The Tin Collectors Read online

  The sirens growled to the curb outside, and Shane quickly looked around the bedroom, taking mental pictures of the crime scene, filing them in his memory for later. Oddly enough, it was Ray who had schooled him in this technique, quizzing him at “end of watch” on what he remembered. They’d sit in some bar at EOW, betting drinks on the answers. Ray would ask questions: What was on the dresser? How many windows in the kitchen? Were there screens? Ray was violent and unpredictable, but he sure knew how to police a crime scene.

  “They’re gonna take me downtown,” Shane said. “They’ll take your statement here, then probably transport you to the ER. Just say exactly what happened. He would have killed you, Barbara. He fired first. This was self-defense. Just leave out you and me. Whatever you do, stay tight on that.”

  They could hear cops coming into the house through the open front door.

  “We’re back here, LAPD!” Shane yelled. Then, as an afterthought, he whispered to Barbara, “Call the phone company and see if you can get an AT&T printout of calls to your phone so we can try and find out who that woman is.”

  Barbara nodded just as a uniformed South Bureau “dog and cat” team came through the door, guns drawn. Shane had his hands in the air and his Beretta Mini-Cougar hanging down, dangling uselessly from his right thumb. “LAPD,” he said again.

  The cops didn’t know him, and not seeing a badge, the male officer rushed him, disarmed him, and threw him down onto the floor right next to a puddle of Ray’s blood. The female kept her Smith & Wesson trained on him until her partner had Shane cuffed. Then they both roughly yanked him up.

  “Where’s your shield?” the lady cop said. Her nameplate read S. RILEY.

  “On my dresser, at home. I was asleep. She called for help. I live four miles from here. I’m Sergeant Shane Scully, Southwest RHD. My serial number is 50867.”

  They looked down at Shane’s now-bloody bare feet, then at Ray. The male cop was a policeman III; his nameplate read P. APPLEGATE. He knelt down and looked closely at the body. “Shit. This is Steeltooth. You shot Lieutenant Molar.”

  Shane stood quietly as Applegate fingered his shoulder mike. “This is X-ray Twelve. We’re Code Six at 2387 Shell Avenue. We have a police officer down. We need a sergeant on the scene and the coroner. Notify South Bureau Detectives we have the shooter in custody. He claims to be Southwest Robbery/Homicide Sergeant Shane Scully.” Then he turned to Shane. “Gimme that serial number again.”

  “It’s 50867,” Shane said into the officer’s open shoulder mike.

  “You get that?” Applegate asked. The female radio-transmission officer answered quickly.

  “Roger, X-ray Twelve. That’s 50867. You’re Code Six Adam at Shell Avenue, requesting a supervisor and a Homicide unit. Stand by.” There was static, and in less than thirty seconds, the RTO came back on. “X-ray Twelve, on your suspect ident: that badge number is confirmed to Southwest RHD Sergeant Shane Scully, 143 East Channel Road, Venice, California.”

  “Roger. We’re locking down this crime scene for Homicide and moving outside.” The officer then turned to Shane. “Who’s your direct supervisor?”

  “Captain Bud Halley, Southwest Division Robbery/Homicide.”

  “You got his call-out number?”

  “Just call the squad. I can do it myself if you take these cuffs off.”

  “Hey, Scully, you done enough already. You just croaked the best fucking cop on the force.” Then he unlocked the handcuffs. “Shannon, take Mrs. Molar into the kitchen. I’ll hold Sergeant Scully in the living room.” They left Raymond Molar in an expanding pool of his own blood to wait for the Homicide team and lab techs.

  On every unnatural death in L.A., the RHD assigns a fresh homicide number and the next team up on the division rotation gets the squeal. The numbers start on January 1 and continue sequentially until the last day of December. If the body is a male, the number is proceeded by an M; if female, by an F. On that chilly April morning, Lieutenant Raymond George Molar became M-417-00.

  The RHD team got there a little after three-thirty A.M. as the crime lab was just finishing photographing the scene. The two lab techs had already done their preliminary workup. They’d bagged the lieutenant’s hands, outlined the DB in tape, and were standing around, waiting for the detectives to show before rolling the body.

  Both Homicide dicks were veterans and had been notified before they got there that the officer down was the legendary LAPD Lt. Ray “Steeltooth” Molar. They had both signed Patrolman Applegate’s crime-scene attendance sheet and now stood in the bedroom looking down at the body with stone-cut expressions as the lab techs flopped Ray over. His face had already begun to fill with blood, causing a darkening of the skin, known as lividity. More postmortem renal jettisoning had occurred, and the smell of feces in the room was getting strong as the two detectives from Robbery/Homicide silently policed the area, making their preliminary notes and observations. They graphed the location of the body and marked the bullet in the doorjamb that Ray had fired, then instructed the lab techs to dig the slug out and get it to the Investigative Analysis Section for a ballistics comparison. They bagged Shane’s 9mm Beretta; it would be booked as evidence.

  Shane was waiting in the living room with Patrolman Applegate. After half an hour the lead Homicide dick, an old, wheezing department warhorse with a basset-hound jawline, came out and sat on the sofa opposite Shane. His name was Garson Welch; he and Shane had shared a few easy grounders back when Shane was still working uniform in Southwest. One case had been so simple, they solved it in less than ten minutes when Shane arrested the perp half a block away as he was trying to stuff the murder weapon down into a Dumpster. The man had confessed on the spot. Shane and Welch had gone EOW at the jail and had had a few beers in a cop bar on Central known as the Billy Club. They didn’t have what you’d call a friendship, but they were at least friendly—better than nothing.

  “This ain’t gonna go down too good at Parker Center, Shane,” the old detective said, rubbing his ample forehead with a big, liver-spotted hand.

  “Yeah, Gar, you’re right. I should’ve just stood there and let him kill her with his nightstick.”

  “Calm down and listen,” Welch went on. “What we got here is a brown shit waffle. Lieutenant Molar had big juice with the Super Chief. People you and I only read about in the L.A. Times are getting phone calls right now over this piece of work. I just got a call and found out he’s been Mayor Clark Crispin’s police driver for the past two months. So there’s gonna be big interest at the city level. We’re gonna go slow and get it right.”

  “The mayor’s driver? Shit,” Shane said. He hadn’t known that was Ray’s new assignment.

  “I’m gonna take your preliminary here, then send you to the Glass House and let your captain do the DFAR,” Welch said, referring to the Division Field Activity Report that had to be filed after any incident involving violence or death at the hands of a police officer.

  “I got my car. I can meet you there,” Shane volunteered.

  “I’ll have one of the blues drive it in and park it for you in the underground garage, but you’re gonna go downtown in the back of a detective car. By the book. That way, nobody gets days off for bullshit nitpicks.”

  “Yeah, sure, if that’s the way you want it.” Shane was beginning to get a premonition of disaster. Then he followed Detective Welch out of the house for the long drive to Parker Center.

  3

  Dfar

  The trip downtown at four A.M. on deserted freeways took only twenty-two minutes. The black-and-white slickback that the RHD dicks were forced to drive now finally made a wide turn off Broadway, its headlights sweeping the south side of the Glass House. It pulled up to the security station. Sergeant Welch showed his badge, signed them all in, and drove into the huge underground parking garage that adjoined Parker Center.

  The building was known as “the Glass House” to everybody on the job because of the excessive amount of plate glass that draped its huge boxy shape.
The otherwise nondescript building had been designed in the fifties, which had proved to be a decade of architectural blight. The parking garage next door went down nine stories underground. The detectives found a spot on U-3, and both led Shane out of the parking complex, through a security door, and into the third basement of police headquarters. They took the elevator to six and got off at the Robbery/Homicide Division, which took up half the floor and was fronted by a thick glass partition.

  Garson Welch buzzed them through and found the OOD, a thin-faced sergeant in uniform, sitting at a computer just inside the squad room. “Is Captain Halley around? He was supposed to get a call out on this activity report.”

  The sergeant nodded and pointed down the hall. “Interview room Three,” he said.

  They moved single file down the linoleum-floored corridor and turned into a small, windowless interrogation room that contained a scarred desk, two wooden chairs, and Robbery/Homicide Captain Bud Halley. Halley had his jacket off and was showing the beginnings of a twelve-hour beard, having missed his shave at four A.M. He had also missed two belt loops. Other than that, he was a remarkably handsome, fit, prematurely gray man in his mid-forties. He was Shane’s Southwest Homicide Bureau commander. They had a good professional relationship. In the two years Shane had been assigned to Southwest Detectives, Halley had given him two excellent evaluation reports. As Shane came through the door, Captain Halley motioned him to a chair. “You guys don’t have to stick around unless you need him. I’m gonna send him home after the activity report,” he said to the two detectives.

  “Thanks, Cap, check you later,” Welch said as they left the room and closed the door behind them.

  “We only have a few minutes and then God knows what happens,” Halley said.

  “A few minutes? What’re you talking about? You’re doing the DFAR. What’s the rush?”

  “ ’Cept I’m not doing it. Deputy Chief Thomas Mayweather is on his way in. He’s doing it.”

  “The head of Special Investigations Division is doing my activity report? You can’t be serious. Why him?”

  “Chief Brewer ordered it,” Halley said.

  “Same question, then.”

  “Don’t you know what Ray Molar’s assignment was?”

  “Yeah…he was Mayor Clark Crispin’s bodyguard and driver. He was also killing his wife with a nightstick. He fired a shot at me. Barbara Molar is my wit. This should be a slam dunk. So what’s the deal?”

  “Lemme give you the secret to survival around here.” Shane waited for the punch line. “Everything that’s not department history is department politics. Chief Brewer was awakened by Mayor Crispin, who called the Big Kahuna from the Dark Side, who got rousted off his sailboat at the marina. He was planning to sail across the channel for a long weekend in Avalon. Now, instead of salt air and sea chanteys, Deputy Chief Mayweather is coming here, in his fucking yacht attire, looking to tear you a new asshole.”

  “Cap, let me say this again, so none of us miss it. Steeltooth was killing his wife. He shot first. If I hadn’t returned fire, we’d both be in the county icebox bleeding from the ears. I know for a fact Ray has two spousal-abuse beefs in his IAD package. He’s a regular at rage-management counseling. Aside from that, we both know he was a head thumper from way back. You don’t get the nickname Steeltooth just because your last name’s Molar.”

  “Don’t convince me. Make Mayweather believe it,” Halley said softly.

  Shane’s hands started to shake. He was coming down from a two-hour adrenaline rush. He had killed Ray Molar, his ex-partner, a man he had once respected, then came to fear, and then finally to hate. His emotions hovered just below consciousness. He knew he couldn’t afford a mistake, so he pushed personal feelings aside and concentrated on his plight, his survival instincts taking precedence.

  Deputy Chief Mayweather was six three and ebony black. He had a shaved head and always carried himself with the athletic grace he had shown as a first-string point guard on the UCLA basketball team in the seventies.

  He moved through the predawn stillness of the Robbery/Homicide Division and looked at the tired collection of swing-shift detectives who were manning their desks, sneaking glances at the clock, waiting for the day-watch to show up and relieve them. Mayweather stuck his gleaming black head into the interrogation room containing Scully and Halley.

  “Let’s do this upstairs.” Mayweather’s voice was cold and smooth, Vaseline on ice. “We’ll use the conference room on nine. Bud, see if they got some coffee down here and bring it up.” Then, without even looking at Shane, he moved out of the room, leaving them there.

  “Good luck,” Halley said as Shane got up off his hardwood chair and followed Mayweather, who was already halfway down the hall, striding toward the elevators with a Yul Brynner elegance, his arms swinging freely, his hips slightly forward. He was not in yachting attire. He’d dressed for this gig. The suit he wore was charcoal gray, creaseless, and fit him like a second skin. Tom Mayweather could easily have made a nice living on the pages of GQ.

  Shane moved along behind him like a barefoot, dark-haired, brown-eyed shadow, his own gait more the shuffling stride of a street fighter. Although Shane had always been able to attract women, he found his own looks pugnacious and off-putting. In his mirror, he saw a face marred by cynicism and loneliness. He was always surprised when he heard someone describe him as attractive.

  He caught Mayweather at the elevator. Both men remained silent as they waited for the stainless-steel doors to open and take them to the ninth floor, where Tom Mayweather and the other deputy chiefs had their offices down the hall from Chief Burleigh Brewer.

  “Sorry about the Avalon trip, sir,” Shane said, going for a little pre-interview suck.

  “Let’s save everything for when we get the tape running, okay?”

  “Sure,” Shane said.

  The door opened and they stepped in and rode the humming metal box to the light-paneled, green-carpeted executive floor. All the way up, Deputy Chief Mayweather said nothing, but he was staring at Shane’s bloodstained bare feet.

  Shane had been on nine only once before. He had been in Chief Brewer’s office three years ago when he received a Meritorious Service Medal. He had risked his life, the citation said, freeing two children from a burning car wreck on the San Pedro Freeway.

  They moved down the hall. Shane glanced out the plate-glass windows and could see the morning sun beginning to light the corners of the buildings across Sixth Street, throwing a fiery glow on the stone roofs and concrete balconies of the old brown buildings that surrounded the huge police monstrosity like tattered memories.

  Mayweather opened the door to the conference room, turned on the lights, and left him there.

  The room was paneled in the same light-colored wood. It was huge and windowless, being part of the interior structure of the building. On the walls were portraits of all of L.A.’s past police chiefs. The father of the new department, Chief William H. Parker, was hanging in a place of honor on the wall at the head of the table.

  They had all learned about Bill Parker in the Academy. In 1934 then-Lieutenant Parker, a law school graduate, was assistant to L.A. police chief James E. Davis. From that post, Parker saw the workings of L.A. city government close-up. The Shaw brothers presided over a corrupt city, and Chief Davis was beholden to the Shaws. Mayor Shaw’s brother controlled the Vice Squad and was selling sergeant’s tests for five hundred dollars apiece. Working with Lieutenant Earl Cook, Bill Parker campaigned for the passage of the city charter amendment that contained Section 202, which provided for a Police Bill of Rights and administrative reviews to protect police officers from inappropriate charges of wrongdoing. That section of the city charter set the model of police disciplinary review that the LAPD still uses today. Portraits of Chiefs Davis, Reddin, Gates, Williams, Parks, and Brewer hung on the walls of the conference room and seemed to glower down at him, silently reproaching him for killing one of L.A.’s finest.

  “Guy was murder
ing his wife,” Shane muttered to himself and to the stone-faced gallery of disapproving ex-police chiefs.

  Mayweather returned with a tape recorder and plugged it in. He chose the seat at the far end of the table, under the recently hung painting of Burl Brewer.

  Mayweather glanced at Sergeant Scully. “You’re a sergeant one, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, Shane, you and I don’t know each other. I guess we’ve probably met once or twice, but we’re not really acquainted. It’s important you know that I’m just here to take your statement. I’m going to try and determine what happened and then make a recommendation to the department as to what our next step should be. A police officer died at your hands. His death may have been completely unavoidable, but either way, we’re into a mandatory use-of-force review. I’m not here to hurt you, take advantage of you, or trap you in any way. Okay?”

  “I appreciate that, sir.”

  The door opened and Bud Halley entered with a pot of coffee and three mugs. He poured. They each took one, blew across the steaming surface, then sipped gratefully.

  “What goes on here is subject to the Police Bill of Rights under Title One,” Mayweather continued, “so this pre-interview will not preempt any of your Skelly rights or privileges guaranteed by Section 202 of the city charter.” The Skelly hearing was his chance to answer the charges against him before his case went to a Board of Rights, if it got that far.

  “This is an administrative review and is subject to the provisions laid down in Section 202. I’m going to record the interview.” Mayweather turned the tape on. “Raise your right hand.” Shane did as he was instructed. “Do you, Sergeant Shane Scully, swear that all information given by you during this interview is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”