After my doctor’s appointment, I called Steve from my cell phone. I was surprised to catch him at his desk, even more surprised at the pout I could hear in his voice. “I don’t have time to play games, Justice,” he groused.
Maybe he was still pissed about what happened—or rather didn’t—last night. Whatever the reason, I decided to overlook his funky attitude and stick to the business at hand. “The doctor sprung me, no pun intended,” I told him. “Limited duty for ten days, then, depending on how I feel, I can come back full speed after that.”
“Good. You’ll be back in the office tomorrow?”
“If you’ll convince Stobaugh to let me work with Cortez on the Lewis case.”
Steve mulled it over for a bit. “I could put in a good word for you with the lieutenant. But what’s in it for me?”
“How about I clear up all our ninety-day reports?” Our captain had been on a new campaign to get our progress reports on open murder investigations filed in a more timely fashion. It was a challenge that I knew was near and dear to my promotion-driven lieutenant’s heart and therefore Steve’s and mine.
“Not good enough,” he said.
“What then?”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You know what I want.”
I felt my chest tighten. No way was I going down that road, I didn’t care how hard Steve tried to force it.
“Why don’t I just take this up with Lieutenant Stobaugh?”
“He won’t like you going over my head.”
“He’ll like it even less if I tell him the quid pro quo you want in exchange for letting me work the Lewis case.”
That shut him up. “You want to hear the rest of my news?” I asked sweetly. More silence. Good. “I talked to an old man in the apartment just west of the scene who I think saw something.” I related my encounter with Jerry Riley into the silence at the other end, stressing my hunch that, beneath his disjointed gibberish, the old man may have seen Mitchell talking to Lewis prior to the murder.
Steve let out a little half laugh in spite of himself. “What’s the New Zulu Nation of God he was talking about, some new gang? Mandingo their mascot?”
I clenched my teeth so hard I could taste my fillings. But I wasn’t rising to the bait. “I told you Riley had some mental problems. But even so, he did describe a man dressed like Dr. Mitchell who appeared to be talking to someone before we arrived on the scene.”
“Did you show him the photo of Lewis?”
“I did, but he freaked and ran off. Maybe Cortez can try him again later today or tomorrow. Just be sure she doesn’t mention doctors. It makes him real agitated.”
“Probably just some nut case burnt out on too much Thunderbird,” Steve concluded with a laugh, “but I’ll have her check him out. But I still don’t approve of you endangering yourself on the streets without adequate backup.” Steve lowered his voice again. “I want you live and well to take care of that unfinished business we’ve got.”
I ignored the urge to get him straightened out right then and there, and told him instead about my conversation with Aubrey Scott and the fact that Dr. Mitchell took off a couple of hours before his shift was over.
I could hear the scratching of Steve’s pen again. “Your doctor friend give you any potential motives for Mitchell doing Lewis?”
“Not really, but I think Dr. Scott was holding something back. He really got lockjaw when I started asking why Dr. Mitchell joined their medical group. Said something about not getting into his personal business.”
“Probably got something to do with the domestic beef. A lot of couples go through that, so I don’t know why it’d be such a big deal.”
“I don’t think that was it,” I said, wondering if Steve was talking about Lance Mitchell or his own situation. “I think Mitchell may have left some dirt behind him when he split from his old medical group.”
“Anything else?”
“Dr. Scott let something drop that made me think Dr. Mitchell is the type who’d intervene if he saw a kid he knew in some kind of trouble.”
“That’s a good way to get shot.”
“Or end up shooting someone yourself.”
Steve’s silence told me he was thinking. “What’s your spin on it?”
“Dr. Scott said Mitchell has treated a lot of these kids in the ER over the last two years, so maybe he did see something go down on the street with a kid he knew. He’s also connected to TAGOUT’s antigraffiti program, which is chock full of reformed thuglettes. He’s involved in a reception tonight for some kids in the program, so I’m gonna go and check it out, if that’s okay with you.”
“What time’s the reception?” he asked.
“Six. It won’t take more than a couple of hours, Steve.”
He finally relented. “But just don’t go charging off and get your ass caught in a wringer,” he warned. “Stobaugh’s made it crystal clear he wants me as primary on this one. He said he wants you to be strictly a backup resource.”
So Stobaugh had already given Steve the go-ahead for me to work the case—even if it was just as a resource—and here he was trying to get me to sleep with him in exchange for him “putting in a good word.” I could think of a few good words I’d like to put right where the sun doesn’t shine.
“Just think of my going out tonight as a date, Steve,” I said sarcastically. “A girl can go out on a date if she wants to, can’t she?”
Before Steve could come up with some wiseass reply, I gave him a taste of the dial tone.
See how you feel. That’s what Dr. Mostafavi had said as I left his office earlier that afternoon. “What you’ve been through in the last few days is like being in a war,” the orthopedic surgeon had told me. “Your three days on the street put you through more physical and emotional trauma than most people will ever experience. You’re only human, Detective Justice, not some kind of crime-fighting robot. Use the shoulder injury as an excuse to catch up on your paperwork, and then see how you feel about jumping back in with both feet.”
Like elevator music, Dr. Mostafavi’s words stuck with me as I turned on the stereo in the living room and sat down at the breakfast table to finish reading the Los Angeles Times’s account of the Apocalypse Chronicles.
A radio station reported on a young black entrepreneur who had organized a bus tour for downtown bankers to see the damage in South Central firsthand. While it sounded like postmodern bwanas on a ghetto safari to me, his and other efforts were being heralded as if they were the Second Coming, complete with inspirational oratorio: L.A.—The Cleanup Continues.
The Times took up the hallelujah chorus and had moved from reporting on the devastation to the city’s efforts to dig out from under. While charts and maps in the paper showing the affected areas made it clear South Central Los Angeles had suffered most dramatically, the paper seemed bound and determined to find multicultural “good news” stories all over town of people helping each other, come what may.
The whole thing was bizarre, like one of those movie musicals of the forties, designed to cheer up the folks at home while distracting them from the war raging on a not-so-distant shore. But in a corner of page 1 was an article by that redheaded reporter from Friday afternoon. It initially caught my eye for the wrong reason—I thought it was about Cinque Lewis—yet I realized as I read that it was actually much closer to the not-so-upbeat heart of the matter.
Another One Bites the Dust: Gang Founder’s Death Marks End of an Era
While most of the world was transfixed before its televisions on the afternoon and evening of April 29, LAPD officers in the Crenshaw District were making a grim discovery that may raise as many fears about the direction of gang activity in Southern California as the beating of Reginald Denny.
When the decomposing bodies of 33-year-old Royals founder Demetrius Octavius Givens and another man were discovered in a graffiti-strewn, vacant Crenshaw Boulevard storefront on Wednesday—several hours before the first blow was struck on Florence and Normandie—LAPD officials recognized that the end of an era had arrived. An era that Big Dog, as he was known among hardened gang members, had dominated with an incongruous mixture of Afrocentric self-determination and brutality that has made the Royals one of the most feared gangs in the nation.
Givens, who had been missing since April 22, was an O.G.—a term commonly used to denote a gang’s original gangster or veteran—of the deadly Lucky Ones faction of the Royals, which he founded in the late 1970s. The Lucky Ones run roughshod over an area popularly known as the Jungle, which in the 1960s was a middle-class apartment development designed to serve the then-growing population of airline pilots and flight attendants but is now home to some of the most notorious drug dealers in the city.
Givens embodied a vision of gang life that was, in the beginning, as much about community pride—”standing up for the ’hood”—as it was about the rock cocaine the Royals would come to distribute, or the drive-by shootings and violence that have often followed in the wake of their drug-dealing activities.
“Big Dog was always stressing to the little homies that you got to be about more than hangin’, [gang-] bangin’, and slangin’ [selling rock cocaine],” lamented Franco Donovan, aka Little Dog. Little Dog knows firsthand the importance of Big Dog’s message. Once one of most feared lieutenants in the Lucky Ones, Donovan is a casualty of one particularly vicious gang vendetta last March that left his mother, two sisters, and three of his children dead and him confined to a wheelchair. . . .
I got up from the table to get my notebook from my purse and started making a few notes.
For all of the death and destruction he left in his wake, Big Dog had earned a grudging respect from other cliques, or “sets,” of Royals and not a few of his former enemies. Edward Carmichael, a former key lieutenant in the Lucky Ones, said, “Anyone who takes up the gang life knows you live by the Uzi, you die by the Uzi. Big Dog played a rough game. He had to know that it was only a matter of time [before he’d be killed]. But,” he conceded, “it’s sad to see a brother with so much potential go down that way.”
Members of Deathstalker sets were more sanguine about their rival’s demise. “It’s just another motherf——bites the dust, far as I’m concerned,” laughed an unidentified red-and-black–shirted young man, his words a profane paraphrasing of a once-popular rock song.
LAPD officials refused to comment on the case, stating only that Big Dog’s death had all the markings of a turf dispute or a drug deal gone wrong. The graffiti-covered storefront where Big Dog and another lieutenant, June Bug Morrow, 26, were found—bound at the wrists with steel wire, bullets through their heads—was located in Deathstalker territory. Former gang member Carmichael, who “retired” from the Lucky Ones to establish Peace in the Streets, a nonprofit gang intervention program in 1988, tried to play down the implications of their deaths, saying his organization has “been working hard to hook up a gang truce that would have made something like this unnecessary.”
Public announcement of funeral arrangements for Demetrius “Big Dog” Givens are being withheld, LAPD officials said Monday, to prevent further bloodshed or reprisals.
Big Dog’s days had been numbered just like Cinque’s, ever since I encountered him as a smart-mouthed drug runner while I was working patrol in Southwest Division. Even though the Royals had flourished in the rock cocaine business where Cinque’s Black Freedom Militia had floundered—thanks to a better distribution network of gang members/dealers and more capital to get started—it didn’t enhance Big Dog’s life or increase his life span.
Another one bites the dust indeed.
My eye fell on the bulging blue binder I had lugged home from the office yesterday, resting on the edge of the breakfast table. I started to open it to double-check on Cinque’s known enemies when I was reminded of Dr. Mostafavi’s parting words.
See how you feel.
I sat for a long time and considered what lay between those blue covers. Other than pulling out the extra photos of Lewis I kept in the front, I hadn’t actually read the murder book in years. Yet I knew I could recall almost every detail by heart. But, memorization aside, I had never let it touch me inside.
See how you feel.
As I opened the binder, the black Xeroxed letters of the copy came off on the inside of the blue plastic cover. Some of the detail on the picture did, too, leaving a reversed ghost image on the plastic that stared up at me from the left, its faded original echoing the same vacant, deadly gaze on the right.
It was a picture of a nineteen-year-old Cinque Lewis, his face adorning a be-on-the-lookout notice—BOLO, we called it—issued by the Department. Although Lewis was an American black, he had deliberately scarred his face like some of the Africans I had met in college, I guess in a misguided attempt to identify with the Motherland. The faded Xerox image made the scars appear hazy and indistinct, much as they were on Lewis’s face Friday night.
I flipped to the Unsolved Murder Investigation Progress report and read the BOLO.
Name: |
Robert Anthony Lewis |
|
AKA: |
Cinque |
|
Last known address: |
Trudy Mitchell Lewis Forrest (Mother) 4329 3/4 S. Kenwood Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90037 |
|
Wanted for: |
Questioning in the double homicide of Keith Eric Roberts, 34 (78-592), and Erica Justice Roberts, six months (78-593) |
Similar state and FBI wanted notices were included with the press releases toward the back of the book. Those pages were yellowed, too; the last official notice on the Lewis case was over twelve years ago.
Other addenda in the binder included background information on the Black Freedom Militia and a few declassified reports I had managed to get from the Department’s old Public Disorder Intelligence Division. PDID was created by the Department in the seventies to monitor terrorist organizations that were considered a threat to the public safety. The Black Freedom Militia, like the Black Panthers or the former Ron Karenga’s US organization, would have qualified for—and gotten—PDID scrutiny.
I hadn’t known it at the time, but the PDID’s surveillance of Cinque Lewis’s group had begun some months before Keith and Erica were killed. A police informant had apparently infiltrated the Militia in November of 1977. There were reports of his meetings at their headquarters on Crenshaw Boulevard and conversations with a number of members. The notes indicated the informant’s street name was Q-Dog.
Hel-lo! Why had it never occurred to me that Big Dog and Q-Dog could have been the same person? If so, maybe Demetrius Givens was the one who set up Cinque for a fall all those years ago. From the age given in the article, I figured Demetrius Givens would have been about nineteen in ’77, just the right age to have been susceptible to that kind of “power to the people, off the pig” rhetoric. And if he really had other things on his mind—like dealing drugs—he could have watched and learned from Cinque’s mistakes, stepped in after he disappeared, and taken over his contacts.
The reports on the Militia’s activities dried up after Cinque disappeared, and became more focused on other gangs as targets of opportunity. The Department and the city paid dearly for that error in judgment. By the time I got to the Southwest’s gang table in ’83, Big Dog Givens and the Royals were so firmly entrenched in the drug scene, they had surpassed all the other gangs in their involvement in drug trafficking and violence against their enemies.
Maybe PDID convinced the homicide detectives working Keith and Erica’s murders they were chasing their tails because they knew Cinque had been dispatched by Givens. What if Givens had assigned some underling to do the deed for him only to be sadly—and fatally—surprised in that building on Crenshaw when he and June Bug found themselves staring down the barrel of an old rival’s gun?
Dr. Mostafavi had said I should see how I feel, but as I pulled out some extra photos of Lewis from the binder, all I felt was relief. Relief that Lewis and Demetrius “Big Dog” Givens had finally gone to their Maker. Relief they couldn’t kill somebody else’s child, or husband, or brother.
But as I got my things together to go out again, there was something else I was feeling. A hollowness inside me, a void that was usually filled with a cold, dry rage. A sudden thought flared up my mind: With Cinque Lewis dead, who was there left for me to hate? If the hate I felt for him was gone, would some other feeling slip into my dreams to take its place?