What we had now was a bit of a mess. Three dead men on a ranch in Calabasas, and a tropical fish business in Thousand Oaks that existed as a cover-up for a drug business run out of, at least in part, a farm in Pomona. As it turned out, Graves’s hubris stung him even after his death, because he hadn’t bothered to move the product out of the farmhouse.
Once I’d told Ott the story, start to finish, no details left out, standing right there on that same strip of grass between the ponds, he immediately set up a raid on the Pomona house. For that night. Well, technically the following morning, 4 a.m. Because now that Graves was dead, had been killed, Ott would not wait, could not wait, for the people in Pomona or anyone else in the organization to hear about it and make a move, if they hadn’t already—and they hadn’t.
The LAPD ended up with a pretty large drug bust connected to a pretty large Mexican cartel. The night of the raid, they seized hundreds of pounds of liquid meth and more than thirty weapons. And they made two big arrests: They got the older man with the long gray hair, a man named Louis Delacorte, one of the top guys in the ring on this side of the border, who had a direct relationship with the leader of the family in Mexico. And they got another man who was at the house with Delacorte, a man named Rafael Rivera, the head of a street gang out of Pomona, the top runner of the gang, one of the men who actually physically sold the meth. Not to mention a longtime criminal who’d killed many people and who’d been making a shitload of money illegally for a long time.
Now, would these two give the police information in exchange for shorter sentences? Names of gang members here in L.A.? Names of members of the cartel, of the family, in Mexico? Who knows? My bet was that if Graves had survived, he would have ratted. Something about him. But these two? Who knows? And I guess the bigger question was, did this bust make a big difference in the overall Southern California drug war? Hardly. But it did keep many millions of dollars’ worth of meth off the street. So it made a dent.
Which made Ott happy. After the raid, he was much, much less pissed off at me for setting up a possible shootout, which turned into an actual shootout, with Graves on my own.
As for Keaton Fuller, they closed the case on him. Gave me a polygraph that read clean when I said that Lee Graves confessed to me, in no uncertain terms, that he had killed Keaton. You combine my statement with the fact that Graves was part of a lethal drug organization—shit, there were two dead trained assassins on his property the night I called Ott—and the story tracked for everyone. Including Jackie and Phil Fuller.
So a few days later I was at my office, sitting at my desk, now no longer working on an active case but instead kind of mulling over the case I’d just been on, the Keaton Fuller case. Anyway, one of the warehouse owners a few doors down, a cat by the name of Eddie Stanton, has an actual cat, a kitty cat, named Toast. Toast was named Toast because he had been badly burned in a house fire, and as a result, patches of his body have no fur, just charred skin. Toast walks with a wild, wobbly gait and has a bad right eyelid that bounces up and down, basically out of his control. Eddie Stanton often brings Toast with him when he visits his space. Eddie’s got a few high-end motorcycles in his warehouse and likes to come look at them or sit on them or something. And when Eddie’s doing whatever it is that he does, Toast often weeble-wobbles down to see me. Which I love. Because I love Toast. Talk about a fighter.
So that day, I had Toast right up on my desk. He was ramming his head into my hand as I scratched it. And I was thinking, Here you have this guy Keaton Fuller, who’d done so many people wrong personally, hurt them, disappointed them, let them down, insulted them—shit, mentally abused them with stuff like Pig Hunt. Yeah, so many people. But—but—all the people who he had done this stuff to were essentially, in the most general terms, good people. Not perfect people, obviously. Flawed people, like most of us. Like all of us. But basically good people. People with hearts. So then, this guy Keaton Fuller gets involved with a group of people who also have hearts, but of a different kind. Black. Black hearts. And these people don’t have this long history with Keaton. Don’t have this knowledge of his family, or of his fine pedigree, to set against his shameful behavior. These people don’t have the context to say: “Oh, that’s just Keaton.” And even if they did, these people don’t have it in them to be affected by his address or his lineage. They couldn’t give two shits. So when he does maybe just one thing that’s out of line, something similar perhaps to the things he’d done to a whole line of people before them, they popped him. Quickly. Heartlessly. Just like that. It wasn’t connected to all his previous behavior, it wasn’t any kind of punishment for his sins. And yet somehow it was. You know? He got it in the end. Not from the people who had all these reasons over all these years to hate him. To give it to him. But from making the entitled mistake of treating the fish people, the meth people, like he’d treated everyone else. Maybe only one time. Poetic justice essentially did him in.
Oftentimes in life, things make sense, work themselves out, but not in the linear way you think they should. That’s true in my line too, in my cases. Things don’t always come to me in a linear, logical way. Sometimes I’ll have a revelation on a case, but it won’t come from methodically looking at or refining my case notes. Or from connecting puzzle pieces that I’ve laid out in their logical order. Sometimes it will—in fact, lots of times, which is why I do those things—but not always.
Yeah, sometimes I’ll have an insightful thought, or I’ll realize that my conclusions on something are wrong, totally wrong, while I’m just sitting at my desk scratching the head of a burned-up kitty cat. Or while I’m driving around doing the most mundane and pedestrian of errands.