Southside (9781608090563)

by Krikorian, Michael

  “I forgot what he said. But it was a long time ago. In the late nineties maybe.”

  “And he was just now getting around to thanking you?”

  “Said he had been out of town, Las Vegas, I think. Yes, it was Las Vegas. And he read or heard about Mike Lyons getting shot and it mentioned that Lyons jerk had wrote a big story about Cleamon, that phony story full of lies. So I guess it made this guy think he never did thank Cleamon or his family. He was really nervous. Bobby had his gun and was using curse words a lot. I told him to calm down.”

  “Mrs. Desmond, could you describe him with as much detail as possible? His height, weight, tattoos, earrings, any marks, scars. Anything.”

  “That’s the thing. There was really nothing distinctive about him. He was average height and weight. I didn’t see or notice any tattoos or scars or earrings. Medium complexion.”

  LaBarbera glanced over at Hart who was busy taking notes.

  “What was this guy’s name? Did he introduce himself?”

  “Oh, Jesus, what was his name? He said it, too, because we asked him, but then I went to get some water. He was so nervous. Bobby would know. Oh, God!”

  Mr. Desmond held his wife again. “Honey, he’s in a better place.”

  “Mrs. Desmond, try and think of his name.”

  She racked her mind. “It had something to do with a football player. I wasn’t really paying that much attention because he had got me thinking about Cleamon and I was just thinking back to when Cleamon was a little boy. So I was here, but I wasn’t. I remember, though, it was something about a football player and Bobby saying something back like he had the wrong name. That make any sense? That help?”

  “Well, not really. At least, not yet.”

  The phone rang. “Good piece in the Weekly,” LaBarbera said. “Still got it.”

  “Thanks. You catch any flack from the brass?” I asked. Sal had been quoted as saying the mayor and chief’s list was “odd.”

  “Not a word. Anyway, Johnny and I just finished and we’re gonna go out for some pizza. Can you get us into your girl’s hot restaurant? You wanna meet us?”

  “Sure.” I hadn’t seen Francesca for nearly a week. This would be an excuse. “What time?”

  Though always booked, the Pizzeria as well as the Osteria next door, would keep one table in reserve for Francesca. I called and asked for that table. They were happy to give it to me. They wondered where I’d been. I was waiting at the front desk, talking to Lance, the maître d’, when the detectives arrived. We were quickly seated and offered menus.

  “So how’d it go tonight?” I asked. “The notification. What was their reaction when you told them their son was dead?”

  A bottle of red wine came.

  “Before we even told her, she knew,” said LaBarbera.

  “Mom’s intuition,” Hart added.

  “Compliments of the kitchen, Michael,” Pilar, the beautiful server, said. She placed down three appetizers. The detectives dug in. I sipped the wine.

  “So when did the parents last see him?” I asked.

  They laid out the story for me. The armed stranger who came to thank Cleamon and the family for saving him in county jail. Terminal terrifying the nervous visitor. The name she couldn’t remember. The football player thing.

  “You mean the stranger’s name was the same as a football player?” I asked.

  “The guy said his name, and then said, ‘like the football player.’ And then Term tells the guy something like you mean so and so and he corrected the name to match a football player.”

  “You mean,” I said, “like he said his name was ‘Joe Wyoming, like the football player’s’ and Term corrected him? Something like that?”

  “I guess.”

  The pizzas came. We ate in silence for a few minutes. Pilar brought another bottle. We ate and drank. The pizza was superb.

  “So,” Sal said between savoring bites, “Johnny and I were thinking the killing of Term and your shooting might be connected.”

  “Fuck, Sal, I told you that already. You asked me if I was a shot caller.”

  “Well, it clicked for us when Mrs. Desmond said there was ‘nothing really distinctive’ about the guy who came to visit. Those are the exact words you used. And what’s the connection?”

  Hart’s mouth was full of the meat lover’s pizza yet he mumbled a response that was impossible to understand. But I knew what he meant. “Big Evil.”

  “Exactly,” said LaBarbera. “Now it may just be a coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences. Mike, I want you to come with us over to Mrs. Desmond’s house, the sooner the better, so you two can go over what this guy looked like.”

  “Just for the hell of it, let’s say the shooter is the same guy. What does that tell us? He got something against Evil?”

  “Yeah. Evil killed someone he loved, and he can’t get to him at Pelican Bay, so he gets to Evil’s little brother. That story you did made Evil a legend. He was a legend in the ’hood, but people all over the city never heard of him until you wrote that magazine story. And that courtroom piece you wrote about his trial. That could piss someone off. How Evil was smiling, how the evidence was thin.”

  “He was, it was.”

  “So, Mike, Johnny and I figured, the shooter figures you’re the easiest one to get to, a journalist, and it was you who made Evil famous. His loved one is gone, Evil is living the big-shot life, so take it out on you.”

  “Well, just saying that’s true. You think he’s done? Like, who’s next?”

  I got a major chill. If it was the same guy who shot me that killed Terminal, he must be a total bad-ass. But even that didn’t add up because the guy that shot me, he just didn’t seem like a badass killer. Even then, I thought about keeping my Beretta close.

  Leaning on his unmarked Charger parked under a no stopping sign, LaBarbera said, “We can’t get dragged down chasing a ghost here on the football name thing, but we’ll take a look. This was a personal attack on Term. He or Evil killed someone’s loved one, and that someone took it out on Terminal. Let’s go through the files and get a list of all their victims. See if one of them has a name that stands out.”

  “That’s kinda ridiculous, man,” I said. “I mean half the guys in the NFL have last names to match homicide victims. Williams, Brown, Jones, Jackson, Johnson.”

  “I know, but something might pop out. We look into everything.”

  “Maybe,” Hart said, “this guy was going to the Desmond home to kill the mother. Get back at Evil that way, and he just ran into Terminal.”

  “Are you two thinking that the guy that Mrs. Desmond said came to the house, and—and what’s her first name anyway? Why we gotta call her Mrs. Desmond all the time? Like a show of respect because she raised two of the biggest killers in the city?”

  “It’s Betty, but, we just got into the Mrs. Desmond thing. She’s a nice lady and I think she tried, her husband tried, they just couldn’t compete with the neighborhood. It was a tug-of-war, and the gang beat the parents for Cleamon and Bobby.”

  “Anyway,” I said and then frowned, “what was I saying? Damn, I forgot already. Mrs. Desmond, why we gotta call her, oh, yeah. The guy that came to the house that she was talking about, you thinking he killed Terminal? Based on what she was saying about how nervous he was when he had a gun pointed at him, how the hell is someone like that gonna take out Term?”

  “Mike, we are not concluding that that guy did anything, but a guy coming to her house with a gun is something we look into. It would be poor police work not to. You know that.”

  I went back to Osteria where Francesca was very busy, but she leaned over the countertop, kissed me on the cheek, and quietly said, “I’ve missed you.”

  That’s all I wanted to hear.

  CHAPTER 23

  The next morning Homicide Detective Johnny Hart was playing a long shot. Hart was hoping one of the names of the victims of Big Evil and Terminal would lead to the mysterious man who came to the Desmond ho
usehold the night before Terminal’s ravaged body was found. He had a list of 127 names of victims, victim’s families, and victim’s known friends and associates. The brothers Desmond had amassed a frighteningly extensive roster of sufferers, dead and alive.

  LaBarbera, taking a short break from a meeting with superiors on the progress of several homicide and shooting investigations, including those of Bobby Desmond and Michael Lyons, approached Hart’s desk. “Anything pop?”

  “Sal, this is ridiculous,” said a frustrated Hart, his third cup of weak in-house coffee in hand. “First of all, the guy that came to see them, if Mrs. Desmond is accurate, seemed like he was about to soil himself, not to brutalize one of the baddest Bloods in this whole jacked-up city. And secondly, yes, I’ve got enough football-related names on this list to make a decent NFL team. Got a Joe Green—”

  “Mean Joe Greene. But, with the third ‘e’”?

  “No, Sal. No. But, if Mystery Man said Joe Greene, I don’t think Term would ask that third ‘e’ question. You see what I mean? This is a waste of time for a superior detective. Me.”

  “Where is he from?”

  “This says, hold on, um, Maywood.”

  “Who else you got?”

  “Got a Steve Smith. Victim.”

  “Steve Smith?”

  “Carolina Panther receiver.”

  “Oh, yeah. He still a Panther? But, no. Too common. Don’t you have anything that sticks out? No Unitas? Jurgenson? No Tarkington?”

  “Damn, Sal, how old are you? Those are some triple OGs.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I knew this was a shot in the dark. Figured, though every now and then, you get an upset. Ask Man o’ War.”

  “How about Payton Sims?”

  “Payton Sims? I know that name. Payton Sims. Oh, yeah. Of course. He got Uzied walking to the car wash on Central. The one the task force finally got Evil for. Evil and Poison Rat.”

  “Yeah, Payton Sims and Marcus Washington.”

  “Yeah, but, I don’t see any football name connection.”

  “Payton Sims. Walter Payton and Billy Sims.”

  “A stretch, but yeah, okay. Or Phil Simms,” said LaBarbera. “Won a Super Bowl.”

  “Yeah, but Phil Simms has two ‘m’s.”

  “How’re the Desmonds supposed to know that?”

  “Sal, you’re the nit-picking detective asking if Joe Green had the “e” at the end.”

  LaBarbera nodded in admission. “Okay, okay. Where’d Payton Sims live? I remember it was close, because he walked to that car wash. And you remember we could never figure out why anyone would walk to a car wash? Think about it.”

  “Maybe,” Hart said, “the shower at his house was broke and he went to wash himself.”

  “You’re stupid. Anyway, where’d he live?”

  “Let’s see. Nine twenty-seven East Eighty-Ninth Street. That’s right across Central from the Desmonds.”

  “Interesting. His family still there?”

  “This is old, but says survivors were his parents who lived there. Edward and Jennette. Should I check it out?”

  “Yes. Let’s cover all the bases. Tell Waxman to check it out. It’s his case. I gotta go back to this bullshit meeting.”

  • • •

  On his trek from Orange County, Detective Ralph Waxman chugged along in his son’s 1991 Honda Accord, heading toward Edward and Jennette Simses’ home in the Kitchen, a neighborhood where he had investigated several homicides. He didn’t want to take his own car, a maroon Cadillac STS, so he traded with his nineteen-year-old son who was so thrilled with the swap he didn’t even ask his dad why.

  Waxman stuck to the slower lanes of the 91, 605, and 105 freeways as his son’s Honda was misfiring badly. Kids these days, Waxman thought. He was planning on dropping the car off for a tune-up later, not that his son would even notice the difference.

  As he exited the 105 and lumbered up Central Avenue, past the infamous Nickerson Gardens housing project and the all-boys Verbum Dei High School, past the Watts Community Action Labor Committee and Ted Watkins Park, past boarded-up two-story apartment buildings and store front churches, past enough liquor stores to get Moscow drunk, Waxman thought Johnny Hart’s request to check out Ed Sims was a waste of time.

  Waxman had called Sims from the road, saying he wanted to go over some details of his son’s case. Purely routine, he said.

  Sims was waiting for him on the porch. He hadn’t bought Waxman’s “purely routine” bullshit. What did they have on him? A witness? DNA in the alley? Had he cleaned his car’s bloodied underbelly thoroughly enough? He came close to panic. He sipped some Hennessy. He considered running. Pack up the Cutlass and hit the road. He drank more Hennessy. And more. The French brandy started to work its dangerous charm. He relaxed. Fuck it. I’m dead already. It doesn’t matter.

  He had checked the load on his 9mm. It was full. Sims had decided he was not going to prison. Not even jail. He switched off the safety and stashed the gun under the pillow of his son’s bed.

  Sims heard the coughing Honda Accord before he saw it. When he did, it made him sad.

  “Hi, I’m Detective Ralph Waxman, LAPD.” They shook hands. Waxman smelled the booze.

  “You need a tune-up. Heard you belchin’ a block away.”

  “Tell me about it. My son’s car.”

  “Let’s have a look. I’m a mechanic.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll take care of it later.”

  “Take a minute. C’mon. Pop the hood and start her up.”

  Five minutes later, Sims came out of Frank’s Auto Supply, his old place of employment on Central Avenue, with a Phillips screwdriver, a feeler gauge, and a package of contact points. He took out the old points and showed them to Waxman, who knew as much about car engines as he did about nuclear physics. “See these points right here, all pitted. That’s your problem. My son, Payton, had a Honda just like this. His first car. Hell, his only car. I changed the points probably five times.”

  He put in the new points, had Waxman blip the ignition to get them in the right position so he could measure and set them. Cinched them up and they were on their way. Night and day.

  “Damn. What a difference. What do I owe you?”

  “Just a ride home.”

  Waxman took out forty dollars. Sims refused, but Waxman insisted, and he took it. He already had that money spent. His Hennessy was running a bit low, and he could use some more bullets. Hopefully, he thought.

  Back at the house, Waxman took a look around. Roses in the front yard, older Cutlass way up the driveway, bars on the windows. Inside, Sims didn’t hide the booze. He poured a glass, didn’t bother to offer any, and took a gulp. “Ever since I lost my son and wife, this has been my best friend.”

  “Your wife was killed, too? I didn’t know that.”

  “She left me. After Payton did.”

  “Sorry.”

  “At least I did something this morning. I love to fix cars.” He took a gulp. “I know this lady, Dorothy, she’s ’bout seventy-five. Runs the Watts Rose Garden. All by herself. Over a hundred bushes. She told me once, when she be working on those roses, she’s in her own world. Her rose world, she calls it. This beautiful world of sweet smells and all them colors. She don’t even see them thorns, even though they scratchin’ her crinkly, ol’ black skin. That rose garden? It’s two blocks from Jordan Downs, Grape Street Crips, one of the worst places in the city. Hell, you know that.” He took another belt. “But, anyway she’s right there and she’s in paradise. I saw you checkin’ out my roses by the driveway. Dorothy planted them. That one there, the red one all creamy in the middle? It’s called Double Delight. It’s my favorite. They call it that because it’s beautiful and smells sweet too. Just like a fine woman. What I’m getting at is, I guess I’m rambling now, but that’s how I feel when I work on cars. It’s like the car is sick, and I’m the doctor in my car world.”

  “Well, Doctor, thanks again.”

  “Anyways, I know you didn’t come to
my beautiful neighborhood to get a tune-up. What’s happening?”

  “Mr. Sims, did you know a Bobby Desmond? Better known as Terminal.”

  Sims took a shaky sip. “His brother killed my son.”

  “You heard anything about him lately?”

  “Heard he got hisself kilt. Gotta say I din’t burst into no tears when I heard the news. In fact, I think I had a drink to celebrate.” Sims took another drink. Laughed.

  “Mr. Sims, where were you last Tuesday night?”

  “Is that when he got it? Now you’re flattering me.”

  “Sir, tell me your whereabouts Tuesday from six p.m. until eight a.m. the next day.”

  “I love it when you guys call people ‘sir.’ I knows what ‘sir’ means. Means ‘asshole.’ Anyways, sir, I don’t think I can prove it by anyone, but I was right here. Probably passed out on this here couch. Sometimes I don’t even make it to the bed, sir.”

  Waxman tried to ignore the “sir” comments. It wasn’t easy. “I’m sure it has been tough, sir, but what’s it been? Eight, nine years?”

  “Seems like last week to me,” said Sims taking another sip. Then another.

  Waxman asked why Payton would walk to a car wash.

  “I wondered that, too,” said Sims. “But, I think I might know why. The other day, I don’t know, a week ago, a month ago, I was outside and a neighbor walked over and told me he was going downtown and wanted to trade me a five dollar bill for a bunch of quarters. You know, for parking. I told him I’d go in inside and check, but he said it was all right, he’d just go to the car wash. You know, those change machines them places have to get quarters to start the wash. Maybe that’s why he went. Man, that made me weak all over when the neighbor said that. Quarters. Get killed for wanting some change.”

  Waxman just nodded.

  “Sometimes I sleep in Payton’s room. I’ll show you.” He led the way to Payton’s room. It’s very neat, preserved, just the way it was when Payton slept there, except for the used 9mm under the pillow. Sims glanced at the pillow. He hoped he wouldn’t have to go for it. He wasn’t going to prison, he’d rather die. Detective Waxman was not part of the Revenge. He had nothing to do with Big Evil living the good life in prison. Still, if he had to use it, he would. As Sims looked at the pillow, Waxman looked at the three Pop Warner football trophies on a dresser. On the wall was a framed poster of number thirty-four of the Chicago Bears.