Unpaid Dues

Unpaid Dues

Barbara Seranella
2003

For Stephen King
and
his wonderful book On Writing

You gotta love a man capable of
delivering
so many hours of pleasure.
 

I'd rather not go down in history at
all.
I'm going down because of history.
       —
Sara
Jane Olson aka Kathleen Soliah*

*Former Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive, wanted
for conspiring to blow up police cars in the seventies. Taken from a
December 2001 interview in the Los Angeles Times. Ms. Olson is
currently serving a twenty-five to life jail sentence after
twenty-four years on the lam.
 
 

Chapter 1

The sixty-two-year-old groundskeeper of the exclusive
Riviera Country Club spotted the bodies at first light. The corpses
huddled against each other at the bottom of the concrete storm
channel just before it disappeared downstream beneath the golf
course. Wide enough to drive through, the storm channel had offered
many surprises in the past—hubcaps, beach chairs, the broken shafts
of misbehaving seven-irons—but never anything so horrific. Hector
Granados had been hoping for treasure this Monday morning, especially
after the heavy winter rain the previous weekend. Golf games had been
canceled and the typically barren storm drain that ran beneath the
course had turned into a raging torrent. This amount of water, he
knew, was capable of carrying and then depositing a vast range of
large, sometimes valuable refuse.

At first he thought it was a bundle of clothing, then
he saw the hands. The larger body, the female, clutched a baby to her
bosom. He looked for a long time, and the baby never moved. Its
little hand reached out stiffly from beneath a blanket. The
slow-moving current carried a branch. It tangled with the woman's
hair, causing her head to pull back. The gaping wound in her throat
opened into a grotesque and silent scream. Her eyelids were purple
and protruded from her face like two medallions of raw liver, and a
small stream of foamy pink bubbles trickled from her lifeless mouth.

"
Oh my God," he said first in English, then
several more times in his native Spanish. He used his two-way radio
to contact the clubhouse. "The police," he told Pat, the
starter. "We need the police."

"
What' s wrong?" Pat asked.

"It's terrible," he sobbed. "
Dios
mio
."

"
What?"

"Bodies, two of them," Hector said, his
breath short as if he had been running. "In the canal.
Ay
pobrecito bebé
."

"Oh, shit," Pat
said, "I just let the first foursome tee off ten minutes ago."

* * *

Mace St. John, the newly promoted homicide
detective-three of LAPD's West Los Angeles Division, arrived to
supervise the investigation. The groundskeeper opened the maintenance
yard gate at the end of Longworth Drive and allowed the police to set
up a command post on the blacktop next to the country club's tennis
courts. The other cops on the scene, including St. John's partner,
Tony "the Tiger" Cassiletti, busied themselves studying the
surrounding houses and their yards, glancing only briefly below.

"
C'mon, ladies," St. John said, feeling
angry wanting a live target to harangue. A lot of the officers with
families had problems dealing with dead children. Hey he didn't love
it either, but the poor little kid was already dead and someone
needed to figure out the who, how, and why of it.

The bodies were slumped against the south vertical
wall of the large cement trough. At first glance they appeared to be
embracing, but that tender impression was shattered when, after a
moment' s concentration, St. John made out the rope binding them
together. It didn't seem likely that they had been dropped the twenty
feet from the bank above. The woman's red shirt was scooted up her
back, and her shoulder-length brown hair pointed downstream. They
must have been dragged. Another ten yards and they would have been
lost forever under the golf course. Getting them out of there was
going to be a trick.

The storm channel was bordered by double rows of
chain-link fence. There were narrow dirt easement roads in between
the eight-foot chain-link fences, running parallel to the channel
until it reached the perimeter of the country club. The entrances to
those roads were off Allenford, across the street from Paul Revere
Junior High School. The gates to the easements were padlocked, and
signs posted by the Metropolitan Water District warned off
trespassers. But St. John could see by the cigarette butts crushed
into the dirt that the warning signs were regularly ignored, probably
by students out sneaking a smoke. He was instantly grateful that kids
hadn't been the ones to make this discovery It was a difficult enough
sight for even the most seasoned cop.

St. John stared at the dark mouth of the tunnel and
the rocky muddy embankment above it. Climbing down from above was out
of the question. There were already piles of loose shale and scrub
brush on the storm drain's concrete floor—small-scale replicas of
the Pacific Palisades' landslides that had recently narrowed the
width of Pacific Coast Highway All those hopeful idiots who'd built
on the cliffs were now paying dearly for their ocean views.

St. John dragged a milk crate over to the fence and
climbed atop it. White out-of-bounds markers stuck into sturdy
kikuaya grass on the crest of the embankment defined the golf
course's border. A low layer of fog hovered over the fairways. The
scene reminded him of mornings in Vietnam when the steam rose off the
rice paddies.

His radio crackled to life. He lifted the
Handie-Talkie from his belt and pushed the transmit button.

"
Go ahead."

"MWD is on the way"

St. John had had dispatch call the Metropolitan Water
District flood maintenance people to bring a key and charts of the
system. He studied the chainlink fence again before responding. The
poles were anchored in cement at ten-foot intervals. There were no
recent tire tracks on the easement. The backyards of the houses on
either side of the easement fences were heavily shrubbed. Storm
water, he decided, had carried the bodies to this resting place from
farther upstream.

"We're gonna need a fire truck with a detachable
twenty-foot ladder, winch, litter, and bolt cutters."

St. John called over one of the uniformed patrol
officers who had been guarding the scene.

"
Where does this feed from?" He looked at
the cop's name tag and added, "Henderson."

Henderson pointed as he explained that the system
originated at Sullivan Dam to the northwest, and Mandeville Canyon
due north. Natural tributaries and storm drains came together above
Sunset Boulevard. Here the large concrete storm drain tunneled under
Sunset and then ran open alongside the school, following the curves
of the boulevard. It also went under Allenford. On the other side of
the golf course, the channel reemerged in Santa Monica Canyon and
ultimately ran into the ocean.

"We're going to need to look upstream," St.
John said.

Henderson nodded and seemed ready to get started
immediately "No," St. John said, "I need you here."
He got back on the radio and ordered a chopper to fly the fence line.

The fire engine arrived within ten minutes of the
yellow MWD truck. St. John told the water district truck's driver
what he needed. Minutes later, the gate was unlocked, and the
eighteen-wheeled hook-and-ladder rolled noisily down the dirt
easement. School kids gawked as their buses turned into the school's
driveway St. John posted patrolmen at the gate to keep onlookers
back. He sent Henderson to stand on the golf course.

"Should we call in divers?" Cassiletti
asked.

"
There's like an inch of water," St. John
said as he snapped photographs with the Polaroid camera he always
brought to crime scenes. "I think we can handle it."

Cassiletti cast a nervous eye downward. "That
can change in an instant."

"We'll work fast."

To the dismay of the guy from MWD, St. John borrowed
a pair of bolt cutters from one of the firemen and snipped the fence
away from the pole twenty yards upstream from the bodies. He then
asked the fireman to lower a ladder into the channel and was the
first to climb down. The storm channel's floor had its own weather
system, colder and damper than top-side.

St. John understood Cassiletti's concern. It was
February 16, 1985, still officially the rainy season, which stretched
from October to April. Five feet up from the concrete floor, a crust
of lighter wood and floatable garbage marked the height the storm
water had reached in the last few days. But today the sky was clear,
in fact it was a brilliant blue. The small grove of eucalyptus trees
above them had put out small white tendriled blooms in response to
the soaking of their roots. One of the houses nearby had a fire
going, and the air carried the smell of wood smoke.

Up close, the bodies looked reasonably fresh,
especially the child's, whose perfect little fingers were frozen in a
reaching gesture. One small plump foot was bare. St. John looked
closer and almost laughed out loud in his relief. The child wasn't a
child at all, but a doll. No wonder it had yet to show the darkening
signs of decomposition. He examined the real corpse, trying to get a
fix on her age. She was either a teenager or a small woman. Her hands
were ringless and withered from immersion. The face was
unrecognizable, rendered a pulpy ruin from repeated blows and death's
decay.

He walked past the body and shined his flashlight
into the opening of the cement sleeve that ran beneath the golf
course, built, he was told by the MWD guy thirteen years ago in 1972
at a cost of $1.7 million. The tab was happily picked up by the golf
course, relieved not to have an ugly cement trough bordered by
chain-link fence running through the barranca of the first and
seventh fairways.

St. John walked in increasingly smaller semicircles
that brought him closer to the body working with his eyes focused
just ahead of his feet, pausing every now and then to squat and study
the odd bit of flotsam that might possibly matter later. At last he
arrived back at the corpse. The distinct, oddly sweet scent of decay
rose to his nostrils. Seeping blood formed a halo on the wet cement
around her head. The severity and abundance of the facial wounds
meant that the dead woman's attacker probably knew her. The slit
throat was very personal.

Had the rains continued, the corpse would have been
swept into the tunnel and never discovered. St. John examined the
cinder block that had been used to weigh down the body. It was the
two-cell variety—the sort of thing college kids used to build
shelves for their stereos. Not much in the way of a clue, but every
lead must be followed, no matter how unpromising. He hunkered down
next to the body to wait for the Scientific Investigation Division.
There was not much more to be done, but the victim had the rest of
eternity to be alone and forgotten. He'd stay with her until the
criminalists came.

The crime scene photographer arrived and took
pictures, beginning with over-alls of the scene, then close-ups of
the dead female. The doll's face was buried in the woman's chest,
nestled between her breasts. The two had been bound together with
white cord, the ends of the rope fastened to the cinder block by odd,
looping knots.

Firemen, at St. John's direction, built a dam of
sand-bags upstream. Kids from the junior high school drifted over to
the fence at Allenford, trying to get a peek at what was going on.
St. John sent a man to the administration office to find out if any
student was absent. He particularly wanted to know about brown-haired
girls.

Frank Shue from the coroner's office appeared at the
top of the bank. As usual he wore wrinkled, ill-fitting trousers, and
his striped, long-sleeved dress shirt was half untucked.

"What you got?" he called down.

"Body dump," St. John answered, his voice
echoing against the steep walls. The worst. Smart killers who dump
the bodies simultaneously eliminated the victim, the crime scene, and
most, if not all, of the trails leading back to the murder.