Flat Spin

by David Freed

  “That would not be my first choice,” I said.

  Savannah shot me the stink eye and walked with Woodley to his house. I sighed and followed them.

  The interior of Marvis Woodley’s home was as orderly as a barracks. Everything in its place. Everything at right angles. There were plastic covers on the lampshades, plastic runners on the mauvecolored carpet, macramé coasters on the dustless coffee table. Savannah and I sat on the plastic slipcovered couch while Woodley paced the living room like Patton, hands clasped behind his back. He used terms like dynamic entry and superior firepower as he laid out his plan for capturing the transient that he was convinced had murdered Arlo Echevarria, while his little white yapper dog ricocheted off the walls and jumped up on the couch, trying to kiss me on the lips. Woodley would yell, “Rambo, get down!” and the mutt would do so, but only for a second or two, before jumping back up on the couch to get at my lips—when he wasn’t trying to hump Savannah’s leg.

  “What kind of dog is he?” Savannah said, fending him off.

  A dog I wanted to punt.

  “Coton de Tuléar,” Marvis said. “Bred for the kings of Madagascar, only this one thinks he is king. Thinks he don’t have to take orders from nobody.”

  When Rambo tried to hump my leg, I scooped him up and locked him in the bathroom.

  Woodley was too wrapped up in his pre-assault briefing to pay much attention. He’d already conducted two “surveillances” of the house that morning during walks with Rambo, he said, and confirmed the killer was inside. The man we were after drove a beat-to-shit El Camino, which he parked on the street. Woodley’s plan called for me to knock on the killer’s door and say that I’d accidentally sideswiped the El Camino. He would then emerge unsuspectingly from his redoubt to inspect the damage, at which point Woodley would jump him. Together we would subdue him with duct tape. Then Woodley would call the police to come cart the son of a bitch off to Folsom. Savannah would capture the citizen’s arrest on Woodley’s cell phone camera, then he would sell the footage to the major TV networks. He was hoping for his own reality series, or maybe a movie deal. We’d split millions.

  “If this guy’s the killer, I’m a theoretical physicist,” I said. “I don’t care whether you trust the LAPD or not. This is their gig, Marvis, not yours.”

  He glared, nostrils flaring, like he was about to lay hands on me—or try. “I already told you. Fuck the LAPD. Don’t you get it? This is my ticket to ride, man.”

  Rambo was scratching at the bathroom door, whining and yapping like he was trapped in there with Freddy Krueger. Woodley yelled at him to shut up. Rambo whined only louder.

  “My old lady’s dog,” he said apologetically. “Left him with me when she split for good.”

  He opened the bathroom door and released him. Rambo padded over to the front door and lay down, panting in relief at having been sprung from solitary.

  “OK, here’s the situation,” Marvis said. He was looking at me not in anger this time, but with resignation. “The truth is . . .” He licked his lips nervously.

  “SEAL Team Six didn’t come along until after Vietnam,” I said, finishing his words for him. “The truth is, you were never a SEAL, were you?”

  He steepled his fingers prayerfully, rubbing his palms together slowly, ashamed to meet my eyes, and shook his head no.

  Only a wannabe ever brags to a stranger about being a member of the Navy’s premier counterterrorist unit. Those of us in Alpha, of course, knew who they were. The community wasn’t that big. We referred to SEALs as the “junior varsity.” Not that they were in any way deficient at what they did. They were quite good, actually. It’s just that we were better.

  Savannah eyed Woodley with a puzzled expression, then me. “Somebody want to tell me what this has to do with Arlo?”

  Woodley sank into a blue velvet La-Z-Boy recliner, his favorite chair, given the well-worn cushions. “Me and Arlo was battle buddies,” he said. “Maybe we never served together, but we was battle buddies just the same.”

  Marvis Woodley may never have been a Navy commando, but he was a Vietnam War-era veteran, he said. He’d toiled for a year below decks in the post office of an aircraft carrier patrolling Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin, sorting the mail, rarely seeing the sun, both relieved and disappointed at having avoided combat. The life that followed had devolved into an unfulfilling career as a letter carrier and a series of failed, childless marriages. Many nights after work, he would pound down a forty-ounce bottle of Olde English and fantasize about running a garden hose from the tailpipe of his Monte Carlo, sliding in his favorite Aaron Neville CD, and going to sleep forever. But he never had the stones for that. Then Echevarria moved in next door and everything changed, Marvis said. The two men started hanging out. Sometimes, they’d order in Chinese food and watch baseball on Echevarria’s big screen plasma. But mostly they just drank. The booze loosened Echevarria’s tongue and he would let slip stories—incredible stories about a group of elite shadow warriors that no one had ever heard about.

  “I couldn’t sit there and bore the man about being some lameass clerk on some lame-ass ship, watching movies and eating ice cream and shit, not after all he done,” Marvis said, “so I start telling my own stories. Being a SEAL, zapping gooks, all that. Arlo, he was just a kid when Vietnam was going down. The hell he gonna do, call me a liar? I ain’t saying what I did was right, but . . .”

  Savannah covered her mouth as she listened. Everything Marvis said confirmed what she’d long suspected but could never get Echevarria or me to admit. The lives we hid from her.

  “Truth is,” Marvis said, drawing a deep breath and letting it go, “I ain’t never done anything my whole life. This is my one chance.”

  “Take down the bad guy mano a mano,” I said, “be the hero you never were.”

  Marvis shrugged like a little kid caught in a lie. I pitied him.

  “You’re certain this guy’s the shooter?”

  “No doubt in my military mind.”

  “What’s the address?”

  Marvis recited it by memory. The house was four doors down and across the street, south toward the Ventura Freeway. I got out my phone and called Czarnek.

  “Who you calling?” Marvis said.

  “LAPD.”

  “You can’t do that!” He sprang to his feet. Rambo, startled, began running around and yapping like the place was on fire. “You can’t, man,” Marvis pleaded. “Let me do this. For Arlo. For all the lies I told him. Please.”

  I glanced over at Savannah. Her eyes were filled with tears.

  “If Arlo were here today,” I said, “I know what he’d say: ‘Never send a man where you can send a grenade.’ You’re a good man, Marvis, but you’re no grenade. You did your job. It’s time to let others do theirs.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck, staring up at the ceiling, then disappeared into his kitchen. His dog padded after him. The house was quiet.

  “Detective Czarnek.”

  He apologized for not returning my earlier call. The turf war had escalated between the Paxton Street Locos and Pacoima Flats, he said, and was monopolizing his time.

  I walked outside, far enough away from Savannah that she couldn’t overhear my conversation, and briefed Czarnek on what I’d learned on my trip to Phoenix regarding Robbie Emerson and the possible Russian connection to the death of Echevarria. I told him about the mysterious man who’d bought a Sawzall from the Home Depot where Emerson worked, using a stolen American Express card issued to one Richard Smith, no middle initial, address unknown.

  “A Sawzall?” Czarnek sounded distracted.

  “Reciprocating saw,” I reminded him, “like the kind that took off Bondarenko’s hands?”

  “A Sawzall. I remember. Right.”

  “If I was a big deal LAPD detective, I might stiff in a call to American Express, get the billing address, and go ring Richard Smith’s doorbell. You never know. He might have some ideas as to who made off with his card.”

&
nbsp; “If you were a big deal LAPD detective,” Czarnek said, “you’d be too busy dealing with little shitheads in the projects killing each other. I’ll get to it when I can.”

  I told him about Marvis Woodley’s claim that Echevarria’s murderer had moved in down the street.

  “That would be a first,” Czarnek said. Then again, he conceded, he’d seen weirder occurrences in nearly thirty years protecting and serving the good citizens of Los Angeles. Way weirder.

  I agreed that Woodley’s tip defied plausibility. But under the circumstances, I said, the LAPD was compelled to check it out. “Somebody calls up to report they know where a murder suspect is holed up, the police department ignores it and he kills somebody else, that’s not gonna go over too big with John Q. Public or city hall.”

  “Must be hard being right all the time,” Czarnek said.

  “You have no idea.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  If Buddhists are correct that less is more, then clearly there were no Buddhists among the LAPD tacticians who planned the raid that afternoon on the house where Marvis Woodley asserted that Arlo Echevarria’s killer had taken refuge. Six uniformed officers in helmets and tactical vests covered two others who snuck through the alley and into the backyard. Glass shattered as the pair in back smashed windows to distract the suspect inside. This was followed immediately by more than a dozen other officers armed with pistols, shotguns and assault rifles who breeched the door with a handheld battering ram and rushed in shouting the usual cop stuff. At Alpha, we would’ve made entry with four operators, max. And without all the annoying yelling.

  Savannah, Marvis Woodley, and I looked on with Czarnek and his partner, Windhauser, from behind the detectives’ unmarked Crown Victoria, which was parked in front of Marvis’s house. Others in the neighbors watched, too, people of color, mostly, standing on their porches with their arms folded.

  Czarnek pressed his cell phone to his ear, waiting for word that the suspect had been taken in custody. His forehead and armpits were wet even though it wasn’t hot outside and he was in shirtsleeves. He was giving his anti-smoking gum a workout. His partner gnawed on a toothpick.

  “This better be the guy,” Windhauser said. “I ain’t got time for this bullshit.”

  “Trust me,” Marvis said, “it’s the guy.”

  The guy had been sitting on the toilet in a glazed euphoria, the syringe needle he’d stolen from his diabetic grandmother still stuck between his toes, when the men in blue came barging in. Startled into something approaching lucidity by all the yelling and breaking of glass, he made what police call a “furtive move” toward a serrated steak knife that he’d used to cut the bottom off a Diet Pepsi can, which he’d then used to mix the heroin, on which he’d been orbiting the planet. For his trouble, he received two barbed electrodes to the neck and a 50,000-volt hello–how-do-you-do, courtesy of Taser International, Inc.

  Two patrolmen dragged the dazed suspect, handcuffed and still naked, out of the house and into the back of a black and white.

  “That’s him, that’s the dude!” Woodley said.

  Czarnek and Windhauser strode toward the patrol unit. Savannah started to go with them.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Windhauser said to her.

  “I just want to look at him,” she said.

  “You’re not looking at anybody. Get back behind the car.”

  “C’mon, John,” Czarnek said, “if she was your wife . . .”

  “I’m senior lead on this case and I say she stays put.” Little angry globs of spittle shot from Windhauser’s lips as he spoke. He turned toward Savannah. “Get back behind the vehicle. Now. Do you understand?”

  “You’re being a dick for no reason,Windhauser.” I said. “All the lady wants to do is look the man in the face who may have shot her husband, though we both know that’s highly unlikely.”

  “She’s obstructing a police investigation. And so are you.”

  “Nobody’s obstructing anything. What if, miracle of miracles, it is the guy? What if she’s seen him before and can positively ID him? But you didn’t think of that, did you, Joe Friday, because thinking requires a brain and the LAPD by all indications didn’t issue you one of those.”

  The wishbone vein in Windhauser’s forehead bulged like rope. Did he not know that hypertension is America’s silent killer?

  “Fuck you, Logan.”

  “That’s all you got? Fuck you, Logan? C’mon, Detective, where’s the creativity? How about, ‘Fuck you, Logan, and everybody who looks like you.’ Or, ‘Click your heels together three times, Logan, and go fuck yourself.’ Or—”

  “Whatever!” Windhauser seethed. “She wants to eyeball him, I could give a shit. But you stay put, or I will arrest you for obstruction.” He motioned impatiently for Savannah to follow him. “Let’s go. I don’t got all day.”

  She rewarded me with an appreciative smile and tagged after the detectives. The kind of smile that makes a man want to do handstands and sing Barry Manilow songs. If I were that kind of man.

  “What about me?” Marvis said. “I was the one who saw him first.”

  “C’mon,” Czarnek said.

  Marvis jogged to catch up with the detectives. “It’s him,” he kept saying. “I know it is.”

  It wasn’t, as it turned out. Not by a mile.

  A quick background check determined that the junkie Marvis Woodley identified as Arlo Echevarria’s killer was a recidivist named Nicholas Sulak who’d racked up so many priors that clerks at the LAPD’s Records and Identification Division had to install a new toner cartridge to print out all seventeen pages of his arrest record. None of Sulak’s close encounters with Johnny Law factored much as far as Echevarria’s murder was concerned, with one noteworthy exception: nine months before Echevarria was gunned down, Sulak was picked up in Riverside for lifting a pack of cotton balls and two cans of Hormel chili from a mom and pop bodega. He was two weeks out of prison. Rather than trifle with misdemeanor shoplifting charges, county prosecutors had kicked his case to state authorities, who promptly revoked Sulak’s parole. On the night of Echevarria’s death, Sulak was in his cell at medium-security Wasco State Prison, 125 miles away. He would not be released for another two weeks. There was no way he could’ve shot Echevarria.

  Czarnek emerged from the house holding the pistol Sulak had allegedly pointed at Woodley. The weapon was found buried under a pile of filthy clothes. Closer inspection determined that it was a squirt gun.

  “Our captain’s gonna want to know why we committed half of Valley Bureau day watch to nab some fucking hype with a squirt gun.”

  “Tell him what Friedrich von Schiller once said: ‘He that is overcautious will accomplish little.’”

  “Who’s Friedrich von Schiller?”

  “German writer. Big Sturm und Drang guy. Invented potato pancakes.”

  “I thought it was the guy,” Marvis kept saying.

  “Fucking ridiculous,” Windhauser said. He climbed in on the driver’s side of the Crown Vic and slammed the door. “You coming or what?” he yelled at Czarnek.

  “Gimme a minute.”

  There was no statute of limitations on homicide, Czarnek told Savannah. The LAPD still had leads to pursue and would continue to work the case vigorously until it was solved.

  “That’s a lie,” Savannah said, “and you know it.”

  The other police cars were starting to pull out. “I’ll let you know as soon as anything breaks,” Czarnek said.

  “I’m sure you will,” she responded derisively.

  Czarnek watched her walk with Marvis Woodley back to his house.

  “Good lord,” he said, “that is one gorgeous creature.”

  “So was Medusa.”

  Czarnek said he would continue to explore the Bondarenko connection, but conceded that the pace of the investigation might be even further slowed. With gang violence exploding in the San Fernando Valley, every detective was working overtime, juggling more cases than they could handle
. It didn’t help, he said, that normally knowledgeable street sources within Los Angeles’ Russian émigré community professed to know nothing about the murder of either Bondarenko or Echevarria. I asked him if he’d looked into Harry Ramos’ possible involvement in the case.

  “Harry Ramos?”

  “Janice Echevarria’s second husband. He was on a business trip to Kazakhstan when I talked to her.”

  “Oh, yeah, him. Yeah, he’s supposed to call us when he gets back to San Fran.”

  “Let’s go already, for Chrissake,” Windhauser said. “I gotta eat before I pass out.”

  “He’s hypoglycemic,” Czarnek explained.

  Windhauser glared at me. “You get any other big leads, do us all a favor. Keep ‘em to yourself.”

  “I assume this means we won’t be taking any warm showers together anytime soon.”

  “You got a bad attitude, Logan, you know that?”

  “Better a bad attitude than delusions of adequacy, Detective.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I just smiled. Czarnek tried not to.

  Windhauser grumbled something nasty under his breath and threw the car into gear. The two detectives sped off like they were late for the early bird special at T.G.I. Friday’s.

  Come to think of it, I was starting to get a little hungry myself.

  Savannah was sitting beside Marvis Woodley on his sofa. He shook his head side to side and kept looking down at his hands, rubbing them together.

  “I could’ve sworn it was him.”

  The hype the LAPD hauled off looked exactly like the man who’d breezed past his window the night Echevarria was killed, Woodley said. All he’d ever wanted to do was square things with Arlo, make amends for all those lies he told him. And now this. Woodley looked like he was about to cry. Rambo rested his furry little head on his master’s foot. Man’s best friend. You can be Saddam Hussein and your dog will love you, regardless. Unlike certain cats.

  “You did nothing wrong,” Savannah assured him. “You were just trying to help. Arlo would’ve done the same for you.”