by Scott Frost
She shook her head. “He said since I went to his apartment voluntarily, I couldn’t prove that he raped me. He told me never to talk about it, ever. That it would only complicate the murder investigation, which was more important than what had happened to me.”
“He couldn’t have committed the murder if he was in his apartment with you,” I said.
She lowered her head and nodded. “I thought my silence would help to punish him for what he did. . . . It didn’t, though.”
“And you’ve done what Hazzard said. You didn’t tell the lawyer Gavin—no one.”
She shook her head. “The other policeman asked, too, and I told him the same thing.”
“What other policeman?”
“He came a day or two after Gavin. I don’t remember his name. He was black.”
“Williams?”
Fleming nodded. “I think so.”
She rested her head on her knees and began to rock slowly back and forth.
“I thought one day it would feel different, like it never really happened.”
She looked up at me and shook her head. “I was wrong. . . . He had no right to tell me what he did,” she whispered. “He had no right.”
32
I stayed with her until she had said everything she needed to or could manage. None of the details changed, but with each telling her emotions became sharper as the pain worked its way from the past to the present.
As she opened the front door Fleming stopped me.
“Why you?” she asked. “Why after all these years and all the policemen in this city are you the one?”
I could hear the words in my head as I answered. They were about a blue dress, and the sound a golf club makes as it leaves a small dent in a wood floor, but they weren’t the words I said to her.
“I took the call,” I answered.
The drive back to Pasadena should have taken a little over fifteen minutes but I wound my way through surface streets, stretching it out to nearly an hour. If I had had doubts before that my own father was capable of killing, they were gone now. But had learning of his raping a young actress cemented that possibility, or was it the alibi that cleared him of suspicion? Was he any less of a monster if he was guilty only of rape? Was the damaged woman I had left in Eagle Rock less of a victim than Victoria Fisher? And where did that leave me? Was that day in the closet the end, or was it the beginning?
Harrison and Chavez were waiting for me when I walked back into my office.
“Your phone was off,” Chavez said.
“I was talking to Candice Fleming.”
Harrison handed me a cup coffee and I walked over to the window. The sun had begun to bleach the blue from the sky. A thin line of smoke hung horizontally across the mountains like a boundary line on a map.
“What do we know about Hazzard?” I said.
“Highly decorated, retired as the highest-ranking detective in Robbery Homicide,” Chavez said.
“He may have suppressed evidence that could clear my father of suspicion for Victoria Fisher’s murder.”
“You’re certain?”
“That he suppressed evidence, yes. Whether it would clear my father, I’m less sure. There are questions about the time line.”
“What evidence?” Chavez asked.
I turned from the window.
“The night Victoria Fisher died he raped Candice Fleming.”
The words seemed to sting Chavez, whose role had always been to protect me. On some level he still wanted to believe I was that naive rookie cop he had met all those years ago.
“She told you this? Your father did this?”
I nodded.
“You believe her story?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I looked at Harrison.
“A little girl in a blue dress told me last night.”
Harrison’s eyes registered understanding but Chavez shook his head.
“What does that mean?” the chief said.
“My father’s violence began in my house when I was a little girl.”
Like someone who has just been told of the death of a family member, Chavez looked like he had taken a physical blow. The muscles in his jaw tensed, then he sat down on the edge of the desk.
“I’m okay,” I said.
He tried to nod but it was a pale imitation at best. “Maybe you’re mistaken about this.”
I walked over and sat on the edge of the desk next to him.
“I don’t think so. . . . But you’re right, maybe.”
“Maybe’s good,” Chavez said. He took my hand and gave it a squeeze, then let go.
“I need you to find out something,” I said.
“Anything.”
“Detective Williams talked to Fleming before he was killed. He must have known something about what happened eighteen years ago. It might help to know what it was.”
He nodded.
“I’ll make some calls,” Chavez said, then stood and walked out.
On the wall of my office was a smaller version of Danny’s map of the universe. I walked over and stared at it for a moment in the vain hope that everything might become clear. No luck.
“Caltech should have an image for us from the security camera by midday,” Harrison said.
“Maybe someone over there should take a look at this, too,” I said.
“Someone in chaos theory,” Harrison said.
“There’s nothing here that can help us. This is a picture of the world inside Danny’s head.”
“You mentioned a time line,” Harrison said.
“My father took Candice Fleming to his apartment in Hollywood after they left the theater around seven. It would have taken at least twenty minutes to get to his apartment. They had some wine and talked.” The picture of my father as the hapless bicycle salesman on Gunsmoke flashed in my head, but I couldn’t hold on to it. With each new piece of information, the past I had always clung to was quickly vanishing. “Fleming could have been there an hour, or two or three; she couldn’t say.”
“And Victoria Fisher left the restaurant on Melrose around nine,” Harrison said.
I nodded.
“That’s not a very big window of opportunity.”
I tried to work back through the autopsy report but the details eluded me. “Was there any semen present in Victoria Fisher’s body or on her clothes?”
Harrison shook his head. “Just the first two victims.”
“Which would be consistent with an attacker who had just raped another woman a short time before.”
“Or who had been fought off.”
“What if there was another reason?”
We thought about it in silence for a moment.
“Victoria’s and your brother’s killer was neither your father nor the River Killer.”
“Cross’s conspiracy theory.”
Harrison nodded.
“On the day my brother died, he and Gavin made four stops, the first at Candice Fleming’s. Their last meeting was with Hazzard. What about the other two addresses? Did you match them?”
“Their second stop that day was at the County Courts building.”
I tried to fit that into the puzzle but couldn’t.
Harrison nodded. “I couldn’t make sense of that, either. The third stop was Parker Center.”
“Police headquarters.”
“Where Robbery Homicide works from.”
“Which brings us back to Hazzard.”
I walked over to the door. The detective squad room was filled with the sounds of police work—keyboards, printers humming, phone interviews. I closed the door and looked back at Harrison.
“So I can either believe the time line works and my father is a killer, or . . .”
We let the idea sit for a moment.
“Or a highly decorated detective in the most elite unit in LAPD, and possibly people in the district attorney’s office, are involved in the murders of at least three people,” Harrison said. “Four
if you include Victoria Fisher.”
“And the police assassination of Hector Lopez.”
“Not much of a choice.”
The implication settled over us.
“It might be better if you step away from this,” I said.
“For whom?”
“I don’t have a choice with this; you do.”
Harrison tried to smile. “Someone has to rewrap your bandages.”
“We keep this between us—no one else.”
Harrison nodded.
There was a knock on the door and Chavez stepped in. He started to say something, then saw the looks on our faces.
“Something’s happened.”
I shook my head. “Just working out the details.”
Chavez closed the door and leaned against it, crossing his thick arms over his chest. “It’s a bad career move to lie to your chief.”
I forced a smile. “Only if you’re caught.”
He looked at Harrison. “It’s even worse if you’re not a lieutenant.”
“I can always go back to the bomb squad,” Harrison said.
Chavez let it go for the moment. “Detective Williams spent seven years with IA before joining Homicide. ”
“Internal Affairs.”
“You need anything else, you talk to a Captain Larson.”
“What division does he work out of?”
“Downtown.”
I looked at Harrison.
“Parker Center.”
33
Parker Center was the headquarters LAPD built to honor the legacy and integrity of its legendary chief William H. Parker. When he arrived on the scene in the 1950s, L.A. was an open city with enough corruption in and out of the department to rival that of any large eastern city.
He built a modern department that was the model for police across the country until a petty criminal named Rodney King went for a drive with too much malt liquor in his system. The cracks that opened that night in the foundations of Parker Center were deeper than the ones caused by the officers’ batons on Rodney’s head, and have yet to be completely stitched back together.
Larson agreed to talk to us, but not on the record, and not in the office. An outside agency asking questions about a recently murdered detective was not in his career’s best interest. An officer who had fallen in the line of duty was the one sacred cow left standing after the scandals had done their damage to the department. The fact that I was the one asking the questions, the woman cop who had walked away with a bump on her ribs when their detective had his throat cut, did not go down well in any squad room in any division across the city.
Harrison and I stopped outside a small restaurant off Alpine in Chinatown just before noon. The few hints of smoke that occasionally drifted on the wind gave way to the intense aromas of ginger, garlic, and brewing tea inside. The railroad car-like seating area ran straight back. The diners all appeared to be Chinese. There was no sign of an Anglo cop anywhere. A thin waiter in a red vest approached us, said something in Cantonese, and pointed vigorously to the back of the restaurant and motioned for us to follow.
We walked the length of the seating area and into the long galley kitchen where the cooks, standing over woks, smoking cigarettes, stopped what they were doing and stared at us. The waiter motioned toward a door at the back of the kitchen and we walked into an alley where an unmarked squad car was parked.
Larson stepped out of the driver’s side and looked around, making sure he wasn’t being watched. He looked to be well past the age where being anything other than an Internal Affairs officer was an option. He had thinning hair and moved like a man never sure his foot was going to meet ground on the next step. I started to introduce myself but he interrupted me.
“I was under the impression we were doing this alone,” he said, not once looking at Harrison.
“We are alone. This is my partner.”
“I don’t like witnesses to meetings that never happened.”
Like most Internal Affairs officers, he trusted no one, particularly other cops.
“Who knows you’re here besides Chavez?”
“No one.”
“And you’re certain you weren’t followed?”
I nodded.
“You have questions about Williams?”
The back door of the restaurant opened and a waiter poked his head out and said something to Larson in Chinese. He shook his head and the waiter nodded, then disappeared back inside.
“This is how it works,” Larson said, turning to me. “You’re here because of Chavez, no other reason. He tells me you’re not to blame for Williams’s death. I accept that, but not enough for me to be here any longer than necessary. You ask me a question, I answer it, you get nothing beyond that, no freebies.”
“Twenty questions?” I said.
“Take it or leave it.”
Larson glanced over at the open door of his squad as if he were about to bolt.
“You worked with Williams?” I asked.
He nodded. “I was his supervisor for four years before he moved on to Homicide.”
“Did Williams make any inquires with IA either the day he was killed or the day before?” I said.
Larson gave away a look of surprise for just a moment. “Yeah, the day he was murdered,” he said.
“Did it have anything to do with the River Killer investigation eighteen years ago?”
Larson shook his head. “No.”
“Did it have anything to do with the questioning of a rape victim named Fleming, or a suspect named Manning? ”
He shook his head, glanced at his watch. “Anything else?”
“Did he inquire about a Homicide detective named Hazzard?”
Larson looked at me with a mixture of surprise and concern. “How do you know this?”
“Did he?” I repeated.
“Yeah, he asked about Hazzard, from when he was in patrol, before he made detective.”
“What kind of investigation?”
“OID.”
“Officer-involved death.”
Larson nodded.
“Were any other officers involved?”
“His partner, but just as a witness.”
“Cross,” I said.
“Yeah,” Larson said. “It was routine. The findings of the investigation were that Hazzard acted in accordance with guidelines involving use of deadly force.”
“Was Williams ever involved in investigating Hazzard when he was with Internal Affairs?”
“I think we’re done here,” Larson said, turning back to the car.
“What are you afraid of?” I said.
Larson stopped. “Name it.”
Harrison glanced at me briefly.
“Robbery Homicide?”
The name seemed to make Larson wince.
“What do you think LAPD is, Lieutenant? A scout troop? It’s a tribe. And in that tribe there are other tribes—some powerful, some dangerous, some both. I’m a Band-Aid the department puts on wounds so the public feels better, that’s all. I do my work, I go home and have a drink, then I get up and do it all again the next day. Consider that career advice, no charge.”
“Did a lawyer named Gavin request information about the same OID investigation the day before Williams did?”
The look on Larson’s face was all the answer I needed.
“Is it possible to see that report?” I asked.
“If a request is made through official channels, I believe you’ll find that no so such report still exists.” Larson’s joyless face became even grimmer. “Give my best to Chavez. And don’t contact me again.”
He walked to his squad and quickly drove away without looking back. Harrison and I stood in silence for a moment, Larson’s words settling uncomfortably over us.
“What does a twenty-year-old investigation that cleared Hazzard have to do with the death of Victoria Fisher, your father, or three deaths years later?”
I shook my head. “Maybe everything.”
We walked back through the restaurant onto the sidewalk out front. Passing slowly by was an LAPD black-and-white. The driver, wearing dark wraparound sunglasses, looked in our direction for a moment, then stared straight ahead as he drove past.
“What did that look like to you?” Harrison said.
The squad car paused for a second as it turned the corner, then disappeared.
“An exclamation point.”
Regardless of what we thought we knew when we walked through the doors of the restaurant, we walked out with an entirely different set of questions.
Across the street a man walked out of a poultry store carrying two headless chickens still weakly flapping their wings.
“You suppose the chickens know something we don’t?” Harrison said.
“What was Gavin’s and my brother’s next stop?” I asked.
“The County Courts building.”
34
It was a short drive up over Broadway to 210 W. Temple, the Los Angeles County Courts Building. We stopped in a space reserved for police vehicles and watched as a steady stream of jurors filed back into the building after lunch. In a justice system responsible for a population greater than forty-two of the fifty states in the nation, the building gave the appearance that it was bursting at the seams.
“Why a court building?” Harrison said.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, then it seemed all too obvious.
“It’s not just a court building,” I said, and stepped out of the car. “It’s also the district attorney’s headquarters.”
“Where Victoria Fisher worked,” Harrison said.
“If Gavin and my brother went through those doors, security will have a record of where they went.”
Inside, hundreds of jurors were waiting their turns to step through the metal detectors. No one got beyond the lobby without a pass, juror badge, or official ID. We showed our IDs to a deputy and were directed to a bank of elevators reserved for non-courtroom floors.
Being a county facility, security was provided by sheriff’s deputies, not LAPD, but there was no shortage of uniformed officers and detectives present on their way to or from court or the DA’s office, all of whom seemed to glance in my direction as if there were a large target taped to my back. We stepped off the elevator on the eighteenth floor and stopped at reception.
