“So the Eastern Star whatever,” Colin said as he pulled away from the curb. “Was that a lie?”
“My friend Lena’s grandmother was the grandmother I never had.” I tossed him a smile. “Like my dorm-room Malcolm X poster said, ‘By any means necessary.’”
The traffic on La Brea Avenue was a delight. Cars jammed the streets—most of them filled with drunken revelers, male and female, standing in the sunroofs of their cars. A few of Inglewood’s Finest had pulled over the worst offenders, but there were so many sinners—the cops’ efforts were equivalent to putting out a forest fire with a baby’s bottle filled with milk. Bass boomed from car stereos as some so-called rapper muttered on top of the beat, “The hat, walk with it, walk with it, The hat, get low…” Somewhere in New York, KRS-One and Chuck D were sobbing into their Fuzzy Navels and Cool Ranch Doritos.
As we got closer to Metro, more people—young women wearing booty shorts and cheap stilettos, and their male counterparts, sporting baggy shirts of color (couldn’t wear white T-shirts to clubs), flooded the streets and sidewalks. A few members of a bike club revved their custom-made Harleys at the curb.
“Oh, goody,” I said. “An FFA convention.”
Colin snorted. “Future Felons of America? How much you wanna bet that a few of these cats are current members—”
A gray BMW 630i with black rims shot from Market Street and swerved north onto La Brea Avenue .
“That our boy?” Colin asked, speeding up to get a better view of the rear license plate.
I ran the sequence through the computer. “That’s his car. Don’t know if that’s him behind the wheel, though.” The Bimmer’s windows were blacked out. Not only could I not determine if Todd was driving, I couldn’t tell whether there were other people in the car.
“This could be bad,” Colin said.
“Shit.” I grabbed the radio and requested backup just in case somebody was feeling large like Ferrigno.
At Manchester Boulevard the BMW picked up speed and shot through the red light.
I said, “Shit,” again.
Colin turned to me. “Well?”
I rubbed my forehead. “Damn it. Didn’t feel like having an adventure tonight.”
Colin said, “Oh well,” then hit the siren and floored it. Off we went, also blasting through the red light, almost clipping an Altima that wouldn’t move the hell out of the way.
The Bimmer was now traveling at least sixty miles per hour in a thirty-five.
“We don’t want him going down the hill,” I said.
La Brea Avenue northbound cut between Baldwin Hills and Kenneth Hahn park. It was a twisty son-of-a-gun, one of those Autobahn stretches of road where a car could get away from you, flip, bang, and kill you dead.
Colin sped up. “Thinks he knows we want him to stop?”
The Bimmer cut a quick right into a gas station but didn’t stop. It then sped out of the station, cracked a nearby bus stop bench, made a left, and roared west on Slauson Avenue.
“I think he knows,” I said.
Two patrol cars, sirens blasting, lights swirling like crazy, joined the chase.
My heart pounded—I rarely participated in car pursuits now, and I wondered how this one would end. I thanked God that I wore Kevlar today, and for the first time in a long time was grateful for the vest’s pinching at my hip—it was very possible that whoever sat behind that steering wheel wanted to die by cop tonight.
The BMW swerved into the parking lot shared by a McDonald’s and a Home Depot.
A second later, Colin also jammed into the lot.
The BMW screeched to a stop near the store’s entrance.
Colin and I hopped out of the Crown Vic, guns drawn and trained on the Bimmer’s driver’s-side door.
The officers in the two patrol cars—two Hispanics, two blacks, none of them acquaintances of mine since they worked graveyard—also had their weapons drawn.
“Get out of the car!” Colin yelled. “Get out of the car now!”
Nothing.
Sweat rolled down my temples and my back. Please God, let this be quick and bloodless. I grabbed the car’s PA system microphone and said, “Open the door. Step out of the car. Hands out so that I can see them. Do it now!”
Nothing happened.
I repeated my order.
A moment later, the driver’s-side door swung open and the noise of T-Pain’s autotuned crap rode out on acrid smoke.
I smelled it from where I stood. “He hot-boxin’ in there?”
“Yep,” Colin said. “I’m gettin’ a contact way back here.”
A long leg clad in denim left the car and a $200 Air Jordan landed on the asphalt. A long arm, the wrist shiny with a Rolex and a thick gold bracelet, hung in the air. The rest of Todd Wisely followed. He slowly placed his large hands on the top of his baseball cap–covered head.
“Anybody else in the car?” I asked over the mike.
“No,” Todd Wisely shouted.
Officer Two crept toward the passenger-side window. With one quick move, he opened the door and pointed his revolver into the darkness. “Clear,” he shouted.
Todd Wisely snickered. “Y’all fucked with the wrong—”
Officer Number Three did the honors—he spun the big baller around, wrangled one large hand and then the other behind his back.
And T-Pain said, “Yeah, god damn, you think you’re cool, you think I’m not—you think you tough…”
Saturday, June 22
45
I gaped at the handcuffed ballplayer seated across from me. Not because he was a wonder to behold. No, unfortunately. Beneath the fancy clothes and diamond stud earring, Todd Wisely was an average-looking kid with skin the color of a Hershey’s kiss, lips darkened from smoking shit on his downtime, and high cheekbones courtesy of some Native American great-great-grand-something. His eyes were rheumy, the whites the color of rhubarb. He had that combative tilt to his chin, that swagger anyone could master if he watched Season One of The Wire. Height—six-foot-six—was the only gee-whiz thing about Todd Wisely.
But if anyone owned a Gucci belt, it would have been this kid. And until today, my handcuffs had never brushed against a genuine Rolex.
“You’re telling me…” Awed, I shook my head. “You ran from us cuz you was ridin’ dirty?”
“Yup.” He crossed his long legs, then uncrossed them.
“Not cuz you killed Monie.”
“Yup.” He was staring at something behind me, maybe a rainbow or perhaps a unicorn.
I turned in my chair—hell, I had waited all of my life to see a unicorn. But there was nothing behind me except a dirty wall. Facing him again, I said, “Why can’t you look me in the eye, Todd?”
He folded his arms and intentionally held my gaze. “I’m lookin’.”
“You’re displaying defensive behavior,” I said. “What do you have to be defensive about? This ain’t a TV show and you ain’t Stringer Bell, so stop with the bad-ass-thug routine. You’re from Carson, son.”
No response, and so we sat there in silence. Forty seconds later, he said, “Ma’am, I didn’t kill Monie. I was in Vegas on Tuesday night.”
“You got proof?”
He smirked. “My word is bond.”
“Your word is turd. Show me a receipt or stop with that noise.”
“I don’t have a receipt on me,” he said. “Let me go home and I’ll find you one.”
I waved my hand. “Let’s move on to tonight’s never-ending game of Pole Position.”
“You didn’t have to chase me.”
“You didn’t have to run. We just wanted to talk to you and now look.” I ticked off fingers: “Vandalism, reckless driving, failure to stop … You fucked up, my friend.”
“Whatever. I didn’t kill Monie.”
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Come on, Todd.”
He shook his head. “We weren’t
a couple. I didn’t call and check in with her like she was my girl, cuz she wasn’t.”
“Fine. Where were you late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning?”
“Like I said: I was in Vegas at the craps table in the Venetian.”
I sighed. “So if you were in Vegas and didn’t kill Monique Darson, why did you run from us tonight?”
He glared at me. “Already told you.” His high was quickly fading and he was becoming prickly. “Why you keep asking me that?”
“Because,” I shouted, standing up, “you don’t seem to be pissed off enough with what I’m accusing you of.”
“I don’t?”
“If someone accused me of murder, well, I’d be shouting and banging my fists against the walls, acting like a crazy woman cuz I. Didn’t. Do. It.” I held out my arms and shook my head. “But you … You’re sittin’ here in the cut, like I just accused you of nibbling too many grapes in the produce section.”
He grunted and slumped in his chair.
“Probably cuz you’re high, right?”
His mouth twisted into something that should’ve been a sneer but was too lazy to be that aggressive. “Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”
I sat back in my chair. “Monique was a cute thing. A flirt, I hear. She liked big ballers—you’re a big baller, aren’t you? Does Gabriella know that you had sex with a seventeen-year-old girl?”
“That’s my private business.”
I pulled Monique’s autopsy photo from the expandable file and slapped the picture on the table before him.
Todd pushed the photo away without looking at it.
I moved the picture back. “You killed her, didn’t you?”
This time he sat up and boomed, “Why? Cuz I fucked her? And? So?”
I laughed. “And the age of consent in this beautiful state of ours is eighteen. So you can go to jail. Even big ballers like you. Hate to pull you from the Matrix, Todd, but you’re not the special snowflake your mom has told you that you are. That UCLA has told you that you are.”
“Then I’m mistaken,” he said with a smile. “I didn’t have sex with her. We just held hands.”
“Does your mother, the Worthy Matron of her chapter of Eastern Star … Does she know that you, her precious boy, committed statutory rape?”
“I didn’t rape her,” he said, his eyes hot.
“The law says you did,” I retorted. “Consent or not.”
His eyes shimmered with angry tears.
“Tell me the truth, Todd, or else—”
“Or else you’re gonna beat it out of me?” He threw me a sullen glare. “That’s what the LAPD do, right? Serve, protect, break a nigga’s neck?”
I poked out my bottom lip and touched my heart. “That really hurts, Todd. I’ve never, not ever, taken a flashlight to somebody’s head.” I paused, then added, “But never say never, right? We all fall short of the glory of God.” I leaned forward, almost knee to knee with him now. If he wanted, he could land one square punch to my face. POW! Right in the kisser. And then, it would be on like Donkey Kong, as we used to say back in the old days. “There’s DNA on Monique’s body, Todd. Will that semen belong to you?”
He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “I didn’t do it. I was in Vegas.”
“Vegas again?” I groaned and rubbed my temples. “When I called you yesterday afternoon, you told me that you had been at Bruin Woods. I called your coach and he told me that you had been at Bruin Woods.”
In a small voice, Todd said, “He was mistaken.”
“Not mistaken. He lied. And you lied. So which story do you wanna go with, cuz frankly, I’m bored with this now. The mountains or the desert?”
He didn’t speak and a tear rolled down his cheeks.
I leaned forward, knee to knee again. “C’mon, dude. It’s two in the morning. You got shit to do. I got shit to do. So let’s end this, all right? A witness placed you at the scene on the night Monique was killed.”
He shook his head. “Then your witness must be a crackhead cuz I wasn’t with Monie on Tuesday night.”
I resisted laughing since my witness was indeed a crackhead. Instead, I said, “There’s DNA on—”
“I want my lawyer,” he said, eyes on the table.
Well, damn. That shut me up and slapped the grin off my face. “So it’s like that?” I asked.
He smiled. “Boom.”
* * *
A digital photograph with world champion boxer Floyd Mayweather taken on June 18 at 11:38 P.M.
A bank statement showing an ATM withdrawal of $300 on June 18 at 9:55 P.M. at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Surveillance camera footage at that ATM in the Venetian.
These three items had been spread before me on the table in interview room 1 by prominent Los Angeles defense attorney Jeremy Lowenstein. “Sports Stars in Trouble” was his specialty—just as Colin had figured. His slicked-back brown hair and blue pin-striped suit had been the second- and third-fanciest things this room had ever seen, with Todd being the first. And Lowenstein smelled good, like butter and warm sugar. I thought of having him stand on my desk for the rest of the day, like a human air freshener, but he already had a job—the Fixer. And he had done it well.
The attorney tapped the bank statement. “I think this proves it, Detective Norton. Mr. Wisely is innocent of murder. As you can see, he wasn’t even in California when Monique Darson was killed.”
“Why did he lie to me?” I asked.
“Why does it matter?” Lowenstein said.
“The other charges—”
The defense attorney waved his hand. “No problem. I’ll have those dropped by the time morning rush hour ends. I don’t know who your witness saw, but it certainly wasn’t my client.”
My stomach burned—the beginnings of an ulcer my doctor had warned me about two months ago. I tried now to block the pain with positive thoughts—it doesn’t hurt, that’s just gas—but staring at Lowenstein’s evidence only made the burning worse.
The sun was coming up somewhere beyond the walls of interview room 1, and I had been awake for twenty-four hours. In that time, I had found a dead girl in the trunk of a Ford Taurus, had led a car chase down La Brea Avenue, and had lost $30 to a heroin addict who had fingered the wrong tall black man driving a BMW who was no longer a suspect, whose attorney had threatened me with a wrongful arrest suit even though his client had fled from the police, vandalized city property, and had enough OG Kush flowing through his veins to put a family of zombies to sleep.
Damn. I needed a drink. A mimosa or three. It was almost time for breakfast.
46
So Todd Wisely walked. He spent two hours in the bucket and now had a fish story to tell. Technically, he had to post bail and still answer for the lesser charges. As a homicide detective, though, I couldn’t care less about those offenses.
The squad room was noisy with third-shift dicks and their shifty-eyed witnesses. Colin had left a sticky on my computer monitor. Catching a nap in the cot room. I plopped into my chair, arms heavy, muscles sore. I leaned back and closed my eyes as the clatter of doors opening and closing, the whimpers of crying relatives and the rhythmic clack of nightsticks rubbing against Sam Browne belts, melted into its own kind of silence.
A knock on my desk pulled me from that place called Sleep.
Lieutenant Rodriguez stood over me. “In my office. Now.”
I glanced at my desk clock: almost seven in the morning.
By this time Pepe, Luke, and Joey had arrived and had been joking by the coffeepot, telling some story about a shopping cart, a peg-legged goat, and a transvestite hooker. As I left my desk, they stood in silence—the favored child was about to be torn a new one. That didn’t bode well for anyone this morning.
Lieutenant Rodriguez was seated behind his desk. “Close the door.”
I did as he asked, then stood before him like a sixth-grade troublemaker.
He said nothing as he stared at me—over the last fi
fteen years, a vampire named Los Angles had sucked almost all of his life away, leaving his eyelashes as gray as his eyes.
I waited and forced indifference into my expression.
Finally, he said, “What the hell was that?”
“What the hell was what?”
“You collared one of the best players in the NCAA on a hunch?”
I squinted at him. “I shoulda let him run away cuz he shot 223 points in a game once upon a time? Are you kidding me?”
“I expected better—”
“You’re acting like I randomly rolled up on a Boy Scout.”
“PC?” he asked.
I gawked at him, then said, “You want probable cause? Fine: he was speeding away from me, and that may have been an indication of guilt, running away because he murdered my victim.”
He shrugged. “That’s it?”
“Since when do I need more?” I asked, hands on my hips. “And when we drove out to Carson, it wasn’t my intent to arrest him.”
“Oh, really?” he said, as he rearranged the picture frame of his twin girls with the Matt Kemp Dodgers bobblehead. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
“Did I come to you and ask that you sign an arrest warrant for one Todd Wisely? No. Because I only wanted to talk to him since a witness placed him at the scene. Talk, just like I’ve done with—”
“You trusted a known heroin addict—”
“Mary Ford,” I said, holding up a finger, and then, two more fingers. “Calvin Hasan, Guillermo Acosta.”
“Yeah? What about them?”
“Two alcoholics and a hooker,” I said, “who all witnessed murders, who told me what I needed to know, who helped get three killers off the streets of Los Angeles.”
Lieutenant Rodriguez exhaled, then rubbed his eyes.
“First, you tell me to use kid gloves with Napoleon Crase,” I said. “And now, you want me to baby Todd Wisely. Are there any rich people I can piss off? Treat like I treat the gangbangers and the crackheads?”
“That lawyer Lowenstein is an asshole who will—”
“I don’t care about Lowenstein and his agenda.” I glared at the wall and at a picture of Lieutenant Rodriguez shaking hands with Tommy Lasorda.
Land of Shadows Page 24
