Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (52 page)

Timothy Blaine is the media rep here, a white cop with a father and grandfather formerly in the force. Tall, handsome, well dressed, I mean better than the Men's Wearhouse. Sometimes he draws the press more than the cases do—he's funny, personable, a master of subterfuge. Making the press look one way, while we work in another direction. Not lies, not distortions, but mainly to keep certain news out of the papers and broadcast streams, news that could help us detain somebody when we get to that point.

“Well, big homie, if you get something just drop it on my desk,” Timothy says, waving his hand in dismissal, walking out the main door.

I've known Timothy for eighteen years. We go back to being uniforms on Southside beats, mostly at the “unlucky seven,” the seventy-seventh—one of the department's most murderous divisions. We learned the cop business together, right after the '92 riots. The riots were the reason I joined, along with other black and brown cadets. And what a training I got during that time: the streets smoldering, burned out lots, bent-steel frames of former buildings, more homicides than ever before.

Now Tim and I hover over desks, memos, computers, cell phones. But I still got my hand in the pot, in the fire, working cases. Timothy opts for the limelight. And it works for him. I'm okay being the background guy, the guy you don't pay attention to but who may be paying attention to you. We're still on the same side, only working different ends of the game, this crime game, this seeing-people-on-their-worst-day game.

“Sammy … Sammy Saez, can you come into my office?”

That's Captain Dwight Tate. I challenge the captain quite a bit. Not serious, just to mess with him. He's a former Marine, African American, maybe late forties. He came to the department after several years in a midwestern police force. He was second in command and about five years ago able to enter the LAPD with a special crew tied to the new police chief. But he's also mighty stressed, always behind, pushing us detectives to do more, faster—we're never on time for anything as far as Tate is concerned.

I slowly rise from my chair, close the file I was staring at on the computer, and grab my notepad and a pencil as I saunter into his small office located at the end of a row of desks past mine.

“You rang, cap'n?” I tease as I enter Tate's space. I don't show much respect that should go along with his position on the force. I mean he deserves the props. I guess I'm a little annoyed he's moved so fast up the ranks for being an outsider. Besides this is just my way—my attitude keeps people on their toes, off my back.

The captain is sitting behind a massive wood desk. Papers and folders neatly stacked, everything in its place. There are photos on shelves, and on his desk—they're all of one girl's face, perhaps late teens, framed and in color. I wait to hear why he asked me in.

“We got a lead on the Sixth Street body dump … somebody's come forward with information,” Tate says, all business, all the time. “Here's a name and number. Check it out and get back to me with whatever you find.”

Captain Tate moves methodically to the temporary podium outside the main police station downtown. TV, radio, and newspaper reporters are gathered directly in front of him. Mics from broadcast stations are taped to the platform, sticking out in front of the captain's face. That's one big change after the riots, that someone like Dwight Tate can represent what was once considered the most racist police department.

Behind Tate stand a few officers in uniform. Tim's also there, in a gray suit. I'm at the end of the line, in a blue blazer, opened to reveal light blue shirt and striped blue tie, shiny police shield on my waistband, my brown hair with swaths of grey combed neatly to the back. The captain clears his throat and in a strong baritone he declares:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for joining us today as we make this important announcement about a breakthrough relating to the body found near MacArthur Park last month. We now have the victim's name, nineteen-year-old Stacy Killian of Woodland Hills. Her family has identified the body. We also have a witness in the case. This witness, whose name will not be released at this time, is being held for questioning, nothing more. We have no suspects, although with the identification of the young victim we hope our investigation will move forward. We are confident we'll have one or more arrests, based on the great work of our detectives and police officers in the field. For now, this is all we have. We'll provide further information when we get something solid to report. We appreciate your patience—the media are important partners for law enforcement in our efforts to prosecute the parties responsible for these violent acts and to bring closure to the families.”

Various voices from the media then rush Tate from all directions. He deftly answers their questions, without revealing any more than what he's said—different slants on the same words, a sort of dance with information that Tim is good at providing. I decide to move away from behind the captain and reenter the station's front doors.

From the mid-1980s through most of the 1990s, L.A. was known as the most violent place on earth. Movies like
Colors
and
American Me
conveyed a gang reality most people had no idea about. Yet this culture, pushed out by West Coast Rap, the
cholo
style, the elaborate tattoos, is everywhere now. You got L.A. gangster-types all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Central America, parts of Europe—even Japan, Cambodia, and Armenia, man.

But today L.A. is not the killing fields it used to be. Amazingly there are whole areas here where nobody is mugged, assaulted or killed. But I have to remind myself—don't get fooled by this.

L.A. still has South Central, Boyle Heights, Highland Park, East L.A., Pacoima, parts of the Harbor with nearby towns like Compton, Long Beach, Bell Gardens—working-class, mostly Latino. There is also MacArthur Park, Westlake, and the Pico-Union. And in South L.A., Compton, and Pacoima there are large sections of African Americans. Many of these places never recovered after 1992.

The murder rates in those neighborhoods are as high as any place, anywhere.

I learn all this while assigned to Homicide. Also whenever I get the time I like to drive around this monster of a city, although it's hard to get a good handle on it. I grew up in nearby West Covina, but I still have a hard time figuring this place out—a city that mostly winds and turns, housing tracts pushed up into wooded hills, various city centers sprinkled throughout the basin, with nice homes up and down the western corridor, and some of the poorest in the southern and eastern ends.

Driving around, I've noticed one thing—L.A. is deeply divided, man. How bad things can be depends on how poor and how dark-skinned your neighbors are. Even downtown is split in two—west of Pershing Square are the big hotels, banks, lawyer suites, mostly Anglos and Asians. East of the Square you have the jewelry district, the garment district, the heavily trafficked Broadway with its clothing, appliance, and taco shops—and more Mexicans and Central Americans shoppers than any place outside of Mexico City or Tegucigalpa.

East of “Spanish Broadway,” but west of the warehouse district, is the largest concentration of homeless people in the country, known for generations as Skid Row, a fifty-square-block area—street after street filled with cardboard boxes, tents, tore-up blankets, mostly black people, except for the tiny apartments and SRO hotels where the illegals reside.

When I first got my desk downtown, I made it a point to check out this area. My fellow officers claim at least ten thousand people would be camped out on any given night. Although most were pushed out of their homes or laid off, too many dudes and women were on the pipe, shooting up, with bottles of rotgut by their feet. A few hospitals and sheriff's deputies used to drop off people without homes in Skid Row because it had a concentration of missions, shelters, services.

But around 2006, the LAPD moved in on many of the homeless—for violating parole, drug sales, fights, drunkenness. We cleared up many of those Skid Row streets, just squeezed them out and they'd end up in and around the L.A. River, east to Riverside or San Bernardino County, to Antelope Valley … the deserts.

Now a few sections of the Row look like upscale Manhattan, like Greenwich Village, with art galleries, cafes, pricey restaurants, million-dollar condos.

The reality is that this is one of the most exciting cities to be a cop. People have found interesting ways to die in this town: Suicides, horrendous car accidents, murders of all kinds. And I don't mean just the typical street gang shoot 'em ups, which are extraordinary in themselves. We also have killings of Hollywood starlets, big-time bankers and developers, high-end crime figures from Mexico, El Salvador, Armenia, Russia, Israel, Japan, China … you name the country, we got some of their worst criminals.

So as I maneuver through the crowded streets, pass the bus stops with maids and factory hands, in the old and new sections, I keep my eyes open. Beneath all this façade and glitter, next to tall buildings and the quiet of the barely-wet concrete river, this is a deadly place. More homeless, more poor, more gangs than any other city. Not every day is war, but when there is, it's a doozy, getting the blood flowing, adrenaline pumping, pushing me into a sordid kind of high.

Like when I think about that poor girl's body in that vacant lot.

“It's been almost a year, people,” Captain Tate needles. “The police chief, the mayor, city council … they're all demanding answers. The private security business is up—you got regular folks arming themselves. This can get out of hand, you know, with somebody panicking and hurting somebody. Now it seems anyone's daughter is at risk. I know we can't make up answers, but something has to give, for Christ's sakes. Follow your best leads, return to people you've already talked to. Don't leave any rock unturned. We're not playing games here!”

The body count has been mounting—more dead girls from well-off homes. White, except for the first one that looked mixed. At least four bodies in the past ten months. The others are discovered along a stretch of the river near Atwater Village, in the fields of Elysian Park just outside of Dodger Stadium, and not far from the USC campus, under the pilings of the 110 Freeway. Again, these are places where you wouldn't expect these girls to end up. Yet there they are, strewn about like so much garbage, like yesterday's newspapers, like a sack of bad burritos.

There is also a curious heart-shaped burn on each of the girls—I first noticed this in the photos of the first victim, on her chest, like if some sicko heated up something and pressed it to her skin.

The captain is losing his patience. Everybody is breathing down his neck. He breathes fire down ours. There have been many other murders in and around the city, but these bodies are getting top billing. The murdered girls are from the well-off parts of the Valley and the Westside, where the clamor to resolve these cases rings louder.

The problem is we have no suspects. Oh, we've had those nut jobs that claim to be the murderer, maybe to have somebody pay attention to them for once. And that first witness—he only had a tidbit for us. He lived down the street, but that night he was drunk, sitting behind a dumpster across from the lot where the first victim was found. He said a green van pulled up early in the morning, like two a.m, still dark out. He saw a husky man with a black sweatshirt, hood over his head, face obscured, remove what looked like a blanket stuffed with something. The drunk couldn't quite see what it was, but the man carried this to the far end of the lot and dropped the bundle there. Probably didn't want to leave tire marks in the dirt. Then calmly—according to the witness—the perpetrator walked back to the van and took off. No license plate. No make or model.