Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  “How about a beer for me, asshole?”

  “Oh,” he says, “here,” and plops the heavy metal cooler in my lap while continuing to gaze after Maggie. He finally looks down at me and says, “How’d you ever manage to meet a nice chick like her?”

  Removing the ice-cold cooler from my lap, I say, “Uh, at a taco bar,” and quickly add, “Sit down, man. We have much to celebrate.”

  This brings him around. “No shit, pal,” he says, musses my hair, and sits heavily in the chair Maggie just vacated. He releases a torrent of breath and pats his chest. “We almost bought the farm today, pal.”

  The cooler is now between my feet, and I withdraw two iced High Lifes and hand one to Chief.

  We clink the bottlenecks together. “Here’s to suckin’ wind,” I say.

  “Amen, brother.”

  We drink deeply.

  “Babe, I gotta say you had a great plan, man. I thought we were so fucked.”

  “No plan works without great execution, Chief. And you pulled off your part to perfection.”

  “Yeah, when I had my guy pinned against the wall, you should’a seen the look in his eyes when he heard the shots from you poppin’ his guys. He knew he was dead.”

  Smiling, we clink bottlenecks again, and drink.

  He reaches into the cooler and comes out with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “I wish I could drink this whole bottle tonight, but I can only have a couple drinks,” he says, unscrews the top and takes a big swig, rests the bottle between his legs. “Look, we gotta talk about somethin’ before Miss Maggie comes back.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Joe Sacci called just a little while ago.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He asked me—fuck, practically begged me—to help him with something tonight, a one-time job, he said. He offered me twenty grand.”

  The stash-house raid, shit. Twenty grand is chicken feed for helping with that. “Did he say what the job entailed?”

  “Nope, just that it could be dangerous. He said to show up at the Venetian around nine o’clock to talk to him and Donsky about it. It’s real hush-hush. He said once they told me what it was, I couldn’t leave their sight.”

  “Did you say you would do it?”

  “Yeah, the money’s good. Why the fuck not?”

  “Perhaps because you have had a full day already?”

  He shrugs. “Strike the iron while it’s hot, shit. I told Joe I’d only do it if my end of the job was easy, and he said they’d have me standin’ lookout for the heavy work the other guys are doin’. And twenty grand is twenty grand, right? For twenty K I can even put up with Donsky for one night. Joe says Fecarotta’s not involved.” He swills beer. “Oh, yeah, listen, you still have an assault rifle? I need to borrow it. Joe said I’ll need heavy firepower to pull the guard duty.” He winks.

  Well, if he knows he needs an assault rifle, he has all the information he needs to realize what he is getting into. Chief is a big boy, and I promised Joe and Viktor I would keep my mouth shut about their little plan. I will keep my promise. I nod and say, “I have an AK-47 knockoff in a storage shed, a Chinese one that is completely untraceable, with plenty of ammo. I will give you the key before you leave. Just stop by the shed and help yourself. Keep the weapon and whatever ammo you have left after the job. I have no need for them anymore.”

  Leo

  Abel calls as I’m on the way to The Back Stop. Last time we talked, he cut me off before I reported much of what Monique told me about the old man who hired Sonita, and he revisits the subject. There’s little I have to say, remaining faithful to my promise to Monique to not reveal what she disclosed to the guy about Khang’s stash house. Abel doesn’t need to know anyway, since I can work the information she provided me to an end point without Abel’s assistance. All I tell Abel is that Monique could shed almost no light on the old man beyond the fact that he was old and had enough coin to hire Sonita at will.

  I say to him, “The only remaining avenue on ‘the old man’ is the driver’s phone number we pulled from Sonita’s cell. Did you get the subpoena served on the phone companies for the driver’s call data?”

  “Crucci, it’s my job to hound people around here about getting things done.”

  “I know that, I—”

  “Then don’t hound me, damn it….Have you called any other numbers that were on the call list of Sonita’s phone?”

  “No, other than the driver’s number, there were none that recurred over more than a single day, and my guess is they were all one-shot customers trying to make an appointment with Sonita.”

  “Use your best judgment on that one. Did you find Phan?”

  “I did. I guess you could say he exercised his constitutional right to not incriminate himself.”

  “You tune him up?”

  “It didn’t work.”

  “Tough kid, huh?”

  “Harder than a ball-peen hammer.”

  “Fucking dinks can be almost supernatural under physical stress. My old man was a marine grunt in ’Nam. One of these days I’ll pass along some of his stories to you over drinks.”

  I can’t wait.

  I say, “What’s the sheriff’s office saying about their investigation into how Oliver just happened to get assigned to a cell with two Oriental Boyz?”

  “ ‘The investigation is ongoing.’ ”

  “Of course it is.”

  He says, “Before I forget, Doc Marten out of Central called a little while ago. He said you showed up at the scene of a bank robbery over on Beverly.”

  “I was having lunch at the Karma down the street and heard the all-units call. I got fucking curious—so what?”

  A pause, then, “Don’t be so defensive. I’m trying to pay you a compliment. Marten said I ought to give you an attaboy for taking the initiative.”

  Jesus Christ.

  I clear my throat. “I’ll have to remember to thank him for that….And, uh, thanks for passing it along.”

  “Don’t mention it. What else did you accomplish on the Khemra case?”

  “I finally talked to Mrs. Khemra, at her house, right before you called. Her cousin interpreted. Bottom line is she loved her daughter but didn’t really know her, and had not a clue how to control her. And she worships her brother Khang. She wouldn’t say a bad word about him, and said he loved Sonita as much as she did.”

  “Did you tell mamasan what Sonita had been up to with her friend Monique?”

  “Generally, yeah.”

  “Damn, son.”

  “It was her daughter, Christ. She had the right to know.”

  “How did that go over?”

  “In a word: bad. She refused to believe it, said Sonita was too good of a girl to prostitute herself.”

  “Naturally,” Abel says. “The thing about this job that never ceases to amaze me is the way parents can be so blind to the failings of their children.” A pause. “Come to think of it, children can be just as blind to the failings of their parents.”

  “Now you’re giving me a legitimate reason to be defensive.”

  The fucker chuckles, says, “Some shots are just too wide-open to pass up,” coughs and clears his throat. “Seriously, remember what I told you about my father, Crucci. I’m speaking from experience. Fathers like ours will drag us down.”

  Not if they won’t even talk to you, I think.

  Leo

  After cruising by the Stop for a leisurely beer and a burger, I drive home to prepare for some night work. Considering the grueling nine hours I put in with Elana last night, said preparation begins with me calling dispatch to go 10-7, then crashing on my recliner for a power nap. I am out of it for almost two hours, out so cold my arms and legs are numb when I snap awake. I work the blood back into my limbs, haul myself up, and take a quick shower, finishing it off with a blast of cold water. Two Tylenol and two ibuprofens later, I dress in what I think of as my surveillance clothes: blue Taclite cargo pants and a plain blue T-shirt, black, lightwe
ight tactical boots. After lacing up my boots, I walk into the kitchen to see what messages await me. After two hours of 10-7, it would be a true miracle if no one has tried to reach me.

  No miracles tonight.

  There, on the counter, the message light on my MDT is blinking. I boot the screen, and among emails regarding other cases is one from Abel with a document attached. The email heading says, “Call data from Mystery Driver’s phone.” One of the five phone companies Abel served with a subpoena responded. Abel’s message says, “Big surprise: The driver’s number was to a disposable phone sold by MetroPCS. No account name. Call all the numbers on the attached list we got from Metro. Don’t write it off as a long shot.”

  That MetroPCS is the cell provider makes sense. Metro is a local company that’s known for providing cheap burners off the rack in discount stores and other retail outlets. This I know because I buy Metro burners at the Albertsons on Sunset. You can buy a cheap one for about thirty bucks that comes loaded with fifty minutes of airtime, and you don’t have to provide your name for the account. Burn up the minutes on one, toss it and grab another. Savvy crooks use burners religiously, and the practice makes it tough to track down a crook’s identity when you come upon a suspicious cellphone number in the course of an investigation. As Abel suggests, the only way to track down the identity of a disposable cell user is to call the other numbers the user both dialed and received, then question whoever answers. I decide to make the calls once I locate the stash house Monique told me about, and have nothing else to do while I stake it out. I forward Abel’s email to my personal email then go downstairs to print the data sheet from my PC.

  Finally, out the door I go, calling dispatch to go 10-8 after saddling up in my cruiser.

  —

  Monique told me the stash house in question doubles as a plumbing company on a numbered street in the vicinity of the Pueblo Del Rio housing project. It doesn’t take me long to find the best candidate—the only candidate, really. The ’hood for about twenty square blocks around the Pueblo Del Rio is one of the most blighted in LA. The biggest employers around are gangs, providing direct interfaces to opportunities in crime—mostly drug-dealing jobs that will allow you to progress from the street corner to the penthouse if you hustle, play it smart, and manage to stay alive. The latter part of this formula for success is rarely achieved, considering that a street hood’s life expectancy is less than a third of your average LA resident. So there aren’t enough successful drug dealers living in this ’hood to support plumbing-service companies; all the other residents would rather buy food than pay somebody to unclog their toilets, and plumbing-service companies abandoned the area long ago.

  The nearest thing to a plumbing company on a numbered street is a plumbing wholesale supplier at Fifty-Third and Malabar, two long blocks east of the Pueblo Del Rio in a rundown light-industrial area. There’s an HVAC company on the other side of Pacific at Fiftieth, but its lights are doused and the premises show zero sign of human life. When I approached the Fifty-Third Street location from the rear alley, the thing that seals the deal for me are the two men and a forklift moving about the yard, which is dimly lit. What nails it is the sign out front on Fifty-Third: “Malabar Wholesale Plumbing Supply,” and it is printed in maroon letters on a gray background.

  Being an experienced and highly trained sleuth, after analyzing this final clue I deduced this just might be Khang’s stash house.

  I find a perfect surveillance perch in the dark alley—the parking lot of an abandoned ornamental-iron works. There is a slip behind a corrugated-steel fence where I nudged against an outbuilding in the shadows, a dark spot with a narrow but direct line of sight to my surveillance target. I’m not invisible here, but you’d have to be looking for me to see me. After parking, I scoped the plumbing-supply company with infrared binoculars. It’s a two-building complex that fronts on Fifty-Third, two buildings from the corner at Pacific. The concrete building that fronts Fifty-Third has to be the company’s administration building. To the left of this building is another, much larger corrugated-steel structure with a mechanical door tall and wide enough to allow two tractor-trailers to enter side by side. This has to be the warehouse where plumbing supplies, fixtures, and equipment—and hopefully, dope—are stored. The complex has a chain-link fence erected along its sides that’s topped with concertina wire. The alley gate is chain-link, topped with concertina, and has concrete block abutments constructed at either end of it. The gate is manned by a chubby Asian male who I first tag the Marlboro Man because he chain-smokes; I soon shorten it to M & M to fit the way he’s dressed in the prevailing gangsta style—baggy sweat suit and bandana topped with a ball cap turned sideways, all of his clothes repping the color red, the color OLB members fly.

  Now that I’ve been here for about five minutes and settle in, I decide to start calling phone numbers the mystery driver made and received on his disposable cell. I clip the hard copy of the MetroPCS data sheet on the clipboard mounted next to my MDT and think through my strategy. Other than steamrolling whoever answers my calls and risk alienating them by saying, “Hello, I’m a cop. Please give me the name of the person who called you from the following number,” there’s only one digestible story I can feed them: I’ve found an expensive cellphone and I’m dialing numbers listed in its call history in an effort to find the owner. Since the reason people use burners to begin with is to remain anonymous, those associated with the user generally just hang up on my ass without saying squat. Sometimes, though, a food-delivery joint or a dry cleaners or a jilted lover will cooperate and connect a face or name to the number. These cold calls are labor intensive and the constant rejections make me feel like a magazine telemarketer. This is pure shit work, and the best way to get it done is to just hold your nose and dive in. I grit my teeth and get to it.

  There are three days’ worth of calls listed on the data sheet MetroPCS provided, twenty-two of them, totaling fifty minutes, more or less the standard amount of air time you want loaded on an off-the-rack burner. Make more than fifty minutes of calls from the same number and people start connecting the number to your face or your name. The numbers are listed in reverse chronological order: a phone number in the far left column, followed by the date and time in the next column, followed by the designation “called” or “received,” followed by a twelve-digit identification number that represents the cell tower that routed the call directly to or from the driver’s cell. I decide to start with the number the mystery driver dialed first after activating the phone, working forward to the last call he made, about twenty minutes or so after Sonita’s estimated time of death. From my glove box I withdraw a new burner I bought at Albertsons on the way over, flip it open and dial the number.

  There’s an answer almost right away, a male speaking loudly to compete with all the clatter and urgent voices in the background. His voice is rushed and high-pitched, and his words run together and bounce all over the place in a distinct Indian or Pakistani accent: “Good evening The Original North End Pizzeria please how may I help you please.”

  I give the guy my spiel: “Yes, hi, I’m Marvin Ford. I found an expensive iPhone today in my store, and I’m calling for help in finding the owner. It’s out of power now, but I copied its call list before it died. The call list indicates the phone’s owner called you two days ago at one forty-two in the afternoon. Would you mind checking your records to see if you—”

  “Are you shitting me you must be shitting me for I know nothing about a lost fucking phone only that I am too busy for this shitting you are giving me. Shit.”

  Click.

  Wow. Never have I heard so many words used to express a single thought that, in the final analysis, could have been expressed in three: Go to hell.

  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s getting hung up on by a wiseass. Normally I’d call him back and employ the steamroller approach times ten, but I won’t in this instance because I know where to find him. We’ll see how many words this asshole uses tomorr
ow when I drop by The Original North End Pizzeria and hit him between the eyes with my badge.

  Taking a cleansing breath to steel myself, I dial the next number.

  Babe

  “Babe, Babe, wake up. One of your phones is ringing.”

  Opening my eyes from a restful sleep, I find Maggie snuggled next to me on the sofa. My last waking memory is of us watching the cornfield assassination scene from the movie Goodfellas play out on my flat-screen. Clearing my throat, I say, “Which phone?”

  Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she reaches over me to the coffee table and snatches the offending phone, holding it up for me to inspect.

  Damn, it is the red disposable Samsung flip-top I use to communicate with Joe Sacci and his crew. Joe is probably calling and I have no desire to talk to him. I will talk to him, though, of this I am certain. When my phone rings, like Pavlov’s dog I am irresistibly compelled to answer it—a result, no doubt, of my seventeen years of institutionalization, of reacting to the incessant bells and horns that mark the various landmarks of an inmate’s day.

  I take the phone from Maggie, flip it open, and say, “Hello?”

  “Yeah, hello, my name is Marvin Ford. I found an expensive iPhone today in my store, and I’m calling for help in finding—”

  Sighing relief, I say, “No hablo Ingles. El numero incorrecto,” and flip the top shut.

  Leo

  Click.

  “You wiseass,” I say under my breath. “You can speak English fine.”

  If there’s one thing I hate more than getting hung up on by a wiseass, it’s getting hung up on in midsentence by a wiseass who insults my intelligence in the process.

  Nothing to lose by meeting this situation with brute force—time for the steamroller approach

  “I’ll show you, you wiseass,” I say, and redial the number.

  Babe

  “Babe, don’t answer it if it makes you angry. Just let it ring.”