The .22 Caliber Homicides: Book 1 of the San Diego Police Homicide Detail featuring Jack Leslie

by William Barrons

  “Can’t say just yet. Mr. Stevens, I carry a .45 Army Colt pistol myself,” Leslie said, taking it out from his holster under his left arm, “just because when I have to shoot a guy, I know he’s down for the count. Most police officers today tote the 9mm Glock that’s issued by the department but I like this one made from away back in 19ll because it hits so hard.”

  Steven’s eyes became very large and it was more than a little plain he did not like the sight of that pistol.

  Leslie put it back in his shoulder holster.

  “You see sir, that’s partly why it’s such a puzzle someone would kill with something so small.”

  “Yes, I get what you mean, but no,” Stevens said nervously, “I can’t recall ever in many, many years talking to anyone at all about any kind of guns. Sorry I can’t help you on that one. Tell me Sergeant, have you actually killed anybody with that thing?”

  “Not just lately, Mr. Stevens,” Leslie said as he got up to leave. “Thanks for talking with me. I think I understand a little more about Jay Williams and I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you again, sir.”

  “Anytime, Sergeant Leslie.”

  “Oh, by the way,” the detective said as he reached for the door, “I read a lot about the fascinating Greek gods and goddesses years ago and I don’t recall a ‘Cecilia’ among them. Out of hundreds, I cannot remember a Goddess Cecilia, let alone a Goddess of Hospitality.”

  Stevens smiled, nearly ear-to-ear.

  “Sergeant, I’ve been waiting twenty years for someone to catch me on that! I intended to name this hotel the ‘Athena’; you’d know she was the patron Goddess of Athens.

  “But a restaurant here already had that name so I had a very talented sculptor in Tijuana cast the woman modeled on my mother - cast in yellow brass with the lost wax process. You’ve gotta guess, that was my dear mother’s name and to me, she was a goddess of course.”

  “Mr. Stevens, you can count me among your admirers.”

  “And you sir, are one helluva detective.”

  They shook hands and Leslie left.

  He hurried back to his office to find what information had been gleaned from the San Diego Police files and the LAPD about Williams. There wasn’t a lot.

  Williams had been a mere insurance agent in San Diego before moving to the Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles. There, he became one of seven vice presidents of his company. The man was just thirty-four and an avid weight lifter. He had been married at age eighteen – a seeming “shotgun marriage” as he made a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant.

  Williams had been suspected twice of molesting underage girls but no charges or convictions followed. Those accusations had been made in Los Angeles but without testimony and complaints, no actions could proceed against him and it was supposed – but not proven – that money had been paid out for silence.

  Leslie scratched his head at that information, wondering what to make of it. The guy possibly had cravings for the pure innocence and the forbidden fruit of young virgins. So it might be he had little interest in the gorgeous woman with fiery hair, but in truth was actually curious about her unusual cabinetry. Did any of that add up to anything? He saw no fingers pointing to someone who’d want to make the man just awfully dead.

  Leslie was given a file on Donald McCoy. Aha, the man had a record. His mug shot showed a reasonably handsome man in his mid-thirties, five feet seven, one hundred fifty pounds, blue eyes, straight brown hair worn longish.

  Besides the small matter of the Billy club, he had once been convicted of a drug offense; for possession. Darn; it was for the hard stuff, methamphetamines.

  Somehow his lawyer got him probation instead of prison. He must have had an unusually slick attorney and he had to have ratted on his supplier for such a deal; had to be.

  How could he manage to get a taxi driver license? The Sheriff’s office must be getting sloppy, Leslie thought, to let a man convicted of a drug offense to get a taxi license. He had thought the taxi-licensing people there were most meticulous in checking out each applicant.

  Leslie had visited that particular Sheriff’s office once and saw each little bureaucrat in her cubicle with family pictures and all, guarding her precious turf. They were quite efficient, supposedly. The police department had formerly regulated the taxi industry and then the City Council had it made the responsibility of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. But the Sheriff still issued taxi-driving licenses to cabbies.

  A call to the Sheriff’s office showed there was no record of any Donald McCoy with such a license.

  Wow! How could he drive without one? His license had to be counterfeit.

  There was a plague of counterfeits of not just money but everything printed these days, he recalled; well, why not cab driver licenses?

  Yet Veronica McCarty said he was “a very nice man”. Was he a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” type rascal? Had to be. He thought, maybe McCoy wasn’t the real McCoy!

  Leslie immediately thought to send the oldest detective on his Team, Charles Fredericks, to the Orange Cab dispatching service.

  Fredericks was one of five detectives in Homicide Team Three that Sergeant Leslie was the leader of.

  The female detective on his team was in the Philippines on a three-week vacation, visiting relatives. She was fluent in several languages and therefore especially helpful when dealing with non-English speakers.

  There were four other teams in the Homicide Detail, making twenty-five Detectives and five Sergeants under the command of Lieutenant Dean and his co-commander, Lieutenant Daniel Cohan, who was still in Arizona.

  “Do you know anything about the cab business?” Leslie asked the younger Detective.

  “I drove one in college for a short while; that’s all,” Fredericks said.

  “Well these days Chuck, they presumably keep tabs on the location of every taxi in their service. I want you to go over there on Pacific Highway to their office and find out where the ‘McCoy’s Cab’ is, if it’s in service. Then don’t let them contact that cab. Get his home address, too. They should know a lot about their drivers. You call me to let me know where the cab is and where he lives and I’ll call you back to tell you when you can leave that office. Got it?”

  “Yes sir!” said Detective Fredericks.

  “Hurry!” Leslie told him.

  Then he gathered up the search warrant a friendly Judge had signed, Sunday or not. The warrant authorized searching McCoy’s residence, his cab and any storage place he rented.

  He began organizing a couple of back-up uniformed officers to deal with the man he supposed as not being the “really nice man” Miss McCarty had assumed him to be.

  It was a good twenty minutes before Detective Fredericks called Leslie and informed him the cab was reported out of service and where the man lived. But Miss McCarty said he had probably moved from the Buckner apartment house. Was he there or not?

  Leslie called Lieutenant Dean to tell him the latest and that he was taking two patrolmen with him in a squad car to back him up while he went to the Buckner to see if he in fact still resided there. If so, “I’ll bring him in for questioning, Lieutenant. Okay?”

  “Okay Jack. But those druggies….well sir, you’d best watch your step with him.”

  “Sir, I’m always careful,” he said and headed for the parking lot.

  Leslie drove the Department’s old PT Cruiser while the two uniformed officers followed in a big Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor, also called a “cruiser”, “squad car”, “patrol car” or even just “cop car”.

  Near the Buckner, he looked around and couldn’t see an Orange Cab anywhere.

  He knocked on the Buckner Apartment House front door while the other officers stood to either side of the entrance. A man promptly came to the door.

  “Sorry fella, we’re completely full up at this time,” he said, hardly glancing at Leslie.

  Leslie opened his coat to show his badge. “You’re the manager?”

  “Yes sir!”

&
nbsp; “Does Donald McCoy live here?”

  “Oh! McCoy? McCoy? Let me think,” the manager said. “Oh, I know who you mean. Drives a cab, I think. No sir, he moved out some time ago. Maybe four, five months ago, I’d guess.”

  “Do you have a forwarding address, please?”

  “Come on in, Detective; I’ll look it up.”

  They stepped into the room next to the entrance. It wasn’t a regular office; it was the man’s room with a small bed, dresser and closet, plus a small office desk by the door with a card file on top and a phone.

  The Buckner had recently been remodeled, Leslie recalled, so it did look nice and clean. It seemed like an okay place for a single guy to live.

  “Didn’t really know him,” the manager said. “Only been here about seven – no, eight months myself. Ah, here’s my file and let’s see…..McCoy; here it is. No sir; no forwardin’ address. He moved out owin’ rent, too. Fat chance collectin’ it.”

  “Any idea of where he might’ve gone to?” Leslie asked.

  “No sir and as I recall, he didn’t associate with any of the other residents so they’d not likely know anythin’ either.”

  “But he behaved himself while here?”

  “Far as I know. Oh, ‘cept leavin’ owin’ money an’ leavin’ his room awful dirty. I remember that ‘cause I had to clean it up. It was awful dirty. What’s he done, anyhow?”

  “Oh, it’s just an investigation. It may not involve Mr. McCoy at all. Thank you very much. If you should hear anything about him, please give me a call. I’d greatly appreciate hearing anything at all,” Leslie said, handing the man his business card.

  He dismissed the two back-up officers and then, back in his car, Leslie called the detective Fredericks at the Orange Cab office.

  “Chuck, have you found out anything further? I just found out at the Buckner that he’s not lived there for quite a while.”

  “Things have been slow here for these fellows today so I asked them to look up his recent calls,” Fredericks answered. “Seems he’s been working all over the city, mostly down there by the border but as far north as University City. But here’s something Sergeant; he doesn’t take many bells and he’s not taken any bells – bells means ‘calls’ in the cab business – for about three or four weeks. They don’t know what’s going on with him.”

  “Chuck, we want to talk with that McCoy. Ask them in that office, please, to inquire among their drivers if anyone’s seen him lately. Or maybe someone has seen his cab or knows where his cab is right now. Say the reason we want to talk to him is that it’s thought he witnessed an accident we’re investigating. Okay?”

  “Yes sir Sergeant Leslie! Will do!”

  “And you’d best stick around there for a bit longer to see what they find out. Please call me the instant anything comes up. This guy McCoy is a real mystery and I’ve got to believe he’ll lead us to something that’s not….well, I don’t know what.”

  Leslie then called the Investigations Unit II Captain, who supervised the Homicide Detail among several others. That was Captain Martin Noffsinger, who happened to be there that day. He had great responsibilities.

  Of course everyone called him “Marty” but not to his face; it didn’t pay to try getting too familiar with such a rank. He had been on the force just about twenty years after a stint of the same length in the Army Military Police. He was a gruff old guy with a no-nonsense attitude.

  “Yes Leslie,” the Captain answered. “What in hell can I do for our hot shot puzzle solver?”

  “Ah Captain, let me tell you what we’ve got in the .22 caliber killings and the guy I want to talk to.”

  Leslie then told him briefly of events so far and that McCoy had surely got a counterfeit cab drivers license, had a drug possession conviction and it was thought he was a rare one to also own a .22-caliber rifle.

  “So I hoped you’d put out an APB on him while I go down to the border and snoop around to maybe find out something.”

  “Good work Leslie; consider it done,” said Captain Noffsinger as he slammed his phone down.

  Leslie got a few mug shot prints done and headed south for the San Diego border with Tijuana, Mexico. It had been again and again declared to be the busiest nation-to-nation border crossing in the entire world.

  No matter the great effort made by the U.S. Border Patrol, among a proliferation of other agencies, the Mexican drug cartels always somehow got tons of drugs heading north and millions of dollars heading south.

  Leslie supposed McCoy might be involved in that ugliness.

  He parked his PT Cruiser in the Jack-in-the-Box fast food restaurant parking lot at the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, adjacent to the border with Mexico.

  He sat inside the restaurant to have a lunch of a ham, egg and cheese “Breakfast Jack” sandwich and a cup of coffee.

  Watching out the window as a parade of heavy traffic went by, he saw the big red San Diego Trolley cars go close to the fast food restaurant. The trolley rails on the street ended practically at the border.

  FOUR

  Leslie didn’t know what to look for. He only had a hunch McCoy perhaps hung around the border because of the information Detective Fredericks had gathered.

  Before leaving, he showed his badge to the restaurant manager and told him he’d be leaving his PT parked there for a short time and “Please sir, don’t have it towed or I’ll be the laughing stock of the Department.”

  Walking south past the McDonald’s restaurant, he saw two Red Cabs on the two-taxi stand. He knew they had their own, exclusive stand a bit further on so it appeared Red Cabs were freezing out all other brands of taxis at the border. He was quite certain it was an illegal tactic.

  The first cab had two men in the front seat and no one was in the second cab. He tapped the window and bent over to flash his badge at them.

  The window rolled down instantly and the two drivers suddenly had worried looks on their faces.

  “Please stay where you are,” Leslie told them. “May I get in the back seat to talk a little?”

  “Sure, sure!” the closest man said as Leslie opened the rear door and climbed in.

  “You know us detectives are a mighty curious bunch,” he grinned at them. “I’d like you gentlemen to look at this mug shot and tell me if you know anything about the guy.”

  He saw the driver’s name on his taxi license which was required to be prominently displayed. Oddly, the driver’s name was “Jimmy James.”

  “Don’t know’s I’ve ever seen ‘im,” the man on the right said as he held the picture a minute. “I’m kinda new around here; just moved down from Fresno, couple months ago.”

  “Let me see that,” the driver of the cab said. He studied it a moment.

  “Didn’t know McCoy’s first name but I’ve seen ‘im here at the border more’n onec’t. Last time I seen ‘im was maybe a week ago. I dropped a fare off at the Palomar Trolley station up there in Chula Vista,” he told Leslie.

  “He got off a Trolley an’ hailed me. Wanted to go here to the border, but t’other side so’s he could walk across easier. That’s what he says, anyways. So, Donald is McCoy’s first name, eh? Funny. Talked to ‘im a few times, didn’t know his first name.”

  “Jimmy, you must see hundreds of people every day and dozens of cabbies, my friend,” Leslie said. “What makes you remember McCoy?”

  “Oh, I dunno. He drives one of them there Orange Cabs. Says he owns it. Picks up around here sometimes. Noticed ‘im around here for I guess a few years. Talked to ‘im sometimes. Seems a real, real good guy. What’s he done?”

  “What has the man done, you ask? Frankly sir, I just don’t know. But I’d like to talk to him about a case downtown. He possibly knows somebody that knows something. What did you two talk about, Jimmy?” Leslie asked.

  “Oh, I dunno; weather, I guess. But one time, he went on an’ on ‘bout the time a cop arrested ‘im for havin’ a club under his seat to protec’ hisself from robbers. I ain’t never heard a
that one. Damnedest thing, they’d arrest a cabbie fer that; it’s jest to protec’ hisself,” the cab driver said.

  “I know it seems unfair on the surface of it Mr. James, but the California legislature made that law for some pretty good reasons. What else might you have discussed with him?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” the driver said, scratching his ear. “But he said he liked goin’ down to T.J. ‘cause everything’s cheaper there. I think that’s about it. Twern’t nothin’ big, I don’t think.”

  “While he’s across the border, what in the world do you suppose he does with his cab until he returns?”

  “You mean, where’s he park it? He shore cain’t jest leave it on a street somewheres. It’d git towed or stole; one. I kinda recomember he says somethin’ ‘bout storin’ it near a restaurant an’ then catchin’ the trolley down here. Is there a Fairy’s or maybe Harry’s restaurant around town?”

  Leslie instantly thought it might be he had said Perry’s since he knew of a storage place close by and it would be but a short walk to the Old Town Trolley station. Hey! Maybe!

  “There are thousands of restaurants in our city so there might be one named that. Thanks for talking to me guys, even though you’ve not been much help. I’ll give each of you my card and if you see him, ask him to call me or you can tell me you saw him. Okay?

  “Oh, by the way;” Leslie said as he opened the door to leave the cab. “tell me, isn’t it sort of more or less against taxi regulations for Red Cabs to monopolize this stand when you have your own exclusive stand back there? It would be a shame for you two to get tickets for that,” he grinned at them.

  “Yes sir! Guess we forgot!” the driver exclaimed and started his engine as Leslie and the other driver got out.

  Jack Leslie stood on the sidewalk, taking in the mass of people getting off and on the trolley cars. The two Red Cabs were quickly off the stand and cruising throughout the San Ysidro area.

  Leslie had also driven a cab for a while going to San Diego State University and remembered the business fairly well. Of course cabbies were alert near the border area to being hailed by a Mexican – legal or not – who wanted to go north up to Los Angeles or even beyond. Such a fare could make a driver’s day and if it turned out he was an illegal alien and got yanked out of the cab by the Border Patrol on the way north….well, that was the chance they took.