Justice at Risk (28 page)

“You turned into an alley?”

She nodded.

“If it hadn’t been for my heels, I would have taken off at a run.”

“The car caught up with you?”

“In less than a minute. The beams of the headlights flooded my back and the pavement in front of me, and I became paralyzed with fright. I looked back and saw the car, and the two men inside. They drove slowly past and stopped at an angle in front of me, and both got out. I remember clutching my purse and blurting out, ‘What do you want? I haven’t done anything!’ It was all I could think of to say. My voice was deep then, it gave me away instantly. I was trembling, shaking all over.

“The first officer, the one who was driving, came over and asked to see some identification. Again, I asked why, what had I done wrong? He stroked my face with the back of his hand, my cheek, then my chin. I’d shaved, of course, and my face was quite smooth. I thought perhaps I wouldn’t be discovered, I prayed for that. Then he reached down and lifted my dress, and grabbed my crotch. When he felt what was down there, a grin spread across his face. It was the most hateful grin I’d ever seen. I still can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Where was the second cop?”

“He stayed a few feet back, as if he weren’t quite sure what to do.”

“As if he was following the other’s lead?”

“Yes, exactly. He even seemed a little unnerved himself by what was happening, like he was uncomfortable being there.”

“At what point did they start beating you?”

“Right away. The first officer, the muscular one, hit me in the stomach. It took the wind out of me, I was gasping just to get a breath. Then he ripped my wig off and began slapping me around. At some point, he closed his fist and began striking me hard in the face and the stomach, and then he was urging the other officer to join in.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, though reluctantly. When I was on the ground, he backed off, didn’t want to do anything more to me. I remember the first officer taunting him, calling him a ‘pussy,’ and grabbing him by the arm. He shoved him forward, calling him more names like that, until the other officer kicked me a few times. They were both kicking me when a patrol car pulled up and a third officer jumped out. I was already bleeding heavily, in a great deal of pain, and I thought this third officer had come to join in the fun. I thought that was the end, that I was going to die right there.”

“Instead, he put a stop to it.”

She nodded again.

“He didn’t hesitate for a moment. He was loud, very forceful. He pulled both officers off me and pushed them away. He told them to get back in their car and leave, assured them he would ‘take care of things.’ Those were the words he used. Take care of things. Which is exactly what he did.”

“You haven’t mentioned the man with the camera—Byron Mittelman.”

She looked at me for a moment, then away. She drew another cigarette from her pack of Capris, struck another match, inhaled.

“Yes, Byron Mittelman was there. Though, of course, at the time, I didn’t know his name. I wouldn’t learn his name until a few weeks ago, when Melissa Zeigler came to my office for the first time.”

“But you knew back then that he was a cameraman for
On Patrol
, riding along with the LAPD.”

She smiled ruefully.

“I certainly learned it soon enough, as if I didn’t have enough problems already.”

“What happened next?”

“The other car sped away, and the third officer, the one who saved me, told Mr. Mittelman to stop taping with his camera. Then he tried to make me comfortable and called for an ambulance. While we waited, he suggested that it might be in my best interest to create a cover story, to keep the incident as quiet as possible. He pointed out that if I pressed charges against the two officers who beat me, it would become a matter of public record, open to the press, and that all the facts would have to come out.”

“Including the fact that you were dressed as a woman that night.”

“Of course, which I wanted to avoid at all costs.”

“So you helped him create a false police report blaming an unidentified assailant for the assault.”

“My mother handled that, actually.”

“Pearl Tsao-Ping.”

Chang drew in more smoke as she nodded.

“At the hospital, they told me I was seriously injured, that I’d need to call someone. Finally, under great pressure, I gave them my wife’s name and number. It was my mother who took the call. When she arrived and learned the details, she took over without even talking to me. She’s a very formidable woman, my mother. She managed to tidy everything up quite nicely.”

“Including banishing you from the family.”

“She agreed to pay for the sexual surgery I wanted if I agreed to go away and never have contact with anyone in the family again. I would have to change my name and start life over as a different person.”

“And your wife?”

“My mother took her back to Taiwan, had the marriage annulled, and paid her family to keep quiet. I’m not even sure my wife ever learned the whole truth.”

“And after the surgery, and enrolling at New York University, you decided that passing yourself off as a lesbian was easier than trying to make it as a transsexual.”

“I was romantically attracted to women; that didn’t change with the loss of my male organs, or the estrogen treatments. So it seemed like a logical approach. I was immediately accepted by the lesbian community. I found wonderful support there that I never would have experienced as a transsexual trying to live in straight society.”

“You must have been concerned about the footage Byron Mittelman shot the night you were beaten.”

“Jacob Kosterman, the executive producer, assured my mother the taping would never be aired, that it would be locked away and never seen by anyone. That it would never be a problem.”

“Kosterman was involved in the cover-up from the beginning?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why didn’t he just destroy the videotape?”

“I’m not sure. He may have seen some future value in it—the financial leverage it gave him with Rose Fairchild.”

“It might never have been a problem if Tommy Callahan hadn’t stolen it the next season, then tried to cash in on it all these years later.”

“Yes, Tommy spoiled the plan, I’m afraid.”

“Let me see if I’ve got things in order, Cecile. A few months ago, after he’d exhausted all his opportunities in commercial television, Callahan came to New Image Productions, desperate for a job. You saw on his résumé that he’d once been a videotape editor for
On Patrol
, but you had no idea of his connection to that missing piece of videotape, or even that it was missing at all. Not then.”

“I’d pretty much forgotten about it, put it out of my mind. I had a new name, a new identity, a new life. It no longer seemed like a threat to me.”

“Callahan didn’t recognize you?”

“Fifteen years and expert surgery, above the waist as well as below, can do a lot to alter a person’s looks.” Again, the thin smile. “Also, I have better taste in clothes these days.”

“When you checked Callahan’s references, you learned that he’d been fired from his last job with Jaffe-Edwards Productions. You checked with Jaffe-Edwards and found out that Jacob Kosterman had ordered him fired, probably after Kosterman had seen his name in the credits on one of the shows Jaffe-Edwards produced for the Documentary Channel.”

“That’s very close to how it happened, yes.”

“You talked with someone you knew at Jaffe-Edwards and discovered that Kosterman had blacklisted Callahan because he’d stolen a piece of videotape fourteen years before—videotape of two LAPD cops beating up a transvestite. It wasn’t too difficult to put two and two together, and realize it was the same video Byron Mittelman had shot during his ride-along, with you as the featured victim.”

A reluctant smile formed on her pretty lips.

“I’m impressed, Ben. I really am.”

“Suddenly, that nasty piece of videotape reared its ugly head.”

“Not really. As I said, I’d started a new life as a different person.”

“But if the media got hold of it, a lot of very nosy reporters might start doing some digging, and do their best to find out what had happened to the victim, Winston Tsao-Ping.”

“I’m not so sure. It was an old incident. Police brutality in those days was commonplace, at least within the LAPD. Anyone with any awareness of what’s going on knows that by now. After the video of the Rodney King beating, half a minute of a transvestite getting kicked would hardly be considered newsworthy.”

“Unless the officers involved were still on the force, maybe even prominently.”

Chang shifted uneasily, and kept silent.

“Why not name the officers, Cecile? Why not tell the story, expose the bad guys? Isn’t that what a documentarian should do?”

“Without that videotape, there is no story. It’s just the word of a troubled transsexual making wild claims fifteen years after the fact. Think about it. If that man who captured the Rodney King beating on his new camcorder hadn’t stepped out on his balcony that night, the public never would have known about the beating at all. King would have been jailed for resisting arrest, his word against the officers’, and that would have been the end of it. Just like hundreds of other incidents of brutality the police have gotten away with in this city over the years. Without pictures, you’ve got nothing.”

“I imagine a tape like that could be worth a lot of money to the right person.”

“Possibly.”

“You must have wanted it awfully badly yourself.”

Chang studied me closely, keeping quiet.

“When you hired Callahan, you hoped to get your hands on that missing videotape, didn’t you, Cecile? Maybe offer him a trade, give him another shot at a career in exchange for the master tape, or just write him a fat check.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Money can always be diverted in a nonprofit organization when the donations roll in, if the head honcho is clever enough. And you’re a very clever person, Cecile.”

“When Oree asked me to come see you, to talk to you like this, he said you needed to know the truth. But the truth is, I didn’t know exactly why I wanted that videotape or what I was going to do with it. My mind was in a state of confusion and despair, something I thought I’d left behind all those years ago. There were moments when I thought I would destroy the tape if I could get hold of it, so that Tiger could never find out about my real identity. There were other times when I burned with desire to use the tape in a documentary on police brutality, even if I got hurt in the process.

“At the same time, I didn’t want to harm the career of the third officer, the one who saved my life, which would surely happen if the complete facts ever came out. He did, after all, participate in a cover-up, to protect not just me but his own. My head spun with the possibilities, the ramifications. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to get control of that tape, before someone else did.”

“Which is why you raced out of the office that day when Peter Graff told you Callahan was missing in action. To confront Callahan about the tape, which you wished you’d done before. To get it from him if you could.”

“When I got to the motel, he was gone. Someone had ransacked the room before I arrived, turned everything upside down. I searched through his belongings myself, just to be sure the tape wasn’t there. That must have been when I lost my earring. Then I saw the blood on the mattress and fled. I had nothing to do with Tommy Callahan’s disappearance or death, Ben. I swear to you, that’s the truth.”

“I suspect you have a pretty good idea who did, though.”

“It’s better not to speculate. Worse, to know. It’s dangerous, especially for me, if they ever link me to Winston Tsao-Ping. Look what happened to Callahan and Mittelman. Do you want the same thing to happen to you?”

“It very nearly has, Cecile.”

“Then why persist?”

“Because Charlie Gitt’s an animal who hurts people, and I don’t like that.”

At the sound of Gitt’s name, her head jerked like a finger snap.

“He was one of the two cops who kicked the hell out of you that night, wasn’t he, Cecile? The leader, the brutal one.”

She shivered, crossed her arms, rubbed them as if a sudden chill had filled the room.

“I’m not going to answer any more of your questions. I’m not going to tell you any more. It’s safer the less you know.”

“Where’s the courage and conviction you’re known for, Cecile? Or was that just another part of the masquerade?”

Her eyes were on me, searching for sympathy.

“He’d kill me if he knew I was once Winston Tsao-Ping, and that I’d been talking to you like this.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ve never been so frightened of a man. I still see his face in my nightmares, that horrible grin, the way it widened each time he drew back his foot and kicked me again. For fifteen years I’ve seen it every time I close my eyes.”

She shivered again, and clutched herself tightly.

“He scares me so much that when I saw him here two hours ago, I drove on as fast as I could. I didn’t come back until I knew for certain he was gone. Even then, I parked my car two blocks away, where he wouldn’t see it.”