Mulholland Dive: Three Stories (9 page)

With his arms cuffed behind him, Coleman could do nothing about the tear that dripped down his left cheek. He bowed his head.

“True story,” Bosch heard him say.

Bosch waited. Coleman said nothing else.

“Tell it,” Bosch finally said.

“Tell what?” Coleman asked.

“The true story. Tell it.”

Coleman shook his head.

“No, man, that’s the name. Trumont Story. They call him Tru, like T-R-U. He gave me the gun to do the job and I gave it back after.”

Bosch nodded. He had gotten what he’d come for.

“One thing, though,” Coleman said.

“What’s that?”

“Tru Story’s been dead a long time, man. Least that’s what I heard up here.”

Bosch had prepared himself on the way up. In the past two decades, the gang body count in South L.A. was in the thousands. He knew that there was a better-than-good chance he was looking for a dead man. But he also knew that the trail didn’t necessarily stop with Tru Story.

“You still going to send in that letter?” Coleman asked.

Bosch stood up. He was done. The brutish man in front of him was a stone-cold killer and was in the place he deserved to be. But Bosch had made a deal with him.

“You’ve probably thought about it a million times,” he said. “What do you do after you get out and hug your daughter?”

Coleman answered without missing a beat.

“I find a corner.”

He waited, knowing Bosch would jump to the wrong conclusion.

“And I start to preach. I tell everybody what I’ve learned. What I know. Society won’t have no problem with me. I’ll be a soldier still. But I’ll be a soldier for Christ.”

Bosch nodded. He knew that many who left here had the same plan. To go with God. Few of them made it. It was a system that relied on repeat customers. In his gut he knew Coleman was probably one of them.

“Then I’ll send the letter,” he said.

I
n the morning, Bosch went to the South Bureau on Broadway to meet with Detective Jordy Gant in the Gang Enforcement Detail. Gant was at his desk and on a phone call when Bosch arrived but it didn’t sound important and he quickly got off.

“How’d it go up there with Rufus?” he said.

He smiled as a way of showing understanding if Bosch said, as expected, that the trip to San Quentin was a bust.

“Well, he gave me a name but he also told me the guy was dead, so the whole thing could have been him playing me while I was playing him.”

“What’s the name?”

“Trumont Story. Heard of him?”

Gant just nodded, but Bosch could tell it wasn’t necessarily in confirmation of Story’s death but in how the name fit with something else. Gant turned to a short stack of files on the side of his desk. Next to it was a small black box labeled “Rolling 60s—1991–1994.” Bosch recognized it as a box that was used in the old days for holding field interview cards. That was before the department started using computers to store intelligence data.

“Imagine that,” Gant said. “And I just happen to have Tru Story’s file right here.”

“Yeah, imagine that,” Bosch said, taking the file.

He opened it directly to an 8 x 10 shot of a man lying dead on a sidewalk. There was a contact entry wound on his left temple. His right eye had been replaced with a large exit wound. A small amount of blood had oozed onto the concrete and coagulated by the time the photo had been shot.

“Nice,” Bosch said. “Looks like he let somebody get a little too close. This still an open case?”

“That’s right.”

Harry flipped past the photo and checked the date on the incident report. Trumont Story had been dead three years. He closed the file and looked at Gant sitting smugly in his desk chair.

“Tru Story’s been dead since ’oh-nine and you just happen to have his file on your desk?”

“Nope, I pulled it for you. Pulled two others as well and thought you might even want to look at our shake cards from back in ’ninety-two. Never know, a name in there might mean something to you.”

“Maybe so. Why’d you pull the files?”

“Well, after we talked about your case and the ATF matches to the other two—you know, three cases, one gun, three different shooters—I started to—”

“Actually, it’s a long shot, but it could be just two shooters. The same guy who kills my victim in ’ninety-two comes back around and hits Vaughn in ’oh-three.”

Gant shook his head.

“Could be but I’m thinking no. Too long a shot. So I was thinking for the sake of argument, three victims, three different shooters, one gun. So I went through our Rolling Sixties cases. That is, cases they were involved in on either side of the violence. As killers or the killed. I pulled cases that might be related to this gun and I got three where there were gunshot killings in which no ballistics evidence was recovered. Two were hits on Seven-Treys, and one—you guessed it—was Tru Story.”

Bosch was still standing. Now he pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Can I take a quick look at the other two?”

Gant handed the files across the desk and Bosch started a quick survey. These weren’t murder books. They were gang files and therefore abbreviated accounts and reports on the killings. The full murder books would be in the hands of the homicide investigators assigned to the cases. If he wanted more, Bosch would have to requisition them, or drop by the lead detective’s desk to borrow a look.

“Typical stuff,” Gant said as Bosch read. “You sell on the wrong corner or visit a girl in the wrong neighborhood and you’re marked for death. The reason I threw Tru Story in there was that he was shot elsewhere and dumped.”

Bosch looked over the files at Gant.

“And what’s that mean?”

“That it mighta been an inside job. His own crew. It’s unusual to see a body dump in a gang killing. You know, with the drive-bys and straight-up assassinations. Nobody takes the time to pop a guy and then move the body unless there’s a reason. One might be to disguise that it was internal housekeeping. He was dumped on Seven-Trey turf, so the thinking was he was probably hit on his own turf and then dumped in enemy territory to make it look like he strayed across the line.”

Bosch registered all of this. Gant shrugged his shoulders.

“Just a working guess,” he said. “The case is still open.”

“It’s gotta be more than a working guess,” Bosch said. “What do you know that leads you to make a guess like that? Are you working this?”

“I’m not homicide, I’m intel. I was called in to consult. But that was back then—three years ago. All I know now is that the case is still open.”

The Gang Enforcement Detail was the overarching street gang branch of the LAPD. It had homicide squads, detective squads, intelligence units, and community outreach programs.

“Okay, so you consulted,” Bosch said. “So, what do you know from three years ago?”

“Well, Story was high up in the pyramid I told you about the other day. It can get contentious up there. Everybody wants to be at the top, and then when you’re there, you gotta look over your shoulder, see who’s coming up behind you.”

Gant gestured toward the files Bosch held.

“You said so yourself when you saw the picture. He let somebody get too close. That’s for damn sure. You know how many gang murders involve contact wounds? Almost none—unless, like it’s a club shooting or something. Then only sometimes. But most of the time these guys don’t get up close and personal. This time, however, with Tru Story, they did. So the theory was at the time that the Sixties did this one themselves. Somebody near the top of the pyramid had reason to believe Tru Story had to go and it got done. Bottom line, it could be the same gun you’re looking for. There was no slug and no shell recovered, but the wound would work with a nine-mill, and now that you’ve got Rufus Coleman up there in the Q putting your Beretta model ninety-two in Tru Story’s hands, then it sounds even better.”

Bosch nodded. It made a certain amount of sense.

“And the GED never picked up on what this was about?”

Gant shook his head.

“Nah, they never got close. You gotta understand something, Harry. The pyramid is most vulnerable at the bottom. The street level. It’s also most visible there.”

He was saying that the GED’s efforts were largely focused on street dealers and street crimes. If a gang homicide wasn’t solved within forty-eight hours, there would soon be a new one to run with. It was a war of attrition on both sides of the line.

“So . . . ,” Bosch said. “Let’s go back to the Walter Regis killing, the one Rufus Coleman carried out and was convicted for in ’ninety-six. Coleman said Tru Story gave him the gun and his instructions, he did the job, and then he gave the gun back. He said that it wasn’t Story’s idea to whack Regis. He, too, had gotten the order. So, do we have any idea who it came from? Who was the shot caller for the Rolling Sixties back in ’ninety-six?”

Gant shook his head again. He was doing a lot of that.

“It was before my time, Harry. I was in a black-and-white in Southeast. And to tell you the truth, we were kind of naive back then. That was when we ran CRASH at them. You remember CRASH?”

Bosch did. The explosion of the gang population and its attendant violence occurred with the same speed as the crack epidemic in the 1980s. The LAPD in South Central was overwhelmed and responded with a program called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. The program had an ingenious acronym and some said they spent more time coming up with that than they did on the actual program. CRASH attacked the lower edges of the pyramid. It disrupted the street business of the gangs but rarely reached toward the top. And no wonder. The street soldiers who sold drugs and carried out missions of retribution and intimidation rarely knew more than what the day’s job was and rarely gave even that up.

These were young men fired in the anti-cop cauldron of South L.A. They were seasoned by racism, drugs, societal indifference, and the erosion of traditional family and education structures, then put out on the street, where they could make more in a day than their mothers made in a month. They were cheered on in this lifestyle from every boom box and car stereo by a rap message that said, fuck the police and the rest of society. Putting a nineteen-year-old gangbanger in a room and getting him to give up the next guy in the line was about as easy as opening a can of peas with your fingers. He didn’t know who the next guy in line was and wouldn’t give him up if he did. Prison and jail were accepted extensions of gang life, part of the maturation process, part of earning gang stripes. There was no value in cooperating. There was only a downside to it—the enmity of your gang family, which always came with a death warrant.

“So, what you’re saying,” Bosch said, “is that we don’t know who Trumont Story was working for back then or where he got the gun that he gave to Coleman to take out Regis.”

“Most of that’s right. Except the gun part. My guess is that Tru always had that gun and he gave it out to people he wanted to use it. See, we know lots more now than we knew then. So taking today’s knowledge and applying it to back then, it would work like this. We start with a guy at the top or near the top of the pyramid called the Rolling Sixties street gang. This guy is like a captain. He wants a guy named Walter “Wide Right” Regis dead because he’s been selling where he shouldn’t be selling. So the captain goes to his trusted sergeant at arms named Trumont Story and whispers in his ear that he wants Regis taken care of. At that point, it is Story’s job and he has to get it done to maintain his position in the organization. So he goes to one of the trusted guys on his crew, Rufus Coleman, gives him a gun, and says the target is Regis and this is the club where he likes to hang. While Coleman goes off to do the job, Story goes and gets himself an alibi because he’s the keeper of that gun. Just a little safeguard in case he and the gun are ever connected. That’s how they do it now, so I’m saying that’s how they probably did it back then—only we didn’t exactly know it.”

Bosch nodded. He was getting the sense of the fruitlessness of his search. Trumont Story was dead and the connection to the gun was gone with him. He was really no closer to knowing who killed Anneke Jespersen than he was on the night twenty years ago when he stared down at her body and apologized. He was nowhere.

Gant identified his disappointment.

“Sorry, Harry.”

“Not your fault.”

“It probably saves you a bunch of trouble anyway.”

“Yeah, how so?”

“Oh, you know, all those unsolved cases from back then. What if the only one we closed was the white girl’s? That probably wouldn’t go over too well in the community, know what I mean?”

Bosch looked at Gant, who was black. He hadn’t really considered the racial issues in the case. He was just trying to solve a murder that had stuck with him for twenty years.

“I guess so,” he said.

They sat in silence for a long moment before Bosch asked a question.

“So, what do you think, could it happen again?”

“What, you mean the riots?”

Bosch nodded. Gant had spent his whole career in South L.A. He would know the answer better than most.

“Sure, anything can happen down here,” Gant answered. “Are things better between the people and the department? Sure, way better. We got some of the people actually trusting us now. The murder count’s way down. Hell, crime in general is way down and the bangers don’t run the streets with impunity. We got control, the people have control.”

He stopped there and Bosch waited but that was it.

“But . . . ,” Bosch prompted.

Gant shrugged.

“Lotta people without jobs, lotta stores and businesses closed up. Not a lot of opportunities out there, Harry. You know where that goes. Frustration, agitation, desperation. That’s why I say anything could happen. History runs in a cycle. It repeats itself. It could happen again, sure.”

Bosch nodded. Gant’s take on things was not far from his own.

“Can I take these files?” he asked.

“As long as you bring them back,” Gant said. “I’ll also loan you the black box.”

He reached behind him and grabbed the card box. When he turned back, Bosch was smiling.

“What? You don’t want it?”

“No, no, I want it. I’m just thinking of a partner I had once. This was way back. His name was Frankie Sheehan, and he—”

“I knew Frankie. A shame what happened.”

“Yeah, but before that, when we were partners, he always had this saying about working homicide. He said, you have to find the black box. That’s the first thing, find the black box.”

Gant had a confused look on his face.

“You mean like on a plane?”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah, like in a plane crash, they have to find the black box, which records all the flight data. They find the black box and they’ll know what happened. Frankie said it was the same with a murder scene or a murder case. There will be one thing that makes it all make sense. You find it and you’re gold. It’s like finding the black box. And now here you are, giving me a black box.”

“Well, don’t expect too much outta this one. We call them CRASH boxes. It’s just the shake cards from back then.”

Before the advent of the MDT—the mobile data terminal installed in every patrol car, officers carried FI cards in their back pockets. These were merely 3 x 5 cards for writing down notes from field interviews. They included the date, time, and location of the interview, as well as the name, age, address, aliases, tattoos, and gang affiliation of the individual questioned. There was also a section for the officer’s comments, which was primarily used to record any other observations worth noting about the individual.

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had long decried the department’s practice of conducting field interviews, calling them unwarranted and unconstitutional, likening them to shakedowns. Undaunted, the department continued the practice, and the FI cards became known across its ranks as shake cards.

Bosch was handed the box, and opening it, he found it full of well-worn cards.