A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (2 page)

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C
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CENE
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VIDENCE
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NVENTORY

1

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ONTENTS ITEMIZED BELOW
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There are some evenings in Long Beach—usually in the late summer and early fall—when the air stops moving, all traces of wind disappear, and even a mile or more inland, the smells of oiled sand, of decaying sea life, of the harbor, of all the urban detritus that washes out of the mouth of the Los Angeles River, hang thick in the air. We’re reminded, yet again, that a beach is not always a beach simply by virtue of its proximity to the immense blue waters of the Pacific, that we don’t live in Malibu or Laguna, and that even though we’re geographically centered between those two paradisiacal coasts, our real essence lies not even on the same continuum of natural beauty that they inhabit, but rather on a man-made, industrialized plane of cargo ships and containerized trains and diesel trucks. We’re reminded that we long ago surrendered any claims we might once have had to the scenic beauty and purity of the natural world, succumbing to the all-encompassing demands of commerce—and that the toxic, decaying smell that sometimes hangs in the motionless air late into the night is just one of the many prices we pay in Long Beach so that other people on other beaches might enjoy the fresh and promising scent of the onshore flow.

It was nearing midnight, and I hadn’t yet thought about going to bed. Sleep never came easily, especially in the waning days of summer when the heat lingered in the darkness until the first light of dawn. I was sitting on a kitchen chair in the middle of my living room, directly beneath the ceiling fan, my fingers curled around the neck of my banjo, a Deering Saratoga Star. No matter how much I worked it, I couldn’t get the fingering for the C chord right. I wished I could have blamed the failure on the chronic pain I suffered as the result of having my hand nearly severed while apprehending a suspect a few years earlier, but the truth was that I just had very little musical aptitude and too little patience to change that fact.

My iPhone thrummed on the coffee table, and I knew without looking who was calling. Only people with the first name Sergeant ever called me after eleven.

I answered the way I always do. “Danny Beckett.”

She told me where the body was. I took off my T-shirt and put on something with a collar. There was no need to bother with a jacket.

I sent a text message to my partner, Jennifer Tanaka.
Want me to pick you up?

A few seconds later she answered:
Yep
.

I made sure the front door was locked and turned on the lamp I always kept burning in the living room when I wasn’t home at night, and then I went out the back door. My garage is too full of my life, packed away in cardboard boxes, to be of much practical use. It’s set back just enough in the alleyway to give me room to park. I wrestled the misaligned gate latch back into place and snapped the padlock shut.

In my Camry, I turned the air-conditioning all the way up as I drove. Springsteen’s
Wrecking Ball
was in the CD player, but I’ve never been comfortable listening to music on the way to a murder scene. It doesn’t feel right. The radio was tuned to KPCC’s overnight BBC broadcast.

Nine months earlier, when the Southern California real-estate market had hit the lowest point of its multiyear collapse, Jen had bought her first house. Because of her relatively good financial position and a little down-payment assistance from her parents, she managed to score a beautifully restored Craftsman bungalow with its own guesthouse, in Belmont Heights. I pulled into her driveway just as she was locking the front door behind her. She climbed in, and we backed out onto Colorado and headed toward downtown.

“How was the weekend?” I asked.

“Family came over to help work on the guesthouse. It’s just about ready to go.” Her father had convinced her to rent it out to help defray the costs of the mortgage.

“You sure you want to be a landlord?” I asked.

“I’m sure I don’t. But what am I going to do after he gave me half the down?”

“So, just get somebody in there until you can pay your folks back and then do what you want.”

“That’s the thing. He insists it wasn’t a loan, that it was a gift. He just doesn’t act like it. He acts like he’s bought into Tanaka Properties Inc. I shouldn’t have taken the money.”

I laughed.

“What?” she said.

“I was figuring it would take longer for buyer’s remorse to set in.”

She didn’t find that as amusing as I did.

We let our conversation trail off as we got closer to the scene. The British people on the radio were talking about an election in Africa while I thought about where we were heading.

We didn’t know what to expect, but we knew it was big because of the size of the rollout. It wasn’t a quiet night in Long Beach—the hot ones usually aren’t—but there were already more than a dozen units at the location or en route, and even the watch commander was on his way.

As we turned off of Ocean onto Golden Shore, Jen said, “We haven’t had one at the river in a while.”

From its headwaters in the San Fernando Valley, the Simi Hills, and the Santa Susana Mountains, the Los Angeles River flows nearly fifty miles, mostly through concrete channels built by the Army Corps of Engineers after the flood of 1938. The river travels south across just about every kind of neighborhood Southern California has to offer. The last thing it passes on its way into the harbors of San Pedro and Long Beach is a trailer park. I’ve always thought there was something meaningful in that—in the motor homes and fifth wheels that witness the waters flowing into the expanses of the harbor and the Pacific beyond—but I couldn’t ever put my finger on exactly what it was.

Along the river is a bike path that stretches all the way up to the city of Vernon. If you’ve never heard of Vernon, count yourself fortunate and don’t go asking. After it flows south through the San Fernando Valley, borders Griffith and Elysian Parks, and passes downtown, the Los Angeles runs through some of the least welcoming areas of the county, places most Long Beach locals would avoid in cars, never mind on bikes. At most major cross streets, the bike path leads under bridges that allow traffic to flow freely without most drivers having any idea that they are passing over a river at all—let alone the one named for the City of Angels itself.

Jen and I parked on the shoulder of the ramp leading from West Shoreline Drive to Golden Shore. There was a pumping-station shed with a small turnout for a driveway and an access gate to the bike path. Patrol units and the Crime Scene Detail van were lined up for thirty yards in each direction.

Before we got there, the senior officer on the scene had been a patrol sergeant named Stanley Burke. He was an old-timer whom I’d known since my own days in uniform, and he’d been working recently with a rookie, as her field-training officer. We found Stan, and he gave us the rundown of the incident.

“So we’ve got the suspects?” Jen asked.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“That should make it easy.”

I looked down the bike path at the charred corpse of the murder victim. “No,” I said, with more foresight than I could have possibly known at that moment. “This one’s not going to be easy.”

A patrol unit had been crossing the Ocean Boulevard overpass when one of the uniforms saw the flames. They called it in to dispatch, and a pair of bike officers working the Rainbow Harbor beat were the second to respond. The three suspects had not been prepared for cops on the bike path itself. By the time they realized their escape route was cut off and reversed their course, the squad car had made its way down to Golden Shore, and the officers had climbed the fence and headed south on the path.

The suspects were flanked, with nowhere to go but down the rock-paved embankment into the river. Surprisingly, only one of them went that way. The rookie from the patrol unit chased him down, tackled him in the waist-deep effluvial flow, and dragged him back up the slope. One of the other suspects had tried to make it over the chain-link fence and onto the street beyond, but he didn’t have enough speed and was pulled back down to the ground by one of the bike cops. The remaining suspect knew there was no place to go and didn’t even need to be told to kneel. By that time, there were two more units on the scene. It was only when the three teenagers were cuffed facedown on the pavement that the officers began to understand what had happened. Most of them would wish they hadn’t.

When we arrived, the uniforms had pieced together most of the story. Several hundred yards downriver from the murder scene, according to a witness from the RV park, the teenagers had started chasing a man who was pushing a shopping cart along the bike path. Based on the cart itself and what little remained of his clothing, we assumed him to be homeless. As the suspects had run after him, the victim had tried to slow them down by spinning around and pushing his cart at them, but that only allowed them to more quickly close the distance, and then two of them doused the victim with gasoline from giant 7-Eleven soda cups. When the man finally began to flag and give in to his exhaustion, one of the teenagers struck a wooden fireplace match against the abrasive strip on the side of its box and flung it at the dripping man.

He exploded into flames.

The victim’s body was facedown on the edge of the bike path, feet dangling over the rocky incline toward the river. The air felt still, but I was thirty feet away and could already smell the acrid scents of scorched human tissue and synthetic petroleum-based fabrics. There must have been a breeze too slight to perceive.

He was all alone within the taped-off perimeter. As I got closer, I could see that not only had his flesh been charred to the bone, but also that the polyester fleece vest he’d been wearing had melted into a kind of thin, hard shell covering his torso. His pants were made from some kind of artificial fiber, too; they created a patchwork of seared red-black skin and black knobs of rendered nylon that had already begun to harden into some repellent amalgam of organic and artificial waste.

He didn’t have any identification that we could find. Because of the degree of damage to his hands, prints would likely be impossible to lift. Later the ME might find some kind of ID in the remnants of his clothes, the criminalists could come across something in his shopping cart, and there was a chance at a DNA match, but at that point our first priority would be determining the victim’s identity. If we couldn’t, it wouldn’t be impossible to prosecute the three teenagers, but it would be more of a challenge.

John Doe cases, especially when the victim was homeless, were often tough to make, because without knowing the identity of the victim, it was more challenging to make him seem real, a person with an actual life, a substantial existence, something other than just a hypothetical stereotype: a genuine loss. With no name and no history, the victim was just another one of the dozens of faceless and invisible transients we see every day in a city like Long Beach. And as much as I was loath to admit it, the truth was that, although a good number of people did indeed care about anonymous vagrants, very few of those people were outside of the system. They were uniforms, social workers, soup-kitchen volunteers. The homeless and the nameless didn’t have families, they didn’t have loved ones, and, most importantly, they didn’t have stories. If we were going to make the boys who burned this man to death pay for their crime in any meaningful way, we needed to find something.

We needed to know who the victim was.

We needed to know his story.