South Bureau’s headquarters always put me in the mind of a speakeasy. If you approached it from the small substation inside Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, you would think it was merely one of those community policing centers where patrol cops fill out forms or wolf down a hurried lunch from Mickey D’s or the 7-Eleven. But behind the door in a corner of the mall was one of the LAPD’s larger operations, complete with over a hundred employees and its own homicide, CRASH, and traffic tables.
I hadn’t been in the Bureau’s offices in a few months, and then it had been to attend an organized-crime/gang task-force meeting that had drawn detectives from jurisdictions all over the county. At the time, Mike Cooper’s presentation on L.A.’s major gang factions and too numerous wars had appeared reasoned and knowledgeable. Knowledgeable enough to get him placed on an intra-agency Gang War Task Force. But high-profile assignment notwithstanding, maybe the everyday conflict between being a hard-charging, paramilitary-trained police officer and working with a unit euphemistically called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums had gotten next to Cooper, transformed him into the bitter, cynical little man I had seen on the bus last week.
I was hoping Stobaugh had spoken to Dreyfuss, and he in turn to Cooper, about last Friday. I needed some information, and I didn’t want Cooper’s attitude standing in the way of me getting what I needed.
Dreyfuss was out, but I found Cooper over in the South Bureau Homicide bull pen, two butterfly bandages on his pale right cheek. I could see behind him a wall display of ties on a nearly seven-foot wooden tie rack. Whenever South Bureau homicide detectives got promoted, they had to sacrifice a tie with their name and date of promotion on it. I had dug one of those long-forgotten, God-awful Brooks Brothers woman’s ties from the bottom of my scarf drawer to add to the rack when I got promoted. I couldn’t even see it on the crowded tie rack now.
Cooper was bragging to some of the homicide detectives about an alleyway encounter with a crack-addicted prostitute. “Strawberry offered to blow me right there if I wouldn’t run her in.”
“What did you do?” one of the detectives asked.
Cooper stepped back, legs spread, hips thrust forward. “Made her face the nation,” he proclaimed, slapping hands with a few male members of his audience, “and it don’t increase the population!”
A couple of the Bureau’s male and the few female homicide detectives had made themselves scarce in anticipation of Cooper’s punch line, nodding hello to me on their way out the door. I imagined my sister detectives in the Bureau’s in-house gym, taking turns at the punching bag and visualizing Cooper’s face making contact with their gloves.
“Hey, Mike,” I called out, “can we talk for a minute?”
Cooper strutted over with a smile and stage-whispered in my ear, “Am I going to need witnesses? I wouldn’t want to be accused of sexually harassin’ one of the Department’s finest.”
Cooper’s slicked-back, mousy brown hair reminded me of the old Brylcreem commercials. A little dab’ll do ya! “No need for all that, Mike. Just you and me.”
Cooper’s eyes widened as he played to his audience. “You heard her, fellas. Just me and Detective Justice.” As he directed me across the hall to his office, he whispered in my ear, “I may even enjoy this.”
Cooper had gotten much worse since I’d had any significant contact with him. I sat down in a burgundy chair by his desk and steeled myself not to gag on the words I was about to say. “Look, Mike, I came over to talk because I want to put Friday behind us. A lot of things were said and done in the heat of the moment that shouldn’t have gotten as far as they did.”
He nodded his head vigorously. “You got that right.”
“There’s nothing personal here, Mike,” I rushed on, wanting to get this over with as soon as possible. “We’ve always worked well together, and I want to keep it that way.”
“Long as you understand it wasn’t some antiblack thing out there, Justice. That motherfucker was out of line, and I wasn’t havin’ it. It woulda been the same no matter what color he was.”
I shrugged, wondering if Mitchell’s dark green hospital scrubs would have said “doctor” instead of “Mandingo-assed motherfucker” to Cooper if his skin had been white, or if Cooper would have automatically assumed a white man would have been trying to steal that car.
“You’ve always been able to take the heat,” Cooper was saying, “but if you’ve gotten soft like the rest of them RHD divas and don’t have the cojones to kick a little ass when necessary or stand up under a little good-natured kiddin’, then you ain’t gonna make it in this man’s police force.”
Cooper leaned back in his chair, as satisfied with his little speech as a pig in shit. He lit up a pipe, forbidden inside the building, reared back in his chair, and blew smoke in my direction. He was clearly enjoying every minute of watching one of RHD’s elite eat crow. For me, smoking the peace pipe with Big Chief Mouse Dick was just a means to an end.
Determined not to play into his little power game, I casually looked down at his desk. Under a piece of glass that acted as a wipeable blotter were pictures of Cooper posing with his marksman awards, an inspirational poem about the Green Berets, and a variety of pictures of a tawny-skinned blonde woman in a nurse’s uniform and two brown-haired girls that I assumed were his family.
“Yep, those are my angels.” His face softened a bit. “Oldest girl is nineteen now. Wants to be a marine biologist. The baby is twelve. Wants to be a cop like her dad.”
I was hoping not just like her dad.
After a little more small talk about his wife and kids, his precious Harley, and the crapper the city was in, I steered the conversation around to the Cinque Lewis homicide. “Finding that lowlife sonofabitch behind that stand surprised me and Burt as much as it did you,” he admitted.
“Anybody on the Gang War Task Force come up with a theory on where Cinque’s been hiding?”
“Uh-uh. Cortez called today, said the lab rats are gonna run a check on his clothes, fibers in his pockets, everything, to try and figure out where the hell he’s been all this time.”
Cortez and her divided loyalties. Still, the Gang War Task Force, including Cooper, had a need to know. “How closely are you following this one?” I asked.
“If Cinque Lewis’s reappearance is a signal of the resurgence of the Black Freedom Militia, I’m gonna be all over this case” was his clipped response.
“Don’t go getting all worked up, Mike.” I lightly punched Cooper’s forearm. I didn’t need him angry and uncooperative at this point. “What I meant was have you had time to check on the Militia with any of the other agencies.”
He relaxed a little, the color receding from his cheeks. “Outside of the Department, I’ve checked with the surroundin’ counties as well as the California Gang Investigation Association. None of them has heard of anything on the Black Freedom Militia since heck was a pup. How’s it going with the suspect?”
“Mitchell? We didn’t hold him. Word is he’s one of those salt-of-the-earth, conscientious types—on the board of TAGOUT, the whole nine. Even giving a full scholarship to a reformed tagger tonight, over at that art gallery in Santa Barbara Plaza.”
“Spiral West?” His tone was disdainful.
Mine was noncommittal. “I think so.”
“This is the kind of shit that bothers me,” he said with considerable bite in his voice. “All Reggie Peeples is doin’ over there is pumpin’ those kids up with a bunch of false hopes. Nobody wants those cave scribblings hangin’ in their house.”
I could have mentioned Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring, the New York graffiti artists whose “cave scribblings” were raking in a fortune, but what was the point? “Well, Dr. Mitchell sounds like a true believer. Enough to put his time and money where his mouth is, way I heard it.”
“Sounds like a real Father Teresa to me,” Cooper murmured while drawing tight little spirals on a notepad.
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t have a motive for doing Lewis,” I pointed out.
Cooper’s doodles grew larger, big loops and arrows practically spilling off the paper. “Could be Lewis was gettin’ in the way of Mitchell convertin’ kids to the straight and narrow path,” he suggested. “Maybe the good doctor did the public a service by poppin’ that zit.”
The notion seemed to cheer Cooper up considerably, but his face soon grew serious. “You should be glad Cinque’s out of the way.” His small eyes were intense. “To take your old man and kid out like that, just wipe out your whole family.” Cooper glanced down at the pictures of his smiling daughters and shook his head in a show of what I took for genuine sympathy. “I don’t know if I could have coped with it as long as you have.”
For all of his racism and misogyny, Mike Cooper was also a man the world would say had strong family values. It was a combination I’d encountered a little too often in the LAPD to consider it an aberration any more.
“What’s the word on that Lucky Ones O.G. who got popped . . .”
“Big Dog Givens? Yeah, ’cept he wasn’t so lucky this time around.” Cooper’s pun was delivered without a laugh. He sucked on his dead pipe. “He was a smart little bastard, or so he thought. Got so he was runnin’ crack all over the county.”
“When did he come on the scene, Mike?”
“Late seventies, early eighties, out of those apartments on Nicolet in the Jungle. He and Carmichael started stealin’ cars and dealin’ drugs, and pretty soon they were shootin’ high school kids at Dorsey and Manual Arts that wouldn’t join up with them. By the time we finally popped him the first time for possession with intent to sell, he had an organization rumored to be three thousand strong—and that was ten years ago.” He sighed. “Givens’s death is gonna set off a power struggle in Royals’ cliques all over the county.”
“Problem is sometimes innocent people get killed in the crossfire,” I noted.
“That’s always the problem,” Cooper agreed. “If it was just these knuckleheads blowin’ each other away, I wouldn’t care. But invariably it’s some old man or some mother’s son who’s a straight A student on his way to Stanford who catches the bullet. Protectin’ them is what keeps me doing this job.” He stood up abruptly. “Speakin’ of which, I gotta git.”
I walked with Cooper to the parking lot. “Where are you headed?” I asked.
“Big Dog’s funeral.”
“Maybe I’ll go with you.”
“Why bother?” he asked sarcastically.
“I was going through the old case file on the Roberts murders.” Saying it out loud made me catch my breath for a moment; it was unnerving referring to Keith and Erica so matter-of-factly. “There may be a connection between Big Dog and an old informant on the case.”
Cooper shrugged. “Suit yourself. They’re plantin’ him over at Eternal Peace.” He snorted in derision. “All I can say is it’s gonna be a whole lot more peaceful without that sonofabitch to contend with.”
Although living, breathing blacks had moved into the surrounding neighborhood in the sixties, Sunnyslope Cemetery/Mortuary’s discriminatory policies had kept our dead out until the early seventies. But with white flight decreasing the target market, as it were, Sunnyslope had determined that they needed to change with the times and—since black-on-black crime presented a major growth opportunity through the end of the century—get the money while the getting was good.
Consequently, in addition to the gone-to-glory members of my grandmother’s church and the better-known members of L.A.’s niggerati now interred there, Sunnyslope and its Eternal Peace Chapel had become quite accustomed to accommodating a gang clientele. So Royals, Deathstalkers, Muy Loco Killers, and the rest congregated regularly in the chapel and at the graveside before expensive rare wood and metal caskets or—on two Jet magazine-reported occasions—a gold-plated coffin and a Mercedes sedan in which the dearly departed lay in splendiferous, dearly-paid-for peace.
Taking to heart the old Biblical adage For unto him who is given much, much is expected, Sunnyslope’s flush-with-cash owners had thought of every convenience—and precaution—to make each rite of final passage a peaceful one, including installing a metal detector at the chapel entrance and, when public safety dictated, asking off-duty LAPD officers to augment the cemetery’s private, discreetly armed security staff. Obviously the extra measures weren’t required for the violently deceased—who flowed through Sunnyslope at a rate of about two or three per week—but for the family and aggrieved friends who turned out for the services, armed to the hilt and looking for trouble.
Edward Carmichael, the gang truce activist pictured in the Times article that morning, stood at the cemetery gates in a purple Minnesota Vikings jacket, passing out Peace in the Streets leaflets to the arriving caravan of cars so expensive, so luxe, that to see them all in one place was a sure sign of only one of two things—the annual meeting of NFL owners or a Royals funeral.
Carmichael had stuck a leaflet through my car window before he realized I was behind the wheel and tried to snatch it back. “I ain’t wasting this on you.”
I won the tug-of-war and put the flyer on the passenger seat. “We all want peace, Ed.”
His eyes were cold: “So you say.”
I parked my lowly red Rabbit between a seven-series Bimmer and Cooper’s Department-issued Ford, and rejoined Carmichael at the cemetery gate. “I like the purple, Ed. New fashion statement?”
“Purple means power and royalty, Detective. Red plus blue. Deathstalker and Royals.” He extended a lavender sheet to an entering car. “It’s all there in your flyer.”
I glanced at the sheet, which contained pictures of children killed by stray bullets, a plea for a gang truce, and the Peace in the Streets address and phone number. “Ed, you’ve been in the mix for a long time. When was the last time you heard about Cinque Lewis or the Black Freedom Militia?”
He regarded me suspiciously. “Why do you ask?”
“He’s popped up again.”
Carmichael paused a second before handing a flyer to the driver of a tricked-out Bimmer. “Dead or alive?”
“Interesting you should ask. Dead, as a matter of fact.”
I saw his shoulders slump a little. “Why am I not surprised?”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Ed? You seen him lately?”
A car slowed in front of us. The driver, a Royal I busted years ago when I was in Southwest, saw me, bared his teeth in a gang snarl intended to intimidate, and sped away.
Carmichael threw up his hands in exasperation. “You’re blocking me, Detective! I can’t be seen talking to you. Ruins my credibility.”
The way he was angled away from me and wouldn’t look me in the eye suggested his reticence to talk was about more than me ruining his rep with his homies. He knew something about Cinque Lewis. “When can we talk, Ed?” I pressed.
“Call me tomorrow. Number’s on the flyer,” he mumbled as he hurried away to another arriving mourner, flyer in hand.
Inside, the Eternal Peace Chapel was awash in a sea of button-downed white shirts, crisply creased and cuffed blue jeans, and blue denim jackets, the official formal wear of the Lucky Ones Royals. I noticed a number of royal blue kuftis atop the shaved and cornrowed heads, marking this funeral as a high-profile occasion.
Mourners from other Royals cliques were there, too. I was surprised that so many of them were still alive, if you could call it that; more than a few had to be lifted and passed through the metal detectors by friends. Their wheelchairs were politely but thoroughly checked by a wary security staff used to firearms being concealed even under a sheepskin cushion intended to prevent pressure sores.
The chapel was filled with hardened faces I recognized from both sides in L.A.’s bloody gang wars. Played off against the royal blue of the gang members was a tide of uniformed and moonlighting LAPD officers—Chip LeDoux, Darren Wright, plus at least a dozen brothers I knew from the local chapter of the National Organization for Black Law Enforcement—prominently and grimly stationed at the entrance and back of the chapel. Cooper, although in civilian drag, was no less somber than our navy-attired colleagues. The only ones smiling were the mortuary staff, situated in a corner by the door, serene in the knowledge they would eventually get a fair number of those in attendance, on both sides of the aisle, one way or the other.
Darren Wright nodded his head in my direction and eased over to me at the back door. “Anything shake loose on that case, Detective?” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
“Not yet.”
“I didn’t know you knew Big Dog.”
“I didn’t. I’m just tagging along with Cooper.”
He nodded, then said, “I noticed you don’t wear a wedding ring.”
“And?”
“Well,” he stammered, “I just thought if you weren’t seeing someone you might want to have dinner with me on my boat sometime. I’ve got a forty-two footer docked at the Marina, and I can throw down on a grill.”
I turned to face him. “I’m flattered, Darren.” And I was. Wright seemed like a righteous brother and wasn’t hard to look at either. Good-looking, well mannered, and cooks, too? I had to mention him to my girl Katrina. “Unfortunately I’m just getting into something . . .” It was my standard line for brushing off cops, but I surprised myself by picturing Aubrey Scott as soon as I said it.
Wright gave me a lopsided smile and threw up his hands in mock surrender. “No problem. Just asking.”
Mike Cooper had made his way to the front of the chapel, where he embraced a plump woman I assumed was the dead man’s mother and sat down to talk with the wheelchair-bound Little Dog Donovan. Both of them seemed at ease with the little man, almost friendly.
Wright nodded in Cooper’s direction. “That’s one dedicated cop.” Although his face was noncommittal, there was a bit of a sneer in the uniform’s voice.
“Are you being facetious?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Don’t let Cooper’s rough talk fool you; he’s very committed. Always comes to these bangers’ funerals, trying to get these kids to straighten out their lives. More than you’d catch me doing, that’s for sure.”
Never judge a book by its cover, I could hear Grandmama Cile say. And as hard as it was to admit, Cooper did have some redeeming qualities, even if they were wrapped in a combative, abrasive little package.
I excused myself and made my way over to the other side of the chapel, where I saw Fred Stoppard and Neil Hookstratten from the Times. “I’ve been meaning to call you guys to say thanks for being my personal ambulance Friday night.”
“My pleasure, Detective,” the photographer smiled. “Reminded me a little of the old days.”
“You ever miss us, F-Stop?”
He smiled at Hookstratten and shook his head, a red mane rustling around his head. “Only until I get my paycheck every month.”
“By the way, Hook, did I leave something in your backseat Friday?”
“Like what?”
“Uh . . . my black notebook.” I was glad the lie came to mind so fast.
“Haven’t seen it.” He unearthed a set of car keys from a pocket and tossed them to me. “My car is parked by the cypress trees at the end of the lot. Feel free to take a look for yourself.”
I checked the back seat of the Taurus thoroughly, but outside of a cartridge of used film and a package of breath mints in the cushions, which I returned to Hookstratten with his keys, there was nothing. No smoking gun hidden in the cushions to link Mitchell to Lewis.
“I gotta let you search my car again sometime,” he joked as he pocketed the items. “You do a better job than the car wash.”
I shushed him, concerned we’d draw attention to ourselves. He moved away a bit to interview a young woman while F-Stop started snapping pictures with a telephoto lens.
You would have thought the mourners would have objected to the whirring motor drive on F-Stop’s camera. But the people assembled in the chapel that afternoon didn’t seem to notice, more intent on their grief—or making sure they were all seen to be visibly shaken by Big Dog’s death. I wouldn’t have been surprised if some jealous rival from within his own organization was the shooter. The wheelchair-bound Little Dog, still talking to Cooper, was off the list; wouldn’t have had the physical ability to tie the two men up, although he could have ordered the hit. Maybe it was the good-looking, bronze-skinned brother in the front row, the one with the azure-blue embroidered kufti on his head who was comforting a keening female Hook said was Big Dog’s girlfriend.
“Second in command to Big Dog,” Hook noted the bronze Adonis, whose name was Trig. “Not as smart as the Dog, but twice as ruthless. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trig started making his move to fill Big Dog’s shoes soon.”
And Big Dog’s bed, too, the way he had his arm around that young woman.
The congregants had just finished mumbling their way through the Lord’s Prayer. I took advantage of the awkward pause to slip into a back pew. While an almost-attractive young female—made less so by straw-blonde hair that was dyed, fried, and laid to the side—read the acknowledgments, I took the opportunity to read the order of service printed in the program.
Grandmama Cile, by virtue of her age and temperament the most frequent funeral goer in the Justice family, would have been appalled. Not that she would object to the order of service, but at the names of the people participating, not to mention the selection of music. The towheaded Celica Davenport—her mother must have gone into labor in a Toyota—was followed by Little Dog and Trig, whose remarks were blessedly brief.
A slight-built young man of not more than fourteen, listed in the program as Too Smooth Sanders, shyly approached the microphone. As he took his place at the front of the chapel, I could read the words “Royals” and “Big Dog” artfully cut into his head, a personal tribute to the deceased. And while Grandmama Cile might have hoped for something more traditional (even “Rock of Ages”—though in bad taste, considering the dead man’s profession—would have sufficed), no one was prepared for Too Smooth’s musical homage to Big Dog by way of Marvin Gaye, another brother brought low by drugs.
Too Smooth’s solo selection, “Inner City Blues,” delivered a cappella with an icy-veined plaintiveness, reflected Marvelous Marvin at the height of his genius, when he captured the pain of my youth and evidently that of this congregation as well. By the recessional, when Too Smooth cried out the refrain of the song I had played in my car just a few days ago, I was forced to acknowledge the connection between me and these young men and women. Eastside or Westside, South Central or South Bay, there were things that bound black folks together beyond the superficialities of skin color or hair texture. It was memory and culture resonating from within, from the way we grieve to the music that had everyone bobbing their heads in the chapel’s late afternoon gloom.
But in the chapel that day I came to believe there was something more, something so universal that it could blow you away from the hilltops of View Park or the blacktops of Watts before you knew it. Could take your breath away on the ninth green of the Brentwood Country Club or crush you in a county jail cell. Whether it was in a driveway or behind a taco stand, in a hospital bed or hanging from the magnolia trees of history, death was the same for everyone. Catching us unawares or unprepared, but catching us all just the same.
The thought gave me a chill so thorough I had to leave before the services were over and the mourners moved on to the adjacent cemetery. As I made my way to the door, F-Stop and the others were capturing the Kodak moment, catching the Royals flashing signs in unison to Gaye’s haunting and prophetic words:
Makes me wanna holler,
Throw up both my hands . . .