A Good Bunch of Men Read online

  “Not my people,” I said.

  “The brass will be up there all night,” Floyd continued, “sorting shit out and kissing ass with the media, explaining why the cops pumped sixty rounds into the idiot, why they didn’t tackle him like they would in the movies or some shit. I don’t think we’ll be bothered.”

  “Well shit, then have another beer.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it. You know I have a cooler in the trunk.”

  “Of course you do.”

  A voice called out from behind, “Dickie Floyd.”

  I turned to see Mike Ortega approaching, the ever-present grin and a bounce in his step, the guy full of energy and usually in a great mood. He had worked undercover with Floyd and me before we went to Homicide but had since promoted and was now back in uniform. Mike had been the first to refer to us collectively as Dickie Floyd, saying we were one another’s alter egos, each a figment of our imaginations. He swore it was true though we knew better; there were two of us, and we were fairly certain of it.

  “What’s up, Miguel?”

  “That’s Sergeant Miguel to you, dickhead,” Floyd said, brushing past me to shake Mike’s hand.

  I touched the stripes on one of his sleeves, exaggerating my enchantment as I bowed before him.

  “I wondered if you two idiots would get this one,” Mike said, the promotion obviously not changing his personality. “I figured one of you’d probably know her, or at least Floyd would for sure. Floyd knows all the hookers.”

  “I don’t have to take this abuse,” Floyd said, turning back to Susie.

  “Dude,” Mike said as he waved his hand in front of his nose, “you want some gum?”

  “You can both kiss my ass,” he said without looking back.

  Mike chuckled and turned back to me, his teeth chomping gum.

  “Nice hat.”

  I lightly touched the brim, a tan felt with a dark brown band. The hats had become my trademark as I carried on the tradition of the Hat Squad, a group of old time homicide detectives the Los Angeles Times had made famous. There had been a front-page story with a photo of the well-dressed men at a notorious crime scene, suits and dress hats with big shiny sedans in the background. Decades later I remained one of a few who wore hats, mostly to protect my bald head, but also for nostalgia’s sake.

  I tipped my hat to Mike and said, “Why thank you, Sergeant Miguel.”

  “So, who is she?” he asked, standing with thin arms folded across his uniform shirt, a shiny new sergeant’s badge pinned on his chest.

  “Susie Q, someone told us. Looks familiar but I don’t know we know her.”

  I called out to Floyd, “We know her?”

  “Looks familiar,” Floyd said over his shoulder, now squatting to have a better look, trying to see beneath the scarf around her neck but careful not to touch anything before photographs and measurements documented the scene. “Maybe we’ve seen her out here, not sure we’ve ever arrested her . . . Maybe we’ve talked to her?”

  Floyd paused, then continued: “Susie Q, huh? I’m not sure, Dickie. I mean, she sorta looks familiar.”

  “Seems we arrested most of them over the years,” Mike said.

  “Except the pretty ones. Floyd usually talked us out of busting the pretty ones, said they’d be a good informant or some shit.”

  Mike said, “Pretty Boy Floyd, lady’s man.”

  Floyd still studied the corpse. “I’m sure we know her.” Convincing himself now: “She’s old enough, could have been tricking when we were out here.”

  We stood in silence for a moment, the three of us trying to put life into her clouded, dead eyes for recognition. Trying to figure out the who before getting to the who did it and why.

  A loud scream erupted from behind us. The kind of wailing you knew right away had to be from someone who’d heard their baby was dead. Word seemed to travel quickly through the streets to mama. Then they’d come running to see for themselves, see with their own eyes it really was their baby. See that it had finally happened.

  A uniformed deputy braced the black woman just outside the yellow tape. She appeared to be in her fifties, this distraught civilian who wore a blue robe and yellow fuzzy slippers. I envisioned wearing the slippers at the office, a thought of the captain coming into the men’s room and seeing them in the stall amused me. Then I pictured walking through the bureau to show them off, maybe wearing a yellow hat to match.

  Then I thought to myself, it’s this type of thinking that worries me at times. Would a normal person have these thoughts? Were other cops so twisted that while standing somewhere between a dead hooker and the devastated mother who mourned nearby, they would humor themselves in this manner? I knew Floyd did at times, but that was no measurement of sanity.

  “My baby, my baby!” the woman wailed.

  Two deputies now struggled to hold her back. A few civilians, a black man and two Hispanics, one male, one female, were trying to console the woman, touching her back and her head, telling her it was going to be okay . . . telling her to calm down, hold on now . . . just regular folks doing the best they could under the circumstances.

  “I guess we found the next of kin,” Floyd said, stepping next to me and following my gaze.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Talk to her?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s give it some time.”

  “Oh God, no,” the woman cried. “Lordy Jesus, please don’t let that be my baby boy!”

  Baby boy?

  Floyd and I glanced at one another and turned to have another look at Susie.

  I raised my brows, looking at Floyd, waiting to see what he would have to say about his girl, Susie, being a boy. He just shrugged, then turned back to Susie, all business now.

  3

  THE CROWDS DISPERSED over the hours and the sounds of a busy city faded to the occasional passing vehicle, a screeching tire or a distant siren. Floyd and I continued documenting the scene, jotting notes in our notebooks that would later be used to prepare our reports. We likely appeared indifferent at times to the violence and death which encompassed us, as the banter continued throughout the process. But between pokes and jabs we would speculate on motive, contemplate evidence, share theories and pose questions, and argue about the answers. Occasionally we’d reminisce about other cases or past times as we stood comfortably in our old haunts, a neighborhood where violence was the norm and an established police presence a necessity.

  In the background a police radio broadcast the soothing voice of a female dispatcher who spoke in codes to the peacekeepers of the night: 10-4, Century 212-Adam Code-6 with a 925A, Alameda and 115th, dark blue Regal, California License two Adam William Boy, nine three eight . . . any unit to assist? . . . any unit, Century 212-Adam is out with a 925A-Adam, Alameda and 115th . . . Century 214 in two . . . Century 210 Sam from the station.

  The early spring morning dew settled in with a light fog as Floyd helped a coroner’s investigator slide a metal gurney into the rear of a white van, LOS ANGELES COUNTY CORONER painted across the side. Two thuds and the doors were closed, and Susie was secured for the ride downtown. Floyd thanked the investigator and shook his hand through the driver’s window.

  Century 210 Sam is Code-6 with 212-Adam, advising additional units, shut down your Code-3.

  The Coroner’s van crept into the darkness with a white haze slowly rising from the exhaust, obscuring the taillights that glowed in the night.

  Century 212-Adam is advising Code-4 at their location, Code-4, 212-Adam. Frequency 22 is clear, KMA-628.

  Floyd turned on his heel and walked back to me, his notebook propped open in his left palm. He jotted notes with a black and gold Mont Blanc pen, his eyeglasses now dangling from the corner of his mouth. He kept his head down and continued writing as he stopped in front of me. “What’s up, Dickie?”

  “Just watching Phil wrap things up.” I nodded toward Phil Gentry, the crime lab technician at the scene. “Thinking we’re about done here
and how nice it would be to crawl back into my bed before dawn.”

  Floyd removed the glasses from his mouth, tucked them into his jacket pocket, and retrieved a can of Copenhagen. He thumped the can twice with his middle finger, removed the lid, and dug into the worm dirt with two fingers and a thumb. He continued studying me while he packed a chaw between his cheek and gum, as if waiting for me to continue.

  “Strange case but that’s nothing new for us, right?”

  Floyd brushed his hands together, letting crumbs of tobacco fall to the sidewalk below us as his tongue fiddled with the tobacco in his mouth. He said through a full mouth, “They don’t pay us enough, Dickie. You think about the shit we deal with on a regular basis, the weirdness that seems to follow us around. Tell me what normal assholes would volunteer for this job?”

  “Us?”

  “We’re not normal, Dickie, that’s my point. They should pay us more like they should pay the coroners more. I mean, your patients are all dead, what doctor wants that job?”

  “Have you seen those doctors without their masks? No way any of those guys would make it in private practice. Strange ducks, they are, the lot of ‘em.”

  “Take Phil over there,” Floyd continued, nodding that direction, “Phil’s a good man, a great lab tech, and we’re lucky to have him at any of our scenes. But then you take that idiot Barrios, the tech we seem to get stuck with every other case, and that asshole makes our job twice as hard. He should get his paycheck from the public defender’s office. Give him an hour in your crime scene, he makes the O.J. case look good. And you have a point about the medical examiners. I cringe when we need them to testify.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “And that’s why, Dickie, they should pay us more.”

  “Because the medical examiners are ghouls?”

  “That and because nobody ever seems to get killed in the daytime. Just once I’d like a case in the morning, so I could drive to work like a normal human being and drive home in the evening, done for the day.”

  “Very inconsiderate of them.”

  Phil finished casting a partial shoe impression from a planter a few feet from where Susie’s life came to an end, and he paused for a moment to look around the scene. Finally, he worked his way over to us. “Are we finished here?”

  “What d’ya think?” I asked Floyd.

  “I think that’s it,” he answered, looking around the scene now from where we stood. “Did we get victim perspective shots?”

  “Phil,” I said, “we get victim perspectives?”

  “Got them a while back,” Phil said, his right hand buried in a pocket of tan-colored cargo pants. His camera hung around his neck on the outside of a dark blue windbreaker, CRIME LAB in gold letters across the chest and again on the back in larger letters. “You guys going to want aerials?”

  Floyd looked at me, kind of shrugged and said, “I don’t think so, Phil. I really don’t see the value of it on this one. What do you think, Dickie?”

  “We can always get them later.”

  Floyd spit tobacco into the gutter. “Yeah, not like this area’s gonna change much if we need them in a couple years for trial.”

  “Trial, ha!” I said. “Figure the odds.”

  “Never know, Dickie. We’ve solved tougher ones. You remember how you felt about Clarkson? Said we’d have better luck with a mafia murder.”

  “We got lucky.”

  Phil ran his fingers sideways through a tuft of hair hanging over his eyes. “That sounds familiar, Clarkson. Is that the El Monte murder you guys handled a couple years ago, female found shot to death in her car?”

  “That’s the one,” Floyd said, nodding as he said it. “We had you on that one too, huh?”

  “We made the suspect,” Phil said, “with a hit from a partial print off the passenger’s side door, is what I remember. You guys nailed him on that?”

  “Nope,” I said, the contempt coming through as I spoke, “D.A.’s office said we didn’t have enough on him, even though the guy copped to being with her that night in the park. Said he met her there and they had a couple beers and hung out for a while, is all. His story is that when he left, she was alive and well, rolling a joint before she headed home to hubby.”

  “We matched him with DNA too,” Floyd said, “his semen just happened to be in her vagina.”

  “And that wasn’t enough?” Phil asked.

  “His lawyer clarified it for us later,” Floyd said. “Apparently, it was a big misunderstanding, an oversight that his client forgot to mention he’d banged this broad he’d had a beer with. The fact she just happened to have her brains scrambled by a hollow-point shortly thereafter was just bad luck. Oh, and it didn’t occur to him to let the cops know he had been there that night, not mentioning a thing until Dickie and I screwed the front sights of our pistols into his ears and introduced ourselves to him early one morning.”

  “Unreal,” Phil said. “So, how’d you guys finally nail him?”

  “Wiretap,” Floyd said, “and a little bit of stimulation. Once we had the wire in place, we interviewed his ex and told her we had enough to arrest him. This was a couple years later. She called him as soon as we left, and they got into a screaming match because now she’s thinking maybe he really did do it. When they hang up, he calls a buddy—panicked now—and runs it by him. The guy asks if he did it, and you’ll never believe what homeboy says.”

  Phil shrugged, “He did it?”

  “Says it was an accident,” Floyd said, “and that’s all we needed.”

  “All they’d charge him with was involuntary manslaughter,” I added. “Because now that he’s said it was an accident, how are we going to prove otherwise? See, this is why we ought to be able to beat confessions out of these guys.”

  Phil chuckled while shaking his head. He looked around the scene once more, and said, “Okay guys, need me for anything else? . . . Last chance.”

  I lifted my hat, wiped perspiration from my shaved head as I took another look around, making that decision of crime scene finality. Deciding whether to break it down, knowing there’s only one shot at it. On this case, we seemed thin on physical evidence and so far, there were no witnesses identified. Sure, someone saw something, but identifying witnesses in this part of town was the most difficult part of solving murders.

  “How the hell are you sweating?” Floyd asked. “It can’t be fifty degrees.”

  “Feels like sixty.”

  I loosened my tie even more below the unbuttoned collar and pushed my sleeves up two turns. My suit jacket still hung in the back of the car. There was a different look to the veteran homicide cop than what they portrayed on television.

  “You need to move to Nebraska,” Floyd said.

  “Montana.”

  “Whatever. Somewhere it never gets over thirty.”

  “Somewhere I don’t have to put up with your shit,” I said, then turned back to Phil. “I think that’ll do it for us.”

  “Okay, guys, I’m going to get out of here then, give you two some privacy.”

  “Might be another murder here in a minute,” Floyd said.

  Phil smiled, turned, and waved goodbye, his equipment and evidence in hand. Moments later Floyd and I watched as his Taurus disappeared into the night.

  “There he goes, with all our evidence. Two envelopes.”

  “What’ve we got?” Floyd asked, “couple condoms—”

  “Unused.”

  “—and a book of matches?”

  “Maybe we’ll get something from the autopsy,” I said, trying to sound hopeful.

  “Like what, semen? The broad’s a whore.”

  “Guy.”

  “The guy’s a whore,” Floyd said. “Point is, if semen doesn’t convict some asshole who kills a housewife in the park, it sure isn’t going to convict anyone on a hooker case.”

  “May get us close though, get someone identified. This time,” I said, my attention suddenly drawn across the boulevard, “we beat a confessi
on out of ‘em.”

  “What are you looking at?” Floyd asked, turning to follow my gaze.

  I nodded toward the motel with the neon sign flashing REGAL INN and ROOMS AVAILABLE.

  “What about the motel?”

  “What about it?”

  “Ever since we determined our girl, Susie-Q, was born Shane Clayton Wright,” I said, “you seem to have backpedaled quite a bit, saying you’d never met that whore in your life. None of the uniforms copped to knowing her either, after that little tidbit of information surfaced.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So, either everybody’s lying their asses off, or Susie wasn’t a regular on the streets. If she didn’t work the streets, then . . .”

  Floyd looked up again at the neon sign, “Well, dickhead, let’s have a look.”

  A patrol deputy nearby tried to conceal a chuckle. The chuckle seemed to be in response to my partner’s term of endearment. Floyd, having apparently caught the deputy’s reaction as well, smiled and said, “It’s short for Dickie.”

  The deputy only smiled in return, likely thinking these two old-timers were nuts.

  Every year the deputies appeared younger and younger. There were some I wondered if their mothers knew what they were doing out this late. Other times I realized this was just part of the process of getting older, being seasoned, and working around other seasoned cops. We all appeared old and worn out, compared to the younger deputies on the streets.

  I wondered if this was the deputy’s first murder scene, but quickly dismissed the thought. He was here at the scene without a training officer, so at the very least he had been at the station for six months. Six months in this district exposes young deputies to a lot of crime and violence. Most trainees working these beats would handle dozens of shootings and stabbings and at least a handful of murder cases before they were finished with their six months of formal patrol training. Not a lot of time passed between murders in South Los Angeles.

  I recalled my first murder scene as a patrol deputy, only a couple miles north from where we now stood. It had been a gang member who was shot and killed in his girlfriend’s front yard. The locals had said he’d been caught slipping, as if that alone summed it up, and nothing else needed to be explained. The victim, a gang member from a rival neighborhood, came and went freely for several weeks without a problem, but then one night, as the locals said, he got caught slipping, and that was the end of that.