Deadly Lullaby (29 page)

After cruising by the Stop for a leisurely beer and a burger, I drive home to prepare for some night work. Considering the grueling nine hours I put in with Elana last night, said preparation begins with me calling dispatch to go 10-7, then crashing on my recliner for a power nap. I am out of it for almost two hours, out so cold my arms and legs are numb when I snap awake. I work the blood back into my limbs, haul myself up, and take a quick shower, finishing it off with a blast of cold water. Two Tylenol and two ibuprofens later, I dress in what I think of as my surveillance clothes: blue Taclite cargo pants and a plain blue T-shirt, black, lightweight tactical boots. After lacing up my boots, I walk into the kitchen to see what messages await me. After two hours of 10-7, it would be a true miracle if no one has tried to reach me.

No miracles tonight.

There, on the counter, the message light on my MDT is blinking. I boot the screen, and among emails regarding other cases is one from Abel with a document attached. The email heading says, “Call data from Mystery Driver's phone.” One of the five phone companies Abel served with a subpoena responded. Abel's message says, “Big surprise: The driver's number was to a disposable phone sold by MetroPCS. No account name. Call all the numbers on the attached list we got from Metro. Don't write it off as a long shot.”

That MetroPCS is the cell provider makes sense. Metro is a local company that's known for providing cheap burners off the rack in discount stores and other retail outlets. This I know because I buy Metro burners at the Albertsons on Sunset. You can buy a cheap one for about thirty bucks that comes loaded with fifty minutes of airtime, and you don't have to provide your name for the account. Burn up the minutes on one, toss it and grab another. Savvy crooks use burners religiously, and the practice makes it tough to track down a crook's identity when you come upon a suspicious cellphone number in the course of an investigation. As Abel suggests, the only way to track down the identity of a disposable cell user is to call the other numbers the user both dialed and received, then question whoever answers. I decide to make the calls once I locate the stash house Monique told me about, and have nothing else to do while I stake it out. I forward Abel's email to my personal email then go downstairs to print the data sheet from my PC.

Finally, out the door I go, calling dispatch to go 10-8 after saddling up in my cruiser.

Monique told me the stash house in question doubles as a plumbing company on a numbered street in the vicinity of the Pueblo Del Rio housing project. It doesn't take me long to find the best candidate—the only candidate, really. The 'hood for about twenty square blocks around the Pueblo Del Rio is one of the most blighted in LA. The biggest employers around are gangs, providing direct interfaces to opportunities in crime—mostly drug-dealing jobs that will allow you to progress from the street corner to the penthouse if you hustle, play it smart, and manage to stay alive. The latter part of this formula for success is rarely achieved, considering that a street hood's life expectancy is less than a third of your average LA resident. So there aren't enough successful drug dealers living in this 'hood to support plumbing-service companies; all the other residents would rather buy food than pay somebody to unclog their toilets, and plumbing-service companies abandoned the area long ago.

The nearest thing to a plumbing company on a numbered street is a plumbing wholesale supplier at Fifty-Third and Malabar, two long blocks east of the Pueblo Del Rio in a rundown light-industrial area. There's an HVAC company on the other side of Pacific at Fiftieth, but its lights are doused and the premises show zero sign of human life. When I approached the Fifty-Third Street location from the rear alley, the thing that seals the deal for me are the two men and a forklift moving about the yard, which is dimly lit. What nails it is the sign out front on Fifty-Third: “Malabar Wholesale Plumbing Supply,” and it is printed in maroon letters on a gray background.

Being an experienced and highly trained sleuth, after analyzing this final clue I deduced this just might be Khang's stash house.

I find a perfect surveillance perch in the dark alley—the parking lot of an abandoned ornamental-iron works. There is a slip behind a corrugated-steel fence where I nudged against an outbuilding in the shadows, a dark spot with a narrow but direct line of sight to my surveillance target. I'm not invisible here, but you'd have to be looking for me to see me. After parking, I scoped the plumbing-supply company with infrared binoculars. It's a two-building complex that fronts on Fifty-Third, two buildings from the corner at Pacific. The concrete building that fronts Fifty-Third has to be the company's administration building. To the left of this building is another, much larger corrugated-steel structure with a mechanical door tall and wide enough to allow two tractor-trailers to enter side by side. This has to be the warehouse where plumbing supplies, fixtures, and equipment—and hopefully, dope—are stored. The complex has a chain-link fence erected along its sides that's topped with concertina wire. The alley gate is chain-link, topped with concertina, and has concrete block abutments constructed at either end of it. The gate is manned by a chubby Asian male who I first tag the Marlboro Man because he chain-smokes; I soon shorten it to M & M to fit the way he's dressed in the prevailing gangsta style—baggy sweat suit and bandana topped with a ball cap turned sideways, all of his clothes repping the color red, the color OLB members fly.

Now that I've been here for about five minutes and settle in, I decide to start calling phone numbers the mystery driver made and received on his disposable cell. I clip the hard copy of the MetroPCS data sheet on the clipboard mounted next to my MDT and think through my strategy. Other than steamrolling whoever answers my calls and risk alienating them by saying,
“Hello, I'm a cop. Please give me the name of the person who called you from the following number,”
there's only one digestible story I can feed them: I've found an expensive cellphone and I'm dialing numbers listed in its call history in an effort to find the owner. Since the reason people use burners to begin with is to remain anonymous, those associated with the user generally just hang up on my ass without saying squat. Sometimes, though, a food-delivery joint or a dry cleaners or a jilted lover will cooperate and connect a face or name to the number. These cold calls are labor intensive and the constant rejections make me feel like a magazine telemarketer. This is pure shit work, and the best way to get it done is to just hold your nose and dive in. I grit my teeth and get to it.

There are three days' worth of calls listed on the data sheet MetroPCS provided, twenty-two of them, totaling fifty minutes, more or less the standard amount of air time you want loaded on an off-the-rack burner. Make more than fifty minutes of calls from the same number and people start connecting the number to your face or your name. The numbers are listed in reverse chronological order: a phone number in the far left column, followed by the date and time in the next column, followed by the designation “called” or “received,” followed by a twelve-digit identification number that represents the cell tower that routed the call directly to or from the driver's cell. I decide to start with the number the mystery driver dialed first after activating the phone, working forward to the last call he made, about twenty minutes or so after Sonita's estimated time of death. From my glove box I withdraw a new burner I bought at Albertsons on the way over, flip it open and dial the number.

There's an answer almost right away, a male speaking loudly to compete with all the clatter and urgent voices in the background. His voice is rushed and high-pitched, and his words run together and bounce all over the place in a distinct Indian or Pakistani accent: “Good evening The Original North End Pizzeria please how may I help you please.”

I give the guy my spiel: “Yes, hi, I'm Marvin Ford. I found an expensive iPhone today in my store, and I'm calling for help in finding the owner. It's out of power now, but I copied its call list before it died. The call list indicates the phone's owner called you two days ago at one forty-two in the afternoon. Would you mind checking your records to see if you—”

“Are you shitting me you must be shitting me for I know nothing about a lost fucking phone only that I am too busy for this shitting you are giving me.
Shit.
”

Click.

Wow. Never have I heard so many words used to express a single thought that, in the final analysis, could have been expressed in three:
Go to hell.

If there's one thing I hate, it's getting hung up on by a wiseass. Normally I'd call him back and employ the steamroller approach times ten, but I won't in this instance because I know where to find him. We'll see how many words this asshole uses tomorrow when I drop by The Original North End Pizzeria and hit him between the eyes with my badge.

Taking a cleansing breath to steel myself, I dial the next number.

“Babe,
Babe,
wake up. One of your phones is ringing.”

Opening my eyes from a restful sleep, I find Maggie snuggled next to me on the sofa. My last waking memory is of us watching the cornfield assassination scene from the movie
Goodfellas
play out on my flat-screen. Clearing my throat, I say, “Which phone?”

Rubbing sleep from her eyes, she reaches over me to the coffee table and snatches the offending phone, holding it up for me to inspect.

Damn, it is the red disposable Samsung flip-top I use to communicate with Joe Sacci and his crew. Joe is probably calling and I have no desire to talk to him. I will talk to him, though, of this I am certain. When my phone rings, like Pavlov's dog I am irresistibly compelled to answer it—a result, no doubt, of my seventeen years of institutionalization, of reacting to the incessant bells and horns that mark the various landmarks of an inmate's day.

I take the phone from Maggie, flip it open, and say, “Hello?”

“Yeah, hello, my name is Marvin Ford. I found an expensive iPhone today in my store, and I'm calling for help in finding—”

Sighing relief, I say,
“No hablo Ingles. El numero incorrecto,”
and flip the top shut.

Click.

“You wiseass,” I say under my breath. “You can speak English fine.”

If there's one thing I hate more than getting hung up on by a wiseass, it's getting hung up on in midsentence by a wiseass who insults my intelligence in the process.

Nothing to lose by meeting this situation with brute force—time for the steamroller approach

“I'll show you, you wiseass,” I say, and redial the number.

“Babe, don't answer it if it makes you angry. Just let it ring.”

Cellphone in hand, I look at Maggie. “I have no choice,” I say. “I will explain later, but it is a prison thing.”

“What does
prison
have to do with—”

“Shush,” I say, and flip the top open again.

“¡Hola!”

“Hey, this is the guy who called a few minutes ago.
Don't
hang up on me. Just listen. My real name is Detective Leonardo Crucci. Sorry to give you another name earlier but I'm a Los Angeles police detective involved in a murder investigation. So don't hang up and don't give me that
¡Hola!
crap. I know you speak English because your Spanish accent sucks. Now, who am I speaking with?”

“…”

“Hello?…Damn it, don't you
dare
hang—”

Click.

“Sonofa
bitch
!”

“What's wrong?” Maggie says.

Stunned mute from shock and confusion, my throat dry, I wipe my mouth and say, “That was Leo.”

Maggie scrunches her eyebrows, now more confused than me. “And you hung up on him without saying a word?”

“Yes.”

“What did he want with you?”

“He was not calling me.”

She sighs, leans back on the sofa, crosses her legs, and places her hands in her lap. As if speaking to a retarded kid, she says, “Sweetie, are you telling me that you hung up on your son simply because he called you by mistake?”

Her condescension irritates me. “In a sense, yes, but not in the same sense you are thinking.” I display the cell to her. “You see,
Maggie,
I have never given Leo the number to this disposable phone. I only use this to communicate with Joe Sacci and his crew. Leo said—”

Interrupting me with a show of her palm and slowly shaking her head, saddened and dismayed by my display of low intelligence, she says, “Have you considered that maybe you accidentally called him from that phone, and that he has that number mixed up with another one?”

“No, I have not considered that. It feels like something else is going on here, and it does not feel right. Why, I cannot say exactly, but the first time Leo called he said—”

I get her palm again. “Wait,” she says to her lap before glaring at me. “You mean that was him calling the first time the phone rang, too?”

“Yes, that time he said—”

The phone rings again.

Maggie throws her head against the couch cushion, closes her eyes and talks to the ceiling. “
Please
just answer it, Babe, and be yourself this time. Your mind gets
so
twisted in knots when it comes to Leo.” She opens her eyes and turns her head to me. “Try being a father to him. Try being
honest
with him.”

“Easy for you to say,” I say, and answer the fucking phone.

“Leo?”

“
Detective Crucci
to you, pal. You've got a lot of nerve hanging up on a—”

“Leo, this is your father you are talking to. You know, John Leonardo Crucci?”

“…”

“Yeah, that was my reaction when you told me who you were the second time you called. Where did you get this number? And why the Marvin Ford and lost-phone crap?”

“I still can't believe I'm talking to you….You won't believe it either once I explain all of this. Look, I'll answer all your questions and more, but you have to do something for me first.”

“What?”

“Look at the call list on the phone you're using and tell me who called you two days ago at two thirty-three in the afternoon.”

“The afternoon after we went to, well, you know, in the morning?”

“Right.”

“Hang on…hang on…All right, I found it, but the number is unfamiliar to me….Wait, at that time I was at the Little Tokyo Hotel with the whor—um,
ahem,
lovely ladies I told you I had arranged for me and you and…Yeah, now I remember. Michael Fecarotta called and woke me up. Joe had him call to get me to come down the hall for a meeting with him and Donsky.”

“…”

“Leo.”

“Does Fecarotta drive Joe around?”

“Yes.”

“Is he a short, muscular guy with slicked-back hair? Middle Eastern features?”

“Yes.”

“…”

“Leo, I answered two more questions than I said I would. Now you have to answer mine. You can start by, you know, telling me what the
fuck
is going on?”

“The answer to that question has so many angles to it you may not want to hear it. But I'm going to tell you anyway because I don't know who else to tell. To give you an overall snapshot of it, Michael Fecarotta could damn well be a murderer.”

“This does not constitute a news bulletin to me. Who might he have murdered?”

“The Cam—
Shit
…Look, I have to go
now.
”

“Why?”

“I'm on a stakeout, and something's going down. I'll call you in a few minutes when I figure out what it is. We need to talk in person to figure out what to do about Fecarotta. Bye.”

“Do not wait too long to call me—”

Click.