Southside (9781608090563)

by Krikorian, Michael

  She replied quick. “Can’t wait. TV will come up with a name. We need to. Good for the paper. You just hint at name. Let us read the story and everyone will go away with a nickname without you naming. Work on end. Send back five.”

  I rewrote the ending. De Soto loved it. My kicker was now: “Is there an Evil killer out there?”

  “Great. Gotta run it by the brass,” she e-mailed after she read. Fifteen anguished minutes later, she e-mailed back with the verdict. It was worth the wait. A serial killer was born.

  The story came out first on their website, then on the racks. De Soto had many connections in the local television media and, wanting to build the buzz and humiliate the Times too, she e-mailed the story to the local stations early. Then she called her network contacts in hopes that they would mention the story in the five-minute teaser they aired at the bottom of the network morning programs. CBS and NBC went for it. Local channels 5, 11, and 13 aired it with gusto.

  “Coming up, serial killer loose in Los Angeles.”

  “L.A. has a new serial killer. After the break.”

  By nine, the calls were coming into LAPD press relations from all over the country plus Mexico, El Salvador, Japan, South Korea, England, Armenia, Israel, and Russia asking about the Evil Killer.

  The chief and Kuwahara were livid and privately vowed to fire the “police sources.” The papers were snatched up quickly, serial killers being one of the favorite topics of Los Angelinos, in a league with the rain.

  At Intelligentsia on Sunset in Silverlake, at Peet’s on Larchmont, at Sqirl on Virgil, at Bob’s Donuts in the Farmer’s Market, at Stan’s Donuts in Westwood Village, at Euro Pane on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, strangers were talking to each other about the new killer in town. Only a few things—riots and natural disasters—bring a community together like a good serial-killer story. And the fact that one of his victims, alleged victims, that is, was an attractive white woman, a deputy district attorney from an exclusive Santa Monica neighborhood, did wonders for the story. If it had been just Terminal, no one at the fancy coffeehouses and donut shops would even have heard about it. Southside homicide victims didn’t matter to most cappuccino drinkers.

  On the noon news broadcasts, the Evil Killer was the lead story. De Soto called me to say four local news stations had called, requesting interviews with me. In Los Angeles, a city with a stunted memory, I was no longer the disgraced reporter who had had himself shot, but rather the hotshot reporter who broke a serial-killer story. I refused all the offers. I’ll admit it felt good to be asked, but it felt even better to tell them no. The chief called.

  “I don’t remember giving you my home number?”

  “You were probably drunk, asshole. Look, Lyons, enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame. Or, in your case, fifteen seconds. You think you broke news with that story today? It will be old news tomorrow.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, the Weekly doesn’t come out every day, right? I mean, that is why they call it the L.A. Weekly. It’s not a daily.”

  “Brilliant. No wonder you’re the chief.”

  “It just that the Weekly is going to come out looking weakly.”

  “Huh?”

  “Get it? Weakly. W-E-A-K-L-Y. That is weakly because, gang lover, that news you supposedly broke today will itself be broken by tomorrow. The Times and everyone else will have a much bigger story tomorrow.”

  “What will they have?”

  “We got a suspect already, loser.”

  As the chief gloated, his bodyguard, a sergeant from Metro Division, walked into his boss’s office. He motioned for the chief to cover the phone, then whispered, “Judge Reese hasn’t come back from lunch. He apparently slipped out the back way from his chambers. That was two hours ago.”

  The chief didn’t bother telling Lyons he had to go. He just hung up.

  CHAPTER 28

  Detectives caught an unexpected break—cooperation from Eighty-Nine Family Bloods. Collect calls from Big Evil to members of the Eighty-Nine Family ordered anyone with info about Terminal’s final hours to notify his mom. Evil didn’t want to ask the boys to give the information straight to the police. He still had clout, but when one is serving an LWOP sentence, the general feeling from the homies, especially the young ones, is “What can he do to me? He’s in for life without.” Most knew Evil could still do a lot, but not like the old days. Once the Joint Task Force brought Evil down, Eighty-Nine Family was not the same. Though they were never a huge gang, like, say, Grape Street or Rollin Sixties who each had more than a thousand members. But, the seventy or so members the 89s did have were true hard-core gangsters. Real riders, ready to die for their cause, whatever that was. They didn’t even know. Now their ranks were depleted, cut down by bullets and long prison terms. Yet, when Evil let those still on the streets know that his mother could be in danger, to a man, they said they would tell her whatever they learned.

  One of them, Showboat, told Evil he would talk to her immediately. After he did, Betty Desmond called Sal, got his voice mail, called Hart, got him.

  She told him someone had seen Terminal drive away that night, after he threw a naked man in the trunk of a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme that was blocking the alley. Showboat wasn’t a Cutlass man, so he just said this particular model was from the 1980s. It was something to go on. Hart let the troops know.

  “Shit,” Waxman said when he heard from Hart. “Johnny, I think that Sims, I think he had a Cutlass. It was a either Cutlass or the Buick, ugh, Buick had a version. What was it? Regal. It was a Regal or a Cutlass.”

  “Okay, check out Sims with DMV. That’s a common name, so have ’em cross the address. Get a driver’s license picture, too.”

  “Jesus, Johnny, I’m a damn detective, too. You gonna wipe my ass for me?”

  Hart hung up.

  An hour later, Detective Waxman’s phone rang. It was the DMV. Edward Sims had a blue 1984 Cutlass Supreme SL Coupe registered to him. Waxman got a chill. They agreed to e-mail Sims’s California driver’s license photo to the homicide table at Southeast Division, to South Bureau Homicide, to Press Relations downtown, and to Pelican Bay. Hart would notify the prison of the impending e-mail.

  Don Ball, the Pelican Bay guard, went to the tier in the SHU where Big Evil was held. “What up, Big Red?” Evil said cheerfully. “When we gonna do a guards versus inmates game again?”

  Big Red didn’t say a word. He just held up the DMV photo of Eddie Sims. Evil grabbed the bars and tried to shake and break them à la King Kong.

  Detectives went to the Desmond house with the photo. Betty Desmond, who had taken a leave of absence from her job, was home and confirmed that that was the man who came to her house. Hart e-mailed the photo to Lyons. “Is this the guy who shot you?” was in the subject box. Lyons studied it for a long time, trying hard to focus on those terrifying moments on 2nd Street. He couldn’t say for certain it was the same man.

  Meanwhile, the chief’s aides were setting up a press conference to announce Edward Sims as a “Person of Interest.”

  “Stupid story is not even one day old and we got the suspect,” the chief said to Lieutenant Lucy Sanchez of press relations. Then he remembered Judge Reese. Damn, he thought, it would be nice to have the big breaking news press conference at five, but, shit, this can’t wait. “We have to protect the judge, Lucy. We can’t wait. Notify the media immediately. They need to put this picture out now. And the car and license plate.”

  Those in the LAPD who were involved felt a surge. They were close to getting this guy. Only one detective was depressed over the recent development. Waxman. “Zeus all mighty,” he muttered to himself when he was alone. “I had a serial killer, the Evil Killer, give my kid’s car a tune-up.” On top of it, the kid hadn’t even noticed the car was running better. Waxman had to tell him, which brought an, “Oh, yeah, Dad, I thought something was different.”

  CHAPTER 29

  For Eddie Sims, finding his prey was not particularly difficult be
cause he had learned the virtue of patience. Sims had studied the whereabouts, the comings and goings of Harrington, Lyons, and Judge Reese for weeks. He had patience now, a quality quite underrated, especially by the impatient. He learned of Lyons’s saloon habits. He found out where Harrington lived alone, simply by waiting near the courthouse parking lot and following her from a safe distance. When she rode out the Santa Monica Freeway to its end near the ocean, he followed a few more blocks, then pulled off. The next day he resumed where he had stopped. Her radiant red Maserati GT was not hard to catch sight of, though in this part of town Masers were no rarity. In just three days, he knew where she lived.

  He did the same with Judge Reese. After several days on him, he discovered Reese had a fondness for slipping away around noon and wildly smacking balls at the driving range of the Wilshire Country Club near Rossmore Avenue and Beverly Boulevard. Although the club was private, Sims had gone to the pro shop and bought a Wilshire Country Club golf cap. As he entered an older, gray-haired man was leaving and telling the shop’s only worker, “Thank you, Dial.” Dial, Sims thought, what kind of sorry-ass name was that? Named after some soap. What’s with white people and their kids’ names?

  Sims had given himself a minor makeover. He’d shaved his head, but not the three-days’ facial growth. He’d brought boots that gave him an extra two inches. Wrapped two sweaters around his belly. He had wrapped three, until he realized the third one, with green-and-gold diamonds, was Payton’s, a birthday gift from Lisa, his one and only girlfriend. He took it off. He didn’t want Payton along for the Revenge. His knife, okay, his sweater, no.

  Sims’s biggest worry now was his Cutlass. He considered leaving it at the long-term lot at LAX, which was the classic place to leave a criminal car. But, he needed a car and he couldn’t rent one without using his real driver’s license, since it matched his only debit card. So he chanced it with the Cutlass and drove five minutes to Western Avenue in Gardena, where he knew of two used car lots. He parked the Cutlass on an industrial stretch of Gramercy Place at 169th Place near the back end of the Gardena Villas Mobile Home Park. He walked the block to Fujishima Motors on Western Avenue next to a UPS facility, and, after a test drive that didn’t even leave the lot, drove out ten minutes later in a once-silver eight-hundred-dollar 1991 Ford Taurus with 190,000 thousand miles.

  He took Western to Redondo Beach Boulevard, hung a right past Normandie Avenue, past the Nahas Department Store, past the Memorial Hospital of Gardena, past Larry Flynt’s Hustler Casino, past Vermont Avenue, and onto the northbound Harbor Freeway. He was going golfing. Or at least to the range, looking to get a hole in one judge.

  Up the Harbor, he tuned the radio to KNX News Radio. Traffic was humming along nicely. As he neared the Manchester Avenue off-ramp, he gazed to his right, to the east, just two miles away where he once had a content life with a wife, an energetic son, some rosebushes, and a never-ending rotation of cars in need of tune-ups. He stared east so long that when he returned his eyes to the freeway, he had to slam on his brakes to avoid rear-ending a tricked-out lime-green Nissan 350Z.

  Off to the northwest, dark clouds were heading toward town. Traffic slowed considerably by the time he hit Vernon Avenue near the Coliseum. It usually did. Then he heard the radio report. “We now go live to Hal Hansen at the Police Administration Building for breaking news.”

  Howitzer Hal, as usual, laid it on thick. “This is Hal Hansen and we have cracking news on the case of the maniacal serial killer known as the Evil Killer. Just moments ago, the LAPD released a photo of a man, Edward Sims, aka Eddie Sims, aka Barry Sanders. He is said to be a ‘person of interest’ in the case. Go to our website, losangeles dot cbslocal dot com to see his picture. Sims is described as black, forty-nine years old, five foot nine, a hundred seventy pounds with no distinguishing marks such as tattoos or scars. He drives a1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme SL, blue with California license plate zero-three-two ISN. Once again, LAPD has not said he is a suspect, but rather a ‘person of interest.’ That sounds interestingly suspect to me. Stay tuned to KNX for further updates.”

  The in-station radio broadcaster asked Hansen what citizens should do if they spotted the man. Sims was sweating now. He was thankful for the anonymity of the Ford Taurus, but wished he had parked the Cutlass farther away from Fujishima Motors. Oh, so they find the Cutter, he thought. What difference would it make now?

  “Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to apprehend this man. He is considered very dangerous and possibly armed like a Navy SEAL, Force Recon Marine, or a Delta operator,” said Hansen, lapsing back into his over-the-top military ways and convicting Sims already. “This man has nearly beheaded a deputy district attorney with, what sources tell me, may have been an unforgiving Special Forces knife. He is alleged to have brutally killed one of this city’s most violent gang members, a gang member so dastardly he was known on the streets as ‘Terminal.’ Let the SWAT unit handle this bad guy. If you see him, notify LAPD at once. This is a nine-one-oner if there ever was one.”

  Even Sims, with all he had going on, had time to realize Hansen sounded like a buffoon. He lumbered up the Harbor Freeway at fifteen mph, then to a stop, then back to twenty mph past the Coliseum, the USC campus, the Shrine Auditorium, and Felix Chevrolet. He dared not look at the drivers surrounding him. Were they staring?

  After passing the Adams Boulevard off-ramp, Sims moved to the right-hand lanes and transferred to the westbound Santa Monica Freeway, taking the swooping two-lane 270-degree right transition ramp so slowly he was nearly rear-ended by a UPS truck that had veered off to pass him on the outside. It gave Sims an idea.

  At the Wilshire Country Club, Judge Reese was getting his unwind on. He was sick of the security detail put on him. Yes, it might be for his own good, but it was stifling. Besides, the judge had his reliable snub-nosed .38. A Colt Detective Special. Lately, he would never leave home without it.

  Before he got his bucket of balls, Reese told club staff that if there were any phone calls for him, any at all, he was not there. He turned off his cell. His shoulders were knotted. He needed a massage. He had no idea about a possible break in the Evil Killer case. He was enjoying the cloudy day. It looked like rain tonight.

  When the word came in that he was missing, desperate LAPD detectives tracked down his wife, Jackie, who was lunching with the ladies at the Water Grill. Jackie told detectives her husband loved to golf at the Wilshire, Los Angeles, and Bel Air country clubs. They dispatched units to all three courses, most to Wilshire since it was closest to the courthouse. Jackie called her husband’s cell phone. It went straight to voice mail.

  At that point, the judge had nine balls left in his bucket. A patrol car was coming Code Three, lights and siren, from Hollywood Division less than two miles away. Others were scrambling from wherever they were. Cars were heading in from Olympic and Wilshire divisions, too

  Sims, in his Taurus, entered the parking lot of the Wilshire Country Club and was greeted by a sunglassed Asian parking valet seated in a director’s chair who figured this guy was not a member. He put his hand up for Sims to stop. The judge was down to three balls.

  “Help you, sir?”

  “I just have a delivery for the pro shop,” Sims said, patting a box in the small rear seat. “Golf shirts, I think.”

  “I can take them here.”

  “Thanks, but I had direct orders to hand them right to the pro shop. To Dial.”

  “I can do that.”

  The judge was done driving.

  “Thanks, but I was told to hand them over to Dial personally.”

  “Well, I don’t even think Dial is in today. I haven’t seen him.”

  Sims spotted the judge, his Callaway FT-I driver over his shoulder like a baseball bat, heading toward his British Racing Green Jaguar XJR coupe.

  “Okay, well, no problem. I’ll just come back tomorrow,” Sims said, blood now pounding against the walls of his veins at the sight of the kill. “I’ll just turn around up in here.”
>
  He pulled the Taurus into the lot, turned it facing out back toward the entrance. He took a deep breath, got out of the car, walked toward the Jaguar, 9mm by his outer thigh.

  “Judge Reese.”

  The judge looked up and sensed the danger. He panicked and went for the Jag door and urgently flung the Callaway driver at Sims while he fumbled for his .38 Detective Special. “C’mon, Snubby.”

  The parking valet watched in horror, unable to speak. Sims sighted his Beretta.

  “You bastard,” the judge said as he finally pulled out the snub-nosed .38. But, it was too late. “Bastard” was his last word. Three bullets missed him entirely, but two tore into the judge, one entering his mouth, the other just above his eyebrow. Like Terminal, there would be no open casket for the judge.

  Sims dashed to his still-running car. The stunned valet sprinted away up Rossmore screaming, “Help!” Sims floored the Ford, didn’t let up as he exited, and made the right-hander onto southbound Rossmore, tires squealing, car starting to slide into oncoming northbound traffic. The worn Bridgestones eventually took hold, and the Taurus ricocheted forward. A lady in a Maxima slammed on her brakes to avoid the reckless driver.

  Sims kept the gas pedal down as he streaked south toward 3rd Street where he made a wild right, then a quick left onto Muirfield Road, the most prestigious street in Hancock Park. He abandoned the car and walked quickly back to Beverly, then back to Rossmore where he waited with Mexicans or Salvadorans or Guatemalans, all females, for a bus. Slow-ass bus, hurry up. No wonder everybody drove a car in this jacked-up city.

  Back at the Wilshire Country Club, the first LAPD cruiser on the scene bounced into the parking lot where Judge Reese’s body lay on its back, his face ruined. Lights still revolving, the sedan screeched to a halt, the doors flung open as the officers, guns drawn, huddled behind the car.