I didn’t hear from Steve at all on Sunday, which I chalked up to the caseload—he was probably working overtime just to keep up. Still, considering I got injured in the field and almost passed out at a crime scene, you’d think he would have called. Did refusing to sleep with him mean I was now entitled to less than common courtesy?
The more I thought about it, the more irritated I became. Rather than stew about it, I channeled my anger into writing out an informal chronology of the events of Friday afternoon in anticipation of the paperwork blizzard I knew awaited me at the office. It was amazing how much of Friday and the days preceding it had hardened like cement in my mind.
But it was the parts I didn’t record that tore at my dreams that night. After battling the covers until the rising sun called a halt to the fight, I got up on Monday, agitated and bone-tired at the same time, and decided to head in to work early. As I made my bleary-eyed way downtown, I saw little ones being escorted to grade school by federal troops and wondered for a moment if I was in Little Rock instead of Los Angeles. An exhausted-looking young Guardsman popped a packet of coffee granules into his mouth, then washed them down with a double-caffeinated cola. Despite my aversion to his brand of poison, I understood the need.
Parker Center was still heavily guarded, but with the cleanup under way and the rioting down to a few isolated incidents, life was approaching something akin to normal. My lieutenant usually came in early, so I figured I’d catch him before the day got too busy. I could see him in his corner at the far end of the bull pen that housed the twelve detectives in our Homicide I unit, a DARE mug full of coffee and a slew of reports stacked up neatly on his desk.
During my tenure in the LAPD, I’d watched Lieutenant Kenneth Stobaugh, Jr., rise through the ranks like a hot-air balloon. In his early fifties, he was tall, lean, taciturn—sort of a latter-day reincarnation of Gary Cooper. Like me, Stobaugh had a master’s degree in criminology. But while I was ABD (all but the dissertation, as my father called it)—permanently sidetracked from finishing my doctorate in criminology by Keith and Erica’s deaths—Stobaugh had completed his doctorate in public administration. He was one of the new breed of professional police administrators springing up in the Department—well educated, focused, committed. And very ambitious.
With his father, an uncle, and two older brothers in the LAPD and a black-sheep sister with the Sheriff’s Department, policing was a calling in the Stobaugh family. His father, Ken Senior, was a former star homicide detective in the Department with a reputation of closing almost 90 percent of his cases thirty years ago. RHD legend had it that Junior’s first words out of the womb were, “Drop the scalpel, Doc, and put your hands up!”
But things had slipped a lot since Ken Senior’s glory days. Murders were increasingly committed on the street, not in the home, and therefore much harder, if not impossible, to solve. But since 1990, when Lieutenant Stobaugh took command of RHD’s Homicide I, our unit’s clearance rate had improved, even as those handled by the divisions and bureaus declined, garnering Captain Armstrong’s attention and signaling Lieutenant Stobaugh’s status as a man on the move. Even his sparsely decorated desk looked as if it could be packed up and relocated to greener pastures at a moment’s notice. And it just might be; I’d heard rumors Stobaugh was being discussed as successor to Captain Armstrong, if and when Armstrong retired.
I dropped into a brown vinyl-covered side chair and waited until my lieutenant came up for air. When it looked like it might take awhile, I slid some Oreo cookies under his tanned nose as an inducement.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Justice. I thought you were someone else. How’s the shoulder?” Stobaugh didn’t wait for my answer, gesturing instead with the cookie toward the papers on his desk. “I’ve been poring over some of the death reports we’ve been getting over the last five days. Did you know these riots have resulted in over fifty deaths? Most of them are probably going to be chalked up to ‘casualties of the rebellion,’ but there are a good number here that I think we can close.”
Stobaugh’s eyes sparked and his mouth inched up a little at the corners. He looked like he would have welcomed the challenge of going out there and solving every one of those homicides himself if he could. His face assumed an expression of concern as he refocused on me. “I read Firestone’s preliminary report on the Lewis homicide. Pretty damn rough on you, I’d say.”
This was as close to empathy as I was going to get from my iron-jawed lieutenant. Still, he was a marked improvement over a supervisor I once had in West Bureau named Lieutenant Curtis Skirk, known there as “Skirk the Jerk” for persistently and rhythmically rubbing female detectives’ knees while we related particularly difficult vice cases.
“Lieutenant Dreyfuss over at South Bureau is about to shit a brick over what went down on Friday,” Lieutenant Stobaugh continued. “He’s left three sputtering messages for me since Friday night. I thought I would get your report before giving Tony a call back.”
“I haven’t written it up yet . . .”
“In your own words then. Firestone’s report said you have a personal connection on this one.”
My heart sank as I tried to calm myself enough to devise a coherent response to the inference behind Stobaugh’s words. Although I tried not to draw attention to it and label myself as an obsessive, everyone in the Department knew about my special interest in finding Keith and Erica’s killer. For years I had followed the case, dogging Uncle Henry for information and begging him for copies of the investigating detective’s reports. The Department’s conflict-of-interest policy prevented me from getting any closer to the case, much less being assigned to it, so the scraps of information I could pull together were like strands of a loved one’s hair, carefully preserved in my own reconstructed murder book, a royal blue, three-ring binder I kept at home that mimicked the LAPD’s official homicide paper trail. When I got to RHD myself in ’90, my bootleg murder book was finally liberated from Keith’s office and moved downtown with me. It took up most of the bottom drawer of my desk, where I camouflaged it beneath a pair of old tennis shoes, a box of Tampax, and an extra pair of panty hose.
My interest in the unsolved murders had taken on the trappings of a holy quest, and, even though they pretended not to, everyone in RHD knew it. So Stobaugh’s comment, filled with innuendos and assumptions, raised my hackles but made me grateful I had made notes the night before. I would not be caught flat-footed. But as I related my account of the events of Friday night, I could sense Stobaugh wanted something more.
“That’s all in Firestone’s report,” he said impatiently. “And while I’ve got him and the new girl, Cortez, assigned to the case, I doubt if anyone misses that shithead Lewis, excuse my French. But we’ve got ourselves a bigger problem, Justice.”
“What’s that, sir?”
Stobaugh’s green eyes reached out to me across the small space separating us and brought me up short. “Your reasoning for removing the physician from the scene.”
“I’m not following you, Lieutenant.”
“From the report filed by Officer Cooper, the suspect was behaving suspiciously when he was spotted. Under the circumstances, he should have been arrested and detained on the spot.”
“The full degree of the circumstances wasn’t known until after the situation was over,” I replied. “If by circumstances you mean the discovery of Cinque Lewis’s body.”
“Not just that, Justice. The report Cooper filed indicates the suspect attempted to attack him.”
I chose my words carefully. “I’m sure Cooper would say that, sir, but some might disagree with his characterization of the situation.”
A twitching eyebrow told me I had my lieutenant’s attention.
“When Rivers and Cooper approached Dr. Mitchell, Cooper was already highly agitated himself.”
“What are you trying to say, Detective?”
“Not trying, am saying, sir. Mike Cooper used racial epithets on the doctor, provoked him through the use of his baton, and in essence fostered a volatile climate that resulted in Amundsen’s use of excessive force and us almost having another Rodney King situation out there. We moved Mitchell from the immediate scene to defuse the situation and prevent another riot.”
Stobaugh was visibly displeased with what he was hearing. If I forced the issue and made him take my 181—LAPD-ese for a Personnel Complaint—it would get back to Cooper, Dreyfuss, and Internal Affairs, too. After the worldwide transmission of members of the Department doing the Fred Astaire on Rodney King’s head, I don’t think anyone at South Bureau wanted Internal Affairs checking into Cooper’s hotheaded remarks or actions. Nor would my ambitious lieutenant-on-the-move want to be the one who forced the misconduct into the light of day.
“Well, emotions have been running unusually high out there,” he reasoned. “Isn’t it possible that Cooper or this boot were merely overreacting to an extreme circumstance? Or that you’re overreacting?”
Stobaugh’s voice had taken on a patronizing boys-will-be-boys tone I didn’t appreciate one bit. So much so, I decided to let the other shoe drop. “Dr. Mitchell clearly identified himself out there. Cooper wasn’t listening because he was already around the bend. In fact, just prior to us pulling up to the scene, he’d been making offensive racial remarks on the bus about black and Latino suspects.”
“Such as?”
“Such as calling them ‘animals’ for one . . .”
My lieutenant waved a hand vaguely. “Calling people animals is hardly a racial slur, Detective.”
“How about calling the rioters ‘mud-brown niggers and spics’ or threatening to put a cap in the ass of the next ‘little jungle bunny’ to look at him cross-eyed? Cooper had that bus so whipped up, I’m surprised they didn’t kill that doctor.”
Stobaugh regarded me for a long moment, before getting out a notepad. “Did he say anything else?” he asked, pen poised but his green stare a million miles away.
“Other than calling Cortez and me ‘split tails,’ there wasn’t much more to say,” I replied sarcastically. “But when Cortez and I didn’t respond to his little jokes at our expense, Cooper came up to the front of the bus where we were sitting and started getting up in my face, talking quite graphically about how some looter would like to get a piece of my ‘sweet-cream ass’ before tearing me apart.” Thinking about being on that bus with that fool made my jaw tighten all over again.
Stobaugh dropped his pen, closed his eyes, muttered, “Jesus H. Christ! He actually said that?” and started rubbing his temples. “Was there anything else?”
“Not unless you want to talk about the Jack Daniels I could smell on his breath.”
Stobaugh swore sharply and jerked around in his chair as if he’d been stung by a bee. “Are you absolutely sure about this, Justice?”
“Ask Cortez. She was right there and can verify everything that I just said—except maybe the part about his breath. Lucky for her she wasn’t as close to him as I was.”
Stobaugh started rummaging through the stacked reports on his desk. He unearthed one, removed a blue Post-It note and began to read, then looked up at me. “We’ll get to Cooper. But in the meantime can we get back to your actions at the scene? From what I can understand from Tony’s note on Cooper’s report, he seems to feel you didn’t consider other options for handling the suspect.”
It was an effort to keep from grinding my teeth. “That’s a bunch of crap! Burt Rivers told me he was glad we got Mitchell out of there, and he was senior man out there.”
“Well, Dreyfuss says here you could have secured Dr. Mitchell in the bus . . .”
“Inasmuch as the bus was almost tipped over by the mob, I don’t think that would have been too wise.”
“Well, what about securing him away from the immediate area until backup arrived?”
“That’s exactly what we attempted to do, but when Mitchell realized I was injured, he convinced Cortez to take me to the hospital instead of taking him to jail.”
He flipped through the report before him. “Cortez’s 51 report says you asked to be taken to the hospital.”
“No way!”
He slid it across the desk. “Read it for yourself.”
I settled back to read Cortez’s Investigating Officer’s Chronological Record but soon sat up with my mouth hanging open. Although she was sitting not more than ten feet from me on that bus and saw the same thing go down among Cooper, the boot, and Mitchell that I did, Gena Cortez’s chron record of that afternoon was as pristine as the streets of Beverly Hills. And as much of an illusion. There was no mention of Cooper’s behavior on the bus, she left out his provocation of Dr. Mitchell and the first blow struck by the boot. And for some reason, she had noted my insistence on being taken to the hospital despite her reluctance to remove Mitchell from the scene.
With the spin she put on the events of Friday afternoon, maybe Gena Cortez would have been better placed in Press Relations than RHD. “I see Detective Cortez left a few things out of her report.” I slid it back to Stobaugh, already planning what I was going to say to the latest addition to the Homicide I unit. “Look, Lieutenant, I’m not going to call another member of this Department a liar, but I was so out of it I was in no position to make that call. Mitchell convinced Cortez to take me to the hospital. What do you think I did—hold a gun to her head?”
“But you were senior in the situation, Justice. You’re expected to provide the leadership, help Cortez make the right call.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but you seem to have forgotten the officer down out there was me!”
Stobaugh held up his hand in a plea for peace. “I can see we’re not going to resolve this right now. Tony Dreyfuss’s message asked me to speak with you about the incident, which I have, and while there are some issues that are still a little cloudy, I think we can keep Internal Affairs out of this.”
An alarm went off in my brain. “I can handle this myself, Lieutenant. I have no intention of filing a report.”
The silence at that moment reminded me of another of my father’s sayings: so quiet you could hear a rat piss on cotton. Looking at Stobaugh in the sudden stillness, I could hear the rats relieving themselves all over my shoe. And feel the color rising in my cheeks. “You mean Dreyfuss and Cooper want to file a 181 on me, don’t you?”
Stobaugh’s averted eyes spoke volumes.
“Lieutenant, you know I’m up for promotion! Something like that in my jacket could ruin my chances.”
“I’m completely sympathetic to that, Justice. I’ll speak with Tony again; I’m sure once he hears the other side, we can make this whole mess disappear and get back to work.”
The implications of what Stobaugh was saying weren’t lost on me. I’d accused the boot of exerting an excessive use of force while Cooper had sexually harassed me and engaged in misconduct, which by departmental policy required an Internal Affairs investigation and possible reprimand. But to put such an investigation in motion might result in an equally strenuous investigation of my actions at the scene, possible reprimands for me, and the loss of working relationships I had nurtured for almost a decade. And hurt my chances for promotion, not to mention my lieutenant’s. I didn’t want Internal Affairs in my business any more than Stobaugh did.
I watched Stobaugh watch me. I could see why my lieutenant would go far. He appeared to be doing me a favor by smoothing things over with Dreyfuss, but the bigger favor was the one I’d be doing for him by making it unnecessary for him to drop a dime to Internal Affairs on Cooper and Amundsen. And Burt Rivers, too—I had almost forgotten the boot was under my old training officer’s direct command.
Stobaugh gathered up some reports and placed them on the battered file cabinet behind him. “How’s the arm? Have you seen a doctor yet?”
“Not yet, sir.” My response came out a little too sharply, but I was still angry at the box I felt he was forcing me into. “I feel fine.”
“That may be, but you know you need a medical clearance before you can come back to work full time.”
“It shouldn’t matter; I can shoot left-handed. And even with the injury, can’t I pull desk duty? How active do I need to be to push some paper around and interview some witnesses? I could be a real help on the Lewis case. I know the file . . .”
When Stobaugh wrinkled his nose like he just smelled a mess of chitterlings, I realized I was trying too hard. “Call the medical liaison’s office, and tell them I said to get you a referral to an agreed medical examiner ASAP. If he clears you, then we can talk about it. My biggest concern is that we don’t compromise an investigation by having your conflict of interest get in the way. You get the clearance and then we’ll talk.”
“Understood.” I rose from the chair, sensing the dampness left behind in the vinyl chair by my anger and fear.
Breathing fire, I stalked over to the part of the Homicide I bull pen that I called home. It was composed of mismatched sets of wooden and metal desks that faced each other in clusters, echoing the long wooden “tables” of Department history. A few detectives from our section were already there and in motion on the worn blue carpet, typing up reports, making phone calls, taking bets on who would make it to the NBA finals.
I called the medical liaison’s office to get the name of an agreed medical examiner to do my return-to-work evaluation. They gave me Dr. Mostafavi, an orthopedic surgeon I’d seen for a previous shoulder injury. I shoved his number in my jacket pocket to call later that day.
While I was leaving a message on Steve’s desk, I saw Gena Cortez walking in with a civilian employee. I could barely discern the soft lilt of their voices as Cortez said something in Spanish. Resisting the urge to charge her right then and there, I waited until she got to her desk facing mine.
“Can I speak to you for a minute, partner?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“Charlotte, I’m surprised you made it in.” Cortez seemed genuinely glad to see me. “Could it have been any worse out there?”
I walked around my desk and stood next to hers. “Gena, I’ve been talking to Stobaugh. From what he tells me of the chron record you filed, you forgot to mention a few things about last Friday.”
Cortez got busy aligning the papers on her desk and reading the messages on her desk. “I really don’t have time to talk about this right now, Charlotte. I’ve got to try and scare up some wits on these 187s that we pulled on Friday. And with you out . . .”
I sat down in a vacant chair next to her desk and leaned toward her so only she could hear. “You need to hone some of your observation skills before talking to any witnesses, Gena. Why did you put in your report that it was me who wanted to be taken to the hospital?”
“Did I?” she said.
Yeah, heifer, you did, I didn’t say.
An expression flitted across Cortez’s face too fast for me to read. “That must have been an oversight on my part. I’ll get it back from Stobaugh today and make a correction.”
That was a little too easy. “And while you’re at it, you better take a look at some other parts of your report. You were a little sketchy about what really happened out there.”
“Really? What’d I miss?” Suddenly she got all wide-eyed and innocent.
“The part about Cooper provoking that whole situation with Mitchell, for starters.” I tried, and failed, to keep the bite out of my voice. “You know damn well he was out of line, Gena!”
She stilled her hands on the desk and considered them for a moment. “Look,” she said calmly and faced me squarely, “after I interviewed Mitchell, I got a call from Tony Dreyfuss. He said that Cooper was a little stressed out but that he had talked to Cooper and straightened it out. Dreyfuss asked me to let them handle Cooper as an internal disciplinary problem and not to mention it or what happened with the boot in my report.”
“Did you stop and think that maybe Cooper’s on the Christopher List of Forty.” The Christopher Commission report, released a few months ago in the aftermath of the Rodney King debacle, had identified a number of “bad apples” in the department, cops with a history of violence that should be monitored. Some were justifiably on the list, some not. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mike Cooper’s name was on it, and, from what I’d observed, for all the right reasons.
Cortez frowned, and her eyes glazed slightly. “I hadn’t even considered that.”
“Well, if he is, then I’m doubly pissed because he’s hoodwinked Dreyfuss over at South Bureau into covering for him big time—squealing like a stuck pig about a lack of judgment on my part in how I handled Mitchell at the scene. Without Dreyfuss knowing the whole story of what went on out there, it makes you and me look like some kind of estrogen-crazed females. That’s about the last thing we need!”
Cortez’s shoulders twitched up and down and her words came out strained. “Okay, Charlotte, maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think what happened was worth making into an intradepartmental beef. I worked with these guys at South Bureau. I don’t want them thinking now that I’m downtown, I’d rat them out.”
“Don’t you think I feel the same way? I worked over there for five years, but wrong is wrong. And your first loyalty should be to the truth, not to your old bowling buddies. You know what’s been going on out there in the streets, Gena. What if some wits come forward with a videotape? Your report is gonna look like a whitewash!”
“And what am I supposed to do?” Cortez’s tight whisper had risen in pitch to a near-wail. “Rat out a man with more years in the Department than I’ve got fingers and toes? What would that get me? Ostracized, that’s what. At least this way I’ve made a reasonably truthful report and got a couple of guys in the field who owe me big time.”
“And you think having them in your debt is worth you jeopardizing your career? Don’t forget, Gena, we’re the only women who work Homicide up here who don’t have ‘coffee making’ as part of our job description! Don’t think that some of the boys in South Bureau have forgotten we made it ahead of them, and you shouldn’t either. This is Parker Center, their precious Glass Palace, and there are gonna be those who try and throw a rock at you and hide their hand. The sooner you figure that out, the better off you’re gonna be!”
Cortez shifted in her chair and studied her hands some more. “I’m really sorry, Charlotte. I was so pissed after Mitchell’s lawyer got through with us and then the call from Dreyfuss . . . I’ll get the report back from Stobaugh and correct it. Honest.”
Was I seeing things or did a big cartoon balloon suddenly mushroom over Gena Cortez’s head, saying, “She’s lying?” I didn’t know for sure, but I did know I was going to have to keep an eye on my new partner. “What happened when you questioned Mitchell?” I asked.
“Just about what you’d expect; he denied everything.”
“Couldn’t you convince the D.A. to make a case of probable cause out of the wallet?”
“Mitchell swore he left it in his car. Remember, he mentioned it at the scene and the hospital.”
“Yeah, but he could have been setting us up.”
She agreed but told me that right after we left the scene, one of the rioters took a baseball bat to the Q45’s windshield and several suspects made off with everything in the car that wasn’t attached. “Anybody could have stolen Mitchell’s wallet and dropped it behind the stand, even Lewis himself, for all we know. That’s his lawyer’s contention, and she made a convincing enough case that the deputy D.A. who was supposed to file the case advised us to back off.”
“Did anyone consider that maybe Lewis tried to steal the wallet from Mitchell and Mitchell shot him before we arrived?”
“Sure, but we can’t find a weapon, and I didn’t see any powder burns on Mitchell’s hands when we had him in the car. Did you?”
“No,” I had to admit, “but there are such things as rubber gloves. And if we had arrested him on the 243, we would have had his clothes to do a gunshot residue test.”
“But Dreyfuss advised me when I called in not to pursue it!”
“As they say, hindsight is a mother.”
We sat for a moment while I let my anger subside. When I could do it calmly, I asked her if anyone had surfaced who could place Mitchell at the scene.
She shook her head in disgust. “Which really bothers me. Even in all of the madness, you would think someone would have seen something.” More relaxed now, Cortez reached for a couple of cookies from the pack I put on her desk and chewed one thoughtfully. “Which is why Stobaugh thinks this is gonna end up being a low-probability case for us. He wants us on some of our more productive cases, which, given as much as I’ve got to do, would be fine with me.”
Good old Stobaugh. Always playing those percentages. “Did Firestone or the uniforms out there find the weapon?”
“Not that I know of.” Cortez checked her watch. “Look, Charlotte, I gotta make some phone calls.”
“I won’t keep you then. Just one more thing.” I paused on my way to my desk. “What if that had been a Latino physician out there Friday night, Gena? Would you have glossed over Cooper’s behavior as easily in your report?”
Cortez paused with the last cookie halfway to her mouth. I took it out of her hand and held it up for her to see. “In my community, when people forget who they are, we call them Oreos.” I crushed it slowly in my fist, letting bits of brown cookie dust fall on her desk. “Don’t let them make one out of you.”
I went back to my desk, unearthed my Cinque Lewis binder, and tucked it under my arm. As I left the Homicide I bull pen, I could see Gena Cortez out of the corner of my eye, still red-faced at her desk, brushing the cookie crumbs away.