Earth Angels (7 page)

"Look, I don't have a choice of who I work with," Stepanovich said. "That guy is up for promotion and he'll do anything to make a case."

"I ain't getting involved in no court bullshit. You can go ahead and lock my ass up, but I ain't going to court. Go ahead and put on the cuffs because I ain't crazy. This is East L.A., man. This is where rats get their fucking heads blown off."

Arredondo glared at Garcia, then strolled outside.

Stepanovich stepped closer. "All I want you to do is tell me whether I'm going in the right direction," he pleaded. "As far as putting the case together, I'll handle all that. I'll get the evidence another way. I can say that a confidential informant told me who did the shooting, and your name will never so much as be mentioned in court. The little girl didn't deserve to die like that. She's gone now and will never have her chance at life. And think of her mother. Her life will never be the same."

Garcia's mouth straightened into a tight line.

Stepanovich handed him the folder, "There's no one here except you and me. Just tell me if one of these people is the man who did the shooting at the church. You don't have to say which one."

Garcia watched Arredondo climb back in the police car.

"Please," Stepanovich said, looking Garcia in the eye.

Garcia glanced at the folder and handed it back to Stepanovich. "He's on there. That's all I'm saying."

"I'd consider it a personal favor if you would give me a hint."

Frightened, Garcia ran his hands through his hair. "No. Because I know you'll call me into court."

"There's no way you could be called into court for blinking, right?"

"Huh? "

"Like this. I point at the pictures one by one, and if you see the guy, you blink."

"I don't trust you people."

Stepanovich pointed to the photograph of Pepe Goez. "I'm not asking you as a cop. I'm asking as a favor. Man to man."

Garcia stared at Stepanovich for a moment, then looked down at Gomez's photograph. He blinked.

"Thanks," Stepanovich whispered.

"If you call me to court, I don't know nothing!" Garcia yelled as Stepanovich headed back toward the police car.

Stepanovich opened the passenger door of the sedan and climbed in.

"What happened, homeboy?" Arredondo said, starting the engine.

"He did Greenie. Let's go back to the office so I can write a search warrant."

"You really have a way with these people," Arredondo said facetiously. "But I'm the one who pushed the man fight into the trap. We had that dude going every which way. Vertigo, man."

"Couldn't have done it without you," Stepanovich said, pulling out the driveway and into heavy traffic.

A windowless room in the basement of Hollenbeck Station, the CRASH office was crowded with desks and a police computer hookup. The walls were covered with neatly drawn link analysis charts that showed the leadership of the most active gangs, personnel deployment rosters, and gang detail wanted posters. Neither Stepanovich nor the others in the unit had much use for the charts, but they gave the captain something to point to when ushering community leaders and other visitors through the station.

Stepanovich's desk was in the corner of the police bullpen, banked by two metal filing cabinets that provided him a measure of privacy. After he phoned Harger at the police academy and briefed him on the developments in the case, Stepanovich spent the day writing and rewriting the search warrant for Greenie's apartment. Because writing a search warrant was a one-man job, Arredondo and the other members of the task force lounged about the office killing time. Their conversation half filtered through Stepanovich's consciousness as he concentrated on the paperwork copying parts of other search warrants he had written, replacing those facts with the facts of the case at hand, then sprucing up the text to make it sound original.

"I learned computers in the Navy," Fordyce said proudly from his seat at the computer terminal. "When I first came on the department I broke my ankle and they assigned me to the records bureau. Pretty soon I was giving lessons to the clerks."

Arredondo, his feet up on a desk, said, "If you know about computers, why waste your time being a policeman?"

Fordyce shrugged and gave a boyish grin. "Actually, I always wanted to be a teacher and work with kids, but I didn't have a college degree."

"So now you put kids in jail," Black said, turning from his desk. Leaning over a brimming trashcan, he opened his mouth and spat a large purple wad of chewing gum neatly into the receptacle.

Fordyce winced self-consciously. "You always have something negative to say."

Black took another stick of chewing gum from a purple package on his desk, "Me, I always wanted to be a cop," he said, unwrapping the gum and forming it into a carpetlike roll. "I liked it in the Army as an MP all of it: bar patrol, even working the stockade. I never had more fun in my life. I mean, we used to kick some ass." He opened his mouth and slipped in the fresh stick.

"You should have stayed in, then we wouldn't have to listen to your gum popping all day," Arredondo said, thumbing through a
Playboy
.

"I used to smoke five packs of Luckies a day, Pancho. Maybe you'd rather be sitting here with a smoke puffer. A man who's addicted to the weed."

"He's right. Anything's better than smoking," Fordyce said without looking up from the computer keyboard.

"I still miss it. Every minute of every day. I even enjoyed lighting the fuckers. That's all part of it, you know. Ask any shrink. They'll tell you straight out."

"I saw you smoking up a storm last payday at the Rumor Control Bar," Fordyce said.

"That's because I was drinking. When I drink, I can't help but smoke. After a drink or two I say fuck it. "

"But you drink almost every night," Fordyce said.

C.R. Black smiled his wide Okie grin. "Nobody's perfect." He stood up from his desk and moved to the computer. "How are you doing with those red pickup trucks, Four Eyes?"

Fordyce tapped a key twice. "Not too good. There are six thousand of them registered within the zip codes that make up East L.A. And my name is Fordyce, not Four Eyes."

Arredondo held up the
Playboy
to show the Playmate of the Month, an athletic brunette with capped teeth. She was balanced uncomfortably in the lotus position on the prow of a speedboat. "How's this for some top quality stabbing?"

Fordyce gave a momentary glance of displeasure, shook his head, and turned back to the computer screen.

Arredondo admired the magazine photo closely. "Bet you've never had anything like that in your life, C.R."

"When I was working Hollywood division, I used to shove gash like that out of my radio car, brown boy."

"I'd like break her open like a shotgun."

About five Stepanovich had completed the affidavit for the search warrant. He rubbed his eyes for a moment. Because the others were either chatting or talking on the phone and he couldn't hear himself think, he picked up the handwritten draft, stepped into Harger's vacant office, and shut the door behind him. The private cubicle was decorated with framed photographs of various Los Angeles Police Department athletic and marksmanship teams, academy graduating classes, fishing trip group shots. On the corner of the desk was an eight by ten of Harger with his tanned wife and three towheaded boys posing alongside an oval swimming pool.

Stepanovich sat down at Harger's desk, made a few corrections to the affidavit, then went over it one last time. It read as follows:

I, Detective Jose Stepanovich, Ser. #613845, have been a Los Angeles police officer for nine years and am presently assigned to the CRASH Detective Bureau Gang Task Force to investigate gang related homicides and other violent crimes. Since entering on duty as a police officer, I have participated in the investigation of numerous gang homicides and gang assaults, and have qualified in Superior Court as an expert on the methods of operation of Los Angeles street gangs.

On August 211 received a radio call of "shots fired" and responded to Our Lady Queen of Angels Church. Upon arrival at the scene, I observed two gunshot victims: Primitivo Estrada, a wounded adult male, and Guadalupe Zuniga, a nine year old female pronounced dead at the scene.

Numerous witnesses (see attached police reports) stated that a male adult suspect armed with a shotgun had chased victim Estrada into the church and fired twice, striking Estrada and Zuniga. The suspect then shouted, "Eighteenth Street," and ran back out the door. One wedding guest (hereafter referred to as Source A), who wishes to remain anonymous because he fears for his life, told me that the suspect who fired the shotgun had green eyes.

In my expert opinion, shouting out the name of one's gang affiliation is the custom and practice of street gangs in the City of Los Angeles. Also, the Queen of Angels Church lies just inside the border of the area the Eighteenth Street gang claims as its gang turf. Therefore, I am led to believe that a member of the Eighteenth Street gang may be responsible for the shooting.

Continuing my investigation, I conducted a records check of the file kept on the Eighteenth Street gang and learned that only one member of the gang, a male adult fitting the general age and description of the male described by the witnesses as the man who ran into the church and fired the shotgun, has green eyes: Pepe Gomez, a.k.a. Greenie. His arrest record shows that he has been arrested twenty two times. Four of these arrests were for felony crimes involving the use of weapons, including one arrest for a gang related murder in which the alleged murder weapon was a shotgun. In this case the charges against Gomez were dropped for lack of evidence.

Today, I reinterviewed Source A and showed him a spread of five photographs (see attached photos) that included Gomez's booking photograph among those of persons of similar age and description. Source A picked the photograph of Gomez from the spread of photographs as being the shotgun-wielding assailant at the Queen of Angels Church.

A recent police report bearing Gomez's name reflects his address as 2965 Eighteenth Street, Apartment 203.

It is my expert opinion that a search of the above address may recover guns, ammunition, evidence of gang affiliation, and other items of evidence relating to the August 21 murder at the Queen of Angels Church.

I request that this information remain confidential because disclosure may endanger Source A.

Satisfied that all the information he'd developed was contained in the search warrant, Stepanovich corrected a few minor typos in the draft, and went upstairs to the divisional copying machine. After waiting for a secretary to finish running off the division bowling league standings, he made the twelve copies of the search warrant required by the district attorney's office.

At six Stepanovich and Arredondo stopped by the L.A. County Courthouse, where a muscle bound deputy marshal in a tailored uniform showed them into the chambers of the duty judge, a young red haired woman whom Stepanovich remembered as having lost most of her cases while a city prosecutor. She reviewed the search warrant carefully, asked a couple of perfunctory questions, then signed both the search warrant and an arrest warrant for Greenie.

It was dusk when Stepanovich and Arredondo left the courthouse. As they climbed into the unmarked car, Stepanovich lifted the radio microphone from the dashboard hook and called Harger. He responded promptly.

"The warrant is signed."

"Good work."

As they were driving toward Greenie's apartment over the Third Street Bridge from downtown into East L.A., Harger's voice crackled over the police radio as he transmitted staccato instructions to the members of the task force concerning the search warrant operation.

Stepanovich turned right onto Eighteenth Street and drove slowly past rundown apartment houses and residential courts. It was now dark and the street was quiet.

At the end of the block he pulled up across the street from the Florentine Gardens housing project, a graffiti covered cluster of pale green cement block apartment houses linked by outdoor clotheslines, community trash receptacles, and unmowed patches of grass. He drove along a little farther, checking the addresses painted on the curb. Stepanovich had served numerous other search warrants in the project. Familiar with its layout, he looked up to the second floor and counted apartments from east to west. Using binoculars from the glove compartment, he located the apartment listed in the search warrant as Greenie's. There was a light on.

Arredondo reached behind the passenger seat and hoisted a pump shotgun into the front seat. Keeping it aimed at the floorboard, he cranked the slide and chambered a round. A police sedan pulled up alongside. C.R. Black was driving and Fordyce was in the passenger seat. Both were wearing black bulletproof vests.

"Where do you want us?" Black asked.

"Take the back."

Black gave a thumbs up gesture and drove off. With his headlamps off, he turned into a driveway leading to the rear of the building.

Stepanovich and Arredondo climbed out of the car and jogged across the street and up a flight of steps to the first landing. Stepanovich pulled out his revolver and they crept cautiously down the landing to Apartment 203. They deployed on either side of the door. Stepanovich felt his heart beating powerfully, his fingers tingling. "Police!" he yelled. Hearing the sound of running inside, he aimed a powerful kick directly at the doorknob. The doorjamb splintered and the door flew open.