Tropical Depression (17 page)

I didn’t have the stomach for computerized forms anymore. But I thumbed through all the stuff anyway. By the end of my rookie year, two of my classmates had been shot by not being thorough. Dull routine is part of the turf.

There were a couple of items that were interesting. But the one that caught my eye was in the crime scene report. It listed a piece of
HARDWARE, STEEL, UNIDENTIFIED
found on the west edge of the roof.

It was typical of this investigation:
UNIDENTIFIED.
They had weighed it, measured it, analyzed the composition of the steel—stainless—and they hadn’t figured out what the hell it was. But there was a full page of reports on the thing to prove that the investigation was thorough. Their ass was covered.

I had been looking at an eyebolt in the west edge of the roof when Lin Park’s friends had done the drum solo on my skull. I couldn’t tell from the picture what this thing was, but I wondered at the connection. I made a mental note to check it out and moved on.

What I really wanted to see was the summary. It took me forty minutes but I finally got there.

If you know what to look for and can decipher the convoluted high-tech cop-ese, the summary tells you all you need to know. Not because it gives the whole story from start to finish in too much detail, but because it tells you how the detective in charge was thinking.

Reading between the lines, you can see how much the detectives were allowed to do in a case—how far they could take it, how creative they could be, how much pressure they were under to nail the killer.

And in the summary of Hector’s file the answer was crystal clear: not much.

Nothing written in the file spelled that out. That would be too obvious, and this summary was not obvious, not at all. In its own way it was a masterpiece of political ice-skating.

I had never seen anything so carefully arranged to give the impression of tremendous work under impossible conditions resulting in a regrettable but inevitable lack of results in a matter that was possibly better left alone for other reasons, which were in any case more in line with departmental policy on the allocation of man-hours with specific reference to overtime on homicide cases.

It all added up to a long-winded and meaningless but important-sounding conclusion that said, We didn’t really do a whole lot here except make all the right gestures and generate the politically correct amount of paper.

But the subtext could not have been plainer. Somebody had put pressure on the investigating team so they went through all the motions, checked in all the boxes, and covered their asses without actually doing anything.

It didn’t have to be malicious. Any time an investigation approached a sensitive area, a competent cop might back away, unwilling to do what is known as stirring up shit. That just means, stay away from trouble. There’s enough of it looking for you already.

It looked like that’s what had happened here. To anybody but an insider it would seem like an exhaustive investigation. It wouldn’t have fooled Roscoe. It didn’t fool me.

I turned to Roscoe’s file. Since this one was still technically a fresh case, Ed had given me a photocopy of the initial paperwork. Detective W. Mancks was leading his team through the same kind of exhaustive orgy of box-checking. He had filled in the boxes with an X, too. Aha, I thought. A pattern was beginning to develop.

The cover sheet said Ed had been assigned to do a background check. It made a lot of political sense. The paperwork would show that a dedicated black cop, above reproach, had been in on the investigation, but background would keep Ed out of the way of all the important non-work. I didn’t know any of the others on the team. I assumed they were all a little more pliable than Ed.

I thumbed through the file and then pulled out the envelope with the pictures. I knew the way Roscoe had died, so I knew the pictures would be bad. I didn’t expect them to bother me too much.

But the pictures were worse than I thought. Roscoe looked like a tired puppet. Some kid had thrown a snit and pulled the head off, then thrown the puppet into the gutter.

I flipped through the report. All the boxes were filled in. There was no summary yet, but I could see it was already adding up to the same thing: somebody with a very heavy hand wanted this investigation to go through the motions without rocking the boat.

The results were identical, but each team was different, headed by a different cop. That didn’t necessarily add up to conspiracy. It wasn’t hard to find a cop who would walk softly on just one case—especially if you threatened his career, his pension, his place in the fraternity. Besides, he would have all the forms filled out right, proving he had done his job.

There were a lot of people with enough clout to twist an arm that hard, from the commissioner on down to the rep from the union. Even a few local politicos, one or two businessmen, and at least one movie star I could think of would be able to swing it.

The only question was, who would do it? Who would deliberately sabotage an investigation into the murder of a brother officer? And why?

I sat with the pictures on my lap and just thought about it for maybe two hours. I started to get a nightmare feeling of wading through something that didn’t make sense and couldn’t be stopped. I finally put the pictures down and turned out the light.

Just before I fell asleep I realized my head didn’t hurt anymore. I was finally getting somewhere.

The morning came a couple of hours before I was ready for it. It might have been jet lag, or a last reminder of my bang on the head. Or it could have been just some leftover uneasiness about being in L.A.

Whatever it was, I woke up feeling like there was something terribly important I had to do and I couldn’t figure out what, just that it was vital. I lay in the sagging bed with my heart pounding for a good five minutes trying to figure out what it was I was failing to do before I decided it was just a dream.

It was after seven by the time I got to the coffee shop downstairs in the hotel. I ordered coffee, eggs, and toast. In a spurt of real bravery I got a small glass of orange juice. It had a weird aftertaste that made me think I had a mouthful of rotting copper. Somehow that made the bad-dream feeling linger as I went to look for a telephone.

I didn’t want to use the one in my room. Hotels tend to charge exorbitant rates for telephone calls, and anyway my room was all the way upstairs, and I was feeling penned in. I just wanted to get outside. I went out and looked for a booth.

That was a mistake. The air was a thick brown sap that could bring on a headache in a statue. I couldn’t find a phone that wasn’t broken or covered with stuff that smelled like the rest room at Venice Beach. After a few minutes of frustration, my eyes tearing from the smog, I decided I didn’t need a phone anyway. I packed myself into my tiny rental and drove the few blocks over to Hollywood bureau.

Ed was already at his desk when I got there. He looked even more tired and sour. He was wading through a stack of papers and he glanced up as I sat in the chair by his desk.

I put the case file on his desk, rewrapped in the Ralph’s bag. The weight of the papers caused smoke to swirl away from the smoldering Kool in the ashtray and into Ed’s eyes. He blinked. He looked at the bag and then at me. “Good morning, Ed,” I said after he had stared at me for a few moments.

“If you get cheerful at me, I’m gonna have to shoot you,” he said.

“Farthest thing from my mind,” I told him. “What do you know about this?”

I flipped a page from the file at him, marked with a paper clip. He glanced at it.

“Uh-huh,” he said, sounding like he looked, tired and sour. “What about it? You want to file a complaint about police incompetence?” He dropped the sheet on the desk with a weary shrug.

“I’d rather take a look at that unidentified hardware,” I said.

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he gave me one short nod. “Yeah. Maybe somebody ought to.” He swiveled away and picked up the telephone on his desk. I couldn’t hear what he said, but in a minute he turned back to me.

“It’s down at Crenshaw,” he said. “I told them it might be connected to Roscoe, which is on my turf. So I’m sending an expert to take a look. That’s you, you understand.” He gave me his new smile, the mean one.

“I got that.”

He scribbled on a pad and tore off the top sheet. “Get on down there. Sergeant Whitt waiting for you.” He handed me the slip of paper. It said
SGT. WHITT
in Ed’s small, precise handwriting. “Let me know about it, huh, Billy?”

I said I would. I tried hard not to notice how important it was to him.

Crenshaw bureau is not the worst in the city. But that might just be because of the competition. The station is not as pretty as the one in Hollywood. It has the look of something blunt and functional, like a hammer. In a way, it is.

Sergeant Whitt was waiting for me in a room in the basement. There was a cage around the room, and a small window was the only access.

Whitt was almost a cartoon cop. He must have been close to retirement; his belly looked like it had taken at least twenty-five years of hard work, punishing doughnuts, arresting chili dogs, and sending whole pizzas away for the big fall. If potatoes were bright red, somebody would have baked his nose by mistake a long time ago.

He sat at a desk about fifteen feet inside the shelf-lined room and glanced up at me when I appeared at the window and leaned on the sill. “What do you want?” he grunted.

“Detective Beasley sent me,” I said. I managed not to add, “Ho, ho, ho.” After all, the guy didn’t even have a beard.

He grunted again. “McAuley case,” he said. “Don’t know if I can find it.” He still hadn’t moved. He looked away again, down at his desk, where a hoagie, fries, a Coke, and two jelly doughnuts were sitting in a small cardboard box.

I straightened up. “Okay,” I said, with a cheerful smile. “Where’s the captain’s office? He’ll want to know you’ve lost some evidence from an open case file.” I very helpfully showed him all my teeth.

Sergeant Whitt grunted and stared hard at me for a good thirty seconds. He took a huge bite of the hoagie. A normal human being could not fit half of a sandwich that size into his mouth, but Sergeant Whitt did. He chewed twice and swallowed. Then he shoved his chair back explosively from the desk and barreled across the room on his wheeled chair. He must have hit forty-five or fifty miles an hour before sticking out a foot and stopping at a shelf. It was startling to see an old fat curmudgeon move that fast. But at least he didn’t grunt again.

He grabbed at something and rolled over to the window. He plopped a sealed bag onto the counter, staring at me with mean, hard little eyes. “You’re not a cop, are you?” he said.

“I’m an expert,” I told him. “Just ask anybody.”

He nodded without taking his eyes off me. “I didn’t think you were a cop,” he said, and he sat there and watched me as I took the hardware out of its bag.

It was a flat chunk of stainless steel about the size of a pocket knife. The tag was hanging from a hole in one end of it. The other end had a similar hole, except that there was a small grooved slot in the side of the second hole. I turned it over in my hand a couple of times, but I didn’t really need much of a look. I knew what it was.

I had seen one only a few weeks ago, back home in Key West. My charter had been for only a half-day, and while I was cleaning up my boat I had heard an impressive amount of swearing coming from a sailboat moored at a dock across the channel from my slip.

I had walked around and over to the slip where I found Betty Fleming, a leathery forty-five-year-old sailing woman, trying to rerig the spreaders on the mast of her forty-two-foot sloop. She resented needing help, never needed help from
anybody,
but eventually she let me haul on a rope and send her up the mast on her bosun’s chair. She’d even given me a beer afterwards.

The piece of metal Sergeant Whitt was guarding so carefully was identical to part of the rig of Betty’s bosun’s chair. Betty, with much amused swearing, had said it was called a brummel hook. “Nobody much uses ’em nowadays,” she had said. “Just old-fashioned assholes like me.”

So the lump of stainless steel in my hand now was familiar—but it just added to the dream feeling with which I’d started the day. This was a pretty uncommon piece of hardware. Why would somebody have anything nautical on a rooftop in an inner-city neighborhood in L.A.? It was one hell of a place to sail off into the sunset.

Anyway, it was easier to understand why none of the detectives knew what it was. Of course, that didn’t make it easier to understand why they hadn’t tried to find out.

I snapped out of thinking about it to see that Sergeant Whitt was still staring at me.

I stared back. “Do you ever blink? Or do you have one of those inner eyelids like a frog?”

I don’t believe he thought it was very funny. In fact, I couldn’t tell if he thought anything. He just stared. Finally he grunted. “You all done?”

I gave up. The man could outstare a rock. Even if the rock was smarter, and better looking. I dropped the brummel hook on the counter. “Yeah, I’m all done. Thanks for your time, Sergeant.”

He grunted.

I climbed up the stairs and out of Sergeant Whitt’s dungeon, and as I turned for the door a hand came down on my shoulder from behind. “Billy,” a soft voice said. “Hey, well—Billy Knight.”

I turned into the big grin of Charlie Shea, the friend who had talked me down that bad morning so many months ago.

I shook his hand, happy to see him. He looked me over with the interest of a guy who has saved your life and now feels responsible for you.

“Geez, Billy Knight. Man, you look great. Look at that tan. You look great. You really look great.” He sounded like that made him happy and he held onto my hand a moment too long, peering into my face. “How you doing, Billy?”

I pulled my hand away. “I’m doing fine, Charlie. Just fine.”

He didn’t look completely convinced. “Uh-huh. What, you’re doing the, uh, the fishing boat?”