelief.

  “Yeah, and you killed her. I know because I was with her moments before you and your guys got to her apartment. Were you jealous? Did this over-the-top anger of yours kick in one too many times?”

  Chago raised an eyebrow and gave me a questioning look.

  “I didn’t kill her. I came there to kill you and get even for my pop. We had you set up, then she let you off the hook and locked the door, and you got away. I got pissed, and yeah, I did smack her around.”

  I churned inside with the thought Vero had played me, set me up for a merciless beating. But I also remembered her tears and frantic apology before I escaped.

  “Didn’t you tell her not to mess with you, or you’d mess her face up so bad men would only like her for her body after that?”

  “Yeah, I said that just to scare her. I did slap her hard a couple of times, and I pushed her into a big wall mirror that fell and broke, but we went there hunting for you, not her. Ask my homies. They were there. They’ll tell you. Vero was hurting, lying on a sofa, but very much alive when we left. You gotta believe that.”

  Chago pulled no verbal punches. “You beat her up, slashed her throat, ripped her off, and let her bleed out. What kind of animal does that to an unarmed woman?”

  Boxer gave him a hard look. “We…I hit her around. I admit it. But we didn’t slash her throat or rip her off. We didn’t do those things! You got the wrong guys!”

  Boxer, head bent, seemed beaten down by his past.

  I pressed on. “What’d you do with her necklace and earrings?”

  “What’re you talking about? We don’t know nuthin’ about that.”

  “Did you or your guys take money from her wallet?”

  “Hell no. We don’t rip off chicks!”

  “Any last questions, Boxer?”

  “Why didn’t you kill me in the street when you had the chance?”

  “If we don’t learn from our mistakes, their ghosts will come back and hit us hard somewhere up the line. ‘Like father, like son’ isn’t always the right answer. Wasn’t the right one for you, and it wasn’t right for me.”

  “You’re a prime suspect for murder, Boxer,” Chago said. “We’ll see if your story holds water when we talk to your buddies.”

  I shut off the recorder and pushed it over to Chago. Two officers stepped in to escort Boxer to a cell.

  “Sarge, we still have one more lead to track down. How about you talking to the parents of Lupe, the roommate? They’re probably native Spanish speakers, and you’ll have a better chance to locate her whereabouts than me.”

  Chago found an empty squad room. He closed the door and called Moreno Valley. There, he charmed the socks off Mrs. Ortega. He told her he had three hundred dollars in bonus money for her daughter as a re
ward for work she had done and wanted to surprise her with it before he left for Vegas tonight. Mrs. Ortega gladly volunteered the information.

  After disconnecting, Chago said, “We gotta use subterfuge sometimes, Rev, if we’re fighting the clock and have no other alternatives to getting needed answers. This was one of those times. Let’s saddle up, partner, we’re off to LAX.”

  British Air Flight #4266 departing at 6 p.m. for Madrid was on time. Boarding began at five-thirty. Chago called ahead for security clearance. We reached the terminal at just after five.

  I spotted Lupe first. “She’s wearing Vero’s earrings and the Irish pendant. She’s the one in a black Raiders sweatshirt seated in the boarding area playing on her phone.”

  I approached slowly from behind and put my nightstick on the suspect’s shoulder. “Get up slowly, Lupe. You’re under arrest for the murder of Veronica Lopez. My partner to your right—he’ll kill you if you try anything!”

  Lupe surrendered without a fight. What could she do, with Chago only ten feet away with his hand on his gun?

  Lupe had a Blaq Paq tattoo artist travel bag by her side. In addition to her tat supplies, the carry-on had twenty thousand dollars cash in Benjamins, a bill of sale for a 2016 Explorer, new toiletries, her passport, and a reservation for an apartment in Marbella for an indefinite stay.

  At the end of the shift, Chago found Captain Fairchild.

  “Cap, I want Rev as my partner from here on.”

  “After one day? Why?”

  “I know gold when I see it. This guy’s a keeper. Don’t let LAPD sign him.”

  Back to TOC

  Auble’s Ghost

  Julia Bricklin

  Frank Chamberlain was a dentist, so the teeth were one of the first things he noticed when he came upon the singed remains. From a distance, he and county surveyor Woodside thought it was a deer or some other animal caught in a bough. When the pair got closer, they could see that it was the body of a young woman. She was white, with long, chestnut-brown hair, which hung down in ringlets frozen by the usual bitter cold of January in Colorado Springs. The body was face down, draped over a long, felled log that was arranged on some rocks and sticks so it was raised about half a foot off the ground. The woman did not have a stitch of clothing on. Chamberlain estimated that she had been rather tall when she was alive—perhaps five-foot, six inches—and no more than thirty years old.

  Chamberlain’s curiosity got the better of him and he could not help but to gently lift the log to get a look at the victim’s face. And there was no doubt about it—she was a victim. There was no other explanation for a young woman to be lying dead, naked and rotting at the foot of Cutler Mountain, far from the center of town. The woman’s face was badly disfigured—the top half of it seemed melted away, along with the crown of her hair. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were burned off, and the eyes themselves were so badly burned that it was impossible to tell their color. The teeth, though, were the most interesting. Her back upper teeth were entirely crowned with gold, which, because Chamberlain tilted them upward, caught the afternoon sun and sent dancing rays onto his flannel shirt. They were masterfully formed and planted. This bridgework must have cost a fortune.

  The surveyor left Chamberlain to watch the body and got on his horse to go get the sheriff and Coroner Lee. He knew the latter would be really irritated. 1904 had already brought him a year’s worth of headaches with mining accidents and labor violence. No doubt he’d want to have some peace going into the Christmas week. Now, he would not get it.

  Surveyor Woodside was wrong. Coroner Lee was as clinically amiable as he always was. But Sheriff Grimes was another story. After viewing the body and the .38 caliber slug Lee pulled from the woman’s scalp, Grimes knew his vacation time was going to be cut short. Obviously, the woman had been killed, and then the murderer or murderers tried to burn her body by pouring kerosene over it and the logs and took a match to it. He figured a sharp wind gusting down from the mountain had blown the flames out before they could fully take hold.

  Grimes dispatched six deputies to search the surrounding area of hills and woods. Over the next four days, the men worked in shifts, three at a time plus some able-bodied volunteers, until they had covered nearly three-square miles. The only items of interest remained those found near the body to begin with: an empty bottle with a bit of kerosene left in it, and a smaller empty bottle with a prescription label bearing the information “Dr. F. K. Linebaker, 3019 Diamond Street, Philadelphia,” which turned out to contain a bit of carbolic acid.

  First, Coroner Law removed the jaw. Then he snipped off two big locks of her hair. He put these items in a box and allowed Evergreen Cemetery to bury the rest. He wrote a description of the poor woman, as she must have looked like when she was alive, which included her dental work, her clothing, and her height and estimated weight. There were parts of the poor woman that survived the killer’s fire, and one of these parts was her left hand, which showed a significant scar—really, still a healing wound—on her left forefinger. Sheriff Grimes gave this description out to anyone who wired him. And many people wired him—there seemed to be no end to the number of people who had not seen loved ones in quite some time.

  Eleven hundred miles to the west, Los Angeles Police Captain Walter Hurman Auble read about the dead woman on Cutler Mountain in the Los Angeles Daily Times. “Her Teeth May Tell: Dental Work in Mouth of Girl Found Murdered Near Colorado Springs Possible Clew.” The paper reported that the metal and labor for the girl’s oral cosmetic help was estimated to be worth about a hundred and fifty dollars. Someone with that kind of money, he thought while playing with his long droopy moustache, would surely have family clamoring for news of her soon. Her body would be claimed.

  Auble was correct. The dead woman’s sister identified her as Bessie Bouton. As well, said sister, Mrs. Charles Nelson of Santa Barbara, confirmed that she had not heard from her sister in some time. Well, Auble thought, good for Colorado Springs. The one Jane Doe it had in years it solved in a week, while the bodies of unnamed souls in Los Angeles’s morgue was piled three thick.

  The captain was just about to move on to an article about horseracing at the Agriculture Park when a word jumped off the page: “Diamonds.” He read more about Bessie Bouton, in the story from up north:

  Chief of Santa Barbara police Ross believes that she was murdered by the man who has been living with and traveling with Mrs. Bouton. They visited this city last August together, having come from the East, and were here for a month with Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Nelson, at No. 1111 State Street. While here Mrs. Bouton displayed a great many very beautiful jewels, mostly diamonds, which her relatives say were valued at over three thousand dollars. She was fond of displaying these jewels and wore them on all occasions.

  Auble took a sip of coffee and kept reading. According to the paper, Bouton’s companion was one Mr. Milton Franklin Andrews. The paper described him as dark-complexioned, about six feet tall, with a small black moustache, a thin face, high cheekbones, dark brown eyes, and thick, curly brown hair. He was extremely thin—perhaps one hundred fifty pounds at most. Notably, he was pigeon-toed, and also had a slight hunch of the shoulders, giving the impression that his torso was somewhat concave.

  Auble’s sternum clenched. He would not have thought anything about these two pieces of information separately—the diamonds, and the description of Bouton’s male consort—but together, they formed a splotchy image—a familiar feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. He flashed to a memory. He remembered the woman who lived on West Sixteenth Street, Permelia Bosler, who told him about the strange couple she saw going in and out of the home diagonally across the street from her. The female was attractive, Bosler thought: probably not a natural blonde, but the kind of subtle honey-brown that can be produced by enough money and time in a hairdresser’s chair. She was too far away for Bosler to see her complexion and whether there were any blemishes, but she could see that her pallor was translucent an
d consistent, with a lovely spot of red where her lipsticked mouth was. And she was slim, which she could tell by her waistline, even with what looked to be an ermine wrap over her shoulders. It was the man that drew most of her attention, though. This figure was tall, she said, and dressed in all black, and wore a Prince Albert coat with a felt hat. As well, she thought, he was dark-complexioned, had a rather slim face, and a head of thick brown, curly dark hair.

  The detective put his mug down, then went to his filing cabinet and pulled out some newspaper clippings he’d stashed at the bottom a year and a half before. Mrs. Bosler and her daughter were quoted in some of them. The descriptions of Bessie Bouton’s lover, Milton Franklin Andrews, reminded him of the man that Mrs. Bosler saw going in and out of 821 West Sixteenth before a real estate agent and his client discovered George Mills’ blood-soaked corpse. He forced himself to re-read parts of the L.A. Times article about the most depraved and gory act of villainy he had yet encountered on the job:

  There was nothing to indicate that there had been the slightest struggle of any kind. The legs were straight, the hands were clenched and the cuffs about both wrists were bloody although as the body lay it was impossible that they could have reached the bloody floor. The bed nearby was as it had been left, the coverings not being disturbed in the least and even the rug on which the body lay was in its usual position.

  Auble tried not to gag as he recalled the smell, conjured by the words in the paper. As a seasoned cop, it took even him by surprise:

  Lying on his face in a pool of blood was the body of a man. His hands were bound behind his back with a piece of sash cord, which was also tightly bound around his neck, several knots being tied in the rope. The head was a mass of putrid flesh, for there was hardly a portion of the scalp which was not cut through to the skull. The rug on which the body was lying was saturated with blood, and blood was spattered on the wall and baseboard.