Ghettoside (33 page)

His prosecuting partner was a younger attorney named John Colello, compact, with a buzz cut, a small chin, and blue eyes a little too close together. Colello was organized and goal-oriented. Skaggs approved of their partnership. Colello and Stirling were fire and water, and reminded him of himself and Barling: they always agreed on a lead for their cases, and they also argued about everything without antagonism.

Stirling was the lead in the Tennelle case and he was most worried about the case against Derrick Starks. Starks hadn’t confessed. He hadn’t fired the gun. He hadn’t even seen the killing. The case against him rested heavily on the testimony of Midkiff and the fact that Davis’s confession and other witness statements corroborated each other in so many details. But Midkiff might have reason to lie. She had a long criminal record. She might be unlikely to elicit a jury’s trust.

Early on, a committee in the DA’s office had declined to seek a death sentence. Their reasons, though unstated, were not hard to surmise. Davis, the triggerman in the killing, was a juvenile. Starks, who, as an adult, would have been the one eligible for the death penalty, was tied to the killing by more tenuous strands of intent. And he never got out of the car.

For all his confidence, Skaggs also knew that much work remained on the Tennelle case, so he immersed himself in trial preparations.

His first problem was Jessica Midkiff. From the moment Midkiff said she was willing to talk in the basement of the Seventy-seventh Street station, it was clear she would never again be able to return to her grandparents’ home. But she was the kind of marginal person who
could barely function outside the ghettoside world. She had never held a job. She stayed up all night and slept all morning, and got blind drunk on occasion. With her big tattoo and coquettish manners, she drew disreputable men wherever she went.

The detective got relocation funds to pay for a hotel stay of several weeks. Midkiff at first seemed settled. She brought her five-year-old daughter to visit and let her swim in the hotel pool—a rare treat for the little girl. But after about six weeks, Skaggs got a call from the hotel manager, complaining that Midkiff had taken up with a new guy and they were making noise. Skaggs had to find a new motel. Shortly after, the manager at that hotel called him, also wanting to kick her out.

Skaggs knew he needed a long-term solution. Police wiretaps of phones in jail were picking up threats against her. He needed to get her away from South Los Angeles and into an apartment. But witness relocation rules assumed that the witnesses could support themselves after moving. Midkiff had no means of support. She was always teetering on the edge of prostitution, a return to which would have been devastating to the Tennelle case as well as calamitous for her. Skaggs needed her safe, sober, and alive.

So he got involved in her problems.

There was no end to them—money, abusive boyfriends, family problems, her penchant for being drawn back into inappropriate relationships of various stripes. Her child’s father, who remained in prison, was trying to get custody of the little girl, who was stable and happy, living with Midkiff’s mother and excelling in school.

Skaggs didn’t say it to Jessica, but he was deeply worried about her. If she went back to her old haunts, she could be murdered. Starks could order Jessica killed from prison.

So he monitored her carefully, checking up on her regularly and taking her to lunch when he could. True to his peculiar propriety, Skaggs always professed wonderment at Midkiff’s dissolute ways. She went to bed at six in the morning and slept until the afternoon, “then does nothing for fourteen hours!” Skaggs marveled, as if he had not worked for years among people who passed their time in exactly this manner.

Jessica only seemed to be able to land one sort of job: brief stints lap dancing or stripping. Skaggs shook his head at the way she was always assuring him that she had some new project in mind—things that never seemed to come to fruition, like getting her GED and finding a job outside of strip clubs. Once when he took Jessica to visit her daughter, she thrust a frosty shake Skaggs had just bought her into his hands before exiting the car. She didn’t want her daughter to see it, she explained to him primly, because she was trying to keep the child off sugar. Skaggs thought this absurd. The obvious doesn’t seem to have occurred to him—that Jessica wanted to appear responsible to impress him.

She did whatever he wanted without question. It was disturbing: Skaggs recognized in it the same ferocious loyalty and obedience that he’d seen prostitutes show their pimps on the street. Through some kind of transference, his witness on the homicide case was now treating him like her pimp. He tried to make the most of it for the sake of the case and her well-being, gently prodding Midkiff to seek work that didn’t involve stripping and steering her away from alcohol and the bad boyfriends who continued to parade through her life. And he used her obedience to try to keep her safe.

Skaggs was getting to know her better. Jessica called him on his cell phone whenever she had a problem, which was often. Theresa Skaggs, too, came to recognize Jessica’s voice on the speaker of the family car phone, because her husband was compelled to take off-duty calls from the young woman so frequently.

Jessica was utterly alone, Skaggs realized. Her mother visited her only once. At this point Jessica rarely saw her daughter. On her birthday that February, Skaggs noticed that she got not a single call or visitor. She had lived for years crowded into motley groups—motel rooms with three or four other prostitutes, or shared houses—and she had passed countless days in the leisurely milieu of the South Central streets. Her life had appeared anything but solitary. But now, only a few miles from her old neighborhood, she was a castaway. At last, Skaggs gave in to her
pleas to move back in with her mother briefly, since her apartment was not immediately in what he considered the danger zone.

In June, Skaggs’s phone rang at 2:00
A.M
. It was Jessica. She was on a street corner at Forty-second and Central Avenue in the Newton Division, the heart of old South Central where Wally Tennelle had learned his trade. She had been out drinking with some guy, and somehow the date ended with his beating her up. He had stolen her purse and jettisoned her on a street corner in a dangerous neighborhood in the middle of the night with no money. Skaggs prepared to go pick her up himself. But then his phone rang again. The guy had come back, acting nice and begging forgiveness. The old story. Skaggs hung up knowing that it wouldn’t be long before her next crisis.

One heavily overcast morning that summer, Skaggs set off on one of his many witness welfare checks, worried by a new report from Jessica that she had been fired from her latest stripping job for fighting. He had been talking to her for a while now about her temper, but she wasn’t getting the message.

Jessica’s mother wanted her out of the house. Recently, Jessica’s newest boyfriend had shown up drunk and caused a scene. Jessica’s mother was alarmed. She had two little girls to raise, Jessica’s daughter and her own youngest, who was near the same age. And the mother was, as Skaggs put it, “realistic” about the risks Jessica posed. If Jessica or her boyfriends caused some incident that got the family evicted from this $1,200-a-month apartment, it would be a disaster. They were living together in fragile comfort and security. Jessica’s mother had bad credit and would have great difficulty finding similar housing.

Skaggs had one more issue on his mind that day: the preliminary hearing was drawing near. He could not be sure of the date, since it kept changing, but he knew it was close. He had barely spoken of this obligation to Jessica in the months since that first interview, deliberately downplaying it so as not to alarm her. But it was time for him to start delicately preparing Jessica to testify.

Skaggs pulled up to a neighborhood full of blooming bougainvillea
and apricot roses and went to the door. A little dog yapped behind the screen door, and he tried to peer past it, calling over its barks: “Hello?” He could hear Jessica moving within. When she answered, her voice was creaky, clearly fresh from sleep.

“You just getting’ up?” he called incredulously through the screen. “What happened to our eleven o’clock appointment?”

He agreed to wait while Jessica dressed and retreated, muttering, to his sedan. “Twenty-two years old and sleeping at eleven-fifteen!” he said. “Come
on
!”

At last, Jessica emerged in a zip-up jacket with a fake fur hood, wearing long, translucent apricot nails and jeweled white sandals, slight as ever, the ends of her long hair dyed a lighter shade. Her demeanor with Skaggs had changed since that first interview. She was happy to see him, eyes crinkling with delight, down-turned mouth giving out a throaty, embarrassed giggle as he chided her for sleeping in. She endured his fatherly grilling with a playful jut of the chin, readily answering questions she was clearly expecting.

“What about the boyfriend?”

“He’s gone.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

Skaggs by then knew the names of all her family members and their acquaintances. He asked about them one by one.

Jessica treated him as a confidant. Skaggs was always struck by the way she easily blended everyday minutiae with horrifying revelations, using the same inconsequential tone for both. She would talk about being raped one moment and her last manicure the next. She shifted easily from topic to topic, chatting about the family dog, an acquaintance’s abortion, her grandmother, her last drinking binge, and her plans to vote for the first time in the upcoming election for Barack Obama because she disapproved of the wars.

She related it all in the same easy monotone. Skaggs scolded her perfunctorily for drinking, and for supporting Obama. But otherwise, he absorbed all her varied tales with his usual blend of easygoing humor
and affectionate teasing. Only once did she manage to penetrate his equanimity. He had asked her about a male friend they both knew and she reported indifferently that “he said something to the sheriffs, and they kicked the crap out of him. He’s paralyzed now.” Skaggs, face expressionless, flipped off the air conditioner and fell momentarily silent.

He took her to a pancake house. She told him she was smoking less, but then made him wait while she smoked a cigarette before entering the restaurant. Inside, she ordered as if starving. One plate of eggs and cheese—she made a big delicate fuss about the onions, telling the server she wanted them chopped very fine—and another plate of pancakes.

She continued chatting over breakfast, drawing up her shoulders when she laughed, dimples showing in both cheeks, waggling her shoulders and popping her neck just a little. She was still aiming to get the GED, she said. She had put in an application at a local drugstore. And now she was contemplating bartending school. Skaggs urged her to “put your goals on paper. Write ’em down.”

For Jessica, it was not so easy. She didn’t quite see that working in strip clubs came at the expense of developing other skills. She told herself it was an extension of her love of dancing, and she legitimatized the work in her own mind by setting absurdly prudish boundaries, vowing, for example, to stick to partial-strip dancing jobs where she was allowed to wear adhesive cups over her breasts. She had also ruled out lap dancing and was avoiding clubs where she knew her fellow dancers were turning tricks out back. She considered herself “clean” and did not want to fall off the wagon back into prostitution.

She knew enough of the world, however, to realize that she had never held what she called “a real,
real
job.” She had a sense of what Skaggs was getting at, but no clue how to go about it. She was relying on him even more than he realized and was worried whether Skaggs would “stay friends” with her after she testified.

When he left, he reminded her of the approaching court date. “Don’t get too nervous till it’s time to be nervous,” he told her lightly. Jessica made no reply. She gave him a polite one-armed hug, the Southern California version of a handshake.

Just before noon down on 118th Place and Avalon, Nathan Kouri’s bald head shone in the ruthless August sun. He was wearing his puzzled look, brow furrowed, with his leather notebook in hand, knocking on doors to investigate the unit’s newest murder. Marullo, nearby, looked untouched by the August heat, relaxed in his dark suit, sunglasses fashionably placed on the back of his head. Near them, La Barbera was processing the crime scene himself to save on overtime.

At the end of the street, a small crowd stood behind the yellow tape. “La’Mere!” someone cried. “They got La’Mere this time!” The speaker was a woman in yellow with an aluminum cane and a Goody comb stuck in her unkempt hair. She was the mother of Ronald Tyson, murdered nearly five years before, the same woman who had vomited when notified of his death. The victim had been a friend of hers. He was La’Mere Cook, Sr., an oil rig worker with six children and no gang ties.

A young woman came up to the tape, light-skinned and wearing a lavender kerchief. She said she was a relative of La’Mere Cook and wanted to join the rest of her family. She called out to the officers guarding the tape. They glanced toward her, smirked, and turned away. She stood in the sun and pleaded. They ignored her.