A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (11 page)

But he couldn’t help feeling that a cell phone was a luxury. An indulgence he couldn’t afford.

He’d only been living in the van for a few months, but everything about him had changed.

No, he thought. That’s not right. Everything changed before the van, before he came home. He remembered the desert, the heat, the smell of the baked dust.

But he stopped himself. Thought of the plan again. Focused on his goal and started the van and headed north on Bellflower.

Inside Target, he purchased the cheapest prepaid cell phone they carried—an LG TracFone—and the phone card to go with it. He sat in the parked Chrysler, in the back corner of the parking lot by the McDonald’s, where he allowed himself the further indulgence of a strawberry shake, and he counted his breaths. He got to thirty before he felt calm and centered enough to dial the number.

His mother didn’t answer. He heard the same answering-machine message that he’d helped her record when he was still in high school. That was okay, though, it felt good to make the connection. He left a message, told her he was sorry it had been so long since he’d called and that things were looking up. He told her he loved her.

Then he wondered how to spend the afternoon. A kind of low-grade satisfaction that he remembered from years ago filled him, left him with a warmth that he struggled to recognize. It wasn’t contentment—he didn’t feel that secure yet, he knew he’d need to save that for a roof and a job—but it was something good.

At the Jack in the Box drive-through, he got three of the one-dollar chicken sandwiches, two tacos, and a large Dr Pepper. With the soda in the cup holder and the fast-food bag in the passenger’s seat, he thought about where to go. It didn’t take long to decide.

He took PCH to Redondo, hung a left, and drove all the way to Ocean. Before long, he’d made it through downtown and had parked the clean but aging Town & Country in the lot at Palm Beach Park and was sitting in the shade watching the Catalina Express cruise under the Queensway Bridge heading for Avalon.

The Dr Pepper had been drained down to the ice, but he’d only eaten one of the sandwiches. He thought that maybe the most valuable skill he’d learned in the army was how to save food for later. The circle of shade he’d been sitting in had moved left, leaving him in the sun. He stretched his legs out in front of himself, leaned back on his hands, and looked up at the sky.

The time seemed to soften and elongate, and he wouldn’t have been able to say how long he’d been there before Bishop approached him. He wouldn’t even have been able to say that that was exactly who he’d been hoping to see when he came to the park. But when Henry saw him, he was glad. That much he was sure of.

“Bishop,” he said. “Pull up some grass.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” the older man said. “Not at all.”

“I got some lunch for you. Tacos or chicken sandwich?”

Bishop looked baffled.

Henry smiled at him and said, “How about one of each?”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I am.”

The two men set up the chessboard and ate as they played. When Bishop had claimed both of Henry’s knights, one of his rooks, and a quartet of his pawns, he looked at the young man and said, “Good day, is it?”

Henry was confused for a moment, thinking he meant the game, but then he realized it was him, his mood, that Bishop was commenting on. It must have been as apparent to everyone else as it was to Henry himself. “Yes,” he finally said. “It is.”

He told Bishop about everything, the VA benefits, the waiting list for transitional housing, even the cell phone.

“Phone has a camera on it, right?” Bishop asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure it does. Didn’t try it yet.”

“Well, get it out. It’s a good day for a picture.”

“This was in July?” Jen asked.

“Yes,” Nichols answered. “Just a day or two after the fourth.”

He held the flip phone open for us and we leaned in and got our first look at Bishop. I was completely unprepared for what I saw.

Bishop was happy.

I’m not sure why it came as such a shock to me. The possibility of his mirthful smile, of the cheerful exuberance shining in his eyes, of his whole face crinkled into such an expression of felicity, had not ever entered into the realm of my imagination. It seemed to me a failure of imagination on my part that made my stomach knot with sorrow.

In all of my consideration of Bishop, the only thing I had been able to imagine was pain.

“You okay?” Jen said to me. Nichols was looking at me too.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just, I didn’t expect him to seem so—” I stopped midsentence, searching for the right word. “Could you excuse me for a minute?” I got up without waiting for an answer.

In the men’s room, I splashed cold water on my face in the vain hope that if anyone else came in, they wouldn’t be able to tell I had been crying.

10

P
LASTIC PONCHO: BLUE AND GOLD
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W
/ UCLA
LOGO
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“What happened in there?” Jen asked when we were back at our desks.

“They looked happy in that picture,” I said. “Didn’t they?”

“Yes. Why is that upsetting?”

“I don’t know. Have you been imagining Bishop happy?”

“No.” Jen shook her head.

“Neither have I.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Neither do I, really.”

“Maybe,” she said, “it’s because if we think of him having been happy, then it seems like a greater loss.”

“No, I can’t accept that.”

“Why?” she asked.

“You know why. We can’t think like that. We can’t let ourselves think like that.”

“Every victim is created equal?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you work harder for happy victims?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“But that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“No, it’s not.”

“You sure about that?”

“What the fuck, Danny? You’ve been doing this even longer than I have. You know the job. Sometimes they hit you harder. But you work the case just the same.”

I didn’t say anything. She was right, of course. I wasn’t just behaving like someone who’d never worked a murder before, I was acting like I’d never even been a cop. My ability to compartmentalize had vanished. I was identifying too strongly with Bishop, and it was beginning to interfere with my objectivity.

I tried to forget about it and got back to work. Now that we had a photo, the Media Relations Detail would reach out to the public with press releases and an update on the LBPD asking for assistance with the identification. They’d set up a tip line and e-mail account to handle the incoming info. It could lead to a break.

Just as I hung up, Marty came into the squad room and plopped himself down in his chair.

“How’s Patrick doing?” I asked.

“Great,” he said. “He’s still working the scene. Kid’s got the bug. He’s gonna be fine.”

“You hungry?” Jen asked. “We’ve got some leftovers from Modica’s.”

“No, thanks. We were right around the corner from Joe Jost’s, so I grabbed a salami sandwich.”

That was Zaferia, not Cambodia Town. “Where’s your scene?” I said.

“Tenth and Ohio. Why?”

“One of our suspects lives right there. Trying to get his brother to talk to us,” Jen said.

“What’s the address?” I asked.

Marty leaned forward. “1072 Ohio.”

“Shit,” I said, looking at Jen. “That’s the front house.”

We peppered Marty with questions, and we found out that early in the morning four Latinos in a stolen Yukon had pulled over in front of the gray Craftsman, and the two on the passenger’s side had leaned out of their windows and opened fire, one with an AK and the other with an AR. On the driver’s side, another shooter climbed up and sat on the windowsill behind the driver so he could reach up and over and use the roof as a rest for his own weapon. They all had multiple jungle-clipped magazines, and the three of them kept at it long enough to fire more than two hundred rounds into the house.

Five people lived there. A husband and wife and their three children. The mother and children were in the bedrooms in the back of the house, and even though dozens of the bullets penetrated the three or four walls between them and the street, they all managed to survive. One of the little girls suffered minor injuries from either bullet fragments or some other kind of shrapnel-like debris. The father had been in the living room, just off of the porch, drinking a cup of coffee and watching a morning news show. He’d reportedly been in a good mood because his kitchen-remodeling business was finally beginning to pick up again after bottoming out with the housing crisis. Later that morning he had been scheduled to begin work on a mid-six-figure job over in Belmont Shore. It would have really turned things around for him, and he was looking forward to moving his girls into their own house again and finally being able to stop worrying about the crappy neighborhood where his daughters were spending what should have been the happiest years of their childhood.

Instead, he was shot eleven times and bled out on the living room floor in front of the flickering and slowly fading image of Matt Lauer.

“Did you talk to the people in the back house?” I asked.

“Of course,” Marty said. “Drunk woman and her little girl. How are they connected?”

“The woman has two older sons,” I said. “High-school students. One of them is in custody on the burning. The other we think was supposed to be there but got smart just in time. We’re trying to flip him.”

“Patrick didn’t make the connection yet?” Jen said. “He’s been helping us with some background.”

“Not before I left.”

I was sure I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “You have any motive on the drive-by? Any gang connections for the contractor?”

“Nothing yet.”

“This is too much of a coincidence. I think they were gunning for Jesús. The addresses are screwed up on the houses. From the street, you can’t tell which one’s 1070 and which one is 1072. They’ve got both numbers on the front. You can’t tell which is which until you get to the back and see the numbers on the porch. I only knew because I checked it out on Google Maps before we rolled.”

Marty thought about it. “So you think somebody wants to be sure this Jesús kid keeps his mouth shut?”

“If they do, this goes deeper than we thought,” Jen said. “Had to be somebody with some serious juice to call in a hit like that.”

I said what we were all thinking. “We’ve got to find Jesús.”

Patrick was still processing the murder scene when we arrived. It would take a long time to process everything. The crime-scene technicians would attempt to account for every bullet. And it was likely that they would. A scene like that takes time and patience. The neighborhood, too, was so densely packed with residents that the canvass would be daunting as well. That’s what never shows up in the movies and on the TV shows: the hours and hours spent with a laser pointer and hundreds of feet of string, calculating bullet trajectories. Or the days spent knocking on each door in a three-block radius and hearing everything from the unanswered echoes of your door-pounding fist to “I don’t know” and “Fuck you” and the unfathomable digressions about lost loves and dying puppies and that time on spring break in Mexico to push the day into unapproved overtime. Or the repetition and the mundanity and the endless details, each of which must be entertained and examined because of the very real possibility of some minute bit of information buried in all of the other noise that might be the one that makes all the difference, the one that breaks the case open, and the one that brings with it that fleeting sense of closure that is the nearest we ever really get to anything resembling justice.

Ohio Avenue was still cordoned off, so we parked on Eleventh, made our way to the corner, and badged the uniforms, and they lifted the yellow tape so we could duck underneath it. The house was four doors down.

I walked out into the middle of the street and looked at the front house again. There was a fence in front with a gate on each edge of the property and a driveway on each side. The curb numbers were next to each one—1070, the back house, on the right, and 1072, the front house, on the left. As I studied the addresses and the fence and the driveways, I tried to imagine that I’d never seen the property before. With the victim’s work truck parked on one side and obscuring the garage, it was impossible to tell which driveway and address number went with which house.

We stopped on the porch and looked inside. Patrick was in the living room talking to a crime-scene tech who was examining a bullet hole in the wall.

“Hey, guys,” he said as he turned and came to the door. “What’s up?”

“We think we might have a motive for you,” I said. We told him about Jesús and his family.

“Shit,” he said.

“Did you talk to the mother?” I asked.

“I took a statement from her.”

“You didn’t catch the name?”

“Solano?”

“Yeah.”

“No. That’s not the name she gave me.” He pulled a notepad out of his shirt pocket and thumbed through the pages. “Felicia Gonzales is what’s on the lease.”

I looked at Jen. “We know if she was married before?”

“No.” Jen thought about it. “Maybe the kids have different fathers. There’s almost a ten-year gap between Jesús and Maria.”

“I wonder if she’d have any reason to use an alias. If she was undocumented you think she might use another name to help hide the tracks?”

“Give me a few minutes.” Jen was already dialing her phone when she went out the front door.

I turned back to Patrick. “Marty gave us the rundown. Anything new come up after he left?”

“No. Just lots and lots of bullet holes.”

“How much do you have on the victim?”

“Basic background,” Patrick said. “No known gang affiliations. Neighbors all apparently liked him. He did handyman stuff for the old couple next door for free.”

“I think they were gunning for Jesús.”

He considered that. “Makes sense. You didn’t know this place, it would be easy to get the addresses confused.”

“I’ll talk to Ruiz. We should be working these together.”

“You’re right.” He held his laser pointer out to me. “Want to help me record bullet trajectories?”

I looked at the device in his hand. It didn’t look like any I’d seen before. “Is that a miniature lightsaber?”

His face fell in disappointment. “If you have to ask,” he said with a sigh worthy of an exasperated Wookiee.

As soon as I got outside, I dialed Jesús’s number, but the call went straight to his voice mail. I left a message asking him to call as soon as he could and then sent a text saying the same thing.

Jen was on her phone too, searching for information on Mrs. Solano/Gonzales.

I made three more calls, all requests. The first, for a BOLO to be put out on Jesús; the second, for a meeting with Pedro Solano; and the last to get the ball rolling for a court order to obtain Jesús’s cell-phone records.

“They’re all documented,” Jen told me in the car a few minutes later. “And Solano is her first ex-husband’s name. Gonzales is the second husband. Apparently, they’re still legally married, but she’s gone back to “Solano” to match the kids’ name. And she’s the only one who has official standing with the school district. He’s not allowed to pick up the kids.”

I’d been talking to the uniforms while she was on the phone. “Nobody knows where she went. She was told it would probably be a day or two before she could get back in the house.”

“We have a cell number for her?”

“Not yet.”

Jen made another call.

I took us down Long Beach Boulevard and turned west on Third. But instead of turning into the LBPD lot, I continued to Ocean.

Jen pulled the phone away from her ear. “We’re not going back to the squad?”

“I want to look at something.”

She had seen enough of my spur-of-the-moment distractions and digressions to give me some slack, and she went back to her conversation.

A few minutes later, we pulled into Palm Beach Park, the place where Nichols and Bishop used to meet to play chess.