77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  The suspect was identified as Anthony Arthur Louis. The .38 taken from him when he was arrested was registered to LAPD officer James Van Pelt. Bullets test-fired from the revolver matched bullets taken from the state police officer’s chest, taken out of the churchgoer’s face, and taken from the corpses of the USC students. Experts matched Louis’s voice to the taped ambush calls. The pair of eyeglasses that the Occidental student pulled from the face of her attacker belonged to Anthony Arthur Louis.

  I heard Mike upstairs swearing at the plumbing and lost my concentration. There was an ungodly racket of metal banging against metal, then quiet, then Mike started singing an old Hank Williams song about a cigar store Indian. I took this to mean that I might get a bath soon.

  Guido arrived late, around nine. When I opened the front door for him he said, “You look like hell.”

  “And you look like a gangster. What is this, early Halloween?”

  “Just want to fit in.” He wore black sweats, a black shirt, and a black cap. And he carried a bottle of single-malt scotch.

  I took the bottle from him. “Something you want to tell me?”

  “Like?”

  “Like, you boozing again?”

  “I brought that for you, Maggie. Thought you might need a drink. Loosen you up.”

  “You think I’m uptight?”

  “I think you’re so tight you’re gonna break if you don’t take the pressure off. Have a drink.”

  I opened the bottle, took a slug, gasped, wiped my eyes, put the top back on. “Thanks, Guido.”

  “Any time. So, what’s the program?”

  “Mike’s in the middle of some plumbing. As soon as he’s finished, we’ll go.”

  “The dancer, Michelle, get her squared away?” he asked.

  I said, “Yes. She’ll meet you at nine. Fuss over her a little, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “She’ll respond better for you. It’s been a long time since anyone was nice to her.”

  We sat on the workroom floor among the reports and shared the scotch. Guido glanced through my reading notes on Anthony Louis.

  “How many murders on this guy’s ticket?” Guido asked.

  “One cop killing was all they got through trial.”

  “He didn’t get the death penalty?”

  “There was no death penalty in 1974, no life without possibility of parole. Mitigating circumstances—he’s nuts—got the charge knocked to second-degree murder. He also went down on two assault-with-intent charges. He drew five to life, and two six months to twenty years sentences, to run concurrently. After nine years at San Quentin, in high-power, they kicked him.” I passed Guido the bottle. “You’re not worried, are you?”

  “Who? Me?” Guido took a drink. “You said Mike’s packing.”

  “He is. Just keep any pencils or other sharp objects away from our subject.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you, you’ll see.”

  He frowned. “Tell me what you want from me.”

  “His face,” I said. “Try to light his face.”

  “Because he’s pretty?”

  “You’ll see. But it’s his face I want.”

  We talked for a few more minutes about lighting and the equipment Guido had in the back of his Jeep. It was nearly nine-thirty when we got up to check on Mike.

  Mike had his head and shoulders inside the cupboard under the sink in Casey’s bathroom.

  “Find the problem?” I asked.

  He handed out a long, sodden wad of Casey’s hair. “I cleared the trap but these old pipes are a bitch to get back together.”

  “Want a hand?” Guido asked.

  The snort conveyed more than no thanks. He slid out and sat up, his hands black with plumber’s putty, his face smeared. He smiled. “Hey, Guido.”

  “Hey, yourself.” Guido passed Mike the bottle. “Sorry about Hector, Mike.”

  “Me, too.” He waved the scotch away.

  “The family gave me permission to film the funeral,” Guido said. “You have any problems with that?”

  Mike looked up at me.

  “We don’t have any footage of Frady’s funeral,” I said. “We’d like to use Hector’s.”

  “I don’t have any problem with that.” Mike slid back down under the sink. “Turn on the water, will you? Let’s see if anything leaks.”

  “We have running water?” I asked, watching with wonder as Guido opened the taps.

  “Turned it on a half hour ago.” Mike sounded as if he were in a deep cave, or maybe he sounded like the ogre under the bridge.

  I asked. “Do I have time for a shower?”

  Both of them looked me over. Mike was the first to speak. “Don’t bother,” he said. “Where you’re going, you don’t need to smell good. You sure as hell don’t want to look good.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  The room was barely ten feet square, roughly the size of a prison cell. It was dark except for the spotlight Guido had attached near the ceiling.

  Anthony Louis sat at the head of his narrow bed, caught in the white beam of light. When he looked straight ahead, he seemed ordinary, almost handsome. But if he turned his head in the least, letting the light find the right side of his face, he became a monster. Set deep in a crosshatched field of scars, his right eye was a small, shiny red bulb, like the rhinestone eye of a toy-store dragon.

  Louis raised his hand to shield his good eye from the light.

  I asked him, “Are you comfortable, Mr. Louis?”

  “Comfortable enough.” He smoothed back his hair and fixed the collar of his striped shirt, preening for the red eye under Guido’s camera lens—a twin to his own. “Maybe some big-time Hollywood producer will see me and realize that I am the star he has been looking for. Sign me up for a million dollars.”

  Mike sniffed. “What would you do with a million dollars, Louis?”

  “What do you think? I would blow this festering hellhole.”

  Down the hall there was a shouting match, sounded like three or four men arguing. I heard, “Keep the fuck out of my stuff.”

  The halfway house was old, and smelled old—mildew and dirt and too many inhabitants. Twelve men lived in space designed for a family of four. The Probation Department contracted rooms from a private company that bought up old houses and divided them into as many tiny bedrooms as the codes would permit, to warehouse felons not quite ready for independence. Weekly counseling sessions and two meals a day were included in the deal.

  I had asked Mike to start the questioning because I liked the police-style interrogation Hector had been doing for us. Besides, Mike and Anthony had a history together and I thought it would be more interesting to let them play out another scene in their personal drama. More production value, as it were.

  “So,” Mike said, thinking, arms folded across his chest, leaning against the wall, relaxed. The composition was beautiful, Louis sitting in the beam of light that caught Mike, standing, at the belt. Mike’s face was in half-shadow, keeping him anonymous, making him an intimidating presence even though his posture and tone were casual. The metal band on his pistol grip reflected some light when he turned to Louis and began to question him.

  “I hear you’re a pretty smart guy, Louis.”

  “If I’m so smart, what am I doing here?” Louis, nervous, chuckled.

  “You tell me. You went to some fancy college up in Oregon or something. Beautiful country up there.”

  “Maybe it would be if it ever stopped raining. I never saw so much rain. Didn’t have a raincoat. I was wet the whole time.”

  “What did you study up there?”

  “Propaganda of the white infidel.”

  “Was that propaganda one A or one B?”

  Louis laughed, glanced up at Mike, showed the hideous eye. “I took the full course, brother. The full course.”

  “Nineteen seventy-two,” Mike said. “Long-haired chicks in miniskirts. Doesn’t get much better than that. You make any friends up i
n Oregon?”

  Louis’s smile collapsed, as if he had been stung. “I wasn’t there to make friends.”

  “What were you there for?”

  “To soothe liberal guilt about the neglected black brother.”

  Mike asked, “What happened to your eye?”

  “I was in a fight.” Louis self-consciously raised his hand to shield the side of his face as he turned away. “Pig did it. Sucked my eye right out of my skull. Chewed it up.”

  “You say a police officer did all that? I heard you put the eye out yourself. With a pencil. That’s what you told the shrinks at County. Why’d you do it?”

  Louis exhaled noisily.

  “Takes a lot of something to put out your own eye,” Mike said evenly. “Must have hurt like hell. What can you see out of it?”

  “The truth. I can see more truth out of my blind eye than you’ll ever see out of your two good ones.”

  “Could be.” Mike was still relaxed. “You have a thing with pencils, don’t you Louis? Didn’t you threaten your public defender or someone with a pencil?”

  “My parole officer.”

  “You tried to escape from County Jail. Put a pencil to her throat and used her as a shield, tried to get out the sally port.”

  Louis turned away from Mike, but the camera could still see his smug smile. “Something like that. Pencil was the only weapon available. I got a year for it.”

  “Who were those guys who testified for you at that trial? Who were your character witnesses?”

  “Ray Boudreaux and Harold Taylor.”

  “What were they in for?”

  “Offing pigs. One in L.A., one in San Francisco, and two in New York.”

  “Did they go down for murder?” Mike asked.

  “I don’t know.” Louis shrugged.

  “You know they did. How smart was that? You’re on trial for shooting an officer of the law, and the guys who speak up for you are the most famous cop killers in the country. Couldn’t you have found maybe some old priest, or even your bookie to testify to your good character?”

  “Maybe I didn’t think killing a pig was a crime.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mike shifted his shoulder against the wall, loosened his folded arms. His right hand dropped maybe two inches closer to the gun on his belt. “You and Boudreaux and Taylor did something else with pencils, didn’t you? Some martial arts thing?”

  “I taught them how to come off the wall. You know, how to overpower the screws when they come in to shake down your cell. How to come off the wall, get their guns away. Boudreaux and Taylor, they’d hold pencils the way the screws hold their guns, you know?” He made a gun with thumb and forefinger. “I’d take the gun away from them. Just practice, you know?”

  “You tried it for real, though, didn’t you?”

  “Would have worked, except they were three little pigs that time. I didn’t see the third one until he was on me.”

  “Did you use your karate to take Officer Van Pelt’s firearm?”

  Louis furrowed his brow. “Was that the pig at Occidental?”

  “Yes.”

  “Textbook example.”

  “Before Officer Van Pelt, did you use your karate on Officer Roy Frady? Did you get his gun, too?”

  Louis was taken aback, threw up his hands defensively. “I don’t know anything about that one.”

  “If killing a pig isn’t a crime, what are you worried about?”

  “I didn’t do it. Know nothing about it.”

  “You told your buddies in County Jail that you did. You told more than one person in module twenty-five hundred with you that you killed Roy Frady. You gave chapter and verse about how you overpowered Officer Frady with your karate, how you took his gun, handcuffed him, drove him in his stick-shift car over to Eighty-ninth Street and shot him six times.”

  “You going to believe a bunch of cons?”

  “If I hear the right story, I am,” Mike said. He never raised his voice. “How’d you know Frady had a stick-shift car?”

  “It’s more Fascist-macho to drive a stick shift.” Louis shrugged. “Get better mileage with a stick shift.”

  “Did being a cop killer give you more status in the high-power module at County Jail?”

  “Yes. We were the elite.” Louis started to preen again, but looked at Mike’s face and toned down, seeing something up in that shadowy region of the room that I could not. “But listen to me. A lot of pigs were going down; I served time on one of them. Frady you can’t pin on me. The snitch you used ratted on me just to get himself transferred out of Soledad and into Chino, down to minimum security.”

  “How come you get all hot when I bring up Frady?”

  “Frady’s a different game, man. I had nothing to do with Frady.”

  “What makes Frady different?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Where were you in May of 1974?” Mike asked.

  “You expect me to remember?”

  “Where were you the night of the SLA shooting?”

  Louis sat up, smiling again. “You can’t pin that one on me. SWAT pigs are responsible for that fuckup.”

  Mike smiled back. “Where were you that night?”

  “Working in Inglewood, flipping hamburgers. We heard about it on the radio. I remember because a customer came in and said we could see the fire from the parking lot.”

  “How far away in miles?”

  “Three, maybe four.”

  “You were sent up for a shooting you did in Inglewood. Were you living in Inglewood?”

  “No. I just worked there for a while. I had a place near the coliseum,” Louis said. “On Figueroa.”

  “That’s up by USC.” Mike said this as a matter of record, didn’t wait for a response. “Drive the freeway to work?”

  “Never owned a car.”

  “How’d you get to Inglewood?”

  “I took the bus down Figueroa and transferred at Manchester.”

  “What time did you get off work?”

  “Can’t remember. That was a long time ago. I know it was late, though. I didn’t like waiting around in that neighborhood for the connecting bus.”

  “The Figueroa bus took you within two blocks of the SLA’s first hideout. You were telling people you were a Muslim convert. Anyone maybe walk you over to Eighty-fourth Street so you could meet the revolutionaries, see their guns? The landlord was a Muslim. I understand there was a regular parade through that house.”

  Louis shook his head, showed scorn in his attitude. “Amateurs. Bunch of white freaks.”

  “You ever stop in at the corner liquor store for a beer while you waited for the bus, maybe buy some smokes?”

  “I might have. I don’t remember. I don’t remember a lot of things.”

  “You on medication, Louis?”

  “Yes.”

  “You taking it regular?”

  “More or less.”

  “What happens if you miss a few doses?”

  Louis looked at me for the first time. He tapped his head. “I get me some company. They can set up a powerful racket inside here.”

  “Why’d you put your eye out, Louis?”

  “I don’t always like what I see.”

  “The young woman you attacked with a machete, she gouged your eye, didn’t she?”

  “She fought pretty good.”

  “You feel bad about what you did to her? Maybe finish the job she started on your eye?”

  He covered his eye. “She did it. She won’t leave me alone. Bitch yells at me all the time. Night and day. Won’t leave me alone.”

  I stood against the door, next to Guido, so that I could watch the scene in his monitor. Louis dropped his head to his chest. Mike turned to me expectantly. Guido grinned like a shark in tourist season.

  I said, “It’s a wrap.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  I slipped Anthony Louis’s tape into the bedroom VCR and watched a few minutes of it while I puttered around between the
bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. Mike came in with his toolbox, glanced at the TV, and grimaced.

  “I like the way the interview plays,” I said. “I like the way you sound and I love the content. Will you do more segments for me?”

  “I don’t mind. It’s tough to look at myself on TV like that, though. I suppose you get used to it.”

  “You do,” I said. “After a while, it’s just like seeing yourself in a mirror that makes you look fat.”

  “Well, I don’t always like seeing myself in a mirror, either.”

  That gave me an idea. When he went downstairs to put the tools away, I stuck a secondary inlet plug into the back of the VCR, but watched a little more of Louis before I completed the switch. Louis would have been a good documentary subject all by himself, but the sad truth was that by the time the Frady film was edited, Louis would be reduced to a few pithy bites. It’s always tough to cut good footage, no matter how useless it is for the final cut.

  I heard Mike coming back up the stairs. I took Louis out of the VCR and put in a fresh tape, completed the switch, then went into the bathroom to run our bathwater.

  Around the turn of the century, when the house was built, bathrooms with built-in tubs were still symbols for the privileged class. Our bathroom must have been designed for a robber baron, because it was absolutely grand. The claw-footed tub in the middle of the room was big enough for the entire family, and, the best part, the room was heated by a small fireplace with a granite mantel.

  I poured some bubble bath into the running water, started a fire, laid out towels. Mike came in, stripped off his dirty work clothes, dropped them into the hamper, and made a full turn for my benefit.

  I ran my hand down his long back. “Rash is gone.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “I love you?”

  “That’s a question?”

  I planted a kiss on his sweaty shoulder. “I wonder whether the long-haired Oregon chicks who sat next to Anthony Louis in English one A ever knew he was a coed killer.”

  “Maybe I should go out and come in again.”

  “Maybe you should. I love the way your backside moves when you walk.”