Hold of the Bone
Authors: Baxter Clare Trautman
For Doc
â“Hurry, don't be late°
and
For Earl
âmy Prince of Tides
Contents
The phone hums on the passenger seat. Lieutenant L.A. Franco picks it up and glances at her on-call detective's number. Frank frowns and holds the phone to her ear.
“Sister Shaft. Wha's up?”
Cheryl Lewis tells her, “Got an old one at an auto shop on Western. It's been here a while. Ain't much more 'an bone and rag. Forensics and the coroners are on their way.”
“Hold on a sec.” Frank grabs a pen and tells Lewis to give her the address. Steering with her knee, she writes the number on her palm. “A'ight. Give me about twenty.”
“Ten-four.”
Frank checks the time before stuffing the phone in her shirt pocket. With luck, she might make the tail end of her Saturday AA meeting. Traffic on LA's 101 Southbound is movingâbut not fast enough. Frank clamps her police light onto the roof and flips the siren on. Vehicles part grudgingly.
She swings off on Slauson Avenue, slowing through red lights and stop signs until she gets to Western Avenue. She parks behind a patrol car, where a uniform she doesn't recognize greets her with the crime scene log. After Frank signs, he waves her through a gate in a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Near a small excavator, a muscular black woman steps daintily around a pile of rubble, directing a vaguely Asian female photographer. Frank notes that when she was a rookie everyone working an investigation would have been a white male. Now, other than Lewis' partnerâwherever he isâshe is the only Caucasian on the scene. And certainly the oldest.
Stepping closer to the broken concrete, Frank lifts her Ray-Bans
to better peer into a hole in the ground. As she kneels, the excavation blurs. Frank puts out a hand to steady herself. She hears rattling, like sticks being clacked together. Lots of them, in unison, in a rhythm she wants to shuffle to with bare feet. She gives her head a sharp shake and the noise fades. Her eyes land on Lewis' shiny loafers and she wonders vaguely how her cop always finds time to show up at scenes buffed and creased. Frank stands carefully. The dizziness passes and she makes a note to drink more water.
“Morning, LT.”
“Lewis.”
“That's the kid over there, who dug it up.” She points her chin toward a skinny guy outside the shop talking to an older man. “He was lookin' for a pipe and when he realized what he got into, he called his boss, that guy he's talking with. You know the first thing he says to me? Can't use his excavator unless we give him per diem on it.” Lewis wags her head in sorrow at the human condition.
“City coming to dig up the rest?”
“On their way.”
Frank looks back at the disturbed skeleton, bones and cloth barely distinguishable from the dirt. She notes there's little or no soft tissue to work with.
“How long's he owned this place?”
“Bought it in '98. Said it was a tool and die shop then.”
“That body's been there longer than that,” Frank thinks out loud. “Gonna take a while to get this sorted out and see if we got anymore in there. You talk to the owner about that?”
“Yeah.” Lewis cuts an evil glare his way. “He say we can't search his property without a warrant, and when I tell him I'mma slap him with obstructing justice and interfering with a homicide investigation, and for all I know he put that body in the ground, he go all quiet, then start yapping about how the city gotta compensate him for lost wages. Blah, blah, blah.”
Frank nods. They have consent on the body, but they'll need a warrant to search for more. “Where's Tatum at?”
Jerking a thumb at the unmarked, Lewis admits, “Ain't nothin' to door-knock here, so I got him working up the warrant.”
Frank's gaze slides to the car. “You sure about that?”
Lewis squints. “That sum-bitch
sleeping
?”
Both women approach the unit from the rear. They needn't bother; Lewis' partner is asleep, mouth wide. Frank studies him through the open window. She probably shouldn't do what she's thinking of doing. It's old school, and the new breed of cops like Tatum have had all the fun bred from them. He'll probably report her to Human Resources and she'll have to go to Sensitivity Training. Again. What the hell, she thinks. Maybe next time, it'll take.
“Got a tampon?” she whispers.
Lewis frowns, then stealthily reaches inside for her purse. She rummages quietly and produces one. Frank takes the tampon and tips her head toward the shop.
“Go see if they got any TapatÃo.”
In LA, hot sauce is the condiment of choice, a bottle invariably in every break room in the city. Lewis returns with a full bottle and Frank douses the tampon. Spying a sweating soda cup on the console, she reaches across Tatum, dumps the contents, fills it with the rest of the TapatÃo, and sets it back in place.
“Get your camera ready.”
Frank gently inserts the tampon in Tatum's open mouth. Lewis chuckles and gets a couple shots before Frank raps her knuckles on the roof. Tatum bolts upright. He spits the tampon out and seeing what it is, gives half a scream before hurling it from the window. Lewis doubles over laughing.
Pawing at his tongue, Tatum grabs the cup on the console, chugs it, then spews all over the dash. His eyes tear as he yanks on his shirttail and swabs his mouth. “What the fuck?”
“Maybe that'll keep you awake,” Frank tells him. “Lewis, when you're done being Martin Scorsese, send Sleeping Beauty back to the office. Get him started on provenance for this place. Find a concrete specialist to tell us how old it is where they dug it up. I'll be back at the station in a bit to see what he's come up with. Oh, and Tatum? Get this car cleaned. It's a fucking disgrace to the city.”
Tatum searches for water while Lewis wipes tears from her eyes.
“You need anything?” Frank asks her.
“Not now. That made my day, LT. Hell,” she grins. “Maybe my whole week.”
Leaving Tatum whining and spitting, they walk back to the edge of the hole.
“Let me see your notes,” Frank says. The Ray-Bans go back on her head, partly to keep her hair out of her eyes, but mostly because Frank needs to squint to read the tiny handwriting.
Cheryl Lewis has attitude, but she is Frank's most thorough detective. She scans the neat handwriting, checking that Lewis has all the whoâwhatâwhenâwhere from the owner and the kid on the dozer. The how and why will be harder. There isn't much more they can do until after the coroner's people excavate the body. Even then, there might not be much to work with.
“Sure I can't get you anything?”
“Nah, LT. Just them techs.”
“A'ight. They'll be here.”
“In they own sweet time.”
“I'mma take off. Holler if you need me.”
“Ten-four.”
Frank starts to walk away, but Lewis calls her. “Yeah?”
Her big cop grins. “Thanks, LT. That was fun.”
Frank replies with a nod and parting wave.
Frank keeps the strobe going on her way to the meeting. She drives with her sleeves up and windows down, gathering the sight, scent, and sound of her beat. She notes a Latino guy selling oranges on the corner, the smell of barbecue, splash of new graffiti on a storage building, an arthritic old man shuffling on the shady side of the avenue.
Frank is the rare cop who has spent a career at the same station. She registers day-to-day changes in the Figueroa Division, yet knows little has changed in the struggling neighborhood since big industry abandoned it in the 60s. With the jobs went the middle-class families, leaving an economic void that went unfilled until the crack epidemic of the 80s. The subsequent South-Central turf wars led to an unprecedented nationwide murder rate that peaked in the early 90s. Homicide numbers hovered around the all-time high throughout most of the decade until falling at the turn of the century to record lows. At Figueroa, Frank and her detectives have gone from a maximum caseload of 160 homicides a year to an almost giddy twenty-two.
Twenty-three, she corrects, adding Lewis' body. And a good thing, considering the budget cuts and reorganizations that have whittled her staff. Still, it's the first time in Frank's tenure at Figueroa that her detectives have what is procedurally considered a normal workload. So normal it's boring, and though she doesn't miss the 36- or 48-hour shifts, she pines a bit for the hectic adrenaline rush of getting called to one scene at midnight, another at 3:00 a.m., and a third at dawn.
Grabbing a parking spot, she jogs a half block to her meeting, tiptoes up the stairs, and stands at the back door. The room is packed with bright-eyed, freshly showered people starting their weekend with a healthy shot of sobriety.