Deadly Lullaby (16 page)

“You should have sucked up to the Aryan Brotherhood when you had the chance,” I say. “They would have protected you…for a price.”

“Ah, yes, I fuck up,” he says, poking his temple with his finger again and spinning it around his ear. “But Aryans more cracked than Liberty Bell nigger. They crazy racist fuckers, so I—”

Smiling in a confused, wondrous manner, Joe interrupts Viktor with a show of his palm. “Hold on a second here. You're tellin' us the Aryans' racism offended you?”

Tarasov does not appear to get Joe's point. His voice low, patient, he says, “Of course, my friend. Their racist shit not offensive for you?”

Joe shakes his head, sighs, and gives Viktor a little
Go ahead
gesture with a flick of his wrist. “Finish your story, Viktor, please.”

Viktor shrugs, shoots Joe a look of doubt, of pity, and continues: “As I say, to hell with Aryan rascist fucks. I make friend with Big Man here.” A wink at Joe. “I know he keep my back, uh? Anyway, big schlong-dong Liberty Bell come to me in warehouse, in back where I check inventory all time, right? And he pull out big, hard cock and tell me I suck it quick before guard return and then he fuck me up ass. When he make sure I see how big cock is,” he shakes his head, lowers his voice to say parenthetically, “And let me say to you, my friend, black cock is big as African python, no shit”—another roll of his eyes—“anyway, he show me big snake and say he make deal with me. He say I not have to fuck or suck him off
if
I am to have someone send his
ho
or
guhlfren,
whatever, feefty bucks a day. Send feefty bucks and he is to protect me to make sure nobody make me suck and fuck. He say if I
don't
have money send to
guhlfren,
then he fuck my ass first, then make me suck him off, then beat me up good. One time a day every day I am to do this for him—give feefty bucks or take it up ass, suck one shitty cock and take beating, right?
Right?
Wrong!” He leans forward, elbows on knees, holding out his hands to Joe in a pleading manner. “I mean, shit, here is stupid go-rilla trying to extort
me
for lousy feefty fucking bucks a fucking day—
me,
convicted in prison for extorting fucking two
million
bucks from president of oil company.”

He shakes his head in total wonder.

“Anyway, listen, to dumb fucking nigger I say, ‘Okaaaay, I got deal for
you.
I give nasty
guhlfren
money day after day
and
suck cock
and
take it up ass.' ” He winks. “Act like
galu
boy, eh? Smack my lips good and tell him, ‘C'mon, Big Bell, let me have that long black snake to suck in my mouth.' He grin big and push my head down to cock and I have biiig surprise ready for him, pull back leg to kick motherfucker in balls.” Tarasov turns sad, puts his hand on Joe's knee. “But, my friend, one problem occur.”

“Which was…”

“He put both hand over balls.”

“They always expect you to try and kick them in the nuts,” I say. “You should have kicked him on the inside of his knee.”

“Thanks a million fucking billion for telling me this after I in infirmary,
shit.
” He turns to Joe. “So, Joe, motherfucker block my kick and come at me with shank, a potato peeler he make razor-edge sharp, right? He stab me in side, right here.” He pulls up his polo shirt to show Joe the ragged puncture-wound scar on his left side. “Then here, here…and here,” he says, hiking his shirt higher to display the other three, his torso looking held together by an uneven row of knobby, discolored buttons of flesh. “And he gets me by throat, push against wall, was ready to stab face when Big Man come rescue me from behind, driving forklift. Ram tong of forklift across top of fucker's head.” He shook his head, laughed. “Like I say, peel Afro hair off like avocado.” He makes a squishy ripping sound and acts as if he is pulling his scalp from his head, front to back, and makes a face. “A piece of scalp hang on end of fork like bloody sponge.”

Joe makes an
Ick
face.

Tarasov slaps my knee. “Big Man remove scalp and stick it down front of Liberty Bell's pants, then punch motherfucker until lights in eyes go out like dead light bulb.”

Joe says to me, “You kill him?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head, “he survived.”

“As did me,” Viktor says, slapping my knee, giving it a squeeze, “and Big Man make it happen.” He looks at Joe. “If my Big Man's wish is to retire, is my wish also. We do whatever we can to help. Agree?”

Joe sighs. “Is that why you insisted on telling me that fuckin' story, Viktor?”

Viktor shrugs and holds out his hands in a grand manner. “You give me much too much credit, my friend. Telling the stories is fun to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Joe says, and turns to me. “All right, Babe, you are now officially fuckin' retired. The party I'm havin' at my place today is now in your honor.”

I bow my head to him.

Joe says to Viktor, “Happy now?”

Viktor winks at me and smiles big, as delighted now as he was when he saw me today, simply delighted.

At my cubicle now, feeling like a formerly condemned man pardoned at the foot of the gallows, I dig into the Khemra file—a thin one. The driver's license we found in her purse placed Sonita's age at eighteen years, and a current school ID revealed her to be a junior at Compton High—lagging one year behind normal progress. Both identifications had her living in Compton. These facts are pretty much all I know about her—other than her criminal record, which isn't clean, but not what I'd call bad: curfew violations, possession of alcohol by a minor, a marijuana possession or two.

Her mother added zilch to the investigation when I met with her last night. A scrawny woman with yellow, crooked teeth, my impression when I introduced myself on her front porch was that she was right off the boat from Cambodia. She spoke practically no English, and wasn't as distressed as your average mother should've been by the appearance of a cop on her doorstep at 1:30
A.M.
I didn't think there'd be much dignity in conveying the news of her murdered daughter with hand signals and monosyllabic words, so I left to find an interpreter. It took me forever to find one, but I finally did, a computer geek named Alani who works out of the Police Administration Building downtown; Alani was just out of college, a tiny Laotian with thick glasses who claimed to speak passable Khmer, the language of Cambodia.

I didn't make it to Mrs. Khemra's place with Alani until almost 4:00
A.M
., when we finally sat face-to-face with her on a couch in the living room of her bungalow—a nice place for Compton, much nicer than I expected. Alani gave her the bad news and the wailing and gnashing of teeth were the worst imaginable, until Mrs. Khemra keeled over in a dead faint, catatonic. I thought she was having a heart attack and immediately called EMS. She briefly regained consciousness before EMS arrived, and through Alani asked if we'd found Sonita's killer. I didn't want to raise her blood pressure by mentioning Oliver, so I told her, No, we haven't found any suspects yet. She hysterically begged me to find the person who murdered Sonita—saying Sonita was a good girl, a good girl—and asked me to swear to her I'd do it. I did just that, swore to her I'd find the killer, and this seemed to give her a measure of comfort before she keeled over again. EMS techs arrived and rushed her away to the hospital.

Today I need to sit down with Mrs. Khemra again, so I pick up my desk phone to call the hospital. She's still in the intensive care unit, and the duty nurse tells me that the doctors have diagnosed her as suffering from stress cardiomyopathy, aka “broken-heart syndrome,” a condition, she says, where stress hormones cause the heart to balloon and palpitate uncontrollably. The nurse tells me Mrs. Khemra is resting comfortably, and that talking to the police about her murdered daughter may trigger a relapse. Maybe I can talk to her tomorrow, the nurse says, after she's had time to grieve quietly and adjust her system to the shock, but today it's impossible, forget it.

The surveillance cameras installed in MacArthur Park were of no help, since the ones trained on the vicinity of the murder scene were on the blink, as expected. The uniformed officers' canvass of the surrounding businesses also turned up nothing. My only remaining avenue of attack is Sonita's school, so I pick up my desk phone, call the school, and am directed to her counselor, Eleanor Frank, who I'm told is now the acting principal. I talk to Frank's assistant, give her the bad news about Sonita, and make an appointment for two hours later.

After spending most of the night and most of this morning on the case, I need to freshen up. On the way home, I call the old man.

“Hello, my son.”

“We gotta talk.”

“So talk.”

“Not on the phone.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Should I book a flight to a country that has no extradition treaty with the US?”

“That might be premature, but make up your own mind after we talk.”

“When and where?”

“Somewhere
very
private.”

“My house?”

“No, anywhere but there—
nowhere
connected to you, in fact. You'll know why after we talk.”

“Jesus…Where, then?”

“I don't know. Let's think about it and get in touch later, say around five?”

“Why so long?”

“I just can't make it 'til then, all right?”

“Okay, I will think of something.”

“Yeah, you always do.”

“You know, the more you talk to me, the more smart-assed you become—like old times.”

“Old man, having a conversation with you still seems so fuckin' weird.”

I get to my house, shower, re-dress my eye—it's healing fast but still needs a band-aid—and change into my best work suit, a gray summer gabardine, with a white shirt and black-and-white striped tie, set off with a silver tie bar. Dressed like an adult, yeah, but I'm thrown back into my teenage years when I head through the front doors of Compton High, experiencing the same old dread as I trudge to the principal's office. My academic performance in high school was damned good, especially when it came to math and science. The formulas, the laws of nature, the measurable and repeatable experiments all comforted me, provided a certainty of outcome absent from my home life. But I was as bad outside the classroom as I was good inside it, and administrators rarely summoned me to the principal's office to discuss the academic aspects of my behavior.

The woman guarding the principal's lair in the outer office is older and skinnier than Sarah Palin and has a longer face, but she has the same feathery updo and the same kind of rimless, rectangular eyeglasses, and wears a knockoff designer suit complete with waist-length jacket. The way she holds herself tells me there's nothing coincidental about the Palinesque image she projects. I experience another déjà vu moment when she looks up at me from her desk as if I've been busted for brawling or smoking dope yet again.

Before I can introduce myself she gives me the once-over, flinching when she sees the bandage on my left eye. “Are you the detective who made the appointment with Dr. Frank?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Your identification?”

She asks this question like I'm the most unprofessional lawman in the West for not establishing my credentials the moment I crossed the threshold.

“Oh, uh, sure,” I say. For a few seconds I fumble around trying to find my badge holder and am embarrassed at how relieved I am when I find it in my breast pocket. I mean, Jesus, what the hell can this witch do to me now?

The badge does nothing to endear me to her. She examines it and turns to her desktop computer and strokes the keys, my thought being she's recording my full name and badge number so she can lodge a complaint later, and hands it back.

“You're early,” she says.

I glance at my watch while replacing the badge holder in my breast pocket. “You want me to stroll the grounds for ten minutes and come back when I'm five minutes late?”

She removes her eyeglasses in a deliberate, dramatic fashion. “Were you an impertinent student in high school, Detective Crucci?”

“There were those who accused me of that, yeah.”

“I recognized that fact the instant you walked in the office door, before you even smarted off—from your uncomfortable demeanor, you see. My experience with police officers is that they were almost always impertinent students in high school.”

I fiddle with my tie, work my neck around. “Can I, uh, see Dr. Frank now?”

There's a movement to my right just as a female voice chimes in. “Yes, you may, Detective Crucci. You'd better get in here before Miss Gloria places you in detention.”

Dr. Frank, I presume, a tall, busty woman who'd look much younger if she colored the stray wisps of gray that run through her auburn hair. She's leaning against the doorjamb of her office, her arms loosely crossed at her stomach and her mouth fixed in a small grin.

I tread around the snarling
Miss Gloria,
eyeing her like she's a Doberman tethered to a chain of unknown length.

Inside, Dr. Frank closes the door behind me and guides me into one of two chairs that front her desk, sits in the one I don't, and reaches for a file on the corner of her desk.

I say, “Thanks for throwing me the rescue line.”

Her eyes are bright and very green when she smiles. The smile fades away as she says, “Sonita Khemra, strangled in MacArthur Park—horrible, truly horrible.”

“Yes.”

“Were you at the scene?”

“I was.”

She briefly casts her eyes downward as if embarrassed to say whatever it is she's contemplating. While I wait for her to talk, I inspect her white silk blouse and gray skirt, of barely respectable length. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, and along with the clothes, you can't help but think she's taking a stab at the frumpy high-school-principal look. The problem is her body won't cooperate; it's curvy in the way of '50s movie stars and would make a Victorian granny dress look sexy.

When she crosses her legs, I'm glad she's not wearing a Victorian granny dress.

“Not to come off as macabre,” she says, “but in what condition did you find her body?”

Interesting question, the kind a cop would ask, so I say, “That's the kind of question a cop would ask.”

“I come by it honestly. My ex-husband is a patrolman with the Beverly Hills Police Department.”

“
Ex
-husband?”

She likes the way I asked this. “Yes, almost. Our divorce is in the works. He left me a few months ago for an emergency-room nurse he met while working a case.”

“A pity.”

“Do you really think it's a pity?”

I smile. “Just being polite, Dr. Frank.”

“Call me Eleanor,” she says. “Tell me, Detective Crucci, do—”

“Leo,” I say.

She turns to the open email on her computer. “As in Leonardo, the name on your ID?”

“Miss Gloria sent you an email about my ID?”

“Now you're getting an idea how she operates,” she says, and turns to me, fingering the tip of her chin while examining my face. “Hmm, somehow I think Leonardo suits you better than Leo.”

“Maybe, but why don't you call me Crooch instead, my street name.”

She makes a girlish face at that, scrunching her mouth to one side and arching an eyebrow. The slight wrinkles that appear around her eyes and corners of her mouth show her age, which I've decided is late thirties or so. “Crooch,” she says,
“Crooch,”
as if seeing how the name plays in her mouth, “I like that….So, Crooch”—a smile—“tell me about the condition of the body at the crime scene.”

I hold up my iPhone to her. “Would you like to see the photos?”

“Absolutely.”

I find the file in the phone's photo app and hand the phone over.

There's just a hint of shock in her eyes when she sees the first pic, but she scrolls through the rest without hesitation and looks up to me, directly into my eyes, and I deduce she doesn't wear tinted contacts. Her eyes are just a naturally bright green. She shifts in her seat, recrosses her legs. “Any suspects?” she says.

I clear my throat. “Yeah, a witness saw a man running from the scene with Sonita's purse in his hand. Taquan Oliver is his name. He's currently in custody.”

“Do you think he did it?”

I shrug. “Probably, but maybe not. He admitted to taking her purse and the money inside it, but that's it. He told me a believable story that would establish his innocence, but we get good stories from a lot of suspects. For now we're proceeding as if he's innocent. Look, I know almost nothing about Sonita. Tell me about her.”

She leans back in her chair. “I guess I should have already made it clear that everything I tell you about Sonita is not for public consumption unless I'm subpoenaed—agreed?”

“Of course.”

She nods and crosses her hands in her lap. “I was Sonita's counselor before I was promoted to vice principal last month. I'm just the acting principal pending a full-time replacement. Our principal became terminally ill and effectively retired.”

“Miss Gloria told me that on the phone.”

“Naturally,” she says, takes a deep breath, and leans forward, obviously uncomfortable with the information she's about to reveal. “About Sonita…She was a wild young girl, Crooch. Her grades have always been horrible and she was a constant discipline problem, and getting worse. Sonita was into drugs—crack cocaine and pot that I know of. We disciplined her for possessing both on school grounds, but her misbehavior ran the entire gamut: alcohol, tardiness, absenteeism, even a fight or two.” A pause. “Her really bad behavior started about three months ago, when she left her mother to move in with her uncle. We were in the process of referring her to the district expulsion unit for a hearing, and probably would be finished with it by now if she had come to school in the last three weeks, but she hadn't.”

“Any indication she was trafficking?”

She shakes her head. “If she was dealing to the students, I've heard nothing of it, and I probably would have.”

“You mentioned her really bad behavior started when she moved in with her uncle; you think he had something to do with it?”

“Oh, I'm practically certain of that. The timing of it, for one. Sonita was always a below-average student, and was always something of a discipline problem. But looking back at her record, her turn for the worse coincided with her move to her uncle's place almost to the day.”

“What's her uncle's name?”

“Khang Nhou.” She notices that my pen remains frozen over my pad, looks into my questioning eyes and says, “Instead of spelling names, I'll give you a copy of her file.”

My pen hand falls to the pad in my lap. “Great, thanks.”

She reads from the file. “Her parents are Samdech and Phath Khemra. Samdech is the father, but my understanding is he's abandoned Sonita and her mother.”

“Siblings?”

“Grown and moved out.”

A nod. “I met Mrs. Khemra last night, and it was a disaster.” After I describe the disaster to her, I ask, “So what is it about old Uncle Khang that you think sent Sonita down a bad road?”

She leans back, folds her hands in her lap. “I counseled her face-to-face twice. According to her, he was too strict. Before she moved in with him, she ran wild, did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.”

Sounds familiar, I think, then say, “Rarely a good thing for a high school kid.”

She tilts her head. “Hmm, something about the way you expressed that sentiment makes me think it comes from personal experience.”

I smile. “Good catch, Eleanor. You were saying Uncle Khang was too strict with Sonita?”

She gives her head a little shake as if to clear it. “Right, and he cut her off moneywise. He's apparently wealthy, very wealthy. I saw him drop her off and pick her up a time or two in very exotic cars—a Lamborghini, for instance, and a couple others. Cars like that cause quite a stir when they show up in a middle-class school like ours.”

“Where does he live?”

“Brentwood, in the kind of mansion you would expect to have a Lamborghini parked in its driveway. I googled a satellite image of it.”

I stroke my chin. “He drove her all the way here?”

“Just a few times. The few occasions Sonita decided to attend school after moving in with Khang, she drove a vintage Corvette.”

“A Corvette, nice…” I look at my notes. “How does the guy make his dough?”

“She told me he owns a company that sells ‘stuff' from Cambodia, so I took that to mean he owns an import company. I googled that, too.” She looks at her notes. “He owns KN Imports, on Sixth and Alameda.”

“Eleanor, you seem to have developed quite an interest in this guy.”

“Yes, so much so I asked Gary—my loving husband—to check on him. Our, uh,
troubles
began shortly after that, and all I ever learned from him was that Khang was
shady.
”

“Shady.”

“Yes, that's all Gary said, or something similar.”

“Well, if Gary knows, that should be easy enough for me to check out. Tell me, if you know, how Sonita wound up living with Khang.”

“Sonita's mother is an immigrant and, as you found out, apparently never bothered to learn English. When Sonita's behavior worsened, I called and talked to Mrs. Khemra through one of her grown children, who interpreted. Cutting through it all, Mrs. Khemra basically told me she had raised four other kids and her brother has none. She said she couldn't control Sonita so she sent her to live with Khang so he could keep her in line.”

“This would be unusual for a kid with access to so much wealth, but everyone who saw Sonita's body last night, including me, thought she might be a prostitute. Not only her appearance, but she had a lot of money in her purse, which I now know could've come from Uncle Khang. But she also had a supply of condoms and a knife.”

She briefly looks into the space over my shoulder, seemingly intrigued by my comment, before she responds. “For many reasons—mainly my naiveté, I suppose—that possibility never crossed my mind. But now that you mention it”—she shrugs—“prostitution could have been in Sonita's picture, yes.”

“And you say that because…”

“Word around school is she was promiscuous. And her best friend, probably her only real friend, Monique Lefler, has something to do with it, too.”

“So give me the scoop on Monique.”

She barely considers this at all. “Monique is almost exactly like Sonita, at least in spirit, except Monique played the dominant role in the relationship. She's a year older than Sonita, and like Sonita was held back a year for academic reasons. A very pretty girl—beautiful, actually—mixed race, African-American and Vietnamese. She's
very
wild, and a lot smarter than her academic record indicates.”

“That can be a combination for trouble.”

Her expression turns grave. “In this case it probably is, and it gets worse. Monique comes from poor family circumstances, and I don't mean that in financial terms. Her mother's in prison—Corona, I think. Mom shot someone, I hear, in an incident that had something to do with prostitution.”

“Is Monique in school today?”

She shakes her head. “I doubt it,” she says, and swivels her chair to face her computer screen and taps the keys. “No, she's not here, as usual.” She turns back to me. “Monique's performing even worse academically than Sonita was, and has been truant at least as much. She'd probably be expelled now, too, but the expulsion hearing notices we've sent have been returned undelivered.”