Vertical Coffin s-4 Read online

  "What's up?"

  "I got Chooch the coaching job. But there's a league guy you have to talk to. He's got some questions. Like, is Chooch eighteen?"

  "Not quite."

  "A Pop Warner head coach has to be eighteen, but I can sign up for that job and he can be what they call a demonstrator. Demonstrators in Pop Warner aren't coaches, they're guys who demonstrate to the kids how to do stuff. Technically I'll be in charge, but he'll do the head coaching job. We just don't tell anyone. There's other stuff you need to sign off on. We're meeting with this guy at six tonight."

  "I can't. Got an appointment. How 'bout in the next hour or so, for drinks?"

  "I'll have to call you back," Sonny said.

  We hung up and I dialed Ruta. "Yeah?" he growled.

  After I told him we were off the case, I told him about the windows across the street from the murder scene, and that somebody should tell the feds to check the apartments over there in case it was the shooting position.

  "Whatta buncha shit," he said and hung up. I wasn't sure if he was talking about my theory or us getting bounced. Then I called the Valley Times. Nan Chambers was out, but I left my name and number and the message that I wanted to see her immediately.

  Sonny Lopez called back fifteen minutes later. "Okay, the guy will meet you at the Boar and Bull on Ventura for drinks. Be there in twenty."

  "Deal," I said.

  The place was almost empty when I arrived. I moved through the darkly colorful restaurant. Stuffed boar and bull heads with glassy eyes were mounted over the bar, gazing down like hairy drunks hung on the wall to dry out.

  I found my way into the back room where four members of the sheriff's department were sitting in one of the red leather booths under a big-screen TV that was playing a tape of last Sunday's Chargers game, with the sound off.

  "Hey, Shane," Darren Zook called out.

  I walked over. I knew them all. Darren was at one end of the booth. Next to him was Sonny Lopez, then Gary Nightingale. Rick Manos, who I remembered from their mission board was an SEB scout, sat on the far end. This was obviously not going to be about football.

  Sonny said, "Want a beer?"

  "Not till I know what's going on." I pulled up a free chair and straddled it, sitting at the end of the horseshoe booth so I was facing them. "So let's just get to it."

  "Okay. You were Emo's friend. Word is you're the one looking into all this, so I guess we're looking to you for some cover," Sonny said.

  "Cover, or cover-up?" I asked.

  Rick Manos leaned forward. I'd heard about him before. Big street rep. His silent jacket said he was not a guy to mess with.

  "We know you got the Greenridge homicide," Manos said. "We also know ATF is gonna try and force you to put it on my people. SEB didn't kill that guy, piece of shit that he was."

  "Okay, here's my take on that," I said. "I don't know whether SEB popped Billy Greenridge, or if he was shot by some old peckerwood bust of his who crawled out of the woodpile at Vacaville, looking for payback. But it doesn't matter what I think anymore, 'cause ATF Title-Eighteened us. They've got it now, so if you got a problem talk to the nutsacks over at Justice. But I'll tell you this much, if I was still involved I'd put your request on the record and you'd all lose pay and grade."

  "You're taking this the wrong way," Lopez said.

  "How is that, Sonny? You guys just asked me to throw an investigation."

  "We didn't kill Billy Greenridge," Manos said. His voice was soft, but I could hear the anger. "We just look good for it and everybody wants this thing put down fast."

  "I'm sure if you lay back everything will turn out fine." I started to get up and Rick Manos and Gary Nightingale stood with me. Each took one of my arms to keep me from leaving. "You sure this is the way you want to play it?" I said softly.

  They hesitated, then let go.

  "Shane, they killed Emo," Sonny said. "They sent him up there without knowing what he was walking into. Why isn't anybody investigating that?"

  "They are," I said.

  "Yeah? And just who's doing that?" Manos said.

  "Me. I'm looking into it for Sheriff Messenger and Mayor Mac."

  "LAPD?" Nightingale said, but his face clouded with disbelief, as if I'd just said the Girl Scouts of America were working the case.

  "I'm not gonna bend the warrant investigation either," I went on. "I'm gonna do it straight up, and my advice to you guys is to back up and hit neutral. Proactive behavior is just gonna make things worse."

  "What if their SRT team decides to even the score?" Gary Nightingale said. "We didn't pop Greenridge, but they think we did. What if they snipe at one of us next?"

  "That's why you guys get the extra-thick Kevlar," I said, and stepped back from the table.

  "You were supposed to be Emo's friend," Lopez said.

  "I was his friend, and I know if it had been one of us up there on the porch instead of him, Emo would never be asking for stuff like this." Then I looked directly at Sonny. "And thanks for using my son to lure me out with all that bullshit about Pop Warner. Next time you want to have a police meeting, call my office and make a regular appointment."

  "Here." Sonny reached down on the seat beside him, picked up a thick blue binder, and slid it across the table toward me. "That's the play book for the Rams and the rule book for the league. The guy you've gotta call's number is in there."

  As I reached for it Rick Manos grabbed my arm and held it. When he looked up at me, his eyes were as dark and empty as two gun barrels.

  "If the shit jumps off, be sure you've got a side to be on," he warned.

  Chapter 18

  RATS

  At five o'clock I was waiting for Sergeant Brickhouse in a back booth at Denny's, the Pop Warner binder sat unopened on the seat beside me. I was still angry about the meeting at the Boar and Bull. I'd expected much more from those guys. I sat with a cup of coffee, trying to calm down while a growing dissatisfaction with my role in police work festered.

  I guess what pissed me off most was how over the years situations like this had forced my expectations down and made me question everything I had once believed in. When I joined the force we were Blue Knights, protectors of the innocent. Centurions. I had worn my uniform with pride, but without realizing why, things had started to change, and I had slowly lost my point of view.

  I remember the first time somebody spit on my black-and-white. I was only about three years on the job, still in a uniform, working a neighborhood car in Van Nuys. It was a heavily Hispanic area and a ten-year-old vatito ran up while we were at a stop sign and hocked a lugie. It hit and ran down the squad car's windshield. The boy flipped us off, then took off running. My partner said the next time he saw that flaquito, he'd slap him silly. I had another reaction. I was angry, sure, but also I wanted that boy to know I was out there in the streets for him. If he needed me I was his backup. Instead, he only saw somebody to despise.

  The same thing happened again six months later, when I was working an L-car in Carson. I had parked the unit, and this old African-American woman with her arms full of groceries spit on the windshield of my empty Plain-Jane. I came out of a coffee shop just as she did it and caught her. She started yelling curses at me. If somebody had tried to mug her, I was prepared to risk my life to stop it. She didn't understand that my job was to protect and serve her.

  Of course, I also knew that in her eyes I didn't exist. As a man, I was invisible. All she saw was the uniform, and it was a symbol of something she hated. What distressed me was that this virulent hatred spanned fifty years and two ethnic boundaries, from that ten-year-old Hispanic boy in Van Nuys, to the black grandmother in Carson.

  Rodney King and the O. J. case were part of it. The Rampart scandal put it in overdrive. We were not Blue Knights to some of these citizens, but a gang in blue-thugs with life-and-death power, who kicked ass, took names, and didn't care if we got it right, as long as we got it down. Hook'm, book'm, and cook'm. A bad bust probably just takes anoth
er guilty asshole off the street, so don't sweat it. It was the total collapse of an idea I once treasured.

  Years ago I thought I should make a difference. Be a one-man cleanup crew. One afternoon I spotted the same old woman carrying groceries in Carson and I followed her home. I guessed her age was about sixty, but she looked almost a hundred. When I knocked on her door she opened it to the length of the chain lock. Our emotional and intellectual view of each other was as narrow as that inch-wide slit.

  "Go away," she said, seeing my uniform. "They all dead." Then she slammed the door.

  Two days later, while I was patrolling the same area, I saw her again. She was struggling with an especially large armload of packages. Her ankles were swollen, her face shiny with sweat as she toiled along. I rolled up beside her, got out, and opened my squad car door. "Can I give you a ride home, Ma'am?" I asked.

  She stood at the side of the curb and looked at me with contempt. "I told you, they all dead," she said, exasperated. "You killed ever' one. Now you think I be gettin' in dat damn po-lice car?"

  "But I didn't kill them," I said. "I never met them."

  "You po-lice, ain't ya? Two boys and one baby girl-my grandchildren, all dead, shot by po-lice." And then she spat again, this time on me. I felt it spray across my face and run down into my collar.

  I got back into my car, drove half a block away and parked. I was shaken by the incident. I didn't know why the police had shot her grandchildren or even if they had a valid reason. But I knew it didn't matter. A valid reason or a legal justification wouldn't change the hatred in that woman's ancient, yellow eyes. I could have carried her groceries twice a week for the rest of my life and it wouldn't begin to make up for those three dead children.

  Protect and Serve. I tried to live up to that increasingly difficult motto. But I was flawed. I was vulnerable to anger and ego like everyone else. I had emotional prejudice and a parochial moral view, which I tried to overcome. On the street, I tried to be color-blind and situation-neutral. Yet, with each passing year I became more fatigued by the effort.

  I would have given a year's pay to have that old woman forgive me for the deaths of three children I never even knew, and that puzzled me. Why should it be so important? Why should I invest so deeply in something I wasn't a part of and couldn't change?

  But I did. I guess somewhere deep down I still needed my uniform to validate me. Maybe I needed it for identity or for a sense of belonging. Maybe I had chosen to be a cop because I respected the values in the manual; and when all those values got skewed I didn't have the guts to get off the ride. I still wanted to do the right thing. I still wanted the people I served to know I cared. But more and more, nobody cared if I cared. I had been absorbed into the mix, unable to rise above the perceptions of others. Now I feared SEB and SRT were on a course that would only make it worse, and that was what was darkening my mood and ruining my day.

  I looked up as Nan Chambers walked into the restaurant. She saw me and headed in my direction on those strong muscular legs, her cut arms swinging, spiky hair bristling, turning heads all over the room as she crossed toward me.

  "Your office told me you were going to be here," she said, answering my unspoken question like a gypsy mind reader.

  "We need to come to an understanding," I said. "You can't write about that crime scene we found across the street, at least not yet. That's gotta stay between us, Nan. And if you left any prints at that apartment, get ready for a visit from the feds."

  "I didn't leave any prints," she said, and slid uninvited into the booth across from me.

  Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a leather wallet, opened it, and slid it across the table. I read:

  Sgt. Josephine Brickhouse LASD

  Pinned under the creds was a star.

  Chapter 19

  BRICK SHITHOUSE

  Don't take it so hard," Jo Brickhouse said. She had just repacked her badge and was leaning her muscled forearms on the table. "Besides, from what I've seen so far, you could use the help."

  "I don't want any help. At least, not from you."

  "Scully, we live in a democracy. Tony, Bill, and I say yes. You say no. This was voted on. Three against one. You lose. Get over it."

  "That's not a vote, that's three coyotes and a poodle deciding on what to have for dinner."

  I put a dollar down for my coffee, then got up and headed out of the restaurant. I didn't see her green Suburban parked in the lot, so I turned and looked through Denny's front window. She was still inside buying something at the counter. I got into my Acura feeling completely sandbagged. I'm generally not this damn gullible. I guess my feelings were hurt, or my pride-something.

  She came through the swinging door of Denny's, opened my passenger side, and slid in carrying a caffe latte to go.

  "Take your own car. I'm not a taxi service," I snapped.

  "I was dropped. Don't have wheels. That SUV was a department plain-wrap. Vice needed it back, so I'm with you. You can drop me at the L. A. substation at EOW."

  She closed the door, slamming it harder than I like, then started to pour about six packets of Equal into her latte. "Okay, Scully, we need to get something straight before we partner up. I have some issues."

  "I'll bet lying isn't gonna be one of them."

  "I'm gay. I don't sleep with guys, and you're not the priceless piece of ass that's gonna change that, so put your fantasies away, stay on your side of the car, and we'll do fine."

  "Then a blow job's out of the question?"

  "You can stow that sarcastic bullshit. I've been in law enforcement for over ten years. I've learned it works a whole lot better if I get this out of the way, up front. I pack a nine-millimeter Glock with thirteen in the clip. I'm a range-qualified sharpshooter and I have two black belts, one in karate, one in tae kwon do. Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I'm a pussy. I don't want to be your backup. We can take turns on cover, or flip for it, whatever. But I'm not your CHCO."

  "My what?"

  "Coat-holder and communications officer."

  "In case you're interested, you're coming off like a complete asshole."

  "I can be that, too. But deal straight and you get the best. Pull any horseshit, and you can go ahead and bring it on down, frog-boy, 'cause I won't put up with it." Then she shot me that dazzling smile and took a sip of latte. "These are good. Sure you don't want one?"

  I put the car in reverse and backed out a little too fast, but she was really pissing me off. Male pride. I mean, I'm happily married, but come on-you shouldn't knock what you haven't tried. I turned onto Lankershim and drove toward the sheriff's forensic lab.

  Jo Brickhouse was looking around the front seat and up on the dash. "Where's your murder book on Greenridge?" she asked. "You didn't give those goat-fucks from ATF your notes, did you?"

  "No murder book."

  "You're the primary on a homicide and you don't keep a murder book?" She sounded stunned.

  "Yeah, I would've been keeping a murder book, but I was pulled off the case before I had time to get most of my evidence back from your slow-as-shit crime lab."

  "You don't have to take that tone, Scully. I wasn't criticizing. I just like to keep everything written down: keep a good event timeline, evidence records, crime scene photos, background. I'll get one going. For now, we can use my notes." She pulled out her spiral pad.

  "But you're not going to be my secretary, I bet."

  "Sure, I've got no problem pushing some pencil lead. But let's do it right." She opened her notebook and tore out three pages. "This lecture on latent prints was simply fascinating. You want it, or can it go in the file?"

  "I know a better place you can stick it."

  "Temper, temper," she said, and wadded up the papers and dropped them in the back seat.

  We drove in silence for six blocks. I snuck another look at her. There was a lot of animal magnetism there. In retrospect, I could see why she needed to get her personal proclivities on the line up front. She'd undoubtedl
y had to deal with her share of squad-car Romeos. I tried to settle down, make the best of it. Finally she finished her coffee, slurping the last drop, then she just pitched the damn cup into the back seat with the three wadded-up sheets of notebook paper.

  "This is not a department car. I'd appreciate it if you didn't throw your litter in the back."

  "Sorry."

  She hitched herself around and leaned over the seat. She was in a miniskirt, and for a minute she was poking a well-developed ass up in the air, nearly mooning the next car over. The driver did a double take. For my part, I almost hit a taxi. She sat back, put the cup on the seat between us, and stuffed my dumb-ass fingerprint lecture in her purse.

  "Sorry about the short skirt. I was doing field interviews today. Sometimes it helps to show a little leg. Tomorrow I'll be in class-C stuff."

  "Whatever that is."

  "Sheriff's department dress code for plain clothes dicks. Excuse the expression."

  We drove in silence for another minute or two. "So, Scully," she finally said. "Where the hell are we going?"

  "Bill Messenger took our bullet, that three-oh-eight casing, out to your forensics lab for a print scan and tool marks. I figure, since you pack a star you can get the techs out there to give us a sneak peek."

  "This is probably good thinking," she said, then settled back in her seat.

  But to be truthful, even the way she said that was pissing me off-like she was validating a surprising idea from a total blockhead. Then she hitched sideways on the seat, snapping her short skirt down. All her movements were athletic and a little too big. She was a muscular girl who took up slightly more space than I was accustomed to.

  "So, I had time to check you out before Messenger sent me to meet you," she said. "You're married to your division commander. I've seen her on the news and once at a cross-training day for detectives, out at our SWAT range at Spring Ranch. Damn fine package."

  I looked over, not sure what to make of that. Finally I nodded and said, "I think so."