“What?” I said, on cue.
“At fifteen, that’s the best it’s ever going to get for these girls.” With practiced hand, she started sewing a hook on the neck facing. “Their parents give the party because there’s nothing else for their girls to celebrate after. They don’t finish school, most of them. They take up with some vato and he gets her pregnant. If there’s a wedding, it’s done with just the priest because she’s shamed. Then it’s babies and beatings and working her ass off. See? At fifteen, that’s the end for her.”
“Surely not for all of them.”
She made a knot and bit off the thread again. “It wasn’t good enough for me. That isn’t the life I wanted. I turned fifteen, I ran away. Went up north, got my first dancing job, did real well up there in some of the big clubs. Lied about my age, worked North Beach where the tourists come. Big tippers. I only came back to L.A. because my mother was sick and I wanted to be near her.”
“Michelle, do you remember when you last saw Roy?”
“Oh, yeah. I remember like it was last night.” She stitched with expert fingers. “Night before he died, he came to see me at the club. I hadn’t seen him for a while ’cause he was working somewhere else for a while. So he came in before work just to say hello.”
“Did you go out with him that night?”
“Couldn’t get off. He came in the middle of my set. He had a drink, talked to some friends, stayed to watch me.” She chuckled. “And I watched him. An old friend of mine from North Beach dropped in on me that same night. I have manners, so I had to introduce them. But I sure as hell didn’t want them to get something going. She was a real good-looking woman when she fixed herself up.”
“They didn’t go out?”
“Not that I saw.”
“I wonder if I could talk to her. Maybe he told her something about what his plans were for the next night.”
“Can’t.” Michelle bent her head over her sewing. “She died.”
The telephone rang and she jumped up, taking the dress with her. I overheard her end of the conversation: “I can’t get to you until eight o’clock, Mr. Jacobs. You’ll just have to stay awake till I get there. Tell me what you want.”
She listened, made a note, told him it would cost him twenty-five dollars.
CHAPTER
7
The house was dark and quiet when I got home. Even though we had lived there for nearly a year, I still felt like an intruder; it was someone else’s house. It was beautiful, an old South Pasadena mansion. And the landlord, a policeman friend of Mike’s who inherited the place from his grandmother, gave us a break on the rent in exchange for work restoring its faded magnificence. Still, as beautiful as the house was, I couldn’t make an emotional investment in it. We were interlopers, transients, dug in only until Mike had his walking papers. In the meantime, my own house in San Francisco had its own rent-paying squatters.
I went into my downstairs workroom and took messages off the machine. Mike was going over funeral arrangements and would be home late. Michael had a calculus tutorial at school. Jack Newquist wanted to know where to meet me in the morning. My sister was fine, my daughter was in Houston, my tenant had bailed on the rent, Fergie would be on crutches for two weeks, Thea had some questions about calculating overtime, the generator had been replaced. Lana fired Brady.
With Casey gone, the big house felt oppressively lonely. Even the dog was forlorn. Old Bowser, who can be best described as a fifty-pound genetic misadventure, lay by the patio doors with his muzzle resting on his leash, his muddy brown eyes drooping. He was so pathetic that I changed into running clothes—shorts, one of Mike’s cast-off police academy T-shirts, Nikes—and took him out for a run through the neighborhood and down to the park. Just to be out.
The day had grown sticky and hot. As soon as the sun slipped below the rooflines the air cooled and smelled fresher. I was tired, so I took it easy on myself, set off at a gentle pace, struggling through the first mile. Bowser, leash between his teeth, loped along beside me keeping pace.
At about mile two I found my stride, my head cleared, my breathing was easy. I began to push it around mile three, took an uphill street, heard Mike’s voice in my ear all the way up, “You’ll never make it, kiddo. You’ve got no speed on the upgrade, baby. Where shall I send the remains? Uh-oh, dial two-two-six, she’s breathing hard.” He could dial 226 for himself, because I didn’t need the coroner. Every time I ran through that litany, I got madder, ran harder, felt clearer. I made it to the top of the grade and back around through the park and home in good time.
Some of us, as horses do, need a little burr under the saddle now and then to perform well. Mike Flint always obliged by providing a little burr.
Bowser, happy again, dropped his leash on the patio and sauntered over to his water dish for a drink, then plopped down with his belly on the cool mulch under the huge avocado tree and sighed noisily.
When I walked into the kitchen, sweat streaming down my face, Mike was transferring food from restaurant containers onto dinner plates.
“A guy named Brady called you,” he said.
“How did he sound?”
“He sounded drunk.”
“Do you mind answering the phone tonight in case he calls back? I don’t want to talk to him until he’s had a chance to cool off.”
“You want me to take the heat for you? What did you do to the guy?”
“I didn’t do anything. He fucked up, Lana fired him.”
“Now we’re a trash mouth?”
“If you don’t want to be helpful, I’ll leave the phone on the machine.”
“I’ll answer when I can reach a phone, but I’m going to be under Casey’s sink for a while.” He held up a serving spoon full of brown chunks. “What is this stuff?”
I looked at the plates on the table and tried to remember what I had ordered because whatever it was looked neither appetizing nor familiar. Mike handed me a glass of cold white wine and after I sipped it I decided I was hungry enough and tired enough that it didn’t matter what I ate.
He said, “Thanks for the wine, Mike.”
I said, “Thanks, Mike.”
“Here’s your kiss, Mike.”
“Here’s your kiss, Mike.” I went over to him, pulled out his shirt, put my wet hand inside on his warm back, and nuzzled his scratchy neck. “Do I have time for a shower before we eat?”
“The water’s off,” he said.
Casey’s sink, he’d said. There was always some fundamental under repair. I washed my face and hands with bottled water and sat down at the table.
We ate what turned out to be eggplant something—definitely not what I had ordered. I washed it down with water and white wine while I told Mike the day’s saga. He nodded in appropriate places, but he was unusually quiet. Hector’s funeral had to be heavy on his mind. I knew he was feeling mortal and reached out for his hand.
He said, “I talked to Casey. I thought that when she got her schedule she’d come back down to earth. But she’s still pretty excited.”
“I miss her.”
“She’ll be fine.”
“I know she will. But maybe I won’t.”
He winked at me, this funny thing he does that is no more than cocking his head and raising his cheek a little, bringing together some of his crow’s-feet. I melted. I don’t know how he does that to me, or how he knows to do it. A quick little gesture, no more than a tic, and it conveys volumes. I wanted to jump him, and would have if he’d so much as crooked a finger at me.
After dinner, such as it was, we cleared the table and stacked the dishes in the sink to wait until we had running water again.
On our way out of the kitchen, I asked, “Are you still taking me to see Anthony Louis tonight?”
“If you want. Let me finish with the plumbing first.”
“It’s late.”
He kissed my shoulder. “Anthony Louis isn’t going anywhere. Besides, he only comes out after dark, with the other vampires.”<
br />
“Speaking of vampires, will Gloria Marcuse be at the funeral?”
“If she is, I just might have to shoot her.”
“Do that. I’ll get it on film,” I said.
Mike went upstairs to work on pipes, I went into my workroom to get ready for a conversation with a cop killer.
In 1974, Anthony Louis was a lunatic. I wondered what nine years of hard time in San Quentin and nearly ten years of borderline homelessness had done for him. Mike had found him through the probation department, which came up with an address at a halfway house east of downtown.
First item of business, I called Guido.
“We’re on for Anthony tonight,” I said. “I have a feeling we may only get one shot at him.”
“What do I need?”
“I don’t know, except the quarters will probably be small and dark. Mike’s coming with us, and he’s packing.”
Guido said, “Ah,” and sounded suddenly eager.
I worked with Guido years ago on a series of foreign news assignments that got us shot at now and then, and deported more than once. After an incident in the jungles of Salvador, I decided growing old had certain attractions, so I moved on to other jobs. Guido stayed in the trenches for a long time. He got to be an adrenaline junkie, kept rewriting his epitaph and sending it to me with his Christmas cards. Eventually, something got to him, too. He turned one too many corners and found himself looking into the light once too often, I suspect. So, he came home, accepted a good job teaching at the UCLA film school; he is attached to my contract as a consultant, his students as interns. Now he has a steady income, respectability, responsibility, a cat. But like any junkie, he longs for that rush. If I suggest there could be gunplay, he is my whore; he told me he would be at my house within the hour.
Waiting for Guido, I pulled out the old police files on Anthony Louis.
Louis was questioned in the Frady murder because during the mid-seventies he lured five policemen into ambush situations, killing three of them and critically wounding a fourth. Cops weren’t the only object of his ire. He also attacked students at a couple of exclusive local colleges, killing two of them and hacking a third with a machete.
From the beginning, the police looked for anything that might tie Louis to Frady’s death. There was no obvious or personal link between them, so the detectives looked for a possible political answer. They investigated potential connections between Anthony Louis and subversive elements that preached against the police, from Black Muslims to more traditional Communists, and found little.
Louis’s family was examined, found clean of the common varieties of abuse; they were poor, but lived a stable life. I don’t know whether the justice system ever found a motive for the crimes Louis was convicted of. I doubt that Louis himself ever understood what he did, or that the voices that resided behind his inner ear ever took time to explain things.
There is an assumption that when a cop is killed, his colleagues hit the streets like pit bulls, abandoning the fine points of the law in their zeal. In fact, the opposite is true. The investigation will be unrelenting, thorough to the point of obsession, and careful. The last thing they want is for the guilty man to get off on a technicality because of a lapse in their procedure. The Frady detectives worked every angle trying to tie Anthony Louis to their case. They never disproved him as a possibility; they also never turned up the hard evidence needed for an indictment.
I stretched out on the floor with the files and began to read the strange and quirky eloquence of detective-speak in the reports.
Anthony Arthur Louis, born Los Angeles, February 22, 1952. Mother, Ophelia Kinsey, a single woman, bore five children, and reared them in the Aliso Village projects. Mrs. Kinsey is a welfare recipient and the dominant member of the family. The mother bears no apparent animosity toward the police. The family’s single encounter with the police occurred in 1968 when the third son, Martin Kinsey, was accidentally shot to death by a neighbor. Mrs. Kinsey described her eldest son, Anthony, as a serious, quiet boy.
Above average in intelligence, Anthony Louis graduated from public high school in 1970 with a 3.2 grade point average. He applied for admittance as a scholarship student at several local colleges, but was not accepted. Louis was accepted by Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on a Rockefeller Foundation grant to aid disadvantaged students. He attended from September 1970 until May 1972, when he withdrew. The notation on his transcript was “Not Academically Motivated.”
Reed College has no subversive reputation, other than the fact that the only American buried inside the Kremlin Wall is an alumnus. In-depth interviews with fellow students and several of his teachers failed to reveal any affiliation by Louis with any subversive group, including the Black Muslims. He was described as being a loner, with no known close friends.
In common with any number of rage killers, from Lee Harvey Oswald to the guy who opened fire at a McDonald’s and killed a dozen or so kids, Anthony Louis was a friendless loner.
After he failed out of college in 1972, Louis returned to Los Angeles and seemed to fade away. His mother rarely saw him. He moved frequently. Between July 1972 and July 1974 he held five low-pay, low-skill jobs. Coworkers described him as quiet and withdrawn except when angered. Twice he lost jobs because of violent and unprovoked confrontations with his supervisors. “Clean the grease trap” earned his boss a spit in the eye. After July, he couldn’t find a job of any kind. There was a pattern developing: he resented authority figures.
By July of 1974, I figured, Louis had built up at least four years of disappointment and simmering resentment. It was just about that time that he hooked up with a childhood friend named Robert Watkins, who pressured him to convert to the Muslim doctrine. Louis carried the Black Muslim newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, to his mother’s house. “I raised him a Christian Baptist,” Ophelia Kinsey told police. “What’s he think he’s doin’, truckin’ with Muhammad?”
Louis may have flirted with conversion, but the message never took hold; he smoked, he drank, he ate barbecued pork. I suspect he liked the inferred power that came with his identification with the group.
On March 19, 1975, his Muslim friend Robert Watkins was arrested, and later convicted for the unprovoked execution-style shooting of a hitchhiker, a kid named Garry Miller, in the city’s Harbor Division.
In San Francisco the infamous Zebra killer, the angel of death, was assassinating white people and taunting the police with boastful letters. When Los Angeles was hit by a similar series of crimes, there was fear that the Zebra killer was at large in the city, or that he had spawned a copycat. Between December 12, 1973, and November 27, 1974, in Los Angeles and its suburbs, there were seven assassinations and assassination attempts on law-enforcement personnel, and four street homicides and assaults on civilians that bore a similar signature. The total body count was five dead and three critically injured.
The LAPD created a suspect profile: “With the exception of two female college students, the victims were all white males, the attacks occurred at night, the attacker was a black male who used the martial arts, firearms, or a machete.”
On July 14, 1974, a female student was taking a Sunday walk alone near her school, Occidental College—the school Mike’s son now attends, a school very like Reed College in Oregon. It was a peaceful neighborhood, a quiet summer evening. The assailant came from nowhere, hacked the student brutally with a machete, and ran off. She fought back and managed to get his eyeglasses off and gouge his eyes, thus leaving her mark and seeing his face. From the emergency room, she gave police a good description.
The campus went on alert. Fear among the student body over the assault on their peace turned to outrage when the police routinely stopped, questioned, and searched every black male student, even those who did not remotely resemble the description.
Five days later, when LAPD officers James Van Pelt and Kirk Harper took a distress call near the campus, they were already on the lookout. When they stopped a suspicious-looking you
ng man, they were prepared to face some anger. But not for an all-out offensive. The young man, of medium height and build, karate-kicked Officer Harper, dropped him to the ground, and, in the ensuing scuffle, managed to get his hands on Officer Van Pelt’s .38. The assailant fired all six shots, critically injuring Van Pelt before he got away. With the revolver in his possession.
September 3, 1974, two University of Southern California students, strolling together off-campus, were gunned down. There were no witnesses, but the slugs the coroner dug from their corpses came from a .38.
A distress call came into the Lennox substation of the L.A. County Sheriff on October 6. Two deputies, Garrity and Earl, responded after a warning that the call sounded similar to the call that had led Van Pelt and Harper into ambush. Because of that warning, maybe the deputies used more force than the manual called for when they approached a man of medium height and build who was lurking at the scene. The man became combative, tried his karate, but this time he was overpowered. Anthony Arthur Louis was booked at the Lennox substation, and released on bail put up by his mother.
Two weeks later, late on a Monday evening, a uniformed California State police officer working security at the State Building downtown was shot dead with a .38 revolver. Passersby saw a lone man run from the scene, and gave a good description: medium height, medium build.
There was another attack on a civilian in mid-November. A man backing his car out of his driveway, going to church on a Sunday evening, was shot in the face with a .38 bullet. He survived to tell about the attack. “Some dude walks up and asks me the time, then, pow. My whole world explodes.”
November 27, 1974, the day before Thanksgiving. Two uniformed Inglewood police officers stopped a young black man for questioning, a practice that had become even more common and more controversial over the last year. They approached the suspect both cautiously and aggressively. When the suspect reached for a .38 revolver he carried in a shoulder holster, the officers subdued him using a compliance hold. Interpretation: they choked him out.
77th Street Requiem Page 9
