Vertical Coffin (2004) (6 page)

In the parking lot I found Sonny Lopez waiting by my car. He still had Emo's DNA on his uniform. We stood looking at each other for a long moment, not sure how to wrap this up.

"Thanks for helping me get him down off the porch," I said. "If he'd stayed up there, we woulda lost the body."

"I was waiting out here to tell you I shoulda suggested it first. He was my carnal, my station mate. I kinda froze."

"Not when it counted," I said, and put a hand on his shoulder. I could feel his nerves and muscles twitch under my hand.

"This is really fucked, huh?" he finally said.

"Yep."

"SRT just rolled out of here in their new LAV." The feds called their SWAT van a light armored vehicle. "I've never seen Captain Matthews so jacked up. He's usually pretty mellow."

"That's 'cause SRT won't sit for your shooting review. They're doing a parallel investigation. His ass is on the line. He lost a deputy, the perp is barbeque, the house in ashes. There's gonna be beaucoup legal trouble over this," I said.

"It's even worse than that, Shane. I just found out from the desk sergeant that ATF called us. They got the initial complaint, but since Smiley was impersonating a sheriff's deputy and lived in the county, ATF handed us the collar. The neighbors up there told me an hour ago that Smiley had been wandering around, showing his neighbors a sheriff's badge for months. He'd been telling 'em he works for our antiterrorist division. They said last week Smiley took some of the guys who live up there into his garage and showed them his armory. Boxes of ammo, grenade launchers. They said he even had plastic explosives up there, some C-four."

"That's what blew the roof off the garage," I said.

Sonny nodded. "The neighbors called ATF and reported it because they didn't want some spook in their neighborhood with a garage full of explosives. Matthews thinks after they gave us the impersonating charge they were parked nearby, waiting to see what would happen about the guns. That's how they got there so fast."

It didn't sound right to me, then Sonny's handsome face contorted.

"The feds didn't want to serve a warrant on a guy with an AK-forty-seven and a garage full of C-four so they sent Emo up there thinkin' he was arresting some ding on a class-B nothing, and he walks into a bullet. All the while ATF was waiting down the road to see whether he got the cuffs on or not." Lopez was shaking with anger.

I knew part of it was just a post-shoot-out adrenaline burn, but I didn't like the dangerous look in Sonny's black eyes. His chest was rising and falling as he took deep breaths to calm himself down. His heartbeat pulsed a vein on his forehead.

"Listen Sonny, I think you need to go end-of-watch, hit a heavy bag or something, then get a beer and chill out."

"I'm gonna go get a fucking riot gun and chill out the ATF building downtown ..."

"Good idea. Real smart," I said softly.

"Damn it, Shane, they might as well have just killed him themselves."

"Sonny, let their shooting review panel deal with this. If there's a problem, their Internal Affairs guys will flag it."

He dropped his head and looked at his shoes. When he glanced up again he was crying.

"I know his wife and kids," Sonny said. "I help him coach Pop Warner football. He was my carnal. My amigo . . . Those fucking guys ..." He couldn't finish, overwhelmed with emotion.

"Get outta here, man. You need to get your feet under you."

"I loved him, Shane."

"Me too," I said softly.

Chapter
5

GETTING READY

It was ten o'clock on Saturday morning six days later, and Emo's funeral was scheduled for two that afternoon. I was sitting in the backyard of my little house in Venice, California. Our adopted marmalade cat, Franco, lounged at my feet, taking in the view of plastic reproduction gondolas floating in two feet of brackish seawater and narrow, arched, one-lane bridges spanning shallow saltwater canals. Venice, California, had been built in the twenties by Abbott Kinney, who had designed it to resemble a scaled-down version of Venice, Italy. It was an architecturally challenged throwback to the fifteen hundreds. Run down now, and a little sad, the neighborhood still clung proudly to its tacky, old-world heritage like a stubborn drunk refusing to get off a barstool. I don't know how Franco felt about it, but I loved it for its corny pride.

Chooch was inside doing his homework. Delfina, his girlfriend, whom we had taken in after her cousin, American Macado, died last year, was now living in Chooch's old room. He had willingly moved into makeshift quarters we'd set up in the garage. Delfina was proving to be a great addition to the family. She was a beautiful, black-eyed Hispanic girl who usually brought a soft, relaxed point of view to our mix. This morning she was off at a rehearsal at Venice High School where she was now enrolled. They were putting on a production of West Side Story, and Delfina was playing Maria. All week she had been rehearsing songs, her slightly thin, true voice floating through the house. She had left an hour ago, visibly nervous because they were doing the first run through with music.

I was stretched out on my patio furniture reading a disturbing follow-up article on the Hidden Ranch shoot-out in the morning edition of the L
. A
. Times. It was under the same grainy photo of Vincent Smiley the newspaper had been running all week. In the shot the dead killer appeared young and expressionless. A vacant smile split his lips like a poorly drawn line that didn't foreshadow his violent end.

He looked small. Small eyes, small neck, small life. It was hard to think somebody like Vincent Smiley could have killed a man like Emo Rojas. But all of society has come to understand that guns in the hands of idiots are mindless equalizers. I was trying to get a handle on my emotions and prepare myself for the funeral ahead.

I hate cop funerals. After the Vikings case, and Tremaine Lane's over-the-top grave site production, I had promised myself that I would never attend another brother officer's burial; that I would try and find a quiet place to say my good-bye alone. But there wasn't much I could do about ducking this one. In fact, to be blunt, it was my second cop funeral since making that hollow promise. So it seemed I was just blowing off steam and lacked the courage of my own convictions.

I steeled myself to get through it. It had been six days since the shooting on Hidden Ranch Road. The incident was still a front-page, above-the-fold feature in the L
. A
. Times. The fickle electronic media had played it big for three news cycles, then returned to their endless fascination with celebrity mischief. But new facts kept rolling out on the pages of the Times. Since I wasn't part of the active sheriff's investigation, I was getting most of my information from the unreliable rumor mill downtown, and from the morning paper.

In a profile of Smiley earlier in the week, the paper revealed that he had once been a member of the Arcadia Police Department. He'd been on the job for about ten months in 2002, made it through their academy training, but had been rolled out as a probationer shortly after he hit the street. Apparently his training officer observed some critical flaws in his psyche and submarined him. The Arcadia police had not shared the reason for his dismissal with the press, saying, since Vincent Smiley was dead and not being tried, his psychiatric records would remain locked up in his 10-01 file.

The county coroner couldn't do a standard print or dental match on Smiley's corpse because the body was too badly burned. His teeth had turned to dust from the intense heat, but the M
. E
. had positively identified the body, using DNA. Apparently Smiley had given a sample to the Arcadia P
. D
. when he was still on the force--something I found very unusual, if not downright strange. Police unions were adamant against letting their officers give DNA, citing a list of probable cause and Fourth Amendment statutes. But for some reason Smiley had voluntarily given up a sample. It made me wonder if his dismissal might have stemmed from charges of sexual misconduct, and he had given the sample voluntarily in an attempt to beat the rap.

As far as anybody knew, Smiley didn't have any family that was still alive, so he was to be held in the morgue for th
e r
equired two weeks. In another eight days, if his body wasn't claimed, he would be dumped in a pauper's grave, courtesy of the county, destined to spend eternity in a ten-foot hole full of the very homeless miscreants he had once hoped to police.

The crisis had lurched along for almost a week, like a cartoon cowboy with a slew of arrows in his back. On Friday, the L
. A
. County Board of Supervisors, headed by a broken steam valve named Enrique Salazar, got into the act. Salazar had picked up the sheriff's fallen shield and was charging the hill at Justice. He repeated the charge that ATF had not shared all the pertinent details of the arrest before sending Emo out to serve the warrant, speculating that this probably happened because Emo was a Mexican. Of course, nobody at ATF could have possibly known that a Mexican-American sheriff would serve the warrant, so that was just Enrique playing to his Hispanic base. But he also reasoned that ATF had not told the sheriffs about the illegal weapons cache, because, had the sheriffs known, they would have said, "Serve your own damn warrant." The Salazar piece was this morning's front-page ticking bomb.

Far more troubling than that was the fact that the temperature between these two law enforcement groups was at slow boil. Only the LAPD had managed to stay neutral.

Alexa came out, sat on the metal chair beside me, and took my hand. I showed her the front-page article in the Times.

"Saw it," she said. "Two thousand of Emo's friends and coworkers gathering this afternoon to cry over his body, and Salazar picks today to say ATF thought he was just another dumb Mexican. Guy needs a new public affairs consultant."

"This isn't going to go away," I said. "Salazar is going to make it an election issue. He'll go to the governor."

"In that case, he won't have to go far. The governor is going to be at the funeral. My office was notified that his security detail was going to need special parking at Forest Lawn."

"Great," I said.

She turned and looked at me carefully. "Shane, we need to talk about this."

I thought we had been talking about it, but apparently Alexa had something else on her mind.

"This whole thing with Emo--it's been eating at you. Even Chooch asked if you were okay."

"Yeah, I'm okay, it's just..." I stopped and let it hang there, not sure how to phrase what I was feeling.

"Just what?"

"I just wish I hadn't been up there. I wish I hadn't seen it. I can't get the memory of his blood off my skin."

"And?"

"And I hate cop funerals. I'm dreading this thing this afternoon. Bring in a TV camera and every publicity-seeking asshole in the state shows up. The governor comes, the city council, all the chiefs, sheriffs, and undersheriffs--even you and Tony. No offense intended."

"None taken." She cocked her head, thinking for a moment, then smiled. "I think."

"You saw what happened when we buried Tremaine. It'll be just like that. All the department ass-kissers who didn't even know Emo swarming like flies on garbage. All telling the brass what a great guy Emo was, how they were in the same foxholes with him, all spinning their dumb war stories. Most of the people making speeches this afternoon will be strangers. The ones who really loved him will get pushed to the back. We'll all be listening to guys like Salazar turn Emo's funeral into a campaign issue. Once they're done, down Emo goes into the hole, awash in crocodile tears and bullshit. Then everybody leaves, hoping the governor will remember they were there."

"Then why are you going?"

"I don't want to go, but I have to. How do you not go to a good friend's funeral?"

"Why is Chooch going?" she said, hitting me with a blind shot that I hadn't seen coming. I looked away to buy time, gather my defenses.

"Huh?" Not much of a response, I admit, but I'm not too good at dodging her.

"He's in there finishing his homework so he'll be able to go."

"Oh. I guess that could maybe be because I sorta told him he could go."

"He didn't even know Emo."

"Yes he did." I heaved a sigh. Once again I was going to have to bust myself. I took a deep breath. "He knew him because he went on an Iron Pigs ride with us two months ago."

"Right. Sure he did. He doesn't even know how to ride a Harley."

"Last July--the week you were in Chicago, I borrowed two bikes. We practiced every night for five days. Got him licensed Friday afternoon. I swore him to secrecy because I knew you wouldn't want him riding a hawg."

"You're damn right I wouldn't." She fell silent and let go of my hand. "And he sure doesn't need to go to this funeral."

"Let him go. He wants to. It's part of growing up. People you know and care about die. It's a bitch, but it happens. He liked Emo. They're both quarterbacks."

"When cops die, you know he puts you in the coffin, Shane. Emotionally, he sees you in the box."

"I suppose."

"No suppose about it. It's true." She was mad about the Harley ride but had the good sense not to bang me around about it now. Instead, her anger was coming out over Chooch and the funeral.