Kind of blue al-1

by Miles Corwin

  “Talked to any family members?” I asked.

  “The ex-wife,” Savich said. “But she didn’t give us much.”

  “Anyone he was close to?”

  “We heard the uncle. He’s a fisherman. He was out for halibut when we called. His phone number’s in the murder book.”

  “Any thoughts on why Relovich pulled the pin after thirteen?”

  Montez motioned as if he were tipping a bottle toward his mouth.

  “That why he was living like a rookie cop?”

  Montez nodded.

  “What do you guys think happened up there?”

  “Junkie hot prowl,” Savich said. “A shot, a grab, and a run for it.”

  “I agree,” Montez said. “I used to work CRASH down here and I used to follow the homies from the projects up to the houses on the hills where they’d fill their trunks with big screens, iPods, and laptops.”

  “How about you?” Savich asked solicitously. “What’s your take?”

  “I don’t have a handle on it yet.” I picked up the murder book and walked off, calling out over my shoulder a halfhearted, “Thanks.” I crossed the room to the vice section, which was empty, with all the desks vacant. Glowing under a flood of florescent light, it had the forlorn air of a windswept football stadium an hour after the game ended. The room would not begin filling up, I knew, until dark.

  I was reaching for a phone, when Randy Walker, a rangy sergeant with a crew cut and jug ears, who headed the division’s buy team, hustled toward me. “Accident on the freeway. I was stuck in traffic. Hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “I just got here.”

  “Good. What’ve you got for me?”

  I told him that I believed the killer had parked on the flats, climbed the hill, shot Relovich, returned to his car, and sped off. Fortunately, Walker was friendlier than Savich and Montez and too polite to bring up the Patton case.

  “We spotted some brisk business on two street corners,” I said.

  “That’s becoming a hot spot for the Rancho Thirteen Boyz-the gang from the projects that controls the tar trade,” Walker said. “We don’t have enough people to shut these mutts down. You know how it is. It’s like pushing down on a balloon. We stop ’em in one area and they just pop up in another.”

  “How about blitzing the area during the next few nights,” I said. “Can you get your undercover buy team to haul in sellers and buyers?”

  Walker grinned. “I was informed the chief is personally interested in this case. So you name it, you got it.”

  “What I want to do is shake the tree and see if any fruit falls to the ground. So I’d appreciate it if you’d ask every collar if they’ve heard anything about the murder up on the hill Friday night. Or if they saw anything unusual on the street late Friday night. Let ’em know that for the right information we might be ready to deal. If you get any interesting responses, call me. Anytime. Day or night.”

  I pulled out a clump of cards that had been stuck in the back of my wallet for the past year, handed Walker the frayed one on top, and asked if I could use a desk for a few minutes.

  “Take your pick,” Walker said, pointing to the empty unit.

  I called Relovich’s ex-wife and set up an appointment for the late afternoon. Fortunately, I also caught the uncle at home. He said he would be heading down to Berth 73 in an hour to work on his boat. I knew the spot was near Canetti’s Seafood Grotto, a small restaurant on the docks. I could eat a quick lunch and walk over to Relovich’s boat.

  When I was a rookie patrol officer, my first training officer gave me some valuable advice, which I always tried to follow: “When you’re on the job, never get wet and never go hungry.”

  I drove from the station to the waterfront and pulled up in front of Canetti’s, a low-slung building that looked like a warehouse, and sat by the window next to a table of fishermen grumbling about the week’s catch. I deboned the grilled rex sole and ate my fish and fried potatoes while I watched the bulky refrigerated trucks rumble to the loading docks at the wholesale seafood market. Brazen seagulls circled overhead, swooping for scraps.

  After lunch, I walked down the cracked asphalt dock speckled with bird droppings, past the long-liners that hauled in the big swordfish and the smaller purse seiners and draggers. The breeze carried the ripe smell of gutted fish. I stopped in front of the Anna Marie, a rusty, fifty-foot gill-netter with peeling white paint and chipped blue trim. A huge pile of nets and orange buoys was piled up on the dock, covered by a green tarpaulin.

  “In those nice, shiny shoes, you gotta watch the bird shit,” Goran Relovich shouted, motioning for me to come aboard. He grabbed two deck chairs, unfolded them, and as he climbed down to the galley, said in a gravelly voice, “I’ll get us some coffee.”

  I lugged my briefcase aboard, sat down, and looked off into the distance. Tugs and Coast Guard skiffs chugged past, leaving frothy wakes in the gray water. Across the channel, I could see the sprawl of shipyards on Terminal Island, ringed by tatters of fog.

  Relovich emerged from the galley carrying two steaming metal mugs of coffee. He was a tall, wiry man in his seventies with a bristly shock of salt-and-pepper hair and a face as leathery and lined as an old wallet.

  He pulled a pint of plum brandy out of his pocket and, hand trembling, poured a dollop into his coffee. “I don’t suppose you want an eye-opener.”

  “Some other time.”

  I took a sip of the coffee, which smelled as strong as diesel fuel, and said, “I want to extend my sympathies to you. Pete was a good cop.”

  Relovich stared out at sea. We sat in silence until I asked, “After Pete left the force, what’d he do?”

  “Went out with me on the boat sometimes. Helped around the dock.”

  “Why’d he leave the LAPD?”

  Relovich set his coffee cup on the desk. “I don’t really know.”

  “Why couldn’t he just take some time off? Why couldn’t he hang on seven more years and get his pension?”

  “Since his mom and dad died, we became close. But he never told me why.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Maybe he left to get sober. His drinking was getting worse and worse. It broke up his marriage. He had custody of his little girl every other weekend, but it got so bad she didn’t even want to see him. Maybe he figured if he was ever going to beat the bottle, he had to quit the LAPD.”

  “So after his wife left him-”

  “Who said she left him?”

  I took a sip of coffee waiting for him to explain.

  “Pete’s the one who took a hike. As bad as the drinking was, she didn’t want him to leave. Even after they got divorced, I think she was still pissed, still jealous as hell. She’d drive down here all the time and bang on his door at all hours of the night, trying to see if she could catch him in bed with some other broad.”

  “Jealous enough to kill him?”

  He stared out to sea, watching the wind from the west whip the whitecaps, the foam floating in the air like snowflakes. “Who knows.”

  “She ever threaten him?”

  “Don’t know.” He pulled a dirty handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose with such force it sounded like the blast of a foghorn. “Pete was a sharp kid. Could have gone as far as he wanted in the police department. But somewhere along the line, he lost his way. Why? I have no damn idea.”

  He poured another splash of brandy into his coffee and said, “Pete’s father-my brother-was the smart one. He knew this”-Relovich pointed to the line-up of fishing boats-“was a dying business. He got himself a good job at the LAPD with a pension. All I got was arthritis in my hands from all those cold mornings at sea.” He held up his gnarled fingers, the nails of the thumbs cracked like broken windshields. “Too many damn catch laws. Too many damn government regulations. Too many damn fishing season restrictions. And they’ve overfished the hell out of these waters. Christ, I can remember when the sea here was thick with sardines. Now you could
n’t find a single one if your life depended on it.”

  He downed most of his coffee and tossed the dregs overboard with a flick of his wrist. “If I’d followed my brother in the police department I could be back on the Dalmatian coast right now, snoozing in the sun, collecting my monthly pension check, instead of busting my hump every day for a haul that doesn’t even pay for my fuel.”

  I tried to steer him back to the murder. “Was Pete security conscious?”

  “He was still a cop at heart. Suspicious as hell. He never opened the door without peeking through the front window to see who was there.”

  “Even when he was drinking?”

  Relovich cracked a gnarled forefinger. “He hadn’t touched a drop in three months.”

  “Any enemies from his days as a cop? Anyone he was concerned about? Any cases that were real problems for him?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Any idea who could have killed him?”

  Relovich coughed and spit into the water. “Probably some wetback from the projects.”

  After the interview, I headed to my late afternoon meeting with Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, in the high desert. Lancaster, the northern tip of the county was more than a hundred miles from San Pedro, the southern tip. Fortunately, because it was a weekend, traffic was light. I sped through downtown, cut over a few freeways, and began to traverse the San Gabriel Mountains. I rolled down a window and inhaled the rich acorny scent of the chaparral. But after I reached the summit and started to slalom down the mountain, I was hit with a blast of desert heat and quickly rolled my window back up and flipped on the air conditioner. San Pedro had been cool and misty, in the low sixties; now it was at least thirty degrees hotter. Southern California, I thought, must have more microclimates than a Brazilian rain forest.

  At a roadside lookout bordered by spiky Joshua trees, I stopped and stretched my legs. Everything seemed outsized here: the vast dun-colored expanse; the big sky, scorched white at the horizon and electric blue overhead; the limitless vistas. I looked back at the San Gabriels, the escarpment veined with snow that sparkled in the brilliant light.

  I hopped back in the car and continued my descent. When I reached Lancaster, I exited the freeway and swung down a road rippling with heat waves, past lizards darting across the asphalt, past a few isolated ranches studded with metal grain silos. I had never visited this edge of the county and was amazed at the beauty of the high desert in springtime. Entire hillsides were thick with orange poppies, ablaze in the late afternoon light. When I spotted a rural mailbox flanked by bales of hay, I juddered down a pitted dirt road and stopped in front of a weathered white clapboard farmhouse with a broad wooden porch. I climbed out of the car and stretched. The air was still; then a hot puff of wind from the Mojave riffled the leaves of the cottonwoods that shaded the house.

  “Quiet out here, isn’t it?”

  Startled, I whirled around and saw Relovich’s ex-wife, Sandy, walking around the side of the house, clutching a can of Bud. She was a big woman, not fat, but definitely packing too many pounds to be wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless blouse. From a distance, she looked like she was in her twenties, but when she approached me, I saw the fine lines around her eyes and mouth and the crinkling at her neck from too much desert sun and realized she was about forty.

  “Come on,” she said. I followed her to a wooden deck behind the house. I set my briefcase down and we sat side by side on canvas lawn chairs, looking out onto a vast furrowed field. She finished her beer in a swallow, flipped open an ice chest, grabbed two more, and handed one to me. I shook my head.

  “Smart cop,” she said. “When we were still together, Pete got caught drinking on the job one afternoon and got suspended.”

  “Today they’re so hard-assed they’d probably fire him,” I said.

  She popped open her beer, twisted off the tab, and tossed it into the dirt. “I’m not really a drinker, despite this,” she said, raising the can. “At least not a drinker like Pete. It’s just-the past few days. Well, you know.”

  She slurred her words and her eyes were glassy and bright. I figured she was mixing antidepressants with her beer. There was something brittle about her manner, and I sensed that if I started peppering her with questions she might shatter.

  “What do you grow here?” I asked, motioning toward the fields.

  “Onions.”

  “Doesn’t smell like onions.”

  “We just planted last month. Don’t start harvesting until late summer. When I married Pete and I moved to Pedro, there were still some tuna canneries out on Terminal Island. I’d smell that tuna and think of the onion fields back home.”

  “You grew up here?”

  She lit a Winston and waved away the smoke. “Yeah. This is my folks’ place. After I left Pete, I moved back home with our daughter.”

  “You really came from different worlds.”

  She took a few nervous drags and said, “I was going to college in the Valley. Pete was working patrol. He came to my apartment building to break up a party. We started dating. I moved down to Pedro with him.” She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “I hated the place. Too foggy down there, too cold. I’m a desert girl. I missed the sun.”

  She told me what a happy marriage they had, what a good father Pete had been, until his drinking worsened. “Things got so bad I had to leave him.”

  “So you left him.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t want my little girl growing up like that.” Recalling what the uncle had told me, I knew either she or Relovich’s uncle was a liar. My guess it was her. But I wanted to keep her talking, so I didn’t press her.

  When I asked her about Relovich’s days on the force, the cases he handled, and collars who might have wanted revenge, she stared at me, eyes unfocused, and launched into a disjointed monologue, jumping from subject to unrelated subject. Finally, after finishing her beer she said, “I’m sorry Detective Levine. I’m having a hard time concentrating.” Her lips trembled and she said softly, “This has been very, very hard for me. I’m going through a lot right now.”

  She dropped her head and began crying, the tears falling onto the ground, stirring up tiny puffs of dust.

  Watching her cry, I thought of Bud Carducci, the salty old cop who taught me the rudiments of homicide investigation when I was a young detective trainee. Bud used to always say, “Before searching for the outlaws, take a good look at the in-laws.”

  I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms, and studied Sandy, trying to discern if her emotion was real or feigned. Was she crying because she was truly disconsolate about Pete’s death, or because she was frightened and concerned she’d reveal something to me that would spark my suspicion?

  She lifted her head, coughed a few times, and dried her eyes with her palms. “Our daughter’s freaked out. I’m just trying to keep it all together.”

  “How old is your girl?”

  “Ten.”

  “Is she at home?

  “She’s in her room. But please don’t interview her. She’s not ready for that.”

  “It’s really important, at this point, to talk to everyone. It would be very helpful for me to talk to your daughter.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t allow that.”

  “Okay,” I said, already planning to return for a follow-up interview. I was determined to talk to the daughter. I wanted to know if she recalled her mother being home on Thursday night-about the time Relovich was killed.

  “Do you have any idea why Pete retired after thirteen years?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Did he have any enemies? Anybody you can think of who might have had a reason to kill him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Any old cases he was worried about?”

  “He never really talked to me about his work.” She dug a balled up Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. “I still miss Pete. I miss him so much.” She began sniffling and crying again.

  I knew
I wasn’t going to get much more out of her today. “Before I go, I’d like to know if you have any family pictures that were taken at Pete’s house?”

  She lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply, and stood up. “About eight months ago, Pete gave our daughter, Lindsay, one of those disposable cameras for her birthday. She spent the weekend with him and took a lot of pictures at his house. I’ll get those for you,” she said over her shoulder as she walked toward the house.

  A few minutes later a screen door screeched open, slapped shut, and she returned, carefully making her way down the back steps, gripping a banister for balance. I rose and she handed me an envelope stuffed with photos. “Why’d you want these?”

  “I can study the pictures and compare them to what I see now in the house. Sometimes I can spot things that are missing, things that were stolen. I’ve had a few cases where I’ve done pawnshop runs and tracked down the people I was looking for.”

  I slipped her my card and said, “If you think of something that might be helpful, please give me a call.”

  She studied the card and said, “Your name sounds familiar.”

  My stomach clenched.

  “Didn’t you catch some serial killer?”

  I nodded, relieved.

  “I think I read about you in the paper.” She glanced at the card again. “Levine,” she muttered to herself. “That ends in a vowel. You I — talian?”

  I shook my head.

  She turned her head and studied me out of one eye. “You look I — talian.”

  “When I was a young patrolman, Italian suspects would call me paisano. Once I was investigating a Greek loan shark, who dropped some of his mother’s baklava off at the station for me. He thought I was a landsman, so I’d cut him some slack.”

  “Yeah, you could get lost anywhere in that part of the world.” She took a deep drag off her cigarette, exhaled, and fanned away the smoke. “Pete looked a little like you-when he was younger and thinner.” She dropped her cigarette, ground it into the dirt with her big heel and stared off at the onion fields, tears sluicing down her face. When I put my hand on her back, she began to sob, her chest heaving. She looked up at me and said, “Pete was a good guy. He just had his problems, like everyone else.” She kicked at the dirt with the toe of her boot. “Shit. I want you to find that son of a bitch.”