Ghettoside (34 page)

Marullo and Kouri left for the police station to conduct interviews; La Barbera remained behind, smoking cigarette after cigarette, sweating as he pushed the measuring wheel in the hot sun, sourly noting the uniformed officers standing by.

Marullo hurried to the roll call room at Southeast where several of Cook’s family members waited. He leaned on his fingertips to speak to them over a desk. They were all talking at once. Cook’s uncle was angry that they had been kept waiting. He took it as indifference. “I’ll have it done my way!” he snapped at Marullo. “I can get it done!” The uncle had been a gang member back in the day. Now he was a portly, ordinary-looking man with missing teeth.

It doesn’t get any plainer. A middle-aged uncle raising his voice in the roll call room of a municipal police department to declare to, of all
people, a homicide detective that he was seriously contemplating a revenge murder. The Monster is hardly subtle. Marullo tried to calm him, doing his boyish-charm thing, eyes wide, eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry, sir! I know you’re upset …” Across the room, some uniformed officers glanced toward them and went back to their chatter, unperturbed.

At length, Marullo led a woman from the family away. He thought she was Cook’s aunt. But as he escorted the woman downstairs, her movements were slow and labored. She sat and rocked. She was short and ample with a honey-brown face and little gray braids. She laid a white 8-by-11 sheet of paper on the table. Marullo began with a reference to her “nephew,” and she slumped. “My son, my son. Oh Jesus. My only son!” She was sobbing.

Marullo was caught off guard. He had not understood this was the victim’s mother. He made a quick readjustment, pulling his chair around the table so as to sit next to her and softening his tone. He touched her shoulder very lightly. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then: “I don’t want to seem like I’m being insensitive. I have to ask you some questions here. We want to find who did this.”

The woman was leaning heavily on the table, breathing hard. Her name was Joyce Cook. Marullo asked her to spell the name and she buried her head on the table, sobbing and incoherent.

Marullo persisted gently with his questions, leaning forward, nodding, trying to keep her on track. She told him what she knew. La’Mere had just gone outside. The killers had driven right up to the house in a van, and a young man or boy had jumped out and fired. There had been shots, then more shots—“So many bullets!” Joyce Cook said. She had opened the door at the sound of gunfire and watched her son’s murder unfold.

Marullo, tense, balanced a pen between his fingers. “I know you are hurting,” he said at one point. “And I can’t imagine what that’s like.”

Cook wept. Marullo tried to get her to focus. But she collapsed and then erupted:
“Too late!”
she wailed. “Too late! You guys always come too late!”

Marullo stood accused. His eyes dropped. A ripple of emotion
skimmed his face. “I wish I was there,” he said to the tabletop. “I’d be there if I could.” Joyce Cook seemed not to hear him. She had fallen forward, her head on the table, sobbing silently.

The paper she’d brought turned out to be a diagram. In the midst of chaos, having just watched the murder of her son, Joyce Cook had had the presence of mind to find a pencil and draw a picture of what she’d seen. Wobbly lines sketched the house, the van, the shooter. It was an astonishing record of the altered state of trauma, documented in real time. Scrawled here and there were snippets of thoughts, almost as if Joyce Cook had been writing in her sleep: “Didn’t stop shuting till I open the door,” she had written. “Still shuting.” And, above, “La’Mere Cook, my only son.”

The drawing was of little investigative value. The police already knew most of it, and Joyce Cook’s tracings had a mad, rambling quality to them. Yet the diagram was a poignant artifact of the deep yearning for justice. Even as her son lay dying, Joyce Cook’s thoughts had gone to the police investigation. Cops in South Bureau were constantly accusing “the community” of not caring enough to help them solve these crimes. Yet the cops themselves often seemed deaf to the community’s pleas for their success.

To many officers, black residents of these ghettoside neighborhoods seemed so incomprehensibly perverse and hostile, so hell-bent on not making things better for themselves. And that same “community” bristled and postured in response. Yet beneath all this dysfunction, just as the cops yearned to be do-gooders who “helped people,” the “community” yearned for their help.

But many officers couldn’t pick up on it. Or perhaps the implications were just too painful if they did: after all, Joyce Cook was right. They were usually too late.

The Cook killing remains unsolved at this writing. The unit had many strong leads, and a few terrified but helpful witnesses. A suspect gang was identified: they lived on the same block as Barbara Pritchett. But after Marullo and Kouri passed the case on to colleagues, it stalled.

One witness was also, coincidentally, a witness on the Henry Henderson case, which Marullo was trying to get through court. The Cook suspects had seen her; a few days after, her house was ransacked. She recanted on the stand in the Henderson trial and disappeared.

Another witness refused to talk to the detectives at all. This was a sixteen-year-old black youth wearing blue who was on the street when the killers rolled up. He had seen them, and he was probably their intended target. But he was street-smart and quick as a gazelle; he escaped over a fence, leaving unsuspecting La’Mere Cook behind.

The previous February, this same sixteen-year-old had himself been shot by gang assailants. The bullet slammed into his trachea. It was a classic “almo-cide.” The sixteen-year-old boy had nearly died. He had coughed blood, turned blue, and his throat had swelled. He was in intensive care for a week and required three surgeries, then remained hospitalized two more weeks, heavily sedated. Family members took turns at his bedside. La’Mere Cook came, too. The youth couldn’t speak for weeks. The swelling caused his tongue to poke out of his mouth, a bizarre and horrifying sight.

He improved and went home. His mother was traumatized. She worried night and day. As with so many gun assaults in Southeast that did not end in death, the case remained unsolved. When Cook was shot, this mother rushed over, afraid it was her son again. Instead, she arrived to see that someone had rolled the dying Cook on his back. She saw a look of astonishment in his eyes. Then uniformed police arrived, and the first thing this mother saw them do was handcuff her son and demand to know if he was a gang member. When detectives came, much later, wanting her son to give a statement about what he’d seen, the mother refused to cooperate. She didn’t see the point. To her, the police hadn’t cared that her son had spent weeks in a hospital with his tongue sticking out. She didn’t think they would solve La’Mere’s case any more than they had solved her son’s. “They never want to solve it if it is a young black man,” she said. They seemed interested only in endangering her son further. And unbeknownst to the police, Joyce Cook had
told her neighbors she did not expect them to put their children at risk because of La’Mere’s killing. She did this out of compassion for them. To Cook, one dead son on the block was enough.

At La’Mere Cook’s funeral, the sixteen-year-old boy pressed both hands against his face and sobbed like a child. He sat with the other pallbearers—black men and boys like him, their faces stricken with grief and bewilderment.

The pastor gripped the mike and looked at the pallbearers. “The devil is trying to make you think it is an honor to die for your ’hood!” he boomed. “The devil is trying to fool you!” The sixteen-year-old straightened and leaned forward, eyes fixed on the pastor, a look of deep thought on his face.

After the wake, several of Cook’s friends gathered to mutter among themselves. The police would not solve the case, one said. To them, Cook’s murder “is just another nigger dead,” he said.

“We police our own,” said another. “Soldiers are heroes. Why are we called gangsters?”

Joyce Cook was not surprised when her son’s murder went unsolved. The same thing had happened when her husband, La’Mere Cook’s father, was murdered back in New Orleans years before.

Cook did not allow family members to erect the usual shrine with candles on the spot where La’Mere had died. She was from New Orleans, where she’d been taught that candles would release the restless spirit of the murdered man into the air. Cook believed there were too many murdered spirits afoot in South Central already, and she was afraid.

The summer of 2008 also saw, at last, the preliminary hearing in the Tennelle case.

Devin Davis had become thickset during his six months in jail, and his hair was an unkempt bush growing down the back of his neck. He looked as boyish and awkward as ever with his big head and square face. His eyes roved around as he entered the courtroom, looking for his
mother. Derrick Starks was mostly unchanged, big-shouldered as ever, hair cropped, hazel eyes alert, a suggestion of a mustache at the corners of his mouth.

The man in the wheelchair, now thirty-one, had been subpoenaed against his will. At first he had refused to come to court. Stirling had spent a half hour before the session fielding the man’s concerns for his safety and that of his family. Now he sat in his wheelchair on the stand, sunk low. As Starks, seated a few feet away, surveyed him with an appraising look, the man recanted his statements to Skaggs and Gordon and asserted again that he had gotten the gun from a crack addict. Challenged, he insisted he’d been pressured by the investigators. He did not return Starks’s gaze.

The prosecutors impeached him. As his own recorded voice filled the courtroom, laying out No Brains, the man pretended to study some papers in his lap. Then he looked angry. Then he started shifting in his seat. At last, he wilted in his wheelchair, abandoning all pretense with a hand over his mouth and a look of bleak terror in his eyes.

Pointing out that this man, who had barely survived a shooting, occupied the zenith of statistical homicide risk doesn’t begin to describe the full dreadfulness of his situation. It wasn’t just that he was already lucky to be alive and that he was now being exposed as a snitch before two accused gang murderers. He was also an “underclass” black man, one of society’s outcasts. No newspaper was going to stop the presses if the man in the wheelchair got killed. No news station was going to cut into its regular programming. No detectives’ supervisor was going to yank the case away from a veteran detective and reassign it if it didn’t get solved.

The man in the wheelchair did not need any special powers to perceive his status. All his life, he had lived in the Southeast Division. Patrol officers there usually treated men like him three or four ticks more rudely than other people; the gradation between cold killers and paralyzed young men who sold marijuana for extra cash was not particularly well calibrated in their minds. If someone made yet another attempt to
murder this witness and succeeded, he surely knew he wouldn’t qualify as a “righteous” victim. But bullets had damaged his spine no less easily for that.

When the judge released him from testifying, he wheeled himself out of the courtroom so quickly that Skaggs did not have a chance to push him. Skaggs trailed out behind him. The man had been betrayed. Skaggs and Gordon had assured him that his statement was strictly anonymous. Perhaps this was in Skaggs’s mind as he followed him out. Or perhaps Skaggs had simply worked Southeast long enough to comprehend how frightened the man must have been. “Hey. Sorry! You know I’m sorry!” Skaggs told him in the corridor. His manner was uncertain and oddly out of character. The man’s eyes were full of despair. He did not respond.

The Beverly Hills High student turned probationer was similarly recalcitrant. He also denied his statements to Skaggs. He denied the interview had ever taken place. When they impeached him, he said it wasn’t even his voice on the tape. The probationer’s eyes locked briefly with Starks’s as he was led out of the courtroom. Starks kept his eye on him. As he passed, Starks slowly rotated his chair and watched his retreating back—watched it all the way to the door. A long, hard stare.

Skaggs put Jessica Midkiff in a motel for the weekend for safety. Midkiff was excited about it. She had brought her daughter. The little girl was thrilled this time by the bathtub—they didn’t have one at home. Midkiff let her sit in it and watch a movie. When Skaggs arrived to pick her up that morning at 6:15
A.M.
, she informed him that she had gone to bed at 6:00
A.M
. and had slept for only fifteen minutes. Skaggs was appalled. He assumed it was her irresponsible ways again. But Midkiff had been too nervous about testifying to sleep.

She wore faded jeans, a nylon blouse with a floral pattern, high heels, and a ponytail, her half-lightened hair cascading down her back. She carried her black clutch purse to the stand and held it as she was sworn in.

Sitting on the stand to testify, Midkiff was ashen. Starks was watching her closely, swinging slightly back and forth, his chair twitching like a
cat’s tail. Her eyes flicked toward him. Between them was some complicated electricity.

Midkiff launched into her story, then faltered, breathing deeply. She kept hesitating and sighing, appearing to waver. “Give me a minute,” she pleaded after one of Stirling’s questions reduced her to stammering confusion. Asked if she was driving, she said: “I believe I was.” It was nothing like her certainty in the interrogation. At last she waved a hand over her heaving chest. “Sort of hard for me,” she murmured.

Skaggs, on his bench, jiggled and flexed his fingers.

During the weeks that Skaggs had been preparing her to testify, Midkiff had made it clear that she felt bad about being, as she saw it, a snitch. Moving away from the ’hood, she felt she had “lost her identity,” and it was dawning on her that she had no real friends. She was more desperate than ever that Skaggs not abandon her. She made weak jokes about it to him, unable to approach the subject directly. “I thought you said we’d be friends!”

Now, on the stand, she thought she’d seen Starks give her a “sexual look” and for a moment entertained the notion that he might jump out of his chair and grab her. Then she realized he was chained. Later, she saw Starks’s mother, Olitha Starks, among the onlookers and thought she caught a hard stare. She was so rattled that the judge called a sidebar.