Vertical Coffin (2004) (15 page)

"I don't want some deputy looking over my shoulder," I said, seizing only on the first thing he said and ignoring the rest.

"Shut up, Shane," Tony commanded. Then he looked at Messenger. "Okay. You get a print run started and have your SEB long guns tested and checked against this brass, and in return, Shane works with one deputy of your choosing."

"Deal," Messenger said. "And as long as all the Hidden Ranch forensic stuff is already at our crime lab, I'd like to suggest we leave it there. My criminalists are as good as yours. It'll save time."

Tony nodded his agreement. Then Bill Messenger turned to me. "Your partner is going to be Sergeant Brickhouse, one of my crack IAD investigators. You two can meet over at the sheriff's main building this afternoon at four."

"No. Your office is too far away, and I have a bunch of stuff to do on this side of the hill. Let's meet at Denny's restaurant at five. The one on Lankershim in the Valley."

"Done." Then Messenger turned, and carrying the brass casing, walked to his car.

After he drove out, I looked at Tony. "How the hell's this gonna work? I'm really supposed to investigate the Rojas shooting with some biased hump from the sheriff's rat squad?"

Tony unlocked his car, took off his coat, and threw it over the seat. "Yeah, because if I was in Messenger's position I'd feel just like him. I'd want my own investigator looking out for my interests, too. He's in a deep crack." Tony settled into his Crown Vic and turned to look at me. "We've gotta turn that secondary crime scene over to ATF," he said. "Why don't you get somebody to rediscover it? Then call the feds and give it to them."

"But we don't give 'em the shell casing I found in there? How's that work?"

"I don't know. I'll think about it and we'll reevaluate all our options as things progress. In the meantime, put this thing down fast, Shane. I don't like where it's going. If SEB and SRT are gunning for each other after work, we're all gonna end up in the bag." He put his car in gear and drove out.

I still had two hours before my meeting with Sergeant Brick
-
house. As soon as I was on street level where my cell would work, I needed to make two calls: Lou Ruta and Nan Chambers. The first was going to be Ruta. I finally had a use for tha
t a
ngry asshole. I pulled up the ramp into a smoggy L
. A
. afternoon and reached for my phone. It rang before I could open it.

"Hello?" I held the unit to my ear as I drove.

"Shane? Sonny Lopez." He sounded a long way away, or we had a bad connection.

"What's up?"

"I got Chooch the coaching job. But there's a league guy you have to talk to. He's got some questions. Like, is Chooch eighteen?"

"Not quite."

"A Pop Warner head coach has to be eighteen, but I can sign up for that job and he can be what they call a demonstrator. Demonstrators in Pop Warner aren't coaches, they're guys who demonstrate to the kids how to do stuff. Technically I'll be in charge, but he'll do the head coaching job. We just don't tell anyone. There's other stuff you need to sign off on. We're meeting with this guy at six tonight."

"I can't. Got an appointment. How 'bout in the next hour or so, for drinks?"

"I'll have to call you back," Sonny said.

We hung up and I dialed Ruta. "Yeah?" he growled.

After I told him we were off the case, I told him about the windows across the street from the murder scene, and that somebody should tell the feds to check the apartments over there in case it was the shooting position.

"Whatta buncha shit," he said and hung up. I wasn't sure if he was talking about my theory or us getting bounced. Then I called the Valley Times. Nan Chambers was out, but I left my name and number and the message that I wanted to see her immediately.

Sonny Lopez called back fifteen minutes later. "Okay, the guy will meet you at the Boar and Bull on Ventura for drinks. Be there in twenty."

"Deal," I said.

The place was almost empty when I arrived. I moved through the darkly colorful restaurant. Stuffed boar and bull heads with glassy eyes were mounted over the bar, gazing down like hairy drunks hung on the wall to dry out.

I found my way into the back room where four members of the sheriff's department were sitting in one of the red leather booths under a big-screen TV that was playing a tape of last Sunday's Chargers game, with the sound off.

"Hey, Shane," Darren Zook called out.

I walked over. I knew them all. Darren was at one end of the booth. Next to him was Sonny Lopez, then Gary Nightingale. Rick Manos, who I remembered from their mission board was an SEB scout, sat on the far end. This was obviously not going to be about football.

Sonny said, "Want a beer?"

"Not till I know what's going on." I pulled up a free chair and straddled it, sitting at the end of the horseshoe booth so I was facing them. "So let's just get to it."

"Okay. You were Emo's friend. Word is you're the one looking into all this, so I guess we're looking to you for some cover," Sonny said.

"Cover, or cover-up?" I asked.

Rick Manos leaned forward. I'd heard about him before. Big street rep. His silent jacket said he was not a guy to mess with.

"We know you got the Greenridge homicide," Manos said. "We also know ATF is gonna try and force you to put it on my people. SEB didn't kill that guy, piece of shit that he was."

"Okay, here's my take on that," I said. "I don't know whether SEB popped Billy Greenridge, or if he was shot by some old peckerwood bust of his who crawled out of the woodpile at Vacaville, looking for payback. But it doesn't matter what I think anymore, 'cause ATF Title-Eighteened us. They've got i
t n
ow, so if you got a problem talk to the nutsacks over at Justice. But I'll tell you this much, if I was still involved I'd put your request on the record and you'd all lose pay and grade."

"You're taking this the wrong way," Lopez said.

"How is that, Sonny? You guys just asked me to throw an investigation."

"We didn't kill Billy Greenridge," Manos said. His voice was soft, but I could hear the anger. "We just look good for it and everybody wants this thing put down fast."

"I'm sure if you lay back everything will turn out fine." I started to get up and Rick Manos and Gary Nightingale stood with me. Each took one of my arms to keep me from leaving. "You sure this is the way you want to play it?" I said softly.

They hesitated, then let go.

"Shane, they killed Emo," Sonny said. "They sent him up there without knowing what he was walking into. Why isn't anybody investigating that?"

"They are," I said.

"Yeah? And just who's doing that?" Manos said.

"Me. I'm looking into it for Sheriff Messenger and Mayor Mac."

"LAPD?" Nightingale said, but his face clouded with disbelief, as if I'd just said the Girl Scouts of America were working the case.

"I'm not gonna bend the warrant investigation either," I went on. "I'm gonna do it straight up, and my advice to you guys is to back up and hit neutral. Proactive behavior is just gonna make things worse."

"What if their SRT team decides to even the score?" Gary Nightingale said. "We didn't pop Greenridge, but they think we did. What if they snipe at one of us next?"

"That's why you guys get the extra-thick Kevlar," I said, and stepped back from the table.

"You were supposed to be Emo's friend," Lopez said.

"I was his friend, and I know if it had been one of us up there on the porch instead of him, Emo would never be asking for stuff like this." Then I looked directly at Sonny. "And thanks for using my son to lure me out with all that bullshit about Pop Warner. Next time you want to have a police meeting, call my office and make a regular appointment."

"Here." Sonny reached down on the seat beside him, picked up a thick blue binder, and slid it across the table toward me. "That's the play book for the Rams and the rule book for the league. The guy you've gotta call's number is in there."

As I reached for it Rick Manos grabbed my arm and held it. When he looked up at me, his eyes were as dark and empty as two gun barrels.

"If the shit jumps off, be sure you've got a side to be on," he warned.

Chapter
18

RATS

At five o'clock I was waiting for Sergeant Brickhouse in a back booth at Denny's, the Pop Warner binder sat unopened on the seat beside me. I was still angry about the meeting at the Boar and Bull. I'd expected much more from those guys. I sat with a cup of coffee, trying to calm down while a growing dissatisfaction with my role in police work festered.

I guess what pissed me off most was how over the years situations like this had forced my expectations down and made me question everything I had once believed in. When I joined the force we were Blue Knights, protectors of the innocent. Centurions. I had worn my uniform with pride, but without realizing why, things had started to change, and I had slowly lost my point of view.

I remember the first time somebody spit on my black-and
-
white. I was only about three years on the job, still in a uniform, working a neighborhood car in Van Nuys. It was a heavily Hispanic area and a ten-year-old vatito ran up while we were at a stop sign and hocked a lugie. It hit and ran down the squad car's windshield. The boy flipped us off, then took off running. My partner said the next time he saw that flaquito, he'd slap him silly. I had another reaction. I was angry, sure, but also I wanted that boy to know I was out there in the streets for him. If he needed me I was his backup. Instead, he only saw somebody to despise.

The same thing happened again six months later, when I was working an L-car in Carson. I had parked the unit, and this old African-American woman with her arms full of groceries spit on the windshield of my empty Plain-Jane. I came out of a coffee shop just as she did it and caught her. She started yelling curses at me. If somebody had tried to mug her, I was prepared to risk my life to stop it. She didn't understand that my job was to protect and serve her.

Of course, I also knew that in her eyes I didn't exist. As a man, I was invisible. All she saw was the uniform, and it was a symbol of something she hated. What distressed me was that this virulent hatred spanned fifty years and two ethnic boundaries, from that ten-year-old Hispanic boy in Van Nuys, to the black grandmother in Carson.

Rodney King and the O
. J
. case were part of it. The Rampart scandal put it in overdrive. We were not Blue Knights to some of these citizens, but a gang in blue--thugs with life-and-death power, who kicked ass, took names, and didn't care if we got it right, as long as we got it down. Hook'm, book'm, and cook'm. A bad bust probably just takes another guilty asshole off the street, so don't sweat it. It was the total collapse of an idea I once treasured.

Years ago I thought I should make a difference. Be a one-man cleanup crew. One afternoon I spotted the same old woman carrying groceries in Carson and I followed her home. I guessed her age was about sixty, but she looked almost a hundred. When I knocked on her door she opened it to the length of the chain lock. Our emotional and intellectual view of each other was as narrow as that inch-wide slit.

"Go away," she said, seeing my uniform. "They all dead." Then she slammed the door.

Two days later, while I was patrolling the same area, I saw her again. She was struggling with an especially large armload of packages. Her ankles were swollen, her face shiny with sweat as she toiled along. I rolled up beside her, got out, and opened my squad car door. "Can I give you a ride home, Ma'am?" I asked.

She stood at the side of the curb and looked at me with contempt. "I told you, they all dead," she said, exasperated. "You killed ever' one. Now you think I be gettin' in dat damn po-lice car?"

"But I didn't kill them," I said. "I never met them."

"You po-lice, ain't ya? Two boys and one baby girl--my grandchildren, all dead, shot by po-lice." And then she spat again, this time on me. I felt it spray across my face and run down into my collar.

I got back into my car, drove half a block away and parked. I was shaken by the incident. I didn't know why the police had shot her grandchildren or even if they had a valid reason. But I knew it didn't matter. A valid reason or a legal justification wouldn't change the hatred in that woman's ancient, yellow eyes. I could have carried her groceries twice a week for the rest of my life and it wouldn't begin to make up for those three dead children.

Protect and Serve. I tried to live up to that increasingly difficult motto. But I was flawed. I was vulnerable to anger and ego like everyone else. I had emotional prejudice and a parochial moral view, which I tried to overcome. On the street, I tried to be color-blind and situation-neutral. Yet, with each passing year I became more fatigued by the effort.

I would have given a year's pay to have that old woman forgive me for the deaths of three children I never even knew, and that puzzled me. Why should it be so important? Why should I invest so deeply in something I wasn't a part of and couldn't change?

But I did. I guess somewhere deep down I still needed my uniform to validate me. Maybe I needed it for identity or for a sense of belonging. Maybe I had chosen to be a cop because I respected the values in the manual; and when all those values got skewed I didn't have the guts to get off the ride. I still wanted to do the right thing. I still wanted the people I served to know I cared. But more and more, nobody cared if I cared. I had been absorbed into the mix, unable to rise above the perceptions of others. Now I feared SEB and SRT were on a course that would only make it worse, and that was what was darkening my mood and ruining my day.