Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  So, this extreme downside of my job got me to thinking retirement. I have had a decent chunk of change squirreled away for years, and need another chunk to meet my retirement goals. If there is no more cleanup to perform on the Macky hit, I will perform just one more job—one more—and I am done.

  Fed up to here with overly critical introspection, I stand from the love seat, put down my drink on the bar, and stroll outside to see what the mad Russian has in store for me. The part of me that constantly dwells on survival is wary. Theoretically, at least, this Russian—Ukrainian, whatever—could be setting me up for elimination. I do not dwell on this very long. Viktor is trustworthy—this I know beyond doubt—and if he wanted to kill me I would be dead already. This I also know beyond doubt.

  On the sidewalk now, confident in my safety, I withdraw from my breast pocket a cigarette I bummed from Sheila earlier. Light it and look to my left, squinting against the smoke. There, the blue Taurus on my side of Beverly is about fifty yards away, parked at the curb on this side of Dillon. In line with the path I would most likely take to my Caddy. Their identities hidden in the shadows, two occupants are in the front seat—Levitch and Latzo?—and they make a conspicuous effort to look away from me.

  A car motor grinds to life from down the street beyond them, past Dillon. A green utility van eases down Beverly, its lights out, and glides down the street until it stops parallel to the Taurus. The side door to the van slides open and a bearish man wearing a Halloween mask, one of a court jester, jumps out and shatters the driver’s window of the Taurus with one blow of a hammer; he ducks low and scurries to the back of the van like a giant park squirrel. Immediately following him from the van is a small man wearing a clown mask, and he’s holding a rifle waist high, aiming it at the smashed window.

  I back toward the Medusa door. Tarasov said no bulle—

  A column of red-orange fire shoots from the mouth of what I now realize is a flamethrower, and the passenger compartment of the Taurus flashes into a ball of flame like someone just lobbed a chunk of Sun inside.

  Levitch and Latzo are bathed in napalm, blackened stick figures flailing their hands and arms at their bodies in a pitiful effort to extinguish the fire. And they’re screeching. I have never heard human sounds quite like that—high-pitched, earsplitting screeches like the lament of tortured demons.

  The clown abruptly halts the stream of flames, waits, to prolong his victims’ agony. The wails and screams diminish to moans, garbled pleas, when the clown hoses them down again, pouring on the flames until the only sound is the crackling and popping combustion of fiberglass and metal, of human flesh and bone.

  A black Town Car pulls to the curb and one of Tarasov’s guys rolls down the passenger window. “In back, quick. We get your car later, eh?”

  I flick my cigarette into the street and climb in back, taking one more look at the incinerated car and thinking, Damn, that is what hell would be like.

  Leo

  After hanging up from talking to the old man, sheets of rain mixed with hail begin to pelt my windshield and a flash of lightning follows, as if somebody up there is giving me a warning, a rebuke. I’m driving north on the 110, heading home, congratulating myself for calling it a night without placing a single bet at Hollywood Park. Just studied the program at my table in the Turf Club, picked horses and watched them all lose. Didn’t even enter the casino next door, and had just a couple hits of weed and babied two beers all night. It’s not that I’ve had anything resembling an epiphany, but Macky’s murder and all that followed hit me like a dose of electroshock therapy, the jolts rebooting my behavior the way application of electrical current to the brain jumpstarts new patterns of thought. I also want to keep my head straight in case any more aftershocks follow today’s events. There are so many ways this could happen it’s beyond worrying about, but this doesn’t stop me from agonizing over the primary unknowns: snitches inside Sacci’s and Tarasov’s crews, witnesses in addition to Levitch and Latzo who might have seen me and the old man at the warehouse….

  The thought of Levitch gets me to fingering the burn under my left eye. I stopped at home and treated it with a Novocain-laced antiseptic cream and a round band-aid, and though my eyeball is bloodshot and watery from the hot ash, the pain and discomfort is minimal now. It looks bad and will be embarrassing to explain, and I’ve decided to tell people at the station that some asshole at the racetrack accidentally hit me with his cigar while he was cheering on his horse down the stretch.

  Shit, another lie to keep straight. I’m growing tired of dispensing lies, and get practically exhausted at the thought of all the new ones I’ll send flying around LA by the time the week is done. Where will it end?

  To find a measure of solace from the problems nagging at me, I begin to talk to myself like my imaginary father, the one I invented when I was nine, maybe ten. There was no one to hash out my problems and insecurities with after the old man went to prison, so I’d talk to myself and respond as if I was my father—a wise soul, tough as nails, but loving and forgiving, supportive. The thought occurs to me now, as it vaguely has in the distant past, that I modeled my imaginary father on my real one, on the father the old thug was before he went away.

  What happened to that man?

  —

  On the 101 now, I’m ready to take the Rampart Boulevard exit when my cellphone rings.

  It’s my supervisor calling—Abel, as in Lieutenant II Jonathan R.

  Any other night off I probably wouldn’t answer it. If I don’t answer it tonight, though, later on I’ll worry that he was calling to invite me to appear as the man of the hour in an interrogation room downtown.

  “Crucci,” I say into the phone.

  “Crooch, I know it’s your night off, but shit just hit the fan around here and I need you to cover a ten-fifty-four by MacArthur Park Lake, a probable one-eighty-seven.”

  Relief.

  Stridently translated, the codes he just spit out means he wants me to check out a dead body, a probable homicide.

  Abel continues. “Nobody on duty is available to catch it. Homicide plus every available detective got called out to deal with some psycho shit that just went down over on Beverly. A couple vics got burned up in their car, and I mean toasted crisp. A definite one-eighty-seven, probably gang related.”

  “Jesus, all right, I’ll get right on it. I just got off the 101 at Rampart and can be at MacArthur in under five.”

  “Excellent,” he says. “Look, I’m still working on getting you a partner. That transfer from Hollywood Division I told you about yesterday changed his mind. Apparently he patched things up with his partner.”

  “No reason to rush it. I like working alone,” I say, and this is an understatement. My first stint of rolling the streets alone began a little over a week ago when my partner and I split, unable to coexist as both partners and lovers. Marita Lizarraga was a great cop and a real looker, long and wiry, taut as a bowstring and of Cuban extraction. Unfortunately for our professional relationship, she also had a blazing streak of jealousy so stereotypically Latin it was almost comical—emphasize almost. I never said or implied we were exclusive, but she nonetheless blew a gasket when she followed me to a restaurant and caught me red-handed with a brunette—and that, as they say, was that.

  Abel says, “I don’t have much info to help you on the ten-fifty-four. Call dispatch and they’ll give you what I have. Check in with me later to fill me in. Looks like I’ll be up all night trying to get a handle on the Beverly thing.”

  We say goodbye and I do a U-turn on Rampart and point the cruiser toward the park—practically a straight shot from here about three miles away. If my professional life wasn’t in such turmoil at the moment, I’d be disappointed as hell that my night off was blown. Instead, though, a tingle of excitement runs through me, electric and invigorating: after all that went down today, I get to play cop again.

  —

  About thirty minutes ago the anonymous call came in to Rampart that a fresh
body—a prostitute’s from all appearances—was found under a bush in MacArthur Park, on the Park View side, between Wilshire and Sixth. The caller claimed to see a large black male wearing a white football jersey running away from the body. The tape of the call revealed the caller was male, most likely Caucasian and anywhere from twenty- to forty-years-old. The dispatcher played the call back to me minutes after I talked to Abel: no unusual panic or anxiety in the caller’s voice, no pride or braggadocio, nothing at all to make you think the man behind it was the killer. I put less stock in that fact than others might. Last year I arrested a fucker who split his wife’s head apart with a meat cleaver, then called 911 as calmly as he’d order carryout Chinese.

  By the time I park on the outer perimeter of the crime scene at MacArthur Park, the meat wagon and two patrol cars have arrived. One of the uniforms assigned to keep spectators at bay flags me down and waves me into a slanted parking slot on Park View, the last one in the line before you get to Sixth. Yellow tape is strung across the front bumpers of the other vehicles parked to my right, creating a barrier at the edge of the sidewalk. Fifteen, twenty spectators are milling around talking and smiling like they’re at a street festival. Red-and-white strobes illuminate their wide-eyed grins, all of them forming the typical flotsam and jetsam you find in MacArthur Park at night—users or sellers, one way or another reliant on the pipe or the needle for survival. I can’t park until the uniform herds four or five of the more severely impaired ones out of my slot.

  After climbing out of the cruiser and duckwalking under the tape, I make a beeline toward the biggest flock of rubberneckers congregated about twenty feet across the sidewalk outside the tape—right next to some bushes on the fringe of a short row of trees that border the park.

  Most cops view gawkers as a pain in the ass, and it’s easy to share that view. But who says there can’t be a valuable witness in the crowd once in a while?

  “Anybody know what happened up there?” I ask the crowd, nudging my head toward the incline to my left.

  In reply I get a lot of gap-toothed, hands-in-pocket grins and thousand-yard stares. One skinny black kid, dressed street, his hair braided in crude cornrows, steps forward. “Some zigga ho got kilt scorin’ rock.”

  “No shit,” I say. “Who did it?”

  He shrugs. “Fuck if I know.” He bounces his head to his right. “Launch here tole me ’bout it.”

  The kid beside him, his hair cut in a high fade, smiles, a gold front tooth glittering. “Did not, fool. You tole me.”

  “Didn’t neither.”

  “Why do they call you Launch,” I say, bellying up to the tape. “You jump high?”

  “Naw,” he says, his grin growing, his eyes moving to the pavement.

  Cornrow laughs. “This nigga cain’t jump high. He called Launch ’cause he get high.”

  Titters from the peanut gallery.

  I say, “Launch, tell me what you know about the dead girl up there.”

  “Don’t know nothin’,” he said, “ ’cept what everbody in the park’s been sayin’.”

  “And what’s that?”

  He tilts his head to his left. “What Bust’a just tole you. Zigga girl got put down buyin’ rock. They say she’s a ho.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You see any part of it?”

  “Naw.”

  “Would you tell me if you had?”

  “Naw—I mean, yeah.”

  More titters.

  “You high now, Launch?”

  “Yeah—I mean, like, yeah.”

  Jesus.

  “You remember seeing a big black guy wearing a white football jersey in the park?”

  Launch shakes his head.

  I ask the same question to the crowd.

  No one admits to seeing the person the anonymous caller described to the dispatcher.

  “Anybody have a problem sticking around a few to view the body after we finish processing the scene? I want to know if anybody knows her or saw her earlier tonight.”

  I get some mumbles and grumbles, no assertive refusals, and some more or less affirmatives. I tell them all to wait, and pass out cards so the ones who bolt—and there are always those who bolt—can call me later if they change their minds when they come back to earth.

  It’s a short distance across a broad paved path and into a copse of trees lined with low bushes, and a bank of bright portable lights beckons me to the heart of the cordoned-off crime scene. Leaning against a tree that anchors one end of the yellow tape is a white uniformed officer, Bill Zoppoth, older than me by about ten years. Zopphead’s a groggy blue lifer with a big mouth who sleepwalks through the job, a guy whose saving grace is he looks good in uniform. He’s presently smiling and chatting up an LA Times beat reporter, one I know well—Joyce Lobdell, an attractive if somewhat road-worn bleach-blonde. Me and Joyce had a two-night fling last year—which fits her romantic MO—and my timing couldn’t be better to run into her again. A repeat engagement tonight would take the edge off my day.

  Joyce holds a cigarette to her lips and tilts her head to Zopphead, who eagerly pulls a lighter from his pants pocket and fires her up as if to do so is his complete honor and privilege. He flinches when he notices me. “Crooch,” he says, “about time you got here. Where’ve you been?”

  It’s beyond disrespectful for a uniform to rag a detective in front of a civilian, especially a reporter, and the punk fucker couldn’t have picked a worse time to diss me. To Joyce I say, “It’s completely up to you whether you quote what I’m about to say to Officer Zoppoth.”

  She draws on her smoke and flickers her eyelids affirmatively.

  To Zoppoth I say, “Fuck you, Zopphead. Wherever I’ve been, you can rest assured I haven’t been cruising hookers off duty on the Strip. Oh, yeah, like you for instance. How’d the suspension go?”

  He flinches like he just got gut punched, confirming the rumor spreading through the ranks. All he can do is pout and say, “Hey.”

  Joyce gags on a giggle, exhaling smoke through her nose in a quick burst, and starts jotting on her pad. “Upon arriving at the scene, Detective Leo Crucci said—” She looks up. “That’s C-R-U-C-C-I, right?”

  “That’s right,” I say. “Need any help spelling the ‘Fuck you’ part?”

  “With all the cops I hang around?” She gives me the once-over, clucking her tongue when her eyes reach my face. “Crooch, god, what happened to your eye?”

  “Rest assured, Joyce, it was all in the line of duty.”

  She tilts her nose upward, sniffs the air. “I smell a touch of beer on you, too. This murder interrupt a party?”

  “I’m sober. Abel called me in on my night off before I got to the hard stuff.” I turn to Zoppoth. “How does a reporter know we have a murder here when I don’t?”

  Joyce rescues him. “Don’t worry, Crooch, a blind rookie would call this one a murder.” She takes my arm. “Can I have a quick word?”

  I nod and let her pull me aside.

  “Just as a heads-up, the scuttlebutt’s going around the crime beat that Babe was released from San Quentin last week.”

  This sends a minor shockwave through me, but it’s easy to hide. “Yeah, so?”

  “Sooo, my editor wants me to consider updating the story I did a few years ago.”

  “You can’t run over that flat cat again.” The flat cat being my relationship with the old man, a topic Joyce reported on about three years ago—to my considerable advantage, oddly enough.

  “She’s looking for a fresh angle to it, Crooch.”

  “There may or may not be a fresh angle to it from your point of view, but a story about me and the old man right now would do us more harm than good.”

  “Have you reunited with him?”

  “You know, Joyce, with all due respect, that’s nobody’s business but ours.”

  “You wouldn’t care to comment on what Babe’s been up to since he got out?”

  “There’s noth
ing to comment on that would interest you.”

  Her big green eyes bore into mine. “Crooch?”

  “Joyce, it’s touch and go with me and the old man right now. Do me a favor and give us some privacy, okay?”

  She draws on her cigarette, considering the request, and finally nods. “All right. Kay will do whatever I want. I’ll tell her there’s no story here.”

  More than she’ll ever know, Joyce comes through for me again.

  Three years ago, when I was still in uniform and making a run at the detective division, Joyce wrote a flattering article about me. It was tied in to a shoot-out me and my then partner, Jeff “Big Ball” Bowling, got into with two strung-out Chicanos who had just knocked over an Albertsons grocery in Leimert Park. We spotted them as they were switching cars on a side street off MLK Boulevard and they started laying down fire on us as soon as we hit the red and blues. A really fucked-up decision on their part, even considering the down assault weapons they had—an Uzi pistol and a CTAR-21.

  Oh, yeah, and one of them had an M3 jungle knife.

  The assholes were either unfamiliar with their weapons or too piped-up to see straight, because the fight was one of men against boys from the start. Me and Big Ball rolled out of our patrol car wielding semiautomatic M4 shotguns—“terror tubes” we always called them—and the six or so rounds of double-aught we got off had the fuckers French-kissing pavement before they fired a half clip of wild shots between them. What Joyce described in her story as “The Leimert Park Gunfight” might have lasted twenty seconds. We killed one and wounded the other, critically. The prick who survived lay sprawled in the middle of the street, and I thought he was unconscious or dead. Turns out he was neither, and Señor Miguel Hidalgo Lazcano laid open my calf with his jungle knife as I kicked his Uzi away from his hand.

  Joyce’s story would have been a hell of a lot more sensational if she had reported that, seconds later, most of Señor Lazcano’s teeth were scattered on the pavement and, hours later, a team of surgeons used a spool of wire to put the fucker’s jaw back together.