Ghettoside (22 page)

Everything about Prideaux, from his glance to his grin, was sharpedged and ironic. The LAPD’s taste in humor ran more to the broad, guffawing variety, and Prideaux was occasionally misunderstood.

Like Skaggs, like Tennelle, like so many of them, Prideaux might have had another career were he not so hyperactive. His father was an executive for United Airlines. Prideaux had grown up in Rolling Hills Estates, an exclusive outpost on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which had one of the lowest violent crime rates in California.

But at a certain stage of youth, no office job seemed as appealing as “driving around in fresh air and sunshine in police cars,” and so there he was, an LAPD career man since the age of twenty-one. By the time of the Tennelle killing, he was in his midfifties. Anywhere else, he would have been at the height of his career, rising through management. But he
was a policeman, so he was looking toward retirement. Although he did not have a deep background in homicide, and no ghettoside credentials at all, Prideaux was an able manager. He had won a place in Robbery-Homicide, and he was Wally Tennelle’s boss when Bryant was shot.

He was out with his wife at Lido di Manhattan in Manhattan Beach, headed to the local light opera, when he got the call from Kyle Jackson, the unit’s commander. As he drove toward California Hospital, arguments about who should handle the case were already zinging over the phone. At the hospital, he met with Jackson and some other brass, and then with Wally Tennelle. Years later, Prideaux’s voice was still tight as he recalled the scene. Tennelle, he said, “came out and apologized for the inconvenience,” Prideaux said. “He handed out bottles of water from a cart.” Prideaux was in jeans and a sweater. He felt crushed, yet Tennelle kept addressing him as “Lieutenant.”

The decision to give the case to the division was above his head. Prideaux was not involved. But like everyone in RHD, he marked the passing weeks. Still no suspects. Prideaux had learned the previous February that he would be reassigned as detectives’ lieutenant in the new South Bureau Homicide. The Tennelle case remained unsolved.

Prideaux had ideas about it. By then, although it wasn’t anywhere near what the LAPD technically called a cold case, it was getting cold by ghettoside standards. Every lead seemed to have been chased to oblivion, even the revolver. There had been no media coverage to speak of. It seemed to be a burning issue only within the LAPD, and even there, it was the preoccupation of a few—detectives such as Skaggs who cared about south-end homicides. And anyone who had ever met Wally Tennelle.

Prideaux believed the case needed a shake-up. He didn’t know South Bureau well, so he performed what he called “some audio surveillance.” He started asking around: Who was good? Who could solve cases in South Bureau? “Word came back to us:
Skaggs
,” Prideaux recalled.

Prideaux had a vague memory of seeing John Skaggs as a young officer and remembered Chris Barling better—that quirky officer who always looked as if he were fifteen years old—but didn’t know much about their record for clearing cases.

All he knew was that in those first weeks in South Bureau, he kept hearing their names. That top-of-the-line team in Southeast—Skaggs and Barling. Some of the talk was critical; not everyone liked Skaggs, who seemed to think rather highly of himself. Prideaux gathered he had a reputation, that he bulldozed over opposition and “like Sherman, he will burn down the forest to find what he’s looking for,” Prideaux said. It so happened Prideaux was looking for a Sherman.

He sought out confidants in the command ranks—trying to find anyone who knew Skaggs. Everyone who did told Prideaux the same thing: Skaggs works insane hours. He works days off and weekends. He solves all his cases. And he will cost you a fortune in overtime.

Prideaux and Skaggs never grew to know each other well. Skaggs was dismissive of Prideaux, whom he viewed as just another PAB bureaucrat (and being satisfied with this first assessment—and being Skaggs—he never revisited it). But Prideaux had a pretty good read on Skaggs from the beginning. Skaggs was successful, he later said, because he was organized and tenacious, had a great memory, and was “bright and insightful.” But he also called Skaggs “a very hard man.”

Asked what he meant by this, he explained that good homicide detectives were ruthless. They had to push day after day. They had to use whatever leverage they possessed to get people to talk. They had to interrogate people, pester them, relocate them, mess up their lives. They had to be remorseless. Prideaux said, “It takes a hard person to constantly work a case like that. It’s tiring. It wears you out.” Being hard, he said, “is a necessary attribute if you are going to be a homicide detective. I don’t want it to sound negative. But they are harder than most people.” Prideaux then repeated himself. “John Skaggs,” he said, “is a
very
hard man.”

Prideaux considered Tennelle another hard man, in the positive sense.

He was not the only one to notice certain similarities between Skaggs and Tennelle—those meticulous habits, the outward mildness matched with bunched-up energy, that obliqueness about their inward lives, that clean-hewn worldview, all right angles and straight lines. The two men were so clearly of a type.

That September, Prideaux called Skaggs in and told him he wanted him on the Tennelle case. Skaggs, ever the California surfer, had one thought:
Bitchin’
.

Prideaux briefed Skaggs on the case. But he also wanted Skaggs to know something about Tennelle—to understand what the case meant to Tennelle’s colleagues who loved him. He wanted Skaggs to know about Tennelle’s tenacity and energy, his honesty and high standards.

Seeking words to sum up Tennelle, Prideaux came up with the obvious ones: “He’s
you
,” he told Skaggs.

Prideaux did not simply hand over the case to Skaggs. He made Skaggs partner to Armando Bernal, the original Seventy-seventh Division detective on the case, who had gotten good leads yet appeared stalled.

When Skaggs learned he would have to work with Bernal, he refused. But Prideaux didn’t give him the choice.

Prideaux defended the decision on the ground that as professionals, Skaggs and Bernal should be able to find a way to play nice. But he underestimated the seething intensity homicide detectives brought to their work, especially in South Bureau, where everyone felt a little persecuted—and especially on such an emotional case.

Prideaux’s decision amounted to telling Bernal, the alpha detective of the Seventy-seventh, that he was being forced to work with Skaggs, the alpha detective from the rival Southeast, because his bosses felt he wasn’t good enough. And it meant telling Skaggs that he could finally have the case he had been hankering for, but not on his terms.

It was a mess. Skaggs did not like Bernal and was not especially nice to him. Bernal was more circumspect, but it was clear he did not like Skaggs, either.

In Skaggs’s account, the two had had some scrap early in their careers. It was an elaborate story from Skaggs’s encyclopedic memory. The gist was that Skaggs had solved one of Bernal’s cases for him and Bernal didn’t like it. Bernal simply said their styles were inharmonious.

Prideaux was right that Skaggs was like Sherman. As soon as he got the case, he wanted to do what he had always done: plunge straight ahead as quickly as possible, get as many interviews as it took, use all the hours available, strip away false leads and lay bare the good ones. He wanted to attack. John Skaggs had no problem scorching some earth.

Bernal was much more careful. He was meticulous about documenting everything he did and anxious to avoid duplication—“shooting the gun in every direction,” he called it, and thus stirring up a lot of false leads.

Bernal found Skaggs to be reckless, dashing off to do things without due planning and coordination; Skaggs, with his hatred of paperwork and desk-driven investigating, thought Bernal excessively process-oriented—a “checklist detective.”

And there was another, especially lethal, flaw in this whole cursed scheme of Prideaux’s. Neither detective was clearly the lead on the case, in violation of Skaggs’s inflexible rule for partnerships.

Skaggs’s first step was to page through the murder book to see what had already been done. Predictably, the book annoyed him.

Skaggs knew that the Seventy-seventh had been following street rumors that
a gang called the Rollin’ Sixties was involved in the murder. He saw that this was the angle that was being worked—though not worked in the way Skaggs would have worked it. Instead of taking to the field, knocking relentlessly, talking to anyone they could find, it seemed the detectives were waiting for calls to come in. Here again were violations of the craftsman’s code he and Barling had established: You don’t sit and wait. And you remain open, never allowing yourself to be seduced by assumptions or intriguing theories. “You never put all your peas in one basket,” Skaggs would say.

The book itself wasn’t as neat as Skaggs would have liked. It was “clustered,” he thought. Only Skaggs knew exactly what he meant by that, but it had to do with his almost uncanny ability to build into his investigations powerful engines of progress instead of mere reports on efforts made here and there. Even when Skaggs was pursuing bad leads, he wasn’t drifting—he was eliminating distractions.

Skaggs reacted most strongly to Bernal’s meticulous scheduling and record keeping. Bernal made appointments by phone; Skaggs usually did not. He treated South Central like a twelfth-century village and simply walked around and talked to people, relying on serendipity and the power of face-to-face interactions. Bernal had taken care to note every incremental action. But to Skaggs, who considered fieldwork the only activity of investigative value, all those notes were the mark of hesitation and equivocation—sins, in his mind.

Bernal, for example, had noted phone calls that weren’t returned and door knocks that no one answered. Skaggs considered that a lot of “filler.” He would never load up a murder book with incidentals. If Skaggs knocked on a door and no one answered, he knew he would be back again, and again, and again, until someone answered. Woe be it to the occupants; they had no hope of evading the cop with a tie and no jacket. Skaggs would make a record in the book only of interviews he eventually conducted, not the door knocks that led up to them. To Skaggs, the only purpose of such notes was to make it appear that detectives were working busily should someone look over their shoulders.

There was a way of working—it was hard for him to put this into words, but he knew it when he saw it—a perfunctory way that met all the technical criteria for how a job was supposed to be done. It would be above reproach should any supervisor review the work, yet lacked some essential quality of passion, determination, velocity.

Checklist work and real work were not the same to him. You could get praise and a paycheck and fill your day with busy, important-seeming activities and never solve a case. In South L.A., Skaggs believed, murders got solved only through another level of vigor—when a detective was motivated by something greater than the promise of a good “rating” or promotion. There was a pro forma way to do the job, and there was the Southeast way—best described by the salesman’s credo he had learned from Sal La Barbera.
Always be closing
. It was why he disliked it when detectives sat around in front of computers or ate lunch at restaurants.

Now Skaggs’s whole outlook and career were rooted in the same
aggrieved sense of injustice that had prompted Wally Tennelle to turn down RHD a decade before. He believed the victims of South Central deserved better than the
appearance
of a functioning justice system. They deserved professional practitioners who saw the full reality and horror of their fate and who brought to the job a personal stake in success and a battlefield sense of mission—not just a credible defense against a charge of malpractice. The Monster needed to be relentlessly pursued and routed, not just contained. Unconsciously, Skaggs saw in a murder book full of “filler” yet another expression of this tacit policy of passive containment. He did not like it at all.

Skaggs didn’t know it, but his irritation was centuries in the making.

Criminal law in the United States has always displayed a tendency to go through the motions. From the nation’s earliest moments, its legal system was fragmented and crude.
Vigilantism and vendettas flourished in the legal vacuum. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, police compensated for the weakness of the courts by
roughing up people to teach them lessons. As late as the 1950s,
their work consisted largely of rounding up drunks in paddy wagons.

But where things got really bad was in the South. In that region’s
long, painful history of caste domination and counterrevolution lurks every factor that counters the formation of a state monopoly on violence.

From before Emancipation, Southern law was infirm. Slave owners wanted the power to discipline slaves without legal constraints. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, ex-Confederates murdered their way to control again, terrorizing emancipated black people and their white supporters into submission. This set the stage for
the racist atrocities of Southern law that are somewhat better known to Americans—the stacked courts, fee systems, and chain gangs—abuses so systematic that, across the South,
black people dismissed the whole framework as “the white man’s court.”

White conservatives favored legal systems that looked the part, but still achieved their racist intent—
a “winking” system that, by design, just went through the motions. Southern legal institutions appeared to observe
constitutional due process, but
real power was held outside the law. Getting away with murder was key to the white-supremacist project. Impunity is a stencil of law; it outlines a shadow system. Southern legal institutions were, by turns, hypocritical, corrupt, partisan, ineffective, infected with vigilantism or too feeble to combat it. In this way, the South cultivated the Furies in all their dark horror. Its harvest was factionalism, informal systems of discipline and self-policing, terrifying etiquette restrictions, witness intimidation, vigilantism, rumors, arson, lynching, and a homemade system of order based on relationships
that historian Mark Schultz dubbed “personalism”—the whole dreary cornucopia of informal justice.