Free Fall (7 page)

I went through a pair of leather upholstered swinging doors, then along a short hall that opened into the city room. Twenty desks were jammed together in the center of the room, and maybe a dozen people were hanging around the desks, most of them typing as fast as they could and the rest of them talking on the phone. Eddie Ditko had the desk on the far left corner, about as close to the editors’ offices as you could get without being one of the editors. A woman in her late twenties was working at a terminal next to him. She was wearing huge round glasses and a loud purple dress with very wide shoulders and a little purple pillbox hat. It was the kind of clothes you wore when you were establishing your identity as a retro-hip urban intellectual. Or maybe she was just odd. She glanced up once as I approached, then went on typing. Eddie was chewing on an unlit Grenadiers cigar and scowling at his VDT when I got there. He had to be forty years older than her. He didn’t bother glancing up. “Hey, Eddie, when are they going to make you an editor around here and get you off the floor?”

Eddie jerked the cigar out of his mouth and spit a load of brown juice at his wastebasket. He never lit them. He chewed them. “Soon’s I stop saying what I think and start kissing the right ass, like everybody else around here.” He said it loud enough for most of the room to hear. The purple woman glanced over, then went on with her typing. Tolerant. Eddie grimaced and rubbed at his chest. “Jeez, I got chest pains. I’m a goddamned walking thrombo.”

“Lay off the fats and exercise a little.”

“What’re you, my fuckin’ mother?” Eddie leaned to the side and broke wind. Classy.

I pulled up a chair and sat on it backwards, hooking my arms over its back. “What’d you find on the REACT guys?”

Eddie clamped the wet cigar in his teeth, leaned toward the VDT, and slapped buttons. The little VDT screen filled with printing. “I put together some stuff from our morgue files, but that’s about it. REACT is an elite surveillance unit, and that means the cops block their files. They can’t do their jobs if everybody knows who they’re surveilling.”

“How many guys we talking about?”

“Five. You want the names?”

“Yeah.”

He hit a couple of buttons and a little printer beside his VDT chattered and spit out a page. He handed it to me. Five names were listed in a neat column in the center of the page.

I looked over the names. They meant nothing. “They any good?”

Eddie grinned like a shark with his eye on a fat boy in baggy shorts. “They wouldn’t be a REACT team if they weren’t any good. They target felons and they’ve got a ninety-nine-point-seven percent conviction rate. Dees has been down there almost six years, along with Garcia and Riggens. Pinkworth joined a couple of years back and they picked up Thurman a year ago. He’s the baby.”

“How’d Thurman make the squad?”

Eddie hit more buttons and the printing on the screen changed. “Same as everybody else. Top ten of his academy class, a string of outstandings in his quarterly evaluations, Officer of the Month four times. You remember that nut pulled a gun on the RTD bus and threatened to start killing people unless Madonna gave him a blow job?”

“Sort of.”

The purple woman looked over. Interested.

“Hell, I wrote about that one. Guy stops the bus in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, and Thurman and a guy named Palmetta were the first cops on the scene. Thurman was, what, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old?”

The purple woman shrugged.

“Yeah, he was just a kid. That was part of the story. Anyway, the nut shoots this fat guy in the leg to make his point, then grabs this nine-year-old girl and starts screaming he’s going to do her next. He wants Madonna, right? Palmetta puts the call in for a hostage negotiator and the SWAT team but Thurman figures there ain’t time. He takes off his gun and goes into the bus to talk to the guy. The nut tries to shoot him twice but he’s shaking so bad both shots miss, so he puts the gun to the girl’s head. You know what happened then?”

The purple lady was leaning forward, frowning because she wanted to know.

Eddie said, “Thurman tells the guy he’s had Madonna and Madonna’s a lousy lay, but he knows Rosanna Arquette and Rosanna Arquette is the best blow job in town. Thurman tells the guy if he puts down the gun, as soon as he’s out on bail, he’ll set it up with Rosanna Arquette ’cause she owes him a couple of favors.”

The purple woman said, “And he went for that?”

Eddie spread his hands “Here’s a nut believes he’s
gonna get Madonna, why not? The guy says only if she blows him
twice.
Thurman says, okay, she’ll do it twice, but not on the same day, she’s got a thing about that. The nut says that’s okay with him ’cause he’s only good for once a week anyway, and puts down the gun.”

The purple lady laughed, and she didn’t look so odd anymore.

Eddie was smiling, too. “That was, what, a couple years ago? Thurman gets the Medal of Valor and six months later he wins the early promotion to plainclothes and the REACT team. They’re top cops, pal. Every one of those guys has a story like that in his file else he wouldn’t be on the team.”

“Eddie, what if I didn’t want the good stuff? What if I was a reporter and I was looking for something that maybe had a smell to it?”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe I’m looking to see if they’ve crossed over.”

Eddie shook his head and patted the VDT. “If it’s in here, it’s already public record. Someone would’ve had to lodge the complaint, and it would’ve had to come out through LAPD PR or one of the news agencies or the courts. It wouldn’t be a secret and no one would be trying to hide it.”

“Okay. Could you check for allegations?”

“Substantiated or otherwise?”

I looked at him.

“Reporter humor. It’s probably over your head.” Eddie hit more keys and watched the screen, and then did it again. When he had filled and wiped the screen three times, he nodded and leaned back. “I had it search through the files keying on the officers’ names for every news release during the past year, then I threw out the junk about them saving babies and arresting the Incredible Hulk and just kept the bad stuff. This is pretty neat.”

I leaned forward and looked at the screen. “What’s it found?”

“Excessive-force complaints. ‘Suspect injured while resisting arrest.’ ‘Suspect filed brutality charges.’ Like that. ’Course, these guys are busting felons and felons tend to get nasty, but check it out, you’ve got twenty-six complaints in the past ten months, and eleven of them are against this guy Riggens.”

“Any charges brought?”

“
Nada.
IAD issued letters of reprimand twice, and dealt a two-week suspension, but that’s it.”

I read the list. Twenty-six names ran down the left side of the page, and next to each name there was a booking number and the arresting charge and the claims levied by the defendants and the accused officer or officers. Riggens had all or part of eleven of the charges, and the remainder were divided pretty evenly between Pinkworth and Dees and Garcia and Thurman. Thurman had part of three.

Eddie said, “You’ve got to understand, cops on these special tac squads get charges filed all the time, so most of these really are garbage, but if I’m looking for tuna I’m looking for losers, and that’s Riggens.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

Eddie stuck the cigar in his mouth and rolled it around and looked at me. “What you got going here, kid? It any good?”

“I don’t know. I’m still just running down the leads.”

He nodded and sucked on the cigar, and then he gazed at the editors’ offices. He wasn’t getting any younger. “If there’s a story here, I want it.”

“You bet, Eddie.”

Eddie Ditko spread his hands, then hacked up something phlegmy and spit it into the basket. No one looked and no one paid any mind. I guess seniority has its privileges.

I went back the way I came, took the elevator down to the lobby, then used the pay phone there to call Jennifer Sheridan in Marty Beale’s office. I asked her for Floyd Riggens’s address. She said, “Which one?”

“What do you mean, which one?”

“He’s divorced. He used to live in La Cañada, but now he’s got a little apartment somewhere.”

I told her that if she had them both, I’d take them both. She did. She also told me that Riggens’s ex-wife was named Margaret, and that they had three children.

When I had the information that I needed, I said, “Jennifer?”

“Yes?”

“Did Mark ever complain to you about Floyd?”

There was a little pause. “Mark said he didn’t like having Floyd as a partner. He said Floyd scared him.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said Floyd drank a lot. Do you think Floyd is involved in this?”

“I don’t know, Jennifer. I’m going to try to find out.”

We hung up and I went out of the building and across the street to my car.

F
loyd Riggens was living in a small, six-unit stucco apartment building on a side street in Burbank, just about ten blocks from the Walt Disney Studio. There were three units on the bottom and three on top, and an L-shaped stair at the far end of the building. It was a cramped, working-class neighborhood, but working class was good. Working class means that people go to work. When people go to work, it makes things easier for private eyes and other snoopers who skulk around where they shouldn’t.

I parked three houses down, then walked back. Riggens had the front apartment, on top. Number four. None of the units seemed to belong to a manager, which was good, but the front door was open on the bottom center unit, which was bad. Light mariachi music came from the center unit and the wonderful smells of simmering
menudo
and fresh-cut cilantro and, when I drew closer, the sound of a woman singing with the music. I walked past her door as if I belonged, then took the stairs to the second level. Upstairs, the drapes were drawn on all three units. Everybody at work. I went to number four, opened the screen, and stood in Riggens’s
door with my back to the street. It takes longer to pick a lock than to use a key but if a neighbor saw me, maybe they’d think I was fumbling with the key.

Floyd Riggens’s apartment was a single large studio with a kitchenette and a closet and the bath along the side wall. A sleeping bag and a blanket and an ashtray were lined against the opposite wall and a tiny Hitachi portable television sat on a cardboard box in the corner. A carton of Camel Wides was on the floor by the sleeping bag. You could smell the space, and it wasn’t the sweet, earthy smells of
menudo.
It smelled of mildew and smoke and BO. If Floyd Riggens was pulling down graft, he sure as hell wasn’t spending it here.

I walked through the bathroom and the closet and the kitchenette and each was dirty and empty of the items of life, as if Riggens didn’t truly live here, or expect to, any more than a tourist expects to live in a motel. There was a razor and a toothbrush and deodorant and soap in the bathroom, but nothing else. The sink and the tub and the toilet were filmed with the sort of built-up grime that comes of long-term inattention, as if Riggens used these things and left, expecting that someone else would clean them, only the someone never showed and never cleaned.

There were four shirts and three pants hanging in the closet, along with a single navy dress uniform. Underwear and socks and two pair of shoes were laid out neatly on the floor of the closet, and an empty gym bag was thrown in the far back corner. The underwear and the socks were the only neat thing in the apartment.

An open bottle of J&B scotch sat on the counter in the kitchenette, and three empties were in a trash bag on the floor. The smell of scotch was strong. A couple of Domino’s pizza boxes were parked in the refrigerator along with four Styrofoam Chicken McNuggets boxes and half a quart of lowfat milk. An open box of plastic forks and a package of paper plates sat on the counter
beside the sink The sink was empty, but that’s probably because there were no pots or pans or dishes. I guess Riggens had made the choice to go disposable. Why clutter your life with the needless hassle of washing and cleaning when you can use it and throw it away?

It had taken me all of four minutes to look through Riggens’s apartment. I went back into the main studio and stood in the center of the floor and felt oily and somehow unclean. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this, and it left me feeling vaguely depressed, as if this wasn’t a place where someone lived, but more a place where someone died. I went to the sleeping bag and squatted. A photograph had been pushpinned to the wall. It was an older picture and showed Riggens with a plain woman about his age and three kids. A boy and two girls. The boy looked maybe fourteen and sullen. The oldest girl was maybe twelve, and the youngest girl was a lot younger. Maybe four. She was tiny compared to the others, with a cute round face and a mop of curly hair and she was holding up a single bluegill on a nylon cord. She looked confused. Riggens was smiling and so was his wife. Margaret. They were standing in front of the bait shop at Castaic Lake, maybe twenty miles north of L.A. in the Santa Susana Mountains. The picture looked worn around the edges, as if it had been handled often. Maybe it had. Maybe Riggens lived here but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he brought his body here, and drank, and slept, but while the body was here he looked at the picture a lot and let his mind go somewhere else. Castaic, maybe. Where people were smiling.

I closed the apartment as I had found it, went down the stairs, and picked up the Ventura Freeway east through the Glendale Pass and into La Cañada in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains.

It was mid-afternoon when I got there, and knots of junior high school kids were walking along the sidewalks
with books and gym bags, but no one looked very interested in going home or doing homework.

Margaret Riggens lived in a modest ranch-style home with a poplar tree in the front yard in the flats at the base of the foothills. It was one of those stucco-and-clapboard numbers that had been built in the mid-fifties when a developer had come in with one set of house plans and an army of bulldozers and turned an orange grove into a housing tract to sell “affordable housing” to veterans come to L.A. to work in the aerospace business. The floor plan of every house on the block would be the same as every other house. The only differences would be the colors and the landscaping and the people within the houses. I guess there is affordability in sameness.