The Scarecrow (6 page)

The door opened. It was only Stone. Carver became annoyed that he had killed his screens and that he was going to miss out
on following Geneva.

“What is it, Freddy?” he asked impatiently.

“I wanted to ask you about vacation time,” Stone said loudly.

He entered and closed the door. He moved to the chair on the other side of the worktable from Carver and sat down without
permission.

“Actually, fuck vacation time,” he said. “That was for the benefit of the guys out there. I want to talk about iron maidens.
Over the weekend I think I found our next girl.”

Freddy Stone was twenty years younger than Carver. Carver had first noticed him while lurking under a different identity in
an iron maiden chat room. He tried to trail him but Stone was too good for that. He disappeared into the digital mist.

Undaunted and only more intrigued, Carver set up a catch site called
www.motherinirons.com
, and sure enough, Stone eventually came through. This time Carver made direct contact and the dance began. Shocked by his
young age, Carver nevertheless recruited him, changed his looks and identity, and mentored him.

Carver had saved him, but after four years Stone was too close for comfort, and at times Carver could not stand him. Freddy
assumed too much. Like just coming in and sitting down without permission.

“Really,” Carver said, a note of disbelief placed intentionally in the word.

“You promised I could pick the next one, remember?” Stone responded.

Carver had made the promise, but it had come in the fervor of the moment. As they were on the 10 Freeway leaving the beach
in Santa Monica, the windows open and the sea air blowing in their faces. He was still riding the high and he foolishly told
his young disciple that he could pick the next one.

Now he would have to change that. He wished he could just go back to watching Geneva, maybe catch her changing that tampon
in the restroom, and leave this inconvenience for later.

“Don’t you ever get tired of that song?” Stone asked.

“What?”

Carver realized he had started to hum again while thinking about Geneva. Embarrassed, he tried to move on.

“Who did you find?” he asked.

Stone smiled broadly and shook his head like he could hardly believe his good luck.

“This girl who has her own porn site. I’ll send you the link so you can check her out, but you’re going to like her. I looked
at her tax returns. Last year she cleared two hundred eighty K just from people signing up for twenty-five bucks a month to
watch her fuck people.”

“Where’d you find her?”

“Dewey and Bach, accountants. She got audited by something called the California Tax Franchise Board and they handled it.
All her four-one-one is right there. Everything we need to set up. Then I went and checked her out on her website.
Mandy For
Ya dot com
. She’s a stone fox with long legs. Just our type.”

Carver could feel the slight trill of anticipation in his dark fiber. But he wasn’t going to make a mistake.

“Where exactly in California?” he asked.

“Manhattan Beach,” Stone said.

Carver wanted to reach across the glass tabletop and whack Stone on the side of the head with one of the plasma screens.

“Do you know where Manhattan Beach is?” he asked instead.

“Isn’t it down by Lo Jolla and San Diego? Down there?”

Carver shook his head.

“First of all, it’s
La
Jolla. And no, Manhattan Beach is not near it, anyway. It’s by L.A. and not too far from Santa Monica. So forget her. We’re
not going back there for a good long time. You know the rules.”

“But, Dub, she’s perfect! Plus, I already pulled files on her. L.A.’s a big place. Nobody in Santa Monica is going to care
about what happens in Manhattan Beach.”

Carver shook his head emphatically.

“You can put the files right back. We just burned L.A. for at least three years. I don’t care who you find or how safe you
think it is. I am not deviating from the protocol. And another thing. My name is Wesley, not Wes, and certainly not Dub.”

Stone looked down at the glass tabletop and seemed crushed.

“Tell you what,” Carver said. “I’ll go to work on it and I’ll find us someone. You wait and see and you’ll be very happy.
I guarantee it.”

“But it was going to be my turn.”

Now Stone was pouting.

“You had your turn and you blew it,” Carver said. “Now it goes to me. So why don’t you go back out there and get to work.
You still owe me status reports on towers eighty through eighty-five. I want them by the end of the day.”

“Whatever.”

“Go. And cheer up, Freddy. We’ll be on the hunt again before the end of the week.”

Stone stood up and turned toward the door. Carver watched him go, wondering how long it would be before he had to get rid
of him. Permanently. Working with a partner was always preferable. But eventually all partners got too close and assumed too
much. They started calling you by a name no one has ever used. They started thinking it was an equal partnership with equal
voting rights. That was unacceptable and dangerous. One person called the shots. Himself.

“Close the door, please,” Carver said.

Stone did as instructed. Carver went back to the cameras. He quickly pulled up the camera over the reception area and saw
Yolanda sitting behind the counter. Geneva was gone. Jumping from camera to camera he started searching for her.

B
y the time Sonny Lester and I left the apartment where Wanda Sessums lived, the projects were alive and busy. School was out
and the drug dealers and their customers were up. The parking lots, playgrounds and burned-out lawns between the apartment
buildings were becoming crowded with children and adults. The drug business here was a drive-through operation with an elaborate
setup involving lookouts and handlers of all ages who would direct buyers through the maze of streets in the projects to a
buy location that was continuously changed throughout the day. The government planners who designed and built the place had
no idea they were creating a perfect environment for the cancer that would in one way or another destroy most of its inhabitants.

I knew all of this because I had ridden with South Bureau narcotics teams on more than one occasion while writing my semiannual
updates on the local drug war.

As we crossed a lawn and approached Lester’s company car we moved with a heads-down-minding-our-own-business purpose. We just
wanted to get out of Dodge. It wasn’t until we were almost right to the car that I saw the young man leaning against the driver’s
door. He was wearing untied work boots, blue jeans dropped halfway down his blue-patterned boxer shorts and a spotless white
T-shirt that almost glowed in the afternoon sun. It was the uniform of the Crips set, which ruled the projects. They were
known as the BH set, which alternately meant Bounty Hunters or Blood Hunters, depending on who was spraying the paint.

“How y’all doin’?” he said.

“We’re fine,” Lester said. “Just going back to work.”

“You the po-po now?”

Lester laughed like that was the biggest joke he’d heard in a week.

“Nah, man, we’re with the paper.”

Lester nonchalantly put his camera bag in the trunk and then came around to the door where the young man was leaning. He didn’t
move.

“Gotta go, bro. Can I get by you there?”

I was on the other side of the car by my door. I felt my insides tighten. If there was going to be a problem, it was going
to happen right now. I could see others in the same gang uniform standing back on the shaded side of the parking lot, ready
to be called in if needed. I had no doubt that they all had weapons either on their person or hidden nearby.

The young man leaning on our car didn’t move. He folded his arms and looked at Lester.

“What you talking to moms about up there,
bro?
”

“Alonzo Winslow,” I said from my side. “We don’t think he killed anybody and we’re looking into it.”

The young man pushed off the car so he could turn and look at me.

“That right?”

I nodded.

“We’re working on it. We just started and that’s why we came to talk to Mrs. Sessums.”

“Then she tell you about the tax.”

“What tax?”

“Yeah, she pay a tax. Anybody in business ’round here payin’ a tax.”

“Really?”

“The street tax, man. See, any newspaper people that come ’round here to talk about Zo Slow has to pay the street tax. I can
take it for you now.”

I nodded.

“How much?”

“It be fitty dollah t’day.”

I’d expense it and see if Dorothy Fowler raised hell. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my money. I had fifty-three
dollars and quickly extracted two twenties and a ten.

“Here,” I said.

I moved to the back of the car and the young man moved away from the driver’s door. As I paid him Lester got in and started
the car.

“We have to go,” I said as I handed over the money.

“Yeah, you do. You come back and the tax is double, Paperboy.”

“Fine.”

I should have let it go at that but I couldn’t leave without asking the obvious question.

“Doesn’t it matter to you that I’m working on getting Zo out?”

The young man raised his hand and rubbed his jaw as though giving the question some serious thought. I saw the letters F-U-C-K
tattooed across his knuckles. My eyes went to his other hand, hanging limp at his side. I saw D-A-5-0 tattooed across the
other ridge of knuckles and I got my answer. Fuck the police. With sentiment like that on his hands, it was no wonder he would
extort those trying to help a fellow member of the crew. It was everybody for himself down here.

The kid laughed and turned away without answering. He’d wanted me to see his hands.

I got into the car and Lester backed out of the space. I turned around and saw the young man who had just extorted fifty dollars
from us doing the Crip walk. He bent down and used the bills I had just given him to pantomime a quick polish of his shoes,
then straightened up and did the heel-toe-heel-toe shuffle the Crips called their own. His fellow bangers over in the shade
whooped it up as he approached.

I didn’t feel the tension in my neck start to dissolve until we got back to the 110 and headed north. Then I put the fifty
bucks out of my mind and started to feel good as I reviewed what had been accomplished during the trip. Wanda Sessums had
agreed to cooperate fully in the investigation of the Denise Babbit–Alonzo Winslow case. Using my cell phone, she had called
Winslow’s public defender, Jacob Meyer, and told him that, as the defendant’s guardian, she was authorizing my total access
to all documents and evidence relating to the case. Meyer reluctantly agreed to meet with me the next morning between hearings
in the downtown juvenile hall. He didn’t really have a choice. I had told Wanda that if Meyer didn’t cooperate, there were
plenty of private attorneys who would handle the case for free once they knew there were headlines coming. Meyer’s choice
was either to work with me and get some media attention for himself or give the case up.

Wanda Sessums had also agreed to get me into Sylmar Juvenile Hall so that I could interview her grandson. My plan was to use
the public defender’s case file to become familiar with the case before I sat down to talk to Winslow. It would be the key
interview of the piece I would write. I wanted to know all there was to know before I talked to him.

All in all, it had been a good trip—the fifty-dollar tariff notwithstanding—and I was thinking about how I was going to present
my plan to Prendergast. Then Lester interrupted my thoughts.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said.

“What am I doing?” I said.

“That washerwoman might be too dumb and the lawyer too worried about headlines to see it but I’m not.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re comin’ on like you’re the white knight that’s gonna prove the kid innocent and set him free. But you’re going to do
the exact opposite of that, man. You’re going to use them to get inside the case to get all the juicy details, then you’re
going to write a story about how a sixteen-year-old kid becomes a stone-cold killer. Hell, getting an innocent man free is
a damn newspaper cliché nowadays. But gettin’ inside the mind of a young killer like that? Tellin’ how society lets that kind
of thing happen? That’s Pulitzer territory, bro.”

I didn’t say anything at first. Lester had me cold. I put together a defense and then responded.

“All I promised her was that I would investigate the case. Where it goes it goes, that’s all.”

“Bullshit. You’re using her because she’s too ignorant to know it. The kid will probably be just as stupid and go along, too.
And we all know the lawyer will trade the kid for headlines. You really think you’re going to win the big one with this, don’t
you?”

I shook my head and didn’t respond. I could feel my face getting red and I turned to look out the window.

“Hey, but it’s okay,” Lester said.

I turned and looked back at him and I read his face.

“What do you want, Sonny?”

“A piece, that’s all. We work it as a team. I go with you up to Sylmar and to court and I do all the photo work. You fill
out a photo request, you put my name on it. Makes it a better package anyway. Especially for submissions.”

Meaning submissions to Pulitzer and other prize judges.

“Look,” I said, “I haven’t even told my editor about this yet. You are jumping way ahead. I don’t even know if they’ ll—”

“They’ll love it and you know it. They’re going to cut you loose to work it and they might as well cut me loose too. Who knows,
maybe we both get a prize. They can’t lay you off if you bring home a Pulitzer.”

“You’re talking about the ultimate long shot, Sonny. You’re crazy. Besides that, I already got laid off. I’ve got twelve days
and then I could give a shit about the Pulitzer Prize. I’m out of here.”