Ghettoside (27 page)

In between, she returned home from time to time. Her grandparents still lived stable, homebound lives. Her mother was raising her little girl. At one point, she enrolled in continuation school and was proud to be elected class secretary. But men always found Midkiff. There had been so many boyfriends-cum-pimps, so many beatings, girl fights, and rapes at gunpoint, so many misdemeanor arrests, that her prostitution years had a kaleidoscopic quality. Only she could keep it straight.

She slept all day and was up all night for years, her life a blur of shared motel rooms and fleeting, intense friendships that often ended in rancor. By the time she was twenty-one, she had never held a job, could barely read, and had no ability to conduct relationships with any maturity or control. She was brittle and constantly flew into rages. She had frequent fights with other women. And she suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder that prompted anxiety attacks. Memories would sweep over her at unexpected moments, as real as if happening anew, the pain rivaling that of childbirth, she said.

One night, someone dropped her off on Lincoln Boulevard, another down-and-out open-air market. She was at the end. She asked a shopkeeper for change to use a pay phone. Instead, the man gave her sixty
or seventy bucks and a ride. For once she received help from someone who asked for nothing in return. With his help she reunited with her mother, who took her in. A short while later she enrolled in the Mary Magdalene Project in the San Fernando Valley, a residential charity focused on treating prostitution like an addiction. Midkiff loved the program. But she fought with another woman and was ejected.

She came back to her mother’s house in South Central, in the neighborhood of the Rollin’ Hundreds Bloccs. As always, she drew male attention. One day walking back from a nail shop on Western and Imperial to her grandparents’ house, she met a gangster she knew named “Thump.” He had a light-skinned friend with him. The friend had massive shoulders and a cupid’s-bow mouth. Derrick Starks had gotten out of jail that April 3.

They talked. A sheriff’s patrol car swooped in. Deputies put them all in handcuffs, and searched them. They let Midkiff go but made the two men sit in the cruiser. The pair joked with the deputies—“You messed up our game!”

Derrick Starks would return to pull “his game” on Midkiff three days later as she was walking to the store. She was reluctant to give him her number. “But you can’t really be too mean about it ’cause you don’t know what to expect,” she later told Skaggs. Midkiff was accustomed to romance shot through with mortal fear; she thought little of it. Shortly after, she “hooked up” with him.

Midkiff’s story was typical of south end prostitutes, that is, it was sordid, dramatic, and monotonous. Such stories always seemed to begin the same way—with a rape or molestation in childhood—and to end with an aging prostitute accepting ever-lowlier tricks to feed a drug addiction. At the end of the line harrowed-looking homeless women with missing teeth wandered the streets, offering blow jobs in alleys.

But Midkiff was atypical in some ways. Skaggs was beginning to see this. For one thing, she was not a junkie. Midkiff was a chain-smoker and binge drinker. But observing her over the next few hours, Skaggs felt sure she was not a regular user of cocaine or methamphetamine.

She appeared bright despite her lack of formal education. “I can tell you are not a malicious person,” she told Skaggs at one point. And she had an excellent memory.

What Skaggs couldn’t see was that Midkiff actually was at one of those rare crossroads in life. She was telling the truth: she wanted to change, but she didn’t know how. There would be no storybook ending for her. But this interview was a turning point. It would change everything for both of them.

“Code Four here!”

Skaggs was back in the squad room talking to one of his bureau colleagues on the cell phone during a break, his tone light with relief. He snapped the phone shut and surveyed his colleagues hovering nearby. One was readying six-packs—photo lineups for Jessica to identify the suspects. Another prepared to take Jessica out for a cigarette.

Prideaux also lingered. He had remained in the background, enduring spasms of anxiety as Skaggs spoke to Midkiff. By now, Prideaux knew he had made the right decision in selecting Skaggs for the case. He orbited the tall detective and waited for an opening.

“Hey John, you need anything?” Prideaux finally asked. He spoke with forced lightness. But his voice held a deferential note. Anyone listening would have thought Skaggs, not Prideaux, the superior officer.

“No, L.T.!” Skaggs told him. Securing Midkiff’s cooperation was game-changing, Skaggs knew he was in the home stretch.

There is little celebrating in homicide units. Even La Barbera and his crew, long known for irreverence that bordered on inappropriateness, did not generally high-five each other or appear jubilant when they solved cases. They indulged in pranks and black humor, and they posed every year for a grisly homicide-themed Christmas card from the unit—a faux crime scene with a dead Santa, for example. But day to day, homicide remained just too depressing to permit much gaiety in their ranks. Detectives walked out of meetings with suspects, witnesses,
and survivors looking somber and spent no matter how well the interviews had gone. Grim faces accompanied even the most dramatic investigative triumphs. It wasn’t an affectation, it was a natural reaction to the cloud of agony that emanated from the Monster.

One could never feel good about solving a case. No sense of a mission accomplished could minimize the horror. Bryant’s death, no matter what the detectives did, would remain sickening and unspeakably sad to everyone who had dealt with the case, forever after.

So although Prideaux had been waiting for weeks for this moment—waiting to see Skaggs emerge from a key interview with a look of success—he allowed himself just two words to express his feelings:

“Good job,” he muttered.

Skaggs reflexively dropped his voice to match Prideaux’s.

“Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “It worked out.”

Up until then, Skaggs had betrayed no emotion about the favorable turn the case had taken. But the tactful respect in Prideaux’s voice seemed to catch him off guard.

Skaggs emitted a small sigh. Then he repeated his own words in a murmur, as if reassuring himself. “It worked out.”

That evening stretched for hours. Skaggs interviewed Midkiff in detail, then drove her past the crime scene. He searched her mother’s house. He became more and more certain that she was telling the truth. He was astonished by how well she remembered the sequence of events seven months before. He tested her, pretending he didn’t know certain details so that she would supply them. He lied to her, telling her he had a conflicting statement from another occupant in the car. He wanted to see if she would improvise.

But she was unshakable. She stuck to her story. After her initial flurries of tears and anxiety attacks, Midkiff settled down and answered each question in a sad, matter-of-fact voice. She labored to find exactly the right terms and paused frequently to remember. When she couldn’t, she said so and apologized.

She nailed everything. Skaggs could not find any holes. Her descriptions
matched everything they already knew: the direction and location of the Suburban, the description of the shooter, his clothes, the style of gun, the number of shots. Skaggs finally tried accusing her of lying. She just wept, said “Well?” and kept repeating her story.

Skaggs had dealt with many people in his career with histories like Midkiff’s. Prostitutes tended to be among the most dysfunctional people in the street environment, their problems intractable, their unreliability profound. But later, Skaggs would say that Jessica Midkiff was the only homicide witness he had ever interviewed who told the same story at every stage of the investigation and trial without a single detail changed, or a detectable lie.

It went against all his expectations but again confirmed Rick Gordon’s doctrine. This jittery young prostitute with her cutesy affectations, angel tattoo, and bare feet would turn out to be the best witness Skaggs ever had.

As the night had gone on, Skaggs had extracted from Midkiff a detailed version of the broad outline she had told him at the beginning of their meeting. Midkiff said that she and Derrick Starks had spent the night before Bryant’s murder in a motel called the Desert Inn on Century Boulevard. Neither had their own apartment. They stayed in cheap motels at least four times a week, sleeping late and drifting into the next day’s activities. These usually involved hanging out with Starks’s friends, the Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips. Members would “come outside and drink and party—that’s what they do,” she told Skaggs.

Jessica had wanted to drive Starks’s black Suburban that day. She wasn’t sure of the time. But she knew it wasn’t morning—they were never up by morning. She was at the wheel when Starks got a call. He directed her to a spot on 111th Street to pick up two acquaintances wearing dark hoodies. Devin Davis was “hyped … antsy,” she said. She thought he was disturbed. But she did not get a good look. “Derrick would not let me stare at his friends too long,” she explained to Skaggs. “I would get in trouble, like, ‘Oh you wanna fuck my homeys?’ ”

In the car, Davis taunted the quieter young man in the backseat: “You ain’t no real crippin,” he taunted. “You ain’t no real man, you ain’t
ready to put in no work!” Starks was playing the same Crip song over and over on the car stereo. Davis gave her directions. They went down a side street. Starks turned down the music.

Davis told her to stop the car. Midkiff knew she was not allowed to obey another man. She waited until Starks echoed the command, then parked. Davis said: “I’m gonna go hang up some business.”

Midkiff turned and saw him reposition a handgun in his waistband. The teenagers hopped out. She watched them glide into the eastbound street, out of sight. She sat in front with Starks. She had believed it was just another of Starks’s outings. She had thought he was going to get girls for the two teenagers, find them weed, or buy liquor for them. But now, glimpsing the gun, she was alarmed. “What do you have me in?” she demanded. “I don’t have you in nothin’!” he snapped.

Midkiff pleaded to be allowed to go home. Then, through the closed windows of the car, she heard
—pow … pow, pow
.

Davis said, “Go go go go
go
!” when they jumped in the car. After Starks yanked her into the passenger seat, Davis was “amped up” and bragging. “I’m proper!” he said. Starks hushed him and turned the music up. That night, they stayed in the motel again. A few days later, Midkiff was again in the Suburban with Starks when some rivals from the vicinity of the 80s spotted them. The gang rivals chased them, seeking retaliation. Starks crashed the car and got arrested. Midkiff gave the CHP officer an alias, using her aunt’s name.

Midkiff’s obedience to Starks was robotic by her account. He did not trust her, she said, and did not share his plans with her. But he expected blind obedience, and he mostly got it by merely implying the violence of which Midkiff knew he was capable. “Pretty much whatever he said, it went,” Midkiff told Skaggs. “He is way bigger than what I am. He choked me out once till I damn near passed out … I’m not gonna sit there and go, Well, where the hell are we going? Because every time I get a smart mouth, I catch it. I fight back, but he is still a man and I am a small female.”

She was five-one and weighed 113 pounds. Starks was of average height but strong and fit, with massive shoulders; he’d played football.

She’d not known they were headed to do a shooting. But even if she knew, “I’m not gonna ask him, just because I don’t want to catch it. And I know that might be
punk
or whatever. But I don’t want to get beat up.”

She claimed she didn’t know that someone died in the shooting. Skaggs challenged her on this point repeatedly. But in the end, her confusion convinced him.

There were scores and scores of gunshots fired in South L.A. that barely registered in the outside world. The events of May 11 didn’t stand out for Midkiff because she considered it just another shooting of the type that happened “usually,” as she put it.

“I know shots went off,” she told Skaggs. But “people usually can shoot a lot and not hit somebody. Especially gang-bangers.”

The man in the wheelchair had told Gordon and Skaggs that Midkiff was “a good girl,” which she was not, in the conventional sense. But she was not a gang member. Starks viewed her as “a weak link.” He shushed Davis because he didn’t want her to know what was happening. He didn’t trust her, she said.

He was right not to.

Midkiff had no appetite for murder. When Skaggs told her of Bryant Tennelle’s death, she wept. “I feel bad behind it,” she said. “That’s wrong. I can see my mother thinking about me if I get laid out. Or if my child gets laid out.”

At last, Skaggs asked her to testify in court. “I don’t even care about me anymore, I’ll do it,” Midkiff said. She began to cry again, worried her family would be killed. “They’ll do it!” she told Skaggs.

He told her that he would be scared, too, if it were him.