A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (5 page)

I knew that was true. No matter how gruesome the crime itself, the public never really cares when the murder victim is homeless. But if the footage of the murder got out, everyone would want to watch.

By nine o’clock in the morning, the thermometer was already close to the triple digits, and the sun reflecting off the concrete of the LA River channel was making me regret my decision to check out the bike path upstream from the crime scene in the daylight. I knew I wouldn’t get as far as I had hoped to, but I decided to see how much distance I could cover before the impending sunstroke made me turn back.

It wasn’t very far. A few hundred yards. I stopped beneath the Ocean Boulevard overpass to cool off for a minute in the shade. Someone else had the same idea. There was a small man in tattered, stained jeans and some kind of Converse knockoffs leaning against one of the concrete support columns. He was caked with the ground-in dirt and grime of several weeks on the street, and he had removed his thinning T-shirt and draped it over an olive-drab surplus duffel bag that looked old enough to have seen action in World War II. I couldn’t tell if he had an extreme farmer’s tan or if the portions of his body usually covered by his shirt were simply considerably cleaner than his arms and face. Either way, there was stark contrast.

“How’s it going?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer. He just gave a kind of noncommittal nod and looked back down at the ground between his feet. The uniforms had done a canvass before the sun had come up and hadn’t found anyone along the path for at least half a mile. That wasn’t a surprise. Nobody who’s lived in a bad part of town for very long ever heads toward a crime scene. No, the smart traffic always flows in the other direction. I wondered how long he had been there.

“You know what happened down there last night?” I gestured toward the harbor.

He still didn’t speak, but at least he was looking at me. There was something in his eyes that I couldn’t figure out—a hesitance, a trepidation, maybe even a fear, that gave me a sense of empathy for him.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m a cop.” I wasn’t sure how he’d take that. There was a good chance that he’d be as leery of a police officer as he would of the killers themselves. In fact, I thought, it was more of a likelihood. Most people in his position would have a lot more to lose at the hands of a cop than they would from a couple of teen wannabe gangbangers.

“A man was killed. We think he was homeless.”

His expression remained the same, but I seemed to have his attention. “We don’t know who he was.”

Nothing.

“Any chance you might be able to help us?” I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet, crouched in front of him, and held it out.

He looked at the bill, then up at me, and then back at the bill, as if he was trying to determine if it might be some kind of trick. After a few seconds, I had apparently convinced him of my sincerity and he reached for the money.

“Do you know who he was? He was tall, about six feet. Had a Whole Foods shopping cart.”

That seemed to trigger something in him. “Bishop,” he said.

“Bishop? That was his name?”

He gave me a slight nod.

“Was that his first name or his last?”

He looked at me very seriously and said in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “Bishop danced . . .”

Without missing a beat, I answered him, completing the lyric about the thumbscrew woman.

His eyes widened in recognition, and I knew that, at least for the moment, I’d cut through whatever fog was enveloping him and made a connection.

4

P
APERBACK COPY OF
T
HE
G
RAPES OF
W
RATH
,
BY
J
OHN
S
TEINBECK
: V
IKING
C
RITICAL
E
DITION
, 1992,
OLD
,
WELL WORN
,
MARGINAL NOTATIONS THROUGHOUT
.

The autopsy was harder than I expected. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected it to be difficult at all. After a detective’s been working homicide for a while, if he’s still having trouble with autopsies and crime scenes, he needs to get out. It’s not going to get any easier. You reach a point early on when you realize whether or not you’re capable of dealing with the realities of death on a daily basis. Most cops know before they ever ask for the assignment. Every once in a while, though, someone slips through. A few years ago, we had a guy transfer in from Sex Crimes the same way Jen had. His name was Grogan. We rotated him through the squad so he’d have the chance to spend some time with each of the vets. Usually working rapes and molestations and the rest prepares someone to deal with very nasty stuff, and we all thought he was cut out for the job. One day when we were working a particularly brutal child murder and we got our first look at the little girl on the ME’s stainless-steel table, Grogan looked down at her and turned an ashen color. Her head had been cut off and there was a two-inch gap separating the severed ends of her neck. The odd thing was that her long blonde hair still reached down past her shoulders and was visible in the space between the raw edges of her neck. He looked at it for several seconds, turned to me, and said, “Excuse me a sec, I’ll be right back.” I never saw him again. Ruiz told me he maxed out his leave time and then requested a transfer back to patrol.

I’d never had strong reactions to autopsies. Homicide had always been my goal, and I worked hard to get it. I never struggled with the grisly realities of the work the way many cops did. Something in my psyche had prepared me for the realities of the job. I’d always known I was cut out for it.

So I was surprised by the feeling of tightness in the pit of my stomach when the ME, Paula Henderson—her gray hair trimmed short and her eyeglasses, as always, hanging on a chain around her neck—led me in to begin.

As soon as I saw the face of the victim, burned into a blackened rictus, the hair gone, the flesh seared away into taut, leathery ropes of tissue, the deep reds, purples, and browns of the remnants of flesh, it took me back to the first time I’d seen the accident-scene photos of the auto accident that had killed my wife. It had been five years since Megan’s Toyota had been sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers. We had been going through a rough patch, and she was on her way to stay with her mother for a while. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she was pregnant with our first child. She survived the impact, but her car caught fire and she perished in the flames. I never should have seen the photos of the aftermath of the collision, but I had connections, and I worked them hard to get copies of all of the files, too. I even have autopsy pictures. A lot of people tried hard to keep me from looking at all of those investigative materials. No one could have tried hard enough, though. I had to see. I had to know. All of the gruesome details have long been fixed in my memory.

When I looked at the victim’s body on the table, it took a concerted effort to put Megan out of my head and focus on the task at hand.

Ten minutes in, Paula looked me in the eye with a compassionate, motherly expression and asked, “Are you okay?”

I pretended too hard to be offended and said, “Of course I am. Just keep going.”

There were no big surprises. We did get a bit of useful information. He was Caucasian, late fifties to midsixties, between five foot ten and five foot eleven, 150 to 160 pounds. Graying black hair and brown eyes. Size twelve shoes on size eleven feet with three pairs of socks in between. Moderate level of liver disease. A scar on his lower-left back from a wound that had been stitched up.

“Could that be surgical?” I asked.

“It could, but there are no other indications. Looks like a knife, but I doubt a doctor was holding it.”

I called in the physical description and possible name to Stan and told him to spread it around the other uniforms helping with the canvass. It felt like things were starting to come together.

“What the hell does that even mean?” Jen asked me that afternoon over lunch at Enrique’s. The location wasn’t convenient for either of us, but she knew it was my favorite food in Long Beach.

I’d told her about the shirtless man under the bridge. “It’s an old Springsteen song. ‘Bishop Danced.’”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s kind of obscure. From the
Greetings from Asbury Park
days, but it was never available on anything until
Tracks
. It’s not one that—”

“Don’t go all fanboy on me. I’ll take your word for it. You really think his name was Bishop?”

“I’m not sure. Going to keep the uniforms on the canvass, and I want to get the description to the homeless shelters and see if the name rings any bells for anyone else.”

“Sounds good. You holding up okay?”

“Sure.”

There was doubt in her eyes.

“Why is everybody asking me that?”

“Because it’s a burn victim.”

“You guys really think I’m that unstable?”

“Nobody thinks you’re unstable. We just think it might be hard.”

I considered what she was saying. Not the fact that it would be perfectly natural for a man who’d lost his wife in a fire to be rattled by investigating a homicide by fire, but the sudden concern my colleagues were showing for my ability to handle the difficulty. I felt a momentary twinge of resentment, but it passed as quickly as it had come, and I reminded myself who I was sitting with.

I said, “The autopsy was kind of tough. More than I expected it to be.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just don’t let it stew like you always do. It’s okay to talk about it.”

“I’m not bottling anything up. I have talked about it.”

“To who?”

“Lauren. Stan’s partner.” I didn’t realize how absurd that would sound until I said it out loud. Of course I hadn’t talked about Megan’s death. I’d only used it in a weak attempt to build rapport in an interview.

“You told that rookie about Megan?” Jen asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“She was tense. I was trying to get her to relax.”

“By talking about your dead wife?”

“I needed to personalize. Get her to think of me as something other than her superior. So she’d be comfortable talking.”

“You think that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“If it was anybody else, I’d say they were hitting on her.”

“But not me?”

She rolled her eyes. “Seriously? Have you ever hit on anybody? Ever?”

I thought about it. “I asked Megan out.”

“In college.”

“You’re oblivious.”

“To what?”

“How’s the carne asada?”

Back in the office after lunch, I checked my messages and found one from the MUPS unit. They found six hits on the name Bishop, but none of them matched the physical details of our victim. I added the new information from the autopsy to the MUPS report and told them the DNA sample was on the way. There wasn’t too much—just the scar as a distinguishing mark and more accurate numbers for the height and weight and other descriptors. I’d have to wait awhile to see what, if anything, they came up with.

When I hung up the phone, Jen said, “I found Jesús.”

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t have to look far. He’s Pedro’s brother. I cross-checked all three of their cell-phone contact lists. There’s a couple more Jesúses, but only one who’s in all of them. What do you want to do?”

“I want to talk to him.” I checked my watch. “He go to Poly with the others? Maybe we can catch him there.”

“No dice. I already called the school office. He didn’t show up today.”

“Let’s wait awhile before we try his house. I want to see somebody else first.”

Outside, the heat was radiating off the street and sidewalk in visible waves. The weather app on my phone said the current temperature in Long Beach was ninety-one, but it felt fifteen degrees hotter.

I’d done some research on Benicio Guerra, and I filled Jen in as we walked. By the time I finished, I’d already worked up a sweat. “You still think it was a good idea to walk?” I asked.

“It’s barely a block away. We’d spend more time navigating our way out of one parking garage and into the other than we’ll spend walking out here. Chill out.”

“Funny.”

We’d exited the department through the back parking lot and cut behind the courthouse to turn left on Magnolia. As we crossed the street and headed west on Ocean, we passed the Federal Building. Several months earlier, an ICE agent who was apparently pissed off about not getting a transfer he requested went batshit there and pumped six rounds into his boss. One of his colleagues thought that was inappropriate behavior and dropped him. He died on the scene, but the supervisor survived. The incident was still fresh enough that, unless they were alone, no one in the LBPD ever walked by the building without either making an ICE crack or hearing one.

“Should have worn your vest,” Jen said as we passed the lobby doors.

“I’ll bet the IRS is happy that nobody who comes here rags on them anymore.”

“You know, Patrick made the same joke five or six months ago.”

“Really? Shit.”

“Don’t take it so hard.”

“Without my razor-sharp wit, I’m nothing.”

“That’s what you base your self-worth on?”

“Yes. That and the number of ‘likes’ my status updates get on Facebook.”

Guerra and Associates took up a whole floor of the World Trade Center building on Ocean. From the look of the lobby, they were doing pretty well. Lots of glass and wood and brushed metal. The receptionist offered us a latte. We declined.

Benny didn’t keep us waiting long. A young suit, who looked at least as much like muscle as he did like an attorney, came in and introduced himself. “Hello, Detectives, I’m Gregory, Mr. Guerra’s associate.”