Vigilante (7 page)

CHAPTER

9

A few years ago, the Hollenbeck Station was the worst rat hole in the department. Times had changed. The new station house was now located two blocks from the old one at 2111 East First Street. Our local politicians called the Hollenbeck Station, along with our new Police Administration Building downtown, shining testaments to the cutting-edge police work being practiced in Los Angeles. Hollenbeck Station was smaller than the new PAB but no less impressive. It was a steel-sculptured monument with curved mirrored sides and private balconies.

The building housed 282 police officers in four thousand state-of-the-art feet of fast track, movable walls; terrazzo floors; and vinyl-upholstered offices.

Hitch and I pulled into the high-fenced guarded parking lot and got out of the Acura. We walked inside and told the booking sergeant that we wanted the Sanchezes placed in separate holding cells in the isolation section of the jail so they couldn’t pass messages to other White Fence bangers incarcerated there.

I got on the phone and talked to Ray Tsu at the coroner’s office. Fey Ray was our assistant coroner, who had earned his moniker because he was a wispy character who rarely spoke above a whisper. He told me Lita Mendez’s body was just coming in and that her death was big news inside the department, so she was already in the pipeline.

“Get me a stomach content analysis and as accurate a time of death as you can. Hitch will send you the room temp for larva gestation,” I said. “We’ve got a suspect with a partial alibi, and if we come up with a solid TOD it could put this beef on her. Also, see if you can retrieve any foreign DNA off the body. Type and match the vic and check under her nails for skin traces. My suspect has scratches on her arms.”

“Okay,” Ray replied. Then he added, “Since it’s Lita, don’t bother to ask. She’s already at the head of the line.”

Next I checked in with Rick Laguna, who’d just arrived back from the crime scene. He said they’d collected a lot of trace evidence and sent it to the forensics lab. In the interest of time, I asked if he could help us get body warrants, so the jail technicians could take DNA samples from both Julio and Carla Sanchez. I wanted to check that against any possible DNA we retrieved from the coffee cup in the driveway or from Lita’s body. Laguna said he’d run that request over to a judge he knew in the downtown courthouse and get it signed for us.

“Listen, Ricky, when you called the PAB to give this case over to Homicide Special, did you use your car radio?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You didn’t happen to put Lita Mendez’s name out on the air, did you?”

“I’m not a fuckin’ ditz,” he said, sounding insulted. “I also checked that out with the primary responders in Patrol the minute Nix Nash showed up. They didn’t use her name either. Everybody knew her death was a giant red ball. I don’t know how that dirtbag Nash found out.”

I didn’t pursue it, but patrol officers had cell phones as well as chalk. News of Lita’s death had spread quickly through the department. Either somebody on the scene had leaked it or Nix Nash had a mole inside our system.

When Hitch and I had most of the details of the investigation in the works we went to the new station’s coffee room. It was magnificent. There were fifteen different machines, all built into a vending wall like a row of slot machines at a Vegas casino. Hitch and I put in our money and punched buttons for coffee.

Our paper cups dropped down and began filling automatically. We both leaned in to study the markings. The break room used a standard vending cup. The decoration was two red lines just below the rim. There was no brown floral ring around the top like the one we’d found by Lita’s driveway.

“Cops didn’t kill Lita Mendez,” I said defensively.

“Of course not,” Hitch agreed, but we’d both checked the cups out anyway.

We sat at a table to plan the rest of the day.

“Flip you for coroner’s duty,” Hitch said.

Most cops don’t like watching the cut, and Hitch and I were no exception. Not so much because it was a gruesome procedure, because after a while you get used to that. It was more because it was a time-consuming drag.

“Call it,” I said as I pulled a quarter out and flipped it into the air.

“Tails,” Hitch said as the coin hit my palm.

We both leaned in and looked at George Washington’s silver profile.

“Two outta three?” Hitch suggested.

“Be sure and wear a smock so you don’t get any of that nasty saw splatter on your gorgeous herringbone.” I grinned.

Ricky Laguna agreed to give Hitch a ride to pick up his Porsche, which was ready, so we split up.

A few minutes later, I left the new Hollenbeck building and walked to the parking lot to get my car. I planned to head back to the PAB and start doing background research on Lita Mendez. I needed to see who was currently in her life and identify her known associates so we’d have a list of people to start questioning. It wasn’t exactly a trip to the movies, but it was better than going to the chop shop to watch the opening.

Once I was outside, I saw the
V-TV
van parked at the curb across the street. Nix Nash was doing another stand-up, this time with the new Hollenbeck station behind him. He had definitely settled on our case.

His producer, Laura Burke, was watching over the shot, supervising her cameramen. When she spotted me, she leaned forward and whispered something to Nash. He stopped his rant and turned. Then he glanced at Laura and drew a finger across his throat, signaling her to stop filming. He handed his mike to an assistant and walked across the street, stopping at the chain link.

I walked the twenty yards or so to the edge of the lot to meet him. We stood two feet apart on opposite sides of the galvanized fence.

“I saw you arrested them,” he said.

I didn’t have anything to say to this guy, so I just stood there.

“Stuck for a response?” He grinned. “Here’s one that might work. How ’bout, ‘Thanks, Nix, I appreciate all the great help’?”

“You knew Lita, didn’t you?” I said, and watched him carefully for a reaction.

He favored me with a small sad smile. “Of course I knew her. She was doing important work, keeping you guys honest. Back when I still practiced law in this town, she often helped out on cases I was doing.” The smile died. “I’m going to miss her. But more than that, I’m going to catch her killer.”

“I’d advise you not to interfere. That
is
obstructing justice. You start an unauthorized vigilante investigation, you’ll think City Hall fell on you.”

“So I’m supposed to leave the investigation of my friend up to the very people I think might be responsible for her death?”

“The police didn’t kill Ms. Mendez,” I said softly. “You’re the one who gave me the Carla Sanchez lead.”

“In a homicide investigation I’m sure you’ve discovered some things aren’t quite as obvious as they appear on the surface.”

I let that pass, then said, “I pull up at nine fifteen
A.M.
, you’re already up the street interviewing Edwin Chavaria. That’s excellent response time, even for you. Wanta set my mind at ease about that?”

“If that’s some sort of accusation that I might have something to do with this, then yes, let me put your mind at rest. I was in Florida yesterday hosting a fund-raiser at the Boca Raton Rape Clinic. You can Google it and check me out. The pictures online are great. I took an early flight and landed at eight this morning. Are three thousand miles enough of an alibi for Nix Nash, Detective?”

He was back to the third person and being damn snotty about it.

“I was supposed to take Lita to breakfast after I landed this morning. Laura and my camera crew picked me up at the airport, brought me here. After breakfast we were going to set up for an interview. Lita had agreed to be a show resource for us. She knew a lot of things about L.A. and the cops here. When we got to her house at a little before nine, patrol officers were already stringing yellow tape. Maybe my showing up was divine intervention, because I’m beginning to think maybe I’m the only one here who really gives a darn who killed her.”

“You need to stop taking yourself so seriously,” I said. I had nothing more, so I turned to leave. He called after me.

“Hey, Shane? Do you feel it?”

“Feel what?” I replied, turning back. He had ditched the sad, funereal expression and was now wearing an excited, hopeful look, like a teenaged boy watching his first stripper.

“I think deep down, on some level, we all know what’s coming in the future,” he began. “Like those stories you read about people who clean out their closets or straighten up the garage and a day later get hit by a bus. The family comes in and everything’s all packed up neat and ready to go. I have a theory the reason stuff like that happens is because intuitively we can all sense the future. It’s why sometimes we’re depressed for no good reason we can think of, or are unreasonably happy. What’s actually causing it is a subtle knowledge of what’s coming. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes bad.”

“And sometimes it’s just too much sugar and too little sleep.”

He shook his head, but he seemed happy, like he was delighted to be here, excited just to be Nix Nash.

“Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think it’s dietary, or sleep related,” he kidded. “Like right now. Tell me you don’t actually feel some large sense of impending doom?”

“I don’t feel anything,” I told him.

“Just wait,” he said, grinning. “It’s coming.”

CHAPTER

10

When I got back to the Police Administration Building, I Googled the Boca Raton Rape Clinic and sure enough, there were half a dozen pictures of Nix Nash hosting last night’s fund-raiser in South Florida.

Not to be overly thorough, but I wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t a suspect, so I checked the airlines and found that Nash had been on a flight that left Fort Lauderdale Airport at 5:00
A.M.
, landing at LAX at 7:43 this morning. I talked to a terminal manager who remembered Nash coming off the flight and being stopped for autographs. That meant either he’d been at Lita’s house to take her to breakfast as he’d said or he’d been tipped to her death by someone inside our department. I suspected it was probably the latter and was determined to root out the spy and close that leak.

The rest of the day was spent researching Lita Mendez. Of course, I’d heard a lot about her and knew something of the trouble she’d caused for the department, but for the last few years, because I’d been investigating high-profile homicides, her crusade against the Hollenbeck Station and the Internal Affairs Group had mostly escaped my scrutiny.

As I surfed old stories about her on the Net, I was surprised by how much there was. When she died Lita was just thirty-three years old. One story revealed that she had become enamored of the court system at the age of six when she watched her mother get a restraining order against Lita’s father, who had been violently assaulting them both. Her dad, an Evergreen gangster, ended his short earthly journey a year later, going tits up in an alley off First Street. Lita had been keeping herself busy since adulthood by making life impossible for the cops in and around Hollenbeck.

Among her numerous activities, she’d crashed various LAPD undercover operations, taking photos of the undercovers, posting their pictures on the Internet, putting their lives in danger, and burning these cops for this kind of work forever. Most of her civilian complaints were not for police brutality but for lesser charges like rude behavior or harassment.

She had also made her share of enemies on the street. A committed Evergreen associate, she had little use for the more than forty-five competing Hispanic sets and often turned her legal skills against enemy shot callers.

An article about her titled “Talking Truth with Lita Power,” by an
L.A. Times
writer named Trent Phillips, told how she was attempting to intimidate and drive rude, harassing police officers out of her neighborhood with complaints and lawsuits. Most cops thought her real motive was to compromise police activity and wrest control of Evergreen turf away from Patrol, turning the blocks back to the gangs.

She printed police corruption T-shirts with the pictures of officers she’d accused of crimes and then passed them out in community centers. It didn’t matter that most of her complaints found those cops innocent. She hung sheet banners from freeway overpasses decrying Hollenbeck police officers, identifying her favorite targets by name.

On our part, the department had charged her with two dozen misdemeanors and a few low-weight felonies, everything from driving without a license to the more serious offense of assaulting a neighbor with a gardening tool. There were eight to ten counts of verbal assaults against various cops. None of this legal vitriol had gone anywhere in court.

Last year Stephanie Madrid, a captain in charge of the Advocates Section at Internal Affairs, had used police union funds to finance a restraining order against Lita, which would require her to stay more than fifty yards away from the Hollenbeck Station. That suit had prevailed.

There was a raging legal debate being fostered within the
L.A. Times
blog community over whether Lita Mendez was a community activist exercising her First Amendment rights or a criminal menace, who was hurting her community and the quality of civilian life in Boyle Heights. By-and-large, the bloggers were throwing in with Lita, accusing the police of just about everything but double-parking.

However, even Lita’s detractors admitted that she had a sophisticated understanding of how to use the court system and the complicated Federal Consent Decrees that, until recently, had governed the LAPD. She had often stated in the
L.A. Times
articles that her dream was to one day complete her GED and go to law school.

She might have made an excellent attorney, because with no formal legal training and a closet of conservative business suits for court, Lita Mendez had managed to keep Internal Affairs and our city prosecutors embroiled in an endless legal debate. Just last week Captain Stephanie Madrid had filed a criminal lawsuit against Lita, charging her with intentionally making a false police report.