The Scarecrow (11 page)

“Did she give you this idea?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Cook.”

“No, man, I just thought of it. Right now. What do you think?”

“I’m wondering who’s going to cover the cop shop while we’re both running with this.”

“Well, you both can trade off on it. Like you’ve been doing. And I can probably get some help from time to time from the GA group. Even if it was just you on this, I couldn’t cut you loose completely, anyway.”

Whenever general assignment reporters were pulled in to work the crime beat, the resulting stories were usually superficial and by the numbers. It wasn’t the way to cover the beat, but what did I care anymore? I had eleven days left and that was it.

I didn’t believe Prendergast for a moment and was not swayed by his column-one overture. But I was smart enough to know that his suggestion—whether truly his or Angela Cook’ s—could lead to a better story. And it had a better chance of doing what I wanted it to do.

“We could call it ‘The Collision,’” I said. “The point where these two—killer and victim—came together and how they got there.”

“Perfect!” Prendergast exclaimed.

He stood up, smiling.

“I’ll wing it in the meeting, but why don’t you and Cook put your heads together and give me something for the budget by the end of the day? I’m going to tell them you’ll turn the story in by the end of the week.”

I thought about that. It was not a lot of time but it was doable, and I knew I could get more days if needed.

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “I gotta go.”

He headed on to his meeting. In a carefully worded e-mail I invited Angela to meet me in the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. I gave no indication that I was upset with or suspicious of her. She responded immediately, saying she would meet me there in fifteen minutes.

Now that I was free of the daily story and had fifteen minutes to fill, I pulled the stack back over to the center of the desk and started reading the confession of Alonzo Winslow.

The interview was conducted by the lead detectives Gilbert Walker and William Grady at the Santa Monica Police Department beginning at eleven
A.M
., Sunday, April 26, about three hours after Winslow had been taken into custody. The transcript was in Q&A format with very little description added. It was easy and fast to read, the questions and answers mostly short at first. Back and forth like Ping-Pong.

They began by reading Winslow his rights and having the sixteen-year-old acknowledge that he understood them. Then they went through a series of questions employed at the start of interviews with juveniles. These were designed to elicit his knowledge of right and wrong. Once that was established, Winslow became fair game.

For his part, Winslow fell victim to ego and the oldest flaw in the human book. He thought he could outsmart them. He thought he could talk his way out of it and maybe pick up some inside information about their investigation. So he readily agreed to talk to them—what innocent kid wouldn’t?—and they played him like a three-string bass guitar.
Dum-de-dum-de-dumb.
Getting every implausible explanation and outright lie on record.

I breezed through the first two hundred pages, skipping page after page of Winslow’s denials of knowing anything or seeing anything pertaining to Denise Babbit’s murder. Then, in very casual conversation, the detectives turned the questions toward Winslow’s whereabouts on the night in question, obviously trying to get either facts or lies on the record, because either way they would be helpful to the case—a fact was a marker that could help them navigate through the interview; a lie could be used like a club on Winslow when revealed.

Winslow told them that he was at home sleeping and his “moms”—Wanda Sessums—could vouch for him. He continually denied any knowledge of Denise Babbit, repeatedly rejected knowing her or anything about her abduction and murder. He held up like a rock, but then on page 305 the detectives started lying to him and setting traps.

W
ALKER
: That’s not going to work, Alonzo. You gotta give us something here. You can’t just sit there and say no, no, no, I don’t know anything, and expect to walk out of here. We know you know something. I mean, we know it, son.

W
INSLOW
: You don’t know shit. I ain’t ever seen that girl you been talking about.

W
ALKER
: Really? Then how come we got you on tape dropping her car in that parking lot by the beach?

W
INSLOW
: What tape you got?

W
ALKER
: The one of the parking lot. We got you getting out of that car and nobody else goes near it until they find the body in it. That puts this whole thing on you, man.

W
INSLOW
: Nah, it ain’t me. I didn’t do this.

As far as I knew from the discovery documents the defense lawyer had given me, there was no video that showed the victim’s Mazda being left in the parking lot. But I also knew that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the legality of the police’s lying to a suspect if the lie would reasonably be seen as such by an innocent person. By spinning everything off the one piece of evidence they did have—Winslow’s fingerprint on the rearview mirror—they were within bounds of this guideline and they were leading Winslow down the path.

I once wrote a story about an interrogation where the detectives showed the suspect an evidence bag containing the gun used in the murder. It wasn’t the real murder weapon. It was an exact duplicate. But when the suspect saw it, he copped to the crime because he figured the police had found all the evidence. A murderer was caught but I didn’t feel too good about it. It never seemed right or fair to me that the representatives of our government were allowed to employ lies and tricks—just like the bad guys—with full approval of the Supreme Court.

I read on, skimming another hundred or so pages, until my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen and realized I had read right through my coffee meeting with Angela.

“Angela? Sorry, I got tied up. I’m coming right down.”

“Please hurry. I need to finish today’s story.”

I hustled down the steps to the first-floor cafeteria and joined her at a table without getting any coffee. I was twenty minutes late and I saw her cup was empty. On the table next to it was a stack of paper turned print-side down.

“You want another latte?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

I looked around. It was midafternoon and the cafeteria was almost empty.

“Jack, what’s up? I need to get back upstairs.”

I looked directly at her.

“I just wanted to tell you face-to-face that I didn’t appreciate you guzzling today’s story. The beat is technically still mine, and I told you I wanted this story because it set up the bigger one I’m working on.”

“I’m sorry. I got excited when you asked all the right questions in the press conference and I got back to the newsroom and sort of exaggerated things. I said we were working on it together. Prendo told me to start writing.”

“Is that when you suggested to Prendo that we work together on my other story, too?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“When I got back, he told me we were on it together. I take the killer and you take the victim. He also told me it was your idea.”

Her face colored red and she shook her head in embarrassment. I had now outted two liars. Angela I could deal with because there was something honest about her lying. She was boldly going for what she wanted. Prendo was the one that hurt. We had worked together for a long time and I had never seen him as a liar or manipulator. I guessed he was just choosing sides. I was out the door soon and Angela was staying. It didn’t take a genius to see that he was picking her over me. The future was with Angela.

“I can’t believe he ratted me out,” Angela said.

“Yeah, well, I guess you have to be careful who you trust in a news-room,” I said. “Even your own editor.”

“I guess so.”

She picked up her cup and looked to see if there was anything left, even though she knew there wasn’t. Anything to avoid looking at me.

“Look, Angela, I don’t like how you did this but I admire how you just go after what you want. All the best reporters I have known are that way. And I have to say your idea of doing the double-profile of both killer and victim is the better way to go.”

Now she looked at me. Her face brightened.

“Jack, I’m really looking forward to working with you on it.”

“The one thing I want to get straight right now is that this started with me and it ends with me. When the reporting is all done, I’m the one who is going to write this. Okay?”

“Oh, absolutely. After you told me what you were working on, I just wanted to be a part of it. So I came up with the victim angle. But it’s your story, Jack. You get to write it and your name goes first on the byline.”

I studied her closely for any sign that she was dissembling. But she’d looked me sincerely in the eye as she had spoken.

“All right. Well, that’s all I had to say.”

“Good.”

“You need any help with today’s story?”

“No, I think I’m all set. And I’m getting great stuff from the community off that angle you brought up at the press conference. Reverend Treacher called it one more symptom of racism in the department. They create a task force when a white woman who takes her clothes off for a living and puts drugs in her body gets killed, but do nothing whenever one of the eight hundred innocent residents in those projects gets killed by the gangbangers.”

It sounded like a good quote but it came from the wrong voice. The reality was that Treacher was an opportunistic weasel. I never bought that he was standing up for the community. I thought he was usually just standing up for himself, getting on TV and in the papers to further serve his celebrity and the benefits it brought. I had once suggested to an editor that we do an investigation of Treacher but was immediately shot down. The editor said, “No, Jack, we need him.”

And that was true. The paper needed people like Treacher to voice the contrarian view, to give the incendiary remark and get the fire burning.

“Sounds good,” I said to Angela. “I’ll let you get back to it and I’ll go up and write up a budget line for the other story.”

“Here,” she said.

She slid the short stack of papers across the table to me.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing, really, but it might save you some time. Last night before I went home I was thinking about the story after you told me what you were working on. I almost called you to talk more about it and suggest we work together. But I chickened out and went on Google instead. I checked out ‘trunk murder’ and found there is a long history of people ending up in the trunks of cars. A lot of women, Jack. And a lot of mob guys, too.”

I turned the pages over and looked at the top sheet. It was a printout of a
Las Vegas Review-Journal
story from almost a year earlier. The first paragraph told me it was about the conviction of a man charged with murdering his ex-wife, putting her body into the trunk of his car, and then parking it in his own garage.

“That’s just a story that sounded a little like yours,” she said. “There’s some others in there about historical cases. There’s a local one from the nineties where this movie guy was found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, which was parked on the hill above the Hollywood Bowl. And I even found a website called trunk murder dot com, but it’s still under construction.”

I nodded hesitantly.

“Uh, thanks. I’m not sure where all this might fit in but it’s good to be thorough, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

She pushed her chair back and picked up her empty cup.

“Well, okay, then. I’ll e-mail you a copy of today’s story as soon as I have it ready to send in.”

“You don’t have to do that. It’s your story now.”

“No, your name is going on it, too. You asked the questions that gave it good ol’ B and D.”

Breadth and depth. What the editors want. What the reputation of the
Times
was built on. Drilled into you from day one, when you came to the
velvet coffin
. Give your stories breadth and depth. Don’t just tell what happened. Tell what it means and how it fits into the life of the city and the reader.

“Okay, well, thanks,” I said. “Just let me know and I’ll give it a quick read.”

“You want to walk up together?”

“Uh, no, I’m going to get a coffee and maybe look through all this stuff you came up with.”

“Suit yourself.”

She gave me a pouty smile like I was missing something really good and then walked away. I watched her dump her coffee cup into a trash can and head out of the cafeteria. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I didn’t know if I was her partner or mentor, whether I was training her to take over or she already had. My instinct told me that I might only have eleven days left on the job but I would have to watch my back with her during every one of them.

A
fter writing up a budget line and e-mailing it to Prendergast, and then signing off on Angela’s story for the print edition, I found an unoccupied pod in the far corner of the newsroom where I could concentrate on the Alonzo Winslow transcript and not be intruded on by phone calls, e-mail or other reporters. The transcript had my full attention now and as I read, I marked with yellow Post-its pages where there were significant quotes.

The reading went fast except in places where there was more than the back and forth of ping-pong dialogue. At one point the detectives scammed Winslow into a damaging admission and I had to read the passage twice to understand what they did. Grady apparently pulled out a tape measure. He explained to Winslow that they wanted to take a measurement of the line that ran from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his first index finger on each hand.

Winslow cooperated and then the detectives announced that the measurements matched to within a quarter inch the strangulation marks left on Denise Babbit’s neck. Winslow responded with a vigorous denial of involvement in the murder and then made a big mistake.