A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  His expression remained the same, but I seemed to have his attention. “We don’t know who he was.”

  Nothing.

  “Any chance you might be able to help us?” I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet, crouched in front of him, and held it out.

  He looked at the bill, then up at me, and then back at the bill, as if he was trying to determine if it might be some kind of trick. After a few seconds, I had apparently convinced him of my sincerity and he reached for the money.

  “Do you know who he was? He was tall, about six feet. Had a Whole Foods shopping cart.”

  That seemed to trigger something in him. “Bishop,” he said.

  “Bishop? That was his name?”

  He gave me a slight nod.

  “Was that his first name or his last?”

  He looked at me very seriously and said in a voice barely louder than a whisper, “Bishop danced . . .”

  Without missing a beat, I answered him, completing the lyric about the thumbscrew woman.

  His eyes widened in recognition, and I knew that, at least for the moment, I’d cut through whatever fog was enveloping him and made a connection.

  4

  PAPERBACK COPY OF THE GRAPES OF WRATH, BY JOHN STEINBECK: VIKING CRITICAL EDITION, 1992, OLD, WELL WORN, MARGINAL NOTATIONS THROUGHOUT.

  The autopsy was harder than I expected. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected it to be difficult at all. After a detective’s been working homicide for a while, if he’s still having trouble with autopsies and crime scenes, he needs to get out. It’s not going to get any easier. You reach a point early on when you realize whether or not you’re capable of dealing with the realities of death on a daily basis. Most cops know before they ever ask for the assignment. Every once in a while, though, someone slips through. A few years ago, we had a guy transfer in from Sex Crimes the same way Jen had. His name was Grogan. We rotated him through the squad so he’d have the chance to spend some time with each of the vets. Usually working rapes and molestations and the rest prepares someone to deal with very nasty stuff, and we all thought he was cut out for the job. One day when we were working a particularly brutal child murder and we got our first look at the little girl on the ME’s stainless-steel table, Grogan looked down at her and turned an ashen color. Her head had been cut off and there was a two-inch gap separating the severed ends of her neck. The odd thing was that her long blonde hair still reached down past her shoulders and was visible in the space between the raw edges of her neck. He looked at it for several seconds, turned to me, and said, “Excuse me a sec, I’ll be right back.” I never saw him again. Ruiz told me he maxed out his leave time and then requested a transfer back to patrol.

  I’d never had strong reactions to autopsies. Homicide had always been my goal, and I worked hard to get it. I never struggled with the grisly realities of the work the way many cops did. Something in my psyche had prepared me for the realities of the job. I’d always known I was cut out for it.

  So I was surprised by the feeling of tightness in the pit of my stomach when the ME, Paula Henderson—her gray hair trimmed short and her eyeglasses, as always, hanging on a chain around her neck—led me in to begin.

  As soon as I saw the face of the victim, burned into a blackened rictus, the hair gone, the flesh seared away into taut, leathery ropes of tissue, the deep reds, purples, and browns of the remnants of flesh, it took me back to the first time I’d seen the accident-scene photos of the auto accident that had killed my wife. It had been five years since Megan’s Toyota had been sandwiched between two eighteen-wheelers. We had been going through a rough patch, and she was on her way to stay with her mother for a while. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she was pregnant with our first child. She survived the impact, but her car caught fire and she perished in the flames. I never should have seen the photos of the aftermath of the collision, but I had connections, and I worked them hard to get copies of all of the files, too. I even have autopsy pictures. A lot of people tried hard to keep me from looking at all of those investigative materials. No one could have tried hard enough, though. I had to see. I had to know. All of the gruesome details have long been fixed in my memory.

  When I looked at the victim’s body on the table, it took a concerted effort to put Megan out of my head and focus on the task at hand.

  Ten minutes in, Paula looked me in the eye with a compassionate, motherly expression and asked, “Are you okay?”

  I pretended too hard to be offended and said, “Of course I am. Just keep going.”

  There were no big surprises. We did get a bit of useful information. He was Caucasian, late fifties to midsixties, between five foot ten and five foot eleven, 150 to 160 pounds. Graying black hair and brown eyes. Size twelve shoes on size eleven feet with three pairs of socks in between. Moderate level of liver disease. A scar on his lower-left back from a wound that had been stitched up.

  “Could that be surgical?” I asked.

  “It could, but there are no other indications. Looks like a knife, but I doubt a doctor was holding it.”

  I called in the physical description and possible name to Stan and told him to spread it around the other uniforms helping with the canvass. It felt like things were starting to come together.

  “What the hell does that even mean?” Jen asked me that afternoon over lunch at Enrique’s. The location wasn’t convenient for either of us, but she knew it was my favorite food in Long Beach.

  I’d told her about the shirtless man under the bridge. “It’s an old Springsteen song. ‘Bishop Danced.’”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s kind of obscure. From the Greetings from Asbury Park days, but it was never available on anything until Tracks. It’s not one that—”

  “Don’t go all fanboy on me. I’ll take your word for it. You really think his name was Bishop?”

  “I’m not sure. Going to keep the uniforms on the canvass, and I want to get the description to the homeless shelters and see if the name rings any bells for anyone else.”

  “Sounds good. You holding up okay?”

  “Sure.”

  There was doubt in her eyes.

  “Why is everybody asking me that?”

  “Because it’s a burn victim.”

  “You guys really think I’m that unstable?”

  “Nobody thinks you’re unstable. We just think it might be hard.”

  I considered what she was saying. Not the fact that it would be perfectly natural for a man who’d lost his wife in a fire to be rattled by investigating a homicide by fire, but the sudden concern my colleagues were showing for my ability to handle the difficulty. I felt a momentary twinge of resentment, but it passed as quickly as it had come, and I reminded myself who I was sitting with.

  I said, “The autopsy was kind of tough. More than I expected it to be.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t let it stew like you always do. It’s okay to talk about it.”

  “I’m not bottling anything up. I have talked about it.”

  “To who?”

  “Lauren. Stan’s partner.” I didn’t realize how absurd that would sound until I said it out loud. Of course I hadn’t talked about Megan’s death. I’d only used it in a weak attempt to build rapport in an interview.

  “You told that rookie about Megan?” Jen asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “She was tense. I was trying to get her to relax.”

  “By talking about your dead wife?”

  “I needed to personalize. Get her to think of me as something other than her superior. So she’d be comfortable talking.”

  “You think that’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If it was anybody else, I’d say they were hitting on her.”

  “But not me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Seriously? Have you ever hit on anybody? Ever?”

  I thought about it. “I asked Megan out.”

  “In college.”

/>   “You’re oblivious.”

  “To what?”

  “How’s the carne asada?”

  Back in the office after lunch, I checked my messages and found one from the MUPS unit. They found six hits on the name Bishop, but none of them matched the physical details of our victim. I added the new information from the autopsy to the MUPS report and told them the DNA sample was on the way. There wasn’t too much—just the scar as a distinguishing mark and more accurate numbers for the height and weight and other descriptors. I’d have to wait awhile to see what, if anything, they came up with.

  When I hung up the phone, Jen said, “I found Jesús.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Didn’t have to look far. He’s Pedro’s brother. I cross-checked all three of their cell-phone contact lists. There’s a couple more Jesúses, but only one who’s in all of them. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to talk to him.” I checked my watch. “He go to Poly with the others? Maybe we can catch him there.”

  “No dice. I already called the school office. He didn’t show up today.”

  “Let’s wait awhile before we try his house. I want to see somebody else first.”

  Outside, the heat was radiating off the street and sidewalk in visible waves. The weather app on my phone said the current temperature in Long Beach was ninety-one, but it felt fifteen degrees hotter.

  I’d done some research on Benicio Guerra, and I filled Jen in as we walked. By the time I finished, I’d already worked up a sweat. “You still think it was a good idea to walk?” I asked.

  “It’s barely a block away. We’d spend more time navigating our way out of one parking garage and into the other than we’ll spend walking out here. Chill out.”

  “Funny.”

  We’d exited the department through the back parking lot and cut behind the courthouse to turn left on Magnolia. As we crossed the street and headed west on Ocean, we passed the Federal Building. Several months earlier, an ICE agent who was apparently pissed off about not getting a transfer he requested went batshit there and pumped six rounds into his boss. One of his colleagues thought that was inappropriate behavior and dropped him. He died on the scene, but the supervisor survived. The incident was still fresh enough that, unless they were alone, no one in the LBPD ever walked by the building without either making an ICE crack or hearing one.

  “Should have worn your vest,” Jen said as we passed the lobby doors.

  “I’ll bet the IRS is happy that nobody who comes here rags on them anymore.”

  “You know, Patrick made the same joke five or six months ago.”

  “Really? Shit.”

  “Don’t take it so hard.”

  “Without my razor-sharp wit, I’m nothing.”

  “That’s what you base your self-worth on?”

  “Yes. That and the number of ‘likes’ my status updates get on Facebook.”

  Guerra and Associates took up a whole floor of the World Trade Center building on Ocean. From the look of the lobby, they were doing pretty well. Lots of glass and wood and brushed metal. The receptionist offered us a latte. We declined.

  Benny didn’t keep us waiting long. A young suit, who looked at least as much like muscle as he did like an attorney, came in and introduced himself. “Hello, Detectives, I’m Gregory, Mr. Guerra’s associate.”

  “Danny Beckett,” I said, extending my hand. He gave it a solid shake, but I knew there was more strength in his arm than he used. I couldn’t tell if I knew that because of my amazing perceptive abilities or because he wanted me to know it. “This is my partner,” I said, “Jennifer Tanaka.”

  “Hello,” he said to her, smiling. He initiated a handshake, but when he saw she wasn’t reciprocating, he brought his left up as well and clasped them both in front of his waist. “Can I get you something to drink? A latte?

  “No,” I said. “Thank you.” I made a show of looking at Jen and raising my eyebrows.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Very kind of you to offer.”

  “Let’s head back, shall we?”

  Jen looked him in the eye and said, “Yes.”

  The walk was long, as I’m sure it was intended to be. Lawyers with their names on the wall behind the reception desk always want to make sure you have plenty of time to think about how important they are on the long walk back to the corner office.

  I was trying to figure out what to make of Benicio Guerra playing the same game as all the other high-end attorneys in Southern California, because he certainly wasn’t like anyone else.

  He’d done eight years for a triple murder when he was a soldier in one of the Long Beach Longo sets. No one involved in the investigation thought he had actually pulled the trigger, but he stepped up and took the hit for someone higher up in the pecking order. He served his time, and while he was in prison he was believed to have killed at least two of his fellow inmates. I wanted to appreciate the irony of Guerra going away for murders he didn’t actually commit only to become a murderer inside, but I just couldn’t. That was too cynical even for me.

  We came into his office, and he stood, made a show of walking out from behind his expansive desk, and shook our hands.

  I’d never met him before, but his history was well known. He’d always been smart, and while he was inside, he took full advantage of his time to study. He’d stacked his time before prisons had started reducing access to their law libraries in the late nineties, and he walked out of prison and into Long Beach City College. After his eight years, Benny found higher education a breeze and transferred to UCLA with a 4.0 GPA and a redemption story that carried all the way through law school. He started as an associate with Sternow and Byrne, a huge Century City firm that allowed him to learn from some of the highest-paid criminal defense attorneys in Southern California. After four years, he started his own practice. And wound up here.

  Since his release, he had stayed clean as a hound’s tooth. Not even a parking ticket. Benny had figured out how to make crime really pay.

  “Hello, detectives. Welcome.” He gestured toward a pale-beige leather sofa, and we sat. “Can I get you something to drink? An espresso, perhaps?” I wondered if they had just invested in a fancy new coffee machine. When we declined the beverage offer, he took a matching chair opposite us. Our backs were to the window, so he got to enjoy the view of the ocean and the harbor. We didn’t mind. Cops always sit with their backs to the wall whenever they can. Besides, Jen and I had both seen everything on the other side of the glass.

  “How can I help you?” he said.

  “Do you know why we’re here?” I asked.

  He had a narrow, inch-long tendril of scar tissue that ran down his cheek under his left eye from the removal of the three jailhouse teardrop tattoos that his records indicated he’d had removed while on parole. When the light caught it just right, it appeared as if he really was crying, an effect I’m sure the blue-black ink that had been there before had never achieved.

  “I’m assuming it’s because of my nephew, but it would be nice if I was wrong.”

  Jen said, “You’re not wrong.”

  “Tell me how I can help.”

  He was studying us. Putting the question to us in the broadest possible terms, trying to read us at the same time we were reading him.

  If his statement was a slow and high lob over the net, I wanted to spike it back in his face. The best I could do, though, was, “You can tell us why your nephew thought burning a homeless man to death would impress you.”

  He didn’t even flinch. “Is that why he did it?”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea. I’m not close to him. Haven’t been for years. Not since he was in elementary school.”

  “Because of the falling-out you had with your brother?” Jen asked.

  “Exactly.” He leaned forward and gave us a sad smile. “You know about my past. That’s why you’re here. I don’t blame you. In fact, I’m sure I’d be doing exactly wh
at you are, were I in your position. The reason I haven’t talked to my nephew in such a long time is because my brother chose to continue down a path I could no longer condone. You’re right to doubt me, but the fact is that I left that life behind me a long time ago. I still make a living from crime. Just look around, I’m sure that’s obvious. But working on the other side of the fence is a fool’s game. Why would I risk all of this?”

  His frankness was surprising. And worse, it left us no angle to work on him. So I let go of the angles and just asked a simple and straightforward question. “Then who was he trying to impress?”

  “I can only guess,” Benny said. “But I assume it was his father.”

  “His father’s in prison,” Jen said.

  “Yes. Corcoran.”

  “And you think he’s still that big an influence on his son?”

  “His old man’s standing up. A word from him could still open doors.”

  We knew the doors he was talking about.

  “I know you’ve been off the streets for a long time,” I said, “but is torching a helpless old man really going to impress anyone?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why did he do it?”

  “Because he’s a fucking idiot.”

  We were outside of Benny’s building on Ocean Boulevard and on our way back to the station before I asked Jen, “What do you make of Benny?”

  “Got a good song and dance.”

  “I know. So good I wonder if it might even be true.”

  She said, “I think it’s too good. Let’s see if he’s got any connection to Omar’s lawyer.”

  “What if he does?”

  “Then we’ll know he’s full of shit and we can look harder at him. Maybe we can shake something loose.”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t say anything else.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I just want to ID the vic.”

  “You don’t think the name ‘Bishop’ will lead us anyplace?”

  “There were a couple of hits on the name with MUPS, but none matched the description. I’m thinking it must be a street name or something.”