Vertical Coffin s-4

by Stephen J. Cannell

  "Oh yeah-he also belongs to a mountain climbing club. The Rock Stars. I put a call into their president, Marion Bell. Marion's a guy, by the way. We don't need any more gender confusion on this case."

  She looked up, waited for my grin, and got it. "He agreed to meet me this afternoon. Didn't sound like a big Smiley fan. Said Vince wanted to learn rock climbing as part of his survivalist training. Apparently he told some of the other members of the club that he was part of some survivalist group, but he was very secretive about which one, or where they hung out. The Rock Stars is a sports club, so Smiley didn't really fit in. Marion said he wasn't surprised when he saw the shoot-out on the news."

  She took another tentative sip of her coffee, then pushed it away. "That's Smiley in Kevlar. Let's hear about his roller skate days."

  I looked down at my notes. "Went to Glendale Elementary School K to fifth grade, then through Mrs. Kimble's Country Day Middle School in Eagle Rock in sixth and seventh. Then he was in high school for a year, but got pulled out and homeschooled through twelfth grade. GED in 'ninety-five. I'm still looking for his birth records, just in case there's something missing-medical problem from birth, like maybe he was born with a tail and horns and nobody thought to tell Geraldo. I put a wire out to all the county hospitals in Southern California, most should get back to me sometime today or tomorrow."

  "Juvie record?" she asked.

  "He's got one. But, as you know, according to California State law it was sealed when he turned eighteen."

  "Man, I'd like to get my hands on that."

  "I'm working on it."

  "You little devil," she said. "How?"

  "Ve haff our veys."

  She smiled at that, so I added, "His doctor retired professionally as well as physically, so we can't get anything there, unless you wanta dig him up and try to restart his heart. That's all I could find by nine thirty this morning."

  "We're really sucking wind on this thing!" She was looking at her coffee, twirling her spoon in the cup. "Now that the U. S. Attorney is in charge, we're just doing busywork." She frowned. "But to be honest, you know I never thought the answer was gonna come out of his past. Now they're just using that to keep us out of the way."

  There was certainly something to what she was saying. With the murder of Michael Nightingale this case had turned into a hot grounder. I was pretty sure Alexa was looking out for my career and had put me and Jo on background checks to keep me out of the line of fire.

  "Even if we come up with more questions to ask, Hatton's IOs aren't gonna be interested. They're focused on those two SWAT units. We might as well spend the day at the beach," Jo said bitterly.

  "Look, we're still officially on the Hidden Ranch investigation. Let the U. S. Attorney's investigators run the Greenridge and Nightingale murders, but for the next four to eight hours, while they're all doing press conferences and organizing evidence, we can still work our case. Nobody is even thinking about that anymore.

  We probably have less than a day before we're gonna be assigned to do grunt work for the FBI. Let's put the time to good use."

  She dropped her spoon into her cup and looked over at me. "One thing you said doesn't track," she said, and held my gaze with those incredible mismatched eyes.

  "What?"

  "This is a nitpick, and it's definitely in the who-gives-a-damn column, but middle school is sixth through eighth grade, not just sixth and seventh."

  "So there's a year missing," I said, waving it off. "He drops out of eighth grade, home-schools, then goes back into the ninth grade at Glendale High, drops out in tenth, homeschools again, gets his GED two years later…"

  "That's a lot of dropping in and out. Whatta you think happened to cause that?"

  "Who knows?" I said. But since she mentioned it, I guess it was a little strange. "So you think something is wrong there?"

  "Look, Shane, as far as I'm concerned, we're on the sidelines. I'm just saying it sounds screwy."

  I thought about it some more. I had to agree.

  I glanced over at the bar TV. Tony and Bill Messenger were just stepping up to the podium, along with Brady Cagel and Cole Hatton. Mayor Mac and Supervisor Salazar, politicians that they were, knew a no-win when they saw it and elected not to attend. The press conference was starting. "Wanta see this?" I asked.

  "Nope," she said. "My bullshit meter is already red-lined."

  I slid out of the booth and drifted into the bar. The Robbery-Homicide detectives made room for me. One of them was a big street monster named Griff Hover, who I'd worked with way back when I was in Valley Patrol. He looked over and smiled.

  "Hey, Shane. That's a good-looking pile a bones you got sitting over there." He glanced back at Jo, who had her head down, again going over her notes.

  "Yep," I agreed and turned to watch Sheriff Messenger at the microphone.

  "We've arrested an L. A. sheriff's deputy named Patrick Dutton and are holding him as a material witness in connection with the murder of ATF Agent William Greenridge. We have identified a shell casing that appears to have been fired from a sniper rifle belonging to the Sheriff's Special Enforcement Bureau. A partial print from that same casing appears to match Deputy Dutton's."

  Then Sheriff Messenger stepped aside and made room for Brady Cagel, who was dressed in his tan gab, with his tan face and tan, freshly barbered hair. Everything tan and perfect. A fed.

  "Good morning," he said. "I am sorry to have to also confirm that one of the AR-fifteen sniper rifles belonging to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives Situation Response Team appears to have been involved in the shooting death of Deputy Sheriff Michael Nightingale. At this time we have not determined which ATF agent, if any, might be involved. The weapon could have been obtained by anyone with access to our armory, even civilian personnel. We are currently requesting that all agents and civilians with access to that particular SRT armory remain in the SWAT house under voluntary curfew. It is our hope that they will also cooperate with polygraph examinations."

  He quickly gave way to Cole Hatton, who looked like ten million bucks in a tailored black pinstripe. Hatton cleared his throat, then spoke in his booming baritone.

  "There is currently no evidence tying these two murders together. Sheriff Messenger, Agent Cagel, and I are all appalled at the suggestion that members of the ATF Special Weapons units and Sheriff's SEB Special Weapons Team might be gunning for each other after hours. However, until this investigation is complete, I urge the news media and the individual members of both the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and ATF to please stand down and cooperate with us in every way possible. I promise that, in the end, justice will be served."

  "Serve this, dickhead," Griff Hover said as he grabbed his crotch. "These humps at ATF are dirty."

  "What about the sheriffs?" one of the other detectives said.

  "Hey, the sheriffs might be square badges, but at least they back us up when we need 'em, and they roll on our calls," Griff said.

  I went back into the restaurant and paid our bill.

  "Dare I ask?" Jo said.

  "Come on, don't put me through it. I saw you listening." "This is about to get a lot messier," she said. What happened was it got a lot deadlier.

  Chapter 34

  PIECES

  Jo and I split up and I used the walk back to Parker Center to gather my thoughts. I climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor, taking them two at a time, using the brisk climb to clear my head. Frankly, my spirits were a little low.

  I was beginning to think maybe I had been wasting my time, like everybody kept telling me. When you got down to it, Jigsaw John retired twenty years ago. Things were different when he was on the job. Back then, each division only had two or three homicides per week. Now we have that many a night. With the growing caseload, there just wasn't time to investigate this way anymore.

  In theory, you study pre-event behavior to determine mindset. You look at the victim to see what might have been going on in that person's lif
e to draw the perp in.

  If something didn't fit it could signal a mistake in reasoning, but it didn't have to. It was entirely possible that Smiley had just gone nuts and started shooting like Jo said, and then, because he was completely delusional, had chosen not to use his carefully dug tunnel.

  What had been eluding me was a plausible alternate theory. Without that I had no line of logic to follow, nothing to work on.

  I suppose it was always possible that these two SWAT teams were shooting at each other, but that was a hard concept for me to buy into. SWAT teams were supposed to be the cream of any law enforcement agency. All the evidence to the contrary, I just couldn't believe that SRT and SEB would try and settle a grudge with long guns. Was that valid reasoning, or just me trying to prop up the last vestige of a once-treasured idea? I wasn't sure any longer.

  This afternoon I'd probably be getting a call from one of Hatton's federal IOs, with a new list of things to investigate. They'd treat me like a stupid lackey, ordering me to do scut work they were too busy for. They'd want me to background every member of SRT and SEB, looking for somebody with anger-management problems, or a history of unprovoked violence. There was no chance that the police union was going to let any of them be polygraphed.

  I reached my cubicle in Special Crimes on the fourth floor, out of breath from running the stairs, and sank into the chair at my desk. Jo and I had divided our workload. She was going to see if she could get her computer genius to run down the insurance policy. Then she was going out to talk with Marion Bell and any of the members of the Rock Stars mountain climbing club she could locate.

  We both had Vincent Smiley down as a loner. It would be worth finding out if he really belonged to some survivalist group or Nazi wilderness outfit. If that proved to be a reasonable alternate theory, it would move this investigation off SWAT and onto an antigovernment hate group. Skinheads always make convincing bad guys.

  While Jo was running that down I was going to stay on the few hot trails we'd turned and work my way through Vincent's school years.

  Busy work?

  I looked up Mrs. Kimble's Country Day Middle School in Eagle Rock and placed a call. When I asked for the director, somebody named Rose Merick came on the line.

  "Mrs. Kimble is retired," the sweet-sounding woman said.

  One of my little games is to see if, over the phone, I can guess a person's age by their voice tonality. She sounded about sixty. I wrote 60 and put a question mark after it, then circled the number.

  This was one of the many ways I attempt to alleviate boredom on the job. Innocent enough, I guess, but boredom, like violence, can change you. Some cops become so tweaked, they carry their emotional remedies to dangerous extremes.

  Back in the late seventies, the entire night shift at Devonshire Division was so far into the ozone they devised a weird photo contest. They each put up ten bucks, then ran a monthly competition to see who could come up with the grossest photo. These guys were crawling onto beds with overdosed hookers while their partners snapped Polaroids. That's how screwed up you could get.

  Humor is the shield that protects cops from the grim realities we're forced to deal with every day. As your view of life darkens you can quickly come to believe that most of humanity is primal, corrupt, and deadly. Little by little, if you're not careful, your humor becomes so sick that you're crawling into bed with a dead sixteen-year-old junkie just to get a laugh. The more death and human depravity you see, the more disillusioned you become, until one day you find yourself sitting on a toilet in some restaurant bathroom with the door locked and your service revolver in your mouth. After you pull the trigger nobody you work with even has to ask what went wrong or why you did it. They all know you just couldn't find a way to laugh anymore.

  Angrily, I scratched out my 60, thinking I had better find a more constructive way to dodge my boredom.

  "I'm sorry I can't be of more help," Mrs. Merick was saying.

  She was about to ring off when I had a thought.

  "Do you still have records of your student body from the late eighties?"

  "My goodness, no," she said. "That's over fifteen years ago. And if we do, they're in storage someplace. This is a very small facility."

  "Were you teaching there during that time?" I asked.

  "No. Except for Midge Kimble, I don't think anybody from the eighties is still around."

  "Is Mrs. Kimble still in the area?"

  "Yes she is."

  "Could you give me her number?"

  "I could, but I'd need to see your badge first. We can't just give out phone numbers anymore. Times have changed."

  "How about you call me back at Parker Center. I'm in Special Crimes. Sergeant Scully. You can get the number out of the book so you'll know it's legit."

  "I guess I could do that…"

  Three minutes later my phone rang. Rose Merick again. She gave me Midge Kimble's number and address.

  I called and reached a recording. If Mrs. Merick sounded sixty, Midge Kimble sounded a hundred. I'm out right now, a raspy voice shouted. Leave your number and I'll call back.

  I did as she instructed.

  I was gathering my notes, getting ready to head out, when the phone rang again. I snatched it up.

  "Scully, it's Cletus."

  Clete James was a friend who worked in the Juvenile Justice Division. He was going to try to cut through the red tape and pull Vincent Smiley's early record.

  "Your guy Smiley had some juvie busts in 'eighty-eight and-nine, but I'm in a tug of war with the Pasadena City Attorney," he said. "She's being bitchy and set her heels on me. I'm gonna need a court order to open them."

  "Pasadena?" I said, writing that in my crime book with the years '88–89.

  "Yeah, that's where all his juvie cases were filed."

  "Nothing in my records about Pasadena. I have him living in Glendale, Burbank, and Agoura, going to middle school in Eagle Rock, but nothing in Pasadena."

  "Well, Eagle Rock is only a few miles west of Pasadena. I think it's even in the same school district," Clete pointed out.

  "Listen, in the late eighties Smiley had to have been about ten or twelve. Can you check to see if there's a bicycle license in Pasadena or Eagle Rock for a Vincent Smiley? Could be under his dad's name, Stanley, or maybe Edna."

  "No problem. Hang on for a minute while I log on." Clete came back a few minutes later.

  "Got it. Stanley Smiley. A Schwinn Scrambler, registered in March of 'eighty-eight-2346 Mountain Circle, Pasadena."

  "Thanks, Clete. I owe ya."

  I hung up and pulled a Thomas Street Guide out of my bottom desk drawer. Midge Kimble now lived on the far east side of the L. A. basin, way out in Duarte. I decided I'd start in Smiley's old neighborhood in Pasadena. Once I'd canvassed that, I'd move on east, check out Mrs. K., then head back and stop in at the hospital in Pasadena. I figured, if Vincent lived there in '88, there was an outside chance he was born in Pasadena at Huntington Hospital. I packed my stuff and headed out.

  Mountain Circle is a side street off a main drag called Fair Oaks Boulevard, which runs north and south, stretching up into the Pasadena foothills. The further up Fair Oaks you go, the more sketchy and run-down it gets. I quickly found myself in a mostly black and Hispanic neighborhood. Single-story, rundown houses sat next to three-story, brown stucco project buildings that, when they were built, were heralded as the answer to urban blight, but within years had turned into urine-soaked, graffiti-marked monstrosities.

  As I passed the Foothill Projects I witnessed a drug deal going down through a chain-link fence, right in plain view. The seller was a thirty-year-old banger dirtbag in a hooded blue sweatshirt and satin basketball shorts. The buyers looked like two fifteen-year-old girls. I didn't stop. Not my turf Why sweat what you can't change? I told myself.

  I knew, even as these thoughts hit me, that I was wrong. Every time I see something like that and instead of stopping choose to just drive on and give it a wave, I know I'm losing a small p
art of myself. I become a little more jaded and skeptical with each lost opportunity. But experience taught me that if I did stop and chase that dealer and those teenagers through the projects and caught them, I'd likely face angry parents who would claim that I'd used unnecessary force during the arrest. They would file charges against me and then the crowded court system would plead the busts down to misdemeanors rather than prosecute. In the end, nothing much would have changed, except that a few more 181 complaints would be added to my IAD file.

  Why bother? It won't change anything. But, of course, it does. It changes you.

  I found Mountain Circle almost in the foothills, turned right, and eventually pulled up across the street from 2346. It was a small wooden house that had definitely seen better days. The long-dead lawn had been beaten into a hard dirt playground littered with broken plastic toys. An old black Cadillac Brougham with a single hubcap and primered trunk was parked in the driveway.

  I walked up to the door and rang the bell. The broken ringer snapped and buzzed like an angry wasp. Moments later the door opened to chain width and an angry black woman of indeterminate age glared out at me.

  "Police?" she said, before I could even get my badge out. Something, some vibe had warned her that I was The Man and up to no good, even though I was smiling.

  I showed her my shield and she glared at it with contempt. She'd seen dozens of badges, and experience told her it always turned out badly.

  "Are you the owner of the house?" I asked.

  "Got a warrant?"

  "No ma'am," I said. "I'm just trying to find out if there's anybody living here who remembers Stan and Edna Smiley. They owned this house back in the eighties."

  "Ain't no Smileys here," she growled.

  "No-I know that. They used to live here. I wonder if there's anybody still in the neighborhood who might remember them from back then."