Flat Spin (37 page)

I agreed that Woodley’s tip defied plausibility. But under the circumstances, I said, the LAPD was compelled to check it out. “Somebody calls up to report they know where a murder suspect is holed up, the police department ignores it and he kills somebody else, that’s not gonna go over too big with John Q. Public or city hall.”

“Must be hard being right all the time,” Czarnek said.

“You have no idea.”

T
WENTY-TWO

I
f Buddhists are correct that less is more, then clearly there were no Buddhists among the LAPD tacticians who planned the raid that afternoon on the house where Marvis Woodley asserted that Arlo Echevarria’s killer had taken refuge. Six uniformed officers in helmets and tactical vests covered two others who snuck through the alley and into the backyard. Glass shattered as the pair in back smashed windows to distract the suspect inside. This was followed immediately by more than a dozen other officers armed with pistols, shotguns and assault rifles who breeched the door with a handheld battering ram and rushed in shouting the usual cop stuff. At Alpha, we would’ve made entry with four operators, max. And without all the annoying yelling.

Savannah, Marvis Woodley, and I looked on with Czarnek and his partner, Windhauser, from behind the detectives’ unmarked Crown Victoria, which was parked in front of Marvis’s house. Others in the neighbors watched, too, people of color, mostly, standing on their porches with their arms folded.

Czarnek pressed his cell phone to his ear, waiting for word that the suspect had been taken in custody. His forehead and armpits were wet even though it wasn’t hot outside and he was in shirtsleeves. He was giving his anti-smoking gum a workout. His partner gnawed on a toothpick.

“This better be the guy,” Windhauser said. “I ain’t got time for this bullshit.”

“Trust me,” Marvis said, “it’s the guy.”

The guy had been sitting on the toilet in a glazed euphoria, the syringe needle he’d stolen from his diabetic grandmother still stuck between his toes, when the men in blue came barging in. Startled into something approaching lucidity by all the yelling and breaking of glass, he made what police call a “furtive move” toward a serrated steak knife that he’d used to cut the bottom off a Diet Pepsi can, which he’d then used to mix the heroin, on which he’d been orbiting the planet. For his trouble, he received two barbed electrodes to the neck and a 50,000-volt hello–how-do-you-do, courtesy of Taser International, Inc.

Two patrolmen dragged the dazed suspect, handcuffed and still naked, out of the house and into the back of a black and white.

“That’s him, that’s the dude!” Woodley said.

Czarnek and Windhauser strode toward the patrol unit. Savannah started to go with them.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Windhauser said to her.

“I just want to look at him,” she said.

“You’re not looking at anybody. Get back behind the car.”

“C’mon, John,” Czarnek said, “if she was your wife . . .”

“I’m senior lead on this case and I say she stays put.” Little angry globs of spittle shot from Windhauser’s lips as he spoke. He turned toward Savannah. “Get back behind the vehicle. Now. Do you understand?”

“You’re being a dick for no reason,Windhauser.” I said. “All the lady wants to do is look the man in the face who may have shot her husband, though we both know that’s highly unlikely.”

“She’s obstructing a police investigation. And so are you.”

“Nobody’s obstructing anything. What if, miracle of miracles, it is the guy? What if she’s seen him before and can positively ID him? But you didn’t think of that, did you, Joe Friday, because thinking requires a brain and the LAPD by all indications didn’t issue you one of those.”

The wishbone vein in Windhauser’s forehead bulged like rope. Did he not know that hypertension is America’s silent killer?

“Fuck you, Logan.”

“That’s all you got?
Fuck you, Logan
? C’mon, Detective, where’s the creativity? How about, ‘Fuck you, Logan, and everybody who looks like you.’ Or, ‘Click your heels together three times, Logan, and go fuck yourself.’ Or—”

“Whatever!” Windhauser seethed. “She wants to eyeball him, I could give a shit. But you stay put, or I
will
arrest you for obstruction.” He motioned impatiently for Savannah to follow him. “Let’s go. I don’t got all day.”

She rewarded me with an appreciative smile and tagged after the detectives. The kind of smile that makes a man want to do handstands and sing Barry Manilow songs. If I were that kind of man.

“What about me?” Marvis said. “I was the one who saw him first.”

“C’mon,” Czarnek said.

Marvis jogged to catch up with the detectives. “It’s him,” he kept saying. “I
know
it is.”

It wasn’t, as it turned out. Not by a mile.

A
quick background check determined that the junkie Marvis Woodley identified as Arlo Echevarria’s killer was a recidivist named Nicholas Sulak who’d racked up so many priors that clerks at the LAPD’s Records and Identification Division had to install a new toner cartridge to print out all seventeen pages of his arrest record. None of Sulak’s close encounters with Johnny Law factored much as far as Echevarria’s murder was concerned, with one noteworthy exception: nine months before Echevarria was gunned down, Sulak was picked up in Riverside for lifting a pack of cotton balls and two cans of Hormel chili from a mom and pop bodega. He was two weeks out of prison. Rather than trifle with misdemeanor shoplifting charges, county prosecutors had kicked his case to state authorities, who promptly revoked Sulak’s parole. On the night of Echevarria’s death, Sulak was in his cell at medium-security Wasco State Prison, 125 miles away. He would not be released for another two weeks. There was no way he could’ve shot Echevarria.

Czarnek emerged from the house holding the pistol Sulak had allegedly pointed at Woodley. The weapon was found buried under a pile of filthy clothes. Closer inspection determined that it was a squirt gun.

“Our captain’s gonna want to know why we committed half of Valley Bureau day watch to nab some fucking hype with a squirt gun.”

“Tell him what Friedrich von Schiller once said: ‘He that is overcautious will accomplish little.’”

“Who’s Friedrich von Schiller?”

“German writer. Big
Sturm und Drang
guy. Invented potato pancakes.”

“I thought it was the guy,” Marvis kept saying.

“Fucking ridiculous,” Windhauser said. He climbed in on the driver’s side of the Crown Vic and slammed the door. “You coming or what?” he yelled at Czarnek.

“Gimme a minute.”

There was no statute of limitations on homicide, Czarnek told Savannah. The LAPD still had leads to pursue and would continue to work the case vigorously until it was solved.

“That’s a lie,” Savannah said, “and you know it.”

The other police cars were starting to pull out. “I’ll let you know as soon as anything breaks,” Czarnek said.

“I’m sure you will,” she responded derisively.

Czarnek watched her walk with Marvis Woodley back to his house.

“Good lord,” he said, “that is one gorgeous creature.”

“So was Medusa.”

Czarnek said he would continue to explore the Bondarenko connection, but conceded that the pace of the investigation might be even further slowed. With gang violence exploding in the San Fernando Valley, every detective was working overtime, juggling more cases than they could handle. It didn’t help, he said, that normally knowledgeable street sources within Los Angeles’ Russian émigré community professed to know nothing about the murder of either Bondarenko or Echevarria. I asked him if he’d looked into Harry Ramos’ possible involvement in the case.

“Harry Ramos?”

“Janice Echevarria’s second husband. He was on a business trip to Kazakhstan when I talked to her.”

“Oh, yeah, him. Yeah, he’s supposed to call us when he gets back to San Fran.”

“Let’s go already, for Chrissake,” Windhauser said. “I gotta eat before I pass out.”

“He’s hypoglycemic,” Czarnek explained.

Windhauser glared at me. “You get any other big leads, do us all a favor. Keep ‘em to yourself.”

“I assume this means we won’t be taking any warm showers together anytime soon.”

“You got a bad attitude, Logan, you know that?”

“Better a bad attitude than delusions of adequacy, Detective.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I just smiled. Czarnek tried not to.

Windhauser grumbled something nasty under his breath and threw the car into gear. The two detectives sped off like they were late for the early bird special at T.G.I. Friday’s.

Come to think of it, I was starting to get a little hungry myself.

S
avannah was sitting beside Marvis Woodley on his sofa. He shook his head side to side and kept looking down at his hands, rubbing them together.

“I could’ve sworn it was him.”

The hype the LAPD hauled off looked exactly like the man who’d breezed past his window the night Echevarria was killed, Woodley said. All he’d ever wanted to do was square things with Arlo, make amends for all those lies he told him. And now this. Woodley looked like he was about to cry. Rambo rested his furry little head on his master’s foot. Man’s best friend. You can be Saddam Hussein and your dog will love you, regardless. Unlike certain cats.

“You did nothing wrong,” Savannah assured him. “You were just trying to help. Arlo would’ve done the same for you.”

“He told me he wanted to move out of Los Angeles,” Marvis said. “That teacher who got shot the week before over on the next block was the last straw for him. He told me if he ever had the money, he was gonna buy himself his own island up in Washington or somewhere like that and live on it the rest of his life.” Marvis wiped the wetness from his eyes. “I told him, I says, ‘Fool, you can’t live on no island all by yourself. No man can.’ And you know what he says to me? He says, ‘Marvis, I’d live there with my wife if she’d ever take me back.’”

Savannah’s chin quivered. “Arlo really said that?”

“Every word.”

I rolled my eyes.

He and Echevarria had eaten dinner together the night he died, Marvis said. Chinese food delivered from Johnny Wang’s Golden Dragon Asian Bistro, the same joint on Sherman Way where they ordered in for dinner every week or so. Egg rolls, kung pao beef, twice-cooked pork, pork fried rice. They washed all the MSG down with a pint of Jameson and still had room for fortune cookies. Marvis’s fortune that night had been worth saving, he said. He dug the slip of paper out of his wallet and handed it to Savannah. She read it aloud:

“You will meet a man named Wright. He is often wrong.”

Marvis chuckled. “Wright and wrong. Can you believe that?” Then he began to blubber about how he was probably the last man to have seen Echevarria alive. Soon Savannah was blubbering, too.

I went outside and called Mrs. Schmulowitz to see how she and Kiddiot were doing. A “nice young man” from the insurance company had already been by, she said. He’d informed her that a big check would be mailed to her within two weeks so she could begin rebuilding the garage, Mrs. Schmulowitz said. She’d decided to bake a German chocolate cake in celebration. This brought us to Kiddiot who, she said, was doing more than fine in my absence.

“He got up on the counter and helped himself to a big slice of cake. What kind of crazy
meshuggener
cat likes German chocolate cake?”

“At least he’s eating.”

I told her I’d be back in Rancho Bonita that afternoon to take him off her hands. No rush, Mrs. Schmulowitz said. She and Kiddiot were getting along fine. She repeated her offer to let me use her sofa, but I’d already inconvenienced her enough, I told her. Mrs. Schmulowitz, however, refused to take no for an answer. She launched into a long dissertation about how her first husband had met a bum on the subway in Brooklyn and insisted that they take him in for a few days until the bum could get on his feet, and how he turned out to be a thief who stole Mrs. Schmulowitz’s silver. There was a beep on my phone. Another call coming in. Mrs. Schmulowitz kept droning on obliviously about how the bum refused to leave after taking one bite of her famous blintzes and my phone kept beeping and Mrs. Schmulowitz kept talking until finally I interjected and told her that I would be happy to finish listening to her story when I saw her in person—“OK, I gotta go, Mrs. Schmulowitz”—and signed off.