Ghettoside (30 page)

Then suddenly, Skaggs grew serious. He raised both hands. “So, listen,” he intoned, and brought his hands together sharply.
Clap!

For a moment, the sound hung in the air, just as Skaggs’s words to Derrick Washington’s sister had hovered before she dropped her head and started crying. Asked to explain this part of the interview, Skaggs had no insight to offer. He could not explain why, three quarters of an hour into the interrogation, he had suddenly resorted to clapping his hands like a kindergarten teacher.

Skaggs was trying to make Devin focus. But the clap was also an instinctive gesture, a flash of virtuosity from a man for whom establishing control was second nature. Skaggs clapped in Devin’s face as if he knew exactly what was about to happen, then clapped twice more, reflexively, to lock it down. So simple and powerful was the device—three sharp reports shattering the air in the tiny room—that someone who didn’t know the context might have assumed that Skaggs was engaged in black magic, calling forth an evil spirit with his hands.

“So, listen,” Skaggs said.
Clap
. “What happened that day?”
Clap. Clap
.

And Devin broke.

Suddenly, he was talking so fast the detectives couldn’t keep up. He was stumbling to get the words out. He was giving them the whole case.

“He put me up to it,” Devin said. “
Woo woo whoopdoobam
. He said we
go over here, I was in the car … I was with the burner, all right. I got out of the car, closed my eyes, and I just started doing it, I don’t know why! I was scared!… I didn’t want nobody thinking of me as no bitch or nothin’… I just wanted to have friends! That’s all I wanted. I didn’t think you had to do all that!”

He paused for air. “Okay,” Skaggs said mildly. “And that’s what we’re gonna talk about.”

Two decades he’d been doing this, extracting confessions, some easily, some less so, and yet he was still surprised every time. He had gone into the interrogation hoping to get a confession from Devin—not needing it, not absolutely—but knowing it would tie up the case just as he wanted. Yet when the moment came, it was still breathtaking, like a shift in the astral alignment. Skaggs didn’t pause to analyze. He buried his surprise and plunged forward in his distinctive way.

Devin was weeping. The tension was at its zenith.

Skaggs chose to retreat. It was as if his adrenaline flowed in reverse. This moment was surely one of the most explosively important of his working life, but he displayed no urgency. He downshifted.

He spoke in a relaxed way, as if what Devin had to say next held only perfunctory interest for him. His tone became light, almost careless: “I just need a few specifics before we go on,” he said. “We’ll take a break. Uh, throw a little food in your belly, get a snack—”

“Can I call my mom?” Devin snuffled.

“Yes, you can. Not right now.” Devin was still crying.

Skaggs began. “Where did you get picked up?”

A pause, then Devin spoke, his voiced changed. His tone echoed Skaggs’s. He was calm, sad, resigned. “I think a Hundred and tenth,” he said.

For the next forty-five minutes he answered Skaggs’s questions, one after another, employing his “Yes, sir” after Skaggs chided him for not speaking clearly. Skaggs spoke slowly and Farell scribbled freely on his notepad. The story emerged at a stately, somber pace. An afternoon in May. A blue-steel revolver so old and worn it appeared light gray. Skaggs was no longer meandering. One question followed another with crisp
logic, as if he were turning over the pages of his immaculate binder in his mind. Horrifying details emerged, one following the other as they would later in court, each one linked in Skaggs’s mind to a piece of corroborating evidence.

Devin’s voice broke at times, but he offered no resistance, walking the path to his own destruction resolutely, with one obedient answer after another, sobbing in between, saying over and over that he knew he would spend the rest of his life in jail. Skaggs got him to construct the chronology in detail—to describe how he and Starks had cherped each other, said “Wha’s up?” and somehow arrived at a plan to do a “beat-down” on gang rivals to the north.

He got him to relate how Midkiff and Starks picked him up, headed north to the eighties, and parked around the corner. Here, the conversation descended into the strange map-and-compass talk of ghettoside cases—that curious legal edifice built on corroborating points in lieu of truthful narratives from willing witnesses.

Because so many witnesses rolled back on their stories, or revealed them reluctantly, investigations were built from inadvertent slips or grudging admissions. Cases fell together when enough of these slips intersected with each other, or matched with random bits of evidence. The result was not a coherent tale of murder in the style of fiction. It was more like a superstructure of joints—made up of the linkages left standing after all the mistakes, lies, and obfuscations had been stripped away.

Devin said that, as Skaggs suspected, other gang members had been giving him a hard time for being a “punk” and he wanted to prove himself. He had taken an ecstasy pill early in the day, anticipating a party. “I was under the influence, and I listened to a jackass,” he said. He seemed not to know Midkiff well. He thought she was white and called her “Jennifer.” It was clear he knew Starks better. He acknowledged recognizing his picture, but he balked when asked to state his gang name, probably afraid of snitching.

He hinted at another reason: the moniker No Brains was intended to be pejorative, he suggested. Devin himself was sensitive to such slights,
having been called insulting names. “I been like that. I don’t ever call nobody by no name,” he said.

Devin said that he recognized the neighborhood by the gang graffiti on the walls and that he put on gardening gloves as they drove, not wanting to “mess my hands up.” When they parked, Devin said he saw a guy walking on the street wearing a Hoover hat, and Starks turned and stretched an arm toward him. In his hand was a .38 revolver. “Here,” Starks said.

Skaggs hammered this point, returning to it again and again. Hadn’t Starks said anything else? Let’s smoke someone? Take care of business? Put a cap in someone? Fuck somebody up? Skaggs reeled off euphemisms. But Devin was emphatic. “None of that. It was just, like,
Here
. That’s all I remember. He said,
Here
.”

Devin said his heart raced at the sight of the gun. He claimed he had not reckoned on shooting anyone. He just thought they were there to fight. He stared at the gun in his gloved hand, thought:
Wha’? Fuck!
But he didn’t want anyone to think he was a punk. He took it, and got out of the Suburban.

Did he know who he was shooting at? Skaggs asked.

“I didn’t get to, like, really see him,” Devin said. “All I know is that he was black.”

He said it simply, as if it were obvious. Axiomatic, even. And it was. A black assailant looking to kill a gang rival is looking, before anything else, for another black male. This was the fundamental fact of Bryant Tennelle’s death. Other elements contributed—the neighborhood in which he lived, the company he chose to keep, the hat he was wearing that evening. But for all that—and for all the rhetoric about bad choices, senseless acts, at-risk behavior, and so forth—what killed Bryant was the one fact about himself that he could not change: he was black. As it happened, he wasn’t even so very black: he was half Costa Rican. But it didn’t matter. In the eyes of his killer, Bryant Tennelle was branded by history. He was a black man, a presumed combatant, conscripted into a dismal existence “outside the law” whether he wanted to be or not. Before
anything else, Bryant was black. To Devin Davis, that meant he was killable.

Devin said he closed his eyes tight, fired, and ran. He said he didn’t see Bryant fall. He didn’t think he had hit him, he said—or, if he had, he convinced himself he had only wounded him. He made it clear that such nonfatal shootings were, to him, mundane. “I thought someone just got hit in the arm or something. Like, you know, a regular hit,” he said.

Afterward, Devin said, “he didn’t feel right.” He made Starks drop him off at Jesse Owens Park. He went swimming. He denied boasting about the shooting and said he had been assailed by guilt. For months, he convinced himself that he had only wounded the guy he saw walking down the street near St. Andrews, he said. When he was shot in the wrist sometime after at Jesse Owens Park, he convinced himself that it was that same gang rival he’d blasted getting back at him.
We even
, he’d thought.

Devin’s diminishment of his crime and his self-protective rationalizations reached heights of absurdity. He told Skaggs that he had not aimed at Bryant, but Bryant had walked into his gunfire. It was unclear at times whether his denial was for Skaggs’s benefit or his own. When Skaggs asked him if he knew he had killed “a cop’s kid,” Devin played ignorant. “I killed a cop’s son?” he wailed. “I really ain’t gonna go home.”

But soon after, he confessed that he already heard from the probationer that Bryant was a police officer’s son. Then he wept even harder, saying, “I took somebody’s child,” and later, “I fucked up my whole life … I couldn’t take it back.”

Skaggs’s questions continued, his tone neutral, his manner methodical and efficient. How had Devin felt when he learned he had killed someone? Devin sobbed. “I ain’t never ever think I’d hurt somebody,” he said, through gasps. “I ain’t never did want to hurt nobody in this world. I always just wanted to be a person everyone was just cool with. Everybody just liking me! I never did want to, ever, ever, ever, ever, my whole life, never wanted to hurt nobody!” He said he disliked guns because his brother had been shot “and I know how my mama was.”

As the interrogation wound down, Devin began asking for his mother. “I’m never gonna go home and see my mom again,” he sobbed at one point. Skaggs handed him a tissue. “That I can’t tell you,” Skaggs said.

“I’m scared,” Devin exclaimed a little later, weeping again. “I don’t know what to do!”

“I don’t blame you,” Skaggs said quietly.

It was approaching 4:00
P.M
. by the time Skaggs had walked Devin through his confession, looping back for clarification on a few points. By the end, Skaggs was down to minutiae—whether the yard had a fence, that sort of thing. Devin unloaded it all, his voice thick with resignation and a kind of suicidal despondence. Skaggs extracted the admissions drop by drop, corroborating nearly every detail of the mission, almost exactly as Midkiff had presented it and eyewitnesses had described. Skaggs’s murder book now had a few additional photos, identifying the murder scene and Starks, and penned with the initials D.D.

At last, Skaggs turned to Devin and asked him if he wanted to view the nonexistent videotape. Devin said he didn’t. “Shit,” Devin said. “I’m already washed. I’m going to jail for the rest of my life.”

He was weeping again. “I really don’t even want to talk about it, sir! I already know how it is. I watch TV. I watch
Law and Order
. I know how it goes. I took somebody off the planet. Off the earth. There ain’t no coming back. There ain’t no bringing him back to life … Ain’t never gonna see my baby. Ain’t never gonna get no pussy. Ain’t never gonna see my damn son. I can’t do nothin’. I’m washed.”

“Okay,” Skaggs said quietly. “We’re done, Devin.” He offered Devin lunch.

Then Skaggs walked out. Exhaustion swept him. For ninety minutes, he had been in a hyperalert state—assessing, calculating, talking with one part of his brain and processing with the other, absorbing every word Devin uttered, every movement, every blink. He felt drained, as if he had just run a marathon. But he knew he’d done it. The case was cleared.

Farell felt the tension hit him much later, after he went home. He
likened the feeling to his patrol days. He would chase armed suspects without a thought. Only much later would it strike him:
Oh, yeah, they could have shot me
.

As they walked him out of the building, Devin was back to whining. He wanted something—a soda. Skaggs turned, and for an instant, the calm, imperturbable patina he had maintained for two decades of working homicides slipped. Farell caught his look, surprised; he had never known Skaggs to be anything but easygoing and in control.

“Fuck you,” Skaggs told Devin. “You killed a cop’s kid.”

After Devin Davis, the interrogation of Derrick Starks was anticlimactic.

It took place two days later. Skaggs and Farell took Starks out of jail, drove him by the crime scene, and interviewed him.

Starks struck Skaggs as more seasoned and wily than Davis. As Midkiff had suggested, he was a big young man, who must have loomed over her like a heavyweight boxer. He was only six feet tall, but solid. His thick neck had a crease in back, and he had a distinctive, saturnine face, like a Roman statue—sensitive cupid’s-bow mouth, dimples, and straight, slim nose. His eyes tipped up at the corners under arched brows, the left one perennially cocked. He was light-skinned, with light brown hair and hazel eyes; except for his strong Louisiana accent, Starks could easily have passed for Hispanic.

Starks barely spoke on the drive. In the interview room, Skaggs did most of the talking. His approach was soft and casual. He got a cup of coffee for himself and a grape soda for Starks. He inverted his usual joke of insulting Farell. Skaggs’s interrogations were like the theme and variations of a symphony. He used the same devices again and again but subtly reworked them each time. This time, instead of calling Farell dim-witted, he referred to his own supposed dim-wittedness and credited Farell with solving the case. Usually, cases weren’t as easy as this one, he added.

Skaggs then launched into a recital of the evidence against Starks.

By now, he had the statement from the man in the wheelchair, Midkiff’s account, Davis’s confession, and the many corroborating points between them. He also had cell phone records that showed Starks’s movements and placed him within nineteen blocks of the murder scene at the time of the murder.

He had confirmed through the California Highway Patrol that Starks was in possession of the black Suburban in custody and had been driving around with Midkiff a few days after the killing. Eyewitnesses had identified photos of the Suburban. Skaggs also had letters and recordings of tapped phone calls Starks had made to friends from jail, none of which amounted to a confession, but which made it amply clear he was deeply involved with the Bloccs and knew about the Tennelle case.