Tropical Depression (16 page)

Ed took a big sip, then poured the rest of the beer into the glass. “The ghet-to changed Hector, Billy. It marked him like it marks everybody. It made him care.” He took a big swallow of beer. “Worst mistake he could’ve made.”

I didn’t say anything. If Ed wanted to be cynical and mysterious, I’d let him. If he wanted to dance naked with a rose in his teeth I guess I’d let him, too. He had been my partner for two and a half years and in some ways he still was.

He finished his beer and waved for another one.

“Then there was this girl, too.”

“You mean Lin Park.”

He raised one boomerang-shaped eyebrow at me. “Yeah-huh. That’s right.” Then his gaze moved up to the knot on my forehead and he nodded again. “Well, well…”

“Yeah,” I told him, seeing he had put it together. “Maybe you should eat more fish, Ed.”

He showed me the teeth. “Don’t need to be smart, man, I’m almost a lieutenant. I just need to cover my ass.” He pointed his head at the Ralph’s bag. “Don’t you leave my ass hanging out, honky.”

“Sure. So Lin changed Hector?”

“Not the way she changed you, Billy.” He snorted. “The way she changed him hurt a lot more. Lasted longer. Made him start thinking about being black, and that’s no way to get a career to happen.”

“What career?”

He gave me his devilish smile and leaned back. “You got to understand how important it is for a black politician to be able to say he’s from the ’hood, he grew up in the ghet-to so he understands what it’s like to be
really
black.

“Roscoe knew that, and he got Hector to understand it. They were all set for that boy to be the first black president, Billy, and they were serious about it. You want to be major league, you got to start young these days. Ain’t nobody walks in off the street and throws a perfect knuckleball.

“Then he meets this Korean girl and the whole beautiful plan is in the shithouse. ’Cause her daddy’d rather see his girl dead than doing the horizontal boogie with a black boy. So now Hector’s gotta think about Black Identity, Black Pride and Black Culture, Racial Context, the Politics of Assimilation, and the Meaning of Color.” He rattled it off like it was a list of classes he had taken at L.A. City College, and maybe it was. But he meant it, too.

I shook my head. “Kid’s what—sixteen? And he’s thinking like that?”

Ed started to look serious. “He’d already been thinking that way, Billy, that’s the point. But now he wasn’t thinking about it tactically—he was thinking what it
meant.
Why it meant that, what he could do about changing it.”

He looked down at the table, almost like he was embarrassed. “Boy started out Jesse Jackson. All of a sudden he’s turning into Martin Luther King.” He shrugged. “And all he ever wanted was a background.”

“Which he thought he would get by hanging with the homeys.”

Ed nodded. “Until he met Lin.” The waitress set another beer in front of Ed and he poured it into his glass. He slurped the beer. “Now this is a girl who is not in any way a black person.”

“Yeah, I noticed that.”

“I bet you did. That would explain the lump on your head.” He poured the rest of the beer into his glass. It fit now. “On the other hand, it occurs to some folks that Hector is in no way a Korean person. And so now we got a situation.”

“Romeo and Juliet.”

“More like Young John Kennedy and Juliet. ’Cause he can’t even get in the door with the Koreans, and since an Asian girl does not fit the presidential agenda he’s getting no support about it from home.”

“So he’s between a rock and a hard place.”

Ed snorted. “Yeah, Billy. Either that or the devil and the deep blue sea. Whichever’s worse.”

“I never could tell the difference. And then the riots happen.”

“Right on cue. Right when Hector is standing at the bottom of his soul, looking for a way up. And hey bop-a-ree-bop”—he snapped his fingers—“there’s his ladder…” He took a long pull on his beer. When he set the glass down again and wiped his lips with the back of his hand his face was serious. “A lot of guys could get cynical here and say Hector just went crazy for some pussy.”

“You don’t think so.”

“No, Billy, I don’t. I like to think there was more to it than that. A man can be changed by love, but—”

He saw my look and shrugged. “You call me a romantic if you like, but I still think there’s a difference between love and pussy-crazy.”

“Sure,” I said, seeing that Ed was a little embarrassed. “Probably a matter of degree.”

He waved it off. “Point is, the boy was for real. You don’t face down a mob if you bluffing. ’Cause they’ll roll right over you and grab onto that new Sony Watchman you standing in front of. And that’s what Hector was doing. He was facing ’em down, making ’em think what they were doing and what that meant, how the rest of the world would see them for it. He was taking a mob and turning it into a group of
people
again, just talking to ’em. Word was all over the city, everybody knew about Hector. New Times was working on a cover story on him. What he was doing—it was like magic, man, and it got to you like nothing I ever saw, like maybe only that I-been-to-the-mountain speech—”

There was a catch in his voice and Ed stopped talking, either because he was aware that he was being sincere, emotionally involved in his memory of Hector, and he didn’t sound like himself—or maybe because the food arrived and he was looking forward to another beer and a second pot of peppers.

I knew Ed Beasley about as well as one cop can know another, and I had never seen him like this before. Something about Hector had gotten to him. Ed had grown up in the worst of South Central L.A. and spent his whole life since in the LAPD. If something could get to Ed and move him like that, it was for real. It could get to anybody.

For a few minutes we ate and didn’t talk. The food was good and it felt good going down. But I was not sure either of us could fill the uncomfortable hole Ed had made in the evening.

And so for the rest of dinner we slipped into old-shoe talk about the people we knew and had worked with and who was doing what.

And until we stood up and walked out to our parked cars he did not say another word that was not ordinary. Then, as I was sitting in my tiny rental car with a hand on the key in the ignition, he leaned into my window for just a moment and said to me in a soft, hurt voice, “Find this guy, Billy. It’s important.”

And then he was gone.

I went back to my hotel room with a sinking feeling I couldn’t fight and I couldn’t pin down.

I still didn’t know who killed Hector. But for the first time I felt his loss.

Back in my hotel room I ripped open the Ralph’s bag and waded into the two case files Ed had given me. I wanted to start with Hector’s—and not just because of what Ed had said. I was pretty sure Roscoe was murdered because he had been looking into Hector’s death. And anyway, Roscoe’s case file was just a day old. There wouldn’t be much in it.

Hector’s file was another matter. It was a good-sized stack of folders and manila envelopes. I opened it up.

If you grew up reading murder mysteries, you probably wouldn’t recognize modern homicide files. They’re not done in pencil by a half-smart bulldog. They’re not typed out sloppily on a thirty-year-old Underwood by a fat guy in a stained shirt. There are no eraser marks and no splotches of chili on the margin.

What you see is a series of computerized forms that looks more like an inventory control report from an office-supply warehouse than a document examining the violent death of a human being.

The first several pages are almost identical with one of those computer dating-service questionnaires. The pages are filled with neat rows of numbered boxes. The detective in charge of the investigation puts a check or an X in each appropriate box to fill in all the details about victim, location, and procedure.

I looked at a top sheet marked (017) Black (023) Male (41) Gunshot.

That’s what Hector came down to. All summed up in a neat row of Xs.

The next form was the lead sheet. It carefully spelled out who would check into each predetermined compartment of the case:

WITNESSES
—Mallory
BACKGROUND CHECK
—Rodriguez
AREA
—Spitz

There’s a lab report, of course. It’s usually spit out by the lab’s computer. The lab techs and coroners generally have blood, brains, bone splinters, and feces up to the elbow. They don’t mind, but the guys with nice offices who have to read the reports do. To keep things neat, which is important nowadays, the lab guys generally have the computer fill in the boxes for them.

It went on—page after page of neat, computerized forms. I didn’t much like it, but that never seemed to be as important to the department as it was to me.

Ed was the guy who had tried to explain it to me, back when he was first bucking for detective and we were sitting in a patrol car together for long hours.

“When you got ten murders a year, Billy,” he had told me, “then you can be creative and go by instinct, get the feel of each murder, each one different. When you got ten murders a week you got to be organized. So you set up grids, make a pattern based on all the other kills. You fill out forms. Play percentages. Everybody do it the same each time so you know where you are.”

“Uh-huh,” I had said. “And that way, when you fuck it up at least you got your name spelled right on a nice-looking piece of paper.”

He had given me the kind of look a sheepdog gives a lamb that keeps getting tangled in the fence.

It still seemed to me that somewhere along the way detective work, like everything else, got to be a bureaucratic procedure. When it did, it started to be about covering your ass.

Because of politics—in the department and in the community—a detective needs to prove he has all the reasonable angles covered. That’s okay as far as it goes. But murder was not reasonable. A lot of times it didn’t fit in the little boxes and you could not track it with a grid. But nobody ever argues with computer-generated forms. Nobody would dare.

So all homicide investigations are handled pretty much the same way. Columbo, Kojak, and Dirty Harry just fill out the forms; no more raincoat, lollipop, and make my day.

But there are still a couple of places in a homicide file where you can find some hint of individuality, and that’s what I was looking for. First I looked to see if the detective filled in the boxes with an X or a check mark.

It was a personal quirk of mine. I had a theory that if you use a quick check mark you’re trying to finish the bullshit and get on to the real work. An X means you take this stuff seriously.

Detective R. Cole had used an X: a careful guy. The arms of the X went up exactly into the corners and did not spill out of the box.

I flipped through the report, scanning for anything interesting; statements, lab reports, background, memos, and so on, all in neat manila folders.

The coroner said it was a gunshot. The entry wound was relatively small, consistent with the type produced by a military or hunting weapon of a caliber in the range of a .257.

It was pretty large for modern military, but R. Cole had jumped on it, commenting that it tended to indicate the shot was fired by an overzealous shopkeeper trying to protect his store.

The problem with that was the exit wound. It looked like it had been made by a high-velocity bowling ball.

I flipped through to the scene report. No slug had been found.

So whatever the weapon, the bullet used was a hunting round. Military rounds are jacketed. They leave neat exit wounds. Hunters use unjacketed lead for maximum expansion. Hunting rounds with a powerful load disintegrate when they hit something solid, like pavement. So there would be a big exit and no slug—exactly what we had here.

And Park didn’t strike me as a hunter somehow.

I filed it away and moved on.

Next came the pictures.

You might expect the pictures from each crime scene to be unique. They’re not. After a while death begins to look the same, whether it’s a grandmother skewered with a bread knife or a roadkill armadillo.

It’s just part of the spiritual downside of being a cop. Sooner or later that piece of you that is revolted and offended by the indignity of death gets turned off and it’s all just scenery, whether it’s an armed robber scragged by a security guard or a Sunday school teacher pulled in seven sections from a blown-up car. It stops bothering you because you could not do your job if every death bothered you the same way.

So you learn to look at death. You learn to look at pictures of death, too. The bodies in these photos never look quite human. The victim is just a lump of cold meat in its own gravy.

I turned to the sheaf of glossies in Hector’s file, not expecting much.

The first shot took my breath away.

Hector was lying on the pavement. He looked incredibly graceful. He lay in an artful heap, almost as though some great painter had posed him there after weeks of sketching and study. His right leg was bent back at an angle too severe for comfort. His left arm was spread wide, beckoning. His right arm lay across his chest.

It was the face that really bothered me. I had never seen anything like it. Hector’s face was peaceful, noble,
important
somehow. It looked like a romantic death mask from some great leader who had said beautiful things and then been shot down.

I knew this was a shot Ed had spent hours looking at, knew it without even seeing the smudges on the margins. All he had tried to say and been too embarrassed to finish—this picture said it all.

And I thought of what Ed had said about Hector. Cops don’t spend much time with what might have been. They know too much about what is. But looking at the picture of this dead teenager, I could see why Ed was thinking that way. It made me think what if, too—what if Hector really had been able to become all Ed thought he might be?

Homicide pictures hadn’t bothered me since I saw my first set. These were making my head spin.

What got to me was the same thing eating away at Ed Beasley—the thought that this kid might very well have been more important than the rest of us, and that by letting him die quietly like this we were blowing it big-time.