by Baxter Clare
1
One of Crocetti’s techs was working the corpse while Noah and Briggs scavenged the area around the body. The streetlight was shot out so they searched by flashlight and neon glare. So far they had two shell casings from a .22 and a bloodied tooth.
“You know, I’ve almost got enough teeth to make a necklace.” Johnnie Briggs made an imaginary half-circle under his collarbone. “Or maybe I should mount ‘em and turn ‘em into earrings. Sell ‘em to all the tourists who want a genuine souvenir from L.A.”
“You’d get richer doing that than this,” rejoined his partner, digging another slug out of the window sash. The owner of the liquor store paced outside, scowling at the body and muttering darkly in Korean.
The tech laughed up at him, removing the dead man’s clothes. “Welcome to the American Dream, my friend.”
The Korean man said something else in his language and spat into the gutter.
Holding a driver’s license under a Budweiser sign glowing behind iron bars, Lieutenant L.A. Franco read the victim’s pedigree to the prowling detectives. “Charles Mackay. 5319 West 53rd. DOB 11/19/79.”
The tech turned the body, and a small round hole at the base of Mackay’s head leaked blood. So did another hole just under his left shoulder blade. As he watched this, the store owner explained that he’d heard Mackay being shot, saw him get hit, but that from his cash register he couldn’t see the shooter. The lieutenant stretched a long, trousered leg over the body and walked behind the counter. She looked out the window and clearly saw Noah talking to the slight man. But Frank was almost 5‘10”. She bent her knees a few inches and her vision was obstructed by a promo sign for Miller Genuine Draft. Their old jingle ran through her head as she recognized that the owner wasn’t lying.
He stood outside, glancing nervously through the window, trying to see what Frank was up to. She smiled to herself and peeked at the cluttered shelf under the cash register. There it was. A long-barreled .357. She knew he wouldn’t have a permit for it, but that wasn’t her quarrel tonight.
He was obviously relieved when she walked out the door. The tech was loading the young black male onto a metal gurney and Johnnie was talking to a skinny woman he’d ferreted out of the adjoining alleyway.
If anyone can find a pross, it’ll be Johnnie, Frank thought, though in all fairness, hookers on Florence Avenue were as common as cracks in the sidewalk. Frank eased under the police tape toward Johnnie and the girl. If she wasn’t so strung out she’d almost be pretty. Frank folded her arms and leaned back against the crumbling brick wall of the alley, gleaming loafers casually crossed at the ankle.
The pross eyed Frank nervously and asked Johnnie, “Who dat bitch?”
“That bitch is my boss,” he confided. “And she doesn’t like being dragged out of bed at 3:00 a.m. Makes her kinda grumpy.”
Frank let her eyes drift over the skinny young woman. She was bare bones, literally and figuratively, dressed only in a skimpy skirt and blouse against the chill night. It wouldn’t be long before she was being wheeled off on a metal gurney, too. Frank ended her perusal at the woman’s face, holding the hooker’s jumpy eyes with an iron gaze. The girl shivered, wrapping herself even tighter.
“So whatcha doing here all alone in the middle of the night, Angela? This ain’t no good place to be hangin’,” Johnnie warned, his voice oozing concern. “You lookin’ to score maybe? Huh?”
The prostitute’s eyes danced back and forth between the big white dude, hunched over her, smiling, and his creepy boss. Angela squirmed under Frank’s pitiless scrutiny, her nerves on fire, her muscles twitching. She giggled tensely.
“Yeah, okay. That what I be doin’,” she admitted to Johnnie, nodding her head vigorously.
“Yeah, I don’t blame you,” Johnnie sympathized. “I’d be out lookin’ too if I had to. Now tell me what you saw here, Angela.”
“I din’t see nothin’,” she insisted.
“For real? See, that don’t make much sense to me, ‘cause if I wanted to be scoring I wouldn’t be hidin’ in a goddamn alley. I’d be out cruisin’, hustlin’. You know what I mean?”
She nodded her whole torso up and down, hugging herself.
“And that little guy over there? He says you’re hangin’ around the store all the time. Now the way I see it you’d be out cruisin” near the store, waiting for guys to walk in an’ maybe lay a little green on you ‘fore they drop it in the store. Am I right?”
“Yeah, you right,” she agreed, then realizing her mistake she started shaking her head back and forth. “But I din’t see nothin’.”
Shoving off the wall, Frank spoke almost absently. “I don’t have time for this. Bring her in for loitering with intent.”
As Frank moved out of the alley the crackhead shouted, “Hey, you can’t do that! I ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
Frank spun quickly and took two strides toward Angela, who involuntarily stepped backward.
“Whoa,” Johnnie said as he placed himself between the two women. “I’ll get her, Frank,” he said over his shoulder, then to Angela he whispered, “See? Now I gotta take you in. It’ll be hours before you can score.”
Frank stayed where she was, glaring at Angela, who wailed, “I don’t want no trouble.”
Johnnie draped his beefy wrists on her shoulders and drawled, “I know, darlin’. Just tell me what you saw and then I can let you go.”
“Fo’ real? You gonna lemme go?”
“For real.”
“On’y thing I seen was a tall dude come outta nowhere, come ‘roun’ the corner. I sees him liftin’ his arm at Smack-Mac and I run down here.”
Angela swallowed hard as Frank turned away. Johnnie took out his notepad and started writing. Angela Barry was suddenly very cooperative. Frank had that effect on people.
Two hours later Frank watched the dawn sky transform itself from gray murk to a pale, delicate blue. Johnnie was driving back to the station house. Noah leaned over the front seat and said to Frank, “You know, if there really was such a charge as ‘loitering with intent,’ we’d have to run Johnnie up on it.”
“Yeah,” Briggs agreed. “Loitering with intent to get laid.”
“Nah. Loitering with intent to work.” Noah guffawed at his own joke, and Johnnie said, “Yeah, yeah. I can do more work in one day than you can in a month.”
“That’s true,” Noah conceded, “you can. But you never do.”
The RTO interrupted the boys’ banter. She was radioing a patrol car about a possible 187 on 8th and 52nd.
“That’d be Ike and Diego’s,” Noah said merrily. “Geez Louise. Not even seven o’clock and we’ve already got a doubleheader.”
Frank didn’t share Noah’s enthusiasm. “Let’s go look,” she said tiredly.
Spying the Winchell’s Donuts on the corner Johnnie said, “I gotta get some coffee first.”
They followed the dispatcher’s address to Crenshaw High School and found two squad cars working the area. One of the patrolmen was stretching tape around the scene, while another stared uselessly at the body. Two other cops were talking to a clump of onlookers.
The detectives carried their coffee to the edge of the tape.
“Haystack!” Johnnie greeted the old cop pulling the tape, then motioned to the cop hovering over the body.
“What’s with the zombie?” he asked, shoving the last bite of a Bavarian Creme into his mouth.
Tying off the final knot, Officer Heisdaeck straightened and pushed his hands into the small of his back. He ambled over to Johnnie.
“Well, if it ain’t the Happy Clapper,” he grinned, euphemistically referring to the detective’s legendary propensity for women as well as his frequent, nonchalant bouts with various STDs. Glancing over at the rookie, he explaine
d, “Second day on the job.”
Johnnie grinned happily. He loved rookies.
Frank looked toward the body. “What do you know about her?”
“See that lady over there? The one in the brown dress?” Heisdaeck squinted dramatically and pointed to a bent, gray-haired woman who was talking to a female officer. “She found it.”
“It?” Noah frowned, shooting the officer daggers.
“She was walking down to Price’s Market,” Heisdaeck continued, tossing his head in the direction of the grocery store on Crenshaw—
Noah interrupted, “They don’t open until seven.”
Heisdaeck pasted Noah with an exasperated glare, as if he hadn’t been working the nine-three since this putz was still a wad stuck up his daddy’s Johnson. He sighed with infinite condescension and said, “You watch her walk, kid. If we let her go right now she might make it there by eight o’clock.”
Noah rolled his eyes and went to talk to the old lady himself.
“Punk’s got no idea what it’s like to get old,” he complained to Johnnie. Briggs was only a few years older than Noah, but he nodded sympathetically.
“So the old lady found her, then what?” Frank prompted.
“Then she goes across the street—she’s been livin’ here all her life, knows everyone in the ‘hood—and knocks on the green house over there.”
He indicated a fading bungalow across the street, framed in orange and red bougainvillea. It needed some paint, but like the little houses next to it, the bungalow was tidy and squarely framed by a trim green lawn.
“Her friend lives there.” Heisdaeck was pointing to the crowd again. “The lady in the pink bathrobe. The old lady tells her there’s a white girl laying out there and her friend invites her in for a cup of tea and calls the cops. I’ll betcha the tea came first,” Heisdaeck grumbled.
Frank ducked under the tape, leaving the two men bullshitting, or “networking” as Johnnie likened his endless hours of griping and bragging.
“What do you have?” she said, strolling up to the pale rookie who was struggling to keep his breakfast in his belly. Frank didn’t expect to learn anything from her question. She’d asked it to get the rookie focused, moving around, looking for clues. Though she doubted she’d get any of those from him either. This already looked like a dump job.
“Ma’am?”
“I want you to go to that unmarked over there. Find the bag in the back seat and take it to that detective talking to Heisdaeck.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Frank sipped from her styrofoam cup, kneeling before the body. Dump jobs were the worst. The killing was done one place, the body dumped in another. Then she saw the KTLA news van rolling down the street. She watched Johnnie offering the rookie a donut from the bag he held open under the kid’s nose. The kid groaned and finally set his breakfast free. Johnnie neatly stepped aside, shooting Frank a thumbs-up. Frank nodded, pointing to the woman exiting the news van. Johnnie returned the nod and went to intercept her.
Frank cringed as she turned back to the Jane Doe and heard Johnnie holler, “Hey, good-lookin’! Out slumming this morning?”
Momentarily free of distractions, Frank scanned the body. The victim appeared to be in her midteens, probably Caucasian. Livid bruises covered almost her entire body. There was no obvious cause of death, but blood crusted around her rectal area suggested a possible internal trauma.
Two facts immediately bothered Frank: the lack of clothing and the dump site. That the girl was completely naked indicated somebody had taken the time to undress her, either before or after she was killed. Second, there were plenty of better spots to leave the body. Even in a panic their perp probably wasn’t dumb enough to just open his car door as he was driving by the high school and push her out. That he chose to dump her in an area where she’d be quickly found, and where he could easily have been detected, indicated further deliberation on his part.
Within half an hour two more detectives from Frank’s 93rd squad showed up, Ike Zabbo and Lou Diego. Wide and blocky, Ike looked like a gangster in his flashy three-piece suit, diamond pinkie rings glinting in the new sun. His partner was a thin, wiry Hispanic man everyone called Taquito. Frank briefed them on what Briggs and Noah had culled so far, which took all of five minutes.
The coroner’s tech pulled up soon after. He was still in the area from the Mackay pickup, so the detectives were ready to bag the body in a few hours. That was the only good thing about this case so far. Instead of decreasing as the scene processing dragged on, the number of news vans ominously increased. Frank had called in the crime scene unit. Although they’d bitched her out, telling her it was obvious to a five-year old with a blindfold on that there wasn’t any evidence at the scene, sixteen years with the LAPD had taught Frank to always plan ahead. She could already see brass written all over this case, and Frank was carefully covering her ass.
“Ready for the shit storm?”
Noah grinned at her, rubbing his hands together with glee.
Frank surveyed the fleet of news crews behind a second line of police tape, then scouted the crowd for any brass that might have shown up. Nine times out of ten they barged onto the scene fresh from a good night’s sleep and power breakfasts, only to contradict everything she’d said.
“No Fubar yet,” Noah said, almost reading her mind, also looking around for Captain Foubarelle. The SID techs had left already, disgusted with Frank, and as she headed toward the hungry cameras she told Noah to take the tape down after the news vans left.
Paul Massey from the Times was the first reporter in her face. He was tall, balding, openly queer. Over the last year she’d watched him thin and lose color. Makeup didn’t conceal the bruises and blotches that erupted on his skin. Pain in the ass that he was, there was no pleasure in watching the man slowly die from AIDS.
“Do you know who the girl is?” he asked. “How old is she?”
“We don’t know who the victim is. She appears to be in her midteens, but we won’t know until we have a positive ID.”
“What was the cause of death?”
That was Sally Eisley, from KTLA. Loud, obnoxious, in your face, absolutely without scruples. Absolutely knockdown gorgeous.
“We don’t know yet. The—”
“Oh come on, Lieutenant! You must have some idea.”
Lieutenant Franco twitched her lips in a semblance of a smile but her eyes remained cool, locked onto Sally’s.
“I have plenty of ideas,” she admitted, “but no facts. When I know the facts—”
“You’ll know the facts,” Sally finished in a frustrated singsong.
An Asian woman Frank didn’t recognize said, “Lieutenant, you’ve been here for over three hours. Do you have any indication who might have done this?”
“We do not.”
“She looked pretty battered. Do you think it was a hate crime? Racially motivated?” asked Tom Blake from the LA. Weekly.
Frank slid around the battery comment. “At this time we have no motive.”
“Doesn’t it seem obvious that a white girl killed in a black neighborhood might involve a racial motivation?”
“That is not at all obvious.” Frank didn’t add that the girl was dumped there but not necessarily killed in the neighborhood.
“But it could be,” Blake persisted.
Frank reiterated, “We have no reason to suspect that at this point.”
They both knew it could be a race crime, but admission would come across as confirmation that it was a race crime. Frank wouldn’t take the weak bait, and Blake shared Sally Eisley’s frustration.
Above the din of questions Frank could hear a siren wailing toward them. That could only mean Foubarelle or some other brass-hat was on the way.
“Sorry. That’s really all we have right now. We’ll let you know as soon as we learn more.”
Frank spun on her heel, motioning Johnnie and Noah toward the unmarked. Sally Eisley and her cameraman tried to block her path.
“How do you think she was killed, Lieutenant? Just between you and me?” Sally spoke in the confidential tone of a co-conspirator. She was new to the station, but aggressive and a real go-getter. Frank doubted she’d be on the morning crew for long. Frank offered another neutral comment and tried to move around Sally, but again the reporter dodged in front of her.
“Off the record, Lieutenant. I swear.”
The tic of a smile Frank had given Sally earlier was a little wider this time and lasted a second longer. It almost reached her eyes.
“Promise?” Frank asked, and Sally agreed eagerly. The lieutenant lowered her head toward Sally and glanced around as she opened the car door. Then she bent closer to the perfectly coifed hair framing Sally Eisley’s perfectly gorgeous little ear. Frank’s lips moved against the starched blonde strands.
As Captains Foubarelle and Bedford stepped self-importantly from their car, Frank slipped into hers. Johnnie steered them quickly into the light traffic and Noah leaned over the seat.
“Hey. What’d you say to Sally?”
Frank was mulling over the peculiarities of the case and she answered laconically.
“Told her she’d stepped in dog shit.”
Johnnie chuckled. Twice already, Frank had made his day.
2
The way he stormed into her office, Frank knew that if she had balls, Fubar would be busting them. Almost shouting, he demanded, “Why didn’t you wait for us at the high school this morning?” Frank sighed and tipped her chair back, steepling two fingers against her lips. “What the hell was going on out there?” The captain wasn’t a bad guy, just incompetent, and Franco resented incompetency. In her line of work it could get people killed. She’d admit he’d only been captain for six months, but she was sure if his learning curve was graphed it would show up as a horizontal line.
In a monotone Frank explained, “We’d been on that case for hours. Before that we were at another scene for three hours. The good citizens of L.A. pay us for an eight-hour day, John. We were already into the seventh hour of our day, with no paper generated on either case. We could have wasted more time standing around like idiots for the cameras, or we could have come back here to do some work.”
