White Sister (2006)

by Stephen - Scully 06 Cannell

  She didn't think it was funny. "We need his real name on the admitting form."

  "Look, Nurse Whitman, the guy's not quite there. He stepped in front of my car and I'm trying to do the right thing and get him fixed up. If he wants to be Crown Prince Mampuna, I'm all for it. He's just a homeless guy who hears voices and needs medical help. The city will pay for this. What's the problem?"

  "And you're Shane Scully of the LAPD," she said.

  "Mostly I'm Shane Scully of the LAPD, except when I'm Lord Bullwinkle, the Vicar of Kent." I gave her a loony smile and she finally relented, stifling a laugh.

  "Okay. He's all yours, Lord Bullwinkle. Get him outta here. None of us down here can take much more."

  What happened next was right out of a Steve Martin movie. I bundled him into my car and drove from the ER back to the Nickel. My theory was, when trying to return something, it's usually a good idea to put it back exactly where you found it.

  "I'm just gonna drop you on the corner of Alameda and Sixth," I said casually. I was in a hurry to get all his junk out of my car and go home to Alexa.

  "Ain't no good squat spots on Sixth. Assholes all whizzin' by like there ain't no tomorrow. All a buncha reckless-don't-give-a-damn-hit-and-run half-steppers, like you."

  "Right. Okay." I choked down a few more confrontational responses. "So, where do you want to go?"

  "Anywhere but the VOA," he said, referring to the Volunteers of America drop-in center. "Them Bible-beaters all hump yer leg fer Jesus. Maybe the Southern ..."

  The Southern is a recently remodeled single-room-occupancy hotel on Fifth Street across from San Julian Park. For years it had been a hellhole where street people would pay for their drugs at the front desk and then go stand behind the hotel and wait for the dealer to drop the cut down from the roof in baggies. A developer took it over, cleaned it up, and renovated. Single rooms went to homeless people for about one hundred ninety dollars a month. For SRO housing, that was considered pricey.

  "Pretty expensive over there," I said. "You got the cash?" I asked.

  "No. But you do," he said.

  "I'm not gonna buy you a month in a hotel!"

  "Lookit this!" he said, holding up his plastered wrist. "This be my green and gold lifetime pass. Green for da money, gold for da honey. This here's gonna cost you. I can't be scuffling for quarters with no broken wrist."

  "You were jaywalking, stop trying to shake me down!" I was running out of patience.

  "I'm going to the Legal Aid!" he shrieked. "Gonna hire me a kick-ass-get-some-money street lawyer. Got some big-time payback comin'."

  I needed this guy out of my life without a lawsuit, and I figured if a hundred and ninety bucks did it, then it was probably a good buy. "Okay. I'll give you the money," I finally said. "But that's it between us. After that, we're done."

  "Righteous." He grinned.

  The Southern was an old, five-story hotel. The brick front, which had not yet been sand-blasted, was still stained brown from eighty years of L. A. smog. But the interior was renovated, the marble in the lobby and the open balconies that ran down the long hallways had been repaired. Fifty-five rooms overlooked a large square atrium. I'd been inside a few times in the past, to make drug arrests. Now, with the renovation and the new management, it was a favored spot on the Row.

  When I pulled up in front, five homeless men were sitting on the steps. As Jonathan got out of my car, they all popped up like they were shot from air rams.

  "It's Long Gone John," a big red-faced guy with a beard yelled. "He stole my radio! Get him!"

  Bodine turned to face them. "You leave me be, Tuck. This here's the po-lice." He waved an arm at me, but one of the men threw a beer bottle in our direction. It broke on the pavement behind us.

  "Get outta here, you jack-rollin' piece of shit!" a third man yelled.

  Then they all started advancing on us.

  "Git this pile a bolts moving," the Crown Prince of Bassaland commanded as he ducked back into the car.

  They were throwing bottles, and since I didn't want to get hit or scratch the paint on my new silver Acura, I ignored my required police response to a felony 415, jumped back behind the wheel and sped off up the street.

  The same thing happened at the Simone and the Union Rescue Mission. The minute anybody saw Jonathan Bodine, they started throwing stuff. In five minutes, he got two death threats and several promises of permanent injury.

  "They really love you down here, John," I said, wondering how I was going to unload him. "You also a typhoid carrier or something?"

  "I'm having some temporary problems with these lie-like-a-crack-whore half-steppers," he grumbled. "Get over it."

  "Everybody's calling you a jack-roller. Does that mean my trunk's full of other people's property?"

  "I ain't gettin' outta this car till you find me a squat spot with windas," he said, crossing his arms and slumping defiantly in the seat.

  I tried twice more to unload him, once at the Weingart Center and once in the park. Both times it was like the last reel of a zombie movie. Guys in rotting overcoats lurched toward us growling. Throughout this miserable experience, I continued to call Alexa on her cell and at home, but voice mail kept picking up.

  I don't know what moved me to take him home with me. Probably guilt for running him down, or maybe a deep-seated feeling that I was still legally responsible, but mostly, I think it was because I was tired of screwing around with him and wanted to get home because of a growing concern over Alexa.

  "I hate Venice," he said, as we drove down Abbot Kinney Boulevard. "Nothing but panhandlers and such on that beach."

  He sort of had a point. The current wisdom on L. A.'s homeless was that panhandlers went to the beach, either Santa Monica or Venice. Teenage runaways ended up in Hollywood, and only the most desperate down-and-outers like John lived in boxes, Alices, or doorways on the Row.

  "I'm gonna take you home with me," I finally admitted. "You get one night in my garage, then we'll figure out what to do with you in the morning."

  "I ain't sleepin' in no garage," he complained, pulling at his shirt. "This here look like a Texaco uniform?"

  "It's okay. I'll put a cardboard box in there so you'll be more comfortable."

  "You run a man down, don't say shit, or I'm sorry. Then you insults me and makes me sleep in some cold-ass garage 'stead a one a them sweet SROs."

  I took him home, thinking this may be the dumbest move in my entire police career. As we pulled into the driveway in front of my Venice Canal house I immediately saw that Alexa's car wasn't there. It was now almost nine-thirty. I wondered if maybe she had gone to the market and had left me a note inside.

  As we got out of the car, Jonathan Bodine looked around despairingly. "I spent a month down here once. It sucks. Got rats by this canal big as fuckin' meat loafs."

  I let it go, went to the front door, unlocked it, and walked into the entry hall. There was no note from Alexa on the floor by the door where we always left them. All the lights were out. I started flipping switches.

  Jonathan Bodine wandered in behind me. "Man, talk about four walls and a chair."

  Here was this guy who lived in a cardboard box, standing in my living room, dissing my classic canal house. I swallowed my irritation and said, "There's a shower in my son's room. Come on." I led him through the summer heat of the house and turned on the central air. I could already smell him and didn't want that stink to get caught in the curtains.

  I turned on the lights in Chooch's bedroom. It was empty because my son was beginning his freshman year at USC on a football scholarship. His girlfriend, Delfina, who had come to live with us after her cousin died, was visiting relatives in Mexico and wasn't due back till the end of the summer. The house felt empty. Jonathan Bodine moved up and stood in the doorway behind me.

  "You'll sleep in here," Ltold him.

  "Thought you said it was a garage."

  "It was. We converted it into a room for my son. The shower's in there. Take off those
clothes. I'll wash them and send that coat to the cleaners."

  "Now you finally talkin'," he grinned.

  He peeled off the coat and started to unbutton his shirt, kicked off his soiled boots, then dropped his trousers and stood there in his skivvies. Without his clothes, he seemed even skinnier than before. He had light coffee-colored skin peeking out from under a layer of street grime. Some kind of African tribal tattoo wrapped his small bicep. He walked toward the bathroom wearing only his boxers, which were yellowed with age, or urine. God knows what.

  "Kick the boxers out through the door. There's shampoo and soap in the shower."

  He nodded and started inside.

  "And Bodine ... if you think you're gonna steal anything out of this house, remember I'm a cop and I make my living shooting people."

  "Already run me down. Might as well shoot me, too."

  He slammed the door. A minute later I heard the shower running.

  I turned around and saw Franco, our adopted marmalade cat, standing behind me sniffing the air like somebody had farted. His yellow eyes were packed with distrust and his ears were back, giving me attitude. His look said, "Why on earth did you bring that home?" Good question.

  I went through Chooch's dresser and found a red Harvard-Westlake sweatshirt, jeans, a belt, some clean underwear, and socks. I put them on the floor outside the bathroom door, picked up Bodine's dirty clothes, and carried them out to the laundry porch. I loaded the washer and turned it on, all the while wondering where the hell Alexa was.

  I tried calling her cell, but again it went straight to voice mail. I gave Franco fresh water and filled his dish with dried food.

  Then the phone in the living room rang.

  Chapter 4.

  IT'S TOMMY SEPULVEDA," a voice crackled through the telephone.

  "What's up, Tom?" I said.

  Tommy Sepulveda and Raphael Figueroa were a detective team that worked with me at Homicide Special. Since Sepulveda Boulevard and Figueroa Street are two main drags in Los Angeles, it was inevitable that some wise guy in personnel would find a way to put them together. Sepulveda was Italian; Figueroa, a second-generation Mexican-American. They were good dicks and had a cubicle two over from me and Sally Quinn, my incoming partner. I remembered seeing that Sepulveda and Figueroa were next up on the roll-out board when I had left the office for the jail at ten this morning.

  "Listen, Shane, you need to get up to the top of Mulholland Drive right now," Tommy said.

  "I'm not back in rotation yet. I'm breaking in a new partner next week."

  "We just got an APE case. You need to get up here now!" He sounded tense and all of my alarms started flashing. An APE case was sixth-floor speak for Acute Political Emergency.

  "What's going on?"

  "I'm calling you on a radio hook-up. My cell doesn't work up here. I don't want this out on an open channel. Just move it."

  "On my way." I hung up and wondered what the hell to do with Jonathan Bodine. If I left him here alone, there wouldn't be anything left in the house when I got back. The shower had stopped running in Chooch's bathroom, so I went looking for him. He was in the kitchen foraging in my refrigerator, his hair still wet, wearing a towel wrapped around his skinny hips. He was holding a leg of lamb in his right hand, gnawing it right off the bone. In his left hand he had an open bottle of table wine.

  "We gotta go."

  "I'm having dinner."

  "No, you're not."

  I rushed into Chooch's room and grabbed the clothes I'd laid out for him, snatched his grimy boots off the floor, and hurried back into the kitchen, throwing the bundle on the dinette table.

  "Put 'em on. We're leaving." My stomach was balled up in a knot. There was only one reason I could come up with why Sepulveda would call me out on an APE case. It had something to do with my missing wife.

  "Let's go!" I yelled, and grabbed him. The towel came off his hips and fell to the floor. He dropped the bottle of wine and it rolled under a chair and started emptying on the floor. I threw a pair of Chooch's undies at him, still holding his skinny arm.

  "Leggo a me!"

  "Bodine, I can take you out of here naked in cuffs if that's the way you want it. You got six seconds or less to get dressed."

  "I got rights, asshole. I got a broken wrist courtesy a your shitty driving."

  I pulled out my Beretta and aimed it at him in an elaborate bluff. "How 'bout I just drop you and throw you in the canal?"

  "Okay, okay. Calm down," he shrieked. Then he put down the leg of lamb and started jumping on one leg, trying to poke his left foot into the shorts. His plaster cast made it difficult to grasp the undies, but he finally made it. Then he put on the sweatshirt and shimmied into the jeans, which were two times too big because Chooch is six-five, two-thirty, and Bodine was a runt. Five-foot-nothing and a hundred and fifteen. There was room for two of him in there, but we weren't going to a fashion show, so I could care less. I handed him his boots and a belt, grabbed him by the collar of the sweatshirt and yanked him out of the kitchen.

  He made a grab for the leg of lamb but missed, and the bone skidded across the floor and stopped under the table. I left it there, a few feet away from the emptying bottle of wine.

  I have a Kojak light in my glove box and a siren under the hood. You can't go Code 3 in L. A. without permission from the communications division, which I wouldn't get because I wasn't on call. But I grabbed the magnetized bubble light anyway and slammed it up on the roof. I used it intermittently and growled the siren to bust through red lights at intersections. Technically a no-no, but I didn't care. I had the pedal down, passing cars on the right as I sped north on Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

  "This be some more-a-that crazy nickel-slick driving," was about all that Jonathan Bodine kept saying. He had his boots on and both feet stretched out in fear, planted on the floor mats in front of him. He was gripping the door pull with white knuckles.

  It took me almost ten minutes to get out of Venice to the 10 Freeway. Then after another quarter hour, I transitioned to the 405 North, growling my siren and flashing my headlights at slower moving traffic until they moved over.

  I got off the 405 at Mulholland and headed east, climbing up into the Hollywood Hills past Beverly Glen. The houses were sparse up here, but the ones I passed were big. This was prime L. A. real estate. Pine trees and elms hugged the slopes on both sides of the road. The Valley lights twinkled below as my headlights sawed holes in the dark.

  "Slow down, motherfucker," Bodine said. It seemed like usable advice. I was close to the summit, so I took my foot off the gas.

  Then I saw a police circus up ahead. Half a dozen patrol cars and a coroner's van. Sitting in the middle of yards of yellow crime-scene tape, was Alexa's black BMW. I hit the brakes and skidded to a stop, getting out of the car almost before it had stopped, running toward the twenty cops and techies who were milling around beyond the tape in front of Alexa's car.

  Raphael Figueroa saw me coming and broke off, intercepting me. He was six feet tall with a weight lifter's build and a tea-brown, Indio face.

  "Hold it, Scully! Slow down!" he barked.

  "Where is she?"

  "Not here. We haven't got a line on her yet."

  I could see a black male slumped over in the front passenger seat of the car.

  "Who's that?"

  "The guest of honor," cop-talk for a body. "Looks like he's been dead about an hour. No lividity yet or rigor."

  I tried to push past Figueroa, but his left hand was holding my arm in a strong grip. Then he put two fingers of his right hand under his tongue and let out a shrill whistle.

  "Tommy, get over here," he yelled.

  Tom Sepulveda broke away from the coroner's van, where he'd been talking to Ray Tsu from the ME's office. Ray was a narrow-shouldered Asian man with such a quiet manner and voice he was known by most homicide cops as Fey Ray. Sepulveda was his exact physical opposite, an Italian stallion. Short, bull-necked, aggressive. Like his partner, he was in his mid-
thirties and they both knew their stuff. Tommy grabbed my other arm, then he and Figueroa led me about twenty yards away to their maroon Crown Vic, opened the back door, and pushed me inside.

  "Let go of me," I said, and they released me.

  "I called you because if that was my wife's car, I'd want a call, too. But you're not on this case," Sepulveda started by saying. "That's protocol, and me and Rafie are holding you to it."

  "Don't quote the rule book to me. Where is she?"

  "We've done a preliminary search of the surrounding areas," Figueroa answered. "It's pretty dark and it's dense foliage up here, but so far no sign of her."

  "Who's the stiff?"

  "Unknown," Rafie said. "No wallet but he's got gang ink all over him and expensive, chunky, diamond jewelry so he's probably some street G. Whoever capped him wasn't interested in bad-taste jewelry. There's a big ABC tattoo on his right bicep."

  "Crip?" I asked. ABC usually stood for Arcadia Block Crips, a dangerous gang from the Piru Street area in Compton.

  "ABC also stands for American Broadcasting Company," Tommy said. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

  "I need to look in the car."

  "No way!" they said in unison.

  "I'm a material witness. I know what was in that car this morning when she left for work. You don't want me to even take a look and inventory that for you? See if any thing's missing?"

  Raphael and Sepulveda looked at each other. They both suspected this was bull. But technically, I had a point.

  "Okay, Scully. You can go over there with us," Sepulveda said. "But that's it. No touching, no asking questions. I don't want a bunch of grief from the rat squad about this later. We square on that?"

  "It's my wife's car."

  "We know, man." Rafie took a breath. "I'm sorry, but if you get into this, the Professional Standards Bureau is gonna fall on all of us."

  "I get it," I said. "I'm not gonna get in your way.

  They took a moment and studied me. I have a little bit of a reputation in the department as a walk-alone, and I could see they were slightly skeptical. But operationally, they had no choice, so finally they exchanged a silent nod and led me over to the car. As we ducked under the yellow tape, Ray Tsu looked up at me.