Hard-Boiled- Box Set

by Danny R. Smith

  Cortez was saying, “That’s about it, guys, hit me up later if you have anything for me or want to know more about the case.”

  He walked away with his head down and the ever-present smile on his face.

  We clapped.

  It seemed odd to me that we did, yet each briefed case was followed by applause. Not an overly cheerful or congratulatory applause, but an applause nonetheless. A colleague would provide the gruesome details of a citizen’s violent death, and we would clap when he or she finished.

  Further proof that none of us was right in the head.

  3

  WHEN THE MEETING concluded, I rose from my borrowed chair and followed Captain Stover to his office. He paused at the door and looked back. “You need to grab a cup first?”

  “Nah, I’m good,” I said, thinking maybe an adult beverage would be more appropriate.

  We took our seats, the captain in his big leather chair at the helm, and me in the visitor’s chair that I had sat in on many prior occasions, none of which had left warm and fuzzy memories. It reminded me of the grade school principal’s office where I had accumulated frequent flier miles and earned the distinction of signing his paddle, an honor reserved for repeat offenders.

  But that was then. I no longer suffered corporal punishment, nor did I assume a subordinate role with my superiors. It is true that law enforcement operates in a paramilitary fashion with the rank, authority, and attendant discipline, but that was for the kids, in my opinion. The young deputies. The rookies with a few years on or maybe even ten, but still working in a patrol environment. This was Homicide—the big leagues—and those of us who made the rank expected to be treated in more of a businesslike manner.

  It was perhaps this attitude, in part, for which I continually found myself embattled.

  “What’s up, skipper?”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like a million bucks. All healed up and ready to work.”

  He tugged at the knot of his tie. “Before you’re back on the floor, you’re going to need a release from the department shrink—”

  “Jesus, boss . . .”

  “You were shot, nearly killed. It’s protocol, Richard, not something I pulled out of my ass in order to fight with you.”

  I nodded.

  “The timing also isn’t great, in that we’re full on the floor for the first time in years. I wouldn’t have anywhere to put you right now anyway.”

  “Where to put me? . . . Why wouldn’t I go back to where I was, Team Two, with my old partner?”

  “He’s training now, and they’re full. Every team is full.”

  I glanced through the window that separates his office from the hallway and watched for a moment as detectives passed by, chatting and chuckling and enjoying the job because they had partners. “So, what are you going to do with me, stick me in Missing Persons?”

  He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Even I wouldn’t send you to Missings. No, I’m going to put you in Unsolveds for now. They can always use more bodies. If you like it and want to stay back there, fine. If not, we’ll bring you out when something opens up—as long as the shrink gives the okay.”

  How could I argue? Unsolveds wasn’t a bad place to be. Most detectives who went there did so in their last couple of years in preparation for retirement. The perks were regular hours, no callouts—generally speaking—and it was less likely you would generate cases that would require court appearances once you retired. The bulk of the detectives in that unit were solid people, men and women I had worked with here at Homicide and in previous assignments.

  I also realized he wasn’t trying to punish me. It was just business, the way it was. I couldn’t expect to come back and step right into my old spot, as much as I had tried to fool myself into believing it was possible.

  It suddenly struck me: “Wait, didn’t Cortez say he was without a partner? They pulled White out of Unsolveds to assist on that case he just briefed.”

  “His partner’s status is up in the air currently. White assisted him and will work the case with him until his partner is back.”

  “Okay, you’re the boss.”

  He hadn’t expected that. I wasn’t sure if he was skeptical, or relieved. He had no doubt expected a fight. But I didn’t want to fight; I never had. Most of the time, I regretted the battles I’d have with supervisors. I didn’t want to ruin my job. It was all I had left. I had successfully destroyed two marriages now, and it seemed I was only happy when I was busy at work. It was the badge and gun, the chase of the bad guys, the challenge of sending them away in a system that favored the criminals. I needed to keep in perspective that this job was my entire identity. It was my lifeblood.

  After stepping out of the captain’s office, I paused briefly in the hallway. Coffee to the right, the squad room to the left. But I didn’t currently have a home in the squad room, out on the floor as we called it. Currently, I was part of the backroom, Unsolved Homicides. Commonly called Unsolveds. It was better than Missings, but still not the floor. The squad room, the trenches where the real work was done by hard chargers, real bulldogs who were carefully selected to work the elite Homicide Bureau because of their investigative skills and strong character. In our department, working Homicide was an honor. We were the highest paid detectives in the county, as well we should be. We had cars and phones and computers all provided to us. The lieutenants were there to fill out schedules, write murder memos, and sign overtime slips. They didn’t interfere in our investigations and they didn’t inquire as to our whereabouts or progress on any particular case, other than for the purpose of staying informed. In baseball terms, we had made it to the show, the big leagues.

  I opted for a cup of coffee and then I’d get it over with, walk into Unsolveds and make my first appearance. See if there was an empty desk or if I’d be relegated to a chair in the corner. I glanced at my watch thinking it must be nearing the noon hour, and though I made it no practice, a cocktail lunch might be in order.

  Where the hell was Floyd?

  As I poured a cup, the answer came from behind me in classic Floyd vernacular: “Hey, Dickie, where’ve you been? I saw you streamline into the captain’s office after the meeting; you’re not sucking his ass already, are you? Jesus.”

  The musky scent of his cologne drifted over my shoulder as he came to a stop. I turned and handed him the cup I had just filled for myself.

  He gladly received it. “Thanks, Dickie. So, what’s the deal, where’s he putting you?”

  “Unsolveds.”

  “Unsolveds? . . . Jesus, you pussy.”

  “Until something on the floor opens up, and not until the shrink gives an okay. Apparently, I’m nuts.”

  “Well, yeah, Dickie, I’ve been telling you that for years.”

  I turned with my cup in hand. “How’s your partner?”

  Floyd drifted to a nearby table, set his cup down, and pulled out a chair. I followed. He smiled at a secretary who walked by, and kept his eyes on her until she was through the door to the secretariat.

  “He’s good. Came from Lennox, he’s a hard worker, easy to get along with. He can also pick up your car if you have a flat, save the time of using a jack to change the tire. The guy’s a regular goon.”

  I nodded.

  “What are they going to have you doing in Unsolveds?”

  “Working unsolved cases? What the hell do you think I’d do in Unsolveds?”

  “I know, asshole. I mean, who are you pairing up with, did he say?”

  I shook my head.

  “Poodle-head just went back there a few months ago, maybe you could team up with him. That idiot would keep you entertained. Your sister, Beth, she’s back there now. That’s who I’d pick. There’s Lopes, but he’d drive you crazy, going in a hundred directions at any given time, seeing if he can lie about more overtime than Lee. Or, you could do what you’re probably more likely to do anyway and just work by yourself. Find a corner and pull your hat down low and mumble about how m
uch you hate everyone.”

  Poodle-head. The wiry little Irishman with pale blue eyes whose curly hair earned him the nickname. His antics, stunts, and constant clowning earned him a regular following at after-shift gatherings where cops drank heavily and laughed heartily to forget the sights, sounds, and smells of a night’s work. Seldom called by his given name, Rob O’Neill, his excellence in gang investigation had brought him to the bureau.

  Beth Jones, my sista from another mista, would be an excellent choice. She was a good street cop-turned-detective after proving herself on the mean streets of South Los Angeles. It would be difficult to find a more pleasant partner, and she would fill the void of female companionship left by the wife. Not that there would be romantic interest either direction, but the company and conversation of a lady might be a nice way to spend long days. If I couldn’t work with my partner, Floyd, that is.

  Or Lopes, pronounced with one syllable, rhyming with ropes, or mopes. Davey Lopes, but not the former Dodgers second baseman. Our Davey Lopes. A broad-shouldered, stocky, former Marine with gray hair and attentive eyes. A tough ghetto cop whose reputation preceded him from the streets to the prisons to the offices of our executives. The only problem was, he never went home. I’d been accused of being a workaholic on more than a few occasions, but honestly, I was a bit tired now, and not sure I could keep his pace. The man had nearly thirty years on the job and still ran circles around the youngsters.

  Steven Lee might work. A constant source of entertainment, the small-statured Jewish kid from Chicago, who had a reputation as a topnotch cop, was one of our best investigators. He was also an insufferable asshole, but in a humorous way for those who knew him well enough to know the difference. He could tell a chief or the sheriff how stupid they were while getting them to smile with him.

  “Or Torres,” Floyd said and grinned.

  “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  Torres and I still glared at each other after all of these years. He was a former gang detective who had been at Homicide several years before me and had been involved in the case of a murdered deputy from Century Station. At the time, I was working as a station detective there, assigned to the Crime Impact Team. My partner and I had developed several good leads on the suspect, and when we passed them along, he dismissed them out of hand. One such lead was a location, and a week or so later someone else came up with information about the same location and they hit it. The residents confirmed the suspect had been there the week before when my partner and I informed Torres of the information we had. Later, we assisted on a search warrant for the same case, and Torres insisted we be delicate with the occupants because, although they were related to the suspect, there was no reason to believe they were at all involved in gang activity. I emerged from my assigned search area with a stack of photographs showing otherwise, pictures of family members posed in gang attire and possessing firearms in the killer’s presence. Torres ordered me to leave the photographs, saying it wasn’t a search and destroy mission. I tossed the photographs on the ground and walked out mumbling a few nice words for him. Then I waited for my partner at the car and never spoke to Torres again. He should have—and could have—used the photographs to play hardball with the lying family members. Rather, he treated them as respectable citizens. There was little doubt they could have led us to the whereabouts of the killer, had they been properly motivated to do so.

  To make matters worse, when I made the list to come to Homicide, Torres had had the nerve to badmouth me openly at the bureau. He didn’t know how many friends I had there, nor did he realize it would get back to me. But it did. Fortunately, nobody with influence seemed to care what he had to say about me; I was selected to come to the bureau on the next list. And neither of us ever tried to make it less awkward once I arrived.

  “You two would make a nice couple.”

  “I’d kill him,” I said, “guaranteed.”

  “Who wouldn’t you kill? Jesus, Dickie, I think I’ve spoiled you all these years, made it too much fun for you. Now you’re just plain crabby about the whole thing.”

  I sipped my coffee. “Whatever.”

  “I have to head out, Dickie. We have some follow-up to do on our dead baby case over in El Monte. Then we’re going to grab lunch at Manny’s. You want to meet us in East L.A.?”

  “Maybe.”

  He stood. “Maybe, huh? Well aren’t you a daisy.”

  As he walked away, I said, “See ya later, partner.”

  He said over his shoulder, “Let me know what you decide about lunch, dickhead.”

  I walked through the front desk lobby area where a desk crew sat answering phones, transferring calls, taking messages, and receiving death notices. The latter of which is the beginning process of a homicide investigation. The lobby is the main thoroughfare of the office and is centered in the building. One path from the lobby leads to the administrative offices—the captain, his lieutenant and secretary—and further down the hall, the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen is the secretariat where a dozen underappreciated ladies spend their days—and sometimes, nights—typing lengthy reports from dictations from detectives of varying degrees of oratory skills and sobriety. There were two other paths from the front desk: one led to the squad room, the other into a smaller office area wherein detectives who investigate unsolved homicide cases are assigned. That's where I was headed.

  Lopes sat alone in Unsolveds. A phone dangled from the side of his head as he leaned back in his chair with the look of a man who had put in a ten-hour shift: his collar was unbuttoned, the knot of his tie had already been loosened, and his sleeves were rolled up. It wasn’t yet noon.

  He nodded when I walked in. “Hey man, what’s up?”

  There were five desks other than his. I pulled a chair from one of them and had a seat. “Nothing much, Davey. I guess I’m going to be back here for a while. How’ve you been?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Busy. I’ve got a wire running on the mob.”

  “La Eme?” I asked, doing my best to pronounce it with a Spanish flare.

  He sneered. “Yeah, goddamn Mexican mafia, I can’t get away from them.”

  I smiled. He was lying. He loved working cases involving the Mexican mafia the way the Yankees loved meeting up with the Red Sox, or the Cowboys and Redskins, Republicans and Democrats. He had dedicated nearly a decade to investigating nothing other than crimes of the Eme when he was assigned to Prison Gangs, a Detective Division assignment he had held before coming to Homicide. Nobody knew the structure and players better, and nobody had been more effective at putting a dent in their criminal enterprise through ongoing investigations. Lopes had turned several hardened gang members into state’s witnesses, and by doing so he had been able to obtain convictions against many of the ruthless killers among them.

  “You’d be lost without the mob.”

  He nodded and then his eyes drifted away, looking at his desk now as he leaned forward in his chair and spoke into the phone. “Yeah, Hernandez, Little Spooky from Big Hazard. He’s in your C-block . . . No, I’ll come see him there . . . Yeah, next couple of days . . . Okay, thank you, sir.”

  He set the phone back in its cradle. “You coming back here to Unsolveds?”

  “I guess, for a while. Until something opens up on the floor.”

  “Good, we can partner up. You up for a road trip?”

  “Where’re you headed?”

  “I need to go up to Pelican Bay, beat this gangster’s nuts. Spooky from Hazard. I need to go remind him about what an asshole I can be.”

  I chuckled. “You’re still messing with them, huh?”

  “We have a wire up right now, about a dozen cell phones and two pods at the county jail. These assholes are out of control. A lot of people are getting killed and nobody seems willing to talk about. I think a bunch of the murder cases are mob related. We’re looking to solve a lot of cases when it all comes together, if all goes well.”

  “This guy, Spooky, he a suspect?”

  Davey
Lopes shook his head. “Snitch. He’s supposed to be giving me information on the regular, but he’s been awful quiet. Hopefully they haven’t gotten to him.”

  “Is he a made member?”

  “Nah, an affiliate. But he’s put in plenty of work for the mafia and has a lot of inside information. He’s looking to improve his living conditions, cause he ain’t ever getting out.”

  I smiled. “He doesn’t realize they’ll kill him?”

  Lopes returned the smile. “I’ve got him convinced he’ll have it made. We’ll put him in Tehachapi where there’s a bunch of other punks and snitches. Shit, they’ve formed a social club there. Everyone gets along and they’re not even stabbing each other very often.”

  Lopes worked the gangs as well as anyone, better than most. He had developed informants in most of the Latino gangs in the county and half of the black ones too. Not all detectives worked informants to solve their cases. Not all detectives even knew how to work informants. I enjoyed talking to him about the Mexican gangs.

  “Yeah, shit, why not? What do I have better to do than watch the champ work the mob?”

  “Pfft, whatever. Okay, good, I could use the company. We’ll leave tomorrow and make it an overnighter. You can buy me a steak and get me drunk, tell me what it’s like getting shot.”

  “I’ll do two of the three.”

  He stood from the desk. “Ok, deal. Let’s go get some lunch and a beer, I’ll fill you in on the wire. You may want to get in on it, the overtime’s unlimited.”

  “I’ll take a raincheck, Davey. I want to find Ray, talk to him about his Santa Clarita case.”

  He frowned. “What’s he got?”

  “You missed the meeting?”

  “I don’t have time for that shit.”

  Mandatory was not a word that impressed Davey Lopes to any degree that would cause him to alter his agenda.

  “Ray briefed a case about a woman found murdered in her car, decapitated and her hands were cut off. Up in Santa Clarita.”