by Alan Russell
“Did he tell you when this happened?” I asked.
“Hace un mes,” she said, and then added, “mas o menos.”
A month, she said, more or less. According to Luciana, roughly one-third of the day laborers she’d talked to recognized Mateo from the pictures; a few had even worked with him and remembered him as a hard worker. Those who knew him recalled that Mateo had always been one of the first picked because he was skilled and strong and he could make himself understood in English. Luciana had remembered to follow through with my questions for those who had worked with Mateo. I had wanted to know if anything stood out about the work, and was curious if they knew of any other workers who had disappeared. No one seemed to remember anything out of the ordinary, and they weren’t aware of any other workers going missing.
Luciana had also asked if Mateo had any “regulars” he worked for. There were a few contractors, the workers said, who requested Mateo whenever he was available. Luciana said the workers didn’t really know those who hired them; they seemed to remember their trucks more than they did a bunch of middle-aged white men. One worker, nicknamed Indio, remembered there was a contractor known as “Hitler” who Mateo refused to work for. Hitler had gotten his nickname because of the bumper sticker on his truck that showed Hitler giving a Nazi salute. Indio said Mateo didn’t like the man because he had refused to pay him the hourly wage that had been agreed upon.
It was a common story, unfortunately. The workers had no recourse. If they appealed to the law, they could potentially be deported. I liked it that Mateo had stood up to the man, but I wondered if his assertiveness had anything to do with his disappearance.
I complimented Luciana on all her work, and then asked her to go back for a second round of questioning. This time I wanted her to talk to the organizers and see if she could get names or addresses of the life-model artist, as well as the Macho Libre promoter, or at least get descriptions of the men and the general areas where they lived. While I was telling her this, I glanced up and saw a white Ford F-150 truck pulling up to where the laborers were waiting. There had been a lot of big trucks doing the same thing all morning, but what was different about this one was that Hitler was saluting me from a bumper sticker that read: Raise Your Right Hand If You Believe in Gun Control.
Der Führer was in the house.
Sirius and I started toward his truck. The driver didn’t see us coming. He was too busy negotiating. “Diez dólares per hour,” he said.
The man’s accent was as bad as his Spanish. He was burly, with reddish porcine jowls and recessed, tiny black eyes. The two negotiators were shaking their heads.
“Easy work,” he said. “Don’t try and shake me down, muchachos.”
“I understand that’s your specialty,” I said. “That and bait and switch.”
All the workers took off. It’s amazing how every nationality on this planet seems to have cop radar. Even the driver of the truck had it. Hitler rolled his piggy eyes to show his disdain toward me.
“How the hell was I to know these people were illegals?” he said. “You should be rousting them, not me. I’m a citizen.”
“If you thought they were here legally,” I said, “why were you trying to pay them less than the state’s minimum wage?”
“I guess a cop with a cushy job that’s chock full of perks wouldn’t know the first thing about negotiating a price,” he said. “The first rule is you start low.”
“That’s a wonderful tip, but I’m afraid I don’t have time to hear any more. Early tee time at the club, you know?”
I showed Hitler the picture of Mateo. “Know this guy?”
“He done something?” The man’s voice was hopeful. “He’s a troublemaker.”
“I understand you had an altercation with this man.”
“It wasn’t an altercation. It was more like a misunderstanding.”
“What was the misunderstanding over?”
“He thought I shorted him some cash.”
“And how did the situation resolve itself?”
“When he got pushy, I told him to go to hell.”
“There was nothing physical?”
“He wasn’t that stupid,” Hitler said, patting a bulge under his Pendleton shirt.
“I assume you’re licensed to carry?”
“I’m legal with Uncle Scam,” he said, smiling at his cleverness, “as long as he doesn’t mess with my Second Amendment rights.”
I asked to see his license, and he asked for my badge number. Both of us complied. Ken Ritter lived in Woodland Hills. I wrote down his address, handed back his license, and thanked him, then followed up with a few more questions. Ritter said he’d never seen Mateo anywhere besides this particular Home Depot parking lot, and after their disagreement they’d had no further interactions other than Mateo’s occasionally hanging around in the background and “instigating against me like some kind of communist.”
That was enough for me. It was time to take my leave. I was afraid in another minute Ritter might start singing the “Deutschlandlied.”
“Danke schoen,” I said.
As Sirius and I walked away, I started singing the kitsch classic under my breath, crooning the words as if channeling Wayne Newton: “‘My heart says danke schoen, danke schoen, auf Wiedersehen, danke schoen.’”
My partner knows bad German when he hears it and pretended he didn’t know me. “It could have been worse,” I told him. “I might have been wearing lederhosen.”
Chapter Seven
A Song for Ferdinand the Bull
Sirius and I drove to the office, or at least what passes for my official office. SCU—the Special Cases Unit—was created by LAPD’s chief of police, Gene Ehrlich, to keep Sirius and me on the force after we captured Ellis Haines and survived our fire walk. Officially, the two of us report to the chief. From the first, though, I knew better than to try and claim an office among all the suits in the Police Administration Building in downtown LA. In such an environment I would have needed a muzzle far more than my partner did. The solution was my cubicle at Central.
As the crow flies, the Central Police Station is probably not much more than a mile from the PAB. When Chief Ehrlich proposed my position, he likely reasoned that LAPD was playing with house money. Had I wanted to, I could have left the force on full disability, but the idea of being paid not to work wasn’t what I wanted. Usually I’m happy with my decision, except when being forced to be a tin hero. On several occasions each year, the chief reminds me to polish my Medal of Valor and Sirius’s Liberty Award, and he trots us out for some PR event.
Hearing the trumpet fanfare as Sirius and I entered Central’s building made me feel as if I were attending one of those events. Sergeant Perez had obtained a recording of “La Virgen de la Macarena.” In Seville, Spain, the matadors prayed to the Macarena prior to their entering the arena. Some people refer to the music as “The Bullfighter’s Song.” Older individuals remember it as the music that accompanied the appearance of Don Rickles on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
I waved to the imaginary throngs. The sergeant’s playing the music for as long and as loudly as he was doing meant the captain wasn’t in. Perez tossed a plastic rose my way, which Sirius picked up and promptly returned to him. When Perez turned off the music, he said, “Speaking of bullshit.”
Then he took the rose from Sirius and said, “I don’t mean you, Officer Sirius.” For whatever inexplicable reason, Sirius enjoys Perez’s company. The sergeant scratched Sirius behind the ears and added, sotto voce, “And don’t worry, I’m working on your request to get a new partner.”
This was the third time I had been greeted by the same music upon arriving at Central. Up until now I hadn’t asked the obvious question. Finally, I bit. “I know I shouldn’t ask,” I said, “but I’m curious as to what’s behind your musical production.”
“Our lord and master speaks to the peanut gallery,” Perez said to Sirius. “We should be grateful. And we need to show this gr
atitude on those rare occasions when Detective Gideon graces us with his company. After all, his mere appearance deserves commemoration.”
In a much less flowery tone, he said to me, “Of course, it was a tough choice between ‘Bullshitter’—I mean ‘Bullfighter’—and ‘(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?’”
Perez is openly skeptical of what he calls the “Strange Cases Unit.” He also isn’t a fan of my odd hours at Central.
“It’s nice to be missed,” I said.
As I walked to my cubicle, he started the music again. It might have been a touch grandiloquent, but it was also catchy. Hemingway loved his bullfights, and probably loved the music of “La Virgen de la Macarena.” I preferred another bull story, that of Ferdinand the bull. The Story of Ferdinand had been a favorite picture book of mine as a boy, about a bull who preferred smelling the flowers to anything else. I doubted Hemingway had liked that story, but I also doubted he’d ever stopped to smell the flowers. Maybe they’ll make a song for Ferdinand the bull one day. I think I’d like that as well.
I thumbed through my phone messages, and then the mail. What I couldn’t figure out was why there were so many travel brochures about various locales around the world. I knew the likely culprit, though, and took the entire lot to Perez. He looked up from his work, acting surprised to see me standing there. His giveaway was an ill-concealed smirk.
“Any idea how these got on my desk?” I asked.
He stared at the brochures with feigned innocence. “Those?” Then he snapped his fingers as if suddenly remembering. “That’s right,” he said. “Since you’re here so infrequently, Detective Dog, I assumed that, like me, you were contemplating the prospects of retirement.”
“You’re retiring?” I asked.
“In three hundred ninety-two days, three hours, and fourteen minutes.”
I had been on stakeouts before where cops passed the time by calculating when they could retire and get the most bang for their buck. The calls between the unmarked cars weren’t about the case we were working but about pensions and the factoring in of leave time and sick pay.
“I’m sure I speak for everyone here,” I said, “when I say that your retirement can’t come soon enough for us.”
“Your words mean so much to me, Scooby-Doo,” he said. Then an evil light shone in his eyes. “Note to self,” he said. “Get the music for Scooby-Doo.”
But of course, Perez couldn’t wait for that. In the absence of the music, he made do with his voice: “‘Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you? We got some work to do now.’”
Three hundred and ninety-two days, I thought.
I waited until Perez got tired of singing his ditty to call Detective Andrea Charles. Unfortunately, my call was delayed a few minutes because Perez found the Scooby-Doo theme song on YouTube and loudly played it two or three times. That was just enough for the song to get stuck in my head. In fact, I was humming it while calling Detective Charles.
She picked up on the third ring, after “We need some help from you now.”
I had met Andrea the week before when I had gone to Las Vegas hoping to establish a relationship with a detective willing to work a case off the books. Andrea was in her early thirties; she was ambitious; and I didn’t doubt that one day she would be the Las Vegas chief of police.
“This is your partner in crime, Michael Gideon,” I said. “I’ll be meeting with our friend tomorrow. You got anything for me?”
“You ever reopen cases other detectives have closed?” she asked.
“More times than I care to remember.”
“Then I don’t have to tell you about the bureaucratic stumbling blocks involved with getting information.”
I had brought to Detective Charles all the dates Ellis Haines had stayed in Las Vegas during the five years prior to his apprehension. Haines was a skilled poker player; he’d even competed in the World Series of Poker on two occasions. I was able to document fifteen occasions when he’d traveled to Las Vegas, but there could have been more. It’s only a four-hour drive, after all. Still, it was my contention that Haines couldn’t have been such a frequent visitor without committing murder.
Once more I voiced the assertion that had gotten Andrea interested in the first place: “Haines was an extremely controlled killer on his home turf, but it’s human nature to loosen up while on vacation.”
“That’s what you keep saying,” she said.
“So you haven’t found anything?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “What I’m telling you is that everything is taking time. I took the dates you provided and looked for homicides that occurred during the same period. Using your parameters, I’ve come up with four potential victims.”
“That’s great.”
“In the next day or two, I’ll send you the files at your private email address,” she said. “Three of the women were white and one was Asian. The age range was twenty-nine to forty-three. Two women were from this area and two were from out of town.”
I had asked Detective Charles to focus on women aged twenty-five to forty-five. The victims, I said, were more likely to be affluent than not. That was at odds with most female homicide victims, many of whom are prostitutes, are poor, and have drug problems. As far as was known, Haines had never preyed on the disadvantaged. His victims had been the suburban girls next door. That explained his reign of terror; so-called normal people had been scared.
“How were the victims dispatched?” I asked.
“They weren’t strangled,” she said, “just as you predicted.”
Before his profession was revealed and Haines became known by most as the Weatherman, he had acquired the nickname the Santa Ana Strangler. The name was apt: Haines strangled his victims during Santa Ana conditions. Despite that, it would surprise me if Haines had strangled any of his Las Vegas victims. My guess was that he would have wanted to deviate from his MO. People on vacation like to do new and different things. And Haines wouldn’t have wanted any of his crimes in Las Vegas to be linked to the California killings.
“Two died from knife wounds that were almost surgical in nature,” she said, “one overdosed on a cocktail that included Rohypnol, and another had drugs in her system and was probably unconscious when she died of blunt-force trauma.”
“Everything is detailed in the reports you’re sending?”
“Every gruesome bit.”
“Any questions you want me to ask him tomorrow?”
She thought about that. “If you can get him on the topic of Las Vegas,” she said, “you might ask him about his favorite entertainment and dining spots. That might give me a point of connection between him and his victims.”
“Will do,” I said, “and please keep digging. Linking Haines with these homicides will put the nails in his coffin. I want to blindside him. Right now, his lawyers are challenging everything that happened in California. They’re not looking beyond the cases that have already been made against him. But there is no way he confined his killings to Los Angeles County.”
“You know him better than anybody,” she said.
“Unfortunately, you’re right about that.”
“The crime scenes weren’t completely clean,” she said. “I’ve got a full plate right now, but in the next few days I’ll be filling out paperwork to run tests.”
“No shortcuts,” I said.
The unsaid was that I didn’t want Haines’s lawyers to be able to challenge any of the new results.
We agreed to keep in touch and I hung up, heartened by the possibilities.
In the quiet of my cubicle, I organized my notes from the morning. Afterward, I checked the system and read the missing-person report on Mateo Ramos. From there I looked at arrest reports involving day laborers. In most cases they were the victims of crimes rather than the perpetrators of them. I checked police reports and called the coroner’s office; no bodies matching Mateo’s description had turned up.
My cell phone rang; the display told me Officer LaVar
Brockington was calling. “Gideon,” I said.
“This is Brockington,” he said, “following up on our last call.”
“Thanks for getting back to me.”
His begrudging “uh-huh” reminded me that I hadn’t given him a choice in the matter. “Anyway, I got some leads for you. Multiple informants offered up the name of the man they think dumped the dogs. They’re pretty sure your guy is Humberto Rivera, called Tito by most. This Tito isn’t a gangbanger or a meth head. He’s a local businessman who runs a salvage yard and also trains and sells guard dogs. His legitimate businesses allow him to hide his real passion in plain sight. He works out his fighting dogs in the salvage yard. That means if he’s ever questioned, he can always say he’s training guard dogs.”
“Has he always been so slick? What’s his rap sheet look like?”
“A few misdemeanors,” said Brockington, “but none in the last decade. When Tito was in his twenties, he was found with some dead roosters and got pinned with a charge of animal cruelty. Another time, he was caught holding a controlled substance. Tito started in cockfighting. It’s a family thing going back to his days growing up in eastern Honduras. Back then, his street name was El Gallo Negro.”
“The Black Rooster,” I translated.
“The word is he still does cockfighting, but he found dogfighting was much more lucrative.”
“You figure out why our rooster dumped the dogs out in the open?”
“I’ve got a theory on that,” Brockington said. “I don’t think he had a choice. There was a shootout between the Big Hazard gang and some bangers from MS-13, not far from Tito’s salvage yard. The Criminal Gang and Homicide Division set up checkpoints throughout the area and were stopping cars, looking for the shooters. My guess is that Tito got caught up in the dragnet when he was coming back to his business from one of his dogfights. Maybe he saw what was going on, or was listening to a police scanner, or one of his confederates warned him. I’m sure the salvage yard is his usual spot for disposing of the dogs’ bodies, but he couldn’t chance getting caught with the goods, so he dumped them.”
