Unpaid Dues

by Barbara Seranella

  "I have another question I'd like answered," he said. "The autopsy showed that Jane never gave birth. Why would Jane Ferrar be clutching a doll?" He paused.

  "I don't know." She remembered how Jane sometimes sucked her thumb, and tried not to picture her dead.

  "I'd really like to find out where she spent her last days."

  "And who killed her," Munch added.

  "Yeah, especially that. We haven't been able to get any kind of line on Jane's whereabouts prior to her murder. She didn't have a current driver's license, hadn't applied for any government aid, didn't have any utility bills or a listed phone number. Her last known public activity was an arrest five years ago for shoplifting?

  "What was she stealing?"

  St. John flipped backward in his notebook. "A stuffed animal, an Easter bunny"

  Munch said to herself the most dangerous phrase in the English language—the short version of the Serenity Prayer: Fuck it. She looked St. John full in the face.

  "Thor had brown eyes. Ten years ago he drove a Ford pickup. Sixty-two or sixty-three. Brown, stick shift, six cylinder." He also owned a big black boat of a Chrysler New Yorker, but that car was long gone, so she didn't mention it.

  "He had some felony beef in Pennsylvania, I don't know what it was, but knowing Thor, it was for hurting someone. He's one of the scariest guys I've ever known. Unpredictable, violent, and smarter than you would think. His last name might have been Mc-something. He did a short stretch at Chino about twelve years ago. I'm sure he's been back since. If not there, then some other joint."

  "How about identifying marks?"

  "Oh yeah," Munch said, "he had a few of those."

  She told him almost everything she could think of. Almost. "I'll call you if I remember something else."

  "Will you?"

  She rearranged the work orders on the service desk. "Yeah, sure, why not?"

  "I don't know.

  That's right, she thought, cops didn't call it snitching, they called it "doing the right thing." As if the choice was always that clear.

  * * *

  St. John wanted a cigarette. Badly He knew Munch was being evasive if not outright deceptive, and he hated that he knew that. Too many years on the job had given him a suspicious nature. He wished he could turn it off sometimes. He couldn't. His innocence was just another thing in a long line of casualties his profession caused.

  He returned to the police station with a heavy heart and pulled old Field Identification cards. Munch had described Thor's skin art in good detail. It was the usual sidewalk commando, bad-ass biker, wannabe shit—a dagger dripping with drops of red blood, crossed pistons, a flaming skull with Viking horns. He took a box of Polaroids and settled downstairs in one of the old holding cells that had been converted to a storage room. In addition to the station's collection of memorable skin art, he had amassed his own private album over the years. His favorite was one some gang-banger brain surgeon had done on his belly It was a life-size replica of a pistol. When the guy was wearing pants and an open shirt, it looked like he had a weapon stuck in his waistband. Real brilliant. St. John also had a picture of "Flower George" Mancini's foot, taken at the time of his death. There was a dotted line leading to the man's big toe and the instruction: HANG IT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER. Very nice.

  St. John spent an hour sorting through stacks of long-haired, sneering assholes that all started to look alike. He found numerous misspellings—Devil's Disiples, Don't Tred ON Me—but no Viking horns. Fuck this, he thought, rubbing his burning eyes. He went back upstairs, grabbed his book of assorted business cards, his telephone, and started dialing.

  Whenever he met cops from another city; he collected their business cards. He sorted them according to geography and kept them in leather-bound organizers with plastic insert pages. The most worn book in his collection covered the Westside. Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Culver City were all incorporated cities that had their own police stations. Venice Beach and the worst parts of Culver City were in the Pacific station's jurisdiction. St. John had worked the Pacific station beat for more years than he cared to count.

  Rico Chacón was a detective there now, but St. John didn't want to call him.

  He had heard some disturbing rumors about Chacón and his loyalties, rumors he thought he'd rather ignore. St. John treaded carefully not sure if he wanted to find shit on the guy or not. Every cop he knew, including himself, was a little dirty, had nightmares about being in jail, caught for some minor indiscretion—a cut corner—and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

  Chacón was in the fight game, a business notorious for its criminal underpinnings. A little of that shit was bound to rub off from time to time. Best to leave it alone unless the rumors got heavier.

  And then there was Chacón's thing with Munch. St. John had introduced them and his wife, Caroline, kept him updated on the status of their interrupted courtship. St. John didn't like it at all. His wife reminded him that he wasn't the guy's conscience or his rival. Besides, Chacón had only been in L.A. for a few months, so he wouldn't have some asshole from the seventies filed in his memory bank.

  He called Sergeant Flutie over at Pacific and asked to speak to someone from a street team, or one of the C.R.A.S.H anti-gang units, someone on the job for at least ten years.

  "You should talk to Nunn," Flutie said.

  "I thought he was retiring."

  "This coming Friday but he's working like he still means it. You coming now?"

  "I'll be there in fifteen."

  Detective Bob Nunn was a good choice, thirty long, hard years on the force, twenty-one of those years in Venice Beach. His memory for names and dates was legendary. The job was going to lose one dedicated detective.

  St. John parked his Buick in the lot on Culver Boulevard. He signed in at the front desk and was buzzed through to the detectives' bullpen.

  "You coming to the party on Saturday?" Nunn asked.

  "I'm bringing the toe tags."

  Nunn smiled good-naturedly "What you need?"

  "I'm looking for a guy" St. John gave Nunn everything he had on Thor. "First cop that can bring me a last name and hopefully an address, I'1l buy a steak dinner."

  "Sizzler?"

  "Pacific Dining Car."

  "You must want this guy bad. Let me think a minute." Nunn lit a cigarette and sucked it like he was drowning. St. John stood where he could get the full benefit of the secondhand smoke. It smelled wonderful.

  A poster of the Rocky Mountains on the wall showed a beautiful twelve-point buck in silhouette before snow-capped peaks. He'd heard Nunn was moving to Colorado when his thirty was up. After a lifetime of busting murderers and other bad guys, he was going to spend his declining days shooting Bambis. Go figure.

  "I had an aggravated assault case that sounds like your guy The victim was a woman named Christine Hill." Nunn tapped out his cigarette and lit a fresh one.

  "I've never seen a face rearranged like that on a living victim. Her assailant was a creep named Cyrill McCarthy aka Thor."

  St. John's pulse quickened. Was it really going to be this easy?

  Ntmn stood and opened the top drawer of a ponderous gun-metal-gray filing cabinet. The sides bore dents at kicking level. He pulled out a file folder. "The date of the offense was March 3, 1981." Four years ago. "I've got a case number for you too."

  St. John wrote as Nunn dictated.

  "The case fell apart at trial. Christine Hill bugged out. Wouldn't testify. It's all in the DA's packet. Let me know if you get anything else on this guy McCarthy all but skated and it still fucks with me, you know?"

  St. John nodded. Nunn didn't need to be reminded that he had an appointment with a deer and a thirty-ought-six.

  "Go see the DA. He's got the file."

  "You know where McCarthy is now?"

  "He was in Chino for the holidays, but you'll have to check with them."

  "Bobby I owe you."

  "Yeah, I won't forget. Pacific Dining Car."

&nb
sp; St. John left the Pacific station and drove over to the West L.A. courthouse. An Assistant District Attorney named Josh Greenberg took him to find the court documents relating to the case number Nunn had given him. They were in a cardboard legal file box in storage. The file on McCarthy was an inch thick and covered with dust. Someone had made an annotation on the cover: a dot inside a circle with a small "3" in the upper right. DA code for Asshole to the Third Power. St. John sat on a bench in the hallway to read the various court transcripts, affidavits, and investigators' reports.

  After Christine Hill bugged out, the only witness willing to testify against Cyrill McCarthy was a woman named Stacy Lansford. She was painted by the public defender as one of McCarthy's disgruntled exes. This was a vast understatement according to the investigator's note. Stacy Lansford was discredited by the public defender when it was revealed that all her knowledge about the crime in question was second- and third-hand, thereby ruled as hearsay.

  Another blow to the prosecution's case came from the judge, the honorable David Helmer. Judge Helmer noticed a mistake in the prosecutor 's court filing—the date of one of McCarthy's prior offenses showed the wrong year. Judge Helmer, for whatever reasons of his own (cops and prosecutors had a theory about the dye in the robes), refused to let the DA amend the date. The result was a deal where McCarthy was allowed to plead guilty and the judge ignored his earlier convictions. McCarthy was sentenced to only three years and was out in less than two.

  After the sentencing phase, Stacy Lansford had written a letter to the court. It was in the DA's file and addressed to the judge.

  "Your Honor, sin please do not take what I have to say as a lack of respect, but you have made a terrible mistake. I met Cyrill McCarthy when I was in high school; he was older than me and seemed very experienced in the world. I was unhappy at home, so I jumped at the chance to escape. We married when I was sixteen. I didn't realize until he had taken me away from my family and friends what a terrible mistake I had made."

  She then went on to recount two years of terror during which McCarthy had made her play Russian roulette, beaten her so severely that she had to have her spleen removed, and had even gone so far as to kidnap her once from her parents' home when she tried to seek refuge.

  St. John checked the dates. McCarthy's relationship with Stacy Lansford had happened after Munch severed contact with the guy. He kept reading.

  "When I first met Mr. McCarthy he told me his previous girlfriend had set the upholstery in his car on fire. Later the story changed. He told me he burned the seats himself because the fabric had soaked up too much blood. I thought he was just trying to scare me at first, but after I got to know him better, I believed he was capable of anything."

  St. John flipped back to the beginning of the file.

  The case that was ruled to be ignored was from eleven years ago, initiated after a confidential informant reported that the Satan's Pride was stockpiling grenades at a house in Inglewood. Warrants were served. The police raided the premises at three-thirty in the morning. There had been two occupants in the house, Cyrill McCarthy and a severely battered woman. The woman was nude, handcuffed to a portable potty chair, and, as tox reports would later prove, under the influence of the barbiturate Seconal. The skin across the cheekbone of the woman's left eye was broken open, and blood matching her type was discovered on the toe of Cyrill McCarthy's steeltoed boot.

  The police searched the premises. They found several knives circa World War II, Nazi paraphernalia, small amounts of narcotics, including the amphetamines known on the street as "bennies," a half-ounce of marijuana, and three red capsules later identified as Seconal. No grenades were found.

  The officers serving the warrant had taken both McCarthy and the woman into custody. The woman refused to answer the 0fficers' questions and didn't want to press charges. When the detectives discovered that she was only seventeen, they no longer needed her help to arrest McCarthy for statutory rape. He was convicted of corrupting the morals of a minor and sentenced to eighteen months at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California. He was out in ten. The juvenile in the case was identified as Jane Ferrar.

  Bingo.

  St. John returned to the copy of Stacy Lansford's handwritten letter.

  "After the baby was born, I feared for both our lives. Thor was so disappointed that Katie was a girl and had even accused me of cheating on him, as his sperm would only produce a male child. Katie even had red hair, just like his."

  St. John sat straight in his chair. The reference to "Thor" was highlighted in yellow. The investigator had made a notation in pencil in the margin. Moniker? "Thor told me he had killed three colored guys who had some drugs he wanted (he called them "niggers" of course). It was probably sometime in 1974 or 75. He said the one guy crawled the length of the hallway with his throat cut. The noise this guy made sounded like a broken accordion and Thor said it was so funny, he wouldn't mind hearing it again.

  "There is no doubt in my mind that he was guilty of this crime and many more. I just wish I had some way to prove it."

  The last page in the file was the report of a psychologist who interviewed Cyrill McCarthy: It seems to him that his appointed task in We relative to members of the opposite sex is to extract as much pleasure from them as he possibly can, while at the same time inflicting as much pain and anguish as possible.

  He shows no remorse or inclination to alter his perverse and dangerous sexual behavior. It is quite likely to continue.

  Chapter 10

  Late that afternoon, Munch went to use the bathroom, but when she pulled on the door to get out it was stuck. "Shit!" she screamed to the ceiling. Carlos's voice came in through the transom. "Whas the matter?"

  "The frigging door is stuck again."

  "You need some help?" This time it was Lou's voice.

  "We gotta fix this door," she said.

  "Beat on the upper right corner," Carlos said. She hit it with the palm of her hand.

  "No. Higher," Lou said.

  "I can't reach any higher."

  "Maybe if you took off your shoe."

  She slid off her tennis shoe and whacked at the door.

  "Is that the hardest you can hit it?" Lou said. His voice sounded strangled. She realized why. The door opened inward. At their direction, she had jammed it farther shut.

  "You guys."

  They laughed. Energized by her embarrassment, she yanked the door open. There were tears in Lou's eyes.

  "I'm not forgetting this," she said. She returned to her jobs in progress with a laugh in her throat.

  Asia's school bus let her off at the gas station at four-fifteen. Asia spent the hour before they went home doing her homework in Lou's office. That evening, Munch heard the front door open, followed by the sounds of Nathan's and Asia's voices. She couldn't make out the conversation but was pleased that the two of them were establishing a relationship of their own.

  Nathan came in the kitchen. His jeans were dirty and he looked exhausted.

  "So how'd it go?"

  He opened the refrigerator and stood there staring at the shelves. Asia hovered beside him.

  "You said you were going to call some guy Some construction gig?"

  "Yeah, yeah. I got it." He pulled out the carton of milk and unfolded the spout.

  Munch grabbed a glass out of the cabinet over the sink and handed it to him. He poured himself a glass of milk. Asia took the carton from him and put it back into the refrigerator.

  "That's great. Good for you. " She looked at the plaster dust clinging to his face and hair. "Why don't you clean up? Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes."

  "Good, I'm hungry"

  "Asia, have you done your homework?"

  "Yes," she said, staring after Nathan.

  "Anything exciting happen at school today?"

  "Not really "

  "Who did you eat lunch with?"

  "Uh, Brittany and Alyssa."

  "What did you talk about?"

&nb
sp; "Brittany's sister is having a baby so Brittany is going to be an aunt."

  "How old is the sister?"

  "Eighteen."

  Munch wondered if the girl was married and if the birth father was sticking around.

  "Hey" Asia said, brightening at the memory "I almost forgot. We learned a new song today."

  "You did?" Munch tried to sound enthusiastic.

  Asia burst into a robust rendition of "John Henry."

  Munch had no idea there were so many refrains as her daughter belted out verse after off-key verse, complete with pantomime about the hardworking steel-driving man. Nathan came back in the room and joined in. Asia was flabbergasted.

  "How do you know the words?" she asked. "I just learned that song."

  "It's been around awhile," Munch said, hiding a smile. "But I know how you feel." When she first got sober, learning to live in the straight world had felt like a continual game of catch-up. She was three years sober before she first heard about health insurance. She still remembered her pleased surprise that such a good idea already existed.

  She handed Nathan forks, napkins, and three place mats. He stared at them as if they were pieces of a Rubik's cube.

  "You're supposed to set the table," Asia said.

  "I'm not sure how," Nathan said.

  "Oh, I'll show you," Asia said with a sigh that sounded forty years old.

  Nathan winked at Munch before following Asia to the table and watching her fold the napkins, then set the forks on top of them.

  Munch stirred the spaghetti sauce and checked the pasta by pressing a noodle against the side of the pot with a wooden spoon. It cut easily so she turned off the burner and sent Asia to wash her hands, leaving her and Nathan alone in the kitchen.

  "She looks like him," he said.

  The observation surprised her. "You remember Sleaze?" She drained the pasta and added it to the sauce.

  "Yeah, he was an asshole."