In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  The look on his face revealed his attitude toward this territoriality. "A John Doe was found in Downey, and at the same time next-door Huntington Park had a missing teenager whose parents were looking all over for him. Someone should have put the two pieces together, but they didn't. Not for five years. By then, the boy's remains were already in Evergreen. A little cooperation would have saved that family a lot of unnecessary grief."

  "Mike was often frustrated when he had to work with, or around, some little-town police department that never learned to share and didn't have resources for a proper investigation," I said. "Or proper officer training."

  "The thing is," Rascon said, nodding knowingly, "just like the freeway system, crime doesn't respect city lines. You can pull a job in one town tonight, and another somewhere else tomorrow, and so on. As long as you keep moving, and, as long as you keep your stuff small and local, you can skate for a long time.

  "There's one exception." He tapped the top of the folder, as if promising good things to come. "Los Angeles County has ultimate jurisdiction over every murder, no matter where it's committed. There is only one coroner, one morgue, and one district attorney for the entire county. Bigger cities like LA and Long Beach run their own murder investigations, but the county sheriff takes over the violent and questionable death investigations for most of those little city departments. And no matter who is investigating, all the corpses come here. To me."

  "Was Mike looking for a particular sort of crime, or pattern of crime?" I asked.

  "Drug deals gone bad, dead dealers found in car trunks. Accidents in meth cookers. Drug busts gone bad, especially if they were cop-related."

  I thought about Mike's collection of clippings, stories about dead drug dealers found in car trunks or down canyons, fires in home meth labs--cookers, Rascon called them--drug house raids that ended in deadly shootouts between dealers and police. Altogether, they were stories about the drug purveyors who met violent ends. And the police.

  I asked, "Was anyone ever charged with the Rogelio Higgins murder?"

  He shook his head. "Too many possibilities."

  "Did Mike think that Rogelio Higgins was killed by a cop?"

  He looked around to see if anyone was looking in. And then he leaned in close. "It was a possibility."

  "And Jesus?"

  "Interesting thought, Miss MacGowen." Rascon began turning pages in the file as if refreshing his memory, or glancing fondly through a family album.

  "Two potential motives: altruism and greed," he said. "Mike was looking at one cop who wanted to take over Higgins's client list. And another he thought might have done what he thought was vector control, killed a source of blight in the community."

  "Boni Erquiaga was the greed-motive suspect?"

  He shrugged. "He was the one who got caught. Took a few years, but he got caught. I don't think he was in it alone."

  "Who was the altruist?"

  "Never found him, or them, if he existed."

  "Ah," I said. "It is a puzzle."

  Rascon grinned at me as he closed the file folder.

  "May I have a copy of the file?" I asked.

  "It's yours," he said, sliding it across the table. "You're Mike's executor, I found out. Consider this part of his estate."

  "You're a good friend, Phil." It felt like Christmas. "Thank you."

  "Like I said, Mike and I go back a long ways." He smiled as if he had heard a private joke. "We had a lot of good talks over lunch, you know. Best way to get the stench of this place out of you? Big bowl of hot salsa and chips, two chile rellenos and three beers at Barragan's. We used to do that fairly regular."

  I knew the place, I'd been there with Mike many times, up on Sunset before Silver Lake. The first time he took me there was immediately after our first visit to the morgue.

  "Can I take you to lunch, Phil?" I asked.

  "Rain check," he said. "I'm swamped today. But another time, that would be good."

  "Another time," I said, looking down at the file. I must have looked like I was ready to come apart. He smiled, tapped the table in front of me, bringing my head up.

  "You're going to be okay, Maggie," he said. "Mike always bragged about how resourceful you are. You'll get through this."

  "You think so?"

  "I do."

  As he walked me back to the parking lot, I ran through a list of old-timers from Central Division besides Boni Erquiaga that I had run into: Eldon Washington, Lewis Banks, Harry Young. The three of them would be a good place to start a conversation about a missing kid, dead drug dealers, and cops on a mission.

  I asked Phil, "Do you know an investigator for the D.A. named Eldon Washington?"

  He grimaced. "I knew him when he was a cop on gang detail; he observed a whole lot of autopsies on that assignment. And I know him from the D.A.'s office now."

  "Did you ever talk to him about this file or about what Mike was working on?"

  "No, ma'am," Phil said. "That man, I only tell him what he asks me for specifically. There have only been two people who ever knew about this file, me and Mike, and now me and you."

  "Can we keep it that way?" I asked.

  "I was going to ask you the very same question."

  "Thank you," I said again, tidying the edges of the file.

  "Don't mention it." He offered me his hand. "And I mean, don't mention it."

  In the car, before I drove away from the coroner's office, I placed a call to the district attorney's offices.

  "May I speak with Investigator Eldon Washington?" I said after I had made my way through the telephone menu to a living being. Washington was in and picked up the phone.

  "Washington," he said.

  "Eldon," I said. "This is Maggie MacGowen. I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot the other night. I wonder if we might meet, start over again."

  "What's on your mind?"

  "Nelda Ruiz. Jesus Ramon. Mike. The usual."

  "I'll transfer you back to appointments. Maybe the girl can find an available time for you. I know I'm booked through the next couple of weeks."

  Before I could say anything, I heard several clicks on the line and then that blankness that means the line is dead.

  I drove straight over to the Criminal Courts Building at Temple between Hill and Grand where the D.A.'s offices are and parked in the public lot behind. Before I went inside I stopped at a vendor kiosk out front and bought a warm chocolate chip cookie that was about the size of a dinner plate, a staple for courthouse workers and jurors. The cookies are okay when they're warm, but they get really hard when they cool. Fortunately, there was no line at Security and the cookie still felt warm through its waxed paper sleeve when I retrieved it, along with my bag, from the X-ray conveyer belt.

  I showed my press pass to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Frances Nelson, who was standing guard in the D.A.'s marble atrium.

  "I know you," she said, handing back my credential. "Sorry about Mike. He was always a gentleman to me."

  "And to me," I said. "Is Eldon Washington in his office?"

  "In his rat hole, you mean?" Rancor and disdain were rife in her tone. "Why you want to see that one I don't know, but he's in. Down the corridor at the end, last door before the fire escape. He ever goes too far and misses his door--next stop, Temple Street, thirteen stories straight down. I wish."

  "Thank you, Deputy," I said, and headed off in the direction she indicated.

  "He gives you trouble, you just call out," she said, patting her side arm. Ha, I thought as I walked away, history there.

  I found Eldon at his gray metal government-issue desk working the morning crossword puzzle. There were some files on his desk, but his office did not have the stacks and boxes of case files that all the other staff in the D.A.'s cramped precincts had piled ceiling-ward on every flat surface in their office spaces. Without fanfare, I put the warm cookie on top of his puzzle.

  "What the...?" He looked from the cookie to me and had the grace to blanch.

&
nbsp; "Peace offering," I said. "The 'girl' in appointments said you were free right now. Said you are a piece of work, but you're available for a meeting. Lucky me. She wants you to stop sending calls her way, says you keep your own appointment book."

  He grinned in an almost disarming way, almost pleasant. He slid an end of the cookie out of its waxed paper and took a bite. In his bare little cubbyhole, cookie held in both hands, Eldon didn't seem either as large or as fierce as he had tried to be when he waylaid me outside the ladies' room at Central Station two nights before. He was a middle-aged man with good shoulders, a softening midsection, and a losing battle with a receding hairline. I wanted to tell him that a comb-over never fools anyone, that bald looks better, but declined.

  "These things are good when they're warm," he said after his first swallow. "But when they get cold you could fill potholes with them. Want a bite?"

  "Thanks just the same." I pulled up his visitor's chair and sat down facing him, elbows on his desk.

  "I heard you retired and went up to Idaho or something," I said. "Why'd you come back?"

  "I got bored," he said, shifting a bite to his cheek so he could talk.

  "That happens to a lot of cops," I said. "They go off into hunter's paradise and can't take the quiet."

  He nodded. He was not being confrontational, and seemed genuinely sincere when he said, "I'm real sorry about Mike."

  "A lot of people are telling me how much they'll miss him."

  He nodded, the lower half of his face buried behind that massive cookie.

  "Okay," I said, "can I have a bite?"

  He ripped off a goodly chunk and extended it toward me. I pinched some off, ate it.

  "Yep, it's good," I said.

  "When they get hard, I nuke them for thirty seconds, gets them soft again."

  I leaned back. "Mom was right, sugar attracts more bees than vinegar does. You might try that strategy yourself sometime. Make you more popular with the people you work with."

  "Look, Maggie." He let out a long breath before he finished. "I'm not the bad guy, okay? I have a job to do, and being nice isn't in my job description. Now, you going to tell me why you're sugaring me up?"

  "What I said the other night. I want you to tell me about that day, when Jesus got into Mike's car. You were on gang watch, you caught Nelda dealing drugs out of a phone booth and informed both Mike and Central Station, and then Boni Erquiaga showed up."

  "I wondered when you were going to ask me."

  "What was that day all about?"

  "Gang watch." Eldon leaned back in his chair far enough so he could look up at the ceiling, as if The Word was going to come down to him from the water-stained acoustic tiles up there. "Talk about a minefield."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "The snitches, the cops, the O.G.--the Original Gangsters, the old-timers--the kids coming up, the 'hood, the justice system, they get intertwined until you can't separate the strands." He looked over at me.

  He said, "My boy, Eldon, Junior, he has this condition called neurofibroblastoma. You know what that is?"

  I shook my head.

  "He has blood vessels and tissue and nerves all tangled up together, and all of them growing out of control inside his face and his neck. He's a healthy, intelligent boy, and he has these purple masses growing, distorting his handsome face. Ugly things. If he doesn't get surgery to untangle the veins and the nerves so that excess tissue can be cut out, the masses will grow until they press on his brain and his windpipe and kill him. But the surgery is really risky, seventy-percent chance something gets cut and leaves him disabled or disfigured. No surgery, one hundred-percent he dies."

  "I am sorry, very sorry," I said.

  "That's what it's like working gang detail. No matter what you do to cut some of them out, you put someone at risk. There's no safe choice to make most of the time."

  He dropped his head. Maybe he was having an emotional moment, maybe he was playing me and needed a moment to strategize. I hadn't decided if I could trust him. There was no picture of his son on his desk; I had only his word the boy existed.

  "Work a neighborhood for a while, you get close to families, to kids," he said. "You get tight with other cops working out there with you."

  He looked up at me with moist eyes. If he was acting, he was good at it. "You see kids grow up, you see them get hurt, you go to their weddings and their funerals. A lot of their funerals. Your buddies, they have their problems, too. You have to put up some personal barriers or you get tangled in everyone's problems to the point you can't get out again, or you don't want to get out. That's when cops get into trouble."

  I pulled a Kleenex from the box on his desk to wipe my hands. He had deflected my question a couple of different ways. I tried again.

  "What happened to Jesus Ramon on January 16, 1999? You were there. Tell me about that day."

  "I know you've read all the reports. What's left for me to say?"

  "There are some missing pieces," I said. "You holding any of them?"

  "Like what?"

  "Okay, let's try this. These people you considered family, would you include Nelda Ruiz?"

  "No."

  "Jesus Ramon?"

  He shook his head, a puzzled little smile, or maybe it was something else, lifting one corner of his face.

  "Boni Erquiaga?"

  "Not that one, not ever. He's exactly where he belongs."

  "Okay, how about Jesus' mother?"

  He dropped his chin, and I had some part of an answer.

  "How close were you?"

  "Not what you think. Or maybe what I think you think," he said. "I admired Julia, the mom. Hardworking, determined to make something of herself. Her sister Mayra, was a hard worker, too. People kept trying to get in their way, take away what they had."

  "Who?"

  "Nelda, for one. Nelda was, probably still is, a predator."

  "I ran into Nelda the other night, after I saw you at Central," I said, pulling out the photo I had taken of her from my bag. "But she didn't stick around to talk to me."

  "I heard about it," he said. "She get brought in yet?"

  I shook my head. "She was selling drugs through a junkyard fence. She took off."

  "Who's her supplier now? Any idea?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Which brings us back to the day Jesus disappeared."

  He shrugged. "How so?"

  "I keep bumping into Rogelio Higgins, who I'm told was Nelda's supplier until someone took him out."

  Eldon frowned, hesitated before he said, "Rogelio was dead a month before Jesus went missing."

  "Rogelio, as I understand, had a large drug network and a fencing operation. He was assassinated, I guess you could say. And someone took over his customer base. Or tried. Who was it?"

  "No one," Eldon said matter-of-factly. "Not the whole of it, anyway. For a while after Higgins got hit, various people tried to move into his marketplace, but they never had the supply lines that Rogelio developed, never had the contacts. And they could never come up with the volume and the variety he offered; Rogelio moved a lot of shit."

  He leaned closer to me. "The thing to remember is this, Rogelio Higgins wasn't an Elay product, not out of the barrio, not out of the Mexican Mafia the prisons germinate. He was real mob, affiliated with the Arellano Felix gang in Baja with Colombian drug cartel ties."

  "So was it a mob hit?" I asked. "The godfather came to town?"

  "No," Eldon said. "Someone local, someone with hubris did it."

  "Hubris?" I teased him, rolled my eyes, repeated, "Someone with hubris?"

  He chuckled. "I may be a flatfoot, but I went to college. I studied the classics. Hubris was always the downfall of men who tried to be like the gods, or to compete with the gods."

  "And that's what happened? Some local got too big for his britches?"

  "That's what I think. So did Mike." He leaned back in his chair after slipping the uneaten half of the cookie back into its waxed paper sleeve for later. "Maybe
there was machismo involved, some guy who resented this outsider, Rogelio, working his home turf, working his people, getting rich off them. Or maybe someone thought he could end the drug problem by ending the life of that one guy. Mike used to call people half-smart when they had notions bigger than their abilities. That's what he said about the shooter, half-smart."

  "Why half-smart?"

  "He didn't know what he was up against, and he should have."

  "You think the gods struck down Higgins?" I said

  "One way or another, probably, yeah."

  "But, there was an earthly shooter. Who was he?"

  "I don't know who, but several people tried to take over Rogelio's operations." He smiled. "Boni tried to chew off a piece of that cookie."

  "That's why he stole drugs from the police evidence locker? To supply Rogelio's people?"

  He nodded.

  "Rogelio had," I said, "from what you say, an infinite drug pipeline. How did Boni imagine he could meet demand over a period of time? His resources were limited to the stuff his colleagues confiscated and booked as evidence. He had to know he'd get caught."

  "You want to go back up to Corcoran and ask him?"

  That comment gave me pause. I looked at Eldon, studied the lines in his face, tried to read his expression, couldn't. But he was an experienced street cop, well-schooled in not giving away anything he didn't want to give away.

  "Who told you I went to Corcoran to see Boni?"

  " 'They' did."

  I remembered the way Boni had said "They." Eldon was mimicking him.

  "We were recorded," I said.

  "Of course you were. And the tapes were sent to the D.A. And because I'm on Boni watch, the tapes came to me."

  Boni watch?

  "How close are you to Kenny Noble?" I asked.

  "We go back a long, long way."