The Scarecrow (4 page)

Fowler had a little office in the line of glass but she preferred to be an editor of the people. She was usually at a desk
at the head of the formation of desks where all the aces—assistant city editors—sat. This was known as the raft because all
the desks were pushed together as if in some sort of flotilla where there was strength in numbers against the sharks.

All city-side reporters were assigned to an ace as the first level of direction and management. My ace was Alan Prendergast,
who handled all the cop and court reporters. As such, he had a later shift, usually coming in around noon, because news that
came off the law enforcement and justice beats most of the time developed late in the day.

This meant my first check-in of the day was usually with Dorothy Fowler or the deputy city editor, Michael Warren. I always
tried to make it Fowler because she ranked higher and Warren and I never got along. This might have had something to do with
the fact that long before I had come to the
Times
, I had worked for the
Rocky Mountain News
out of Denver and had encountered Warren and competed with him on a major story. He had acted unethically and for that I
could never trust him as an editor.

Dorothy had her eyes glued to a screen and I had to say her name to get her attention. We hadn’t talked since I’d been pink-slipped
so she immediately looked up at me with a sympathetic frown you might reserve for someone you just heard had been diagnosed
with pancreatic cancer.

“Come inside, Jack,” she said.

She stood up and left the raft and headed to her seldom-used office. She sat behind her desk but I stayed standing because
I knew this would be quick.

“I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.”

I nodded my thanks.

“I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.”

“She’s very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The
newspaper is supposed to be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies. Think of all the great journalism
we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper
in the country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in Florida
says corruption will be the new growth industry without the papers watching.”

She paused as if to ponder the sad state of things.

“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m just depressed. Angela is great. She’ll do good work and in three or four years she’ll own
that beat the way you own it now. But the point is, between now and then, how many stories will she miss? And how many of
them would have never gotten by you?”

I only shrugged. These were questions that mattered to her but no longer to me. In twelve days I was out.

“Well,” she said after a delayed silence. “I’m sorry. I’ve always enjoyed working with you.”

“Well, I still have some time. Maybe I’ll find something really good to go out on.”

She smiled brightly.

“That would be great!”

“Anything happening today that you know of?”

“Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is meeting with black leaders to talk about racially
targeted crime again. But we’ve done that to death.”

“I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up with something.”

“Good.”

A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in
the space where the old presses had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite. The conversation
with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around
the cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen
her at one of the watering holes favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.

“Where’d you come from, Angela?”

“Tampa. I went to the University of Florida.”

“Good school. Journalism?”

“I got my master’s there, yeah.”

“Have you done any cop shop reporting?”

“Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete. I spent a year on cops.”

I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t been able to keep anything down for twenty-four
hours.

“St. Petersburg? What are you talking about there, a few dozen murders a year?”

“If we were lucky.”

She smiled at the irony of it. A crime reporter always wants a good murder to write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody
else’s bad luck.

“Well,” I said. “If we go below four hundred here we’re having a good year. Real good. Los Angeles is the place to be if you
want to work crime. If you want to tell murder stories. If you’re just marking time until the next beat comes up, you’re probably
not going to like it.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not worried about the next beat. This is what I want. I want to write murder stories. I want to write books about this
stuff.”

She sounded sincere. She sounded like me—from a long time ago.

“Good,” I said. “I’m going to take you over to Parker Center to meet some people. Detectives mostly. They’ll help you but
only if they trust you. If they don’t trust you, all you’ll get are the press releases.”

“How do I do that, Jack? Make them trust me.”

“You know. Write stories. Be fair, be accurate. You know what to do. Trust is built on performance. The thing to remember
is that the cops in this town have an amazing network. The word about a reporter gets around quickly. If you’re fair, they’ll
all know it. If you fuck one of them over, they’ll all know that too and they’ll shut your access down everywhere.”

She seemed embarrassed by my profanity. She would have to get used to it, dealing with cops.

“There’s one other thing,” I said. “They have a hidden nobility. The good ones, I mean. And if you can somehow get that into
your stories, you will win them over every time. So look for the telling details, the little moments of nobility.”

“Okay, Jack, I will.”

“Then you’ll do all right.”

W
hile we were making the rounds and the introductions in the police headquarters at Parker Center we picked up a nice little
murder story in the Open-Unsolved Unit. A twenty-year-old rape and murder of an elderly woman had been cleared when DNA collected
from the victim in 1989 was unearthed in case archives and run through the state Department of Justice’s sex crimes data bank.
The match was called a cold hit. The DNA collected from the victim belonged to a man currently doing time at Pelican Bay for
an attempted rape. The cold case investigators would put together a case and indict the guy before he ever got a chance at
parole up there. It wasn’t that flashy, because the bad guy was already behind bars, but it was worth eight inches. People
like to read stories that reinforce the idea that bad people don’t always get away. Especially in an economic downturn, when
it’s so easy to be cynical.

When we got back to the newsroom I asked Angela to write it up—her first story on the beat—while I tried to run down Wanda
Sessums, my angry caller from the Friday before.

Since there was no record of her call to the
Times
switchboard and a quick check with directory assistance had turned up no listing for Wanda Sessums in any of L.A.’s area
codes, I next called Detective Gilbert Walker at the Santa Monica Police Department. He was the lead investigator on the case
that resulted in Alonzo Winslow’s arrest in the murder of Denise Babbit. I guess you could say it was a cold call. I had no
relationship with Walker, as Santa Monica didn’t come up very often on the news radar. It was a relatively safe beach town
between Venice and Malibu that had a pressing homeless problem but not much of a murder problem. The police department investigated
only a handful of homicides each year and most of these weren’t newsworthy. More often than not they were body dump cases
like Denise Babbit’s. The murder occurs somewhere else—like the south end of L. A.—and the beach cops are left to clean up
the mess.

My call found Walker at his desk. His voice seemed friendly enough until I identified myself as a reporter with the
Times
. Then it went cold. That happened often. I had spent seven years on the beat and had many cops in many departments that I
counted as sources and even friends. In a jam, I could reach out. But sometimes you don’t get to pick who you have to reach
out to. The bottom line is you can never get them all in your corner. The media and the police have never been on comfortable
terms. The media views itself as the public watchdog. And nobody, the police included, likes having somebody looking over
their shoulder. There was a chasm between the two institutions into which trust had fallen long before I was ever around.
Consequently, it made things tough for the lowly beat reporter who just needs a few facts to fill out a story.

“What can I do for you?” Walker said in a clipped tone.

“I’m trying to reach Alonzo Winslow’s mother and I was wondering if you might be able to help.”

“And who is Alonzo Winslow?”

I was about to say,
Come on, Detective,
when I realized I wasn’t supposed to know the suspect’s name. There were laws about releasing the names of juveniles charged
with crimes.

“Your suspect in the Babbit case.”

“How do you know that name? I’m not confirming that name.”

“I understand that, Detective. I’m not asking you to confirm the name. I know the name. His mother called me on Friday and
gave me the name. Trouble is, she didn’t give me her phone number and I’m just trying to get back in—”

“Have a nice day,” Walker said, interrupting and then hanging up the phone.

I leaned back in my desk chair, noting to myself that I needed to tell Angela Cook that the nobility I mentioned earlier did
not reside in all cops.

“Asshole,” I said out loud.

I drummed my fingers on the desk until I came up with a new plan—the one I should have employed in the first place.

I opened a line and called a detective who was a source in the South Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department and who I
knew had been involved in the Winslow arrest. The case had originated in the city of Santa Monica because the victim had been
found in the trunk of her car in a parking lot near the pier. But the LAPD became involved when evidence from the murder scene
led to Alonzo Winslow, a resident of South L.A.

Following established protocol, Santa Monica contacted Los Angeles, and a team of South Bureau detectives intimately familiar
with the turf were used to locate Winslow, take him into custody and then turn him over to Santa Monica. Napoleon Braselton
was one of those South Bureau guys. I called him now and was flat-out honest with him. Well, almost.

“Remember the bust two weeks ago for the girl in the trunk?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s Santa Monica,” he said. “We just helped out.”

“Yeah, I know. You guys took Winslow down for them. That’s what I’m calling about.”

“It’s still their case, man.”

“I know but I can’t get a hold of Walker over there and I don’t know anybody else in that department. But I know you. And
I want to ask about the arrest, not the case.”

“What, is there a beef? We didn’t touch that kid.”

“No, Detective, no beef. Far as I know, it was a righteous bust. I’m just trying to find the kid’s house. I want to go see
where he was living, maybe talk to his mother.”

“That’s fine but he was living with his grandmother.”

“You sure?”

“The information we got in the briefing was that he was with the grandmother. We were the big bad wolves hitting grandma’s
house. There was no father in the picture and the mother was in and out, living on the street. Drugs.”

“Okay, then I’ll talk to the grandmother. Where’s the place?”

“You’re just cruising on down to say hello?”

He said it in a disbelieving tone and I knew that was because I was white and would likely be unwelcome in Alonzo Winslow’s
neighborhood.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take somebody with me. Strength in numbers.”

“Good luck. Don’t get your ass shot until after I go off watch at four.”

“I’ll do my best. What’s the address, do you remember?”

“It’s in Rodia Gardens. Hold on.”

He put the phone down while he looked up the exact address. Rodia Gardens was a huge public housing complex in Watts that
was like a city unto itself. A dangerous city. It was named after Simon Rodia, the artist who had created one of the wonders
of the city. The Watts Towers. But there wasn’t anything wonderful about Rodia Gardens. It was the kind of place where poverty,
drugs and crime had cycled for decades. Multiple generations of families living there and unable to get out and break free.
Many of them had grown up having never been to the beach or on an airplane or even to a movie in a theater.

Braselton came back on and gave me the full address but said he had no phone number. I then asked if he had a name for the
grandmother and he gave me the name I already had, Wanda Sessums.

Bingo. My caller. She had either lied about being the young suspect’s mother or the police had their information wrong. Either
way, I now had an address and would hopefully soon put a face with the voice that had berated me the Friday before.

After ending the call with Braselton I got up from my cubicle and wandered back into the photo department. I saw a photo editor
named Bobby Azmitia at the assignment desk and asked if he had any floaters currently out and about. He looked down at his
personnel log and named two photographers who were out in their cars looking for wild art—photographs unconnected to news
events that could be used to splash color on a section front. I knew both of the floaters and one of them was black. I asked
Azmitia if Sonny Lester could break free to take a ride with me down the 110 Freeway and he agreed to offer the photographer
up. We made arrangements for me to be picked up outside the globe lobby in fifteen minutes.