Ghettoside (40 page)

Outside, the sky was brown from wildfires and the smell of smoke filled the chapel. A second young man rose. “I’m trying to live,” he said. “At least to see twenty-one. That’s a lot.” A stir went through the crowd. A youth pastor sprang to his feet and called the young men back. He placed his hands on their shoulders. “We want better for you than just twenty-one! Understand?” His voice was thick.
“It is possible in our community to live on for a full life!”

The pastor then called on all the young people present to stand. He told the crowd to place hands on them.
“Protect them from the evil thing that lurks in our community!”
he cried. “Amen! Amen!” the crowd shouted. The young men for whom they prayed wept like children.

Hordes of cops patrolled “the box” for a week or so. Eventually,
Metro officers barged into a Hoover party, arrested several people, and seized some guns. Sal La Barbera considered it the only “good caper” of the surge. But it generated no leads on any homicides.

By fall, his squad had exceeded the overtime allotment and he was sending detectives home to take unplanned days off. La Barbera was feeling moody and pessimistic. His squad too inexperienced. Resources still scarce. Two years since they’d moved to this office, yet the phones still didn’t work. His personal problems were mounting. Cases were going unsolved or falling apart.

The suspect in Marullo’s case from in front of Barbara Pritchett’s house—the killing of Henry Henderson—had been tried unsuccessfully three times without being convicted. The suspect was back in Pritchett’s neighborhood. She’d heard rumors he’d been involved in more shootings.

But Pritchett had her own worries. Carlos, her thirteen-year-old brother, had been “hit up” by men down the block. The men belonged to the same gang as the suspects in La’Mere Cook’s killing, which remained unsolved. After the hit-up, Dovon’s older brother had confronted the men, telling them to leave Carlos alone. Pritchett, learning of this later, was cold with fear. What if her surviving son were also killed? She would lose her mind, she thought. She might even retaliate.

That fall, after all the months of hard work, a mistrial had also been declared in the double-murder case on Laconia. This had been a complete surprise. After seemingly endless relocations, Kouri and Eiman had succeeded in forcing, coaxing, and physically carrying all of the terrified Laconia witnesses into the courtroom. One teenager had pulled the hood of his sweatshirt entirely over his face as he testified, but the marijuana dealer had been impressive on the stand—though she shook so violently that the hem of her T-shirt flapped against her chest.

In the end, however, jurors said they couldn’t continue. Four of them said the defendants had mad-dogged them in the courtroom and corridor outside it. A fifth wrote a note saying he’d seen a defendant’s relative at his local grocery store and felt menaced.

For the first time, Tom Eiman, Kouri’s partner, still new to homicide,
felt bad about being a police officer. He felt protective of the marijuana dealer. She was the sort of person he might have arrested in his old narcotics cop job. Now Eiman considered her principled and brave.

She and the other witnesses would have to testify again. “This is asking way too much of them,” Eiman seethed. “How can you allow an environment like that and do a mistrial? You leave those jurors in the hallway …?”

To La Barbera, things were not much better than in his early days at Southeast. He had a sense of disintegration: Skaggs bored in Olympic, Marullo bored in his uniform, his own grand project thwarted. Retirement was inching up on him, but La Barbera had no legacy.

He had one consolation. Shortly after Da’Quawn Allen’s murder, La Barbera had noticed Kouri at his desk, bent over the case file. La Barbera had given up communicating with Kouri, Marullo’s introverted sidekick. But this time, Kouri glanced up and read his mind.

“I got this,” he said.

THE OPENING

It was cold and sunny the day the Bryant Tennelle murder trial opened.

The decor of Department 105 at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center reflected the modern era of public sector economy. Harsh strips of fluorescents overhead threw a dull oatmeal sheen over the courtroom and bounced a metallic glint off the judge’s microphone. Slippery blue seat cushions were too short to cover the length of the wooden benches. Oily dark blotches left by weary jurors’ heads stained the wall behind the jury box. On the witness stand, a box of tissues stood ready.

There was no one in the courtroom except lawyers and cops. The lawyers looked nervous—no matter how many years in, they never got over the pretrial butterflies. Stirling was flying around the room, tripping over things. His suit jacket was crooked, his hair askew. Colello paced, then sat, hunched. His eyes were red and watery, his skin pale and blotchy. He’d come down with the flu, and the combination of illness and anxiety had reduced him to a ball of misery.

The defense attorneys, Zeke Perlo and Seymour Applebaum, were better at playing it cool. Perlo, who would retire from trial work after this case, ending a forty-six-year career, was wearing a stylish pin-striped
suit. Applebaum—not one to overlook such a transgression—flipped over the lapel to expose an Armani label. Perlo protested weakly: “It was on sale!”

But even Perlo and Applebaum’s usual enjoyment of the courtroom scene was muted. Applebaum tightened his tie more than was necessary. Perlo jiggled. Only Skaggs seemed unperturbed. He was in a smart gray suit, watching Stirling’s antics and shaking his head. His cheekbones were burned from a weekend in the sun; lifelong fair-skinned Californians get sunburned once a year, on the first hot weekend in March, caught slipping after a winter without sunscreen. Balanced in Skaggs’s lap was the big blue binder, divided by neat yellow tabs.

Skaggs had faith in Stirling, though the two men were forged from different elements. Once Skaggs had described to Stirling a scene he loved from Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row
in which Mack and the boys, “healthy and curiously clean,” in Doc’s description, keep their backs turned to the Fourth of July parade. The scene appealed to Skaggs—the image of men so immune to popular taste that they were not tempted by the spectacle. But Steinbeck’s lyricism, so resonant to Skaggs, was lost on Stirling, who wrinkled his face and asked such obtuse and literal questions (“Well, why were they
there
, then?”) that Skaggs grew irritated and cut the conversation short. “You don’t get it!” he said. Skaggs and Stirling did not quite interact on the same plane. But Skaggs respected Stirling and they worked well together.

A door on one side of the courtroom opened and all four attorneys subsided into silence, taut and ready, as if awaiting the starter’s gun. Devin Davis’s round eyes wheeled around the room in a futile search for his mother as he was led in, handcuffed in blue fatigues. His body had finally grown in proportion to his large head; he looked like a man now. But his eyes were as childlike as ever. Derrick Starks entered next, massive shoulders stretching the yoke of an orange jumpsuit.

Judge Bob S. Bowers was tall and lean, with deep furrows on each side of his mouth. His dour expression was lightened only by an occasional glimmer of humor. Everyone stood. Court was in session.

There were some issues to be decided outside the jury’s presence.

The testimony of the two witnesses who had disappeared—the man in the wheelchair and the young probationer who had told Skaggs, “Everybody know”—would be read into the record. But first prosecutors had to prove they had done everything possible to find them. In Los Angeles Superior Court, AWOL witnesses were as much a part of the culture as Scotch tape and mismatched furnishings.

Corey Farell took the stand to discuss the disappearance of the man in the wheelchair. Colello questioned him. Stirling sat at his side, anticipating his opening statement with such anxiety that he was bent double, hands over his eyes. Farell told Colello that detectives had tracked the man to another California city, then lost the trail. Farell had checked death records but found nothing to indicate the man had been killed. Perhaps he had finally “gotten out” and put his gang ties behind him, as he had long claimed he wanted to do.

Next Colello brought up the young probationer. Farell recited the nine visits detectives had made to the house, the long discussions with the boy’s father. They thought the relationship was going well, he said. Then came an unexpected twist: another Seventy-seventh Street detective, Refugio Garza, had contacted the father, also trying to find his probationer son. It seemed the youth was a witness in yet
another
homicide case.

The story was like so many others: Two years before Bryant Tennelle was shot, the probationer and his friends had crossed into rival gang territory over on the Eastside to visit a girl. They had stopped at a liquor store and exchanged words with a man inside who had ties to the Swans, a Blood gang. The quarrel ended in gunfire. The victim, Marquise Burnett, thirty-four, hadn’t been an active gang member in years; he had been working in construction. The probationer had agreed to testify against the shooter, telling Garza that he didn’t even know he’d had a gun. But as it became clear that the youth would be taking the stand in not one but
two
homicide trials, his father balked. The young man fled, and the more detectives pressed his father for his whereabouts, the less cooperative he became.

Stirling moved successfully to admit Bryant’s photograph, the one
with his jacket thrown over his shoulder. Applebaum then moved successfully to redact “sexually explicit talk” from Starks’s letters to Jessica, prompting Starks to laugh silently and blush lightly.

The discussion was routine. But it kept getting sidetracked because Stirling introduced arguments where there were none. He rose several times, moving his hands around, sprinkling his remarks with the phrase “If I may.”

Stirling had a distinct way of gesturing. He framed his hands in front of him and moved them from side to side as if placing each point he made in space. Once placed, the various points remained in their places until finally they were all suspended somewhere in front of his nose. He would then rearrange them to make his arguments. It was as if he were stocking shelves with invisible shoeboxes.

Listening to him, Judge Bowers veered between amusement and impatience and at last grimaced, staring balefully as Stirling shuffled his imaginary shoeboxes. Finally, Bowers chided Stirling for creating confusion and needlessly repeating things. Stirling agreed heartily, repeating to Bowers exactly what Bowers had just said about repeating. Bowers glared. Farell, in back of the courtroom, suppressed a laugh. The morning’s session was over.

In the afternoon the trial finally began in earnest. By 1:25
P.M
., the hall in front of the courtroom was packed. Rick Gordon was there, along with half a dozen RHD detectives in natty RHD suits. And a surprise visitor: Skaggs’s wife, Theresa. All week Skaggs had assured her that this trial was no big deal. Theresa knew him better than that. After watching Skaggs sweat over every detail of the case all weekend, she had bidden him goodbye, then dressed nicely and followed him to court. It was the first of his trials she had attended. Skaggs was clearly pleased.

A few Tennelle family members had arrived: Wally’s mother, Dera, balancing on a cane, and Wally’s sister. And then there was Wally Tennelle himself, occupying a halo of empty space in the crowded hallway. Yadira was not with him. Tennelle was thrumming with tension, his eyes brimming.

A few months before, Tennelle had dismissed questions about Bryant
with a wave of his hand, saying that his grieving was over and he was moving on. But the approach of the trial had stripped him of his defenses. For days he had barely slept. He stood slightly stooped, embarrassed by his tears.

The RHD detectives fell back. But Skaggs walked right up to Tennelle. He clapped him on both shoulders in a hail-fellow-well-met spirit, then turned quickly away, lighthearted, shaking hands all around. Skaggs behaved as if he had not noticed Tennelle’s tears. Experience had made him deft with homicide grief: his hearty handshakes, his whole manner lowered the tension palpably.

After the courtroom doors were flung open, the RHD detectives, eleven in all, filled the mismatched office chairs in back of the courtroom. Tennelle composed himself. He dragged a lip balm across his lips, then hunched over, staring at the floor, hands over his mouth.

There were two juries, one for each defendant. As the members filed in, Skaggs adjusted his jacket and studied their faces. In front of him, Starks was doing the same thing.

Perlo put on his glasses and moved his Vitamin Water bottle around on the defense table. Colello performed the same motions at the People’s table, using an Arrowhead water bottle. Stirling looked as if he was playing giant solitaire: he had six notepads spread out in front of him and was arranging and rearranging them, leaving no surface of the desk uncovered. When he finished, he sat still, looking slightly nauseated.