The Tin Collectors Page 10

  “This is not good, Mr. Thackery. As a matter of fact, you’re under arrest, regnat populus.” He poured the dope back into the bag. “So you won’t get the wrong idea about me and think I’m some overeducated, Latin-quoting blowhard, that’s just the state motto of Arkansas. I was stationed there in the Marines. It means ‘the people rule,’ and the people of Los Angeles don’t like this one bit and are about to rule that you go to the city lockup.” Shane pulled out his handcuffs, spun Thackery around, and put them on.

  “You can’t do this,” Thackery protested.

  “Somebody should tell that to my watch commander. In the meantime, you’re gonna sit this one out downtown. Don’t worry, I’ll call the principal for you and tell him his assistant dean of admissions is gonna be at County Jail riding the pine in the detox box.”

  “Is this about Chooch? Is that what this is all about?” Thackery’s eyes were darting around, hoping no other member of the faculty would come driving in and witness this debacle.

  “You bet it’s about Chooch. But it’s also about you, Brad. If you weren’t such an insufferable asshole, I probably wouldn’t have gone so far out of my way to knock your dick in the dirt.”

  “Look, Chooch has problems. Okay? He’s got deep emotional difficulties. Besides, he’s selling drugs.”

  “Bet he didn’t sell you this crummy bag a’ bird food,” Shane said, holding up the bag of thin, seed-ridden grass.

  “You think this is funny, is that it?”

  “It’s about as funny as prostate surgery. How do guys like you end up teaching school?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to cut Chooch some slack. I want you to go to bat for him.”

  “I can’t change the course of events. It’s too late. They’ve already had a faculty meeting about him.”

  “I’d think the assistant dean of admissions would have a little pull around here,” Shane said. “Of course, after this bust, you’ll be lucky to be in charge of school bus schedules.”

  “Look, okay…maybe…”

  “Maybe what?”

  “If I…if I said to them I’d work with him separately, maybe do some drug counseling or something…”

  “I don’t think you’re exactly the right guy for that, but go ahead, keep talkin’.”

  “Maybe if I really try, I could get him another chance. Just one…”

  “Okay, that sounds more promising. You give him another chance, I give you another chance.”

  Just then, two other faculty cars pulled into the parking area and slowed as they passed Thackery’s van. He was standing there with his hands cuffed behind him. A woman put down her window.

  “Is everything okay, Brad?” she asked, looking at the handcuffs.

  “We’re fine.” Shane said. “I’m the magician Mr. Thackery hired for next month’s high-school assembly. Just showing Brad here how I do my handcuff escape.” Shane smiled and she drove on, not looking too convinced.

  “I want immediate results, Thackery. I’m looking for Chooch to get outta that detention hall this morning and back into regular class. If he gets goofy about anything in the future, don’t bust him. Call me.”

  Shane shoved his business card into Thackery’s shirt pocket and then unhooked the cuffs. He put the dope and pills in his jacket pocket, gave Brad Thackery back his car keys, then he led Officer Krupkee over to the Acura.

  The Lab jumped into the backseat, Shane put the car in gear, pulled out of the faculty parking area, then drove back to Valley Division and returned the dog to the Valley Bureau Drug Enforcement Unit. He shot back onto the freeway and got to Internal Affairs downtown with ten minutes to spare.

  12

  The Dark Side

  The bradbury building never failed to amaze Shane. He felt that it was the most magnificent building in Los Angeles. Only five stories high, it had been designed in the late 1800s by Gregory Wyman, a draftsman with no architectural degree. It sat bravely on the corner of Broadway and Third while slovenly men leaned forward to piss against her or curled up to sleep, rubbing the grime from their clothes on her magnificent yellow bricks.

  Shane pulled into the modern concrete parking structure that had been built next door, took the ticket, then found a spot on the second tier. He rode the elevator down and came out onto a brick patio with umbrella tables that served as a lunch area. It was located directly behind the old building. Along the concrete wall adjoining the patio was the historic fresco depicting the life of an African-American woman named Biddy Mason. The wall chronicled her odyssey, from her birth as a slave in 1810, through her incredible life journey, all the way to her final heroic years of service as a nurse delivering babies in Los Angeles hospitals in 1870.

  The fresco had been placed there to show the early African-American commitment to the quality of life in L.A. Shane found it strange that in post-Rodney King L.A., this monument was behind the Internal Affairs building, in a patio where mostly cops accused of misconduct would ever see it.

  He pushed through the back doors of the Bradbury, through a section under reconstruction on the first floor, into the building’s magnificent covered courtyard. He looked up at the five floors stacked above him. Light brick contrasted with the intricate black wrought-iron railings. They wrapped around the interior hallways that surrounded the open atrium. Polished oak banisters snaked along the top of the ornate black-painted iron. On each side of the building’s courtyard were beautiful, antique turn-of-the-century open elevators. They ran on exposed counterbalances that carried the filigreed boxes up and down. They moved slowly, stopping carefully at each floor as if time had not sped up in modern L.A. or had not fallen into desperate conflict with elegance. Over it all hung a glass roof five stories up, supported by black metal grates.

  Shane stood there for a long time. He had been here for a week during his last BOR and had learned the rituals of the place. He knew about the waiting-room silence that followed the bustle of echoing voices in the atrium just before the nine o’clock commencement of the boards. He remembered the tense posture of witnesses and police officers as they leaned over the metal railings near the fifth-floor hearing rooms, waiting nervously to testify. There were the subtle, silent signs that were read only by the people familiar with the activity in the building and who spread the word on each board’s outcome. The elevator operators watched carefully as accused officers left their penalty hearings, checking to see who was carrying the accused’s gun. If it was in the advocate’s hand, it meant the officer had been terminated.

  The administration of LAPD justice churned relentlessly in the building, leaving bits and pieces of its victims’ lives bobbing like scattered garbage in its wake. Like the Tower of London, it was way too beautiful a place for all the beheadings that occurred there.

  Shane got on the elevator, rode to the third floor, and moved up to the heavy glass-paneled, wood-frame door of the Advocate Section. After taking a deep breath, he pushed it open and walked inside.

  He was back in the narrow, gray and brown space fronted by three reception desks, where secretaries directed business to the twenty advocates seated behind them. Across the hall, on the opposite side of the open atrium, were the investigating officers, known as IOs. They were regular detectives assigned to IAD who did background interviews and took affidavits from “wits.” All of Shane’s memories of the place came rushing back. From where he was standing, he could see back to the advocates’ cubbies located on the far side of the office. The advocates were all sergeants or lieutenants and worked in five-by-five clutter at small desks, cardboard “case” boxes filled with affidavits and IO reports clustered at their feet.

  Shane remembered the chief advocate, a tall, vanilla milkshake named Warren Zell. Shane moved to one of the secretaries, a black woman with a remarkable body, and smiled at her.

  “I’m Sergeant Scully. I’ve been assigned here. I’m supposed to report to Commander Zell.”

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m Mavis. Take a seat. I�
��ll tell him you’re here.”

  While she buzzed in, Shane sat and picked up the LAPD newsletter, The Blue Line, that was on the table along with a stack of Chief Brewer’s newsletters, a glossy white four-sheet called The Beat. He assumed The Beat was required reading in this political squirrel cage. He was looking down when he heard the female voice that distressed him the most,

  “Mavis,” the voice said, “can you send all these 301’s on the Scully deps out to the subpoena control officer and tell him I need them served as soon as he can get them issued? Also, make sure this charge sheet gets sent to Pam Davis in the District Attorney’s Office. They’re monitoring his board for a possible murder indictment.”

  He looked up and saw Alexa Hamilton standing with her back to him, wearing one of her severe, tailored gray suits. Her shapely calves and tight, rounded ass were only a foot from his face.

  “Work, work, work,” he said softly.

  She turned abruptly and, for the first time, saw him sitting there.

  “It’s not work when you’re having fun,” she replied.

  “Don’t forget to subpoena Barbara Molar; she’s an eyewitness and supports my statement word for word.”

  “We always include exculpatory evidence, despite what you think, Scully. This division exists to try and keep the department clean. We’re not down here doing hatchet jobs.”

  “This division exists to destroy hardworking cops so people like you can get an E-ticket ride to the top of the department. You know it. I know it. Everybody on the job knows it. But don’t take it from me, go ask any uniform sitting in the front seat of a Plain Jane.”

  Alexa stood there and tapped her thumb against a file folder. “Y’know, Scully, you mighta been an okay cop, except you’ve gotta do everything your own stiff-necked, jackoff way. You’re always trying to be the smartest guy in the room, always cutting corners and blaming others. This is a division that is set up to defend the rules and mandates of this department. Since you have your head so far up your ass, you only see things through your navel; it’s understandable your view is clouded. That’s your problem, not mine.” She turned to Mavis. “On second thought, Mave, I’m gonna walk this stuff over to the subpoena control desk personally. Nothing’s too good for Sergeant Scully.” She turned away and, carrying the paperwork, moved back to her desk behind the counter. Her hips swayed seductively as she walked. Shane felt nothing. She had turned his balls to ice.

  The phone buzzed, twice.

  “You can go in now,” Mavis said.

  Shane got up and headed down the long rectangular space between the east wall and the three reception desks. He entered Zell’s office at the end of the room.

  Seated behind a slab of oak was Commander Zell. He had his jacket off; a huge Glock automatic in an upside-down shoulder holster hung under his arm like a sleeping bat. It is a proven LAPD street-cop axiom that any officer in plain clothes who wears a shoulder rig is, by definition, an asshole. If it’s upside down, then he’s a puckered, purebred asshole. Zell looked up and pushed a stack of signed papers away as Shane entered.

  “Sergeant, don’t bother to sit, you won’t be in my office that long.” It was starting out worse than Shane had expected. “You’re under my direct supervision,” Zell went on, but while he spoke, he turned his attention to another stack of papers. “I expect you to report for duty at eight-thirty every morning, without fail. You have only half an hour for lunch, so I suggest you bring it. You punch out at five. It’s a straight eight. No overtime will be approved. Questions?”

  “Well, sir, I have to drop a fifteen-year-old boy at school every morning. I have to get him there by eight-fifteen. Eight-thirty is going to be pretty tight.”

  “Then here’s your solution, Sergeant. You drop him off at eight instead of eight-fifteen.” Zell finally looked up, fixing his gaze on Shane, as if to determine what sort of lame idiot wouldn’t be able to figure that out by himself.

  “Sir, if I might ask, what will I be doing?”

  “You’re the unit discovery officer.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “On every case going through here, the accused officer has the right to look at all statements and affidavits taken by our IDs. It’s called discovery,” Zell said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “In order for the accused to get those documents, somebody has to Xerox the material, or make tape copies if it’s a voice or video recording. The discovery officer works at the Xerox machines located on the second floor. There are four machines and some audio/video duplicating equipment. You make copies of everything, including personnel investigations, addenda, and any supplemental findings of proposed disciplinary action. Also include the response of the accused and the reply of the commanding officer, photographs or laser reproductions, rough field-interview notes, chronological records, case summaries, and the department wit list.” He was ticking them off from memory, showing off. “Every case folder will tell you how many copies and where they are to be sent. They go out by registered mail to the accused officer’s defense rep.”

  “I’m a Xerox machine operator?” Shane asked. He couldn’t believe this was his new job.

  “You are the unit discovery officer. Your job is to operate Xerox and electronic duplicating equipment. That’s it. That’s the job. You’re excused.”

  “Wasn’t there a crummier job you could have given me?” Shane asked, anger creeping into his voice.

  “If you don’t want the job, just tell me.”

  “Why? So you can hit me with a negligent-duty slip and put me in for insubordination?”

  “Then go do what you’ve been asked to do.”

  “Yessir.”

  Shane moved out of the room and walked back down the hall. He stopped at Mavis’s desk. “What room does the discovery officer use?”

  “Room 256,” she said. “It’s locked. Here’s the key.” She handed him a key attached to a square wood block. It reminded Shane of a gas-station lavatory key. Appropriate. He was definitely in the toilet. As he moved out of the Advocate Section into the open corridor, he saw Alexa Hamilton coming back from the ladies’ room. She passed him, her gaze straight ahead, as if he didn’t exist or, more to the point, as if she knew he was about to disappear.

  He punched the button for the beautiful old wrought-iron box. The elevator arrived and he got on. An elderly black gentleman in a dark blue blazer was running the lift.

  “You must be new here,” the old man said. “Whatchu gonna be doin’?”

  “I’m the new discovery officer.”

  “Boy, good goin’. That sounds pretty darn important.”

  “Yeah,” Shane said sadly. “No doubt about it. I am de man.”

  13

  Unit Discovery Officer

  After calling Harvard Westlake and leaving a message for Chooch that he’d be late picking him up, Shane spent the morning Xeroxing cases in the narrow one-window office on the second floor. It was the only office that Internal Affairs had rented on two. Except for the occasional secretary who came in and dropped more cases on his stack, he was alone with his thoughts while the Xerox hummed and coughed up copies, passing its white light over the endless pages.

  Shane wondered how much longer he should stay on the job. He’d pretty much run out of police department highway. He couldn’t believe that the district attorney would ever bring murder charges. That was just being orchestrated by Chief Brewer to put pressure on him. But being terminated by Alexa Hamilton at his upcoming board was a distinct possibility. Except for Bernie Cookson, the judges were stacked against him. He would probably lose his tin and be kicked out, his seventeen-year pension going down the drain with the verdict.

  He thought about Barbara Molar, how he wanted to hold her and make love to her, but this was immediately followed by a puzzling feeling of dispirited grief for something he couldn’t identify. Moments later he was aware of a thickening depression. As the Xerox machine hummed and kicked pages into a tray, he tried to work it out.

  He knew
that pursuing a relationship with Barbara was stupid under these circumstances. Beyond that, something else was nibbling at his subconscious. He finally slapped it down and held it up.

  It was a simple five-word question.

  Why had Barbara married Ray?

  What had led her to walk away from him and find solace in the arms of the most brutal cop on the force? She said that it was sweet to see tenderness in such a huge, seemingly brutish man.

  Shane had known Ray almost from the day he’d joined the force, and he had never seen tenderness. Ray Molar was buffalo meat. His temper was always close to the surface, hiding there, waiting to explode. So why had Barbara married him? Why had she made such an obviously miserable choice?

  With that question came another.

  What weakness in her had caused her not to see Ray for what he was? Of course, Shane had also been fooled at first. But he’d had Ray as a partner. Having a kick-ass partner was considered a life-insurance policy in police work. Shane had misevaluated for reasons of his own survival. Why had Barbara been fooled?

  His mind left that half-chewed thought and began on another. He had physical desire for her. He had once thought he loved her, but yesterday afternoon at Shutters, she had seemed to be trying to start up their relationship on the heels of Ray’s death. He could understand cerebrally why this might be: she was lonely and scared, and Ray had been abusing her. She had come to hate him, but…

  Ray had been her husband for twelve years. She had once slept in his arms. Yet his death seemed to hold no consequences for her. Shane had despised Ray, but he had not felt the same way since he’d squeezed off the round from his Mini-Cougar and watched his bullet explode in Ray’s head. The picture of that death was on a macabre bulletin board in his psyche. He could not do anything without walking past it. Yet Barbara had no remorse, no guilt, no misgivings. To her, Ray’s death was the doorway to her future. What did that say? What did it mean? Had be been too young, immature, and blinded by lust to see any of her shortcomings back then? Had she changed…or had he?