The Black Box (6 page)

“Okay, so you consulted,” Bosch said. “So, what do you know from three years ago?”

“Well, Story was high up in the pyramid I told you about the other day. It can get contentious up there. Everybody wants to be at the top, and then when you’re there, you gotta look over your shoulder, see who’s coming up behind you.”

Gant gestured toward the files Bosch held.

“You said so yourself when you saw the picture. He let somebody get too close. That’s for damn sure. You know how many gang murders involve contact wounds? Almost none—unless like it’s a club shooting or something. Then only sometimes. But most of the time these guys don’t get up close and personal. This time, however, with Tru Story, they did. So the theory at the time was that the Sixties did this one themselves. Somebody near the top of the pyramid
had reason to believe Tru Story had to go and it got done. Bottom line, it could be the same gun you’re looking for. There was no slug and no shell recovered, but the wound would work with a nine-mill, and now that you’ve got Rufus Coleman up there in the Q putting your Beretta model ninety-two in Tru Story’s hands, then it sounds even better.”

Bosch nodded. It made a certain amount of sense.

“And the GED never picked up on what this was about?”

Gant shook his head.

“Nah, they never got close. You gotta understand something, Harry. The pyramid is most vulnerable to law enforcement at the bottom. The street level. It’s also most visible there.”

He was saying that the GED’s efforts were largely focused on street dealers and street crimes. If a gang homicide wasn’t solved within forty-eight hours, there would soon be a new one to run with. It was a war of attrition on both sides of the line.

“So . . .,” Bosch said. “Let’s go back to the Walter Regis killing, the one Rufus Coleman carried out and was convicted for in ’ninety-six. Coleman said Tru Story gave him the gun and his instructions, he did the job, and then he gave the gun back. He said that it wasn’t Story’s idea to whack Regis. He, too, had gotten the order. So, do we have any idea who it came from? Who was the shot caller for the Rolling Sixties back in ’ninety-six?”

Gant shook his head again. He was doing a lot of that.

“It was before my time, Harry. I was in a black-and-white in Southeast. And to tell you the truth, we were kind of naive
back then. That was when we ran CRASH at them. You remember CRASH?”

Bosch did. The explosion of the gang population and its attendant violence occurred with the same speed as the crack epidemic in the 1980s. The LAPD in South Central was overwhelmed and responded with a program called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. The program had an ingenious acronym and some said they spent more time coming up with that than they did on the actual program. CRASH attacked the lower levels of the pyramid. It disrupted the street business of the gangs but rarely reached toward the top. And no wonder. The street soldiers who sold drugs and carried out missions of retribution and intimidation rarely knew more than what the day’s job was and rarely gave even that up.

These were young men fired in the anti-cop cauldron of South L.A. They were seasoned by racism, drugs, societal indifference, and the erosion of traditional family and education structures, then put out on the street, where they could make more in a day than their mothers made in a month. They were cheered on in this lifestyle from every boom box and car stereo by a rap message that said fuck the police and the rest of society. Putting a nineteen-year-old gangbanger in a room and getting him to give up the next guy in the line was about as easy as opening a can of peas with your fingers. He didn’t know who the next guy in line was and wouldn’t give him up if he did. Prison and jail were accepted extensions of gang life, part of the maturation process, part of earning gang stripes. There was no value in cooperating. There was only a downside to it—the
enmity of your gang family, which always came with a death warrant.

“So, what you’re saying,” Bosch said, “is that we don’t know who Trumont Story was working for back then or where he got the gun that he gave to Coleman to take out Regis.”

“Most of that’s right. Except the gun part. My guess is that Tru always had that gun and he gave it out to people he wanted to use it. See, we know lots more now than we knew then. So taking today’s knowledge and applying it to back then, it would work like this. We start with a guy at the top or near the top of the pyramid called the Rolling Sixties street gang. This guy is like a captain. He wants a guy named Walter ‘Wide Right’ Regis dead because he’s been selling where he shouldn’t be selling. So the captain goes to his trusted sergeant at arms named Trumont Story and whispers in his ear that he wants Regis taken care of. At that point, it is Story’s job and he has to get it done to maintain his position in the organization. So he goes to one of the trusted guys on his crew, Rufus Coleman, gives him a gun, and says the target is Regis and this is the club where he likes to hang. While Coleman goes off to do the job, Story goes and gets himself an alibi because he’s the keeper of that gun. Just a little safeguard in case he and the gun are ever connected. That’s how they do it now, so I’m saying that’s probably how they did it back then—only we didn’t exactly know it.”

Bosch nodded. He was getting the sense of the fruitlessness of his search. Trumont Story was dead and the connection to the gun was gone with him. He was really no closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen than he was on the night
twenty years ago when he stared down at her body and apologized. He was nowhere.

Gant identified his disappointment.

“Sorry, Harry.”

“Not your fault.”

“It probably saves you a bunch of trouble anyway.”

“Yeah, how so?”

“Oh, you know, all those unsolved cases from back then. What if the only one we closed was the white girl’s? That probably wouldn’t go over too well in the community, know what I mean?”

Bosch looked at Gant, who was black. He hadn’t really considered the racial issues in the case. He was just trying to solve a murder that had stuck with him for twenty years.

“I guess so,” he said.

They sat in silence for a long moment before Bosch asked a question.

“So, what do you think, could it happen again?”

“What, you mean the riots?”

Bosch nodded. Gant had spent his whole career in South L.A. He would know the answer better than most.

“Sure, anything can happen down here,” Gant answered. “Are things better between the people and the department? Sure, way better. We got some of the people actually trusting us now. The murder count’s way down. Hell, crime in general is way down and the bangers don’t run the streets with impunity. We got control, the people have control.”

He stopped there and Bosch waited but that was it.

“But . . .,” Bosch prompted.

Gant shrugged.

“Lotta people without jobs, lotta stores and businesses closed up. Not a lotta opportunities out there, Harry. You know where that goes. Frustration, agitation, desperation. That’s why I say anything could happen. History runs in a cycle. It repeats itself. It could happen again, sure.”

Bosch nodded. Gant’s take on things was not far from his own.

“Can I keep these files awhile?” he asked.

“As long as you bring them back,” Gant said. “I’ll also loan you the black box.”

He reached behind him and grabbed the card box. When he turned back, Bosch was smiling.

“What? You don’t want it?”

“No, no, I want it. I’m just thinking of a partner I had once. This was way back. His name was Frankie Sheehan, and he—”

“I knew Frankie. A shame what happened.”

“Yeah, but before that, when we were partners, he always had this saying about working homicide. He said, you have to find the black box. That’s the first thing, find the black box.”

Gant had a confused look on his face.

“You mean like on a plane?”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, like in a plane crash, they have to find the black box, which records all the flight data. They find the black box and they’ll know what happened. Frankie said it was the same with a murder scene or a murder case. There will be one thing that brings it all together and makes
sense of things. You find it and you’re gold. It’s like finding the black box. And now here you are, giving me a black box.”

“Well, don’t expect too much outta this one. We call them CRASH boxes. It’s just the shake cards from back then.”

Before the advent of the MDT—the mobile data terminal installed in every patrol car—officers carried FI cards in their back pockets. These were merely 3 × 5 cards for writing down notes from field interviews. They included the date, time, and location of the interview, as well as the name, age, address, aliases, tattoos, and gang affiliation of the individual questioned. There was also a section for the officer’s comments, which was primarily used to record any other observations worth noting about the individual.

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had long decried the department’s practice of conducting field interviews, calling them unwarranted and unconstitutional, likening them to shakedowns. Undaunted, the department continued the practice, and the FI cards became known across its ranks as shake cards.

Bosch was handed the box, and opening it he found it full of well-worn cards.

“How did this survive the purging?” he asked.

Gant knew he meant the department’s shift toward digital data storage. Across the board, hard files were being turned into digital files to make way for an electronic future.

“Man, we knew that if they archived these on computers, they would miss all kinds of stuff. These are handwritten, Harry. Sometimes you can’t figure out the writing to save your
life. We knew most of the info on these cards wouldn’t make it across, know what I mean? So we held on to as many of those black boxes as we could. You were lucky, Harry, we still had the Sixties in a box. Hope there’s something in there that helps.”

Bosch pushed back his chair to get up.

“I’ll make sure you get it back.”

4

B
osch was back at the Open-Unsolved Unit before noon. The place was largely deserted, as most detectives came in early and took their lunch break early. There was no sign of David Chu, Harry’s partner, but that wasn’t a concern. Chu could be at lunch or anywhere in the building or the outlying crime labs in the area. Bosch knew that Chu was working on a number of submissions, that is, the early stages of cases in which genetic, fingerprint, or ballistics evidence is prepared and submitted to various labs for analysis and comparison.

Bosch put the files and the black box down on his desk and picked up the phone to see if he had any messages. He was clear. He was just settling in and getting ready to start looking through the material he had received from Gant when the unit’s new lieutenant came by the cubicle. Cliff O’Toole was new not only to the OU but to Robbery-Homicide Division as well. He had been transferred in from Valley Bureau, where he had run the full detective squad in Van Nuys. Bosch hadn’t had a lot of interaction with him yet, but what he had seen and heard from others in the squad wasn’t good. After arriving to take over command of Open-Unsolved, in record time
the lieutenant garnered not one but two nicknames with negative connotations.

“Harry, how’d it go up there?” O’Toole asked.

Before authorizing the trip to San Quentin, O’Toole had been fully briefed on the gun connection between the Jespersen case and the Walter Regis murder carried out by Rufus Coleman.

“Good and bad,” Bosch answered. “I got a name from Coleman. One Trumont Story. Coleman said Story supplied the gun he used for the Regis hit and took it back right after. The catch is that I can’t go to Story because Story is now dead—got whacked himself in ’oh-nine. So I spent the morning at South Bureau and did some checking to confirm the timeline and that Story does fit in. I think Coleman was telling me the truth and not just trying to lay it all off on a dead guy. So it wasn’t a wasted trip but I’m not really any closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen.”

He gestured to the files and the shake box on his desk.

O’Toole nodded thoughtfully, folded his arms, and sat on the edge of Dave Chu’s desk, right on the spot where Chu liked to put his coffee. If Chu had been there, he wouldn’t have liked that.

“I hate hitting the travel budget for a bum trip,” he said.

“It wasn’t a bum trip,” Bosch said. “I just told you that I got a name and the name fits.”

“Well, then, maybe we should just put a bow on it and call it a day,” O’Toole said.

“Putting a bow on a case” referred to C-Bow, or CBO, which meant a case was cleared by other means. It was a designation used to formally close a case when the solution is
known but does not result in an arrest or prosecution because the suspect is dead or cannot be brought to justice for other reasons. In the Open-Unsolved Unit, cases frequently were “cleared by other” because they were often decades old and matches of fingerprints or DNA led to suspects long deceased. If the follow-up investigation puts the suspect in the time and location of the crime, then the unit supervisor has the authority to clear the case and send it to the District Attorney’s Office for its rubber stamp.

But Bosch wasn’t ready to go there with Jespersen yet.

“No, we don’t have a CBO here,” Bosch said firmly. “I can’t put the gun in Trumont Story’s hands until four years after my case. That gun could have been in a lot of other hands before that.”

“Maybe so,” O’Toole said. “But I don’t want you turning this into a hobby. We’ve got six thousand other cases. Case management comes down to time management.”

He put his wrists together as if to say he was handcuffed by the constraints of the job. It was this officious side of O’Toole that Bosch had so far been unable to warm up to. He was an administrator, not a cop’s cop. That was why “The Tool” was the first nickname he had received.

“I know that, Lieutenant,” Bosch said. “My plan is to work with these materials, and if nothing comes of it, then it will be time to look at the next case. But with what we’ve got now, this isn’t a CBO. So it won’t go toward fattening our stats. It will go back as unsolved.”