A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (9 page)

Omar, I could believe, was a monster. Watching him in the video of the crime made that possibility clear. He enjoyed the killing. The pleasure he took in the violence was obvious in his gleeful excitement.

Francisco didn’t share in the monstrosity, but his cold and calculating response made me think of a veteran soldier with a job to do who was getting it done.

Pedro was the least enthusiastic of the trio. He held the Galaxy and, as the cameraman, was the least visible. But I could hear his voice. “Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, man.” If there wasn’t regret in his voice, there was at least a realization of the magnitude of their actions. In those four syllables was the recognition of an unalterable change in the course of his life. Even before the sirens and the flashing lights and the uniforms, Pedro knew that nothing would ever be the same again.

We were back in the squad room after lunch. A stubborn piece of pastrami had wedged itself between two of my molars, and I was using the tip of my tongue to try in vain to work it free.

Jen was telling Patrick about some remodeling ideas she saw on HGTV.

“Everything on there is crap,” I said.

“Not all of it,” she said.

“Are you kidding? Those shows where they have to race to get everything done in time for the big finish?”

“They’re not all like that.”

“Maybe not, but they’ve always got to come up with some fake bullshit conflict to liven things up two-thirds of the way through. I wouldn’t trust any of those guys with my house.”

“You don’t have a house. And you can’t compare everybody to Norm.”

“Who’s Norm?” Patrick asked.

“From
This Old House
,” Jen and I said almost simultaneously.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course.”

I added, “Don’t forget
New Yankee Workshop
. Norm’s amazing.”

“Nobody watches those shows anymore,” Jen said.

“It’s not my fault the world’s going to shit,” I said. “You don’t need all that fake HGTV tension to make things compelling. It drives me up the wall. Just show us how to do quality work the right way. Don’t give us a bunch of bullshit over-the-top drama.”

Patrick took a long drink of his iced tea. “Think maybe you’re getting a little too worked up over this?”

“No, I don’t. You should be on my side, Patrick. This is all about authenticity. That’s totally a hipster thing.”

He and Jen just looked at me.

“No offense,” I said.

“None taken,” he said. I think that was true, too, which was a shame. We’d been giving him crap about being a hipster for years. If his skin had finally gotten thick enough that it didn’t bug him anymore, then we’d have to come up with something else to needle him with. He was still the newest member of the squad. Until someone else transferred in and moved him up a notch on the totem pole, letting him off the hook simply wasn’t an option.

Jen got a call. It was quick. When she hung up, she said, “That was Stan—he came up with something on the canvass.”

8

T
HREE
CD
S
: F
AIRYTALE
, D
ONOVAN
; T
HE
D
EER
H
UNTER
: O
RIGINAL
M
OTION
P
ICTURE
S
OUNDTRACK
,
VARIOUS ARTISTS
; R
EMAIN IN
L
IGHT
, T
ALKING
H
EADS
.

Julia Rice was a photographer with a background in sociology. She’d worked for the city for several years and had even taught in the MSW program at CSULB for a few semesters. According to her website, she’d given up the day jobs to focus full time on her photography. She’d had half a dozen shows in the last three years all over Southern California. Her name came up during Stan Burke’s canvass of the shelters. She’d done a lot of social work with the homeless in her old job, and recently, according to one of the food-bank administrators, she had started a photography project taking portraits of street people in an effort to raise awareness and, ultimately, of course, money. The man running the shelter had said he thought she was there on one of the rare days he’d seen Bishop.

When Jen had called her earlier to arrange a meeting, Julia had told her to stop by her studio—which was actually a loft in one of the newish buildings that had opened on the Promenade downtown with the most recent spurt of redevelopment.

We walked into the lobby and ogled the concrete and glass and metal. “Seems upscale for a social worker,” I said.

Jen corrected me. “A
former
social worker. Now an artiste.”

I was never comfortable around people with lots of money, especially if they felt the need to be hip and cool about it. Something felt off about going to one of the trendiest and most expensive buildings in town to investigate the murder of a destitute victim. I tried to swallow my disdain.

Before we had the chance to find Julia’s number on the intercom system, the elevator opened and two young women with enormous breasts, carrying yoga mats rolled up in earth-toned tote bags, passed us in the lobby and went out the gray-glazed glass door into the heat. I was still watching them walk away when Jen said, “Hey.”

She stood in the elevator with her hand extended so it wouldn’t close, until I boarded too.

“You know the apartment number?”

“Yeah. Fourth floor.”

We rode up and found ourselves wandering the halls in order to figure out which way the unit numbers ran. Two wrong turns later, we found Julia Rice’s apartment and, out of courtesy and general niceness, gave the door a normal civilian knock. It’s rare that we do this when we’re on the clock. We’re so conditioned to pounding on every door with the heels of our hands—and the resultant booming echoes—that it feels anticlimactic to just to give a door a run-of-the-mill tap. But that’s what I did.

From behind the door, we heard a muffled voice. “Yes?”

Jen held her badge up to the peephole and said, “Ms. Rice? I’m Detective Jennifer Tanaka. We spoke on the phone earlier.”

We heard the sound of the deadbolt and the door opened.

“Hello, Detective.” Then she realized Jen wasn’t alone and said, “I beg your pardon, Detectives.” She smiled at me, and, without thinking, I smiled back. “Won’t you come in?”

She wore old-school Levi’s and an olive-colored T-shirt. Her light-brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. It looked like she’d done it that way for convenience rather than for style. “Let’s sit in here.” She led us into a living area with a large brown sofa and two matching chairs that faced each other in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked Alta Way and the square. Jen and I took the sofa, and Julia sat in the chair closest to the window.

“This is a very nice view,” Jen said.

“It’s okay. I’m looking for a new place.”

“Why?” I asked. “This place looks great.”

“The apartment’s nice enough. But the people here are all pretentious assholes.” I must have smiled again, because she looked at me in a curious way. “How can I help you?”

“We’re investigating a murder,” Jen said.

“Is this about the man who was burned to death by the river?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s horrible. What can I do?”

I let Jen answer.

“We don’t know who he was. The director of the Rescue Mission said you have a lot of photos.”

“I do. If you don’t know who he was, how do you think we might find him in the pictures?”

“We believe he went by the name of Bishop, but we suspect that’s not his real name.”

“That doesn’t ring any bells. Can you give me a physical description?”

We did. “Doesn’t sound too unusual, but I can start looking through what I have. I get names whenever I can, but a lot of my photos are just faces.”

“How many do you have?” I asked.

“Thousands. Only about a dozen of the portrait series I’m working on, but I’ve been taking pictures of the homeless for years, trying to document the conditions on the streets. I used to be a social worker.”

Jen nodded. “We have someone who used to play chess occasionally with the victim. So far he’s the only person who would be able to recognize his face.”

“I know what I can do,” Julia said. “I’ll put together a catalogue of everything I have that matches the description you gave me.”

“That would be very helpful,” Jen said.

“We’d only need photos that would be a good likeness, that might help us identify him.”

“Well,” she said, “that shouldn’t be too tough, then. I think I can have something for you in the next day or two.”

“Thank you.” I handed her my card. “Just let us know when you have it ready for us. We appreciate your help.”

“I’m glad to do whatever I can, Detective Beckett.”

She showed us out, and in the hallway while we waited for the elevator, I said, “She wasn’t really what I expected.”

“You know,” Jen said, “she already had my number.”

I had no idea why she was suddenly so amused.

There was a message from Kyle waiting for me when we got back to our desks. “You said to give you a heads-up when we were done processing everything from the John Doe’s cart. We’ve got everything finished. Let me know if you want to check it again before we put it into storage.”

I headed downstairs to Evidence Control. The clerk told me where to find Kyle. He was in a processing room double-checking his inventory sheet against all the tagged and bagged evidence on a large worktable in front of him.

“That everything?” I asked.

“Except the clothes he was wearing. What the ME could save of them.”

He handed me his clipboard so I could look at the list. “Anything new?”

“Nothing substantial,” he said. “We’ve got more detail and description. Confirmed the count of socks and things. But it’s basically what you’ve already seen.”

I read through the list again, item by item. The man’s whole life was there in that dry, clinical list of a few dozen possessions. Would they add up into any kind of cohesive narrative, or would Bishop remain a mystery with nothing but a random assortment of accumulated belongings to mark his passage?

One thing on the inventory caught my attention. I’d noticed it on the preliminary list but hadn’t taken a look at it in person yet. A copy of John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
. There were three other books on the list as well—a mystery novel from a few years ago, the title of which sounded vaguely familiar, and two others that didn’t ring any bells at all. I knew the Steinbeck book, though. How could I not? If I hadn’t already read it, I certainly would have the first time I heard Springsteen sing “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

I took a pair of latex gloves out of my pocket and opened the evidence bag. The book was a trade paperback Viking Critical Library edition that included a lengthy introduction and a bunch of other academic addenda. As I thumbed through the pages, I saw that someone had annotated the margins throughout the novel. Reading a few of the penciled notes, it was clear that the person who made the comments knew what they were doing. I looked inside the front cover to see if there might be a name. No luck.

“You think there’s any chance this might be Bishop’s handwriting?”

“Bishop? I didn’t know we had a name. You got an ID?”

“Nothing solid yet. We have a witness who thinks he went by that. Probably an alias.”

“You ever watch that show
Fringe
?”

“Yeah, why?”

“When you said that name I thought of the character.”

There were two characters with that name, a father and a son. “Walter or Peter?”

“The father.”

I imagined John Noble, the actor from the series, scribbling in the margins of
The Grapes of Wrath
.

“What about the handwriting?” I asked.

“We didn’t find anything else to compare the notes to, but they seem more grad-studenty than homeless guy.”

“You’re right. I’d like to read them. Any chance we can scan the pages?”

“We could. But it’s probably better to go through by hand, unless we need them for a trial. Do less damage to the book that way.”

I would have liked to have a copy I could take with me, because the evidentiary chain of custody would be much stronger if the book stayed in the evidence room.

“I’ll be back to look at it,” I said. I wasn’t sure when, but I knew the chance to hold the book in my hands and read the same words Bishop presumably had read wouldn’t be an opportunity I’d be able to let go of until I had done it.

That evening a marine layer drifted in and overcast the sky, and the heat backed off by a few degrees. The air, though, was filled with a muggy thickness that drained even more energy out of me than had the dry Santa Ana conditions of the last few days.

Things were beginning to slow down on the case, as they normally do after the first surges of evidence come pouring in with the wide sweep of new investigation. Once the crime scene is processed, the witnesses interviewed, and the obvious connections explored, the pace lets up. There are always more strands to tug at and more leads to follow, but the initial momentum begins to fade and the intensity, if you’re not careful, diminishes. I always fought against that tendency, against the idea of
The First Forty-Eight
—the mistaken popular notion that if a murder case isn’t closed in the first two days, then it’s unlikely to be closed at all. Like so many other misconceptions about homicide that media of all types love to perpetuate, it’s simply not true. There are a good number of cases closed in that time frame, but they’re the slam dunks, the cases where we find a husband weeping over the body of the wife he just killed, or those incidents in which “it just went off,” or those times when the witnesses line up around the block and tell us that guy had been talking about killing his father for years. The truth is that we work a lot of cases like that. People forget the definition of “homicide.” It simply means the death of one person at the hands of another. Those cases are how we spend most of our time. But
murder
, especially first-degree murder, killing with intention and forethought, was where our energy and our intellect went. We spent a lot of time filling out paperwork, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. But it was on cases like Bishop’s that we really earned our keep.

I brought copies of the case files home as I always do, but the pain was shooting up my neck, and I’d been in chairs or car seats for most of the day, so I decided to take a walk before I settled in for the night, hoping the exercise would alleviate some of the tension and stress I could feel settling in my spine.

The sky was still banded with gray in the west as I set out toward Belmont Shore. I lived near Warren High School, and one of the routes I liked to walk took me south and east to Naples Island, which had been built at the mouth of the San Gabriel River around the turn of the twentieth century in emulation of Abbot Kinney’s Venice development on the coast near Los Angeles. Depending on my pace and how many spontaneous diversions I made along the way, I could count on anywhere between one and two hours on my feet.