Land of Shadows (32 page)

He grunted and slumped in his chair.

“Probably cuz you're high, right?”

His mouth twisted into something that should've been a sneer but was too lazy to be that aggressive. “Yeah. Somethin' like that.”

I sat back in my chair. “Monique was a cute thing. A flirt, I hear. She liked big ballers—you're a big baller, aren't you? Does Gabriella know that you had sex with a seventeen-year-old girl?”

“That's my private business.”

I pulled Monique's autopsy photo from the expandable file and slapped the picture on the table before him.

Todd pushed the photo away without looking at it.

I moved the picture back. “You killed her, didn't you?”

This time he sat up and boomed, “Why? Cuz I
fucked
her? And? So?”

I laughed. “
And
the age of consent in this beautiful state of ours is eighteen.
So
you can go to jail. Even big ballers like you. Hate to pull you from the Matrix, Todd, but you're not the special snowflake your mom has told you that you are. That UCLA has told you that you are.”

“Then I'm mistaken,” he said with a smile. “I didn't have sex with her. We just held hands.”

“Does your mother, the Worthy Matron of her chapter of Eastern Star … Does she know that you, her precious boy, committed statutory rape?”

“I didn't
rape
her,” he said, his eyes hot.

“The law says you did,” I retorted. “Consent or not.”

His eyes shimmered with angry tears.

“Tell me the truth, Todd, or else—”

“Or else you're gonna beat it out of me?” He threw me a sullen glare. “That's what the LAPD do, right? Serve, protect, break a nigga's neck?”

I poked out my bottom lip and touched my heart. “That really hurts, Todd. I've never, not ever, taken a flashlight to somebody's head.” I paused, then added, “But never say never, right? We all fall short of the glory of God.” I leaned forward, almost knee to knee with him now. If he wanted, he could land one square punch to my face.
POW!
Right in the kisser. And then, it would be on like Donkey Kong, as we used to say back in the old days. “There's DNA on Monique's body, Todd. Will that semen belong to you?”

He swallowed and his Adam's apple bobbed. “I didn't do it. I was in Vegas.”

“Vegas again?” I groaned and rubbed my temples. “When I called you yesterday afternoon, you told me that you had been at Bruin Woods. I called your coach and he told me that you had been at Bruin Woods.”

In a small voice, Todd said, “He was mistaken.”

“Not mistaken. He
lied
. And you
lied
. So which story do you wanna go with, cuz frankly, I'm bored with this now. The mountains or the desert?”

He didn't speak and a tear rolled down his cheeks.

I leaned forward, knee to knee again. “C'mon, dude. It's two in the morning.
You
got shit to do.
I
got shit to do. So let's end this, all right? A witness placed you at the scene on the night Monique was killed.”

He shook his head. “Then your witness must be a crackhead cuz I wasn't
with
Monie on Tuesday night.”

I resisted laughing since my witness was indeed a crackhead. Instead, I said, “There's DNA on—”

“I want my lawyer,” he said, eyes on the table.

Well, damn. That shut me up and slapped the grin off my face. “So it's like that?” I asked.

He smiled. “Boom.”

*   *   *

A digital photograph with world champion boxer Floyd Mayweather taken on June 18 at 11:38
P.M.

A bank statement showing an ATM withdrawal of $300 on June 18 at 9:55
P.M
. at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Surveillance camera footage at that ATM in the Venetian.

These three items had been spread before me on the table in interview room 1 by prominent Los Angeles defense attorney Jeremy Lowenstein. “Sports Stars in Trouble” was his specialty—just as Colin had figured. His slicked-back brown hair and blue pin-striped suit had been the second- and third-fanciest things this room had ever seen, with Todd being the first. And Lowenstein smelled good, like butter and warm sugar. I thought of having him stand on my desk for the rest of the day, like a human air freshener, but he already had a job—the Fixer. And he had done it well.

The attorney tapped the bank statement. “I think this proves it, Detective Norton. Mr. Wisely is innocent of murder. As you can see, he wasn't even
in
California when Monique Darson was killed.”

“Why did he lie to me?” I asked.

“Why does it matter?” Lowenstein said.

“The other charges—”

The defense attorney waved his hand. “No problem. I'll have those dropped by the time morning rush hour ends. I don't know who your witness saw, but it certainly wasn't my client.”

My stomach burned—the beginnings of an ulcer my doctor had warned me about two months ago. I tried now to block the pain with positive thoughts—
it doesn't hurt, that's just gas
—but staring at Lowenstein's evidence only made the burning worse.

The sun was coming up somewhere beyond the walls of interview room 1, and I had been awake for twenty-four hours. In that time, I had found a dead girl in the trunk of a Ford Taurus, had led a car chase down La Brea Avenue, and had lost $30 to a heroin addict who had fingered the wrong tall black man driving a BMW who was no longer a suspect, whose attorney had threatened me with a wrongful arrest suit even though his client had fled from the police, vandalized city property, and had enough OG Kush flowing through his veins to put a family of zombies to sleep.

Damn. I needed a drink. A mimosa or three. It
was
almost time for breakfast.

 

46

So Todd Wisely walked. He spent two hours in the bucket and now had a fish story to tell. Technically, he had to post bail and still answer for the lesser charges. As a homicide detective, though, I couldn't care less about those offenses.

The squad room was noisy with third-shift dicks and their shifty-eyed witnesses. Colin had left a sticky on my computer monitor.
Catching a nap in the cot room
. I plopped into my chair, arms heavy, muscles sore. I leaned back and closed my eyes as the clatter of doors opening and closing, the whimpers of crying relatives and the rhythmic clack of nightsticks rubbing against Sam Browne belts, melted into its own kind of silence.

A knock on my desk pulled me from that place called Sleep.

Lieutenant Rodriguez stood over me. “In my office.
Now.
”

I glanced at my desk clock: almost seven in the morning.

By this time Pepe, Luke, and Joey had arrived and had been joking by the coffeepot, telling some story about a shopping cart, a peg-legged goat, and a transvestite hooker. As I left my desk, they stood in silence—the favored child was about to be torn a new one. That didn't bode well for
anyone
this morning.

Lieutenant Rodriguez was seated behind his desk. “Close the door.”

I did as he asked, then stood before him like a sixth-grade troublemaker.

He said nothing as he stared at me—over the last fifteen years, a vampire named Los Angles had sucked almost all of his life away, leaving his eyelashes as gray as his eyes.

I waited and forced indifference into my expression.

Finally, he said, “What the hell was that?”

“What the hell was
what
?”

“You collared one of the best players in the NCAA on a
hunch
?”

I squinted at him. “I shoulda let him run away cuz he shot 223 points in a game once upon a time? Are you
kidding
me?”

“I expected better—”

“You're acting like I randomly rolled up on a Boy Scout.”

“PC?” he asked.

I gawked at him, then said, “You want probable cause? Fine: he was speeding away from me, and that may have been an indication of guilt, running away because he murdered my victim.”

He shrugged. “That's it?”

“Since when do I need more?” I asked, hands on my hips. “And when we drove out to Carson, it wasn't my intent to arrest him.”

“Oh, really?” he said, as he rearranged the picture frame of his twin girls with the Matt Kemp Dodgers bobblehead. “Forgive me if I don't believe you.”

“Did I come to you and ask that you sign an arrest warrant for one Todd Wisely? No. Because I only wanted to
talk
to him since a witness placed him at the scene.
Talk
, just like I've done with—”

“You trusted a known heroin addict—”

“Mary Ford,” I said, holding up a finger, and then, two more fingers. “Calvin Hasan, Guillermo Acosta.”

“Yeah? What about them?”

“Two alcoholics and a hooker,” I said, “who all witnessed murders, who told me what I needed to know, who helped get three killers off the streets of Los Angeles.”

Lieutenant Rodriguez exhaled, then rubbed his eyes.

“First, you tell me to use kid gloves with Napoleon Crase,” I said. “And
now
, you want me to baby Todd Wisely. Are there any rich people I can piss off? Treat like I treat the gangbangers and the crackheads?”

“That lawyer Lowenstein is an asshole who will—”

“I don't care about Lowenstein and his agenda.” I glared at the wall and at a picture of Lieutenant Rodriguez shaking hands with Tommy Lasorda.

“That's your problem,” he shouted. “
Eww. Politics.
You don't care. You
should
care.”

“Dude was high as fuck,” I yelled back. “He was a danger to the community. He had three Baggies of weed in his jacket
and
two Costco-sized tubs of Ecstasy and Viagra in his trunk. Fine: he didn't kill our girl, but goddamn, he's an asshole who could've hit and killed
your
family. But I guess you'll forgive him for that since he's gonna play for the Lakers someday.”

Lieutenant Rodriguez pounded his desk with his fists. “Damn it, Lou! You want us to have a black eye? You want folks screaming about racial profiling? You want your reporter friend writing an article about how Southwest Division targets more black men than any other race?”

I rolled my eyes. “The BMW's windows were so freakin' dark—another offense—that I couldn't see inside the car. So at that time, I didn't know
who
the driver was or
what
box he checked on the last census.”

Lieutenant Rodriguez sank in his chair and tugged at his mustache. “Lowenstein threatened to call the mayor.”

I laughed. “Good luck with that. Ain't the mayor in Maui right now, helping himself to the local lady reporters?”

“Be careful.”

“I'm always careful. I even restrained myself from stomping in Crase's head yesterday. But I guess that doesn't count.”

“You're letting this affect your judgment, Lou.”

“
This?
” Confused, I shook my head. “What is ‘this'?”

“Sometimes you focus on one thing until you can't see anything else,” he said “And sometimes, that changes everything about you.”

I closed my eyes and forced myself to smile.

“I just want you to be as good as you can be,” he said.

Dumbstruck, I gaped at him. “So caring about something makes me a horrible person?”

“No. Caring about something too much that it affects your judgment is a problem,” he said. “And to be honest, I'm three seconds from pulling you off this—”

Someone knocked on the door.

Lieutenant Rodriguez called out, “Yeah?”

Colin poked his head in and said, “Sorry to interrupt but we have a visitor. A relative of Monique Darson.”

To my boss, I said, “This isn't personal, Lieutenant. I'm just doing my job.”

But maybe I
did
care too much. But that's who I was; that's what I did. For many people, Greg included, that wasn't good enough. Sometimes, I wished that I could read something horrible in the newspaper and say, “Wow, that's too bad,” then drive down the hill to buy a handbag and a Frappuccino. But I can't, no matter how hard I try, even when I'm doing just that. One day I will luck out. One day, a callus will form around that part of my heart, and then I will stop caring like some cops, and then I will be as good as I can be. This will lead me to Hell, but at least I won't care only because I can't.

Before we returned to the very popular interview room 1, Colin squeezed my shoulder. “You made the right call, partner. Todd was a danger.”

But his support didn't silence the noise in my head—which sounded like a middle school orchestra was warming up during basketball practice. All squeaks, squawks, and echo. Colin said something else, but I couldn't hear him over the clarinets.

A woman the color of peanut butter was seated at the table, hunched over a cup of coffee. She wore jeans and a blue postal worker's shirt. She had a mustache and the loveliest hazel eyes in the world.

I introduced myself and shook the woman's hand.

She said that she was Freeda Duffy, Monique's cousin. “But y'all can call me Free.”

“So,” I said as Colin and I sat across from her, “why are you here so early in the day?”

“I work graveyard at the post office,” she said, “so I'm just getting off. I had been plannin' to talk to y'all when it was more convenient, but it's been four days now and it ain't been the right time yet, so here I am.”

I didn't say anything—my head still buzzed with that school-orchestra-gymnasium noise.

Colin kicked my leg to get me started.