Fallen Angels

by Connie Dial

  ALSO BY CONNIE DIAL

  Internal Affairs

  The Broken Blue Line

  FALLEN

  ANGELS

  CONNIE DIAL

  Copyright © 2012 by Connie Dial

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dial, Connie–

  Fallen angels / Connie Dial.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-57962-274-9

  eISBN 1-57962-306-9

  1. Police—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.I126F35 2012

  813’.6—dc23 2011051392

  Printed in the United States of America.

  To Paula and Patricia Milazzo

  ONE

  Captain Josie Corsino stood near the open door and studied the dead girl’s face. She’d seen plenty of corpses during her twenty-one years with the Los Angeles Police Department, but still thought it was odd the way each victim had such a unique expression—fear, surprise, anger, resignation—but this was new: the dead girl was smiling.

  What dying people thought or saw in the last few seconds before vacant stares signaled cognitive life had gone forever was something that always fascinated Josie. Despite all the claims by those Sunday morning television evangelists, she knew there was really only one way to find out. She wasn’t that curious.

  The victim looked young, maybe early teens, but a premature beauty with thick blond hair, perfect skin and a well-developed figure flaunted in tight designer jeans and a spandex halter top. At the moment, the girl smelled like sour milk and was unattractively sprawled on the couch in this living room with a bloody gaping hole in her right temple and her brains splattered all over the wallpaper. A chrome-plated semi-automatic handgun lay on the floor between a leather ottoman and her lifeless fingers.

  “Recognize her, Captain?” A uniformed sergeant asked from the doorway. It was three a.m. and Josie was having trouble recognizing the sergeant. She looked at his name tag, Richards.

  “You work Hollywood, Sergeant Richards?” She thought she knew most of her patrol guys even though they transferred in and out every month—the chief’s clever shell game designed to fool the public into thinking there were lots of cops on the streets as he shifted warm bodies from division to division riding the crime waves.

  “No ma’am, Rampart, but it was quiet tonight so I rolled on the call. I know this place.”

  She nodded at him and thought, cops, we’re all alike . . . little kids chasing fire trucks and sirens. The Hollywood Hills party house. Josie knew it too. Her vice and narcotics detectives had conducted more than a dozen investigations at this house for high-priced prostitution and drug parties.

  The lab squints and a few detectives had gathered in the kitchen waiting for the coroner. Lieutenant Tony Ibarra looked up when she entered.

  “You recognize her?” Ibarra asked.

  “No, but I guess I’m the only one who doesn’t,” she said.

  “Hillary Dennis,” Ibarra said, looking surprised by her ignorance when she shrugged. “She’s one of those up and coming kiddie movie stars, making millions between drug and alcohol binges.”

  “Sorry,” Josie said. She didn’t follow Hollywood gossip and only watched classic black and white movies on television. “It’s late; I’m tired. Tell me again why you need me here.”

  “Headline stuff,” Ibarra said, giving her the “duh” look.

  “A teenager’s suicide?”

  “Who said it was a suicide? It’s a homicide, and she’s a movie star.”

  “I saw the gun near her body . . . you got the shooter?” Josie never understood why Ibarra couldn’t just tell her the whole story instead of feeding it to her piecemeal and forcing her to ask endless questions to get information he knew she needed. He was a middle-aged man but behaved like an old querulous woman. His promotion to lieutenant came late in his career and he never seemed entirely comfortable in the position, but that didn’t stop him from stepping up, taking charge and making terrible decisions. He was shorter than Josie and she felt he always tried to stand anywhere but next to her. With his small stature, lean body and tendency to mumble, Ibarra seemed to fade into the background when she was anywhere in the room. His parents were Cuban, and his one valuable asset to her division was his ability to speak fluent Spanish.

  “Don’t know. It was a party, but the cockroaches scattered. We caught the stupid one, but he claims he’s just the caretaker and doesn’t know who else was here. We’ll test his hands for gunshot residue, but I don’t think he did it,” Ibarra said.

  Josie slid her slender frame onto the bench in the breakfast nook without asking Ibarra why he thought the caretaker wasn’t involved. She was done with him and started checking out the room. It was a gourmet kitchen with a huge granite-top island, sub-zero refrigerator, and two professional stoves. She loved to cook and felt a touch of envy. Her kitchen was 1950’s vintage, big but designed by Betty Crocker or some other ancient woman of that era. Somebody put a lot of money into this place since the last time she saw it. Thinking about the kitchen was a nice distraction. She hated dealing with Ibarra, but for now he was in charge of all her detectives. His people knew their jobs, but he insisted on sticking his nose in their business, making things more complicated than they needed to be. She would talk to Red Behan later when she got to her office at Hollywood station. He was the homicide investigators’ immediate supervisor who usually managed to get things done despite Ibarra’s oversight.

  “Who’s living here, now?” she asked. “Is this still a party rental?”

  “Nope, according to the caretaker some big-deal downtown attorney bought it the end of last year. He’s in New York on business.”

  The caffeine deprivation headache was drilling like a jackhammer in Josie’s brain. She would call press relations and have them prepare something for the media. The hordes would eventually discover the identity of the victim. Ibarra should’ve handled it, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t. It was easier for him to dump his responsibilities on her, so he could continue playing detective.

  “Did you notify the bureau?” she asked but knew the answer.

  “Not yet.”

  Josie said she would make the notifications and take care of the media. She knew Ibarra was delegating up, but everything would get done right if she did it. She’d been stuck with him since she took command of Hollywood division less than a year ago, but had learned to work around his incompetence. She was too busy to do his job, but it was especially important now to make him look good. The captain at Wilshire division wanted a detective commanding officer who spoke Spanish. Josie knew he’d try to steal the bilingual Ibarra if she could make him seem halfway competent. It was a difficult task, and Ibarra wasn’t helping.

  HOLLYWOOD STATION was nearly empty when Josie arrived. She’d left Ibarra at the crime scene gossiping with a busty neighbor who looked like somebody who used to be famous . . . skeletally skinny and surgically altered. Josie waved at the graveyard shift watch commander who looked irritated that the captain would dare show up on his watch. If Josie came in this early, it usually meant she wanted to talk to him or look over his shoulder to see what he actually did for his paycheck. Josie knew Lieutenant Howard Owens worked in the middle of the night to avoid her. She’d inherited him as well as Ibarra from her predecessor. She gave him a hard time because he was l
azy and had made it known he didn’t like having a female boss. Eventually she’d have to deal with Owens, but kept prodding him hoping he’d either get better or retire. The rest of her lieutenants had proven to be topnotch, but Ibarra and Owens were useless and a constant source of irritation.

  Owens should have retired years ago, but the money was too good. This guy was a prime example of why she hated DROP, the city’s deferred retirement plan. It was another bureaucratic Ponzi scheme designed to make the department look bigger, with a lot of dead weight kept afloat with the promise of more money after retirement.

  He was in her office before she could close the door.

  “What’s up, Howard?” she asked, feigning interest.

  “Somebody’s gonna have to deal with all the calls we’re getting on this homicide. I haven’t got time to babysit every reporter who needs a thirty-second sound bite. I got real work to do . . .”

  “Give them to me,” she said, interrupting him. “I’ll handle the press, and why don’t you ask a day watch supervisor to have his team relieve your guys at the crime scene before they go up to roll call so you can all go home on time?” Josie crossed her arms and waited. Owens was a big man, taller than her, and she was nearly six feet. He had thinning blond hair that never looked combed and a receding chin that disappeared into his flabby neck. He seemed to enjoy complaining, and she’d just taken away his reason to whine. His pink face flushed; he mumbled something and walked away. Kill the turd with kindness, she thought, loving her job at moments like this. Howard Owens was a guy who’d made Josie’s life miserable many years ago when she was a young uniformed officer, one of the few females in patrol, and he was her training officer. She’d promoted faster than him and knew he expected her to retaliate for his prior asinine behavior. She never had any desire to get even because she figured her success really irritated him and that was the best revenge.

  In less than an hour, Josie had made all the notifications and had press relations handling the calls. She found a full pot of fresh coffee in the detective’s squad room and felt her headache dissipating as she drank from an almost clean oversized mug. Detective Red Behan was at his desk scribbling on a yellow pad. He was tall and lanky, a redheaded Ichabod Crane who looked as if he’d slept in his jeans and short-sleeved blue plaid shirt. His fourth wife had thrown him out of the house a few weeks ago, so he probably had. His unruly red hair needed combing and his puffy eyes were an indication that he had spent a good part of the night drinking, again. He was in his forties, but was one of those boyish guys who would never look or act his age, but lately, Josie worried her friend seemed a bit frayed around the edges.

  She sat at the desk next to his and waited until he finished writing. He had a new computer but preferred writing everything in longhand first.

  “Morning, boss,” he said, not looking up. “Did my fearless leader get you out of bed for this mess?” he asked. Josie realized she probably looked like a train wreck, too. Ibarra’s phone call woke her from a restless sleep. She didn’t bother to shower or brush her teeth, and dressed in the jeans and sweater she’d thrown on a chair next to her bed late last night. She and Jake had stayed up arguing about their son again. David wasn’t the only subject they disagreed on lately, but he’d become the favorite.

  Eventually, she’d take a shower at the station and change into her uniform. Before driving from her house to Hollywood, she managed to brush and twist her long black hair into something resembling a messy French twist. Makeup wasn’t anything she needed or ever wore. Nature had blessed her with thick eyelashes and a clear olive complexion, but over all, she figured the best description of her appearance this morning was chaos.

  “Tell me important stuff,” Josie said. She knew the big redhead didn’t like long stories either.

  “Miss underage, never-gonna-see-eighteen movie star goes to a party, gets shot in the head by unknown assailant and dies. Nobody saw or heard anything, and it looks like there’s no prints on the gun.” He stopped and looked at his watch. “As of 0630 hours, detectives are baffled.” He glanced up at her and grinned. “There’s nothing important to tell yet.”

  Josie stretched her long legs and pulled herself up. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s what I figured.”

  “Happy to help, boss,” he said to her back.

  “Asshole,” she mumbled and heard him chuckling as she walked away. Red Behan was one of the good guys. He couldn’t be politically correct even if she threatened him. He said what he thought, and Josie always went out of her way to protect him because he was as loyal to her as an old hound dog and the best detective in Hollywood. Ten years ago, when she was a detective, they worked and drank together. These days he consumed enough alcohol for both of them, and she preferred to do her drinking alone, but they remained friends.

  When Josie got back to the captain’s office, her adjutant was watching her television. The local news station was showing pictures of the party house surrounded by yards of yellow crime scene tape. Reporters were interviewing neighbors, gardeners, any live body they could find in the neighborhood. A studio photo of Hillary Dennis in an evening gown was set in a corner of the screen, as an Asian woman questioned the pool cleaner from next door. Josie was grateful there was no sign of Ibarra.

  Josie turned off the television and sat on the couch across from her desk. She had slept on this couch for more nights than she could remember, and it was tempting to stretch out now and sleep for a couple of hours. Jake had accused her of pretending to have call-outs so she could sleep here instead of in their bed. Sometimes, he was right.

  “You okay?” the adjutant asked, sitting in the chair behind her desk. Sergeant Bobby Jones was a young stocky black man with an easygoing manner, a smooth, youthful face and big brown intelligent eyes. He liked to talk and was smart, but she wasn’t in the mood this morning.

  “Call West bureau and find out what time I can brief the chief on this Dennis thing. I’m going up to roll call.” She got up and left him in her office. Josie hadn’t been to roll call for a few weeks, and she knew the uniformed patrol officers liked to have her there so they could find out what was going on in their division, especially on mornings like this. Besides, a few minutes with them always left her energized.

  Half an hour later, she had answered every question she could about the morning’s events and made a mental list of all the officers’ complaints, including those problems she couldn’t solve. It was important to make contact because their lives were tied to her. She had a son, but was ashamed to admit she never worried about him as much as she worried about these young men and women. They might die doing what she asked them to do every day. A few had. David was . . . David wasn’t likely to expose himself to danger for anyone, especially his mother.

  Behan was waiting in her office when she got back. He was sitting on her couch shuffling through a pile of photos.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” he said without looking up. “Mrs. Joyce Dennis, Hillary’s mommy, is waiting in Ibarra’s office. She wants to talk to you.”

  Josie groaned. “What for? I can’t tell her anything more than you or Ibarra.”

  “I mentioned that, but she thinks talking to you will inspire us to solve her little girl’s murder.”

  “What are those?” Josie asked, attempting to see the pictures Behan kept mixing up.

  “Shots of the killer, according to Mrs. Dennis,” he said, handing her one of the photos. “Looks like it was taken at a club. Quality’s not good. It was printed on one of those cheap digital printers.” He pointed at a tattooed young man with a shaved head standing beside a somber, glassy-eyed Hillary Dennis. She was wearing a rhinestone-studded tank top, silk shorts, and knee-high white leather boots. “Mom says this handsome guy threatened Hillary yesterday morning, swore he would blow her brains out.”

  “Does he have a name?” Josie asked.

  “Cory Goldman.”

  “Any relation to . . .”

  “His son,” Behan answered before
she could finish. “The honorable Los Angeles City Councilman Eli Goldman’s first born.”

  TWO

  Every decision Josie made as the commanding officer of the Hollywood station was potentially explosive in a city full of unmarked special-interest landmines. The chief of police, police commission, her bureau, the diverse community, the ACLU, the officers and their union—all their needs and demands kept in perfect balance like a juggler spinning plates. Josie thrived on the work. Her marriage might be in a tailspin and her son a complete mystery to her, but she knew she was good at her job.

  She went to the locker room, took a shower, put on her uniform, and invited Mrs. Dennis to step into her office. The woman wasn’t what Josie had expected, not the hardcore, stage-mother type. Mrs. Dennis was old and ordinary with sparse grey hair and an off-the-rack, faded brown matronly dress. Apparently, Hillary hadn’t shared any of her considerable wealth with her mother.

  Mrs. Dennis explained that Hillary, the youngest of her five children, had been spotted by a talent agent four years ago at the L.A. County Museum of Art when she was thirteen. The agent got her a bit part in a B-movie where Hillary’s sultry Lolita look caught on. Bigger parts and more money followed.

  “She hasn’t listened to me since she was sixteen,” Mrs. Dennis said. “There was so much money. Shoulda had a firm hand, but they let her run wild. All they wanted was money . . . stole my little girl from me, got her killed.”

  “Was she an emancipated minor?” Josie asked. Mrs. Dennis stared blankly at her. “Did the court let her live on her own?”

  The older woman nodded. “Too young,” she mumbled and her eyes narrowed. “Her agent’s a whore . . . she’s a evil bitch.”

  “Detective Behan’s very good, Mrs. Dennis,” Josie said, a little taken aback by the prudish-looking woman’s profanity.