Hollywood Crows (8 page)

Then Dan Applewhite started to sneeze and had to grab his box of tissues and his nasal spray. “See what you did,” he said, sniffling. “You stressed me out and activated my allergies.”

When the older cop got his sneezing under control, his young partner thought things over, looked at his training officer, and said in English-accented high-school Spanish, “
Me llamo Gilberto Ponce. Hola, compañero
.”

Wiping his dripping nose, Doomsday Dan said, “That’s better. But you don’t have to overdo it. You Hispanics always tend to gild the lily.”

Leonard Stilwell was a thirty-nine-year-old crackhead with a mass of wiry red hair, a face full of freckles, and large, unfocused blue eyes that would have looked believable on a barnyard bovine. He had served two relatively short terms for burglary in the Los Angeles county jail system but had never been sentenced to state prison. The last conviction resulted from Leonard’s having tossed his latex gloves into a Dumpster after successfully completing his work. The cops later found the gloves, and, after cutting off the fingertips, the crime lab had successfully treated the inside of the fingertips and got good latent prints. After that conviction, Leonard Stilwell began watching
CSI
.

The county jail was so overcrowded that nonviolent prisoners like Leonard Stilwell could usually get an early release to make room for rapists, gangbangers, and spouse killers. So Leonard had benefited from all the crime that everyone else was committing and got squeezed out of the county jail onto the streets like toothpaste from a tube. Whenever he was free, he would hurry to old companions to try talking them into an advance against his cut from the next job, then he’d go on a rock cocaine binge for a few days to smoke the miseries of county jail from his memory bank before going back to work. But that had been when he was teamed with master burglar Whitey Dawson, who’d died from a heroin overdose six months earlier, his last words being “It don’t get any better!”

Leonard Stilwell had proved reasonably adept at breaking into liquor storage rooms, which had been Whitey Dawson’s specialty, and also showed some competence in refilling empty bottles of premium brands with the cheap stolen booze, then affixing a believable stamp to seal the cap. Twice he’d sold several of the doctored bottles, mixed with legitimate ones, to Ali Aziz of the Leopard Lounge, who had never caught on.

Now with Whitey Dawson gone, Leonard Stilwell was reduced to taking a job. It was the first time in fifteen years that he’d actually drawn a paycheck and he hated every minute of it. He was the only gringo at a second-rate car wash, and when the owner wasn’t yelling at him, the other workers were. One of the Mexicans was an old homeboy named Chuey, who sometimes had some decent rock to sell. Chuey never carried the rock on his person and he lived in a cottage in East Hollywood, where Leonard had to drive to if he wanted the dope.

Leonard drove there just after sunset and found Chuey’s door wide open. He yelled and finally entered but couldn’t find Chuey anywhere. Then he walked into the backyard and found him. Horrified, Leonard ran back inside, picked up Chuey’s phone, and called 9-1-1, reporting what he’d found in what he considered to be Spanish-accented English but which was almost indecipherable.

Before he left the cottage, he sublimated his horror long enough to ransack the bedroom until he found Chuey’s wallet. He stole $23 from the wallet and got the hell out of there.

Their “unknown trouble” call came a couple of hours after Dan Applewhite’s allergy attack had quieted. Unknown trouble usually meant that somebody had phoned while drunk or hysterical, or sometimes in a language that was unintelligible. But it could mean anything and made cops a bit nervous and more alert.

That part of Hollywood was gang territory, but not the turf of the Salvadorans. This was where older cruisers lived, Mexican American
veteranos
of White Fence. Recent reports identified 463 street gangs in Los Angeles with 38,974 members. But how the LAPD had managed to count heads so precisely was anybody’s guess.

“Bring the shotgun,” Dan said to Gil Ponce, who removed the Remington from its barrel-up bed between the seats and racked one into the chamber, topping off the magazine with an extra round.

It was a wood-frame cottage, white paint faded and peeling, the tiny yard full of weeds. A smell of salsa and frying lard was coming through the open door.

“Police!” Dan Applewhite said at the doorway. “Did somebody call?”

No answer. He took the shotgun from Gil and used the muzzle to push the door farther open. The house was dark but there was light coming from the kitchen. Somebody had eaten at the table recently. The single bedroom was vacant and the bed was made carelessly, a worn bedspread pulled up over a single pillow. A man’s clothes were draped over a chair and hanging in the closet, the meager wardrobe consisting of two pairs of khaki trousers, several white tees, and a gray sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves.

The back door was open and Gil shined his light outside into a small rear yard, where he saw a child’s tricycle and a plastic wading pool, although the house interior bore no signs of a child living there. On a cheap dresser in the bedroom, he noted four pictures of a smiling Latino boy, and said, “He’s got a son living somewhere, if not here.”

The young cop walked to the back porch of the cottage and noticed that the rear gate was hanging open, facing onto an alley. Across the alley was a firetrap of an apartment building, defaced by gang graffiti, known to house Latino illegal immigrants. The proof of their occupancy was all of the bean and tomato plants in the common areas, where there was an erstwhile flower planter or a patch of earth. It wasn’t very late and only a few windows showed light in that three-story building, whose westside owner had been cited for fire code violations.

Gil Ponce walked through the yard and out to the alley, and there he found the object of their call. He was hanging by what appeared to be nylon rope from a climbing spike on a telephone pole between the cottage and the house next to it. He was wearing white cotton briefs and that was all. He was shoeless and there were drizzles of feces running down his legs and over his feet. His neck was stretched a third more than normal and his face had gone from its normal olive tone to purple and black. His torso, arms, neck, and even the side of his face, were decorated with colorful body art, much of it gang tatts. A stepladder was tipped over onto the alley floor a few feet from the dangling corpse.

“Partner!” Gil yelled.

When the older cop saw the dangling corpse, he said, “Somebody from that apartment building must’ve put in the call.”

Never having seen a suicide victim before, Gil said, “Whadda we do now?”

Dan Applewhite said, “Mostly we worry about this dude’s head coming off and rolling down the alley.”

When the coroner’s crew arrived, a floodlight was set up. One of the body snatchers said he’d go up the ladder to remove the noose if his partner and a cop could lift the corpse to give the rope some slack. By then several residents of the apartment building had their windows open and were gawking down at the macabre spectacle.

Gil gaped in horror at the feces-caked legs of the dead man, and Dan Applewhite said, “My young pard is big and way stronger than me. He’ll help you.”

“I can smell him from here!” Gil cried.

“We’ll wrap a sheet around him when we lift,” the body snatcher said. “We never untie the knots. The coroner wants his knots intact. Hold your breath. It’ll be all right.”

“Gross!” Gil Ponce murmured, gloving up.

By the time the stepladder was in place, and the lights and voices in the alley had caused several more illegal immigrants to pop their heads out of windows, D2 Charlie Gilford had arrived, pissed off for having to leave his TV just because some old cruiser did an air dance. One of the talent show contestants, a fat girl, had begun blubbering, and the killer panelists were pouring it on just as the phone rang.

Dan Applewhite said to the detective, “Just an over-the-hill homie. Which means a middle-aged guy that never filed a tax return.”

Charlie gazed at the dangling man’s full-torso and full-sleeve colorful gang tatts, then at young Gil Ponce walking disconsolately toward the stepladder as though to his own hanging. Finally, the detective sucked his teeth and smirked. Dan Applewhite noticed and said, “I know what you’re thinking, Charlie, but those people up there can hear you. It’s obvious, so don’t say it!”

But the night-watch detective was nothing if not obvious. Squinting at pale and queasy Gil Ponce, Compassionate Charlie Gilford yelled, “Hey, kid, find me a fucking stick!
This
is what I call a piñata!”

F
LOTSAM AND JETSAM
caught an early-evening call that they felt should have been referred to the CRO the next day. A Guatemalan woman who lived in Little Armenia complained that she couldn’t drive out of her alley early in the mornings because of all the cars parked at an auto body repair business owned by a man who she thought was Armenian. She needed to get downtown to her sweatshop job in the garment district by 7:30
A.M
., but the south end of the alley was often blocked. The north end had apartment buildings on both sides filled with Latino gang members, and everyone was afraid to drive or even walk in that direction.

“This is a quality-of-life issue,” Flotsam said to the mother of five, whose English was better than most.

“I do not understand,” she said.

“We got officers who deal with this kind of thing,” Flotsam said. “They work in the Crow office.”

“Like the bird?”

“Well, yeah, same name,” Jetsam said. “See, they warn people and then write citations if they do stuff like blocking alleys in the neighborhood.”

“I can sympathize,” Flotsam said. “I mean, you can’t even use the alley because of thugs. Your kids have to bob and weave their way to school just to get through yellow tape.”

She understood the allusion to yellow tape. She’d seen plenty of it strung across crime scenes since migrating to Los Angeles.

“How do I call to this crow?” she asked.

“I’ll tell one to call you tomorrow when you get home from work,” Flotsam said. “You can tell them about the problem.”

When they cleared from that call, Jetsam decided to drive to the alley and have a look. The body shop was closed and there was only one security light on in the front of the building. Those at the rear were burned out or had been broken by vandals.

Jetsam pulled the car up near a chain-link fence where cars were stored, awaiting repair. He got out and shined his light around, lighting up empty oil drums, wooden crates, a Dumpster, and hopelessly damaged car tires and wheel rims.

“These fucking mini-lights!” he said. “If I ever get chalked because I couldn’t get enough light, it’s gonna be the police commission and the chief who really killed me. Remember that, bro, and seek revenge.” Jetsam shined his light up at the window eight feet above the alley floor and began looking for something to stand on.

“What’re you looking for anyways?” Flotsam asked, not bothering to get out of their black-and-white.

“That woman said there were lots of cars blocking the alley and I noticed that the shop didn’t seem big enough to do that kind of business.”

“So?”

“So I was wondering about the rest of the businesses in this little strip. Like, the place next door has no sign on it. I was thinking the body shop might use that part of the place to work on the cars. If they use stuff like welding torches and flammable cylinders in a space that’s only separated by a plasterboard wall from some dwelling units, there might be a fire ordinance that could be cited to close them down. See?”

“Lemme lock in on this shit,” Flotsam said, genuinely perplexed by his partner’s behavior until the answer came to him. After a moment he said, “I get it!”

“You get what?” Jetsam said, as he stood on a wooden box and then on top of an empty oil drum to shine his light into the window of the building next to the shop.

“This is all about Ronnie Sinclair!” Flotsam said. “She’s working Hollywood South now. You wanna run over there tomorrow and get some face time with the Crow sergeant and show how you’re all obsessed about quality-of-life crap. So maybe he’ll consider you next time there’s an opening. And then, if dreams really do come true, you might even get to be Ronnie’s partner. And she eventually might not find you as repulsive as she does now. Like, I’m on it, dude!”

Jetsam would have been really steamed by Flotsam’s accurate assessment of his motives, but he was too busy being surprised by the business at hand. He said, “Bro, climb on up here and look what’s inside.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” Flotsam said, not budging. “Enlighten me.”

“This whole place is a wide-open storage and repair area. There must be a couple thousand square feet of floor space in there.”

“So?”

“So I’m looking at six SUVs. New and almost new. A Beemer, a Benz, a Lexus, and, let’s see, I can’t tell what the others are. It’s too dark.”

“Dude, this is a body shop. Did you expect these Armenians to be storing olives and goat cheese in there, or what?”

“I’m just sayin’,” Jetsam mumbled, still peering in the window. Suddenly, he turned and said, “Bro, they ain’t Armos.”

“Okay, so what are they?”

“I can see a newspaper on a workbench right down below this window. I think it’s in Arabic. I think they’re Arabs.”

“Now I know why you don’t have the word
detective
on your badge, dude. News flash: We got thousands and thousands of camel fuckers in L.A. So what?”

“I know what they’re up to, bro.”

“Lemme guess. They’re al Qaeda operatives?”

“They’re repainting and selling hot SUVs. I’m calling the auto theft detail tomorrow morning soon as I get up.”

“Why don’t you go all radically
CSI
on me and start looking for stuff with DNA on it? I don’t mind sitting here while you sleuth around. Maybe you’ll find O.J.’s knife or Robert Blake’s gun.”