by Sheila Lowe
Jovanic gave RJ Scott her work for the day: “You and Randy follow up on the Travis Navarette case. See if LAFD has anything new yet. Collect whatever evidence you can find. I’ll go back and talk to Jacqueline Solis, get a description of this Big Carl character.”
Hardcastle, chewing on a piece of wheat toast, no butter, wanted to know what his assignment was.
“I want you to sit on Dragon House, see who comes and goes,” Jovanic said. “I’ll call you when I get a description of Big Carl. If he goes out for lunch or whatever, get his license plate and follow him. Call it in and get an address. He’s Viper’s muscle. He’s gotta have a record. Once we know what we’ve got on him, we can find his weak spot and squeeze his balls.” Jovanic rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes. He should have remembered to stick some Visine in his pocket to wash out the grit. The few hours of shuteye he’d gotten was not enough to make up for the deprivation of the last few nights. “This journalist—Shane something—we need to locate him; see if he’s got any intel. Huey, see what you can dig up. You can do it while you’re surveilling the tattoo parlor.”
“Who’s he write for?”
Jovanic stared him down. “That’s your assignment, Huey. Find out who he is, who he writes for, where he stays. ‘Shane’ isn’t all that common a name.” He turned to Scott. “Any luck locating Navarette’s next of kin yet?”
She pushed away her empty plate and shook her head. “Nothing so far. Maybe he didn’t have anyone. I’ll keep digging. If there’s someone, I’ll find them.”
“We know Angel and Travis were connected, and we know why—Viper wanted to set up Travis for underage sex. We need something that ties him to the arson and the homicide. Randy, you talk to the fire investigator. Why’d they torch the place? Was it because of what Bobby Morgan told us—Travis was the competition after Viper trained him, and Viper wanted revenge? Or was the Molotov Cocktail a cover-up for something else?”
“You know he did it to send a message to the other parlors,” Coleman said. “‘Don’t fuck with Viper’s business.’”
“We’ve never been able to make anything stick to that asshole before,” Hardcastle said. “He always alibis out.”
“Nobody died before,” Jovanic said. “The stakes are higher now. Somebody’s going to screw up, and when they do, we’ll be there.”
“The autopsies are tomorrow morning?” Coleman confirmed. “Think the ME can tell whether the vic died in the fire, or was already dead?”
“I’m not looking forward to that post,” Hardcastle said. “Crispy critters gross me out.”
“Just don’t eat breakfast first,” RJ needled him. “Less cookies to toss.”
“Okay kids, knock it off.” Jovanic mopped up the last of the ketchup on his plate with O’Brien potatoes. “Anything else before we split up?” The other three detectives shook their heads and Jovanic grabbed the bill. “This one’s on me.”
***
Jacqueline Solis was on her way out the door when Jovanic reached the staircase to her apartment. Her initial look of alarm at the large man ascending the stairs changed to one of recognition.
“Hey, Detective. What’s up?”
As Jovanic neared her, he could hear the frantic barking of Rocco, the little Yorkie, inside. He came up the steps, forcing Solis to move backwards onto her small balcony. “I’ll just take a moment of your time. When we spoke yesterday, you mentioned a friend of yours, Big Carl, who works at Dragon House.”
“What about him?”
“What can you tell me about him? What does he look like?”
“Well, he’s big, obviously, but not tall.”
“How big would you say? Compared to me?”
Solis stepped back and sized him up. “You’re tall, but Carl is just huge. I’d say he’s about 5’8”, but he’s wide—not fat, just wiiiide. Time he came over here I was afraid he wouldn’t fit through the door.” She laughed. “Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, but he comes by his nickname honestly. He’s the size of a bus.”
“So, maybe 250-300 pounds?”
“Yeah, somewhere in there.”
Jovanic smiled and nodded, encouraging her to continue. “How about race? Black? White? Mexican?”
“None of the above. He’s Samoan. Hey, look, I gotta run. I have an appointment.”
“Thanks, Ms. Solis. I appreciate it.” Jovanic started to move down the risers, then did what Claudia would have called his Columbo move. Turning around, he kept his back to the wall. “Is there anything else you can think of that might be helpful?”
Solis huffed her impatience and started down the stairs towards him. “You can’t miss him, okay? Just look for the bus with the tribal tattoos on his face.”
***
Randy Coleman dropped into his office chair across from Jovanic, notebook in hand. He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jovanic asked. Smoking had not been allowed in the building for at least twenty years. Coleman removed it and held it out for Jovanic to see. “E-cig,” he said. “You oughta try it. I can always tell when you’re jonesing for a smoke.”
Jovanic ignored the comment. On closer observation, he could see that what he had thought was a cigarette was a realistic-looking plastic tube with what looked like a filter at one end.
“Looks like the real thing. It’s got the taste, the nicotine, water vapor looks like smoke. See, you get the smoking experience without all the bad shit.”
“You sound like a commercial. Put it away before someone sees it and sends you to the time out corner, or whatever the hell they do in kindergarten these days.”
“I know, old-timer.” Coleman cracked his voice like a shaky old man. “Back in my day, we—”
“Fuck off, Randy,” Jovanic interrupted him. “It’s your shtick that’s getting old. Do you have something for me, or are you just here to waste my time?”
“I’ve got something on our ‘Angel in the dumpster.’ Got potential, too.”
“Let’s have it.”
“Remember the apartment building right across the alley from Harvey’s?”
“Yeah?”
“The other night when they were canvassing, one of the uniforms talked to a woman who has a friend on the third floor. Seems the friend’s ex has been stalking her, vandalizing her car. So, she picks herself up a surveillance kit—couple hundred bucks worth of camera, disk storage, timer.”
Jovanic sat up straighter in his chair, a little zing of excitement buzzing through him as he guessed where his partner was going with his story. Coleman continued, “It’s set up to record every night. She points it at the parking lot so she can catch the guy in the act. Instead…”
“She catches our guy?” Jovanic had nursed a faint hope of video somewhere, but this was far better than he had expected.
“Well…sort of,” the change of Coleman’s pitch dashed his hopes. Of course it couldn’t be that easy.
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“The woman’s been out of town, got back this morning. She goes downstairs to see her friend for coffee, learns about the body in the dumpster. She freaks—”
“Does this woman have a name?” Jovanic interrupted, getting his pen ready.
“Yvonne Lee.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So, Lee goes back to her place and runs the video for Tuesday night. At one twenty-two, SUV pulls up by the dumpster and two dudes get out. Mutt and Jeff. Smaller dude opens the dumpster, other dude hauls something out of the back seat—according to the wit, you can’t see what he’s carrying, but it’s big enough. They toss the package in the dumpster and drive off.”
“The three car doors Dumpster Dave heard.”
“Yeah—driver, passenger, back door. T
he body was in the backseat.”
“Did Ms. Lee happen to get a license plate?”
“Last four digits.” Coleman consulted his notebook. “4731.”
“How clear were Mutt and Jeff?” Jovanic asked, rising from his desk. He grabbed his jacket, which was draped across the back of his chair and started to pull it on.
“Not clear enough for an ID,” Coleman said. “But Lee is burning a DVD for us.”
Chapter Eighteen
Yvonne Lee, an Asian-American woman, led the two detectives into a second bedroom that had been converted into a home office. The first thing Jovanic noticed when they entered the room was a video camera on a short tripod. It stood at the window, which was ajar, pointed at the alley two stories below.
Lee was talking about her attempts to catch her boyfriend in the act of vandalizing her car. “This is the best idea I could come up with,” she said, leading them to the camera equipment. “I figured at least I could catch him going into the parking garage under the building—he has no business there anymore. This setup cost me three hundred bucks.”
In her mid-thirties with translucent skin and smoky mascara ringing her eyes, she had the look of a fragile alabaster doll. But there was nothing fragile about the ice in her tone. “When I catch that bastard—and I will—I’ll cut off his balls and feed them to him for breakfast.”
Jovanic winced. “You probably shouldn’t make those kinds of statements in front of peace officers. It might be interpreted as a terrorist threat. You can go to jail for that.”
Lee flashed him an impish grin. “Did that make your manhood shrivel, Detective? What were you expecting, a submissive little old Asian lady? I came to this country young enough to become Americanized.”
“Well, I’m sorry about your boyfriend, but your video might help us catch a killer, so maybe that will make you feel better.”
“Well, of course I’d be glad to help for that poor girl’s sake. I can’t believe how disgusting, the way those men threw her in the trash like a sack of rotten potatoes.” Yvonne Lee walked to the window as she spoke. She crooked her index finger and beckoned Jovanic to come and look.
He crouched to the level of the camera where the lens poked through the raised window opening. With his eye to the viewfinder, Jovanic found himself looking at the alleyway that passed between the edge of the parking lot behind Harvey’s Market on one side, and the apartment building’s garage on the other. Any vehicle driving along the alley would cross the path of the lens.
After Lee handed him a DVD in a plain white sleeve. “I copied the part from 1:30 to 2:00 a.m. I figured you’d want to see if anything else happened after they left.”
“We appreciate that, Ms. Lee.” Jovanic stepped aside and let Randy Coleman take his place at the camera.
“You know what? It took less than two minutes for them to dump that poor girl. If you didn’t know what to look for, you’d think they were dropping off a piece of furniture or, or a rug—something that was too big for their own trash. People do it all the time—leave their crap in someone else’s dumpster so they don’t have to bother with it. Want me to show you what’s on the DVD?”
“That’d be great.” Jovanic followed her to the glass and chrome computer desk. The monitor was bigger than the TV set he’d grown up with. The thought made him feel old and made him remember Ariceli Lopez’s comment about him being hot like a grampa.
Lee plopped onto her chair and tucked a leg under her. She circled the mouse around and the screen came to life. The video was already up on the screen, paused. “The website said the infrared would record up to 45 feet at night. You can look at the video on a smartphone, but I was at a conference and I was just too knocked out to check it when I got back to my room at night. Of course, I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at anyway, until my neighbor told me.”
With a few keyboard clicks, the video started playing. Despite the somewhat grainy quality, the security light on the garage opposite Yvonne Lee’s building illuminated the alley well enough to display the shapes of some of the vehicles parked in the lot behind Harvey’s. Still, to the casual observer, it would be a challenge identifying the make and model of the SUV that crawled into the frame.
The vehicle came to a halt a few feet from the trash dumpster. Jovanic asked Lee to stop the video. He pointed to the rear brake light. “Chevy,” he said to Coleman, who had been a huge car buff long before it became his business to know cars.
“Yeah, it’s a Tahoe, I’d bet my left nut on it.”
Coleman had spoken in an undertone, but Lee turned and gave him a sharp look. “So, it’s okay for you to talk about your nuts, but I can’t talk about my ex-boyfriend’s?”
“I apologize, ma’am. That was out of line.”
“Oh, puhlease! Now you’re insulting me with ‘ma’am’?”
“Could you zoom in on the license plate?” Jovanic asked, drawing their attention back to the screen. The SUV was parked at a slight angle, cutting off part of the plate. On the Tahoe, the plate was on the rear bumper. As it was placed higher than on some vehicles, they were able to see the partial number: 4371.
After getting the go-ahead, Lee clicked on Play again. The front doors of the vehicle opened simultaneously on each side. “Stop there,” Jovanic said. The vehicle had lifted noticeably when the man on the passenger side exited.
“The size of a bus” was how Jacqueline Solis had described Big Carl, the man who had picked up Angela Tedesco from Bobby Morgan’s house on the night of her death. In the early morning shadows and from the distance of Yvonne Lee’s third floor condo, Big Carl’s features were indistinct. The brim of a small hat—maybe a pork pie—perched on his large head might later be used to identify him.
Standing behind Lee, Coleman nudged Jovanic with his elbow. He tipped his chin at the man who had climbed out of the driver’s side, and was now frozen mid-stride on his way to the trash dumpster.
Jovanic gave a brief nod of acknowledgment that he had also recognized Morgan. Robert Morgan. The same asshole who had claimed to be tucked into bed with Ariceli Lopez on the night Angel’s body was dumped. That confirmed Mouser’s information about the dumpster. The video might not be clear enough to convict him, but Morgan didn’t have to know that when they brought him in and leaned on him.
Jovanic directed Yvonne Lee to advance the video a few seconds more. They watched Morgan glance around furtively. When he believed the coast was clear, he raised the lid of the dumpster while Big Carl was opening the back door of the SUV. Carl leaned inside.
It was over in a flash. Carl hauled the body out of the vehicle. He tossed it into the dumpster, as Lee had described, like a cast off sack of rotten potatoes of no use to anyone.
Morgan suddenly looked toward the ground. He went into a crouch that took him out of sight for a few seconds.
“He dropped something,” Coleman said.
Jovanic made a mental note to send a fingerprint tech back out and check the area in front of the dumpster. They had found no prints on the lid—he must have worn gloves—but if he had dropped something, there was a chance he had left some evidence behind.
Big Carl made a gesture that telegraphed his irritation with Robert Morgan, then climbed back into the SUV. Morgan hurried around to the driver’s side. An instant later, the SUV disappeared from the frame.
To all appearances the scene was just as it had been two minutes earlier. The only difference was, the battered corpse of a sixteen year-old girl now reposed on a bed of decaying food and other trash.
Yvonne Lee fast-forwarded until several minutes had elapsed and they saw Dumpster Dave emerge from his hiding place behind the low wall.
“I wonder who that guy is,” Lee said, as Dave sidled to the dumpster and took a quick peek inside, then dropped the lid and scurried away. He had omitted that part in his nar
rative when the detectives interviewed him.
Neither detective revealed that they already knew the homeless man. Lee fast-forwarded a few more minutes until Khan Khosa came around the corner unprepared for the gruesome discovery he was about to make.
***
On their return drive to Pacific Division, Jovanic and Coleman made a few stops around the perimeter of the Venice neighborhood in locations where they knew there were surveillance cameras. Being able to pinpoint the location of the SUV within a few minutes at one of those locations would make it easier to discover whether their suspects had made a stop at an ATM or a gas station on the route in or out of the alley.
The managers at each business they visited agreed to allow the detectives to run their tapes within their time frame to determine whether a Chevy Tahoe with the numbers ‘4731’ had visited their location. They would contact them when the tapes were available.
Coleman’s next assignment was to check with the DMV, whose traffic cams would catch the SUV crossing an intersection. If luck were with them, Robert Morgan would have run a red light while driving the Tahoe and been photographed. An ID on the owner of the vehicle would be required to run the search. For that to happen, Coleman needed to request a DMV query for all Chevy Tahoes with the numbers ‘4731’ in the plate.
He got the search started in the car. The first thing he learned was that the vehicle was not registered to either Robert Morgan or Alvin Rousch—Viper. Without a surname he could do nothing about Big Carl.
Unlike in other states, vehicle color was not included as part of the California registration process. Jovanic’s plea for the department to lobby the legislature for a change in policy had fallen on deaf ears. So it was of no help that they knew the vehicle was either black or dark blue—the only dark colors that were standard with the vehicle—and assuming the SUV had not been painted a custom hue—color could not be used as a search parameter. This irked Jovanic no end.
