Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  I’m right.

  For years, Back Stop Bar on Sunset was a cop dive, until the late ’90s, when the patrol officer at the hub of the Rampart scandal, Carlos Guerrero, testified that he and his boyz regularly gathered there to distribute payoffs and scheme frame-ups and evidence scams. The feds had Guerrero’s ass nailed to the wall for plenty of crimes, so he cut a plea deal in exchange for testimony. The scandal blew wide open when he sang, and at least half of the seventy or so cops he implicated were regulars at the Back Stop Bar. Since then, cops have avoided the place like it was a leper colony—afraid, I guess, that corruption is a contagion that lingers on bar tops and toilet seats.

  The Stop being one of my regular hangouts, earlier I tinkered with the idea of bringing the old man by tonight and relating all of its seedy history to him over drinks and burgers. It’s the kind of dark gossip he appreciates and would give us something to talk about, something to further thaw the freeze that has locked us up for years. The Stop is just too public a place to hang out with him at this point, though, and I decided to not push my luck with Abel any further than I have to.

  I walk through the Back Stop’s door to see Sal the bartender busy at work. Sal’s a furry little wop with Coke-bottle-bottom glasses and a freaky obsession with Hawaiian shirts, and when he sees me he says, “Detective Crucci!” as if welcoming a celebrity of great note. He sets me up with my usual Corona and shot of Patrón and wanders back to the other end of the bar, resuming his conversation with a trio of women. After I have a sip or two of each beverage, Sal returns and leans in to me, rocks his head toward the women and talks so low you’d think he was passing on a state secret. “See those chicks checkin’ out your act, my brother? I know ’em, man, and they’re notorious badge bunnies; they especially dig detectives, and I’ve been talkin’ you up.” He winks. “My money says you can have the pick of the litter.”

  “Thanks,” I say as I nod and smile at the women, hoisting my tequila to them in a silent toast and receive smiles and blushes in return. They’re girls, really, all in their early twenties with that honky-tonk woman magnetism about them that never fails to attract me in a dive bar, especially when I’m buzzed. The dive-bar piece of the equation is in place and I have a nice buzz going, so everything’s signaling Go. I start my stroll down the bar, say to Sal, “Thanks, Sal, set them up with whatever they’re drinking,” and check out the girls, trying to identify the neediest of the lot.

  Babe

  Waking up at 5:00 A.M. and unable to find sleep again, I left Maggie zonked in bed while I threw weights in the living room, did calisthenics, then took a long run. Dawn had broken by the time I returned to my house, a bruised sky obscuring the morning sun. It was one of those humid Southern California mornings when the air was so thick I felt like I was slogging underwater on my way to the front door, and early traffic on the 10 sounded surreal, muted and distant, the sounds of LA failing to have their usual exhilarating effect on me. Maggie was still crashed in bed and part of me wanted to join her, but the restless part won out. After showering, I paced the house drinking coffee with CNN blaring in the background; all my brain received was noise, my mind occupied with thoughts of the last few days.

  Something resembling calm finally settled over me, and it was almost 8:00 A.M. when I crashed next to Maggie in bed.

  A hand is now pulling me from a deep ravine of sleep, Maggie’s hand, and it is tugging my shoulder as she says, “Babe, wake up, there’s a man on the phone for you and he insists on talking.”

  My throat is as dry as a zombie’s, and my voice sounds like a zombie’s when I speak. “Who is it?”

  “He won’t say.”

  I clear my throat. “Which phone is it?”

  She hesitates before replying. “The Nokia.”

  This information jolts me almost fully awake.

  Six cellphones are lined in a row on my living room coffee table: an iPhone I use to communicate with Maggie and the rest of my nonbusiness world; two different-colored disposable Samsung flip-tops I use to communicate with Tarasov and Joe; and two different-colored disposable Motorola flip-tops I use to communicate with Chief and Leo.

  The disposable Nokia is the one I use to communicate with my new client, Señor Jorge Tadeo Alvarez, a native Colombian who, I think, periodically resides somewhere in Southern California. I was introduced to him by his cousin, who served time in federal prison with me during my first hitch.

  Alvarez is a mysterious man.

  All I definitely know of him is that he is an international player, my best guess being that he is an arms smuggler, since his cousin was serving time for weapons violations. I am virtually certain he is a wealthy man, and this I only infer from the amount of money he has agreed to pay me for the services he has asked me to provide.

  After thinking about my dealings with him while rubbing sleep from my eyes, I remember that he is also an impatient man.

  I shake my head to work some thoughts into my brain and swipe a hand down my face, the skin slowly creeping back in place like cold rubber. I turn from my back to my side, prop myself up on my left elbow, and take the phone from Maggie. I motion with my head toward the bedroom door and give Maggie a wink to indicate my desire for privacy. She complies, nimbly exiting her side of the bed and strolling from the room naked.

  That ass, Jesus.

  Another shake of my head to work some thoughts out of my brain.

  I say into the mouthpiece, “Yes?”

  “Our friend is leaving the country today.”

  Friend, I am thinking, friend…

  Oh, hell—Errol Ovando.

  Leaving the country?

  Today?

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Yes. We must move today.”

  “That is too risky. Our surveillance barely started yesterday. His movements and those of his associates are unknown and therefore unpredictable.”

  He hisses his words. “He has no associates to be concerned about. I know this. He is a banker.”

  “Now he is a banker, yes. He is also a crook and was a gang member years ago, and I have no idea who he associates with. But there is more to it than that: security and police patrols at the strip mall where his building is located, the flow of his customers; they are all wild cards at the moment.”

  A pause. “I was told you are a competent man.”

  “And you were told that because of the way I prepare for operations like this one.”

  “You must move today or he and my money are lost.”

  “Look, I—”

  “I will pay you a twenty percent premium for your consideration.”

  Hmm, now you might be on to something.

  Rubbing my neck, sighing, I say, “What time does he leave town?”

  “His plane is scheduled to depart midevening, but he plans to leave his business no later than three P.M.”

  The digital clock on my nightstand practically cracks up with laughter when it shows me the time of 10:01 A.M. I barely slept four hours and my body is in pieces, as pulled apart as the whole lobster I ate last night with Maggie at The Lobster on Santa Monica Pier, which just now begins clawing at my stomach lining.

  “All right, I will get it done,” I say.

  A breathy sigh of relief ruffles across his mouthpiece. “Ah, good, very good,” he says and clicks off the phone so fast it is as if he was afraid I would change my mind.

  I grumble myself out of bed and head for the living room to fetch my red Motorola disposable to ruin Chief’s day, my thought being shit always flows downstream.

  Leo

  The strong smell of marijuana jars me awake, a burst of sunlight hitting my eyes like a flash-bang grenade. Even queasier now that I’m temporarily blinded, my head throbbing and spinning, I roll over to find a blurry female form next to me. My eyes finally focus on a thin wisp of a girl with long, straight blonde hair, wearing nothing but one of my dress shirts completely unbuttoned. She’s sitting up in bed, her long legs stretched out, her eyes riveted
on the screen of her iPhone, sucking weed from my glass pipe. Most of her makeup rubbed off on me and the sheets, and for the first time I notice her complexion is ruddy—a condition worsened by whisker burn.

  She removes the pipe from her mouth, says, “Wow, your eyes are redder than blisters,” and giggles like a little girl.

  Sighing, groaning, I run my hand through my hair, thinking, Elaine…Elana, shit, something like that…Yeah, Elaine, of that name I am now certain, a criminal-justice undergrad at UCLA. The memory returns of us dancing like natives at the Rooftop Bar on South Flower, her saying into my ear that she loved the view of the city from up there and me responding that I loved the view down her strapless dress. She laughed at that and called me a butthole, her point being her breasts didn’t provide much of a view. She’s actually almost as flat as a fifteen-year-old male; as it turned out, she also has about the same amount of sexual control as a fifteen-year-old male.

  I scoot myself up and am startled by a cold metal sensation that bites my ass. I lift my left bun and hook a set of my cuffs with my forefinger. Dangling them in front of her, I say, “Whose idea was this?”

  “Fuck if I remember,” she says, “but we didn’t get too far with it,” and casually kicks off the sheets and lifts her left foot in the air to display my other set of cuffs fixed to her ankle. “I just hope you can find your key. I have to be in class in an hour.”

  “Damn, what time is it?”

  “Just after ten.”

  “God, I have to blow out of here and get to work, pronto.”

  I roll out of bed and use the momentum to propel myself into the bathroom. Standing naked at the toilet, urinating, I say to her over my left shoulder, “Elaine, you want some coffee before we leave? Cereal?”

  “My name’s Elana, butthole, not Elaine.”

  “Oh, uh, sorry,” I say—shit—and concentrate on draining my bladder. I flush the toilet just before she says something about an article she’s reading and I step to the basin, squeeze what seems like a bucket of eye drops into each eye, quickly wash up and wet my hair, dabbing pomade on my fingers and tousling it into presentable shape. Around 4:00 A.M. we took a bath before finally using the bed for sleep, so there’s no pressing need to shower. I could use a shave, but there’s no time.

  I hear Elana mumble, “Oh, damn,” from the bed and she hops up and pops her head in the door, her big green eyes wide with alarm, and thrusts the iPhone at me. “Um, you’d better read this. It’s about the dude you told me about last night. The one you got in custody for murder?”

  “Taquan Oliver?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  My brow furrows as I lean against the sink and read:

  LOS ANGELES—A 24-year-old inmate at the Men’s Central Jail committed suicide, authorities said, Thursday evening.

  Taquan Oliver, a homeless man from South LA, was found dead in his cell about 7:20 A.M. Friday in the jail at 441 S. Bauchet St., said coroner’s assistant chief Ed Winter. A crude noose made of strips of bedsheet was found around his neck with the other end anchored to cell bars.

  Oliver’s cause of death was listed as “asphyxiation due to self-strangulation,” Winter said.

  “The suicide occurred between 10:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. during inmate sleeping hours,” Captain Mike Parker of the Sheriff’s Headquarters Bureau said. “During the deputies’ checks of the cell during the night, the inmate appeared to be sleeping in his cell.”

  Oliver’s two cellmates slept through the incident, Parker said.

  Oliver was charged Thursday in the robbery and murder of an eighteen-year-old female named Sonita Khemra, Parker said. Sources within LAPD’s Rampart Division would not comment on how the murder investigation would proceed.

  My vision blurrrs.

  I give my head a little shake, pinch the bridge of my nose to clear my eyes before rereading the article. I gaze out the window of my bathroom to check out a small bird chirping from the tree limb just outside; drops of moisture on the window indicate it rained earlier, but now it’s a beautiful day, at least for the living—not for Taquan Oliver.

  The news finally begins to sink in, and I try to place it in perspective.

  “Crooch?” Elana says. “Are you processing this okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s happened to me before. Four, five years ago when I was in uniform, a child abuser me and my partner arrested offed himself in Central, pretty much the same way Oliver did. But this one doesn’t play right with me. Oliver was distraught over his predicament, but I never read him as suicidal,” I say, and something occurs to me. “I wonder why my lieutenant didn’t let me know about this. The watch commander at Rampart should’ve called him as soon as he found out.”

  With something of a guilty look on her face, she takes my iPhone from behind her back and hands it to me. “This was dinging like mad on the coffee table.”

  “Christ,” I say, snatching the phone and inspecting the missed-call and voice-message icons on the screen. “Yeah, my lieutenant tried to call me twice, once at five this morning and once about an hour ago. Elai—Elana, we have to split, ASAP.”

  “That’s cool but, uh”—she raises her foot—“the key to these cuffs?”

  “Yeah, right.” I scan the room. “It’s around here somewhere.” I hope.

  “And can I have another hit of your blow before I leave? I need a bump. Oh, and I need a ride home. I live just over on Vinson. It should be on your way.”

  “Affirmative on both.”

  She steps in to me and puts her arms around my neck. “On the way to my place, could you run your siren for me again like last night? That was so fucking cool.”

  Run my siren for her, I think, like last night?

  —

  I thumb Abel’s speed-dial number as soon as I drop off Elana. The call rolls over to voicemail, and I leave a message saying I’m on the way in. I’m anxious to get the details on Oliver’s apparent suicide, and I decide to call Cyril Lopez, a sergeant with the sheriff’s department and midlevel supervisor at Central Jail. The cruiser’s pointed in the general direction of downtown when he finally answers, his voice as quick and high-pitched as a piccolo.

  “Lopez.”

  “Cyril, it’s Crucci.”

  “Crooch, man, ain’t seen you in over a month. What’chu been doin’ with your collars, chainin’ ’em up in your fuckin’ basement? Or you just been sittin’ on your culo gordo?”

  “Cyril, where were you last week? I hauled a burglar into booking, a meth head who went as wild as a raped ape as soon as he smelled the filth from the dungeon you run down there. You were nowhere to be found. Nobody can ever find your culo gordo when there’s man’s work to do.”

  “¡Vete al carajo!, man, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

  I laugh. “¡Vete al carajo! yourself, asshole….Listen, Cyril, I’m working a case that involves a swinger you had in the block last night. Taquan Oliver?”

  “Oh, yeah, man, a real pain in my fuckin’ neck, like I need one more.”

  “I’m on the way in to Rampart now to talk to my lieutenant about it. He didn’t answer the phone when I called him, but my guess is he’s going to be pissed as hell that I didn’t answer his calls last night. I’m thinking I can get a foot out of the doghouse by getting briefed on what went down before I get there.”

  “Anything you need, ese, bring it on.”

  “You can start by telling me what happened to Oliver.”

  “Bottom line is the big hombre did the Dutch with a bedsheet; thaz about it. I got the report from the floor bull right here in an email somewhere, hang on….Yeah, says here the inmate was calm and well behaved the last time he checked on him. Sedate is one of the words the bull used, and lethargic, but said he gave no sign he needed to be on suicide watch. Oliver’s cellies said he had the jailhouse blues last night, and talked about offin’ hisself. They said they didn’t put no stock in it, and about shit their pants when they found his ass x’d out early this mornin’.”

  “Any sign the ce
llies did him and rigged it as a swinger?”

  “Not that my guys reported, and I doubt those fucks could do Oliver. They were gangbangers and mean as el Diablo, but, shit, that describes over half the population in here. There’s no sign of a struggle, and says here Oliver was a big boy.”

  A big boy, sure, with a hyoid bone just as fragile as that in the puniest man in LA; one well-placed karate chop to his throat while he was asleep and the two men could string him up with ease. Cyril knows this, but I’ll not rag him, respecting his right to cover his department’s backside. “Yeah,” I say, “you’re right. What flavor bangers were they?”

  “Uh, lemme see…tatt histories show they’re E/S Oriental Boyz, an OLB offshoot. They’re zips, Vietnamese or Cambodians would be my guess from their names. They wouldn’t admit to no affiliation, though, at booking.”

  My heart jumps into my throat; the fuckers are affiliated with the Oriental Lazy Boyz, the same gang Khang founded as a youth. “That’s interesting…What are their names?”

  “Hell, gato, I ain’t got time to spell out these ching-chong names for your illiterate ass. I’ll just email you the report. What’s your address?”

  I give him the address. “Thanks, Cyril. Anything else about this I ought to know about?”

  “Yeah, says here that about an hour ago these guys got transported over to Rampart to talk to Lieutenant Abel—your supervisor, right?”

  “Shit.”

  Cyril laughs and says, “He’s grillin’ ’em without your tardy ass, doin’ your job for you. Shit, man, you are so fucked.”

  “Thanks, Cyril….Anything else I need to know?”

  “Probably a lot more, yeah, but I ain’t got it. You tapped me out.”

  “All right, I owe you one.”

  “Damn right you do. Look, Crooch, if Abel comes down on you, tell him to kiss my big hard ass. I know that prissy bastardo, and he won’t fuck with me the way he does you, you big fuckin’ sissy.”