22

At 12:30 A.M. on the first Saturday in May, Lieutenant Hartwell calls Detective Ron Ito, who groggily reaches for the phone near his bed.

“Good morning,” Hartwell says. “We got a callout. The wife of that actor, Robert Blake, was killed in Studio City. The captain wants us to go out there and take the case.”

“Is it a whodunnit?”

“I don’t know,” Hartwell says. “But before you roll out there I want to make sure your plate’s clean. Any court cases coming up? Anything I should know about?”

“No. I’m clear.”

“Okay,” Hartwell says. “I’ll see you out there.”

About an hour later, they meet in the squad room. Ito, who is Japanese-American, is about five-nine, compactly built, and dressed in a muted green suit, white button-down shirt, red print tie, and gleaming black oxfords. His hair is cut military style, sheared on the sides and longer on top.

Hartwell is dressed in a manner few detectives could afford—custom-made blue suit of the finest Italian wool, made-to-order creamy white Egyptian cotton shirt, and shimmering silk tie. He spends all his vacations in Thailand and buys his clothes from a Bangkok tailor at only a fraction of what they would cost in the United States. He is fascinated by Thai culture, cuisine, and history, enjoys scuba diving on remote islands far from the tourist sites, and plans to retire to Thailand in a few years. Hartwell is fifty-nine, the oldest man in the unit. Divorced, he lives in an apartment a few blocks from the beach and looks perpetually sunburnt.

“The North Hollywood detectives have talked to Blake,” Hartwell says. “Now he’s in the interview room with his attorney.”

“What’s he need an attorney for?” Ito asks. “Is he a suspect?”

Hartwell shrugs. “You know how these things are. He’s not a criminal lawyer. It’s his entertainment attorney.”

Ito is immediately suspicious. Why does Blake need an attorney? His wife has just been murdered. Why isn’t he still with the North Hollywood detectives trying to help them find out who killed her?

Chuck Knolls joins Ito and Hartwell in the squad room, greeting North Hollywood detective Martin Pinner and his supervisor, Mike Coffey, who were the first to be called out to the crime scene and have just interviewed Blake. Last August, Pinner and Coffey investigated the Luda Petushenko murder before Knolls and McCartin took over. While Knolls explains how he and McCartin solved that case, two other Homicide Special detectives arrive, and they all head for a conference table at the side of the squad room.

Coffey tells them they interviewed Blake for about an hour while investigators questioned some residents near the murder scene. He then provides a precis of the case: the union between Blake and his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, Coffey says, was not one of Hollywood’s great love stories. She was a star stalker who made a living selling dirty pictures of herself, advertising in sex magazines, and corresponding with lonely suckers whom she conned out of cash. Blake knocked her up, she had the baby—a daughter, Rose—about eleven months ago, and they fought for custody of her. Eventually, a few months ago, they married.

On Friday night, Blake and Bakley had driven to Vitello’s, an Italian restaurant in Studio City. But instead of parking at the restaurant, Blake had parked a block and a half away, on a dim street, beside a Dumpster.

Hearing this, Ito raises an eyebrow.

After dinner, when they returned to the car, Blake told Bakley that he had left his .38 snub-nose revolver—which he has a permit to carry—in the restaurant, on the seat in their booth. He jogged back to retrieve the gun. When he returned he found Bakley slumped in the car and noticed blood coming out of her nose and mouth.

A North Hollywood detective steps in to announce, “Blake’s getting antsy.”

“Tell him the case is being transferred downtown,” Ito says, “and the downtown detectives are being briefed.”

Ito asks Coffey, “Is the scene secured?”

Coffey nods. One casing was found in the street, he says, and another on the passenger seat.

“It’s a nine-millimeter, but that’s not totally confirmed,” Pinner says. “There was a shot to the body and the right side of her head.”

The North Hollywood detective interrupts again. “Blake’s ready to go. He’s in the hallway.”

Blake wears jeans, a tight black T-shirt, and black cowboy boots. His hair is shaggy and an unnatural shade of jet black, which gives his pale skin, stretched taut from a facelift, a ghostly pallor. He looks exhausted and a bit sheepish as he stares at the floor.

“I don’t want to be sixty-seven years old, but I am,” he mutters, standing in the hallway beside his lawyer. “I’m sixty-seven fucking years old.” He sounds disgusted. “I’m tired and just want to lie down.”

Ito subtly scrutinizes Blake’s hands, clothes, and shoes, looking for specks of blood, but he finds nothing. He knows that the North Hollywood detectives have tested Blake’s hands for gunshot residue, but the results are not yet available. Ito asks the lawyer whether he can question Blake. Not tonight, the lawyer answers, but maybe tomorrow morning.

Ito then asks to search Blake’s house. “He can take a nap while we check out the house.” The attorney refuses, but gives detectives permission to examine the guest house in back where Bonny Lee Bakley lived. Hartwell dispatches two detectives.

Ito is frustrated, but he cannot detain Blake unless he arrests him. “Go home and get some sleep,” he says. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

Ito watches the lawyer and Blake saunter toward the door and thinks, This is not how a man acts whose wife has just been murdered. He did not seem distraught. He did not ask how his wife was killed. He did not show any curiosity about the case. He seemed more concerned about getting to bed than finding his wife’s killer.

The detectives return to the conference table, where Coffey resumes his briefing. “She’s from Tennessee and travels back and forth,” he says. “I asked him when they got married and he gave the phony crying with no tears. He loves to talk about how dirty she is.”

“Anybody interviewed from the restaurant?” Ito asks.

Coffey nods. “Three of them. All employees.”

“Did you run him for guns?” Ito asks.

“He’s got three or four,” Pinner says.

“The officers at the hospital want to know what to do with her clothes,” Coffey says.

“If they’re still on her, we can’t take them,” Ito says. “The coroner will handle it.”

A patrol officer walks into the room carrying a large envelope with Blake’s gun and hands it to Pinner.

Ito, who has investigated hundreds of murders, calmly delegates tasks and coordinates various aspects of the investigation. “I need someone to write a chain of custody on the gun. And let’s see if the gun’s loaded or if a round’s been fired. Someone get gloves and check it out.” He turns toward Hartwell and says, “Can you ask the coroner to hold all press? Refer all calls to the LAPD.” Then he asks Coffey, “A casing was found inside the car?”

“Yeah,” Coffey replies.

“Everything circumstantial is going against him,” Ito says. “A few things are interesting. That story about coming back to the restaurant.… He has to have someone see him so he can say: ‘I didn’t shoot her.’”

Pinner tells him that the restaurant’s co-owner, who greeted customers by the front door, said Blake returned only once—after he spotted his wife’s bloody body in the car. He was in a panic and shouted for a doctor. A nurse who was dining in the restaurant followed him back to the car. The co-owner never saw Blake return for the gun.

“This is a dark street,” Coffey says. “No light at nine-thirty. And he says she’s paranoid. But he leaves her there. He’s full of shit.”

Ito smiles ruefully, shaking his head. “We’ll never get another statement from him.”

Knolls laughs. “That’s for sure.”

“She’s on full-scale probation from Little Rock from one of her scams,” Pinner says.

“He’s blaming it on the mob she was running with,” Coffey says.

“He never cried?” Ito asks.

“No,” Coffey says. “He pretended to.… And he never asked what happened to her.” Coffey drums his fingers on the conference table. “Good luck on this one. He’s a character.”

After the briefing, Ito and Steve Eguchi head to the crime scene. Ito is between partners, but has been assisted recently by Eguchi, a member of Metro, the LAPD’s elite tactical patrol unit, which is dispatched to problem spots throughout the city. Eguchi and another Metro officer have temporarily been assigned to Homicide Special to assist detectives working a few difficult investigations.

Ito and Eguchi, both Japanese-American, have similar family backgrounds. Although Ito, at forty-seven, is only three years older than Eguchi, he has become his mentor. Eguchi joined the department in his mid-thirties and has no detective experience. Ito has helped him plot his future and is teaching him the rudiments of homicide investigation. Eguchi recently passed the detective exam and is waiting for assignment to a division. Meanwhile he will assist on the case. Ito does not really need a partner, but because the case is so high profile, Homicide Special supervisors decided to free up several detectives to work with him.

As Eguchi drives them through the dark, desolate city streets, Ito yawns. “I was watching M*A*S*H last night. I got about an hour of sleep when the phone rang.”

At about four A.M., they arrive at the murder scene. Reporters, photographers, and television cameramen have started gathering behind the yellow tape. Several patrol cars, overhead light bars pulsing, block off the street. Paramedics have already transported Bakley’s body to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Blake’s black Dodge Stealth is parked in front of an enormous Dumpster filled with chunks of stucco and strips of lumber. The Dumpster is beside a house, encircled by a chain-link fence, which has been almost completely demolished and will, no doubt, be rebuilt on a grander scale. The street is lined with ranch-style houses with carefully pruned shrubbery and well-kept lawns. The night is cool and the full moon and scattering of stars are veiled in a thin film of fog.

Ito and Eguchi study the area around the car, which is littered with a bloody towel and ribbons of bloody gauze, left behind by the paramedics. Ito grips his flashlight like a patrol officer—knuckles up—raises it above his shoulder, and illuminates the inside of the car. Both front windows are open.

“I see a glove,” he tells Eguchi, who peers inside. “I think it’s O.J.’s glove.”

Eguchi chuckles and Ito continues studying the car’s interior. There is a single shell casing on the passenger seat, near a small pool of blood, surrounded by a few reddish streaks on the gray upholstery.

Coffey, Pinner, and Homicide Special detective Mike Whalen join Ito and Eguchi. Whalen has just returned from Blake’s house, where he and his partner searched the guest house and then obtained Blake’s clothing, which will be tested for gunshot residue. The entertainment attorney said Blake would not talk to detectives and that a criminal lawyer would soon take over.

Coffey points out the streaks of vomit that dapple the exterior of the car from the driver’s door to the taillight, and sections of the inside, near the driver’s seat.

“Patrol says he was throwing up,” Coffey says.

Whalen says to Ito, “We should go back later this morning and ask Blake some questions that weren’t covered in the interview.”

“He’ll lawyer up,” Ito says.

“I don’t think so,” Whalen says. “He’s playing games. Let’s listen to the tape and prepare.”

Ito, Whalen, and Eguchi slip into the squad car. Eguchi starts the engine and flips on the heat, while Ito slides in the cassette of Blake’s interview with the North Hollywood detectives. The three detectives sprawl out on the seats and listen intently.

Blake sounds like the detective he played in Baretta, cursing and infusing his speech with an East Coast tough-guy inflection, although he moved from New Jersey to California when he was five. While his attorney monitors the interview, Blake begins by providing some background on Bakley. Coffey then asks him about the murder.

“Who would want to do anything like this?”

Blake sighs.

“You know a lot more about her than we do,” Coffey says with a hint of impatience.

Blake tells a confusing story about a man from New Jersey named John—Blake does not know his last name—who he says tried to kill Bakley two years ago. “He tried to crash both of them. He said they were going to commit suicide or something.” But Blake cannot provide any details.

“Can you fill us in on what happened tonight?” asks Coffey. “What were your activities tonight?”

Blake is silent for about ten seconds and finally says, “We went to the restaurant. We parked.… And things were going really good. We were talking about bringing Holly—her daughter—out here. And when I sit down, the gun, which I don’t always carry, but with her I carry the fuckin’ gun … usually I just leave it in a car or leave it at home … I took it out and put it on the seat, under my sweatshirt.”

Blake says he keeps the gun in a small holster and had owned it since he starred in Baretta in the mid-1970s.

“So you had the gun on the seat under your sweatshirt. Then what?” Coffey asks.

“I picked up my sweatshirt to leave. Then we got to the car and I realized I’d left the gun there. And I was afraid I was going to lose my license or that somebody would find it and it would be a bad scene.”

Ito yawns, and turns to Whalen and Eguchi. “The gun’s an alibi.”

“If he’s so worried about her, why’d he leave her alone?” Whalen says.

“He parked a block and a half away,” Ito says. “He could’ve driven right up to the restaurant and got the gun.”

On the tape, Coffey asks Blake, “Did you leave and think the gun was missing? Or were you just sitting in the parking lot and said, ‘My gun is missing.’”

“No, we were on the street and I said, ‘I left my gun in the restaurant. I got to go back.’ … So I went back into the restaurant and the gun was on the floor. Under the booth.”

Blake digresses, telling Coffey that Bakley was fearful and in hiding because she had made numerous enemies as a result of her business scams. “She puts ads in all kinds of sex papers all over the U.S., Australia, and Canada.…” Blake says. “What she does, and she’s been doing it for twenty, thirty years … guys write to her from these ads and then she calls them on the phone.… They send her money to come and see them and she never shows up. They send her plane tickets and credit cards. It’s a whole mail fraud scheme behind something that seems legit.… She says, ‘Wire the money to my bank,’ or ‘My credit card is used up.’ She’s got a million different ways of doing it.”

Whalen snorts derisively and says, “He’s trying to talk about everything except what happened.”

Blake, referring to Bakley’s enemies, tells his lawyer, “I want to write out a will tomorrow, because if those motherfuckers are looking for me, I want Rosie protected.”

Coffey ignores this. “Robert, what happened? You left the restaurant, discovered you didn’t have your gun, went back.… Did you say anything to the people in the restaurant when you went back and got it?” He is trying to lock Blake into his chronology so he can eventually use the co-owner’s statement against him.

“I just said, ‘I left something in the booth,’ and went in and got it. And I left.… Then I went back to the car.” He stifles a sob. “And it looked like Bonny was sleepin’.”

“So in that time you went into the restaurant, somebody came by and did this to her,” Coffey says—flatly, without a hint of sympathy.

Blake pauses. “Are you askin’ me? That’s how it must have happened. ‘Cause she was perfect when I left.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I went to a couple of houses and banged on doors that had lights on them. I was screaming, ‘Help.’ And their dogs were barking.” He stifles another sob. “And there wasn’t a motherfucker that would come to the door. And I finally went to one guy’s door”—his voice cracks—“and he recognized me.… And I said, ‘Call 911.’ And then I said, ‘Something happened to my wife and I saw blood on her mouth.’”

Blake pauses. “The first thing that came to me. I had no fuckin’ idea why. When I was a kid, when I was about nineteen years old”—his voice quavers with emotion—“I saw a young guy that didn’t pay his gambling debts. And I saw some people beat him with a hammer. And when they left I went up and looked at him.” He cries. “And for some reason or another, that’s what came to me.”

“Meaning that’s what she looked like to you?” Coffey asks.

“It just came to me.” He sobs. “I don’t know if I consciously thought someone hit her or robbed her. I just didn’t know. That thing came to me from when I was a kid and I just started running around yelling. I just lost it.”

A few minutes later Blake says, “I know this sounds weird, but I got to pee again. I hope I don’t dehydrate. I’m not drinking any water.”

Coffey leaves for the crime scene and Pinner and another detective eventually resume the interview. Blake tells them about a suspicious-looking man driving a black pickup truck who had been cruising by his house recently. On one occasion the man parked in front. Another time, Blake says, “he walked past my house. He was wearing an old plaid shirt, a windbreaker, Levi’s and he had on dark glasses and a baseball cap, like I wasn’t supposed to recognize him.” Blake and his bodyguard, Earle Caldwell, nicknamed him “Buzzcut.”

After Blake tells a long, disjointed story about the times he spotted Buzzcut lingering near his house, Pinner cuts him off and says, “Okay, so tonight when you’re out to dinner … you keep your eyes out for these guys?”

“I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since I met Bonny and …”

Pinner asks about Blake’s curious decision to park a block and a half away from the restaurant.

Blake tells him there is no valet parking at Vitello’s and on weekends the lot is full.

Pinner asks Blake to recount, again, the events of the night.

Midway through his story, Blake says, “I just thought of something.” He tells Pinner that he was worried recently about two men sitting inside a van that was parked in front of his house one night.

Whalen raps his knuckles on a window and says to Ito, “See how he’s always changing the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about what happened here.”

On the tape, Blake says he brandished a pistol and scared the men off.

Pinner steers Blake back to the events at the restaurant. After Blake again recounts what happened after he retrieved his gun, Pinner asks, “Let’s go back to the van, the two guys in the van.”

“I hate to ask you, but can we wrap it up? I’m beat,” Blake says in a weary tone.

The other detective in the room says, “What’s holding it up now is the downtown detectives. The big shots. They’re here and they’re being advised of what happened.”

“Oh God,” Blake groans.

“They’ll be coming to briefly talk to you. They just want to figure out what happened. They’ll be here in a few seconds. It’s because of your status.”

“I can’t make it, man,” he says softly. “I can’t make it. I’m sixty-seven years old.”

Blake’s lawyer, who was silent during most of the interview, says, “Tell them we’ve got to go.”

“Tell ’em,” Blake says, “I’m sixty-seven years old.”

Ito, Whalen, and Eguchi climb out of the car and stretch. The first hint of sunrise streaks the horizon with a pale orange band. The sky is clear now, without a hint of mist, and chirping birds perch on tree limbs, fences, and roofs.

Ito walks over to the Dumpster and tells Eguchi, “Let’s take this to the dump, empty it all out on something, and go over it all.”

They walk over to Blake’s car, crouch by the curb, and study the passenger seat, which is smeared with blood.

“There was no contact wound, so it’s hard to figure the scenario,” Whalen tells Ito and Eguchi. “If the entry wound was on the right side of her head, how does the casing get in the front seat of the car? Since casings kick out to the right you’d expect it to be here,” he says, pointing to the curb. “But maybe the doctor was wrong. Maybe it was an exit wound.”

Knolls points to the passenger-seat headrest. “This is a weird one. Why isn’t there any blood here?”

“Another strange thing,” Ito says, “is none of the neighbors heard any shots.”

“Maybe she was shot somewhere else,” Knolls speculates. “Maybe she was tossed into the car and someone drove her here.”

The detectives scour the crime scene again in the buttery morning light, walking past lawns slick with dew. A soft breeze carries the scent of roses, planted behind a white picket fence across the street.

Hartwell calls the LAPD’s press relations department from his cell phone and updates them. He clicks the phone off, shakes his head wearily, and says to Ito, “They say it’s going to be an avalanche. The press is going crazy. They’re all asking: ‘Is this an O.J.-type crime?’”

When a woman is murdered, detectives usually focus on the husband or the boyfriend first because crime statistics reveal that in the vast majority of cases he is the killer. If the detectives clear him, they will then move on to other suspects. Now is the time, in this early stage of the Bakley investigation, to obtain as much information about Blake as possible. So when the detectives finish examining the area, Ito heads back to the office to write the lengthy search warrant for Blake’s house.

During the past few months, Ito had been increasingly frustrated by the abundance of officer-involved-shooting callouts. He occasionally muttered to other detectives, “I hope my next case is a homicide.”

Now he turns to Eguchi and says, “Yeah, I wanted a homicide. But not this homicide.”

Ito is one of the few detectives who was a member of the unit during the O. J. Simpson case, although he was not subjected to criticism because his role was peripheral. Still, he knows the problems and pitfalls surrounding a murder investigation of a celebrity’s wife. Robert Blake might be considered a B actor at this point, but Ito knows the case will generate extensive press coverage anyway. As he drives back toward downtown, he thinks of the adage “Be careful what you wish for.”

Ito’s great-grandfather immigrated to California in the 1880s, but his grandfather returned to Japan fifty years later. He wanted his son to have a more traditional Japanese education. The family was fortunate that World War II ended when it did, because in the summer of 1945, Ito’s father was in kamikaze school, training for a suicide mission.

Ito’s family moved back to Los Angeles when he was seven. His father owned a Japanese restaurant in West Los Angeles and his grandmother—who had stayed in California and spent the war years in an internment camp—opened a café in Little Toyko. Ito grew up washing dishes and busing tables. His family lived a few miles west of downtown, in a fourplex; they occupied one apartment and his aunts, uncles, and cousins lived in the other units.

Ito enrolled in a community college police-science class because he thought the class would be an easy A and he wanted to raise his grade-point average. But he found the subject matter so interesting that he eventually quit school and joined the LAPD. After six years working patrol and a vice unit, he was assigned to the Hollywood Division as a detective trainee in robbery. He had always been interested in homicide, so Russ Kuster, the detective in charge of Hollywood Homicide who trained Rick Jackson and Jerry Stephens, occasionally called him to murder scenes. Ito never turned down a chance to assist and learn, and Kuster eventually hired him.

Kuster appreciated Ito’s work ethic, how he sifted through cold cases during lulls in the action, attempting to solve them. One of the first old cases he checked out involved an immigrant from Mexico who had doused his wife with lighter fluid and tossed a match on her. She gave a dying statement to police, identifying her husband. The suspect, however, fled after the murder and detectives had never been able to find him. Ito studied the thirteen-year-old file, called a few acquaintances and relatives of the suspect, and discovered that he was hiding out in a small village in the state of Michoacán. An LAPD fugitive squad located him. Since both he and his victim were citizens of Mexico, he was tried there, and convicted of murder. Kuster was impressed that Ito had cleared the case with just a few phone calls.

After four years at Hollywood Homicide, Ito joined the RHD, eventually transferring to the division’s bank robbery squad. In the wake of O. J. Simpson’s arrest, Homicide Special needed a coordinator to handle the deluge of data, so for a year Ito collated the almost five hundred tips from all over the world and organized them in order of urgency. Much of his time was spent separating the legitimate tips from the crank calls. One man called from Greenland with a tip on where to find the murder weapon. Psychics called, and dog psychologists told Ito they could interpret barks and identify the killer. When the Simpson trial was over, Ito stayed at Homicide Special.

Ito, whose mother lives in a Little Toyko retirement village a few blocks from Parker Center, is active in the Japanese community, serving as president of the San Gabriel Valley Japanese Community Center and teaching judo classes there. After years of enduring bad Japanese jokes, Ito enjoys working with Eguchi. They have much in common, but their paths to the LAPD have been quite different.

Eguchi studied auto mechanics at a trade school and was eventually hired at the Parker Center garage, where he became friends with a few detectives whose cars he serviced. When he joined them for racquet-ball at the police academy, a few told him that since he was in such good shape he should join the LAPD. But Eguchi believed that, at five foot seven, he was too small and, at thirty-three, too old. They convinced him that his size and age would not be a problem, so he applied and was immediately accepted.

Eguchi’s mother was not happy. “Japanese,” she told him, “are not police officers.” But as he quickly rose through the ranks—from patrol to training officer to Metro—she finally accepted his decision. And Eguchi, whose 200-pound bench press set the LAPD record for officers in his 131-pound weight division, soon realized that his size was not a problem on the streets.

Now that he has decided to become a detective he feels his assignment to Homicide Special was serendipitous. And although the Bakley murder is a daunting case, Eguchi is grateful for the opportunity to learn alongside some of the best homicide investigators in the city.

More Homicide Special detectives arrive at the crime scene and start knocking on doors and interviewing neighbors. Eguchi waits for the Dumpster to be moved so he can sift through the rubble. Knolls drives to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank to examine Bakley’s body before Sunday’s autopsy.

In the hospital morgue, an orderly opens a stainless-steel cold-storage vault, rolls out a gurney, and unzips a white body bag. Before examining Bakley’s body, Knolls tucks his tie inside his shirt so it will not pick up bloodstains: the reflex of a veteran homicide detective. Bakley is still wearing the cervical collar and blue plastic breathing tube that the paramedics inserted before they transported her to the hospital. Knolls leans over and studies the perfectly round circle on her right shoulder—an obvious entry wound. Her hair is stringy and matted and her face and ears so bloody that Knolls cannot locate the head wound. He shines his flashlight on the right side of her face and finally locates what appears to be an entry wound, in front of her earlobe. To be sure, a technician posts Bakley’s head X ray on an illuminated viewing box. Knolls studies the X ray, frowns and shakes his head. The X ray reveals that the bullet entered on the left side of Bakley’s head—a small white circle—and then exited from the right side—a wider, jagged pattern. Knolls can identify the exit wound on the X ray because bullets, especially hollow-points, mushroom after the initial impact.

Knolls is troubled because this contradicts the findings of the coroner’s criminalist. He crouches and studies the wounds from several angles. Finally, he sees the problem: the technician posted the X ray backward. When he flips it around, the X ray clearly shows the entry wound on the right side of her face.

As Knolls drives away from the hospital, he flips on his cell phone, calls his wife, and asks her to give his son a message: “Robert Blake is ruining my weekend. I’m not going to be able to make the UCLA volleyball game.”

Knolls returns to the North Hollywood station and spots Eguchi in the squad room.

“We found the gun,” Eguchi says.

Knolls flashes him a skeptical look.

“I’m serious.”

“If you’re bullshitting me, I’ll beat your ass.”

Eguchi turns around and bends over. He grins at Knolls and says, “It was at the landfill and recycling center. I was with the criminalist and the photographer. There were two big piles. There was nothing in the first pile. The criminalist goes through the second pile. There was a bunch of lumber and dirt. He says, ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ and motions me over. And there it was. The hammer was cocked, the safety was off, and there was one in the chamber.”

The pistol is a Walther P-38 semiautomatic, a German World War II relic. It was slick with oil, so fingerprints are unlikely.

Knolls claps Eguchi on the shoulder. “Good thing we went through that Dumpster.”

More detectives have been summoned to the crime scene, they canvass the neighborhood in the harsh glare of a hot May morning and attempt to find witnesses or, at least, locate someone who heard a gunshot. Because there are so many neighbors and this is such a high-profile case, investigators from both Homicide I and Homicide II are called out.

Detective Robert Bub is preparing to interview the only resident who talked to Blake that night. Blake banged on his door and asked him to call 911. North Hollywood officers have already talked to the man, but Bub wants to interview him more thoroughly.

The man lives down the street from where Blake’s Dodge Stealth was parked, in a modest single-story stucco house with an air conditioner jutting from the front window. Bub walks down a cement path bracketed by rosebushes and knocks on the front door. The man, who is in his mid-thirties and wears jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap, appears dazed as he leads Bub to the breakfast room table. He tells Bub he is a film director.

“First thing I’m going to do is to have you run through the story for me real quick, as to what you heard,” Bub says.

“I was at my back computer, in my bathrobe and I heard ding, dong, ding, dong, ding, dong, like crazy. Knocking and ringing … I open the door and the first thing I heard is”—he imitates Blake’s panicked cries—” ‘You got to help me! You got to help me! She’s bloody and she’s beaten! Oh my God.’”

The man, reenacting the encounter, says incredulously, “‘Robert Blake? Robert?’”

“He’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s me.’

“I said, ‘Please come in, Robert. What’s going on?’”

The man again imitates Blake’s breathless manner: “‘She’s bloody! She’s bloody! My wife is bloody! They beat her up! She’s been beaten!’”

“And I’m like, ‘Where is she? What do you mean?’”

“He goes, ‘She’s in the car.’”

“The first thing I thought of: I looked at his hands to see if it was him who beat her up. You know, a domestic kind of situation. He looked like his eyes were totally dilated. He was in shock. He looked a little inebriated to me, to be quite honest. So he goes: ‘I got to call the police. I got to call 911.’”

The man says he ran to the bedroom and called 911; the dispatcher told him to grab a towel and apply pressure to the wound. He rushed outside to the car, carrying the towel. Blake headed back to the restaurant.

“I found that odd,” the man says. “Like, why isn’t he going with me to help her?”

The man describes how he tried to stanch the bleeding. “All I see is blood coming out her nose. Like a lot. It wasn’t completely runny and didn’t look completely fresh. It was mucusy already.… It looks like a bullet wound, because I’ve seen bullet wounds. I’m a director and they do a lot of research and stuff.… She was totally catatonic. I looked into her eyes. They were all over the place. No focus. No anything.”

When Blake returned, the man says he tried to console him. After the paramedics arrived, Blake began crying.

“What I found odd,” the man says in a confidential tone, “was there were no tears. I’m a director so I’m looking at him as an actor and his emotions and da, da, da. It’s really weird to see someone go”—the man acts out heart-wrenching sobs—“and nothing is coming out. I don’t know if it’s shock that shuts it off. I have no clue.”

As the man hugged Blake to comfort him, an LAPD sergeant approached them and asked who was related to the woman. Blake told him, “That’s my wife. I knew this was going to happen. I knew it. She was afraid. And I’m carrying my piece.” Blake then handed his revolver to the sergeant. When Blake said he was thirsty, the man returned to his house and brought back a glass of water.

Before concluding the interview, Bub says, “Let’s go back to the beginning.”

The man again describes how after he called 911 Blake dashed back to the restaurant.

“And you said you thought that was kind of odd,” Bub says.

“Completely,” the man says. “If it was my girlfriend or my wife, I wouldn’t let her alone for a minute.”

When the man describes the bullet wound to the side of her head, Bub asks, “Can you get any sense of direction?”

“This is what would go in my head, as a director, if I did the scene: she was totally trusting of this person. You know what I’m saying? He comes around. He says something to her. And boom. Because it looks like she just…” He pauses and demonstrates how the body was slumped in the car seat. “Her hands were down.”

Most of the detectives meet for lunch at the Aroma Café, less than two blocks from the crime scene and across the street from Vitello’s, where Blake and Bakley dined. While Vitello’s is a traditional, family-style Italian restaurant, with a plain redbrick façade and a menu of standard pasta dishes, this strip of Tujunga Avenue is lined with a number of trendy businesses, including a power yoga studio, an aromatherapy spa, a wine and cheese store, and several boutiques.

The Aroma Café is a quaint, ivy-covered restaurant-coffee shop-bookstore. About half a dozen detectives, along with Captain Tatreau and Lieutenants Hartwell and Farrell, gather in a cozy room with screenwriting books lining the shelves, a tiled fireplace, and a brass chandelier overhead. Emblazoned over an archway is the message “May the Coming Hour O’erflow with Joy.” The detectives, all wearing pressed white shirts, ties, and dark suits, with their 9-millimeter Berettas and .45-caliber Smith & Wesson semiautomatics hanging from their belts or peeking out of their shoulder holsters, appear decidedly out of place on this warm Saturday afternoon. They draw countless stares from the hip young customers wearing shorts, sandals, and tank tops, and sipping cappuccinos.

Most of the detectives order bacon and eggs or omelets, since this is their first meal of the day. “If this murder was on the south end,” Tatreau jokes, “we’d probably be eating lunch on the trunk of our car.”

The detectives are perfectly aware that this case will attract tremendous media interest and that their actions will be scrutinized by a national audience. Still, they are accustomed to working high-profile cases and jousting with reporters, and they seem matter-of-fact about the murder. As the detectives eat, they trade insults and swap their favorite lines from Baretta:

“ ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,’ ” one offers.

“ ‘You pull the trigger and somebody dies,’ ” another adds.

“ ‘And you can take that to da bank,’ ” a third announces in a mock-serious tone.

The detectives then attempt to recall the name of Detective Tony Baretta’s pet cockatoo. Finally one blurts out, “Fred,” and the others smack their foreheads and nod.

Tatreau tells the detectives that he is a fan of the movie Electra Glide in Blue. Tatreau’s favorite line from the movie is when Blake’s character, a Vietnam veteran motorcycle cop who cruises the Arizona desert, pulls over a driver who complains about how he has been treated since he returned from Vietnam.

“ ‘I’m going to do for you something that it took six months for people to do for me,’ ” Tatreau says, acting out Blake’s part, and pausing for dramatic effect. “‘Nothin’!’”

Tatreau picks up the tab and everyone drives off to Blake’s house, located less than a mile from the crime scene, in a more upscale section of Studio City. The area is an amalgam of architectural styles—Spanish, ranch, colonial, Cape Cod, English Tudor—and the flora are a typical Southern California hodgepodge, with sycamores, live oaks, palm trees, and magnolias shading the street. But even in this eclectic neighborhood, Blake’s house, down the street from where the television series The Brady Bunch was filmed, is an eccentric anomaly. Constructed of rough-hewn redwood planks, with a horseshoe hanging over the door, a lantern and deer antlers nailed to the walls, and two large signs in front—MATA HARI RANCH and BUZZARDS GULCH—the place looks like a rustic lodge, better suited to the Wyoming backcountry than the Southern California suburbs.

The detectives arrive to find Blake stretched out in a lawn chair on the patio, unfiltered cigarette in one hand, matches in the other, wearing maroon sweatpants, a blue T-shirt, white sneakers, and a baseball cap. He looks stunned and his eyes are glassy. He is flanked by Harland Braun, his criminal lawyer, whom he just hired, and a private investigator, and he now refuses to speak with detectives. Tatreau talks to the lawyer about the terms of the search warrant, and then Blake and his entourage drive off.

A few minutes later, Tatreau tells Hartwell and Farrell that he just called Chief Bernard Parks and updated him. “I told him Blake was here and he’s leaving, but there wouldn’t be another white Bronco chase.”

About a dozen Homicide Special detectives and supervisors assemble on the front porch, some dozing in lawn chairs while they wait for Ito to finish preparing his search warrant and obtain a judge’s approval. The area is blocked off to keep the reporters at bay, and the street, which has no sidewalks, is now a peaceful, bucolic setting, with broad lawns edged with rosebushes, Mexican sage, and jasmine. A soft Valley breeze rattles the bloodred climbing roses against a metal fence. Across the street, thick wisteria in full bloom drapes a house in pale purple blossoms.

When Ito returns with the warrant in the late afternoon, the detectives, accompanied by two deputy district attorneys, fan out and search the house. The living room features a wagon-wheel light fixture and is cluttered with dirty clothes, baby toys, a leather saddle in one corner and a stroller in the other. Other rooms suggest a man trapped between adolescence and old age, with shelves and cabinets filled with toy soldiers, vintage Lone Ranger comic books, BB guns, cowboy memorabilia, and Indian relics. Most of the pictures on the walls trace Blake’s career, from his first parts as a child actor to his role as a killer in In Cold Blood. While most of the house is messy, the nursery is immaculate. Peter Rabbit curtains shade the windows; a crib and a new rocker with green upholstery stand on one side of the room and stuffed animals are arranged neatly on top of the dresser.

Behind the house is a sprawling two-story guest cottage. On the ground floor is a carpeted, well-equipped gym, with barbells and workout machines, and a mirrored aerobics room. Bakley briefly lived in the loft, which features a fireplace, a wood-beamed ceiling, a skylight, and a kitchen.

The detectives spend hours, from afternoon to night, carefully examining every closet, drawer, and cabinet on the property. When they finish, they are disappointed: they do not find anything that definitively links Blake with the Walther. They have, however, made a few interesting discoveries. On the wall of a bathroom and on the gym mirror, Blake has scrawled: “I’m not going down.” One detective turned up $12,000 in a bedroom dresser. Another found in a cabinet a hundred-bullet box of 9-millimeter ammunition with three rounds missing. Ito is excited by the discovery: Walther P-38s use 9-millimeter ammunition, Bakley was shot twice, and the Walther found in the Dumpster had a third round in the chamber.

The detectives cart off boxes of Blake’s financial records, briefs documenting his custody dispute with Bakley, other paperwork, several pistols, and the ammunition. When Ito finishes itemizing everything, the detectives decide to meet at Astro’s, an all-night coffee shop north of downtown. Over cheeseburgers and fries, they discuss the case.

“Steve and I are probably going to fly back to Tennessee and Arkansas to interview people close to Bonny,” Ito says.

“Oh, you two will fit in real well there,” Whalen says sarcastically. “Just tell ’em, ‘Sure we look different. We’re Italian.’”

Bub tells Ito about his interview this morning with the neighbor who called 911 for Blake. “The guy contacted me later and said that Larry King personally called him,” Bub says. “King wants to fly him to New York. After that, Good Morning America called the guy.”

“O.J. all over again,” a detective says.

“Not quite O.J.,” Bub says. “Maybe an off-Broadway O.J.”

A detective asks Eguchi about the gun he found in the Dumpster.

“Looks like an antique German gun,” Eguchi says. “No markings.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if the gun was a Beretta?” Ito says.

Although the Walther was unregistered, a detective says, “If there’s some way to connect Blake to it, he’s through.”

“We’ll have to go to the ATF and hope they have a record of it,” Ito says.

At about eleven P.M., the detectives finish eating. Ito sends two detectives off to interview the nurse who accompanied Blake from Vitello’s back to the car. Ito and Eguchi would do the interview themselves, but they plan to arrive at the office early Sunday morning, write the chronology, set up the murder book, and find out whether LAPD technicians can lift any fingerprints off the gun.