by T. B. Smith
Luke greeted the feeble inside joke with a weak smile of his own.
“I’ll run in to the market at the corner to see if I can’t borrow something,” Bradford said. Sun-streaked bangs bounced against a tan forehead as she jogged across the street to find the owner who may have been the only person in the neighborhood not at the shooting scene. He ran his gaze up from the bottom of her boots and along her short body until it reached her breasts.
“Do you have any rope or something I can borrow?” she asked him.
“We sell string.” The owner turned his back, lifted the string from the shelf and turned back toward her, exaggerating his disdain with a lascivious glare toward her ample chest. He clutched the wrapped ball of string tight and twirled it in his hands.
“That’ll be $1.19,” he said.
“I’ll pay later,” Bradford said. “I’ve got a police emergency outside.”
“That ain’t such a good idea. I could be gone when you get back.”
“I have to contain a crime scene.”
“That means nothing to me. I’m trying to run a business without getting ripped off by you cops,” the owner responded.
Bradford reached for some money, forgetting she’d sewn her front pockets shut to break the habit of stuffing her hands inside them after Francie dinged her score on officer safety for the second day in a row. “You can’t pull your gun with your hands in your pockets,” he’d told her. “And you can’t block a punch to the face either.” She finally remembered the two quarters she’d secreted in her back pocket for buying soft drinks from the cafeteria vending machines. “This is all I’ve got with me,” she said, palming the coins in front of her.
Galindo eyed her silently for several seconds. “I think we can work something out,” he said. He pulled a knife from his hip pocket, using the blade to slit the plastic covering the string. He hauled some twine out and wrapped it around his hand and elbow until satisfied the allotted portion amounted to the fifty cents Bradford offered. “There you go, officer.” He sneered as he snatched the quarters from her palm.
“Asshole,” Bradford muttered the word through tight lips as she pushed the front door open and stepped onto the sidewalk.
Galindo called out exaggeratedly as Bradford exited. “Have a nice day, Officer.”
“How’s this for high-tech police equipment?” Luke hollered. He and Bradford ran string from the bumper of a police car around a street lamp and back again, establishing a flimsy perimeter around the body.
A portly man pushed through the crowd toward the victim. Alejandro was embroidered on the chest of his greasy coveralls.
“Keep away,” Luke ordered, convinced that the authority in his voice, backed up by the badge on his chest would command obedience.
Alejandro ducked beneath the string and went to his knees. A puddle of blood soaked into his pants. “I already know what happened,” he said.
Alejandro’s sniffles evidenced his fight to control his tears. “One of the boys ran over to the house and told me. They just drove around on the streets and seen this vato who don’t belong in the neighborhood. My Kiko, he got out of the van like a big shot and told him, what’s he doing here? That he don’t belong. The vato, he pulled a shotgun from under his coat and pulled the trigger. What’s he doing with a coat on? He came down here looking for somebody to shoot to make a name for himself.” Alejandro lifted himself from his knees and sat cross-legged in the middle of the intersection.
“Get that guy out of the crime scene,” Hartson yelled.
“My Kiko, he had to be the first one to challenge him. Look at me,” he said. His shoulders quivered as he lost his fight to hold back the tears that flowed into a pencil thin mustache with flecks of gray at the edges. “I was in Nam. They couldn’t do nothing to hurt me there. But right here in my own neighborhood, somebody gunned down my boy. What am I going to tell his momma?”
Luke saw Hartson coming and there he was, just standing there, letting some guy sit in the middle of the crime scene. Hartson stomped through the crowd, apparently prepared to give Luke a tongue lashing only an incompetent trainee deserved.
“Sir, I wish I had a clue what to say to your wife about your son,” Luke said, raising his voice so Hartson could hear. He reached under Alejandro’s arms and started to lift as the burly mechanic raised a calloused hand and wiped a rolling tear away.
“Officer,” Alejandro pleaded, another tear rolling through his mustache. “Can I hold my baby just one more time so I can tell his momma?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t let you do that,” Luke said. “We need to work together to protect the scene so we can catch who did this. Why don’t you tell your wife you did the right thing, that you stayed strong?”
Luke helped Alejandro up, walked him to the curb and helped him sit. Alejandro tried to stand, but crumpled to his knees in the gutter and rocked on his haunches.
Hartson helped Bradford finish securing the scene and motioned for Luke to join him at the car since a supervisor had arrived to take charge. Only a few officers were needed to stay at the scene until Homicide got there and Hartson was hungry. He directed Luke to the drive-through at Roberto’s, a small fast food Mexican restaurant that resembled a swollen pickle barrel.
“What kind of crap is this?” Luke asked. “I thought you were springing for Greek food tonight.”
“There you go thinking again. I must’ve forgot to tell you, trainees should be seen and not heard.”
Luke understood this type of macho banter only got tossed around by guys who liked one another and basked in his gained acceptance as he and his partner took massive bites from greasy tacos and deep swigs from aluminum soda cans. Luke wiped a glob of guacamole from his mustache, lifted his chin and pointed out a patch of salsa on the front of Hartson’s shirt below the name tag.
“Shit,” Hartson said. “Goddamn it. Wipe that grin off your rookie face.”
“Pretty sloppy if you ask me,” Luke said.
“Nobody asked you,” Hartson said as he wiped at the spot with a napkin. The action left a greasy red blob that spread outward in a fashion sure to set with an irrevocable stain.
“A clean shirt’s the sign of a clean mind,” Luke said. “That mess is the outer evidence of the filth trapped inside that head of yours.”
“I suppose that’s Shakespeare,” Hartson said.
“Actually, that one’s courtesy of Grandma Jones,” Luke answered. “But there’re plenty of slobs in Shakespeare’s plays to help make her point. They’re always his lowlife characters, you know, the drunks and sluggards, the kind of folks you senior guys call pond scum and dirtbags.”
“Fifty-one-Frank,” the dispatcher said before Hartson could frame a response. “Can you clear your Code-7?”
“Affirmative,” Luke answered into the microphone without checking with Hartson.
“We’ve got a six-year-old on the line who says her parents aren’t home and she can’t be late for school. The phone room operator has promised not to hang up until somebody gets there.”
“Doesn’t want to be late for school?” Luke said to Hartson. “It’s the middle of the afternoon?”
“We’ll just contact and evaluate,” Hartson said. “What else can I say?”
The upstairs door that was ajar drew their attention as they walked beside a curving hedge lined at its base by Shasta daisies. Hartson nodded toward a set of keys in the lock after they trudged up the stairs. He grabbed the edge of the door, put a foot inside, and knocked, calling out repeatedly before leading Luke inside to find a neatly groomed woman dressed in a trim black suit. She was curled into a fetal position on the couch, the phone clutched close to her ear.
Hartson cupped her shoulder and nudged her gently. “What’s going on?” he asked her. “Who else is here?”
Luke checked out the rest of the apartment as Hartson answered a curious radio dispatcher’s questions through his handie-talkie. “Yes. We’re inside. No, there’s no little girl here. There’s
only a woman who’s probably in her late twenties, but we can’t get her to talk to us.”
Hartson tugged the receiver from the woman’s ear and spoke to the operator while Luke surveyed the room for clues to what had happened. “Unbelievable,” Hartson said after hanging up. “The operator says he’s been talking to a six-year-old girl for close to an hour now. He swears it’s a little girl.”
Luke eased onto his knees and stroked the woman’s clammy forehead as her body quavered against the flowered print of the couch. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Why did you call the police? What’s happened?”
“My daddy hurts me.” The tentative answer came in the timbre of a young child. “My mommy won’t love me if I tell. I don’t want to, but I don’t want him doing things anymore.”
“Your daddy won’t hurt you from now on,” Luke assured her. “My partner and I’ll see to it that nobody hurts you.” His words triggered a memory and he smelled a musty odor. He’d forgotten being there until this moment, in the house of a childhood neighbor. He couldn’t have been more than seven and pushed open a bedroom door to see Tuffy standing in the middle of the floor with his pants around his ankles and a man’s face close to his crotch. Tuffy stood as still as anyone could stand.
“Smell that?” Hartson asked Luke as he walked to the front door, pulled the keys from the outer lock and closed the door in the faces of a gaggle of nosy neighbors.
“She’s peed herself,” Luke said.
Hartson eyed Luke as he whispered words of consolation to the attractive woman with a shivering adult body and the broken heart of a little girl. “You know,” he said as he started looking around the apartment for some identification to figure out who to call for help. “Every now and then, something comes along that really gets to me.”
Luke nodded.
A pristine kitchen, neatly placed knickknacks and a bedroom closet full of tightly pressed women’s suits still wrapped in plastic baggies from the Fairlane Cleaners revealed that only one person lived here and that person was an adult female. A telephone answering machine on a stand next to the couch displayed a flashing red light. Hartson finally noticed it, walked back into the living room, and turned the knob.
“Laurie,” an older female voice said, a tremulous urgency evident in every syllable. “I haven’t been able to find you anywhere. Baby. Your daddy didn’t make it through surgery. Can you come home right away? I need you here with me.”
The question held a poignant silence together until Luke broke the tension with a question. “How often do you take two people in one shift to the mental hospital?”
From his answer, Luke knew Hartson’s emotional center of gravity had been knocked askew. “This job’s a lot like golf, the big difference is, somebody else tees off, and then we play everything as it lays.”
“What happened to her?” Luke asked.
“It doesn’t take a shrink to figure this mess out,” Hartson said. “She was obviously molested by her father as a kid.”
“I got that much,” Luke interrupted.
Hartson took a quick glance around the room. “Look at the evidence, smart guy. Considering the keys hanging in the lock, she was obviously either headed in or out the door. She heard the phone ring, ran in to hear the message and snapped when she heard it. She got completely helpless again, like a six-year-old girl being hurt by somebody who should have protected her.” Hartson paused. “I hope the old fuck was in a lot of pain when he died, that’s all I can say.”
“You know, Luke,” Hartson said as the ambulance pulled away and they piled into their car to drive to the station. “You ran into a lot more shit today than some officers see in a month.”
A grin spread on Luke’s face. “That sort of reminds me of a quotation,” Luke said.
“Aw Jesus, of course it does,” Hartson said.
Luke let fly.
O that a man might know,
The end of this day’s business ere it’ come,
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.
“I don’t suppose that’s Grandma Jones,” Hartson said.
“Julius Caesar,” Luke answered.
“Really,” Hartson said. “I actually figured it was probably Shakespeare.”
“Shit,” Hartson spit the word out before Luke could say the quotation actually came from Shakespeare’s play, not from Caesar himself. “I guess we’re not done yet after all?”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you see that?”
“See what?”
“Get your head out of your ass and maybe you’ll see something sometime,” Hartson said. “You didn’t see the turn that gray truck just made?” Hartson leaned forward to activate the emergency lights.
“I didn’t see anything,” Luke said as the truck with the personalized license plate of “Thor,” yielded and pulled to the curb.
Hartson passed between the front of the car and back of the truck before Luke unfastened his seat belt. The truck’s driver, who confronted Hartson in the street, completely personified the mythical name on his license plate. He was a gigantic man with shoulder-length blonde hair and his resentful gaze shot down toward the smaller man.
“What the fuck do you want?” Thor demanded to know.
“Sir,” Hartson said as he craned his neck upward to look the towering man in the eyes. “I need to see your driver’s license and the truck’s registration papers.”
“What’d I do?” Thor demanded. The slits of his eyes narrowed and his hands balled into fists.
“When you made that turn, you cut across a double yellow line, drove on the wrong side of the road and nearly caused an accident.” Hartson spoke the words as he glanced to his side to make sure Luke understood the danger.
“Like hell!”
“I’ll be right back with my ticket book,” Hartson said.
“I won’t sign shit.”
“You’ll either sign or you’ll go to jail,” Hartson said.
Luke knew the authority Hartson represented dictated the eventual winner in the battle of wills. The price of victory was the only unanswered question.
“I’ve been digging ditches all week,” the Viking giant said, a slightly quieter tone to his voice. “And a ticket’ll cost me three days wages. Can’t you give me a break this once?”
“If you wanted a break, you should’ve asked before you came off like such an asshole,” Hartson said.
“You can bet your pig ass you’ll have a fight on your hands,” the Viking shot back.
“Is that a threat? Are you threatening me?” Hartson demanded.
“You’ll see when you finish writing that ticket.”
The Viking behemoth, pulling himself deliberately tall in his square-toed work boots, stood two heads taller than Hartson. The size disparity obviously catapulted his confidence to immeasurable heights.
“I’ll shove that stupid club up your ass sideways till it comes out your ears.” The Viking shouted the words at Hartson before turning his attention toward Luke for the first time. “And you,” he bellowed. “What the fuck are you going to do when I’m taking this punk’s policeman toys away and kicking his ass up and down the street?”
Luke had trained for this moment for more than a decade. “That man’s my training officer.” Luke squared his feet into a fighting stance and delivered his responses with the calm of a Zen master surrounded by the serenity of an oriental garden. “And if he tells me to, I’ll be kicking your ditch digger ass.”
18
Winter 1978
BALBOA PARK’S BIG BANG MOMENT of creation came with the Panama-California Exposition opening on January 1, 1915, in what had previously been known as City Park.
It’s impossible to calculate the cost in lives, human misery and personal tragedies among the workers who constructed Panama’s canal so rich people who lived in rich nations could improve the quality of their already stellar lives. It is safe to say none of those thoughts stirred the minds
in the park on opening day so many years ago.
The Expo was so big its most august participant performed his role from a stage twenty-six hundred miles away. Woodrow Wilson threw a Washington D.C. switch that ignited a stream of light bulbs suspended from a massive balloon. The flash illuminated three square miles on the ground and coincided with events several miles distant as Navy ships in San Diego’s bay boomed enormous cannons at Point Loma’s Fort Rosecrans. The explosions reverberated for miles around.
The exposition’s Isthmus, a stretch on the east side of the park, spanned 8,000 square feet, encompassing twenty-five acres of ground. It housed Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds together with the menagerie of exotic animals that would later blossom into the world famous San Diego Zoo. Other displays included a China town, a Japan town and a Hawaiian dance stage. Colossal dioramas of scenes from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Battle of Manila Bay, complete with a shipwreck and battle sound effects, dominated the landscape. The exhibit also boasted a replica of a mountain railway train, a .22 caliber shooting gallery and elictriquettes, small electric cars that carried two or three people at the fantastic speed of three miles-per-hour around the exhibition.
The exposition’s magnetic appeal lured the rich and famous from around the country. Among the more celebrated visitors were William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt, then Secretary of the Navy, and his nephew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Given the electric light opening, the attending luminaries had to include Thomas Alva Edison.
The west end of the park’s layout included football fields, baseball diamonds, botanical gardens—courtesy of Kate Sessions—and a lily pond shimmering beneath a spectacular concrete and steel bridge named for Juan Cabrillo, its six arches emulating a famous bridge in Spain. Quail and rabbit skittered beneath the undulating trees and it seemed for all the world that nothing could go amiss in this magnificent park, the crown jewel of the city referred to by so many as, “This sun-splashed Eden by the Sea.”
The exposition’s more understated closing ceremonies were, by all accounts, a touch more elegant. A famous resident opera singer, Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink, stood on the Organ Pavilion’s magnificent stage, belting out Auld Lang Syne, tears streaming down her face as a splendiferous display of fireworks spelled out, “World’s Peace, 1917.” Congress declared war on Germany less than four months later.