Burden of Truth

by Terri Nolan

  “I guess there’s nothing more to say then. So, what does the heart mean on the card?”

  Ron raised the pitch of his voice to sound female. “Thanks, Ron, for the lovely sweet peas. They’re gorgeous.” He lowered his voice back to normal. “Insert adjective of choice here.” He raised his voice again. “They’re my favorite. How did you know?” He lowered. “Father Frank told me. I’m glad you like them.”

  By now, Birdie was laughing.

  “Oh, good, we’re back to Birdie now. I like her better.”

  “Really, Ron, thanks. They’re awesome. How’s that adjective? Now answer my question.”

  “The heart means affectionately.”

  “Why not just write the word?”

  “Because the heart would compel you to call me.”

  She appreciated his cleverness.

  twenty-six

  Saturday, January 14

  Birdie kinked her neck to look up at Narciso Alejo: freaky tall, skinny, and preacher-like in all black attire with a buttoned jacket that ended at a mandarin collar under his goateed chin. His hair was a bit long and tucked fashionably behind his ears. He wore overpriced, hip designer eyeglass frames. There was nothing stylish about the permanent grim expression chiseled into his face. He cut an imposing figure.

  Alejo’s hand completely enveloped hers when they greeted and shook. “Do you remember when we first met?” he said.

  “I do. My dad had picked me up from school and had business downtown before going home. I begged him to let me go inside with him instead of waiting in the car. I marched into your office and demanded you tell me everything to do with Paige Street.”

  “You were what? Seventeen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I didn’t take a girl in Catholic plaid and braids seriously.”

  “Everyone underestimated me.”

  “A cute girl that age should be hanging out at the mall with girlfriends and flirting with boys. How did you come by that drive so young?”

  “I was a bad girl. Constantly on house arrest or restriction. Being an only child with no sibling diversions I had a lot of time to spend on the computer so I wrote.”

  “How’d you outgrow the bad girl behavior?”

  “I didn’t. I became an alcoholic.”

  “No shit? I just had my fourth birthday.”

  “Congratulations. I’m 246 days in.”

  “You in the program?”

  “I’m on my own.”

  “Brave.”

  The compliment marked the end of further conversation and Alejo escorted her to a windowless meeting room in silence.

  The Paige Street murder books had been brought over from cold case and were stacked up, awaiting her attention. Her inspection. She had begged and cajoled for years and years for this opportunity granted no one outside law enforcement. She gazed lovingly at the notebooks on the business-gray table.

  Alejo gave her complete autonomy to look through the files with a few rules: no copies, no recordings, no notes, a short time limit, and a brief Q&A. All-in-all very generous. To make sure Birdie played by the rules he confiscated her electronics, the yellow pad, a pen, and broke the tips of her No. 2 pencils.

  Birdie opened the first notebook. The separating dividers were no longer crisp and efficient. She could almost see the fingerprints that had worn the edges fuzzy, smelt the stress of frustration as investigators studied page after page after page, looking for an answer, convinced it lay hidden inside.

  She started with the summaries.

  Hugh Jackson had a college education and thought he was too cool for a black-and-white. He kept applying for advancement, but continually performed poorly on the tests. He broke rules, was overly boastful, and had a raunchy lack of respect for women and members of his own race. All of it earned him poor evals from his supervisors.

  Matt was the opposite. After graduating from the academy, he hit the streets under the watchfulness of Commander Ralph Soto, who took a personal interest in yet another Whelan. During friendly competitions, Matt out-ran, out-shot, and out-tested nearly all his peers, earning him a reputation as an ass-kissing showoff.

  Matt and Hugh rolled together for five years before their lives changed forever on a triple-digit, smoggy Tuesday when they responded to a hot shot.

  The communication tape transcription:

  OFFICER: 4Adam-19 clear from code 7.

  DISPATCH: Three shrill beeps, then: all units, 211 in progress, RD 402, code 3, 8-9-3-zero Paige Street.

  OFFICER: 4Adam-19 in route, 8-9-3-zero Paige Street, ETA 5 minutes, going code 2.

  RTO: Roger that.

  OFFICER: 4Adam-19, code 6 hot shot.

  OFFICER: 4Adam-19, two heavily armed masked men, requesting backup.

  RTO: Backup on the way.

  Birdie grew up surrounded by cops and their stories. She immediately detected a wrong. Matt and Hugh rolled code 2, arriving

  in silence and taking the suspects by surprise. No cop passes an opportunity to roll code 3 with lights flashing and sirens blaring; especially to a hot shot. Had they rolled code 3 the suspects would have been alerted and the whole scenario could have ended differently. As it happened, it was over before backup arrived.

  They observed the homeowner being severely beaten by two masked men—an exigent circumstance which demanded immediate action to prevent an irreversible act from happening. Matt and Jackson stormed the house. Jackson never had a chance to fire his weapon: he received a double-barrel shotgun blast to the chest. Matt took a grazing hit to the head, but was able to return fire and kill the man who shot Jackson.

  One uniformed cop dead. One injured. One masked, off-duty cop dead. One masked man escaped. The homeowner died the following day from his injuries.

  That’s the story Matt told the FID (Force Investigation Division), PSB (Professional Standard Bureau), the Chief of Police, the psychologist from Behavioral Sciences, and Lt. Narciso Alejo, who headed the taskforce. It never wavered.

  Alejo thought the officers should have retreated and reassessed. Waited for backup and Air Support Division. At the very least, one of them should have covered the back door. In the end, a suspect used it to elude capture and make off with over a million dollars cash.

  Included in the case file was a recommendation by Alejo that Matt be declared unfit for duty. OSS rejected the request: …

  under the intense circumstances, any police officer could make the same mistake. Instead, Matt was awarded a Medal of Valor.

  Imagine: a cop killed another cop and got a Medal of Valor. Yeah, the dead guy was off-duty out of Van Nuys. Yeah, he was performing armed robbery, but still, there had to be some pissed-off brothers. And she wondered if this was why the bad package rumors originated.

  8930 Paige Street was a home owned by Martine and Monica Alvarado. Monica identified Officer Antonio Sanchez and Officer Arthur Keane as the cops who came to the home two days earlier looking for drugs. They didn’t find drugs, but they discovered three-point-four million dollars in the house. Sanchez and Arthur couldn’t seize the cash because it wasn’t covered by the warrant’s search parameters.

  On the day of the robbery, two million in cash was checked into evidence from the Alvarado home, which left a deficit of one-point-four million. The day after Martine died of his injuries Monica held a news conference and accused the Los Angeles Police Department of murder and theft. She hired a lawyer and filed a wrongful death lawsuit. The press ate it up. And while Monica was talking to the press, so was the Chief of Police. He asked for the community’s help in finding the second suspect and challenged the citizens of L.A. not to judge the whole police force because of the actions of one rogue cop. The FBI was invited to run a concurrent investigation. A reward was offered.

  Arthur swore he wasn’t with Sanchez that day. At the time of the home invasion, he was at the family
’s boutique doctor. Dr. Ryan supported Arthur’s alibi, no physical evidence placed him at the scene, not even a drop of spittle or sweat. Still, Alejo wasn’t discouraged by two circumstantial tidbits. One, Arthur was Sanchez’s partner. Two, Monica identified him despite not being able to see his likeness through the long sleeves, gloves, and mask. She couldn’t even properly identify his eye color. But she had been there at the start; a compelling fact that always seemed to slip behind the others. She had been beat up, too. She faked unconsciousness and while the two men assaulted her husband she snuck out and ran to a neighbor’s house and called 9-1-1. Still, not a credible witness, and she prejudiced the process with a lawyer and a news conference just two days later.

  The taskforce didn’t hide the fact that Arthur was their number-one suspect. Yet Birdie was shocked that so many resources were spent investigating all the members of her family in law enforcement—including her mother, a non-sworn employee—as possible co-conspirators, along with Dr. Ryan. Their alibi sheets were thick with confirmations and triple checks. The Keane family presented a united front and made it clear that when you mess with one Keane, you mess with them all.

  And the story got stranger. Nine weeks after the Paige Street murder, Matt resumed work and transferred to Rampart Division where Arthur had transferred in from Van Nuys. Their partnership was assigned. After all these years she finally knew why.

  Birdie knew the story better than any reporter in the city. Still, she liked visuals. The murder books filled the requirement. She flipped through the photographs, autopsy photos, sketches, and floor plans. She speed-read as much as she could before her allotted time expired. Without the benefit of notes, Birdie had laid out the notebooks, pages carefully curled to secure her place so she wouldn’t forget what she wanted to ask.

  Alejo returned and sat at the far end of the table. She tried to ignore him as she furiously flipped for the same thing many investigators before her had sought: the identity of the second suspect. Without him, this case couldn’t be closed. She found tidbits that would add flavor to the true crime novel in the works. She learned new investigative tactics, scanned the interagency memos full of law enforcement who-ha.

  Birdie lingered over press clippings. At the top of one of hers someone had written “check this out” in red felt tip. It was a human interest story about Hugh Jackson’s wife. On the morning her husband was shot to death she had taken a home pregnancy test and got a positive result. In one of Matt’s many sworn statements he said that Jackson was upset by his impending fatherhood and that may have contributed to the recklessness of their actions—Matt never singularly blamed Jackson and he took his share of the blame for that awful day.

  Birdie felt Alejo’s leer. Seriousness personified. Heard him clasp and unclasp the watch on his wrist. His gum chewing equivalent? Or the not-so-subtle signal that her time was nearly up? She dared a peek in his direction through the hair that dangled over her face. He returned the gaze with a grin that said, I see you. At least Alejo was capable of smiling. And that he had big white teeth. Just like the wolf.

  Alejo said, “Why Paige Street now?”

  She flipped her hair back and secured it into a loose bun at the base of her neck with one of her stunted pencils.

  “You know that crime solving moves slowly,” she said. “In this business, the science and the courts have to catch up with the detection so I have several investigations going simultaneously and work on whichever one is currently hot.”

  “It’s true what Soto said. You have something new. How can you be neutral with family involved?”

  “I stick to the facts.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” said Alejo, crossing his arms. “I understand that Matt Whelan was a close friend of yours. He was too smart for patrol. By all accounts he should’ve been a detective, but he chose to stay on the streets. I distrust cops that prefer to stay on the street.”

  “You made that opinion quite clear in one of your many reports. But it’s where he did the most good,” she said. “He was fluent in Spanish, Korean, and Mandarin. He was a street cop, from a family of street cops. The hard work would be done before the detectives arrived on-scene. His work could make or break a case, and he was in the line of fire every day, where all the action was. The one, unwavering constant in his life was his love for the job. It was a calling, almost like a ministry. He loved the people. He never lost faith. So many street cops become jaded. Turn into hateful men. Or suited slags. Not Matt.”

  “That was almost the exact same way he put it. I believed his assertions until I found out he was undercover.”

  “Soto told me. Matt was teamed with Arthur so he could earn Arthur’s trust and get a confession or something. I didn’t know Matt was undercover until Soto told me. But I knew Matt well enough to say with the utmost confidence that it was secondary to his patrol job.”

  Alejo shrugged in dismissal then twirled his watch. “What blanks can I fill in?”

  “Looking at the autopsy photos of Sanchez, I noticed a tattoo near his groin. A double B. Do you know what that signifies?”

  “It represents membership in the Blue Bandits.”

  Birdie spat out an absurd laugh and her gum popped out of her mouth. She picked it up off the table, stuck it back in her mouth and wiped the spittle with the side of her hand. “Once upon a time, long ago when the department was corrupt, a small group of cops formed a secret society and called themselves the Blue Bandits. In the beginning, the Bandits acted like Robin Hood—they stole from bad guys and gave to good guys. Churches and men’s shelters were the usual benefactors. As time went on, the society became a notorious gang that dealt in prostitution, kickbacks, extortion, and even murder for hire. Eventually, the members were flushed out, prosecuted, or fired. I’ve investigated the Bandits as far back as the 1920s. It was a small band of men. Old and nearly forgotten history. Rumor and exaggeration grew into urban legend.”

  Alejo scowled. Clearly not amused.

  “Look,” she said in her defense, “the story of the Blue Bandits is a fairytale told to criminals. The moral is ‘don’t mess with the LAPD. We’ve been there once. We can do it again’. ”

  Alejo didn’t move. Give him a hood and a sickle and he’d be the reaper.

  She erased an imaginary chalkboard. “Okay, Alejo, let’s say the Blue Bandits have reemerged and Sanchez was a member. And Arthur—because of his association with Sanchez—was suspected of Paige Street. Does it follow that he was a member of the BBs as well?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Arthur is a MMA celebrity. He fights and trains. Quite the obsessive. He’s not shy or modest. I’ve seen him naked. He shaves head to toe before a bout. He has no tats on his body. No Double B is hiding underneath the pubes because he shaves them too. His moniker is The Ghost. He’s a fair-skinned white boy with no tats. He’s pure like Casper.”

  “If you think Arthur is innocent and pure, then you’re deluding yourself. He just hasn’t been caught yet.”

  “Let’s forget that for now. Soto told me he put Matt undercover with Arthur to get information about Paige Street. He said Matt found something bigger. Bad cops secreted into every administrative division. The Blue Bandits?”

  Alejo nodded. “’Fraid so.”

  “Come on, Alejo. Don’t screw with me. This is huge, if true. But look. Couldn’t the Double B stand for something else? I mean, this Sanchez guy had a huge penis.” She tapped her finger on the autopsy photo. “Maybe the BB stood for Black Beauty.”

  That almost brought a smile to Alejo’s face. “Sanchez was Hispanic.”

  “Barrio Brother? Work with me, here.”

  “Work with me. This is my day off and I’m doing a courtesy. Don’t debate me.”

  Birdie sighed. “Why Rampart?”

  “The mastermind of the Bandits worked out of Rampart.”

  “Why not bust him?”

&nbs
p; “There’s a difference between knowing a thing and proving a thing. They’re buried deep. Well organized. Disciplined. They’re like evaporating vapors—impossible to catch. Much like that ghost of yours.”

  “Matt kills a member of the Blue Bandits whose boss worked Rampart, then transfers to the same division to do Soto’s spy work? Did he know how much danger he was in? I mean, why not just paint a target on his forehead? Did Matt take the assignment willingly?”

  Alejo looked at his watch. “He knew what he was getting into.”

  Birdie wasn’t getting hard facts so her brain juggled the supposition. The Bandits must have discovered Matt’s evidence gathering, but probably didn’t know what he had or where he had it. When Reidy delivered Matt’s boxes to Birdie, they dispatched O’Brien, not knowing that the evidence was already safe with Soto. Or maybe they knew Soto had the evidence stashed, but found out about the last box and wanted it as desperately as Soto did.

  “Whelan and Keane were untouchable at Rampart,” said Alejo. “They only worked days, no nights, no holidays after their first year together, they got a new car, always had the best rovers. The brotherhood didn’t hassle the new guys. Someone high on the food chain had a hands-off policy for those two.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “The BBs knew Matt was Sanchez’s shooter, and yet they had a hands-off so he could go about and collect evidence? He was a rat and rats get caught. Why are you telling me?”

  “You asked. Soto asked. My bosses said okay. This is eyes only. You’re being read in. You can’t repeat or write anything.” Alejo looked at his watch.

  Then it became clear. The department took this opportunity to use Birdie. As an investigative journalist she could get away with stuff they couldn’t. She would pursue it even if she couldn’t write about it. She’d help them with their cause. That’s why Soto had her followed. Showed up at the EZ-Stor. Her right hand began to shake. She sat on it. And though she was excited about getting information that the public and her journalist compeers didn’t have access to, she still didn’t have what she wanted.