77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I’m not sure I know what you want,” Kellenberger said, looking at me over the top of his reading glasses. “I know what the Freedom of Information form says you want. But I don’t get it.”

  “You remember the SLA?” I asked.

  He gave me a crooked, know-it-all smile. “I worked the SLA case. I was there.”

  “Early on the morning of the shoot-out, the SLA abandoned a house on Eighty-fourth Street and moved uptown to Fifty-fourth. After they left, the FBI raided Eighty-fourth Street. All I want is to see your inventory of the contents of that house.”

  Kellenberger had his hands folded on top of a manila file folder, as if protecting the file from me. “You filed a formal request. If there is a document, and if it is available for public access, we’ll mail it to you.”

  “I believe Detective Flint explained that time is of the essence.”

  “Uh-huh.” He was being a hard-ass and getting off on it. I knew the file I wanted was under his hands, and that after he had finished his shtick I was going to get a look at it. We just had to play this little scene through to its end.

  I smiled. “Can you tell me what type of underwear was worn by the men in the SLA?”

  He frowned to keep from smiling, to keep from telling me to get lost. “Detective Flint said something about a movie. What kind of movie is it?”

  “Documentary.” I took a notebook out of my bag and flipped it open. Scene one, act two. “Unsolved local cop killing, Officer Roy Frady. You familiar with it?”

  He waffled his hand, meaning either he sort of remembered or the case was no big deal.

  I said, “I believe the killing had many of the earmarks of an SLA caper. Frady was shot around midnight on May tenth. You worked the SLA case, you know the possible significance of the date.” When I told him the address where Frady was shot, I got some reaction, a nod of recognition, so I continued.

  “When Roy Frady was found, his head was wrapped in a freshly laundered pair of size thirty-six blue boxer shorts. Then his flannel shirt was tied around his head to hold the shorts in place.”

  He lifted the file and opened it.

  I said, “According to the officers who shared the Seventy-seventh Street locker room with him, and the many women who might have firsthand knowledge, Roy Frady never wore blue boxers, rarely wore anything except size thirty-two white jockeys.”

  Kellenberger leafed through the documents in the file.

  “So,” I said. “Other than cartridge cases and bullets from a nine-millimeter Browning semiautomatic, those boxer shorts are the only physical connection between Frady and his killers. All I want to know is this: did any of the three men in the SLA house wear size thirty-six boxer shorts?”

  He took off his glasses. “The SLA already had enough heat on them. Why would they do something as asinine as shooting a cop?”

  “At her bank robbery trial, Patty Hearst said that when the SLA moved to the Los Angeles ghetto, Cinque trained them constantly for search and destroys, which she defined as going out every night, stealing a car, destroying a cop, hiding out. In her eulogy to her dead comrades, she said—even though I believe she was fed the words—that Nancy Ling Perry taught her to shoot first and make sure the pig was dead before splitting. I think that describes what happened to Roy Frady in a very clear way.”

  “Yeah?” Another smug smile. “For instance.”

  “Besides motive and opportunity? The MO.” I sat forward, met his eyes. “Precise planning. The killer took Frady’s service weapon, and it has never been found. His car was commandeered, dumped down in the South Bay, by Ascot Raceway. Wiped clean of prints.”

  “Boxer shorts?” he said, pulling out a single sheet of paper, which he handed to me. My palms began to sweat, my heart pounded. My thought was, what a great gift to take home to Mike, the solution of the Frady murder. What a great promotional hook for the film.

  The sheet was a fuzzy photocopy of the original Eighty-fourth Street inventory. I scanned the lines: groceries, dishes, mattresses, furniture. And this: “Two cardboard cartons, various items, men’s and women’s clothing. One suitcase, various items, men’s and women’s clothing.” No details.

  I handed it back to Kellenberger. “Where is this stuff now?”

  He pointed to a notation at the bottom. Everything had been destroyed years ago. Kellenberger began to rise as a sign, I believe, that the interview was over. I stayed in my seat.

  “You said you worked the case. Tell me what it was like inside that house.”

  “All I remember is trash. Nine people spend the better part of a week in two rooms, they generate a lot of trash.”

  “What about the autopsy reports?” I asked. “Anything about clothes?”

  “Clothes?” He sneered. “After the fire there was hardly enough bone left for the coroner to identify. Clothes? Forget it. I think maybe you’re out of luck on this one unless the three survivors want to talk to you.”

  “Not likely they’d say anything that might tie them to a murder. I know the FBI had a mole planted with the SLA. I don’t suppose you’d tell me anything about him. Or her.”

  He shrugged. “Guess you’re at a dead end.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and turned to a new page of my notebook. “The son of our next-door neighbor was kidnapped by the SLA the night Patty Hearst was taken. He was overpowered at gunpoint by Nancy ling Perry as he got into his car in front of his mother’s house. Perry blindfolded him with his own shirt, made him lie on the floor of the backseat under a blanket. He was still on the floor when the kidnappers dumped Patty, also blindfolded, into the trunk of his car and drove off with both of them.

  “In Oakland, Patty was transferred to another commandeered car; the kid was thanked for his service to the revolution and abandoned. There wasn’t a single fingerprint in that car when the SLA walked away. They were very consistent.”

  He said, “You think this is new information to us? You think we didn’t go over every angle?”

  “I’m sure you did. That’s why I came to you.”

  He folded his hands across his paunch and studied me for an uncomfortable moment before he asked, “Where do you get your information?”

  “Same place you do: police, witnesses, the press.”

  “I thought so.” He sat up straight. “Because your information isn’t very good.”

  “Where am I wrong?”

  “The gun,” he said. “Frady’s gun showed up in a Las Vegas junkyard. Your police friends should have known that.”

  “When?”

  “Couple years after the shooting.”

  “In Vegas?” It made a small mental click. Doug had mentioned Vegas that morning. “How did it get to the junkyard?”

  “The lead’s a dead end. Won’t get you anywhere.” Kellenberger handed me the file of xeroxed reports. “They’re still around, you know.”

  “Who is?”

  “There were more lunatics in the SLA than the group that came to L.A. They all didn’t die in the fire.” He stood up and offered me his hand. “If anything turns up, give me a call.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You, too.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  One of my best resource people is an old college friend, Darl Incledon. Darl can find anything. For the last six or eight years she has worked for a construction consortium, recovering heavy equipment that gets stolen from construction sites. She travels all over the country, matching serial numbers to skip loaders and road graders parked at construction sites. When she hits one on her hot-equipment list, she climbs in, this itty-bitty brunette in her demure little suits and prim little pumps, and drives it away. No one dares to challenge her.

  When I got to the studio, I called Darl.

  “I need you to find a gun for me, a thirty-eight-caliber Smith and Wesson Airweight, two-inch barrel, blue steel, five-shot revolver, serial number three two eight three one four.”

  “Where am I going to start looking?” she asked.

  “Las Ve
gas. It was recovered from a junkyard after May of 1974, maybe a couple of years after.”

  “Twenty years ago?” Darl laughed. “No sweat, honey. I’ll just pick it up on my way home from work. You expecting me to bring you this very gun?”

  “That would be nice. But I would be happy if you could find out who found it and where it was found. And when.”

  “I’ll make some calls.”

  “What I want is the route the gun took from Los Angeles. Any names you can attach to it.” I gave her some background on Roy Frady and she seemed, as Darl usually seems, excited to be on the hunt, positive about the prospects for success.

  “If I find it,” she said, “you owe me lunch.”

  “Even if you don’t find it, I owe you lunch. Bill me for expenses.”

  I was in the cutting room logging in film footage for the editor, hiding out from Thea D’Angelo, when Mike called from Parker Center.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “I have my bank shooter on the other line. Won’t hurt to make him sweat a little. Let him hang on hold. So, what’s new?”

  “Your murderer called you?”

  “I called him. He gave me his pager number after the first heist. We’ve been talking off and on all week.”

  “Tell him to turn himself in right now because your main squeeze is getting cranky about all the overtime he’s causing.”

  “I’ll give you his pager number and you can tell him yourself.”

  “Gladly,” I said. “How are you?”

  “My backside itches, but otherwise I’m fine.”

  “I’ll put something on your back when you get home.”

  “What something?”

  “Me.”

  He laughed.

  I asked, “What’s your schedule tonight?”

  “Depends. I have a meeting on this bank case, people from every department where they’ve hit—I think they’ve done banks in five cities all told—and the Feds. We’re trying to put everything we have together, get the big picture.”

  “I thought you didn’t work bank robberies,” I said.

  “I don’t. I told you, the bank shooters like me. He calls me all the time, she sends me little love notes. They want me on this case, I’m on it. I have a feeling the man is someone I busted or testified against, and they have some hard feelings. Whatever, they sure have the hots for me.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “What do the notes say?”

  “Why?” He chuckled. “Jealous?”

  “Not hardly. I can’t see you running off with a woman half of the witnesses describe as an ugly man. Unless maybe you have a kinky thing for women who shoot old ladies in banks. There’s a lot I don’t know about you, Mike.”

  “We’ll keep it that way.” He ruffled some papers. “The notes say things like, they aren’t stealing money out of banks, they are merely redistributing the wealth. And when they tell people to hit the floor, they mean it, so they don’t feel responsible for the two people they’ve knocked off.”

  “Do you have a profile yet?”

  “A profile?” Mike snorted. “I don’t need some egghead to tell me how these assholes were emotionally neglected children who are acting out their aggression against authority figures by knocking off banks, because this is all I need to know: they’re losers.”

  “You talk so tough,” I said.

  “Yeah?” There was a heh-heh in there. “I am tough.”

  “Not where it counts. Not where the sun don’t shine,” I said. “You coming home for dinner?”

  “Hell yes. I need something on my backside.”

  “Happy to oblige. Did you find a bagpiper?”

  “Yeah.” He paused. “Something funny came up. Got the reports from the Santa Monica PD about Hector. The guy who shot him? His mother said he wasn’t armed. Because of his mental history, she never allowed a gun in the house. She said she didn’t know where the murder weapon came from.”

  “So, where did it come from?”

  “Nowhere. It was reported stolen in a residential burglary fifteen years ago. Looks to me like a throwaway gun.”

  “What’s a throwaway?”

  “Sometimes you go out on a call or you pull someone over and you have to take a gun off a guy. If you don’t make an arrest, it’s just too much hassle to do all the paperwork to book the gun in. Some of the guys keep ’em for insurance in case they get in a shooting that goes down bad—asshole goes to his waistband, so you drop him. But when you turn him over, there’s no gun. You cover yourself, kick a throwaway under the body.”

  I try not to sound shocked by what Mike says sometimes. I never worked the streets, I can’t always make judgments. “Did you ever do that, Mike?”

  “Not with a gun, but maybe a knife once or twice. When I picked up guns I used to toss them into the flood control on my way in. Saved a lot of paperwork.”

  “Maybe Hector took the gun in with him. Maybe it was one of his throwaways.”

  “I asked that question. When the neighbor woman went looking for him, Hec was just coming in from the beach with some friends. All he had on was running shorts and a jock. No place to hide a gun. And even if he was packing, he wouldn’t let some lunatic get it away from him.”

  “You would have said the same thing about Roy Frady,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Mike, you never told me Frady’s gun turned up.”

  There was a long pause. “Who says?”

  “The FBI.”

  “There’s no recovery notation in the department files,” he said.

  “Doesn’t mean it isn’t true. FBI says the gun turned up in Vegas.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Don’t go looking for a mob tie-in.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the mob at all,” I said. “There are all sorts of people in Las Vegas. Retirees from the Snowbelt, for instance.”

  “What brought that up?”

  “I started thinking about Vegas this morning when Doug said Ridgeway had some Vegas tie.”

  “Gambling?”

  “Don’t be a cop for just a minute, and listen to me,” I said. “About a month after the big L.A. shoot-out, the three SLA survivors, Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst, were taken east by this radical sportswriter.”

  “Oh yeah. What was his name? Hooked up with that longhaired basketball player.” Mike hummed while he thought. “Bill Walton.”

  “Never mind the basketball player. This sportswriter’s parents lived in Vegas, managed a little motel; snowbirds in retirement.”

  “Uh-huh” sounded like a challenge with the timer running.

  “Patty Hearst and Bill Harris passed through that Vegas motel in June of 1974 on their way east to hide out, and again in September when they’d worn out their eastern welcome and had to trek back to Berkeley. Hell, the sportswriter’s parents drove Patty all the way to New York. Sweet old white-haired people.” I paused, gave him some considering time. “The SLA three started out with their usual duffle bag of guns. The sportswriter made them leave all weapons behind.”

  “They left the guns in Vegas?”

  “I don’t know. The important thing is, there’s a connection.”

  “If you believe the FBI,” Mike said.

  “Will you make some calls for me?”

  “Hmm,” was all he said. Followed by, “What’s for dinner?”

  Before I went upstairs for my two o’clock meeting with Lana, I stopped by my office cubicle, read through my stack of menus, and faxed a dinner order to the restaurant delivery service. Guido came in before I got out the door.

  “Where’s I asked.Rolling Stone?”

  “Thea volunteered to give him a tour,” Guido said. “Maggie, we have a problem.”

  “On a scale of one to ten …”

  “The dancer isn’t being very cooperative,” he said. “Fergie said she couldn’t get her to confirm an interview time and I want to shoot her tomorrow morning before we go back to the house. We’re all set up with the Hot-Cha Club again, but the dancer
’s balking. Did she call you?”

  “No,” I said. “Hold on a minute, I’ll try her.” I loaded my computer’s Rolodex, scrolled to Michelle Tarbett’s number, and pushed Dial. I got Michelle on the third ring, and she agreed to talk with me that afternoon, no cameras. I hung up and turned back to Guido. “She’ll be okay. We’ll get her there in the morning.”

  “Cold feet?” he said.

  “Camera shy; she’s feeling fat. What do you want to do right now?”

  “I left Fergie waiting for X rays,” he said. “I want to go get her.”

  “Go. We’ll schedule Michelle. No big loss if we don’t. She isn’t the only girlfriend Frady had.”

  “This day has a jinx.”

  “Take Fergie home and make her comfortable,” I said. “Don’t forget, we have a tentative date tonight. Eightish.”

  “Jack coming along?”

  I said, “No.”

  Lana was alone when I walked into her office. She barely looked up from the balance sheets in front of her. “The accounting is beautiful. That kink-headed giant is a genius with this shit. Where’d you find her?”

  “Thea? You assigned her from the staff pool.”

  “She’s an odd one, but she’s good.”

  When I sat down, Lana glanced up as if surprised. “Did I forget to call you? We don’t need a meeting; you sold Gaylord. Just remember he has a short memory. By the time he gets back to New York, he may have reconsidered.”

  “So, we’ll sell him all over.”

  “Won’t be so easy next time. I suggest you think about what he said, Maggie. Think hard.”

  “Which part?”

  “All of it.”

  I thought about it. Working around L.A. means driving the freeways, plenty of time to think about a lot of things.

  I was back on the freeway in early rush hour, headed south toward the suburban town of Lakewood. A couple of fender benders held traffic to a crawl, the usual mess. Plenty of time for thinking about how long seven months can be.

  You live in Southern California for a while, you learn to calculate a trip in time rather than distance. It isn’t an exact science. The trick is factoring possible mishaps against the likelihood of a clear roadway. Sometimes you arrive too late, sometimes too early. It’s a bitch either way. I was five minutes early for my appointment with Roy Frady’s widow: one fender bender, one stray dog on the right shoulder.