Tropical Depression (13 page)

“Do you think Hector’s murder was racially motivated, Ed?”

He gave me a long hard look. I thought I knew Ed. I’d spent a lot of time with him under tough circumstances. But I’d never seen a look like that.

“Racially motivated.
That’s real pretty. You getting your cop talk back again, Billy?”

“Looks like I need to. How about it? Was it racially motivated?”

He lit another cigarette off the butt of his current smoke. “Roscoe thought so.”

“Roscoe wasn’t exactly an expert on murder, or on racism,” I said. “So why did he think that?”

Ed gave me a slight variation of the look. “Shit,” he said. “Every black man in America is an expert on racism.” He shrugged. “Why he thought it, I don’t know. But it’s maybe worth you thinking about.”

“Anything in the investigation lead that way?”

“Billy, you just don’t get it. Ain’t nothin’ in either investigation can even confirm somebody’s dead.”

“So there’s nobody investigating either death right now?”

He hissed out smoke through the meanest smile I had ever seen. For a moment he really looked like the devil, the classical one who enjoys your agony only because it hides his own. “Hector was just another black kid who walked into a bullet. We got the paperwork going on Roscoe. There’s a team on it, but—” He shrugged and his smile faded into a cold look I’d never seen on him before. “Officially, we are making progress and expect an arrest momentarily.”

I nodded. We all know what that means: no progress, no leads, no investigation. “I’d like to see the files, Ed.”

Ed knew I’d come here to ask him for the files. Any file on a dead case is public record. Anybody can look at it. But the files of a case that’s still open are another thing. They’re not supposed to be passed around, even within the department.

These killings were still technically open. If I knew Ed, since I’d walked in he had been balancing the political implications of giving me the files against the possible good that might come of it. He had to decide if he still trusted me, because he could be putting himself in a world of trouble. If he made the wrong choice he’d never be a lieutenant.

He looked at me for a long moment. I looked back. Then he gave a half-shrug and a nod. “Don’t see how it can get any worse. I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Call you tonight?”

I stood up. “I’m staying at the Franklin,” I told him.

“Elegant as shit,” he said. His telephone rang and as he turned to stare at it, I left.

It was still just a few minutes after eight in the morning and I wouldn’t get to see the files until tonight, if at all. I thought I’d like to see the spot where Hector was killed, on the same goofy theory that looking at the spot where somebody died somehow attunes you to the killing.

I know it’s dumb, but cops and fishermen are more superstitious than most. I wasn’t sure which I was at the moment—maybe an ex-cop. At this point, maybe an ex-fisherman. Or half-cop, half-fisherman, some strange, mythical hybrid beast that lurches up out of the flats to solve crimes, like Aquaman. Whatever: I figured it couldn’t hurt to look at some scenery.

The only problem was, I didn’t know where Hector had died. At this hour it was going to be tough to find out.

I left my car at the police station and walked to Ivar Street, where the public library sits next to a strip joint. There were twin ramps crossing in front and leading down from street level to the glass doorway. Taped to the window beside the door was a sign with the library’s hours. It opened at ten o’clock today. I glanced at my watch. I had ninety minutes to kill.

I found a newspaper box up on Hollywood Boulevard, and a bus bench with almost six square inches of seat that had somehow been overlooked; there was no gum on it, no vomit, no bird droppings, no spilled chili or melted ice cream. I sat and read the paper.

A battered-looking woman in a greasy green plaid coat was standing at the far end of the bench. As I opened the front page she drifted down to my end and read over my shoulder.

The news wasn’t good anywhere. The comics weren’t funny, either. The sports reporters hadn’t learned to write yet. And the Dodgers were so far in the cellar they had a lock on last place for the next four years. For a saving second I saw my sour mood from outside and found it briefly funny. “Bah, humbug,” I muttered at the paper.

“Amen,” said the battered-looking woman.

By the time I was done with the paper it was a quarter of ten. I left the paper on the bench for the woman and walked back down to the library.

A fat security guard sat on a stool a few feet inside, chatting to a young woman with a large butt. I stood and waited. At exactly one minute after ten the guard stretched, glanced up at the clock, and sauntered slowly over to the door. It took him a full minute to cross the twelve feet of tiled floor.

He unlocked the door and held it open for me. “Morning,” he said. I nodded and headed up the half-circle of stairs to the stacks.

The Los Angeles
Times
for May 2 had what I wanted. On page fourteen of the A section was a small story, three paragraphs long, headed:
POLICEMAN’S SON SLAIN
. The first paragraph was mostly heavy-handed irony about how even a cop’s kid wasn’t safe from murder. The final paragraph was a quote from a community leader calling the death tragic and senseless. They made it sound generic.

Sandwiched in between were the two or three facts the reporter had thought might be interesting enough to sneak in. Included was an address near Pearl Street where the killing had happened. I wrote the address on an index card provided by the library for writing down reference numbers.

On an impulse, I pulled out the telephone directory. The free clinic where Nancy worked was only a few blocks away from the spot where Hector was killed. I wrote that address down, too, and stuck it in my breast pocket. Maybe she’d want to have lunch.

Everybody has to have lunch, right?

I drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard, then south on Vermont. L.A. was not a melting pot, no matter how many different ethnic groups settled here. The melting-pot idea was dead. It had been swept away as unfair, and as a result L.A. was now a centrifuge. Every new group that arrived was rapidly whirled off to its own area, separated from any cultural contamination like the need to learn English. The new arrivals were all able to preserve the way of life they had fled from when they came to America, and avoid all the dangers and stupidities of this awful place. They could be Americans without ever seeing more of America than the corner store run by someone from their hometown, and whatever they saw on the local TV channel broadcasting in their own language by people from their homeland.

The new immigrants didn’t assimilate. They stayed in tight clusters, and there was little interaction. In fifty years America will be made up of a million small neighborhoods that can’t even speak to each other.

The area on Vermont I was driving into had become solidly Korean over the last ten years. The Koreans tended to be more insular than most, and they didn’t usually care for outsiders, especially anybody that smelled like police. If I needed to talk to someone in this area I would need some leverage, or some luck, or both.

Soon after making my turn on Washington I found the spot I was looking for and pulled off into a small mini-mall parking lot across the street. I stood beside the curb and looked over at it.

Down the block to the left was a row of stores that had been burned. The black smudges of smoke had half-covered most of the graffiti. Fallen beams twisted up at crazy angles.

In the other direction was a large Thrifty drugstore. It was still boarded up. Ads for specials on aspirin, motor oil, and diapers were tacked up on the plywood that covered over whatever might be left of the plate glass.

Directly across from me, in the street, was where Hector McAuley had died. There was a modest four-story building there, with a small grocery store on the ground floor. A sign in the window said
PARK HONEST GOOD FOOD GROCERY
. Underneath was a neon Schlitz sign.

Next door on the west side was a Pasadena National Bank branch office. It sat in a square six-story building with small windows. The bottom windows closest to the front door were new and still had stickers on them. On the east was a vacant lot with half a car sticking up out of the weeds.

I crossed the street. There were no bloodstains in the road or on the sidewalk in front of Park Honest Good Food Grocery. Either it was already washed away by sun and rain or Hector hadn’t bled as much as his father.

There were a couple of young black men lounging outside the store. They looked about seventeen. Both wore clothes that were much too big. One of them wore a porkpie hat and sat on a blue plastic milk crate. The other leaned against the building. He had a Raiders cap on, turned backwards. He said something to the guy sitting as I approached, and they both laughed, looking sideways at me.

I passed them and entered the store. A soft electronic chime sounded in the back of the store as I opened the door and stepped in. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness inside. When I could see, I blinked again.

Somebody had crammed an entire full-sized supermarket into a room that wasn’t more than thirty-five feet deep and twenty feet wide. Things were hanging off every inch of wall. The shelves went all the way to the ceiling, a good ten feet up, and in the narrow aisles between the shelves more things hung down from hooks screwed into the ceiling.

The cash register was to the left of the door. It was completely enclosed by a heavy metallic mesh. More stuff hung off the mesh: pretzels, potato chips, barbecued bacon rinds, cinnamon toothpicks, and Slim Jims. Farther along there were sunglasses, condoms, and snuff. Almost invisible in all the hanging clutter was the cashier’s window.

Through the window, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, was a Korean man of about forty-five. Koreans have a reputation for being tough and stubborn. It looked like a lot of that reputation was based on this guy. He was simply watching, with eyes that had seen about everything twice. His face seemed frozen in a permanent frown of watchful disapproval. He looked like it would take heavy earth-moving equipment to budge him.

I stepped to the cashier’s window. His eyes followed me, unblinking and almost unmoving, like the eyes in a good portrait. I leaned slightly in to let him see me better. “Hi,” I said, “Are you Park?”

He just stared. I stared back. “I wonder if you could help me?” I said.

“You no belong here,” he told me.

“That’s right,” I said.

“What you want here?”

“It’s about the boy that was shot out front of your store, back in May. I’d like to talk to anybody who might know something about it.”

He stared at me some more. Something was going on beyond the dark eyes, but it would take a team of researchers ten years to figure out what. “Why?” he finally demanded.

I had a few choices. I could claim to be a cop, but that would matter less to this guy than a mouse fart on a pig farm. I could give him some shiny lie about insurance, but I had a feeling that would matter even less. Taking a deep breath and holding onto my luck with both hands, I went for the more devious approach. I told the truth.

“His father was a friend of mine,” I said. “I promised him I’d find his son’s killer.”

The man moved. He nodded his head almost a full quarter of an inch up and down. “Father dead too,” he said.

“That’s right.”

He nodded again. He was turning into a real whirlwind. He took a step and leaned his head around the protective mesh. He yelled eight or ten syllables. I didn’t understand even one of them. Then he stepped back and leaned in his original position, recrossing his arms. “You wait,” he said. His eyes drifted away, back to the front door.

I waited. I had no idea what I was waiting for. It could be a Libyan hit squad for all I knew. But something told me that I had got to Mr. Chatterbox, and whatever I was waiting for would be helpful.

There was a breath of movement, a faint smell of something clean, and a girl was standing beside me. She said something softly to the man in the cage and stood waiting. She was about seventeen and one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen. She was all the stories about GI’s falling for gorgeous Asian girls, all rolled into one.

The man said something harsh to her. She answered, still softly but with a certain amount of firmness.

He interrupted her and spoke a little longer. She hung her head. When he stopped talking she raised her head again, looked at me, and then gave the man six more syllables. He grunted.

She turned to me. “My father says you want to ask about Hector.”

There was nothing showing on her face, but there was an awful lot going on behind her eyes, too—too much for somebody that young. Maybe it ran in the family. “That’s right,” I said. “Did you know him?” Her mask flickered for just a second, and she gave her head a funny half-turn towards her father.

“Oh, yes,” she said, a little too loud, “I knew Hector quite well. I used to see him all the time.” Her father said nothing, but I could feel the ozone building up. The air between them was as charged as a summer day with a thunderstorm moving in.

I nodded just like everything was normal. “Can you show me where it happened?” I asked, hoping to get her outside before the cage around her father melted.

She turned to me and smiled politely. “Sure,” she said, and slid past me and out the door. The chime sounded again. Her father didn’t look as I walked past, but I thought I could see a vein throbbing on his forehead.

The two comedians were gone from outside the store when I got out on the sidewalk. The girl was standing on the curb, looking into the street at a point about eight feet out into traffic.

“There,” she said, nodding at the spot. “He was standing right there.” I looked. It was just another patch of asphalt. The girl was looking at it like she saw something else.

“What’s your name?” I asked her. Her head jerked around, the first thing I’d seen her do that was not entirely graceful. She looked at me for a long beat before she answered.