Omerta

by Larry Darter

  “Loved the pigtails.”

  Lucy laughed. “Well, don’t expect to see me in them again. I outgrew the pigtails stage a long time ago.”

  Drew loved her laugh.

  She went back to work at the stove, and Drew walked behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders and massaged them. She offered no resistance. Soon he felt her muscles relax. He noticed an empty wine glass on the counter next to the stove.

  “I’ll pour you more wine,” he said.

  He picked up the bottle of red wine from the counter that was already open and poured some in the glass. Lucy picked up the glass and clicked it off the side of his beer bottle.

  “Here’s to you, babe,” she said.

  “Cheers,” Drew said.

  * * *

  Lucy had gone all out with the meal. Besides the chicken parmigiana main course, they started with Caprese salad and had fresh focaccia bread topped with olive oil and parmesan cheese on the side. They finished with tiramisu for dessert, a decadent, creamy chocolate cake with espresso. After dinner, Drew helped her clear the table and load the dishwasher.

  “That was delicious,” Drew said. “I could get used to your cooking.”

  “Well, don’t,” Lucy chided playfully. “I prefer eating out usually.”

  * * *

  Later on, after they had made love, Lucy lay on her back, head propped on a pillow. Drew was next to her, his arm across her body beneath the sheet, having pulled her tightly against him.

  “So, how is the new case going?” Lucy said.

  “We have two good suspects,” Drew said. “Rudy and I just can’t decide which one did it.” He told her briefly about the interview with Narek Hovnanian that afternoon.

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “I don’t think Hovnanian is the killer,” Drew said. “He was too eager to take a poly when I asked him if he would. Also, he adamantly denied ever being in her apartment. It seems if he were guilty, he would have invented some innocuous reason for being in the apartment to cover his ass. Just in case we found his prints or DNA inside. As it is, if we find his prints or DNA was in the apartment when we get the lab analysis results, Hovnanian is toast.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Nothing on that Jamaican guy yet?”

  “No,” Drew said. “I don’t want to talk about Jamaican guys or murder cases or anything else right now.”

  “Then what do you want?” Lucy said with a grin.

  When Drew didn’t answer right away, she turned to face him, smiled, and pushed him down on the bed flat on his back before climbing atop him.

  Chapter 27

  Two months after Bailey Henry’s murder, Drew and Ortega continued waiting for fingerprint and lab analysis results. SID had found one hair on Henry’s body and one on the mattress. If the lab technicians could find a root in either hair, they could get DNA. But even if there was no root, sometimes the technicians could determine the suspect’s race, which would enormously help the detectives. It would allow them distinguish between their two prime suspects, Narek Hovnanian and Teddy Hamilton, the Jamaican.

  Neither SID nor the deputy coroner who performed the autopsy had recovered any semen after the sexual assault. But the coroner had found skin tissue under Henry’s fingernails, which the lab technicians were also testing for DNA.

  Drew felt guilty because Henry’s parents, who at first had been calling weekly for updates on the investigation, had stopped calling altogether. It seemed they had lost faith the detectives would ever find their daughter’s killer.

  With the Henry case at a standstill, Drew and Ortega had spent weeks tracking down and interviewing people who knew Nelson Welch, Fiona Silverman’s former manager and one of the two remaining suspects in her murder. The effort discouraged Ortega because the more they learned about Nelson, the more certain he became Welch was not Silverman’s killer.

  After questioning many more people who knew him, they had a better understanding of Welch. What motive he might have had remained obscure, and he simply didn’t seem the kind of man who would kill a woman. His friends and acquaintances contended it was unlikely that Welch would own or even have access to a firearm.

  While the handwriting analyst had concluded that it was “highly probable” that Nelson Welch wrote the note to the Beverly Hills Police Department alerting them to Silverman’s corpse, that finding was far from conclusive.

  Ortega and Drew still hoped to interview William Hurst, but the man’s whereabouts remained unknown after Hurst fled New York to avoid the Westchester County grand jury subpoena. Both cases had lost momentum, and that too discouraged the detectives. Although they have spent months investigating both homicides—up to twelve hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, there was still much work for them to do before they could hope to complete either investigation.

  On an overcast July morning, Ortega and Drew briefed Deputy District Attorney Scott Brooks on the two cases, who was spending more and more time in the squad room, conferring with the detectives.

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” Brooks said. “Hovnanian either killed Bailey Henry or was present when his cousin did it. You have the security guard who saw Hovnanian climbing the apartment’s back fence on the evening of the murder, and you have the neighbor who saw them pass by her apartment and overheard them talking in Armenian the same night.”

  “That’s all true,” Ortega said. “And Hovnanian swore he hadn’t been to those apartments since the previous December. But it’s all circumstantial. None of it puts him or his cousin in Henry’s apartment. That’s why we’re waiting on the results of the analysis of the fingerprints and DNA. We need something to use as leverage before polygraphing him.”

  “You’re right,” Brooks said. “We don’t have enough yet. Anything new on the other suspect, the Jamaican man?” Brooks said.

  “No, his ex-girlfriend hasn’t called,” Drew said. “She agreed to contact us if she heard from Hamilton that he was returning to Los Angeles. He’s still in New York as far as we know.”

  Brooks nodded. “Okay, on the Silverman murder, it sounds like you’ve ruled out her manager as a suspect. That right?”

  “Yes,” Ortega said. “All we had on Nelson Welch was the flimsy handwriting analyst opinion on the cadaver note. After spending weeks interviewing his acquaintances, we feel sure he didn’t kill Silverman, and we never could envision a motive for him.”

  “William Hurst is our suspect by default now,” Drew added. “And he’s still in the wind. Even his attorneys claim they don’t know where he is.”

  Brooks nodded. “Tell me if you think I’m wrong,” he said, “but I feel we’re getting close on both cases. We just need one break in each of them to make the arrests.”

  “I think you’re right,” Ortega said. “If Hurst surfaces and we can interview him, I think we will clear Silverman’s murder. And I think any day now we’ll get results from the fingerprint or DNA analysis, which will tell us who murdered Bailey Henry.”

  “I think you guys need to go back to the apartments and talk to Hamilton’s ex-girlfriend regularly,” Brooks said. “Instead of relying on her to volunteer the information if she learns he is back in L.A., I think you should keep the pressure on her. Let her know you aren’t going away.”

  Unlike some deputy district attorneys who imperiously ordered cops around, Brooks always couched his suggestions in a respectful, soft-spoken manner that the detectives appreciated.

  Drew nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “She seemed either frightened of him or was trying to cover for him. We shouldn’t depend on her to do the right thing by reaching out.”

  After the meeting, the circumstances they faced still wore on the detectives. But both were confident they would eventually make cases against the prime suspects in both murders. Brooks’ certainty that they would soon file murder charges in both cases also encouraged Ortega and Drew.

  * * *

  Hours later, when the detectives returned to the office
from lunch, Ortega spotted a note on his desk, a message to call the LAPD’s latent print section. He felt a rush of excitement because he hoped a fingerprint examiner had identified a suspect in the Bailey Henry murder. Now maybe they would finally learn which of the potential suspects, the Armenian whose mother was the victim’s neighbor or the tall Jamaican who lived with a woman in the complex, raped and strangled Henry.

  As Ortega grabbed his phone and punched in the latent print section number, his eyes fell on the murder book. It had been gathering dust on the edge of his desk for months. He felt a pang of conscience.

  The print examiner came on the line with the news Ortega had been hoping to hear for months.

  “We got a match on your Bailey Henry case,” the technician said.

  “Teddy Hamilton?” Ortega said.

  “How did you know?”

  Ortega was exultant. “He’s a guy we’re looking at,” he said.

  “Okay,” the examiner said. “There are two prints. One print he left on the inside of the front door. The other he left on a bathroom wall.”

  Ortega was glad he had made SID send out the second team of fingerprint technicians after the first team had done such a shoddy job. The second team had lifted both prints.

  After hanging up, Ortega rolled back his chair and turned to Drew.

  “We hit the jackpot, Youngblood,” he said.

  “What did we get?”

  “The latent print section matched two prints SID pulled from Henry’s apartment,” Ortega said.

  “Whose?”

  “Teddy Hamilton.”

  “Yes!” Drew said.

  Ortega raised his hand. The detectives exchanged a high five.

  “Let’s make a run over to Crestwood Apartments and talk with Teddy’s ex-girlfriend again,” Ortega said. “It’s time to apply a little pressure. We need to find Hamilton and get him in an interview room.”

  Chapter 28

  Ortega parked his city ride in front of the Crestwood Apartments. The two detectives entered the complex and crossed the courtyard to Cheryl Cooke’s apartment. After Drew knocked, Cooke opened the door. She stood in the open doorway with her arms crossed in the classic defensive posture. Cooke didn’t invite them inside.

  “Is Teddy still in New York?” Drew said. “We’ve interviewed everyone else with a possible connection to the case except Teddy. We need to bring Teddy in for a routine interview.”

  “I told you last time Teddy wasn’t involved,” Cheryl Cooke said defiantly.

  “I understand you believe that’s true, Ms. Cooke,” Ortega said. “But we have to interview and eliminate everyone we can place at these apartments at the time someone killed that woman. We can’t eliminate Teddy as a suspect until we talk with him.”

  “The sooner we can interview Teddy, the sooner we can stop bothering you, Ms. Cooke,” Drew said. “Until we do, we’re going to have to keep circling back to you.”

  “Okay,” Cooke said, interpreting Drew’s remarks as a veiled threat. “Teddy is living in Plano, Texas. He works for one of the satellite television companies there as an installer.”

  “You know the name of the company?” Drew said.

  After Cooke named the company, Ortega said, “Good enough. Thanks for your time, Ms. Cooke.”

  “And don’t forget to call us if you hear Teddy is coming back to Los Angeles,” Drew reminded her.

  Cooke nodded curtly and then went inside her apartment and closed the door.

  “I think we’re finally getting somewhere, Youngblood.”

  “Yeah, looks that way,” Drew said. “Isn’t Plano near Dallas?”

  “I think so,” Ortega said. “Let’s head back to the office and call Teddy’s employer. If we can verify he is still there, I’m asking Walsh to allow us to fly to Texas to run him down.”

  “Great,” Drew said. “Road trip.”

  * * *

  Back at West Bureau, Ortega looked up the telephone number for the satellite company in Plano.

  “While you’re checking with Teddy’s employer,” Drew said, “I’m going to call the Plano cops to see if they have had any contact with him.”

  “Good idea, Youngblood,” Ortega said, picking up his phone. “You do that.”

  Drew got on his computer and looked up the number for Plano PD. Then he got on the phone with them. Both detectives obtained some useful information.

  Ortega spoke with a representative from the satellite company’s personnel department. The woman told him that the company hired Teddy Hamilton in May. A month later, a customer filed a sexual harassment complaint against him. The company gave Hamilton sexual harassment counseling, and afterward, he never showed up for work again. After Hamilton failed to report for work for three consecutive days, the company officially terminated him for job abandonment.

  Drew spoke to a Plano Police Department detective. The detective told him that two Plano women had recently filed sexual assault charges against Hamilton. The detective said both women told similar stories. When they first met Hamilton, they were drawn to his looks, charm, and affectionate manner. But when they were not in the mood for sex, Hamilton turned violent.

  One woman reported that Hamilton struck her so hard, the blow knocked her off the bed. Then Hamilton stomped on her. The other told police that Hamilton lifted her off the floor by the neck and choked her until she passed out. Drew realized that would be powerful testimony in court given Bailey Henry’s death by strangulation.

  But the Plano detective had even more information. When they started investigating Hamilton, the Plano police learned Hamilton had recently pawned five women’s jewelry items and a man’s ring. The detective emailed Drew images of the jewelry while they were on the phone together. Drew immediately recognized the gold dolphin pendant necklace Bailey Henry’s mother Lisa had described to him. The Plano detective told Drew that they searched the area extensively for Hamilton but couldn’t find him. In the detective’s opinion, Hamilton had left the Dallas area and possibly Texas.

  Once both detectives had finished their phone calls, they compared notes.

  “There’s no doubt now that Hamilton is our guy,” Ortega said. “Possession of Bailey Henry’s missing pendant and the print matches seal the deal.”

  “Yeah, all we have to do is find him now,” Drew said. “There seems no point in going to Texas to look for him since the cops there believe he has left the area.”

  “Which means he might be on his way back to L.A. unless he’s already here,” Ortega said. “Start typing the affidavit for the arrest warrant. I’m going to make another call.”

  While Drew started the affidavit, Ortega called his previous contact at Greyhound. After examining the bus records, the Greyhound representative told Ortega that Hamilton had left Plano on June 30 and arrived in Los Angeles in July.

  After hanging up with Greyhound, Ortega searched a computerized database service that held extensive public records. He discovered an address for Hamilton. When he checked the city’s utility records database, he discovered the address belonged to an apartment leased by a woman who worked for a nonprofit organization that aided the homeless. Now familiar with Hamilton’s approach, Ortega suspected Hamilton had worked his way into yet another woman’s life.

  Ortega briefed Drew on what he had learned.

  “In the morning, we’ll go to the homeless center where the woman works and find out where Teddy is,” Ortega said. “Let’s run the affidavit downtown to the CCB so Brooks can file the charges and issue the arrest warrant. I’ll call him and let him know we’re on the way.”

  Chapter 29

  It was a warm morning when the detectives headed to South Julian Street, the central artery of downtown Los Angeles’ skid row. In the central downtown area, homeless people who slept in cardboard boxes, tents, or beneath tarpaulins clotted the sidewalks. Drew saw people sitting on plastic milk crates reading Bibles, some pushing shopping carts, and others lugging large plastic garbage bags filled with their belongin
gs.

  Drew knew the homelessness problem was exploding in Los Angeles County. An ever-growing number of people who couldn’t afford the region’s high housing costs, an estimated 70,000, lived on the streets, in shelters, and in vehicles within the county.

  The large homeless population contributed significantly to a growing sanitation problem. Gutters overflowed with trash, and pigeons pecked at the rubble. The air was ripe with the smell of garbage and human waste. Politicians of Los Angeles and the California governor and legislature bemoaned the “climate change crisis” constantly, demanding that the nation and world mobilize to clean up the environment to save the planet. Yet, they couldn’t even clean up their own city and state.

  Boom boxes blared along both sides of the street. Through the open window, Drew inhaled the pungent odor of marijuana. He saw a few daring denizens firing up crack pipes with plastic lighters. Drew also knew skid row was an epicenter of the region’s substance abuse problem.

  In the distance, Drew saw Bunker Hill’s skyscrapers towering above the hellscape of skid row, shimmering in the July heat. He suspected the politicians focused attention on the remote “climate change threat,” hoping to distract citizens from the devastation they had wreaked on L.A. and other large swaths of the Golden State with their failed progressive ideology-driven policies.

  Ortega stopped the car outside the homeless center where the woman acquainted with Teddy Hamilton worked. Inside the center, they spoke to a male employee manning the desk. He told them that the woman they were looking for was out for a few hours. Ortega took a printed photo of Hamilton from his jacket pocket and showed it to the man.

  “Have you ever seen this guy?” Ortega said.

  “Oh, sure,” the man said. “He stays at a hotel right down the street.”

  The man told them the name of the hotel. The detectives left the center and walked over to the hotel. They entered the dingy lobby that smelled of Lysol and walked past toothless residents staring vacantly at a small television.