Kind of Blue

by Miles Corwin

  When I walked to work on Monday, it was warm and clear, a late May morning with a warm breeze from the east and a hint of summer in the air. I could smell the oil stains on the street baking in the sun.

  As I entered the squad room door, Ortiz, who liked to parrot the stock Hollywood detective clichés, called out, “Who’s the perp? Is an arrest imminent?”

  I ignored him, and as I sat down at my desk, my phone rang.

  “Detective Levine, it’s Walt Jenkins from SID serology.”

  “What do you have for me?”

  “We got a hit,” Jenkins said.

  “Don’t leave me hanging.”

  “The DNA results just came back. You got the hit on the Kleenex.”

  “From the bathroom wastebasket?”

  “Yeah. The snot gave us the sample. We got a match in the database. His name is Terrell Fuqua.”

  CHAPTER 15

  I hung up the phone, clenched my fist, and said to myself, “Yes!”

  Duffy walked by and I called out, “We got a cold hit!”

  “On Relovich?”

  “Yeah.”

  Duffy clapped his hands once. Then he walked over to my desk and said, “You’re a marvel, Ash my lad. I never had a doubt you’d put this one together. I just didn’t think you’d do it so quickly.” He pulled up a chair in front me. “What’d you get the hit on?”

  “The Kleenex.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Not really. Next to blood, mucus has about the highest concentration of DNA.”

  Ortiz, who overheard the exchange, called out, “The Case of the Golden Booger.”

  “Who’s your guy?” Duffy asked.

  “Terrell Fuqua.”

  “Sounds like an interior decorator from West Hollywood,” Ortiz said.

  Duffy waved him off. “What do we know about Fuqua?”

  “At this point, nothing,” I said.

  “Let’s jack his ass up by the end of the day and we can make the five o’clock news.”

  “I’ve got to track him down first.”

  I slid my chair over to a computer and called up the system we called Cheers because of its acronym—CCHRS (Consolidated Criminal History Reporting System). I printed out Fuqua’s rap sheet—listing all his arrests in Los Angeles County—which was an impressive nine pages. Next, I clicked onto the CII—the Criminal Index Information—which detailed Fuqua’s convictions and prison sentences. Then I checked CAL/GANG, a state-wide computerized gang file for law enforcement agencies to determine Fuqua’s street name—C-Dawg—and the set he ran with—the Back Hood Bloods.

  After about twenty minutes, I had compiled a fairly comprehensive criminal biography for my suspect. Terrell Fuqua was a thirty-four-year-old ex-con who was one of the founding members of his South Central gang. He had been arrested numerous times by Southeast Division cops for narcotic sales, car theft, burglary, rape, selling stolen property, but he beat most of the charges because it appeared that witnesses had been intimidated into backing down, or his gang associates were willing to take the rap for him. He had been convicted of only two felonies: once for attempted burglary and once for robbery when he stuck up a liquor store and made off with $900.

  During the attempted burglary, patrol officers had caught him trying to climb inside a window after a neighbor called 911. He spent a year in county jail.

  And there was no way for him to wriggle out of the robbery because a detective recovered from Fuqua’s house a bottle of Tequila and a carton of cigarettes stolen from the liquor store, as well as a ski mask used during the heist. He spent five years at Folsom.

  I called R & I—the Records and Identification Unit—and asked for all of Fuqua’s arrest reports. After I took the elevator down to the first floor and picked up the files, I started reading the copies while walking back to the elevator, bumping into a commander, who flashed me a withering look. For the next hour I perused the files and gleaned several facts that quickened my pulse: Fuqua had once been arrested on a South Central street corner carrying a .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol—the same type of gun that killed Relovich. And Fuqua’s robbery arrest five years ago was even more interesting. The liquor store was in San Pedro, which established his familiarity with Relovich’s neighborhood. And the detective on the Harbor Division robbery table who put together the case against Fuqua was—Pete Relovich.

  This confirmed what I had believed all along: Relovich knew his killer. Although it seemed unlikely that Relovich would let a dirtbag like Fuqua into his house, maybe there was an explanation. I just couldn’t fathom what it was.

  Fuqua had an obvious motive—revenge—because although he had an extensive criminal history, Relovich had been the only detective to put together a good enough case to send him to state prison. But I knew that sometimes an obvious motive was a red herring.

  I called a state parole office in Sacramento and picked up the name and phone number of Fuqua’s parole officer. He provided me with his charge’s South Central address. I then contacted the Southeast Division captain and arranged for two uniforms to back me up when I jammed Fuqua. I headed down the Harbor Freeway, with Duffy in the front seat and Ortiz—whose partner just left for vacation—in back. We pulled off at Florence and met the two patrol officers in the station’s roll call room. I showed them a booking photo of Fuqua. Duffy worked out the logistics, telling the uniforms to storm the front door, while Ortiz and I guarded the back. Duffy said he would monitor the bust from the sidewalk.

  We drove out of the station lot and parked a half block from Fuqua’s house. Ortiz and I slipped on our Kevlar vests and blue LAPD wind-breakers and followed the officers. The street was barren, without a single tree or bush, lined with slum apartments and ramshackle bungalows with splintered porches. Sandwiched between a front house, which was encircled by a dry patchy lawn, and an alley, Fuqua lived in small gray guest cottage with two stained mattresses stacked against the side.

  While the uniformed officers pounded on the door, I kept my hand over my .45. In the distance, I could hear an out of sync rooster crowing. The officers continued to knock, but no one came to the door. I peeked in a back window. The apartment was vacant. Ortiz and I circled around to the sidewalk. I thanked the officers, who had missed lunch and were glad to leave, and motioned to Duffy. We walked to the house in front and rang the doorbell.

  An elderly black man wearing faded denim overalls opened the door. He looked us up and down and glared with an expression of contempt. “Yeah?”

  “We’re LAPD detectives and we’re looking for a former tenant of yours, Terrell Fuqua,” I said.

  “Do you have a warrant for this house?”

  “No.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then I ain’t talking to no damn detective.” He slammed the door.

  I rang the doorbell again.

  The man angrily swung open the door. “What part of no don’t you understand, Mr. LAPD,” he said, spitting out the letters.

  “I assume you rent that back house out,” I said.

  The man stared at me without expression.

  “My guess is that it’s not up to code. I’m sure if I notified city building and safety, an inspector could find a dozen violations and shut that rental down. It may be years before you could get a tenant in there again.”

  The man slumped his shoulders and wearily opened the door. While Ortiz, Duffy, and I squeezed onto a sofa, the man carried a wooden chair from the kitchen and sat down across from us. “What you want to know?”

  I showed him Fuqua’s booking photo. “Do you know this man?”

  “Yeah. That Terrell. He lived out back.”

  “When did he move in?”

  “When he got outta the penitentiary. ‘Bout six months ago.”

  “Weren’t you reluctant to rent to a guy who just got out of prison?” I asked.

  “Naw. I tell him, ‘Don’t you bring that trouble around here.’ He didn’t. And he pay his rent on tim
e.”

  “When did he move?”

  “Few weeks ago. I got a new tenant moving in on Monday.”

  “Where’d he move to?”

  “Don’t know. One day he say he got a new lady, and next day he out.”

  “Where are they forwarding his mail?”

  “He ain’t never got no mail.”

  “Anybody around here might know where he moved?”

  “He stay to himself. I don’t pay no mind to where he go and with who. As long as he pay his rent on time.”

  I gave the man my card and asked him to call Felony Special if he heard anything about Fuqua. Driving back downtown, I told Duffy, “Interesting that he moved a month ago.”

  “That’s right before Relovich was popped,” Duffy said. “Probably figured he’d do the job and then disappear.”

  “Any guesses where he is?” Ortiz said.

  “Fuqua,” I said, swirling my index finger, “is in the wind.”

  I returned to R & I and picked up all of Fuqua’s 510s—LAPD forms that we fill out after the arrest report, and include personal information such as the addresses and phone numbers of relatives, girlfriends, and ex-spouses, and other random data. I discovered that Fuqua’s mother and four sisters lived in South Central. A brother lived in San Pedro, which would explain why Fuqua pulled the burglary there. I figured that if I door-knocked the family, they would warn Fuqua and he would be even harder to find.

  Back at my desk, I called the state Department of Motor Vehicles office and asked for the date of birth for Fuqua’s mother and sisters. One of Fuqua’s sisters would be celebrating a birthday on Friday. Now I had the opportunity to try an approach that had worked a few times for me in the past. On Friday afternoon I would stake out the sister’s house. If she had a birthday party, and if Fuqua showed up, I would be there in the shadows, waiting.

  In the meantime, I had plenty of work to keep me busy. And if I was lucky, maybe I could even pick up Fuqua before Friday.

  I slipped Fuqua’s booking photo into a six-pack, grabbed my murder book, and drove up Interstate 5 to the Pitchess Detention Center. I decided to see if the skinny junkie who I had interviewed at the Pacific Division station after the drug sweep could identify Fuqua. The junkie had described the man climbing into passenger’s side of the car at the end of the bloodhound’s trail as a tall, skinny Mexican and the other as shorter and stocky. Fuqua was listed as five foot ten and two hundred twenty pounds, so he fit the description of the driver. I decided that there was no point in showing Fuqua’s picture to Theresa Martinez because she said she didn’t get a look at the driver.

  Pitchess is a sprawling jail complex set in the parched Castaic foothills about twenty miles north of downtown. I passed through the gates, deposited my Beretta in the metal locker, and waited in an interview room. A few minutes later, deputies brought out the junkie. The last time I had talked to him, he was extremely jittery, nervously tapping his feet, and picking at his nails. Now, wearing loose fitting jail blues, he walked across the room so slowly and sat down so deliberately he looked as if he were moving underwater. After deputies uncuffed him, I slid the six-pack across the table and asked if he could pick out one of the suspects. He carefully studied each picture.

  “Now if I pick out someone, will you give me a Get Out Of Jail Free Card?” he asked, smiling slyly.

  “Doesn’t work that way. I can talk to the DA, but I need you to be sure. If you can’t identify anyone, don’t worry about it. I won’t forget you. They’ll be other six-packs to check out. This isn’t your last chance.”

  The man, again, studied each picture. He slid the six-pack back across the table. “Dang! I wish I could, but I can’t. Don’t know any of them dudes. I don’t even know if the guy I saw was a brutha. It was too damn dark.”

  I returned to the office and spent the rest of the day studying Fuqua’s file. First I tried to determine if Fuqua had ever been arrested with a Hispanic so I could show the junkie witness the suspect’s picture. But I had no luck. Then I searched through the computer for all the information gleaned from field interview cards, which listed everyone at a crime scene, from witnesses to neighbors to suspects. Still no Hispanics were identified at Fuqua’s arrest.

  After I made fifty laser copies of Fuqua’s photo, I drove over to the Southeast station and passed them out during the p.m. shift roll call. “Anybody who finds Fuqua,” I announced, “gets a case of beer of their choice.”

  When I was done, an old-timer in the gang unit, a black sergeant named Chester Pinson, said he wanted to talk. I followed him to his desk and he pulled up a chair for me.

  “I’ve been keeping tabs on Fuqua since he was a fourteen-year-old pooh butt. As you know, he did a nickel at Folsom a while ago. Since then, a whole new generation of gangsters have hit the streets. But I remember him pretty well when he was coming up.”

  “What do you remember about him?” I asked.

  “He’s one cold motherfucker. When C-Dawg’s moving down the street, everyone takes a step back.”

  “What’s the C for?”

  “Capone. The number one gangster.”

  “Was he?”

  “Well, he dropped eight people before he was eighteen. Who knows what the tally is now.”

  “Who was he killing?”

  “Mostly rival gangsters.”

  “Ever get close to popping him for murder?”

  “Naw,” he said, disgusted. “Those gang-on-gang hits are tough to put together.” Pinson grabbed a pencil off his desk and slapped it on his palm. “All those stupid fucking movies with the serial killers knocking off one vic after another in crazy-ass ways, taunting detectives, sending them cute little notes. You and I both know that’s bullshit. You get one of them dudes every decade—maybe. Now C-Dawg is your real-life version of a serial killer.”

  “I got some information that Fuqua might have been working with a Hispanic guy. That sound right to you?”

  “I don’t know. He just did a stretch at Folsom. The blacks and Mexicans are at war there. They fucking hate each other. If I know Fuqua, he cliqued up there right away. At Folsom, if a black hangs with a Mexican, he’ll get a shiv in the liver. From his own peeps. So he might be kind of hesitant, as soon as he’s kicked loose, to partner up with a cholo. You might see a black and a Mexican gangbanger capering in a place like Oakwood, where everyone’s on top of each other. But it’s a little unusual for South Central.”

  “You said it’s unusual. I take that to mean it’s possible that Fuqua was working with a Mexican dude.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You know that Relovich was the only detective who ever put together a good enough case to send Fuqua to the joint?”

  Pinson nodded.

  “You think that could be enough of a motive for Fuqua to gun Pete down?”

  Pinson pushed his chair away from his desk and crossed his legs. “Could be, but I wanted to tell you something else. When I heard you found Fuqua’s DNA at the scene, I wanted to fill you in. Pete’s ex-partner is an old-timer name of Sam Doukas. When Sam was promoted to D-III, he got transferred over here to Southeast, so him and Pete had to split up. I got to know Sam, and he talked about Pete some. And he told me a story that I wanted to pass on to you. After Pete nailed down that robbery case against Fuqua that landed him in Folsom, him and Sam went over to Fuqua’s place to hook him up. Fuqua was with some of his homeboys and he was putting a good show on for them, mother-fucking Pete and Sam this way and that. He told them that if they didn’t have their badges and guns, he’d kick both their asses.”

  Pinson chuckled. “So Pete handed his badge and gun to Sam and told him and the homeboys to wait outside. While they were outside they heard some whacks and some thwacks and some furniture breaking. Three minutes later, Pete had Fuqua—who was out cold—over his shoulder and tossed him into the backseat of the squad car. He knocked the black right outta that boy.”

  “That’s hard-core,” I said.

  “Pete foug
ht Golden Gloves when he was a kid. At the California Police Olympics, he was the light heavyweight champ.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me about this when I picked up the case?”

  Pinson held out his hands. “I’ve been on vacation. Just got back this morning and heard about Pete.”

  “I’d like to talk to Doukas.”

  “You can’t—he died of a stroke last year. Two months after he retired.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Fuqua claimed that Pete cold-cocked him when he wasn’t looking. But nobody believed that—not even Fuqua’s homies. As you know, on the streets, rep is everything. And Fuqua’s rep took a hard fall. So he lost a lot because of Pete. He lost his rep and he lost five years. Maybe during that stretch in Folsom Fuqua stewed and stewed, and decided that when he got out, he’d put getting even with Pete at the top of his to-do list.”

  CHAPTER 16

  On Wednesday evening, I pulled off Washington Boulevard, drove through a confusing labyrinth of streets, parked, and walked to Nicole Haddad’s house, which fronted one of the Venice canals. I was surprised how the area had changed.

  When I was working patrol in the Pacific Division, the canals were filthy, with a sheen of scum on the surface and garbage littering the banks. Now they had been immaculately restored, and some of the small, ramshackle homes and vacant weed-choked lots had been replaced with two- and three-story villas. I had heard about the changes and now was relieved to see that they had not entirely destroyed the area’s idiosyncratic charm. Invisible from the major thoroughfares and accessible to only a handful of cars because of its narrow streets, the canals remained an anomalous L.A. island, cut off from the homogenous sprawl.

  Unfortunately, the Italian-style resort, built in the early 1900s on marshland, was doomed—like so many city landmarks—because of Southern California’s slavish obeisance to the automobile. In the 1920s, when people began driving to the beach instead of commuting by trolley, city officials decided that Venice needed more roads and parking spaces. They ordered the inland lagoon filled in, converted it into a traffic circle, and paved over most of the canals. Soon, the remaining canals fell into disrepair. Later in the century, when land values in Venice and nearby Santa Monica skyrocketed, the scruffy neighborhood was rediscovered and gentrified.