Finnegan's week

by Joseph Wambaugh

  CHAPTER 8

  No sex appeal is what they always said about cases involving hazardous waste. By that they meant no jury appeal.

  “How do you take a bubbling vat of hazardous waste before a jury?” a deputy district attorney had once rhetorically asked D.A.’s Investigator Nell Salter when she’d wanted a criminal complaint against a waste hauler.

  “Well, what if we drape a little silk and lace on the acid drum and hang a dildo on the flange?” Nell had suggested, before calling it a day and giving up on a case that had cost her at least one hundred investigative hours.

  That was everybody’s attitude when it came to environmental crime. Nobody cared about it because nobody knew much about it, least of all the cops. The field was too new, too esoteric, too unsexy, and there was almost no case law. Clint Eastwood would never ask the owner of a dioxin-producing paper company to “make his day.”

  When Nell had been assigned to the unit back in 1985, she and another investigator, Hugh Carter, had simply shaken hands and said, “Now what?”

  The District Attorney’s Fraud Unit had been given the job of investigating environmental crimes. There were about fifty of them in the unit: attorneys, accountants, investigators and assistants, all sharing a floor in a downtown bank building because the county building was not large enough. The Fraud Unit could be housed in a privately owned high rise because their clientele wouldn’t frighten the other tenants of the building as ordinary street criminals might do.

  Their quarters were cramped, and Nell’s view was of the downtown homeless. She had a cubicle containing a small desk, two chairs, a computer, a bookshelf and a file cabinet. Investigators were not entitled to a full wall so she had to settle for a three-quarter divider, but she also had an unobstructed view of the common bathroom in a nearby residential hotel. Nell learned that both men and women had some weird bathroom rituals.

  There’d been no training and very little information available on the subject of environmental crime back when Nell was assigned. In the early years most cases dealing with the illegal disposal of toxic waste merely involved lawsuits by the county. Then dumping became a misdemeanor, and sometimes a “wobbler” felony that could be prosecuted as a misdemeanor, depending upon the circumstances.

  But at last the laws had been given teeth, fangs in fact. For a hazardous waste hauler who “should have known” of intentional dumping there were new felony provisions for a determinate sentence of sixteen months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months in prison, and a fine of up to $100,000 per day per offense, with a mandatory minimum of $5,000 per day. If someone suffered great bodily injury as a result of the dumping, the perpetrator could get thirty-six months added to his sentence, along with a fine of $250,000 for every day that the material was actively exposed. The county’s share from that kind of money made the bureaucrats and politicians pay attention to environmental crime.

  When Nell Salter and Hugh Carter started out they referred to all hazardous waste as “methyl-ethyl bad-shit,” until gradually they began to learn a thing or two. Once, an EPA Super Fund team of chemists and waste handlers had made an error cleaning up a dump site that involved a large quantity of nitric acid. A lot of workers ended up with a snootful of acid and cyanide fumes, the very thing used to execute people within the walls of San Quentin Prison. That made Nell and Hugh more anxious to read all they could about any methyl-ethyl bad-shit they might encounter, so as not to get up-close-and-personal to suspicious containers with strange contents.

  “Beware of BFRC!” is how they put it: Big Fucking Red Cloud.

  Many of their investigations consisted of tracking down knowing disposers. Plating companies were among the worst offenders, and their acids were dumped everywhere, much of it in southeast San Diego. Nell knew of one particularly egregious case where fifty 55-gallon drums were transported to Mexico by a waste disposal company that had bribes in to a Mexican customs official. The de-headed drums were dumped into the Tijuana River and the empty ones were sold to squatters who used them to haul drinking water. And there were other horror stories involving Mexico as a dump site; one involved the casting of re-bars used in cheap Mexican concrete housing with metal that had been made radioactive in the United States.

  Presidential candidate Bill Clinton had recently sort of approved of the North American Free Trade Agreement, his approval being subject to more environmental safeguards from the Mexican side, but Mexicans said that their citizens had suffered from U.S. toxic waste in ways that no one would ever know about. In that poor Mexicans had a high mortality rate from diseases long since eradicated in the U.S., who could say if hazardous waste contributed to it?

  That was the way of things in a Third World country, or so the Mexicans said. And nobody south of the border thought that the Americans would sign the NAFTA agreement unless it greatly favored the U.S. It had always been thus, ever since the gringos stole their land in the Mexican War, or so the Mexicans said.

  Of course Nell’s job stopped at the international border, but she often thought about the people down there. She frequently took holidays on the Baja peninsula, and had been to Mexico City twice, as well as to Acapulco. She was interested in the Mexican culture, liked the people, and hoped to be able to afford a decent specimen of pre-Columbian sculpture someday, like those she’d admired in the shops of Mexico City.

  If Finbar Finnegan thought it was tough staring down the muzzle at the forty-five-year benchmark, Nell Salter could have told him that it wasn’t a lark turning forty-three, which she had accomplished in July. Unlike Fin, she hadn’t managed to chalk up three divorces during her twenty years in law enforcement; one was enough, when she was twenty-two, then working as a civilian crime-scene photographer for the San Diego P.D.

  The job of crime-scene photographer hadn’t been exactly what she’d envisioned. During young Nell’s second day on the job she’d found herself literally cheek by jowl with a dead drug dealer who’d had his throat cut, and was discovered inside the trunk of his own Mercedes two weeks after his murder. Nell’s civilian husband had made her strip naked before she was allowed into the house after that one. Her clothes smelled, her hair smelled, her fingernails smelled. For months she could whiff that dead drug dealer. It might happen when she’d walk into an unfamiliar room, or when she’d open the trunk of her own car. Once it happened when she was cooking dinner. Keeping a small can of aerosol in her purse helped her to get her imagination under control.

  “This isn’t what I expected from corpse photography,” she’d explained to her boss.

  He said, “Did you expect they’d resemble mannequins that you could dress up like dolls?”

  Nell’s fourteen-month marriage to her high school sweetheart deteriorated quickly after that. His boozing, aggravated by a job layoff, made things worse. One night after a drunken row, he’d punched her in the face, breaking her nose and blackening both eyes.

  As a civilian employee of the S.D.P.D. Nell had known what to do, but didn’t. She didn’t call the police and didn’t prosecute, but she did try a gag that a cop had told her about. While he was packing his clothes, vowing to leave forever, she put tiny pebbles inside the valve stems on his tires, then screwed the caps back on, while she bled on her $50 silk blouse. Then she watched him drive away, hoping that the tires wouldn’t go flat until he got on the freeway.

  It was a pots ’n pans divorce, and she sent him a check for his half of all they owned. As far as Nell knew, her ex was still living in Miami, where he’d gone to work for an uncle at a Cadillac dealership. After she’d taken back her maiden name and joined the San Diego P.D., he’d called her late one night to suggest that they consider reconciliation, asking if she missed him.

  Nell said she missed him like a yeast infection, and that she no longer got misty remembering their high school homecoming dance, and that if he ever crossed her path again she was going to show him a few tricks she’d learned at the police academy, like ripping out his fucking eyeballs and feeding them to the cat.


  As it turned out, breaking her nose was the only good thing he ever did for her. As she matured physically during her eleven years as a San Diego cop-after she’d got into jogging and regular workouts-her face narrowed and her cheeks hollowed, giving her a more refined look. And with that refinement a slightly bent nose was sexy indeed. In those days other female cops told her that if they could get a nose like that they’d date Norman Mailer. In more recent years they changed it to Mike Tyson.

  Nell regularly jogged along the Embarcadero in those days, loving the spangled sunlight that ricocheted off the bay and caressed her bare legs. No headset for Nell; she liked to hear the groans of sailboats straining at their moorings, and the zing of halyards against metal masts. Jogging along the Embarcadero was an utterly sensual experience.

  Later in her S.D.P.D. career when she’d worked as a detective, Nell began to dress better. In winter she liked cable turtle-necks, and double-pleated trousers worn with blazers or tweed jackets. A loyal Nordstrom’s customer since the chain opened in the San Diego area, she wore slim-girl things off duty: stirrup trousers and walking shorts.

  Nell promised herself that she was always going to dress well and live well, and that no son of a bitch was ever going to punch her in the face again, not without wearing handcuffs and getting some big-time payback before she got him to jail. And for sure he’d be wearing the cuffs with his palms outward, because once Nell had the misfortune to arrest a Plastic Man clone whom she cuffed palms inward for his comfort. While she was outside her patrol car completing her report, he’d managed to jackknife his body and pull his cuffed hands around his legs and feet. Then he drove off, crashing ten minutes later during a high-speed pursuit by the Highway Patrol. Her most humiliating day. After that, Nell Salter wasn’t the kind to worry a whole lot about a male prisoner’s comfort.

  Other events began to change her in subtle ways, as inevitably happens to young people in law enforcement. One of these changes resulted from a phone call by a parole board representative who wanted her opinion concerning the impending release of a man she’d arrested for battering his family. The man had not only broken his wife’s nose, but had cracked four of her ribs. During his rampage he’d also managed to fracture the skull of his eight-year-old daughter and puncture the child’s spleen.

  He had not served even half of his sentence, but it turned out that his kidney disease was causing the state to have to pay for dialysis treatments, and what with the budget crunch, the parole board thought about springing him. Despite premonitions, Detective Nell Salter had allowed herself to be persuaded not to oppose the release. She was told how, like everyone from Manson murderers to Watergate conspirators, he’d found Jesus perched on his bunk in that little prison cell.

  What really made Nell assent, despite misgivings, was that he’d broken his wife’s nose during the assault. Nell worried that at a subconscious level, she might be transferring feelings about her ex-husband onto this man, so she did not vigorously oppose the parole. Three weeks after his release, he located his wife’s new home, broke in, shot her to death, then his daughter, then himself.

  The murdered child had given Nell a photo of herself in a Girl Scout uniform, and on a few occasions during the weeks following the killings, Nell had surprised herself by breaking into sobs. Always when she was alone, of course, because unlike TV cops, real cops don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. And the one thing that female police officers absolutely could not do under any circumstance was to cry. Not in the presence of a male cop, nor in any situation where a male cop might hear about it.

  Male cops. That was a big problem, as far as the females were concerned. It was never enough to be as good as, not if a woman wanted total acceptance. The woman had to be at least as good as, and not let the men know it. It was a very dicey business, the care and handling of male cops.

  All the females talked about how, during stressful, emotion-packed moments, male and female police partners would bond and lose track of the “other” world, the civilian world. That bonding, those moments, could be sexually supercharged.

  More than a few hard-nosed, veteran cops had walked into their lieutenant’s office to say: “My wife won’t let me work with females anymore!”

  Nell had tried living with a male cop she thought she was in love with. Confident and competent professionally, he was a personal and emotional mess, just like almost every male cop she’d ever known.

  Finally one day she said to him: “I’m not your mommy. I’ll never be your mommy. You should go back to your mommy.”

  He’d seemed stunned, and said, “But I thought we had something together! I was thinking about … marrying you!”

  “Go marry a nurse,” Nell told him. “That’s what you guys do, marry nurses and other care givers. But please, leave my life so I can chisel the crud out of my oven and scrape my kitchen table with a putty knife.”

  The day he left, she went to Nordstrom’s and bought a new dress, after which she’d had her brown hair touched up with chestnut highlights. And she made a vow to date civilians.

  That seemed like a good idea, and at first it was lots of fun regaling civilians with cops ’n robbers tales. They loved it, most of them: a dentist (sexy whiner), a flight engineer (unsexy whiner), a carpenter (great buns, no brains), a lawyer (seldom changed his underwear), and a mall developer (never wore any) who went broke and left town just ahead of subpoenas.

  There was one common denominator: Most of the civilians were fascinated by her gun. She was always playing Mister Rogers show-and-tell with her 9mm Sig Saur.

  “This is a Sig semi-automatic! Can you say Siiiig? It holds sixteen rounds and can make a biiiiig mess!”

  She finally decided that the shrinks were right about pistols and penises. Mainly though, they just didn’t get it, those civilians. They didn’t understand what it is that cops see: i.e., not just the worst of people, but ordinary people at their worst. They didn’t understand the cynicism, and the gross-out gallows humor. They couldn’t understand dealing with horror by smacking it in the face with a cream pie full of maggots.

  Nell finally decided that marrying a civilian couldn’t work, not anymore, not even if she found one she liked. And marrying a cop was unthinkable, unless she wanted to be tied to a forty-year-old infant with chest hair. Gilbert and Sullivan didn’t know the half of it about a policeman’s lot. They should’ve known a few female cops, or so her colleagues always said.

  At last, Nell Salter decided that she needed a change. Not a huge change, not out of law enforcement entirely. So, Nell left the San Diego Police Department in favor of the District Attorney’s Office, and became one of two people investigating environmental crimes. And there she’d stayed, and there she’d learned to identify methyl-ethyl bad-shit and Big Fucking Red Clouds.

  On the day that Fin Finnegan visited his agent with malice aforethought, Nell Salter, having had three cups of coffee with her morning poached egg, had to run to the John the moment she arrived at work. And as often happened with female investigators who were in a hurry, she forgot all about her handcuffs when she sat down to pee.

  A few minutes later, when she entered her own office, her older partner, Hugh Carter, looked up over his bifocals and said, “Three more days and I’m gone. Three whole weeks. Salmon. Pine cones. Clean air …”

  “Mosquitoes,” Nell said. “Psychotic hermits in camouflage fatigues with M-sixteens. Snakes!”

  “Hope you can manage without me, and …” Suddenly Hugh Carter noticed that she was shaking the water out of her handcuffs. Again. He said, “Nell, you know how fastidious I am. Would you not shake those nasty drops all over the floor. Aim for my coffee cup, please.”

  “Hugh,” Nell said, “I don’t know if it’s a good time for you to go on vacation. You know how we always talk about some evil and ugly genetic monster emerging from all the contaminants in places like the Tijuana River and the Rio Grande?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Some uncontrollable mutant
life-form that’ll raise its horrible snout from the toxic muck and slime of California or maybe Texas, and flap its scaly ears, and terrify the entire nation with its wicked bellowing screams?”

  “Yeah, yeah?” her partner said.

  “It’s happened!” Nell cried. “Ross Perot is gaining in the polls!”

  CHAPTER 9

  When Fin came to work on Monday he discovered that Sam Zahn had neglected to make any hazardous material notifications on the van that was stolen at Angel’s Café. Because Sam had the day off, Fin thought he’d better cover his old pal’s ass by making the notifications. Sam had a short-timer’s attitude.

  Nell Salter’s partner had only been gone on vacation for one day when she received the unusual call from San Diego P.D.

  “This is Nell Salter,” she said to a somewhat familiar telephone voice identifying himself as Detective Finnegan.

  Salter? He used to know a female cop named Salter. Was she the chubby one that could’ve used a Thighmaster if they’d had them in those days? “Did you have a sister with S.D.P.D. at one time?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a sister, brother,” Nell said. “I left the P.D. in nineteen eighty-five.”

  “I worked Central then,” he said. “Fin Finnegan?”

  She couldn’t place him, and said, “I’d probably know you if I saw your face. How can I help you?”

  “I gotta talk to a sludge drudge,” he said. “You know, a goop cop. Are you one of them?”

  Sludge drudge. She hadn’t heard that one. “Yeah, I work environmental crimes. What’s up?”

  “On Friday, a van got stolen down near Imperial Beach. Had some drums of toxic junk in it. Belongs to Green Earth Hauling and Disposal. Ever heard of them?”