"You can't post crime stats for homicide divisions on the COMSTAT board without a cross-reference to division troop strength," she scolded him. "What the hell is wrong with you, Paul? I can't do the percentages without the prime numbers. Do you think, just once, you could do something right?"
Paul turned and left, looking angry but resolute. Then Alexa glanced up at me.
"Not now, Shane."
"Jesus. What did / do?" I stood there looking at her, my hands on my hips, trying to decide which way to jump.
"I'm sorry. It's not you." She crossed quickly to the door and shut it with a little too much force. Before it closed, I saw her assistant Ellen frowning.
"I can't seem to get any decent help up here. This damn performance review of Tony's… Why the hell am I wasting time defending my performance when I've got a city full of hitters out there? I should be doing my job instead of wasting a week covering my ass."
"I was wondering if you wanted to catch a bite downtown after work. You pick the joint."
"Can't you see what's going on here?" She motioned toward a stack of papers on her desk. "That stuff alone is just support figures for the city crime reports I did last year. I have to go through all this material and present it again." As she stood there looking it, without warning, her lower lip started to quiver. "Dammit, don't cry, Alexa," she ordered herself angrily as tears started to flow.
I went to her and took her into my arms. She is so beautiful and strong that sometimes I forget how vulnerable she's become recently. I held her and rubbed her back. She felt stiff. Her muscles jumped under my touch.
"Listen, honey, this performance review isn't the end of the world."
"What if Tony sacks me? What if he sends me down on a medical? I can't deal with this." She pushed away from me and turned back to her desk, looking down at the reports with frustration, gathering her emotions under her, getting set for another run at being tough.
"Alexa, you can only do so much. Ten months ago you were lying in a coma in the UCLA neurology ward. Nobody, including your doctors, thought you were going to survive, much less recover. I was advised to think about unhooking your life support. Now you're back here trying to manage two hundred detectives. You're not ready yet."
"I don't want to hear it, Shane. This is such bullshit. I just.. I was out so long. I got behind. I'm swamped. It's not TBI or ABI or whatever Luther calls it, okay? It's just that this damn job never stops. Never slows down. I'm getting plowed under."
"I want you to come home with me. I want you to take a few days off."
"Are you nuts?"
"I got Cal to give me the time. We could go to Shutters in Santa Monica, get our favorite room overlooking the beach, let the RPMs slow a little. Talk, make love, have a laugh or two. Whatta you say?"
"What part of the word 'no' escapes your understanding? No, I don't want to go to Shutters. No, I don't want to fuck or have candlelight dinners. No, okay? I'm getting torched here. I gotta straighten this stuff out, get this right."
"Alexa, you're pushing people too hard. You can't make up for lost ground by going to the whip. You're driving people away from you."
"Is that what's happening with you, Shane?"
"Of course not. I love you."
Then, as if she hadn't even heard me, she started rummaging on her desktop. "Where the hell did Ellen put the Valley crime reports? I swear, that woman is becoming useless." She moved to the door and threw it open. "Ellen, I asked you for the Valley crime reports for August through November. Is that ever going to arrive or were you planning on giving them to me to take home over Labor Day?"
"Alexa, you already looked at them. I saw you put them in your Out box ten minutes ago."
I was standing by her desk and I looked down at the Out box. Sure enough, there they were.
Alexa closed the door, crossed to the desk and picked them up. I saw frustration and anger in her eyes.
"How can I catch up when I can't even remember what I'm doing?" she said.
"Come home. Take two days off. It'll do you more good than spinning your wheels down here."
"Shane, get out of here, will you? I can't do this now, okay? Have a shred of understanding. Can't you please just do that one thing for me?"
"Okay. When will you be home?"
"I don't know. By ten, I hope."
At ten-thirty she called me at home and told me she was staying at the office. She would sleep on her couch. She said she needed to reconstruct last year's rape and robbery numbers. Tony especially wanted to see those, and somehow she had misplaced them.
After we hung up, I went into the backyard and sat looking at the Venice Canal, my mind in turmoil. When I sit out here, it usually calms me. I needed the quiet perspective that my canal house always provided.
In the twenties, a dreamer named Abbot Kinney designed Venice, California, to be a scaled-down version of Venice, Italy. The real estate development had been an immediate success. Replica gondola canoes floated on the six square blocks of shallow waterways under arched Disneyesque bridges. Over the next seven decades it had fallen into a state of despair, but now, eighty years later, Venice had been rediscovered. Julia Roberts, Anjelica Huston, and Nicolas Cage had all bought property here. The area had gone from hippie-chic to Hollywood-chic. Now it was a mixture of architectural styles and social cliches.
Dot-com execs had built million-dollar houses on postage-stamp lots next to clapboard houses owned by seventies-style social misfits and a few throwback romantics like me. Still remarkable, the six blocks of replica canals had been folded into today's urban sprawl of Southern California's strip malls and cultural bric-a-brac. I loved it here: living on a canal designed to look like fifteenth-century Italy, living in my own throwback house made of fifties clapboard and shingles. It was my castle, my refuge from doubt.
As I sat on my painted metal lawn chair, I worried about Alexa. My wife was breathtakingly beautiful. High cheekbones, black hair, eyes the pale blue color of reef water. She had world-class beauty, but had chosen the rough-and-tumble dog pile of police work. And it was a good choice, because it suited her courage and heroic sense of right and wrong. That is, until Stacy Maluga fired that bullet into her head a year ago and changed everything. Alexa was so used to being in control of her environment that this new personality, and the reckless behavior that came with it, unsettled her. She was no longer able to see the potholes in the road ahead. These last months, she was constantly forced to confront who she had been and to compare it to who she had become. Frustration and anger always followed.
Franco, our adopted marmalade cat, suddenly jumped up in my lap, startling me. He sensed that I was troubled and stared at me with knowing yellow eyes, wondering what my damn problem was as I slowly stroked his fur.
I heard the door behind me open and Delfina Delgado walked out into the yard. She was my son Chooch's girlfriend and had come to live with us when her family died two years ago. She was going to USC as a freshman in the fall and was getting a head start by enrolling in summer school. She had come home to do her laundry. Chooch was in his sophomore year at SC on a football ride. He had red-shirted last season and was just beginning his second year. Two-a-day football practices had already started and he was at the team dorm by Howard Jones Field. Delfina crossed the lawn and sat in the chair next to me. She was beautiful, just eighteen, and from Mexican heritage.
"Has anybody fed El Gato Grande, here?" she said, reaching over and scratching Franco.
"I think he's still got food. I probably should check though."
"Is Alexa coming home?"
"I guess not. Another night sleeping on her office couch."
Delfina was silent and I looked over at her. She finally said, "This will get better, Shane. You have to give it time."
"I know."
"You think she has changed, but she hasn't. I can see how confused she is. She doesn't want to show this to you."
"I'm not gonna split and run, Del."
"I didn't say t
hat."
"But everybody thinks it. I'm better than that. If I can't see her through a rough time, then what good am I?"
"This will all end up for the best. You'll see."
"Sometimes I wish I had your belief in the future. You always seem to be able to see what's really important."
"So can you, Shane."
"No, I'm a pusher. I try to force results. It's been my way since childhood. To do right by Alexa, I have to fight my natural instincts. But I'll learn. I even went and got some help today."
"Good. It will get better, you'll see."
I wanted to change the subject, so I said, "Heard from Chooch?"
She beamed at that. "Oh, yes. He calls every day, that one. Right after practice. He had a good day today. The coaches gave him twenty first-team repetitions. He says that's good for a second-year quarterback."
I knew it was too late to call him. They had a ten o'clock curfew.
"Listen, when you talk to him tomorrow, tell him I'm going to be out of town and to check in with his mom."
"Where are you going?"
"Prison."
"Oh, Shane. Come on, it's not that bad," she teased.
"No, really. Since I can't go to Shutters, I'm going up to Corcoran State Prison on a case instead. I'll be back by sundown."
"Okay." She picked up Franco from my lap. "Come here, you. I'm gonna give you some fresh food."
She left me alone looking at the still canals. The cold Alaskan air was still blowing along the coast, so I decided to go inside and found a new spiral notebook in my desk. It was one of the ones I used on crime scenes. Over the years I'd filled countless numbers of them, noting gruesome case facts and laying out crime scene sketches and drawings. Now I opened a fresh one and on the first page, wrote:
ALEXA'S DIARY
Then I wrote down everything that had happened when I visited her office. I remembered to include my feelings: how worried I was; hpw angry I'd become at her. Dr. Lusk was right: she'd invaded my space, become the reckless, impulsive one. It wasn't in my nature to be holding a leash, constantly warning her of potential danger. It cramped my style and when I stopped to analyze it, I realized that it really pissed me off. I still loved her, but as I wrote all of this down, I realized how frightened for us I had become.
Chapter 5
I left the house before six o'clock the next morning, picked up some coffee at Starbucks, and by six-thirty was on the interstate, heading north. I knew from having made this trip many times that it was going to take me almost three hours to cover the hundred and seventy-nine miles to Corcoran State Prison, which is located in lower Central California.
I had called ahead and talked to the visitor's custodial sergeant, told him who I was, and that I needed Truit Hickman sent over from general population to the visitor's center. After I gave him my badge number, I informed the sergeant I would be there around ten A. IM. and that I was investigating some anomalies that came up during Hickman's appeal. There was no appeal, so I kept it vague, and he seemed satisfied.
I hate the drive through the desert and since I had all day, I decided to take the more scenic, coastal route. By the time I was approaching Santa Barbara, my thoughts had again turned exclusively to Alexa. I didn't want to call her until later hoping that she'd get some needed sleep. She was running on nervous energy, and recently had been losing weight. I could see the strain on her face, the tightness around her eyes and mouth.
North of Santa Barbara I turned inland and after forty minutes drove out of the low hills into Central California. It was mostly farmland up here, but after twenty miles the fields gave way to high desert. Along the roadside, I passed an occasional saguaro cactus standing like a man at gunpoint with his hands in the air.
By nine-thirty I was nearing my destination and turned on Poplar Avenue for the eleven-and-a-half-mile stretch before hitting Central Valley Highway. I called Alexa, but was told by Ellen that she was out of the office.
"Out?" I said, concerned. "Out where?"
"She went across the street for some breakfast."
"Oh, okay. How's she doing this morning?"
"Compared to what?"
"Stick with her, Ellen. She needs our help."
"I'm trying. You too," she said.
I hung up and finally turned on to Otis Avenue.
The huge, foreboding prison loomed in the tan dust up ahead like randomly stacked chunks of gray concrete. Corcoran was ugly, like all prisons. It was built on the site of what was once Tulare Lake, the long-ago home of the Tachi Indians. The dry lake mitigated the prison's relentless, unforgiving architecture because everything out here was relentless and unforgiving. In this hopeless landscape Corcoran State Prison somehow managed to belong. Level One inmates had placed painted, white rocks along the drive and lining the visitor's parking lot. Very festive.
I found a spot, locked up, and walked under a cloudless sky to a large structure with a painted sign that read:
CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS VISITING CENTER
If everything went according to plan, Tru Hickman would have already been transferred here from Level Four, saving me a long wait.
The visitor's building, like everything else, was poured concrete with slit windows that resembled gun ports. The buildings were sending a stern message.
The inside of the CDCVC was more of the same. Brown linoleum floors, pale yellow walls, hard metal furniture that looked like it had been intentionally designed to hurt. I talked to a desk officer, showed my creds, and handed over my gun, which was locked in a gun box. He handed me a receipt and I was buzzed through a sally port into the police and attorney's waiting room, a grim little space with faded leather chairs and one window.
Thirty minutes later, a prison sergeant who looked like a college linebacker came through a door and told me to follow him. He led me through another sally port into a large visitor's room full of wood desks and chairs. There were already two prisoners with their families at opposite ends of the room. Both inmates were holding infants. Their wives each carried transparent plastic diaper bags, which were mandated by the prison visiting rules and allowed staff a clear view of the contents inside. The two families were huddled as far away from each other as possible, whispering. Large killjoy signs were posted that read:
YOU MAY HOLD HANDS ABOVE THE TABLE.
TO AVOID TRANSFER OF DRUGS
ABSOLUTELY NO KISSING.
I sat at a wooden table and waited. The two inmate families gave me a quick look, knew what I was at a glance, and further turned their backs to me.
Then, Tru Hickman came into the room, escorted by a yard bull. I'd seen his booking photo, so I certainly wasn't expecting
Jay Leno, but in person this guy was sad and pitiful. His walk was puppet gangly and loose-jointed, as if nothing really quite connected. Hips forward, elbows out, head bobbing, trailing a loser vibe. He was implausibly thin like a lot of tweakers, having spent years forgoing food in favor of meth. His jaw was undershot, his complexion pockmarked, with ears that stuck out. He had recently been beaten. There were bruises all over him and his left eye was swollen half-shut. His nose looked as if it had been broken and badly set. This kid was a target for aggression.
He sat down and immediately looked down at his hands, then started to pull at a loose thread on one of his frayed cuffs, his eyes steadfastly refusing to look up at me.
"Tru, I'm Detective Scully. I'm looking into your case. I'm here because of the letter you wrote to LAPD Internal Affairs. I was asked to talk to you by Detective Llevar. You spoke to her on the phone the day before yesterday."
" 'Kay." He continued to stare down at his cuffs, showing me the top of his head.
"Tru, you want to look up at me?"
"'Kay." He didn't look up.
"Now. You wanta look up now?"
The eyes slowly came up and found me sitting across from him. We locked gazes for a second and I saw fear and pain swimming in brown pools of confusion before his eyes darted away, then
came back, then darted away again. It was as if he was taking me in, one quick little glance at a time.
"I read your letter. You need to tell me why you think you were framed. You need to start at the beginning. Walk me through it."
"Man, this is so…" Then he looked over at one of the inmates across the room. "I can't snitch people out with them in here. I'm already wearing a rat jacket. It's why I keep getting stomped on."
"This is the visiting room, Tru. They have a right to be here."
"But…"
"I drove all the way up from L. A. I'm interested in what you have to say. Forget about them. Just talk to me, okay?" He didn't speak, so I said, "Let's just start with the day of the murder. Your friend, Mike Church, came over and got into a fight with your mom. Start there."
Now his eyes finally found mine. "Ain't my fucking friend," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "That guy's like a case of the clap I can't get rid of. Been on me since tenth grade."
"You met him at the California Youth Authority, right?"
"Yeah. Pounded my ass every fuckin' mornin'. My crime was I was alive and that seemed to really piss him off."
"If he's not a friend, why was he over at your house the day your mother was killed?"
"To fuck with me. To make my life suck. That's all he ever wanted me for. He'd pop a bunch of Amies, get all 'roided out and come lookin' for my ass."
"No other reason?"
"That afternoon he said he wanted me to go buy a case of beer for him. Like I'm still his CYA yard bitch."
"That's it? That's all he wanted? Why?"
"Why? How the hell do I know? He wants my life to be shit. He'll kick my ass just to get the lint in my pocket. He's a fuckin' psycho."
"Why didn't he buy the beer himself?"
"I just told ya. He likes fucking with me. He knows my mom hates his guts. He likes to rile her up. Sometimes I wouldn't see him or his greaser gang friends for months, then all of a sudden, there he is. Back in my life like a boil on my dick. Nothing I can do about it, either."
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