Vigilante Read online

  I realized that I’d been duped when Chavaria stopped at the side of the van and refused to go farther. He’d led me to a preset camera position so the encounter could be recorded by a hidden microphone and HD camera filming through a smoked-glass window from inside the production van.

  The stolen interview of course included me telling Chavaria that I wasn’t a very nice guy and considered myself to be a shithead. The word was bleeped, but you could read my lips. It also included me saying if Chavaria didn’t cooperate, I would bust and jail him on anything I could find, including old traffic warrants. The interview between us had been edited and tightened. It included Chava’s description of the argument between Lita and Carla over the ceiling fan.

  After that came the arrest of Carla and Julio Sanchez. The shot featured Nash standing on the street corner as Hitch and I watched the squad car pull out with the Sanchezes in custody.

  Then we were back in the conference room. The shot was close on Nix Nash. “So when you break it down, here’s what the cops basically have against Carla and Julio Sanchez. No time-of-death evidence locking either of them to the murder. All the police have to support their flimsy arrest is a statement about a front-porch argument over a ceiling fan from this gangbanger, Edwin Chavaria, who my producer just found out has an extensive criminal record and was a sworn enemy of Carla’s husband, Julio Sanchez. Questionable testimony at best. But that’s not the worst of it. There’s also this.…”

  Drew said, “Roll film package two.”

  Even though the control truck was kept chilly, beads of sweat began to form on my forehead.

  Now Nash was interviewing a tough-looking, middle-aged, heavily tattooed Hispanic woman whom he identified as Janice Santiago.

  “I was across the street,” Santiago said. “It was late. I was walking my dog and I saw a blue Sidewinder truck pull up at Lita’s house and then, because Lita gets a lot of threats, I just … well, I shot it on my cell phone.”

  “This was the night of the murder?” Nash asked.

  “Yes, around eleven P.M.”

  “Camera Four, you’re up and staying wide,” Drew said.

  The shot took us back to the conference room. Nash held up the iPhone. “Here’s the cell that Janice Santiago shot her video on,” he said. “And here’s what she shot.”

  “Roll it,” Drew said, and the cell-phone footage played on a large screen in the conference room so that all of Nix’s “experts” could see it and participate.

  The cell video was time-stamped 10:48 P.M. On the screen Carla Sanchez walked up to Lita’s front porch and rang the bell. Lita opened the door; Carla dug out her wallet, pulled out some money, and handed it over. Then Lita handed Carla the ceiling fan, which Carla carried back to the truck. She got in the Sidewinder and Julio drove them both away.

  “Camera One, move in tight on Nix,” Drew said.

  “So, there’s your corroborating witness, including a cell video proving Carla Sanchez’s story that she bought the ceiling fan just as she said she had. Yet, strangely, this innocent woman and her husband are still in jail. Why couldn’t the cops find Janice Santiago? She lives just down the street in Lita’s neighborhood. It only took me half an hour to locate her. What’s going on here, Marcia?”

  “Somebody’s not doing their job,” Marcia Breen said in close-up. “Or worse still, maybe somebody wants the Sanchezes in jail so they can charge Carla and Julio with this crime. If the Sanchezes are found guilty of Lita’s murder, it could cover over what’s really going on, couldn’t it?”

  “And what do you suppose that is?” Nix asked innocently. “Let’s see.… Hey, maybe it’s this.”

  And we were again on the same shot of Lita Mendez inside her living room.

  She was looking into the camera just as before. “My name is Lolita Mendez,” she said again. “I live in Boyle Heights, a suburb of L.A., and members of the Los Angeles Police Department are trying to kill me.”

  The shot switched back to Nash in close-up. “We’ll be right back,” he said solemnly as they went to commercial.

  CHAPTER

  21

  I sat in the control room fuming. I’d been outplayed and led in a big, ugly circle by this guy. I could see now how the cops in Atlanta had been made to seem like such fools. Nobody in the control room spoke to me, although a few stole looks.

  After the two-minute break, Nash was on camera again.

  “We’re going to find out what kind of corruption is going on in Boyle Heights. This is a major V-TV exposé and you’re not going to want to miss a moment of it.”

  “Camera Three, go wide and track,” Drew said as Nix turned and began walking through his fake squad room set where fake detectives were working at desks, not looking up as he passed.

  “Law enforcement doesn’t have much time to solve a murder in metropolitan crime areas,” Nix said. “They pile up fast, so if detectives don’t put a case down in the first forty-eight hours, it quickly becomes something police call a cold case.

  “Here on V-TV we like to dig into some of those old cases and see if we can supply a measure of justice and closure to the families of these tragic murder victims. In each city we visit, we select one cold case that seems to have maybe gotten more than the normal amount of short shrift and see what we can do. For our new viewers it’s a segment we call: ‘Cold, but Not Forgotten.’”

  Nash walked into a fake captain’s office to join J. J. Blunt, Frank Palgrave, Marcia Breen, and two attractive plainclothes female detectives in suits with prop badges hanging out of their breast pockets.

  “You already know Frank and Marcia and ex–FBI profiler J. J. Blunt. So now meet Karen Bowman and Katie McKiernan, both retired LAPD detectives.” The women smiled as Nash continued. “You guys have the case files?”

  Karen Bowman handed over a stack of cold-case folders and Nash gave a brief summary of each. One or two of the cases went back as far as the seventies.

  Then Nix told his audience, “I’ve asked every detective here to write down their vote for which case they think we should reinvestigate. So hand your slips on up.”

  They all passed pieces of paper forward and Nix made a big show of counting the votes before announcing: “Three out of five of you agree we should look at Hannah Trumbull’s murder from four years ago.” He turned right into Camera Two as Drew punched the shot up.

  “Here’s the dope on this murder,” Nix said. “Hannah Trumbull, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old nurse from Good Samaritan Hospital in L.A., was murdered in December of 2006.” He held up her picture. She was indeed beautiful. She had shoulder-length straight blond hair and piercing blue eyes. “Hannah was shot to death in the garage of her duplex in West Hollywood. LAPD Hollywood Division Detectives Keith Monroe and John Hall got the squeal. After investigating for just two days, they determined that the murder was committed by this man.”

  A sketch of an African-American man in a watch cap appeared on the screen superimposed over Nix’s shoulder. The suspect in the drawing looked to be in his mid-thirties.

  Nix continued, “Nobody can find this dude. They say they’ve been looking scrupulously for four years, but I was a cop once and believe me, no cop looks for anything for four years unless it’s a winning lottery ticket.

  “This drawing was done by an LAPD sketch artist in 2006 working with Gina Wilson, a woman who lived across the street from Hannah Trumbull. Gina was robbed by this man one week before Hannah Trumbull’s murder, and Detectives Monroe and Hall think this thief was targeting that neighborhood and committed both crimes. Working with the artist, Gina produced this drawing of the SBG, which, by the way, is unofficial cop lingo for ‘Standard Black Guy.’

  “So here’s what these two homicide cops would have you believe. They say this home invasion specialist, this SBG, broke into Gina Wilson’s house a week before Hannah’s murder, tied Gina up, robbed her, and then left. He didn’t beat Miss Wilson to death or shoot her in her garage. He just stole her money. So, if he didn’t shoot
Gina Wilson, why did the SBG shoot and kill Hannah Trumbull?”

  Nix picked up the actual suspect sketch and now turned to the camera, holding it up. “I ask you, is this really a picture of Hannah’s murderer or is it a picture of police disinterest and incompetence? On our next show, we’re going to try and find out if this guy, who the cops have been searching to find for four years, really did the Hannah Trumbull murder. I think he may just be a convenient way for our two homicide detectives, Monroe and Hall, to dump poor Hannah’s violent, hard-to-solve murder and move on.

  “Next week, we’re also going to see if we can run down Hannah’s parents and get them in here to talk to us. We’ll hear what they know about their daughter’s life in the days just prior to her death. We’ll ask them what they think about the service they’ve gotten from the LAPD so far. If you have any thoughts which might help us you can text the number at the bottom of the screen. We’ll also continue to probe the troubling Lita Mendez homicide, plus a lot more. It’s a pile of work, but it’s God’s work, and here at V-TV we’re always invigorated. Stick around. There’s more. We’ll be right back.”

  The final segment of the show dealt with the fact that Los Angeles superior court judges were being paid cash bonuses funded by the county government. Jurists were getting up to forty-five thousand dollars extra over their base pay. So far, according to Nash, $300 million in this fiscally crippled state had been paid out to judges in Los Angeles County. Judges who, Nash informed us, were already among the highest paid in the country.

  Ex-judge Web Russell weighed in. “If the county is paying bonuses, will these judges in return feel a need to favor the County of L.A. when actions are brought against it? Is this a condition where the county is in effect actually bribing these judges to get favorable results at trial?”

  Nix Nash did the show close from his dressing room. He’d kicked his shoes off. His stocking feet were up on the coffee table. He was sipping a soft drink and grinning at the camera.

  He set the can down and said, “So that’s show one from L.A. We’re in the City of Angels, but we haven’t seen too many angels yet. Maybe just two.” He held up Hannah’s and Lita’s pictures, one in each hand. “Remember this quote by the noted American humorist Donald Robert Perry Marquis: ‘Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.’ If that’s so, then we’re probably the biggest procrastinators on earth. On V-TV, all we do is examine what happened yesterday. We’re in L.A. speaking truth to power. See you next week. God bless, and turn out the lights as you leave.”

  Drew Burke said, “Kill the lights.”

  The dressing room was plunged into darkness.

  “And we’re in black,” Drew said. “Bring up the theme music and roll end credits.”

  CHAPTER

  22

  I ran into Nix just as I was exiting the control truck. He was standing in front of the open elephant doors of Stage One just outside the warehouse, dressed again in his blue velour running suit.

  “What did you think?” he asked, gesturing with his soft-drink can.

  “Good start,” I said, “but I haven’t been up to the plate yet.”

  “I don’t think your turn at bat is going to help much,” he said, a knowing smile lighting his cherubic face and twinkling in his blue eyes.

  “Put a bat in a cop’s hands and anything can happen. Isn’t that your theme?”

  He walked toward me. “Gee, don’t be like this. My deal is still on the table. Come on; let’s talk this over.”

  “What’s to talk about? You shot show one. I’ve already been marked for evisceration.”

  “That’s the nice thing about shooting these shows live to tape. We’re still a week from air. We can always edit, change, and reshoot.”

  “So it’s not just you against the system, speaking truth to power. You can massage troublesome corrupt facts if you want to.”

  “It’s not corrupt to make a deal to advance a cause.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  “In that case, here.” He handed me a DVD. “That’s a copy of Janice Santiago’s cell-phone video.”

  “What shooting gallery did you dig her out of?”

  “Not important. Her film doesn’t lie,” he said. “You’ll need that video to clear the Sanchezes. I’m sure you’ll finally want to release them now.”

  I took the DVD, said nothing, and started toward my car.

  “I suggest you make note of this time and place,” he said. “’Cause your life just took a big turn for the worse.”

  I looked back. He was adrenalized and grinning, happy to be standing there in his Cuban-heeled boots and blue velour running suit. As he turned and reentered the warehouse, I promised myself before this was over I was going to flip that goofy smile of his upside down.

  When I got to the Acura there was an older man and woman walking away from the car next to mine. They’d parked too close, making it hard for me to squeeze in.

  “Sorry, can you make it?” the man asked.

  He was one of those skinny older guys with only a few gray hairs left, but he kept them long, slicked back over his shiny pate, unwilling to surrender to total baldness. The woman was his same age and pleasant looking, if a bit plump.

  “I can make it,” I assured him as I squeezed between our two cars.

  The man said, “We’re here to see Mr. Nash. We have an appointment. Could you direct us? I’m Russ Trumbull and this is my wife, Gloria.”

  “Really,” I said, stopping to look at him more carefully. Then I pointed at Stage One. “I think you can find him just inside that warehouse.”

  Trumbull and his wife hurried off.

  I levered myself into the driver’s seat, pulled out of the commercial park, and drove up Pico. With each block the knot in my stomach got tighter and harder. I finally called Hitch on my cell phone.

  “Yo,” he answered. I could hear laughter in the background.

  “You in a bar?”

  “Party. I’m at Joel Silver’s. He’s still trying to horn his way in on Prostitutes’ Ball and keeps inviting me to these private Hollywood screenings at his house. Jamie says I should string him along. Joel’s producing deal is at Warner’s and we still might need their distribution. What’s up?”

  “We need to get together.”

  “You mean now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s wrong? You sound different.”

  “I am different. Listen, Hitch, I wouldn’t pull you away from your Hollywood friends unless—”

  “Shit, dawg. Put a sock in it. These aren’t friends; they’re business associates. Where do you want to meet?”

  “How about your place?” I said. “It’s closer than the office.”

  “See you in twenty.”

  “It’s gonna take me about thirty. I’m all the way out in Century City.”

  “What’re you doing there?”

  “Nix Nash invited me to his studio. It’s out on Pico.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “He wanted me to see the taping of the first L.A. show. I just left.”

  “So how’d it go?”

  “We’re fucked,” I told him.

  CHAPTER

  23

  Hitch lives in a multi-million-dollar house near the top of Apollo Drive in the lush development of Mount Olympus. Most of the homes up there are big, sprawling mansions. Last year, Hitch bought a beautiful Georgian two-story with Doric pillars that span a wide front porch. When I got my first look at this place I was insanely jealous. I subsequently managed to rationalize that feeling by telling myself that Hitch just got lucky when he drew a great homicide case and was smart enough to cash it in with a big-budget movie. Maturity and good sense have since prevailed, and now when I visit I’m only mildly pissed and momentarily disgruntled. It usually dissipates in less than ten minutes.

  I left my Acura in the drive. Hitch’s hundred-thousand-dollar black Porsche Carrera was already parked under the porte cochere. I walked up to the
front door and pushed the doorbell. Dum-de-dum-dum, went the chimes, sounding the theme from Dragnet. It struck me as being at odds with Hitch’s cosmopolitan style, but I’ve learned that even the most sophisticated of us can fall prey to moments of cultural whimsy.

  I heard the classical sounds of Dave Brubeck’s jazz piano burbling away inside, once again revising my opinion. Moments later, my partner opened the door. He was wearing his Hollywood vines—leather pants and vest over a rich dark purple turtleneck. He looked like a celebrity contestant on Dancing with the Stars, but I guess it was a pretty good outfit for a show-biz screening at a mega-producer’s house.

  Hitch greeted me with a frown, saying, “You okay? You look like roadkill.”

  “You got one of those German lagers I can’t afford?”

  “Sure. Come on in. Crystal’s on the back deck. I’ll get three and meet you out there.”

  I walked through his beautifully furnished art-adorned living room while Hitch detoured to the bar to get our beers.

  Outside I greeted Crystal Blake with a hug. She’s Hitch’s current girlfriend and is a pastry chef at a four-star restaurant in Hollywood. The restaurant was dark tonight and she had gone to Joel Silver’s party with Hitch. Crystal is talented, funny, and drop-dead gorgeous. Like Hitch, she’d been raised in South Central, but unlike Hitch, who’d used mostly charm and BS to claw his way out of the ghetto, Crystal had used a straight-A report card and a full academic scholarship to UCLA.

  “What happened to you, sugar?” she said, holding both my hands and staring into my face. I must have looked worse than I thought.

  “Just caught a depressing glimpse of my future,” I told her.

  Hitch joined us with the lagers and handed me a foaming mug. “You looked so bad, I dropped a scotch shooter in there to add a little kick,” he said. “Don’t swallow the glass.”

  I drained half of the beer and scotch as the three of us sat at a table on the edge of his deck, which commanded a spectacular view of Hollywood. The carpet of lights below his house twinkled like a jewelry store showcase.