A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  “I know what I can do,” Julia said. “I’ll put together a catalogue of everything I have that matches the description you gave me.”

  “That would be very helpful,” Jen said.

  “We’d only need photos that would be a good likeness, that might help us identify him.”

  “Well,” she said, “that shouldn’t be too tough, then. I think I can have something for you in the next day or two.”

  “Thank you.” I handed her my card. “Just let us know when you have it ready for us. We appreciate your help.”

  “I’m glad to do whatever I can, Detective Beckett.”

  She showed us out, and in the hallway while we waited for the elevator, I said, “She wasn’t really what I expected.”

  “You know,” Jen said, “she already had my number.”

  I had no idea why she was suddenly so amused.

  There was a message from Kyle waiting for me when we got back to our desks. “You said to give you a heads-up when we were done processing everything from the John Doe’s cart. We’ve got everything finished. Let me know if you want to check it again before we put it into storage.”

  I headed downstairs to Evidence Control. The clerk told me where to find Kyle. He was in a processing room double-checking his inventory sheet against all the tagged and bagged evidence on a large worktable in front of him.

  “That everything?” I asked.

  “Except the clothes he was wearing. What the ME could save of them.”

  He handed me his clipboard so I could look at the list. “Anything new?”

  “Nothing substantial,” he said. “We’ve got more detail and description. Confirmed the count of socks and things. But it’s basically what you’ve already seen.”

  I read through the list again, item by item. The man’s whole life was there in that dry, clinical list of a few dozen possessions. Would they add up into any kind of cohesive narrative, or would Bishop remain a mystery with nothing but a random assortment of accumulated belongings to mark his passage?

  One thing on the inventory caught my attention. I’d noticed it on the preliminary list but hadn’t taken a look at it in person yet. A copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. There were three other books on the list as well—a mystery novel from a few years ago, the title of which sounded vaguely familiar, and two others that didn’t ring any bells at all. I knew the Steinbeck book, though. How could I not? If I hadn’t already read it, I certainly would have the first time I heard Springsteen sing “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

  I took a pair of latex gloves out of my pocket and opened the evidence bag. The book was a trade paperback Viking Critical Library edition that included a lengthy introduction and a bunch of other academic addenda. As I thumbed through the pages, I saw that someone had annotated the margins throughout the novel. Reading a few of the penciled notes, it was clear that the person who made the comments knew what they were doing. I looked inside the front cover to see if there might be a name. No luck.

  “You think there’s any chance this might be Bishop’s handwriting?”

  “Bishop? I didn’t know we had a name. You got an ID?”

  “Nothing solid yet. We have a witness who thinks he went by that. Probably an alias.”

  “You ever watch that show Fringe?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “When you said that name I thought of the character.”

  There were two characters with that name, a father and a son. “Walter or Peter?”

  “The father.”

  I imagined John Noble, the actor from the series, scribbling in the margins of The Grapes of Wrath.

  “What about the handwriting?” I asked.

  “We didn’t find anything else to compare the notes to, but they seem more grad-studenty than homeless guy.”

  “You’re right. I’d like to read them. Any chance we can scan the pages?”

  “We could. But it’s probably better to go through by hand, unless we need them for a trial. Do less damage to the book that way.”

  I would have liked to have a copy I could take with me, because the evidentiary chain of custody would be much stronger if the book stayed in the evidence room.

  “I’ll be back to look at it,” I said. I wasn’t sure when, but I knew the chance to hold the book in my hands and read the same words Bishop presumably had read wouldn’t be an opportunity I’d be able to let go of until I had done it.

  That evening a marine layer drifted in and overcast the sky, and the heat backed off by a few degrees. The air, though, was filled with a muggy thickness that drained even more energy out of me than had the dry Santa Ana conditions of the last few days.

  Things were beginning to slow down on the case, as they normally do after the first surges of evidence come pouring in with the wide sweep of new investigation. Once the crime scene is processed, the witnesses interviewed, and the obvious connections explored, the pace lets up. There are always more strands to tug at and more leads to follow, but the initial momentum begins to fade and the intensity, if you’re not careful, diminishes. I always fought against that tendency, against the idea of The First Forty-Eight—the mistaken popular notion that if a murder case isn’t closed in the first two days, then it’s unlikely to be closed at all. Like so many other misconceptions about homicide that media of all types love to perpetuate, it’s simply not true. There are a good number of cases closed in that time frame, but they’re the slam dunks, the cases where we find a husband weeping over the body of the wife he just killed, or those incidents in which “it just went off,” or those times when the witnesses line up around the block and tell us that guy had been talking about killing his father for years. The truth is that we work a lot of cases like that. People forget the definition of “homicide.” It simply means the death of one person at the hands of another. Those cases are how we spend most of our time. But murder, especially first-degree murder, killing with intention and forethought, was where our energy and our intellect went. We spent a lot of time filling out paperwork, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. But it was on cases like Bishop’s that we really earned our keep.

  I brought copies of the case files home as I always do, but the pain was shooting up my neck, and I’d been in chairs or car seats for most of the day, so I decided to take a walk before I settled in for the night, hoping the exercise would alleviate some of the tension and stress I could feel settling in my spine.

  The sky was still banded with gray in the west as I set out toward Belmont Shore. I lived near Warren High School, and one of the routes I liked to walk took me south and east to Naples Island, which had been built at the mouth of the San Gabriel River around the turn of the twentieth century in emulation of Abbot Kinney’s Venice development on the coast near Los Angeles. Depending on my pace and how many spontaneous diversions I made along the way, I could count on anywhere between one and two hours on my feet.

  I was damp with sweat by the time I was three blocks from home, but once I settled into an easy pace, I began to relax and let my thoughts drift away from the motivations of Omar, Francisco, and Pedro, and I began to think about Bishop. Whenever I work a case with an unidentified victim, I feel a strong need to discover not only the circumstances of the crime itself, but to also unravel the mystery of who that person was. This isn’t unusual—most homicide detectives I know feel the same way. Typically, though, the process is enmeshed in the investigation itself—determining the victim’s identity is central to understanding the circumstances of the murder and vital to making the case. This one was different. While I’d closed investigations with unidentified victims in the past, I’d never had so tight a case for a John Doe. We could close this with what we already had on the record. Of course it would be even more solid if we could tell Bishop’s story to more fully humanize him, and it would tighten the noose even more to have a real picture of the motives behind the teenagers’ acts, but those weren’t necessities from a legal perspective. There are always unanswered questions in an
y investigation. The difference now was that I was becoming obsessed with finding the answers I wanted, rather than the ones I needed.

  By the time I reached the stretch of million-dollar houses along the waterfront and stopped at the end of Appian Way on the tip of Naples Island, the sky was dark, and a nearly full moon was rising above Alamitos Bay and ghosting its way through the marine layer. I thought of Bishop walking along the Los Angeles River on the other edge of the city. I couldn’t quite see it from where I was standing, but I knew the San Gabriel met the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the marina. I wondered if Bishop had walked along this river, too, separated as it was not just by six miles of Long Beach coastline, but by a socioeconomic divide that seemed unimaginable even to me.

  Walking home, I decided to head west on Second Street and get something to eat. In the past I would have gone to the ShoreHouse Café, an old nautically themed diner that I’d first gone to when I was a student at Cal State Long Beach that had a long tradition of making up for its bad food by being open all night. Thus it was one of the few places in Belmont Shore where you could find some hot food to help sober you up after the bars closed. But the ShoreHouse, like so many other local neighborhood businesses, had closed up shop to make way for a new, upscale gastropub called Simmzy’s. I’d heard the place was good, though I hadn’t eaten there yet. The quality of the food had never really been the point.

  At the other end of the commercial stretch of Second Street, I stopped at Super Mex and put in a takeout order for a carne asada burrito.

  While I waited for my dinner, I crossed the street and went into Apostrophe Books looking for a new copy of The Grapes of Wrath. I knew I had one buried somewhere in my garage, but I didn’t want to spend the time digging through the storage boxes to find it. The bookstore was small, really just one wall of books and another of cards and gifts. I was hoping the Steinbeck novel was enough of a perennial that they’d have it in stock.

  I walked up and down the shelves, and when I didn’t see it, I inquired at the counter.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have that in stock,” the young woman said. “Would you like me to order it for you?”

  “No, that’s okay. Thanks.”

  “We do have Of Mice and Men.”

  “I don’t think that one’s thick enough.”

  She smiled politely but didn’t say anything.

  “For some reason,” I said, “that sounded funny in my head.”

  She kept smiling, and I thanked her and left the store before I could make things any more awkward.

  Rereading the book wasn’t going to solve the case. But still it felt necessary, as if the story itself might somehow pull me closer to Bishop and help me understand him.

  I picked up my food and walked home. A light harbor breeze had blown some of the humidity away but brought with it vague traces of the stewing scent of industrial runoff and stagnant water.

  Without Steinbeck to keep me company, I decided to practice for a while. The Online Banjo School with Tony Trischka was probably as good as any music lessons on the Internet could possibly be. I’d been working at it for months, but I’d only worked my way through about a third of the beginner’s section. I’d made the leap from forward rolls on “Boil Them Cabbage Down” and second-guessing my readiness for the same song with mixed rolls when I decided to throw in the towel for the night. I wiped the Saratoga Star down with my gray Deering Care Cloth and put it back on the oak stand in front of the picture window in my living room. I pulled the curtains closed, turned off the lamp, and sank into the couch.

  My copies of the case files were spread out on the dining-room table. I could see them stacked in piles around my MacBook from where I sat. I wanted to go back to them and keep reviewing and analyzing them, but I knew from experience that no matter what my impulse was, my mind needed some downtime occupied with something else—anything else, really—if I was going to be able to maintain any kind of perspective. So I fought the urge and stayed where I was.

  Thumbing the remote through the entire channel rotation on the cable box, I gave up on finding anything interesting to watch and settled on the KABC 7 Eyewitness News. I remembered believing, as a child, that the “Eyewitness” in the name of the broadcast somehow distinguished it from the other local news shows. They couldn’t call it that if it wasn’t different, right? I dozed off thinking of Jerry Dunphy and trying to remember Dr. George’s last name.

  I managed about two hours before I woke up to Dr. Oz spewing unsubstantiated bullshit for people uninformed enough to get medical advice from a talk show. I turned off the TV, brushed my teeth, popped a Vicodin, and went to bed, where I stared at the ceiling in the dark, listened to radio news from the BBC, thought about Bishop and Jesús, and didn’t sleep.

  Usually the second or third night after I catch a big case brings with it enough exhaustion for a good five or six hours of sleep, but that night it didn’t. I was still awake at four in the morning when KPCC broadcast Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. It was the birthday of two writers I’d never heard of and the anniversary of the date On the Road was published. I remembered being annoyed by the book in college, but my recollections were cut short by the poem Keillor read—“Wrong Turn” by another writer I’d never heard of named Luci Shaw. I spent one more hour in bed thinking about my dead father who’d been shot responding to a routine domestic disturbance call and my dead wife who may or may not have known she was pregnant at the time of her accident and the way life is really just a series of losses, one after another after another, and how the moment we realize that is the moment we begin to die.

  I fucking hate poetry.

  When the first light of morning glowed in the window, I got out of bed and took a hot shower. The water rinsed away some of the thoughts that had kept me awake, and I wallowed in the few moments of relaxation it brought me. Over the years, I’d learned how to relax through my insomnia, to breathe deep and let go of my tension and worry and find some degree of restfulness in the dark hours of the night. Most of the time I was pretty good at it. That night, though, I hadn’t been able to will myself into that state of mind. I’d have to make do with the shower and a few gallons of coffee.

  As I toweled off, I reminded myself to call the landlord and ask him not to switch out my showerhead.

  I put on a pair of shorts and thought about going out into the garage and searching through the boxes of books on the shelves along the back wall, but I thought better of it. I got out my Kindle and downloaded the e-book instead. At the dining-room table, I sat down with a freshly filled Smith & Wesson mug and started reading.

  To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth . . .

  9

  ZIPLOC BAG, QUART-SIZED, CONTAINING: ORAL-B TOOTHBRUSH, ONE; COLGATE TOTAL TOOTHPASTE, THREE-OUNCE, NEARLY EMPTY.

  I was at my desk in the squad room planning my schedule for the day when Patrick came in. He was halfway across the room when Ruiz leaned out his office door and said to him, “Don’t sit down.”

  Patrick dropped a bike helmet and courier bag on his chair and headed straight into the lieutenant’s office. Somebody got killed and he was next up in the rotation. Patrick was still new enough to the squad to feel the rush of excitement that came with being the lead detective on a fresh case. He’d been doing excellent work all around, but the murder rate was down in Long Beach this year, so this was only his fourth time in the driver’s seat.

  When he came out I said, “What did you catch?”

  “Drive-by in Cambodia Town.” I could tell he was experiencing that odd mix of emotions that only a homicide cop can understand and identify with. No one without sociopathic or psychotic tendencies can be glad at the news of another person’s death, but there is a kind of surge of adrenaline and sense of purpose that can be very powerful. It is without doubt a dark and complicated feeling, shared with firemen and soldiers and paramedics and emergency-room workers
, that comes from knowing that you can only be at your best and only really achieve any kind of fulfillment when what is at stake is literally life and death. I know I’m better at investigating murders than I have ever been or will ever be at anything else. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good enough at to make me forget my chronic pain and my grief and to engage me so fully and completely that I’m lost to anything else. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that’s truly allowed me to achieve that transcendent mental and emotional state that athletes and artists sometimes refer to as “flow.” I get there often when I’m working a case. Especially in the early stages. A lot of cops don’t like to think about this obsessive aspect of our work, but it’s a fact of life for many of us. It’s also why we drink and why we divorce and why we search for a higher power and why we eat our gun barrels. It’s why my father, just a few months before my sixth birthday and his own death in the line of duty, told my mother, “Don’t ever let him be a cop.” It’s why whenever I hear someone quote Joseph Campbell’s admonition to follow your bliss, I shudder.

  Patrick, though, hadn’t thought as much about all of that. He just tried to contain his enthusiasm beneath a respectful countenance and got to work.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Marty going to meet you there?”

  He nodded and slung his courier bag over his shoulder. I’d partnered with Marty myself on my first rollout as primary. Patrick could do a lot worse. Marty was the most senior member of the squad. His regular partner, Dave Zepeda, was out on medical leave with a broken foot. Supposedly, he injured himself when he was climbing off the small sailboat he kept in Alamitos Bay. When he’d been in the station a week earlier, everyone old enough to remember Jaws had hit him with “This was no boating accident!” jokes. I thought he’d appreciate it when I told him everyone was misquoting the line. Richard Dreyfuss actually says, “This was not a boat accident.” People always get that one wrong. That fact didn’t lighten Dave’s mood, though. He just grumbled some about assholes and crutched his way back to the elevator. Most people don’t sweat the details the way I do.